OH WOW OH WOW OH GEEZ
OH WOW

MM!

Mr. O'Hara,

Frank,

King of Bourbon and Trembling Empress of the Island Manhattan,

My darling,

I miss you today.

Can I tell that the only thing pinned up in my drab office cube is your Song? Printed in a tiny typeface so you have to be close (as I am) to read it. I don't do this as hopeful gesture. I know you cannot visit me because you are dead. Your note is an instruction and I keep breathing. It serves.

I think you used to laugh at Allen Ginsberg for keeping so close his hero Walt, for writing poems to him, for crying out to the bearded American wonder when he, Allen, was drunk and awash in pills on your bathroom floor and ruining yet another of your parties. "Walt's dead, Allen," and so on. Cheeky, witty excuses for your sobbing compatriot to your other guests and so on. Banging on the door, "Allen, Allen, ALLEN," and so on. I'm sorry to exult you in a way that would make you laugh.

But, darling, dickhead, my angel, whatever you laid out in front of me, I've yet to learn. I remember when we met. Your sunshine sluttiness wafted in on dust motes. You were somehow filthy and read in a classroom. A classroom creaky and old as sin, under a teacher who would rather write than speak, but in a classroom nonetheless. You were beatific even with a mouth full of cock. Or so I like to imagine. My first salt circle, my first protective spell, I put around me with your words on my tongue. Clunk went the pipes on the third floor and the sirens wailed up 55th street and the police came in to strap her into a wheelchair and I clutched your lunch poems and my tears splashed the phone and in the interval I didn't have time to understand what you were trying to say.

Will you come back, my angel? Climb up to my apartment again? There are no fire escapes like in New York, but hanging out on the back porch has the added sweet irony of standing atop wooden exit structures in a city that burned to the ground not so long ago. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Throw your head back and laugh, won't you? You'll love the internet and I think you'll quite like the music they're making these days and I think I could help you to see the merits of beer.

Please, Frank. Darling, dickhead, my angel.

I miss you.

right..
shadows at play.

if i'm bored then it's my own fault, right?
it is not anyone's charge to entertain me but my own...

so, what am I so afraid of, huh?

time to up the ol' ante.

today i have started the official Portland Welcoming Committee
which turns out to be me welcoming everyone to the moment
with the force of my hello
ha!
we love it!

and then pooping in the jesuits' front yard

it's so far very gratifying

We are the motley colored crew
having taken generation after generation
and search after search
so many years
to gather here today

we represent all heritages, all families
all broken lineages and lost stories
all sufferings, denials, attempts at annihilation
and eternal quests for freedom

we are philipino
we date back to the nordic
we are related to the holocaust
our european grandmothers were silenced at stakes
our  hiv brothers died so they could love
in africa our family has starved

and we are still living
and we are still yearning
as we seek each other out
and unite across all our freak-fested differences
that we love, that we celebrate

and we do the work to overcome the next boundaries
those that say how we should express our innermost essence
and who we should love

and we try to remember
the language of the land
so that we may love her
so that we may finally take care of ourselves and each other

so that we may go home.

this has never happened before.

still

I. WILL. DEVOUR. YOU.

yo Portland
WHERE THE PARTY AT????????

sup Portland
I WILL DEVOUR YOU

and it is not simply because
I am hungry and buzzing from this fast
but because YOU DESERVE IT

you deserve being put
in my mouth
and being given one humdingggger of an eye-opening blowjob

hi, welcome the fuck back

show me you want it.

today I HAVE HAD AN OPENING
hurray, hoorah.
yes. may they continue.

i have been fasting
(say NO to the drug which is FOOD)
to temper the privilege of food in this place
and in myself

i am lifting myself from the spell which is the sleep which is the false satisfaction
of filling yourself so as not to feel empty
and BOY AM I HUNGRY

for life

which is not..

this place where the gentle snore amidst the hops and honey,
the meat and poppies.
where every occasion is brunch.

PORTLAND. is. brunch.

sandwiched between pilates and getting drunk, passing out, back to sleep.

this place where the people are as pretty as the cherry blossoms that reign every neighborhood,
and their flowers hang heavy
like your empty ballsacks.
your deflated nuts.
your lack of drive desire inspiration.

where the men are always on vacation, reflecting
and teaching tai-chi
MEN QUIT ZEN-ING OUT AND DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR HARD-EARNED INSIGHT

where "the young come to retire" (??????)
i think i just barfed and shat myself at the same time

Portland!
why are you here????

and ok,
yes
here we heal
this feeding gives us core
makes us pretty
now: what will we dooooo?

and yes.
your monotony
has inspired me to make MY OWN SURPRISES
to howl and snarl my own wildness,
to be thrilling
to steal from you a smile
to provoke you, me, your fucking dog
which is my passion
my love

so fuck you thank you.

