yanaghostage

I stare into the sewer and wait for you climb your way up. You take my hand and drag me down. I hold my hand out farther and you grab my wrist and I pull you up. You drag me down. I put on a clown suit and I reach my hand down for you and I ask you to take my hand. You drag me down. I dress up as a cow and I tell you take one of my udders because if you don’t take one of my udders, you’ll fall in the sewer. You drag me down. I lift my hand out really far and I start speaking like a movie actor. “Take my hand! Take it! It’s your only chance!” I say. You drag me down. I’m hovering on solid air, I’m hovering on packets of biscuits that I have kept folded in my pocket for just this occasion. I reach out my hand and I try to grab you. You drag me down. I put on a blond wig and I pretend that I am a beautiful woman, like Bugs Bunny did in the old Bugs Bunny Cartoons. You drag me down. I am dressed as a sewer repair man. I tell you I am here, I am here, I am here in this sewer to fix this sewer. I think that will make you feel safe. I think that will make you feel happy. I think that will make you let me into your life. You drag me down, you drag me down, you drag me down. I tie a bunch of corpses together and I climb across all the corpses in an attempt to get to you. You drag me down. You drag me down, you drag me down. I’m dressed as an invisible man. I’ve got a sadness in me and you’ve got a sadness in you. We could be sad together I say. I reach my invisible arm out of my trenchcoat and I reach it towards you. Music plays on violins nearby. The stars all begin melting out of the sky. I can hear a yelling in my inner ear, and it’s a yelling I remember from a hillside in my childhood. It might be a hillside or it might be a television show I watched once. There’s no way to say, really. You drag me down. You drag me down. You drag me down.

We weeped over the body Murder Sultan and we pulled a hundred thousand knives from his back. Here are the names of the knives we pulled from him: the Knife of a Thousand Forking Dicks: this is what it sounds like. The Knife of Unrepentant Murder and Sadness: This is a knife with the reflection of a dead arc sun and the the empty fuselage of a small plane reflected in it. The Knife of the Smallest Back: this is a knife made of two atoms. One atom is the handle and the other atom is the blade. It is meant to be plugged into the backs only of only the smallest fucking assholes. The Knife of Remembering That You Are Sad; This knife has this very poem written on it. The Knife of Eight Tomorrows You Sounded Out While Surrounded By Hornets: This knife was left at a party by the beach that you dreamt you attended but now you do not remember. You were wearing a yellow dress and you remember standing on a chair and reciting something funny, people were laughing but it doesn’t matter now. The door was open and it was the evening and you remember the ocean even though you did not walk much on the beach that night. The knife of sorrow’s dumb arc: This is a knife that reminds you that being alive is inherently tragic not because cosmic logic prescribes it but because our bodies eventually give out and we have no control over this. The Knife of Interstitial Banter: this is a knife pulled from the gut of an obscure singer songwriter from Chelsea in the 70’s. The Knife of Embeddedable Tumors; this is the knife that impregnates your ghost when you are both washing one another’s faces and staring quietly at the ceiling after your honeymoon. The knife of dying in silence while surrounded by large dinosaur faces: a cow stole this knife, and ran a thousand miles in the snow with it and it felt so excited to be alive and cow-like, it was cool outside and the stars felt quiet and new to him and the cow looked up at the sky as it was running and said out loud, “please god let me always remember this moment.”

Frank O’hara

died with a hundred

bees still in his mouth

buzzing learnedly

and looking for a home,

they moved his body

down to Rivington and

they moved his body down

to Houston and finally

they planted a Duane

Reade in his torso

and he grew a new body

like men grow clues,

like you grow your

sister out of your

neck, cassandra,

like a brick lying

alone on a road

in kansas city

grows lonely

in the july sun,

ants embarking on

across the cracks,

ants crossing into the

new body of you

if you feed an

ape to a tarantula, it

will open its many

mouths to kiss it,

cassandra, and if you

feed me to you, your

mouth will gape wide

and a yawn will

envelop my body

every tentacle on

your tongue will

lick my flesh off

and then i’ll be

nothing but a barrel

moving through

an ocean, a swan

dying on a spaceship,

a dog that is half a dog

that is bent awkward

asleep on a

crescent moon

shifting sky

we climbed into clouds

and shifted their switches

until they

reversed their language

we made the snore

and the breeze mute themselves

we rode mechanical wolves

whose bodies clanked

against the wet leaves

like dust circling the fire

you screamed ‘hallelujah’

