Carousel Somnambulist

Dark from beneath eyelids black milk pause seeps as the first
Hint of alarm, smoking, and turns this carousel midnight.

Or flying, running godhelpusall for the nearest feathers but the bullet
Comes, flashes blind, arms tied tight with ticketing tape plastic sunshine.

Cotton candy leers most dimly in open eyes, irises empty carousels
Their bulbs all fizzled, power plug sparking in a pool of popcorn grease.

Sneaker rubber skidding into white powder, fingernail chalk
Through the wind tunnel umbilical cords ears wrap tight, fetal.

Shoe planes air-wearied, hours of graphite becomes its own cellophane horror,
There are screams, blankets the most shackled prisons presently constructible.

Knees folded into amnesia nocturnes, and hair creaks stubborn,
Tangled carousel bars splayed out damp on pillow carnivals.

Myelin sheathing REM cycles like cheap taffeta after the
Dancer has tripped from her house and gone home, broken.

Not enough chainlink gripped with enough fervor to sit still
Skulls so full of ticket stubs, the world’s best forest firefighters.

A body flat in the streets like oil, black water rivuletting on either side
Streetlamps lining its breathy sleep like goosebumps after a drizzle.

The indigo taste of bowls of sleep spilt candy corn
In the dirt under feet ever-correct, forever deciding.

Death between every stall’s hocking when the doors close
When the story ends in a gasp and sheets wet their pants.

Blush grits between toes that have forgotten slippers to crunch,
Mallets, into jars of pennies hungering for a public square.

Library

I don’t know what I’d do—

The burn in my thighs from too many stairs
Banana espionage and a wood grain that sands
My ears, befuddled mind-trumpets,
When fluorescents become prisms
Become more familiar than the sun,

When all these shelves shelf me
Into filing cabinet sections that will never
Even skim the lates and the greats;

The heat slows my pen and fogs grey,
Shimmering and solid between my paper
And the words I haven’t snatched yet,
Tugging my attention to the infinite piping
That sheaths a certain wired electricity
I wish my ink would conduct—

Formica permits no love to splash
Purple and unbidden like kool-aid
Onto its has-been television snow horizontals,
Will only sip history’s solace
With iced mint leaves drained of their curtseys
And flirtation, like metal bookends.

List Poem, or, I Do Want Something After All

I want banana pancakes at midnight,
Apple rings like donut islands in the syrup
Boston with its bright lights and pea coats
The same just-waking hands every morning
Paint slathered thick and hard across a canvas without worrying that I’ve wasted another one
Chairs that don’t bite back
Sand that doesn’t stick
Ceilings that don’t negate the sky
Clean showers and doors that don’t jam
Milk cool as a ghost at every thirsty turn
Boys who leave when they’re gone
Fingers in the brownie batter dripping salmonella
Sharp corners like creased paper
Pools that end sooner and numbers that drop faster
Freckles to number like cancerous stars
Oranges that burst, not shrivel
Old ladies in Brooklyn lawn chairs gushing Russian to a nod
Wrists on fire and knees that chatter late into the trembling afternoon
Beds that make themselves
Mistakes with erasers color-coordinated and attached
Justice, and fun that doesn’t come in bottles
To melt like peanut butter on toast
Freedom, and to make decisions faster than I pick ice cream flavors
A dust-free present tense
Flip flops all over the tile,
An end to hallway boots
Birds in every tree and trees in every room
More smiles and fewer Office episodes
Death as motivational speaker
The guts to cross more stages
A whiter mind

To Trip Over Carpet (Expanded)

Caught mid-slide against a notch in the thread
Strung oily from thunder to sludge,
Between a grunt and your claim of cry,
This glass bead only cracks,
Never sighs, dust facet finality,

I remember your nerve endings—
Charred, yearning. I wrapped their vines
Tight as twine around my throat trunk,
Let them burn the space between my fingers,
The smooth desperate hills of my diaphragm

But your groaning couldn’t feel how it frayed
My taut pleadful wire of an ear,
Or left my eyes cold as the fish I formed
Lying chilled and bleary on the bathroom floor
Macbeth phone hard beneath my too-slack cheek

You’ll imbibe it—us, me, and you did,
Gulping down the fruity smoke like the child
I knew you are, and choked nimble as the candlestick
I snuffed when you dropped to the ground
In that field whose wet disrupted grass I hope to never smell;

I’ll know you in the tile glimmer
Of my failure, your hand grabbing firm
The unyielding small of my back
When we dance, we’ll dance, we danced
Our tenses always and never changed—

I’ll live forever the night of my still, unbroken pride,
Flipping through the domino pages of cabinet doors
Looking for more tears, the hook of your need
Eroding my last unsevered vertebra
Like cheese, my every frozen reach.