If I had any courage, I'd read the masters
The translations of the masters by the foregone masters' handlers
Or so I thought
My dyslexic mind
Scavenges for words recorded
For me to hear
Free form poetry is sad, but allows a sense of wonder, or,
jealous appreciation of great accomplishment

I doubt my skill
And wish I knew Rumi's Persian style
So that I could read in silence
Without grasping for some faulty foothold in my own
And falling
Asleep, with his unread anthology on my chest

Pick them out
Like you’re picking a lock
And throw away the key
Once you’re inside
My brain, throbbing, uncertain
Panicked a bit
Tossing and turning
Before I walk to the fridge
Open it up, touch my eyes
Pick them out
Out of that zip-lock
They’re fresh, but not able
To see the light in your smile
Or the venom dripping off your canines
Why, dear, do you fail to announce yourself?
It’s not polite to lurk about so
In my mind, like a waterbed
You float beside me, liquid gushing
Places between us
You can’t have me forever
I’m meant for just now
Be happy with that or
Or, Or, Or,
You can just take my trash out with you
To the DMV or wherever you’re driving
You’re legal and willing
So pull to the curb when I scream blue and red
Show me credentials and I’ll let you flee
Go on then

I read the news today
                                            Oh boy.
                                                              About a lucky man who made the grade.
And though the news was rather
                                                                  Sad.
                                                                            I just had to laugh.
He blew his brains out in the car.
                                                                    He didn't notice that the lights had
Changed.

It’s reassuring when the birds chirp
Until I realize I’m still awake
And I mourn my unrealized dreams
As I rub the stubble on my neck
Tremendous, green valleys
Flash in my mind
Puffy clouds circle and cast shadows
Raining
On my head
As I shake it
It reminds me of you
Where have the birds gone?

Ja, er hat dich gekuesst-- aber ich auch
wenn er nicht da waere-- wer sonst?
Ich bin ohne dich geflogen, und wohin?
Keine Frage der Zeit, Schlampe
ich bin's

Ich bin's der bei dir sonst waere-- ich bin's, bist du wirklich so bloed?
Wieso fragst du >>WER?<<
Du bist ne Schlampe, und das erkenn' ich schon
aber das macht mir nichts, ich bin alleine geflogen

Und all die Menschen die ueber mich sassen
haben es gewusst und wollten mich kaum antasten
Sie sind ohnehin weiter-- immer weiter-- gegangen
und, ohne dich, Schlampe, bin ich heruntergefangen

Mit den Hunden und Paeckchen diese Leute staendig nach- duersten und mitbring'
Lag ich
Bin ich auch zu ueberfluessig um oben drinzusitzen?
Schlampe, willst du dass ich wein', so ohne Wasser
im Dunkel, in Einsamkeit, im Gefaengniss der Lust?

Am Kartenkasse drueckte ich 'eins-Plus!'

Vergiss dich, Schlampe-- ich hab' fuer dich kein Benutz
Du bist nicht wer ist, das bin ich
Tschuess.
---------------------------------------
Yes, he has kissed you-- but I too
if he weren't there-- who else?
I have flown without you, and where to?
No question of time, *****
I am the one

I am the one that would be by you otherwise-- I am the one, are you really so stupid?
Why do you ask "WHO?"
You are a *****, and I recognize that already
But that doesn't make a difference to me, I have flown by myself

And all the humans that sat over me
have known it and hardly wanted to touch me
they have regardless further-- always further-- gone
and, without you, *****, am I caught under here

With the dogs and little packages these people constantly thirst after and bring with
I lay
Am I indeed too superfluous to sit inside, above?
*****, do you want for me to cry, this way without water
in the dark, in isolation, in the prison of passion?

At the ticket counter I pressed "one-Plus!"

Forget you, *****-- for you have I no use
You are not he who is, that is I.
Goodbye.

