We dropped some acid and played a game of Clue
Then rode bikes down to the outpost and canoed
We stung in our swarms both turgid and blue
And remarked how much nicer it felt without you
To hear him tell the story—
Crackhead came by his house
Said she needed some money
He said "I ain't got but five dolla's."
And before he could even get the door closed—she was on her knees sucking his cock.
When you've heard a story so many times you can almost tell it for them
And he's a big boy now, big old wide-ass, big fat gut on em'.
He said "she was sucking my dick on the couch, she was licking on my balls, my asshole."
Said he was even looking between the cushions of the couch for some change
Because she was working his cock so hard for that five dolla's
He said "that's the best 5 dolla's I ever spent."
Hipsters clad in Mrs. Dash t-shirts
Clorox work-pants
&
Tylenol tennis shoes
Onanism
Starfuckers
&
Their Anti-Christs
Cyberpunk necromancers
Sycophants & cell phone sex
Esoteric poetry--oneiric glass beaches
I was—
Not the only one beaten by Absalom
The lamps are lit, the moon is gone
I think I’ve crossed into the Rubicon
Ersye, what u doin’?
Oh, just watching anal love song
Arroyo: the great gulch
The children play in streets of blood
If it makes you feel at all better—
You were right: I never really loved you at all
And now it is then—
When this hollow cavity of our empty sky pours out all of its varia upon us en masse
And the whores are all selling their haggard bodies out per layaway plans
And the chevals are eating their baby foals when otherwise starved by negligent owners
And no one breathes so much as a word of it or even bothers to look twice because no one gives a good goddamn unless it harms them or their faces need be saved
And the young children gaze off now heavenward without a sliver of sunlight
To assuage their sorrows
When the moon curls up and the clouds swell out and instant death feels more like a summer vacation package to a kind-of faraway utopia
And the preachers go knocking door to door peddling their personal plights and we say to them all
Where is your god now? Now that you've squandered his tidings on whores and drugs with your big house that you can't even afford the property taxes on and wouldn't you know it goddamnit, a Mercedes Benz to cap it all off. Hallelujah!
What will the scholars and suits advise us to do with ourselves now?
Will they turn their backs on us all as they board their personal spaceships to venture outward from this vacuous planet of ours?
Will they show us any mercy?
Do we deserve any?
Wait, don't answer that.
I
Blackbirds perched at Adlestrop
The engines hiss pellicles of steam
Aromas of piss & ammonia in bedsheets
Charlock & woolen horses choked on wire
II
Peignoir and painted wet plumes
Lily lay in flowerbeds on this cold & aching night
Dripping & dark the woods, this soft-boiled forest
III
Alone without youth now grown
Drawers of boy’s letters to girly pulp
With holes cut out the middle of them all
IIII
The black girls all just kiss off
In the sullen summer heat
Sulking like a blister, I was bloodied
In the sun, licking at my feet
My love did return to dust today
Violet rays of light in sprays
The beast & the golden threading
Like a haze descended upon the foothills over my lit head
The whims of a girl at the cradle of a routine existence
Read her future on the entrails of a rabbit
Crocodiles under the cupboard
Dress-store dandy then doll—driven down with desire
Forget me if you can, sweet
For time makes fools of us all
We are a disused generation
Denigrated and debauched—
Each of us invected by the powers that be
Those who've laid their hands upon this world before us with pernicious pastiche
Which they appropriate for us with arrayed varias of well-worded caprice
Whilst we wait here, on these dead men's shoes
All the while selling out our souls
Our bodies
Our time
Our focus
Our loves
And our lives
for the thrill of fast cars and wet cheerleaders
Diamond rings and designer drugs
The dream, the lie and the thrill of it all
The trappings of flesh,
the glamour and glitz
Born of a facile dalliance
Ornaments of blood and sinew, one and all
God help us now
I fucked her with the remote
Please, be reasonable here
You were always such a level headed girl, really
Flicked the tv on once, we laughed
You don't have to do this
Leave me like you have
Hopeless and without reason for those three years of my life
I take it too far sometimes but
she always said it turned her on
Bestial & cureless
Scratching out a maimed miracle
Squelching the saints
Humoring the whores
Cherubs
with
dirty
faces
&
dirtier
minds
Cajoled
with
candy-coated cancers
Holy ghost wrests with my demons now
But I can languish in their loss no more
Nor rape this dream of its cynosures
I am ruined here—
in this torn-up, punched-in memory
It makes my head hurt—
To know you'll be there when I've gone
Now and forever—our deathless spell of neon horses burned like galaxies onto the night
Have you ever had an ex you hated so much
that any time you see a car like theirs, you look to see if it's them or not & you're pissed with the outcome either way?
I have an ex like that
She drives a Chevy HHR.
