Wednesday, August 27, 2014

maxim: "Love"

To Love, and to expect Love: a self-imposed construct in defense of the fear of aloneness; a systemic selfishness asking for another to act selfless in deferral to your own fearful selfishness, in defense of the universal fear of aloneness, i.e., we are somehow singularly more deserving, and thus create our own Love/in-Love construct to attract the devotion of another just as alone yet not as deserving.

To confirm or deny my own belief in this maxim would be to presume that I had absolute knowledge of the resolutely abstract/unquantifiable. If my personal faith-based opinion in re: this maxim were questioned, however, I would politely demure from judgment, so as not to reveal my lonely strategies.

Gnats

swallowing gnats with bile rising
a tomb of sleep
I hear the day
I fear its heat
and swing away

humming gnats o things of beauty
a tomb of life
I know the smell
I love the night
and blissful hell

rhythm rhythm count on fingers
clever here now
stupid there
they ask me how
I could not care

fingers blunted vodka singing
a week of me
of me and I
I hope this week
is not to die

Anarchist Come Poems

This evening I drove about Branson
marveling at the destruction wrought,
at the shyster bankruptcy
upon the pavement I once commanded
from atop a Santa Cruz skateboard deck,
when we smelled vagina upon our fingers
and marveled at the ocean before us,
an ocean of carrying these dreams of possible dreams,
that now when I smell vagina upon my fingers
I am ashamed
and feel I've left some part of myself inside of her,
something drowned in that ocean
now abyss
now brimming
swimming sharks,
and I a shark among sharks,
monster upon men,
seeing schoolmates grin from realtor billboards
wanting to scream at them that they peddle only blood
but not the blood that I crave and thusly seek
but a blood sterile and devoid of the immortality
I deserve.

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

"Mean-Fingered Cops"

mean-fingered cops
laws made by those who plan to break them
assert their kinghood
while I need no king
while I am my own king
death to the kings
and the mean-fingered cops
a burning I crave
a burning and a subsequent raving
a raving I crave
long into endless nights
preluding endless days
which do not prepare
for night nor war
but do our war in stock of paper
and dance
in string and in song
in dreams of dead priests
and effigies stuffed
with legalese
a day that will not turn to night
and yinyang
a night that serves day
a changing lady
our lady
of the sun which never rises
but to which we turn
and carve poems from pain
and pleasure from alone
to know that as we die
in this night, our night
the someday sun
will illumine our dances and poems
our sculptures and songs
scriptures lectures all waiting
waiting for your day,
your someday sun,
we do this in silence
not for ourselves
but knowing that as we die
and someday there will be no I
so someday all cops will die
all presidents will die
all lawyers and priests
and money-changers and warmongers
all pigs will be slaughtered
by the marching night of time
and this time is why I carve and carve
sometimes from bits of my own skeleton
and with ink of my own bile
that these poems will remain
and be read and heard
in a day without cops,
saved as an historical record
of the pain
in a night with cops.
kill em all

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

I write
anarchist come poetry
obsessed with my cock
and terrified to use it

gunshots echo Kirbyville night
but the dogs have stopped barking

what had I done?

and when the pigs kneeled so heavy upon me
and named me a homosexual
and bloodied me
for what had I done?
drank drinks marvelous drinks
sucked some joint of spice
with Sugar my tranny neighbor
ran howling off into down
Missouri
while someone shattered windows
someone's shattered window
and maybe a drain pipe here
a drain pipe there
and I laughed in my leather
breathing a new october
until then kneeled upon so heavy
and when, then,
what did you say to me?

and when I left my bullets sown upon my floor
and upon my bed
and upon my tables
and balanced my guns on chairs
and had these dreams of feeling for them
in the dark
finding a tiny body
not a barrel in my mouth
nor a job to go back to
waking bloodied
for what I had done?
fallen down stairs
broken my nose
and bled oozing clotted snot
blackened my eyes so bright
what did you say to me?

ah, for I kept it all a secret
I slept as a ghost
ashamed to have friends
worried in their anger
and angry in their worry
but I kept it all a secret

for what had I done?

alienated, my own fault
due course
lawless drunk marvelous drunk
I expect things from my friends
which I will never give to them
and I expect love of lovers
whom I will never love

what did you ever say to me
I do not ask nor indict
but instead am straining to recall
what have you said
for what I had done?