I’m throwing my voice throughout a corridor
With no one on the other end
A space empty and dark filled with my radiance and purpose
I’m here to entertain, my friends
I’m here to guide the tour
Each doorway leads to a lecture hall, a subject to purvey
Each window out is bricked and barred
With damaged curtains, worn by air
Dusty books and creaking floors
No sign you were here
Hourglass and broken microscopes
Scattered all around
Competition from the past
Tests the finest pupil’s skill
Unclear who will succeed

Sometimes, to scream seems like the only hope i have for eternal life; to scream and have the vibrations reverberate throughout the universe until it vanishes. How terrible it is that this hope is so callously dashed in the next sentence. How terrible that the universe will end. Will humans be there in the end? I suppose not. It seem we’re not very likely to make it past another generation or so. Oh well-- it wouldn’t really matter, then, if my scream did reverberate forever and the universe never ended; there wouldn’t be any humans to recognize it, analyze it and understand what it is that I was saying. To be honest, I wouldn’t even be able to explain if someone were to hear me the second I was screaming-- they probably would’t ask me either. I’ve only screamed a few times in my life. The ones i can remember were late at night on the side of desolate roads where i wouldn’t be asked to give an explanation; which was haunting. I almost wished the moon would pivot in space, reveal a mouth, two eyes and ears then ask me “now what’s all this about?” In either instance, my answer would have been alternating uncertainty about my future and loneliness. I might have even expressed discontent in my life condition. The moon might have responded “you control your own conditions,” but that’s only becase the moon represents society and the generalized other. I’m glad the moon just stayed the moon; a lifeless, crater-riddled celestial body incapable of empathy. I was jealous of it.
But here i sit now, tense and distraught. I’m not taking initiative in my life; what makes this worse is that if i were to set any goals for myself they would be social constructions of what other people value. My entire being is dependent on these others and what I think they want from me; without them, I couldn’t conceptualize myself. But, as it is, I see myself as a lonely, scared, miserable wretch. This is because I am not living up to their expectations-- or at least I assume not. My father tells me that all he expects from me is to “be happy” and “be the best you can at whatever you are,” whatever that means. I think I’d rather be expected to become a convicted felon than a “happy” person; at least felony is a definable and achievable condition. The only word more vague and meaningless than “happiness” is “love”.
So, I’m not happy-- I’m roughly the opposite, although that is a contradiction of terms. I don’t try to be happy, because I know it’s impossible. The people looking for happiness have just transposed the term onto the concept of God and made a religion of hedonism. They give offerings to their God in the form of unrealized self-disdain and misunderstood feelings of guilt, and most of them lack so much in introspection that they still attribute this to original sin, i.e. being human. They don’t even feel foolish when they worship the old gods. They don’t realize that human existence is that of God-in-Becoming; even though they relate to themselves as such.
It is this becoming God that troubles me and makes me want to scream. It is the desire to Be and to Know. Because we are conscious we cannot escape it, but we are liable to hide ourselves from this truth. Our individual-self (the Ego) only insofar as it is experienced by others. It is their reaction to this experience which enables us to make hypotheses as to our actual existence, and our behavior is the way we test these hypotheses. We are desperate to understand how others experience us because it is the closest we can come to experiencing ourselves. The only way, however, to run a successful psychological experiment is to maintain a control group, and in our private experiment, the Other (society) is seen, contrary to nature, as such. We treat it as a static monolith from which we read our name and Being. It tells us what we are and can become, but we look to individuals in our life to refute what the Other is telling us about ourselves. This is our second misstep in our search for the the true Self (Being), because we alter the random sample, deliberately or otherwise, to demonstrate not the truth, instead merely the opposite of what the Other has said. We do this out of necessity, in order to create meaning for ourselves and the only way to create meaning is by transcending the contingencies of Being and Consciousness. We use our consciousness of the Other to create our own Being and since this Self is unconscious and mute, we ask individual others to view it. Our Being thus becomes a shrine to the Becoming-God our Consciousness wants but can never realize. It is an empty shrine, where we wander until we forget the Being’s relation to the Self.
In essence, I am at the shrine of my Becoming-God tonight. And instead of lighting candles or screaming, I am wondering why I have come because I fail to recognize my Self at its alter to destroyed contingency. In the past I’ve laid down decisions I have made, actions I have taken, as so many animal sacrifices and lit them on fire. I’ve consulted my Being as to what to do and what to think about my life. Tonight I am unconcerned with this. My notion is to burn down the temple; vanquish my Being through overwhelming Consciousness. I want to deny my Self and its inevitable destruction in an unfeeling universe by destroying it through contemplation. Why should I slowly creep toward death, when it seems the only moment in life which is coherent and understandable? Why extend life? What is worth experiencing? What drives me on? The answer, again, is the illusion that I will once and for all deduce the Self from my interactions with others and recognize in it a transcendence of Being and Consciousness. I want to profess my Godhood, and in so doing enable myself to postpone death, until the final end of the Universe. I see my death as oneness and God, the gentle ebbing of all energy in the Universe into nothing, which is the ultimate meaning of life. All meaning is destroyed in the burning out of the Universe, and in my becoming-God I witness the destruction of all meaning, the only true meaning. Until that moment, the end of my human life is simply the snuffing out of a candle, or Consciousness. Forever after, my body is a waiting room to annihilation.
To destroy the shrine is to delineate nature and its synthesis with the human mind. This is not a cognitive parlor trick, but an active acknowledgment of reality using the body. I stand beside the charred ruins of what I built in my mind and am unaware of this fact as it simultaneously ceases to exist. This forgetting is impossible in death, because death is without Consciousness and there is no sense of loss. Therefore, I can only appreciate the fact that I have destroyed my Self in becoming something new while I live; a different, untested Self. I have thus oscillated to the opposite of Consciousness and become Being. I can no longer view myself and depend on others reactions to establish my new Ego. At the same time, my Consciousness is outside my Being, gathering stones for a new temple. My Being will take on the sheath of Consciousness at the entrance and commune once more in the act of becoming-God.

