HYDROGEN & HELIUM

For Patti Smith

Like a bird, my mouth is full of dirt.
I’m shitting milk and laughing about it.
Bones all hollowed out, veins all dead.
Singing songs I’ve known since birth.

They say I should be more goddamn grateful
but I’d rather smell the way boys smell
than play the roles I’ve known since birth,
sucking on sausage and staying gagged,

then hide behind the piano, wear my hair tied back. No.
I’ll square my shoulders and settle in with my mean smile.
I won’t swallow that sewage, and I won’t stay gagged
when I got steel-bred calluses and an insensitive hand.

I’ll lay back. Get my nerve up. I’m not another cattle
and the reign is calamity, the oligarch insane.
My body’s used up, but my call stays the same.
I’m the disease that festers wounds in battle.

I’m mean like a man like Calamity Jane.
I’ve got dead bones, hollow veins.
I’ve got a disease and there isn’t a cure.
My filthy mouth is full of birds.

My feet got cold
seeing the way the world looked
from up on the dune
in the rain
with raindrops on my glasses
dissolving the view like hands
pressed up against a window pane.
The flesh-toned sandbars all belly-up
and the expanse of water spread out like paper
ripped in two,
an ink-soaked lake
and a bleeding black horizon at the bottom of the sky.

The next day
the escape from the dormitory
led me to a creek with water so cold
after an entire semester of only ever being nude
for the 2x3 shower, the shoebox sized
frosted window.

The tree had fallen across the river
so I ran across. On the other side
I laid down on the mossy bend
in front of the dark stretch of forest,
moments later feeling the urgency
of a return, of no one ever knowing
that I had gone.

Back then I think it was hubris,
but today I think it could have been
the fear of going somewhere
where no one could stop me
and getting what I really thought I wanted.

Today
I’m remaining in my head and not relapsing. Tomorrow
I might come out and write a poem.
Eleven years ago
I perched on my windowsill and talked to the Catholic god
about the horrors an eternity of damning fire
does to your skin. Two summers later
I got a bad sunburn and the skin on my back
was like an impregnated frog’s.
I picked away at the skin on my arms
with a shard of yellow plastic.
The scab was bloody and mossy.
The scar looked like a reindeer.

Today I’m remaining
in my head and not relapsing. Tomorrow
I might stand on the moss and talk to the Catholics
about finding poetry where I should have found God,
about my impregnation,
about the blood on my arms,
about the skin in my throat that is scarred like a frog’s
after years of inhaling shards of burning plastic.
I have endured the eternal damnation
of the hallucinated reindeers of my childhood closet
mocking me for my yellow scabs.

Today I am
remaining in my head and not relapsing.
I have never written a confessional poem before.
I never told anyone about the suicide attempt,
nor the eating disorder, nor the skin
I fashioned into bloody moss
to endure my own god damn eternal fire.
Two summers later I
will not love this town anymore than I do now and
I might burn all the poems I’ve ever written.

If a woman stands upright
she is a violent, rotating column of air.
She is a cumulonimbus cloud.
She forms the base of an elastic muscular canal.
If a woman stands upright
she swallows huge amounts of water several times a day.
She takes form as a huge bladder
whose face is all mouth.
She will offend the sun god by killing his sacred cattle
with a violent, rotating column of air
in which the walls self-lubricates.
The walls are the narrow end that touches the earth.
They are often encircled by a cloud of debris.
If a woman stands upright
during sexual arousal
she expands in both length and width
before belching everything back out again.
If a woman stands upright
during birth to offspring
she is in contact with the surface of the earth
and its soft elastic folds of mucous membrane skin.
If a woman stands upright
during birth to offspring
she creates many whirlpools
stirring up the mud at the bottom of the ocean
and hardening it with her breath.

A loose fold of skin in adults that can retract
covered in overlapping scales
forms the glans penis:
an elongate legless carnivorous reptile.
In order to accommodate their narrow bodies,
in order to swallow prey much larger than their own head,
they lack eyelids and external ears.
Some species retain a pelvic girdle
on the enlarged and bulbous-shaped end
which supports the foreskin
using only one functioning lung.
Most can dislocate their lower jaw.
On either side of paired organs (such as kidneys)
develops the same tissue as human life.
They have loosely articulated skulls
where the foreskin is attached
with a pair of vestigial claws.

