Saturday Mo[u]rning (lyrics)

I've got no time for regrets
I ain't got no time to act upon or feel them
When you're burning at both ends
with the right kind of friends
You don't need them
But maybe come Sunday
I will kneel down in Confession
And I'll spill them

That's assuming I'll still make it home
by Saturday morning
That's assuming I'll still be alive
on Saturday morning

I've got a lot of scars that I wear upon my arms
If you wanna see them
I've got notebooks of poems all about love and bones
If you wanna read them
And I leave blood drops like breadcrumbs
all the way to my bedroom
Just to lead them

Assuming I'll still make it home
by Saturday morning
They're assuming I'll still be alive
on Saturday morning

And one day you will wake up
and realize you'll never get another letter
From anyone, from any boy
who could ever presuppose to write them better
So maybe come Monday
I will sit down with my pen and paper

That's assuming I'll still make it home
by Saturday morning
That's assuming I'll still be alive
on Saturday morning

Country Music Death Poems

I.
Tom T. Hall sings, a scratched record
open: dark kitchen
bubbling on the stove
marrow, chunks simmering in blood
butter churned from brains, onions
sauteed in white lightning
and in butter
churned from brains.

II.
Hunting dawg stands on its hind legs
prized hunting dawg
speaks an ancient tongue
cleaves the hunter's head
with a tobacco knife
long-handled with a blade
fashioned from an ancient handsaw.
Prized hunting dawg shivers
brushes blood from his fine coat
mumbles to himself in an ancient tongue
smokes a pipe
learns to drive a car

III.
old country graveyard
(Mincy)

coffins of wood, real wood, collapse inward, marking the rotten slumber of decades with sunken spaces throughout the shaded sycamore roots

dead things wake up
light themselves a fire
have a dance, neck, get drunk on creekwater and fireflies

early morning, sun begins to rise, the ladies are exhausted, shuddering into the leaves, the boys left unpaired in their romance of tendons long snapped and skull kisses, they stir smoldering coals and talk gets real, far-out, they laugh about their dreams, especially the ones about bein' alive

written, I think, around Valentine's Day '13, I think

Song of the Cockroach

unedited, devoid of proofreading, candid
first draft of Part 1 to a planned epic
tentatively titled "Song of the Cockroach"

I.
Fear not, you dumbly spinning mundane world
you profane knot gasping in space
entitled beyond your own dreams
slitting your own cheeks to swallow whole the egg
your fish-eyed men and mean pinch-faced women
your mud brains piled high with false worry
ignore the devils in your soft hands
and the teeth forgotten beneath your pillow

Fear not for your attempts at love,
love brutish and forced and pitiful and hurried
and bored

Fear not for your losing yourself
within another just as lost and ugly

Fear not your shit food or your shit food shit
splashing in latrines of holy water
your tight fist balled in unspeakable anger
unspoken because it has no brain
formless nasty anger
stealing drowning eating, proudly glaring
learning ways to die slower but never a way to live

Fear not for your impersonal secrets,
your secrets are shared by all

For I alone have secrets yet, I alone am burdened with monsters of passion and folly held close to my heart and these I bear happily towards my own sunlit rock

Fear not the loneliness that chills your skin
the same chill of your lover's breath
as he mutters beside you
both so utterly immobile and so

Fearful of words you may find
(your arms wrenched behind your back)
begging themselves to be spake

Fear not the truncheon pigs
horny stomping our littered streets
born only to smash the skulls
of the peasant boys who dart between your legs
like cockroaches stockpiling for the apocalypse

Fear not the songs of these same roaches
for theirs are secret songs
and if you were to know them of course
the hymnal would be inborn
Glad Hosannas not yours and so worthless

Fear not the gentle rot of all you once knew
and everything-to-know.

II.
Do you hear whispers in the dark?
whispers that are so envious of you
and of this final love you've found?
Fear not these whispers
for none should care so much,
you've invented these gossips on your own
while babbling faceless in a mirror
and shuddering that your love is finite
and impresses no one
and bitter is the love that is
nothing without the grounding that
one other may disapprove.

