It Hurts ‘Cause It’s Big

1.

marooned in the rip mountain stream,

i’m ass out eyes down – searching the fugitive glints on the surface

for the double hit of gold

the tut tut water slurping at me up into my butt and

new douse sidling up my right thigh, which points to where the stream falls toward me

it doesn’t stop and each moment passes worse than the last,

like i have to swallow them and they’re getting denser and it hurts

but – really – they eat me,

eat me more thoroughly than any other i can remember

thinking back on the whole past few months, and then my whole life,

cause always before there was another day after

that that would be the time something would find me but still

i am given nothing save for some naked branches, smooth with drench,

and reminders of men working higher up the mountain:

their empty food tins and bobbing feces and short crumpled smokes

waving by as simple greetings

but the vein, the thing that beat its way into my claim, the vein runs nothing

damned dry socket

it feels personal but i keep swallowing

my wide hate does little

the wind is purple

my sought-afters pull off me and float downstream like tender meat from a bone

my hunger and thirst and the coldening current and all affecting my mood

softens what i thought i could live without

i am easily resolute, i hate that i am, i turn in

i lance to the embankment and mistake my flask for coolness

a newly minted touch-me-not from the day’s long power

that has only just begun to blip away, it shreds my palm with burn

its fiery metal buds imprint with a lurching snug and

my yell rips out of me, pummeling round off the gully walls

i feel very very punished and young

i also feel very clearly that i want to defend my soul, that i must prove what is happening

i swing with heavy breath which is real and feigned and, in that,

feel all around me sees the violence in my hand

“i am compensated.”

i declare

better yet, the smell works up into the air

a smell is something i cannot fake

it mingles with the round smell of the rocks and the clean smell of the water and the thick smell of the trees

my humbling sufficiently witnessed, i pry the metal body from my hand

and return to the water to temper my hand within it

i turn my hand over under the water, it looks unnatural but changes quickly

it is pink and then white hot and then the green of rainbow trout

incredible what freshness can do

the texture rising to crest courageously, which is to say handsomely, is now transfixed

on my hand and my flask’s dinged body looks readable

my flask’s polyps will never shrink

his mark, a boxy signature, rejects soft beauty and enacts pain

on our unremarkable professionally estranged relation

i, the opportunist–the sometimes beholder, shake

i have been made such quick work of

he sat in waiting, as is his nature, and watched me in my stillness

we are both so of ourselves that there can be no blame

but it felt so sudden, the change

my eyes, busy and untrained to such details as temperature

incapable of vigilance after having used it all up on the dizzy to-and-froing of watching something acutely that slams on,

in and out of view

i smile at my flask abandoned on the dirt with grass between rocks, thinking “He cocks back.”

so committed to taking up everything god has given him, whatever its isolating effect

taking up the sun and his metal body and his fate as my indiscriminate pouch and his hole, a welcoming spout turned monster

i think about valor the untouchable so the unlovable

i blush, so brave and self-sufficient and capable of claiming attention despite complete lack of

vigor

and he saw me all season while i begged to an industrious male god

i blush harder about what is between us

i want to be more like him

i think what i am thinking and also that i must get back into town

i am lost when too long away

the orange sun is secreting a bright foamy line over the high ridges it is cold like night now

i wrap my hand and glance around, sensing sentimental but not quite feeling it

i want it to push me around or force me into it

i want to be asked to stay but the rocks retain whatever lies underneath their solidness

the smooth stones do not rise with me out of the water

or line up to sing and dance in tattling fable

no one will be here, least of all me, when the fall and then winter

reciprocate these mountain quest blues that i have subjected them to

i climb o’er the ridge and down the decline,

filling and emptying the narrow path

i keep my eyes wide as they will

2.

i swallow the horizon

just on the corners i can see my own chest and shoulders and tiny feet chopping the land

i want to drink before i depart but still maintain a decent kind of schedule

i pick up my step see how fast i can go without falling

the gear in my pack jangles metallic as i fly

the town of Jamesly starts slow, less and less boulders and then completely flat for a time

a couple of respectable buildings interrupt this empty and then more and more take up the eyes

my favorite hitching post stands in the southeast barrier of Jamesly

right front of the jail

news and fear enough to make a bad boy act good

always on my way to either a workday or a trailing back towards the evening

my empathetic horse Claudette rolls out the red carpet and i unhitch and board her, eager

My pack swings from her side. After a short while we approach the bar The Young Magnolia. More men stand out front than regular. They all smoke and spit without avoiding one another but none of them speak.

