No parenthetical this time in my rhyme, I'll lie flat the baseline like, Here are my cards, bro. Take a look at them all, bro. Get started with just the light kinds of gospel like, Bro, did you know I got a **** down there? Taken aback you say, What? Bro, did you know I'm packing a tackle, though so modest in stature, bro, instead of a package I joke split/second to cope and still manage to crack a satanic smile as I call my most modest hose a gigantic, titanic ****?

Word. You got nice lips, still, though, how bout you look up and get down on me, yo? Word is that I handle it with alarming aplomb considering how I present myself to the world. So what I got a culturally appropriated slab of ink tattoo yo. Just a guy trying to get along with the little he's got, and then on top of that I like to slide my **** n stuff. How about me too? Cause I can get down on you if we both repeat **** like we believe it. You got *****, bam, and plump curved fat just as all the girls growing up had, fashionable hair and even a soft face. You, girl, I can bend you over. Sure, be glad to bend you over.

Rough riding baring face to the wind on highways
I never thought I would be here deciding
Do I believe in others' abilities enough to believe that they know me as
If they would know a human?
Get close, pry in, to my life,
you'll find a lion, lonely, dragging coats of molted skin
with wire stolen from her other lives,
the desperate lioness devours the food she can.

I’ve written words since I found out that those graphite sticks
could form them and wrote my name
on the top of a kleenex box
when I was four.
I’ve written words since I learned that each one
held a meaning I could hear in my head.
I’ve written words since I realized that writing
releases them from my mind,
so that I can hear myself think.
I’ve written words because numbers run away from me,
just out of grasp, teasing me with
their teamwork and rigid cooperation
and parenthetical expressions.
I’ve written words never read by anyone,
words which embarrass with their frankness
words which I’ve burned thinking they would die.
I’ve written words which I longed to share
because they fit together better than numbers
and made my skin crawl with their
deliciousness.

(I’ve had better)

If earth should be protected,
We are a scourge.
If earth is a mother,
We are a scourge.
We think we're caretakers
But we are a scourge.

Hu-Man, agent of Entropy. (<-- that thing to the left, try not to hate; it's kinda like a middle eight)

Maybe earth is something else
Or else we are a scourge.

Ah, Jacob
I love you
(look! I have personalized my poem! But alas, that means I have isolated
the audience.
By mentioning your name-
such a wonderful name, it reminds me of church bells
Doritos
and a good shower after a long run-
by mentioning your name, I have ensured
that those not in love with a Jacob-
and I pity them, for if they do not have one, they should seriously consider finding one-
Anyway
By mentioning you name, my love
I have ensured that those not in love with a Jacob
will never understand the soaring
joy
sorrow
trust
security
never understand what it is they have just read).

You nearly dropped me
to my knees, somewhere
between those two valves
holding all of my blood
between you and your
trumpet call of ******
and rusty notes, I did
I did as I pleased

My parenthetical ******
you and your aborted mission
as if my heart and soul were
so much real estate,
a mere commission of
your concubine mentality
and a big ol' wrench in
your alternate reality
you did, you did
as you pleased

I defended your every atrocious
deed, you there, Herr Panzerblitz
standing with your chest out and
your thumb in the air testing
the breeze

I deferred to your omnipotence
like a good villager and even
in the shadow of each turned page
I deferred to your made up history
quelling my each and every fit
of rage

Deferring to all that was yours
was as easy as deferring my life
as a whole held in the fat of
your fist as you slowly lost
control

I am chopped in half by
the parentheses of your grip
half a woman who has found
her running legs and sliding
far and away from your
parenthetical head trip

Totally like whatever, you know?
by Taylor Mali

In case you hadn’t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you’re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you’re saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)’s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? You know?

Declarative sentences—so-­‐called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true, okay,
as opposed to other things are, like, totally, you know, not—
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, don’t think I’m uncool just because I’ve noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
It’s like what I’ve heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
I’m just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?