pdx
you've got it going on
so what are you so afraid of?

obey your flesh and descend

i am of the country.

these brooklyn nights of mocked moons pass through us unslept

marrows of darknesses are unmet, forgotten in teemingness light

but it is we who forgot ourselves in the screaming clout of engines

and it is my flesh unkempt that has been arcing to and fro, unable to let go.

then somehow always dawn arrives as it has for a clockless bygone.

when once it spilled itself in silence til the sounds we made sung it found

now it bays our paused bones like bells.

in landscapes of skin you are here with me

and so is my witching soul dwelling--

its brawn of strange poetry clicks placelessly

while facing its fans on the embers of stagnant hours

words are spells, time has to be devoured and

death is gifting a secret forever.

i've learned how to hold a seed out among a crowd of deserts

and watch as their plantless dunes pant.

i trust language as an experiment of faith

though these sentences insecurely admit it

what we seek are not stars seen through chinks and mirrors.

what we seek are not shapes dancing anonymously behind a curtain.

i can feel your body and its faces

mid-blurring in cisterns of my mind swimming closer.

memories are not anonymous though their imagery is tricky

every day the red fruit i brought above roofs is for you

and i hope it is ok when carried off by living birds

to boughs of bridges

barely swinging in the gaps

we did not make but cross.

my totem body looks toward it loudly from the exhausting mud

what is it? only my confessions of diminishing teeth have guessed

my jaw sits bound so tightly it grinds in a veneer of sleep.

but you're right, when the cage door is opened my love does not step out.

ever since our answers disguised themselves as questions and

desires have been unlived ghosts called freewill.

i don't know who unlocked it and why.

each new day in modernity begins pre-haunted with

the hearts of people in the custody of history.

so you're right, i have been unyielding, bitterly and

my roots sent out poisons so that nothing may grow nigh

what gathers does so along borders

you have all stood in the shadow of my wounded dream

as it darkened--as it coiled and begged.

but we need not be bigger or smaller than we are.

i've shed and let it go, though very close to the sun, i had no one.

in lieu of a Man ill be a man and a woman and the plainest flower in the field

and become every day less afraid of myself

and less obliging to the throne of Men made gold and baroque with rape.

my chimera heart that has stiffened and stalled and trusted only itself

will transform and adapt along a curve not an angle.

what remains is sung

i am of the country.

i am of land and its wide sweeping parts belong to what we've lost.

i do not understand why we forsake life's tests and endless place to take our breath

so forgive me while running until no cars are felt and no road lies under feet.

love me and run alongside, and if in our steps we lurch, we can rest.

this day does not burn, or rather it does, but doesn't hurt.

what remains is screamed

i am of the country!

we must keep working and loving and learning

even amid flowers waking up in beds of dead bees.

we must keep walking an already over-trodden land

even as it yawns an uncharactered emptiness.

we must want yes while war is noisome and no and emptying

while its black blood runs deeper because we want life to be easy.

there can be no rising if we think we are falling

we cannot stand to not feel this--

something is waiting beyond our veils.

the expanding spring is here.

it is this lonesome side-walk sapling that is boxed in and pretty

it is the restrained blossoms

cajoling our callow nature,

but it is not this feast of fancy crumbs,

our jeering treeless stretches and

the worldless eye of city skies.

my existence was folded neatly and i needed to carelessly break it.

now i back track a mind that has lived to strip itself but worries about being too naked.

those of us who know how to weave find it tempting to unite loose ends that are messy

but even knots seeming to hold can unravel.

so be it. uncertainty is the soul of pleasure.

how could we not try? what else would we do?

this is why the wild fox said the prince the point is to create ties.

what we love we should tame, but we should not tame what we cannot love.

we have tamed the world as intensely as we fear to love it.

more than ever blood and bone are only home for the spirit that sees this.

so no more bloodletting, a body needs itself.

even if our love at times scares us and makes us strangers

it will always invent new invitations.

i try not to doubt this friend-studded roam

it's the only thing i know.

friend-ship wards off the bullshit of an uncertain tomorrow.

eulogy for a piece of the sun

bleeding hard and streaming saltwater. gutted the first top-bar beehive, once lover, wracked with this sobbing. so fragile, cracking wax chambers. seams of dark resin. beautiful comb - whites yellows oranges browns rusts, whorls & folded & fluted chambers, i can see where she was hatched. they almost made it through.

the back of the box, where i always pressed my ear to hear the thrumming (the shifting pitch, the messages!), was where i found the entrapment of their many bodies. scented of fishy death & mold, wet
colors of the gone. once they smelled like sugared heat and oozing buds and flecks of juicy light and yes yes yes. now it's different.

