The funding of my own little massacre,
my own precious little war crime. My smoke
is everywhere. My father coughs in his sleep.
My mother gags, hangs her head out the window, sick.
My cheap *** before and after cheap ***
I chat up some high-waisted pastiche on Alberta.
She tells me collage this and that and looks
so lit up and skinny, it's a dream.
Where I go to brand myself. I have this image
of a spark on my arm sitting stovetop red,
sinking into the skin, losing color as it digs,
turning to grey and then nothing like the drowning
of a comet's tail in atmosphere. My burns look so good
in the pale dormitory bathroom shower light: so baby tulip
and teeth, so how-I've-made-it-through-the-wringer.
Christ, I should be a film, look at me: so bent and bright,
such a cute boxer, such a prize fight.
Dec 10, 2012
Dec 10, 2012 at 4:34 AM UTC
My sweet Austin Texas ecstasy, my beloved Guadalupe you
gem of the desert. Your family’s a basket-a-bigots but
******* they drink for miles and how near they are to my
heart. This heat’s a drug I swear it. Let's swim in that hole
in the bedrock between two rivers. That'd be nice: me and
you and mobs of Westlake High sophomores with their
blue-raspberry bikinis, a hundred Teen Vogue magazine
covers lined up on the grass like a set of bad church pews.
Imagine that whitewash of a crowd, you and me so alone in
that big static it's better than private. Let’s punch brick, peel
back our knuckles and watch’em clot in the sun. **** gauze,
we’re goin’ to a punk show. I’m puttin’ on short sleeves,
goin’ on parade, gunna flaunt my cigarette burns like a Cadillac:
I want those dorks at the Mohawk to look and love me like
they love gore. I’m gettin’ my black-eye ribbon tonight.
We’re in the Chaos in Tejas show, darlin’, put on Crazy Spirit
and bring your 2x4: skinheads ain’t jumpin’ themselves.
Let's get medicated, hunny, let's get saved. I love watching
Austin bleed out into the sand every dusk. Love the musicians
sailing out grimy and frothing over what night brings:
what a big sky, Texas, you're almost better in the day all
parched ground and azure azure. I love the glass on the high
buildings here, they’re like mirrors. This is God’s powder room.
This is where God sees himself drugged up and beaming in a
beautiful powder room. This is where God goes to remember
youth. I love how youth hasn’t gotten you yet. That unassailable
capacity for charity, that surging belief in belief shouting out
through your temples, I can’t stand how you make me sick of
making myself sick. You slapped the ******** outta me so quick
I’ve never seen grace move that fast. I thought you'd knock the
grapefruit polish right off your nails you hit me so good.
What a sight you are, kid, so proper and fit, Christ, you could
be therapy: so brunette-in-the-Fall, so full-lipped,
unabashed and Aristotelian, frayed like anything but ****
well stitched, impeccable at the seams.
Dec 4, 2012
Dec 4, 2012 at 8:11 AM UTC
1.
His soft neck.
Put wires
all the way around it
and pull.
2.
I see glass in the road next to trash,
take a piece
and
make it hot over a running engine,
look for the sky in André's
stomach,
wear gloves
and hold the glass
and dig.
3.
André has
so many bones
under his skin,
make all of them come outside.
4.
See how much water he can breathe and don't stop.
5.
Put him on a sidewalk in the Pearl District,
paint him black or ******** or crack-addict
and leave him there,
watch the crowds watch him
away.
Aug 21, 2012
Aug 21, 2012 at 7:24 PM UTC
When my hair is short and my face becomes coarse from days' age,
I cannot tell myself apart from my father.
In mirrors and photographs and the eyes of who I love,
I see my father before I see myself.
My father's dimmed reflection through mine;
my successes, failures;
these my father make with me.
I see my father sick in his son's cigarette smoke.
I see how my sleep makes him healthy.
I feel my father's calm, honest tremble at the animal inside of me.
My father's stillness when the glass under my skin breaks.
My father's smile beneath mine.
I speak and it is my father's voice.
My father's voice of reason, my father's desperation.
My father's voice under mine speaking to that missionary:
*(I cannot trust conditional morality as an absolute truth)
(I won't trust ****** even if it calls me friend)
(I know love happened before you invented God)*
Beneath my laugh, the echoe of my father's joy.
Beneath my violence, my father's fear.
Beneath my awe, my father's humility.
I see my father with me,
I see
me,
my father's son,
my father's son,
my father's son.
Aug 21, 2012
Aug 21, 2012 at 6:04 PM UTC
Sometime before you were alive,
the mother of the woman you will grow to love is kneeling over an empty plot of land in a burning cemetery etching text into the dirt,
laughing,
laughing to the sky:
*I carry with me the sins of my mother,
To my daughter I give my own.
