And sometimes I know I am having a feeling
but I don't want to have a feeling so I close up
like a book or a jacket or a sack which holds
a body. Don't mind me, I'll just be dead in here,
you can drag me wherever you want, the body
seems to say. You laugh like a little silver moon.
You laugh like the moon on the water ignored
by necking lovers. You said you didn't like that word
because something so sweet should not call to mind
giraffes, but I love the word “necking,” the way it twists
in on itself, like what I do to you when I want
to disappear in you, leave the sack of my body
strewn on the shore of you. Sometimes I'm inside
the sack and then sometimes I am nothing more
than the stitching which keeps it from bursting.
Sometimes I carry the sack and sometimes the sack
carries me. I only know the difference sometimes.
Do you ever feel like it's difficult to figure out
what you're feeling? I have that all the time, especially
when I look out a window or at your open face
across from me in bed, or your closed face
when I see the quiet pain you contain, or which
contains you. I know you're more than that
frown which makes your face resemble a fist
with gorgeous black hair. I know you contain more
than the reaction to my words or my body.
Some of us have to learn to love with hands
interlocked, but each with our own hand.

My pills doze until I wake them
on the shelf

behind the bathroom mirror,
the one I see myself in

curled over, whimpering,
eyes dark and heavy

like lakes at night.
My pills doze until I shake them

and they dissolve inside me,
make complicated arrangements

with my biology.
They sleep and I take them,

gathered in the cup of my hand.
They tick against my teeth

and I hold my hand over my mouth
as if to shut them up.

still as a scar through the screen's glow : perhaps this is the origin
of my obsession with the color white : searching to name this shade
color like bitten bed sheets : color like a failed dove : or split lip 

when red has ceased howling its way to the surface : perhaps the color
of fog over the river bed that morning : or the color of concrete
that bleach & blood leave behind : it hangs around her like the word

faggot in the air of the locked bedroom : like drying hemorrhage suspended
between skin & cotton : sideways on the bathroom floor : it hangs around
her like a name : that once belonged only to me : & i think maybe

most of all i am jealous : for any metaphor i can put to it : the dress
is still beautiful : pale & soft & pure : & isn't this just like my poems?
dressing a violence in something pretty & telling it to dance?

It’s interesting to me there’s a minimum
but no maximum wage. One without the other
seems like pants without legs or love
without someone to love. So what
are the groups? People
who want no minimum or maximum wage;
people who want a minimum
but no maximum wage; people
who want a minimum
and maximum wage; and people
who want to eat. A minimum wage
of twenty bucks an hour
is roughly eight hundred a week,
or forty grand a year,
or 1.6 million in a life. There’s
your maximum wage—1.6 million a year.
If you earn in a year
what I earn my entire life,
you deserve the right
to be happy about it
in a gated community
where you don’t have to be ashamed
of the dance of your joy.
I deserve the right
to put heirloom tomatoes
in the salad now and then.
Such as when my kid
got her cast off
and her hand looked fine,
like it intended to go on waving
at moonlight and birds.
And I never thought about it
but slipped the insurance card
out of my wallet and slid it over.
And the car started
the first time
for the drive home
to our little bungalow
that needs a new paint job,
but that’ll happen this summer,
right before we go to a lake
for a few days and I open a beer
one night and think, I have a place
in whatever this is.
Then listen to the stars
saying nothing in peace,
though what passes for peace
is a mystery to me,
not unlike who’s behind
the universe or why so many people
in unions voted for people
who wanted to kill unions, but we did
and they died, unions died.
Now where on earth
am I supposed to send the flowers?

No one
is here
right now.