PLANETS FULL OF RAIN POETRY BY MICHAEL HESSEL-MIAL
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DEDICATED TO MICHAEL JACKSON & THE LYRICS OF THE WAY YOU MAKE ME FEEL.
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PLANETS FULL OF RAIN POETRY BY MICHAEL HESSEL-MIAL EDITED BY ANASTACIA DAVIS STEVENS a two-headed unicorn press publication
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CONTENTS/POEMS: WHAT ARE YOU DOING? PLANETS FULL OF RAIN BUTTERFLY HAIKU EROTIC AGAIN UNTITLED THE FRIED SURFACE BY STARLIGHT, OR BY BREATH MULTIPLE MOON SEQUENCE SLOW DANCE 1-10 POTENTIAL CRAIGSLIST AD WHEN YOU COMMENT (ON MY FACEBOOK PAGE) BE FOREVER LOVER HELLO FUTURE LOVER BABY WHY AREN’T COMFORTABLE? WHERE I’M RIGHT NOW TURNING MACHINE
W H AT ARE YO U DOIN G ? what are you doing drinking tea in the rain? come inside and get your lips off that cup
PLAN ETS FULL O F RAIN toss me into planets full of rain I want to dance with you and dress in the radiance of desire from the virtuals of appendages
BU TTERFLY your butterfly eyelashes against my cheek, keeping me awake
EROTIC I need a clumsy fuck electric buildings are rattling around my body, the wind catching my limbs AG AIN rip crystals sip liquor blue powder dip thicker skin thick drink gasp pink money-faced rasp gray rage. failing body. cold flint. razor dull. come here for a tumble pull my hair, stuff me into a thimble cry into my chest like you found out everybody’s dying
U NTITLED make me feel like I make you feel.
THE FRIED SURFACE stop it. you are a mermaid star electrocuted to madness in a universe of molten gold or better, imagine yourself a diver plunging, pulling a weird warped body from a sunken ship seawater transformations unanswered by our desire. this essence, half-alive, is anywhere but inside and outside, playing gravity to melt into our tentacles, to have a love affair with atmosphere answered only by damp cardboard. it's almost the snap of a black rubber hand, grease shimmers of what it wouldn't touch, or the water dancing away from the olive, like a folktale henrietta’s red iron shoes, steam scattering on copper, black from waiting and not doing.
BY STARLIGH T OR BY BREATH as a young man I am still driven to the opportunity of your caress cleverly, proposing games for us to play restless, linguistic, unfortunate for us to ever touch in a blank space, distant from the color of any form the shatter of every motion of what in me can touch another until I sit listless as though buried in losing you unfolds like effects, the dead ends of causes M ULTIPLE I become multiple when you breath me in, out, expand, contract how many shades will I become, how many colors? to capture me you will strike a series of chimes you will become crazed, a lioness in wildly inappropriate green your legs will walk up and down my body, independent of you mouth to mouth dizzy from one another like cheap inhalants spectral blindness engulfing us like light
M O ON SEQU EN CE
1: Oh! moon, what have you? I did not know you were a satellite with a face, a cork with a crumper, bobbling on a cloudy sea of nightcap, whose ink does not stain but drains, does not black but lacks, aimless in its gravity, polite, predictable. 2: Oh! moon, excuses! We look to you for everything, but you look back. You've gone nowhere when you turn your cape, pretending to be reborn, the light rings you drew around yourself in cold skies, merely fallen salt in the morning.
3: Oh! moon, You trickster, whose light was never really yours, that ghost's voice sucked singing into a locket passed from star to star for a gloater’s reasons, it will bust your ass when you find what never shone will burn like coal. 4: Oh! moon, Though time only passes when dream is bleached to daylight, woven into the shared disorder of life, neon still emits a glow from nowhere, injected into night's frenzy, held with such conviction it is forgotten, drowning out all light but yours.
5: Oh! moon, we sing unearthly of you and only you with earthly songs, the stars and planets just maps and shine-trace; don’t fear, there is nothing for you to do but pester the globes that think they have outshined you. 6: Oh! moon, Neon palace of carved wood and lasers bottles of powdered essence that giggle and blush Your dirt that cuts teeth Your jewel dust that never settles that never unsettles that never nightly that figures geometries of madness technology of ticks and whirrs swivels, clicks and hinges trapdoors that lead to buttons and buttons that lead to trapdoors.
7: Oh! moon, I am acid lapdog stumble like a taut watch a whirring burning crank. I, that slumbered unannounced beneath myself, bristled like a flipped switch barked slobbered bit from snapped silence waiting to be disturbed. Light catches and I snag, bark and crack, thin black lip, dog-rubber drool, wild yellow orbs, showing a festering moon from a dusted iris edge clattering, disembodied like a shriek a liquored sheen of sweat abounding in salt-and-pepper follicles. 8: Oh! moon, I kiss your ring as a fanged cocksman in furs, gladiator sandals with inset rubies, gilt whip and flatblade tongue, Red jism gobs and flecks from mouth, eyes, nostrils, sweat glands, dispersed like merciless laughter.
