Is There a Ghost? -- dunno if i like this it's a little angsty, huh?

I could sleep for days at a time.
The dead have nothing on me --
my hair would curl, and so would the dreams.
Once I dreamt of being pushed,
twice, off different platforms
and in another, battled the gator
that ate my grandmother. I woke up
feeling strange but gratified.

When I lived alone, I'd dance,
lots of times without music,
in my room. Why not dance,
I thought. I would cook eggs
and black beans and they would
dance in their rooms as well.

The dead must be haunting my hair.
I wake up with more each day,
wavier now, acting wild & unruly.
Mornings breakfast is practically useless --
there is no fast to break.
Now, December begins the cold,
while November stayed nice.
Is there a ghost in my house?

Smog -- an attempt at a poem in Spanish

Cuando llueve cae la clara de huevo.
A veces me toca mirar hacia la cordillera
y se ve brillante aunque
cafe y verde no brillan. Estoy convencido
que la idea de una montana
tapada con hielo o nieve
ya es historia, que, cuando se ve
ese estrecho de panzas gorditas
no hay cerros ni viejas errupciones terrestres
sino luz brillando con el color de tierra.
El proximo dia vuelve tapandose como una hoja seca
y deja su luz como la mariposa de sueno.

Facebook Status Sonnet -- a poem of facebook statuses ripped apart & thrown together again..

Risk-ed out, searching for sleep.
Dreading somewhere near
Canada and the Atlantic.
So close, so delayed. Seattle, DC.
Proceed, smiling. What doesn’t
Disappear, wants it to happen.
Awake, turned, it’s not a tumor.
Speckled daughters left as leopards,
Respectable again: clarity, foresight.
It is love like maple syrup.
Wishing the remains were longer.
Vodka soda soaking in today’s spring;
Strolling through summer fields,
Loving. I want to be a maniac. It is love.

Untitled

I assume we can handle thunder
even when lightning
smacks us with blue
every monsoon season. Sometimes
the driest times are in rain.
Warm rain in August.
It brings you back briefly
to the drought my father
kept reminding me about.
Before it begins
it's warm August in rain,
humidity you can swim in.
Days like that, our desire
stays inside like a tired adolescent.
Turn toward the inside.
What's under the bed beside August.
If it could rain inside my room
I would always let it.

After Miles of Scorched Trees, I've Had Enough

I think we all wear beards.
Honeysuckle and bees
bees and honey that drips
like a red curtain. Beards
made of hair and dead whales
like the ones you see on tv sometimes.
Sometimes beards get sick
and throw up white ugliness.
We wear them pretty,
lovely like some trees.
They itch like burnt earth.

Sleep

A few nights ago Malorie and I
were in a class, a raving professor
and his existential thoughts
on snowflake and snowmen cut-outs.
I fall asleep on public transportation.
Lasting things on my tongue:
dryness, a woman, a floor, grain,
footsteps, hands holding, maybe a metal bar.
Sara and I biked in the rain.
Hers was dry, mine soaked and set
leaning in an alley with soft light.
She twisted off. Like how she really did
when we biked in Bariloche.
That was no rainfall. If anything, wind.
If anything blue. A tree. A bump
in the road like a swell in a carpet.
We took no short cuts. In a dream
I woke up from another dream
and went out to search for a friend.
When we reached the top of that hill
the world felt cleaner.

Perfume is my Only Hope

I’ve made the mistake again
rubbing my eyes with
traces of chili pepper juice
still left on my fingers.

Think pepper spray
or tear gas, lacrimogena,
lacrimae. Swallowing
a gallon of perfume into my nose
slowly clears up the sting,
lingering to creep & itch.

I wish chilies weren’t so delicious.
My own fault for having eyes,
my own fault for succumbing
to urges I should ignore,
blackening the senses
panicking, wanting more than anything
what helps.

Night (needs a new title...)

Sometimes I laugh

    and I like it.

Get me another beer

    will you?

"Iam Ver Egelides Refert Tepores (Now Spring Brings Warmths)" After Anne Carson

Soledad, Warmth

In the cold, aren't we waiting
for a larger season
of no brown paper bags
to breathe into, no falls?
What unlocks
but flowers. Louder, lovelier.
Now we plant our backs into the ground.
Now we watch what leaves.
Keep coming back to it.
Back the same way go a new way.

At the Park

At the park, I sat on a large
colorful lizard, pinks, blues,
small fish as eyes,
beside the playground's
other sculpture toys & jungle gym.

There sat a kid, large
in the eyes, tight blue
jeans, fumbling, looking drunk. I
watched. He sat, made a sculpture his ground
while the smaller kids kept to the gym.

I started to think up something --
probably profound -- about
stupid drunken kids
when he suddenly got up
and rushed (as well as he could)

fumbling toward my lizard.
Something must've told him
(maybe my silence apart from the kids)
that I was looking. I stood up,
practically fled. Serves me right, anyway.