Fear not those whispers
they are only your own teeth shaking
your own absolution
no one cares so much as you

Fear not
for the whispers will cease
when your heart is a home to worms
and your skull a castle for the cockroaches
without the artist's palate to taste
oh how exquisite and important your pain must have been

III.
Fuck your fast food, fuck your online prescence, fuck your blame, fuck your crude attempts at fraternity, fuck your lidded eyes, fuck your baleful heart, fuck the wars you fight and the children you murder for the gas pedal you stomp and the gears you grind, fuck your art, fuck your god, fuck your gardens, fuck your boss and fuck their vapid patronizings, fuck your pets eating better than the Congolese, fuck your eyes-to-the-stars and your feet in their ruts, fuck your parents whose ruts you yet trod, fuck your zoos and nat'l parks, fuck your president and his bombs, fuck your laminated flaps of human skin worn dangling from rearview mirrors dripping blood from one disgusting city to the next as you cower in the trunk and let the armless molester take the wheel careening burning gasoline spraying splashed against tree trunks and your own flimsy celluloid eyelids and your teeth carved from cheap glass and your hair falling out in clumps and fuck you and die so that we may commence our feast.

IV.
The hero a mirror to his brother man
Where they lie putrid he is electric, vitriolic
His eyes so beautiful because of the poison
While they wither at their own bite
He would not judge them were they on their knees
But still insisting on walking proud
he judges freely

"How are you fueled by toxins?"
they too chickenshit to ask
tottering on their bleeding stumps

His teeth are perfectly sharp, the venom
drips milky from their tips
Each droplet a world, a secret
and when they fall, finally, the bellows of
their lungs cracking their pipette spines
and pleading,

"What is your secret, you who have borne
such venom, what runs in your veins,
surely not the crimson samestuff that weakly
trickled through our own, what secrets do
your cells carry?"

"Exactly so, exactly right" I gently whisper,
cradling their sad face, their smashed skull
and they believe to have died before hearing the answer.

Fear not!

Riot Fest, etc

I kept notes on my phone during the blur-that-was-Riot-Fest. These are they, spelling errors (hopefully) corrected but syntax errors and general lack of ability due to chemical cocktails left largely (sic)'d. Also, I'm sure I could add more to some of these show reviews, but there's something to be said for the candid medium.

Riot Fest

Tera Melos: Never having heard them, I was totally impressed. It's like if Nathan Wall was famous. Promptly lost my friends and was having bad chemical foreshadowing.

Off With Their Heads: Loved em, but for some reason convinced myself they were only playing Clash covers. Bad things start happening to my head.

Bosnian Rainbows: paralyzed with fear

Best Coast: Following a "nap" in the medical tent, I watch these nice people from the shade of a Marlboro tent. Apparently they sing that "Boyfriend" song.

Superchunk: Great fun, played a bunch of new stuff, played "Out of the Sun" as the sun set behind the stage, which was cute and appropriate. Great fun cut short when a dude had a seizure next to me and I sprinted back to the medical tent to inform a totally disinterested "medic", which set about a chain of weird righteous creepiness and I raced around the festival yelling at employees about the "free water" shortage.

Dismemberment Plan: I found a good dirt hole to waller in and shield the sun from my eyes with a giant foam middle finger. Didn't watch them, but they sounded good and were hilariously weird.

Guided By Voices: Blew my mind, won me over. Bob Pollard did a lot of high-kicks and got wasted.

Alkaline Trio: Back in my dirt hole, came up with this idea and began writing, only paying attention to Ak3 when they play a song I recognize, which is about twice. Lost my friends and I don't think any of them want to see Rocket from the Crypt.

Brand New: SO FUCKING GOOD. Loud as shit, so loud they made my teeth hurt. I cried. Had a mental lapse in the middle of their set and got confused and thought they were playing reggae.

