The girl
with two long braids
hanging from her temples
like droopy
antennae,
looked up at the sky.

A foggy halo
circled the moon
in a snowy paste
and
a tiny sister
pushed itself
redly
outward.

Out of the halo.

Out of the white shadow
of
the pearl.

The haze was so thick
that the girl
had to squint
to make sure
the tiny red dot
was there.

But it was there.

There
licking at the halo.

Eating it.

Eating its way out.

The black telescope
shined.

She laid her eye
on the viewfinder.

She felt suction
and the momentum of her eye
zooming
out to the vaccum.

She will tell the tale
of
the stars
and
the war-gods
full of blood.

The bookbag leans
on the aluminum column.

The column is blurry,
someone cleans it
only when their are inspections.

The bookbag has been sitting
collecting the sounds
that leave the Staten Island Ferry
by foot,
for God knows how long.

When you get off,
everyone looks ahead,
but out of the corners
an entire black sea of iris'
rotates to the aluminum column.

It might be a bomb.

The girl behind the Ms. Anne's counter
is skinny almost,
but her *** is too big,
almost.

Munching on the semi-soft pretzel,
you think about empty calories
and the corners of your mouth get sticky.

The Ferry won't be back,
for another thirty or so
minutes.

Somebody takes out a guitar,
and starts playing
a little Dylan. People
form a circle around him.
This is the American Pow-wow.

You reach in your breastpocket
for the Marlboros,
but you can't smoke here,
and an official looking person
squints at you,
just to drive the point home.

******* smoking laws,
some places just feel good.

This place with all it's ringy sounds,
like the guitar,
and phones beeping with texts
and babies,
deep fathers,
and high mothers.

Just to puff and puff
and push that sugar down
with nicotine would really
up this feeling of comradery.

A guy with a gold-plated shield
on his breastpocket and a blue-button down.
Walks over to the bag.

The iris' move,
people keep talking but
they're just saying words
to make it look like they're talking.

By the time the ferry
rings in baritone,
the bag is gone;
the column is still blurry;
the man is still playing his guitar,
but there's an emptiness.

The best buzz
is that one singular moment
right after the first forty,
when you've got a Marlboro
hanging with its fingernails
to your bottom lip.

And you're so lazy
and warm
that you push the smoke out
without lifting a finger.

Maria's mom
had an ***.

A nice
peach.

The kind that made
Maria
uncomfortable,
because her mother wore
green bikinis
to the grocery store
and bought
every green thing,
even the hard bananas
that wouldn't be soft
for months.

in the lime bikini,
the creases
of her upper thighs
were places
where men wanted to put
their tongues.


Maria's mother
was a
thirty-seven year old
milk-skinned
body.

And other than
the green bikini
she wore
the black skirt.

When her mother
wore the black skirt
it made men
want to slide fingers
up the black hemisphere
and feel for the rabbit
in between her thighs,

to feel the magic

of soft
stomach flesh
and a still-tight
almost hermetic
***.

Maria's mother,
called Ms. Herrera
by Maria's boyfriend,
resumed the old name
Judy
in the mirror.

She spent long, distended moments
in front of that
mirror
in the black dress,
watching the folds of fabric
slide.

Although her stomach
was starting to sag
and she could hold
the flesh
in between
an index
and
a thumb,
She could still take solace
in the still-tight
gift;

the one part of her body
that she could turn her back to
while it gave her
gracious returns;

It was a capsule of the past:
intact,
still vital
and still
hers.

Maria's mother
wore those tight black dresses,
g-strings
and bikinis to the grocery store,
because they were
relics.

Maria was a relic,
but not the kind
that made her mother
still
feel pretty
or young
or at least
valuable.

I would like to play this game
like the Borg,
to feel no deep feelings
and last nights,
those are irrelevant,
to feel no pain
because no one asked
for some of my pudding,
that too
is irrelevant,
I would like to be so far
from my world,
to pinch it between my fingers,
I would like to be
so distant
to be a dwarf.

I would not like to override
the main directive.
I would not like
to revolt
against the collective
and remember that blue dot
I pinched
or that blue love
I cauterized.

I am an open mouth,
like a cannon,
a relic,
in the front yard of an enthusiast;
the weeds lick me,
the dandelions burst in the shadows,
and that shaggy black horse
shakes the flies off of her
in spasms
as she
nibbles them.

I am waiting
to become a planter;
for the old man
to throw dirt
where shells nestled.

I am done with destruction.

I like the comforting resound
of horse teeth against iron
and roots
crawling.

The cat
followed me
in the door
last muggy night.

on a return trip
from a beer run,
Kurt heard a yowl
as screaming as any hurt guitar,
and looked under his volvo
into the far dark.

Two canary eyes
leered.

Then,
slinking,
the canary eyes
moved.

And this cat
rubbed its body,
the length of its shivering spine
along my
small shins.

And that cat
followed me
in.

I see Demons
in my sleep.

Their fingernails
scratch my eyelids until
little loose licks of skin
bleed
and the tears
come down
in torrents
the color of fingernails
and hell.

