Not sure if you’ve ever
heard of
Phineas Gage,
but he was a railroad man somewhere
in Vermont
and one day he accidentally blew a
******* iron rod through his
******* think-box and
here’s the kicker:

He
*******
lived.

Now, this big metal cylinder,
on its flight path,
carved a cavern in Gage’s
cerebrum, more specifically
through his frontal lobe
and when the bleeding finally stopped
and they got his left eye all sewn shut
he told the first person he saw,
probably a loved one crowded around his
filthy hospital bed
to kindly
******* and Die.

He got out of that hospital bed,
eventually,
and when he did, he tried his damndest
to go back to work
but he just couldn’t.

What’s more his friends said he just wasn’t
Gage
any more. His personality
had changed.

He didn’t give a **** about
the sunset anymore.
He liked his coffee black and his pancakes
dry.
Which is strange because beforehand
he didn’t drink any coffee
and he didn’t like pancakes much neither.
He also became quite
the drinker,
which is funny considering he hadn’t had
a drop
of alcohol
in his life
before then.

You see I always thought that
personality
was something you couldn’t
touch.
That it was some grand unifying evidence
of the existence of the human
soul.
But here’s Gage,
who just so happens to take
a pole to the dome
and suddenly he’s just
not
Gage.

So maybe it’s true
that we’re all just
machines
and you can pull a man’s
favorite color
or his taste in music
or his eating habits
out of his head
and set them on a sterile tray
right in front of him.

That makes sense.

But everything in me
still wants to
believe.

"poetry's dead,"
he wrote.

Wet slush on serrated mountain crest
glimmers like a pearlescent gemstone
untouched by even the brave ones-
sword-wavers, chest-beaters, ski-maniacs,
gemhounds and bloodhounds
and even father sun
has stayed his hand
to drag a finger through that heavenly
mirror-tile's topcoat
for its unmarked face, streakless
and unpocked by avalanche
reveals no disturbance.

They say these are the steepest mountains on earth,
and it would be hard to disagree while looking at them
their upper edge against the equally spotless sky
is a perfect, continuous line
and the slopes, appearing near-vertical
create the illusion
that this miles-long ridge could split hairs like a hand-sharpened razor-
like a colossal, snowy
bowie knife.

I don’t feel very good
She says and she looks at me with those big doleful eyes and
I say
Oh yeah? What are your symptoms?
And she says I feel far away from you even when you’re next to me
And I say me too
And I’m listening to the staticky scratch of the needle at the end of the record thinking about how far from me I’ve been
And how could I have possibly been close to her when I was so distant
From the present tense
I’m tense in the present tense
And I’m sleepy because in the conditional tense I can do what I want
I want to sleep
And dream about anywhere but the present tense and my single bed with its yellow-tan sheets
And that record’s still skipping and has yet to be flipped and I’m
flipping
but externally I’m ice water
crackling on my wobbly coffee table singing me to sleep so I can dream about something else again
something like meaningless ***
because meaningless *** feels good
in the present tense
and I’m present tense
I’m present tense and future tense and conditionally tense and
I just can’t bring myself to flip that record
Because I lost the tracklist
And I don’t know the lyrics
And what if it’s worse than the first side
So maybe I’ll just listen to it skip
Until the skipping

Puts me



To sleep





Again

Pushed?
Pull until they fall with you.
Shushed?
Make a silence so deafening it drives them insane.
If evil strikes your right cheek,
slip that right hand so fast he falls on his face.

Be aggressively passive.
Because fire plus fire just burns down the house.
Be the negative space
Invisible to everyone
but those who are
looking.

And if that maddening silence makes them scream,
(which it very well may)
reply calmly,
but give no ground.
not even an
inch.
and you will do more than win;
you will baffle them.

Because all the
pushers
know to do
is push.


They’ve never seen someone like you.
someone so
avoidantly
direct.
so deafeningly
quiet.
so precise in chaos.

You’re like negative space.
and you baffle me
because when I push
you pull
until I fall over myself.
When I roar a lion’s roar
you are a mouse

Yes, you are a puller
and I am a pusher
and I am so
astonishingly
fascinated
by you.

Don't breathe long and slow-
don't be carried downstream by the current
of the universe-
Fight!
Thrash and writhe and wriggle with all your might.
And of zen, well...

**** zen!
We are alive that we can go against
that mighty current-
for a while.
Don't waste your time in stillness!
Don't accept!
Be loud and fast, and fly in your own direction.

There will be time to be still,
there will be time to accept,
there will be time to dissolve into homogeneity,
more than enough time.

Don't squander the opportunity
to fight,
to resist,

to live.

Clench the disembodied tooth of your
solipsism in the womb of your fist
with your eyes closed
and let it bite your flesh.

