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.

History, ca. 05/14 ("Excess, Sex, and Exes")

"Hard to keep your nose clean when you're blowin' it every day"
"The trenches of memory are dug deep, and filled with bodies"

Guilt, self-loathing, and self-punishment are lacking in that they do not afford others the chance to deride you from atop whatever personal precipice they've chosen as an ivory tower, and no objective punishment is ever fully concluded until "another" passes their judgment upon "you", no matter what devils dance behind your brow.

We know, that is, I and my sorrowful brethren, kindred in black blood and selfish teeth, that our own deluded self-punishment is far more effective, as we can only See and Feel what the film of our eyeful consciousness allows. I have a sense of pride and self-worth, but only because like a blade to a whetstone do I routinely grind the imperfections down to something cold and mean. Within every boulder precarious lies in wait a daniel or orpheus to come rocketing to sunlight, chiseled and finished, finite in its infinity.

I have been lectured on "wasted potential" for now nigh on 25 years (being 30 this coming June). At which point does this bullshit symptomatic phrase cease having any actual relevance in re: someone's "potential" (as defined by authority figure [including but not limited to lovers and friends]) and becomes only a declaration of someone's character (or said someone's character's inherent "flaws", and I saw "flaws" only with a grinding of teeth because seriously you can all go rot in hell. My potential is firestorm, is apocalyptic, is talismanic claw display, and I have no interest to indulge in such just yet, but if you really deem it necessary, by all means, push me), and how another chooses to digest that supposed fault in your own character? If I have shown no signs thus far of engaging this "potential", why guilt me into seeking it out hence? Perhaps it needs to remain undisturbed. Perhaps it never existed in the first place, and you are putting far more faith into my faculties than I would ever deign worthwhile. Who's wasting whose time here? My time is certainly being wasted, and I expect to be paid back in full. There are no free rides. Gas, grass, or ass. Instant karma's gonna getcha.

I had one of those falling-into-sleep visions recently, when your mind is finally freed of the boring concreteness of the day, and chooses instead to relish in the inert abstractions represented thusly in your dream-state, and it was about bleached beauty and venom. I would sever an arm to regain the poetic wings upon which I sailed for those last few moments of early morning awakeness, for the words which I unfairly paired, which sparkled like gems, a rotten tomb of tumors blessed with that specialized phosphorescent bacteria which causes the decomposing to glow like Ezekial's wheel above the profane earth, the same wonder in snails and snapdragons that are so largely more profoundly handsome than our fumblingly sick gestures, rendering any pride we may have carried in our deluded spines to nothing more than electrical impulses dancing down tired synapses and making a ghost's lonely wagon jolt.

Saddest thing I have ever said, in response to the suggestion that I need to find someone worth caring for, as if I have not already stretched my atrophied limbs to their breaking point upon everyone else's bullshit cross, and left so many worthwhile angels in my bloody pariahal wake: "If I start caring about someone, I'll have to start caring about everyone".

And why the fuck aren't I getting paid to write yet? Probably just gonna have to kill myself, because everything is taxing, and the payoff seems delayed.

A study, by the writer.

A study, by the writer, of
Sex-as-prison, of
Love-as-hawk-in-chains,
a broken raptor of the evening,
a blind and silent dream of flame.
Money sears the palms of orphans,
lashes borne as woodcut flesh.
Memories dry upon the morning,
no one wondering which comes next.

A study, by the writer, of
promises,
and the slave traders who broke them, of
cigarettes in lips,
and the lungs which deign to choke them.

of judges
and the knots they tighten,
of lovers
and the loads they lighten.
A dove, a crow,
the things they carry;
a worm, a mouse,
a sumac berry,
a single thread, a double noose,
a button which has wandered loose,
an ancient piece of gold conniving,
a single sprig of poison ivy.

Unanswerable.

Does the sight of blood make you proud, patriot?
Can you see you your face reflected in the eyes of the dead?
Is there anything left on these scraps of skin to suck,
a tapestry yet to be woven from the stained hairs
that decorate your unexploded grenades?

Do the stammers of a foreign tongue
echo as the cries from an abattoir,
bleating in the face of bolt guns and bone saws,
a warning to their impatient ilk of the true nature of justice?

Will you be as brave as the Crushed
when the scissors are to you handed,
and they ask to see the scripture
scalded into the muscle of your forearm?