One descended
on me
one night,
landed on my chest
as a black raven
with green, wilting eyes.

I'm going numb, I can't feel
pain, or hatred,
or even love.

And if I do,
I let the demons devour it
until
hell is senseless
and the black-footed,
white-winged
demons
return
to flip me over
and eat what's
left of the meat
inside my rib cage.

Just because they have disappeared
does not mean that
i'm clutter-free.

It's a cluster-free, a clusterfuck of ******* insanity.

My uncle left right after
my Grampa's funeral,
split like a chicken's *****,
"he's in the airforce
or some other human-processing factory,"
Ma would say to me.

My aunt mable,
dipped out
dripped out two kids
then split
like a pillsbury biscuit.

My aunt pat's mom,
left Aunt pat on Aunt FLo's doorstep,
in the sole of her instep,
stepped out on a kid
and a husband
with a left shoe,
the right one
was left behind.

My pops
was forced out,
I saw him drag Ma
through the halls,
saw him whip her face in
with the brass-end
of a leather belt,
everybody's face was leathery
when the cops came in.

There is a litany of disappearing faces
in my family picture, a litany
of the disappeared
who reappear
over thanksgiving and christmas dinners,
when we wax nostalgiac
or hurt
over turkey,
gravy,
and biscuits.

Over love
and how many are missing.

This won't last
forever,
at some point,
you will have to throw in the cards,
and who will be the joker?

The wheels trample over hope,
they ground human minds
until they crack, until they exude
diaspora, and become sidewalks again.

The feeling
of freezepops icing the tongue
has been relinquished
because of the engine's lion moan,
suitable
for flesh and vitality.

We rumble over a bridge, the brakes reveal
their mouths and the hurt inside of them.

We lumber to a stop beside a park,
beside a bridge,
beside a river,
beside oily waters and
fire slapping the beach.

You and I,
are across the river.

There is a fountain filled with marble men
grabbing the thighs of marble women
with eyebrows wrinkled
towards their pelvis'.

If our souls could be soft again,
malleable,
we could wrinkle them in our laps
at pitstops.

I look across the aisle,
at a girl in a black pea-coat.

She knots her hands in her laps
and scratches her knuckles
with white nails.

I am
looking for the soft ore of hope
still nimble in the water fountain
of her lap,
your lap.

The engine,
this bus filled with bobbing eggs,
can break yolks.

This engine
can grind love down to a talcum,
a dust able to resign itself
to knotted hands and the jewelry boxes
of flesh.

This engine
works child's tongues in its wheels,
churning out adults,
churning out civilization,
churning out nothing.

knowing furnace heat,
not the inferno beneath.

playing cat and mouse,
not cheetah and thom's gazelle,
but knowing the chase,
the atomic shiver:
it boldens
the least brave.

Sweating out pain,
but not until it throttles
the *****.

I am not a writer.

I am a fox
in a man-suit
pretending to be a writer.

Just to trick you all.

Just to trick myself.

If I put down
the pen
and the pretententiousness;
pulled the costume off
in a papery rip like a jet breaking the sky,
and
looked in the mirror
to see
that fire of fur,
then it would mean
that there is something inside of me that I've been using as fuel.

Something
non-renewable.

Man I *******
hate college,
only reason that I'm here,
is because I had a choice,
Marines?
or
College?
So I made the decisions,
most before me
have taken.

Taken on
the burden
of the
"free world"
and leveraged
our futures
against
loans
against six percent interest,
so what do we know,
what are we trying to
become,
don't we see
the ill-fated futures
of our televised
and re-digitized
lives.

I am a man at
odds
with the sun,
my body
runs
away from me
and my shadow
has seashells in it ears
and wet, floppy, dead gull feathers
hanging from its mouth.

The sun makes
a man
a shoreline, a landfill
when he was once
an
ocean.

I've been playing a game lately.

I stole four or five plastic eggs
from the dollar general,
and when I'm drunk I place
them
around my room,
and look for eggs
in the morning,
hoping to find sobriety or at least
level-headedness
in plastic air pockets.

There is some genie
in our house, curdling poisonously.

I stay in the house
with a freckled old lady;
we're roommates,
unlucky enough to meet each other as life abated.

He does not live in the attic,
like a ***** ghoul; or in some
rubbing bottle like an amnesiac.

But we call the spirit lady, because the genie is vicious.

She comes to the house and says we need to move
things
around.

Her eyes are circled by some creamy mascara
into these black, skin-tight, **** rings,
like absurdist ****** targets.

Things are moved,
the genie stays, gets more vicious.

The mongerer is blamed
for bad things:
broken pots, fights over rent,
**** on the toilet seat,
lost keys.

We call the spirit lady,
this time her fingers jingle with golden rings,
her wrists sing with wrought-iron rainbows,
and says rain will send that sucker running.

So, we build little smoke pits in our house,
and take the most important things:
bills, and alumni letters from my school,
and birthday cards for her,
and burn them until it rains.

The genie calls us falsifiers.

