i want to perform
a good deed
i want to acknowledge
“good morning!”
the presence of others,
drag the angels back to earth.

these are tough times
staring into our reflections
greasy tea kettles and muddy car windows
seeing through our own eyes, skipping straight to:
“how naked the trees!”
“how white the snow!”
ignoring the glitter, not pausing to wonder
“who is behind my camera?”

genuinely listen to others by
robbing their shoes and
exaggerating their souls and
crying about how
correct and different and alone you are.

play the game of “appearance matters”
compliment the makeup-less:
their stressed-out hair, their limp, their frozen bones.

disable the fast forward button
walk to the beat of the second hand
each step flickering by
mother each moment and gulp it away
pushing their final leaps from the hill of sensations
dropping them into the abyss of
my sweaty machine’s bouncehousing
daydreaming hungover factory workers.

knocking at the tank of your heart, i hear your hinges
still thinking, still blinking, collecting
points for an oily fantasy diet.
side effect: your body wakes up
moaning about disrespect and
lack of interaction with other bodies
so you dive into the gutter and
fish out a beauty-breaking melody
who echos each word you’ve ever
flushed from memory.

the fridge is playing its lengthy, one-chord lullaby,
my pupils swim in-between your
three-degree pores, but
up close you’re still too far away,
a blurry chaos of space.
my words ache like
wounded soldiers still marching forward
sleeping as piles in a moldy closet.

i dream about your face while looking at you.
in theory you make my heart explode and be reborn like a
kidnapped star;
in reality i’m
still asleep.

this beach dying my blood inspires
silenced audience, absent eyes.
cackling shakes my fear of facing your
torn, brown and white buildings.
my own structure is too stressed out to
babysit its owner.

turning the town’s dial
from fierce,
weightless jewelry
to innocent,
squeaking tugboats
to draining,
redundancy

i re-start this game every pause when
the earth trips over its spinning.
it only ever stopped accidentally, but
legend has it that, if you try with shine,
you can stop it
on purpose

our weight pulled our wishes over the edge and
stomped us to sleep.
breathing compressed breaths and
struggling to open one eye, we catch only glimpses
of a world so diamond.

careful,
coma’s teeth might catch up to you.

waking up from this breed of sleep is like
feasting on a million tigers with your powerful, godlike mouth,
forgetting everyone’s face and name,
writhing as their meat digests, like
claws roaring in defense,
striking at your paper belly.

stepping on spiders,
shadows of wasps circling mine,
background’s trees bellow ghostly tongues.
unable to register their depth,
we recycle our final layers into
future dreams.

we tuned up our body clocks
to purple meadows and bumble bees
your graveyard was warmer than my hands
it was a fun boat ride; the ladders creaked and
your head fell off every time you sneezed

promise never to apologize in front of love ’cause
it will catch on fire (i used to dream of drowning
in a flower’s mouth)

mix-matching ideals can disintegrate a garden of strangers
right down to their bones
when the moon hangs so close to our heads like a
glowing bar sign or crack light, i notice how
your knees tremble and
melt
grizzly called saying he had found your hair and strawberry scars,
still boiling and fresh in the grass, but
his hunger was more important (knowledge-torture always comes second)
and i’m glad -
his teeth don’t deserve to mourn over lost birds
anymore

“we need to replace ourselves sometimes.”
well, mountains don’t reclaim their sand or
shovel their skin flakes back into their caved mouths and only
alcoholic veterans beg the shops for a new liver, so
i would gladly shed my wool,
spit into your heart’s dumpster, and
apologize.

this brand new and improved vaseline lipstick gently treats you like
the thinnest of baby skin;a bottled genuine form of sympathy,
listenhearabsorb you’ll be forced to soon; they’ve got these sneaky
sound machines now, you know.
so let’s close our eyes and wish for a tornado ride home.

we stand at the welcome mat of their capital doll house
a scent of plastic limbs carefully placed, displaying
dinner,mossy fountains,letting each know when the other wants to
brush their teeth or take a ride on the backyard roller coaster,
pet goats sporadically itching barbecue chords all the way down the mountain stairs.
yeah, i think i dropped the key
to the hiding places of my body.