What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally . . .
I mean absolutely . . . You know?
That we’ve just gotten to the point where it’s just, like . . .
whatever!

And so actually our disarticulation . . . ness
is just a clever sort of . . . thing
to disguise the fact that we’ve become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since . . .
you know, a long, long time ago!

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.

To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.

Pretty Persuasion

beginning

I skate around the mall
with a walkman tuned into
subversive sounds
I am in search of secret passageways
people of unusual genders
spaces of unabashed desire
The teenage girls with
nasty tongues never look at me
yet they tell me stories from afar
strange, exotic tales
they could never have gotten
from television
they dress in layers
in bizarre mosaic patterns indecipherable
I listen for simple truths
yet hear only complex lies
which, of course, are much more trustworthy
I purchase working class lingerie
(I mean, underwear) at Sears
from a salesgirl who KNOWS
but will never tell
I plead with her to scream it out
reveal the source of her despair
but she just laughs heartily and
steals away into the hardware section
I call the security guards
who arrest me for wearing plaid socks
with a leather skirt
I manage to escape between the cracks
and return unscathed to the scene of the crime...









middle

I light a cigarette
though I don't know how to smoke
it seems natural at the time,
I cross my legs
right over left, left over right,
then I refasten my garter,
smooth my skirt,
fluff up my *******
I'm anticipating something
but I'm not quite sure what it is
a recurring moment, perhaps
a (parenthetical thought), maybe
the merger of parallel lines
that's it, the merger of parallel lines
I remember vividly the secret dance
I used to perform
when I was nine and yearning
so awkward
so strange
so utterly incomprehensible
yet it could not be denied
it had a raw beauty to it that exhilarated me
I check between my legs
to see what gender I am today
I find nothing in particular except
an old beat-up baseball mitt
and two dozen rose petals
"I must be a boy," I say to myself,
though I can't be certain,
I never am, but I never give that away
there are much better things to give away
imaginary kisses
telltale signs
sideways glances
I dream of climbing Mt. Everest in my Maidenform bra
I never reach the peak
I wake up in a cold sweat...

end

We make love in a vacant lot
as it was meant to be
cold asphalt below
full moon above
crickets chirping madly in the background
He is my dada Daddy
I am his exotic drag princess in heat
when we kiss, our fantasies collide
explode
immersing us in minute particles
of lust and longing
He touches me as if I wasn't there
when I cry out for more
he gives me less
the pleasure is all too much
so I revel in the pain
He draws his sword
and I my water pistol
we duel for hours into days
he backs me into a corner
I dive between his legs
and make a run for the abandoned space
between provocation and allure
between outrage and surrender
between perception and scandal
He calls for me
he pleads for me
he paints his face by numbers
and recites nursery rhymes for me
remembering my name for the first time in weeks
I reach out and pull him deep within
and hope he hasn't forgotten how to swim...

It was the winter my mother discovered her identical twin sister was dying. It was a season of falling into knowledge of another's body failing; the body you were born with. All that had been sculpted in a body was slowly being chipped away at day by day by day. It was a season of maybes. Maybe she tasted Ohio snow instead of morphine. Maybe behind her eyes lies another world no one has access to. Maybe she is already gone and what remains is pantomime of living. Maybe she will die before Christmas.

It was the winter I saw my mother touch someone on a regular basis. She smoothes and strokes her sister's arms as if they were soft sheets. Through sunset in the eyes to moonlight in her hands, she does this. Maybe she even whispers "taste the snow". How literal we take our lives when they are taking us on our final journey. Where do we receive direction on what to do. We don't. We go on nerve endings and will power and love we contain in the corner waiting for moments like these.

These are contained, constrained paragraphs - no combustibles here. Precise and to the point. What snakes beyond the lines that are laid out? That is the real saga. It is winter and there are a city of birds outside the window. They flock when my sister-in-law arrives with her bread crumbs. This is a parenthetical detail to the main narrative. But surrounded by family and hospice workers. Women brush their hair, people buy tickets to movies, fill their cars with gas. She does nothing but walk towards herself. Sometimes slower than before. This is her task. The dark wing she flies under and the walking, walking, walking, walking. No cold ash in the mouth here. Yes, Ohio snow and the scent of flowers in the room.

