By book-ends my stomach is churning,
I'm cantankerous and stand-offish
in spurts, barely there in others.
I could not dig up where my head was
if I had to. I do not have to.
There are some things in my life that
lead themselves to failure. I have dropped
instinct, instead adopting pattern,
a means of coping with the endlessness
of life in a globalized world.
This is not lament. I could part with
objectivity, happy to expire for a
scrap of extra sentience. Please, before
my words become manners and manners become
holes full of dirt, pardon me for the mess.
I only had so much time after all.

Some things reek of
sameness. Winter rain
for instance

driving wind whipping
at light poles, chilling
other thoughtless things.

Christmas coming around
in a few weeks, money tight
with bone-cold breeze.

Five people shot in Oregon.
Happy holidays, please remember
to duck and cover.

Time wasted neck-deep in
idolatry, pretty bottles of
pretty liquids, light gold,
amber, charred oak brown
soaking vanillin and wood
which warms the tongue
perfectly.

I pop my pinky finger in
funny ways, relegating
flow of blood to necessary
extremities only, thumbs
or forefingers or whiny
joints screaming loudly for
sustenance.

There are days in my past
I wish I had skipped,
accidentally sleeping past
my alarms and the sirens
and noises of cars passing
past my window in whichever
home I find myself to wake.

There are days more recently
I have skipped, my mind
spending hours drunkenly
slipping from action to act,
poor me and my problems,
always worthy of an award,
a statuette of broken glass.

You're blocked;
you're bugged;
your eyes stay screaming
but I can't hear a thing.

Wash through me like knees through mud
not yet caked over by the heat of the
sun; like you're looking for something
you dropped and it may soon be entombed.

Look at me as you would a tree
caked in mud.
          Name me by my leaves, or
                    my sinewy limbs.

You're soft;
you're coarse;
the lines that puzzle your face
make frowning silly, and small.

          Name me Steinway like the
               piano. Or Pecan, like the
                    tree.

Find me forward, trudging through mud.

I can see solid ground but my branches
can't reach to touch the grass or its flowers
or to smell the rotten-ripe crushed leaves of
the pecan trees.

Stick me where I'm stuck,
save the mud. Give my leaves
some snow, some lightness,
cold. Give me color. Paint me
in storm clouds.

We sully women who think,
unbowed and without corsets
to prop or hide whatever fuddle
we've told them exists.

We need not be told, all
of us. No is not an abstract
concept, it rides no waves
of uncertainty, no great barriers
or walls need of climbing.

Verily he told her she must
cover for not to be mistaken for
impious. Shell-shocked and
sullied she bides her time between
bites to plot her spiritual escape.

Why do we care
so fully

to an acute point
of exhaustion

to the
     extent
we suffocate

in the
     moment
we're told to

speak

All new people
crowding the heavy cage,
dribbling on to West 33rd
in heat.

All new people
mid-mourning, 4am, heartbeats
ring the streets like gong-strikes.

All new people
I've never seen. Faces
who, tomorrow, may
never again see the
lightness of me.

He craved a father like a burnout
licking his sugarcane eyes &
slapping them on
any surface they'd stick &

he called night The Kingdom
would wander off for ages
said I don't need to know
where I'm goin'

said Someday I'll have already
found it & maybe he's right
All people die a little
more in daylight

he was 16
a dry firecracker
one spark away
from infinite eruption

The purest of pure irony in that
we live to die, this is endgame,
nothing reminds us about life more so than
death. And so we fear, because we
do not know the result of the thing,
only the thing. Humans who assume too
much makes for messy subtext.

If I could pop open my skull,
find the part of my brain so often
mistaken for the heart, and ask it
a question, do you think it would
have the courage to respond?
Am I a soul, or is this brain and
its infinite connectivity capable of
fooling itself so deeply? I side with
the latter, not for depression,
but truth.

My poems sound like mindless simplicity.
They are poems because I call them such.
**** what the editor says.