In that eyes-closed world
you can feel the roots and ridges
pressing back
like a kicking fetus
that can't understand its own
existence,
much less the existence of anything
  else.

The blood of the world you don't
believe in is trickling
from between your fingers

your pain is leaching out
onto the living room carpet
into the stratosphere. And
as you and the tooth become
one in the dark
you can feel the fist of something larger
closing around you.

Sunrise
sun, rise
is because it was because it will be
sunset
sun,

set.

When I was young,
and knew nothing of death,
I remember looking from my bedroom window
into the branches of the cherry tree on the opposite side
and seeing a nest full of blue eggs,
still ripening.

I watched it all summer,
each day checking to see if the
new birds had come fully into
life.
One day, playing in the back yard,
I found their discarded shells lying on the ground,
now useless.
I remember the feeling of numinous awe
as I inspected them, knowing the little birds
were elsewhere now.
It was so simple, so effortless,
but so penetrating.

And now I have seen death
by car accidents, on nameless roads
by cancer, in hospital beds
by violence, in supermarket parking lots.
quick death and slow death
painful and painless
with grace
and without.
And now I feel fearful.
Not for myself,
but a simple, effortless
penetrating feeling.

Such is the cycle of life,
whether I am present
to watch its digression,

or not.

Tonight I looked into the cold dark sky
Empty save the full moon,
Godless and lonely,
And I wondered how it must feel?
To be the brightest object in an otherwise empty abyss?
and then I considered earth
Full of life, yet alone with the knowledge
of its own greatness.
And suddenly,
The thought of the moon didn't seem so foreign.

A million tiny pinpricks
the brightness of the sun
they would blind you
if you looked right at them.

A thousand earsplitting whispers
wishing you well,
pushing you on
they would deafen you
if you hadn't already stopped hearing them.

A sea of faces
fades into black before the horizon
if you didn't know not to
acknowledge them,
you might.

Someday,
years from now I can guarantee
those million spotlights
will blind you

those thousand voices
will drown out your own

that sea of faces will look back
Confused(?)
Disgusted(?)
or worse

disinterested

Fifteen minutes is up.

I open all the windows at night
and let the frigid canyon wind wrap me
like a sheet

It's never cold enough,
truthfully

There's never enough justification
to sleep next to some(one)thing
warm

It lets in all the mosquitoes
and the ******* squirrels
wake me up with their
idle chatter
each and every morning
but I like it.

The comedown's most always
(never)
worth the high
(So I'm quitting stimulants
and other people)

But then I remember
that when the music
resolves
it's almost always
worth the wait

so I think
"Just one more day,
then,
just one more beer,
just one more roll of the dice-
they're bound to come up
sixes
sometime"

I could sit
here naked in front
of this typewriter
and tell you
about how I'm the wind
about how I'm a good guy (no really)
about how I'm a ******* (really)
about how i am                            (an artist)
i am                                                                              (a martyr)
i am                                                                                                           (a fool)

But frankly I can't think of anything I am
that I really believe any more.

I was born tall and thin
and pink
like a ****** steak.
I cried until I could run
and then ran
like a lunatic,
screaming peals of laughter
and destroying
without guilt
as kids do-

and still I was
skinny.

I was skinny in elementary school.
The other kids took to football
and dirt bikes.
I was still pink
like an underripe
tomato.

I grew up tall and thin
in a world for shorter
and fuller people.
With crooked teeth and
glasses.

I was skinny in middle school.
When the other kids started to build muscle
you could've played my ribs
like a xylophone.
You still could.

I grew up tall and thin
and frustrated
like a ****.
I never fit on public busses
or in the little plastic desks
at school.
My feet stuck off the end of my bed.
They still do.
I slouched and hiked my shoulders up
so as not to obstruct others'
line of sight.

I still do.

I was skinny
when I first fell in love.
What she saw in me,
I can't say.
I was tall
and thin
and crooked
but I wanted so badly,
just for once,
to be the right shape
for her.
She was rather short
and had caramel skin.
We made an odd couple.

I grew up tall and thin,
a square peg in a world of round holes.
I'm skinny today-
a pinkish wisp
with a skinny soul
tucked away behind dark sunglasses.

I was born skinny.
And I'll probably die skinny
too,
and make a tall,
thin corpse
for a much
shorter,
wider
casket.

Every morning I must slay a mighty rusted dragon. His jaws gape as he waits for me. I climb his belly slowly, but persistently. When I reach his mouth I throw myself in. I burst from his stomach and slide down his back and he lies with his wounds and waits for tomorrow. I will slay him again today. These dragons are everywhere, waiting to be destroyed every morning by commuters and diabetics and dialysis patients. We must grit our teeth as the needle pierces the skin or as the engine starts again. We take that bitter pill and emerge victorious. But to what end? The dragon will be waiting the following morning as he always has, as he always will. It is the curse of the modern man. Each day we will slay this dragon until one of us is too weak to fight.

