Category: Poetry

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Spleen

I think my spleen hurts. I’m not quite sure where my spleen is, left side,  I’m pretty sure, that’s why I’m not 100% on the diagnosis. I fell when I was drunk a few years back; it’s not like my pee is orange or has blood in it.

I used to tell people that my family dies of things they put in their mouth, mostly cigarettes, but sometimes too much food or alcohol (once it was an ice pick through the mouth into the carotid, but I don’t think that counts in the spirit I intended). I don’t smoke. And for a long time now, I don’t drink. Mine would be the first spleen casualty, though I’m pretty sure you can live without your spleen if it’s removed before its rupture causes peritonitis or, more likely, exsanguination. I’m sure there have been times when my liver could have been happier with me. I cross the street carefully.

People want to die fast. While sleeping if possible. There will never be a DNR order on my charts. I want to live forever by any means necessary. Dulce et decorum es pro dignitas morti. Bullshit. I see no nobility in giving up. My personal black eternity happened for at least 13.6 billion years before me, and I’m not looking forward to going back.

On the other hand, even if you believe in all that rah! rah! Christian stuff, living forever seems like it might get boring. I get tired after an hour of sex or seven hours at Disneyland and I love both of those.

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Pua mēlia

I walk to the store and I can smell the magnolias as the stench permeates the misty morning. I don’t see the sun. The smell suggests the plumerias from home. Almost a stink sweet. But for some reason, the magnolias stink like death, like the slow burn of a Southern dying melancholy. Plumerias, so common, so complex, represent the opposite in my nose’s eye. The sap bleeding from the picked flowers or broken branches that ooze white lifeblood. So common, so complex. Like the rebirth of long-awaited airport greetings, or high school graduates buried in flora. It is the surging force of beauty and occasion, of celebration and happy.

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Two stupid apes

You asked me what I was afraid of and I couldn’t articulate it at the time. This is that. That moment when you wake up to pee and she’s warm and asleep and beautiful. Not concidentally her mouth is closed. And you look at her and think, “Fuck, if this doesn’t work then maybe nothing will.” How do two stupid apes rub against each other and still not tell you about the time, “I did this and no one else can know?” How can we call each other the worst words we can think of for years? How can we be happy when those words actually work? How do I look at you in all your warm beauty knowing you don’t see I’m warm and beautiful too? That you’re here because we have this unspoken agreement. That if either one of us were strong enough we’d say maybe this hurts too much. Then I cry and think about my life without you. Wonderful terrible you. And that pang makes me dial. And pick up when you call. I don’t know why cows say moo. They just do.

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Swollen

Mountains swollen to the left and right,
Clouds kiss their noses at the tip,
The face is visible.
Green and wet and living.
Ignorant of reality, I suck through a straw jammed in my mouth.
Everything I am is resistance.