Acid Poem 1

His features became that of a beast

and his teeth became that of a beast

and his thoughts became those of a beast.

Yet to all others he appeared as a man,

and he wondered if it was only he

who saw his bestial reflection in the mirror of their eyes.

Christmas dreams.

I had dreams, yawning wide open, of old gods that sat heavy upon the world, great engines that hummed with the om of life and death, ominous hulks whose ancient bodies obscured the horizon. They sprawled eternally like sphinx, frozen in the sand of a timeless earth, on treacherously lazy paws, morose landscapes in and of themselves, seething with atomic intelligence.

Followed angels behind bars into the secret shadows of my mind's alleys, realistic and painful sweet moments with angels reaching realistic and painful sweet conclusions. The sun burned blonde behind my eyelids, I drank a thick nostalgia, golden sand wet with sweat.

I had ponderous, crawling epic dreams of racism and social inequality, unexpected chilling visions of a great tree, rotten in trunk and leaf, rotten roots deep in rotten soil, and I had difficulty leaving the scene without feeling like a rapist.

I watched reality twist itself into a dervish, vibrate into a mirage suspended on the fragile shining spiderweb of a single song.

I saw a giant ruddy beast made of mud and crumbling masonry, with gasping slot machine mouths, and the jackpot vomited torrents of rusty water and mud dotted with muddy human bodies, the living and the dead, and even the to-be-born. I knew then as I know now that this was nothing to fear, lest we admit that we've been living in that same fear our entire lives. I knew then as I know now that the rivers of blood and mud and rust run freely with those of Spring and sweat and wine and light, and that when all these nebular rivers freely intermingle upon their absolution in the final ocean, light will shine through to its deepest depths, and it will remain clear as virgin water untouched by the sin of time.

Astronaught.

Big ol' eyeballs stretch thin lids. A day, a night, a week, a month, a night spent in fog, stumbling along the surface of the autumn moon, a cosmonaut among cowboys. I'm finding less things to believe in the eyes of fellow man, and more things to believe in nighttime and the magical realism of lunar-manic road trips, scuttling along the planet's cold surface like a bent crab. There's some primal vigor rendered superficially inert, kinetic to potential, by the melancholy weather and wistful indiscretions. I feel I could walk a thousand miles through numbing, freezing rain and be carried forth by the warmth that I carry behind my eyes.

Words lose their meaning. I have no faith in them, but in the shapes behind them, infinite fractal silhouettes, glowing neon silhouettes against ghost sky.

Astro-naughts. We have knight visions, night visors, sunglasses reducing the glare of a black sky and electric expanse to but a painting on the inside of your skull, a perfect Impressionist landscape from the other side of Proxima Centauri. The air is breathing for us, tastes like a frozen heartache on your tongue, crystalline nostalgia about being buried happily alive in blankets. We're all still too young in our eggs to realize how that heartache will warm us when we relent and let it melt.

Dot my tease. Crossed my eyes. It's my bedtime. Back to the incubator.

Man the observation deck in my leave.

Unlucky You...

It's 5:36, I'm nearing the end of a bottle of wine, and it just so happens that this is one of those startlingly lucid early-morning moments of inebriation that causes a boy to light another cigarette and nervously let his fingers do the stammering for once. I've got so much to say, but the world is asleep and disinterested, so my eyes alight on some fool target, someone that, upon morning's sober reflection, will still patiently observe me as a kindred spirit, a sooted little bird-of-a-father, and not just a drunken nuisance. That's unlucky you.

So I've gotten this far, and mild horrific bemusement sets in as I realize I haven't a goddamn thing to actually say, that I was mostly just reflecting on the past few months and the saints and sinners therein, and that sometimes when we're at our most self-righteously lonely lows, we just thrash around violently until we maybe brush against something recent and refreshing. If it was just the wine in my blood, I'd probably erase this whole scam, but I've amassed quite a varied collection of bad habits, and none of them point the way towards prudence or patience. Time to string my guts up like a telephone line and pray for a bolt of lightning to come along and set the whole thing crackling and arcing into the dry winter air. Sometimes we pray for a catalyst even when we haven't the wherewithal to actually deal with anything new and confusing.

But with that sort of introduction, there's no recovery, and so I understand now that some secrets are best kept until my lips are but a whisper from your ears.

comment in re: Gibran's "My Countrymen"

It's difficult to express my moral and spiritual disdain for the entire American political system, from the sunsabitches in power to the civilian stooges that allow themselves to be bought and sold like beef. My gripes with the whole affair lie in a way not being addressed by any media outlet, liberal or otherwise. When trying to express my thoughts and fears, I usually end up sputtering and trying my damnedest not to sound like either a closeted believer in any sort of partisan rhetoric or just an apolitical apathist (though this latter may be closer to the truth).