To my daugther my burning blood, this divine fire,
The charity, the greed, the cruel indifference my life has known.
To my daughter these things as they came from my mother to me.
To my daughter the echoe of my own sin,
To my daughter my own depravity.
To my daugther, Trial by Fire,
Clarity of purpose and strength through this Trial granted to thee
Because only through this Trial were these things granted to me.
Life to my daughter I will give
So a good life my daughter might choose to live.
Life to my daughter
because life to me,
because life to me,
because life to me.
The blood I give to my daughter because the blood my mother gave to me.
My blood to my daughter,
Thee,
Because mine own blood my mother gave to me.*
Aug 21, 2012
Aug 21, 2012 at 6:03 PM UTC
84:
i have discovered i am i have been attached somebody attached strings to me and often wrenches violently upon them,
***Breton has strings too, and sometimes
he likes to twitch.***
85:
dead space.
i ca
n ’t, i can't think,
everything is a mirror,
ym deah sdeen ot ehteabr,
my head needs to breathe,
ehtaebr ot sdeen daeh ym,
im going to make holes with breton to breathe so i can think,
i only need a nail
or some thorns and wire. Breton is probably hiding some wire. I am good at finding things.
86:
when my kneecaps turn blue,
i know my health’s shot to ****
Breton ran into Old Mathers
in the basement
and Mathers says Breton’s not coming up (for [quite!] a long time).
Kat told me **** little Breton for his marrow,*
never enough marrow,
Mathers says.
I listen to Kat, always go by Kat,
always by Kat, always:
*Death came too close to me,
Almost seeing the eternal light.
Harder to feel when you’ve almost died,
Hopes and dreams never almost tried.
In His eyes, your time to go:
Having this purpose for me in life,
Having this purpose for now,
I do not know.*
Aug 21, 2012
Aug 21, 2012 at 6:01 PM UTC
**28:
My one year-old laughter:**
*(I still hear
what God said
when
she
spoke,
to me first;
that sound,
they tell me,
was my mother,
I remember
what God told me
when
she
held me first:
You are too young to be your own personal horror)*
**34.
What I know as a nine year-old:**
9/11 means
quiet,
and
**look at my feet standing
on the solid fertile Earth** and
be more quiet than the ground is quiet
don't point at Isabelle's mom because she is skinny like fence wire
don't stare at Jake when he gets limp and speaks like a broken dog
42:
my twenty year-old morbidity,
minor self-inflicted injuries,
invented and self-sustained psychoses,
drink; drinking the whole thing;
i'm going to make myself red inside;
i am the fire, they said, and burned, all of us burned, and they said this was love.
Aug 7, 2012
Aug 7, 2012 at 11:09 AM UTC
J'adore l'âge du jazz mais ce n'est pas mon âge.
Mon âge est ma vie.
Ma vie est ma famille et mes amis.
Ils ne vivent pas dans l'âge du jazz et je ne vais pas jeter ma vie à la merde pour tous les jazz dans le monde.
L'âge d'or,
pour moi,
est ici.
C'est la vérité.
Ici: here
Dans: in
Ma vie: my life
Et: and
Mon âge: my time
J'adore: I adore
L'âge du jazz: the jazz age
Ills ne vivent pas: they do not live
Ma famille/mes amis: my friends/my family
est: is
ce n'est pas: it is not
C'est: it is
Pour moi: for me
La vérité: the truth
L'âge d'or: the golden age
Je ne vais pas jeter à la merde pour tous les jazz dans le monde: **I would not throw it to **** for all the jazz in the world.**
Aug 2, 2012
Aug 2, 2012 at 10:50 PM UTC
The world proves itself to me by its motion.
I know the world because it moves and is moved.
I know hidden parts of the world by the shadows of motion these parts make.
I speak with my world in the language of movement.
I know things the world cannot tell me by learning the rules it uses to tell me what it does.
I know the weightless motion of veils.
I know the movement of what I cannot see move by learning how motion must act.
I know how motion must act, can know what moves even when I don't see it,
all by knowing how the world could not otherwise work.
Life is life because it moves.
Life that does not move becomes death.
Death is life without motion.
Death is an invention.
Death is just another name for a life that cannot move ever again.
