atangken
Growing up my best friends were Ginsberg and Bukowski. We would sit in my room and they would show me how to mess with people's minds. They taught me that poems are just honest words not skipping a beat over an obsession over couplets or making a thing look like what it is.
I brought up race at work
they wrote me up
they wrung their hands
they shuffled their feet
they shifted their eyes
they stuttered their words
they kept some demeanor
they stumbled on logic
they pretended a point hadn't been made
They found a ***** in the armor.
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 6:19 PM UTC
The Underground Man
“By the way, what does a decent chap talk about with greatest possible pleasure?
Answer: about himself.”
Note one: On the Circus.
Lies are cars, I tell you, pummeling through the freeways of smiling faces and charmed ears.
Spitting smoke in my eyes. Despite this clear fact, honesty is *****
I turn on the TV, I choke on the noxious laughing gases of the permanently paradoxical world.
******** smells of roses. We’re wooed by the scent of scandalous roses.
******** is a beautiful bouquet beating on so many dead horses. A million bouquet armed gadflies
Stinging the horse. Grating her with their stems and thorns.
Our lips contracts as sphincters in a never dead language, a romance language
L’amour du merde.
The air smells of rosebuds and vanilla candles, and I break into ulcers.
They sing the sugar songs. Muddled by the sound of a flock, imitating a fog-horn blaring in the mist of song. Speaking openly is **** and the **** clinch tightly to keep it in.
But we dance with bouquets reeking of peppermint, gumdrops and bon bons, smiling with courtesy, modernizing a Victorian cordiality
A half-made smile. Fetal. Sloppily pasted. Circus clown faces hysterically melting under the intensity of the honest moment.
It is truth: Half of the single human life is spent taking part in the most pornographic reality we can conceive, while the other half is a mask pretending we don’t grab the ***
Note Two: We are an aftertaste.
Some days I feel ugly to the world. I justify these sensations by the believing the world to be ugly to me in return. So the world and I glare at one another in a staring contest between two ugly wounds. We’re really quite eager to bark the last word in a garbled string of language.
BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!!
Going on in the nights where my eyes are wracked by the tired pins and needles of insomnia.
My heart rate jumps to the skipping rope turned by anxiety and exertion.
Muscles are stretched thin and I’m no more fluid and wanted than old Play-Doh left to cringe in the sun.
Then the red glow of alarm clocks shriek at me to lie in sleep.
I’m a hammer split against a wall stored in a shanty hovel pooling of novels and slanders hissed through grit teeth and clenched jaws wading through this growing cesspool where I hiss and hiss as a coiled snake residing in these hidden underground passages.
I will be vile because the world is vile. And I will be beautiful for the world is beautiful. Humanity is the manticore. A Monster consisting of a million realities. A colour palette of melting hues and every person wants to say we’re pink, red, or green. We’re a mysterious aftertaste, left lingering in the back of nature’s tongue. A platypus walking on two legs. A monster with eyes leaking **** with irises more alluring than Shakespearean Sonnets. An Angel with a lyre belting out the best of Bob Dylan. A mother leaving her newborn to rot in a dumpster.
And a doctor saying he ain’t gonna make it. Mama’s hit the bottle cuz’ daddy’s comin home and daddy’s hittin’ mommy because look at what she made him do.
Humanity is a manticore. He gnashes her teeth at coiled snakes. He wants to swallow its eggs.
A bank machine to wallets, and creditors to pockets.
She’s crude and cold. He has eyes of atomic flashes, roar that wails an echoing wail of lives spent sighing behind a monitor. Tragedies piling into transcendence, gripping onto God with heads packed into ovens and daughter swallowing one pill too many.
Of wedding bells and birthday parties and strawberry shortcake and the hope we’ll just get together and feel all right. He has an underbelly glistening of ivory white, and she’s brimming with dreams filling with the hope of seeing Xanadu. A belly of ecstasy and climaxes of the most ruthless sort to glisten to the light of ****** that embers the night towards the ecstatic scent of chemical mornings.
The gravedigger.
I am the world’s gravedigger
Burying the world
In the needless disgust
Of a muscular mind, armed with an atrophied hand.
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 6:08 PM UTC
So Here, settled, is the bare voice,
Quivering echoes of egos
Do minds make the world hear Drum Dreams?
Here poets have milked tired *******
Of language to allay the lone,
Weighted and burdened from out There.
To rid themselves the form, the world,
The plague of storms that rock this ship,
That overflows, that bleeds too much
Of the vision that draws and defines
The days when the traffic of life
Is the onslaught of passing time.
There we trudge onward grudgingly.
Cradled upright by crashing waves,
Lonely amidst the dim gray sun.
Unnerving the courage of souls
Man is hushed, left to silences.
Reticent and bearing the masks
Hiding in Drum Dreams. Unnoticed,
We’re every soul at the crosswalk.
Here stands the prolific poet
Painting the infinite canvas.
Dreams are swirled upon dreams, deformed
By time, stultifying the brain
With dreams swirled upon dreams, drying
Into dust, caught in the wind’s palm;
Riding the breeze into the stream,
Into the curled spine of the storm.
Dreams swirled upon dreams, seeping;
Painting, and painting the loathsome
Self, trapped in the drum dream, suckling
Violently out of her dream mouth.
