Living's ruminative rule:
Know not what you're getting into.
Smothered, soft head and two feet
Warm still in a nest built for you.
But thought to be founded, instead.

Right when nature makes sense
Resplendent, fluorescent lights
Taste insane. You've been born, a bastard
Art of cellular division or rather a skin itch.
Nearly dead, feathered mother will soon write

Poetry with sound waves the same shape
Of your fingerprints. Father's broken voice is
Heard as it will always be with weeps
And screams, "Oh boy, a boy"
With red-stitched baseballs in irises.

Air-conditioner for adult comfort freezes
Wet salmon pink skin. And, you howl for mercy,
Though the wild doctor with strong hands will cut you
Loose, anyway. Instantly, you hunger, ache, pray
Until you draw from her breast,
Finally, formally introduced.

Rally the People with Earphones Lodged in their Left Brains

Twenty-something and sure of the world she's been given,
Her Facebook reads, "So sick of hearing political fights on the streets
About who is for who. For Christ's Sake, keep your vote to yourself." 

Like Paine when he picked up origami rather than proceed
With Stars-and-Stripes Liberty-and-Freedom jargon.
Such a better use of paper than his "Common Sense"!

Or, as Rousseau when he orderly formulated France
Into a hushed breadline, where everybody smiled after
Their half loaf and cooed in front of the obese king, happy.

Her Facebook is the modern Toussaint, using her elite
Technology to raise a nation to sit down without another
Sound. In the words of Toussaint, "Slave labor is a steam bath,

Fit for the mind and foreign cities. Be grateful to be useful!" 
He spoke no further, only signing what he was given and
Counting the days until he could return to Paris for croissants.

She has 24 likes, no chance of dislikes, and 15 talks
Going at once with family, friends, and strangers 
Her mother warned her never to talk to, but she's sick

Of the old political discourse. So sick of hearing,
"Who do you represent?"
She represents a body of one.

Monetary System

Holes in my shoes

and I am upset for my babies
Never will be able to afford them
or the Galapagos Islands
or senescent Costa Rica
or the holy borders of a meal
still growing from the soil

Great Romanance

Open 24 hours NIGHT DAY
Never a start or a stop
Pretty girls to show you to your suite
Smiling & awake & happy & not afraid or alone

Nearly half way out the door
Do you ever forget where you were going?
There is no one to tell you
So, you can not be wrong
But you feel wrong, anyway

That is loving
When you were supposed to stop loving
That is how it works
START STOP
LOVE LOSE LOVE

If he touched me
What would I think?
THAT CROOK
It could be fulfillment or death
He circles 'round again,
This time on two wheels
'Stead of two feet
Can he see this set of eyes?

What does he want?
One of the few things I have?

If I convinced him there was feeling here
Would he be gentle?
And then do I thank him for his business?
Tell him to come back soon?
With CROOK money & HUMAN genitals!

HOW IT WORKS:
LITTLE girls' spines retract
Into their LITTLE bodies
Into their LITTLE throats
Forever
Turtle in its shell
Phyllis Schlafly fear

But a crook is a crook
Crook hands Crook feet
One crook never likes another crook
Look sweet
Cement jaw
Sew together thighs
Count breasts

Fear & loss of love & caffeine
No trust & no love end up alone
That is just how it works

After a cup of coffee or so
They are hoping you will end up on the table
DANCING!
So nervous, you spill the sugar
It does not get past the regulars
Who insist on personal wake up calls
From your face
Come morning

And if they knew how alone you felt
They wouldn't have asked
Pretty and Smiling
Could not help but ask

Yes, a crook is a crook
(Maybe he thinks you to be off symmetry,
CROOKED)

Stay up all night & day
Thinking of all those men
& objects
& fear
& loss of love
& caffeine

Though, that is just how it works
Must work
Have to make it work
Commitment
Just commit
Must commit

BUT fear & loss of love & caffeine
Demand passing mountains

NOT your anatomy
NOT theirs or his
NO feeling NO need to stay awake
Or safe from all of this

When You Go

You would not find a young Rose salivating and peering across a candle lit table at a man. A young Rose would be found huddled over test tubes, science books, foaming chemicals, stones she had foraged for in creeks. She would laugh madly at her own mistakes, when substances busted or wilted right before her. Her romance was bubbling with numbers and reason. There was more to the world than we were being told. And that was her romance.

Rose was sexless for so long, more years gone without touch than not, because of nothing to do with Christ. For the record, she did not hate men. She loved them. A product of the sixties, she even loved women. Rose wrote poems, stories, drew pictures incessantly of the human body’s contours. It was the one fix she allowed herself to have.

There was nothing wrong with Rose’s body, hormones, or reproductive parts. In the first part of her adulthood, she had sex with many men and women between university lectures and lab experiments. And then, she discovered the biology behind making love.

Rose discovered the biology. She did not learn it. What they tell you is wrong. The truth: At penetration and climax, two lover’s skin cells bloom inside the other person’s body. The cells undergo a kind of zygote-less meiosis. They are yours. You are their’s now. The fate is sealed by his DNA rearranging yours. This is not romance, but science.

