Where sand goes when the hourglass breaks

On a spring morning aged the color of elderly
With the last frost from winter
We were the children of Valentine’s day kamikaze bouquets
Between the cheese grater fence teeth of the house above
We turn to each other and say
My father was a propeller and my mother a cockpit
In WWII they escorted bomber hearts
Til a woman threw them off a dock filled to high tide with waiting and parachutes made from sea foam
Our seeds were caught in the hem of her pants
And tumbled out as she guided her blitzkrieged husband
Through the front gate
His footfalls still shaking with the rumble of landmines
She trembled in sync with them
That is how we began
This yard is a broken flower pot spilling soil on the carpet
The husband’s thumbs are green from whistling memories with blades of grass
Til his vocal cords bleed black orchids
So with a broom and dustpan she became a gardener
Trying to cultivate this diaspora of wilting greenhouse
budding in our chests
Once a week she prunes the guilty osmosis from our backs
Crying
She knows you can’t water broken til it’s fixed
Some things just don’t grow back
But we can always start again
I tell this woman I want to start a rosebush here someday
At this point she says that flowers are asexual
And thorns hurt anyway
So we stop speaking rhododendron
And start speaking metaphor
I tell her I spend most of my days
On a liquor store shelf
A pint of forget me by tomorrow
Being touched by clock radios with people for hands
She is oragami lion tucked in bamboo chute neatly folded
Behind the register
Waiting
Because nothing is tighter than the black liver clutch of an alcoholic
I welcome her chokehold
She grips me boa constrictor
Til I cough up everything I lost in drowning
Remembering that brown bags are straightjackets for glass
But her husband was already dropped from an Omaha Beach wrecking yard
He will cut you if you walk too close
And her veins are mandolin string thin
He strums sledgehammer ballads to admit marriage can’t grow in a drought
He writes a note telling her she can put the gloves and shears back in the shed
cuts a rose from the front yard
This soil was never a home
It was a casket for good intentions
And graveyards are no place for children to play or rosebushes to grow
The only thing to do is leave
So we both say goodbye
Leaving our roots next to broken pots

Boys will be boys
As long as we get our man guides early enough
The cover is a menagerie of fire trucks mudpies action figure dolls
Scraped knees elbow casts bruise colored makeup
Chapter 1
Leashes
Put them around skirts
Put them around car engines
Put the engines in the skirt and tell her to keep moving
These are lessons on momentum
Panties are trifold displays on gravity
Look from corner to corner then take it down
Put it in your pocket next to a wrinkled condom wrapper
And all the lies you told to get there
Chapter 2
Hands
Our convoluted hands up shirts looking for something
We left there last night
Like our hearts
Hand that over to a comic book collection and a desire to blow shit up
Before our bar shots of droughtgut vodka
We drank the kool aid and believed our knuckles were
Made for baseball mitts and flesh
You know what you tell a woman with two black eyes
You tell her to leave that son of a bitch
Chapter 3
Rockstar
Not energy drinks guitar smashers
Whiskey and cocoa puff breakfast eaters
Holding needles in the crook of their arms like pacified babies
Break everything made to carry you
Throw beds out the window to see if the love you made on it is strong enough to fly
Overdose in the bathroom and live to tell the story
If your mother doesn’t cry at night because of you
You don’t live hard enough
Make yourself a holiday
In honor of pissing standing up
Chapter 4
Heroes
Superman Batman Spiderman
Like if you take man out of the name
Their dicks will fall off and they’ll start sharing their feelings
Wear a mask
Heroes shouldn’t have a face
Hide your good deeds
A damsel isn’t a damsel if she’s locked in your tower
She’s a house ornament
Keep her shiny and to yourself
Epilouge
Look at the ugliness inside of you
And tell it it’s beautiful
Put a ring on it and marry all those good habits you were called a pussy for
Stop touching footballs like braille
The only story worth reading over is the smile you had
Before you knew the word masculine
The same way women are taught to be victims
We are taught to make victims
Every grown man has a little boy with broken legs
Still trying to run in his soul
So men
Pick him up
He doesn’t know how to break you yet
And the next time you want to act like a man
Be yourself

kneepits:

intangiblecollective:

become a fan of the INTANGIBLE COLLECTIVE on facebook. right now.

