"Life and Dread", the newest short collection of writing I've completed, was technically finished during the final week of CWRU's spring semester, per my self-imposed deadline. Small changes have occurred since.

***

Life and dread

There's a fear of summer in an uncertain state.
No sure job waiting excitingly, no happy occupation.
A hot snake under green leaves,
June slinking unpleasant

When I was nineteen, I stayed up later to serve no purpose. Until the irritation in my eye rims became too pink, I squinted at web pages and haloing white word processing screens, expensive duplicates of blank hard copies. Real paper somehow is less defeating. The inexhaustible supply of screen sheets, room for hundreds of novels in ones and zeros, automatically scrolling and spellchecking, clean of handling and evidence of correction. The convenience of communication exploding literature. When I present my work inside the open ledger in which it was written, even finished: I might write all the words I know and send them to be wiped plain with a touch. The loss of mechanics, of manuscript. There will be no memory hole; there will be only magnetic fields, formatting, clicking indifference.

State uncertain in a summer of fear, there’s
No happy occupation excitingly waiting, no sure job
Leaves green under a hot snake,
Unpleasant slinking June.

***

plastic gaps
to spy her through
black hair
wide face, spaced eyes
beaming
minus our kisses, her nipples
minus each last thing.
She has been the sum of I don’t impress
has been found not attractive, has not been bragged about
has been left by the least of me and inspired no poems
while is this:
red, too bright.
Five inches of icing, overstuffed animals, Pixy Stix
Stah-bucks. Toothy, lazy-eyed
flat-buttocked. In her pressed soul a soul
staring up into my nostrils. Thinking well of me.
Coming to stay the night,
saying what could you do you have proven me right
I coughed, what can I do
you have proven me through.

I at last am in the clear.

***

(before:
plans were more
complex
in present
pale yellow candy
tips for aging expedience
remember:
there is plenty of time for masturbating
on the sum of those before
what sins they, divided, committed
prior, hair grew thick on my knuckles
bones stood out past my neck
you make me feel handsome
in my least favorite shirt.

Between sheets I've washed to get pubic hairs off
suspicious flagellates under every strip of tape
pants out of the dryer damp and wrinkled
Swells of hair, white-scaled skin
and lavendered eye-shadow, caked violet and blush
Stopping in a word to witness
I dominated every conversation,
won you overmuch –
we both despaired in my boredom
,afterwards,
growing parts of silence and
run-on sentences
began bringing out the lumps in your skin
before)

your long hair comes out strand by strand
my face gets bad when I go home

***


There's a brush in the sky
painting over its beaten metal dome
dry-brushing cumulus and tracing
cirrus
a sun that burns away the foil.

City blocks, detail-heavy
pedestrians elevated above motorists
lines to every block
brushed hair-straight through the Midway
new bangs in front
ashen, frizzled in the back.

There's a hanging sun that burns away the foil
over wide bathtubs full with saltwater
drying the wet from chameleon leaves, makes its deposit
roaring soundlessly, imploding
hotter than Jesus
frozen between giants
and dwarves, glowing thermostat faces.

I'm painting over a bleach-metal dome
bending tabs and fixing decals
damp nervous fingers
feel the rotors.
plane lackings in capacity
covered over,
balmed.

There's a brush in the sky
writing burlap and sandstone
writing canvas and cardboard
stippled, maverick frogs
hide under brush,
drip dark tempra

***

1
at the bottom of a lasagna pan
it's noodley, hot
and saucy

2
if you hit me in the head with a drumstick
-one of the mallets-
enough times, would I just
cave in?

3
on the second next layer of the chalkboard
just above the sand
deepsea marine green
and dusty scratches

4
in mom's neck
my eyes are clasped
but I can listen to her.