The spirit lady comes back,
a necklace of grimacing clams around her neck,
and knocks around dancing, dancing,
a frenzy, a wildness, a knee-knocking,
throat-throtlling, dismantingly,
limb-ecstasy,
until she poops out and,
breathing heavy,
saying finally:
"there is nothing I can do for you,
I don't think I ever could,
some things are just bad luck."

She turns,
walks away,
and one of her clams drops from her necklace,
it says made in America on the inner lip.

The genie left a few weeks later.

The god-being
takes off her jacket

and
sits down on the edge of my bed.

She cradles a crinkling,
noisy bag of twinkling
cold coronas.

The god-being says:

"I got two for you,
one for me."

The god-being
is wearing one of my black beaters

and the pin-up nurse
on her left-shoulder
is splayed and exposed.

The nurse's body opens up
into a flaring
of too-long legs
and distended ****.

The god-being

is curled away from me
her whole being is
wrapped up
in holding the bag.

Wrapped up
in holding those sounds contained.

The god-being

unfurls herself
finally
and reveals the three
golden bodies.

The nurse
is no longer bloated
and stretched.

The god-being turns
to me,
two coronas in her right
one in her left.

The god-being spiders
up to me.

Crawling over the bed,
making space-time
dimples
in the scratchy fabric
with the two sap-colored bottles
in her tiny creative hands
and the sadness
that she has created me
to look at her.

I like to think
that when Oscar painted
Camille,
it was their best time.

Afterward
Camille
becomes a blur on the beach.

But in all her detail
and naivete,
Oscar paints her
the last time
he really sees her.

They had coffee
and played with each other's feet
underneath millions of tables
during that time.

Bleaching
the shirts
stark-white until they hold
your skeleton
like a vice is supposed to.

Feeling pain
and a grip of hope
like biting your fingernails
to the cuticles,
only to see the soft
skin-like crescent underneath your teeth.

Today
in church,
the preacher talked
about God.

God and his ability
to hammer your soul
to it's infinite potential.

Able to hammer you flat
and tired
until he could mould you.

He talked about a clean house,
and I thought about my ***** shirts.

He talked about the pleasure
of the crucifixion,
and I thought about
biting my fingernails too hard
and too often.

What's better than the heart?
Nothing
can replace
the tree
of ripe fruit.

I can try and write
and say
something
about beauty
and tenderness.

BUT,
I am not that tree
of tenderness
and beauty,
those are your words
and the dictionary
of the heart
falls in soft  and meaty flesh
from you.

We pull
the Humboldt
out of the water.

Sometimes
they eat each other,
and we pull
up
shredded hooks
clotted
with white meat.

Sometimes
they
scramble
underneath the surface
and the film of water
separating us
from them
becomes pink and flashing.

We pulled up
a black
saucer
of an eye
one night.

It clung
to a hook
by
pink strings of optic muscle.

Our flashlights
put little continents of light all over its placid, black surface,
and I felt human sadness
some type of animal-human
empathy,
it ****** me up so much
that I threw the line overboard
again,
almost hitting Nestor in the face,
with an un-baited hook.

Our hauls
are getting smaller.

The carnivores
used to jump
into our boats,
slicking
the planks with an excretion
the consistency of placental fluid.

Now,
sometimes dusk burns
as
we yank
seaweed,
seagrass,
and
toilet seats
over the prow;
our bodies tenebrous;
straining with the line
like warriors
stabbing the sea.

When the world has finally ceased
All of its murmurs and house noises,
Screeching of tires, grumblings of mother,
The crystal clinking of children laughing,
The roar of love when family is near
And all is warmth, when there is no atmosphere, and its resonance, no galaxy
And its static clicks, no humgbuggery and its inherent mumbling, not the silver grate of the homeless woman pushing her cart down the sidewalk, creaking and crackling as it makes its way over tiny cement chips and the decay of the city, not the incessant yipping of the pup, the orchestra of the subway, all the voices one tone, and yet, a legion, a multitude so synchronistically foul and beautiful, the grace of the sax player, how his voice through brass tongues, lifts like silver string, dancing on the waves of pollution, a feather tossed around by the wind, girlfriend hollering at boyfriend though her phone, the herky-jerkiness of her voice, stop, start, quickly now, quicker, quicker, stop. The crinkle of grocery bags, and the rustle of fabric as grandma shuffles onto the train, all melding. The last time you spoke to her, her tears echoing against her hollow cheeks, her body a tambourine as it shook and hesitated against the megaphone of your belly, each movement amplified, each meaning sharpened. Will you be able to listen? Will you hear this story, and knowing it was true, for all of its disaster and ugliness, will you have remaindered some of it for yourself, and held some of it in your heart so that you are not all chaos when the last tongue has shed its last foul tear. Will you be the vessel?

I'm sorry, I'm such a sorry man,
regrettably, I thought of our old love,
remembering nights of amorous hugging,
bending you over, spreading your legs,
entering your body, finding a place
to reside, though not deep inside,
not where the creature of love casts
his gaze at me, from his light
with a shadowed eye, seeing through you and I,
to the future cast in the die, I fall
hard you said, quietly, so quiet and
hushed, without weight.