where could I have
fashioned my rudder from bone and board
the resolute bones
of those who would laugh apart my victories
my victory of waking
my victory of sleeping
always a surprise

when one follows the other

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

skulls of Shakespeares, for now we are Shakespeare

Spin the cap, spread notebook spun hard, no sympathy with this my hard lust for words touching words, I'm screaming to tell someone, screaming at anyone, I want only to share this, what I do so late at night left alone with pen powerful pen and clean lined notebook paper, I love it and am crying, this is all I know to love besides her who would share it with me, no quirk and as no laboratory exercise but a thing my hand does just as it wipes shit from my ass and jerks myself off and signs-of-the-Cross and fingers guitar strings and fingers strange cunts, and O Lord how my hands hand me these bottles and fingers promises into my faggot gasping mouth, my tongue fucks my palate in a waterfall of-- a Niagara of welling welling emotive spill some oil spill I leave behind me, some disaster I am always walking from, shredding without sympathy yet I the most sympathetic raking coals across my pock-marked abdomen, but still, enough of all that, I choke back tears and here is the new nest, I mastering a fat new handwriting, a truce between my drank violence and the peace I find in love-letters of words the words so looming but it's the letters I kiss, it's the words I submit yet the letters are charged with my dick-violence, with my tongue-dick tongue-prick, if I had the chance I would prick the world fuck the world with this venom 'til naught was left but she and I, she she she, I want she so bad across the flaming world above the bodies we dance we always dance in our Hell, I nearly wrote "purgatory" but Blake or Dante or someone claimed the damned walked among flames that the angels with their screwed eyes saw as hellfire and we so happy amongst them, imagine, if tomorrow the coasts would fall and creep inward while we dance and dance upon Hiroshima upon Trail of Tears upon Auschwitz upon Rwanda, we you and I could be Adam and her Eve, we more than I imagined you and me was, all those pitiful gorgons of past/passed sense memory and memory and sensibility I now see them gorgons so boring and mute and lame and pale and deathly and resigned and weak and empty and empty and weak and mean and screwed and drift drift drift no "Melville" Jungian big-name big-name big-name big-name archetypes and so unconfused and sterile in their unconfusion, but you you! finally you broke those chains and now-- ah gawd weeping again! weeping again, I put such long long years lost behind such hospitals, but you alone, rose, rose me from defeat to defeat, a new defeat I gladly resign to which I gladly resign, I can taste your olive skin and I can taste your footprints and I can taste your smile never screwed nor squinted, always a spring a fall to which to whom I bleed I bleed I bleed ah the cunt I bleed for, kill all cunt but the cunt I bleed for, a perfect Georgian flower of tomorrow and yesterday, who knew she existed, who knew I could bend my back in these new and splendid ways which remind me, lost me for so long, lost me me me, there is still a beacon from far offshore and I chickenshit faggot pussy bitch stand gibbering and fucking these people, there she is, you fool, I fool, I sank so far this summer, I sank so far and welcomed the sighing and the sunk, the witchy shadows tracing nipple to jaw, such delicious tits but no war is won with witchy twitchy nipples, lucky guy when all luck runs out, who is this guy, lost last guy, I dream and dream, I dream of another dance in a crematorium, I dream upon dancing upon ashes and ashes of skulls of Shakespeares, for now we are Shakespeare.

notes

8/6/14

Did I just shit myself? Are sweat and shit running tandem down my leg, organic miasma Me-Me-Me?

Timed this right, I think. 1-2 drinks @ bar (double tall vodka, 2 or 3 ice cubes), transcribe "Prey" to internet, leave, buy smokes, home, finish home stash, sleep sleep. I'm not paying for liquor-in-public, I'm paying for wifi-in-public.

It all depends on whether or not there is anyone worth speaking to on the mezzanine.

Goddammit, every step of the way sneaking through shadows, I piss as I write this.

Knowing you can always be drunker, herein is my freedom.

A little chrysanthemum
with your pillow arsenic,
pillowed pill
and vote away
away against

O christ, here defeat looms!
A race against
dying batteries last call
caffeine's tug
water's float
interest's wane
moon's moment
caloric impulse
general freeze-eyed frustration
and nausea now!
because all of it
will never be enough.
When do I draw my line
and dead-eye that bead
through
a skull most familiar?