then beat the drum

until the saints and  angels

 burned holographic

obtuse magnetic chrome

neon painted, a gas leak

fuming against a painted

yellow sky, a mouth

i once used to flatter

you is increasingly

filled with dead birds

this has made

all the difference

this moment is off brand. this is a hotel we invented. there’s a laughter inside your circuitry that is hard to pick up. if you doubt poetry, just remember the moment that you realized you were doomed. things are going to pick up. i feel alive in the hotel room, and i feel most alive when the blinds are closed and i am alone. and i feel the most alive when i am asleep, and i feel the most alive when i am dead. there’s a heap of code loaded into hexagons that we use to row this boat. other people of note who have died in my arms: agatha christie, Vladimir Lenin, John Lennon, J.T. Leroi, Elroy from the Jetsons, diana troi, L. Ron Hubbard, a sandwich you stared at for too long, some pickles. I am moving quickly into you and you are darting away from me pixel by pixel. i am moving into you and you are moving outside of me. i am moving away from you and you are filling the space i once occupied and then all of the space outside of me and then me, i guess. i  remember this video game, it’s where we left our sanwich. forgive the dust and  take the last taco out of town,

never look back

jesus is being filmed on webcam all the time. jesus is being filmed right now. if you could see jesus live on his webcam right now he’d spit cereal out of his mouth and say ‘jesus’. in his mind, to stay calm with all the cameras, he imagines a tiny bonsai tree that is five inches tall and there’s a fat buddha man on top of the bonsai tree and he’s eating a mysterious ‘forbidden’-seeming fruit of seeming mid-eastern origin and the man is smiling and pudgy. the bonsai keeps growing and growing until the bonsai tree is ten feet tall and now the buddha is bigger too. out of his pocket he picks out a tinier version of himself. the tiny version of himself is the same size that he was before the bonsai tree grew very large. the buddha man drops the tiny versin of himself into the big green thickets of the bonsai tree and watches as he falls around and, always smiling, looks for fruit and is chased by strange large beetles and tigers and other animals that are native to the bonsai tree. the tiny buddha is smiling as he does all of these things. when he is thirsty he drinks water that he finds running by the river. when he is able to find fruit, he eats fruit, always smiling. when he is tired or wants to be left alone, he pulls a branch onto his face and covers himself and thinks  good thoughts and loses his sense of time. always he is smiling. the larger buddha man sits in his bonsai tree and thinks of this and smiles. jesus visualizes both the large buddha man and the tiny buddha man and smiles. the cameras are still running and jesus is just sitting in his room alone in his boxers. his hand is on his tax forms and his other hand is reaching unconsiously for his boxers. oh man, what is this guy going to do next.

you scratch out the battery until only the acid remains. a horseshit manchild stumbles down to you and hands you your neck in a noose, gums bleeding all over you, dick out, calling you “my dude” like he know you. you reach into the false sun and pull out another false sun. a bunch of false suns fall out like quarters out of a slot machine and you windmill gunshots at them like an animated cowboy. you mate seahorses arhythmically until their faces blow up pink and painful and pop, out come little floating fish each with a face shaped like your corpse, my dude.  A ham sandwich remembers half the shit you said to her. you take a tricycle to the windfarm and pool together moons. you burn a heather into the left arm of you and what’s left is a burning sensation where your tongues used to be. it’s 1970, you wake up a shithead at a video store.