But I know, too, that this dragon is necessary. He is the grain of salt in my morning that seasons the bike ride down his back. I have learned to enjoy riding through the rusted iron bridge that is his throat, and yes, even the climb I must endure to reach it. Each day I must slay this dragon. I must. It is for me that he exists, not the other way around. And I will slay him each day until I am struck by an automobile or die of a blood disease.

So when I rise tomorrow, I will look him in the eye and he will wink. And I’ll know that he is not just a hill capped with a rusted iron bridge. He is the plight of modern men. He is the eternal struggle that must be, else life would be tedium. and we need each other, him and I.

When I wake, I will rise and slay him again.

And again.

And again.

The best part
Of wakeful life now
Is the hazy
Twenty seconds of consciousness
On either end of sleep
(When I may as well not exist).
Because in that diluted fog

I don't feel anything.

I don't feel sick
To my stomach
I don't feel
The crushing weight of reality
I don't feel good
About the good times
Or bad
About right now
I don't feel

Anything at all.

And it's wonderful.

Inhale-
Exhale.

A smoke signal plumes from my defiant lips
Shivering in the cold
And rises into the atmospheric light of the city
It was never meant to be an SOS
It was intended to say
"Save yourselves"
But as far as I can see it has fallen entirely upon deaf ears
As just one voice in a confluence of voices-
A river of smoke signals climbing steadily into the smoggy air
Like prayers
To a god we know we don't believe in.

Inhale---------------------

Exhale.

Save yourselves
And it twists and bends and floats away
To meet the others
All screaming some collective emotion that will be left otherwise unexpressed;
And it is probably better that way.

If you live your life with your teeth gritted,
with your jaw clenched,
with your upper lip pinned back
to reveal your pearly white fangs,
don't be surprised
when your they start to loosen,
bleed,
and fall out of your head-

leaving you with an unconvincing smile
and an even less convincing
sneer.

The women drink the tapwater-
even the infants are drunk.

Imagine meeting
Someone
Who has never met anyone
Before
Who has never seen the stars
Or had a conversation
Or walked through the park on a day like today
Who has never listened to music
Or eaten pumpkin pie
(Or anything for that matter)
Or loved
Or painted
Or played
Or laughed
Or sighed and said that it's getting late.
Who has never prayed
Or written
Or read.
With no tattoos
Or scars
(Inside or out)
Who is healthy
And surrounded by people committed to their
Well-being.
Someone without clothes
(Or any possessions)
Without a moat and a drawbridge.
An open book full of blank, white paper.
Imagine meeting
Someone
New.

Conifer-covered hillside
in the hinterlands
of this sleepy town
on a warm day
in this mid-June

The unspoilt soil
neither grieves
nor revels
and there's no revelation in that-
just what you see.

It's just what you see.

The quivering quakeys
can't hack it even when they cackle-
an attempt to unravel the shackles of
their incomplete alchemy-
cause it's never enough

one laugh is never enough.

The high's always flanked
by a sunrise so rank
as to wrinkle the brows
of the loudest and proudest-
the laughers and criers, or livers and die-rs

Just give me the bliss of the birds
and a big lidless urn to retire my fire
when the work week expires
when I finally can see even truth holds some lies
and when the sun sets too low to appraise the horizon,
I'll fly.

I'll just fly.

When the sun rises over the mountains,
the air is still cool,
                   meaning that by the end of the day,
                                          when the sun has crossed
                         the main ridge and gives light to
                                    the other side the air is hot
                                                             ­    and dry.
                   This means that trees growing on the
                                         northeast face of any given
                         mountains flourish, while the southwest face
                                                        is generally left barren-

              there are, however, always a few brave
                                    tufts of foliage
                         who dare to challenge the
                                                       infernal heat
                                        and survive.

                                                       ­                                      so too,
                                                            ­                        with people.

Streetlamp's effusions,
uncaring,
rain down on
milky flesh clad in
shapeless polyester
and pockmarked asphalt
under abstruse night,
with unfaltering
honesty

like the nonsense soliloquies of drunken idiots.

"thank you,"
I offer.

"Just doing my job."

The reflection of grey light from the sun above the clouds reveals a greasy film on my arm.
A mess I made.
I can smell my stink and it turns my stomach.
You probably still have grains of my dandruff under your fingernails
despite how much you’ve tried to wash them off by now.