I never got to hear your voice
Remaining silent with anticipation
I thought of you, what you may hide within
a pillow, or a slab of clay
How your expression lingered, prepared
blank and austere yet flush
Would I feel thawing satin
beneath, your thighs
slowly unspanning, your flesh
ready for attention

You hear me come
Inside some walls
And gather heat toward yourself
Your eyes engage my willingness
an empty naive gesture
"Is this the place?" I wonder, in my head

No one is really speaking here
the person I perceived you were
rises from a fluffy polyester comforter
Clumsy and ensnared
By a memory of something I can only dream

If I gave you just one word
we would fall together
Like two dobs of marshmallow puff
melting into the dark wood floor
Sticky and diffuse

But it's too easy in this moment
to let it slip away
Sighing, I imagine
one day you'll say
"this is the place"
and then tell me your name

(...)
It is perhaps this association between birth and beginning each school year which led me to respect knowledge. The entire month of August tends to fly by, unnoticed, in anticipation of the day I see children forced back into ill-ventilated buildings to emulsify themselves in education, for knowledge. Knowledge, that Moloch of an idea! Hobbies, interests and Summertime activities were heaped on flaming tongues with words in order to illustrate their ultimate insignificance. We hoped to bring out the blessing of wisdom from its mouth. “What matters is the coming Winter, not the frivolous activities of undisciplined youths.” It is as if the leaves of every tree were humanity's hair, and August had pulled back every strand to blow the woodsy breath of Autumn smoke into life’s ear. "You won't be this way forever." I am yet seduced by Fall’s cryptic murmurings and led to believe in endless, Halcyon flight. With arms draped around us from behind, knowledge draws me into oblivion, with unlabeled memories and I throw my desires into Moloch’s mouth. Now that I am burning, my self is the voice of this demigod. My birth certificate is my body, holding a memory to be inscribed on some later form beside some other numbers. Life has only so many Decembers.
(...)

Hi
I hate you
Bye
I love you

The shadows of youth drape my body
As the sun encompasses a tree
Beneath the leaves and scratchy bark
Water flows through veins
Each drip of sunlight
Passing through
To reach the ground below
Falls from my skin
And each inch of earth’s rotation
Goes unnoticed

You won’t believe it
We were together
If only in my mind
And it led me to try things
I never thought of
It’s exciting, at the start
But then I turned and you were gone
I fell on the floor!
Afraid to go on
And I backtracked, to a non-existent circumstance
When we were together
I jogged in the summer heat
Gravel crackled under my shoes
But I felt it through the soles
And the sun shone on us both
It won’t do that again
Can you believe it?

We’re tying our shoes-- as we think about the day's gifts
          Holding strings-- curling ribbons with latent sweat
"I’'ve heard they’ll pull us through-- we tie around each box
          eyelets, through tunnels and catacombs."-- a shimmering luster abetting
beyond the sky.

Today we mourn those drained sausage-limbs at noon-time
     --(Sallow-cheeked mistresses and fortunes abounding
        for those who have time for such things.)

