birthday girl.

i thought maybe this time
the landing wouldn't hurt so much


that i had maybe figured out
a way to break the fall
without the softness of you


but everything thumps and bumps and breaks apart
just like it's the very first time all over again


and collapsing in on myself
has become a rather uncomfortable thing to do

i've gotten all hard in places
in my lack of close attention

gone all prickly and stiff
bones full of neglect and weather
and a__f__i__n__e
__________________w__h__i__t__e
________________________________h___u___s___h


i am waiting for the sanctity to fall upon me
with the reassuring breath of false angels

but who am i to seek a god
when i will not accept him?


i just really want to spit in his face
and be the one to say 'no' for a change
even if i have to invent my antagonist
in order to exact my useless revenge






truthfully, i do not quite know
what i think i might be waiting for
except that i am rather afraid
that there might be nothing out there

at all





if i were to play victim
to the commonest of safeties
and base my understandings of all i could perceive,


i would be my own temple


and i would rejoice in the warmth
of the pulsing beneath this skin


but as it is
i, like all indignant scholars
who are no more scholars
than mice are men
(and i am quite the mouse these days),
am insistant on grabbing fistfuls of the intangible,
kissing its anonymous face with slippery lips
and calling it my own familiar lover


when, to be honest, we've never been introduced




so here i am again,
my little airplane of futility
giving one good shudder in acknowledgement
of what abstractists call 'the inevitable'--





i will crash on my belly
and make a fire of the mountainside