PALLAS,
a Titan,
and
STYX,
an Oceanid,
begat
ZELUS,
--a companion of
ZEUS--
who, in turn,
begat human zeal.

NYX,
the night,
(who many
do fear)
begat
ERIS,
--a companion of
ARES--
who, in turn,
begat human discord.

Closely related in theory
to the good in
DISCORD,
the competitive creator
that drives human development,
ZELUS
and
ERIS
are mentors of
GRAFFITI.

I tell you this
to spell out
what message
is missed in
GRAFFITI
--
WHY
ARTISTS
STRIVE.

I read so many poems about the tangling of souls,
or the intertwining of limbs
and hearts.

Combining smiles with flowers,
everlasting this and thats, laughter
with bullets, memories in objects. Boring,
all of it.

I read the cliches, the red colors
associated with passions of flesh
and mind.
The blue oceans mingled with longing.
Still winds with waiting.

I read these things and think of how
far away from any sense of truth.

Neruda finds love in bread,
cummings finds it in buildings,
Bukowski
in beer.

No one remembers that love is
in chemicals - that true love finds
its way through all chemical imbalances,
all sense in senses.

I can be drunk with you,
I can be high with you,
I can be depressed,
anxious,
hyperactive,
crazy, boastful, cheerless,
smug, annoying,
annoyed,
frantic, courageous,
bashful,
broken,
crying, dying and dealing
with my own **** self

and I still feel my love for you
(and your love for me).

Why do poets pick
one image, one allusion,
to craft a poem about a truth that overtakes all?

It seems lazy, unfortunate.
It does wrong
in my eyes. This is where
discipline has destroyed
what they try to express.

When was love ever disciplined?

No, my love is not a red, red
rose because my love is punk
rock and she'll fight you
if you try to say she's not.
She drinks and smokes
and would intellectually crush any girl
who thinks

that love poems define proper behavior.

The college kids still pump out poems;
my heroes haven't published a book in years.
The academics are moving to visual arts
kerning letters on the page, adding artist statements.

Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.

Passion fades with age, I suppose. A symptom of
the cult of happiness.

And I love to read poems
from twenty-somethings who just want to get ******.
I picture my red pen exciting them as I destroy
their fine-tuned metaphors, all muddled with conflicting allusion,
as if juxtaposition alone adds meaning.

In school, it was all Cezanne and hydrogen jukebox birdsongs,
and equally interesting but useless adjective strings.
The academics are doing the same, but with form.
It bores us, don't they know?

Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.

**** these kids for having such easy means to publication.
I read their journals, their magazines, their "editions"
online, vivid, vomiting color and opinion.

I long for publishing classified ads and
scribbled chalk portraits of the women I loved
and the twenty-somethings who just wanted to get ******,
and reflections of how I never mastered either craft.

I long to rub the ink off newsprint in my fingers,
smudge the words on the page and ***** my hands,
watch the chalk run into the red brick
during ten-minute monsoons, smell the library's adobe,
light a cigarette and remember that the stacks are filled
with ages of greater work than these ******* kids...
and these ******* academics.

Greater than me.

We are possibility.
Nothing undone:
the red key swung,
the pins aligned.
     Spite and Malice -
you won in Burque;
in Buffalo, in April,
I'll be writing in coffee shops.

Cage made fake acrostics
and clamoured more than us.
He watered himself in blenders
tacked his piano like stigmata.

But really, he just put the right letter
on the correct line (if he
ever wrote a line),
but our house was a mess
of books and skulls
and everywhere you looked
too perfect a nest,

so we tore ourselves apart.
Why don't we stop?
Someone will spend graduate school
anthologizing our correspondence,
analyzing the details we missed,
et al., hic et nunc.

The girls dancing in Budapest
and the guys making passes at you in the snow
reduce us to baser instincts
by counting how we
could, might, tentatively
hurt again
on our second-class driver's test.

Fortunately, I am with you
when you look at computer screens
and you're with me at the bar
when television commercials
show off their bras and the beer hits
harder than libretto
and snus drips down the candle wax
making arcs like the Scott Monument.

The imperfection is bliss,
the knots loosen and move
up our spines. We'll soak
the tub and swell
our glands with menthe
and tumble
     further down the mud,
until we either love or ****
what makes us whole.

