You Are Everyone Else

The Water Is Warm, But Its Said The Knee's Shiver

"What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?"
—Erich Segal

Besides:

Good-by, good-by, good-by,
Adios, au ’voir, so long,
Sayonara, dosvedanya, ciao,
By-by, by-by, by-by.

It Tastes Like Death But It Looks Like Fun

I remember he was bent down

Like a non-specific paintbrush

I was yelling at him

He looked scared and backed away

Another time, I squinted my eyes to see

And he said I looked ugly

The funny part was when

My sister asked me where he went to

And I just didn’t know

He just disappeared one day into nothing

I am rotting and rancid

Each day, rotting, but I am water, too

Like a wetted animal, with their insticts

I saw the man walking, hunched over

And thought it was him

I yelled after the man

Who was hunched, he was going somewhere

He turned but the face was green

It is a black life, but I don’t want to die

I don’t want to die, I don’t ever want to die

God damn you, don’t you shoot me in my sleep

Let me rot on this earth forever

Like a carrot I will be everything you can’t see

Oh, what do I mean

You try to see everything

I mean the half-gods and the emoh mermaids

I mean the flowers, don’t ever let them see me live forever

Don’t you ever let them see

That I am all root here in the ground

The Poem That Can't Be Written

And so it begins little lizard, birthday cake special
Night, and take a box.
So it begins, take a bow, hold your head up,
Scowl now. This is your own guitar.

Stop and see a movie.
Stop and see whether the trust holds up at the end.
I’m leaving. See how I pull the door to.
The door is the floor and it’s rising up,

Below is a dungeon. It’s all you can see in the dark.
There is graffiti on the wall.
The bugle has ceded its call to power.
It’s the time when we are waiting to be told that:

Nothing is getting better.
Having lunch and having a medal of honor.

Let’s put our culture on a cartoon’s.

Have the mouse answer the phone.
Have the receiver click.
Then the real comes to
Its awful end. Thats the point where, as he said, all came in, therefore:
“We should go to the aquarium.”

I Used to Live Alone Until I Knew You

Yes I know a good stick so often and then
a stick in my ribs in my heart your old
sprouting havoc
and now I’ve stood for what I never should

The last thing I ever wanted was to
write again about grief
did you think I would your grief this time not mine
oh good grief enough is enough in my life that is
enough was enough I had all those
grievances all those griefs all engraved



but would you believe I found
your old woody heart sprouting
I thought I’ll stake my life on this old stick
I’ll stick,
and we talked into the morning and night

and wouldn’t you know it you were a stick

The Fate of the Animals

Awkward, and almost always the idiot
Savant, mutant, retard, I
Travel my own effervescent weather,
In my underwater
Vessel, my sweet
Mars, and soundless
Clumsy, and guileless, mind-
Blind, and full of everclear
I won beneath the bed.
Fight as
A landowner warding off
Leagues of feral thieves,
In grade school,
Listening to the same Nsync song in my bedroom, over
And over for hours, days,
For years.
But the one: silent, and sitting
In my head. Running laps around
The house for five, ten, fifteen
Miles, counting
Until I am nothing
But a body.
Burn the body down
And, with it
Blue light of the mind.
I was pretty back then.
Maybe, way back then,
Before I began.

The Saying of the Day

http://www.perryrubenstein.com/artists/robin-rhode/video/street-gym/