Out of Focus

In ‘69, I met a wild-haired man named Reggie
who walked an empty dog collar on a stiff leash,
who prowled the savage island between adolescence and adulthood,
popping Dexedrine, swilling Ripple, talking baby talk
to the dog collar. “Gude poochie. Poochie poochie hoochie coo.”
Reggie was ill, contracting attention deficit from a whore
years before it became a medical disorder.
The first time I saw his paralyzed smile, we smoked black hash
laced with white veins of opium. Our feral eyes drifted with the smoke,
unmoored skiffs in a current of cold light.
I got a hard on when Reggie’s girl rubbed her tiny tits
across my arm and asked for the last toke.
I passed the pipe, but Reggie stood there frowning
and sucking air as the water pipe bubbled.
The strange girl giggled “All gone.” Reggie’s right foot
pounded the pavement and he sang along with a
John Lee Hooker 8 track,
“I’m your poochie poochie man. Everybody knows I am.”
His voice squealed like sneakers on a clean gym floor.
When the tape ended, Reggie turned his collar up, petted the air,
and walked slowly into the night.
He’s a chemist now, hired by Bristol Myers
because of his phenomenal pharmaceutical knowledge
and I’m a poet, drunk on words, stumbling over
the illusion of art.
For twenty-eight years we’ve brushed our wild hair away.
He helped develop Prozac too late to save his own brittle grin
or my last few healthy brain cells;
but the man still walks an empty dog collar late at night.
He just bought the John Lee Hooker box set on CD.
Some evenings we sit together on a park bench, smoking dope
until the moon changes colors and the dog collar pisses on my leg.

Dear son
I didn’t intend to raise a martyr
I regret reading Joan of Arc to you at bedtime
And turning off all of the lights
So you could become accustomed to the darkness
In hopes that one day your sacrament would elevate you beyond a pulpit
You will have to excuse me
I come from a place where many speak of God
But never on a first name basis
I shuffled through my bible today
I found no scripture that mentioned holy ways to die
I will look again tomorrow
In a different translation
Maybe in the private letters Martin Luther wrote to his son
Do you remember our trip to Germany that made me change our names to Martin
You share your name with many other men of God
As though I hoped you would become the patron
Saint of suicide bombers and Inquisition casualties
But you became a movement
Then
A section in a history book
And third world streets across america
It seems like your memory is fading
Between wrinkled pages and street corners
There are still questions of who shot you
On that Tennessee motel throne that morning
A man told me he was close enough to hear the shot
I never asked if he heard trumpets
Or if he turned to see where Jesse was pointing to
Did your murder change your ideology
Make you wish to wage war in your final moments
Instead of becoming a plastic souvenir in our
Gift shop of national holidays
I am still waiting for the civil rights act to become an amendment
People are saying your name without a Jr. now
I do not mind that they are forgetting you are my son
But I wonder how the years will treat the rest of your name
Will it fade into a pop culture alzheimers pill bottle
Sometimes it feels like you are nothing more than a qoute
A billboard
An away message
A side comment from someone else standing at their pulpit
An argument against sagging jeans baggy clothes and the word nigger
People no longer see your smiling ghost when opening the door for a stranger
Or when enemies agree to a peaceful resolution
We are forgetting your march through Selma
The speech you gave at the Lincoln Memorial
Your letters are still locked up in a Birmingham jail
Dear son
This is the last sermon I will write
A man’s life can be defined by his greatest achievement
And your were mine
I still see you in the mirror
I still see you in the joined hands of children with
Mismatched skin tones
My baby boy
When you were born I named you Micheal
The right hand of God
I am sorry if I raised you to die

A love letter to Love.
comma Courtney
You are what every rockstar who gets a period aspired to be
And what britney spears lacked the steady supplier to go through with
If Marilyn Monroe had an oval office dress
You’d be the unexplainable pit stain
You cokewhore diva needle goddess
Heroin harlot angel dust housemaid
Alcoholic beach towel
Fuck you are awesome
If keith richard’s drug stash and angelina jolie’s crazy
Had a child it would be you
Can you imagine what our sex tape would be like
I can
Scene
Opium den
I walk in dressed like a cross between baby huey and a pimpnamedslickback
A purple diaper pimp bottle and a limp stick of butter
I knock on the door but you’re too strung out to answer
I let myself in and you snap to as soon as you smell the formaldehyde I like to dip your toes in
Lover come here
You whisper in that way that usually comes with a straightjacket
And I say okay
And you go OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
And I’m like (insert monkey sounds)
Ten minutes later I’m passed out with you still riding me like a thoroughbred at the kentucky derby
While you lick the foam dripping from the corner of my mouth
When I come to we can share our songbooks with each other
I’ll ask you where you want me to put the fireworks for your tombstone
In the last 40 you drank or the pair of lungs you coughed up after you smoked too much Hollywood
If we ain’t tied off dammit we ain’t happy
Bobby and whitney might as well have been the partridge family compared to us
When kurt cobain killed himself
His teeth and lips inverted and whispered
Goodbye you druggy bitch into his ear
Ba
But I’ll never think that
Even after you try to pawn my kidneys to Irish dialysis paitients
It’ll be a funny story to tell at christmas and a good distraction for our parents from the jar of Oxycontin I’ll wrap for you
For months on end we’ll listen to people tell us about our nights
Do you guys remember that night you stole a UPS truck
And tried to deliver christmas presents to children…in cuba
Or the weekend you spent fully clothed…at a nudist colony
See
We have most memorable moments we can’t remember
And I know there’s more to come
I’ve dreamed of us lacing our fingers together and zigzagging down a rose petal aisle
And the guests will ask why two people in shoe costumes are walking down the aisle
Because that’s what the fuck happens when you get married on shrooms and try to plug the holes in each other
And create something strong enough to carry our weight
I’m so damn happy I can wake up from this
Even if you can’t
In a culture that loves to see celebrities crash
We have watched you like a suicide jumper
With the room catching fire
You were blondes having more fun and the toxicity report that came with it
You were the best advertisement the FDA had
You were the music industry’s worst kept secret
Pile of trash under the bed
You were rap videos that made us love poverty and funerals
You were every broken guitar string Kurt Cobain ever wrote with
You were every photo TMZ didn’t take of your daughter hugging you
You were every foster home she won’t have to live in like you did
You were Courtney Michelle Love
The woman Courtney Michelle Harrison became
So she wouldn’t have to hurt anymore
Too bad no one told the rest of us

