Suburban Swampcity Blues

This is a fragment from a short story I'm currently working on. Constructive criticism is welcomed, as always.


When Santiago removed the knit skullcap from his head, he felt a blanket of goose bumps rapidly form all along the nape of his neck, as if Aphrodite herself had been the one making love to him all night. The sensations his mind had identified were nothing but vertiginous pleasure spasms; he could not make sense of any of it. Rationality was a tiny vessel of mute seamen, and it was long gone by now. He tried to compose more thoughts, but this only made him dizzier.
He laid down on his bed and began tossing a hackie-sack up toward the ceiling and with his thumb and index finger, catching it each time with ease, as if it were the stem of a feather floating back to him. His hands appeared to be rough and aged, unlike the rest of his body: an immaculate machine throbbing with a youthful urgency. Then again, this was commonplace at the studio. It was filled with the buzzing of the young, and each palm was scarred and calloused. The people he shared his space with during the day were there for the same exact reasons. They, too, were thirsty for malleability, for creation. And they loved to sculpt, just as he did.

Five Dense Minutes

2:58 am: My feet are almost as calloused as your hands always were. These hands are virginal apparati with a texture similar to that of honey or warmed dough. Virtually unscathed. Clearly, they do not make nearly enough.

3:02 am: My head is buried in my pillow now and I'm thinking this can't be healthy- being reminded of your life by the faintest sound of music that you will never have the opportunity to hear. I'm wondering if I'm sick for never wanting to forget; for fearing Alzheimer's at age seventy more than death at age thirty; for wishing for any physiological malfunction over amnesia. I'd like to always be able to recall the inflection of your voice when you would ask what it was I had learned in school that day. At twelve, it posed as a hideous question. But at twenty, not so much.

"What did you learn in school today?" Now, that's a poem.

Well I guess it's more of a Science anyway

"I want you to gallop past my periphery.
Prance across my panoramic scope,
so I can practice the art of
refusal, as I clench my teeth
to turn you away
over and over again," he insisted.

"I'm hoping it will get easier
after the six-hundredth trial..."

"You should be kissed. And often. And by someone who knows how."

you could say what she had experienced
was a bout of magic;
a strange ephemeral burst of wicked
confidence that could seemingly give one the ability
to blow dozens of shiny, prismatic bubbles without a wand,
to make billows of smoke dance when the incense
burns too quickly,

but there wasn't anything magical about it.
it was the stroke of a guru,
a transient cluster of divinity's guise:

a lie,
cloaked.

He was a Sailor

Look onward, psychonauts!
Scrape the paint off the gilded cage,
as you murmur your melodramas through
the straws in your mouths
and then softly ask,
"Where is my ego today?"

"Dead!
Dead!
Dead!
Dead!"

Inked

maybe tattooing
old, wrinkled skin
feels like writing
on wet paper-
don't want to
rip you, you:
so fortunate
to have survived
the rain,
the time.

but watch as a grandmother
sits in a parlor

age seventy-two,
abiding in agreement
with her twenty-something
granddaughter.
"nothing you'll want to hide
when you're my age."

see her flinch
from the needle as it
traces lines on her
leathery, brown flesh.
"i passed four children -
there isn't a pain i can't bear,"
she keeps repeating,
not intending to remind
anyone but herself

bandaged, they walk out,
and under each bulk of
thick, white gauze
lie tiny etchings of
Sahara totems:
an itchy hieroglyph

Ducts of Whiskey

you cry tears of Dewar's,
and lick your lips when you speak of the past,

how do you do it?
gesticulate with all four limbs
like that.

you speak of things
you've seen that
i cannot even dream,

infancy is strange,
when it lasts for
twenty years.

maybe these memories
were meant to be
discarded,
into the Great Lake of
regret.

right now,
a poem will sound good
to me only if it was written
in anything but
first person perspective

but today, i am
fine with being
mediocre.

Variation on a Theme/Deviation

I've been ostracized
by younger men than you,
but none who carried
the heavy sandbags of hostility
so far
without shattering the glass
of their own gait.

No.

la luna sabe que
la practica es necesaria.

A Nutty Ode

Your shell was shed
so I could find you,

I'm an addict on a binge
for your love, as I scrape the jar
of your body with a spoon,
scouring
your beautiful remains

I slide you between fluffed
yeast,
welcoming your comfort
when my lover ignores
my needs.

As your aroma plays the banjo
with my senses,
your rich contents ride
the contour of my tongue,
begging for a fuller,
less irregular commitment.

Knees buckling at the sight
of Jiff, I recall that fateful day
in aisle eight,
where a five year old
fell in love.