two poems

by Jason Davidson

Hoax

you invented your own language in a pale attempt 

to try and describe it, but each time that we touched

one another we were violent and you smiled, 

you pried my lips apart with pliers and reached down 

my windpipe trying to find it, but just like I vowed, 

I wore my horseshoes brightly and I stayed silent. 

but you roared open like the dead ocean, you combed

all the beaches while the night-storms rained, their blaming, 

their peaceful, pretty pain. if you found me in a seashell, 

you swore out loud you’d name me and I would be the same. 

shame on you, then, mr. rifle-man, mr. master-plan, 

mr. if we-can’t-figure-out-how-to-happen- for-one-another-other

then no one across the cosmos can. 

pretty words. but they were not verbs. they were better off dead.

they were the blisters of toads never kissed or the broken out loud 

condoms of a fuck-me-so-pretty sycophant, a ransom letter you etched

into the smooth flesh of my chest, my body grazed like 

the badlands, a mirage of stroking, stoking, morbid smoke. 

together, we were broken, mr. rifle-man, and I drank of you

until I was drowning in my own disbelief. my speeches 

drawn as deliberately as damselflies or sweet grey spies. 

we were a murder of crows. we were overthrowing our own

kingdom never built, each answer you ever offered for every

question that I slaughtered within my stained-glass throat.

I was busy raising my daughter out in the garden, grafting the 

branches and drenching the soil: the toil of love leaves us open. 

you saw that space, you hoisted me over your shoulder, walked 

me away from the whole disaster. once you knew I was marble, 

you cracked up like a canceled sequoia and offered:

when you finally finish me, we can always just say it was manslaughter.

we’ll hide under the sheets and we’ll kill one another over and over.

but I wasn’t a past-time. I didn’t bend over. I should have spoken up sooner. 

you are dead, you are dead, you are dead, your cock’s cherry red,

you are smashed into the back forty of my marsupial brain

like a weasel dream or a painkiller. you filled my prescription

and we hung on together at the edge of the vestibule kitchen,

while we wandered Nanakuli’s night market together. 

say it again like that, sailor. leave room in your bed while your wife

gives birth to your daughter out yonder. congratulations, dark star, 

now you’re a father: giddy up, cowboy, giddy up, giddy up, giddy up. 

at the night market, you hold my hand and strum in your silence, while

you tell the whole band that we really are boyfriends. 

a man in the back room is selling broken dreams, he claims he can 

fix us, shove the truth back down my throat and hold it there, quietly. 

he introduces me to my seven brothers and sisters, the changelings. 

you just roar like the voided ocean, and open your huge hands to reveal 

my dead mother’s blue womb: caked with blood, a space-ship, a bad trip. 

I’ve had enough of it, mr. rifle-man, go back and smack her around some

more, I’ll be cold asleep on the floor, with you sutured inside my skull’s

parlor,

a naked cowboy, a shining giant, a beautiful hoax, a permanent coma. 

Unwound (How to Finish the Novel)

 with thanks to Haruki Murakami

Using a clever and made-up name,

I register quietly at the front desk.

The young woman is watching Westerns

projected on the walls like horse-stalls,

free-falling, the call I missed that final winter.

She wears a woven hat and tells strawberry lies,

she purrs like a young spinster,

“Welcome to the Good Night Inn, Mister,”

and, as I listen, I am busy introducing myself

to me again, so I tap the counter with my pinky

so as not to miss the point of this mission,

but I do not know this woman well at all,

I can’t remember the smallest thing about me.

She tells me that her name is Nutmeg,

I explain that I read about her in a very

important novel, I begin to explain that I too-

but she cuts me off,

I am a stolen coastline, A California stop.

She says that she is intimate with only non-fiction.

Well, then.

I clear my throat of the sweet baggage,

the burning garbage, the stars I could

not stop eating. Speaking again, I explain that

I too-

But on the wall, the man in the movie,

he is a spotlight with his Stetson hat,

his tap-tap, his rusted, burning spurs.

He’s giving it, hard and dumb, to some

random boy leftover from the stables,

he laughs at me, he is packaged up like paper,

he is simple, pretty hatred and he wails,

“Going so soon, Mister? I must have misheard

you... I thought you said you missed her.”

His comet empties then, a needful trauma,

the boy coils up, a failed astronaut,

a road-kill armadillo.

I ask Nutmeg if she can call Dr. Crusher,

I begin to mention that I too-

but she slips the needle in my arm

like we must be in love with one another.

We are peaches and cream.

We are clean, meaningful murders.

She is sweet when I vomit,

convulse like a silent rockabilly,

your piss is only hot when summoned

like an unwelcome weekend visitor.

The black and red dancing a mating dance

inside my basic brain and this has happened

in hospitals, theatres, my old front porch

when all was grey and it would not stop raining.

It’s a shame then, I remember who I am now.

There is a rotten well in the bathroom

of my room at the wonderful Good Night Inn.

It is as spacious as New York, it goes on forever.

I awaken sunk down like Sucrets inside it.

Now I know how Toru got like that,

but it is not uncommon in the afternoon

for me to think my cat is missing.

I run around the house, a useless typhoon.

A loony bird who has lost his peck and needs

to crack his neck in order to get the fire going.

Nutmeg is calling for me from the top of the well.

She and the Cowboy are going at it now, it seems,

that’s just swell, I guess, everyone should have

someone that closes their eyes and sees them.

They don’t have any time for me, so I smile, and

go ahead with my shameless explanation:

I too am trying to finish my novel,

a hollow exploration of a darkened imagination,

but more than anything, I need to get these

goddamn people out of my head,

put them to bed, sullen, solemn children.

“Get on with it then, Mister,”

the spellbound Cowboy yells and

now I understand exactly how I know him.

My cat isn’t missing, he is right beside me,

studying LinkedIn and drinking the water from

the well, we are shell-shocked slap-stick.

We are always our own worst critics.

I clear my throat again, ease my mind,

tap in time with all of these old rememberings.

I get out my foolish phone and begin again with typing.

Photo of Jason Davidson

BIO: Jason Davidson is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and performer. He's written and directed over 200 works of experimental theatre and his one-act plays have been widely published. His poetry has appeared in Unbroken, Cathexis North, Quibble and other journals. Jason lives on California's Central Coast with his husband and four-legged children. Find him on Instagram at @jasonwriteswords or visit his site at jasonwriteswords.com.