AFI: Especially considering what Brand New had just finished doing not five minutes before, AFI seemed wimpy and irrelevant. Bad.

Iggy and the Stooges: Iggy Pop is Iggy Pop. Some kind of sexmeat avatar. I had to leave halfway through their set to get a good Replacements spot, but Iggy & the Stooges were TREMENDOUS!

Replacements: Surreal.

Day 2

Stars: Regret missing their set, but it made good a soundtrack for tailgating with friends.

Public Enemy: Real bad sound for the first third or so of their set. Flava Flav is stupid and obnoxious. Fire that dude. Also, I'm pretty over the "rappers sampling/referencing Nirvana" thing. Seems too obvious for these kinds of shows, like, "Hmm, what do white people like? Oh, I know, Nirvana!" Yeah, but I like hip-hop more, y'know? After the sound was fixed, they sounded good. Live band. Chuck D's the dude. Sucks that I love hip-hop shows so much but still feel awkward putting my hands in the air. Justin got sexually assaulted during the set.

Flag: Way cool, set got cut short because a storm blew in and tore all of the giant Riot Fest banners down and shit ("There's only room enough for one Flag in this town"). We drank a lot of whiskey and Sean moshed.

At this point all of Riot Fest was evacuated and we sat in the car and got real weird and listened to Icona Pop's "I Love It" on repeat.

Bad Religion: First set after long-ass storm delay in which EVERYONE went back to their cars and ate/drank whatever drugs/drinks were left over (re-entry wasn't previously allowed - ed.). Mass delirium. I danced a little. I like when Bad Religion play their songs that are older than me.

Matt & Kim: Watched about half their set, not sure what was going on. Pretty annoying. Fell asleep in the grass until a guy kicked me to make sure I wasn't dead. Left Riot Fest, napped in the jeep.

Rancid: I hear em playing. I'm going to sleep.

And here are some random notes I took en route:

Turnback Creek, atomic veterans, Master National, lunger road, euphoria awareness optimizer, Huggers condoms, Running Turkey Creek, Operation Battle Fire

Idea: discount dental work, performed by children

"I have to concentrate when we kiss"

Crawlord

"evades hemps arpus waivor"

Bovina, a beautiful cow goddess

Jovanotti

Goth Brooks playlist, 09/16/13

@ Martha's Vineyard, with Polywaves, the Violet Lockets, Annalibera, MR NASTI, Delvok

01. Prince and the Revolution - "Computer Blue"
02. Craig Mack - "Flava in Ya Ear (Remix)"
03. Jesus and Mary Chain - "Between Planets"
04. El-P - "The Full Retard"
05. Sisters of Mercy - "This Corrosion"
06. NASA - "Strange Enough"
07. My Bloody Valentine - "Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)"
08. Ministry - "Hizbollah"
09. Big L - "Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous"
10. Beastie Boys - "Sure Shot"
11. Sonic Youth - "Bull in the Heather"
12. The Clash - "Straight to Hell"
13. Apathy - "Dead in the Middle"
14. M83 - "Graveyard Girl (Yeksek Remix)"
15. MIA - "$20"
16. Grouplove - "Itchin' on a Photograph"
17. Icona Pop - "I Love It"
18. D12 - "Purple Pills"
19. Icona Pop - "I Love It" (sic)
20. Daft Punk - "Fall (M83 vs. Big Black Delta Remix)"
21. Love and Rockets - "So Alive"
22. David Bowie feat. Nine Inch Nails - "I'm Afraid of Americans"
23. Homebwoi - "Halftime"
24. Tobacco - "Sweatmother"
25. Material - "Seven Souls"
26. Smashing Pumpkins - "Ava Adore"
27. Superchunk - "Everything at Once"
28. Kanye West - "Bound 2"
29. Gayngs - "The Last Prom on Earth"
30. Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros - "Get Down Moses"

We expect God to be sympathetic to our pain, though He's never had any of His own.