It's my humble opinion that humility will **** you.
You're trapped in a cult of positivity, kid;
and, there ain't no end in sight there.
If people were meant to be happy all the time,
the chemistry of our brains would done figured that for us.
And in that, there's something to be said about being sad.

The only way to beat your demons is to out perform them.
Hell, the whole of human literature hints at that.
And, it's my humble opinion that baking humble pie
is a death march for the destitute.
It's times like these you gotta get cocky.
Besides, women like that sort of man.

"Find the things you love and let them **** you."
Ol' Hank was right when he said that.
Taken further, you gotta seek out the things you hate,
and be prepared to duel until one of you expires.
You gotta outrank, outfile and outcast thems that drags you down.
No more saying "hi" to the bees to let 'em know you ain't scared.
The bees you're fighting sure as **** don't care.

You once told me:
"when you've had enough of getting the **** kicked out of you
well, then it was time to start kicking some ****."
You better lace up them boots, boy.
Or, you'll have more trouble than you can bargain.

The easy outs ain't so easy, the older we get.
Self reliance makes a joke out of playing fair -
it simply out preforms it.
And, that isn't selfish when you remember that the world won't always bend down and hug you.
Most of the time, it just punches your guts in.

I was feeling really ****** and low,
coming to from an affair that bored me.
Frankly, I was rut down
in a mind that all ladies had bored me,
and I happened into this woman with a large brain
covered in a drunken and sly confidence
mixed
beer, shots, smokes, violins and
billiard *****.
We flirted a while in such an unusual mansion
owned by a millionaire racist
who we all later came to adore
and drank his Polish ***** in welcomed shots
by the dozens
as I (feeling ****** and low)
was coming out of my rut that women are a bore,
I watched her shoot pool trying to relax my wanton urges
and the thing that really helped
was this very long silence between flirts
while we traded the stick
and I could plan my next geometric move
as haphazard as the geometry of my brains.
We were clever,
so clever, and cool, that
we didn't know we didn't know
and hardly knew that we didn't know
that in a few short hours we'd be hopelessly
desperately undying linked
in a nicely confusing and endlessly evolving
affair of our own that would
go on for years--
offending her younger brother at parties
running drunken through the streets of Denver
rocking to sleep in a boat in San Diego
staring at geysers in Iceland
and mumbling Viking songs in Stockholm--
so much so that everyone
turned lovers around us
and it goes on and on
and the years passed and
it all seemed like a match strike
so quick and delicate
but so emblazoned and fierce
that the wood might snap or the sulfur degrade
or the flame stabilize and flicker
but the lighting fluid seems endless too
and she's still evolving to burn
even hotter
and I stopped believing that women are boring
or at least there's hope for the rest of them.

I read about an old couple shuffling into a little cafe and opening a window to the summer in front of them, their slippers flying on sluggish wings, on tides that collect with age and ebb like heartbeats thumping with passion and deciding mid-way to throb together; I read they used to lay under those throbs, far past the warmth of summer, in the warmth of their chests, they spoke like head waters, like rivers that ran thousands of miles to splash together, and exit as one, "some of her lips on his words," and I could see blue running out of the sky, onto her dress, across his eyes, into their cups, and I thought of you.

Its just me and you and everything in front of us, or behind
     especially if gravity operates like chemicals.
Let's go exploring, if you'd like,
     or sit like lumps and metastasize on chocolates.
The stage, the fame, the beer, the strife,
All the things we wanted don't matter in that
     wonderful white space ahead. This hill can trail
     off to the worlds we'll create, so utterly shapeless
     – impossibly white –
     yet filled with color and sound and romp.

The airplane we rode, just the first or last few frames of the film
     (you should start wherever you want)
     it had the new world in its sights to open up the stodgy filth
     and land us tumbling into the great unknown.
We walk ill-prepared, like our fathers,
only so far as what they know.
     A harsh word.

These legs will take me to Tøyengata or Nieve or Las Ramblas
and that street to the river
to the train or the bus
to a frozen tube of horrifying humanity
to land on familiar runways in New York or Albuquerque
     catch you in your mother's Civic
     and bound away.