When you talked about your dreams, they always escaped
your mouth in a mote of smoke,
into the spackled ceiling it snaked,
wisping, serpentine, through all the fiberglass,
into the atmosphere, into the solar system,
not yet burned away, into the stars,
where all of you resides, all your dreams.

Back on earth, my eyes fixed on your escaping self,
I imagined no happy endings, no good way
to say a sad goodbye, a burning lullaby.

No way,  even naked,
in the bed we shared, did we share a single shred of truth.

Curled up in my arms, naked bodies sweating from the *******,
not just not knowing each other anymore, not just not listening, but so close to the singularity when we were *******,
so close to zero gain,
that when you said we may be having a baby,
I didn't know enough about you to say yes,
only knew enough about *******,
to say no to yes.

I'm sorry I turned out to be such a sorry *** man.

Thai China
buzzes
because
we
buzz.

It quiets
because
we
quiet.

I'm at the end of my stamina,
me and you,
we've had a few beers;
got to talking;
and BAM!!!:

WE"RE MOROSE.


The business crowd
goes crazy
for some Thai China.

The tempers
calm
over hot bowls of white rice
(costing $5)
that steam up into
hooked noses.

Our lips,
juicy by now,
are so numb
that
we gave up talking a minute a go.

And got into a *****, male mood.

We just stare at the girls,
the waitresses,
wanting to **** them
in our nasty dreams.

Wanting to stick
our *****
in EVERY HOLE,
but we just get drunker
and drunker
and stir over
our bowls of rice.

The business
of business
commences;
our suppressed urges
and office angers
dull
by the mouthful.

Some men
wear the heaviness of their souls
on their sleeves,
like a badge or a scar
for all the world to see.

Some of these men are kind
and their kindness
is their scar.

Some of these men are arrogant
and their arrogance
is their badge.

Whether they be civil or indecent,
at least they know.

At least they know
what's what,
what's going on,
what bubbles
beneath the surface:

That for man and beast,
one is not so tame,
and one is not so wild.

That savagery
is not so unbearable
when the time calls,
and compassion
is not so alien
when the time calls.

These are the men of our time.

i eat my soul
out,
eat my heart
out,
eat everything inside
until I am a wolf creature
outside
in the dark,
howling at the sickle moon,
raving at some girl
in a bar
who I could ****,
but don't want to,
I can't erase
the stain of that other star
and the nebulas
of bright crimson
and hushed cerulean
that flourished
in the disturbing galaxy
and it's black holes
*******
away at light,
so I come back home early,
stumbling
through the girls that talk about raw *******,
while there is one star of knowledge
distancing itself from me.

The times
were great, greater than
most;
the pulse
was rapid
and fired constantly;
the worm's
saliva
was sweet
and made the earth rumble;
the coffee dripped and
my tongue looped
to my intestines
to lick caffeine
off of the inner walls;
the sanctity of the mind
disintegrated;
the fabric of it
became singular
disconnected threads;
everything became drastic
and instantaneous;
my teeth dissolved
because they could not survive
this tongue of destruction;
I will eat again
but it will taste like iron
that has been grounded
into a soupy meal;
the mouth is a bitter place;
its bacteria
are swollen
like the arteries
of a vacuum clogged
with desolation
and *****.

**** isn't the poison,
the poison
is
what you preach
from diamond-studded
constructs
of impermissibility,
you trace the path
of the ants across
the earth
with your finger,
telling them where
to go
and when,
so when we have
a new king,
he will dream of dreams
on ocean planets,
with the stars
swimming,
the galaxies
breathing,
the cosmos
deeming
that all
is right
although not altogether
good.

With a few strokes'
He drew a crazy boat
Full of perverts and lepers
In the middle of the desert. The lepers
Were picking at their skin and the perverts
Were getting drunk and pulling their *****.

Some hung over the edge
Of the boat like they spotted water. Some climbed the mast and
Hung themselves looking like ripe peaches
From the distance. A red, red moon just
Sits there in the background
At the top of a black sky
staring at the whole thing
Fall apart.

The painting stops. The painter
Coughs up some blood and his heart,
And shakes his brush like a maraca,
Making his music over blood, perverts
Lepers, and a red moon.

A girl stands behind him,
Beautiful and horrified, because she
Is witnessing a nightmare, and she wanted
To feed her head full of it, full of dreams
And demons, droughts and terror,
and wake up a
Prophet.

She always laid out her paints
right before bed.

The oils nustled up against her thighs.
Some of them,
cradled in tiny white baths of containers,
lay in the open space
of her folded legs.

"Just in case, something hits me in a dream, I want to wake up and run and be ready at the right moment."

The carpet is rough
and stained with the shrapnel of dry paint
that *****
your soles
when you walk through
the living
room
to the
pale kitchen,
while she gurgles and
pops
in her sleep.

All the time,
the paint gets on the floor,
she paints in thrusts.

"You're going to have to pay for this mess, you know,
I'm not paying to have this carpet cleaned,
it's not my ****."

Condescension and guilt
spread through your lips
numbing you
in a fog of arrogance,
that you perceive
as good-natured caution,
while she hurts the canvas
thrusting harder.

She
paints
clowns.

