His father was a drinker,
his father was a drinker.
And for him,
love was a folding chair.
Life was difficult.
and time was purchased in packages.
Bruises would wax and wane,
though his skin stayed clear,
His wrists were like orchids,
you could peer through it,
thin, fragile, and resilient,
but see the carbon, not the blood.
His father worked at Lobel’s;
his father worked at East National.
In those days, gin was cheap,
but tonic was steep.
(Circa 1894)
(Circa 1918)
Jul 13, 2010
Jul 13, 2010 at 12:33 PM UTC
Plato believed that the future could be told
by listening to the lingering whispers of the wind.
between its howls and sighs and
its knuckles cracking on the branches
it mentions something,
the something to come
the something that envelopes us
like an iron blanket.
or so Plato says.
but every time i've opened my ear
it just grew cold and slightly stung
so i stopped trying to hear the something
that wouldn’t voice itself loudly enough.
yet, along came an orange-haired girl who claims she can hear the wind
and i watch her and she sings along with it
in words that sound like cello strings.
her arms sway leaflike in a breathing ballet
a combination of her and the something
and all i hear is its hushness.
but it lures my legs to sit
and it tempts my mouth to shut
and listen.
i don’t know if this girl actually understands Plato’s sacred windsong
i don’t know if it’s something that her mind composed
but i do know that her lungs seem fuller than mine ever have
because she breathes belief, something i’ve always exhaled
in my sarcastic search for Science’s future.
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:23 PM UTC
after enough charred inhaling and stuttered swallowing
and after the invincibility of the act evaporates
your biceps begins to sag and your mind stops moving
it’s you suddenly find yourself hovering through the days
and time is subjective and all things are subjective
and so what if you don’t do that because everything’s just particles in your brain
slapping against one another to make the flickering pictures of this world
and then once every few days you shake your head and stand up
and say I’m gonna do something! but keep the same diet
and revert to the same state of synthetic zen-like denial.
you sit on a silent conveyer belt as hours pass
and things happen around you but you see them through a lens
a film onscreen, pleasurably cathartic, but your soul’s still in the theater
watching from a stained, sticky seat some dimensions away
and the heckler’s behind you won’t shut up
and they keep you from focusing on the movie itself
and your peripheral vision becomes distinct
and you find yourself aware of the speakers and exit signs
and the slight dust and film grains splashing in front of your view
and you think of this as an ephiphany
instead of Brechtian distanciation at its most curdling.
then your brain starts feeling like a frisbee
and your body is the monkey in the middle
trying to grab at it but it tires out
and the bullies run away with it
and your left with a black hole in the head
laying in complacency in front of a shimmering cube
sounds and images with no correlation or relevance
pondering your higher knowledge of all things around it, around you
and giggling to the echoing cobwebbed corners of the room
about the ignorance of those not privileged to the same diet.
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:23 PM UTC
the moment when you met was rather insignificant
but then someone told you that she liked you
and you realized that – hey – you suddenly liked her too.
and so you expectedly courted her
kissing her at moments that you did with previous girls
telling her old sentences
recycling plainly hidden stories from your childhood:
one showing your good heartedness
one about your embarrassing marching band days (without forgetting to mention your pop-punk band now)
and, of course, the first girlfriend tale that makes you seem vulnerable.
and through these, you reveal things to her that other girls, now decaying in your mind, have known for many many months.
yes you hook up
and the *** is up to par
and there’s some appeal to the overall lack of trying involved.
you date as obligation
and you somehow convince yourself that you love her
because feeling wanted feels so **** pleasant
and her lack of intrusion on the rest of your life is pretty convenient overall.
and out of complacency this love takes hold
or at least solidifies like an algae bloom
and you grow tired for settling
and she gets exhausted from caring
and everything stagnates to a perfect balance.
your blood hardens to plastic
so the your muscles can no longer fight
against the unsettling comfort of the life
you said you’d never lead.
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:23 PM UTC
living can be tiring and decisions regretful, so often we find ourselves
marching to the beat of obligations’ drummer – unnecessary paths are safely untreaded
doing only because the doing is necessary – to keep life at its homeostasis
fixing but not tinkering – the return to normality is the goal
just accepting these ************ days for their lukewarm livability
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:22 PM UTC
yass yass
you his over my shoulder
********* through Foucalt
agreeing to whatever I said in a way
that doesn’t show commitment or care
to my whichever whyever opinions
cause I’m here to drive you to Vegas
so we can drink and you can leave our trip
for a guy who tames white tigers and will buy you
white wine from California from a vineyard that his friend owns
and he will have to take you there sometime
you sure are fun
and we have fun but I don’t like being
a vessel for your fun
so you can take your ambiguous agreements
and your artificial american adventures
and shove them up your
recently waxed showered this morning but look ***** on purpose
middle class daddy issues band-groupie neo-intellectual
early twenty’s ***
and your sigh and smirk
and say yass yass
and push a bang out of your eye and look ravishing.