Where we'll speak – concisely.

That's where intimacy lies: in codes and twitches,
     and very little soft sweet words;
     and, the more we love the less we say,
     'cept to remind each other we're ready to go cartograph again.
Then speak endlessly, drunk in each other's words, and move brazenly, tromp the neigh-sayers and know-it-alls,
stumble our way across frail little ropes,
sprint through orchards to catch smoke.
     Through the door, into bed.
     past the last frame.
     past that sweet little line –
     to let this placid chaos slide down the hill
     and trail off
          into madness.

I'll be waiting by the sleds.
You know what to do.

Check out all the books on the shelves
and remember me to your mother.
Or sell a few back cheap to some
spindly haughty clerk at the shop.
He might remind you of me when we
first slid books to each other
and our fingers kissed. If you find yourself
in tall stacks, hiding,
spend a moment to remember my lips on your stomach
and how our hot breath mixed
when we read aloud. Under the covers.
When you cross bars, carry your knife,
for ****'s sake. Go on snapping
mussels and water flows, the particles
that clog our veins;
and, publish a thing or two,
so I can know you're alive,
while I fester my own wounds.
If you cut your hair, keep it
blonde and I'll know you read this.
Or dye it black and I'll stop writing
to you on snowy days, prefer to walk
between the aspens and sleep forever
under the stars. Smell the pages of your armchair
fiction and make a mental note to clean your sheets.
The world is filled up with writers, and lovers.
Shove the new release pile over,
label it "read later" and get back
into the shop to find another
volume louder and more raucus than mine.
And throw your journals into boxes,
ship 'em to your cousins'.
When we're gray, you can think
back to pool cues and pillow talk.
And I'll cry when you bin me again.

The mountain that roared at midnight,
It never heard us.
The mountain that roared, covered up by the oven falling,
smothered by the hard mess of Norway,
and plane tickets, and lonely hearts.
You roared. And I fell asleep knowing
too much
or just enough
to get the sense that the mountains aren't high enough here.

Folly from all, this
was such a sweet summer for lovers,
if only it were so sweet for us.
But the mountain roared.
And this time I couldn't bang the pans loud enough
or shake the slam the door hard enough
or put you into sweat gleaned sleep.
This time you listened.

And from the distance I saw our graves.

All the ***** in Scotland,
the smoke in Netherlands,
the gin and dance of Denmark,
the glacier water in Ålesund,
or the high wire act of our travels,
all that couldn't stop the mountain.

It roared and you listened,
putting me valleys below,
seeking new tops
for just a glimpse of how to drown it out again.

"Some say calamity
and some catastrophe
is beauty."
Some think rolling
hills, hay, joints–
madness in the head,
in bed, on paper and canvas–
soothes our souls
but our soles wander
and we're trainers
following the egos
of Hollywood and Penguin,
Netflix and Dover.
I say your beauty,
encompassing calamity
and catastrophe,
and never letting less
beget sad days,
sends me out,
spurs me to transact,
create, build, fail,
love.
I think running
alongside your stride,
fingers down your back,
scripts about our language,
reigns me in,
slows my transience,
comforts me to breathe,
decompress, heal,
care.
We, the ebb of calamity,
the flow of catastrophe,
are bound.

You exist in this world and your sheer impossibility is comfort. On this speck of dust, you move and shake me. If the potential to rearrange a hundred books is greater than there are atoms in the universe, how lucky are we that you find your way into my bed, that I kiss you while we talk to trees, that you love me and I love you? And no manner of oceans – little blue streaks on a teensy blue marble on the edge of tiny spinning cloud – can squelch us. In a world where you are possible, my love, nothing can go wrong for us.

think about this day
outside offices
nearly
your toes might
cauterize
in
tough, rotten
dirt

science like every publication
prints

no madness, straight-faced
out to harden.

Pull me into you.
Let your waves crash over me –
your currents push me deeper.
Grip my by my thighs and let me wade into you.
**** my fluids with your salt tongue.
Let me float inside your cove and sleep next to the roll of your shoreline.
Let your spray permeate my beard, so I smell you everywhere,
taste you when I lick my lips
and yearn for me when you meet rockier tides.
I am land, locked and solid.
And, you are my ocean.