the dramatic length of one porch Pall Mall

Is it too melodramatic to swivel these eyes inward and proclaim myself on this broken throne an avatar of melancholy, demanding violent distraction? Summer's tedium is fully represented by these flies that insist on buzzing grossly about my house and light on my face which, I think, shows no sign of rot but then again flies have a more discerning palate for these sorts of tastes and I may have been rotting since May or even well before. When did this season lose its liberating jubilance and settle so begrudgingly into an era of misplaced aggression and malevolent lusting drips, contempt held close to the chest because of smothering sticky walls of sweating plaster and sodden bedclothes that weigh upon me as sheets of lead? A season of prison, that most feared prison born of my own doubting abstractions, a loss of inherent faith in my faculties created by cyclical nightmares aloft upon the morning's terror hence that I stagger with through the heated afternoon and drown again that evening in a wash of headed brine. Summer's end brought childhood shackles, but as an adult I am broken and choking and crave only the release of damp, moldering fallen oak leaves.

Love in the Time of HPV (lyrics [New Madrid song, unfinished])

Love in the time of HPV
has always taken on the air of a tragedy
There's something wrong with me
on account of the books that I read

And now is the winter of our discotheque
We're scratching on the 8
and we're cashing soundchecks
Following beats to our bed,
but there's no rhythm to our sex

And if you see her, tell her that I said hello
Tell her that I'm trying so fucking hard to not be angry anymore
Tell her that I've learned so much, but don't tell her 'bout my broken bones
And only tell her if she asks about it that I ain't been alone
I ain't been alone

We're just standing in the corner,
waiting for the song to end
Making eye contact but not many friends
So I duck back down the alley
just to find the mean means to an end

And if you see her, tell her that I said hello
Tell her that I'm trying so fucking hard to not be angry anymore
Tell her that I've learned so much, but don't tell her 'bout my broken bones
And only tell her if she asks about it that I ain't been alone
I ain't been alone
No, I ain't been alone

Hyperbole (lyrics [rap song, unfinished])

I've smoked more crack than your favorite local rapper
I's a thief in the temple before I knew what I was after
I didn't fuck your girlfriend but I did kidnap her
Now she's chillin in the basement while I'm hanging from the rafters

Sleeping in the attic where the bats and the rats live
Copying these verses from an ancient book of Madlibs
Causing campus chaos on the backside of my eyelids
Standing there all bloody like "Mommy, look what I did"

Throwin solo parties in condemned abandoned buildings
and I'm jerking off to pictures of all three Destiny's children
Sometimes I wanna die but the future is unwritten
So I stay preoccupied making money and incisions

From Canada to Texas, Atlantic to Pacific
I'm fucking metaphors when the names get too specific
When the pain gets too specific I'll just say it's her or me
You can't call it a murder when it's just hyperbole

Get down, girl
Go 'head, get down

So while I'll never be as high as the vultures in the sky
I'ma get twice as high or at least I'ma try
Get a birds' eye view of the birds I choose
And I'm scraping hella shoes for the turds I chew

Got a lot to say but no one will listen to me
And with the boom boom boom it can get kinda doom-y
Oil of the universe, see it seeping through me
But I gotta listen close to what the devil's saying to me

I'm chillin like a tomb, yo, I'm chillin like a crypt
Rattlin dem bones on the graveyard shift
I can try to find your center with a lick lick lick
It's the only guarantee in light of whiskey dick

Get down, girl
Go 'head, get down

From Canada to Texas, Atlantic to Pacific
I'm fucking metaphors when the names get too specific
When the pain gets too specific I'll just say it's her or me
You can't call it a murder when it's just hyperbole

6-26[/7]/13(/29)/4:35

How quickly we become accustomed to our own disbelief. It IS indoctrination you realize, yes? Stretch your larval mind prior, remember that there existed a time that Disbelief was no more a part of your perception than was what you have yet to accept tomorrow. Why do I each day shoulder this weighted cynicsm, the same each night before sleep which I shrug to my floor in some half-hearted gesture of finality? Pray that tomorrow we exchange our burdens for lessons, and our defiance of possibility for the acceptance of awestricken humility.

