Honesty

1.

I keep telling you that I only smoke to deal with my anxiety.
Somehow we have three televisions so let’s pitch one out the window.
It’s not about destruction. I’m just worried that I’ll run out of messes
to clean up. Another thing that should be reversed is that I’m plucking
ants from your hair and discovering fuchsia blossoms in my own.

I make myself proud and then go outside
to punish myself for thinking I know how to live.

2.

Only homeless people talk to strangers
these days so I’m free to sit by myself and read.

I hold office hours in the library.

The kids don't show up so I check out books 

and write in their margins.

Sometimes love notes, sometimes just
little things like How was your day?
No one ever writes back.

I think I'm coming on too strong.

3. 

Sometimes I find a poem and
it feels like walking into a bathroom
where someone is laying naked on the floor.

It’s not a bad feeling, but it flusters me all the same.

Sometimes I write poems
and sometimes I want to make people
feel the same way.

I think maybe I should work on getting a tan first.

Skirt&Breeze

this skirt you put on the night before of the softest fabric.
chocolate brown, white hot circles all over.

this breeze we have created by entrusting ourselves
to the center of something of great mass and velocity
and then rolling the windows down.

this skirt you took off to swim.
the swimming that was a nourishment, a thing I needed,
the recognition of happiness as unknotting muscle
and the release and intake of breath

this breeze that blows your skirt against my skin.

this skirt you didn’t put on after we pulled ourselves from the water.
the one you put back on this morning before we left it out

on the shore with the rest of our belongings.

this breeze you press your face into as you lean partly
out the window while appearing fully beautiful in that swimsuit of yours.

this skirt you put back on this morning because it came off last
night when you dug your nails into my palms like trying to tell me
that I wouldn’t stay dead for too much longer. could you have
anticipated the breeze or the waiting water? did you read
from the lines around my eyes of those four months when
I was hysterical over death or the possibility that maybe
I wasn’t anymore? oh, no, you couldn’t have known but it
hardly mattered. not with this skirt on the floor, with these
bodies in the dark. these bodies slight of mass, their most
admirable velocities found in the blood racing within.
these bodies and the soft breezes their breathing creates.
not with these nails. not with your nails in my palms like
telling me you couldn’t tell me, like telling me you
didn’t know but here you were. here. here with spades
and pressure. with this skirt on the floor and, of course,
it all explodes outward until suddenly it doesn’t because
tonight we don’t want everything. sit up and compare
hands with me. press your nails into my palms like saying
it doesn’t matter what we do with our bodies as long as
we still have bodies. tell me you never thought I was
dying. press your nails into my palms but don’t kiss me
because we all know that story and that’s not what’s coming.

this is the breeze of you sleeping

this is my body in a bed like an unoccupied skirt
on the floor.

this is the mass and velocity of our bodies
and no, it isn’t much, but this is the mass
and velocity of this thing that carries us.
the windows are down. we are creating a breeze and look:
for once I am not thinking of anything and you aren’t either.

Trying

I.

I am trying too hard. I am shaving in the shower.
The shaving cream keeps washing away, circling
the drain--this is how clouds would look if
they fell into the ocean--and, so, the razor burn
but it doesn’t matter so much to me.

I am putting on and taking off shirts.
I am brushing my teeth twice.
I am washing the smell of tobacco off of my hands
so when I arrive at your door you will be impressed.

There are people who we love.
These are the things we try to do for them,
but end up doing for ourselves.

II.

I arrive at your door expecting to impress.
I am overdressed. I am trying too hard.

Then, we are eating food.
This food and the waiter and the decor
are several other things that are trying too hard.

You are tired and there is a dissimile
between the way I smile and the acute
angle my chin forms with the table.

I spend money. We leave.

The way you look as we walk out
of the restaurant is a bottle of champagne
that I want to break over the side of a ship
to get at what’s inside of you.

I know what’s in there:
Effervescence! Intoxicants!
Enough to get us wasted, to get us
together and giggling under a set of sheets
but I am trying too hard and you remain
paradoxically intact. Thick, tinted glass.

III.
Here we are driving back.
Here we are cresting a flyover with the whole city on display
below us. It’s beautiful and here you are beside me
saying half a dozen things that I do not want to hear.

From this vantage point we can pretend to see the future
but astronomy and physics have taught us that this intuition
is heartbreakingly stupid. Light has a speed. It is extreme.

Extreme to the point of being imperceptible but still

we can’t look at anything without looking into the past
and I stop trying.

IV.

Then kissing at a stoplight
kissing in the parking lot of a single pump Valero
kissing back at my place--unfurnished,
my room barely air conditioned--places we don't
have to try. Drinking whatever is left 
in my fridge and smoking scraps
from yesterday’s pipe and I can’t dance a smile
onto your face so instead I am saying
Smile!

like I’m about to take your picture.