I clenched my fists in the chocolate cake loam trying to cover the smell of me
in something forgiveable. But
it didn’t work, and now the soil reeks
of my wretched sweat.

I picture the rings of Saturn.
Concentric circles in the silent dark.
They are perfect and I am filthy.

I picture the umber canyons just before dawn. I picture
cacti living on cliffsides beneath the infinite stars.
They are perfect. And I
am filthy.
Just by living I am filthy.
Every breath I take carries the noxious odor of me.
Diluting the perfect blue sky.

Purifying fire unmake me. Break the lattice of my flesh. Swallow me up.
Make me clean.

Sit broken
Sulkin'
Softly weepin' wisps which then
Withdraw themselves from all of this
Fickle
And fiendish
You'd have my arms and legs bound tight
You're sulkin'
Broken
Without remorse, without respite
I'm nervous,
Workless
And functionless in all your eyes
You're girlish
And cutesy
You give them eyes to get replies
I've never-
You've never?
You finish thoughts and work your little fingers down my
Spine

-chorus-
Uproot the weeds inside you
Fine
I'm through with being fruitless and
Surprised
By old attempts to change our ways
Besides
We're newly polished anyways
We're newly painted, off the line

The bitter
And nameless
Are working after hours to reface this
And shame it
It sits and spins and multiplies
With frequence
I feel it
I feed a framework filament fire
And hapless
You're hopeless
I'm hoping on another line-
To find out what's been sanctified
Who sacrificed to tranquilize
And backfired by bullshittin'
So now I'm sleepy saunterin'
To see what life's like on the other side

(Chorus)

-breakdown-
If we cared
We could whisper cloudy whiteness where there
Used to be only filth and flies
I'm sick of sentimentalism
Sick of sinking in
I'm feeling fine.

-chorus-
Uproot the weeds inside you
Fine
I'm through with being fruitless and
Surprised
By old attempts to change our ways
Besides-
We're newly puffed up anyways
I've walked the line from Z to A
We're freshly painted hypocrites
At least this time I won't be so surprised.

-fin-

I opened the window just now
The metronome of the leaky bathtub
dip
dop
in the next room
Disembodied evidence
of a world outside.
I reset the margins on this old typer
The sputter of the leaky radiator
as familiar as the cars on the street
as the 6 am garbage trucks-
the cacophony of morning,
the wheel of time.
Keep your past lives.
I know nothing about
the world outside my skull
save the leaky bathtub.

But I know those trucks-
and they are older than me,
older than death,
older than the garbage they carry.

I hear them every morning
but they have never heard me.

Tell Shiva to stop dancing.
I'm trying to get some rest.

My whole life I have been looking West
from the apron of the Wasatch
into the countless spines and valleys
of The Great Basin.
The Big Nothing.
The living room floor of America.
And then on a whim I got in the truck
and I drove the ten hours
across the amber plains of Idaho
and the knolls of Oregon
to the east ***** of the Cascades.

From this side it looks pretty much the same.
The ponderosas suddenly end
and there is this massive, untamed
space.

And while I will grant that most everything here
is both the same
and completely different-
desert (but without cacti)
mountains (all volcanoes)
forests (but sparse and flat)
there is nothing foreign
about the carpet of sagebrush
in the lowlands of the west,
regardless of which edge you are standing on.

For the first time it does not scare me,
the immensity of it,
the emptiness of it,
the quiet of it,
and for the first time I feel I am not looking out
toward the opposite end of it.
For the first time,
it feels like home.

Gimme the dregs
the sludge
at the bottom of the coffee ***
in a twelve-ounce paper cup
Give me snowmelt
Give me the bile in the belly of the earth
Give me good, clean american dirt
and half-remembered dreams
and I'll show you what it means
to live honestly.

Gimme the sun
up on high
on the other side of nightfall
to tighten the bags under my eyes
Give me dandelions
Give me a candle for warmth and light
Give me the mist in the sky
and a spoonful of rice
and I'll show you what it feels like
to move a molehill.

You look tired, girl.

The lines on your face
from annual frost wedging
sprout tiny trees and assemblies of
lichens
that blot the pages of your book
like carelessly spilt ink,

but it's not worth crying over.

I spent my time trying to read those
pages,
those hieroglyphs
penned in a foreign
and dead tongue.

I tried to read the landscape of you.

Where split rocks harbor still-breathing mammals
at the base of your collar bone.
Where the aspens quake
and make homes for hawks
on the crest of your bony hip.
Where the trickles of water babble
softly,
but not unheard
and the trout jump like living jokes
in the cracks on your tongue.

Really, I tried.
And the closer I looked the more I realized
that you are not my native land.
I was an invasive species there
and I could feel the god in you
crying out
to abolish the man in me.

