"selfest" by brad hamers

i graph my orbit with my leash
know the distance from myself to my skin
from my ignorance to my knows
i snort the finish line
all at once
eyes like ground meat blood
flying straight into the sun (into the pan over the pilot light)
construction crane in a cloud
gravity was debt
pockets as parachutes
music was my straight line
eyes under par
best way to put it
dot-matrix ripped off edge and dubbed cliff
i pirate my newest latest thought
with each and every up and download losing quality
each plank loses another diver
i question the mark
score card eyes and bread rising arms
preheat to work 15 mile an hour wake-up
the exhaust pipe says it all
emotions like carved out roads
gravel in throat kicks up into my eyes missed the sign hit a church hood caught on fire woke up under water full of fish hook holes skin like curb hands like blacktop i pressed the sky like enter key eyes hot pressed sinter like graphite like pencils creeping over checklists like mouse eating windows through cheese i paid three pounds of my own mold for these heels watch how they click
hit home like religious missile to the forehead
(was)healed by a deeper wound
i graph my connectedness with my ball and chain throat
limping around my tongue
i regurgitate another gun
another long drawn out squirming chorus in bullet form
another set-up sentence behind stockings and bars
another epicycle sleeping through the ellipse
the night was even more night for a few going for seconds
i slept even deeper
pressing on my oxygen key
like a janked space bar
full face diving
first into the pencil itself writing this
blurry score card eyes and pirated mind
patch of welcome rug for hair
i sit and wait to get combed
by the right four feet of minute and hour(for our cut to start bleeding) for the right stomping foot of flood water on my bathroom door
knocking eyes
calloused pupils
knuckle down in the cake like text like blood running through the book
witness-stand legs
shaky decked out heart hanging off the front of my housed in sub-rural mouth (porch-dog howling at the moon - with home keys in his throat) a way to put my hands on the keyboard
i play the piano with my tongue
my drool electrocutes me
i shoot off dots
dead computers and dud language
make prints of myself
through the light of everyone else
i graph my time with my pen blinking twelve
with my prerogative pulled out of orbit
writing straight lines with my second hand
from my lowest gear to my mouth
from my piano to the sidewalk
four stories down
i sit
in myself
a straight line into space
a straight line up into forever


we feel around with our mouths at the lock and keyhole on the way
at the dock with our ties i wrote you around the ropes with my tongue
hung face first into the wake the 56k traffic the see level
like time going by
i missed the boat about her emotions
the way they sunk without sound in the bay
without borders or limitations in the demarcated land
most of the time we sat inland in her emotions
building apartments and comfortable ways to sit
like the sun in the sky

i measured my orbit by the point
by how many times i’ve seen the same plain
we know the distance from our self to our skin
and we sit in it
digging cul-de-sac and cob web
out of the corner of our eye
we saw a stage down
we scene a play
we sleep in rewind


(in orbit around the previous day)