I talked with you on the phone the other day.
You were telling me how you visited the zoo;
spent an afternoon watching the zebra graze
and the lions lazily roar at civilians with digital cameras.

I talked with you on the phone the other day.
You were visiting the zoo, crying on the phone—
How can they keep them in cages
Locked away as if they don't feel like we do
You forget
there are people in cages without keyholes
there are blistered eyeballs scanning a lightless horizon for a lock pick or a clothespin
that may allow them to puzzle their way into the gears
There are people who die searching

I talked with you on the phone the other day.
We chit-chatted about sunbeams and lawnmowers.
We were happy, careless.
There are no cages here.

Only keys.

This wall has skin
     a signal
stretch and collapse
w/ each breath the bent
mind keeps pulling—

See how far deep we can cut
you should have told me
anything but that they say
his pen tipped skin—ax-head straight through

when we left he was asleep and later
I got a phone call and the
voicemail, it said—

you need to get back
but first, you need to
tell me what happened

tell me
tell me
please
tell me

later, as we sat,
he said he didn't mean a word,
said, Maybe you should just
forget about it.

Bend at the waist
be a doll, doll,
dance your *** down
this way, my way
into sentiment, burning
images onto the brain
you can't get away.

Bend babe, shake or
shiver as you please
let lethargy melt into
unkempt smiles, deep
dimples of face-skin
softened in sweet sun ray.

All the people in the street.
Where are they going, and
what does that mean in the
end-times, the ever-present hour
of a dying world's last breaths,
here for sole reason of shepherding
the sheep, because you're a wolf
are you not?

Miles above the weeping masses,
holding it together with barely
a grip to give name; coping
they call it, accepting reality as
objective, something separate from
myself.

I imagine the world as a bubble
and I hold the pin-needle, too close
to body to alarm and too close
to bubble to bat away, bend
please, bend at wrist for sake of
sanity, bury yourself neck-deep in
chance. Bend babe,
bend away.

I don't know the rules. If I go looking
for grace and find it, what will grace

be but penance for my past, a silver
sinew-thread wrapping 'round old
            wrongs, gray hair for the
                        fickle.

I've naught but want for sweet release
from this history. The bombs ignored,
            repeating in gramophone static
                        dripping stiff

as wet bamboo. I remember someone
once sang here, once strung together

chords so sweet they rang like peace-
bells beneath cloudless sky. They've
            rang the bell upon my jaw and
                        done no wrong.

It's not so much unlike one's curiously
cold reception at a funeral. The cold
            and rain ****** at the skin
                        during graveside hymnal.

As long as the earth continues
its stony breathing I will breathe.

That which I cannot help but do.
Stuck between boulders, I sing.

When it stops, I will shatter back
into gravity. Into quartz.

It rained the whole time we were laying her down;

Plucked from earth to elsewhere, some fantasy. She left like water after a rain, running to the sun to again slide down. And it

Rained from church to grave when we put her down.

Soaked the soil, left it muddied. Someone stifled a cry but the wet and cold made it sound like a sinus problem. There was something funny about it, but not in that moment. There,

The **** of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.

It's my last hope.
The sun in its afternoon swirl. It's up there. Far,
                 far and I still feel that
There's always hope.
It's fresh fruit meeting the tongue. It's playing
                 King of the Mountain.
It's the budding smell of spring flora.
It grows on trees.*
                 We pluck it, make it purchasable.

How many more seconds until this cigarette is all but broken ash?

How many more questions must I ask until the answers start to **** their way in?

How many people went to my funeral?

How many people didn't want to go and went anyway? Someone give these people a medal.

How many people have I killed on accident?

Was it quick? Torturous? Which is more horrible?

Did it happen too fast to enjoy (or recognize) the end, or slow to the point life was no longer a desirable option? If it ends in this…

Have you ever planned a ****** in your headspace? Where did it happen? What did you use? What were they wearing? How quick? Why? No, not why. No. I don't care why. All good people have reasons.

All bad people have options.

