Tuesday, November 15, 2011

11/15/11, 4:45 am; A Story.

I suppose it doesn't matter to reason
dirty and drinking from puddles
who is this 4 am saint
offering only love from a cracked hand
outstretched after such a journey.
Free of you at last,
we who spent the last week
rolling and fucking in this
painfully fresh glow
of cardboard burning and you singing
songs you never wrote
as if I am to believe you.

Yes!
This is me!
I am fetally warped
and lying until you speak
with open door
and no more dying but to die!
This is excitement of life and love!

One boot in front of the other,
this is where it all goes wrong
so explain to me please
the look of mad joy
on my face!

You
DO NOT KNOW ME,
and it will be your lesson,
not mine,
in the mean
time.

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

Dancer's body
to drive me mad,
clean house to spit
down my prudent throat
and I will
corrupt
like the virus
I know
ME
TO
BE.
No doubt,
I have played the weak card
far too fucking long.
My lungs are borrowed from dragons,
and I learned my lessons
in Hell.
Fuck you
fuck you
fuck you
I have plenty of hair to burn
and your stars
will mock you
and your worry
will smother you.
You never
should have
let me in!
Fall back on safe boys.
Safe boys, safe boys.
They don't know how to kiss
your legs.

October.

A Bad Night for Horses

I'm leaking important fluids
Picking crumbled edges of pills
from among stacks of books
and tapes and letters.
My pen tugs impatiently
on my finger
wanting nothing more than to write you back
and I haven't the heart to tell it
that there is no letter
asking for a response
and me
and my pen
are alone and leaking.

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

Crickets with jackboots and whips dance the railings
and the night invents music.

The sound of shadows paints a prism on the ceiling
and I, stumbling pilgrim, accept the lot.

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

the concrete ditch gliding worms
across the field
where stupid stupid children
feed their brains
with their heads up their assholes

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

Tongue, tongue
darting little bitch
daring fishhooks and fingertips
let me nibble the end
just a taste of furtive fruit
like a spoonful of jelly
I want you down my throat
tongue, lips, teeth
I want you in my stomach
tease from a foul mouth
with bubblegum sex
barely resonating
little bells of spit

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

Darling damned little doe
Dancer of sidewalks and bedsheets
I want to strangle myself
rather than not have
your tender skin
against which
to judge
my own.

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

Smoke curls high to the ceiling
and carries with it my cock
to crow
early in the frugal morning
where I will laugh
like smoke curling to the ceiling
with an evil sparrow stare
and dance
to the golden night of dead leaves
when I will find lips and lips to fill me
with smoke curling to the ceiling
and my wings spread and tear lightly
to die
and die and die

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

We are cloud people
We appear as dinosaurs
and as locomotives
and as seashells

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

I hope it eats you from the inside-out
this mud you've turned from fucking in dust

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

Shivering six o'clock in a girl's house
looking with dim light for a blanket
opening closets filled with shoes
closing them almost blushing
as if I weren't to see them
until they were on her feet

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

Grim lessons
staring at a spent ceiling,
strange yet coming sleep
relieving a weekend's plasma,
a blood-letting flooding my eyes
with a flame colored red
and daring my breath
to whisper feathers
that dream me someone else
some Me you won't know
and will not like
as if this bothered me
in my grim lessons.

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

Delmar

Numb hands dance with leeches
and rain washes broken glass
down the greasy streets.
An auxiliary of spent bottles
stands watch over my tired eyes
and cars dream lazily by
like cancer cells.
I am not undead, I am unbored.
Numb hands dance with cigarettes
and leaves,
always leaves,
always will.

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

Sucks
when you really need pause
and clench your eyes
to ask yourself
"What the fuck
am I on
again?"

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

Dancers
always dancers
know to rise to the sky
arching and aching
always dancing.

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

We do not know
each other
ourselves
tomorrow
today
let's spend it together
?

Autumn Song.

Here is an autumn song, why sad stories hang in smokey air, the full moon being my baby my baby is mean is bad is no one's baby.

It's ok, momma, I'm burning candles and saying my prayers.

This bed is gonna swallow me, too many nights I've laid rough hands to my pillows and ghosts to twist some feathery little vapor out of the darkness, some gourd-faced golem to fill with secrets and lust. We don't lie while we're lusting; I don't, and I speak for the lizards and lightning but not for another dick-swinger.

I won't be home 'til I'm bleeding brains on some holy boulder, black as peat and sweet as honeycomb.

Samson is swinging wild controlled circles with the bleeding jawbone of a jackass, and his hirsute heroics are relegated thusly to a few scraps of paper to incite wars in some future where artists are dead and greed's teeth chew all.

I'll love anyway. There's not much else for us.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

October Phoems in re: Girls, Anxiety, Autumn.

This fragile little leaf,
eyes like sad almonds,
she floats in flowers
and breathes gentle secrets
that ring of the tragedy of truth.

She scarcely looks further than the ground,
but when she dances and sings forgetting pain
she is often the only thing to punctuate my day
with a semblance of a smile,
with furrows finally carved north
with the volatility of joy.

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

Here we go falling
insane little autumn rodents
muscles bulging and hungry teeth
restless hands and frightened eyes
jumping from limb to limb hand to mouth.

Winter will be long long
longer than we can stand
so here we go now while we
can still remember our names.

Just don't worry
when I build a nest of your hair
and seal myself in with lead
until the lashes of Easter
massage my eyes
and stir my spine.

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

Relapse (with Ian)

What a day!
like a little skipping stone
we end it sidewalking
and talking from our assholes
in bright clouds of the wine
and love deep in our guts.
I am going to bed hungry
and yet am already bursting
with the thought of tomorrow morning
being spooned like butter
and golden cigarette butts
upon two no more well-deserving goats.
Sleep long, sleep well,
tomorrow we take Hell.

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

The day unraveled in its nervous string,
webs of blonde anxiety spun through trees
and exploring my throat,
the last bittersweet guesses of my questions
whispering wind to your sails.

Sitting immobile my heart threatens to explode
like a blossom of sawblades to sever these shining ropes,
we will crash to earth like birds forgetting to fly
and meet eye to eye with broken ribs
and the wheezing justice of my anxious love.

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

Nothing's good enough for you,
nothing is real enough,
is honest in its permanence,
least of not I.
But I Am and can do no else,
and I am Real and can be no else,
and have Faith enough for nations
in my honest contempt for the ephemeral.
I am good enough for I,
that I am good enough for me.

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

Desert nights I'm glued to the surface of the lonely fucking moon. Knowing you and I are sleeping alone, no matter who breathes by our side, stealing air from our parted lips. It seems too easy, we two wrapped in pages and doom, and some nights, these lonely fucking nights I'm terrified at how little sense it all makes, at the injustice carving chasms through the mettle of a heart. I've surrendered to my eyes a sadness that will shape me beyond the veil of death, and until then I will walk breathe sleep with a patient vengeance.

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

Staring at Kandinsky (Morphine)

Staring at Kandinsky,
wondering where the water goes,
wearing a disguise of my own skin.

Last night shudders rubber through my veins
like a thousand needles of sex,
thirty hours of dreaming
I'm made of air and laughter.

Morning all great erections aimed at no one,
day all eyelids and drag,
afternoon all coffee and stuttering,
night all pain wrapped in moth wings.