They regard each others’ bodies familiarly but without friendliness or warmth. i remain on Claudette and cluck my teeth to face the swinging doors of the entrance head-on. i observe from my perch and my blood kind of thickens.

The guys don’t advance but the everything feels quick.

Like, it’s like they’re rushing at me. Their teeth know me and that is why they close them so tight. i don’t hold my breath, i just can’t get any air in.

A meow of pleasure wanes from inside The Young Magnolia. The mens’ steeliness foams. i see in their faces everything that i’ve come from and i cannot approach.

Claudette turns on her heel without instruction and then i cannot see the men.

it sounds like a cry when i push air into my gut.

Tonight i will not ride with lazy eyelids and soft joints by the moonlight.

i will remain rigid in where i begin and end. i will shiver and know it.

i will be stuck on everything. We start off.

-it is safer this way- satisfaction moving into me as we get farther and farther away from feeling afraid.

Claudette’s back is pale and freckling with one zit willfully transfixed as a pink rose or some other girly taxonomy of knowing and giving.

i pat her thanks for being beautiful and safe. our hips move steadily past hillsides and deepening tributaries in parallel with the dovetails overhead. Their whiteness whiter as the sky turns from blue to black. The clouds encourage our travel. They protect my head from gunmen, robbers, bandits. They rise over my soft spot in an inflatable finish line.

The sun falls totally.

i look behind and cannot see Jamesly.

i right myself and feel frighteningly faint.

i push down on the stirrups to shift my weight around, letting the blood flow down and up everywhere. Refreshed, my wrists tingle but then stumble the reins.

3.

i sit. Something like a bubble forms and grows steadfast in the back of my head

which juts out like a shelf. The world looks grayer. i am loose.

The low swollen moon slips from me and my shoulders and spine wilt and

my head cannot right itself over my heart.

i register a hawk poaching in the east and he looks so ashamed of me.

That is the last thing i can see before i am limp and hung over. All my muscles release,

a puff in the navy cold of the desert night and i find i cannot scream. All i can is watch the ground go by and feel my hands fill with blood. Knowing i can’t call out feels impossible. Who is to succor me? i wish i hadn’t tried, didn’t know.

i vomit and loathe its noncommittal beige color

which is fine because Claudette continues us quickly by.

i thank her, without words, for carrying on forward despite my lameness. She cannot sit and stroke my tousled hair because she cannot sit. i cry for me and mankind and also for her because she will never sit. Even after she is dead she will only lie.

My brain shakes against my skull with the plodding on, moved by her and not me.

My bones will look like something to someone years from now. They will fall off me, one by one, sling this worn trail and someone will find them and think it a riddle.

My remains will be stripped of their context and paraded on a ripcord necklace, like i am an amusement or souvenir, when i am in fact a person.

i get willful, despite all my care.

ingesting daily zinc tablets, incurring no small cost, at the general store and packing peat and nobly restraining my mind from the cloudiness of drink. My body fails me and my shame is psychedelic.

Amn’t i too young as to explain all this? The good years, still more ahead of me.

Doubly, the line of men i come from is one capable of withstanding the disarming power

of the spaciousness of the boundless open sky.

So why does my body abandon the order of my mind?

i try to see myself from behind or above or just out of sight, over my shoulder.

My eyes hurt and blur. Something on the back of my clothes?

The desert winds misinforming a bald spot?

is there a nasty name on my back or a label warning written secrets to a stranger?

