HYDROGEN & HELIUM

The street lights fizzle on at 5:30
on Division street. I got a man I’ve got
to see. He lives in a hotel up by
Irving Park, where I left my heart to rot.

But I don’t mind going up North so much
when there are so many faces to drown
in concrete limbs, the buildings that can touch
the cold and empty lake if they bend down.

I don’t mind all the solo journeys there.
The city’s clenched fist is pulling my hair.

I’m gonna keep the word I gave to you
after we tossed our bodies around
on the cold dark concrete
of the balcony, your limbs so swift
I don’t even care if you burn me with your touch
but you don’t, and the two
glowing orange eyes of our cigarette butts
are the only thing watching us devour each other.

I’m gonna keep the word I gave to you
but don’t mistake it for a love poem.
This is the sound I make when I let my voice ring out into you.
These are the words I spell
with the palindromes of our body.
Your thigh, my thigh, my thigh, your thigh,
your fingers catching my fingers catching your fingers,
your hair echoing against my face
the same way my hair falls around your eyes and mouth.

This is not a love poem.
This is sincerity
because when we kiss it’s the best goddamn kiss I’ve ever had
and it makes my blood curdle and all the alcohol in me starts to boil
and that’s why I threw up all over my car when we were driving back to my place,
because I wanted you so fucking bad I had to explode
and then I had your soft skin the same color as my skin
to clean my body, I had your mouth the same shape as my mouth
to swallow me and then
I was just a ticking time bomb in your gut
waiting to blow you up from the inside.

This is not a love poem.
This is the word I’m gonna give back to you,
the word I’ll give to you any time you want it
because, baby, I hope you never shut your eyes
so you and I can stare into each other
like mirrors reflecting infinity.

The Little Caesar’s down the street has gone out of business.
Someone stole the sign’s plastic sheath,
the skeleton of dead florescent lights exposed.
An idle child chipped the paint off the windows
with a broken piece of glass.
Around the corner, the burnt house is sinking
into the lead-poisoned ground, its roof
caved in, the window panes manipulated by flames,
tinted to oil-stain blue.

The funeral home
used to be a liquor store
but there’s more business in death than drunkenness
these days.
They kept the bars on the windows
and the gate on the door.
The dead must be protected, respected
and restored.

Are we platonic
or are we just tectonic plates—
always rubbing each other the wrong way
when we try to move closer,
opening and reopening canyons
big enough and fast enough to swallow whole houses.

Do I
slip up and over you,
instead of letting the soft folds fold over each other,
wet and content? Can we only
widen the oceans,
spread out the coast,
organize continents so lonely and so young.
Have we only just emerged
from the molten magnum rock
to find the only thing keeping us suspended
is our own disbelief?

Do we move the earth when we touch?

Sometimes I mistake the sound of your heartbeat
for the sound of a tidal wave turning over the land
moments away from turning me over, too.
Sometimes when I hear the sound of your breathing
I mistake it for the sound of water rushing around my head.
I can feel my arms, legs, spine being pulled in contradictory ways.

Sometimes when you are silent
I think I hear thunder.

I know what it’s like in inner space,
the parts of the earth so hidden we deem them unfit for life,
where all the creatures are just creatures that never should have been.
I know every time I move to touch you
I could be swallowed by a bottomless pit,
or spat back out on the surface, alone.
I’ll blame it all on the magnetic pull—
opposites collide and abide no laws.

For Patti Smith

Like a bird, my mouth is full of dirt.
I’m shitting milk and laughing about it.
Bones all hollowed out, veins all dead.
Singing songs I’ve known since birth.

They say I should be more goddamn grateful
but I’d rather smell the way boys smell
than play the roles I’ve known since birth,
sucking on sausage and staying gagged,

then hide behind the piano, wear my hair tied back. No.
I’ll square my shoulders and settle in with my mean smile.
I won’t swallow that sewage, and I won’t stay gagged
when I got steel-bred calluses and an insensitive hand.

