yum house

you asked if i wanted chinese
but i had no taste for it. so  i missed
my chance to try the yum house, a legend
at the edge of the projects, so good, the genteel
souls of the heightss cross  the river for it.

i kinda thought you'd be back after all
despite the sandy commitment.
so far though, no one's knocked.  i'm not
waiting for season's end , a rough version of the sales rack.
i'd rather look in the shallows of ft desota for a blue dragon
with one wing, despite the cold.

/










it's about what kind of audience you want.
that's what drives the tapping. even though you really already know
there are smaller, younger versions of you waiting to be born
it won't really take this dying mayfly to begin those labors.

and you have no message to the future, why would you do that to me?
there are ways of being you haven't even dreamed of yet.
let me find out myself, then ,when it's time.

so that what would be the  point of saving any of it.
if you're reading what i'm writing, your life is passing by.
turn off the movie, record your own.

that means the audience i want is the one i've always written for.
me. in the future. i ran across the hand written journal i had
for when d left me and it was only half full. the inside cover
has  a photo of him and me rather early in our
relationship, , taken by mj is how i know/ i am talking
animatedly to someone, smiling, his lips are pursed
in profile he looks so much  like a guess jeans model
that i get a small catch in my throat at the beauty
despite the years between now and that moment.
there is another photo of him alone,  he looks weary
 eyes  closed, sufferance on his face or a prayer
to  make it all go away. the pages after
are filled with badly written torment,  poorly
awkwardly cast in bad similies and trash from the streets.
 i wonder if the things i said online where as bad, feeling
happy that the public view of them has faded
into the painted over tags in a so last year part of the city. .
he said they were pity magnets posing as poetry,
i wish i had half his talent. lol.















(*)*


and now i am in the playroom
where your dollhouse sits in a place of honor.
a candle flickers redly in a colored votive
atop the yard sale five year old size chest
i bought at the anual westchase event/ the gates
where open . i also found a mirror just your size.
the desk has been moved to the entry way and we've expanded
the play area so that cars can make trips to lands
afar , where super raggedies, ann and andy, reside
nursing their wounds. since the new dolls came along
they've been all but stuffed aside. i do not think
they will survive till your daughter is three, my love.

 *(*(((((
it took me almost an hour to get on this machine tonight.
i still find its creaky fan, small screen and usb'd keyboard
the best place to fall into free flow. it's how i know to type,
mostly by touch and fast as fuck backspace.

and i weeded all day today, mowed the yard. my nails are cracked
dirt blackens the razor thin spaces between layers.
it was good to be outside with bees droning around
my fingers as i followed the roots of spanish needles to their home
and yanked out the small daisy like flowers chanting
songs the radio's been playing five times a day. i heard the needles
cry out as i pulled a thousand babies from the soil, torn mothershearts
in fistfulls after stabbing them with my cheese slicer trowel.
they begged the bees help but bees are adhd things. once the scent
is in their nose, they're off to the next flower, whose battles
do not belong to thm. and so i was legion in the extermination
but i do not think i got them all, general. i believe we will have
to go back, when the ones i missed have come out of hiding
or grown some little flowers of their own. i will bring my trusty cheese slicer.




*(


i doubt you were looking for a weather report but seriously
do you remember how the last part of november could be
so earthly paradise? mild days, cool nights. someone said
it was like spring where they grew up. in the midwest.
he was your lover for now, and ever was hanging in the air
between us, getting battered around   on its string while
the helium slowly leaks out/ there a moments of hope
that line the streets with cool shade dotted by yellow jacaranda buds
and there are moments of doubt  that yawn after dinner, empty of the means
to pay the check.  you  burned indeterminancy into my code
so now the surprise game is all i know.each time i
wonder how it is i got sucker punched again.
but this time, i'ma try to not believe in love any more
than i believe in beauty as it drops from the cliff face
in uncountable nanodiamonds to reform in the perfect pool
of aquamarine that is your eye.


i

all fall down

I'm the midst of a playground
Screams follow tags, ring arounds
Watch where you're goings.the energy
Here is astounding.
Stunned parents ,, overstuffed grands,
It's the Friday when malling
It's jammed packed with black ink
and I can't believe I'm here.Today.