(what's a) six-pack of snow in a borrowed town?

Goddamn hiccups

Gross, one of those gross nights wherein I spit gross shit on the floor.

8/7/14

Let's clock it at 9:47 pm when I finally left my house today. The cashier who usually irritates the hell out of me with inane jokes and other assorted jibber-jabbers has apparently finally taken my mute impatience to heart and no longer wastes my time with frivolities, but now I am burdened with shame at the thought of how much of my own time I waste so self-righteously, and how I've won this skirmish, the sole spoils of which are the denying of consistent and well-intentioned interactions with another lost person so unfairly judged. I feel like a monster.

My ideal mate would be an absentee landlord. I want to marry an absentee landlord.

Tried to light my pen with my cigarette. No, the other way around, pen of fire, pen is fire, penis fire. Why are the pen or pencil never discussed as phallic symbols? I've been toying with the image/idea for a while now; writing as masturbatory, also as a powerful virility. Paper a come rag, or a fertilized womb, the difference being (to paraphrase an earlier thought) that ink achieves and retains vitality when dry, while sperm does not.

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

Going out for "a beer" with M shortly. Worried. Worried I may get The Thirst, knowing what happens to my mood(s) afterwards, with the 2 options being:
1. Buy more. Drink drink drink. "Seek oblivion". Oblivion? Nay, liberation! I can already feel its caress.
2. Quarantine. Evil pacing. Shake in sheets. Scream.

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

New obvious idea: bring this tiny pad of paper to the porch/bathroom with me while I smoke/shit, instead of that damn phone. [The Smartphone Revolution is another nail in the coffin.] Even if I write nothing, nothing, nothing at all, I will have been more productive and have stimulated more neuronic wiring than if I had stared feverishly at my phone and bathed in the perverse light of social media's intense worry and self-obsession. Funny that as a self-aware (in each way including the admittedly narcissistic and meta-narcissistic) "writer", lots of stream-dream I I me me stuff, I react with such nausea and violence to others doing pretty much the same shit as I albeit in the social media medium. Am I any better, really, when all is said and done, I the prideful and aware and self-critical artiste? Doubt it.

8/8/14

Long discussion with M tonight in re: heroes, super- and supra-, ourselves and close friends and lovers, the way others' expectations become like radiation upon our backs, we mutate these illusions, holograms projected, respond weirdly and am/are not to be trusted. Everything I write comes with hidden manipulation, a military tactic, offense and defense entrenched in idiosyncrasies.

Earlier I sez to myself, Andrew, I sez, you should post on Facebook a plea asking your friends to never again [------] you. Can't remember what it was now, but please, friends, don't [------] me. I'm not worthy of your [------].

In my house tonight
there is a buzzing throughout
the eaves. I think it is
the ghosts of flies.

I'm horny.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

New Notebook (July, pre-meltdown poems)

"New Notebook, pt. I"

So are ye taunting me now, boy?
Where'd ye get that fine new pen,
and where'd ye stash the last?
Remember that sorrow's secrets
bear somber children,
and ye will yet answer to me, boy,
to me ye will yet answer.

"New Notebook, pt. II"

A new day,
a new vista to be poached!
Line the lions,
and let us mow.

"An Ogre Laments"

An ogre laments;
Watch my lumbering shoulders,
each arch of bone
is a cramp to be mourned.

There is no savior;
Align yourself therefore
with Leviathan
and the dragons.

I am so fucking tightly wound,
trusting no one.
Furious, furious
let swing,
swing and sway
hung by my beautiful handwriting
and heavy breathing.

Storming rain
and still I without a name,
and still I without a ghost to hold.

Left alone,
always alone by choice
though offers have been made
to alleviate this gaping hole
this slit throat
at the heart of my conflict.

Shall I wail, what
shall I wail?
Should I wail, what
should I wail?

O that this thunder
sound as footsteps
of the comfort that never comes.

O that each aching shadow
I take as a companion
never to hold in my bruised hands.

Gather it all so near,
if only to have it at hand
when it comes time
to shove it all away

Out of booze again, goddammit!
Out of booze again.

Never will you know
how easy it is
to fade into the wall of white,
the sheet of lines,
never to return;
this is my gift,
and someday I swear I will not come back.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Prey.

