lollirotcat

touch-starved waistlines recollect memories in old text messages and incomplete composition notebooks they argue with themselves about self-preservation in a predatory wilderness: the privacy of homes and thick bedroom walls with birds calling them from hiding spots amongst the fear and hope unfounded and unfound & steady hands let go of their centers to grip reluctance in pens recording the songs of bluebirds outside, outside, outside as growth sets in with resignation smiles

now of course this is the natural                     order of things: like all those immigrants     on the barge now, with paint hardened into dog shit                      between their fingers. now of course you mapped those escape highways                & the empty rigs, the breweries, the dollar stores. and it's all for nothing:                        rain sends us back into the grocery kennel        with the old women yelling in canto,                          & this goddamn rainbang stylus             of communication slivered away and away on the trash tide. a daggerfish thrown onto the sand,            sewing itself o

shrink wrap rips from the thighs              these tired flags drop; used to flap them clapping into rooms of empty hands,        now the shadows on the walls have pterodactyl faces, used to wait for the blinking ahead,                              now hallucination, you aren't ghost, your codes just uninvertible, your parallel an axis spearing straight into what? couldn't hear; will not slow over unfortified drivel,            will not coo into this river's pinna, bled dry these taxpayers for the reins                        the torrent cleaved through, now tread taklamakan of debt, leader; saran wrap stitched onto eyes for sight lo

the astronauts never returned and neither did the news in my hands i fold a megalithic pigeon the take-home message is: the cosmos is a cold dead bitch as you sleep under magazines, waiting for nothing. in the shackles of a sterilized den, there's an actual mastodon heart, pale and glassy pink, icy film tightened like a fist;  - and the scientists despair:    it's the morning of the opening, then the few slashes of paralyzing waves. like a sign we'd make when we were younger, a way to disarm a bandit, or a preacher                 or the oncoming horde of space invaders. but the drawings you sent to venus never returned,  and now the cra

your thoughts are jackals, yet their twilight howls sound like cries in your head; you have been finding yourself & not- while trying not to sound so sad. so, Dear Heart, you can write. yet, you stopped wearing your words on your wrist & all that hair you chopped off this day a year ago, refuses to grow back. you turn, try to decode your encyclopedia of powerful spines, tearing at the pages you wrote them upon. angry, You were so angry. & now? nothing but an untamed, wild thing you leave collared & quiet in a cage.