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2012-02-15T13:27:00.000-06:00

I don't see any way out.

Tangled like a guileless slave with the belief
that I deserve to be where I am, serve
those who are used to being served, but not as well
not quite as well as they're accustomed to.

So start the derisions, so start the beatings.
From every one I learned a lesson,
I swear, even if I make the same mistakes again
even if I show no sign of understanding.

There are too many stars in the sky
for me to begin to define what a star is.

There are too many fish in the ocean
for me to catch one, flay it, study its anatomy
to begin to catalogue them one by one would be to kowtow

to the immensity of life.
Save that for my masters, who have nothing else
to bow to. I haven't got the strength left in me.

I don't see any way out
because the innumerable winding paths
blur into an impenetrable fog.

2012-02-13T13:47:00.001-06:00

As terrifying as it is real,
as real as it is boring
cup after cup, the days go
by, weather changing outside the city,
inside is only slow decay, the scattering
and then regathering of dust and thoughts.

I can't percieve in my small way
the tiny ways in which
everything I see is either growing
or falling apart,
and the simple knowledge that it goes on happening anyway
bores and terrifies me, as I am bored and terrified by
television, genocide, and people.

There is no danger in lightning,
but I hear it crackle constantly.
There is no danger in poison,
yet my food and drink taste tainted.
There is no danger in betrayal
and yet seething torrents of love and hate
mash together in the currents of the sky.

As terrifying as it is real,
as real as it is boring,
I make sandwich after sandwich,
drinking coffee all the while
past the time it takes to think every thought
past the time it takes to bore of every person
past the time it takes to overcome all fear
past the time it takes to wear out all of my sarcastic smiles.

2012-02-10T13:37:00.000-06:00

terror and hatred, hatred and terror
not explosions in my mind, there is no
Hiroshima in my mind, there is only the slow march
of a war that is a real war,

that is give and take of ground, starving out,
trench-foot, beating with a rifle butt
because there's no steel left for ammo, one
particular general, well known, skins
his victims with a fishing knife,

there are famous ones like him who stand around
like books for their complexity of meaning,
spots to focus on. But there are also the faceless thousands
writhing and dying or living in hopeless fear
or dead already, their families dragged
across the mire and raped.

terror and hatred, hatred and terror
and every false respite condenses the world that much more
brings the war that much closer, makes it real.

Until I do believe, finally,
that we are all monsters, and yet
we are all victims, and yet
we have no say in anything we do.

And that anyone who doesn't think those things are true
it's only because they never think at all.

2012-02-08T04:46:00.003-06:00

Last night Salmacis entered my dream
and whispered many things to me
that I can remember just well enough
to be unable to repeat.

It wouldn't be fair to say I've been waiting for her
though I was starved, and she offered food,
and I was tired, and she offered rest,
and nothing in this world could compare, drought of droughts,
with the way her vagina satisfied me.

Today I trimmed my hair, deactivated my facebook account
and wrote a poem that makes me a little uncomfortable to read.
Is it the language? The juxtaposition of symbols?

Nevermind. My life is slipping away, the years collapse
and I am covered in dust and regret. I don't know what to hope for.
I've felt this way before. A series of girls coaxed me away
from feeling suicidal, yet so afraid of death I couldn't breathe.

Now, again, I lay awake at night
trying to draw a circle around eternity
so that it won't keep me awake a second longer.

Now I feel that life is a part of eternity, as well as death,
and so this moment is conceptually no different
from the third hour of the fourth evening of the eight hundred
and thirtieth year after my death, to me or to anyone else.

I have cut the comfort of conversation, alienated myself from the girl I love
because it is precisely that comfort that has made this darkness come.

Salmacis, you horrible monster, come back
I hate you, and that hatred helps me sleep.

589 revisited

2012-02-06T13:28:00.005-06:00

Suddenly
our eyes are almost touching

we can't close them, no
that kind of violence would be
unforgivable

and we would never trade
this closeness for
the ability to see, for focus, we
would rather stutter over
the soft shapes
semi-reflections and shimmerings
the wavering pupils, searching
for the joy of searching.
We would much rather stare than see, and we

would never give up
feeling (or being) this close
to each others' eyes (or to each other)
to be able to see (or comprehend) one another, yet

every day we do, and every day;
Is it the distance? Is it our growing
recognition? I don't know, but every day
your eyes seem less like portals, more like jewels.

2012-02-03T12:59:00.001-06:00

The internet is a horrible distraction.
Where was I? Have I come here again
to list, like an accountant,
the things I believe opposite those I don't
add, subtract, quantify somehow
their effects, and who's to blame?

Get me away from this horrible form of expression!
I realize that I'm only writing these obscure
personal, transcendental (which is another word for simple)
and repetitive odes because the information
is close at hand, and it doesn't take long
to jot them down. It is, in short,
a bad habit, which I use because I'm out of practice
and indolent, and this interstice
can only be ended by force of will.

But the internet is a horrible distraction,
and people are a horrible distraction
and I am a horrible distraction.

Where was I? On this blank sheet of paper,
wandering again. Drawing idly with a branch
tossing stones, knuckle deep in gravel,
grass around my toes, air runs through my skull,
and I do think I'm freer here
than in an actual wilderness, and more at home
here than in my actual home.

I just need to clean house. Mark my territory.
Lay claim without laying waste, return
as a king returning from a war, and unload
all these treasures and turn them into wealth.

2012-02-01T01:13:00.000-06:00

Tonight, only you can calm me
your voice, your words, it must be you.
why am I so picky?

By the morning it will be
someone strange, someone new.
why am I so fickle?

Can no one person satisfy me
just for a month, just for a week or two?
why am I so sickly?

There is something seriously wrong, that
I've never doubted. I just can't decide
if it's in me or in the world, this disease.
My friends claim there isn't a difference.
My friends are idiots.

The symptoms may be the same
but the cures are polar opposites.
Do I change the world, or allow the world
to change me? There is of course some middle ground:
what my friends call sanity.

2012-01-30T15:35:00.005-06:00

Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy,
for we have had more than enough of contempt,
Too much of the scorn of the indolent rich,
and of the derision of the proud.

I have made way through dirt and dirty things
towards a light that buries with its weight
the bones and stones of the living,
as the dirt of the abbey buries the dead.

Light so thick it could be swum like water
if my arms were not weak to the point of uselessness.
If my legs were not worn to the point of breaking.
If my soul were not heavy with dirt and dirty things.

It tangles through my skull freely as wind
there are times I feel it must be pulled out, and so I pull
often it takes some little grime with it, and drifts upward again.
Once it took a piece of my brain, a little one,
on accident, I'm sure. I'm sure I could have retrieved it, too,
if I wasn't in so much pain.

I think that the light is playing with me
in the absentminded way that children play.
So make my way back, heavy-hearted, scorned
by my own expectations, my own weight.
Make my way back through dirt and dirty things
towards a light that is light and buries nothing.

2012-01-27T18:02:00.001-06:00

I've made a lot of mistakes.

I don't know what I was doing.
The first time I thought it was ok.
The second time I couldn't help myself

after that I didn't think at all.

New Years Eve my mind exploded,
a pastiche of stories, none of them mine,
of the addict's overdose, the predator's plan,
the young man's mistakes, the cops' injustice,
the victim shrieking, but I was both the victim
and the murderer.

Yes I was the murderer, that night.
I hope I can't remember it, but I refuse to try.

Without beliefs, my mind would wander
without a home, I'd run my mouth
at anyone to get through another hour.

Overnight a thousand posters
bearing a face no one but I could recognize,
it didn't look like me, but it was me. It stared
cold, desolate, and it was me. But only I knew it was me.
Cold, desolate, it stared. I stared. It stared at me.

Every corner a grim reminder of something
too big to comprehend, some thousand intertwined mistakes
starting at birth, ending here, same old city,
but suddenly. Suddenly. Everywhere I look is me.

They're going to find me. I'm under all their noses,
and I killed their sweetheart, their friend, their Esme.
I'm under my own nose, and I smell like death.

Every corner a grim reminder, every grim corner a reminder
I've made a lot of mistakes, more than you'll ever know.
Now, now, once again, the hate rises in my throat
the hate rises like a wet warm stench
and I know where it must go. Where I must go;
I know the road well by now.

2012-01-20T04:51:00.000-06:00

wasted love there was no love feel sad but do not hope
others might feel sad for you, not on this occasion.

The walls are cracked, the ceiling cracked, spiders
dart into the kitchen for a drink, such is our atmosphere
of chill and calm so severe that we notice every
minor inconvenience, every speck of decay, and so
of course your loss seems large from where we are.

Yet the curse of man (or the one I'm most concerned with)
is the ability to see beyond what he can see, and there

I've spoken to you of the children of God -- I'm trying
to drop that religious moniker, they're so much more than that.
The children of God will say what a good thing it was
that this little bit of wasted love was wasted.

You know they're my invention, and I have to side with them.
Did I say they were my invention? No, I only gave them a name.
Come to think of it, you might be one of them.

What was I saying? Something about love, something about
the people I admire... Oh well, just don't expect me
to feel sorry for you today. You know how stubborn I am
(moral, in my opinion, and that makes a difference)
and how loyal. Feeling sad for you now
would be an insult to your strength, and to my sadness.

2012-01-16T14:44:00.002-06:00

In the bible God is defined as a human system.

One of those systems we've created, that is,
that appeared at a fixed time by our own ingenuity
and yet describe and contain all of time
from our perception at least. In the beginning was the word;
mathematics, logic, and reason. From these we created
and maintain the sciences, physics, society;
in short, we created the world.

And after creating it, it had always existed.

The name God is nothing but an anachronism, but
it may yet serve a purpose. For this form of creation
that integrates into all creation, enriches
and redefines all creation, needs no name
yet has a thousand. Let God describe the feeling
of contemplating that contradiction.

Let God describe the unreasonable love of reason.

2012-01-13T03:45:00.000-06:00

Had we not met entwined with that deeply colorful catalyst, that bleak and tiresome backdrop, that restaurant
we would not have spoken, would have never met at all. But there is something about that place that fosters friendship
especially among two souls inclined as ours. Had we not met at this specific moment, this specific month of my long life
you never would have thought that my intentions or my feelings lay more with my words than my (in)actions.

I do not love you, that you knew. Neither am I drawn to your slight white body. If I have a stake, any stake
in what you do and who you know, it's because of that old adage "don't speak to me of lovers with a broken heart,"
do you want to know what will really tear you apart? To share everything and nothing, to find a matching mind
(how closely matching? Not too close, but then that's half the point) and simply not to care as much as I had hoped.

Can we manage to maintain as we have, without change, without growth. without processing, or coming close
or drifting apart? Perhaps that wouldn't be anything new for you. It would be miraculous for me. Without a specific goal
I often let my habits fall from me. They don't stumble away out of disuse, I crumple them in a moment of hatred, festered
by the pseudomorph they make. With a goal, well it depends; the most common is to surpass that nebulous meaninglessness: friends.

In favor of what? Confidante, or lover, or brother, or even rival, I suppose. Let's not dwell on that, as I said,
my goal with you is to have no goal. Does that mean I've already failed? Not quite, it's far from paradoxical,
it's just complex. As you are. As I am. Don't presume to know me, even when I say you do. I'll try not to do the same to you.
I enjoy what we have, and that in and of itself is rare. So if I grab your ass, or play with your hair, don't turn around
and pity me, and wish you could obey, if only for my sanity. I don't want to fuck you, I just love that moment
(like stepping off a missing stair) when you change your tone, your stance, your stare.

2012-01-06T16:49:00.001-06:00

Hey Satan, save me from this fate
I can't stand I really can't face myself
through writing, or in any other way
so use your minimum wage prisons,
ignite a lonely flame -- anything you can
to assuage my fear that I am myself
Satan, come, by any of your names.

Hey Dionysus, Happy Satan, like a fat Buddha
send me to sleep, or waking, I'll stare at walls
pretending to contemplate the little truths
within the little lies within the little lives
I deride so much I can't think on them at all.

