woke disappointed this morning, mistook the wind as rain. for two weeks straight a man asking about emily has left twelve voicemails. sorry about michigan. i save the messages & listen to them while walking alone at night. i have memorized the area code.

the story has no point but stillness itself

on the front porch a roach sleeps supine. one could conclude dead, but i saw its left antenna move one afternoon & then the next. everyday i’m careful not to crush, to watch instead that lone antenna, even though i know the twitch might just be a trick the wind playing on movement.

sometimes i think my body believes in manifest destiny. that once unrest was just a tiny speck that grew cause it fancied itself the possessor of a god-given right to conquer. i see dissatisfaction as a disgruntled despot in my intestines who sprawls behind a desk of wadded gum i swallowed in fourth grade. he is napping, head resting on a map of my innards. he dreams of a destruction so disgusting no one will want to notice, so no one will. the dream’s vivid, so genuine in fact that, when he wakes, he cannot comprehend the stillness of his surroundings.

big wheels keep on turning/proud mary keep on burning

walking home last night, out past the tracks, i was amazed to see the train still running as if the night was holy. walked out & bought a forty from a station i know sells underage. sat in the grass & watched the fireworks that somewhere must be startling children into delight.

school finished itself off with a gpa not entirely depleted but going mad from lusting an up. & winter break? xmas proved boring at my parents house, on the couch, five hour’s watching mtv’s next with my sister & her boyfriend. mom dad in the back bedroom wrapping/unwrapping gifts for the relatives.

(also: avoidance at friday's party. a girl name shannon tugging my hair come sit. i attempt to escape via alan; i grab his shoulder: im really not prepared. but still. on the sofa: shannon as a mouth, a girl it started at age four. & there liz sits, wondering why, please god, couldn't it have started at eighteen: the crux of her emotional distress. her emotional unrest resulting in overdose, AA meetings twice a week. i think: where the hell is her girlfriend? outside smoking, safe from shannon’s im so socially awkward. if this were highschool. i just have so many feelings.i am already gone. i climb the seven flights to the top of the parking deck where stephanie & shannon's girlfriend are sprawled out giggling on the concrete.

a boy from oklahoma writes me confessions of acts he’s never committed. he requests no responses unless its to fess up to my own actions. i stopped writing after the first few. such redundancy on my part. my body, existing.

on fridays tanya calls me while i sleep so when i answer the phone i sound like milk. tanya says her sheets are full of snow, that the boy in her bed smells like cedar & fur.

every night i walk through the lit streets of my neighborhood, watching the porch lights snuff one by one, the shadows of bodies shifting, imagining conversations that almost always end in frustration.

stillness cloys. rub my feet across the floor for friction; apartment taut with want. at night, the neighborhood's bugs slink between my floorboards, their hiss fills the rooms full. when morning comes, the apartment's silent & a dead moth's stuck to my chest..

slow fold inward. body can only crumple so small, into a ball, limbs roll tighter & knees bend. rip the phone from the wall; the receiver fills with sulk & the dresser clock blinks at you, it’s obscene tick. if you could stand still, stare into the sun for hours on end. if you could move. yr mind’s a knot of exhaust; the morning tried to untangle but botched & as result, you contradict. stillness or movement? both. cause crawling cross america’s wilted flesh means nothing more than standing motionless, your hands in your pockets, biting your bottom lip. the fact all yr suitcases swell with silk slips & nectarines differs none from leaning at the kitchen sink scrubbing clean yr wine stained sweater.

lying to reduce my words to nothingness, to create streams of syllables so muddled with falsehoods, even the sound of my voice is a contradiction. my body as well. the mere shift of skin on the couch, bend of knees, click-click twist of my wrist as i open a kitchen cabinet cuts a lie through the air so thick it swells, splits, exposing all the oxygen till it browns. wherever i sit or stand, any moment along time’s sticky filament, i'm utterly meaningless. a mouth emitting incomprehensible vibrations, movements disrupting nothing.

last night i dreamt America became so paranoid of conspiracy that fat legislatures with filthy fingernails stamped a law mandating lucency. citizens were required to exist without whisper, exposed wholly by living in glass houses with clear couches, drive see-through cars through see-through neighborhoods & swallow transparency pills every night while tucked in bed in order to drain all pigment from their skin. as if the citizens held within their bellies a thousand spies, between the notches of their spines, a hundred blasphemous betrayals. or as if the body was a secret in & of itself.

"tell me about your love life"

the entire weekend dissolved under exhaustion’s white flame. no work accomplished only sleep & sleep till i could at least stand, perform the daily functions of brushing my teeth, feeding the cat. my exhaustion surprised, welled within for weeks, then burst suddenly. me, cotton-mouthed & near collapsing at work, a headache that warranted smashing my skull into the brick wall of super-target till beads of relief trickled through.

the night slips, surprises with how quick it stumbles from your body, bed. dawn takes over, spreads its day glow. everything, smoke. all day thoughts converge—sinking & sinking into sleep’s plush red flesh.last night your body was not a body at all but a clumsy machine. you took too seriously the words of a poem touch any of these & something of yourself disappears. so you touched nothing, no one. at dinner you sat utterly still while the waiter poured your tea & when you opened your mouth to say thank you, nothing came out. in the parking lot you shuffled aimless with your friend trying to find the car, find a reason not to find the car, not to drive home where shadows waited for you in all the corners.

the trick’s not existing. no, simply exhaling is easy as spinning. your body a whirlwind as yr friend raises drinks to starvation in foreign countries with names longer than their longest rivers. you spin all night & your friend passes out on a couch. breathing, body shifting room to room—that’s never been the hard part. its everything else. then you remember the night you felt alive, walking five miles to the city graveyard & back. the wind slight, moon flushing light. how even the trees bent forward as if in awe of you.