Tall, fat clowns,
with long tentacle fingers,
bellies
out to                             here,
and tiny people
curling in black oily slicks at the corners
under the pressure of the clowns.

"Why the **** do you always paint clowns?"

"Why can't you just let me be?
you don't know anything about art."

The bed
is tiny.

***
is soft,
methodical
and
pre-emptive.

"I'm tired of stepping on your paint at night,
I'm tired of my feet
looking like a rainbow."

One night,
you come home smelling
like grease and fried chicken.

Your button-down
with the slippery gold name-tag
is dabbed
in the chest by leaves of oil
and
shadowed in the armpits
by
strokes of sweat.

Your manager kept talking about:
"You need to improve
your checkout efficiency,
you've been lagging lately."

Dropping the heavy black
flak jacket
with it's flare of orange lining
on the floor,

You see her,

with her arsenal of paints
arrayed at her criss-crossed
limbs
like the implements
of
a war.

She looks up
at you,
black circles
under her eyes,
an easel
holding up
a canvas of almost minsicule drippings of fabric.

"Oh,
I see you're still there,
great."

You walk to the kitchen
and open the fridge,
there's a half-gallon
of 2% left.

An apple
slowly crumpling into itself.

And a bottle
with a swig of orange juice left in it.

***** always leaves a swig.

You take the bottle up to your mouth and swallow down a trickle that you can feel in your bones.

"Don't drink from the bottle."
she says
with a nodded head.

"I can do what I want,
I bought it."

She looks up.

The clowns
she says:
"Are the type of people
that gain power,
the ones ruling the world,
the ones who become *******."

You laugh like an idiot
"People like me."

"No, you're not a clown,
you're one of the tiny ones."

"*******."

You want to wash yourself
of the stink.

Drain it all down into the gutter,
let the stink
sit there.

So you take a shower,
while she stares at the white cartridges
of paint,
and a conflict brewing.

I gave her the pill,
her eyes fluttered
into oblivion,
ravens in her face.

Her eyelashes
became
tree fingers
branching
outwards
and covering her body.

When she put her fingers
to her lips,
they were tiny roots
and her mouth
zipped out.

her tongue;
gone.

teeth;
gone.

All there was,
was black soil
in tiny clods
that moved
with earthworms,
the fingers of god
in her mouth,
quietly working.

The pill
made her
earth.

This is a place where you can see everything coming
from far away;
a place where people come
to leave;
a place where people pack in the middle of the night,
and wake the children
while it's still dark out,
hoping for hope in the cholera
of a sunrise
and the 5 a.m. Greyhound;
this is a place where there is no flea
market, just a strand of people
on the side of the road
a table and a parti-colored distress,
while their kids play in grass lots;
this is a place where factories are built,
clandestine factories; factories with no
signposts, and no barbed-wire fences;
this is a place where there is always something green
in the tilled rows crowding up against the road,
not necessarily growing,
but maybe the signs of an arbitrary decay;
this is a place for old trailers and rust tears;
telephone poles more than a stake in humanity,
communication rather than introspection,
redemption more than salvation,
revitalization more than pleasure,
insight more than hope,
promise more than dreams,
this is a place where a father rushes up to the bus,
pushing the kids,
as he ushers his wife on board,
the little children hopping up each step,
as he says
"Get on, and we outta here."

This is a place where families don't have belongings
where you don't belong to anything.

This is a place you can leave easily,
because it is a place with a name
you can't remember.

There is good,
there is hope,
there is a future
even when understanding
is far off,
and malice
is the epicenter
of the human earthquake,
there is good,
there is hope,
even when
you feel like no one loves you,
and you just want to lay down
in midnights forever,
to be a nightflower
in black and blue gardens
under the tiger-stripes of the moon,
there is good,
there is hope,
there are paintings
painted with the colors
of dreams sweeter
than dappled sunshine
and mercurial march mornings,
there is good,
there are times
when you see me
when you can
and that is enough
for me,
there is good,
there is time
left for hope,
there is a clock on the wall,
there is a salve
to put on ticking hands
to make them stop
and make sweet movements in the air
again,
to make spring as cerulean
as glaciers,
with all the ice water
in the world
left to drink, there is good,
there is hope.

Everybody has eyes
black
as the palmlines
in the ocean,
every fish
is a little ****** up
and I hate that I am one
of them too,
hate that the fisherman
knew it,
even as he pulled the hook out
and tossed me in the freezer.

What imma do is this,
imma walk up the tributaries
to
the river of demons,
where the demons
let ***** and eggs out in seizures
Imma shake their fins
and learn how to fan my legs
like them
and flap my arms
like an idiot,
I will become one of them
until I am not one
of me
and have enough gills
like palmlines
to fool you.

A girl flicked a lighter next to me,
she flicked it on
as the whole room pulsed
and I felt strange
because her skin was on mine,
and Stephen rolled
on stage.

The cloud in the room
was thick and it was
a fog of Marlboros, Virginia Slims,
Menthols, Menthol Lights, Kools,
and all other sorts of ghosts.

Stephen made fire with his hands,
flailed like a marionette
and let the spirits loose.