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:22 PM UTC
boo croon the sunflowers
and **** squeaks the jay
this garden was not tended to
and when it was, it was done with bitter blisterless hands
the weeds are creeping out now and thickening stalks
and they move out
out out
goes any sense trust we grew in this garden.
and out
out out
goes my frothy yellow blood into the humid grounds of the garden
and you mop it up and glaze over my barkless parts
boo croon the sunflowers
and **** squeaks the jay
the hose to feed me
was bent at angled corners
and the water shrieked its way through
to come out a subtle flaccid
drop by
drop by
drop
on my parched cracked tan sun slapped skins
and i was angry
that you never felt the need to untangle the hose
because you turned the faucet to full volume
so you assumed that was all the water you could give
and i needed
boo croons the sunflowers
and **** squeaks the jay
the garden is all sand colored and tired
and you don’t feel guilty
you looked at it every day
and squirted what you could on it
and picked whatever weeds you saw
but you never went beyond what looked pretty to visitors
and you let the roots rot across the summer
and now that the winter’s fallen in
there’s not enough water to keep the garden beating
and all the melted snow in the world won’t make up for it
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:21 PM UTC
you know how when you are reintroduced to a thing
a thing from your child-days, a grand something, a monolith of that tiny time
and you know how when you see it, it is suddenly
average-sized and painfully plain.
well, this wretched phenomena,
this inevitable happening of that comes with the aching curse of age,
was given a name by the scientific community:
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (or AiWS for short)
i swear to god that’s the name,
and when i learned that some psychologist chose to identify this as a real something
(and give it a title so playfully curious, at that)
i couldn’t help but giggle at how man’s heart can be so unnecessarily sub lime.
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:21 PM UTC
Hiro was such a clever guy.
he always said the funniest little jokes, even when he was Hiro-chan, to me.
he used to act like a cat when he was frustrated and, and-
remember what he said to the mailman that day, in like june?
about how he looked like an angry Hotei-osho?
we all laughed and that mailman, that man’s face went radish red.
he was such a good lawyer, Hiro.
i mean, he wasn’t rich and powerful, no
but he did good things, though.
like Sayotoma’s lease –
without Hiro, he would’ve lost the store!
and then where would we get our tempura? huh?
oh, Hiro, you are so much fun to talk about.
and i hate that all i have of you now is smoldering incense and an expired passport.
i poured a cup of water on your grave today, you know.
it was a hurting kind of hot under summer’s sun – it’s august, after all.
some steam came off, and it sounded like you sighing
and i said more loudly than i cared no problem, Hiro
and my wife looked at me, with a misting eye,
while my son kept flicking matches
from that cheap matchbook we got at Sayotama’s place.
all the failed matches collected between his sneakers
and i thought that *i wish Sayotama didn’t make all his matches
so **** fragile.
they burst and blacken in a second,
and you don’t have the chance to really light something,
and they just end up falling between the sneakers
of some kid who can’t even remember you,* Hiro.
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:21 PM UTC
Father, Son, Mechanic…
Man, I’ve wanted to talk to you – really talk to you – for some time now.
to see your face in front of me, instead of dangling from necklaces,
or hanging, melancholy, over sexless couples’ beds.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading all that stuff you wrote (supposedly),
and I’ve enjoyed it, Man, I have.
but I keep wanting it to be a letter, when in the end it’s just
a bipartisan explanation – an engineer’s guide to
building a pretty vehicle around a faulty engine.
I always see you, arms spread,
sprawled across the older bitter-america’s steering wheel.
my mama would tease me, saying you’d want me to help some day.
but you and your cronies drove me like a beat-down El Camino,
joyfully taking me through wrong turns and bumpy streets
waiting for my chassis to split.
and once I ran out of gas to offer, you refused to touch me at all,
letting me rot in your cobweb garage.
and all those ******* in turtlenecks and polos popped,
they’ve gleefully branded your logo on their chemical biceps
and gaily explain how close you were.
how they knew you like no one else did,
how you guys didn’t have a connection, but a relationship.
people should only let their mechanics touch their cars, though,
and keep their innards free of oily fingers.
to be honest, I don’t think I’ll be coming back to this establishment again.
it’s a little too clean for my taste, and your prices are way to high
especially when all you get is a little peace of mind and a sense of humbled grandeur.
don’t worry about the car, though – you can keep it.
you’ve sort of spoiled all its good intentions,
so I’ll be buying a new one sometime soon.
I guess I’ll be taking a taxi.
No, actually.
I’ll hitchhike home.
Jul 12, 2010
Jul 12, 2010 at 11:20 PM UTC