The walk home is as all walks home,
indifferent to the sky's indifference,
praying for exciting stab wounds
and an end to your boring bullshit.

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

I am reminded of you in moonlight and pyrite,
worthless shines but honest stone.
My saviors will always lose.
My saints have always eaten the dragon.
Better to keep you with rubber bands
and photographs of burns.
I remember your skeleton hands
hiking across pillows and meat
to steal the crown from my temple,
not a second thought to the smile you've glazed
across my hopeful sleeping face.

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

Autumn is bleeding,
listen to dripping colors
and the sound of smokey wind
wrap itself around melancholic afternoons,
this bittersweet purgatory
an excuse to bind ourselves
in veined leaves
and assume a nature
not dissimilar
to the ground
we tread.

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

Count your blessings in the wound
hidden behind your snake mirror
that we judge you only for who you could be with us
and not for what you actually are without.
Lord give me strength to find no schism between your two
and finally be rid of this gross malfeasance.

The Letter Opener

Somewhere in Iowa, I drank a lot of cough syrup and wrote this.

He stands unsteady, his eyes in his hands
the letter-opener still protruding
from his massacred left socket
"I'll cut my fingers off next" he mutters
"and then go to work on my tongue with gardening shears
and on my ears with chopsticks to the hilt."
I don't reason with him,
I've been too far gone myself
and I know that reason is dead
in the swollen, bleeding heart.

His screams are unnerving
as any who choose to scream alone
behind closed doors
and I can hear him even with the
key in the ignition, even idling in the street.

There was no telling him
no matter what he chopped off
what he butchered from his body
or scraped with scouring pads and lye,
her letters will glow neon in his universal night
her skin will wrap him haunting still
and O God how she will roll yet on his tongue
and sing poison bells through his skull.

The trenches of memory are dug deep
and filled with bodies.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

September

A True Story

A melancholy Sunday, and yet you glow with the same lightning of years past and their verdant desperate grinding of soft kisses, nothing more, and how the tenderest ornament was placed atop the highest broken limb.

I dreamt of you, what with brown eyes searing a late summer's night of longing leaving, and awakening I found my bedclothes twisted into a limp shape of your fragile body clutched in my arms and us quivering in every night being the last night the last kiss the last knowing glance tracing your tattoos with my fingertips. Those summer nights I would have died. I may die yet.

You taught me love beyond reason and I've drug that cross ever since. I will wait on your doorstep trodden and I will sob this rock to mud, and I will never surrender your luster in my memory to these cold demons of rationale. Wait for me at the doorway to oblivion. You'll recognize my scars and I won't forget your little yellow dress.

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

I have no room in my heart save for the desperate,
as the idiots go caterwauling safely to darkness
I am left alone in purity's embrace

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

Boys Strumming War

I will not die for some stamped cause
let their children's boots tremble
not me, not mine
I can scarcely win this war of living

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

Is it wrong to be so jealous of the ground you walk upon,
of the moon that watches you sleep?
I'll spend my days staring at setting suns,
waiting for the cloak of blindness
to make a religion of memory
and a faith of forgotten faces

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

Another Drink

It occurs I don't need another drink,
I don't need to walk on unsure knees
or fall asleep already sleeping,
to pour another glass of rum
in a houseful of friends already retired,
not one more ring of dizziness
to cloud my vision of night and cat,
and I will go to bed as unfamiliar as I am
and rest bashful sober and quiet.
A poet's work is never done,
which is why I'm a line cook instead.

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

I spent today a grinning skull,
lost in the awful wonder of the world
losing all sight of the gunpowder lessons
hammered through my heart,
losing all sight of who I had Been, who I need to Be,
just sick with amusement at broken bones,
a shrinking banner of pride
limply waving in air never so chilly and heavy
with the smell of bedrooms and hair.

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

I've found this beast bloating beyond my comprehension,
rearing up like jagged mountains that eat sky and drink daylight,
crawling on its belly through my gut,
pulling at my hair until my eyes roll back into my head
and I stare into nothing, nothing at all,
just the jaws of the End and the ripple of my sinking heart.
We are willingly drowning in a lake of roses.

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

I'm creepy, man
diving into navels
finding none so deep as my own,
dancing dead little circles around lovers,
snorting state lines for kicks
and heartbeats pushing sweaters above waistlines,
just creepy and asleep
cross-legged
mouth sagging
bile
fade to wide-eyed concession
that this night was not mine to win.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Springfield Poems, 08/18/11-08/28/11

In no particular order.

I want
to taste your teeth,
drink your eyes,
drown in your lungs,
dance in your skin,
breathe your hair like smoke,
kneel upon your back like an altar,
wear your feet like a mask,
wear your hands like a noose.

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

Mill of avarice be damned,
I am not unwanted!
Ground to a pulp,
doth not blessings yet be cursed from compost heaps!
River rolling, my swollen ears float Me
to downstream chests of mud and silver!
The apes cannot fathom why you'd love this man,
where I why I am still still, shining coin in pale hand!
How sick every day to find love,
how torn every day to live!

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

Alcohol

O sweet tranquilizer, cross-eyed womb,
excuse to hate and be hated,
to do and be done,
kaleidoscoping vomit to forget the day,
staggering pathetic morning still alive,
blessed blood transubstantiate,
words spilled from skinned knees
like ignored arrow through brains.

How the sentence would smart if my gun were sober,
what wake my actions would leave in the pavement
if my hand unwavering swung that axe
with a clear mind
and frightening eyes.

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

I'm slobbering drunk and hungry
chewing on sunrise
my own two feet my own two feet
drooling truth while you swim in lies.

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

Shit, how could I forget blonde punk rocker;
we used to neck in purgatory.
"Ah, fuck it" he sighs satisfied,
faces away from everyone
and drinks his drink too fast.

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

I'm building a hearth,
palace between my ears and behind my eyes,
heavy wooden doors and a moat of blood.

It is my jungle, my lighthouse
my nuclear submarine in a black sea of quiet glass.

You are not welcome,
you will not shatter my tranquility.
You have proven to be anything but a friend.
I refuse to be anything but alone.

I hope to live my life as a thorn in your ankle
and you think of me every time you fall.
I hope to live my life as a bone in your throat
and you think of me every time you choke.

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

Chainsmokingpushupaholic

I stink with living
and am a pond brimming
with the frogs of discontent.
Let me show you my arms,
wrap you in lazy scars.
My eyes train towards the heaven of smoke
your beacon is lost in the fog of bleeding.
I have plenty of dry bones
with which to stoke dry fire
and your hair is made of straw.
I am the avatar of kerosene,
dripping disappointing oaths
to a cold curving pink god
one-night-love, this town dead in flame.

I will not stop smoking.
I will turn into a tree
and your spine will lean into mine
and roots will fuck the mud.

Who am I
who is this motherfucker
knowing too much,
saw him to lumber
treated so that his eyes are stain
and his hips fragile be balsa.

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

Complete solemnity,
paper pulled from golem's ear
is a mixtape track list,
thusly are my feet glued to habits and sighs,
my face is turned and shorn and blossoming
in summer's final death throes as if to affirm
I cannot last forver!
I will flame unto you while I can still muster humble strength.

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

Doing the Twist in my bedroom,
just me and Nina,
5:23 am,
makes me want to drink more beer.
I'm missing the point
and don't care.