With tears
     --hiding the feelings of those who have none

                  slapping the ground.
We see
           every unfurling light
combine with blots of pity
                                                 to fortify prairie grass.

And I remember an old gravel highway that separates my family and church from geologic
build-up which the wind is slowly chewing.

I can't be with them-- like the western, sandy steppes of Nebraska,
     I can't hold water, and their loving nourishment sinks through me.
     My arms won't be like ribbons, in an embrace of the
dead’s remitting tendrils.
     As I lay outstretched on the Sand Hills, shielding my belly from the desert sun;
     boring water trapped in caverns under neatly wound sweat-bows and boxes
I, one day, too, cry emaciated tears.

     Surely, we are tethered firmly to the spool, dangling with
tensity on the tines of breath, shimmering, aloft-- but also, don’t forget:

We are fastened by a knot above our leather casing
     holding the body in-piece and being manipulated at once.
     We decorate the boxes, in which we are to lie
with wet, green ribbon, pulled through rocky soil by course, chapped hands.

Not only he breathes
Millions do, and want to stop
Wishing co2 would fill each lung
Swallowing poison, inhaling fumes
Bringing cords into water
****** relics in piles
Belts cling to ceiling beams
Feelings etched into wrists, blown away and thrown
Before traffic from overpasses
Right now
He chose pills, antibiotics
They tried to pump it out of him
Pressing down his chest
They want to make him one of them
Beep… Beep…
Every limb restrained
September fourth, 9:42
Pronounced alive

Hallelujah, I’ve found you
one I could have chosen.
Were your body pliant, capable
more slight, more saudrey
a subjectivity
easily disposed

I would be able to hold your breath, capture your voice
contemptuous, mocking and wholly undue
spending more than a half a day
being who you are would make me hate you--

But for a morning, maybe from eight to noon
I’d take on your face, look straight in you,
my mirror.
Shout out my name three times
with hope, I would appear,

without your bated breath
from jagged mirror, foggy-eyed by shower
I'd be able see me touch your body, glistening
parting your quivering lips for
myself inside, to feel your smile.

A phantasm to myself.

I want you, my significant other
my lover,
my ontological
displacement
of
milky
misfortunate
malaise.

Your substance is my fortuitous down-going.
My ship-sinking speculum.
Desire, mediated by a lack of being-there.

Klage.

She tells me I have
Beautiful veins for needles
Too much heroine

I no longer mind
the laughter of people,
leaves falling,
sun rising—
all is destitution,
squalor,
our dirt-clod--
Earth.

Moons snicker, too
at our moon, which,
sneering at me
becomes dizzy
from its hypocrite
cycle.

Pulling tides,
the way it has
a quarter-century,
my life.

I want you
to die;
I want you all
to die before I do.
Moons, stare on.

I want to steal an abandoned air-
liner for you.

As far as possible,
I will climb toward
your towering grimaces
crashing, directly,
into the ground
without wonderment
or acknowledgment
on this Earth.

Trending topics
of the day
could not take stock of my
demise.
Shallow conversations
sit on barstools
put off
for eternity.
They showed me love
by suggesting
“change”.
I show them
love
is coming back
to earth
and lying with their putrid
bodies
against my will.

"Love, Love is a verb. Love is a doing word.
Fearless on my breath. Gentle impulsion
Shakes me, makes me lighter."
                ~~~
Snipping, mechanical apparatus of air
pushes around, the slightest elements of sound
unknown torment, blowing
leafs strewn through the corridor.
A reverse vacuum, no bag
only the earth
which perpetually maintains
the forceful stream of words
like
"snip" and "blow;"
they are verbs,
just like "love"
only harsher.

Your decisions don't merely impede the flow of days
relocating things that would like to stay
like crunchy leaves, unacknowledged beneath feet
until cries of ecstasy are heard by neighbors
who have nothing to step on.

Those discarded vestigial coverings would,
with a gentler blowing
have turned tepid, flaccid and freed.
Emerging from a snow covering
thawing and lying there, unashamed of their repose
shriveled and fully reclosed, recumbent.
Protecting from rough, sodden clothing, parts that can’t be hidden any other way--
diverging water toward infrastructure needs more urgent and vital
fallen leafs would not only **** grass, but let flowers grow
flowers of intimacy and exuberance
touching the hands of young women.