Hey Jesus, Ascetic Satan, tell me that I
by denying myself art, ability,
am learning to accept the nature of nothingness,
of the world, of the unity of all.
Tell me to sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice
and hang my head above all others
in humility.

Hey Satan, if any being spawned from any religion
could have created them all, it is you. So I invoke
your silly name, your thousand forms, legs
of a docile goat, breath of a wise dragon
calm and waiting, contemplating
the nature of God.

I invoke you even though you are meaningless, and powerless.
Real meaning, real power, exists in abundance within me,
but I'm afraid to invoke myself. Help me.

2012-01-04T02:26:00.000-06:00

I feel that today is a day
when the beauty of a million little things
must be reaffirmed -- but
right now I can't seem to think of them
can only sense a muddled collective
like the glitter of the sun on speckled streets.

deeper within, I know, we all know,
that these things must reaffirm themselves
that worry isn't something kept inside us
but an emotional static that penetrates the town.

The child who can't bring himself to bathe
the woman who is singing painful songs
in a voice that's on the edge of ecstasy
the child wrist deep in mud and gravel
the man whose life is not slipping away

every flower is a soldier in their army
every raindrop is a footstep in their march
every smile is a bullet in their weapons
and they pierce us all directly through the heart.

look up to the terrifying heavens
the stars beyond number, what do you think?
And each one host to several planets,
each planet host to something indistinct --

Infinity and eternity don't have to be the rocks
against which all our tiny heads will break
though they describe the inconceivable
in terms we understand perfectly - those of death -
they circumscribe enough immutable beauty
to weep with joy across their horrid breadth.

2011-12-09T21:46:00.000-06:00

Panorama of Sylvia Claire is finally complete! I'm excited, even if I show no outward signs. I would like regular updates to resume from the point forward, but realistically I can't promise that. Good luck to both of us, eh?

2011-11-23T21:43:00.004-06:00

I give myself to luck, on the banks
of the tumultuous chasm where random chance
by force of numbers becomes certainty
and certainty, by weakness, becomes death.

As every weakness, every certainty must
eventually become death to an extremist
a philosopher, or a victim of depression.
I give myself to luck, knowing this,

and into the chasm I tumble again
because every decent moment in my life
was on that climb.

2011-11-21T14:32:00.000-06:00

Some people need to be tempered in the elements, like a sword.
Others need to be tempered by emotion, the slow wilt
of a directionless love, the ghostly thunderhead
of dissatisfaction, of hate for one's governors
and the lies of the state, necessarily peppered
by the swift, intense rain of love for one's people.

Some need to be tempered by words, and never leave the library,
which is the universe. Some need to be tempered by warmth, and inaction,
like an egg. Some need to be tempered by harsh critique
and pure rejection, and if they ever get their way
they become soft and docile and useless.

Most of us will never be tempered at all,
if only because we haven't found our way.
We will be called the ignorant masses,
the lazy, fawning aristocrats, the Nazi army.
Of course to some extent it's true --
but don't dwell on that, it's only the nature
of those without the courage to enter the forge
to follow one who has come and gone from it.

And it's only the nature of a man subsumed in fire
to rage against those who aren't in pain.

2011-11-18T03:02:00.000-06:00

Knowing me not at all, Orpheus sings
a song composed in his lonely repressing of reality,
expects me to be wooed, or won, or delighted
by the simple words, the simple melody
of a man whose worldview's blighted
by the image (not the truth) of me

Knowing the birds not at all, not a bit,
Orpheus sings his little diaries
as if they flew, or in any way divined
the rightful path of air through
the wrong-as-mortals sky.

Foolish carpenter, he builds
a table for human contentment, while
the hand of god designs an ugly, little thing
that seems to have no purpose, yet
can transform oil and ozone
into oxygen and water and light.

If I begin to sing, I open myself
up to that critical comparison, that
demonic inequality. Instead I weep
and weep and weep and weep
and hear his singing, and weep
and weep and weep.

2011-11-16T21:43:00.001-06:00

Woken up again, in a strange city.
By what, I don't know, but I'm in the basement
of a strange house in a strange city,
and I've woken at the same time every day here
for a month or so now. Walking the streets
at all hours of the day, I take notes
on the people I see, so I can faithfully repeat
that yes; people are the same everywhere you go.

Or that they aren't, because I think
that may be an important thing to know.
The air is different -- Rilke said
that all cities smell in Summer, well,
living in the middle of Texas,
in the age of machines, I never smelled anything
except on the coldest days of winter,
except in this city, and one I visited as a child.

Here the people are serious, the streets are all named
after presidents or trees, and the weather is mild.
Every little detail means so much to me, only because
the city is strange, so different, so similar,
and contains both the affirmation and the destruction
of everything I've ever known about life.
Honey rises from the street drains, until it drowns me.
This is their idea of punishment?

2011-11-14T06:34:00.000-06:00

I'd rather walk a thousand miles than watch you fawn over a douchebag

I'd rather drink my heart's content and drown it there and die
than spend a minute sober here, where the highway takes a steep dip down
perpendicular to the earth, and cars enter the ground.

than spend a second sober here, and try to meet your eyes
confidently or shyly, in a world not my own, not one
I would ever choose in a million billion years
to be born in, to see, to know about.

I've already seen the stars snuffed out, not one by one
like the men of the army of the revolution, but all at once
in a huff of light and smoke, like the jews of the holocaust.

If only the best minds of my generation had been destroyed by madness!
But they are so far from madness it's sickening!
Let us pay the price for faltering, in this sick world

seeing the roads set before us, the one
toward being a righteous man, the other
toward being a good man, and a third
toward being a happy man, and, for fear of missing out
or pigeon-holing, never take a step on any one!

The price for breaking with the eye of eternal vigilance
that is the only requirement for a sensible society,
and yet too steep, much too troublesome for us.

I'd rather walk a thousand miles than watch you fawn over a douchebag
not for your sake, not for any one's, I can't stand to be reminded
that I'm revolting, and I'm the only one,
that I'm the revolting one.

2011-11-11T04:38:00.002-06:00

you know when you set out to remember something vividly, if you can,
and it comes back to you in the half-sensible parlance of dreams?

or worse, you mix it up with some movie you saw
and then you're really lost - you'll never get the damn thing straight
and what good are the loves of Katherine Hepburn
or anyone else when you've just lost yours for the second time?

Worse yet! to realize it was a dream,
you did dream it. Then you wake, and waking has a strange quality
as if you had just fallen asleep, and everything around seems false,
and you want nothing more than to return... to wake
but you won't, not until a few years pass

and memories have combined, in their happy way,
that which is real, and that which is fake. Of course
by then it's even more difficult to return --
and it was originally impossible, or nearly

but piece by piece a memory reforms. Concentrate.
Was the chair here? or there?
Quite right, there wasn't a chair at all.
Day or night? if you're inside, what's the point?
so scratch that. What else? Was she smiling?

Was she there? were you there? well, then where were you?

   and the bum who spit words at you
   was once the preacher who taught a young man you admire
   the principles of story telling, who brought
   a smug, senseless woman to the brink of pride,
   who treats you like an insect, and is afraid to die.

And the moon! but no,
not the moon. Not the panorama of insects.

What then?
Not a face, but like a face remembered in a dream
when one has no body, no constrictions,
where you are not divided from the things you love
or the things you hate, but you are one in oblivion -- that face
that face seen from the inside of its body's belly

and that eye that contains the world.

2011-11-10T14:01:00.000-06:00

I apologize for the lack of updates. I've been lazy. Panorama of Sylvia Claire is approaching its fifth draft, and though I feel most of it is ready, the beginning is not, and that's quite an important part. I increasingly feel as if I'm treading old ground here, but that is an unavoidable symptom of growing older, and can be made useful.

2011-11-09T02:07:00.007-06:00

Cry not for our nation's dead
they shall not have died in vain,
let us look to the future instead.

The sons who've felt a soldier's dread
and seen their fathers bent by pain
cry not for our nation's dead.

The daughter's who've prayed and said
"The past dies too if you are slain --
let us look to the future instead!"

join their mothers in the flower bed
to busy the hands, busy the brain.
Cry not for our nation's dead

leaving their families; they never fled
but stood brave on some distant campaign!
Let us look to the future instead,

or better still the home front, where we're led
by gods of greed to war for their sick gain!
Cry not, for our nation's dead!
Let us look to the future instead.

2011-11-07T16:09:00.000-06:00

Who was it that said
everything real doesn't need us?

well, he made me feel
the penetrating all-reality of the things
around me, exactly how real
(that is, far too real) every single thing
I see now is.

yet it feels illusory, passive,
transient. Perhaps that's the way
that real things are, that everything
beautiful and lofty, everything great

is an invention of our feeble minds,
a dreamt-up comfort, a dreamt-up truth
(what is real isn't always what is true)
and it brings us such joy, such awe,

because it is both natural
and irrefutably ours --
everything real doesn't need us,

everything great relies on us completely, that is
knowing it doesn't need us, kneels and swears
allegiance anyway, out of respect, or love,
or some other sugary sentiment.

2011-11-04T04:53:00.001-05:00

I've done alright, I think, despite you.

Wish I could avoid your silencing palm,
wish you didn't shine so brightly

on weekends, at night, whenever I'm alone,
and need the broad darkness to guide me
home like an ocean, without reference, I could drift
and find direction without forcing it.

wish I could turn it on and off,
wish I could alter or hide it,

I've done alright, I think, at least
I know my faults (and everyone else's)
which is an ok place to be, at least
if you're no good at finding praises.

wish I could avoid speaking of it
wish I could not speak at all,

for the trouble I've caused, for the people
I've hurt, for the days I've sat panting
and clutching my heart. Achilles gave his ankle for it
Samson gave his hair. Every great man has his glory, has his fall.

Great women have their sons, and have their glory,
or at least their victories -- yet I can't think of one
at the moment who fell, except maybe Joan of Arc
(but let's face it, who didn't they burn in those days?)

wish I could forfeit this wavering voice
wish I could write for my time, and my life

instead of these songs that make no sense at all
and even their nonsense makes no sense at all
and even you must see what it's all worth

how little it's all worth

when the people you detest are more loved than you
and live longer and better lives, and all you have
to show for it are wishes, and doing alright.

2011-11-02T14:20:00.000-05:00

If we haven't yet had enough, then we never will.
I for one am still complacent, and I think
will never learn a decent lesson, no matter what.

Poetry! When I've known from birth
that a handful of people have controlled the world
from dawn til dusk, and night is falling soon
and hard and fast, and I write poetry!

How self-indulgent, not even egocentric -- id-centric.
And idiotic. What is it the corporate monoliths have done?
Well, they started a war to make money for their
ammunition business (it sold guns to families, not just soldiers)
and they got government funding shifted that way
away from education, which they turned into a racket
by cycling textbooks for no reason at all.

This is only a fraction. They've monetized warmth,
food, shelter, knowledge, art, and love.
And we are complicit, and complacent, and for all
our petty moral squabbling, we are all equally so.

So. So. If we haven't had enough just yet, it's only because
No. We all have different reasons, there are too many to count.
I can only marvel, dumbstruck, at how well the founding fathers
emulated the states of Rome, and play
the fiddle as we fall.

2011-10-31T13:58:00.000-05:00

Fresh rosemary growing in a vacant lot
in the best of all possible worlds

tastes like something that can't be tasted
and I know that half
of the person standing on this dais
is a statue, and the other half is living,
but for the life of me I can't tell which.

If I could explain exactly what I felt
and then decode what that explanation meant
and then could communicate that cypher

to fresh rosemary growing in a vacant lot
along with like-a-nose, and posies
of forget-me-nots, if I could only

see every day what I see today
(because I do, in fact, and yet...)

but in the best of all possible worlds

miracles are nothing without novelty,
and 90% of us are slaves to poverty.

2011-10-28T13:44:00.000-05:00

More than I've realized, my room is my sanctuary
and anyone unwelcome there is a nuisance to me.