Then a spritely tunnel of air surfs the nighttime environment, ringing the hollow spaces between rocks and pink cactus fruit. its dance is bare. invisible except for quick sparkles when suspended particulates are spun, angled to hold the moon’s light. i hear the wind’s song but no part of its melody is clear to me. i try to remember it for if i can, it must be real. But each subsequent chord erases the last and i am left with nothing but the next.

A siren does not want me, i am myself, and when the music’s skillful weaves

build to an exciting pipe organ i know it is so.

That this song is of my mind and not the world.

My trust in all is shaky but, guiltily so.

i can still think. i can understand every zooming judgment reasonably.

Everything around me and within still feels real but, with all the blood in my head, i want out.

What was a harp is now a great clap of thunder. Rain does not fall and lightning does not force my shadow under me. Eleven doming blasts of weather sound in impossibly quick succession and i am undone.

i have lost everything.

Pain flips up. Despair gauzes my eyes rosemary and leads me down the mammalian path.

i moan out into the boulders and saguaros and roadrunners and the daggering stars.

i have to be able to bring what i need with me because i need it.

Because i came from somewhere.

Just it comes out muffled and dangling. My voice falls shallow from crumple

and i am again unheard.

The world does not keep me.

4.

A milky angel asks -What do you intend to use as cork for this sinking lifeboat?-

Draping unforgivable discomfort.

The hurt in my throat knows why i came here.

The angel can see it in the way i have no proof of regard.

-i am so sorry my family feels visual to me. My heritage feels visual to me. Whomever came before sucked my life dry before i was born. All of it traded for a last rigging of love, of drink, of time, of control. i live in the shadow of a greedier me.-

Even so i cannot tell her and if i could it would be the same. This is all so un-new.

My butt sticks up straight in the air. i get confused. The saddle bruises my haunches. The swelling horn that i regularly grip pushes into the seam of my jeans. A tickle rises in my.

i am confused about what my body means. i cannot stop this faint joy,

not even this belongs to me.

Red curtain sway in the dark and maybe i should’ve committed to the theater.

i could’ve been sat in my own room with a star on the door. The floor a clean carpet

and the cake on my face dabbing powder instead of grime. Artful affairs with co-stars

or directors and exchanges with adoring fans and wealthy patrons

but now i smell and i cannot envision a way out it.

i monologue for no one while being dragged through the middle of the desert’s night on my horse named Claudette because i am now a joke.

i push to a character perfect to prove my seldom witnessed gift of talent through imaginative strength and sheer willpower: a woman scorned.

i begin

-When i was a girl i had a festering magic about me. My eyes said yes instead of no.

i made decisions from the unreachable. i couldn’t orienteer myself and i can never get that back. i shall not warrant that power henceforth. it is lost to me and yet i do not yearn for it as i do for things i have had but no longer do. i am within my choices without fear. Now i have chosen to commit to otherwise. i am saved from desire.

i am inside something untakeable.-

The critics applaud and i blush at feeling convincinging.

But it is ugly that i am happy, losing sight of what i am up against.

if i lose where i’d like to be.

i cannot reside within apparition and still be alive.

it hurts to think of me so i think of the world. Someone to tell a raucous joke and moor me to my life. The only thing that can mend my fate is anyone other than me. And in that,

i should have been dead a long time ago.

i cannot slap my hands or rub my eyes.

i bet all of your fingers and toes amuse you intensely. What you see belongs to you.

The moving ground under me so familiar that i no longer see it. i see nothing but what i want. The opening and close of a tri-spurt fountain. i see the atomization of a lover. i see a man who is partially responsible for my being. He is stolid and timely aglow with destiny and beauty and belonging and he is endlessly accustomed to rugged travel.

He is quick and lucky and blessed.

He is within my lineage but within a time when the sun warmed the footing that felt true. i have been cold. And i have been without sun. But he found the strength to tread on. And his willingness to carry fluids always pleasantly surprised expectation. He grew in that way by bringing that which was his at any impasse. Never thinning the ties between.

The less visible forces build on one another.

The world morphs parrot then rebounds because i realize blonde could lend silver and orange could lend pink and despite despite shit despite i know that i am so far

from being saved these colors sicken me because i cannot close my eyes or get away.

i cannot extricate myself from their presence, how i'd die to.

