The Fifth

Day one said we didn't have to wear shoes

Bone white toes curled in shallow cold

water sloshing from a pail.  Now

We don't go when the tide is out

So we don't go at all

bound up in books, careers

Water still there though no

one is looking.

On the second day we donned black ties

Polished like our hair. Jostled 

a resume with clammy palms for hours on end and then

your mother heard you cry for the first time in a while. While 

I sobbed for four years straight.

On the third day we crawl.

Age has not treated us kindly. The

Return is slow, we envy even 

Barnacles, creeping 'cross the dull shine. 

The common blight of dawn breaking

Oceans on our skin and bleeding

Out or bleeding in.

The pill is sour, it tastes of death. Metallic

on the fourth day. You 

are gone, wriggling in the the morning sun. We 

say we are young and hold each-others tongues 

with our teeth. 

On the rocks or underneath the tide

somewhere in the pools brimming with life. 

Your shirt was red, I remember

But day five brings nothing.

Forgotten prose from late August

Summer passed. I lost the last tendrils of it today, trailing off with packed up books and the things my life doesn't have room for anymore. Time dragged June out of me like a splinter, quarantined with the neat outline of my past, printed on a fraction of the map I know like a woman you buy a drink but never sleep with. July was about the same until anxiety pumped my eyes wide open to the coyness of time's glacial slip, and I was surrounded by dry land for miles, where there used to be towers of ice. After that I slowed down a little, kissed my parents, bought a few books, and somewhere between Salter and Hemingway summer swelled then expired.

Last night I dreamt I got into my car only to find a dead woman, her discolored skin hung on a skeletal frame sagging like it would melt off. For some reason she didn't alarm me. I buckled her seatbelt for her and drove the corpse around town, as if it were typical, though I was slightly concerned with the smell of her decomposing flesh. I only remember the dream because today, when I sat in my car, I panicked briefly once more about the fictional odor. 

It's funny how things come back to you. 

There's this Croatian band that I used to listen to, wandering along the cliffside's teetering rocky paths that crusted the Mediterranean island where I spent summers as a child. Recently I played one of their songs and was disarmed by the distinct sense that everything is temporary, so chronologically shackled to fragments of the things we used to experience. I feel that summer in my bones sometimes; the abandoned elementary school and cola with wine, walking home in the night to sails clanking and swaying and just swaying along with them. Now it's gone like this one, rotting still, with all the poems I hid in places I don't visit anymore. 

dream 1

In November we walk the short span of the wall that stands white 

and divine that sometimes it's a flag 

so we climb it instead

I know you're good at climbing because I've seen you in pictures

I just kind of hang

There's this telephone a ways up in case of emergenc y

your hand on the receiver 

your fingers not lost upon me

pushing H-E-A-V-E-N  in numbers

[dial tone] "I thought so,"

you laugh and we go 

on towards the billowing sheet

When we get high enough

its all wind,

pulling hair from my eyes and mouth

you smile as my teeth fall out I smile 

at your eyes but I can't quite 

remember them 

until you let go

of my grip

(Someone must have heard it crash

because it did)

the car collided at midnight

then silence stretched for days.

There were three dead, maybe four.

Names lost to us along with the toxins 
found in their post-mortuary bodies.

We only remember the silence that followed. 

t h e  s i l e n c e 

became an entity,
swallowing the island whole with its unrelenting fog.

It leaked from houses like smoke,

filling the lungs of villagers 

until 

masts clanking in the bay became a hymn of our mourning

playing while last traces of teenage flesh were scrubbed clean from the rocky facade 
by thunderstorms, 
fleeting, and common on the coast.

Even the children hushed themselves,
took a break from their barefooted sand wars to stare out at the tempered sea,

eyes wide with ignorance.

Still, they felt ripples from the collision, 

stirring in their beds

like animals before a storm. 