There are many I would like to see, out and about,
at a bar or at a theater, many I would carry on my arm
and this, I think, wouldn't mean much. Even the other rooms
of my house, they don't belong to me, and don't mean much.

You're the only one I want in my room right now,
here where there is reality, where there are stakes,
where I'm alive. Will you come?

But I'm not here to ask that question!
Today, I only share desires, and by sharing
communicate, unite, in my own way --
the question means so much more, don't you think?

The moment of asking, the catalyst
between the instant and eternity, just as, leaving my room,
I leave the eternal stasis of solitude
for the momentary joys of transitory days

for the sole sake of the hope
that I can find some transitory thing
some contraband to bring back into this place
where things are able to remain.

2011-10-26T13:37:00.002-05:00

High contrast sensation; electricity
in 2 billion colors lit beyond
the half-imagined truth of distant stars
and yet the sky, outside the window looks
brighter and more colorful and more electric.

Dive into the glittering trees.
Two hundred deaths and counting,
and counting only me.

This is the world
This is the world
This also is the world.

There is contrast on the screen, contrast too
between the screen and reality, and further contrast
between these two contrasts. This I can add,
this I have seen:

Darkness is easy, it's only one thing.

2011-10-24T19:05:00.000-05:00

oh yes I'll accept
this hokey corporate jewel -
sure, some doubts remain
but all my friends say
that it's exceptionally cool.

and what else might
an American patriot want?
A big advertisement to ride around
and hear from every man in town
damn that lucky, lively cunt!

Does this make me a bourgeoisie sympathizer?
Oh just take the gift, relentless scrutinizer.

2011-10-21T15:38:00.000-05:00

And why, dear, aren't you published?
the doe asks, almost plaintively, although I know better
than to accuse her of that. Curiosity is, we know,
its own rhyme and reason, to be revered and not ignored.

I answer in the way unpublished poets do:
Ambition? Hah! If I had that, I would be king
of all the oceans, greater than Alexander
with his tiny world, I would hold all in my hand
like a savior or a tyrant!

Money? Feh! what need? I have all I want here.
A can of beans every other day, coffee and wine
every hour on the hour, enough left over
for a ticket to the theater, that is,
if I can't wriggle in for free.

Surely, though, I seek legitimacy? How can one be happy
writing in the dark, unsure of quality? How can one
define themselves that way? To this I say
I'm not quite sure. But I know poets, I've read
their magazines, and frankly
I don't think I could ever shove my head
that far up my own ass.

Better yet -- I have an answer that trumps all 3 of these!
I'm lazy, unmotivated and already half-asleep.

2011-10-19T15:31:00.000-05:00

For the sake of drama let it rain --
to make meetings more romantic, partings
more bittersweet, days inside
more forced-upon than granted.

For the sake of tragedy let it snow --
to hide the dying hiker, and his calls
to cover the bulbs and the hatchets
and strip the trees. To chill the maiden's heart,
worsen the knight's disease.

What is the weather of comedy? Clear skies --
I can't see it any other way. The joker, after all,
doesn't notice the weather at all,
and so it should be with his audience.
To dally a bit in a scene without world,
with no trivialities in the way of the absurd.

Today the fog is thick as a brain's gray matter
and nothing like an emotion penetrates.
Our eyes nuzzle the air, as a sobbing child
nuzzles his mother's breast. Our mouths
itch towards a smile, but cannot make the leap.
And we recognize, without a hint of excitement
that some evil men are hording souls
and turning them to gold, and killing billions.

2011-10-17T18:10:00.000-05:00

"For all your yapping... Not one comment!
WHO are [you] writing for because as far as I can tell there's no one here!"

Ah the mark of the attention whore - here
I'll give you everything you crave.

To write in the void of heavens colliding
with tragedies in the mind of a lunatic - and trust me,
we are all lunatics - to write

between trees in the forest, crumple the pages of your notebook
and one by one leave them in piles of wet leaves.

To drag a pen through the sand on an empty beach
and throw oneself into the ocean.

To drink three liters of Gin and scream
poetry at the children falling from the balconies
that hang out over college campuses like clouds
over rivers in winter.

Poetry falls from the sky in one hundred degree weather
rises from ovens on a winter day -

it never graces the desolate plains of the internet
where demons and children play.

It cannot exist under the horrifying gaze
of more than one entity, as it can't exist
in more than one space, or at more than one time,
it is the indecipherable instant.

Seek it, it cannot be found.
Quickly seen it scurries quick away -
simply put, poetry does not exist

or seems so clearly not to
that it makes no difference.

As I do when I get my way.

2011-10-14T10:50:00.002-05:00

If I wanted to be the largest man --
I could. I don't know if I could be as charming as Hitler
or as saccharine as Disney,
but I could be large in my own way.

It's difficult to know our own size
I assume, based on the monsters
I see on the street. To know you have no right
to judge another person, that you deserve
absolutely nothing, and yet
should get more than you've been given.

It's very difficult to be alive
without ice cream and scotch and vagina.

And suddenly whenever I hear someone complain
about another's work, or claim
they're good enough at anything to be respected
all I can think is "Have you seen Michelangelo's David?
What's the big deal? My dick is like twice that big."

2011-10-12T15:26:00.000-05:00

plastic houses one by one
sink under the plastic sun

moving but inches every day
plastic people work and play

towards what goal, what end?
let us not pretend

they have one, or have thought
to instill one there is not.

Coins like secrets exchange hands
die-cast people make demands

and lies like coins are paid
to keep them pacified, dissuade

them from acting out in force
the terror of their die-cast course.

Plastic houses one by one
emptied by the work they've done

emptied and left that way;
left by life, left by decay

sterile as a patient under the knife
empty of decay, empty of life.

2011-10-10T18:43:00.001-05:00

your heart is gold, cool and malleable,
how does it feel when someone close to you
bites into that sweet flesh to see if it's real?

close your chest, dear, I trust you.

your muscles are sore, your fingers fragile
and popping, your cushions of fat
melting in my hand like a cube of ice.

At this rate you will disappear.

at any rate, I've already forgotten you
once, and though just to say it makes me
unspeakably sad, I can't guarantee
I'll remember you this time.

All these little games you practice to keep you strong

have left you weak with exhaustion,
and powerless to stop me from consuming you.

You know as well as I do that
there's another muscle you should be exercising
your flesh gets stronger and stronger,

while under my cyanide breath
your heart becomes worn and muddied
and ready for extraction.

2011-10-07T15:12:00.000-05:00

dark clouds gather on the rim of the city
full of kids who aren't kids, adults
who aren't adults, and a thousand smiles
directionless, shapeless, happy and whole

as rain comes falling from the sky
sky sky, thunder peals like the line of bells
some foolhardy pilot propped on saturn's rings
and we hear saturn ringing constantly

but that wasn't what I meant to say
I sat down specifically to try and say
for once nothing about the sun or the rain
or the climate or the people or the sky

my brain, poor sore muscle
is rattled with sweat and wine
like the brain of an oracle

and my tarock pack and my tarot pack
and my tarocchi pack show numbers, their faces
erased, so that I can't tell
a sword from a rod from a coin from the world from the fool

perhaps it is the soft, white wood
that a coffin I saw once was made from
or the cold stainless steel that seems to decorate
every sterile restaurant in town,
collecting dust and grease and discontent

except for today. Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe every day, we'll see. and by see of course I mean
guess about relentlessly.

2011-10-05T16:37:00.000-05:00

Hiding in a summer squash
the saintly mother of a long-depressed
hash-obsessed half-poetess
waxy, flamey, flickers lamely
trying to re-manifest

as light. Ghost mother, no need.
Your daughter wants no more of you,
she needs your strength, and when
you disappear she'll rifle through
her memories and discover her memories
and kill you again to grow stronger.

All this is necessary
to progress through a generation
through this coreless, stagnant universe.
This and more, and her and I
carving a summer squash in autumn.

She chatters with spasms of you
and professes all your secrets.
She expects I care because I love her,
well, I'm done mourning.

I'll make dinner from your pulp
joy from your carved shell, an off-kilter
holiday from your axle-true funeral.
That, more than caring, is what life means to me.

2011-10-03T20:09:00.002-05:00

I wonder if I've lost the ability to register tragedy.
I can't seem in my mind to make anything in this life matter

can only feel the barrage of moods
like an animal on LSD, I can scramble
towards meaning like a roach on his back in the bathroom sink
can scramble towards the sky, or at least
try not to drown

I see desolate, rainy beaches, or foreign deserts
where nothing survives, and think
if I could only go there, be there,
I could be inspired, fall
in love with the world again, but I couldn't. Or if

these are my desires, did I ever really stop loving it? perhaps
I'm only mystified by what my love's returned -
nothing new, nothing beautiful, nothing ugly.
As if I thought this were an exchange, an argument with life
but was only sacrificing love to some great, unchanging sky.

A white van passes by, a grackle flies past
I breathe through book-lungs
and watch the leaves turn brittle, delicate and brown
not from autumn, silent muse, but from a drought
no liquid could diffuse, a van whiter
than anything in nature passes by, the driver
never noticing a world exists outside.

2011-09-30T19:48:00.002-05:00

too much fire, too much sleep,
elemental dissonance, the shocked desire
disruptive alchemy in the cleavage of a new-age god
7 arms inside her, and a hack beatnik
designed her for just this kind of new-stupidity.

yesterday a song grew stronger
twice the size of a New York monster
stomped around the avenues of my heart, where
voluptuous candy-mouthed maidens sang
little tyrant songs, his children and his enemies,
and crushed and arooed in the way mad monsters do.

I wish I could dispute it - liver-death
pickled thymus, a beating red soursop with a stony village on top
I wish simply not to know. And see the sun
like a prehistoric man, fire-in-the-sky
day-lantern, god-ball, radiant sun.

Watch food and shelter and pain and sorrow
shoot from the earth in incomprehensible forms

pole, or leaf, or great yellow spikes around a sulfurous smelling orb
and feel that magic, know that fear, and yet
crush that magic and that fear in your hand like a dollar bill
not to smile at it, not for any reason. Just to feel.
Because these are the tools of our work, and no sane man reveres his tools.

2011-09-28T19:58:00.001-05:00

The duck is not allowed to make a sound.

In this heat, he hides beneath a bridge
and quacks like meteors sound in my skull
cratering my chewing gum brain.

No one may speak! Sun!
how dare you shine on me?
come down this instant, you monster!

Why, where would you be without me, duck?
Dying by the dozens in an ocean of muck.
And you, oh great and cynical sun?
shining like a magma flow, on nothing, on no one.

Yet do you show the slightest gratitude?
Hah! You throw it back in my face, you argue
and spit ale and chunks of meat across the room
shouting in your best barbarian voice
that I know nothing, while you feast
and feast on things I've left untouched for you

Oceans, valleys, useless beautiful things
you seem to treasure so much, idiotic ingrates!
Choke, go ahead, sun, choke on being seen.
Duck! Quack one more time, I dare you!
We'll see how you like a philips head screwdriver
inside that wonky corkscrew vagina!

This is my Earth, my home,
you wear out your welcome quickly
arrogant beasts, idle, thankless beings!
My world! My Earth!
Don't you dare ignore me.

2011-09-26T20:22:00.000-05:00

violent Viola, tuned by the deaf matron
to perfect pitch, I almost have the urge
to destroy it, not quite out of fear
of her perfection, or even fear of all I lack
and will always lack, not fear of perfect music drifting from
the arms of a woman without hands, while I
dumbly stutter over strings that twist and snap,
wrenching notes from the source of sound
like a raccoon cornered, trapped, and wrenching
sounds like lengths of intestine from his gut.

No, those fears are meaningless, unfounded.
I have the urge to destroy this the same way
I would destroy any miracle in reach.

If I had discovered the rosetta stone
I would have scarred its surface, and shattered it.

I can see it now, tired from the journey
walking through the ruins of pompeii
placing dinosaur bones here or there, and keys
and sitting down with a pot of coffee at a table
where a woman dead for thousands of years still sits
and waiting for another explorer to come, I'll turn, and say
"Oh, I didn't see you come in."

