It's Easier to Think

In a certain state, somewhere south,
you can take a mug to the ocean
and scoop a glass-full of coffee
straight from the boiling beach.

In the same way, you can arrive
at an airport holding a handful of sand
and, after looking out a window, fly back home,
where the coffee is in the kitchen,
bitter, nothing a few teaspoons of sugar

can’t fix.

But in this state, water is boiled
by the spaces between enormous shrinking shadows
and it tastes just as bitter -
a blend of fish feces,
a sand castle destroyed by angry tourists,
and the sugar you brought from home.

Somehow, in some bizarre manner, I was able to write this short poem right after a dream I had about a year ago. I just found it on my phone, and I can still remember the sweeping glow of my Blackberry on my nightly face.

People like my music for my poetry
When I give them my poetry,
It’s not enough.
People like my poetry for my words
And when I give them my words
I become lonely;
When I give them me
It is not enough.

Last night I was stabbed
by a family member of the first degree.
My wounds became fitful mouths and coughed blood
in intervals of time, between silences.
Bruises began to grow on the fields of my extremities
and I started chanting an ancient hymn in a forgotten language.
Trees withered when they saw me
by the drenched stare in my eye.
I began to stab myself with nail clippers,
once in the throat, and twice in my eyes.
Maybe I should have sawed my ears,
torn them away from the evil sounds of my pacing,
the running of boiling water coming to soak and fill me.
My wounds drank the fire, spewing blood and ingesting it back.
I stabbed at my eyes again, the visions they kept conjuring.
What really hurt was my head,
at this point nothing more than a bird’s nest
made entirely of long, dirty old worms.
I grew a beak and picked at myself —
soon there was nothing left of my head,
nothing of nourishment or substance,
only the hot, thick water boiling me from the inside out,
and I cried with a smile, because now I have thought of everything;

I have thought of everything
my fucking worm head could have thought of,
and it’s becoming a familiar sickness.

My headache is always heaviest
in the morning;

not because I recovered
under the night’s tea-scented breath

or was able to, for a few anesthetic hours,
forget the burdens of days passed,

but because the second I am tranced
into consciousness,
I am forced to leave my dreams,

the place where you slumber — pucker-lipped and smooth on my chest —
when you cannot tread in my own sheets.

“I roll joints on my poetry

because it gives it that extra kick

I’m looking for. It burns the herb

the way a flame can never,

licks it with the fiercest of adjectives

and tightens it up the way my bones

fill up my skin, from end to wet end.”

Interesting subject matter, no?

I wrote the subway train into a cave

low, beyond the tunnels of my toes

and I pushed for that canyon, a cry

of hail from my mouth, glass in the mist

on mountainsides, and the train

becoming red from my beak.

It’s hard to be a mountain goat.

It’s hard to give birth when

your world is tilted.