mouth to ear

There are two types of people in the world –
the duped and the non-duped.
I used to consider myself non-duped until
you blew my world wide open, a car bomb
in a crowded city street. Words traveled
mouth to ear, mouth to ear, mouth to ear.

I wondered if I was killed in the explosion
because I had to close my eyes when you stared at
me. I thought if I never looked at you I would never
see myself (I covered all the mirrors in my house.)
You were all the sounds in the night that I heard when
I was alone not quite awake but not quite sleeping.

“How do you know if a tree that falls
in the middle of a forest makes any sound?”

Sometimes I thought you were next to me
eye to eye while I was lying on my side in my
bed sick with fever. The corners of our
starved red mouths were electric with desire
or conversation but you can’t kiss anyone when
they’re coughing up their heart and lungs.

It was a hell of a lucid dream because
I could’ve sworn you were solid and
your outline rumpled my sheets but
I am the duped after all.

I’m the priest shot dead in the street
there’s no faith in the rosary and
I don’t get down on my knees
to pray.

I stare at the sky through the cracked
ceilings of bedrooms that aren’t my own
and I don’t think about God. I wonder when
the Earth will stand still on its axis and when
the duped will all be pulled down by their ankles
through the mulch and into the fires.

the core

I am surrounded by padded walls
for a padded mind in an attempt to
stop this implosion of hate and regret.

I know I’ve cracked open like the shell of
a nut waiting for my insides to be devoured
and understood but no one can read this

murky motivation. Somewhere in this
stillness I am an unborn child waiting to
confront the new era. I am meandering through

the rivers of my own blue blood before it hits
the surface the air just to become another type of
smear to wipe away.

There is nothing to document in this emptiness and
all I can feel is my own biological clock
ticking ticking ticking

a bomb waiting in the dark a grenade without a pin
a hallucination and a suspension of all rational thought
this is what it’s like when I know

I have death around the eyes since everything dies
eventually and I know all I have is my own constant ticking.
One day you’ll reach me at the core

of everything where the light blooms and explodes
kaleidoscope geometry in a heart so deep that
it may never be found.

violence

I am a lens that would rather forget all it’s seen.
Cover me with the cap so I can fade to black and
wake up walking into walls for the rest of my life.

I don’t want to see all the smoke across the water,
the implosion of buildings, the mirthless replay of
the media implanting the violence in my brain,
an egg in the wall of a woman’s uterus.

I want to close my lens forever
focus on the breakdown of the body
that comes with age and wisdom
rather than the premature deaths of my peers.

no stranger

I’m no stranger to accidental collisions of
naked bodies. I’ve never met someone
who could cram all my words back down
through my mouth, an unsuspecting pillage
of speech. You’re no stranger to what lips
can do when they’re in a rage or a rave or
steeped in a bottle of vodka and spit back out
in your face.

Maybe I’m a piece of clothing you keep
in your closet and try on when you get
bored of the other boring people but
I like to think that maybe you’re scared
of what might happen if we opened
our mouths instead of our legs.

AK-47

Even when I’m thirty
my father will still cover my eyes
during sex scenes in movies. When I was
twelve my parents took me to see The World Is
Not Enough long before I was aware of the
objectification of women in James Bond
films and took me out right before
Bond James Bond laid
Christmas and I

knew what happened
it was ridiculously obvious
but the visualization of it was
what they were worried about because
what we don’t see is what we don’t know
no frame of reference is better than a foggy
picture at best and I’ve carried Catholic guilt
holes from the nails in my palms but I am
no savior and just a sinner at best. I’ve
seen the bodies of women

geometric shapes shifting
in pools of oil and I’ve seen the bodies
of women as if they are sand dunes but it
doesn’t help me understand myself any better
and I’m sure I haven’t figured out how we work
in tandem. I’m also sure that the man in the prim
expensive suit with the Omega watch is nothing like
the rest of the men in the real and tangible world
because no man has ever been this consumed
by love and no man would ever shoot
everything up if I died in a
conspiracy.