how you sleep determines the quality of the stupor you wake up in. likewise, light demands to be known as light only when it dims in the wastebasket.  in fine art, a robot towering 30 stories high may be called a gundam. in heart attacks and sowing needles there are little molecules of longing that shiver and these are called ‘Dracula’. There is no pace to the pace of life, no beating to the beating of the heart, no deterioration less meaningful, cold, or inartful than that of the body aging into a mouse so nervous and timid it fakes its own death and continues to live in a cartoon mouse hole it still calls its home, a borded up door with wet paint covering it. It’s called a hat trick if you can live three times and mean every word you say and love everyone you mean to love each time and never have to feign enthusiasm. we all tie our shoelaces once and then they are forever tied. They call them Gundams because they wander around for the first 30 years of their life aimless until a small boy living alone in a post-apocalyptic landscape befriends them and gives them a sense of purpose. I say Dracula because, it doesn’t matter, every time I say “Dracula” you know that I mean “I love you” and there are rules about that too

*snake ate us in the tub
*our bodies became acorns and the acorns became time zones
*you were lost in the zero of yourself
*a tumor woke up in your handake
*a year went by and i said nothing
*the baby rattled
*I netted a minor key
*consumed by anger
*the universe beyond this one
*powerless, breathless kisses
*by a fox
*the old woman
*the toilet, the hand, the lady in the lake
*days without fasting
*brooklyn came loose
*a shower and the things inside it
*the keyhole, the eye in the keyhole
*new colors
*weeping into a taxi, hand on your belt
*hateful
*spiteful
*sorry
*lost
*your hands looked like your father’s hands
*you had no hands
*exhausted by narrative
*an engine of self reflection lost in itself
*laughter becomes foreign
*a sense of departure
*you lived a life without me
*rattlesnake
*seizure alone in a hotel room
*fainted alone on the stairs after a run
*the ghosts before us
*suicide at dawn
*bathing in light
*bathing in ion
*burnt honey smeared on our lips
*two flaming idols shot into the sun
*dead from the neck up
*swimming
*not swimming
*in heat; with lasers
*in love?
*saxophone solo closing out television sitcom
*shivering in life vests
*separately, years apart
*godlike
*monstrous
*round, destructive
*faces drawn any way we liked
*loose threads dangling in other peoples’ narratives
*shallow
*alone
*seizure on airplane, evangelist teen in next seat
*unto ceaser, render
*hurtling into a star too soon
*baboon heart gave out, fucking baboon heart
*shocked at the world you became
*blinking;
*every time you blink, wake up a thousand years later, for a moment
*brick by damn brick, i tear it down
*with the dog
*without the dog
*negatively effecting the outcome
*(shallow)
*heatsick
*nightmare-bound
*gruesome
*shellshocked
*in perry ellis
*(in paralysis)
*docile, fractions, noiseless
*pointing at monkeys
*not pointing at monkeys
*couched between two equations
*yelling into a megaphone
*harbored by palliative verbs
*ear aches
*cursing
*angry
*(shallow)
*unintentional armpit farts
*cursing memory
*having given up on most of it
*sexless, sinless
*at the opera
*too masculine, too feminine
*too soft, too soft
*alike
*blanketed by inhuman sadness
*in a comic book
*in a show toon
*as cartoon characters
*paralyized
*inchoate
*incoherent
*under blankets shivering
*car accident
*car, intentional
*you kissed the tumor into me
*i kissed the platter of your grievances
*sorry it never made sense
*voices gone; we shouted for years
*staring at ducks
*not staring at ducks
*haunted
*lying
*deferring terror to other things
*grinding teeth, beats
*our new smoke was sweet
*shallow body, river
*what made us smile never saved us
*training for something better
*waiting
*hovering a half-foot above the grave
*unsurprised
*shitty
*fucked up
*spooked
*migrating into other stories
*just medicine
*balm
*tricking
*rocking
*evolving
*shaking
*tumbling
*Mad Men DVD menu screen, two bodies slumped motionless on the couch
*Dinosaurs were louder
*never got it right
*bent out of shape
*lukewarm about the new version of you
*deaf
*brave
*defiant
*dead, though