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