The sounds escaping mouths of leaf blowers are a demand--
they are a type of love lacking tenderness
myopic utterances of planning committees
who don’t know love is a doing word,
like snip and blow, an impulse, only gentler.
Ordinances are the "circumcision-for-hygiene-purposes" of urban planning,
never seeing that leaving things concealed by Fall
is the best way to see Spring
and experience the joy of new awakening.
They should let each leafy-******* grow,
covering our shaft, our ground.
Prevent the pleasure-impeding growth of grass!
And the earth will continue to cry
out!
Tiny sensations of pressure
moving delicately along its surface,
cause soil to writhe with lost control
then erupt with wild flowers and shrubs.
And if not these, then at the very least,
trampled torsion of plodded soil
covered by desperate human debris, collecting upon it
showing what we try to hide:
our wastefulness and discarding of things we really need
ripping off our closeness sheath
and replacing it with dark, green, translucent barriers
of grass
and blowing machines with blades
their maintenance demands.

Our apartment complexes have ambient
tones of industrial malls
when your procedures are taking place
you cut and snip and blow.
Maybe your attempt at concealment
has been a revelation.
But the fearlessness of love
I feel
is something you thought you could snip
and blow.

The bar was full
               in the basement of my mind
and i read the manual, my buddy hunched over on a
stool beside me.
“it’s a cinch he said”
not really, though, because people don’t speak in dreams.
(i ascribe to them 50‘s slang expressions)
my beer was magically empty
and others were magically full
studying alien life forms
in this book
this manual
and wanting to puke.
dreaming is stressful
and so is life.
where is the best place to hang
a bathrobe?

Every winter since I was just a boy the noon sun shone upon my bedroom window
As I turned my head away from the wall I noticed that light shone upon the entryway to my bedroom
The red hue cast across the carpet by my curtains fell into the crevices beside my bed
Radiation of day’s star was refracted by my frame
And night time had been vanquished
When each spring’s blossom erupted from beneath the hardened surface
Every breath welled from my lungs into the external world of the elements
Then it was replaced by the invitation to partake
In smells of sweet bread, flowing tears
Girls in dresses dancing, boys aloof
Schemed beyond the pasture fences
Catastrophes were addressed if need be
By silence
By calm
By flowing breezes and gentle consolation
By the wonder and force of spring
Triumphing over winter

I made eye
contact with a woman
carrying turquois around.
Her pale neck, warm and slender,
contrasted softly, calf-length
shorn cotton colored by
the night. Her heaving blonde
strokes of hair brushed the skin
lovingly and shaded each cheek bone
with dynamic pulsation,
rivaling the fluttering
eyelids beneath my forehead.
I could easily recognize her
before
she told me I could
take an empty seat
facing her
away
to my table, alone.
But then
she held out her hand
gently petting the chest
of another man-- and I was silent.
Wrapping her ankle around his shin
she seemed to stare at me
through the back of his head, but
I was sure I would slide out of my chair
if she saw me watching.
I sat there, feeling her
rough tongue and brittle fingers
from around the world
pry into my mouth and glance my chin,
smiling with teeth
partially inside his skull.
Cooing,
as I had been,
she reached into
my chest
without knowing.

Meandering footsteps throughout the Autumn darkness
Toward each sallow recluse of a moment
A simple ending ceaselessly beginning
With each sniff of smoldering residue from the grass
Beyond the harsh horizon of what may as well be eyelashes
And inside- yes, inside
Within the blank fortress
Is a scoundrel of a man, who
Knows not for what he’s come?
To die, dear dalliance; fickle, frolicking foal of the Frühling!
And out the pasture’s gateway
In the Autumn, in the Autumn
Unaware
Above the marshes and the moon-orb’s
Sweet icing on the water
In an eerie sort of night
Forgives the foal a mare’s ear
Silently reprising in delight
Yes, Yes it is the Autumn
And the riders are far from sight

Blindly swinging at the wall
In front of my face
Although it is behind me, too
One continuous layer of separation
From the world beyond, the world we cannot see
I swing again I swing again
I swing some more
And connect only with absence
From this earth
Absence from reality
Sheltering my worried shaking head
I tear you from me,
I tear me from you
I’m confused
I don’t know where the ceiling is
I don’t know why there’s a sky inside my room
I don’t know why my basement is flooded
With air
Please just take every last breath of
Cyanide
Please just take every last gift
To the poor
Please just take every last effort
To undo your wrongdoing
“Bad times ahead”
And take them with you
When you stop being me

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, again,
and I'm wearing green shoes, green shirt--
overeager as usual. I've never really enjoyed St. Patrick's Day, or any other holiday, for that matter, and I find
it ironic that the more significance we give to a person or
event the more their meaning is deluded. But it's good to have something to look forward to.

