Look:

If mankind is a forest and you then a tree
then I am the one who stands sentry
and watches for signals in a distant belfry
one of if by land and two if by sea
a position not revered watching danger near
and screaming curdled-canticles dear
that fire is sweeping and the kindling is fear
the smoke's in the distance – it doesn’t just appear
you frogs oblivious to the quick melting veneer
to afraid to strip it away, to look in the mirror
and see yourself for what you are; for what we're
becoming – something less than...

Stop:

And you think there's truth in this verbal climbing
but it's just that what I'm saying was designed to be rhyming
and is syncopated to give it an ear-pleasing timing
like a...a........a
***-***-***
heartbeat
a heartbeat pinging unbirthing mountains
on a static-shot blue monitor
in a faraway
hospital where all the rooms are
painted black and the
Doctors curse themselves.

Cursed like we are cursed,
to our death marched and the only
sound ringing is the bleating
of a New Orleans trumpet
in a funeral march – our coffin
into the dirt sank and left behind
these idolatrous sycophants who
have like pigs at a trough suckled
the very marrow of genius from our
bones, then spit back but a slim
shadow of our once impeccant brilliance.

Like the unborn galaxies of celestial mothers,
like the toxic lessons of a distempered
youth, like the sullen, momentary terror of a
child before sleep: let it be said that we
are forgotten.

Let it be said that it is as though we never were,
that the banshee curses we have screamed at the
horrors and the inequities we have witnessed
are for naught, are
disappeared, are into the ether ****** until
the great unknowable beyond has become
the altar of our yesterdays, forgiving the
domain of God and forgetting that of man:
show me a man of faith and I will show
you one of fear; man the animal, the scourge,
man the fiend who cannot forgive, merely
erase the memory and think not of the
transgressions done to him

Forget us and we will forget
what you have done to us;
but do not ask us to forgive the
pillage of our sacred rights, to forgive
the devolution of our ideas into the mire
of the ordinary, to forgive at all- No
man is not an animal who forgives; leave that
to God and **** him for it.


Forget we ever were; it is a greater kindness
than to remember the mutant bile we will become.


All of which is to say this:

Earlier I wandered outside and heard cries
behind the closed doors that guard our loyal lies
and this boy sitting near with a gold hooped ear
called it a ghost town
then took another drag and tears
slipped past his locked up frown.
I'll never know his name

I wander down padded blue halls and hear cries
behind closed doors guarding our summer lies .
The boy outside with the gold hooped ear
calls it a ghost town
then takes another drag and tears
slip past his locked up frown.
I never knew his name

To begin: a poem entitled “Lines to Serve as an Introduction to the Show, Written for the Lowest Common Denominator; Hastily Amended to Address our Pale Horse Future”

There are no literary devices in this poem
no simile, no apostrophe-
there's no dissonance, no assonance,
no distancing my consonants,
in constellations of conversation,
an astronomic lack of conjugation-
there's no elevation in
the elongation of thoughts-
With this piece, my synaptocratic,
idiosyncratic oath I recants.
I'm just a guy quick-drawing
inspirado from the sky,
full clouds and dark wishes,
kisses from other's Mrs'
red wine and all that comes after.
The truth's in repetition,
the revolution of the wheel,
all art's born of friction.
Hell, God said
'Creation is lonely work,'
and on the eighth day,
hoping hands will hold flimsy dishes,
he filled us with desperate artist wishes-
Sad, bold lumps of clay rising
like Play-doe,
hell, ask Plato,
we're forms arriving at the real
manifest desk in a city,
where writers write dying,
praying for real forms arising,
just in time for the plying
of fact in layers peeled back,
while cracks in the truth
erode faith from way back-
Stopped dead in their tracks,
feel like thieves who steal moves,
but the ecstatic hack,
the stark raving yet pragmatic
hack will still muse;
muse for the muse
and on the grandest conquest
will invest, digress, come upon
an ingress and disappear into
a land beyond the beyond.
All in search of the mustang *****
who won't ever wear a saddle-

I've met the muse
She was the queen in the land of the blind
and what she lacked in depth perception
she exploded in all the truths of all the world
because to her all truth appeared equidistant
So I met her for a simile, but missing an I
all she could offer was a smile
but it was she who taught me
the demography of cool
“artists create from nothingness”
she told me
“and so when they begin it is with nothing,
so they live among Ginsberg's ***** streets
where the rents cheap and they chip away
at the void until where once nothing
now is something”.
“Remember,” she said, “creation is lonely work
but once created celebration demands a crowd;
so those with nothing are surrounded by those
who need something; something to fill the
emptiness they cannot fill themselves.
But the crowd ***** the creator dry
and like weeds temples to the boring
emerge on those once ***** streets
and the artists still have nothing and
now need something to stay – but with
nothing they are forced to move:
move on, move out, move away,
leaving behind those who only know
how to follow to lead”.

