LOOKED LIKE LAUGHING

A collection of cold art, inspiration found on bottoms of shoes, and bottled freckles scraped from bare shoulders.

[lookedlikelaughing]

erasure (unstructured units of time)

I’ve never been in love with anyone I’ve eaten at a French restaurant with especially a croque madam, eye flexed as I order a beer.

This comes to me passing a Pavilions on Melrose where Melissa and I bought condoms one night  when it was very easy to not be in love  and winter sweat  and low-stress sex  on Lexington.

Then the gods started fucking around, hammering mantle and spitting rotgut.

Everybody now breaking their teeth at brunch and biblical you a shatter in Brooklyn.

I want to know what kind of woman you’ll be when you’re sixty-five and I want to know when your sister gets married and notified when your mother dies and you could  skin me every morning with a flick of your eyes sleepy on the side and petrified.

But I’m gone and Hollywood is a wince and I’m gone and I will eat you when I’m gone and the engine turns over gone so I flirt with an actress on twitter or spin quarters with married bartenders yes it’s awful still learning and my bones are a creek my head is emptied of honey and you won’t email me about checking out the hottest cam models, for free, but someone will, now, and everybody...

[lookedlikelaughing]

a real bad word got caught in my hiss

australians in bali all liquored by the beach the last time i saw you in a bikini you were bleaching my bathtub, smirking up at me flicking your tongue like some hot wet warning, then

unfollow, unfriend, a week later i see you on tinder again

with all the other unknowables maybe working for david geffen maybe blowing their bangs and saying some empty bullshit like “berlin is so over”

so let me tell you where it frayed as if i owe you! but, anyway my teeth were soaked in old granddad while you were pleading a repeat one winter night, green-lit at the formosa as i strained to hear hoagy carmichael  behind your sinister exhales, your steaming side-eye, when i remebered alexis saying, “i think i’m moving back to cincy”

are you following?  oh god, you were so good in bed but you’d never say something as real as that so i go back to the beach for a scream what’d that divorce lawyer say? the tree remembers, the ax forgets?

oh you pouty girl with the princess name i’m more than action and you don’t need to be better you just never needed to happen

[lookedlikelaughing]

trends in divinity

You’ve got your crystals You’ve got your intentions I’m spitting at the moon someone needs to give me detention and I’m sorry I got loaded and said you shouldn’t move to L.A. I mean fuck! Even the Chargers might do it I guess it’s anyone’s game. Don’t listen to me. I’m crazy, I’m dying. I spent a Tuesday in the house drinking cucumber martinis and crying. I’m shredded ghost architect, look: These hands are large, I know, but I’m still surprised they built this beautiful museum of guilt— we’re open seven days a week we’re tonguing sockets we’re dragging a creek we’re whipping our backsides and admission is free.

[lookedlikelaughing]

sans crainte, un homme peut le faire

it’s hard to trust yrself when the world you once knew as flat is suddenly round, and newly known to you there's a second one, and in a witch’s breath they’re both right in yr face, smothering you off like a good Legionaire to a vanilla Vahalla

it's at that moment you realize if you allow yrself to rise up and be confident with the fact the truth is never wrong fucks will be given

and in the morning you can watch the doe begin to curl up under a conifer for the winter

[lookedlikelaughing]

dance of the flatline

i’ve lived with walking skeletons made friends with alien millionaires hell one time i witnessed a miracle

a prima ballerina assoluta pirouetting without spotting 

but nothing prepared me for the thrust of hunting wild game in the post-midnight air

now that is a pastoral vocation a noble career haunted only by whimsical decisions leading to a few drinks maybe too many   maybe not enough     who really cares (counting is for athletes and scientists musicians and captains of industry anyway)

as with every imbibed dram fashionable remorse plays Friday hooky as contemporary memories replace the finesse of idle gab as the digestion of a stranger’s pathos becomes attainable with every desolate breath

as the pull of a hair-trigger  discharges a double-aught cartridge we’re weaving that fifth-mile home quick-fast in yr sample sale blouse and Ann Taylor Lofts that flea market shawl deftly removed prior to the pivot of that master key

out of the corner of my eye i watch that drowning gabardine saunter towards the concrete in a hummingbird’s heartbeat

don’t get that worsted wool wet

whiplash we splash into an ocean of bespoke bedsheets enveloping ourselves forever in goose down sealing the fever like a drop of melted wax stamped with a royal decree 

upstage of this orchestral waltz our ballet is on point  with an e in this dream

in this reality our pas de deux lasted three measures but damn it was good a standing ovation

now back to first position

[lookedlikelaughing]

M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (Lang, ‘31)

you have a crush on every girl, she says as i try to keep my pills down as i try to keep any nicety of you after throwing everything out find a photograph from disney world tucked between pages of a short story about some warring american couple

and this is where you live now in a fissure welching on a bet when all i can think of is your bed and how i crept a coil of your thread to spool me into foolishness and silt or thickets of thin, someone who wants to love without a station to begin, and yes, yo, la peor de todas, but i mean it, i’m a sin.