The motion of my mother proves to me the motion that came before my first movement;
my first motion when
my left hand's newborn fingers moved from the cradle of
my left hand's newborn palm to squeeze
my mother's elegant, shaking ring finger and felt
my father's elegant, shaking ring finger;
felt my parents' wedding vows,
their promise to each other;
felt my parents' wedding vows,
their promise to me;
felt them hold me between their chests,
them,
their motion within me;
me, my infant body learning its life because they first moved;
my small, soft limbs reaching out slowly,
soft limbs moving soft in the soft, moving world
uncurling new in every new direction.
Everything I learn by motion must come,
finally,
to move within, and move,
me.
Cursed, blessed,
I am my only source of reason.
I am my only source of insanity.
I am, to me, my greatest safety.
My greatest danger.
I am the only thing I have to know how love feels.
To know how loving feels.
I am the only thing I have to know
the beauty of this motion,
the world.
I destroy myself, I destroy the only thing I have to know motion.
I destroy myself, I destroy the movement of the world.
I destroy the world's movement, I invent its death.
I destroy myself, I destroy the world with me.
Destroy myself, destroy my mother with me.
Destroy her elegant, shaking ring finger.
Destroy myself, destroy my father with me.
Destroy his elegant, shaking ring finger.
Destroy my parents with me.
Destroy their promise,
their promise,
promise,
never,
to stop moving.
Apr 30, 2012
Apr 30, 2012 at 11:35 AM UTC
A Poem Composed Entirely of Verses, Phrases, and Select Words From T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and The Hollow Men Disposed in a New Order for an English Literature Class Called English 206 at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon
This is the Dead Land.
The Death By Water Land.
The Hanged Man Land.
I had not thought death had undone so many.
In vials of ivory and colored glass,
Under the firelight,
Under the brush,
White bodies naked on the low damp ground.
Bones rattled by the rat's foot.
Rattle.
I hear the king my brother's wreck.
Rattle.
I hear my father's death.
April is the cruelest month.
April is breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land.
You first gave me Hyacinths a year ago.
They called me The Hyacinth Girl.
A year ago, at the small house in the mountains,
I feel free.
I feel free when we are
Trembling
With tenderness;
Lips that together kiss.
Lips that together form prayers,
Form Life,
Form Earth.
Lips that kept us warm.
Lips, life, Earth, Prayers
Feeding life in the Dead Land,
Breeding Lilacs in the Dead Land.
They call me The Lilac Girl.
I think we are in Rats' Alley.
There I see one I know and him,
crying, picked his bones in whispers.
Crying in whispers unshaven he says,
*Burning burning burning
O Lord pluckest me out
O Lord pluckest me out
Burning burning burning*
In demotic French,
Asked me to luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel.
The Cannon Street Hotel is burning.
In demotic French,
Asked me,
*You who were with me in the ships of Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? my nerves are bad tonight.
Stay with me. yes, bad. stay with me. what is that noise.
It's so elegant. so intelligent. mon semblable; my likeness!
Hypocrite! you!*
He sat as though a heap of images broken in a flash of lightning
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall among the lowest of the dead to voices singing out of Empty cisterns,
*Burning burning burning
O lord pluckest me out
Burning burning burning*
Sweet Thames, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
Sweet Thames, no more can I, I said, no more can I bear to look at you and think of poor Albert.
You ought to be ashamed, Sweet Thames, I said, to look so antique.
I want to know what you have done with the memories he gave you,
The memories you took,
The sound of horns and motors,
The prolonged candle-flames,
The pattern on the coffered ceiling,
The small house in the mountains,
The lips that together kissed,
The life,
The Earth,
The Hycinths.
What have you done with my Hyacinths, Sweet Thames?
I still remember those pearls that were his eyes.
*Albert, speak to me. Why do you never speak.
Speak.
What are you thinking of?
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
Where are your bones?
Do you see nothing?
Do you remember nothing?
Are you alive, or not?
Alive, or not?
Alive,orNotAliveOrNotNotAliveNotAlive
Not alive.
You are nothing.
I am nothing.*
I clutch and sink into the wet bank.
Death by Water.
The Dead Land.
Hyacinths in the Dead Land.
Lilacs in the Dead Land.
The Hyacinth girl in the Dead Land. Dead Hyacinths dead in the Dead Land.
The Lilac girl in the Dead Land. Dead Lilacs dead in the Dead Land.
Hurry up, please,
It's time. It's time.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago.
They called me the hyacinth girl.
Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Yours arms full, and your hair wet,
I could not speak,
And my eyes failed,
I was neither living nor dead,
And I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Goodnight, Thames.
Goodnight, Albert.
Goodnight, small house.
Goodnight, Hyacinths.
Goodnight, Lilacs.
Goodnight, April.
Goodnight, goodnight.
Apr 15, 2012
Apr 15, 2012 at 4:06 AM UTC