I was a languid ocean at low tide
I was throwing her in the fire
I was a grin without a kitty-cat
I was an emperor without even a rag
Porter laid my burdens down to bed
My stones into the sloe & still water
Hurry up & wait for nothing much
Gathered all my skeletons in a bale
Sackcloth full of sorrows in each hand
Working my way to the deathbed & dirt
Gentle lady, do not sing to me here
My cigarette prayers left me cold turkey in the spring
You’re living all over me, withal your lovelorn lies
Rosefrail, my blue-veined child here defiled
Shook the nest but what’s it all worth the matter—
Give it around 45’ before the chrome of cold handles
Fruitful belly, greasy lips sally forth with their violet signals
Stale or sung your love is the breath a hollow hatful hung
Now on the memory at the heel of her iron bed
So sloshed that I need subtitles
B-Boy bop—dirty buzzes on the beach glass
Neon night-walk I've not dreamt it at all
Elephants in a tar pit but my girl loves a stone
I’ll sleep it off until I can forget her
Awoke with my head swept in a pail
With these extant lives & their hollow voices
Spit in my Coke & nothing for me
I’ll bleed it all out on the front porch—
Alone
And he said:
I take one one one cause you left me and --
Two two two for my family and
Three three three for my heartache and
Four four four for my headaches and
Five five five for my lonely and
Six six six for my sorrow and
Seven seven for no tomorrow and
Eight eight I forget what eight was for and
Nine nine nine for a lost god and
Ten ten ten ten for everything
Everything everything everything
I take one one one cause you left me and --
Two two two for my family and
Three three three for my heartache and
Four four four for my headaches and
Five five five for my lonely and
Six six six for my sorrow and
Seven seven for no tomorrow and
Eight eight I forget what eight was for and
Nine nine nine for a lost god and
Ten ten ten ten for everything
Everything everything everything
*from the Violent Femmes song "Kiss Off"
Blow-dry blob bouffant coiffure
Bee hives & horsetails in the bedside drawer
Wailing brownies squall on the fiord
It was a bad acid trip in back of a half-remembered Passat dream
Klosterman delineating Kia commercials starring Blake Griffin to cartoon cats
Docent frontwards jazz conduit sale outside on the pavement
Remember when you passed out on the counter of the bar
And woke up some time later aching from off of the concrete floor
Flounce your frippery, sweet pea
Baubles, bustles and box-elder brains
Gewgaws & gauche gimcrackery
Shitstorms like Southern snows in Spain
“Are you an apologist for your spiritual dogmatism, or are you a seeker of truth?”
You can't be both.
You can get caught up in these fucking patterns, and you may well never deviate from them; always being a slave to your head and your incessant thirst for the immediacy that is palliative excess, the lustful desire for all things sating. I would love to think I’m better than all that, though. I’d love to believe I’m trying now and getting better at it all of the time. No backsliding. No turning back.
Steady now…………
River run
Turtle tongue
The hives have now spread with scraggy nunce
Portal blotches
Myrtle mums
Young lechers lit the fire all to piss it out
Cashels, elms weep now in nodes on the strip-way
kisstvanes, tramtrees; a hop then, hepcats, one cop and 3 carhacks up the block
Hacking in the miracle. Dripping out the dream.
Drip...drip...drop out the scene
Hemlock and hollow threats
Of wedlock and widowed wives
The babies bark—the lilies scream,
Dumb lesions on my hands, lips and k ees\
Lie here limpid in a fascicle of rusted out leaves
My hash-maddened mind obviates all of these
Piss poor bulb-coats & pious beasts \
Whilst I lay in wait for the lie of love to
Set my blood afire or else set her loves free
The piano's on another drunk now
Saying "help me find the keys"
The telephone's out of cigarettes
As my brain slaps me down God's ally way with all the moral lepers
And the angel's sneakers are wrapped around the power lines
So you know where to find blow in the quarters of heaven
The codicil is a pepper shaker eating the prostitutes garters
And Randy can't tie his shoes when people are talking
It's all cold coffee and broken cigarettes
Jazz June and a heavily hung moon
he said, whole lotta people get to talking that idle talk and forget where they left their minds at
I ain't never called the city on her
She's pretty as a plane-crash, ya heard me
I hear it all out here on the wire
I tried to love the girl but she just wouldn't let me in
It seemed like a good idea at the time, as I recall
But for her I was always the means and not the end
I just need some time is all just to get her off my mind
Some time to realize just how she was never really mine
Yea, I just need some time to clear my mind of her erstwhile memories is all
Some time just might do the trick
Do me a world of good I bet
And when I see her now in photographs with the one who take my place
It shakes loose hell from my bones to know I was always hers to waste
And waste my love the girl did just to spit it all back in my face
Cornflower eye
Sickly cipher
Cauldron carrions,
Hellish hounds—
Damningly envisaging them all
With eyes born of diffidence
Father, I've fallen flat—
Brushed my faith to its asides
Currier call for me, and I will be as snails are upon the snow apples—
Placid & bland now
Tempest swoons for all mine hearts swivets
It whimpers & it purrs,
Bears out to all the stasis of this torn-in night
Pared down—I reach now to curtail these cancers from their sinew
Wordless to the world
Where you are on about it all
Specter song do sing my agonies
Come & take me home tonight
Flush lips, hands bloodied
Knees drawn up abreast
The lioness now at sleep
Ruby tongue plumed out
Upon thighs—half-closed
In
the
dark
Eyes—stiller than sinkers now
Red
Red
White—
Harped on dumb desires
Dispassionate doldrums
Gentle little protests
Parodied with knives
down
the
hallway
I
go
Not for the first time
But the last one now
I leave you here, to this—
Your house of stone