[lookedlikelaughing]

fuck list

Fuck Portland no fuck Beverly Hills fuck me and fuck my skinny wrists fuck talking about wanting to kill myself and fuck not talking about wanting to kill myself fuck poetry and fuck using poetry as therapy because it’s much easier to not lie here and fuck this lazy teenage excuse for a poem. Fuck my ex and how she is because of what I did because of who I am and fuck me, again. Fuck my filthy sink fuck my need to drink fuck me wanting to take oxycontin  every single day of the week fuck the way I think and fuck following hot girls on the internet fuck thinking I’m progressive and changing while staring hot-mouthed at a 23-year-old’s ass on 2nd and Spring.

Fuck my inability to love correctly and fuck my putrid selfishness no fuck all the unanswered calls from my father fuck my purposeful foolishness and fuck! stop crying all the goddamn time.

Fuck the poet in K-town who doesn’t want to be referred to as the poet in K-town most likely because she’s scared she’ll be as nothing as that line is or as nothing as me which is, to be honest, a whole lot of nothing, a tire-fire in the iris of your eye gone out, a cum stain on your sheets washed away with me.

Fuck not speaking to my mother or ever calling my sister or knowing a single fucking thing about my brother or letting Rachel fade into ancestry.

Fuck being, just, like,  so goddamn horny all the time! smashing my needs into the corners of every new thing and fuck my awful teeth and fuck how I can’t not do this and fuck Loraine for thinking she could have a piece of me while dragging me through shit or thinking these bruises were hers and not caused by someone else (Samantha) and fuck that I came inside Dani but not that I came inside Eliza but while we’re here fuck a miscarriage but not an abortion and fuck the anvils roped into my memory that snap up and crack until I’m the excuse you need or some simmering bad memory, angry as ever and futile for fun.

Fuck Rita for dying and fuck me for not or rather fuck me for living like such a wretched snot and fuck me not telling you every beauty every day oh just fuck me until I’m a knot, or not—  fuck me for letting every holy I’ve held rot (especially the miracle from Beverly, the body of Christ in wafer piping hot.)

Oh fuck this, who’s even reading why am I even, oh, oh just, man, buddy, come on

fuck me

fuck me until I’m a wash

fuck me until I’m something you can’t repeat

fuck forcing optimism into this last beat.

[lookedlikelaughing]

bush did 9/11 and i’ll do it again

A year ago today I was screaming light and white uprooting my beard hairs in the psych ward and when they shook me out like a sheet that’s when I died impossible to track back to the other side.

Impossible me, winded to my knees with secret sinister histories.

I’m a cock I’m confetti I’m a canon if you’d let me.

Sidewalk scum you can’t see growing  in the shadow of your arches in the rectum of your knowing in the father of your fist secret sinful glowing.

I’ve gone down on four women this summer mouthing their pulp for the living sweating sheets of skin and cutting my tongue sometimes I can’t get hard and I still feel young maybe I’ll spit on your thighs so you won’t forget there was a child’s god in the fog of your apartment.

Here’s the thing: you will and I won’t and lap me over edges I’m your no one I’m the text message not being composed and never.

It’s Friday and I’m spread in spray descending Glen Towers, flicking your ass in the elevator eating breakfast on Ensley Avenue and lord I can’t believe That I can still be seen

Or that there’s ever a you when there’s a me and a poet in K-town and a bartender at the Redwood and forty fucking futures soon to be dissolve and dust and that’s even if I make it out of Bunker Hill on foot.

Fante would have called me a Spic and Bukowski would have fucked my girlfriend and they’re both dickheaded and dead while I wrap a wrist and hop back in the ring. I want to be your summer fling I want to be your mattress gleam I want to be your International Jewelry Center your wealthy Angeleno swing I’m gonna restore Angels Flight as a gift to the city that I sing cause I’m a rich motherfucker with big pockets and a bigger dick I’m the shine you can’t escape I’m the wreck you couldn’t splint I could be good for you, I could shed my sling I’m the sun that could drip your Catholic trees, the bark of the body, the cosmic neon belief, a screaming, bleeding tower in full careen—

The Calvary Christ, I’m the only fucking me! Me, me! The selfish I suck, the suck that I flee I’m bruised but I can be better I’m alive and what a thing.

[lookedlikelaughing]

the california drought

I’ve been drinking Rittenhouse for three straight days I wonder at the liquor store if strangers know I’m a slut do they know once I hit a homerun and once I was student of the month I wish I were brave enough to grow my hair out I wish I were a father and not a hot dry pile of shit you swerve your car around I wish I weren’t drinking myself to death watching Elliott Smith youtube videos and refilling the Salton Sea with saline me and supine lies oh this operation is mad and mechanical I’ve got rules for the hurt I’m structured maniacal I want to sing you a song but I’ve been bottled in bond.