9: Oh. slipped out of self in sunlight, a needle bed of gray, unspooled, removed. The slave of today, once a howl and now a feeble croak, a condom cut in half, shrunken like a burst phallus like a shivering orphan and I awaken, disrobed. Poured naked into hangover, I am luscious, ever bitten, a chocolate cake drooling blood, a body askance from spilled-milk lights, dead furnaces in the corner of the eye.
BE M Y FO REVER LO VER please be mine I’m dying of infinity, lapsing into the worst of myself and want to find my life purpose in doing you while music plays— launch me into the sun and give me a reason to stay alive, plant seeds like bullet holes in me rise over my body, creep up my side like the sun on the side of a hill I’m pretending I can taste you right now
SLOW DANCE 1:10 1. fish is whisper a cuddle of rain hung skies in skies like real slow to the smell of a color wheel 2. cats as cluster tight fur breathing whoosh not as on our side of it 3. sleep the risk walk with tilt leopard gaze glassed : make me rattle
4. why stop at hummingbirds like drunk without the ground swell aftershock of cartoon clobber glass broke the bourbon broke small things around conduct atmosphere 5. mass oak stems scandal sundial bright with night light the fabric the shell gleam gamble ferocity 6. I’ll flash fold back flip kids drinks seal my under emeralds
7. cattle gem lavender and i click brass sleep treading 8. fabric ache slender, locked to the break to lever self dealing big stop 9. some came linked fed and we were too famous
POTENTIAL CRAIG SLIST AD little drunk and looking to fuck open to all types of experience, gender unimportant maybe just a blow or a jerk or something I always come too soon, so you should work in a humiliation/forgiveness thing maybe me 'worshipping' while you undress but you have to come to me since I’m in bed and you have to like Yoko Ono I'm passing out waiting for you, visualizing computer imaging software of erect penises emitting soft faint light
W HEN YO U CO M M EN TED (ON M Y FACEBOOK PAG E ) I felt warm and knew you had a long-distance boyfriend Sincerely hoping that he had some type of ‘war wound’ on his genitals and he couldn’t have sex with you in a ‘loving, understanding relationship’ where it would be totally cool if we had slept together
HELLO FU TU RE GIRLFRIEN D This is so explosive stupid dangerous Watch me move I will incorporate us into being together The storms keep scattering, changing direction setting terms of their gravity The wind is the one calling the other’s name the other is here / not here This landscape engulfing us, allowing us to touch is the reason I feel the way i do Fuck me until I turn to primordial ooze I want an apple to dissolve into where my mouth was I want you to punish me for the fidelity of my flesh I want a loving dissection, for me to be wrong and in need of shame I want to walk like people know from my body where your hands last were Do you see the marks you’ve left on me? I need your skin to fill them Do you see me? I’m trembling like you’ve restored my place in somewhere stupid aimless and vast
BABY W H Y AREN’T W E CO M FO RTA BLE baby why aren’t we comfortable in our heads we’re laying together and you’re fucking me in a way that makes me new and real and I’m doing the same, it doesn’t matter that every part of our skin can’t touch at the same time but right now we’re sipping drinks too fast and going home too early I stare at your hip for hours without knowing the right way to pull you toward me It is failure pretending we’d never want anything but quiet silence I didn’t know that our breaking makes us warmer and that reaching for it again make it unbroken as if we were best off sitting on my couch for years, never touching, until…
W HERE I AM AT RIGH T NO W my room is musty and immediate a hot damp twilight I had sex in my room but probably never again one girl left a shirt there, then another I accidentally mailed both to the same person fuck this register of language what am I doing? the cross-hatched apparatus I have to open, recreate my philosophy of slow love seems to be falling apart I want to become a gently wavering surface tissue
TURNIN G M ACH INE When I think of you I think of some ancient device taught how to solve everything, no gaps, no lacunae uncured by the shimmers of the imagination, but still mechanical, a swivel process, an accidental, un-tuned elegance just beneath language, the only phrase that appears to hold your shape, I’m clueless as to how the thing works. The cicadas, long promised, aren’t in earshot, the rain comes sunblind without rainy days and the cats chase one another in erratic and twisting circles, planetary orbits tightened when confused and afraid, like figure skaters clutching themselves dizzily inward as if theirs to keep. I appear most likely true to myself, I remain available to answer to my forecasts, though dreams remain soft and pliable and bendy, not at all the way dreams ought to be.
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