7/20/14

"If it wasn't one thing, it was another, and it never mattered which. Always something to run away from, no matter what, no matter why, as though you'd been born with a consciousness of guilt and would find that thing to feel guilty about regardless. Feel? Be." - The Lost Weekend, C. Jackson, p. 84

Too terrified to cross the street

To all those I've let down,
be brave in my admonishment.
To all those I've showered with scorn,
be proud that I so fear you.
Each day upon our earth
is harder than our last,
Remember.

I will never trust a woman who doesn't like to kiss during sex.

[cthonic]

O how that blow would smart if my axe were to be swung sober.

My dry eyes click like billiard balls, a membrane of dust between the sphere and the lens. Each blink is a guillotine shutter, capturing all I take in in the basket of blood below.

7/21/14

Today, I feel like prey, stalked about my house by anxieties unseen, I creep past my windows while eyes slither through blinds, I remain silent afraid that I might wake what lies in wait.

Pout in the mirror, then,
you knot-headed fool,
if even from light you must hide.
The reflection reflects tension
so smooth and cool,
and besides, there's people outside.

Shudder at each crack, then,
appliance and porch,
the sounds of the house as it settles.
Your nerves are ropes of flies
now buzzing in hordes,
your blood shrieks in a curdling kettle.

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

My little lover
wakes as an animal,
blue eyes wide
as wide as only blue eyes
can know to be,
staring not through the air,
but at the air
and the dreams of dreams
yet painted there
upon the canvas
of motes in sun.

Weird marijuana nostalgia; Cocteau Twins. Sewing patches onto my shorts: Spoke Pants of the Flowering Skillet. Still can't draw a pot leaf.

Can't leave my house unless I'm leaving the county. Sirens, alarming.

7/22/14

"My love confused confused with after loves
not even over time did I outgrow." - from "Images of Elspeth", J, Berryman, Love & Fame

If each word writ
is a shell being loaded.
or if each word wrought
be a shell fired,
should I let heart
or brain
choose the target?

"'The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom: language

so twisted + posed in form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.'
I was never altogether the same man after that." - from "Olympus", J. Berryman, Love & Fame

DREAM:
Game of Thrones' Jon Snow-as-cowboy, with a murderous dog, hiding in limestone outcrops of Arkansas. "Hold... hold... hold... get 'em!" Dog kills four bounty hunters, also GoT actors.

Dog kills two boys, one turns out to be brother (?) or boyfriend (?) of Jon's old fiancee. [ink running from spilt sweat, words unintelligible]

Jon sighs, says, "He's killed a lot of my friends over the years." Then he gives her a small plastic ring.

DREAM:
I start a fire in the basement of a house during a house show. Fire is put out, but damage is done. None suspect me, assuming accident, except for Kyle K., who will not tell. He understands.

DREAM:
Brian Cummings handing out matzo at a Pantera concert. Jon Snow has replaced Dimebag. Pantera covers "May the Circle Be Unbroken".

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

One week in, I'm still blowing bloody snot and picking bloody boogers out of my nose. I wonder if maybe I broke it.

Downtown, I look at a trail of broken glass on the ground with sentimental detachment. How many times was this spoor my own, with nary rhyme nor reason, but me hyena cackling and enraged and erotically charged that my blood should spill, hallowed and hollow, with none to see and grant action the witness which raises violence and sacrifice from the profane to the legendary, worthy of mindless devotion?

"a mat of flesh a bed of down where I'd bed down and roll you over once again with your corona round your head and who's the one that fitted you with that when all should know to deify is to betray in a failure of love in some sort of transaction with myself." - L. Ferlinghetti, Her, p. 147

[here there is a second Ferlinghetti quote in re: God/galaxies, unfortunately likewise rendered hereforthwith inert by the power of buttsweat]

7/23/14

coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee
coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee

$3.67

I want to stop everyone I walk past and tell them everything I know, and all that I've seen. This is my new art, their faces my canvas.

7/25/14

It is 1:25 am. Somewhere, someone is still able to buy liquor, and goddamn them. Fuck your sympathy. I feel like shit.