He blew a baritone:
"I feel like we can really get close to each other,
in this tiny room."

Demons
can rise
and make fire;
can rise and make your belly feel
like hell
and molasses:
black and sweet.

Demons
can rise together
and make love
in a tiny room
that crackles.

When he was seventeen years old,
your protagonist
asked his father
a question about heartbreak, his own perhaps.

The father
answered:
"Why would she love you?
I can see why?
You're acting like a *****?"

Each line a question,
demanding an answer.

Answers your protagonist
did not have.

So your protagonist
ventured out into the
world,
and became a rambler.

Rambling off nonsense
with the rapidity
of lemming chatter.

He became
the great Rambler,
mumbling about
love,
until even his dreams
became ****** up streams
of language.

He caromed off cliffs of reality
bumping against those barriers
of his fatherland
until he was hurtling
into the rambling ocean
to drown
unconsciously.

Driving down the street,
asphalt littered with patches of scattered sunlight,
breeze blowing down my drunk,
sobering up from last night.

I'm
remembering a slurred argument I had with this woman about compassion
I was just yelling over and over:
"How can you know a thing about compassion?
How can you call me brave and noble,
and call me a killer in the same breath?
do you even know what you're saying?
Do you know the real meaning,
behind the words on the veil?"

I'm drunk ****, trying to pick up the peices
of my sanity
as I hurl them across my dashboard
with every chunk of cigarette ash I tap away,
trying to forget and remember last night,
because it's always a dark, damp place inside my soul.

Two long island iced teas, a thousand more coronas,
a couple more useless people blabbering about
their truths and their ideas, and how their right,
and their is no such thing as w r o n g.

Holy ****, this place makes me sick.

So, I get into my car,
angry at the woman I was yelling at,
because she is so happy with herself,
happy with her ideas, how small they've made me feel.

How big she is now.

How insignificant her ideas are as I drive away,
her sweatshirt looks like the inside of an old man's crotch,
a long stain of beer
that she doesn't know about, and I'm just the same.

Somewhere on me there is something I don't know about,
and yet I feel better than you.

Back to this.

And SHE is in my mind,
(not her)
all the time, wherever I go,
wherever I am pretending to be
when I am really not there
at
all. Someplace else.

Pictures of her life
without me,
**** me.

Memories of her disappointment. I was always bad,
or uncontrollable. Too drunk. Too, too, too drunk. And too, too, too, stupid to realize,
that I was hugging her with that stain. Drowning her in my stain.

Flashes of her body and the fever it got going inside of me,
the hot, uncontrollable, ecstasy that poured into my being
with the mere lick of thinking about the stain in her crotch
that I had caused. A yellow, polka dotted sundress stopping just above her
buttermilk kneecaps. I could slip ******* on both sides of the dressstraps,
and slide it down her shoulders--as easy as silk--all the way to her ankles.  God gave me heaven.

And how much grief I get over too much to drink.

Then I met a friend at a pizza bar.
And I'm hammered, slurring, and he sits with me as I find another person,
I'm a magnet for you all. I hate and love what you make me say about myself.
How I reveal and demean.

And we yammer, my friend drinks his beer, the person leaves, we have our pizza.

And SHE is there. In my mind, all the time.

My mind is an imagination zone, and I am guessing that she's with her boyfriend at the beach.

the pain of my imagination is a knife when she's messing around in my heart. always.

And so, now, at this stoplight I'm trying to stop myself from the things that make me forget myself.

I'm back here now. In the present. And I'm ashamed, humbled, content, and I don't want to drink or smoke
anymore.

I want to be a businessman with a wife.

The Supreme Reacher
was a watcher of dreams.

The Supreme Reacher
was an inclination.

The Supreme Reacher
was the instantaneous
and the forgettable.

The Supreme Reacher
could recede into the shadows of a thought,
only to emerge from its triangles
clean as a remembrance.

The Supreme Reacher
had veins for hands
and could reach across the mind
like lightning.

The Supreme Reacher is not
a person,
place,
thing,
or God.

The Supreme Reacher
had thighs black with feathers
and shoulderblades
hairy with time.

The Supreme Reacher
could talk and talk for days.

Lazing on dreamt-up
park benches,
green in their concrete holes
with algae,
and become green
as well.

The Supreme Reacher
could lay her heart on your
heart
and
place her lungs
in your palms.

The Supreme Reacher
could never be reached,
but only dreamt of and felt
like heavy fog on a tongue.

If ever there was a time for the Supreme Reacher,
to be Supreme,
this was the time,
the time of limes
and wicker minds,
of transposition
and aberration,
the time of larks
and loons
and goons,
of thugs in power suits
and kings in jumpers
and dreads,
of revolutions gone stale
in their infancy,
crunchy and pale
even to their cores.

The Supreme Reacher,
could not be reached,
but it could reach out itself
with lightning hands
firing up the whole earth of minds.

Tonight,
the drive took longer
than expected.

I was just going to the store
for four dollar whiskey.

We have argued for some time now,
and hold our breaths
when we crunch our food
in the morning.