It is morning and she lies in her bed. It is afternoon and she lies in her bed. It is evening and she lies in her bed. Some say "resting" but I prefer ruminating in a roomful of memories. You are thinking that death is delicate, soft and slow and nothing dangerous about it at all once you have decided it is the road you will meet yourself on. This is no abstraction for you nor art one must be taught. Instinctual, the I in you meets it full faced. The moon glows from the bulb in the ceiling, silver speckled stucco are the stars you peer at. You do not question it. A thousand windows ago were birds water rock sand desert wind. Now there is your own pale reflection where once there was the world forever, I shall not entirely be emptied of beauties, the gift of your small breath, the drenched grass, smell of your sleep, lilies, lilies ...planetary wanderings through the black amnesia of Heaven. You touch still remember still feel still. Ambivalence rests in your red needle slammed arms. But there is beauty in blood too. The pulsing, veins and rivers of it. The deep underground river you sleep in. You there on your back eyes to the moon lit room, not a relic but a woman avoiding death's lip to her ear, the shadows on a face, the abyss of absences. The moon mingles with the image of a woman warm and flushed with life and history and future.

My aunt remembers names lucidly. The keeping of names is sacred. Before naming things and people was wind stone snow.

How to explain there are the perpetually open graves. One need not give oneself over to death. Fluid in the brain circling like liquid around a planet need not destroy you. Your bones might turn to tin but it still does not claim you. Creaking when you breathe means you still breathe. Yours is not the stone face of the woman who does not feel. The mirrors may seem to fail you, but you face them anyway. You live now in a ponderous house, with strangers, family, friends, co-workers flooding in. "Where am I"? you ask. In the citadel of love.

i am a terrible poet.
the words i tied together in attempt
to annunciate 
the way your kisses felt
along the soft of my 
cheeks were
mediocre and just barely enough.

just barely.

there weren't enough ways that i could describe
the mouthful 
of stars that spilled at the seams of my

lips as you gently traced them with warm finger tips.

mm, your finger tips.

your finger tips felt like a personal extension from god himself as

they dusted the empty jars i left untouched

in the forgotten spaces of me.

you held them tightly and filled them to the top

with a breathful of morning secrets

and hidden places to meet.

i found you.

i found you and allowed the words to slip

through my small hands

as you kissed my palms gently and sweetly

and folded them into your own to keep for just a little bit.
(
i could stay here)
i could lay underneath your tired smiles

and messy hair

until stars realigned themselves and directed

me to you all over again.
(
i could stay here)

i could tangle in-between your pale sheets
and make up all the words that

effortlessly translate the way i melted and simmered

at the sheer thought of waking up and knowing you again.

i could illustrate all of the galaxies you whispered

onto the trail of my back with

colors and warmth i never knew

and turn them into poorly strung together,

black and white strings of thought.

you were my favorite secret

and the cause of all of my writer’s block.

(i could stay here)


i’ve lived in florida my entire life

and have spent more days than i can count

under the sun and in the wake of rays that always burned,

but i’ve never felt more warmth than lying underneath

your expired thoughts and eclipsing eyes

as the moon seeped through your broken window blinds.

i forgot what it was like to breathe

until you took my face
sweetly and sincerely
and kissed me.
the paragraphs and ellipses that perforated my parenthetical
sighs of relief
stained the corners of my mouth
and lingered
long enough for me to remember
the after taste of your recycled sunshine
as you left me.

i am a terrible poet,
but a better kept secret it seems.

your
smile's
giving me
splinters
i should
take a
sabbatical
been there
done that
old hats
linger
ellipses
colon open parenthetical

Face all of crag
Lined out in youth
And smoothed where Time thinks best.
Parenthetical mouth.
Asterisk-ine blush spreads
Where Doubt lingers.
Question marks pronounced
Exquisitely through lips.
Like a tactile symphony,
No harsh chord exists.
Not in the lines of the face
Though it looks as if its
Planes were imported from disparate periods.
From a Baroque cheek
To a Tudor brow
And a smirk that even James would be
Hard-pressed to translate.