Today, in America,
St. Patrick may as well be a naked, red-headed lepperchaun.
People don't care about him as much as me; they don't get out of bed
each day that week wearing green and scoffing at
the timid early-spring sun gazing at the short-sleeved men and
brown-thighed women.
Maybe it matters to them that suntans at the beginning
are only de-tubed relics of an ancient, burning photosynthesis
relinquished to the ground. It matters to me more that
these women think-- even more, know!--
that it is too late in the early spring to cover their legs and
allow the pale, unready skin lie in hibernation.
They want to show the men their defined calves and
undefined dreams. They fain naivety with bright hues, such as Kelly.
And I frown, because I know they have to do this, or
I wouldn't notice them. Waking up and putting green shirts on
the whole week leading up to St. Patrick's day.
Anticipating the Spring, which is already here, they raise their glistening
arms in the air and lean back, smiling, to sing a toast to the short, Irish martyr.
Who wouldn't rub their flesh with dripping tongues for fingers?

If I was forced by the great hand of God
To hold up my face to the heat of the sun
I’d melt away and leave the pain behind
From that day on I’d bump into everything
I’d see the world for what it was beneath the light
I’d feel the warmth of a stranger’s voice
I’d touch a world that can’t be measured
By lines, and colors, and rays from space
Aren’t I there now?
Things we don’t recognize control us
Things we knock down are empowering
If we’d hold our eyes shut for a minute and listened
If we’d try to feel our way around
We’d see, all of existence is vibrating wildly

I was drunk by a glass of water today
when I realized it was the substance forming me.
I felt it fill a network of veins--
like a sweet, sugary soda, fizzing within and decaying.
It burned down what seemed inside of me
culminating with evaporation.
I watched it rise through skin
carried by the breath which had been taken
and escape my pores once more.
I felt the water pull a soul from me today
knowing there was no place inside for it to stay.

Only the imagined faces of spurned women let me ***.
So, talk to me,
let me feel you out.
With my eyes, I'm trying to tell
who's being rejected.

When I was younger, and chat rooms were relatively new
I would bring up the topic of suicide. Sometimes,
contemplating the reaction my death would get from others
I would lie on my bed, sobbing.
It was just a mental exercise
to soothe myself
with the thought of my own death.
I saw this internalization of conflicts as the ideal approach--
mortality, akin to a train-line I could exit at any stop.
Where you pull the chord determines context for your plot.
I try not to romanticize suicide or see it as a solution; suicide is simply a neutral alternative to life, which is full of painful and pleasurable experiences.

You walk a creature without leash
whose shell is your own flesh.
You treat the sunrise like a breeze,
which blows you where it will.
Each day a subtle fluttering, or
striding yard for yard
a gallop or a stuttering
that never goes too far--
Tell me, is it really you?
Running, in a daze.
Tell me, if that’s really you,
how to solve this maze.
Because I see you walk that creature,
as if it were your own,
and it seems to me you forget
that your body’s not your home.
You wade across the ocean
and fire into space;
with every single motion,
you stay resting in one place.

chewing each sound
like a dusty paint chip;
they don’t sit well, dark, wooden stairways
wrapped around my throat, banisters
sherry carpet running down the middle.
trial steps, you buy with each motion
swollen bones.
“sturdy windowsills,” that’s true.
we peel off raindrops,
closing the canister.
i sneer outside; that sun oscillates,
with its blistering pirouette.
costume design left it naked.
yet, this sallow creaking in my attic
is
a conscious decision.
possession, not ownership.

