When I write poems

am I really writing poetry

or am I just too lazy

to write anything else? 

Maybe poetry is to short stories and novels

are what the tracks on “Donuts”

are to songs.

Apples and oranges (is what I tell myself)

At home, and out the window

the night time sky is lingering pink 

and I can see I’m trapped in a paper lamp.

The pink is the same pink that my great grandpas trailer

in the middle of nowhere was.

The trailer smelled of musk and alone.

I whip through the glass, like being thrown from a windshield

and can see over the mountains 

outside my paper lamp prison

into 

My mother grew up in a very small town that was forgotten and shut out from the world when the interstates rose up like paved spinal cancer for said small towns. In middle school and high school, she played an instrument in the destitute school band. They were poor growing up, and while my mother wanted to play the saxophone, they had to settle for the flute. My mom loved the flute. She could learn to love or hate anything. 

I was always closer with the maternal side of my family, but every marriage failed. Marriages are the trunks of family trees, they are the thickest branches. My grandmother was a teenage bride and a teenage mother, and she became a middle-aged drunk. Her thirty-five year marriage failed, and she seemed to wither with it. She hit so many walls; she broke through so many. She fell so far and even though she’s hit the ground so many times she isn’t done. 

Later in life, my mom loaned her flute to her cousin. They lived out in the plains, across the country. My aunt sold the flute for some reason, and stole my uncles money and ran away; two times.

My shows up in our lives from time to time. Once she disappeared for a few weeks. She was usually unhinged, but it’s always spooky when people disappear. The first we heard from her in weeks, she text my mom in the middle of the night. The text said this and only this: 

“I’m sorry you had to play the flute instead of the saxophone.”

Who are the people 

who wait in bus stops in the freezing cold

whose fingers get crushed 

by invisible hammers?

Who are the people who bicycle down frozen winter streets

to return cans

with dirty beards

and greasy grayscale hair?

The article in front of me is a copy of a copy

of an old newspaper article

and I can no longer see the man in the photos, only his outline.

I can’t see his eyes, ears, nose, or mouth.

Approaching the twilight dawn of sleep

faces inches apart

our breathing sounds like coming and going ocean waves

washing up on the damp warm sands 

of sleep.

Silent midnight trains whisk me from reality to reality

station to station 

to and fro my matryoshka doll fiance. 

I love the wash of white noise

music and talking before sleep

those are windows

into dreams.

The little and fast and hard and long 

schizophrenic frenetic pumping of the cylinders tiny machines

exploding and combusting 

thousands of times a second

electro-shock volt lightning beam bolt nerves

rocketing crayon red melted wax stamp veins. 

The ghost of Tammany hall lives in microwaves

and smokes in wine cellars

and eats with barbecued fingers

in damp, cramped hallways.

The ghost of Tammany hall is afraid of vacuums 

and loves the vague egg and dryer sheet smells

of the boiler room. 

The ghost orders lemonade and coffee 

and goes to drive-thru’s in the middle of the night

to get water.

it plays the bassoon 

and rides into town on public buses 

on fumes. 

It likes watching night-shift-fast-food-workers

mutter to themselves through headsets.

When he drives at night, it lets the radio beacons

and cellphone towers

do the navigating. 

I’m deathly ill

because my pseudo-home(s)

the ones I’m stuck in

are killing me.

It’s weird reading Collings and Cummings

in the same way it’s weird to live out of dufflebags

house to house, and week to week.

It’s like being on a train

that constantly jumps off tracks and onto others. 

I’m sitting on red plastic bleachers 

at a basketball practice for middle schoolers

who play in an elementary school gym

and I’m trying to find rhythm

in all of the dribbling, disoriented basketballs.

The woman next to me is playing a game on a ebook

and the old man next to me is playing Sudoku in pen

and everything is somehow more frustrating

when I can’t get home

to take care of my beautiful, lovely, matryoshka doll fiancee. 

They say you always hurt the ones you love

but of course, yeah? 

That’s when everything is on the table

in the dining rooms

of hearts and minds. 

It’s when you put yourself out there, naked

that things get messy

and feelings get hurt. 

I was an asshole just the other day

and would you know,

that it’s really hard to tell stories with asshole protagonists

when it’s you?

I always mean it when I say I’m sorry.

From my bedroom window

I watched the shadow of a plane, crashing through a tree

and watched the pilot (without his parachute)

flailing, falling down through the same tree.

The pilot missed every branch, so I guess he must be lucky.