hi, don’t talk to me. i’ve got a date
with this blueberry pie and the tattoo parlor and the beach.
somewhere far and not so set-on-fire.

a rock fell off the moon and it dreamt of dark submarines,
entrapped: cages leaking dog gelatin whose personalities evaporated
just this last week- so close you were, detective! and anyway,
your face was gray, i let my fingertips taste
and they reported: “a marriage-
he smells just like the aftermath of your honeymoon’s nest!
you gotta buy into it, granny, who knows when it’ll last.”

that soap opera there did not apply to any blood cell i own, but
my shadow mingles
with it
somehow.

i said yesyesyes until i agreed that i will never know what to agree on
truthfully,atleast . 4 stories high
our sweaty, hungry-for-pizza flock sat on top of black trees.
level-headedness miles that way, pointer-finger said:
“in that plane ejecting pink lemonade exhaust, lingering something
filmstrip-innocent.” good.i’ve been meaning
to get rid of that, but my money’s garbage man had instead.

rodent smile,epilepsy gaze,shy songs bubble through her giggles.
strings stretch,gasp,fall — until thoroughly cracked.
hasn’t school ever taught you? never be humpty dumpty,
your body breaks and so does the rest of your luck.
it would seem like nobody knows how to talk anymore. maybe something
happened to our planet? “nope,
just yours,
robot-person.”

you cry like a tiger. i like it when you
bite your lip before shooting a gun.

let’s go play in the toy store,
in the soap shop, in the lingerie aisle;
let’s spray four different perfumes on our backs because
we are modern skunks; let’s follow the train tracks
to civilization, to chinese food; let’s eat lunch in the alley,
nexttoallthese strangers, withallofthese strangers
who transformed into what not even they had predicted;
let’s make wax castles
using all the candles in this abandoned house;
let’s play cribbage and eat cap’n crunch;
let’s have a picnic
on the highest hill of the graveyard,
by that blowhole,
on our roof.

let’s get drunk and go skinny dipping,
pee ourselves, and then wake up
with piss all over the bedsheets.

do you feel the electricity, transferring from your body to mine, running through the tunnels in our chests, roaring like a million different trains? do you think if we created enough friction we could set ourselves on fire? since it’s a love fire, do you think it would be pink, with heart-shaped flames?

your ears are the kind whose lobes glide down and disappear, attached to the homey skin of your head. if you took both of those ears off and conjoined them, you’d make a heart.

i want to teethe on your brain.

yelp,
howl,
ferment.

sleep with me in a low-calorie paper house. let’s stock up on furniture that leaks color all over the floor. visitors can leave their hand prints on the walls. let’s throw away our matches we use to set off our skulls’ fire alarms. isn’t it getting dull? wouldn’t you rather be a body of fruit trees and modestly low-grade farm land, rather than a body of taxi lights and chocolate pudding? your colors were not dyed by a machine and your skin was not fabricated for a school project. you are really orange juice and sunlight and your pores rumble with all the stars that fill them. real stars, not the ones we’ve made up to feel less lonely. my favorite words aren’t in the dictionary, they’re in your movements and buried in your hair; greasy, chlorinated, salty hair full of dandruff, hairbrush lint, and city smog. i love how different we are. i love every aura you radiate. i love you.

blockage, swollen
community sickness
stovetop gasoline aggravates argument bubble
a chore to draw movements

freedom for the liquid yellows who watch
the letters
sccramblingg in vomit tidal waves

contradiction reality mixture = inexcusable
broken body structure = unable

to prevent literary mess

climbing the roof of your lifelong home
they’re still there
every food you’ve ever welcomed to your machinery:
dead and located in-between the spaces
that air cannot feel for,
they watch over your suitcase life
with pink liquid arms
and swim far easily now, but

really, there’s no-one who
really knows, nobody who
really, no-one who knows who the lucky one
really
is.

you always say you’re so enormous
wearing that family fur coat of yours

(money belongs underground
only)

by the time any living being
floods up
toward the curb
[bicycle-legged,
smelling like lost cigarettes]
you begin to dissect and remove
each of your organs that the newspapers have
disapproved of.

