Ugly Artistry

Seed split.
The wet sponge.
Milky mildew hugging the soft curves
of the kitchen sink, in my gut.
Bends after bends and bend for me
gracefully, metallically. Hollow drum of the
water-spotted, meal churning
disposable me. Sputtering logic,
upheaval of fennel and
bay leaf and old wisdom.
In the slow dance of things I cannot retrieve.
The recology of
meals gone cold,
wine gone warm,
and you still gone.
Beneath this iron-cloth mouth
and rubber plugged throat,
something organic still crawls.
All wretching and no vomit.
Bleach of finger, root of ginger,
a tea-pot engagement
that took just as long to froth
as to whistle.
Yes Adam, this is another poem
about my vagina, but hark!
I am ugly slit.
I am splintering self.
I am warped wood.
I am animal.
I am the slow lull of
tectonic plates writhing
below your farmer’s feet
to reveal:
beautiful nothing, embrace it.
Shed your olive branch modesty
and echo into me.
Find comfort in reverberation, spoken mirror:
     Eve, eye level, level eye, Eve
     Bird rib.
     Devil never even lived.
     Dogma in my Hymn: I am God
Ring and middle finger,
a makeshift paint stir stick.
Piece through hardened film of
crusted untouched
for red, red, redder
second coat, third coat
glossy primer.
Mural of me.
My left nipple caught
between your canine teeth.
(But they all look canine)
I try to remember all
of the phases of the moon
while you                 first quarter
rip and                     waxing crescent
tear and                   new       
grade.

It’s too much for me,
and from the split in my chest
a seed spills into
salty soil.

This poem was written on public transportation.
On the back of the rent, on the backs of entry level,
inspired yet sequestered teenage, middleage, oldage.
I’m pushing buttons for eight hours, fantasizing through the patterns I find in subtotals and hyperbolizing mildly attractive customers into uncompromising concubines, each of them going to save me, surely.
Customer service is faking an orgasm for eight hours straight,
and all I want to know is if I’m believable.
Who else is with me?
All of us, ugly, sad, hopeful. It’s a job.
I feel it in the lowest.
The bags under their eyes, like charcoaled upturned hands,
cupping their vision and doing their very best to keep the present in sight.
When will the hands give out?
Tell me about your day.
Tell me about your day.
The things you think about at work, that’s where I’ll be hiding.
Behind point and purpose, beneath objective and assignment.
Be good.
Have a nice day.
Take care.
Which god should I pray to? The one who cuts my check or the one who cuts it half? The caffeine tells I’m ready and the nicotine tells me I’m ready and
the other employees tell me I take things too seriously.
I can’t help but put myself into everything that I do;
I’m still naïve enough to be passionate.
The problem with projecting yourself onto objects, institutions, and other humans is that you end up getting made porous, thinned out, bullet hole’d.
Taken by the magnificent ruin of it all.
Pressure pushing down on the veins I’ve thrown out like life preservers to my occupation, my hobbies, my filthy habits. I feel them all being tested.
I feel it in the highest.
In my small talk, my transactions, my passing.
The mask is slipping and the melancholy trivialities of check stand teller number five will amount to receipt paper.
You want to feel reborn?
Step out of a subway entrance, ascend the stairs,
Get eaten by buildings.
Even if god came down, we’d all go like turkeys. Mouth agape, gargling in disbelief at what was raining down upon us.
There’s only so much life I can breath into ten minute breaks.
Into thirty minute lunches.
The frail, weak, old, crippled, challenged need groceries.
The arrogant, strong, rich, selfishly-abled need groceries.
The poets need groceries.
Greatest equalizer, have mercy, if only for a second.
I can’t wash the nine to five from my skin.
Four to twelve.
Twelve to eight.
One to nine.
But I’ve got a girl now and I can get drunk and fuck her until the thoughts of my boss and my wage and my pent up everything fall out in thin white lines across her back. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Enough for tonight.
Let sleep take me,
hope that my rapid eyes move faster than approaching bills,
than approaching bulls. 
Take it easy.
See you later.
Hope to see you again. I really, really do.

“If you’re going to want to come inside me, things are gonna get complicated”
And so it begins, the search.
Frantic, mad scanning for placement, purpose, fulfillment.
I’m a hydrogen molecule, splitting and dividing all over the lab, give me a test tube.
No, not the chest, that’s too post-modern pornographic and
no, not the belly, that’s too prenatal-sentimental and
no … not … the …
Clarity:
In the form of supernovas, magellanic, nebula-like globs,
the stuff galaxies are made of.
I can make clouds, hot webbed strings of weather, weave and rain down
potential, potential, potential.
Certainly, I’m a child again, finger painting, wheat pasting, killing time.
This spiritual confidence isn’t going to last much longer.
My swirled understanding of the universe is about 3 minutes away from distilling, evaporating, hardening, marring the sheets until all that remains of my transcendental breakthrough is a different search entirely.
The search for quarters,
for laundry day. 

          
Rebirth!
A slow, sick, welling deep within me. See the beauty is that you have to completely give up. You cannot maintain grace or posture while vomiting. You close your eyes and clutch porcelain and gag and jerk and hell you might even pray, why not? You work in reverse through meals. The acidic twist of tomato, the sharp prick of onion, the warm sugary blanket of milk. It’s dinner, lunch, breakfast, until there’s nothing. The body lurches, worms it’s silly frequency upwards, but you can only spit. And it is at that moment, you fall backwards or you fall downwards and you can’t help but feel really, really good. With film on your teeth and a renewed sense of mortality, you’re back to zero. Try and wash the stink from your fingers, you’ll still smell human.
Stomach pangs, a hollow drum. I think of a documentary I saw when I was eight. Tape worms can live harmlessly within until you give them a chance to breed, like rising them to your upper stomach by throwing up. I notice part of the toilet I never clean, the implied humor that my toilet’s company name is “American Standards”. Jimi Hendrix. The drunk girl at the party. Bile.
Too afraid to eat anything, drink water, I’m a living fountain.

1:46 in the morning.
Already showered.
The game, watched.
Post ejaculatory, post caffeinated.
Engulfed by the glacial stillness of suburban life.
Here, in the town of my youth, it’s near impossible to ignore what my mind keeps coughing up.
All the old familiar feelings, as subtle as dust, as pungent as earth after the rain.
Everything has meaning, connotation worms its way ‘round every fern.
Every cafe, park, and apartment complex.
The freeway on-ramps that swallowed me,
the bars that ignored me,
the girls that did something in between.
It’s all so sleepy, this vegetable existence.
I wonder what they are doing, in their little houses.
I wonder what they are doing, back in the city.
I wonder what she is doing.
I wonder what she is doing and how could I not?
I like to picture her waiting for buses at 4, 5, and 6 in the afternoon, smoking cigarettes, tugging on the ends of her girlhood, hair, dress, thinking about nothing.
I like to picture her at midnight, featured by moonlight and tired street lamps, fighting fog and electric bills to briefly illuminate her bleached coral skin while she walks, thinking about everything.
I like to picture her dead in an open casket,
drunk in my living room,
pensive in my kitchen,
partially naked and
completely unimpressed by all that I do.
Maybe I could masturbate again,
shower,
another cup.
It’s 2:20 now, and if I can’t convince myself by the end of this line
that this isn’t another high school poem about her,
I’ll soak this entire town in gasoline
and drive back to the city.
Flames licking my back, neck,
and smile.