So I tore down the shack I had built
at the border between you and I
and I watched as the trees regrew
where I used to harvest my firewood
and I saw the deer
bed down
as the sun set
behind the
cold and silent mountain range
that fringes your hairline-

those mighty castle walls
that I could never truly breach.

Last night I dreamt I cohabitated with
Two beasts, both loved.
The one, a young lioness
The other a spry lamb
I had raised the both from infancy
But the lioness, who was then entering her adulthood began to size up the lamb.
And it occurred to me that in order to
save
the lamb from the lioness
That I must **** and eat it myself

It is the inescapable nature of a lion to
Hunt and ****
livestock
So while there was no scruple or problem for me to have these two animals,
They could not abide one another.
So I did it.
I slaughtered the lamb and cut it's flank and got at its tender meat
And I cooked it and served it with Marsala sauce and that night the lioness and I dined on the flesh of our old friend.

And I became aware eventually,
Between my ravenous gnawings at the meat
That the lioness was not eating.
She was
Staring fixedly
Directly at me.

She did not blink.

And I stopped feasting on the lamb.
And as I did I saw her eyes dilate
And she pounced across the table
And she gored me with her great claws
And split my gut and spilled my innards
And she ate me bit by bit still screaming
Still covered in Marsala sauce.

Before it was over I had but a breath in me and I cried,
"But why?!"
And I realized that it is the inescapable nature of the lion
To hunt and to ****.
Not just livestock, not just lambs.

She had hunted and killed us both.

I saw visions of tortured souls
ripped apart by machinery
in the bowels of a concrete prison
and reassembled
like patchwork quilts
and I was awestruck with horror
at what I saw
and then I woke up.

Relief gave way,
after a few minutes,
to a deeper dread
because what I had seen was not
something I had been forced to watch,
it was something that came out of me

I had given those feverish images
of inhuman evil and suffering
life.

I spend so much time
gripped by the fear of the world outside
my home, outside
my bed, outside
my body
and now I feel like
nowhere
is safe.

It is three o’clock in the morning.
The streets are quiet.
There are no car alarms.
There are no dogs barking.

And I am too afraid to sleep.

See "Laws of Physics"

1. You will have a body.
2. You will have a mind.
3. You can do whatever you want with either.
4. You will hurt.
5. You will feel joy.
6. Love is not guaranteed, though it is a possibility.
7. You do not owe anyone anything. Although, (see rule 8), people may decide you do.
8. Some people will be more powerful than you. This can mean influence, size, weapons, or intelligence.
9. There are no laws (excepting the Laws of Physics). Although, (see rule 8), people may decide there are.
10. You will not have time to see it all.
11. You cannot choose to whom, or where, you are born.
12. You will die.
13. Any prospective afterlife will not be revealed until after the time of death.

These are the rules. They are entirely non-negotiable. Should you find them agreeable, you are welcome to experience life and all it has to offer. Life is non-refundable. Life cannot be re-sold. Life is without material value.

To proceed, please sign here-


X__________

The talent is what we wake up with
And it has got nothing to do with
Being good,
Because everyone has at least some
Ability to do something
In the beginning.

The soul we all have
It's just a question first,
Of volume, second,
Of whether or not we lose it and third,
Of how well we interpret it.
It's the grit
In the battle-cry
It's the blood
On our fingers as we work the neck
Of some great instrument,
Playing on despite the insignificant pain,
With wet strings.
It's the vibration
In shaky muscles clenched
In complete and utter control
To hold a pose for a moment,
And flow into the next.

Skill's the hardest.
And it's got nothing to do
With perfection.
Perfection's an antiquated lie-
No, skill's greater, more intangible
Skill is turning typos into plot movements
And a missed note into a syncopated part of the beat
And each stumble
Into part of the dance.
Skill's in improvisation
Because error is unavoidable.
And when computers and amateurs err,
They freeze up and break down.

A skilled artist knows better-
Knows the mistakes are all just part
Of the grand scheme,
More a product of divine inspiration
Than anything we could have
Meant to do.

We are balanced
Precariously
Over the vastness of the unknown.
Every day when we get ourselves up
We have a choice
To continue to walk the tightrope above the abyss
Or to let ourselves
Fall.
This can be both good and bad
Or one or the other
But the important thing is to remember
That the life of the tightrope walker
The fence sitter
The cliff hanger
Is one that is doomed
To regret.
We must cast ourselves in
If we seek to
See what life is and life is always
Unknown.