And pour hot coffee down the pillar's throat
as I would poor acid down the deaf matron's
to scar something miraculous in the name
of making it seem more miraculous, when I only
want to punish their dumb luck.

2011-09-23T15:54:00.002-05:00

In this part of the country, where the withered oil-stalks
fool the grass to wither, pushing early summers
and late summers and long summers,
the hedge-apples and the roses are indistinguishable.

Sentimental people like to say that if you
give a lady one of these roses, her hands will bleed
even if you pick off every thorn. They can't tell
much difference between people and pincushions anyway.

Yeah, this last month has been long and white,
day and night reaching into each other, and everything
looks pretty much the same. Whiskey and water,
sun and rain. In this part of the country, to be both trite

and content with triteness, love and hate seem much the same.
It's too hot to get close, trying to yell
is liable to make you suffocate. Only a cold brown ale
shows any emotion at all, sweating under our dead weight

sparkling like an auburn eye, bubbling like
an autumn laugh. The trees won't change colors this year,
they won't even sprout leaves. But you'll know
summer's ending when the line of old cars turn
from grey steel to red-orange rust
and fireflies light dances in their chassis.

2011-09-21T02:52:00.000-05:00

tonight I saw a golden stream of light
spread across the blue-green world
and noticed, for the first time,
strangers eyes, and the rain of leaves
that preceded autumn this year by a lifetime

what lifetime? The life I lived
by your side, in your arms, the years
we spent together, married, kids,
all that tragic cliche crap we somehow
took seriously, even relished in
the beauty of the too-often repeated play.

The lifetime that began and ended in a single hour.
Divorced from you by a kind of death
I've become terribly familiar with,
I know the world saw a splash of divinity
across the never-ending sky that unites us all
unites us, suffering, desiring, all,
and tried my best to smile knowing
you aren't special, and neither am I.

2011-09-19T20:46:00.001-05:00

there's nothing worse in this world than a poet.

always exalting in that lame way they exalt,
never stopping to have fun and just have fun
with a beer and the bass and warm body
grinding against them in the dark, strikingly dark
and youthful house of a summer afternoon.

feh, it's so difficult to believe in anything
or say I do for even a minute.
come, come, let us whisper of the tendrils of the beast
who devours our world, piece by piece.
Will he listen? Not like a king - I can't imagine
him listening that way. No, he will listen rapt
and wondering at all the big words we choose to use
and why we choose them, and he will marvel
as a child marvels at the things we do,
the beliefs we seem to cherish, and why?

He can't tell. As the teenage dancers can't tell
there is more than the rough tumbling of bass
and the jagged unconsciousness of drugs, and will dance
in a sexually stunted, awkward dance
and go home and weep about the times they didn't cum.

No, I definitely think there's nothing worse
in this world than a poet. Who is useful only to other poets,
and who feels only anger at people who aren't.

and writes his little chastising remarks
on tissue paper and leaves them in the rain.

2011-08-19T18:47:00.016-05:00

More birds than people here
eating scraps
of pesto, sushi rice, fair trade coffee
feathers sleek as a photograph
eyes quick and wide
as a hypochondriac's

In this haven we act
as human cornucopias & they
take advantage of us, as if
we were their mothers
as we feed them, bathe them,
keep away their predators

and think nothing of it, their
paradise being only a byproduct
of our miraculous excess, perhaps
this is how the universe regards us

scavengers of starlight,
rarely noting, never thanking
our aloof benefactors

2011-08-17T03:51:00.001-05:00

once upon a time
there was a little girl who was cursed only to speak in quotations
but
only in quotations she memorized before the age of 12
unfortunately, only words set to rhyme and rythym remained in her brain when she reached 18
and, distraught that she could only communicate in the parlance of disney music, she reached out to youtube for a community that could understand and love her
and found it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXFNYXHBmNg&feature=related

2011-08-15T05:45:00.000-05:00

not everyone survives cancer, you know

I had forgotten. After five or six scares,
five or six treatments, five or six survivors,
I came to think that cancer
didn't mean a death sentence anymore.

but what do I know?

I can't decide now whether comedy and tragedy are
to use a tired metaphor, two sides
of the same coin, or the same side
of the same coin, whose other side
holds apathy, ennui, and boredom.

one other time I've mentioned cancer in my poetry -
I postulated that its genesis was
in being born without love. How

many times have I abandoned a work halfway through
because I didn't understand it at the time?
Does cancer feel the same way,
when it picks a target and everybody boos?

no, I'm the wrong
person to be writing this.
This isn't fair. I'm not
objective, and I don't
know anything about disease
or tragedy - the worst moments
in my life were, after all, by all accounts,
invented entirely in my head!

sleep, for now. And then death.
would it be better to live
and rage as I never have before?
no - I would spend my last moments sleeping.
Ask anyone I know, it's true, it's true.

it's not the same when it happens to you.
when it happens to me I'll know
what an idiot I am, if I don't already.

2011-08-12T04:24:00.000-05:00

my demeanor? oh! I apologize -
it's my perogative to criticize,
and when I'm drunk I compromise
my ability to compromise
and so,
stranger bro,

whether you are smart or dumb,
preoccupied with what's to come
or what went out last week,
I'm a freak
wrapped in calm delirium
I speak
maybe because the day was hot,
maybe it's the rum I shot,
or the girl who takes
up all my thought, or possibly
the decades of philosophy
I took and then forgot

but yo,
stranger bro
I hope we're cool when morning breaks
and hours pass, 'til, wide awake
we go
to placate the strangers stranger
than the great strangers we know

who sow the seeds of greater woes
than strangely meeting, we let flow
I'm completely lost in rhyming now
and I don't remember what I was saying.

2011-08-10T02:42:00.001-05:00

reverence? feh. I don't pay much attention.
ya think I don't know that every goddamn thing I see
is a miracle of science, coincidence, impossibility
personified? I see people driving on the interstate
risking their lives to get around someone, maybe
gain a second on their trip. Don't they know
that going sixty miles an hour is a goddamn
impossible miracle, and that they're only demeaning
the ridiculous luxury by risking their lives to push it
slightly further into insanity?

but reverence, no. That implies I care.
that would mean I really got down on my knees and wept
when I turned on my AC in 100 degree weather
or saw a drama created 50 years ago channeled through
some modern box bigger than my body,
made of light and plastic, with even the faces
of the dead returning in perfect clarity or
drinking pure, clean water, cold as ice
without leaving the comfort of my home
(and what a miracle the home is in and of itself!)

I know this, yet I feel no reverence at all
for the immensely beautiful things our people made.
The reason? feh. Not one I can think of, unless, maybe
it's the realization that even genuine miracles
get boring pretty quick.

2011-08-08T02:33:00.000-05:00

god it's been a strange
life day week or month, no I can't
tell if I'm hungover or sick or what
I say things I don't think
I say, or ever would, but yes
I think things I would never think as well.

Desires contradict,
if they dictate anything at all
the flying of the bicycle is
like the falling of an avalanche,
the cracking of the whip is like
the smell of coke and oil and ranch

and here I am in bed again, where I often lay
for hours in the morning wasting time
without diluting any of my senses with sensation

only filtered light, and fan-blown air
and the mystery of time,
the way it passes when there's no one there

2011-08-05T15:22:00.006-05:00

Dear Time Warner Cable

I should mention first of all that I'm a long time customer,
and have never really had a problem with your service.
Sure, when you sent someone to install it,
he hooked everything up wrong and blamed it on the telephone pole,
sure you charged us for that month even though
we didn't get your services and it was your fault,
but overall, I expect that from corporations.

Today, however, I have a complaint. In an automatically sent email
you included the line "Thank you for allowing us to serve you."
I don't take kindly to being patronized off-hand by a service
that is simply supposed to report to me how much money
I owe you. You do not serve me at all, you don't even know
who I am, and if you were truly thankful, why,
you'd pay me for the opportunity! I am frankly insulted
that you think so little of me
as to include such a blatantly false, patronizing remark.

Here are a few suggestions on how to change this line
so that I don't withdraw from your service immediately:
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
"Pay up."
"Thank you for choosing Time Warner Cable."
"Thank you for allowing us to siphon money
from your account without giving any rationale
for the amount we charge for services that
may or may not actually be given."

Sincerely,
I know you don't care what my name is.

2011-08-03T14:56:00.004-05:00

...Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,

- from Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot

I came up with the best line of poetry of my life
told it to Sylvia, who repeated it like a bird,
let it twirl my head for hours, rewriting bits
of words, went for a walk, and heard

some crack-addicted homeless guy shouting it to the world.
I guess, sometimes, art and dementia are the same thing
"This is the kind of thing," Sylvia said to me
"that most people post on facebook or twitter."

Oh, for any other era! One that wouldn't, at least,
invade my space with myspace, my face and my book,
what a shitty place we live in, when we really look.
And it is I, the poet, who's looked on as the beast!

At least Sylvia understands me. Lets me wallow in
my half-hearted arrogant pretension for a moment or two
before saying "we may not be perfect,
but at least we enjoy ourselves."
it's a relief that my depression is a joke to her
in the same way death is a relief for cancer patients.

2011-08-01T18:46:00.008-05:00

when the buildings rose like giants' teeth
and every open road compressed against me
like a throat, you spoke, your tongue
mocking the world's lack of one, your lips
reminding me of how we entered this,
you said, you know, there's nothing we can do,
the whole modern world's conspiring against us

knowing this to be essentially true, I said,
yes well, but look, towers all around us, set with jewels
that any king a hundred years ago would dream of -
a bustling city where a little dementia means nothing
and a little conversation means so much, and beneath
it all, a thousand seeds waiting for our guard to drop
besides, if you want, there's always somewhere we can run.

but it's next to impossible to be romantic about
this world. Probably because we're in it.
You said how? where, exactly, could we go
where none of this asinine cultural propaganda
or crumbling economy wouldn't follow, evil eyes
wide open, where we couldn't see
the teeth of these towers in the distance, drawing near?

having no answer, no faith that an answer existed,
I only answered that we'd find somewhere,
drove her home to an empty kitchen, leaking pipes,
humid bare white rooms, made love to her there
and forgot about it all.

2011-07-29T18:46:00.000-05:00

The cold air is only passing through the valley
to charm an army of blue
and bottomless concrete streets

in its wake heat takes on
a visceral pulsation and anything that
isn't visceral turns from an ache
into a thought, like
desires do after masturbation.
how can I

outlive the dandelions? granting wishes
as they burst into a thousand dandelions
drinking - imagine it - milk and honey
from dry brown soil, transmuting
cum into gold, I

who was born deformed in a valley
overcast by the shadow of a troublesome brute
without a sun or moon to see me through
and howled like a dandelion, resolved

to other peaceful colors,
blue-green and gray, nothing circles the earth,
that is, she wears no ring, proving

at very least that she knows there may be a day
when we fall into her cold, pulsating heart
and she can no longer feed us.

how can I make a cowardly amends
for what she has done for me?
any morning in the park, disentangled from
my books and fantasies, down where
the event horizon dims,

where no one has passed or even tried
I will watch, dumbstruck,
as the dandelions condense and recombine
and multiply in ever-shrinking gardens,

oh, delicate nature,
how your childish hands skip over
our delicate flesh
and caress our bony elbows
nostrils and knees...

have you lost the will to punish us?
even as we cast you into that final peace
that is summer and winter simultaneously -

I want to give you my blood
and my meat, but am overwhelmed
by a nepenthe of apathetic dreams
and so, I can only watch these small weeds grow
as we are thrown into a black hole

whose field of gravity contains
more light than all the stars of heaven in their prime.

2011-07-27T17:06:00.000-05:00

On her windowsill the moon surveys

a line of bottles. The light plays
through them as liquor did before,
"Why put emptiness on display,"
I ask, "instead of something fine?"

"Scribbled notes," she says,
"for my next memoir."

pours another glass of wine
and adds a bottle to the score.