Statues of the Virgin Mary Weep Blood, Why Should Others Not Likewise Menstruate

Statues of the Virgin Mary Weep Blood, Why Should Others Not Likewise Menstruate
- or -
A high-minded orchard is an awful place to fall.

I've been licking statues. I've been licking statues, kissing them. Some erode beneath the glaze of my vitriolic tongue, their carved aquiline features caving inward, cancerous and leprous and accompanied by fate's cruel chuckle, it delights in their delayed rot, the quiet sobs of sculptors long dead. Some turn away, suddenly aware and very sure that it is not my crawling ape tongue and impatient ape fingers for which they have silently borne the centuries' weight. But some glow and delight, groan and crack and press into my embrace, stone lips separate and moisten in solemn and immediate defiance of their nature, and their fingers spread the folds of ancient stone robes and into which I settle, bashful at the unsung warmth of marble, a skeletal peace observed only by the morbid gardener for whom my insistence was only a passing curiousity and my death so deserved and welcomed as a respite;
"That asshole would he just would, rotted between carved thighs - in death he skewers and is skewered by hyperbole - with a pike he never knew to wield anyhow, and she too cold to reciprocate" [this is irony] "it is not pity I feel! It is not - he just would - "
But the respite soon ends and I die and the statues slowly crumble and the gardener tends her spiral of flowerbeds where the blossoms refuse to fall nor do they ever burst from fertile buds but just dumbly Are.
At the foot of the statue there is magic in the dust of my sperm, and a bird perched upon the marble nipple shits a seed stolen from the orchard's fallen fruit, which the magic catches and sighs gently into dark soil, and something will unfurl, unnoticed by the sterile eye of our morbid gardener, and will bud in spring and cause madness amongst the mindless flowers as surely as the bees take to the ley lines with their dusted gifts.

late winter 2013

I know your bitter breath would prove sweet as victory, and likewise your shallow fangs when you sink em into me.

poemtry

Why doth mine thumb feel broked?
Why doth mine throat so choked?
To sleep away the waning hours,
To piss upon the grinning flowers.

The puppet children have their hands up their own assess! What shall I do, what CAN I do to remind YOU of that pain of gestation? Please, take this mantle from off my shoulders; my struggles are unbecoming and I have naught upon which to rest.

sir?

Up with the birds and chimes, no rest granted the weary, least alone I, weary in Biblical proportions. Slept for a while on a shitty couch, struggled to my feet, excusing a bashed knee as I tumble towards my bedroom to wash my teeth. But sleep nay come, so a porchlight covenant with too-sweet liquor I have stowed, eyes rolled back and sucking to find an alternate dawn. Daylight is upon us, no less lonesome than its brother-the-night, and I fool myself, tickling, "Today shall be different!", though there is no longer a difference in the days of convicts. I have sealed my fated lips with a stretching wax, as if this is how I chose it, this day, each day, passing as an unlit fuse, soaked and waning under an abysmal fucking tidal urge to swell beyond my given boundaries. I skip amongst a gerrymandering long dead and uninterested, empty lines lingering just long enough for a proper questioning, bent lamplight glares in my face and shoots violence into untanned eyes. I know nothing, I swear, not me but he who tempts you Fates and fists, he my brother though I know him not! Ah, pity you poor fool who lurks within my scab'd bones, to hide your wretchedness within a wall of sanctity and secret despair, peering out of my bone-hole window with a hound's baleful eyes and lamenting the great yoke that has been clenched down firmly upon [y]our brow. Really, then, you'd have thought he larger than an unkempt derelict, larger than the beetles that helicopter madly upon the bells' striking tone, a tome a tomb a room, all the same, wrapped in doom with your cardboard California spine. Books are to blame for my not having ate solid food for a week, for my guts erupting upon the intervention of a careful calorie. Books are to blame when I wake upon a ghost and stammer my morning, stamp my morning unto an evening bereft of charm and holiness. I soaked the meat in a sink until the blood bled through paper and turned the water rust, chopped it and fried it and paced circles within tired circles, never enough blood to feed the healthiest vampire "who looks so sick in the sun". My dreams are filled with many-trunked elephants, great engines that spin and spit turbulent waters through the skies of imaginary hospital towns, and carefully indulgent women who refuse to plead an allegiance because/in spite of that kick'd dog that insists on following my steps while wearing a mocking cloak of my thin skin.