Out the ***** double-paned window one would first notice that it's unbearably hot.
The metal box in my window is humming a metallic symphony as it blows
cold, electric salvation into my greenish-brownish, moldy, moth-eaten room.
A white van drives down the street. I know this guy, I've seen him before.
Well, maybe not him but the van.
He's peddling poison, not the prescription ****,
but the **** that makes you need to self-medicate
with more.
Upon close inspection one may see the used ******
and two ***** needles
lying in the gutter.
Across the street, in the "yard" in front of the projects
there's kids playing tag.
At the end of the street there's a corner store where the toothless
and their pimps shout at passers by
a guy storms out the door, ticked off that he didn't win enough
quarters on the "arcade game" inside for a tall boy.
One of the pimps shouts at a girl across the street
as a coke (crack?) dealer slowly cruises by on a bike,
his flag hanging out of his back pocket so there's no
confusion
about how he affiliates himself.
The kids are running through the stream of a hose and
laughing and
laughing.
The have no idea where they are.

I get up to open the window,
trying to create some kind of breeze,
any kind of breeze.
I raise my beer to the neighbor, waving from his lawn.
As I sit back down a procession of sirens passes our street.
as they pass I hear the children laugh and somebody at the corner store shouting.
Hustling.
everybody but the kids is hustling and the sirens are wailing and it is
so
****
hot.

Obscurity.
Mist.

The roar of the ocean drawing back
miles
and
miles
into the dawn of human existence.

Origin.
Fear.

Giant orbs of light emanating from
streetlights atop
the seaside
cliffs.

Terminus.
Void.

But not an empty void, no,
the dark side of this world
reflected.

Unknowable.
Occult.

Slicing through the murk,
a lighthouse
miles
and
miles
up the shore pings
and is gone.

Vision.
Wonder.

That there could be so
very
much
hiding in the dark.

Reckoning.
Completion.

The way down has been a screaming horse on fire blundering its way on

    Down,
         Down,
    Down.

Last Saturday was the bottom.
The absolute lowest the sun will dip the absolute earliest in the day.
So we drank ourselves more than half to death and spit whiskey at the sky screaming
"I made it this far!
I took everything you threw and walked the coals to this day-
I dare you to end me now!"
And the night drew on and I walked to a park with a pond with a friend
We threw snowballs at the sleeping geese
And talked about our losses and our victories
-And there was an obvious weight on one side of that scale-
We talked big fish and sea monsters until the church bells rang across town
And the Catholics walked with their guilt to the cathedral on first.
We stumbled home
-blasphemers, but free of guilt-
And talked women and war
Until we found our way to our house in the ghetto.

So that's how the way back up began:
Too hungover to work
Too broken down to fornicate
Too weak to wage war

And it occurred to me at that moment
That if we have crossed the first half of the valley,
we are now walking uphill
And the worst may well be

Yet to come.

The clock reads three A.M.
And you are listening to radio static
And you are picking feathers from your naked pillow
In the light of a nightlamp you kept near your bedside as a child
To keep the gorillas in your closet from eating you
Or whatever it is gorillas do with small children from the western world

And Somewhere in a country overseas,
A man is standing vigilantly on a beach
Waiting for the small mail boat from his home country
(which just so happens to be the same as your home country)
He is waiting to get any kind of word from the western world

Are you still out there, western world?

The childhood memories collecting dust on your shelves
and faint sirens soon lull you into a sleep that is barely more than a deep thought
where you dream of a girl with pineapple hair and an intoxicating aroma
And you think to yourself
Who still gives a **** about the western world?
And   then you kiss her lips and remember why YOU give a **** about anything in the

Western world

Is anyone out there, western world?

Anyone out there practicing western medicine?
Eating at some massive fast food chain that serves the parts of the pig you can't even name without vomiting?
Sitting on a couch made of the skin of an animal who your ancestors relied on to survive?
Buying jewelry for a member of the opposite *** whom you met no less than three weeks ago?

And in your light, restless dreams
you smell the pineapple girl's tranquilizing neck and you think
Is this happening anywhere else in the western

World?

Are people asking themselves questions they already know the answers to
And picking feathers from naked pillows at three o clock in the ******* morning while the sirens and radio static blare on
Because they're too proud to answer the questions that they know the answers to?
Is there anyone else confused in this vast low-budget carnival that is
the Western world?

And the answer is yes
This is happening everywhere
In this
Western
World.

Thou.
I can't think of a more romantic word.
and who was the genius who first said "thou"?
who distinctified another human being from all the other
"it's"
and realized that whoever that was, that first
"thou"
saw the world just as he did?
and perceived him just as he perceived them?
brilliant *******.

He,
Whoever he was,
was the first man to grasp true
empathy.
To identify with another human not as an object,
or an animal,
"but as another of himself"
an extension of himself.
himself.
itself.
thyself.

It is one of the oldest existing words,
and has not undergone any major change in tenthousand years.
Perhaps this is evidence that we were,
in fact,
built
in pairs.