i am already wrapped in the big sweater (the one for mental health emergencies, color of my mother's eyes, this isn't the only loss of late), reaching out/withdrawn. eating knife-point droplets of honey, all that's left, and the only i ever tasted from them. maybe there's 3 drops. they came on the full moon eclipse in june almost 3 years ago. flew from the forest and landed right above my pile of wood and screws, we stayed up all night laughing drinking tea transforming the pile into a home, before dawn we saw through the window that the quiet man came unhinged and murdered our rooster. at dawn we placed them facing east at the bottom of the garden, said good morning. said you can stay if you like. said i'm sorry i'm not a carpenter really but there's hope in these angles, in these stripped screws, and it'll be different for you than it was for the rooster. said how the fuck do we trust anyone anyway maybe you can teach me how? said i don't know why but i already love you. said you are so, so necessary.

i loved them long through two wild queens, snows and summer slumber, whispering my secrets and travel plans and promised that i would always come back here as long as i was theirs. even when they were the only ones in this clusterfuck collective to whom i felt actually connected, sometimes.

i watched their pollen streaming legs, wings glinting whirring with the light, made offerings, buried some dead, brought lovers and friends and songs. i think they knew about the way i smell, especially when i'm being brave, in all this femme seriousness with a short skirt and bare arms and feet and crown of bees, landing all over my neck and thighs. (i liked the way we fucked: sometimes i didn't want others always watching and would offer myself to you late in the night). bees don't sleep, they just get closer and quieter. some hardened parts of me always melting as i marvelled at their golden fur, their spangled bridges through air and time and nectar flow and all my ragged stories, doubts.

one summer i slept beside them every night, my spine was hewn of that stony mound and i loved them through the aching in my bones, i loved them through the soggy blankets i had dragged down the hill. i dug that garden, brought them calendula and tulsi and lavender and lemon balm and yarrow. there is so much i didn't do or know and still don't. thank you for that magic, your death is a hollow ringing louder than the emptiness of your old home.

robot grrl in paradise
baby walks alone

if there are angels with wings aflame on these streets then i can't see them
there now
i've said it

there's no blurring of lines among virgins
and all my favorite martyrs are virgins.

speaking of keys...

a briefcase lost deep in the heart of the southern sahara once spoke,
sun glancing off cracked black leather,
papers shuffled hopelessly,
of some sort of ministerial oversight which resulted,
in the final analysis,
and practically overnight, actually,
in its loss, that is,
the briefcase's loss, roughly speaking,
the separation of the briefcase from its owner which,
actually,
wouldn't have anything to do with the southern sahara or anything else except that,
right away,
it should be mentioned that the keys belonging to the owner of the briefcase,
including but not limited to front, side, rear doors of house,
car,
and U-lock seldom used
were in the briefcase at the time of separation which is strange,
incidentally, because the owner of the briefcase was the sort who never,
whether by oversight,
by carelessness,
by accident,
through sheer stupidity,
a sense of adventure,
that romantic need to “just let it go”,
ever, ever, let the keys out of the pocket except, of course,
to open a lock,
and thus the placement of the keys in the briefcase was an aberration so unlikely,
so alien,
that upon hearing that the briefcase and keys had been shipped to the southern sahara from chicago, the owner of the briefcase could only pat the left pocket of the pants, over and over, rubbing up and down, over the pocket, over the leg, the thigh, slow at first, then fast and frantic, then reaching in to check, emptying the pocket, pulling out wallet and matches, checking the other pocket despite having never put the keys in the other pocket,
could only sit and sob.

talk about what heaven's like: time folded over on itself eliminating all moments but the following: a nearly empty, silent train car on a morning that is not hot or cold with the sun in your eyes; pissing in a large quiet bathroom at a terrible party; staring at the mess on the floor from your bed at 6:57 before your alarm goes, sound smoothed out by the hum of a fan; walking down an unimportant side street alone on a summer night; driving on the Merritt Parkway at midday and you're very early to wherever you're going; perpetually conscious enough to appreciate your unconsciousness, clothes fitting just so but no one's looking which is so nice

talk about what dying is like: what's going on? what's going on with a line over the last number after the decimal point to indicate repeating

talk about what being dead is like: everything doubles in size and what what you did becomes so ensconced and entrenched as to be gospel, every nightmare scenario you tried to prevent is unavoidable, but of course you can't do much of anything anyway, because you're dead and the dead don't tell tales so you have to become ok with being dead and being immaterial and not being watched (which it turns out is really fine anyway) and being in heaven (which is rather nice too)

the dead throw away their old clothes and hide their old notebooks and pare everything down to their bare essentials

"We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is short. We die on the march, But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost."

not so, not so, and some times it's good to forget where you left your keys