we can kneel against birches
just minutes after you crash your car
the snow can turn warm
and squishy in a fertile moment

a gelatin of wasted seasons, under a concrete bridge
where the nuclear seasons move fast
under a crimson sky and a predictable cloud

the girls can drive their pick-up trucks
into boys on a ledge that overhangs the city
they can drive their cars into boy guts
and drift and hang there
after their engine hardness has totally died down

we can find a hill rolling halfway up the trunks
of palm trees that feel their trunks
being caressed by softened fibers
of guitar bodies
smashed and softened by the sea
wound together by their fallen strings

for Olivia

One day
we were in the back of the video store
looking at porn together
trying to find something beautiful
something loving and aesthetically pleasing
and you kept loudly denouncing
the films for being so stupid and degrading

you were the only woman in the room
and I was the only young man
and the middle-aged men all around us
fidgeted nervously because of your words

and I loved you for it.

I walked past the video store today
and looked at the posters: most of them display
the women that the world considers
its most beautiful. They are nightmarishly blank,
their flat eyes horrify me. And you with your
heartbreakingly gentle hands, you with your
elegant eyelashes, you with your naked eyes
trembling, are not here.

When we make love to each other,
our spirits go marching through
an alternate history together
arm in arm.

Your body is a sleeve of reddened light
encasing me, keeping me free
from the greys and blues in loneliness
of all the worlds.

And I let my body pray
inside of you, pray dearly,
pray to the laws of your faint
flesh, to be kept by you,
to be visited like this only by you,
to be kissed and satisfied only by you
in this cloakedradiant place which is love.

Sleep, my freckled doll--
the evil have their appetites,
but ours is greater.

I miss your strange chin
and your strange ears.

I'm going up
to the woods around a mountain pond
to weep on a rock and think of you.

She did nothing wrong
and nothing cruel, but
nevertheless

I have that wonderful Leonard Cohen feeling
of having been really satisfyingly
fucked over by a woman.

I can touch living things and cry out for them;
I can eat cheap and rotten food, and live on desire.

I can move around on the flying Earth
and hurl my tears onto things that won't move.

But I can't cling to you, a fellow creature;
because you want to be free of embraces,
the embraces that you used to want.

I can't make you want to live, to seek,
to plunge amazingly, into this thing, me,
which is waiting for you.

I just want to watch you move around,
touching the things that surround you.

I just want to be in your presence;
I want to watch you from behind a tree
where I can quietly sob
while you move around in your yard.

I want to watch, because my love
is not welcome; I'm not allowed
to get up close and close my eyes
anymore.

There are suns in other galaxies
that stun the mind. If you moved close
to one of them, they would cleanse you
of these half-longings and turn you
into a pure desire. But here on earth,
if you don't have any money,
falling in love with someone who has money
is terrifying. Because you can't follow love
around the globe; you can't afford
to track it with jetplanes
or move through its massive atmospheres.

There is a place in the heavens
inhabited by a strange star.
I live there, with a greenish glow,
now that you have broken my heart.
There is nothing for me on the planets
anymore, the creatures are on a landscape
that I do not comb or farm or copulate with.
Since I do not live on the land,
I can float with my eyes in front of me,
and see anything coming that might touch my body
and slice it away before it comes too close.

in my dreams my friends and I
take our cameras into the mountains
and snap pictures of our genitalia
laying up against mountain rocks

in the winter sun, shrivelling in the light
the army comes to steal our cameras
and chase us down off the mountains

into the land of parking garages and quick restaurants
where we try to find a darkroom to lie down with

and a lover leaves her camera
on the floor of my rented room
where I have assumed a false identity
that has become more real to me
than the name given me by my parents

I carry a grey heart in a pail,
over the wooded highways.

Over the roots that break tar,
I carry my heart in a grey pail.

I am going to throw it into the water
where the river intersects with the wooded highway.

I will throw the bucket with it
and let them be carried away by the stream,
and may they smash into something good.

After the war, your bed.
After the knives, your legs.
After being beaten by police with shields, your kiss.
After your bed, the war.
After your legs, the knives.
After your kiss, being beaten by police with shields.