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

Bricks are red and bed is magic
Trade them for a life less tragic

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Poems 08/04/11-08/17/11

Bomb Dream #16

Napoleon pinned down by sword thru his guts,
they had no problem aiming the Bomb right at his heart
and blowing the city into a new seaboard
a harbor of boiling blood
and me splashing away in a fervor of survive! survive!
Jesus O Lord save me
as burning ocean laps my ankles with flame
and I wade thru water thick with fat and atoms
past dead dogs and cars transmuted to coal and iron
floating atop Munich's ash river
and under the glare of a European dusk
God willing I nor anybody will ever see.

What do all the movies mean?
I ask my sure-footed shore, my grunge god.
Nothing at all
as he calmly smokes his cigarette
and waits for me to wake.

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

Country Boy

Where is she who loves legs swinging over farm gates
eyes trained to the cowshit
the crunch of drought-bleached gravel under boots
the sweet-sour sweat soaking chest
under St. Christopher hanging desperately around my neck
like a noose of the interstates I've known and loved
and fill me with a lonesome dread
so that here I am, walking meditation
remembering when this tree was a tree
and not a lightning-torn stump
just egg rolling back to cedar nest
just drying fish flapping like dead man's clapping hand
towards creek towards spring basins.
This I offer.
Take me for what I am.

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

Of Those I Miss

Of those I miss
I miss their faults as much as their perfection,
their lies as much as their love,
for we have shaped shaped shaped each other
beyond any semblance of ephemerality.

And now we wander
with feet planted opposite shores
among the ruined foundations of bridges burned,
and I can't remember their faces
but I love them just the same.

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

Twisting A's out of twigs,
kissing all the wrong backs,
worried about my parents.

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

There will come a day
when I'm judged not for my inability to cope with small talk
with people looking down their noses
Me swelling up like a tick
like a balloon like a ballast of love
a raft on tides of shame.

Fuck no, that day is tonight
and here I am,
sober as birth and as deadly serious.
Electric fence,
a live wire stare with towhead and mean fingers.
Rebuild my crumpled body with bricks and cable.
This heart will never know the difference.
I need love and raw meat
I need love and dead leaves
and we all float slow and screaming
to rot in Heaven.


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

Ante

I've been rolling my eyes like dice,
going all in on the small blind first hand,
playing people like chess.
There are no winners,
the game will end the same.
Ha!
Except I will live til the end!
Swear allegiance equally to passion, whimsy, and folly!
No regrets, by God!
I've loved!

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

Mildred

Sitting quietly in country static,
a radio tuned to night bugs
and the occasional snuffle from a tired hound dawg,
I can hear the draw on my cigarette.
Watch mosquitoes land on me,
fly away without molest,
I am unprovoking and without resistance
to those who suck and bite
so they neither suck nor bite.
Nothing to do with how I taste now.
More to do with how I choose to sit;
silent still sad content.
A bird couldn't alight from my shaking knee,
My ribs would spread like legs
no, like a curtain
and the bullet would pass through
and I walk unharmed.
Maybe a little lighter, I've lost some weight.
Maybe a little more humble, I've lost some pride.

I've lost nothing.
The goddamn son will rise in the morning
and there I go.

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

a constellation of cigarette burns
with a burning cherry satellite
while I'm a space station
still spinning mute

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

You're beautiful as frost,
I'm stunned as Valium,
thinking floating eating memory,
pure as
pure as snow
pure as hate,
clearer than swollen hearts
is the fading plea,
the choice to about-face in this gunfight
draw and fire.

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

New Orleans

I don't consider myself an extrovert in any way.
it's a scam.
Today I got my first lapdance
I loved her, smelled her on my hands
the rest of the day.
met people at the metal show.
got punched in the gut at the metal show.
I don't know.
I guess they're alright
these people
these people
------------------------------------

Thunderstorm broke the night
like a fever
5 am
hangover.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

A Marked Change in Behavior

Sometimes you gotta lose to win
I have no home
but here feels good.
In my dreams
My friends are dropping like flies
and here I always thought myself humane
a vicious carnivore
but usually a scavenger
a lye facial
lying facedown
and lying.
No, goddammit, I ain't no brute
no caveman
no muddy fool with clumsy tongue
no bleeding heart carried on broken legs.
A cannibal, maybe
though I'm not sure
if eating your own fingers counts.
And besides, I'm happy,
Alhamdulillah,
Pretty sure I'm happy.
Sometimes you gotta lose
to win.

"Road Prayer"

There are some nights, I've said it before, when there is nothing like a perfect murderous drive, I've said before, like a hot knife through the buttery underbelly of state highways, our angular little hood the head of a snake swallowing its two-lane tail, blinking at spirits hallucinatory and convincing, like making love straddling a backbone and swinging wide through the curves until she gasps and I nearly see the Glory of the Almighty in the infinite shadows cast by floodlit flagpoles, though the flags themselves drip with brains and wet gunpowder.

Only a night ago, everything was wet with stars, and closing my eyes I could see a lunar landscape of glowing coral and spiraling marble columns encrusted with hard candy and brooches, and I could kick off of these columns with a child's feet and fall giddily and unscathed through the storms of fear, and I was only filthy barefeet dancing with cicadas.

It makes me sad we will never know each other, but life is a funny wheel. I'll still have your letters and someday I will read them without a bitter pang, still will I someday regret to have washed your hair from my pillowcases. The wheel spins, we move on as swiftly as the world turns beneath us. There is no room for futility in these spokes, only a playing card to make the whole rotten thing feel a little more like a motorcycle. Insha'Allah, may we all find blessed comfort on maddening winds, knowing that same air pushes the sweat from all of our brows, knowing I will never know you so long as I refuse to know myself.

Screeching hymns of the open road, the lonely howl of semis and the tranquility of smoke and good tunes, the Holy inertia and exhausted eyes in league to make this road twist and pulse and lunge under my feet even when I'm standing perfectly still.

Amen.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

I'm glad we stopped at this gas station,
I've been here before with a Lawrence hangover,
ate hot dogs in the rain.
I'm panting in front of the soft drinks,
there's this girl who looks like an angel.
I'm about to skin something,
die, wadded up, sweating limping love.
She does not give a shit.
Teach me to harden my heart
float like the moon through a hive of assholes
lend a glow to the seductive treachery of memory.

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


Goddamn, you look good,
like you've been fucked,
like you've been fucked,
like a good fucking cup of coffee,
flushed and fucked.
And I'm winking as I back into
shadows and tangles of wire,
because I know you haven't been fucked good enough.
I find myself staring vacantly at legs,
probably for long enough to be noticed,
and I feel like I'll throw up
every time I cough,
which is often.
I'm back in Missouri,
I blew snot all over my shirt,
I'm drunk on warm vodka,
it's humid as hell.
I'm untouchable, goddammit.
I'm bored, don't come near me.
I'm having a great time on an empty heart.

Minneapolis.

The world is a playground
except someone jumped off the see-saw
and I'm just on my ass in the woodchips,
just sliding down a metal slide
that bubbles flesh
as it spend all day soaking sun
like a sponge,
and someone took a shit
right next to the water fountain,
and now I'm just throwing up
on the merry-go-round.