But the kid needs some burn off  So  I can sleep tonight.

the geography of rice

i've been thinking she said
about the geography of rice. i mean
who eats it and why, where it grows-
is lowlands isn't it? i'm a mountain girl
myself and we didn't have rice
at all until we moved to florida.




*(







at the corner of the light
i always catch because i won't
speed through the senior zone you never know
when the cops will have a speed trap
three guys rest against the wall of the texaco  food mart
smoking cigarettes, huddled beside their bikes
they are small, they're on bikes, i'll call them
middle schoolers skipping but they could
easily be waiting for it to warm up so they can open
the car wash stand that the texaco mart owner-
an indian you can tell by the pipes in the glass case
on the counter as well as the scent of curry coming
from the deli, where cubans are advertised but basmati
is available-allows them to operate at the edge
of the parking lot, next to a farmer's market also under
a tarp strung over formed aluminum poles that mark
twenty square feet of entrepeneurship here in  town n cuba.
on the other side of the highway, a man with a dog walks
by the bus stop on his way through the pawn shop's
parking lot. the dog is a white mixed breed he rescued
 when he was about six weeks old
from the drainage ditch by his house. why
do people wait so long to drop
them off, he wondered, as he picked up the shivering
soaked puppy. at four weeks he would have drowned
the dog and his owner are passed
 by a man on a bike who has his hoodie
drawn tightly over his head so that his face resembles
an aztec carving found on calendars that predate any thought of
european descendency. he's headed home to his wife,
with a bag of vigo yellow rice and a small package
of legs and thighs tucked inside
 his jacket. she was hoping he would
bring pimentos and peas as well but when he lays
the bag on the table she smiles and says thank you.
the bus stop holds a woman with her hair in a bun
in black pants and down jacket. she's on her  phone
flipping through websites looking for the vital information
she needs for her assignment. if she blows this presentation
she's pretty sure she'll be taking an early bus home. last
night the baby was colicky, she couldn't put him down
for more than twenty minutes. she yawns . the light turns green.
i continue the short drive to work. in the five point two miles
and fifteen minutes it takes for me to get there
four thousand lives have crossed my path
and i sometimes feel like we are all
so similar we could be grains of rice in budha's bowl.





&*

sans

sans something, i won't say tobacco because
every day i scour the leavings of the still- smoking
in the break area, sometimes  they pity me, leave
a quarter unsmoked because that's a better hit
for the bums goin for the butts. i just don't want to buy
a pack. if i buy a pack i'm smokin it, like an alky that'll
drink the whole bottle in two hours or the junkie
that cooks a week's worth in a day. sell me small packets
i think, sell me a four pack for 2.99. i can deal with that habit.
maybe. but if i get a whole cigarette, yes i've become that person,
if i get a whole one, i don't do a few puffs and save it.
i'm hot boxing it to half gone then whoops i remember
i wanted to save it. string it out. take a hit or two when the craving
is worst. like when i'm writing. and i don't want to blame not writing
on the not smoking. i wasn't writing before then, a consequence
i believe of the way i wanted to live a poem, and i think
sometimes, that's what i'm doing but then i remember
i have been addicted to games because, at the end of the day
 honey likes to talk
and games are a mindless thing to occupy
my other half while he does so.then it's time to
surf the resonances between us. so, writing has taken a back
seat tho my mind's been brimming with stories
or beginnings of stories that i don't write down
or note or anything so when i do sit here and begin to type
all those cool thoughts bury themselves like acorns
and i'm the squirrel with amnesia. or is it possible
that the driver didn.t crash and there are lots of things
that don't matter but when the bugs begin to crawl
then i have things that need to be done.  ok listen
there are bugs in my house again even though
my daughter doesn't live here and i got company coming.
shit. also there is so much stuff in this house
to be contaminated. oh fuck me with a borrowed tongue.
listening to new music is a good way to pass the night
and i think i'll do some poetry maybe.
before i have that quarter smoke waiting
on the tray.

