YOU YOU YOU

your eyes, thick as a high school scrapbook
crackling and yellow, curling at the edges
a book of myths
in which i do not appear.

I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock."

— Michelle Tea, "Paris: A Lie"

from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache

...feel the fierce way desire
tourniquets itself around you and
clings

Clubland South of Market tweak-
chic trannies powder their noses from
bullet-shaped compacts and flick their forked
tongues like switchblades as they burn the night
down bleed day to night to day to

Mission sidewalks where pythons hide
twenty dollar balloons beneath their tongues which
get bartered in smiles quicker than a coke buzz and
tossed out through the cracks

Cottonmouth kisses
camouflage emotions and
strike with a vengeance
when he
wants and she
wants and they
want and I
won't

Genet was right, I suppose
when he wrote "The only way
to avoid the horror of horror is
to give in to it"
it's
the nature of
the economy of the
business it's the
nature of
things...

There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.

I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.

The movement
Of the body is

Where poetry
Begins

Morning breaks. So do bottles and bones.