2011-07-25T14:56:00.000-05:00

someone in the other room is crying out in pain
I'm in pain but make no sound, and I prepare
to lift my sore body once more and work through
the night, wishing, rather, that there was some
impermanent form of death I could retreat to.

Paralyzed by disease and desire, if the two
aren't in fact the same, I make no sound
only nod at those around me, wave
at people I recognize along the way.

Trapped wherever I am (I don't recognize it,
should I?) I picture sitting on the edge
of a dirty creek I used to sit in every day
on my way home from school, both
to revel in the natural beauty and
to avoid returning to a house full of demons

and there I see nothing except my self,
my own face staring at the profile of my own face
so that there must be four of me at least,
and nothing else. So why
picture the creek at all? What,

exactly, am I thinking? I don't want to think.
I hate myself. When I go to work, I listen
to the drugged out old men ordering their food
and all I can think is that they're wasting my time.
But who has wasted more of my time than I have?
If I hate them, how much more must I hate myself?

I make the burger, shove it across the counter,
and tell them to enjoy, smile big as all outdoors.

2011-07-22T16:27:00.002-05:00

put up six poems today. I'm almost caught up.

----------------------------------------------

I stare at nothing
and I see you.

I felt thirteen years old
when I saw your panties today
but, to be fair,
you shouldn't ride a bike
in such a short skirt

and I hate feeling like a creep
but I do like feeling thirteen,
since I felt so much older at the time.

Now thunder is sounding from every direction
and clouds are cluttering up the sky
as they always do when god gets an erection -
not long before he sprays us in the eye -

and I stare at you
and I see nothing.

I remember the day
you wore your hair up
and I finally saw your face
for what it was.

I remember the day
we smoked weed by the pier
you were so paranoid, I thought
it was hilarious, and everything
I did made you so upset.

You know, it's true, when I look at you...
I want to fuck you worse than ever
but you're such a bitch, and you're so stupid...
I wish I was a misogynist when I was thirteen
so we could've done it then. Now I realize that
believing in gender equality
doesn't just mean that some men are scum,
it means some women are too

and I look at you
and don't know what to say.

2011-07-20T16:20:00.000-05:00

The sky is linoleum, a slime
distilled, shedding flakes of forceless wind
hiding the sun, so dull and thin, hiding

Well. look into the eyes
well, see, the children of god
are crying, asleep, with too little here
to sustain them, too much form,
too little meat, the children of god
fumble the streets as if they were nothing
but ordinary children, slave

to linoleum skies and drought and vinegar
and humid, windless circumstances.
Too much forgotten, so much, in fact,
that we think god is omnipotent and benevolent
and wise. That the trees press their roots
into gray styrofoam packing peanuts and accept
the diseases of the fauna, wipe

fungi away as if they were parasites
and begin waving in restless circles
afraid of the weeds around their feet.

See the bluebird on a branch, near
that cluster of pinecones? So smooth
and sleek without his wings, without even
the wounds where he bit them off.
So cute without his feet. When the children
of god wake up and realize
that god has died, can you imagine
how angry they'll be?

I can't wait.
They're so cute when they're angry
and they paint such pretty things.

2011-07-18T16:09:00.000-05:00

Fractured, thought erased by
flippant moods, fractured, time
distorted like a falling moon
reflected in the lake so flat
and fluid, fractured, I'd rather
be battered, rotten and sore
soft as a falling peach, thick
with worms, eaten, fractured, rather

than all these sharp edges
distinctions I can't bridge worlds,
no, homes I can't enter

it comes to a head, all comes to a head
an airy froth, it all comes off
as if it might explode
a billion times
and then it goes, leaving nothing
no noise or impression I can call
worthwhile or disruptive or fractured

erased, maybe. I snap
at everyone who tries to help
punch a few cardboard boxes
and sing along to certain songs
in cathartic grumbling notes
and still feel my heart beating
fractured beats, as if
it weren't pumping blood, but sand

and I imagine only
tall grass to walk through,
and a stranger's hand, and a country
far off in the distance, on the brink
of war, a strange war
that will fracture the hillside
and I actually see the hills,
the green hills fractured

and from the great rifts made in the land
green smoke emerges, and all the dead
who ever died come walking out
carrying the eggs of fractured birds,
or else the stars which, fractured
from the edge of the galaxy, exploded long ago

perhaps a dog or two, some cows
and all those poor families
fractured by death over the years
come together again, see each other
and remember what love is.

2011-07-15T15:31:00.002-05:00

Lightning strikes, drawing yellow yarn
either across my eyes, or across the sky,
I can't tell. A forest of gray trees
hovering where, somehow, all their trunks
were amputated, sway without swaying
and move without moving the moonlight,
in the moonlight, and the waxing waxy moon
melts against my eyes
as if it were a clear summer night.

I'm reminded of a girl I love and hate
and what she does with yarn
and how she looks at trees
and moons just slightly out of place.
I slept for seven years last night,
and dreamt the longest dream

broken, possibly,
by one of the storms I scratch a sketch of now.

I hoped to sleep forever,
now I don't hope, I only survive
anticipating a cold, clear, dreamless night
with only the fragrance of old rain
to pacify.

2011-07-13T15:14:00.000-05:00

you must be so disappointed in me.
twenty three years old already, I barely
graduated high school, I've
worked for minimum wage for about five years
and my few classes at community college
amounted to nothing.

Those poems you were so proud of? They were shit.
Worse, I'm not writing as well as I did then.
When I do write, when I'm able,
I just go on about nothing, starting
conversations with people I can't stand to talk to.

What else? I'm not married, I've only been
in one real relationship and I'm still so neurotic
I can't imagine fucking a stranger.

I don't have a driver's license, I drink too much,
I only have about five friends, and I'm not good
at anything but video games. I've only read
two books this year and a handful of poems,
and I don't watch good movies or read
literary magazines or follow the news.

You must really be very disappointed in me,
but guess what? I'm much more disappointed in you.

You had everything I've ever wanted.
A few odd skills, intelligence and strength of will,
and most of all social graces and more love
than you knew what to do with
and you let it all fall away from you out of sheer laziness
and left me with nothing at all. Left me with nothing
but three brothers who also have nothing,
a lot of hatred for the world and a little bit of love
for literature and people with common sense.

So you had a hole in your heart? So what? It runs in the family.
I'm tired of revering you, dad,
and if you are disappointed in me, well,
you're not the only one.

2011-07-11T07:09:00.000-05:00

some days life is like some immense and petrifying standardized test
that you're not sure whether or not to take seriously -
they say it's difficult, but really they mean
you won't get all the answers right all the time.

I was a little upset when they said seventy percent was good enough
because, hey, we're here to learn, and I don't like thinking
most of my classmates get out with only a portion of what
we've been thinking of all year as necessary information.

Then they lowered the bar further, not because people started failing,
but because they complained about not passing with a high enough grade.
So I think, now, roughly thirty percent is enough to make it through
and don't worry about it so much, they know what to expect
when your next class starts.

Some days life is like public school. Everyone expects you
to be lazy, and stupid, and they'll give you a gold star
just for showing up and smiling.

In Illinois, an entrepreneur installed in one of his
many concrete cubes the stuffed corpse
of an elephant he shot on holiday. In Africa
a lion drinks from a dirty lake and has never felt
so satisfied. The sun is beginning to set, pink and orange.

2011-07-08T07:09:00.002-05:00

a second draft
-------------------------------
The leaves are gray, twisting from their branches
in epileptic fits, as the sky roils and spits
filling the avenues with tea and soil

the sun, sat on like a child by the earth,
cries uncle, rises callous and embarrassed
and begins to burn us, not out of spite or malice
but because its worthless power must be reaffirmed.

Still the dirt is in the air, the spilt smell of a
spade striking a root, or of a pine box
just built - my friend interrupts
and locks my reminiscence
away with her murky talk

and the streets are murky where we walk,
and I slow to reaffirm my footing
because the ground here, like her voice
feels as loose as pudding.

rain in summer always disrupts more than it quenches,
it leaves too soon and takes too much with it.
perhaps the plants
are greener, and there are more bugs and children
playing in the thicket, but as we pass,

my friend and I, we dwell on small
annoyances and notice only that our lips are dry
and we're out of choices.

2011-07-06T06:43:00.001-05:00

for the sky to be beautiful, and yet

two clouds dance like lovers there
feeling the pain that lovers feel
before exploding into rain

and for the squirrel, wrapped around
a thin tree, climbing
in and out of the ether, up and up, and yet

for the peppers,
just beginning to flower
potted and placed on a shelf in the valley
like poisons in a chemist's shop

stretching their roots into fertile earth
and knowing nothing else,
not their latin names,
not their prices, and yet

the cats dive in and out of each other
we've had them for a while now,
and know them better than our friends

they hunt roaches at twilight -
the bigger one brings them in alive
for the thin one to kill

then they lay down and clean each other
as if nothing has happened.

seeing that the nature of things
remains at peace among the bitching yuppies
drugged out parents and useless, clueless kids

makes me smile for just a moment, and yet
makes no mark against my anger or my pride.

2011-07-04T11:14:00.000-05:00

If, in your condo, in the morning,
you hear a faint rattle
and slip, nearly dying,
on a snake's discarded skin

ever again, don't blame me.
Snakes have had a bad rap ever since
you know, those bible stories
your momma used to quote you
as if they were gospel,
probably because they killed a lot of people
with a little peck on the cheek
or on the ankle.

My infamy is rather new.
It's something I haven't quite
gotten used to yet, but I like nature,
it has a way of succeeding with grace
everything humans fail to do,
it has a way of breaking us back down.

I've broken you down twice this week,
or at least I've broken us. I've traced it back

to the morning you called me, scared to death
because a rattlesnake
was hiding near your bed, and it was early,
and I thought that I'd rather see you bitten
than have to get up and across town

even if you died, and maybe
I did start that fight, and maybe
you did treat me better than I treated you,
but, sweetheart, a snake is a snake.

2011-07-01T05:15:00.001-05:00

She Said
I want someone to touch my pussy

though I can't tell anymore
what I believe, or how to write
a simple phrase I don't believe
I think I feel her near tonight,
amidst the shining of my grief

for a second only, her wet lips,
though she lives past the horizon,
past wrecked-out hulls of ships
where, every day, the tide is rising,

I think I feel the color of her skin,
beyond description, dark and pale -
not the major white of Gautier or Larkin -
but some stiffer drink than ale.

Let imagination dazzle me, for now,
let cum stain my clothes.
Beauty is a monster best let out
but when and where, god only knows,
and while good monks pass through collumns high and white,
good poets pass through trembling thighs
muttering prayers to sheer delight

no bird, or rose, or pearl, or cloud
suffices anymore. Beauty is actual,
to hell with metaphor.

She asked if I would eat her out,
and I looked away from the computer
for a second, noticed
it was raining, so I stepped outside and drowned.

2011-06-29T16:22:00.000-05:00

My child tried to run from home,
but couldn't make it past the door.

In her haste, as she made
it panting down the hall,
she called me a bum, and her mother a whore.
"Is that all?" I heard her mother call,
reading a magazine in the atrium.

"Listen, honey.
I've run away before."

"You have?" her conviction waivered,
and with a surge of feeling
the likes of which are rarer every day
I slavered at the thought of all that power,
and how, if I played it right,
I could have her entranced for another hour
right until she tired and went to bed.

"I was living in Texas, and I read
that some thousand people, somewhere,
wound up dead. I don't remember how.
I had a panic attack and fled
to another state, another town.
I just ran. And then"

"and then?" her hand on the doorknob,
her face bright red -

"I came home ashamed, that nothing had changed,
that some thousand people
in some faraway world were dead,
and in Texas no one even said
'where've you been? you just up and left?'

and I was worse off than before."

"Is that it? Is there more?
If you're trying to scare me,
it just won't work. I've heard it all."

"That's a laugh!" cried her mother from the hall.