I’ll lay back. Get my nerve up. I’m not another cattle
and the reign is calamity, the oligarch insane.
My body’s used up, but my call stays the same.
I’m the disease that festers wounds in battle.

I’m mean like a man like Calamity Jane.
I’ve got dead bones, hollow veins.
I’ve got a disease and there isn’t a cure.
My filthy mouth is full of birds.

My feet got cold
seeing the way the world looked
from up on the dune
in the rain
with raindrops on my glasses
dissolving the view like hands
pressed up against a window pane.
The flesh-toned sandbars all belly-up
and the expanse of water spread out like paper
ripped in two,
an ink-soaked lake
and a bleeding black horizon at the bottom of the sky.

The next day
the escape from the dormitory
led me to a creek with water so cold
after an entire semester of only ever being nude
for the 2x3 shower, the shoebox sized
frosted window.

The tree had fallen across the river
so I ran across. On the other side
I laid down on the mossy bend
in front of the dark stretch of forest,
moments later feeling the urgency
of a return, of no one ever knowing
that I had gone.

Back then I think it was hubris,
but today I think it could have been
the fear of going somewhere
where no one could stop me
and getting what I really thought I wanted.

Today
I’m remaining in my head and not relapsing. Tomorrow
I might come out and write a poem.
Eleven years ago
I perched on my windowsill and talked to the Catholic god
about the horrors an eternity of damning fire
does to your skin. Two summers later
I got a bad sunburn and the skin on my back
was like an impregnated frog’s.
I picked away at the skin on my arms
with a shard of yellow plastic.
The scab was bloody and mossy.
The scar looked like a reindeer.

Today I’m remaining
in my head and not relapsing. Tomorrow
I might stand on the moss and talk to the Catholics
about finding poetry where I should have found God,
about my impregnation,
about the blood on my arms,
about the skin in my throat that is scarred like a frog’s
after years of inhaling shards of burning plastic.
I have endured the eternal damnation
of the hallucinated reindeers of my childhood closet
mocking me for my yellow scabs.

Today I am
remaining in my head and not relapsing.
I have never written a confessional poem before.
I never told anyone about the suicide attempt,
nor the eating disorder, nor the skin
I fashioned into bloody moss
to endure my own god damn eternal fire.
Two summers later I
will not love this town anymore than I do now and
I might burn all the poems I’ve ever written.

If a woman stands upright
she is a violent, rotating column of air.
She is a cumulonimbus cloud.
She forms the base of an elastic muscular canal.
If a woman stands upright
she swallows huge amounts of water several times a day.
She takes form as a huge bladder
whose face is all mouth.
She will offend the sun god by killing his sacred cattle
with a violent, rotating column of air
in which the walls self-lubricates.
The walls are the narrow end that touches the earth.
They are often encircled by a cloud of debris.
If a woman stands upright
during sexual arousal
she expands in both length and width
before belching everything back out again.
If a woman stands upright
during birth to offspring
she is in contact with the surface of the earth
and its soft elastic folds of mucous membrane skin.
If a woman stands upright
during birth to offspring
she creates many whirlpools
stirring up the mud at the bottom of the ocean
and hardening it with her breath.

A loose fold of skin in adults that can retract
covered in overlapping scales
forms the glans penis:
an elongate legless carnivorous reptile.
In order to accommodate their narrow bodies,
in order to swallow prey much larger than their own head,
they lack eyelids and external ears.
Some species retain a pelvic girdle
on the enlarged and bulbous-shaped end
which supports the foreskin
using only one functioning lung.
Most can dislocate their lower jaw.
On either side of paired organs (such as kidneys)
develops the same tissue as human life.
They have loosely articulated skulls
where the foreskin is attached
with a pair of vestigial claws.

Please,
lover,
ease into me.
No more force upon all my
indigenous bits.
Please,
oh, god; you’ll
tally every bit of flesh, a census spell
enveloping me. But
now I am yours.
Tax me as hard as you can.
I
am willing to take your
rape for
you.