Should the ache dull,
consummate the liver,
fulfill desire,
I refuse to stop it.

I keep feeling the whole day in one pinch.

Perhaps writing should not render in burst
format as it ****** and rots.

Rothko knew pain was art because to Rothko
it was all art.
He would not budge, stood stooped in
knee-deep-scarlet splash-stained denim
begging all to see the colors through him.

Rothko paints mountains with pulses in
red rectangles.

a dish containing my bones
& several vital organs
laid to rest on a bed
of colander and sage

a pretty platter
a selfless oblation

one hopes a gift of such
heart might be atoned
& wrapped in a cocoon
& sent away to float the sea

my insides ravaged
my restitution complete

Set sun set
on this tired day
which is yet to
yield quick promise
of new light

Light seeps into
my window in
mornings like an
intruder wearing
steel-toed boots

I can't quite crack
my eyes from their
shutters shuttered
tight as fingers curled
in death grip

Gripping my sheets
I shake the sleep
off my bones to
find a new me
an old me

Barely breathing
of my own volition
until I am reminded
that I must indeed
breathe

Breath of Adam
and Eve or something
in-between it *****
and shivers like
shutters slammed shut

This is nothing new
as the sun will rise
and fall as it has before
and always will or
maybe it will break

Patterns are the
death of will
dying lilies of
too much sun or
too little

Set sun set
on this tired day
of bang and repeat
and give reprieve to
those of us

Left upright

Walking down 17th, I  found a note in a
dumpster—don't ask how these things happen, they just
     do. Things. It read,
Freely run, gentle traveler, but be wary the ground
beneath your feet; it trembles under the immense
weight of your fear.

I took the note and crammed it in my back jean
     pocket, hoping a vibration would soar up my
leg and shake the coarse curve of each letter off
the page and into the air so people stepping on my
     heels might catch a whiff of exactly who they're
dealing with.

This boy, he carries his fear in his back pocket and
     not beating in his chest like a bass drum. I haven't
shaken all the words yet, but every traveler has his day.

Today, tomorrow, yesterday. No, no.
     Not yet.

A lightning crack. A blinking television.

His hands, like packed sand melted to glass,
rugged and burning on my torso.

Shoveled feeling and lust and gilded
passion. Tears well, a guilty mind
strung up again.

I stop. Our eyes locked. Lost.
Lost, lost. I see lips. Slowly dragging
his head, I wed them.

I pull back. Flashing lights,
blinking television.

The night is young.

saw a video
other day
sheep bleating
foggy
scotch air
expelled at her
lips

it looked like
outside

imagine i'd kissed
you in public at
the gas
station the
grocery
store

imagine our
tongues made
kind in
church on
sacred ground

The morning after was cold.
I shielded my eyes as the blinds cut
open; scratched glass gives
way to a beautiful summer morning.

Avoiding my pupils at all cost, you
scurry out of bed and mechanically toss
your clothes atop that slender frame
just in time to say,
I should go. I can't disagree.
I haven't the conviction.

The sores on my arm have all but blackened;
bruises beneath the surface of my
skin retell the night like a lost tape:
we came home, we made love,
we rode a euphoric steel railway in a lumpy,
benign mess of an evening.

Now it is morning. Birds are chirping,
children play games in the street.
Light shames to shine on our battered faces.

Blues:
singing, grumbling

vocal chords soaked in a
vat of golden whiskey, aged
like the pain he sings of.

Blues:
white, ivory

piano keys stained red
from the blood his guitar strings
cut out his fingers.

Blues:
chimes, rhymes

more like a feeling
than the color
of the cloudless sky.

What it must
be to be a
poet with
clarity of
thought

bully the knot
in my head
unwound and
***** and
bounding straight
for daylight

Think of mole rats,
spiders, mites even,
crawling underneath your
feet without knowledge
or care that you may be
thinking of them.

Think of you, conscious
animal fretting your
mid-twenties or a mortgage
and think of your family,
all blood and genome and
thicker than ******* molasses.