So many promiscuous souls, with Epicurus breathing into their ears, have made Rose the enemy for speaking this truth. She saw it under a microscope, dedicated decades to research for a deed she no longer did. Living across the street from her all my life, I am well scripted in her lonely hypothesis. I know it to be true.

Listen to your heart more closely. If you just listened a bit closer, you loose souls, you would hear it. You would hear it when laying down with someone new. The sadness you feel after making love is sound. You are hearing the crying of all your past lovers, stuck mutating somewhere inside of you. Emotional cancer.

I myself have not laid down with a man in a decade. In all my life, I have slept with three men. Those men are known by their crying now and by nothing else. I hear them whimper every time I am sexually attracted to a person. I am like a man who feels a zap at each erection.

At thirty-nine, my hair is long with the ends trying to run away from the head they belong to. I am going grey; and that’s fine by me. There is no one else to ask ‘is grey hair okay’ to, but my cats. I don’t think they mind. Many people who have known me make fun of the stereotype I have become. I love my cats, though. They are one of the few things I can touch without hearing the cries.

It is the day after Rose’s body stopped breathing. I am already lonely. She was my only friend. She died at such an old age that when people asked how she died, the answer was usually ‘old age’.

No person ever questioned it, but in fact, her womanly breasts killed her. She never had a child; so, the cancer came to collect her human body. Rose, the scientist, broke the biological breeding rule. The one that says nursing your child prevents breast cancer. It was worth it for her.

It is not worth it for me. One day after Rose has died, my ovaries are pleading for a child. The lovers inside me agree. Rose cried for children on her death bed. She kept howling, “give me my babies, God! I’ve been good!” So, now, I must make a baby.

Sitting on the porch, my eyes move from the male neighbor bringing in groceries from his car to the male landscaper who is clearly too fit and too young for me. The crying inside begins. I am aware of each heart beat, which drowns out the tears. Past lovers don’t matter. This is for thrill, conception, for Rose.

I take another sip of coffee, becoming aware that my teeth aren’t so good. Neither is my hair, skin, weight, I am dissecting and disgusted by my body. So, I decide to go to the bar just down the street. Legend has it that alcohol makes men loose.

When I walk in, a handful of eyes gaze to the noise the opening door makes. They all look away abruptly, uninterested in my entering body. I stuff myself in a chair, which takes more effort than it should have. The bartender is a female. It shouldn’t have let me down, but it did. Perhaps since bartenders are paid to stay there and chat, one would become interested in me…that was my train of thought. But females don’t have sperm. They don’t have what I need.

Four beers and two shots later (names of alcohol and beer left hazy), the universe gave me what I needed. It was a minute or so before it registers that I am sitting next to a tall, average-sized man (whose features are left hazy), while maintaining a conversation.

“Have you ever noticed how they always play love songs in bars? As if to remind us of our reasons to drink,” the man laughs harshly. It is such a harsh laughter that I knew he felt and heard his past lovers’ cries, too, when making love to others. We were the same.

I lifted up my glass, which may have been empty as far as attention serves, and exclaimed, “here’s to that!”

The next thing I know, we are in his apartment. I always thought lesser of people who used that term- ‘the next thing I know’- to justify their own misjudgment. It’s like a plea of insanity for the sane. But next thing I know, the tall, average-sized man with hazy features is rubbing me.

The feeling is one I haven’t felt in years. ’This is wrong, wrong, wrong’ I can imagine Rose say for one second. But then her voice is gone. Rose is gone. But the man is here.

I hear the cries, but I can’t think. He is rubbing me all over, making me want him. The cries are a symphony behind us. They are the love song in the bar as we groan about the last one gone. I can’t think about any of this, yet. Rose being gone- or my heartless sexuality being born. For every finger he lays me, I lay two on him, happily.

The crying of past lovers is real. They are apart of you. But as I am listening to them, grinding my way on top of a man I barely know, they are nearly inaudible. The sound is real, but I can’t comprehend the noise. No emotions. This is for thrill, conception, for Rose

I can’t think. Can't think. Is this the joy of sex?

I wished to love you, I did

Nina came as soon as you called
Ella licked the detrivore spores
Of mold from the set of dishes
Too dirty even for you to get to
Eventually leaving behinds
Though you could only know
The voluptuous kind that left
A windblown kiss and a smack
And poor Bessie had it best
Though there was never a thing to have
Lavender hash wouldn't make her behave
She heaved out of seemingly orgasmic heat
For the feel your vinyls' grooves beneath feet
Glass, wood, and flimsy whims crashing
At the wave of her hand your eyes wide
The gloss of water and loss like a boy
With a broken toy as her throat explodes
In violent, vibrant blue hues
That pulsates your astute, scarless skin
Finally kinetically stirring blood
As you say, "Bessie, some sensitivity?"
Mystified, she laughs to break another thing
She knows you will stride and seek
Another feline to sickly listen to her sing
Until her voice is deep with blues and blues

Domestica

Our first house as adults
No door but the front closed
Family dog came in night
In sleep in sex in nightmares
Can't think, sing, make music,
Masturbate without the hound
Hailing adherent and sad eyes
That sigh," Can't we go out
And be wild?" Guts writhed,
We wanted to be