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

Drunk as I am,
still even at two in the afternoon
rotten little ape
Waking up as I did
facedown in a back yard
slept for two hours
whiskey
beer
cigarettes
telling fuck stories 'til dawn
avoiding dog shit
sick on raw meat
drunk as I am
I'm not embarassed
to let you know about the waittress
that just conned me into a second Bloody Mary
and had perfect breasts.

Mollusks

I spent my winter cracking my shell,
unwrapping some ropes
and letting a little light shine.
Far too long
I'd been an asshole,
closed my ribs up like a mollusk
brined and burning.

I'd slobbered a selfish frenzy,
loved my own lies,
gouged out my own eyes
with my own filthy fingertips
and crawled laughing through bedroom windows.

It was time, I felt
for a little innocence
to melt the ice of my eyes,
a little trickling compassion
to do right.
But goddamn,
see if I ever try that again.

At the sight of that first fissure
Hands were upon me
I was taken a fool
a crowbar into the heart
Pried open like an unripe scallop,
swallowed like a raw oyster,
left my shells to be groud
into gravel and chicken feed.

So I'm cinching the armor again,
a slow process
like drawing a bow
a painful rebirth
into this hardened thing
I'd buried
like a casket.

And the armor will be tighter this time,
hell, smothering.
Retreat, boys.
This fucker's gonna eat us alive.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Duck in the swimming pool.

To be a duck,
to be a little brown turd
graced with the wings of cherubim
if not the flaming knives,
to be granted in flight
a vertical undeath,
to have the keys
to the moaning waters of the world,
to see the arc of sound
through the eyes of spheres,
to prefer to paddle in poison,
wade in a sick blue bath,
a maze of chlorine and skin.
Maybe so.
To look for her in wandering compassion,
the fold of sleepless eyes,
I could walk into the room
and fall silent and invisible as breath.
I dare wakefulness to damn me.
Tempting as my dreams have become
I pray within them
to find myself on the other side
of the somnolent mirror.
To burn my pillow
and become a pillar of ghost,
to hurry that path that we all tread,
to wonder why no one else is as excited
by these fabulous failures of the heart.
Each night we are lucky to die,
to sail innocent seas,
each morning we are lucky
to still taste their salt on our lips.
A useless crush,
a high school crush,
a radio crush,
sometimes like cold sap,
sometimes like flames cracking windows,
left unattended swallows you,
becomes something sinister and useless.
You can't purge your mind
of a slicing urge,
you can't begin to train your eyes
to your own muddy footprints,
you can't recall a time unencumbered
by the weight of a glad storm,
by the crawling sting of devotion.
Or at least,
I can't.
I know the saddest girl in the world.
I've stepped across deserts with her,
sailed lifeboats over the Rockies,
plodded the coolest pavement,
I can't help her.
I'm an awkward scalpel,
I'm a wounded bird
wheeling towards Jesus and suicide.
I have nothing left for her
but bitter sheets of blue plastic
blinking in sockets.

She is the saddest girl
and I am the saddest boy.
I have nothing for her,
but I'm glad she's alive.
And she's glad I'm alive.
And we are all alive and hurting.
All together now.
Nothing can stop us.
is just like me on the shoulder
trying to peer around the foggy rainy corner
trying to weigh my present
on a scale not yet born
and getting hit by a car.

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

I'm willing to choke swallowing some rope
These hands are whipped

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

I am PLEASED with myself
pleased pleased pleased
I'd like to die soon
wake up mourned upon mundane tide
an underwear pariah
me-oh-my-oh
I'm a little rot
staring from trash cans
and chillums.
A delighted angel
is clapping
that I once was
that I tread water
in a cesspool
that I died angry
in a garden
that I was angry
to the very end
glowing even in a sea of gems
awash in a silver shit
with wings of righteous spit spit spit.
I carry spit in my veins
and the angels are anxious
for me to find my way home.
Fuck you all.
I'm going to Heaven.

Poems about the bats in Buffalo, NY.

I couldn't stand the girls
and their skirts and skinny jeans
and puckered faces
and thighs and breasts and opinions
Can't take it
so I wandered the theater district
sat on a bench
cradled a sinking skull.
The fountains were turned off
the pool lay black as hell
a rippling skin of space
an abyss adrift with
bats flitting and diving
occasionally dipping their toes
and I nearly sobbed
realizing the fountains
were for the night deactivated
dead, perfect companions
Yet I sat stared legs crossed
and I waited
as if I expected the ground to rupture
tearing the sutures
great geysers of relief
a tempest of holy unreality
showers of
[love or come, I can't read my own handwriting]
but of course it's bullshit
and it's just me sitting on a bench
staring at a silent pool of water
dreading the falling minutes
sigh sigh bats and trash
trash and sighs

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

A bat in Buffalo
eats gnats and mosquitoes
tiny guts vitriol
dissolving amber armor,
a thief for blood,
a sopping rubber glove
with cardboard propellers
twisting my hair
slitting still waters
whistles across night's skin.

flagpole fingers of rosy stone
aching branching industry,
calloused hands raking porcelain
a slobbering dog let loose upon vegetarians

Let me stomp around your picture frames
Let me remind you
that life is an ephemeral gauze
and we should fuck fuck fuck

5 am, twisted spun drunk in Buffalo
There is a part of me
that wonders
what it would feel like
to throw myself in front of the Metro
Buffalo, NY
a part of me
praying to be mugged at knifepoint
a part of me
praying to be harassed by crooked cops
I pretend the trash
blowing on the wind
is a person sneaking up behind me
gun in hand
knife in hand
club in hand
to beat the holy living shit out of me
and there's a part of me
that is sorely disappointed
when it's just trash
when it's just leaves
blowing on the wind
and no one harasses me
and I'm alone
and bored.

I love cigarettes

I love cigarettes
Staining my fingers
I can still smell them on me
in the morning
Moments cast up like dice
like wet feathers
like cherry stars
lit with a Bic lighter
inhale exhale
panting wild in a jungle of sweat
my four a.m. oasis
I love cigarettes

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Albany, NY

Albany wakes up sharp
Like a muddy crack of green thunder
The businessmen are rude in the elevators
and leave an expensive trail, a stain on the air
(I'm not impressed)
My pupils are dilated like mikcaps
so I keep my eyes trained to the ground
I miss industry, chugging chimneys, American royalty
I see Mexicans sawing lumber
I see a band-aid pasted across sidewalk cracks
I see turkey bones
a lonesome boat dry
a parrot in the window screaming
Andrew is so polite to gas station attendants
treats his friends like shit
Because those gas station attendants
would never forgive me
Oh, it's horrible
You wouldn't believe me if I told you
You'd say I'd been blinded by fortune
But it's horrible
This nation is a giant
so many puddles of oceans
and ruts of highways
and slag piles of cities
It's horrible to see
So many county lines drawn in chalk
Countrysides with rotting farms
It's horrible
Like the roar of horses
Like a thousand pounding bleeding drums
It's horrible, I can't stand it
I get to see it all
Slack jaws, dough faces
A billion eyes shine
and make shapeless constellations.
Let me suck on the tailpipe like a whore,
lash me to the trailer hitch
Drag my smokey body home
and bury what's left beneath a limestone slab.

Portland, ME

Tonight I got so drunk
Jogged up bird cages
Fell down elevators
Now I'm on cat hair
and envelopes
sweating, heart pounding, muscles ache taut
Remember why you loved me?