Point is, politics are neither sexy nor poetic. Not to me, anyhow. Perhaps I'm just ignorant, or maybe just an idealist, but the fears and doubts I have for my country are not going to be abated by political change so readily, as it's hard to put faith into absolutely anything having to do with the bullshit they're strobing across your eyeballs. None of it feels right. In choosing not to vote, though, I fear that I am revoking my right to bitch about it, or at least to critically comment on any part of its nature. So at the very least, I wish I could at least just emote some of this feeling I have deep in my heart and my guts, this sick feeling about politics and elections and people and America moving forward into the 21st century. Emote, with no labels applied, purely from the context of a human being, born confused and concerned into a nightmare that just keeps plodding on and on, a sleepwalking nightmare that seems so easy to wake up from, yet everyone just stumbles forward. I think the real rotten spots are in our hearts or souls or consciences or whatever vague term you use for the moral abstract.

I don't know what I'm trying to say. I guess I'm just trying to give you some context for this poem. My political views are kept to myself, but everything hurts me and concerns me as much as it does everyone else in this great country. Everyone's worked about Tea Parties and mosques and elections and a dude stomping on a woman's head in Kentucky, and I guess I am too. Cuz even if I have no faith in the Thing, a lot of people do, and I'm afraid that Thing is gonna let a lot of those people down.

SF

I hate flying, and I hate airports, but it seemed such a superficial shame to waste those little blue pellets wrapped in aluminum foil on such a silly post-modern neurosis, so I opted instead to deprive myself of much-needed sleep, choosing instead to coast through the takeoffs and turbulence and landings and transfers with a narrative narcotic delirium that caused my mind to float with the same holy fluidity that I saw in the clouds out the window. It made sense, at least back then, to play on the laptop and smoke cigarettes on the porch until the sun came drowsily up, and then to pack at t-minus thirty to us climbing in the car with a steaming mug of whiskey and green tea, casually brushing aside the rotten 7 am humidity with the fuck-off Knowing that the wheels would be burning down the tarmac on an alien planet two hours in the past. Did I sleep on the plane? I can't remember; I was passed out.

And now just two nights later, I'm exhausted and still coasting on that delirium, poised with pen in hand on the tenth floor of a hotel at the gate to Chinatown, anxiously and thoughtlessly scribbling and ignoring the pleas of body and mind for that short death of slumber, hoping that writing and writing with San Francisco on my mind and in my stomach and skin will render some fat worthy of candles at 3 am Pacific on the East Bay where the fog finds every crack in your soul and settles there to fester like fungus spun from gold. No luck, I suppose, on this my last night in the most wonderful city in America, a city that expects so much. I'm shriveling under the pressure of a fine performance, walking where my father and my uncles and my heroes have all trod, and not a single song erupts from the black ink, no patterns are recognized on the wide-ruled lines, no paintings congeal between the margins. I'll succumb to that sleep that I lost in Tennessee, and I'll leave the worrisome foundation of nostalgia for a distant day, when I think back to the Bay and how this city forever and ever gently and sweetly damaged my life.

Unbuckling My Rust Belt.

I haven't been writing, I've been thinking. I've been watching America slide away from the window of a 1994 Chevrolet Astrovan, breathing firecracker smoke and trying to adjust my eyes to the full spectrum of this light we bathe in, the light we take for granted. I've been bumming smokes, I've spent days eating like a peasant, and days feasting like a king. I've drank deeply of night and all its temporary comforts, of its moist natives and their feminine suppleness, like Pittsburgh smokestacks arching erotically to the stars, swaddled in pink flesh and smokey hair. But I haven't been writing; there's no time.

There are cities in China, cities I've never heard of, that eleven million people call home. I know so little of this world around me, but I have faith in my own sensual faculties, and as long as the light is shining through my eyes I will be alive and growing. We have no other choice, lest we want to fully forfeit our humanity, an option that far too many deem wholly acceptable.

But I've felt the earth shake as the El roars by on a sultry Chicago night, and we are drunk outside of an open-late Mexican restaurant with a waitress all curves and birthmark and tan old-world (New World?) beauty. I've been too twisted to stand in the middle of Ohio, with the friendliest people nested in the most unfriendly town, and we ceremoniously carve the hot-ripe watermelon that we lugged up from Arkansas roadsides to this, its Rust Belt absolution and cannibalistic consecration. Take this, all of you, and eat from it.

We are in Rhode Island now, and I am tired and broke but hungry for more. I could walk these roads until my body was more bone than skin, until my muscles relinquished their involuntary governorship of my mobility, and I become a ghost setting fire to toll booths and sleepwalking across the murky waters of shipyards, dancing an ancestral dance on Philadelphia rooftops in the post-industrial drizzle and laughing at the totemic sterility of an old, cracked bell.

Last night I slept in a stranger's bed, curling up alongside mismatched shoes and unopened nicotine patches, with an oscillating fan ans Heinlein book my only company. It was a basement room, lightless, filthy and smelling of cat shit, but there is no disgust, no disdain for the forms Life takes as she gently leans into my embrace, hips against hips, seeking a superficial security but offering immortality in return. She may as well be Death, for I'd kiss her just the same.