**** slick, you're sly, you heard my simile-
in a piece that promised no imagery,
and that wasn't the only one...
Do I contradict myself? Abso-simile-lutely
This realm is rife with ******* platitudes and
be sure, this poem here contains a multitude
We have many names on the list,
some you've forgotten, some you've missed:

I'm sorry Lawrence Ferlinghetti
we here ain't getting
any closer to a rebirth of wonder

I'm sorry Jack Kerouac
there ain't no going back
on the road when your directions
start with you are here
and here is a windowless room

I'm sorry Billy Burroughs
the algebra of need is thorough
but ours increases not geometric
but exponentially

We have many names on the list.
some you've forgotten, some  you've missed

Beat.

If war, you're telling me, is what makes a
man a man
and that you can dig out my insides and
replace the good with automatic unfeeling-
reprogrammed to see no shadows and no
gray just the blinding light of some lairs
justice winding my spring and setting me
marching to the rat-a-tat-tat of bugles bleating
and you can then see fit to wonder why I
might one day come apart as splintered wood
and scream banshee curses and beat on some innocent
flesh with nothing in my empty head but the
nightmare visions and devil's rewind and all the
pox of all the horror you have made me do and
see, the ****** beast you have made of me:
then mister I have to tell you I want no part of that

If war, you're telling me, is what makes a
man a man
and that staring into the flesh torn face
of the stranger you told me is my brother
as my hands claw frantically to wipe away
the blood that spurts greedily from his neck
ripped open by stray debris scattered uncaring
into the wind and that I am meant to hear as well,
hear his foul frothing lips as the weary white
of terror drifts across his eyes and he flops
terribly trying to offer just one more **** word into
this ugly world with the sky turning red above
the both of us and the smoke as thick as carnivals
then mister I have to tell you I want no part of that

If war, you're telling me, is what makes a
man a man
and that I should with echoing voice rejoice
seeing in flashing images of that ephemeral
gaudy green the distant explosions from oblivious
machines and with each shredding salvo should
whoop and holler and not dare think what those streets
must be like, or the limbs in the debris or the searing
heat of the fire as it spreads hungrily from building to
building (office to office, home to home, who knows)
a feeding frenzy that should seem unreal, on a busy night
for Azreal, but since it is something far away I am meant
to be glad for it, and exalt the far off victim's torment
then mister I have to tell you I want no part of that

If war, you're telling me, is what makes a
man a man
and that a man I have never met who had the
misfortune of being born in his country rather
than the misfortune of being born in mine is
my enemy, is my demon defiled, is my foe and
that coming face to face I shouldn't think of his
mother/father/sister/brother/lovers crying just
like mine must be, but should instead see only
the ignorant rage flush his face and feel the cold
knotting of insensible hatred inside my chest should throw
myself on him a dervish of murderous limbs and
mercilessly pound the very breath from him and
smile all the while for having done it with the blood
still splattered on my face like a criminal's Rorschach
then mister I have to tell you I want no part of that

If war is what makes a man a man then god be ****** if it
isn't what breaks a man too, and filling our heads with
tripe and flags and marching bands doesn't change
the fact that I would be made a monster and the stink
of gore and sorrow untold would never wash from
my hands but would follow me to the end of my days
and it would be the last thing my mind would see before the black,
the stench then buried with me in my grave would rise
above the close cut grass, me just one in an ever reaching
row of crosses all done up in white-
not red or black or blue or green or any ****
color you told us mattered, that you sent us to
our deaths under with those colors flapping ahead
of us in the wind and pounding their venom in
our ears no **** color at all just:
white.
Which is all the colors mister,
all of them at all at once in fact.

Mister, I'll have no part in that.

If only a poem will do and
I have no pen with which to
write then give me a needle
that I may use my blood as ink.

If only a poem will do and
I have no paper on which to
write then give me your body;
that I might trace crude letters
across the drawn, copper skin
of your thigh and the form words
everlasting even as the fading
pink recedes from your skin.