pop up training

but what of the times she spent languid
inside your head, imagining  light curled
through remembrance windows, fingering
sock remnants, footies to be exact, the poms of
to be even more exacting, down to the shavings
scattered by a knife your friend owned and the first
time you kissed her, behind the shack, by the river
after the game of mumbly peg. where was she then
waiting, what were her concerns as you opened
the box and let her out again, into that curious reflection
the warm yellow insides of houses of which you were out.

she decides she's done caring
 for the boy with the yellow ball
to come back. she's done wondering
how the play turns out, pretty sure
immortality wasn't exactly how he pictured it.
buzzed, a bit disappointed, yes, possibles
shut down or deeply buried still. but you know
she thinks  we came so close to the edge.
we came so close to losing it, to scatterrig into a thousand
pieces and i want to know what EGO it was
bought us back here where
there are no CIgarettes and longing
for the trap door to open and let us out
is futile and on the order of strom chasing.
she takes her selectro, ramps up
the feed back and begins to hear
fans, breaking down in the distance
to a low rumble fortelling the lightening
that will come and she lays me gently
alongside the fiver, ksses me in that terrible
intimate way, on the lips this time
she got in the car. he was thirteen, i was ten.
he left with her, his mama didn't care.
they ran a life of crime the whole summer
he said that's what you get when you get kids.
you gotta play those ten smokes.

compensation

the soundtrack in my head keeps playing cage
the elephant's time flies, nasally ringtone that reminds me
like so much does today, there is something i keep
forgetting to do and it's a distracting thought that recurs
about every fifteen minutes when i'm not at work, where the craving
 has been tamed to the bell but still
permeates and  persists in an intimate layer
surrounding the meted out minutes, which mean so much less
to me now i'm not using. in the morning i pass
  butts stubbed into sand filled pie pans, risen up
like skeletons on rapture and i know by the afternoon
they will  be my promised land. if i don't buy them
i'm not smoking. e cigs are not very enjoyable
i'd almost rather not have that nico delivery system
but it helps in the really desperate times when
there's coffee and a book in my car , my will has
not been tested by the morning's round of drama
piled upon by lunchtime's requisite buzz drizzled
with a tincture of rework paranoia will this job never be done
kinda looming at the end of the day, ten  minutes before
most of the kids leave for home, unless they're in the special class
that'll let them work some overtime babee, wanting to avoid the final
failure of the day, let it rest in the inbox with last week's problem
children, save them for tomorrow la la la.









()***




so you kick habits
with a vengenance, the cling of ritual
the ring of virtual. only by denying
all that made you yourself can you hope
to be reborn in untainted flesh.

look man. i , i founded this god dam country
how can you kick me out like this? you owe me.

we owe a lot of people, that's not the issue. the truth is
you've worn out your welcome. people are looking for better things
to be addicted to. there's really no cache surrounding
you anymore . or let me put it this way, that cache
stinks like an unwashed ashtray.

ok fine, have it your way. you're such a cliche
i can't see why i stayed with you so long anyway.
i'm just going on over to the third world
they know how to treat an addiction.























^^^^909090))))
















()()((((


isn't it nice that she called you just when
my support for you is on the wane just when
i have seen enough of your crazy brand
to spin the bottle, play truth or dare.









































()*>>>>>









ostrich feathers line the desire
it stretches and bobs, a woman in a sari
a jug on her head. i keep thinking there's food
in the oven or a cookie in the jar
i remember you went for fish and chips
in oldsmar. or dale mabry. i can't recall the closer.

i had hoped for cleaner lungs, less snoring
but a cold has gripped them, wrenching clods
of tar from alveoli and tree roots so tiny
even worms don't detect them.

what will my newfound health afford me?
years of watching lust disentigrate to love devolve
to tolerance and strained waiting.
oh my god. wo man.
why is everything now couched this way
and always and forever couched this way as if love
had any relation to time whatsoever.
and lust, well lust
is malt vinegar and salt
on the fish, tequila in the glass.

xo