The [after]Effects of Red Wine Upon a [wo]man's Spirit, or, "A Titscendantal Crisis, One Among Many", or, "Two Long Nights [ago]".

[Ears ringing, note, natch]

Dreams of tits, clouds of tits just raining. I try to keep it towards some semblance of reality, but jeezus how the tears fall, you know?? If I could be left alone with the knowledge that I am alone, I may be able, just maybe, to grasp upon a falling leaf, to grasp the breeze like a chickenshit rodeo clown, who knows? Oh, this feels so good, as if I'm freefalling again; one again so sweet at the breast of Nipple. Treat me beastly, feed me poorly when I beg to be fed. O Lord, the Almighty Church of Nipple-Fist Action! These flags of Vein will take millenia to decipher, and by then there will be no word for nipples!? Someone is the only fruit worth desecration, as if it became life upon its abortion, but who believes? Certainly none of the cunt I deem worthy of words, they all too smart to be bedraggled with the decidedly unhip notion of THEISM but at any rate I challenge on, I challenge on, always the shepherd of a land that few would beg a difference. So tonight I am left alone to a flip-side, mosquito pest pestilence pestilence

feels so good to write. I may as well write it a few more lines...

Wear your bird-mask, protection against the miasma! The inherent, inherent miasma. As if the very repitition changed the nature of the evil words that come freely. As if my hands were dragons, my fists dragons, my tongue eyes bladed dragons...

And so I survey a landscape raped from a youthful ambition to find tits to spill my cloudy blood upon. CLOUDY BLOOD.

I
AM
IN
CUNT
TROL
L
.

[heart] [skull] AtD '13

fun to attempt a decipheration of my inundated crossthoughts, to scratch a translation upon glass, all "[sic]" by nature [sic], Shea is passed-the-fuck-out on my ratcouch, Nina Simone sings

The postcoital cock is a limp corpse draped in seaweed, a mariner found bloated still upon splashed rocks, sea foam in his beard.

Sometimes it sounds better from the outside, listening to that distorted hum bounce upon damp walls, the same I'm braced against with hand and forehead, pissing and thinking in a saturated corner, imagining the improvements on my character if I were to be turned inside-out, all jeweled and steaming, but as it is from the outside, I've doomed my damned self offering my eardrums as Communion hosts to the greedy harmonics that frame my night with its dancing drizzle and thicklunged smoke, boys and girls graceful without grace, sharp of lip yet with yawnful eyes, letting the ripples wake upon the liquortongued bank, easy with liquorfingers and liquorhips, everyone in a passive fuck spinning around the room, or maybe in a back alley I dance alone in a rain, in clouds, listening to the ricochet of metal, seeing sex in cold corrugation, marveling that I am not inside-out as feared but swathed in nightlove and warm monkey skin dusted with cold spring, and how good it sometimes sounds from the outside.

knotsbooks

Heartburn, but not from what I ate
I never knew why people ate these
And now I know why I never did
Record's skipping, but I can't get out of bed
Vinyl cries in the corner
While we bathe in the digital ocean
My dad always told me
To watch out for electromagnets
Humming, buzzing, like a microwave
In one ear and out the other
In my nose and oust the others
Feel so shitty now
Feel like I'm sinking now
But is it enough to stop me
From doing it again
Never was, never will be

