the bass (base) of my breath, thumping, humming like a static through my lungs. it's sanding down my throat.
i paced the hardwood, it was fed up with the weight i possessed over it.

i finally sat down and threw my hood over the top of my head.
there i sat on the green metal, an uncomfortable retro piece of shit.
i pressed my fingers to my forehead to uncover my password.

when i raised myself to inherit the mess sprawled over the third floor,
i knew i'd lost it.
records splattered over old rugs.
pictures, cracked at the peak of teeth.
guitar, war wounded and tables toppled like insects.
kicking a fit of legs in the air, scrambling for solid ground.
my best jacket, torn and leaning over the fractured lamp.
books were dissected into feathers.
like a dead bird.
i looked around, at everything i had built.
in ruins, shambles.
(in a place once known as hollowed ground, now only remembered as my final resting place).
i'm sick. diseased.
i'm sick of hearing that word repeated in my dungeon cells.
over and over.
like a damp echo between decaying walls.
(it didn't cost anything for you to experiment, did it?).
no emotions leaked from the pin holes.
but if they had, i imagined they would have been forced to exchange themselves into every mistake, rolled into a scroll, written in foreign languages i don't know.
i'm chaining laws to my tongue and locking cages around my head.
i'm just another statistic to her.
just another line in the books.
one last check mark.
i speak of confusing, bedraggled thoughts and assumptions, does that make me crazy?
i dare to gamble the risks of making life sound film-oriented and cliché.
is it brick or glass?
water or diamonds?
i abandoned my retro chair.
looked back once more at the third floor.
and turned my back on everything.
no goodbyes.
some say the place is still empty, a couple broken windows.
but my work and anger still lives throughout the grout. burrowing into the floors and talking between doors. whispering between cracks.
but it's all in there. 


it's what someone is looking for.

Broken girl
Folded over the curb
Neon pink wig
Halo on her head
Vomiting in the street
"Lose a contact?"
A smart ass says
Lost
She has lost more than that
Vodkas, beers, lemon drops
Spin her head
Completely around
Sea salt spray
Mists on her lips
Clears her mind
For a brief moment
Memories try to sneak back in
But the liquor swirls them away
Masochist on unsteady feet
Jostles her way
Back into the Riptide
Crowded with Halloween revelers
Sits, then slips off the
Retro bar stool
Asks for more punishment in a glass
Anything to make the pain push away
Even if just for a few hours
She's now had her fill
Halo a bit askew
Pink wig in place
Friends gather 'round
She's incapable of walking
Arms around each other
They make the long journey home
She gratefully passes out
On the cool, crisp sheets
Oblivious to the pain for several more hours
Avoided until she wakes up
To the cold, hard truth
There's no escaping it now

The Tabloid Column

As I lean back gazing through the half-closed blinds of my cubicle
I cannot believe I have to type the latest tinsel town tabloid between a tortured musician
and his Oscar-nominated wife.
I pull up the shades and stick my head out the window and watch strangers, each talking
on cruise control,
A bit jealous — I hear their laughter, but not the punch line!
Not a single character outside has the calendar with circled deadlines.
And, as my thoughts take a cig break, I hop onto a floating daydream, kicking my feet up
and inhaling the breeze,
Of lounging Chattanooga! Southern town of storybook landscapes!
Summertown where I thrived, and can only reminisce in fragments, Ah, Tennessee!
But reverie blossoms, below the scribbled scraps of brainstorm and blank face monitor
used to fill the space of grocery tabloids,
Her endless emerald backyard, town, neighborhood with a bubbling oasis on the patio!
The boom box is blasting Cortez the Killer by Neil Young.
Laying around the pool are next years high school seniors drawing rhombuses in the
shallow end.
Each with deep indentions in their cheeks (Whew! There shimmering crescents neatly
hang),
And close by is the swing set where children in swim trunks explore the heights of there
own invention.
The Adults are bar-b-queuing; all the neighbors on the block are satisfied.
One girl, sitting on a cooler, is a precocious child.
Dressed in hot red. On her lap is a notepad.
And she wears bangs that have been grown out to cover her wrinkles.
Her best friend, a boy, only a year younger and a free-spirit; his sunglasses are oval, retro,
and smooth black.
His feet bear no worn soles; it’s not an adolescent phase.
And he carries no wallet, for he is frugal, and all he wants from his empty family room is
witty conversation.
But the adults are having too much fun mingling.
I bet they wouldn’t hear the short philosopher’s muse sighs.
Ah there are the toddlers! They are walking now and constructing sentences that come
from a pure mind
That isn’t tarnished yet. One kid, the one with permanent teeth, has a birthmark near
his eyebrow
He doesn’t cry like the others, and is oblivious to the compliments of the divorcees in
their sundresses.
Soon the other babies see them and wail for their nourishment from the groaning cows.



But soon their voice will drop, with the melting of candle wax each year,
And a new substance will attract each to the July BBQs, for a new thirst.
Hmm, I don’t know where is the toddler with a birthmark on his brow.
Ah — I see him — waddling right along the patio edge,
Wandered from his brothers, in deep discussion with a slouching man
Of sixty or sixty-five. I try to guess the man’s tone from his facial expressions
Though I think the man is just trying to be heard — grateful words from solitude,
maybe.
The old man’s teeth are frailer than the kids; he gently kisses the kids forehead.
He wears reading glasses. The flying dust grazes his dark gray lashes that shade
his sun-veined eyes.
Might be hard to tell but he’s in harmony. The kid, that small kid with a birthmark on his
brow, he is in harmony too;
His silence reveals it. Looking away from the discourse.
I peered over at the steam rising from the grill.
The chefs are drinking and spilling bread crumbs onto the grass
(The buns lay on a white paper plate passed out by an undergrad who smokes on a cigar),
And the newly widows flirt with them, in their blue-striped bikini tops
and ask
About the novels they read, their dreams, and what they do for fun in their leisure.

