Champagne Wall

I have no headboard,
it's just the wall there.
My white wall goes up and back,
it's high and wide
and yesterday,
when we in bed in the afternoon,
there were shadows from the blinds
all over it. I waited with the white wall.
I looked over my shoulder at it.
Poor white wall caught my hand,
catches my movies in bed,
steams up in the night with dreamy breath
and slows down with the fan.
The white wall is clear and pretty
and alone most of the time.

Boy Toy

I am a soft toy
and my limbs splay easily.
I miss the way you held me,
fed me fake food,
casted me off when a friend called.
I trusted you to ruin my fur,
yank at my torso,
whisper hot, wet secrets down my throat,
catch me with you fist,
drag me by the ear.
I relished the times when you were sick,
then we were both sick,
and you were clammy and cold
and you clung to me.
Maybe one day you won't want me like this
but, I am a toy, I say.
I am your toy.

right in my face

i sat in a mug,
i spied your mug
and cupped my hand around it.
there were many days to hang
on some silly ideas exchanged
in the remote way
we interfaced.
maybe i imagined them.
there were big, luscious drinks
to buy and cherries to eat
and you said eagerly that it was time to
switch to alcohol.
it was the first time to see you
seeing me and it pinched a bit
because it went back and forth so fast.
i can't imagine us brewing in water
but we did,
i can't imagine us climbing around
in towels
but we did.
i came home and sat with my eye brows up,
my hands on my chin,
just like this,
and couldn't explain it to my own face.

hold the ham

when i woke up
i noticed again
the spot where you used to
charge your phone,
that you were the last person
to do all the laundry,
how you propped up
all the pictures
and it seems completely unbearable.
inside this apartment cooks
a terrible red stew.
just below the floor boards
it simmers. at first it was fired
with anticipation and now
it's the saddest energies of absence,
the slow desperation of a
rolling boil.
i have to drink it with everything
i do. a cup for walking the
hallway, a bowl as i lay
alone in bed. soup pools at my feet
in the shower. it's no
good that you're out there
drinking too. i bet you find it in
your pockets, in your hands,
in your mouth between bites
and all this rich meatiness
is killing me.

you're glowing

there was a girl coming up the alley
and i could see her in my rear-view mirror.
her shoes had neon tongues
and she was drinking mountain dew
from the bottle
but somewhere on top of her big, blond
head was a beige beanie.
she ate a meal of
ice cream cake with radishes for dessert.
she walks the alley flicking bad
song lyrics into peoples' cars.
she'll stay like that,
i think.
her clunky, badly lit lot in life
is to glow dumbly
into parked cars.

this is a rock

what if i laid on my gritty floor all morning?
what if i lay here and pretend to have died
mysteriously? i could look good dead.
i could place a pot of flowers by my feet
and crumple some candy in my mouth. it could
have been a choke or another accident.
maybe they'll assume i'm really something,
a spectacle of sorts. maybe they'll keep me
fresh, leave me to sun that spills through the
kitchen window.
i ask only that you water my plants,
eat all the food from my fridge,
cancel my credit card and
take my nephew to the theater
because i spent so much money
on those tickets.

table and chairs

here are the plaid chairs we share
when we drink coffee and eat food
with cheese and deposit wrappers and mail
into our pockets when we stand up.
i saw you the other day
with a letter jammed in your pants.
i thought about what
a little note in a pink envelope could
say but i didn't muster up the concern to ask.
whatever that letter meant would
stay creased inside anyhow,
showing it's true glowing glue
to it's one reader
who'd shoot the words from a distance
with long, stringy sex lines
and nails. then those pink pages are plaid.
i think there are hunter plaid stories to tell
in bars, with dark plaid feelings
hemming them in, making full plaid pictures.
there are fall plaids
coming strong and they mismatch me,
always make me look fat and sad.
i bellow, i blow my nose into old
flannel sheets, crammed
with such similar colors and patterns.