Think of the microscopic
living things which coexist to
make you, animal accident, a
living thing. Bacteria boiling
your stomach, microbes bailing
from your bottom lip. Kiss.

Think of love, in all its
devices, tedium—conquest even.
The smallness of our thoughts,
little whispers skimming the
surface of the pond. Do you
think of what comes after?

Smart poetry



Christian pacifist punk artists shaking their fists at the government elite

Mothers dreaming in Tide-to-Go and quiet nights

'"Bed-head" implies you have a bed to sleep'

Cracked lips, because its cold and I don't display that spring-merry ****

Smart poems sound like silly songs

John 8:7

Greek reference to Aphrodite and her thousand noses

'I haven't slept in four days'

Atheists asking fundamentalists to dance at the prom because you're alive now in this moment at the least

'It's silly to think we'll be alone forever'

Finality—some kind of closure

I can't seem to sleep

Write in stanzas. Think in stanzas.
Speak in stanzas. **** your routine.
Sleep less. Go to work drunk.
Yell at inanimate objects. Yell with
inanimate objects. Fly your mother to
San Francisco (coach) and watch the
house for her, the dogs, the child, the
drunk. She is your mother.

You do not like your job. Spend
your days beneath an apple tree and
spend your workdays eating apples
in any given weather. Lie on the floor
of your bedroom belly-flat and smell
the carpet beneath you, all dead flakes
of skin and dog fur, sinew strand of
hair, black dots—tar or shoe-gum or
something other.

Think on your place. Reach to the left,
your side table with glass of water and
lampshade. Feel the hilt, small knife for
your pocket, small pocket. Free the blade,
feel the grooves, gold and blacked-brushed
blade you bought with a flask, a set, two
tiny commodities that may serve you well
in the wild or a shopping mall, what ever
little evils exist away from your bedroom
with its television and soft blankets, slow
mortal shuffle and modicum.

Stop and breathe. Feel the heart in its
always-patter. Know it will stop.
Not fret, no, only knowing.

When one is forced to stop drinking, the first thing felt is shame. It is recognition that coerced abstinence was inevitable. The court told me No alcohol and I said Okay. An assessor of the state told me If you picture life past 30, you stop now: he might have added For the longevity of both you and your relationship(s), but it might be his own history stopped him. The morning I crashed my car was not cold like today. Suburbs are generally quiet at four-thirty; runaways choke-chain drooping eyes to a bedpost for a few more fickle hours, hoping (praying) body keeps pace with hunger. I was hungry, and we went to get food. My brow beats ripples into the airbag. In county my sheltered white life was a blanket doused in gasoline. The sheltered white mind may scream but the sheltered white body cowers under concrete. In class I was assured Alcoholism runs in the family. The gene plagues Hendrix men as a curse of choice. It's a gun in a knife case. Six months sober; it still itches. I'm still hungry. The state told me I was Lucky [I] didn't **** someone. I was selfish. I was selfish because I thought they meant me.

Estimate tells us the avg. height
of a female in the U.S. is 64 inches.
This is quantitative. Unfeeling of prospect,
the numbers fascinate and baffle.

Recent estimation supposes
1500 active volcanoes on the earth of which
500 have erupted since history,
the invention of writing.

                                                       ­                Such a short time ago.

Measuring in quantities, the earth is
4.5-4.6 billion years old.
Creatures of like sentience who never wrote about
volcanoes, the age of their earth.

Quantities hum of something borrowed.
So tight-wound, so deeply close, and yet still.

                                                         ­               Something not ours.
                                                                        Blind, free of invention.

Four walls and one door
maintaining (perfectly) in-tune
with the outside world,
countless libraries and braver
brains in court, fingertips
away.

Too much sometimes, too much
noise and sleepless racket,
no need for hotel wifi or
roaming minutes, change nowadays
burns faster than
relationships.

I woke today to find
bombshells exploding elsewhere,
slaughtered innocents and
captives in bright silver fences
until the next time I
read about it.