[lookedlikelaughing]

caught up in cough

Maybe a bottle of white wine for breakfast. I know when I’m trash. Lean in, go hard in the paint. I live in the glass peak of a thermometer, screaming mercury, full of pop and smash. When I am angry O lord how I am angry. I’m a blade in Levi 511s. I’m a fucking howl. Cocktailed to hell and letting you squirm on the patio. You’re on the hook now, honey, and it looks good from down here. I could apologize or light a cigarette. They always fuck up a margarita here. The tether taut, I’d know. Never faked a love, never felt more held by what I no longer hold. Yes, Bee, my whole body feels like a ghost limb now. Beer in the a.m. and googling suicide notes. Forever a draft on the table. “These last few days are among the happiest I’ve ever ignored.” Swooning for the scatter. Debris fingers, flotsam, flotsam, flotsam and shuck. I’m a mess and so are you, all of this. Blonde babies with a cackle for a hip saying some stupid shit at 3 in the morning. Everyone thinks they know something. I wish I could forget what I look like. These are gifts. This is always.

I’m going to draw you a map.

[lookedlikelaughing]

180 to casper slide on freud’s grave kick-flip out to the opening drums in “hot for teacher”

all the dizzy quartz of poetry and the poems outnumber the stars so many i could drown i could swallow the sea and still not even lose my lanugo and poems you’ve dog-eared poems you’ve linked little mighty poems in the huff of your pout devastating shocks while turning right on red anthologies locked into the fontanels of my head and the best ones are shown to me like a rip like a wild kick by those i love supernaturally and i will eat each one my laughing skeleton chomp my screeching face my awful waist sunk into the pulse of your hips my heart in your tits and oh god i miss my mother yet here i am fed.

[lookedlikelaughing]

improvisational tragicomedy

she asked  for three words  and a location 

“i love you,  everywhere” was my only thought  as i sat slient while she turned her back to the crowd  ready to make jokes  at my expense knowing i would laugh regardless 

because love conquers all even men

[lookedlikelaughing]

recovery chart

never told a pulse in Battery Park I nearly OD’d and again next week trying to fuck Allegra in Fort Greene 

I had a feeling you were craving a killing and depression parades through my legs

they whisper he was so often limping around the lazy limbs of this town.

my trembling morning ankles say it’s hard to celebrate

a birthday for the foily fucker you will always hate

but this will be the first one that I stare into the gut

and say

give me 20 more and I will show you how to cut

I’ll show you all the glims in me I will shout you a thrust

I’ll eat the clouds that run at me with nothing but trust

a fist that fucks my awful face with all that’s left to come.

[lookedlikelaughing]

pacific bell

Sometimes I think you’re the only good thing out of the Valley

Circus Liquor is sad the houses drag some purgatorial place 

stretched inverted shadows of terror but you I’ve never been suspicious of

flicking bullets in the heck of your day

some people don’t need a nickname some people always have their hands on fire 

rooting around the apothecary bag and melting all your tools

frayed to fuck and hoping you would hold them

like a gouge in the soil in place of a womb

spilled over the mountains some soft and uncontainable force.

[lookedlikelaughing]

christian quarters

We drove out to the desert we stayed at the Ace a good year after it was cool

We were a handclap a ‘58 Bel Air chromium archers interstate ribbons

We drank rum until you cried because rum makes you cry and that was the only reason why

[lookedlikelaughing]

dug in

I feel healthier even with my cracks and I wonder if people liked me more when I was worse but when was that. 

One night, within arms reach of my summer boil, disaster on the stove, I watched youtube videos of Challenger news coverage and trembled.

The death of Venus, a million brittle laughs brickle behind your back, a face like I’m okay is a long term attack.

Today I’m emerald San Bernardino I’m Crystal Cathedral watching the soft glow of my living room window, wondering what’s changed.

There’s a heckle in your holster, estocada alma mater, deserts sick without the water, I do not have to die in the dirt.

[lookedlikelaughing]

within the blissful fist

Vicki tells us a story about happy, isolated peoples in Siberia

I nod and wince I worry who here can see my chest undressed

My mechanics spilled into every corner my shiftless grip slipping?

It’s spasm via specter it’s combing my rugs it’s finding your letters cause

cuts come quiet, they surprise, funny how often in shines of Modelo’s golden tide

and when the sun sets do you wonder what happens to the light it didn’t take with it?

Later, we are in a car and moving forward at least a little bit at least a relative hush, a plus. 

The people I’m with want to listen to Fleetwood Mac but for a different reason while my teeth crush

histories in my mouth, I unlearn names and hiss, Siberia’s got nothing on a tundra like this.