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

Besides, nothing better to do
Get dressed, roll cigarettes, plod down sidewalks
A black man in overalls
screams Scripture from the corner
It's Sunday morning
"Look at all that body fat!
"I can't have a plate of food?
"I'm sixty pounds underweight!"
"Me too" I tell my shoes
Too poor for pride
Too rich for humility
I camp in front of the sun dial
Squint at girls jogging around the lake
And pray for all us sinners.

Monday, July 11, 2011

I'm serious
This is it, I'm going crazy tonight
I pace through mirrors
Stare at my hands
Weave thread through my tongues
Ball up on cushions
Scratch blood up like oil
I'm deadly serious
All you have to do is pick up the phone
And ask me if I'm doing ok

7/8/11, Amherst, MA
You're my favorite interruption
A tree rises suddenly from a fogbank.
You're a rose rising from the sidewalk,
you're covered in pricks.
You're break time at the slaughterhouse.

7/8/11, Amherst, MA
Don't you dare do that
I've only just met you
and not nearly knowing well enough
for you to dance through the room
sure-footed and sunning
a shadow inverse
impeccable little monster
you press a tattooed hand
up to my side.
Don't you dare,
my ribs ache, will open like jaws
and swallow you whole.

7/8/11, Amherst, MA
I wrote these in that unsleep state, napping on a couch, in between dreams, Amherst, MA, 7-8-11.

I am a tiny bird
Plummeting stone with wings of leaf
Pounding furiously in my fall
To be cast up
With the weightlessness of disaster
and the fruitlessness of misery.

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

I had a dream, black rails
My head leaning on night
I felt movement, looked down
And you were against me
Staring up
Blue eyes breathing
and the stars spun.

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

She was tiny,
as big around as a roll of dimes.
Her eyes flashed and her hair was ink
We talked books as she packed a pipe
Talked poetry wet on the porch
I stood in the yard staring at my feet
and we told each other secrets
of all those dark nights
and we became friends.

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

We found a rhythm
tongues tracing
fingertips floating:
it was a feather in a smokestack
and you hated it,
it was an iron ivory egg
and you smashed it,
twisted pegs and clipped strings
fell to fitful sleep upon your own bed of silence.
I'm tuned, cable strung to the wall
and I rock myself to sleep
waiting for the drums
for the rhythm, for the harmony
dying in a minor key.

Sieve

Sometimes the wind feels like plastic thread
spider webs piercing my cheek
tightrope that saws through my soles
winter's laughing traitor like sap
into a blue glowing summer.
I am a creature of spaces, gaps
A billion tiny holes through which light shines
and water leaks like tea
strained through a skull's net of teeth:
and summer, joy of light and insects whining
is dry sand is empty salt
shook from my skinny fingers
of space and gauze
running like time down my bloody arms
and spilt wastefully
on an unmade bed.

Raining in Amherst

I gasped when I opened the book
found folded pieces of notebook paper
Inexplicable delights like ants carrying dead ants
Like smiling my way through a night
Or being woken by a rainstorm
as I sleep drunk angel in the yard.
I toyed with the dog bone with my bare feet
stood up and smoked a cigarette on the porch.
It's raining in Amherst.

Friday, July 8, 2011

poems

Something rotten in my marrow
has become dislodged, sailing seas of blood
and sticking in my heart
balanced like a knife.
The weight of dead skin
drags my feet
the syrup drips from my eyes
and my eyelashes wilt like petals.
Leave your door unlocked,
for the love of God,
leave your bedroom open.
I'm blind and can crawl no more.
I'm coming for the cure.
I'm coming
for the cure.

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

She paused in the open door
at the house party
Breakbeats and yellow backlit
And I swear you can know a girl
By her impossible silhouette.
Impossible legs
her hair clouds flowers blooming
wrapped in impossible caramel
her eyes maybe blue maybe brown coffee.
It was too dark to tell.
She hustled up next to me on the couch,
hustled the gas station attendant
and jumped on the trampoline
like a maniac.

Philadelphia poem

Sitting in a ratty chair on Philadelphia rooftop
Watching planes circle the gotham skyline
as lazily as the mosquitoes
that have followed me across six states
and are the only insistent secrets buzzing in my ear
and the only reason
I have to believe
that I actually taste good.
In this shroud of night and smog
I bow my head
And nearly pray
And thank God for one moment
I am alone.

Burial at Sea.

The ocean doesn't care that I'm sad, sitting as I am on wet sand, being as it is an abyss of tears. The ocean doesn't care that I'm hungry, being as it is the swallowing of the earth, drawing sand from the shore like time whittling toothpicks from our bones. The ocean doesn't care that I threw my worn-out shoes as far as I could towards the horizon, and tomorrow it will probably gently deposit them on the beach among shells and seaweed and some poor fool will throw them away without a second thought to the miles they've carried me, towards what great views and from what crushing loves. If I knew they would be washed to India, if I knew, I would've thrown them in still lashed to my feet, but then some poor fool would be left with a soggy corpse among shells and seaweed, and I would not be writing this now but would be on my way to India still following a broken pair of Vans towards new horizons and from great loves, and I should like to think those shoes won't wash immediately ashore but have died in my stead, and that a grain of my soul has sank with them and one day an oyster will burp a pearl that will rise like a moon and act as a candle so I shall finally be able to light my way home.

poem

Every day I feel I'm drowning
They plant flowers between the exits and the highways
I have no exit
I have no flowers to pick
I collect scraps of metal
and blisters
and burns
and blood on my jeans
and a portfolio of strangers
and their handshakes, forgotten
I fold myself into napkins
and dream about eating pussy
at least four times a week
I mail bloody envelopes
to addresses I cannot remember
I thumb through cellphone contacts
But I hate none of them enough
to call them
and feed my intestines
out of my mouth and through the satellites
and I hate none of them enough
to beg them to thread the other end
through the eye of a needle
And none of them love me enough to do it.

I relate to only insects
I pinch off their wings and examine
their veins with careful scrutiny
through the lens of my broken eyeglasses
that I can't fucking believe
I forgot to bring with me
So I wander selfish and blind
Poor me
And I hate falling asleep sober
Because I wake with tears drying on my cheeks.

Getting Nowhere at the Speed of Sound

7-6, 1xx am, Philadelphia

It's gotten so hard to relate road stories, to find the time and patience to carve details into wood, and I relish instead these abstractions, cascades of emotional response triggered by the images and situations into which I've been thrust. Plenty to say about Virginia and the ocean, about the traffic bleeding into DC as we boiled alive in the van, about the steaming basements and filthy Chinese restaurants, but all I feel is a moment upon Philadelphia rooftops, not my first time, but there I am perched in a broken chair pondering the Philadelphia skyline and slapping at mosquitoes and licking hash oil from my face and fingers and I am only here and I have nothing to say about it because you will never know my horrors and joys, just as I will never know yours, though not for lack of trying. I could ring a bell of night and let loose a sea of flies and fleas and scratch my ankles like oars rowing and get nowhere at the speed of sound, my heart is aching at the bottom of everything and I hate everything I've written and done and tasted. She'll always be right, Shea reminded me at 6 o'clock this morning as I burned my left wrist with a cigarette and blew away the ash and agreed a thousand times and laughed my heart over the ocean and drank more wine and watched The Real Housewives of New York until I couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry or stick a screwdriver into my ears and up my nose until I sneezed brains.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Desperation is a fool's fuel.

