The space between us closes now as it expands.
Eyelid movies flash:
your smile, black sets and that fire alight.
You were not a candle. You are a torch.
Burnt and laughing we shared too little time.
Frost grass and fall leaves crack together
underfoot in rhythm to this dance,
a meagre dedication to your eternal
here there everywhereness.
Stillness brings your peace and
dragonflys, dragonflys.
I fell like going home,
I know You will be there.
We miss you. We love you.
Always.
-
tjq
High seas, low swells.
Sea over you, sea clawing me,
spitting and submitting.
Your nails draw maps across
my back, but still
three weeks sailing alone,
and you, two days. I’m sick.
This cell, this matchbox bed,
stretching and pummeling,
yet you won’t wash off.
Over easy, warm salt
waters flow so no
soot covers me,
just sweat, and the wine
you spilled.
–
tjq
mmm, you can spray your delight
call it a night
bite off my pie
i’m pretty sure i’ll need reconstructive surgery
after the pull
and the friction
pounds my beef curtain in
into 14 directions
pulsating submission
hard boiled egg
hard boiled resurrection
nfl styled
last second misdirection
spider man swam on
squirts of cranberry
creme brule
you were in there tight
help
i know this sounds trite
but
don’t smoke that cigar
it was addressed
to the best
fidel castro
arivaderci
need a light?
–
dbr
dwelling on the wrong words
in other people’s poems.
I think she’s talking bones,
but she’s talking me.
–
tjq
I never much cared for her,
until cutty got lonely,
too much work:
peel, cut, dice,
simmer, skim, stir and
fuck I’m lazy.
Would you please, ice, yes,
and pass the canadian dry
–
tjq
Everything you said,
all night, foggy,
tinged blue.
In the rain,
under the bus stop
I tried to watch as you climbed
aboard, but the windows
were all white, foggy,
tinged blue.
but
your smile,
all night,
red red red.
–
tjq
complications and thick wet nights,
gowns of cold sweat,
the sticky walls of our low
rent apartments.
oh those long formative years,
oh these hot bothered nights
the wrong ending, again.
same start, same week,
desk, coffee, cereal.
waiting on nothing,
won’t someone write me a story,
good morals, strong characters
i’ll read it. soon.
–
tjq
light rays banned for shade,
bright bulb blunder
poly-porn foe,
i hated her smooth camel clutch
frothy touch
fucked up candy and backwards attitude.
but before she eats pie
pork
and pita bread sauced
ricey cakes were devoured by puddled up poonicorns
as they flew through
my bedroom wall.
–
dbr
ranting and spitting
has been so common these days,
i felt lumber laundering my skin
for illusions and chicken broth -
salty wounds dripped
sagged
zipped
slowly soundly asleep,
as i finger fucked their noodles
everything felt complete.
–
dbr
She kicks me and scratches
my leg with her toe nails.
I finish the flick, clean up,
set the alarm, for her.
She was asleep and dreaming,
maybe. Now she has questions,
I don’t have the answers, or
she won’t take the ones I have,
Or whatever. She’s up now,
won’t sleep, can’t. Who knows.
–
tjq
Out the western window the sun thought
about setting and the whole thing,
the window, the plane, the airstrip,
my red face, glowed something romantic.
You could call it a peachy salmon,
but it probably had more to do with the fumes from our 777
refracting the low light, than any fruity fish.
In the dirt, off the tarmac,
thousands of prairie dogs gathered to welcome us.
Well that’s if you come from the middle west,
maybe you’d rather call them ground hogs, ferrets,
mongooses (geese). Whatever. Thousands of them.
Angelic too, in the gaseous fruity fish light;
little rodent Zorasters.
Maybe it was the Dolly Parton special I watched, twice.
Maybe it was the diet of scotch and scotch. ($5)
I’d thought about a snack pack ($5)
or a fresh Asian ($5)
chicken wrap
but no, for me just scotch,
scotch scotch.
–
tjq
Flip through your Rolodex of days
and tell me which you remember best.
I could tell you of these days most vivid,
but they are so near to my heart I don’t want them to
dissipate like the last gasp of steam from a pipe.
I could tell you what my bones are made of
but it wouldn’t matter much since you can’t feel them.
They wake me in the night, as restless as horses before a storm.
The morning sighs a turquoise dialogue
and I lose myself in this distance,
gladly.
Heart as eager as my feet, pulsing forward and faster
until my hair becomes tangled and tucked under my ribs.
*[They are made of lost seams, mulled carbon, memory, and flight.]
-ct
Indolence’s whiplash cracks
like 16 gauge steel forced
through 20 gauge lips.
Which might not sound so bad,
but imagine putting a hole
in your lip
with a sewing needle,
even a big one.
Now try slipping,
all nice and easy,
a pencil through the same gash.
Oh how I suffer for fashion.
–
tjq
Yes ma’am–and I don’t say
ma’am often–yes ma’am I did fold
that poem into
my back pocket. Here
you are. You say you did
fold that poem into
your back pocket? Yes ma’am
Yes ma’am I did fold. See
all I have to carry
is this poem for
now–see–the book-
classes, they come later
with the straps.
-
bt
When I’m not there, you know, really
there.
The way we are
at new breakfast joints,
packing it all into our oracular crates.
Her squirming gets so abstract
mons a mons
and – you know, really -
no one in between,
the sheets tonight.
Our smile is weary,
no longer round.
My farming is no good
I need green new tractors
and bt corn.
In the end all i’ve got
are hoes, spades and manure.
–
tjq
The storm that left me drunk this morning,
last night flooded the sewers of my mind
slick and slow with the daily special,
again.
Today’s clean bright hours are a dry wind
blowing winsome platitudes through my cold fingers.
So I think about women, as baked clay,
how my hands won’t bring a plate from her bowl.
Nothing is organic with his, your, my
girl.
Breaking off her sins with ass pinching fingers,
gluing them on with face cupping palms.
She’s rounded out nicely now, mellow and easy
on the eyes, but half full, half dead.
I’m here to glaze her,
again.
Her past embraces chip off, poorly fired,
her memories flake down to me.
I can pick them up,
I can melt them
I can cover her,
again.
–
tjq
The sex, if poor, is gratuitous; she is
Texan blonde, or lesbian.
The band plays us loud
mournful numbers,
syncopation in seven
fourths. Dinner follows.
George works for the TSA with a duck,
a prick and a flower.
His Soviet realist hips and
allergic eyes tiredly beckon in
a whisper of vodka tears:
Yesterday the duck ate the flower and
the prick was arrested for fucking the duck.
The little prince and I have stars
to catch, you may come
to the blue black sky,
help us find
her red
red blossom.
–
tjq
Masturbation.
It’s like shopping, drunk,
at Wal-Mart,
at 2 a.m.
Once you’ve been a dozen times
you realize:
Hey!
it’s got everything I need,
and nothing I want.
–
tjq
Like file cabinets
tucked under overburdened
shelving units
beneath leaking drain pipes
that drip lives to be
ground and re-fed
(train train train)
accomplishments lie
like rust chips
ready to breed
tetanus or apathy.
Flabby red youths heave to,
wooden rubber dollies ease our
interventions
detoxifications
reorganizations
s-t-r-e-a-mlining,
and in the corner office
a wondrous filing derelict watches
old broken trains clatter
over old broken tracks.
Red powdered iron feeds the carpet,
spores fill my lungs,
despair stares back in flaking paint;
education is surely a wonder.
–
tjq