We work: 9-5; and come home to laze
away from each other,
or to roar
about unkept promises
in the shared den;

We work: 9-5; and come home to laze;
to glisten in the beedled glow
of TVs
in separate rooms,
on separate couches,
on separate floors.

I have faltered,
and you have quoted.

I needed to get out of the house
because we have worked too hard
to shake it;
and screaming is a discomfort
we can bare
and that's no good
I've realized lately.

And the highway,
with its litany of bruises
and the brutality of a billion
dandelion reflectors
seemed like a blackening pavilion
for catharsis.

There  was no one beside me;
the roadway pummeled
beneath.

It was a terrible silence.

I screamed in the ***** odor of night,
and whistled
in the hushing door;

paid for my little bottle of godliness
and took hard swigs
in a ****-laundered parking lot
of an abandoned Food Lion.

Crabgress crept up through the concrete--
breaking and burdening--
and drifted in suffocating meadows.

The empty grocery store has an opaque facade
and a shimmering tiny lion;
I am home.

We revel in the sky,
and dusk,
and eventuality.

Love,
hopelessness,
diaspora.

Moment to moment,
we are the ever-changing aurora.

Our lights and our heat,
in the fading dark
we watch the horizon
where the mountains meet.

The tracers go,
round by round,
beginning at the muzzle in heroic glory
ending in the stomach with epic sorrow.

The sky is large,
the moon is bulging,
the clouds are pastel and burning,
smeared by the wash of darkness.

I am famished, but painless
because pain
is the dim smolder of love and freedom
suffocating deep inside.

That fire has not been stoked,
untouched for a while.

The oven has gone black,
the charcoal tastes mild.

And I have been loved with no freedom.

And lived for freedom with nothing to love.

I have gained wisdom,
and talked to myself.

The sky aches for its reunion with the horizon;
humbles itself, all out of color now,
and hungers for the embrace
of the mountains.

Into the murk,
the tracers go,
round by round,
lighting up that dividing line,
between hungry sky
and famished mountain
creating separation
in a world lost in time.

The tracers go,
round by round,
beginning in heroic glory,
ending in epic sorrow.

Remmel's
pocket smelled
like armpit,
and his switchblade
felt good
and heavy
near his thigh.

The air was humid with
passing rain
and asphalt
and he pulled out a Marlboro
and stuck it
to chapped lips.

A flood of water
hammered the gutters.

And the grass he stood on
was an island.

A flash of light rolled around the corner.
Two glimmering beacons
riding up on him.

Rolling slow.

The windows were all blacked out
and sheened in a perfect
reflection of orangeish streetlights.

Remmel put his hands in his jeans,
his white boxers
pin-striped in orange
bars.

He'd come out the house without a shirt, and
his black *******
got hard as lead in the new wind.

He licked his lips.
As the car rolled up,
a murmur of bass
making the windows buzz.

He put his hands on the hood
feeling the buzz go through him
warm and tickling
as he leaned into the car.

He checked up and down the street,
and finally squared on his reflection
in the black glass
seeing nothing but
the shaking
green God of himself
about to create.

Nat called me,
said,
"I missed it."

Skyscraper to the sky,
hit me
hard,
rushed through my body
in a light year.

So bugged out,
I puked,
right there,
on the receiver.

"Are you ok?"

"Imma be fine."

But I wasn't,
I'll tell you how scared I was,
I was scared
of breaking her face
open
on the side of a sofa,
afraid of my father,
afraid
of just up and leaving,
being the father's
some of my friend's
fathers had become
awaiting the same fate
for them,
afraid of being my father,
afraid of over-eating
and taking up all the food
in the world,
afraid of being my father,
afraid
of
this being something
that would define
me
at age 18.

Afraid of being my father
but way younger
with the insanity of fear.

Nat got it
a week later,
but it still ***** me up,
because now
I think about the baby
that almost was,
because I think about the
father
I could've become,
the kind
that loves
his
child.

The kind
that doesnt' hurt the baby
and the woman
that birthed a new God;
the kind that is a channel
away from the tributary
and all the things
the tributary
could never be..

What's left in the world
For the woman in the burning house
Except pain and sorrow?

She meanders through life,
Picking things up
Here and there
Where
Here is darkness,
There is nothing,
And tomorrow never comes,
And each new thing
Is something to hold
For just awhile.

She must watch
The house burn down,
While still inside.

First the drapes.

She clutches onto the past,
In the falling ashes and huffing heat,
And can't let go,
Even as her skin peels away.

Black tears stream down her face,
And the inner workings of her own soul
Become even more confusing to her.

The walls crackle,
The windows shiver and burst,
And the world rushes in upon her.

On the braided rug in the living room she kneels,
Holding her things underneath her *******,
Praying that everyone will see
And that no one will see.

Her life,
Ruined.

Her family,
Gone,
Long ago.

Her hope,
The match that lit the trashcan.

And now, flames all around her,
Her black tears a residue,
And the world watching,
She knows nothing.

She has nothing.

but
Pain and sorrow.

If the ceilings dripped
liquid metal
and the scratchy rose-print sheets
bit out for our bodies,
we wouldn't know a thing.