Your earring is on the floor
I wish it were someone else's

THUMBS DOWN

motorcycle exorcist into the wild
picking up a spare, settling for a strike
plates smashed on sidewalks
police can target practice
these nights drag and drag
endless and senseless
this book sucks, no reason to read
give all her birds away
it's winter, and you know what that means
nervous hands on top of washing machines
we were all sixteen once
Once, we were all sixteen
tangled mess of electrical cords
sick to your stomach, slick rubber
makes you think viscera, snakes
pick it up with a paper towel
sop me up with my paper trail
grind poison into my bed
wars between spiders and notebooks
flicked the dead onto the carpet
hate killing those fuckers
you know they never stop moving
you know
hear the love from the other room
is it being made or made up

just flick me onto the carpet when we're done, mop up my poison with paper towels and the ocean

Found this in an old notebook. I remember writing it, and if memory continues to serve, as aided by the inherent message in the stumblin' word, I was on some sort of pharmaceutical trip, bad little pill-eater boy thinkin' he a big bad pill-eater man. Probably winter of 08/09? I was reading "The Exorcist" and was miffed how it sucked. Ok.

Collected blackouts, 2012.

No, no, no, make no mistake; these are the suns I rise for, this is the fractured battlefield dawn, this is the glory. A leather bird carries arrows and flint, telling hesitant secrets of our gasoline blood spilled in clots among interstate ruin. Your delicate savage foot a red sled sliding atop shell and grisly snow, you throw haughty lips towards the conflagration as the brave wade knee-deep in the guts of their stricken brothers, brows slickened and singed in the greasy smoke. Scalping white people scalping white people, scalps, scalps, scalps.

"Bach visits"

Brought to wheezing life
at a Spaniard's hand,
there is the smoke of guitar
lofty in a room
belonging to the breeze,
I awkward on elbows
I spin sparkling eyes
I dream lightly
on a plain plaster ceiling;
oxen, a levee
a man, a mistress
a gentle rain of feetsteps
a bow with swept cap
from deep in the gut
to mouth a moth
down dry throat
and dust my lungs
with a boiling allegro.

Spitting spit and drooling mistakes, I'm as cute you know I'm just as cute. My back blank of flesh reminds us in it a canvas for a girl I know sweet as wine and a homely feather who claws at my meat to leave blood marching along nailed deltas in the knots of muscle, I wanting her to tear me apart and shove barrow-loads of gristle upon the morning's screaming sidewalks, I tense instead gather my skin and not inquire more into her delicate position. Oh Lord I am lost and lose the children.

My pain seems guileless and my worry sustainable. My tears grind without pride. But my pain is acutely and viciously MINE and my worry smotheringly and warmly MINE though my tears grind for us all. I expect no anodyne light upon my lips nor a shoulder to share my yoke. I expect to be let be, bent and learned.

I was born with your eyes searing negatives, I was made strong carrying much for long, hoping for oystershelled fingertips to rifle me as the pearl pages of a new book. I've looked for you in dim-lit rooms from ocean to ocean, in postcards from my father, 2002, in Harry Nilsson songs I knew by heart well before the foggy Humboldt dawn knew to assault my eyes, searing negatives and laying such a burden upon newborn shoulders.

Death limps
mystery and fog
trailing us all
A bad feeling all day
Pressed hands sail
valleys of ivory
drank all sensory
bliss
in every irreplaceable blemish
There are caverns in my hands
to hide whispers
to skate razors
and lit matches
Scar scar tissue
Count backwards from zero
right hand through left eye

2012: hips lovebones pain teethkisses

You step through sprung roots and burnt buds to cradle my face in a peaceful charade of hips versus love versus bone. You are a pilot light dancing at my diesel spring, I slow-burning and shrouded by the furs and teeth of poets and cherubim. You are what I want, we carving gruesome hearts high atop sandstone bluffs, we chasing cattle, we mosquitoes, lives swollen and pregnant with pain, finally fulfilled in that valley of lotus only grimly glimpsed then on those summer evenings blue stones awash in a molasses comfort.

