"Can I Trust You?' (Some Short Poems about Trust)

TRUST


"Can I trust you?"

I mutter to myself often.

As though I'm standing
on a shady street corner.

Considering a deal.




TRUST


Dead lovers already way decided.
Famous Liberators and cartoon characters
of the soul equally.
Doctors. And dealers. And brothers.
Dead poets. Wormlike poems.
I mutter it even to food.

"Can I trust you?" I ask food.




TRUST


This endless mantra is the battery
of human existence mostly.
This is even while walking down the street,
watching a movie or intensely fucking somebody.





CAN I TRUST YOU?

The ill and dying are those who have dead batteries
or will soon. We run the other direction
when they ask: "Can I trust you?"

HELL NAWL. YOU A DYING BITCH!




TRUST


"Can I trust you?" can be said
many other ways. Pathetically.

Think of those rhetorical questions
people used to carve on tombstones.




TRUST

I laughed at my lover who was not my lover
while he was standing on a cliff,
and I smeared cum on his face.

"But can I trust you?"
I stupidly asked the earth, which was promiscuous,
more promiscuous than any reader.

It was the earth.

It was my lover.



TRUST

(Writers are usually men who spread their legs
and imagine they give birth too.)

Sometimes they are women
who have actually spread their legs

and seem to have a little more credibility.




TRUST


Today the soil in the backyard
felt darkly vaginal when I pushed my hands
down into it, thinking about a man,
yes it's always a man
that I can't trust. I guess I like
not trusting you, because I married you.

Happy Anniversary!




TRUST


"Can I trust you?" I say to rebirth, death, rebirth.

How fractal-loving starlings all turn at once in the sky,
the crowd is not on my side.

But that's okay
because it has to be.

I trust sky over the starlings anyway.




TRUST


"Can I trust you?" I whisper to crosstown buses
that grow an eerie green at dinnertime
as winter approaches. To the stranger
on the other side of this poem
it soon becomes apparent I matter to myself darkly
and unconvincingly. That I am like
that crosstown bus. Except I am language.





TRUST


as I am delivered over to the public transportation
of the bus, which in some ways is like the public transportation
of the Bible? Public transportation
is filled with parables and Biblical shit like that.
Prophets with shopping bags or backpacks.

Imagine a schoolbus filled with angels
all sitting patiently as first graders in the seats.

And Lucifer is the bus driver.

That's pretty much the situation.




TRUST


Or are you one of those asshole fractal starlings
that turn in the sky all at once,
a giant ball of you, a clusterfuck, pretending
you trust each other
as you weave in and out of the girders of the bridge
dead people built over that river
which will soon be ice,

as you stare not very deeply

into the bridgework of each other's faces.