He imagines and paints, writhing,
Vacant howling in stormy clouds,
Cast in impotent bloodletting.
Here stands the fanatic poet,
Painting the relentless image,
Playing placated remedy
To dreary drunks trapped in the Drum Dream.
Hear, She hums, she hums the Drum Dream.
And life sways back and forth
Dancing the way the night does
Under the cool glow of streetlights
And all that remains of the world
Are still minds, hypnotized hearts,
And her sudden suckles for breath.
And we slow dance to a rhythmic drum.
Here stands the Prolific Poet…
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 6:05 PM UTC
How the world empties me
Thoughts, digging as ants do
Where the new and unseen travel,
Undisturbed by the drying light of everything left said
In habit, comfort, and politeness.
To trap them in jars of words,
Glow in poetry like the light of fireflies.
Rhythmic motion cradles my eyes,
So aching for comatose in a restless present,
Crawling my body together
Fetal and safe inside this womb I call my world.
How I am serenaded by the living stillness,
The singing darkness of the soft blue,
By distant choirs composing the song,
Dancing mind stutters of consciousness,
While I ***** for the expressions that assure you, laconic,
Of how utterly enchanted and childlike comes the how.
And the song man groans
His rasping, alcohol-torn voice
Drags a dancing lyric behind my stool
To accompany my pains and joys.
How the world turns its hues
How the light of darkness touches the world
Of all the immaculate and disturbing sublime.
How often I am lonely
How often I am alone
Only because the world is always a new and comforting stranger.
How the world is left to dreamers
I am left
How ready to let things end.
How focused to one act,
How to abandon temporal reality.
Singing singularity
The stillness so hypnotic and happy,
How that I am I,
I, like
God
saying “Hello” to Adam
For the very first time.
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 6:04 PM UTC
Sometimes
Sometimes I lie awake staring at time.
As if at one point you were crying at the impact of birth.
and then you finish
and you're in tears over anything
A man would blow his brains out for.
And the trigger mechanisms are simple
So it closes in.
The crinkling stares of so many children
Who can't even imagine themselves in me.
And it is I,
I'm the one in make-believe,
Only dreaming and dreading of the future.
Like a heavy wool blanket bedding with you in a heat-wave.
My own until it becomes the crucifix;
The point of martyrdom of the heretic's soul.
And somewhere I have dreams of catching lost time
Of an existence of perfect contentment,
A life without waste or remorse.
time flows like mercury…
Breaking and gliding away
Rushing with unforeseeable motion
Into a horizon that breaks
into sunrise to sunset
In the shortest, disbelieving , stunted, stutters of breath.
The times you find when you're malleable.
When you look far enough back in time.
When you try and find that breaking point.
Where your idealistic self broke down.
Like a body collapsing over a sleeping foot.
the point where disillusion became a new *********** eating hyperreality
Where the idea became a living stain swathed in a sheet of toilet paper you stole because you couldn't afford to buy your own. Where living and eating, filling the fridge, became the maniacal obsession. When it began to devour all the space the Truth was taking up,
like an orca charging a shoreline,
like a bad piece of art you bought for cheap to fill a void in the room.
Your liver fills with beer and your lungs are lit by a six dollar pack of nooses.
day in day out.
You find where you got yourself all chewed up.
When you're laying in bed with all your prized possessions
***** laundry filling the floors like empty husks, shed skin
deflated costumes of the person you've always wanted to be.
When you realize that hour glass needs turning over
But you've already done the deed and the *** end of the vial is burying the best of you in dirt.
Where selling soul for *** comes easy.
too afraid of the becoming
too comfortable with the being.
Cowardice comes easy.
That's where it all comes together to fall apart.
To sell your soul
You don't need a prayer
You don't need to be offered the world
You don't need the love of your life in the fold
You
Just need an illusion of certainty
A moment, a shadow
Of doubtless prospect
Just the belief that what you think is coming around the corner
is around the corner
You sell your soul
You sell your heart,
your *****
your spine,
your genius,
your brain,
your sanity
Just to feel at home.
Sell it for a guarantee on cigarettes,
***** and a couch to meditate your guilt on.
A bed to sleep in where remorse is a dance done tossing and turning.
A bone dance.
A roof over heads.
Rent in pockets.
Zen
in a hovel hole of holy indiscretions.
The devil was an empty fridge and a stomach eating us thin!
We walk the streets as Concubines of wandering flesh
Paid and obliged,
obligated and pained
Marching with an anemic braggadocio, and a wounded dignity
Everyone's on their knees swallowing pride in gulps.
We wake up young and tired, vice-ridden, punched-in and broke.
waged into hypocrisy with all of our valiant and cumbersome notions of ancient virtue. Read to us in bed time fantasies and fairy-tales of things dreamed not meant to be.
And wagered into all that nothingness of essence, where
Vividly ****** in the violet haze of nightmares entranced in the violence and fury of the guillotine mind,
We converse in the language of our new and violent times.
It's become that Dream and Dread sit one letter off.
Dreaming and dreading, dressing as drunks draped in the dreary.
That's it there.
There's my poetry.
The extinction of the New Romantics.
The blood drenched fist harnessed in the beguiling, gilded, golden tapestry
the smearing of the ink upon the neon lights.
The weight.
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 5:40 PM UTC