Which raises the question of who the first "thou"
was
and his relationship to whomever first said it.
I like to think they were lying across from one another,
he and his partner
or she and hers
and it occurred to one of them that the person opposite them
saw
them too.

Thou art.
as I am.

Next must have come "we"
or some variation thereof.
Thou,
I,
thou and I.
We.
Us.

What was the brilliant sonofabitch who first uttered "us"?

I wonder if he died alone.

to be a stone worn smooth in the bed of a river rushing to parts unknown, save for the banks and bits of cattail being dragged downstream by a million hungry hands, broken up into the smallest constituent parts by a million groping mouths and spit back out into mother ocean's wide accepting embrace and stirred into a stew of bones and various creatures picking them clean, many of which know not the existence of anything above the surface save for warmth and light, like the embryo turning fetus which also swims in a sea of nourishment, also cradled in mother ocean's loving arms, also perfectly content to feel the light of the outside from a distance until, in time, when the descendants of the same coalition of cells that once made up the body of that fetus breaks back down to atoms, flesh feeding new cattails and a million tenacious sets of teeth, slowly washes back into a rushing river where I sit,
a stone worn smooth,

                                                        ­                       watching it all.

I threw away an old pair of shoes today.
They were a few years old
and the seams had begun to burst
particularly about the sole, there was one hole big enough
to slide a toe through.
It’s winter and I don’t need them anymore
so they became trash.

Someone returned a relic of my past to me recently.
It was a dreamcatcher,
a furnace big enough to fit my most evil of nightmares.
It was a gift from a person I once knew.
I was looking at it one night
for a long time;
I took it from the wall where it had been hanging
and tossed it into a nearby garbage can.

I can handle my nightmares on my own now.

I’m shaking off the weights of the things I don’t need
because,
if there’s a lesson I’ve learned in my adulthood,
it is to travel often
and to travel light.

Plain and simple, I didn’t need those old shoes.
I have leather boots.
They’re warm and waterproof and will never get holes in them.

They were as good as dead weight-

so I let them go.

The poetry’s gone to **** lately.
Mostly I mean there isn’t much,
but what there is isn’t that good.
Maybe, *******, life’s just
not awful these days.

Maybe my eye for the magic in the monotony’s just gotten
lazy.

I feel too good to even resent whatever it is
making me limp-dicked.

“coward,” I think.
“******* coward.”

And in a minute,
the coward I am,
I’ll probably set this page down,
unfinished
walk to the television,
turn it on
and submit
like a coward

like a corpse
belly-up
under a sky of infinitely small pixels
flashing on
and off
on
and off.

Standing out here
in the cold
in front of this bar,
freshly laden rain over all the sidewalks and asphalt,
wrapped in the
comfort of fuzzy woven cotton
and the comfort of a comfortably
easy drunk
in the company of these (borderline)
obnoxiously drunken
bar-patrons
under the citystarlight-

and I smile,
contented,
for now.

I am here, risen up
from dust
and I sit in the sand
beneath the mangroves
as fruits fall around me
thudding softly in the
strewn leaves.

We sit here,
where I am,
these fruits
and these insects
and small reptiles,
watching the clouds roll in from the east,
where the ocean sprawls,
lavishing the beach with delicate hands
under the phosphorescent moon.

We all sit here,
the fruits,
insects,
reptiles,
the ocean,
and I-

We watch dense clouds roll in
as distant flashes of light
and gongs of thunder
grow more frequent-

we sit-
we watch-
and we wait-

for the rain.

To walk until this gradual curve gives out-
Or to walk until the point where "up"
is sideways

and jump.

I'd fall for countless hours
pass all the stars and waywards
who, like myself
couldn't walk a straight line in broad daylight
I'm too sober
and too addicted to vice
I'm a pincushion of anxious
and when the tension releases,
explosions shake my achy feeble frame
or just plain mistakes get made
I feel like I can't handle life
I feel like I can't cope
with even the slightest feather's poke
I feel useless
a self-destructive nuisance
who speaks grandiose
and uses words like verbose
but couldn't tie my own shoes
-note that these don't have laces-
or might miss a bus cause
"**** look at those clouds"
or
"man, bees are super weird"
and meanwhile I'm crashing through china shop two.
I'm a bull without horns,
ever bitter, never scorned.

so I'll walk in silly circles
until this curve gives out.
I'll walk until I'm back where I started
and change course
I'll walk until my own head makes sense
I'll walk until I feel like I have enough room in my body
to contain me.
I'll walk until my legs give in
and my shoulders slump forward
from exhaustion or boredom
I'll walk until I figure out there is no
"up"

and jump.