[unintelligible] can relating your past [unintelligible. . . . ] deep in my iron [unintelligible. . . . ] needles, staggering anxiety [unintelligible. . . . ] leaking tears and so tightly wound I feel entirely made of screaming horn is now the goddamn fucking time to tell me that, as if it in some way equates us as brother and sister in our pain, and besides who doesn't dream of a sex addiction every now and then, me of course considering how many wasted years I spent not being promiscuous, but hell shit I know every motherfucker in this town and now can only picture them inside of you, and christ I'd like to write more but this bastard cunt of a right hand of mine is cramping and I have to fucking stop whether I want to or not.

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

And while each girl makes sounds her own during sex, I expect in Heaven they will all sound alike, and Heaven will be a bore.

When first she held me,
but then my head,
but then my hair
in her hand,
when first we touched
and spoke our hello,
'round fire
and ashen october fell,
she loosed a gnat
and I swallowed it
and carried it
for two years hence.

*******************

"I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that."
- R. Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p. 11

*********************************

DREAM:
He came to the bathroom and reached to the light switch, then started as he realized she was on the floor, laying on a hurried pile of blankets between the toilet and the sink. She began to sheepishly rise, sheepish in her solitude and facing only herself with guilt, as she had yet to notice his presence.

"Christ," he said finally, her seeming the barest surprised at his voice. [ed. note - "Swan Lake" screams sexceptionally triumphant here] "Are you alright?"

Hardly raising her eyes, then, she spoke, the words tumbling freely. "Friends come home, and are so helpful, he took me to eat and listened, he hadn't listened like that before. And back here, you gone for so long, we drank and I felt him grow, he in me and holding me, we both fucking in my bed until I came, arching, then he came, inside me, as friendly as they who are where they are needed when they are needed, and I was stupid to think only you would make me come from now on."

He stood, silent, anger warming his cheeks. His vision blurred, doubled, cleared, then blurred again as he bent and put his hand beneath her chin, pulling her face upwards to the relative light of the still-dark bathroom.

"Gone? So long? It was only three days! And I saw how much you drank..." His anger now gained proportions which seemed immediately to betray the early comfort of his self-righteous rage.

"And nothing happened, those three days?" she asked. "You lay with no one?"

He was silent again, still holding her chin, and his vision blurred once more. He remembered the girl's shoes, tangled beside his own in the salted sun-bleached morning, and the pillowcase he had drug home still damp with her sweat and still blossoming with the smell of perfume.

DREAM:
He wandered about in front of the museum, wary of the officers stroking their mustaches, who though speaking in code ("the wolf...", "the egg laid...") he knew to be discussing the break-in and murder the night before.

"There's no reason for them to suspect me," he reassured himself, "Save perhaps my guilty constitution, some thing I don't realize I wear upon my face."

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

Words,
gouts of blood,
drowning in dreams,
I lift them
and spin
a rearrangement,
jerrymander-upon-juxtapose
Strafford-upon-Ava.

What then the knocking when finally sleep may come?

I jerk off ferociously to foreign porn stars whose names I never learn to pronounce.

My house is ghostlight
blue ghostlight

Will I ignore my phone?
Will I get anything done?
No, yes,
say it and let it lie true!

8/5/14

Men have been trimming trees in my neighborhood since sometime this morning (it being about half-past 6 pm now). I cannot bear to watch; they are idiots, and I fear I will be witness to one losing a limb. Even without watching, though, they intensify my anxiety, the frantic cicada of their two-stroke saws only letting up long enough for them to gripe and shout at each other in the wearily angry, thickly impatient grey tone of fools.

Such anxiety today! Tony being put on "96 hour hold" at Cox South was only a tipping domino to some sort of walking-catatonia, handymen showing up not helping, too much coffee. Drinking a beer now, bad boy, but it was screaming and I don't know how else to shut them up.

**********************

Find myself with plastic bottle clenched tight in hand, find myself no fault of mine. Here we, weary. Here we only I and I, such miserable company, such dust-mote poetry and private fancy. Ah goddammit my sister now what twenty-eight this weekend? And I miserable coward shuffle-shuffle, little crab-man too afraid to touch his phone, and the terror of auditory hallucinations, I hear knocking at night, and now I swear someone is screaming every name I own across my alley-drive, surely real? and surely in jest? not knowing my state has but utter terror, here! Do you see? This is why I draw my shades and want only drinks and a clean house and my guns, all to scare the rest of 'em. Locking all my doors. No one's allowed.

Lackadaisical charisma has obscured the fact that I constantly consider myself at war with everything and everyone around me. I deserve none of the gratitude I am shown.