Please,
lover,
ease into me.
No more force upon all my
indigenous bits.
Please,
oh, god; you’ll
tally every bit of flesh, a census spell
enveloping me. But
now I am yours.
Tax me as hard as you can.
I
am willing to take your
rape for
you.

Believe me when I say
that I admire the way
you still come, despite
the way my bedcovers cling
to the smells of the night,
the wrinkles formed around
all the hollow sounds of mourning.

You are insatiable beast.
You insist upon forgetting, upon
the routine, the least
objectionable sunrise.
You make a shy regret
look like me. You rhyme
words that sound nothing alike,
like waking in bedcovers full of wrinkles of unity
instead of the wanting to fill,
to be fulfilled.
All things make sense
when compared to continuity.

so many things we don’t understand.
what to say or do with it,
when to apologize, when enough is enough.

sometimes he just isn’t in the mood.
that’s when you’ve got to lick your fingers
and clasp your hands together—
give him some leverage.
like an oyster.

he will show himself to you
when you put your face as close to
his cavernous nothing
as possible
and breathe in the fleshy sea air.

it is immoral to sell or buy god.
even if he needs the money.
that's how diseases get spread.

i will never forget
the first time he let me reach inside him.
he was slippery.
the heat was excruciating.
afterwards
i felt like i owned the world.

What curdles down the throat
curdles down the arm,
curdles around the pen.
Boils in the fingertips.
Puts her up against the wall.
What comes in the throat
comes out the mouth
and inflates her nostrils
and breathes hotly in her ear.

God is showing himself to me.
I can see the whites of his eyes.
I can count the capillaries
in his palms.

Builds up her ego
and lets her down gently.
Crawls back into its dark hole in the corner.
Gets real quiet.

I had fallen asleep
with a lit cigarette in my fingers
and awoke to find my body
covered in blisters
which had steadily climbed in a strangle
up my arm and around my neck.
And the haystack I had rested in
was ash beneath me.
And the cries from the horses
out in the field—
they were ablaze,
but the fence would not burn.

Nine hooves
as hot as coals
burned in a trample
across my chest.
My lungs, a flicker
smoldering in each breast.

I’ve had all five of your within the past year—
just barely. You all turned to me face-up,
some reversed, each time too early
to see a cause for mourning;
two cloaked figures in the distance,
a sky like wet rice paper
ripping at the seams.

You’ve all fallen apart,
spread yourselves out on the sand.
Two I’ll carry over my shoulders,
one I’ll clutch by the blade.
Those that remain
will bake in the sun,
steel reflecting from two different angles
(my face, his,
fingers interwoven,
crossing at the tips)

One of you I will fall onto
but I’m not sure which.
You are all daggers dishonest,
coated with red mud.

One step forward, one step back,
my soul peers wearily from under the el tracks.

I seduced you in a dream
although love didn’t part from our lips
as before. You remember my milkwhite breasts

and my wideset hips.
I escaped because the dream was circular,
and I will escape back to you.

My breathing is irregular.
Your heart is gentle too.
Naivety, that they wouldn’t send you

overseas to a desert like a storybook.
All your dreaming got you nowhere.
You caught your lip on the hook.

I’ve got two cities in my blood
and a whole lot of you.
No poem could ever buy you back.
My soul gazes eastward
from under the el tracks.

The Mix Tape Poems, no. 4

I’m walking the streets of the dead
with a hesitation of you
swallowing my head.
Did I hear someone tell a lie?
Did I hear your feet shuffle through my hair?
I see silhouettes in my window.
I should have known not to hang around so long with you
in the shadows, combing out the knots.
My home is pumping through my veins like warm milk
as your arm becomes a noose
around my neck.

I never felt so quiet
once, twice before.
I’ve walked these dead roads
with your song swallowing my head.
The waves breaking on Lake St. Clair,
the color of my hair. I fell asleep
in the dream. I woke up
with demon jazz in my ears.
A man whistling with smoke in his breath.