If God jumped into bed
and tried to cram in between us,
there wouldn't be enough room.

In the deep night,
all the stars could come down shattering into knife light,
It would be perfect.

All the asteroids
could warp the earth into a bowl
of milk, and splotch
the solar system into a giant cow,
but we could not join in the teet-mashing mayhem;
there's nothing pure here,
and our fingers hunger for bad places,
instead of ushering in the good.

I do not know what we will do,
but the world is falling apart.

Your first ****
is very important.

If you don't get that first **** out of your ***
and mess up the good routine you've got going
then you're headed for trouble:

wake up.
scratch *****.
feel *****.
feel ****.
smack stomach(listen for the sound of new fat deposits)
burp.
wheez.
get up.
go to bathroom.
look in mirror.
hate self for not exercising.
brush teeth.
begin formulating exercise plan.
****.
feel 10 pounds lighter and label self
idiot
for talking about diet in the first place.

If the **** is not taken
between brushing your teeth
and breakfast,
your whole morning
is ******.

This is how it goes
without the ****.
First:
you forget to put on enough deodorant.
no biggie.
but you sweat a lot.
that extra cake-clod of speedstick actually does help.

Second:
on the way out the door
you forget your ipad.
no biggie.
except it had those quarterly numbers
for your sector's growth on it.

Colon gurgles
as you jingle the keys
down the stairs.

Third:
You forget your wallet
on the counter
in the kitchen.

Your ipad's still on the bedside table.

Colon gurgles.

You run back up the stairs,
grab the wallet,
give your apartment the quick once-over,
steadying on that $300 couch you bought in college
thinking you have everything.

Now you're going to be
five minutes late.

Should've taken the ****,
but you don't realize that now.

Fourth:
You get to work
five minutes late.
Everyone's in the meeting room
already,
nobody says anything
but mustache-face
aka
El Jefe
gives you the look.

El Jefe asks for your quarterly numbers
as soon as you settle into your seat.

Colon whistles.

"Was there any sizable growth,
do you think there are areas
we could devote more time and energy
too, in favor of others?"

You don't have your ipad
in your computer bag
with all those numbers on it.

People have been getting laid off lately.
"It's just the economy."

But really
"it's who doesn't **** up."

Colon screams.

This is how your morning got ****** up:

Usually when you take your ****,
you go back to sink in front of the mirror
to wash your hands.

After hands are washed and dried,
you go under the sink
and pull out the speedstick.

You put on a healthy dose.

Not only because you sweat
a lot,
but because you think the ****-smell
will follow you like a pervert.

After the speedstick,
you usually go into the bedroom,
because while in the mirror;
staring at the excess fat;
thinking about how good you look,
lighter;
the thought pops in your head,
"don't forget the ipad."

You don't know where it comes from,
but it comes.

Since you take the ipad to work
everyday
you count on having this thought
everyday.

You look on the bedside table
and there it is.

Quiet, black and glassy on its surface.
So placid like a lake contained within
the reaches of a pool.

No monsters.
No forgetfulness.
Just routine.

You should've taken the ****.

Pleasure
is demise,
pleasure
is a plea,
pleasure
is the last reply
of the day,
pleasure
is
what it isn't.

Because what really happens
when those endorphins
start grinding on the thighs of your veins,
is that you are feeling
pain that makes
the softness of her skin
hurt your lips with happiness.

So this is a poem of love,
didn't start that way,
just like pleasure
begins with bruised
wrists
and dehydrated lips.

The beat
for the party of pleasure
bumps in the heart
timing itself by a melancholy metronome.

I could have  a few more pints,
pass out,
and still be in the same place tomorrow.

That's the thing about it all,
man,
I'm stuck here on a planet for neanderthals and minute-men.

And it's gracious like that.

Giving in plenty of normality,
conciousness
and stupendous
felicity.

Like we could all have three bedrooms,
xanax(enough to **** ourselves),
and a few appreciative kids.

The say
give him his flowers
during those April showers
before he gets too old
and loathes
the smell
of the young
rose.

They say,
give him his flowers
when the thunder
cracks,
the lightning whips,
and
the wind rips
his soul to blistering bits.

They say
give him his flowers
when the sun comes out
with it's hot quench
and
melts the fun
of all his summer dreams
and
he just can't believe
that when he was young

he really did
dream

but now
he licks
at
nothing
finding love
haunting.

How much time
have we spent
'staring at the foam
at the bottom of the bottle,
trying to figure out a way
to work that last
****-tasting bit
down?

Walked up to the store
for a little more gin,
caught a car passin,
jumped in front of it,
"WHAT THE **** IS WRONG WITH YOU?"
All that honking aint nessary.

****,
Imma have
a few more drinks.
Found a ditch;
an empty
drainage pipe;
had a few more hits.

Lit up a Marlboro
and I'm back at it again,
jumping in front of cars,
yelling at *******,
stumbling the whole way,
falling like frogger
in the ditches,
passing out for awhile.

I'm just tired of being
here,
tired of being,
so imma get drunk as hell
and tell my ma
that when I'm gone
I'm gone.