beat the same

your new big heart is beating in my bed and against my chest 

filling a dent in my mattress, shaped like your absence. 

it was nice of you to show up, but I don't know if you
noticed that your side of the bed
was taken

my God it was and it is 
still dripping red and fucking hell you are 

sleeping in it how did you miss it? 
you are colorblind


or, blind.

it must be beautiful to think this could work.

to share our lives and build beautiful things

out of this beautiful thing you're saying we've

always had. perhaps you see it a red, red rose, 
perfect from years of healthy pruning?


I do not see that. 


you know, 
it's been tough since the  great flood of  

"always" and "beautiful," 
when I bled a color they don't teach in preschool
because is not a color for
things that

make it 

look at you.
your heart is beating and you do not 

seem to understand how red this is so hand me 
your new big heart, 
that thing in you that believes in things that are
always beautiful and i want you
to you want to understand and you
do and  I'm not 
gonna 

lie   I   would never    
lie
to       you      I       
WILL     
WRING 
IT.      


With piano wire, I WILL STRANGLE YOUR RED, RED MUSCLE 
I WILL 

GUT IT so help me God 
will help me hold it together as 
I throw what we've always had into some sharp 
churning machine that the night shift butcher forgot to turn off 

and you'll sleep there.


every morning, you will wake up in blood.

it's weird how your heart works when it's removed,
it might freak you out at first, when it

beats. And it hurts,
but you won't have it in you, 
you don't have the 
heart to 

kill it and still in your sleep, you'll carve every word 

of the thousands you've written without me

on every clod of skin hanging from your bones,
begging yourself to have mercy and deeper, 
deeper is never as deep 
as the pen needs to go
to make you stop.

I will not see you creep from her bed to wash the blood off in the morning.
I will not see you crawl from her bathroom, 
raw from bleach and lye, reeking of vinegar, white as a ghost 
and shaking like a junkie in detox

when I sink into your mattress, 
you will cry with her as it sinks into your bones like ink into skin
your heart will beat faster and the blood 
when it is still red 


you will question what has always been there

i am sorry

a sentence
that i made up,
to tether my existence to
yours:
let's dance around it,
circle it,
strangle it
with things that i
haven't made up
one of these days,
it'll look like something
we haven't made up;
it'll be strangled,
with real ropes made out
of our arteries,
our hair,
our straining eyes.
it'll be real,
much more than
the sentence i made up
to make you feel
safe enough
to unravel.

Five-oh-seven in the morning; the neighbors'
earlier drunken garage chatter calmed to an ebbing tinker
that only raises its pitch in the moments it remembers
what it used to be,
and that it is not supposed to die;

not like this, not for sleep,
not for tomorrow;

to remember is not the object
either; after a certain point
memory is not in the cards and the object
is a point,
a moment,
swimming around in the calming waters of the
earlier drunken garage chatter,
later left in the dark
with the spilled ashtray
and melted conversations

A Shrine to Samuel Clemens

When I don't want to do something, I often read Mark Twain quotes instead.

"It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us--oh infinitely better for us--if the serpent had been forbidden."
-Notebook

"After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her."
-Adam's Diary

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart."
-Letter

"Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any."
- Advice to Young People speech, 15 April 1882

On the Afterlife: "I am silent on the subject because of necessity. I have friends in both places."
- quoted in Mark Twain, His Life and Work, Will Clemens

"You can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you."
- 70th birthday speech, 1905

"We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty."
- Foreign Critics speech, 1890

On Angels: "They are always on deck when there is a miracle to the fore -- so as to get up in the picture, perhaps."
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

On Antiques: "There are rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities."
- Life on the Mississippi

"Whenever I take up "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility," I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel, would almost certainly feel. I am quite sure I know what his sensations would be -- and his private comments. He would be certain to curl his lip, as those ultra-good Presbyterians went filing self-complacently along. ...She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see."
- "Jane Austen," published in 2009 in Who Is Mark Twain?