Man goes back to last week and buys another lotto ticket.
Loses again.
Hindsight bias, humans multiplying
universes by mistakes.
A mallet against the mirror
is held stagnant for him.
Wife gets a headache.
Man goes back to prom night,
doesn’t tell his date something,
or puts the champagne to cool a little sooner.
Wakes up next to her and she says,
“What are you doing here?”
Goes back
to when his knees reach the sidewalk curb
and when the yellowjacket lands
on his cheek,
he knows the poison is coming,
he doesn’t cry.

Yesterday I swam in a river.
The water was so cold
I drowned trying to keep the heat,
trying to keep moving.
It’s not like this in the city.
We have one big river
that you have to pay to swim in.
If you look at it too long
they might ask you to pay.
Not to mention the dollar
to get the hobo to be quiet.
But here, it’s better.
Here the water is flesh toned.
Here the water is as fast
as a slipping memory.
Goes so fast I forget
by the time I wake up.

You, the Duke,
as a skeleton, as a roof
are burned in, collapsed.
Empty the bomb
hovering above me
from your grasp.

I am a fortune teller.
I am a second longer.
I am divided from your mind.
I am Dr. Gonzo poised for death.

I remember how to tell the yellow glow of fireflies
from the stars.
I die a second sooner.
I was a second too late.
I know the limits of your sanity.

Look me dead in the eye.
No secret kept, no lie forgotten.

Our memories stand with the frames of my past.
Our topography spreads out as our bodies.
Sing about it.
Sing my death tune
sprawled out on a page.

The towers all around are a second off
when your veins are full of whiskey and coke.
This is where you first told me you loved me.
This is why the grass is always green even on the worst corner of Detroit.

Wipe your drunken smile on your sleeve.
You have been waiting for me.

99th and Loomis and the road
turns deadly. “We’re at the end
of the world,” he says. Cigarette ash.
There are no
lights in the sky, no stars, cityscape
be damned, quiet

in the streets. “Quite
dangerous here, yes?” The road
curves, no escape,
a dead end.
“We’re lost.” “I know.”
“We’re goners.” “Ashes

to ashes,
dust to dust.” We get real quiet.
I panic like no-
body’s business. The road
is a gaping jaw, an end
swallowing its tongue and all the cityscape

all at once, everything I know escaping
from my grasp like ash
off my cigarette. Another dead end.
“Turn around,” I say, breaking the quiet.
The small cracked driveways of the little road
spread out like dead veins. “I don’t know

where we are.” “I know.”
I am his favorite scape-
goat, martyr on the alter, ash
in a crucifix on my forehead. The road
is called “Prospect.” “Turn right. This ends
out on 95th, I’m quite

sure.” He is quiet.
I know
him well enough to know the end
of his anger is his escape
into silence. His face is ashen.
Darkness is the road.

Then, lights above the road. “I knew it.”
It’s the end of our escape,
and it’s as quiet as soot and ash.

I will break your heart
like how I write poetry,
strange coded messages describing the way
the light hits your skin.

You have been this to me—
an art. I carved your name
into my eyelids, praying for blindness
only to wake every morning
staring into the dark bones of your clavicle.

And in my dreams, too—
you stood in my nightmares,
leaning against the garage
with a cool smile on your lips
as I escaped into the arms of pine trees.

I will break your heart
like how I write poetry.
I will remove my flesh and drown you in it,
that sweet smell I left on your pillow
filling your lungs like the ash of Pompeii.
You'll be left a ghost

who sees only my face
in the echoes of all his loneliness.
And my lips will move, slightly,
and a susurrus will burn your ears:
"Never betray a poet."

You didn’t know, couldn’t answer
after making love, when I asked you
how Philip K. Dick died.
Eventually we fell asleep,
our bodies lined evenly next to each other
like twin snakes. In the morning
you ate the venom
from behind my teeth.

You bought me breakfast.
The waitress had a tattoo of my name
on her forearm.
I saw it as she handed you your eggs.

It was a stroke.
Five days later the line had fallen flat
and they pulled the machine out from under him.
No more blood moving beneath his flesh.
But they say the hair keeps growing after you die,
and the nails. The electricity
clings to those roots
for some months.
His face slides off his cheekbones
but his skeleton is in need of a shave.

You have given your body over
to the forces of now. You wish to stay here.
As a man, you fade away.
The light from the window behind you
has washed out your lips already.
You’ve got no fat for me to hold on to.