"There's one thing more, yes,
and listen closely now." I leaned in close,
brought my voice down low
so my wife couldn't hear,

"It was the best thing I ever did.
I've never looked back, I've never
looked at anything the same way since."

and she looked at me and knew I meant it
and somehow that made her too weak to go.

2011-06-27T01:31:00.000-05:00

blue ball in the sky, the mountains
like frying pans lie
covered in grease
and pimples and eyes.

blue ball in the sky
from whence, to wither
a sphere, to bounce against my skull?
a disk, to gnaw my tether?
like-minded in success, the mountains
teeter totter

like an otter
missing a limb, or a
thalidomide baby trying to swim.

my head spins.
Where will I lie down to die tonight?
in the arms of Ophiucus,
in the red pool
of Tabris' eye,
in the blue pool of the blue ball in the sky?

Ah, I shouldn't cry
I have friends and wine, and work,
that doesn't require blood or a knife.
I haven't a whore
or a politician to choke on,
and my friends and I, and
our blue ball of wine, have plenty of fools
in the world to joke on.

like-minded in success, terrifying death
submits to rules I drew up out of spite.
and the mountains are sucked
and the mountains are siphoned
like pudding by the blue ball in the sky
and I might start climbing, I might.

2011-06-24T16:09:00.001-05:00

A Hello Kitty made of steel
clutched tight to her esophagus
and some strange god of Japanese culture
wrapped pink plastic around her wrists
and I thought, for an American
with blonde hair and blue eyes,
it must be strange to be chained, beaten
and slave to a second-rate capitalist.

but she was a second-rate girl, compromised
every virtue she held at least once.
I guess you could say I loved her because
of her childish style, bright colors,
and slavery. And she compromised
her virtue to try and love me,
but I left it for what it was.

Now I find myself longing
for the cold of Mount Fuji,
or the dark languor of strip-mall shopping
and the touch of a sweaty hand.

I find myself drawn to the freshest green saplings
that spring can muster from her new-born cunt
and the tiny hairs that grow along the ridges
and hills of the bible belt.

Better yet, I find myself
undaunted by desire, free to think
of uncertain pleasures
without the punishing doubt of possibility.

2011-06-22T18:38:00.003-05:00

Like Alexander, you have conquered the earth.

Now you think that the smallest twitch
in the eye of a dying dog
is more significant, worth more,
than that broad-backed, golden bitch

your self. You have, with an ancient musket
pierced the flesh of a god, and he
forgave you because he thought
it odd that you were there, on the hills

of that forgotten island,
with a weapon from his time
for he was a god of iron, way back then

itching to shoot everything you saw.

But why? you said something, once,
that I repeated twenty times
trying to set it to memory, but I've tried
twenty times to recall it today, and I can't.

Anyway, if
you're going to commit suicide, if you really think
you're the meanest, weakest, and stupidest person
who has ever conquered the world, if you

decide you can't live as the contradiction
you sought to become from the very beginning
I am no god to forgive you,

and even if the sum of your life
made the world over, in the spirit
of sincerity, even when sincerity is cruel -
if you accomplish everything
I thought impossible, everything we discussed

across seven or eight years worth of stale,
cheap beer, even then
the good you've done won't outweigh
the simple revelatory fact
that great men kill themselves,
and people like me die.

2011-06-20T03:18:00.001-05:00

whatever you think, you don't treat
me like a friend. You feign interest,
pretend my dry intelligence
holds something precious for you, but then

you only call on me when you feel fragile.
The rest of the time you're pushing me away
ignoring me, sleeping through the day. It's okay,
it really is. Or it would be if you let it.

But you keep drawing me out, taunting me
with love that isn't real, with words
you'll never say, and I have to say
"forget it,"

"I don't mean to be a jerk or anything,
I know you don't mean to, but really,
you make me more depressed than anyone I know.

I don't want you to go. But you will.
and I can't keep following you," to and fro
like a moon beside a planet,

damn it. I'm empty enough without craters, and
you're lonely enough without sitting in black space.
I know my place. You know yours. I just
can't get you to admit it. "well, shit it,
I can't handle thinking about this anymore."

and you look deeply hurt, and I think
for just a second
that you realize my words can't be taken
exactly at face value. Not that I
could ever lie to you, but
that you're hurting me, taking

chunks of my viscera and showing them the sun,
and that I've chosen now to tell you all of this
just to see you frozen, struck dumb,
not by the truth of how I feel
and what I feel you've done

but by the simple force of cruelty, which
I hope at very least will send the message
that you need to think twice before calling me your friend.

2011-06-17T03:11:00.017-05:00

The leaves are gray, twisting from their branches
in epileptic fits, as the sky roils and spits
filling the avenues with leaves and oil

the sun, sat on like a child by the earth,
cries uncle and rises to a defeated, crackling birth
and begins to burn us, not because it's what we deserve,
but because his idle power must be reaffirmed.

Still the dirt is in the air, the smell of a mound
at a funeral or of a picnic in autumn, instead of crying
though, my friend interrupts and locks my reminiscence
away with her murky talk

and the streets are murky where we walk,
and I ask her to slow down so I can reaffirm my footing
because the ground, like the air and myself, feels
as loose as pudding.

Rain in Summer always disrupts more than it quenches,
it leaves to quick and takes too much with it. Perhaps the plants
are greener, and there are now more buds than barbs
in the ever-present thicket, but as we pass,

my friend and I, we dwell on small
annoyances and notice only that our lips are dry
and we've lost our voices.

another tirade

2011-06-15T03:06:00.001-05:00

we're tired of being pandered to, of being patronized,
of accepting a dumbed down world where everyone
is pronounced equal, and our differences are disdained
in the name of equality and our powers stripped
from us, lowered to the level of the weakest
among us and told we can be anything we want to be -
and we can. but to be critical, to demand anything
of anyone, we must be MAD. To expect at least common
sense of each other, to give the benefit of the doubt,
we're required to be outcasts, the first thrown
onto the fire. Because we can't do better, we're
too depressed, too defeated.
How can everyone seriously believe that they're
as special and entitled as they do, and also believe
that speaking critically and honestly of someone
or something is essentially blasphemy?

2011-06-13T16:17:00.001-05:00

I
To eachothers' ears, our words
sound feathery, as waves
dripping in green agony over stubborn rocks.

slow, like a clock that needs winding,
you lead me on - towards what?
I stumble
the teeth of the earth
grinding against my gut

I can't help feeling that you know,
that you're not as confused as you say,
that evil does exist,
that you play
with my reeling corpse
like a violinist with the strings of a cat,
and that
it's on your play that I subsist.

II
To read these simple stanzas, one would think you were an artist.
Or an intellect, or at least a lying prick.
No such luck.

III
I have behaved.

What have you done, besides wait?
I have decided, my love,
that I'm beyond your command

and with this decision, I assuage my guilt;
its terrifying reprimand.
Now I will devour - like fire
burns a paper crane, like the pages
of ancient books devour your naked brain,
like your eyes devour those pages.

IV
I can't continue writing poetry.
Not with your breasts heaving behind the lids of my eyes,
your ratty jeans revealing bits of thigh

more tender than the freshest mozzerella
sweeter than the waters
of the fountain of youth -
clear as the outline of a hooded mountain.

your perfect belly, ready
to grow ripe, or hollow,
speaking of which - your throat, your ass,

and your eyes - more moody, moodier by far - than the ocean
in hurricane season, and your cunt
which, having felt but once, must be
both king and queen of all these haunting reasons

that I can't seem to write poetry,
that I can't seem to write.

V
Extreme contrast. Dark and light.
How can you be so sad

with so much love? I'd be happy just to have
a single kiss from someone I admire.
I smother you with mine, and you desire, what?
to be alone?

throw me a bone! A word, or a gesture,
or a hint or a hope. No, I know, just yesterday
you spoke, "I would be bad for you."
which means, of course, something closer to
"I won't."

But why? Is it the other men,
their waiting prominence, their greek jaws
and distant almost-anger?
Trust me, I'm learning their ways.

Or is it really this work, and this desparation,
starving through our country's long recession,
barking at the stars, in quick succession,
diving in and out of lessons, given
by old dull fools who dream of ressurection?

I dream. I do. And so do you.
Of nights without anxiety - of simple
comfort which is easy enough for some.
We dream of being dumb. Of being easy.

And every day the world reminds us, its horrifying sounds,
the creatures crawling like maggots on its face,
that grief doesn't come from having no place
but from knowing your role is too small -
that behind it all, there is only meat, and mutilation,
and that grief is knowledge and happiness is masturbation.
that grief is a set of invincible lungs
that grief is a heart that never stops beating.
that grief is the place you and I belong
but that grief is fleeting.

VI
My love, my love, my love, my love, my love,
I'm getting used to saying it.

There's something like that, that you want to say

somehow I'll force you to say it.

Because this time I won't be content
remaining just friends, and I won't be happy
just because you're happy.

My love, right now, is a selfish love,
I'm done apologizing.
Joy, itching like an apple at the end of spring
to fall into the hands of a child,

or am I only a child, itching
for gravity to make my trek for me?

Itching, anyhow, to devour the apple
if not the entire tree.

an old tirade

2011-06-10T16:15:00.000-05:00

I hate this neo-primitivist shit.
People talking about moral issues in child-like tones.
Name-dropping, singing songs of peace
and veganism, and do it all yourself
bypass the consumer culture, and if you won't
I'll never speak to you again.

People take the moral highground
when they know they can't be nice about something.
We should all be nice all the time
to everything and everyone. That's another thing they say.
But there's a difference between nice and polite
and we shouldn't support the already-supported
especially if they're worthless on their own.

What do I want out of a world?
I'm not sure. Happy people, who act according to reason.
People satisfied with what they're doing
who can take a critique or negative review
and hang it on their wall.
I think if everyone always felt loved
all of our problems would go away, every single one.

In my opinion, to make that happen
first you must establish trust, so honesty is key.
People must always believe you when you tell them
how great they are and why. People aren't used to honesty
they'll get bitter and hate you for saying what you did
especially if they know it's true.

I think people should turn off their TVs,
because those things spout lies all the time.
Computers are more helpful, but I do think that
the internet should never be used for social interaction
because it's too comfortable, and keeps you invisibly distant.

The rest of our technology can stay the way it is.
I'll let cell-phones stick around, but texting should go.
We need better voice-recievers. Be loud, don't be afraid.

Then when we trust each other, we can cultivate love.
It may take more self-discipline than you'd like,
and you may have to deal with people you have no empathy for
but what good would it do to tell them off?
Especially when your only reasons are
"the fact that you're not happy annoys me".

I think that would be nice. A genuine world.
I recognize that if I lived in my ideal world,
I would find things in it I hated, and I would still be unhappy.
But I still hate this neo-primitivist culture.
Name dropping bands and stores and even ideas,
so that we know who to respect by what games they like
and where they get their clothes.

What it amounts to, anyway, is that I don't like elitism
or pretention. I want everything, and everyone to be equal
and I want parents to stop telling their children they're special
because they aren't. They're great in a thousand ways
like everyone else - isn't that better, anyway?
Don't teach your children they're perfect
and also tell them to be nice. That's hypocritical.

It's like saying capitalism is inherently good
that America is the best because it has the most money
and that the working-class is the heart of America.
It makes no sense. It stratifies us.
Don't tie Capitalism up with Democracy, don't tie
Love up with Lust, or Greatness with Ability.
There are too many processes working in tandem
for us to have any idea what we're doing, anyway.

Do your best. Be nice. Grow up, but not too much.
Do your fair share of work, and always assume the best in people.
Stop caring about collective opinions, because they don't exist.
Relate to people on a one by one basis, and you'll see
they're all worth talking to, and none of them hate you
or even think less of you because you don't conform
or you aren't polite. They may hate you based on who you are,
but that only happens when you hate them too.
You don't have to talk to people you don't like,
but it's impossible not to like someone you've never talked to.