The face you wear is unimpressed, serious
the plastic of a balloon that I want to pop
to watch its technicolor pieces fly across
the room, to hear the bang of all that noise
I know your heart makes but you keep under wraps.
Smile! Read me a poem! Okay, okay, I’ll read
to you instead.  I know you’re tired. Here’s one
by a man who might also be in love with a girl 
who is tired. I don’t know. I haven’t read 

it yet.

As it turns out, the poet is another person who is trying too hard.
Maybe he’s entitled to it. He reminds me of me when I was 

trying too hard but got better results.

V.
I am kissing the back of your neck while you 
are laying face down on this mattress of mine. 
You will not stay the night. You are not trying hard enough. I
am driving you home. I am saying half a dozen things that 
you do not want to hear.

You are not trying hard enough

Should I have to? 
No, I guess not.

We are kissing goodnight, but really
we are kissing goodbye. I want to
fight and scrap and wrap my hands
around your ankles but trying is tiring
and oh it doesn’t matter so much to me.

There are people who we love
and these are the things we do for ourselves
but end up doing for them.

I let you go inside. The drinks I had
from the back of the fridge and your
lipgloss make the cigarettes sweet.
I smoke them. I drive home. My house
is empty and I pour another glass. Add
white tapwater ice. This is how clouds
would look if they fell into the ocean.
The blinds are drawn. I am laying in bed.
I am searching for something to tell myself,
I am trying too hard and come up with nothing.
Outside there are clouds. I can hear the wind
blowing them around, I can hear them. Outside 
there are clouds and they are falling into the ocean.

Compliments

I want to turn pink for you
I want to become a string of pearls around your neck
when I put my arm around your waist--I mean,
I want to compliment you. Don’t let me get carried away.

Most men have trouble knowing
how to decorate themselves.

You brush your hair
in a second hand mirror wearing a cotton robe and I
sink my face into you and
this is how I become
beautiful.

But no, not just like that
I am not some piece of burnished metal
and you are not a piece of glass that displays me

These are my arms with their several small cuts and
ant bites that have become cuts from scratching
These are my eyes with the scar on the bottom left
lid and the few missing eyelashes
These are my hands and they are good at ten or twelve
things and I could show you
but mostly it’s just nice to have you back
so let’s just lay in the dark for a while

maybe I could put on some music
I appreciate this new way you touch me

Make me blush.
I will turn pink for you.
I will repeat the five syllables
of your name under my breath all day
and this is how I become beautiful

but no, not just like that

A Summer in Three Parts

I.

Today, I am working on a sunburn.

When I was younger, I had terrible skin  and uncontrollable hair.
It made me extremely self-conscious. A girl called me beautiful
for the first time two years ago. She had her hand on the back
of my neck and looked directly into my eyes as she said it.
Her earnestness was convincing, and she was beautiful too
so it seemed like she might have known what she was talking about.

I am still extremely self-conscious
but these days I feel more comfortable
taking off my shirt in front of the ocean
or the world. Hence the sunburn.

II.

I am considering writing letters to old friends.

It is a habit of mine to forget about the world beyond the city I inhabit.
As a consequence there exist many people who no longer hear from me,
though I consider each of them to be a constituent part of my clumsy heart.

I want to write them and tell them about the development of my character
and my promising situation, how I feel like a better man than I was when
they saw me last, and make plans to drive and meet them so we might bask
in the upward trajectories of one another’s lives. But I hardly know how
to express how little I believe in that sort of teleology now. The future
may be a map spread open but I anticipate every thoroughfare abandoned
and all because I can no longer rest my hand on a certain girl’s knee while I drive.

It’s stupid.

I have been a collector of beautiful moments for so long
that I shouldn’t need to hold them in my palm, and ask
“what do you think?” in order to make their meaning stick.

III.

All summer, I have been working on the bags under my eyes
while at the same time cultivating a terrible narcissism.

It makes me feel as if I am capable of anything during those same
evening hours in which I hate each word that escapes my lips.

Being genuine was one of the few things I truly believed in
before I realized it was just another way of manipulating people
into giving me what I wanted

before those three nights I thought I had convinced a certain girl
to follow her heart only to have her wake up to remember
she had forgotten herself

before another knocked on my door
at two thirty in the morning because she thought I was sweet
and sincere but also knew she could rely on me to be dishonest

before I tried to kiss the last one and she clutched
at my hand and brought it to her hair as if to say
“I understand the way your heart beats, but after
all this time I thought I could trust you not to make me
untrustworthy”

just like there were days in which I felt as if poetry was simply
everything you wish you could tell another person until
I realized there was nothing aesthetically valuable in saying
"I’m sorry for who I am. I am trying to get better. Will you please take
pity on me for just a second and pretend I am something you couldn’t live without?"

Hence the nights when I’d rather
drink cigarette ash out of almost empty
beer cans than say something true

hence the bags I’ve been cultivating under my eyes.