Mother Tomb

I think you want to be crucified, sometimes,

bobbing my head down for an apple amid the squeals of some

stillborn love child's indigo lips.

You never asked so you don't know 

how six weeks I counted his curls backwards 

until there were none.

Father's surname feather soft

In a cradle of death.

A fawn shot down,

Bright bullet hole hot springs

Spewing out

On a bed of baby's breath.

We still pull over to examine the wreckage,

Bruises blooming in the reality where I fitted 

on your bathroom floor

And death shook my shoulders 

While you frantically struggled to catch and steady them.

What's in the blood, really?

It rained hard its coagulated tendrils all through the night,

And I

Just wondered what sunrise looks like in Berkeley. 

Photos by Chema Madoz

I first met her grieving on the bathroom floor
the peeling sea-green paint revealed an ashy grey wood and
her too,
wide open in the house that smelled of pipe tobacco, stale beer.

It was funeral March and May as well,  
When her feet hurt her mother would yell
and I watched her blank stare strangle some guttural shout but
all I could do was wring my hands

There's a gentleness to mental disorders
makes them so hard to catch –Comely women letting their hair loose and then
recoiling from a slapped hand or
me cowering in a pool of my own blood
and something to do with yellow wallpaper.

There were evenings in Europe,
the sun still hesitant to dip into the Mediterranean at half-past nine
she was young enough to be a stranger,
skipping stones and pouting with her belly pushed out like a wild thing

She doesn't remember it now,
She asks us to forget it too,
and we all do in our own way.

Last year she arrived, suddenly
flooded with emotion, indigence, and thought
but then
it all went south,
frothing at the mouth, I saw no gleam inside her eyes

Instead the days burst out like playing cards and in them I was still running down Cambridge Drive at 3 a.m. stomach aching from laughter, in the car listening to music uncomfortably loud with all the windows down, blowing past our house until a fraction of the love,
the lead weight in my gut,
might make like dust picked up by a street sweeper that passed
on the morning I was holding someone's hand
and
when she asks me if it's ever going to get any better I say
well, yes
and no

Ms. Entropy

Got signed up for classes today, so there's that. Just another solidification, another reminder of some paramount changes in a future that's approaching quickly as it is hurdling away, as all things are until there's nothing left. Time is of the essence, so when I say I'm writing a book I mean I'm staring very hard at those first four lines and contemplating how to write a believable passive martyr character. I've also been watching lots of some cheesy nineties alien t.v. show called Roswell, which would be an indulgence save for all the brain cells driving off in my teal Z3 convertible with a younger man and flipping me the bird. It's a good show, though. I like it. I still haven't received my housing information, which troubles me because I submitted my application late and requested a single room after realizing I'm devolving into a misanthrope. It's unfortunate but at the same time I picture myself as some unkempt madman and I just have to laugh. The dreams have been alright, lingering on the benign familiarity of everyday life. Friends' faces decomposed and then resurfacing in household objects. Always smoke and laughter, and music. Once I felt my tooth come loose in a red and gold theater with my parents. I tongued it in my mouth for a while wondering if I was awake, but then the dream shifted and I was someone else entirely.  I'm not doing them justice. Some were particularly fantastic, bits of stories I moved through to pick up the patterns with which I should maneuver my real life. But they were all dead, flat-lining in the morning when I tried to summon them to memory. Lost to the NyQuill which covered me with heavy black tar for 14 hours a night. It clung too, through the days I kept slipping into my imagination as easily as I had in my youth. I forgot to mention I was sick; I was. Just a common cold that hit me pretty terribly. I took long baths with all sorts of oils, salts and candles, ate little, and slept during the day in a large white bed. All the while everything blurred together and when I finally emerged I felt as though I had taken a trip or come home after a night at a carnival. It's so bright here, it's so blinding. The kaleidoscopic array of poppies, avocados, mountains and the pacific spinning 1,040 miles an hour in universal silence.
It's okay that I write without purpose because there is none.