I don't know. I really don't.
Who would take advice from me?
I just think... we're doing this wrong
we're trying to fix things
but entropy always wins, and what we need
I think, is to be happy with ourselves
because the world is going to end someday
no matter what we do, and the only thing that makes any sense to me
is for all of us to be happy even as it crumbles around us.
Why shouldn't we be? Why should it frustrate us
that we can do nothing to stop it, instead of calm us?

I think it does because we were raised,
I was raised,
to believe I could do anything
that I could be better than anyone else at anything
if I put my mind to it, and that I could save the world.
As far as I can tell none of that is even remotely true.
I'm not even sure I can survive another minute here.

24

2011-06-08T16:09:00.000-05:00

the new dawn strikes, finally
awake to see it, I
am no less depressed, am not
rejuvenated.

2011-06-06T16:08:00.003-05:00

I haven't written any poetry in a while. I'm sorry. It's been so hard.
If I was half as sure as I claim to be
about the love I won't let go of,

or if my house were cleaned for me,
my meals cooked, and my bills paid
without my intervention

then there would be space for poetry.

If, for only one day,
Aphrodite's two dicks stood erect
for me, and her breasts
heaved with unearthly motions,
and her voice trembled
with too-natural notes

oh! if there were space for poetry.

If all the doors weren't locked
by humid heat, all the air poisoned
and all the grass dead, and if there wasn't
anyone to blame

If, and only if, I sleep fourteen hours today
only to awake, find that all of this
is still real and true, and fall to sleep immediately again
because I just can't stand the weight,

then and if and why should it matter,
when all things stay the same
and there is no room for poetry.

2011-06-03T15:53:00.009-05:00

Paper tigers, dream tigers
tigers mean nothing to me.
The skies, they gawk, wide-lipped
combed-over, pristine. Tug at a tooth,
lick a half-shaved jaw,
sip a rotten cocktail, two parts vermouth,
one of gin, one of grenadine
and a single egg, raw.

That's right, skies, this penniless
gangrene fellowship, panty liners
and moth-eaten motherhood and nancy boy
coon-ninny cunt chugging, wet hugely gargling
paper tigers, dream tigers,
oh captain my captain,
throw us all into the sea.

The white devil, he
invented money to put
time and joy into physical forms,
so he could swallow these things.

The thousand races, and species, and beings
who died before are lucky to have died.
It was better when it was race against race,
when it was settled by fire and war.
Now there is only the slow leak
of life to the rich from the poor.

Paper tigers, dream tigers,
hung over and working for pennies a day.

2011-06-01T15:52:00.000-05:00

Stilted tenpenny tiffany,
jumbled jailor of the joyous jungles,
queen of the quick delinquents.

Blossom like a blossoming flower.
Sing like a singing bird.
Do what you do, what defines you, and do
do what you think is right.
Pushover princess, pink and preening,
tie one on and sink.
I think, after one more drink,
your simple jewels will dangle, links clinking against the sink
suddenly filled with blood and bile and food.

Crewd madonna, lift your head until your throat, straight as an arrow,
meets the sword of damocles
point to point.

a dream

2011-05-30T15:50:00.003-05:00

I saw you, red-lipped and cunning
painting walls of masterpieces I could never imagine, though
I must have, as I dreamed you into being.

Not the first girl I've dreamt, nor the most beautiful,
nor the most talented. But I loved you, and you
were having a fight with your girlfriend
and wouldn't let your boyfriend near, for some reason
you wouldn't share with me, a random passerby,
giddy because I knew, somehow
that you belonged to me, at least for the night.

A pile of fabric, you often fell
into some awkward space and lay there, lazily reciting
some joke, some aside, some meek request,
and even though it was my dream
you confused me, made me laugh,
surprised me.

I had already slept three times that night,
and gotten nothing from them.

Every time our eyes met I embraced you
we never kissed, we never said
a word about love or life or death
but joked like old friends who never quite got over
the fact that fighting in a war together
doesn't mean you know someone.

Success called, you ran. As the night runs
from day, as dreams run from consciousness,
yet linger, leaning, remembering something, or discerning something
and feeling the need to stay. But you were called away
and you said

Caitlyn and I got back together, and
I'm meeting Kyle in San Francisco, thanks for everything.
Of course I replied
if all that falls through, give me a call.
Even though I've never seen a phone in any of my dreams.

And now awake, I think just how
annoying she was, and all the girls I probably
took pieces from to build her.

I heard once that you don't become afraid
when you dream of a monster, but
you dream of a monster to explain the fear you feel already

I must feel so comfortable, so full of love
alone in my dark, empty room. I must be overflowing with joy.

So how come I want to choke someone?

2011-05-27T18:06:00.024-05:00

she looks down with a grimace, tries her best to burn
the little green things and the pink, roaming beasts,
but the sun, poor girl, for all her anger
can only force us out of long sleeves and shoes

and into some shade, or a small, blue pool.
Calmly mister moon surveys the situation, thinking,
of all the delicate solutions, which would actually
appease his long-time friend, and not frustrate her more.
Never does he consider a brash solution; the problem, to him,
is not so severe. He thinks if it were, the sun would say
something indicating she was in such pain.

While they passively play, the rest of the blue sky
gets ready for autumn, summoning rain, bugs,
children. The earth stores all its tea, its smells
in preparation for the sensory banquet that
Summer's timely death makes room for. Everything
that's been forced into sleeping for these long months
will soon spring to life again, green and blue,
and wriggling, while the sun stays just as vehement,
but at least drifts further away.

The calm moon never leaves his circle, only drags
walls of water a few feet up, drops them again,
and meditates on her effect on him.

For now
there is no time, no give-and-take, no love.
I sit in the darkness of my room
writing about the sky, about the seasons,
wanting nothing more than to stay inside
and see only the white wall
breathing white.

correction

2011-05-25T14:47:00.000-05:00

the number 666 wasn't necessarily a mistranslation, it just came from a source text that is not as old as the one they recently restored. Sorry if I mislead anyone.

- - - - - - -

My god has abandoned me but I have not abandoned my god.
though in darkness there is now only darkness
and in the corners of my house devouring dust
jilts and duresses the walls, and the hardwood floors
rippled, as if by an impossible splash,
and my bed of nails and my votive stash.

It is our territory, faith, and never the gods',
who are above doubt, above addressing individuals,
and stick to their rules as rigidly as whores,
love is our territory, and our dirty hearth
is free of the gods and their scorn.

But I have not abandoned my god,
his words are part of my core
his old care has pushed me
to come where I am, to revel
in this squalor I couldn't suffer before.

He has granted me favors I could never return
I have made him a promise I can never make good,
I deserve nothing else, I need nothing else,
but faith in my god, faith in myself
would only distract me. My god has abandoned me
but has not undone the exhilaration of life
we stumbled upon. My god has risen, and left my bed
leaving only a smell, and a morsel of cum.

2011-05-23T16:02:00.004-05:00

They went to the creek to play
where the silverfish swim in the musky bouquet
and toads swallow morsels of pink-green decay
they went down to the creek to play

a ribbon fell into the murk
where the maggots' tired mothers lurk
shopping for trinkets and dinner and dirt
a ribbon drifted into the murk

the boy washed it with his tongue
he said "no matter where you run,
no matter who or what I become"
the boy washed the ribbon with his tongue

the creek drifted into the sky
and the creek-bed was left dark and dry
"until the silverfish rot, and the toads putrify"
the creek drifted into the sky

"I won't let you be alone
until the maggots have maggots of their own
and they feast on our bodies, even the bone,
I won't ever leave you alone."

happy rapture! hapture!

2011-05-21T16:21:00.000-05:00

I'm making a special post today for two reasons, that happen to coincide! Today's the rapture again, and we're getting ready for it over here, trying to fit all seven sins into two or so hours. Also: this is post number 666. I'm not making that up, but I could if I wanted to. Actually 666 was a mistranslation, the devil's number was discovered to be 616 relatively recently, so if I was going to make up a post number it would be that. And no, I don't have to cite my sources for the date of the rapture or the number of the beast, but I will: The Fucking Bible.
- - - - - - -

down the mountain they come today
to announce the end of the world
through the woods they come today
to announce the end of the world

while god and his minions sit quiet, in waiting,
knowing no warning would do.

2011-05-20T15:59:00.004-05:00

It was a long path through a hollow mountain
that led to the promised land
It was a dark and a long path
that led through the mountain
it was a long and light land
that shone through the tunnel
it was a dark and hungry mountain
with a dark and hungry tunnel
leading to the promised land.

On the first day I ran out of light,
on the second I ran out of food

On the third day I ran out of water
on the fourth I ran out of hope

The earth was as jumbled
as my drunk father's stories,
the air was as dank
as my drunk father's breath.

the deeper I went, the more I heard noises,
the longer I traveled, the clearer they got.
It was a long path through a hollow mountain
that led to somewhere, or something, or not.

At day I trudged alone through the darkness
at night I trudged alone through the darkness
in summer I palmed along the rough walls
in winter I palmed along the rough walls

enough time passed that I should have died
enough time passed that I should have rotted
enough time passed that the air should have run out
and the mountain should have collapsed
and the land should have been forgotten
and I kept walking because it's all I had
all I had was walking.

and the noises I heard were deafening when
I first saw the pinhole of light
and just that one speck, on the furthest horizon
blinded my eyes, so used to the darkness.

so used to the darkness, when I looked down
I expected to have lost my body.
I felt like my body had fallen off,
fallen and left in the tunnel somewhere,

and when I looked down, I saw my hands briefly
pale in the sparse, thin light
and the noises collided into one mean hiss
and the pinhole in the distance was snuffed like a flame.

2011-05-18T04:16:00.000-05:00

When I have trouble sleeping, it's not usually because
my heart is beating too fast or too hard.
When I have trouble saying something, it's not
usually because I'm afraid of what's to come,
but what's already past.

and so much has already passed. Few things
really confuse me, you know? But so many times
for this one soul I thought
this is your chance, give it all you've got.

Now I can't sleep, and it's not because
all the unusual memories I've had trouble
forgetting... God knows I've made mistakes before, and all of them
all of them were either because love
makes a fool of you for waiting,
or because love pushes you to act
when there's nothing you can do.

The trick, I said,
I said the trick is to...
the trick, I think, is not to
I mean, there are two tricks, ok,
the trick is not to love at all

or else not to succeed, not to flounder
when every day you feel like a fool...
there is no trick.

I'm just confused.

2011-05-16T03:47:00.000-05:00

I couldn't tell, when we first met,
what really drew me to you.

Here are some things love might be:

unquestioning devotion, sympathy,
feeling finally complete,
standing side by side admiring
something truly infinite,
staring face to face
and burning

or it may be feeling how you always feel
but, somehow, more intensely
and always asking

if things are real, imaginary,
right or wrong, cruel or heavenly.

Yes - that strikes me as true, since
I never questioned anything a week ago.
The difference didn't seem to matter then.

Though I know, for instance,
that these two things are equally true:
forcing a moment to its crisis
and patiently abiding what may come
are virtuous sins, and grief

grief is a set of invincible lungs.

Here's what I've learned:
death seeks us
we seek love
if we have the faith to seek at all

the trick is being immovable
while giving in fully to the flow

the trick is keeping sane
and knowing what you know.

the flabbergasted sun

2011-05-13T23:53:00.000-05:00

the sun, she runs
her four small feet
imprinting neat
little prints, leaving hints
all over the street.

I loved her once,
her flabbergasted eyes
her fleshy thighs
boiling from inside
her pus
I loved her once.

a ghost without a host
may still be heard
and seen, however absurd
her stunned heat, her numbed
(at most, at very most --

I loved her once)
expression.
her breath leaves an impression
whiter than heaven
deeper than antlantus
I loved her once.

