Somewhat-polished poetry and stuff from an older era.
2007
tired
June 3, 2007 12:00AM
Ah Mother Mary you are going to make it home. Jaw
to cheek to socket glued to this pillow, I practice digging
my hole in detail. I practice leaping from rooftops.
Drowning in pillow pressure, swallowed hole, I wait for
morning to regurgitate this resolve.
Surgical thoughts needle my way through the day. This
thing next, over here–no–over there. These are my keys.
I watch myself carefully not lock my keys in the car.
I flip the handle, yes, this door is locked. Everything
checks out, I walk away. Slowly puzzle pieces falling
from this sky somehow land, well, upright.
Damn, do I have go eat again? Sweet Jesus Mother Mary,
I am going to make it home. All this effort to
maintain. Always plugging holes, always emptying holes.
I can’t believe these birds. Chattering nattering
children up in trees. So much twittering, squawking,
trilling, the hoard and host of little birdy lungs.
Little birdy things to say, little birdy thoughts.
Ah lordy, tapped clean. Step by little step. Where
this crumpled limping train is heading, well, who the
hell knows? Death is a given, thank god, it’s the interim
so wonderfully painfully cloudy.
Ah, damn, it’s hot. Steam floating upwards. Post-traumatic
puddles flopped lazily in all these depressions, bubbling
quietly with the last remaining drops sizzling from the sky.
Or whatever. Mother Mary we are going to make it home.
plus and minus
May 30, 2007 12:00AM
An umber moon glowers full and luminous along the edge of
this hazy but darkening bowl of a sky. Weaving in an out of
signal lights, I careen through lilac-scented pools of air
whipping uncertainly through the open window of my car.
From lilac to tar, from moonlight to phosphor red and
blinking yellow blinking.
Streaming down these concrete byways on the threshold of
this newly minted night, I do very much try and remember
where I am. I do very much try and remember why I am alive.
Through guarded toll booths swallowed in yellow swatches,
past blurry white and green signs… Under, then over,
bridges–the City churns off in the distance, coolly and
deceptively peaceful reflected in the river.
From lilac to tar to scorched grease. I try and remember
where I am and why I am here. Amnesia amidst a ghostly
frenzy. How long before this novelty will burn itself off
and I will long for the lilac silence and the swing slowly
and easily creaking in the dead of night.
zero percent
May 20, 2007 12:00AM
purloined unfolding lingering
downpour draught.
littered clouds,
bruised fruit horizon,
gruel streaming frenzy.
gorged sky unlapping grappling
drowning
drained.
tense
May 18, 2007 12:00AM
oh my scrambled back,
spastic nerves,
ground up senses,
puddled resolve,
rack-and-bound ligaments.
lord, deliver me from this
tension,
pooled weight and pain,
gravity’s suction.
blah blah blah blah.
this road is very long.
thought-knot
May 7, 2007 12:00AM
Whatever miles churning through this treadmill, whatever hours
wheedling away, whatever sweat dripping from this brow—
there will be this thought-knot: i am going to make it
home.
I am going to make it home.
Don’t know where that is, how long it will take to get there…
The place where everything revolves, the eaves grow thick,
amber musty warmth, a familiar wind tickling familiar limbs.
Fibrous and ropey in the brain…
mess nonsense
April 29, 2007 12:00AM
Serendipitous return.
Unslaggered, turnaround revenge.
Strange granulated strains.
Friction slog,
lurid grapes,
mouse meets monkey,
parapet romance.
Nogging it hard and
sans abandon.
Lugnut love.
Speaking in wayward drools,
mouth-gruel meat,
sluthering muttering
mess.
humma-la-humma
April 26, 2007 12:00AM
humma-la-humma-la
blurp,
oh humma-la-humma-la
glurp.
cool wasted winds
burble my smurble
cool wasted flapping
slapping and slubbed
loose-lipped slurry
mouth.
slurry storm, lord–ah lord!–
i am a’smashed–
so deeply deeply smashed
and not one drop inside me.
not a single drop ‘cause i am so cooly
smashed on this semi-tractor-trailer windshield,
and me the bug is
just humma-la-humma-la
singing,
just humma-la-humma-la
buzzing this last and final
groove about just how
flat i am
(how flat i am!)
how deeeply dissolved, how
lacking in bones,
how mushed tight and
enjoyin’ in the ride.
ride trucker ride!
loosely carried returned,
a humma-la-humma-la
smooch!
softly sinking against the grey
April 24, 2007 12:00AM
A vivid red apple is plopped square in the center of a
slate-grey cistern. Following the splash and slurp and the
slowly rocking surface there is nothing but that dark-ruby
orb slowly shrinking to a small and silent circle. It is
this seemingly interminable length of time while it drops
slowly to the bottom that I know peace. Red surrounded
by a sea of grey, I see it sink, see the red desaturate,
see the ripples attenuate, then all is still. It perches
perfectly on the bottom, in the perfect solid center. Not
cold, not alone. At home, preserved, secured.
Or so my imagination conjures this tale. I focus on this
falling circle of deep ruby apple red immersed calmly in a
lucent grey cistern of variegated stone and I feel peace.
the ferrous demon
April 22, 2007 12:00AM
Of course you know those narrow concrete stairs on the corner
of Second and Main. Inside is where you’ll likely find me,
burrowed deep in a drink and the raucous to weepy tunes of
Nick Cave and his host of merry dreadful minions. PJ
Harvey, Tom Waits, the tortured ilk. This first room is
steeped in amber antiquity, a creaky-mellow brown, rusted
complaining fixtures ripe with age. Completely underground,
electric lamps burn staggered pools of yellow and auburn.
Webs from fearful spiders tremble to the bass, speakers
are everywhere half hidden. There is little on the walls
but yellowed and textured stucco punctuated by thick and
creaky beams.
At first glance–with the bar and the bearded tender
leaning casually before a long cascade of unnamed and
gleaming frosted bottles–you’d think this was any old bar.
But this place is deceptively immense and the further
you burrow into this cavern you realize just how much
you’ve left behind. When you realize there are chambers
and chambers devoted to styles of music, color themes
from the brights to the darks, rooms where flowers
grow at every angle, where water flows all around you
against carved grey stones. Where you can sleep if you
need to–hoisted high inside a honeycomb wall of stone
lined with clean wooden planks. Where you stumble across
performance art, women and men (sometimes naked) juggling
knives, corridors of diffuse pulsing lights revolving
around the tunes of Radiohead, dance floors packed with
languid to frenzied dancing.
This is my dark place, this is my brooding heaven, my
untipped joy. This is why there are other people on
this earth and why I want to live with them. They fill
this place with a dark warmth, a community like I have
found nowhere else. This is where I came to fuck
myself over and where I learned exactly why I wanted
not to.
escape
April 21, 2007 12:00AM
Panting biting concentration, gasping grasping
culmination. No not sex, escape. Escape
escape escape. Hounds at the heels, nipping trauma
exhaustion swallowed black, gruel and glory, straddled
bullet bleeding.
Escape escape escape. And lo, in the valley of the shadow
of death, we shall prevail. Out the other side, catastrophe
averted, revolution landed.
Every knee to the ground brings me closer. Every tooth and
nail moment, this world will end and I will wake up
somewhere else.
No, not the afterlife, somewhere far far far away from
Utah. Fuck you Joseph Smith, fuck your ridiculous
garments, your temple made of china, your little scripture
totes, your racist flip-flopping. Fuck your heaven, your
hell, your words of “wisdom.” I don’t want to live
here nor there. Your legacy is to be forgotten. a
shedded snake skin, robes worn thin to bone: shaken off.
Escape escape escape.