01UndatedEven when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
02UndatedThe Quiet WorldIn an effort to get people to lookinto each other’s eyes more,and also to appease the mutes,the government has decidedto allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup.I am adjusting well to the new way.Late at night, I call my long distance lover, I only used fifty-nine today. When she doesn’t respond,I know she’s used up all her words, thirty-two and a third times.After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
03UndatedThere's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
04UndatedIf you heard your lover scream in the next roomand you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood.You wouldn't rush to the pinkie and say, 'Darling, are you OK? 'No, you'd wrap your arms around his shoulders and worry about the pinkie later.The same holds true if you heard the scream, ran in and saw his hand or -god forbid- his whole arm.But suppose you hear your lover scream in the next room, and you run in and his head is on the floor next to his body.Which do you rush to and comfort first?Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
05UndatedThe Everlasting Staircase"Jeffrey McDanielWhen the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,my first thought was: can't she postpone her exitfrom this planet for a week? I've got places to do,people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boardeda red eyeball and shot across America,hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keepthe jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew uppoor in Appalachia. And while world war IIfunctioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,she believed poverty was a double feature,that the comfort of her adult years was merelyan intermission, that hunger would hobble back,hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the JacquesCousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuitstuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chindangling like the boots of a hanged man --I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chestand listen to that little soldier march toward whateverplateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.The point is I knew, holding the one-sidedconversation of her hand. Once I believed the heartwas like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll snap offin your grasp. But when Grandma's last breathwaltzed from that room, my heart openedwide like a parachute, and I realized she didn't die.She simply found a silence she could call her own.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
06UndatedHey you, dragging the halo-how about a holiday in the islands of grief? Tongue is the word I wish to have with you.Your eyes are so blue they leak.Your legs are longer than a prisoner'slast night on death row.I'm filthier than the coal miner's bathtuband nastier than the breath of Charles Bukowski.You're a dirty little windshield.I'm standing behind you on the subway, hard as calculus. My breathbe sticking to your neck like graffiti.I'm sitting opposite you in the bar, waiting for you to uncross your boundaries.I want to rip off your logicand make passionate sense to you.I want to ride in the swing of your hips.My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.But with me for a lover, you won't needcatastrophes. What attracted me in the first placewill ultimately make me resent you.I'll start telling you lies, and my lies will sparkle, become the bad stars you chart your life by.I'll stare at other women so blatantlyyou'll hear my eyes peeling, because sex with you is like Great Britain: cold, groggy, and a little uptight.Your bed is a big, soft calculatorwhere my problems multiply.Your brain is a garageI park my bullshit in, for free.You're not really my new girlfriend, just another flop sequel of the first one, who was based on the true story of my mother.You're so ugly I forgot how to spell.I'll cheat on you like a ninth grade math test, break your heart just for the sound it makes.You're the 'this' we need to put an end to.The more you apologize, the less I forgive you.So how about it?Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
07UndatedBut one kiss levitates above all the others. Theintersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
08UndatedWhen you were sleeping on the sofaI put my ear to your ear and listenedto the echo of your dreams.That is the ocean I want to dive in, merge with the bright fish, plankton and pirate ships.I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like youand ask them the questions I would ask you.Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smokerising from a chimney? Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing? I don’t wish I was in your arms, I just wish I was peddling a bicycle toward your arms.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
09UndatedWe didn’t deny the obvious,but we didn’t entirely accept it either.I mean, we said hello to it each morningin the foyer. We patted its little headas it made a mess in the backyard,but we never nurtured it. Many nights the obvious showed upat our bedroom door, in its pajamas,unable to sleep, in need of a hug,and we just stared at it like an Armenian,or even worse— hid beneath the coversand pretended not to hear its tiny sobs.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
10UndatedI surrendered my identity in your eyes.Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the waysomeone falling down in the street is funny.I entered a revolving door and emergedas a human being. When you think of meis my face electronically blurred? I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniestsatellite dish in the universe, your smileas the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash, how I once held the soft audience of your hand.I've been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silenceso far, without spilling a drop.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
11UndatedOnce I dated a woman I only liked 43%.So I only listened to 43% of what she said.Only told the truth 43% of the time.And only kissed with 43% of my lips.Some say you can't quantify desire, attaching a number to passion isn't right, that the human heart doesn't work like that.But for me it does-I walk down the streetand numbers appear on the foreheadsof the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.With each drink, the numbers go upuntil every woman in the joint has a blurryeighty something above her eyebrows, and the next day I can only remember 17%of what actually happened. That's the problemwith booze-it screws with your math.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
12UndatedMathematicians still don’t understandthe ball our hands made, or howyour electrocuted grandparents made it possiblefor you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the windowto leave six ounces of orange juiceand a doughnut by the bed, or me becomingthe sand you dug your toes in,on the beach, when you wishedto hide them from the sun and the fixed eyesof strangers, and your breath broke in wavesover my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling outover the opposite lobe, and my first poemsunder your door in the unshaven light of dawn:Your eyes remind me of a brick wallabout to be hammered by a drunkdriver. I’m that driver. All nightI’ve swallowed you in the bar.Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealedeyelid along your inner arm, driedraining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discoveredall your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d knowwhere to run when the cops came.Your body is the country I’ll never return to.The man in charge of what crosses my mindwill lose fingernails, for not turning youaway at the border. But at this momentwhen sweat tingles from me, andblame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,I realise my kisses filled the halls of your bodywith smoke, and the lies camelike a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidentsthey orchestrate, and I swalloweda hand grenade that never stops exploding.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
13UndatedI've been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silenceso far, without spilling a drop.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
14UndatedNow I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the waysomeone falling down in the street is funny.I entered a revolving door and emergedas a human being. When you think of meis my face electronically blurred?Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
15UndatedI want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
16UndatedThe Quiet WorldIn an effort to get people to lookinto each other’s eyes more,and also to appease the mutes,the government has decidedto allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup.I am adjusting well to the new way.Late at night, I call my long distance lJeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
17UndatedI realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go.Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
18UndatedI mean, have you ever imaginedthe ocean is alive, and needs to tell us something important, and the only way it can talkis by making waves crash, and we just lounge there, drenched in cocoa butter, on towels with crappy novels and volleyballs, sipping spritzers, as the ocean uses all its strength to repeatthe same warning over and over?Jeffrey McDaniel / quote ↗
