year of the dozen goatees

I grow a full beard; I shave it down to a goatee; I shave the goatee.

In it are some goatee-related thoughts.
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I am the frailest among you.
I am yet more years of childhood away from calling myself able to call without guilt nuns guilty of sexual thoughts.
My intellectual debtors repossessed my sofa. My divan.
Jesus, save me. Save us.
We who are of the same bigness born of selfhood kindly minded near our same mantle. Holy, it.
We are endowed: Puff Daddies of our modern hell.
I heard this: You don’t have to drink, but you have to get drunk.
You don’t have to have sex, but you have to make love.
Because if you can’t make love, you’re pretty well fucked.
I am haunted by bottled water bottles.

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I create, I enchant this green rose.
I am palpable. I am a thing as yet unwhispered but known.
My ninety ex-wives want a special selfhood: one which chooses for them what clothes to wear.
A person is for half an hour a single cell. That means all of you.
Here I reside: the moment between your
brushing of your teeth and when your lover hears your brushing of your teeth.
Say “Show me” and for as long as it takes you to read this line I’ll
pause, and think, and answer, and then you ask again, I wait, I answer, over and over, born again, born again.
One day I’m going to stop shaving. There is a number for how many goatees I ever could grow.
It is a real number.
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Nothing fixed. Even my molar, unstuck, my gums receding, their tide never to come back.
I hear, in other peoples’ stomachs, growls.
I have eaten today at least one hair. Another pulled out of my teeth, another spat out, where it landed I don’t know, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry for it. I’m sorry to it.
Must we argue? I argue. I buy up my meat from vending machines, lined up slung in condoms, tied, hung. I will always after purge.
I rip a page. I never want to hit but more often am hit. What is your fault like all things changes.
Your father and mine are perhaps the same people, deep down.
By being taught to think I hazard turning thoughtless.
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For my birthday I would like a vanity press self-help book about how to show everybody around you that you are intensely worried about your soul, while still believing that we are all surrounded by the unseen.

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Never will I say things as if small. I will, when taken with the urge to, crouch, but no time else.
Each morning I wake up weary with the world’s tallest library. I took these chores inside myself, and so inside we took them too. I say, “The sky paid enough yesterday, didn’t it?”
Never has or will it ever answer. The desert plants they planted in terracotta planters have all died, although the snow is by now melting.
These seconds spent between the saying-things took root in me, and I waited, still, for that which would happen which I knew: my karate class is early, but I oversleep; my voodoo class is late, but I oversleep when I nap from staying up all night so as not to oversleep for karate.
I have a fern waiting to grow in my forearms. All mammals are covered in tiny black hairs, including my ninety ex-wives, if I had any ex-wives. I think that’s special.
I see one way only out of this trap I made of brightness, with brightness, little lobes, or gems in teeth, and I am in love although I ought not be with the terror of righteous waiting to leap out.
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We *are* surrounded by the unseen. I insist. You can’t make me.
I think of each pen as a person, which makes me more of us than you, and I’m not going to apologize for saying that, you can just go fly a kite.
It’s like the Matrix.
It’s like amnesia, waking up to thoughts of birds and stars and turning over to no longer exist.
I am blurred; I am growing ragged with my beard.
What is yet of mine of my beard remains to be taken, O Christ. Unto me make another day to wait, bearded.
I can almost feel around the mouth that hint of sorry I’m almost to make to all of you.
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Again a want of knowing what no longer to say.
Again a wanting of sushi- eel and carrot and salmon and bacon- served with chocolate milk or gin-and-tonic.
My brother Drew has left me, killed forever by the Indians. They live alone inside a chamber of my guttyworks. They are in there eating him I think. Each birthday of his they give me a piece of him. There are little pieces missing, which I believe they have taken to eat. Or they’re eating me, and the Frankenstein I’m putting back together of him is really him, all whole, and the only reason I don’t think so is the bits of me the Indians who killed him ate instead of him.
I Drew gave back to himself.
I wash my razor in rosewater. It turns to dirty water I never can turn to roses again.

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I dump out my water I used to clean.
I wipe off my sink and mirror hairs. I wipe off my face and cheek and nape of neck stuck hairs. They come off.
This I do with a towel.
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No more sweeping language. I will make every last sentence with swears.
Nor eating animals. Today I brought my id out with the garbage.
Dumb ideas, all of them. I endeavor to put out the light in my eye. I will pick out of somebody else’s their light, maybe eat it, probably not, probably just put it back and say sorry and feel sad.
If I don’t give it back I’ll keep it inside a chest behind a triple lock inside my goatee.
I am now hiding the key.
My goatee has the key to the light in our eyes hidden from you inside.