I only a poem will do and
I have no words any good to
Offer then give me your eyes
That I may see the world anew
Seeing neither sun nor water
Nor tree nor flame but only
The thin veiled truth of your
Perception, your alien manner
Of being that the world may
Be to me new again, fresh,
Ready for ridicule or praise
Or any manner of discourse
That, finding us lacking, fills
The void of the myriad mysteries
We cannot ever see like fireflies
In the daytime, their light obfuscated
But there, elusive as the truth
And equally beautiful nonetheless

If only a poem will do then:

Creativity:
sentimentalization
justifiable

If only a poem will do then
(See above)

I can sit enveloped in this womb of a chair smoking
knowing that you would like the knowledge that I am
watching you asleep in our bed, watching the pulsing sway
of your form as
each gentle breathe you draw stirs and courses
from lung to heart to body, that hallowed body
whose skin I have touched in minutes gone, whose
lines I have traced idly with my fingers, whose
curves I have known and mysteries I have explored
(in time both short and immensely vast
and always, always the finding of more).

Behind you sleeping, through the window lies
the city eager and waiting twenty floors below
vibrant in the blanketing night, a thousand million
countless points of splendid light flickering away
that hold a thousand million countless lives:
one of whom I know one is a man who
watches the sleeping shape of the woman he
adores on a bed disheveled and beautiful, behind
her the city through the window, huge and always
the city we share (as we share this moment),
vibrant in the blanketing night, a thousand million
countless points of splendid light flickering away
that hold a thousand million countless lives:
one of which is mine staring back at his-
the whole world between us: but joined
because we love.

Should we pass each other on the street (he and I)
we could never know by looking that we shared
such colossal galaxies, nor that when
I look into your eyes (or he in hers) we find
our better angels. But I like to think that he
could smell/hear/see your body with mine
(separated by distance but together) and smile,
and he and I could know that in our hands
(his and hers)
(yours and mine)
we all hold a thousand million countless points of light.

I can sit smoking knowing that you would
like the knowledge that I am watching you,
that it is the delicate majesty of you sleeping
framed against the hard eternity of the
city in the window
that makes me feel alive; one amongst a thousand
million countless points of crisp and loving light.

In seeing as dancers whirl eclectic,
and actors know parts better than
they know themselves (which, in either
case is barely tolerable at best),
I feel it is only fair to mention,
as long as you are here, beside me,
the cool breeze of my
fingers swirling portraits
on your inner thigh,
that should you ever
feel the need to break
from me a piece of
soul, and, cracking it open
(like crème bruele) dip
your tongue into the center
simply to see me cringe,
I would be amenable to it;
little sacrifice for your embrace.

Winters folly does in spring create
in essences a dire, wily fool
who, speaking truth- a noble trait-
can make the blooms anew seem cruel
In temperate waters, the ocean blue
bind you to me as I to you

Youthful solstices in equal parsimony
bring hushed utterings, the listless creed
of breaking hopes, the terrible fragility
that lifts desire, want, dream and need
Before this schism, our great undo
bind you to me as I to you

Stars never see the light of day,
or feel the warm stroke of the sun,
but each is at peace, in its own way
before and after it’s burning is done
With sunfire and ice, kiss me imbued
bind you to me as I to you

The hollowness of my voice that fails
and falters belies the nature of my love
and defines more than the tale
of young souls in the greater above
Let our hearts, that simple truth
bind you to me as I to you

I once had this friend, see
and I was as much him, as he me.
And we’d laugh, and cry and dodge the stars,
weaving in and out of love,
fight and ****, and long to starve,
hoping one more would be enough.
I only really remember him, me,
because he saw things I’d never seen.
Things you can’t tell people:
they just look at you like an animal;
something wild, and crazed, and raw.
And you say,
“Mainly, he used to sit, funny,
like something that mattered was coming,
all on edge, leaning forward,
perched between paramours and providence.
And his eyes,
My Eyes,
Would scan ahead, and roll
dully in the sockets.
And it seemed
(or so I was told, after and before and all at once),
that he, I, was about to pounce,
And tear at the flesh-
And rip at the bone-
And scream at the sinew,
carnal and callous fates.
But every time, beyond the guile,
Little more than a lamb; docile.
nobody moved.
And He,
and I,
would just sit there,
watching out for a lullaby”.


The audience will laugh,
And think you mad.