My brain is spent running in
slow-motion. I have glasses now,
my vision once was perfect but
staring at screens beat biology
to the punch: a most frightening
revelation.

I am guilty of overthinking
a sunrise, some certain
moment of minuscule
collaboration between brain
and dirt, ***** truth of it
being I am unable to think
past my own two eyes
but able to fathom a sun
setting and not fretting
whether or not it is to rise
when I wake.

On her arm, the tower of Pisa bumps back and forth with her swollen sleeves.
On her back, standard holometabolous insect flutter flames it’s way heavenward.
Her thighs house songbirds, yellow, flightless—beauty is her.
A cobra draped around her neck; an olive branch psyching back, rearing it's head, infinite.

Her body is a shrine of shadowy ink.
Her cheeks have become temples.
I lie my faith in them alone.

I have not changed in years (it seems),
     physically I am constant,
six feet and lopping sack of
     bone and skin, buck-forty
on my best, wettest day.

These months have flown as
     leaves in fall.
November is come and soon
     will escape with the wind
as well and I am solidly planted
     at a desk in an office with a
floor too hard to deepen the reach
     of my roots.

I am like to wither and rot,
     left rootless in snow and
ice; ash of autumn, flowerless.
     The trees will die—grounded,
yes, and utterly passionless.

There were days I thought I'd never open my eyes,
days I didn't want to, days I have long tried forgetting.
We called it the Aftermath.

The calm always settles before the storm.
So they say. Hardly could one handle the
violent twists and turns in the winds you spun—
I could never quite quickly enough grasp
a branch to hang on to.
I wasn't yet strong enough. Yet.

The days after the storm, I sat idle, nigh—catatonic
outside your apartment door singing 'Sweet Caroline' like a *******
child because, in my childish, young heart, I thought,
You can hear me. You're listening.
The return silence was deafening.

Nothing was audible, save the radiator buzzing in the hall and the fierce, intrepid lapping of winter wind against a broken window pane.

Sting of sloppy light.
Purse, bow, amphetamine.

Brown hair & a pink—
wind current cut through
               one open car window

to the other car window
pilling cigarette smoke cheap

               & steady forward.

He's a beauty, that one.
Wallet, vest & tie, coke.

Cut open her stomach &—
waves of salt water
               bolted to the ground

like tiny rocks & hardened
shells lain beneath the sea,

               a doubtless factotum.

Pull & stitch.
Sting again.

Cupid sang about sunbeams
and blooming grapevines before
darting a single arrow in either
of our directions—I suppose

he knew better. I suppose it was
all part of the Master Plan, because
if there wasn't a plan then what's
the point of planning a *******
thing anytime, anywhere. There

isn't one. It was written that I'd
meet you. Shakespeare said something
tragic about it, but he certainly never
felt what I felt. Not like this. The feeling
of loss is never familiar. You are talking

underwater without a snorkel or air
to pray with. Cupid never misses, that's
part of the plan. But maybe, ever so
often, he hits the wrong people right
in the ***, and forgets to pull the arrow out.

God slips from
tongue as phlegm
from lung post-
cigarette

back to back
reel to reel
sitting *** to heel
palm to palm

praying

I've spent paychecks
laying pavement
into bedsheets
bearing teeth

biting holes into
free time
me time
with myself

waiting

twenty one years
stacking unread
newspaper new with
news not bothering
with digestion

to treat the text
as words on paper

*******
transfiguration

sight unseen the
sight of me in
chapel pacing through
Peter as though
for penance

God is meant
a friend to
comfort but
recently its
felt dishonest

a masquerade
a malformation

There are those who die with the wind,
and those who inherit,
staring, steam-eyed, at the blistering cloud scattered sky,
scanning for a safe place to land amongst our feet.

Everything starts at the bottom.
Sun peaks over the orange Horizon,
Sea crests and bellows, ebbs and flows,
History begins at the Beginning, and so on.