To my initial A. Long may he reign;
For I feel in truth whatever he may feign.

Come, let me lavish love
upon your shoulders to start;

thumbs probing for stubborn
points of stress, rolling them
about, plump grapes of pressure
aching to pop.  s  l  o  w  l  y

s  t  r  e  t  c  h  i  n  g  

long ropes of back muscle,
langorous luxurient strokes
all
     the
             way
down to cup the flexors
around
(your parenthetical)
hips.

you didn't even know
you were tight there, did you?

I carry you like a badge of dishonor.
You rest on the left side of my chest, fastened to my skin, causing me to bleed. My scarlet letter of wrong. I am avoided by the parenthetical deeds of day. I am oppressed by the dense solitude of night. A crowd is nothing more than an overgrown forest. Silence. There is only silence. Once there was laughter and arms and warmth to call home, though now I cannot keep my eyes high enough to search for a wandering smile. I grew a new pair of bones in your absence. They are brittle. They need to strengthen. They keep breaking. I tried hope to calcify them, I tried love to mend them, I tried tears to set them. 
I am still crippled. 
Each time I stand, trembling, the sky shakes and the earth moves and I fall, again and again and again until I am looking up from the mud in the ground. I cannot open my mouth to question or cry out. I endure. I lie until I am entwined with the path itself, until feet cannot distinguish between dirt and flesh. I watch you fly. I try to accept the ache of emptiness. 
I cannot.

I do not believe in heaven or hell, but I believe
in whatever vindictive god left me here
like an unfinished sentence: incomplete, unenclosed, trailing
commas and semicolons and dangling prepositions
in my wake, tethered to nothing but my own beginnings
in a world obsessed with the way things end—I did not ask
for answers, and yet they were given to me;
I did not ask to be dragged down and anchored to a single story,
trapped between well-meaning parenthetical smiles (“put a period there,”
they say, “and begin a new sentence"—
but how can I start over when I have only just begun?)

I hear myself talk
In parenthetical echos
From your downward eyes
While you text
Someone absent,
Yet closer than I;
I hear myself grow silent
As you smile,
Then look up,
Surprised I'm here.

Two souls, the footprints of space time. 
Another conversation. 

Behold! 
The bucket's bottom. There are lines. 
Above but still below zero, are your promises. 

My greatest achievement is securing your only ******. 
The mess and the tendrils of confusion, the beacon for infidelity may remain his. 

Deity. ******* symbol of immense warmth and firmness. 
I turn you away. 
Grant me witness. 
And strength. 
And restless nights. 

A blood disorder. Yet mine fight all natural bodies. 
A stuttering problem. 
I've just the time to find my place. 

From a fiery prison. 
Peace and love with one cost. 

Your firstborn tainted. The king's seed on innocent's belly. 
What is your answer? 
Parenthetical or textual?

Frustrate the ***** of his people. All around decisions leave in rings unmade. 
The *** boils over and the mystery vanishes. 

I am finished. I am to weep tonight. 
My sobs and shudders move my shoulders and break my lease. 
From the front door, down the copper staircase and further down into the well of opportunities. 
I crawl and move my trail of tears underground. 

From the fire to the furnace I rise with skin as bronze.

your greedy metal mouth  (the taste of tin will never leave my tongue)
   engulfs me
                                               (my parenthetical affection can only last so long
)

in a parenthetical existence
see the shadow of reality
through infinite lenses
distortions of distortions
the infinitude of humanity's
misunderstanding

pick a side for no reason
but why not?
then pierce strawman enemies
with low resolution image macros
which ignore the macrocosm
both sides return victorious
over their lifeless enemies
and await tomorrow's call

artists of ambiguity
find new ways
to draw the same lines
resculpt the truth
leaving nothing
but a monstrous mass
of homogeneity
favoring the profane

His name was Adam Chester,
          and I killed him.