***

See:
All the girls I’ve ever wanted to fuck
Sink lips into
feel over me in the shower
Put my arms around the unbumped waists of
mm practically anything not sweet not
Waking up next to
fellow bus-riders,
(mealy,
math class sitters
commiserating
ahead of me,
pantie-bands visible
not being there in
the
morning)
tangled up in a mammoth naked pile
maybe moaning my name? or silent
dripping aroused on each unbothered other
easily pulled away by the hand,
(of as many different tones as erection tallies)
no embarrassment
or aftermath
values
or diffidence
an awful lot of the word
baby

***

For one year, my fifth grade term, I was able to walk to school across busy Smith Road, across this road to Herberich. Her-Brick. It’s an elementary school now, kindergarten through fourth grade. There was a burst of life in the three or four years after my own emergence, more Ohio couples sweating to hits of 1985 and 6.

Herberich bled green all year, dripped it from the roof. The black brick of its one-story ‘50s stolidity was crowned by a row of beige-brown cement running the top perimeter. A flagpole stood staked in the asphalt landscape of 8-foot basketball hoops and yellow foursquare lines, cracks and dried fifth-grader blood, passed from knee-scrape to simmering blacktop. The pavement trickled out into grass, not pure green but mixed straw and celery strands, rolling down a short hill to an immense soccer field. Stark, netless goal-frames were its only semblance of regulation. On the far side of the field’s length, a shallow ravine and clumps of trees screened us from the neighboring yards. There were, of course, no positions or out-of-boundaries. In racing herds, we chased the mossy ball and mauled the dribbler. We passed to the tomboy girls for crush points, they being less willing to join our swarm.

Once, I escaped the pack and chased the ball down the yard toward the vacated goal. Anxious to score for the glory of recess, high-fives and back-slaps already tingling, I booted the ball from some thirty feet out and watched it hook past the center, past the post, and roll out of bounds, across the only enforced line on the field. Sides changed; the opportunity did not revisit.

I’ve fallen from a wild and errant basketball shot. Nursing the abrasion, looking past worried peers, I see the cool ichor running down the school’s brow. My trials were pressure on this carotid, drawing on a bottomless lake elsewhere, brewing iron oxides. Teal and gray workbook covers, ripped in two at June’s last bell.

***

I've lost my shyness. Cut it away, rind from cheese. With it, potential to be subject to a true-smiling obsession. With it, appeal to the untouched. For surface panache. I'm too tight and flash. Too successfully apathetic. With nicer eyes when my mouth knew its station. They're hidden behind voice.

Girls blurred and refracted as I group their tendencies. Lost with lost, furnishing the future toll a stepstool for my angry shoes. I sandwich my love and obsession with anticipation. Surrounded by rosy words, I may avoid letting her cause me know a want to keep her. A one must not be permanent, must not be final.

I had wanted to make these promises. I had lain and wished for compliments and talk of me of which I might catch word. I hadn't known these couldn't exist at once, vows and gratitude. Someone tells me there is one for success and one for failure - that both always are here. There is a disappointment for your happiness. I want to know this and share it.

It happens once and not again, truth of the life I dread.

***

I have had the same sleep position for all of conscious memory:
Flat on my stomach, good ear to the pillow
Deaf ear to the open air,
Fans and open windows cooling
the small mute hairs on rim and lobe
sleeping white-needled trees,
stinging nettles on pink slopes
ridges and ravines, flush, waxed, fuzzy
The window open all year, I listen before blocking these sounds:
Skateboard wheels, yelps rising
Audible ivies on two-second delay,
creepers and morning glories brushing by.

***

Left-on lamps, bulbs and casings too hot to touch
Blurry pages, pixilated and spattered
Damp stinking sheets, unchanged pillowcases, drool prints
Mouth in the morning, spit on a finger, inhaled
A mood ring pried off in the shower, given to the smoking girl
With whom, drunk and anxious, I cracked the dragging remains
Of zinc-scraped virginity.

The Quad muffled, peopled but soundless
Nearly running, dodging, head to horizon
Yawning humidifiers behind each complex
booming over our voices,
Bullied to silence I scuttle between dunes, parking garages
Now becoming reed-tops, ochre and russet shoots showing through
Pebbles, cigarette butts (alone untransformed),
Passing under the shadows of these.
Shell, sand, sea.

***

the preceding was a protest to spare time.
I was impotent to grasp far pieces of the planet
too long in coming.

those that will not stand a second revision.
This is an early step and is no summit.
None will rework into the best things to come.

These will arrive in their own forms.