and one day I get tired of walking
so I climb to the top of a very tall ridge
no bigger than the contours on your fingertips
and I jump

The ground spins away from me
and it falls into the distance
I get lost in orbit
around the technicolor island of shiny garbage we’ve all left in space
pincushioned with guidons
it spins out of my field of view

I scream at the stars
tell me why, tell me why
but they’re silent
they’ve always been silent

But even silence is an answer
and I’ve grown to know the voice of the void
without, within
the shape and color of that silence
has hardly ever stopped me from shouting
and somehow it never fails to surprise me when it shouts back

The self-portrait you printed on a rectangular piece of cloth
waving in the wind of the atmosphere of aerosolized liquids we've all sprayed
hairsprays and bug repellents
at the end of a metal pole
I see it
and even though I am too far away to do anything
I call out
and the answer comes in silence

And then it spins out of view
so I close my eyes

The tether of gravity hauls me back down
and I splash in the plastic ocean
the flecks of confetti that used to be styrofoam containers and disposable straws we've all used and disposed
dance in the light amid the baby blue

I sink
faster and faster as the bubbles rush out of my pores
the baby blue turns navy
the red and orange flecks blink out
and then the green
and the rest

The sun drifting farther and farther
even as I watch it go
then the blue goes too
and the cold of space is holding me again
I’m spinning out

The prehistoric things down there giving off their lights
make streaks of ultraviolet beyond my comprehension
they float around me
so alive and so alien
I watch them through my unblinking windows
undulating back and forth from one food source to the next
pushing against the silence down there
swimming stars in the night
they rotate out of my view and away
into the vacuum

And then the void takes me in
why, why I ask in the loudest whisper I can muster
water rushing over my vocal cords
and the answer comes

And I cannot see it
but I can feel the eventual dirt of the bottom rise up
to catch me
it consumes me like an amoeba taking in nutrients
I close my eyes
and I understand.

Up early today.























Got the worm.

I imagine you
in the slot canyons of valhalla
among rattlesnakes and bighorns
at twilight

I imagine you
running through knee-deep snowdrifts
with icecicles forming on your beard
under a full moon

I imagine you
living after dying,
and it's so hard
to imagine anything else

But you can't move anymore
and if there is a valhalla
no one ever deserved a place in it
like you did-
but that's a fiction

it's my imagination

it's my cowardice
and my inability to accept that anyone
as alive as you could be dead.

You're a nothing now
and the truth is I imagine you alive
because it is so much better
to be a something than a nothing-

which I think you knew all along.

Here I sit.
Clutching this ***** little transfer slip
As the darkness sips the light
and the sky's absorbed by dimness
I ponder in the nightlight
As my self-knowledge reels,
A database of feelings
but which holds the most appeal?
A choice of voice
with little indignations
of different vocabulary
stopped by writer's block syndrome
Cork a drain
Unplugged and let the hounds run
After the *******
After pilfering caskets
Who know their own fear like a monkey knows these branches
snap
Trip wires over wiretaps
Who's the fool now?
and whose shoes must you fill?
When the working dogs debunk the formerly favored gods
and ham sandwiches for the ill
Except those who prefer vegetation to the pleasure loaf
Expressing superficial favorites came down a bit
from last year
After hipsterism destroyed all previous conception
of what "cool" is and does
So soak another moniker
'til the loathing and the faithless
destroy those of us with names
and replace a kid with numbers
Can you reconcile that?
Or count lies 'til they pass as facts?
In politics
Deprived of all that whatchacallit
Respond a lofty little miss
who won't take bribes or bacon bits
who's tripping all the time
and uses fresh air for narcotics
I see her
The same albeit as she spies me
I ask her as a comrade
What in confidence she accumulates
As little life and dictators
would sell me but in reverse
A pause
She responds,
but does so gently
And in a softer tone than she uses with the game-players
Four words one chooses not to forget,
"baby, beware of naysayers"

In fever dreams
The city sleeps
and wakes with a dose of DMT
Daytripping inconclusively
Is yellow to you as it is to me?
For a people of productivity
surely feel no joy.

I want to lay with you,
roots grown together,
tired from the day
in a bed of clover
under mother moon
with nowhere to be.
The leaves would begin to fall,
eventually,
blanketing us from autumn's bitter cold
and the scorns of obligation.
I want to drink you through my nose,
your primrose perfume twinged
with subtle notes of leaf litter.

And when the whim to rise finally
lifted us
the grass beneath would be matted
and combed
in the shape of yin and yang.

When you want something,
but you don't know what.
Maybe it's a want to want,
misplaced in hopes of filling
the ever-present void in you.
Maybe it's happiness.

Maybe it's as close as you'll ever get.