These interstellar deluges of worry and vision.

How long can i possess this beast who will circumvent this misgiving

where has simpleness gone what would've happened had this not no one can see me

i run from the state of things in my heart

5.

Claudette descends a mountainside.

My hammered metal flask shirks itself free from my vest stowage and meets the side of my face, bouncing against the height of my cheek. And i find gratitude that the sun has retired and the flask does not burn me so as before this softness hardens behind my eyes.

An amoeba blooming in my flask during the midday spent boiling in repose.

Did the nap in the narrow sandbar leave you too sluggish, my flask, too sluggish to fend off the bending multiplication of germs moreover propagated by your acrid humidity?

Where was consideration?

Where was thought of me?

What in your past makes you so ready to betray?

Why do you insist now on this closeness?

Closeness to the one you have so fatally betrayed.

it is closer. Our relationship now closer than we have been, aside from my sips from his insides. My only accompaniment willing to see what i see. To flap. To choose to be with me. To share my undesirable status.

My flask choosing to have no choice at all. it is brave and still he is endearing, without ego.

A flask empty, its hand is a reminder to fill.

Full, it is a security but more so a belief.

it is small and therefore cute and therefore owned and therefore mine.

Who else’s? Mine and forcing itself as mine still more and more.

More closely to my loving eyes and a part of my constant life.

He slaps my face again and again rhythmically, a stumbling drum to know my plight. i cannot tell if they are coy or scolding or both slaps but i have nothing to do about them anyway for it was not the flask that poisoned me but the bacteria within him. Some little punk gotten into me through wretchedness now ruins my life.

Who could live and scheme in such conditions? Who has the skills to maintain safety?

i grow hot. it is not my body that is difficult but the flask’s. i am an easier clean than him. i swear i’d prove it. illuminating damp corners, sensing brackishness, witnessing the winds of change. Those are things i can do.

i am of use so spare me.

Far off and then nearer coyote cries spook Claudette. She takes off and my teeth break one by one against each other. My jaw doesn’t work so i cannot hold my mouth open to avoid this.

i wish i was dead in a hole and i beg because i know that we could have had it all. Our hearts beating together. Our closeness by choice and not chance. i make her promises in the hopes that she will be soothed and stop this run.

i will name our firstborn Starlette so that there is no question of our quality. if it lives on my hip it lives next to yours. if there is something we can share then it will be. i show her how much i care and, for us, mostly. Our future. To be honest and convincing, to become mortars of historic ugliness, as any parent is, i will do so fiercely with a guarantee. i will be bonafide.

A whole world without heroes. Us purchasing the nippled powers of rivers. A recurring role in the domain of reproductive enterprise.

Something that must exist within before it can be perfect in an object. Every effort, a freedom, a developing kernel at the feet of everlasting mutation and taking its seat with the rest. Always tributary and continual entrance into a bigger body that holds more extinguishing.

My returning belief that there is no way i can ever die. The peonies bloom east and mothers wear the world in turns, passing over. Pruned and calcified and south after like youngness. The world shattering. That is what we will face together.

i will help you with that. i will stand by you, if only you’d let me. She continues to gallop and with every assurance grows faster still.

-Those are the gaps that are inevitably announced- i scream.

-OUR iNTiMACY A MiRACLE.-

-Raucous bounty harvest vestibules gripes and suns. Oh, how the sun marching towards the courthouse ants and honey and all these living things like matriculation and bouncing and rubbing and burning and coming back and tightnesses and breaking.-

i quiet, checking for reception, but i must tell her more.

-Middle use propagates frenzied ownership. And the olive, oh the olive can tint even you mudded female glare. Let me show you you stupid bitch. Let me love you right. Let me tie everything down and show you. Let me show you, let me.-

She doesn’t understand me.

i am reasonable.

No discernable words have been made.

it would be lovely if her animal wildness could attune her heart to declarations unspoken. it would make sense if the physical worked.

My frantics are unattractive, i imagine,

or maybe i have misjudged Claudette’s heart and what it has to offer.