My world is not your world and I am its champion. My world is not awake and brimming, disgusted. It is warm, asleep. My stare downcast though perched upon a straightened back plows furrows in the dumb concrete, brushing aside shattered eggs and their sloppy drunk yolk greening in the aging sun and adorned with the same rotten crown of fallen leaves granted all those ignorantly immobile. I breathe wordless oaths in kissses at one-eyed cats that dream lazy beyond neglected furniture, I pump my arms and scream at the boys lounging in a man's skin playing a man's horn satisfied with a child's game. My feet licking lap upon a careless placenta born from found flirting bluffing automobile enmity, brown glass and broken plastic.

My body is tense with the wind crackling walls and knuckling upon my window, the cold dancing against the house seducing its fingers into some neglected fold, holding its icy breath until the house shuddering relaxes resigned into crystal arms of breeze and frost, and a tandem exhale then, an ephemeral semblance of kinetic unity, one mass sighing cold and warm, organic and fabricate, home and distance. Fingers find their mark, tracing in sandy hair inscrutable whorls to be read in some unborn tongue, eyes rolling to their whites throwing gobs of spit and semen upon plaster and mirrors. Teeth taking of their turn more than their share, cuneiform on clay walls of legs and labia, staining winter's blues with a flush upon the surface of ivory, fiery blood splashed haphazardly from memory's palate.

all written at some point last year, no recollection really just spare prose jotted now and then just telegramming myself now from then, a year bulldozer subtle, superficial like a werewolf, no time to write i thought, so busy grinning and grinding away kissing with my eyes and teeth and forgetting maybe to be letting my heart lurch freefall from my throat be letting my fingers dance the tongue dance, now keeping it chained and them tame and just wondering who i was waking next to/walking away from last year, just found these old scraps of paper that told me the above-transcribed secrets and sometimes hard to read my own writing but there it is

reel to real

red light never real but reimagined with a coital zest tape decks and bare breasts the beat she tattooed on my bare chest tasting the blood in her neck without bared teeth breaking flesh tape decks reel to real to real to reel too real careful baby careful she says lest this trip get too heavy already hot and heady hotboxing momma's chevy will she remember the leather disappear from the weather will she remember the vinyl will she remember the wax will she remember the dreambeat she tattooed on my back will she remember the vinyl will she remember the wax

Squad Cars.

(Crack rock cervical cancer fist fights nut lumps
squad cars bloodied brothers broken wood
bite mark birth mark)

she under blanket
she with coffee mug in long fingers
the coffee cools

(Booty calls squad cars
nose drugs sun rises
candle light first sight black out)

glowing afraid to dim
remembering to glow, remembering how
taking time

(Squad cars trash cans collar bones
broken bones broken hand broken plate broken wood
broken lamp broken table
broken chair broken
dry wall dry eyed head hung

ending tables what belonged to ghosts
no respect, no water)

dance floor dance bed
music roaring waving hands on hips
a clapping, a rejoicing
heavenly light beer foam
heady refraction

dance around the squad cars!
growing to glow to glowing to grow!
mend ye old broken bones!
break ye old habits
lest ye habits break thee!
O ye in need of a mending

No Ghosts.

No ghosts, but my wet clothes raving on the railing. We are dehydrated and starving, sucking madly at the rain like lonesome roots. I only want to pull your hair down to the sweating pavement so you can lick the thunder reflected in rolling puddles. No ghosts, there being no memory to sustain them, but we wield our horned imaginations like a dick in the hand, like a tit to the mouth, and we feign ghosts in our wake, dripping on our arms and sighing dreams from our locked chests. My fingers are tomahawks, my tongue a landslide, and I walk not with respect for the dead and their stones but with an embarrassed and self-conscious fear that a hearty misstep may uproot the crypt.

summer '12