2011-05-11T23:20:00.005-05:00

thunder storm I want a day job where every day from noon to nine I walk through the rain, see thunder marking neural impulses in the sky, feel the wind protest my efforts, feel the heat dissipate from the earth as if it were never welcome there.
thunder storm I want to see angels on my day off, not those christian angels too doped up and loyal to speak, but the angels of poetry who're mere flat symbols for people too perfect to meet, too old to know, not clever the way new people are clever, yet more inventive and awe-inspiring than anything clever can be.
thunder storm I want to learn the rain dance, the thousand languages, the shape of every foot, the course of every brain, I don't really believe any government could succeed, because basically it's not the system that's at fault it's the people, and people are all broken and I want to learn where every fault is, which pieces are beyond replacement, not for any useful effort but simply to know because knowing satisfies me.
thunder storm I want nothing I want everything I don't know the difference between the two. A layman's fact is a scientist's theory, a layman's theory is a scientist's hypothesis, a layman's hypothesis is a clergyman's fact, and I want to understand everything without clipping out everything I didn't understand the day I was born, saying anything is beyond comprehension is giving up before you begin yet some things are beyond comprehension, and I haven't given up.
thunder storm in a city of garbage and electrodes, mask everything in a web of electricity fry everything indiscernable. Love is light and light is stable speed, particle and wave, sound and fury, bed and breakfast, love is love which isn't love and thunder storm thunder storm thunder storm god bless the thunder storm

2011-05-10T03:42:00.000-05:00

I've uploaded a .pdf of my Winter Poems, as I said I would. Here's the link:
http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_70/10654000/10654573/1/print/portfolio.pdf
but my browser doesn't like .pdfs, so I haven't double-checked it. I'll throw this up on the side bar, and retroactively throw these poems up as the updates for the 25th-9th, I just didn't want them to sit here until the end of the semester because of, I don't know, superstition or something.

My First Five Births

2011-05-09T19:16:00.011-05:00

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I was born in North Carolina in 1988.
I was born in Oregon in 2009.

I was born three times in 2001, under three different clouds:
The first was black and smelled of soot.
The second was yellow, and covered everything.
The third didn't really exist.

First that summer when our house burnt down,
twice that winter, when my father died
and I gave in to hopelessness and hate,
and then when I overdosed on love.

I
I woke at dawn
ate my father's burnt biscuits,
chewy ham and eggs, and a cup of black coffee.

My brothers taught me to believe
there was nothing in the world but pain.

II
In this strange climate, I almost forgot
how dry the world used to be.
Even the air, even the plants are entirely new to me.

A stranger taught me how
to use them in tinctures and salves.

III
Scents, memories, I've only lived in Winter
Spring was only roses, Fall was only leaves.

In Summer every smell was burnt away.
The smell of rain, though it never rains,
is clearer now than the salmon-colored sun.

And there is water, but it's black
and thick with caffeine. We all drink
except my father, who takes Alprazolam,
lights a cigarette, and falls asleep.

IV
The humidity creates a valley of steam
all around us, water rising into the blue sky
while the plants and I turn brown.

Texas, as an origin, dooms any family to wander, I think.
Though Tuscola's not necessarily the deserts,
that doesn't mean the roots run deep.

I don't know why my father circles here,
chooses this place to die. Right now I don't remember anything.
I think I know by heart
the million solitary facts that have led us here
to the seventh circle of Poverty, to this little city hotter than hell,
but now I can't remember even one.

Parched, I want to cry,
but my eyes are cottony.

V
Brushed by peppery flowers
invisible on this corner of Lamar,
but clearer this morning than the winter sky,

the chain-link fence, covered in lush vines
hides me from the unblinking sky,
so I don't think I'm in Austin right now.

I could be in the gardens, or the forests,
the illusory, forgotten places, the imagined Edens
from which my family, long ago escaped.
Where my mother met my father,
and they made their first mistakes.

I could be anywhere, surrounded by clouds,
by waterfalls and icy lakes. I blush like a flower,

and music descends from the clouds.
Hearing it tickle the tin roofs
I can't help but tremble with joy.

On this corner of Lamar, there's a garden hidden
behind the school for the blind, and I know
it will be thirsty again by tonight, and I know
this trembling is the only fair expression
of all the things I've felt in all my lives.

Discontent

2011-05-06T19:19:00.008-05:00

Having been worn out, worn to a tatter,
my friends and I forgot how to behave.
Without a future, why should it matter?

Every day we slept through, and thereafter,
took anything to speed us to the grave,
having been worn out, worn to a tatter.

Every night, in protest, we'd shatter
windows, hear them tinkling like waves.
Without a future, why should it matter?

Concealed by smoke and music, like a satyr
I huddled alone in a concrete cave,
having been worn out, worn to a tatter

by these so-called friends, their boastful chatter
and their giving in to anything they craved.
Without a future, why should it matter

if I betray them now, regain my stature -
would it be cowardly, or brave?
Having been worn out, worn to a tatter
without a future. Why should it matter?

Clumpfoot Cabbage

2011-05-04T19:21:00.000-05:00

Pitied mongrel -
mess of warmth
& stink
sinking into the dirt.

Bloom.

The rose is a prickly bitch,
however well-endowed.

Don't accept the mocking tone
that drips from her painted mouth.

Bloom

As a hardwood floor blooms under startled feet,

as a cat blooms at the first sniff of a mouse.

Pretend the sun is high,
pretend the world is green. Hey
listen now, sweet-heart,

you're tougher than anyone I know.
Bloom
as David bloomed under Goliath's toe.

Working for Minimum Wage

2011-05-02T19:23:00.000-05:00

When the persona of customer service overwhelms the body, face-first, the id rears up, rampages like a boar through the cage, finally left untended. Without direction, without hope, it's no wonder the beast goes mad. It's no wonder you go mad, pushed further and further into the dense and humid jungle of this intensely degrading work.
It's no wonder all you can smell after a year or two is the shit of some creatures you can't identify mixed with a bit of your own. No wonder you get wilder and weaker by the day until every thinning path seems to promise escape and every clearing of branches makes your heart skip a beat. After another year passes, these are as suspect as they should be; make-shift traps, built by pygmies or poachers to catch the newborn, wriggling. Only when your pack is full of rain-water, your gun's too rotten and rusty to hold, and you've abandoned your shoes for reasons not quite clear, you stop deluding yourself that there is any way to leave. You stop pretending you had a home other than the jungle once. That you weren't supposed to enter, and don't belong. You accept
that from now on, you're stuck doing something you hate for someone you don't respect. And for now, barely surviving. It's an awakening of sorts, to be sure, and gives you the freedom to do a half-assed job, call in sick for no reason, and ignore the flaccid mewling of your boss, but it's also the final awakening,
placing you at the center of another small clearing, spears pointed through bushes by invisible hands, urging you to take another step, and before you, a rough pit, seemingly bottomless. Edges scraped away as if by human hands.

Grandfather's Last Words

2011-04-29T19:24:00.004-05:00

In the hospital, when he spoke to me
he meant to say "I've forgotten,”

"I've forgotten how to not be terrified.
My eyes turn images away,
all my food tastes rotten,
and I can't hear, or shit, or walk
without breaking a bone –
you remember, clearly you remember,
if you're not terrified of me.

If you're not terrified of me
I want you by my side when death is called..."

and just trailed off, eyes immense and blue
glowing like jays on a summer wind
and drooling and spitting like dying men.

I remember when his passions boiled.
Now he can't muster even half
the quiet fire he once controlled, he can only lie
and stare, as the annihilating cold washes over him.

and I heard "If only because
you're the only ones still here
from a lifetime of ghosts, you.

You, the children who denied god,
you, the devout socialists,
you, the philosopher's spawn,
I want you by my side right now."

Of course he didn't actually say that.
It's odd. All he said was "I love you,"
but it was the first and only time he said it,
and I think this is what he meant
because I know he's doubting everything.

XVII. The Star

2011-04-27T19:25:00.000-05:00

Sit in my hand. All of you.
Stop your dopish shimmering.

There are no more sailors,
you have no one to direct.

There is no more night,
a gray electric haze guarantees
that the sky can't hold you anymore.

I offer you my Tarot pack,
a white sky to shine in.

Appear for me
on the crown of a cross,

or dully, in the east,
spray me with your color.

Stars! your constellations have abandoned you
too obsessed with their own astrology.

No more are you the water-bearing wind
No more are you the mother with her jug.

Be the pheasant,
wandering the woods,
be the mountains sharp as tongues.

Don't be afraid. Appear for me
and you'll live forever
or close to it; as you faded
from the black night, so you may fade into the white

worn, and muted by a thousand caresses,
dealt to the fates once more.

My Confidante and I

2011-04-25T19:26:00.000-05:00

choked on a line of white dust

skin, hollow as a steel drum, twanging
weak, lusterless rhythms.

you chug your gin
and ask me for acetaminophen.

What good will it do to kill this pain?
Like a roach drowning in the toilet,
the next night, it'll crawl around again.
the same roach, or one just like it.

we've been pushed
through a harp,
shred to ribbons.
her voice is too sharp,
her words too true –
the woman singing from the other room.

we made our own water, we made our own heat.
hollow and moist,
hotter and hotter,
I tried to kiss you, hidden by steam.

The harpist's lament builds note by note,

a crescendo once halted
a buried memento of a buried romance
give it a chance to burst from the earth, give it a chance to grow.

You don't love me sober.
Too high to care, too high to know,
when the song's over I swear I'll let go.

the music falls silent, the air quivering
like a harp-string calming from some immense pressure
like a spasm of pain, or a spasm of pleasure
like an addict, or a lover, denied for too long
my confidante rises
to restart the song.

the mathematics of wonton burrito meals

2011-04-22T15:34:00.001-05:00

There's a mess
of confusion and certainty in my slavering organs that I can no longer parse out and define. there's a truth
obvious and impossible to comprehend that drags me on, by days and miles, across the park I used to build castles in, across the creek I used to combine with, through a shopping center's secret entrance, tucked under a counter, glittering through the window, run outside, look up, and see it. There's a moon
pock-marked and full in the strange blue sky. I remember when I used to look up at it, and sigh, and regret all my hatred, and that I couldn't tell anyone how I really felt about anything unless it was something entirely cruel. Still, how I deny myself desire, looking at the same moon, the same still trees, as dawn is breaking, breaking everything but me. There's some
rigidity to my thoughts I can't penetrate, and every step towards sanity seems also to be a step backwards, toward the void, toward unfeeling death. There's nothing
that can be done about it, I suppose. One day I'll die, having never lived, and the next day a scientist somewhere in the dead of night will look up and see and know as I could never know that all matter exists in superposition along eleven dimensions, our sun is one star among literally infinite others, and this world in every conceivable way overcomes us, its breadth, its imagination, its eternity make even our gods seem like specks too small to see. There's something
about dying that doesn't bother me. There's a mess
of confusion and certainty in my exalting organs that I can no longer deny and no longer fight. There's a truth
and I can no longer bide my time while others find it. There's

goddammit
there's so much
and I'm wasting away trying to name it all.

idle venting

2011-04-20T15:33:00.004-05:00

some kind of cloud has dispersed
look at all the people
whose basic logic and reason
are so horrendously impaired
that they really, truly think
companies and corporations care
about anything but money.

they will swallow all they can,
as I'm sure you would.
some kind of cloud has dispersed
and revealed devils and devils
and devils and devils
and devils and I
thought we believed in reason above all else.

No, no. Worse than the dark ages
when at least savagery
led to bloodshed,
kept us kin to nature,
slave to evolution.
Worse, even more so,
because we pretend to revere logic
and righteousness and freedom

yet pay our working class so little
that they're worse off than slaves -
making only enough money for food and a home,
and gouged every step of the way.

and let the majority of our wealth sit idle
in the hands of a few lousy imps
and let our passions destroy us
and let the world end.

I like to think an age of reason
will come again, but the truth is,
it may be that our lives are too comfortable now.
It may be, we've made all the progress we can
and it's our time to die, or sleep
so long we may as well be dead.

There's simply too much information
for a revolution to retain the kind of certainty
we need to crush the American dream.

Destroy your car, destroy your television,
at very least. We'll find a way, somehow
to turn this hell into a first-world country.
Even if we have to kill
all the pompous ambitious businessmen
and the idiotic, religious rednecks
and every other self-entitled
greedy, heartless hypocrite.