7/1/11

Every moment in which we find ourselves is a culmination of our entirety leading up to that moment. Every second we are here-now is an end upon which to stand and look back at the paths and means and decide for ourselves whether or not it's all justified. I am only in Greensboro, NC, all of me, forever, I am only a sad quiet boy sitting on a curb writing drowsily in a yellow notebook with a green pen, my red lighter matching my red sunglasses, my shoes matching my state of being; torn, ragged, blue, ready to be cast into the ocean. If a life of mistakes has led up to this peaceful doldrum, to this Greensboro cigarette and these dirty shaky hands, this calm acceptance of relatively fortuitous though destitute lots, I dare to consider for just a shivering moment to where all the other paths would have led me, and I of course decide it's irrelevant, hung though I may be from a gallows of my own making, from heartsick rope woven of my own devices.

I'm desperately trying to find a reason for calling only couches, gas stations, and highways my home, to be reminded why I've gone without so much for so long, to feel that righteous retribution granted by the Fates and Muses, but there is a loneliness arching over my head that has obscured the mountains and stars. I'm screaming day and night into a shoebox, hearing my echo returned flat, hollow, muted. So many pairs of ears begging to bleed at my behest, save the pair that will not listen, will never listen, the one pair from which I wish to dab the clots, to bandage and kiss and into which I would give up all of the rest just to whisper one more promise, one I would never feign to break as all the others before, a promise silent as a prayer and thunderous as earthquakes and churches collapsing and the world shaking itself apart from the epicenter of the bedrooms of angels, and I'd gladly forget that I ever solitarily considered myself whole as all I hear is the settling dust of Armageddon and a silent night and the tinkling of bells.

There is something completely wrong with the way I've resigned myself to the swallowing ocean, to the night that I could just as easily hide behind my eyelids and sleep away until day breaks with clarity and birdsongs, and find I'd been a bird all along, and that my wings were never clipped by anyone's hands but my own. Desperation is a fool's fuel, but I have nothing left to burn.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Wish You Won't Wish You Won't Wish.

The ocean spoke, saying, "Wish. You won't. Wish you won't. You wish, you won't". I lay in the sand and put my handkerchief over my face so as not to allow the mosquitoes to get their little vampire lips against my soft cheeks. That skin is for you to chew. I'll save it the best I can.

If I had any spine at all, I'd wade into the sweat of Chesapeake Bay and swallow lungfuls until I sank like a stone. If I had any spine at all, I'd march like a soldier all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific and carry you on my back like all the dead weight you've proven to be, and we could find some crater in the mountains and dig our separate holes and wallow in the mud until we bleed from our eyes and die passively in a puddle of Self.

Wish you won't wish you won't wish you won't. I'll bleed liquor by the end of this, by Gawd.

North Carolina; I picked dried blood out of my hair for hours, gritty maudlin burgundy under chewed fingernails, sprinkled like paprika upon the dusty veins of our nation.

You won't wish. You won't.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

instead

The white noise of hissing trucks,
moths frying in mercy lanterns,
an old friend traces circles with gentle lung
while the fire makes dying footstep drumbeats
and night bugs sing waves.
I almost set myself on fire with a candle I don't need,
wishing I were drunk instead of remembering past poems
saved on a broken cellphone,
gone now
and hollow my heart's mute fingers.

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

Backseat seasick,
wanting handfuls of round supple steering wheel,
head bouncing on glass instead,
already missing breakfast.
I should've stayed up when I woke up
sweating and sick of dreaming before seven,
blood caked on my blistered feet
burned hands from improper vices
spun from spider webs dull with falling ash,
thirsty for water or vodka.
My letters slip from clumsy grip,
god is dog.

Early-Morning Front Porch Manic

6/11/11

I'm hysteria in black suspenders, jittering so fast and mad I can barely hold onto my pen, locked out of Jackson's house on Missouri Ave. in a manner that perturbs me on the tail-end of a morning already heavy with bad magic symbolism. Starving, and if I had a can opener I'd open a gracious can of black beans and eat 'em cold with my fingers or just suck 'em down like a beetle milkshake. Instead I lie on the porch, using my stuffsack (stuffed with sleeping bag, two pairs of boots) as a pillow and my feet propped on a wooden folding chair and watch hysteric as birds flit across my field of vision, except for the blackhead that I can just see on my nose in my periphery. I try unsuccessfully to pop it out in Jackson's rearview, instead turn and ponder my sad belongings piled next to car, ready to go go go to Tennessee in their stained knapsacks, battered guitar cases, and duct-taped boxes of books and hats. And despite how wrecked they all look they're obviously prepared. And despite my grooming I myself am emphatically not.

I'll write 'til 9, just 13 more minutes (or 14, 2 times 7, a doubled magic numeral, just as 13), and then I'll bang on doors windows cellphones or just howl and crow on the backporch, like that asshole rooster, all sleep-deprived beady eyes and twitching headache.

Why is everything so green?

Pocket stock:
wallet w/ gas money and no more
white handkerchief for snot, sweat, and other secretions
Nokia flip-phone, for use in desperation and/or romance
lipbalm, not vegan
guitar capo, the screwing kind that bruises my fingertips
2 rocks with fossils, stolen from Panther Creek
.73 mm Dunlop nylon guitar pick
63 cents
illegible notes to myself, taken down upon take-out tickets from Bambino's Ital. Cafe
green Sharpie marker, twin-tipped
5 mg Abilify tablet in cigarette cellophane

view stock:
black rag
old man with cane
2 chairs
robin staring at me with adorable curiosity
green
green
green
broken porch swing
white Ford Tempo, 2-door
empty jar, dirty
crushed pack of Camel Filters
dead tree
blue shoes
green
green
green

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

night terrors

6/11/11, 5:03 am

I dreamt I was lost, lost in concrete stairwells with too-low ceilings, suddenly lost on a college quad intersected by long walls of mirror and glass forming rainy alleys on the dark morning grass. My eyes wouldn't remain open, I was drunk and staggering blindly

and awake and hadn't the slightest idea where I was

I fell back asleep, immediately in the apartment of a girl about my age, begging me to deal with the roaring elder god swelling and groaning on the street below, a great moloch of sharp fins and rotting dark vegetable matter, sweeping up cars and pets and unknown people , and the whole scene was one of panic and great primal terror.

Next I was as I was the preceding afternoon, wearing a grey-striped pearlsnap shirt and dark jeans, leisurely strolling about my father's yard. Dogs ran up to play, dogs I recognized and also some strange. I thought nothing of it until a brood of kittens began doing the same, following me mewing, climbing up my leg. And then the birds; doves, chickens, songbirds, all following me, harassing and pleading and it was horrid and I realized I could understand their prayerful complaints. Mice began raining from a catalpa tree that was cut down years ago, falling upon me, one somehow making it past my elastic waistband and I could feel it disgusting and warm soft, nestling in the crotch of my underwear, coarse velvet and tiny nails against my genitals. I found my father and begged him to see the horde of animals taken to following me, looking at me with desperate empty animal eyes, and then the insects came. Ants, cicadas, flies. "There was a fucking mouse in my fucking underwear!" I gesture wildly at the animal entourage, all of whom followed my every move as overzealous followers of a faithless and corrupt terrified guru. When the birds began tucking their heads beneath their wings, looking back at me with sickeningly coy human glances, I gave up. "It's alright" I tell my father who may not have even been there. "I'm only sleeping"

and I'm back in the girl's apartment, though she is much younger now, and she haltingly tells me that her grandparents have been living in her bathroom for three years. She asks me to look in on them, and I hesitate when I see the dark closed door down the hall to the right. Suddenly, the door slowly creeps open, and her grandfather emerges. "Only he never looked like that!!!" she exclaims, clutching at me. The man is scarcely human now, walking with a gnarled cane that looks to be an extension of his arm, his hair a tangled mess of wiry white and twisted brown and green supplejack vine, arcing over his head to nearly for a halo or horns. His eyes open

Enough. I wake, heart aching and nearly sobbing, cheek pressed against dirty green carpet and see that at least the ants are real. I look at my cellphone, see it is nearly 3 am and I've slept for five hours and know I will not sleep again tonight. I rise, piss, drink water, smoke cigarettes, watch infomercials for miracle bras, take a mile walk in the dark and find an armadillo.

