rats

I got stuck coming out, which is why I’m now here

in tears only twenty years later, with neighbors banging

walls and telling me to shut up; “some people work” after all.

Manic depression is like the rat that ran across the room

pulling a trigger and launching its claim to what’s left of

good judgment. So I’ll remain awake and take what’s left

of the night and put it to good use, (I dare say, staring at corners)

waiting for mice. Friends are busy sorting their squalor

and don’t want to hear about vermin. “They will just eat the flies

anyway” they say, though humor is stiff when you’re awake in bed

flinching at each sway of the blinds and the hardened sap. I sometimes

prefer dramatic wars over still evenings like this, listening to car

crashes on the 55 and plotting with peanut butter and traps.

Cutting through static night

Cutting through static night, a plane flies

while you mumble breaths and

think of scenes with someone else.

In solitary sleep, bareness engulfs me

and you too are soft; unaided and striking;

on your own, and yet how ironic it all seems!

This fleshy arm spun around a tired, frumpy

clump of nothing really, save some

weathered down that seeps through little

holes you meddle with mechanically.

Who am I tonight? It’s your pick between

characters who beat and touch–

the ones who ignored you and the others

who never said much. I’ll just let you

do the talking and help you forget

those doors that quietly unhinge in tip-toed

stillness– the 5-o-clock get-always and

sad hours when we wake at once together again,

empty. You’re mine, and despite gentlemen

who gruffly grab and push us to

the side, tomorrow evening, alas,

it’s me with whom you’ll sigh, and say

“good night.”

He looked so different

He looked so different online; Jesus Christ…
with clichéd spiny hands and beady eyes
that detail of his drive and Northern Lights; 
“While here the chicks wear short-shorts and get high”—
Again there’s coffee and another lie—
our angled photos, fiercely hiding truth.
 I can’t get over chin and mouth that spies 
my own (a grotesque notion.) Quite uncouth 
for someone like me… Grinding grinds and tooth 
we sit and talk about our lives. I leave
and yet we both feel less. Here’s solemn proof:
still driving home to cats and empty sheets…  
And yet, despite the fickle web I spin
I know that I am lonely, just like him.

From a balcony in Santa Ana [in progress]

It’s still magical, even from a balcony

six miles away in Santa Ana, the far-off

sonic booms and pixilated workings of color

and spectrums. I envy those

stroller-years when God was pyrotechnics

and a chocolate-dipped banana.

Now I’m alone, and a carton of ice cream is

still relief, but not so sweet when on a balcony,

alone and goosebumped. How pastel it all is—no

bold colors tonight with lights polluting our

skies, molding alongside ash. When you’re

young and dumb, you don’t think about the silence

in between the Disneyland “Parade of Dreams”

but simply marvel at the workings of

fireworks and a chocolate-dipped banana.

The morning hangs with pancakes

The morning hangs with pancakes
searing with hot rays. I awake
to the smell of burnt butter,
from that shop ‘round the corner.
Would it be bad to lie about being sick again?
There’s something really punching,
poignant about the noise from Warner Avenue–
people punching brakes and old women on street corners;
pungent, but I sort of crave it–
like the after-regrets of binging
on warm pancakes until your father says,
“Maybe you should go to the mall and
get those pants a size bigger…”
I’m just going to lay and lie
and act like I don’t need to live,
while cars zoom by and exhaustion
smokes through my window…
but the blinding squares of light,
the 8 a.m. jitters,
smother my face like my pillow.
It’s not really a lie that I’m ill–
but I slouch and sludge and decide to arise
to the capsizing sound of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On”—
an appropriate reminder that I am alone
and that there are sirens outside.