People start at the feet, and wheel their way up.
So often there are toes caught in the zippers,
the hairs of our feet singed on the swelling soil
we plant our feet.

A Sun rising.
A wave crashing.
A human being born into a dying world,
deprived and blinded,
it's beauty swept away in the panic of a coming storm.

three days remained;
the decision made
to pull it

no one knew
exactly how to
break the news

the gravity pulling
down a room:
tons & tons

i wonder, softly,
might we change
all our minds

if we should,
don't let it
be too late

never too late

Let us ignore
the wall
built in his honor

a looming crow's nest
black mangled stone
and onyx

Can we not forget
the bodies
the people lost after

the ground sank
deeper

esther She says
she's it and
double that
she Says all
doubt you'd held
in the chest
dormant like
some sort of
bomb

was just
prison

*******
you're more
of yourself
than you'd
wish to
admit

So pointless, still starting sentences with
and as though I am curtailing from
previous profundity into present thought.

Silly, still. Finally I have found
inspiration in the smallest places,
skin-deep moments, echoes.

I don't have anything to do with this

          imperfect receptacle,
light of pre-dawn-breaker-
bringer of boredom.

                    There are systemic means of
                    hurting oneself, the constant

ripping and stitching of that cherry-
          covered cloth

                    it's like drowning in
                    maple syrup, sticky and

sweet. I've been told that dropping
drink was the hardest thing I've

                    never done.

          I found these things,
these iron pores dripping
iron sweat, remarkably

                    easy to ignore.

First we watched the fires dance
lapping at the old wood like
a parched dog's tongue to water

Second we bought vegetables from
a man and ate them without washing
or burning with fire

Next I can't remember but it was
so very long and sad and the things
that make people cry
made us cry

Without a compass I can't move
a new direction even if the wind
rips at my back and thrusts me
forward

I am the shadow of tree limbs
on bright mornings

Dark and soft and untouchable

The subtle act of meeting
old friends with lines on my
face, pock and blemish
dominating the right side of
my face, left to them. Swing
left if you've an inclining.

How many times have you
reached out to a friend, tiny
gestures or grand statements
that state the grandeur of
relationships, twos and threes
and dates and early mornings.

Left to myself in bed I sleep
and toss and dream of friends
I remember and forgot about,
not but a text message away
from a rekindling, idling in
neutral and there's a hill ahead.

Outside the crop has wintered,
tall husks of green lopped over
and fumbling for sunlight.
        There are rules to the arrangement.

The limits of energy and
abundance, lost somewhere in
a fray of hot sound, cold
        Frame for the crop to weather.

Let it slip away. Humble yet
whorish for warmth, bare skeleton
of being from which to frame the
        Praying, hand scraping concrete.

Find that voice. Put it in a box.
Punt that box into oblivion, a fire
of sunlight, warmth, a burning skeleton
        Begging for life; hollow shell.

Imagine the world
as your palm north-
south'ing your face

from fleeing fore-
head to flicking
brow-ridge to
nose-bridge

and all of it you're
stuck with and with
everything it hides

you're stuck with

stick it to your chest
and let it pump
rage in your veins

see it die in whatever
vein tracks from clavicle
to un-sunned wrist
it's wind; it's fire

singing your hairline—
your eyebrows though
thin as they are

they're still strong, love

I am plastic, c-through

the gnats in my bedroom know as much
they fly into me as though by accident

an impossibly clean sliding-glass door
that upon approach is nevertheless shut

these small things hit my skin
but leave no physical marks

no gnat guts splattered
on my pocked arms

I am not glass but plastic
I can bend without breaking

I told him what it was to
tread water and he, for the
longest time, believed me.
My friend is a musician and
the instrument that chose
him is the keyboard, with
it's near infinite possibilities,
incarnations, iterations.
Different lives, so to speak.
It is a craft that as it is
learned learns you. Small
flash of contact. Text
message. Unreturned call
with voicemail attached.
We've learned to sing over
the phone. I hope that doesn't
ring flat.