But what of those twenty minutes I won't mention, between sobbing on the floor and rising pissing drinking. Anxiety, panic, dread. Escaping from a sleep worse than death. Indescribable, makes a scared boy never want to sleep again. To wake up lost and alone, confused and terrified, better not to sleep at all.

Now I'll watch the sunrise on the back porch, watch the storm roll in and listen to the asshole rooster announce how he's going to take this day in his beak and spurs and fuck it, Amen. You're missing all of it. I need coffee.

supernatural

Oh, that I could go where the sunshine doesn't flow
Instead it drips down our backs like wax
By the light of June, we're howling at the moon
You already knew I wasn't coming back

There's a sea in your eyes, secrets in your smile
Your tongue drips down my back like wax
I was born in June, a hundred years too soon
You knew I lied when I said I was coming back
You're so supernatural

Poems.

Ants crawl black on dirty spoon
Crushed cans cradle spent cherries
of lazy cigarettes
Ashing low on summer's hum
And we have our full cans
Sweat run down their cool curves
And we dream those metal curves
skin and muscle
And to be drunk instead from your mouth
And your eyes
I'd trade all these assholes
And this desert of a porch
But only for an afternoon
Else who would I tell about you.

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

In love I found confusion
and in confusion I found a mirror
and in the mirror, sadness
and in the sadness, a realization, an awareness
and in awareness, joy
and in joy, life
and in life, death
and in death, God
and in God, love.
And I threw away the mirror
and bound myself to an oak
and said from here I won't move,
Goddammit.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Poem

Once we laughed in light
and laughed like rain on skin
and laughed like a blanket on grass
and God laughed with us
and trees bent their buds to my nose
and I to your tongue.
Now, though all is night
and the clouds have hidden
every moon I stare through the sky,
I laugh with the clouds
and I laugh as a storm rends trees
and as a river lashes the soft bank,
and God laughs with me and graciously
bends the breeze
to carry me the smell of your hair.

written as a text draft on a Nokia cellphone, 6-9-11

...no qualms at the heat and loneliness of May...

Sometimes your mouth is so dry from late-nite drinks and smokes that the early-morning drinks and smokes just rake down your throat and nose and the cold glass of water is just an afterthought to the glory of your desert lungs, it all reminds me I'm alive, and I bask in the solitude and luxury of not having to speak a single word aloud to any-fucking-one, all who yet slumber, and the morning is mine alone, I crow a silent crow and pretend my dry throat is a blessing.

A dirty spoon on a sun-baked front porch, black with crawling ants chipping away at food residue with their tiny black jaws, this image replays over and over as representative of my time spent in Springfield this last month, though its meaning unclear it makes me feel a hot crawling. It was a month of surprise at my own ambivalence towards surprise, punctuated only by a time or two by mania conquering reasonable will. I cooked myself like a lizard, found God in the blessed and occasional press of lip to hip, in the cool creeks and scummed swimming pools and happily dumbfounded Me on my birthday, pretending not to be in love with Her and It and All and the sun rolling outside the window while I giggled and drank passenger seat beer and promptly forgot to remember to pretend. Lips loosened and sun reddened my skin and muddied my legs and I rolled my eyes (metaphorically) up into my pickled and sunburnt brain and promised to write all sorts of love poems and run-on sentences and to begin my bout of monthly vow recitation to ears who only pretended not to hear a stupid word my tongue scratches on paper with a green marker.

No complaints, no qualms at the heat and loneliness of May in the Ozarks. I feel fortunate and grateful for my minuscule burdens, for my heart's yoke and my tanned humility. The year is laid before me, boiling and snowing and whispering sexy in my ear all sorts of dirty promises and angelic lies that I take, all of 'em, at face value. I'll see the Atlantic soon enough, and be reminded of our freedom as rubber rubs road and we hum with violence and passion and refuse to show mercy in either or any exploit, like singing to trees as we fell them, like kissing the tears away that you yourself strangle out of her undeserving.

I used to write so much, and I wonder now if it was because I had nothing to say. I'm older now, twenty-seven yesterday, and it feels like as my heart and mind burst and flower it would be trite to attempt to form my exquisite delights and delicious delirious pain into any semblance of readable and orderly trash. Maybe I'll start writing poems instead. My life no longer feels like prose, but rather arrhythmic skipping of stones tumbling from eyes to ears, tasting of blood and dry grass. O Lord, thank You for my afflictions.

6-9-11

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Finding a little mundane wonder on a drunk Sunday morn.

5-22-11

9 o'clock wake up, 10 o'clock bleary, sweaty befuddled and jazzed. Use your momentum from the night before to erupt in slow motion from a too-small couch and ride high and drunk on sneakers forgotten to be removed out the front door to lose your bearings

and I found myself strolling down St. Louis at nine o'clock Sunday morning, a street lined with used car lots guarded by steel cable and posted warnings, one of which actually spoke to me to dissuade any notion I had of hopping the cable and wandering around the lot full of squatting orphans, which I had no previous inclination to actually do though the speaking sign ("No trespassing" it repeated, though it also sounded a bit like "You look unhappy", which may have been true though my mood was gleaming) caused me to take a contemptuous pause and wonder if maybe I did want to trespass, check a few odometer readings, kick a few tires.

Walked in a roundabout way to a gas station on Glenstone, purchase a diet soda and a pack of smokes, both to battle the hangover that has yet to set in but is surely nipping at my afterglowing heels. Exploring Cairo Street next, a neighborhood of swinging doors caught in the wind like ghosts.

I Will Will You

New song, just wrote it on Garrett's front porch. Unsure what it means, if anything. Sounds like a huge Centro-Matic rip-off. Hyphen-hyphen. It was supposed to be a feel-gooder, but it reads pretty obnoxiously melodramatic.

I'm tracing these maps in blue and red like a junkie looking for a vein
Holding my head under the waves until I come up with a better plan
Cowards don't run, they sleep in their shit
Will you think me brave when I leave?

I will will you to come

The whole thing's corrupt, doomed from the start
Will you let me know if it's worth my heart?
I got Texas plates and California eyes
Will you be a dear and remind me what's mine?