Alright, lets continue this journey and walk up the back-road to the marina.
Now you might happen to spot the white sailboats with honey glazed decks.
They’re the tradition around these parts. Hey — what’d I tell ya!
It’s solid and calm onboard, but the air is humid.
A pretty girl in tye-dye jumps onto the boat, pouring the sand out of her boatshoes.
She invites us to go sailing, and even hands us orange life-vests.
“As of now I live with my Auntie,” she says. “She would say hi too
if she was here. But she travels in Europe every July.
Here, check out this souvenir she got for me.”
And a glass sphere with the coliseum inside of it turns white as
Her hands rock it.
We embrace her then wave her good-bye because the sun is setting
And there is still the rest of the town to gaze at before it gets dark; one last view
before we turn back.
The tree house next door will aide us—the wooden cube, is nailed down on top of
white oak branches. Carefully we climb.
The architect, a father to twins, wears black and navy blue plaid, asks us if we like his
craftsmanship and what are we waiting for.
His son is illustrating the driveway with bright green chalk —he grins as we enter the
tree house.
On the balcony, we stand above the southern suburbia that seems to expand with
each blink.
There are the mansions with smoking yellow-top gazebos that sit beside
granulating stone fountains.
There are the townhouses; their fences are high and bone-white.
There’s the drive-in theater, where smart alecks lean in and make promises
And there is the Roman Catholic Chapel, splattered with a mix of white and bright
yellow.
Right there! There’s the BBQ we were just at, with the merry neighbors.
There are less lying by the pool, now that the afternoon wind has broken in,
But the old man and kid still discuss the endgame by the hard patio.
Also there’s the sailboat of the shy cute girl —
She is still sailing across the lake, humming an old tune.
How peaceful, and altogether how interesting, has been this trip to Chattanooga!
We have seen old friendship, new friendship, and the long-distance friendship of a sailor
for her Auntie.
We have eaten the food, jumped from the swings, and stared at shades of nostalgia.
Is there anything else to do now, except sleep? But we can’t do that.
And as a red balloon sneaks into the tree-house window, I climb down
as it pops
Back to the tabloid column which inflated the daydream of Chattanooga.

                                                                                                                                      2011

who?
what?
I,
thats who.
who's asking anyway?
Was it that ratchet ho
frahm the deli?
cus I got something to say to her, And I will say it
sometimes she puts my chicken on rye
on ciabatta.
And sometimes it's fine because...
sometimes I see the moon then soon I see the sun, sometimes I like to look out of the highest floor
and everything is so small and so peaceful:
no one can upset that tranquility,
the sheer exhaustion of life,
gives one a tough exterior, a shell.
If someone comes a knocking, before i've had my pie, it's all over,
but sometimes realizing you are but an ant...is refreshing
then you get back downstairs and someone spills their grande americano, no milk or sugar, because that's so  mainstream on your cashmere cardigan
then you realize
that throwing a punch is so very healthy
a punch straight in the retro glasses that they do not need.
pow, right in the kisser.
So you can tell the nashty from the deli
she might be next.
The man who spilled his drink is now on the ground, but it's ok he instgrammed the whole thing.

Self satisfied hipster pricks
immaculately disheveled
crawl up anarchy patched
and retro fitted
from every bagel shmear
coffee house hell hole.
I hope this whole district gets fire bombed
leaving only the book store
so I can sit here in peace.

Once upon what seems like so long ago,
We were children incapable of being tainted.
A kiss was just a peck on the cheek
And "screw" was just something that you drilled into a wall.
Boys and girls could be friends, best friends even,
Like my best friends were, and rumors of sex were unheard of.
When fights on the playground were just childish games,
And we didn't care about other's opinions.
We wondered what it would be like to grow up, never realizing the horrors.
Of the lies,
The drama,
The torture we would face.
Now, we think back, wondering why we ever changed.
Why we wished to be the way we are now.

Today, we are Teenagers;
Hormonal,
Emotional,
Physical,
And undoubtedly stereotypical.
Society seems to think we are incapable of rationality.
Incapable of thinking for ourselves instead of pleasure.
But, no.
We wonder why.
Why we had to change.
Why we did change.
Why we lost our most prized possession.
We remember the friends we had,
The promises we made.
The inside jokes that everyone knew.
The one person we wanted to marry,
And then they moved across the country.

We were so innocent, and knew so little.
Until we grew and adapted to the young adult life.
We claimed to be happy, and others believed,
But all of us teens know
We long to be young.
We long to be innocent.
We long to be normal.
Not the perverted freaks people think us to be.
Not the people who judge boys who act like girls
Or the girls who look like boys.

Our innocence and ability to understand was robbed from us
The second we left Elementary school.
We now feel the  need to bully others,
To judge our peers,
To impress the opposite gender by exposing ourselves.

If only we could remember the innocence.
If only we could bring it back like a retro fashion sense,
Yet keep it here instead of letting it die for good.
Could we try?
Will it work?

Could it still be with us after all this time?