Beautiful, sobbing,
high-geared fucking
and then to lie silently
like deer tracks in the
freshly fallen snow beside
the one you love.
That’s all.

Deer Tracks, Richard Brautigan 

There really is no good reason for being alive -
It is as you say
pointless, brief and mean
and yet that is the beauty
of discovering suddenly a slug
all night while you slept wrote something

indecipherable and silvery in trails across
the screen door and so what
if you are ugly
and no one loves you. For you will die
one day as I will 
eventually and you are absolutely right.

It hurts like a motherfucker and has no real
intrinsic meaning and so
we are all doomed. Very well…

Creature of puberty, shame and possibility 
you are having a hard time
and I’m not being helpful.
Forgive me. That time was hell. I know.
No matter how long you live -
at the end your life will have been too brief.

So let this thing sweep through you slowly.
It affirms and persists.
It hurts like a motherfucker.
I don’t know how else to do this. Who does?
We are all making it up as we go.
Whatever it is let it sweep through you. Slow.

To a Girl on a Broken Porch, Steve Scafidi 

There was once a young girl hidden in a forest

Another boy kissed me at the cafe.
I laughed in a bitter, unattractive way.
It’s not funny that we fell through
Or that apologies and roses won’t bring me back to you.
It’s the stories they told us when we were young -
How to wake Snow White with a fiery tongue,
How happiness lies in earning another’s love
And wishes come true if you dream hard enough.

until a prince heard her singing to a friendly songbird

That’s the way they told it to me,
Boy saves girl and they live ever after happily,
But I’ve noticed it seems a bit of a lie
And I’m pissed I’ll never find that guy.
No, boy meets boy and their parents tear them apart
Or girl meets girl and she’s afraid to start.
We all end up at home watching microwaves turn,
Drinking vodka from a teacup and asking when we’ll learn.

so he whisked her off to his kingdom on his horse

Prince Charming is overrated at best,
But from the movies and the stories you’d have never guessed.
He struts in the room with a hero’s smile,
All the while pushing his princess down the aisle.
But what if the princess wanted to wait,
To appreciate being awake, to control her own fate?
If she begged him not to force her, would the story break?
And when he leaves, I wonder how much did he take?

and the kingdom was readied to receive their new princess. 

I add up the times I’ve sat too close to
men I had no intention of pleasing and laughed,
head thrown back like a broken neck, hand
slipping down the inside of their thighs,
and watched them calculate the probability
of getting laid and weigh those chances
against the friction building in their slacks,
and multiply that by the number of borrowed
men’s dress shirts I sell to thrift stores every month
and divide the whole thing by the way
you counted every vertebra in my spine,
my derivative, tangent to my curves.

If I measure the distance between fucking
and loving, there’s an expanse of undefined space,
like an open dot on a calculus graph,
like the space between the asymptote and its axis,
Instead I might try to count seconds in a minute
or the number of gumballs in a jar
or the missing ships at the bottom of the ocean
or the interest owed on an unanswered text
or the numbers between zero and one.
I might try to make sense out of our parallel fingers,
or the perfect circle of a Venn diagram 
expressing where “we” comes out of “you” and “me.”

The acceleration of two falling bodies may be equal
but I’m far past “falling” for anyone. Subtract
the moonlight and the fragrance of air after rain
and kissing in cars. If you ask what I need
with the average wavelength in the ocean
and the cosine value of wet wood over 2π,
I’ll tell you I’m looking for the limit
where emerald meets aquamarine,
where the power of caffeine equals the power of coffee,
where the rays of sunlight travel through
bird cages and rib cages and form a cotangent
to the cycle of self-destruction within me.
I’ll tell you I’m looking for the radical algorithm
of falling in love measured by
the meaning of an ellipsis in the infinity of an answer.

Told you we’d make a run for it
In an old Cadillac
Told you we’d make a run for it
And we’re not coming back

Toothpaste kisses, late night wishes
Talking sweet, forgetting my name
Toothpaste kisses, late night wishes
Talking sweet, forgetting my answers

Jump that train, lie through your teeth,
Dance on the roof, come home to me
Jump that train, lie  through your teeth
Dance on the roof, come home to me

Told you we’d make a run for it
In an old Cadillac
Told you we’d make a run for it
And we’re not coming back 

If I could knock a house down with my crotch or pull a train
cross-country with a little string tied to my cock well then
that would be something. Not much, but at least something.

If I could breathe in sharply now and swallow the western half
of Portugal with its bright umbrellas and pointy cathedrals
and statues of Fernando Pessoa it might be the same.

If I could just think of the pain I would fall over like a lettuce.
As it is, a great and glowing awe comes between us now
and we do not speak of it. Months pass. More months.

She cries out suddenly and her cries are deep like nothing
I’ve ever heard and the car zigzags and we are there.
Then the hours pass filled with a difficult kind of grace.

And she pushes that baby out of her and the baby finally
says OK and galumph, just like that, this lump of breath
falls into the world and is lifted to her mother’s breast.

And she is crying and people are snipping and cutting, saying
Oh isn’t she, isn’t she and the room is spinning hard
and this spinning spins the earth and the earth spins faster.

And I always thought that life was like a blue donkey
named Disaster that we ride to death and whisper to.
Now I know. It is this bloody holy work the mothers do. 

Witness to the Work, Steve Scafidi

Two days ago, a drunk girl stumbled past this doorway,
       blood and sand
arranged like a jigsaw puzzle of a hand on her skin.
       In the morning,
the detectives, who’d seen it all before, muttered,
       what a waste.

But love yet tries to change this world
       back to itself.
Today, rain puddles like liquefied silver on the pavement while,
       meticulously,
a spider draws the map of the universe in the doorway,
       completed.

There is no shame in trying, in spite of everything
       to see the world
through the underside of a glass-bottom boat,
       wonderstruck.
With love, we are alive like free birds
       in springtime. 

There was a second - just one - when you were three years old
and still needed me to reach the top shelf where the sugar was
that I lifted you in the air and caught the look in your eye - one of wind
and night and land mines and, from that second, I knew you’d be impossible. 

Once after a full day, I came home to you
Asleep in my bed still wearing dress shoes.
Like parentheses, we lay together,
Exchanging secrets caught in down feathers.
And if, in the bakery aisle, you cry
I will take your hand and lead you outside. 

people get ahead of themselves,
tripping on their own ankles
and they fall headfirst,
hitting the concrete hard -
blood and sand like cherry slushies
and fire like hell
where the skin has been scraped away.

words can only get you so far;
for the rest you need kisses
and a mother’s stomach gurgles.