He was something early thirties
still built like twenty-two.
His eyes were as green as life
and the corners of his mouth could
shine enough certainly to
photosynthesize.

He was dying.

I was something late twenties,
young enough in Hollywood
to still be exposing my ******* for parts.
My hair still had more red than shame,
and my body still looked like a
parenthetical aside
in all the right places.

I had never felt more dead.


He said he saw me in some room
with some people sometime
and that the spark in my eyes had
restarted his heart,
cause he was surely dead,
just waiting to die.
I said I understood,
and I drank daiquiris.
Later, he would tell me
my skin felt softer than the
Egyptian cotton sarcophagus
entangling our legs,
that my lips tasted like cherry,
my breath like alcohol,
and my skin like so many
     squandered summer nights,
     bikini tops and Tanqueray,
     riding solar flares between friendships
     and not taking no **** from no one.

For weeks and months we were together. He didn't seem to be wasting any way but spiritually, and I didn't seem to be wasting anything but time. He told me that everybody dies alone, and that he would give anything to break the trend. I told him that of course I would help, and that I didn't love him, but I loved the thought of him, and that in me that thought would live forever. I promised I would find a way. He would touch my hair and smile without showing his teeth - either because it seemed too aggressive or too disingenuous. He told me how our lives resembled Moulin Rouge, except that he was the one on the clock, and I just wanted to drink and ****, and that was precisely why he chose me; perhaps if he was never alone, he would never have time to die.


It was the kind of arid night that makes you want to water your plants compulsively.
The air had our lips cracking like sarcastic smiles
and skin too dry like a sense of humor,
unable to turn the pages of our paperbacks.
I asked him to be my chapstick.
He asked me to be his lotion.
I told him that he was gross.
He told me to go to hell.
               I told him...
          He told me...
     I told him...
He told me...
I told...
He...

I woke in the cold embrace of solitude.
She kissed my neck and called me Lover.
I told Solitude to leave me sleep.
She told me she was lonely.
Told me I was breathing, if barely.
More than could be said for some.
She kissed my neck.
My heart stopped.

Time flows not like grains of sand,
but like grains of wood,
back and forth, swaying, dancing,
some ****** understanding within itself
which we have no place in,
no fate with or without.
I saw him laying alone,
saw him stand beside himself.
Saw him wonder
where I had gone.
Saw him go.
Saw him, gone.
When you die alone, you leave even yourself behind.


I went back to bed,
back to my body,

where Solitude could have her way with me.

Just an afterthought
in the story of your life.
      (Parenthetical)

(  to which temple shall our in-betweenness       kneel before

       reft in ****** dark?

   housed in parenthetical arms,
       graver than a tomb's rhetoric—

washed in red of flowers, a swarm
    of light arrives, waking the undeath
                                                      of stone.

  from glib strife to downpour of
    leaves — a morning unbound, unclose

the    sojourn     lay by the side of the
     river, the single-minded cruise


     to      appassionata,

                                       love.)

gOd put a smile on your face
      your eyes (half-thrush like two beings in the dark
and a gladiola of light spurns to chide in its bickering excess,
    birds, birds of morning and paradisiacal streets half-wittingly
       fork to single-handedness, a star is uttered and altars sing
           rarely-beloved, a dance-song of soul) and their parenthetical
    rush to what continues to live suddenly as if to say its conscious
       death is a room without flowers.

daylight does not
   (and perhaps) disrupt me
   as roses are put in
   pressing questions

  life is neither
    an ellipsis
      nor movement

   and death (cessation
                amid
              words where a locutionary, alone, dropping
     into the world
           sends us to places
        of silence) is
       nothing but a remembering
   of this and things anew
    yet old with pains
       (tender
     with parenthetical kisses.)