How does the wine taste sipped from a child's skull?
How does the bread baked from ground bone
taste upon your confident tongue?
Will you ask for that same mercy that by birthright you have held aloft,
as a canteen above lips cracked and dying?

Or will you fill your pants with shit
when you finally find your fingers trembling upon the golden trigger,
thrust to the back of my neck
while my eyes reflect your own guilty cheeks,
and unanswerable cries are silenced
by the weight of all you were born to be,
of the violence that steeps within your bless'd arteries?

I lie here, quiet, I die,
and still you bring yourself to life without misstep,
evil rendered inert by opportunity,
and the American refusal to view it as such.

Nine Scraps.

01.
"Hagiography 1 (a friend walking home)"
I imagine you and your Ludi eyes,
crossing feet homeward towards a respective rook,
feeling the olive throb of your veins
tempting the bleach of the night's cold.

We hoisting a palate of lies,
we pray for swan-skinned maidens
to sweep our stone clean,
for carlies with arched temples
to appraise the tombs
we've drug from some holy land.

My ribs, beloved, friend,
are yours reaching just the same,
cracking like kindling in our fraternal
immolation
consumption
consummation

02.
O, what can't your boy do with his renaissance auspiciousness? Die, apparently, as I've been efforting as much as the next for now on thirty years. I stand from bed each day only to gift my blood the chance to drain from my head.

03.
When your life is consumed with grief it can be a screw turned into a rotten tooth, the singular pain that defines your entire existence. I hesitate to say this, but I think I know already the feeling of loss of a parent or child, of a loved one, the final amputation of Love. When one feels like one will never live again, and when you do, what next?

04.
"Hank Williams, dead at 29"
Ah, the plush seat of a Cadillac,
a fine American auto,
here is where I lie my head,
tossy hair sprawled
in some fictitious Christ-pose,
never to rise,
knowing that I soar sore soar
from broken eyes,
wings of barroom paper,
heart of the godly love of Pain
and heart of the god of Pills.

05.
"Otis Redding, dead at 26"
I still see you, Otis;
You defy and define
the light and the dark,
you who splashed your blood
upon fiberglass fins
and filled your beautiful lungs
with the rotten water of some northern lake.
Your silhouette is that of a street lamp,
and within I find a mirror;
it blinks when I blink.

06.
*a startling influx of cute black girls in my neighborhood
*noticing finally in an empty graveyard that my backpack's plastic clasps knock like bones
*a dog with a mosquito head

07.
"Rimbaud"
I've never finished Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell", though I've owned several copies. It, that is, a copy of it, along with Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind", are in my mind's eye silently moldering and mummifying in some great old Chevrolet, wedged in the groin where windshield meets defrost vent, bleached dusty pages eroding across a dashboard, unread. Why I lent her Rimbaud, especially not having finished it, is beyond me, for as surely as that summer melted into a dank fall I had already learned that all I found exciting about this Some Her was ultimately flashing teeth and terrible driving and breasts still stupidly prideful and that we smoked bud while fucking but it was all gross, grossed me out and myself grossing out as well, limply slapping time with gypsy fantasy, so I threw dark books at her, dark books I hadn't even been able to finish. I hear it echoing still around the empty skull of her car, grimacing as worms as to thighs as to wild eyes rolling in an empty head, her breasts and their promises barren when their flesh was forced down my dry throat. I pretended the candles and beads and dark poems made the situation desperate, but I embarrassed only myself.

08.
"My Ghost"
His name is Despair,
and he is my ghost.
He lives in mirrors,
though in this instance
"lives" may be giving too much credence
to "Life",
as there is plenty to be had
apart from the realm
of the contextually
warm and breathing,
slave to their empty dreams
and unable to fly unfettered.