6.

My body slides off Claudette’s in a quick shift.

i land with my shoulder tucked under my ear and only half a mouthful of dirt which i measure through my partial intake of breath. This air is unclean, full of clods with every stuttering inhale when it blows back out through my broken mouth. My nose takes it up. My ribs are surely broken too. i know not my legs or feet as they are no longer of me as they are outside of my sight.

i feel that Claudette heard every word i sent to her. The only passage that moved her, my slight. What a prickly girl. Huss.

But i can believe that i choose freedom for her.

That i am thankable in keeping it from her so long that it would feel oh so much sweeter.

God only understands my goodness and he forgives the ramblings of a scared man.

i am neither the first nor only man he is watching deteriorate in quick prayers.

No, i am one of many and i pray once more that the wisdom of my brothers in dying might lend some insight unto me.The one who endures it here and now and at this point the one who takes up the pike for this time.

Resentfulness rises in my throat like sawdust because i’d rather not.

Ranting, twitching, pouring something in a slant torque between the center of two people.

Pathetic ritual of commitment. Blood or better yet iron replace with paltry service.

That of god, galvanized only by the state and that readiness to testify in the name of righteous etiquette, as is everyone’s inherited urge for the stage.

i calm myself repeating -She was never mine until the words sink in.-

Pity there are questions i will never ask.

What if my dog bites?

What if my kid kills?

i will never see a girl go up in a rocket to outer space when she knows she will die, having volunteered for this. i will never get to try to understand her sacrifice.

i will never be focus-grouped.

i will never take up my roots as an interrogation and not a celebration.

i pee on my self, tapped sideways. it relinquishes a vague stream. Something i haven’t done in a while, since the day’s laborious gold searchings. My tip doesn’t burn.

To go with half my vision blunted by the dirt group up against my temple.

i am of the small things now. All this is close to the ground, close enough to feel it breathing in me. Fitting with me now that i am banished.

What’s inside me is fur lined instead of meat. i am an animal soft as lichen. Proud, there’s pressure on my neck.

A crunching step.

i am torn around the fineness of communion.

Strangles me and i fight it off with every lesson i have ever received.

it feels weird that everything and i continues to happen but

i fight for it and win. i fall asleep.

7.

The night passes quick.

i am surprised that i wake up, reintroduced to my paralysis by the sun’s hello.

i pity the man who tries to reason with me.

God hears of my worsening condition and speaks -Your boxiness is admirable trusty sturgeon, but i am the one you might need to bloat and drain you. Without that you are still deadly so.-

His format beguiles me.

That he would say -i am the one you might need,- when he knows what i need and he knows that there are no ways around it or through it without what is required and he to take up air time, to look down on someone so low and act big, to remain tall, and not mimic to condone or comfort.

i bellow at his unremarkable communique -i do not disagree with his prognosis, logic has yet to leave me.-

But i hear resolutely the vibration of his frothing wake, hollow as bubbles.

i cannot help but undermine him as i see him now.

i am too lost and too afraid not to summon evil, so i jab at his countenance.

-Anyone can write an anthem, you grueling freak. it is the fire within us disciples that is the stinging functional difference. You analogous poppy speculum, drooping. You are swinging down, down here. Come closer. Come down farther, but you wouldn’t.

You are something any glottis can sync to because you are nothing. You are emptier. You stick to us. We don’t choose you. There’s no choice. Your familiarity is your undoing flaw because i know you and see you now and i aim to rub each of my gruesome fingers in your wound so that no one, not even you, will know where it begins or ends.-

Venom parts the right corner of my mouth and its droplet trails my cheek, winking at the bountiful sun. Only escaping my bloodless lips to sizzle lightly on my bed of refuse.

My eyes roll white and something witchy bludgeons my belt buckle.

i annotate the specifics until that is all that remains, slight fumblings and curlies.

My castle’s shadows rotate the turrets, keeping time.

i watch the sun ravage the phases of my body with the hours of the day.

i feel immense warmth.

it feels like it's coming from inside me.

THE END.