There is a homeless man in my coffee shop.

he likes to babble about the sky

but when he talks about Maureen, a

woman made of steam, and ribs

and stationary sets,

his mutton lips run scratchy

and he points into the air like warning shots.

His face looks like how I thought

God would look when he was

mad at me.

There are three songs I will

never play again. The keys

were new when you told me

you loved them but now 

they remind me of the time

I twisted my ankle on purpose

because I couldn’t breath

and couldn’t run anymore.

My cousin died and I didn’t

cry until I sat on the ground.

I smoked,

and cooked,

and had to cut onions .

My grandmother died and left

me a music box. It broke

and the words I’ve got you babe

played until they ate

the porcelain man and woman

who danced around without

moving their feet. I threw it against

the wall.

When I die, I hope that they burn me

outside, in an open field, fingers

melting into the air and ashes

drawing suns in the ground. I hope the air

will swallow me whole. I hope the

homeless man still talks about

the sky. 

April is the cruelest month, breeding

insomnia with blue skin, mixing

bad dreams with bad vodka, stirring

soft arms with boys who don’t call.

Nighttime kept me warm, covering

blemishes in dark apartments, feeding

a little life with dried throats.

Strangers surprised me, phone calls at 3 AM

showers like chrome, we stopped because my skin was breaking

and went on because my nails were sharp enough. 

And we smoked a while, and talked for an hour.

No tienes mi confianza pero no puede ser exigentes mendigos.

And we slept, bodies crossed on dead matresses, 

my bright eye, it took me out into the sun. 

And I was frightened. He said oh my god,

dear, I’ll hold on tight. But away I went

through the daybreak, when I felt free.

I wander, much of the night, and

go west along the dew drops.

“There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.”

for someone who hasn’t been in it for awhile. 

and any poetry that isn’t modern for even longer. 

So I pulled out some Keats today and I can’t say it really made me feel better, but for some reason, it made me feel bigger. 

I remember you sending me a picture of a mourning dove with the caption that said, “I saw a mourning dove die the other day.” I couldn’t decide what the saddest thing about it was. There was the fact that, without the caption, I would never have guessed the mourning dove was dead and I would have wondered how you got so close to it. There was also the fact that you sat on your back porch for an hour and a half and watched a creature die for the poetry of it. 

John tells me to describe my dream house

and he’ll draw it for me.

and so he sketches

and I describe the chandelier and

all the wood panels and how I would

love to have a little space where I could put a piano.

And he hands me the drawing when

he finishes and it’s a picture of a church—

the one I used to go to when I believed in

god and felt like hell for drinking wine.

John and I sit with our knees touching

and our hands behind our backs.

we’re testing the theory that we’re one person

so we say one two three and put up

a number of fingers that the other can’t

see until we finally take our knuckles off the floor

and check if we picked the same amount.

We both put up seven, but he has five fingers

on his right and I on my left

and so we determine, rather, that he is the person

and I am the mirror and that’s why

neither of us wear shirts with writing on it.

John and I worry about being young

because it’s the only time when you can have

a love that is too passionate to be sustaining

and believe in all the things that are bad for you.

and I tell him that I’m afraid of getting my dream

house full of hymns and angels and that

I’d rather have the stained carpet in his

apartment on the street where Kurt Vonnegut lived.

John and I wonder about how stories tell us

as much as we tell stories, and about how

Scheherazade could tell them for a thousand nights

without telling a lie. Maybe it’s easier to be honest

in the presence of royalty because I lie all the time,

I lie to the extent that by the end of this poem

I almost really believed I knew someone named John

and he isn’t just a love I made up to make my

stories sound a little bit bigger.  

The morning air is all awash with angels