fault lines
down here where the heat’s so fine
i’ll drink to your health and you drink to mine
as we try to make the money we scored out in vegas hold out for a while
we drink vodka from russia
we got chocolates from belgium
we have our strawberries flown in from england
but none of the money we spend
seems to do us much good in the end
i got a cracked engine block
both of us do
yeah the house, the jewels, the italian racecar
they don’t make us feel better about who we are
i got termites in the framework
so do you
down here where the watermelon grows so sweet
where I worship the ground underneath of your feet
we are experts in the art of frivolous spending
it’s gone on like this
for three years I guess
and we’re drunk all the time
and our lives are a mess
and the deathless love we swore to protect with our bodies
is stumbling across it’s bleak ending
but none of the rage in our eyes
seems to finish it off where it lies
I got sugar in the fuel lines
both of us do
yeah the fights and the lies that we both love to tell
fail to send our love to its reward down in hell
I got pudding for a backbone
but so do you
Hand-colored glass lantern slides from an expedition by the extraordinary Carl Akeley, taken in 1896. Plucked from the Field Museum’s expansive photo archives.
(via feralcatbox)
Blue in the Face, 1995
auggie says that first of all, you like somebody, and um, and then, then you kiss em, and after you kiss em, you do the dirty, yeah…yeah, doin’ the dirty…then after that, then you find out if uh, if you can fall in love with em, and if you can fall in love with em, you marry somebody else.
benjamin franklin of monogamy
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice
the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end
of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds
of women—those you write poems about
and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction
lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast
as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power
never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely
a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,
as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed
antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long
regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don’t know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light
of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit,
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing
into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn’t make the silence
any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses
I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out
of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years
to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate
to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.
m. fields
I built a ship with my own hands to take us to the moon,
I took a pen in my own hand and wrote you a hundred tunes
Now I’m crazy for you but not that crazy.
I pretended you were Jesus, you were just dying to save me.
I stood beneath your window with my ukelele.
I made our yard a playground just in case we had a baby.
Now I’m crazy for you but not that crazy.
I treated you like radium, I treated you like God
You were my glass menagerie, did you not find that odd?
I dwelt within and went without and broke my virgin flesh
I performed acts of devotion as if you were Ganesh,
but now
I’m crazy for you but not that crazy. I’m crazy for you but not that crazy.
Weasels, Putorius ermineus. (1878)
via NYPL
haha. Hiss Face gets me every time.
(via scientificillustration)
m.h.
Everything that is so painstakingly important in other places seems to brake there, and you’re left more or less with just yourself. And although you might feel slightly naked for the first few hours or days, wanting to know where to put your hands, what to worry about, whom to exchange arrogant glances with, you can’t really help but feel some kind of massive, benevolent relief.
“Failure,” he said to me, “is not an option.” This was discouraging news.
and then recede to the horizon
one by one the titans of my sexual youth swell to the surface and i let their briney tide wash over me, coat me with a thin film.