09.
"Leaving the Card Game"
I have such tremendous energy,
but when left rudderless
have no sink within which to bury it.
One step at a time,
when morning's still breath
becomes a cyclone.
Walking a thin line bleeding,
the avenue is alive
in each way I am not.
Maybe I can fish romanticism yet
from some sort of defeat,
from "Yo no soy yo",
from monster-man,
from yin-yang,
as goblins gobble
and men Stand and Walk.
I alone am not I,
turning data to birdless wings,
sparrows remembering the dreams of men,
and I put faith in happy selfishness,
and selfish happiness,
which both remind me
that tomorrow a new sun rises
upon a new earth,
and each funereal clod fallen
is a new lung to breathe,
a new breath to be won,
a new rose upon a frightful sidewalk
that beneath the sun's scrutiny
I promise that I will remember yesterday's bats
and tomorrow's green fruit.
I pray Gawd bless our young love,
and carry the answer's to yesterday's flowers,
and tomorrow's sorrows.
I give myself dirty looks in the mirror.

State of the Union

In every way I am strong,
I am weak.
In every way I am whole,
I am broken.
Each potent totem
has as its ballast an idiot.
Magnetic tape sinew
wears, wears
strung bodily upon a device's gears
stretched thin with a watermark
each for each blessing
for each prayer and pratfall
for each tiger trap a night light
each candle by which to love
is a flame to render marrow ash.

We think we are Gods?
We think we are Magellan?
Yes, circumlocuting the wastes
only to find Death at savage hands,
we no better masters than our fathers.
Yin Yang, then.
Look to our women.
Our mothers, our lovers.
Stronger I have not known.
Apologetic in the symmetry of their loins,
the logic of strong taut tendons
where I and my fathers brothers fellow travelers,
our Men,
are so weak weeping.

Merry silence, wrap my bones.
O Lord if you loved me
I would die.
Long have my afflictions
been dragging our Earth from the sky
and her bosom of milky stars.
My leaden feet echoing eyes' change,
a flag flared full
bull skulls
a rag soaked in gasoline bloodclots
eggs shed
so that we conquer some fictitious mountain.

Is this truly what I was reared towards?
Am I only a corkboard
Am I only antiquated flesh
to be stabbed and quantified?
Am I only my dim skin
to be scoured and planed,
riding nebulaic toenails and semen spurts,
to be bat a'flit on fingered wings?
O Deliver Me Lord
From All These Things!

Finally now I find my peace,
shrapnel ache settling on shattered palms.
How long must I write,
explode these sons of Suns of sons,
before I fisherman catch
some gulping mouth
gasping venomous air,
left to dry upon the concrete
beneath sliding glass eye
before automaton eye
before slit glossy eye
beneath shit glossaries yet to be writ,
each thrum of the heart
an inconceivable notion of doubt?

Tonight I wept in relief
at the fecundity of Rot,
at the permanence of Death,
that all die,
that all fade.
These ephemeral tails which wind catcheth
and which whir in delight at dissolution.

Burden born may yet appear
a swaddled joy,
a bless'd jaw
with teeth of gold.
See the scale of gold,
see Indiana's strains of silver string.
Please put one last hand's breadth of faith
in the fate of burgundy ink.

Waves strip shingles
from haunted measures,
each cunt-hair an inchworm
burrowing into the furrows
of my generous guilt.
In light
(in lieu)
Of bone and death
Of love and breath,
each more perfect than the last.

1/28/14

fairytales that flit from sight when my sight may flit to find

I've nearly lost my balance on the steep slope of a skittering grin, each morning's weight settling into my threadbare pockets like a flour sack of mealworms. Unevenly I keel upon feet sliced by broken-glass teeth, slick with drool and the dead snow and brown ice that gasps upon losing your boot to your will. My veins are ivy run thick with mustard and slow as morning smoke, the smoke that barely sighs itself a shape, a ghost born weary, born only to melt waxwings in sunbeams.

Were that I were to be a seer, or a clown or a drinker of women, or a clock with its hands stolen, knowing and loving only the midnight chime in my bones, or a goat with its yoke dragging in dust and its cart forgotten, or aboard a boat in portage between eyelid black and iris blue, would that I were able to dance myself through day's distress and night's preoccupations, would that I would finish wrestling these bears who break my bones for a long enough song to admit my terror at the ants that inflame my feet.

Cut me as you would an apple to show its star, and you will find my cloven body the bisection of a wasp's nest, these paper chambers all I can see when I finally beg to dream. Here now when my mind stills do they come gurgling up through the plumbing and sliding down the simpering flagpole, here now when rest gently threatens with crackling fur my busy ears do they prick my dulling drums, whispering fairytales that flit from sight when my sight may flit to find, leaving only an afterimage of piss in a shitcan.