I will will you to come

So lock me in your sleep, stabbed with your eyes
They're as blue as the day I was born
I drop to my knees, my blood in the dirt
Making mud ever fertile in your arms

I will will you to come

Monday, May 23, 2011

The New Pink is Rattlesnake Pink (unfinished)

I don't know how I ended up outside
All I know is that I can't go back in
And I can't remember what it was I was trying to hide
All I know is that it's shining through my skin

So I turned myself inside out
I set my spine free
And I watched in slither away
And as I bled there in the grass
You know I just had to laugh
When them bones, they looked just like a snake

There's a freedom that I need to find on Hwy 65
Though I may not find it until I am dead and gone
And soaring like an angel on these pink snake entrail wings
Until the sky opens up
And I'm swallowed like a song

And I'll never have the chance to say
I loved you 'til that day
Letting go of all these songs I'll never sing
But I have faith that you'll all know what I mean when I say
That the new pink is rattlesnake pink

These drums are just rattlesnakes
These guitars are constrictors
Wrapping 'round my throat

That body you'll be burying, it long won't have been me

Girls playing tennis in the park.

5-21-11, sunned like a lizard

I woke in a cloudy delirium, beset upon by the oxycontin I ingested the night before at Thor's birthday party. The rest of our friends and loved ones were properly drunk and screaming, tracking foam and wet paper and fervor all over the floors of the cabin rented for just such purposes, while no matter how many glasses of whiskey or vodka I poured myself, I felt sober as the day I was born, though without the necessary wonder and innocence with which to glean any real meaning from the situation. So, drug imbibed, my mood improved though my general appearance remained the sulky same, the only noticeable difference maybe a slight curling-up of my lips as I paced and drooled all over the "hunting lodge" decor.

And so today was began in delirium, remembering vaguely but fondly the car ride back to Springfield, when James and I discussed the loves lighting pale fires in our eyes and stamping around in our wimpy hearts (wimpy as contextual hyperbole, though throbbing and vital in the overflowing nature of their abilities).

Paced around the loft, compulsively bored myself to half-slit eyes staring at internet social networking sites, and then walked across town to a liquor store that would assure me cashing a check from Tennessee would be no problem and could likewise sell me a tallboy that sits beside me now in Phelps Grove Park, that I will drink on an empty stomach before work, attempting to finish the lyrics to a psychedelic song about snakes, and not be fingered as a derelict or pervert for drinking beer in the early afternoon mere yards from screaming school children swinging and leaping on squeaking playground equipment, watched over by pretty young schoolteachers whose fears would no doubt remain unalleviated even if I assure them it was upon their breast my tired eyes had been falling.

Instead I'll watch the girls playing tennis from the muddy shade of this tree, and only after I've finished my song and only while I'm turning the pages of this Gurdjieff I've been meaning to finish, for it seems any more that the truest solace I can reach these beautiful lonely spring days is the printed word in my hands, framed by wet grass and eye-piercing sunlight, a blanket of shade falling like a corona upon my head and shoulders, and is not to be found in a female form that may as well be an automaton, hollow as they may well be despite my efforts to fill them with my own desperate hope, a powerful wish but no more than cotton in their lovely limbs.

Kirbyville, Honestly.

I could write poems and poems about these strutting weekday chickens

I'd rather like to spend a day writing your name, taking care to allow the cursive to choke the blue-lined whites like kudzu, giving myself no room to breathe. Not in any sort of obsessive sense but to hold the page up to my eyes and mouth and treat it as a suffocating mirror, to prove to myself that I've left no room for fresh air and that perhaps your own lovely brand of fatalism is best appropriated and applied in this very context. Wear it like a mask, this obstinate page, and burn it from my face when I'm done, revealing fresh pink life underneath in a tender pink skin.

All of the morbid thoughts of the last few weeks, all of the carefully aligned phrases I've catalogued in my head, waiting for a little serene solitude to transcribe, have drifted into gloomy little harbors to be beached ignored with the next storm. The day is far too pleasant, exiled as I am on my father's farm in Kirbyville, to pay any mind to this last week's binges and battles. I'm alone with fresh air and birdsongs.

5-16-11, a Monday

Monday, May 2, 2011

Considerations.

Stay up, paw through boxes of your own shit, your own useless trinkets and baubles, separate them all into different smaller boxes; Phillies cigar boxes, Vans shoe boxes. Put the small boxes inside the bigger boxes. Fold the flaps shut with a certain short-lived satisfaction, like putting your foot over the burrow of one of those subterranean wasps, knowing you're safe as long as you keep your thick sole on the ground, but tensing to run as soon as those mean little fuckers get a glimpse of sunlight and soft skin.

Drink too much coffee, navigate the tangled memory jungle of your bedroom every fifteen minutes for another piss break. Stare unsteadily at your frowning reflection in the mirror, pick absent-minded at the puckered acne sore just to the left of the soul patch beneath your lower lip thrust forward in an embarrassingly perpetual pout. Think about abstractions of the heart, stretched nearly to its bursting point, at how good it'd feel to pick at the scabs forming in the creases and stretch marks, and then let up on the navel-gazing and reflect on the fact that my heart is no more or less strained than anyone's, and that I should expect no one or nothin' to even give a moment's pause to my singularly strained condition.

I'm not long for this chair, for this room, for this weird green 11 am sunlight displayed before my tired eyes, the white noise of the traffic beyond our magnolia trees. I'm not long for these magnolia trees. I'll be back.

Ah, christ. I could be doing anything but nailbiting and taptaptyping, I could be sleeping or continuing to organize/pack, or I could just sit in the corner and think about all of the upsetting things that caused me to pace away my lazy day, to murmur away my bitter night with eyes shaded by broken spectacles and spooky treetops, eyes underscored by darkening circles and a curious apprehension in regards to my stuttering heart, trembling with cups and cups of black coffee and not a single moment in weeks where I've felt my back relax its manic tension that causes me to trip through each day like a puppet with its strings tangled.

I'll be in the woods soon, and on the water and on the limestone, and under the water and under the Midwestern summer sun, and I will remember that I shan't, for one fucking second, be forced to consider anything I don't feel merits considering.

I haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Fort Assumption Park, Memphis, TN.

We've been assuming our ascension in Fort Assumption Park, picking through river trash and tottering rock for potent items to guide our profane hands and eyes towards the proper muddy rituals that will secure our bucket seats in Heaven, in Graceland, or sunk to the bottom of the Mississippi. Easy to imagine a year, two years, five years after the End, the Quake, the Fall, the Reckoning, turning your head to see only the ragged brush the color of soft snake entrails, pink and stained, to see only the tires and deflated soccer balls and jumbled messes of broken glass like discarded gemstones, to utilize the dazed wonderment and detachment and imagination awarded to those who have deprived themselves of sleep just to spend five hours screaming down I-40, trailing banana peels and plumes of cellulose smoke, to gorge on friendly grease and watch Memphis' black sky illumined to the saintly blue of early-morning rock and roll, to stumble down the shitty riverbank and not have a second thought to where the girls are and who they're thinking about, to all the busy bored cars on Riverside Drive nor to what their busy bored occupants are doing at 8 am that could possibly be more edifying than watching the river lurch and roll between us and Eventuality, between Arkansas' far shore and our tired feet balanced in Fort Assumption Park, pondering our imminent ascension.

And I saw a woman in the family-owned gas station this morning and she looked exactly like you in twenty long years, or five hard years, and I bit my tongue as I took the bathroom key, wanting nothing more than to ask her if she missed me yet.

3/7/11, 8:18 am, Memphis, TN