She is gripping her purse tighter these days
Her fingertips indented from the beads glued to its shell
She is also walking faster
As if she were late to meetings that always start early
And her alarm clock is in love with watching her sleep

She is a busy woman

The curls of her hair are holding question marks
Left by hands that wonder what they feel like
She never straightens it

She is too busy

She fell today
and the ground opened up that purse to see what makes her walk so heavy

Inside are two neatly folded pieces of paper
One has the jagged curves of a man with too many callouses to hold a pen tightly
It reads
I would like to see you again one day

The other is scented with her silence
and written with fingers too slick from perfumed lotion
It says
I won’t wait for you but I won’t forget you either

She is busy again today

My grandmother is old fashioned
She keeps coupons
Can’t use a cd player
And hates loud music
She likes hot water cornbread
And rose bushes
She fears God

We don’t speak much these days
At least nothing past the way we hangup on telemarketers
We don’t have much in common

I hate political parties
And have white friends
Her feet are still looking for segregated bathrooms
And I’ve never seen her hold a rope

She almost cried when Obama was elected
I asked her what she knew of his politics
She said a black man is president
I said it takes more than skin to run a country
Then walked away

Her husband was a soldier
I imagine she was told
The army is no place for a black man
So she puffed her throat when she saw me in a uniform
And never said she was proud of me

Her church has a painting of a white jesus
Her hands pray to him in Jim Crow obedience
And she is a God fearing woman
So I don’t know how to tell her I am not a Christian

I was once
And I was happy being a good Christian
But I am more fulfilled just being a better person
I know she will not see it this way

She will see failure
She will see the alcohol on my breath
And the weed in my hair
She will see my unshaven face and the dirt in my nails
She will stop seeing me

You were called a genius
You were called a leader
A traitor
An uncle tom
And worst of all a disgrace

Your avarice for a country that could shake the chains from its wrists was a footnote
From a book coated in dust the day after its first print
The author thought Dubois was right
He never saw the school you built

He never saw the home you built for your wife
You made the ceilings and doors lower
So all your guests would know who’s house they were in
Would they have thought better of you if you built her a hut instead

A century after you wrote your book
You were still spindling tales of our people
And your name sat no better on our tongues
Rubbed rough from the radicalism of Garvey and Malcolm
You intuition betrayed you

Your book is now mandatory reading for the students at your school
It makes me wonder
If left with the choice to read it
Would they choose to ignore your lessons
Many are adept to this practice of turning their head

Your tombstone now lies between a chapel and hotel
As does your statue
It faces the hotel
The roads made by your students do not
Booker Taliaferro Washington
Is this the song of freedom you heard in your sleep

I drink whiskey because of you
It is how we pass the time between stories
Of how if you were a good girlfriend
You would have stopped him from pulling the trigger
It always ends with your tears

I wait for them
I can see poetry in your pain
And think
What a monster lies within me

You imagine yourself a spinster someday
And have already accepted the solitude
So you clutch a plastic gallon of Seagrams til you pass out
It would surely break if it were glass
You should get a cat

It seems like you are waiting for our forgiveness
But we don’t know what there is to forgive you for
So you think everyone blames you
I tell you
It’s not your fault
But I don’t know who you’ll blame if you believe me

Your daughter is still a child but she seems much older
I can tell it comes from you her mother
You are tethered to an age still out of your reach
You are only two years older than me
But you wear forty years of whiskey behind your ears and on your wrists

You smell of aging
Of Pandora trying to close the box
You smell of infection
Perhaps it is grapes fermenting
You smell of wooden barrels
And confuse them with caskets

The man at the liquor store still gets your name wrong
So I think there is time

I am not sure for what