(this way home
grows
muddier)

transformed into a circular shape,
you wipe away the remaining film left behind by this
neighborhood web, and then
regret
being so
beautifully
human.

the children will never quit screaming
for a dimmer sky to breathe under.
i watch them ’til they believe i’m actually still here,
but i really have to leave in
just a second…

“safe insect grip
sell me your devices
bibles and beef gardens
the things dreamt to stop this
sunlight
war”

can’t look – look,
by meghan tennison

the calendar makes me bite on my burns
that have no creator, says my memory,
and the more i ignore time,
the less i do with myself
besides walk
away from people talking about things
that they don’t even care about

“how do you think they feel
when you make those sorts of
faces?”

i could tell you something brilliant
as if i think things through, as if you deserve that much from me,
but i haven’t gone that far,
and all i really wanna say is
i don’t care at all
so let me absorb whatever
reddish blame blot goo
that i can marvel and poke at when thrown/flown/flowing.
(i know someone’s been blaming me for
something much more dark and ruined
and i know they dress up just to ask me things
even though
i’ve told them
Everything -
[i was never quiet
to begin with]
)

stranger, lover, friend, lover
turned into paper air
you linger, scratch, try to ignore the busy me,
and only pass through my face
while i sleep

(i dreamt of that one place again
that i made up years ago
with the sky-tall trees and the treewater -
you had four different bodies
and wouldn’t look back into my eyes)

i notice
because my lungs start forcing themselves
to jump with a heavy breath
and fall back down
too fast – “now you have to do the rest”
you’re so flattened-out it dries my throat
and i can’t think through your thin noise anymore
screaming quietly-pathetically enough to
inch out burdens
from my self-grounded eyes
i wish you could accept that i have no time for
what’s too hard to understand

something evil’s going to happen soon
where i’ll have to face the Reality
that i can’t love everyone i want to
which’ll only
grow some sort of monster jealousy organ in my belly
so that whenever i look at others
stuck in the past or not
i have to
delete what i say

i tore my nails off
so unevenly
trying to make them look better
you’ve got to see it
my index finger bled
like a melting kool-aid popsicle
you’ve got to taste this
it’s so red

no Xs over everyday heart-break action
By Meghan Tennison

when you offer your animal
an open mouth to
climb on in!

[ right claw
left heel
]
]
diced meat too.]
but they refuse

and drop-thump
on the linoleum to make

your face:
.sad…

grab a pan by the handle and
dive uncomfortable

-liquefy -

don’t shout
but
l i s t e n

the love, it’ll come back soon

“you’re in a wrong place,”
you said to me
i don’t think i’m going to fall in that hole, i’m sorry, but thanks ’cause it is
so cute of you, enoughenough my words will get carried away.

i know i go too far with things like this
and i know it’s a problem how my mental state is airplanes away
while i’m doing important things, like walking around
but no that is not your cue to tell me about all the other people
who do it worse than i do, looking so pretty in your mind
while you sit there, talking about what i just said only a minute ago.

take a stick, needle or a straw out of my palm
so you can have something else to chew and teethe on;
i care that much. it would be different if i were really talking to you
or if you had a face that i could cut-n-paste with my eyes.
i wanna put you in my shallow dreams so that i can miss you,
whoever you are.

i’m not talking to myself anymore. i give up
’cause all this trouble makes my chest split
and all the shelves where i stored my secrets, my stories, my funny episodes
- all of which i think are so rare, but really just babble out of my mouth everyday -
well, they, everything, um, fell out. they flew.
those exploded peppers and many more benign ingredients.
they all spilled on the floor, but i won’t pick them up,
i won’t pretend that i know how to do that anymore,
since they’re all the same hues and, plus, my heart says it’s easier
to play doctor as a blind man.

it was the worst, a perpetual school day, run-down by me, like
should i say this&this to her, in the paper? to him, in the roof?
embedded mr. face, you always thought i couldn’t figure you out.
don’t you know that you talked to me more than anybody else, for years?
but i’m wondering – where did all those special words go? (the ones
that i tried so hard to put to sleep.)

those were the days that swam by, like they would never get caught
and brought out so abrubtly from their smiling puddles
only to start kicking the realities away.

shaky. shaky, shaking, sick shaking
hands.
it never was fixed and you never did help.
you never did anything. shame on you and go waste your look
seeing past everything that ever was
by themselves, singing carefully.

just listen to them go.