We hid between fences
in our neighbors’ yards at night
while others counted

Abounding in delight I think I will be alone forever
I may tarry down each avenue, sordid; even longer
Dangling suspicion toward emptiness
Hold me by the tail with each imagination
I will; I do-- While I am without that
Which impetus and hostility abashed-- it’s probably true
Dangling suspicion holds me

They say once you crawl you’ll walk
You won’t stop moving forward
But if you sprain your wrists enough
You’ll soon learn to hold back
And doubt yourself and bite your nails
And sweat when others stare
You soon forget the ground you’re on
Because it wasn’t ever there
You shave your head you pluck your brow
You dance with eyes toward floor
Searching for the place you stood
A mere five years before
Swimming toward the light, this
Fishbowl’s water’s stale
Growing anxious in the night
As your skin slowly grows pale
But the moon hides the sun in the night
So you’re exactly wrong you see
Each moment in time passes us by
If only we would watch
And listen

Staggering through streets lined by maples
Filled hours prior with revelers
Now mostly barren, save for one man
A sidewalk, and me
Weathered and wearing his shelter
Shoes unmistakably fastened and striding
As his meek voice timidly prattled
I slurred "what the hell are you doing?"
Patting him down before he got in my car
We drove to his church's mission
50 years old
He's from St. Louie, saw his sister a ways back
Dead mother, spectrous father
Six foot 140
Likes it here

Fissured seams-- shutter widens and catches
Black foreground on sky
Whirlpool current
Order
Yawning underneath
Swallows
Handel-- Cargo taken whole
Into those eager stomachs
Once more-- for all time
Greedy serpents misspend hate
With whips
Bloodying their subjects’ once dry mouths
Who offer,
with that salty ocean
Apéritif-- to quell nothing
Their meal won't be had

Vapid, empty-- pregnant with my projections
        The woman dissembled
        her shaking legs;
led to the ground where
        cherry blossoms
        blow through the field
        and heaved.
        We ran
        disguising their war
        with tiney sandals
        and heavy, ambrose mist
        clawing for that--
        they even noticed
        your scar.
My true one.

Today, I watched a heavy insect of
indeterminable species
repeatedly slam into the wide picture windows
of my college library’s
third story as I read a book
analyzing one poem
Teilhard de Chardin wrote
after carrying casualties
on a stretcher
all day
from a war for which no name is presented
to me.

It is inferred de Chardin's time tells of world wars,
yet his poem deals with virginity
and mothers
although of each he was in just one.

Resistance to our ****** urges
and the potency resistance drains
was compared to
minute prosperity provided by the pursuit
of retaining 'innocence'.

The book was named "Eternal Feminine"
and its author's argument functioned
as a double victory for remittance
to a cloud kingdom
and shivering loneliness
seen through invisible barriers
on earth.

Hooray!

He seemed to be
rationalizing the struggle
with sickly pleasure
from repetition of denial.

But I lost interest in his foolish, war-time words.

Watching the flying thing reverse directly,
then continuously speeding ahead
into various windows
which were thought to be bare air,
confused and jolting with every attempt
and frantically circling in my sight,
I was led to thinking of a
demolition derby
at a fairground to which
my parents brought me
each year
of childhood
in the Autumn.

I watched, fascinated
machines stave-off
self-induced decimation
until the very last collision, after which
their motive force removed itself
rushing off to pilot
some variant of bumbling insects
and stretchers
in the form of French theological poets
throughout the past
carrying bodies
into the hands of a college student
backing up determinately
to burst through, toward the one who bares
no sons, who may become warriors
or demagogues.

This kind, secular Hannah
crosses my vision
walks out
beyond frames and doors,
clothes flowing with her
body, like a
sweet corona
sweltering with unseen heat
the fading horizon
of my day.

He sees her reflection on the moon.

Now he may not see space’s vacuous expanse
while
she may not be able to touch time’s clear fabric,
although they each feel
glass’s frozen liquidity
in silence.

Each
continuously strikes their head
against motion’s transparent barriers
with force
stubbornly flapping
into matter
with passion
and wings pulsating
toward a new direction
which does not seal them off
to the outside
of a building
in which they would be swatted,
punished for what they are.

Then the moment passed
and the sun’s thousand year combustion
had reached my neck
and penetrated matter
to massage me;

for eight and a half minutes
it travelled
toward a shadow I pushed
across the table
when the sun suddenly was helpless
to tell me where I ended,
which windows I flew through.

I was on top
de Chardin’s stretcher
as he looked at me to say I shouldn’t
charge in that way,
but I fell down
when he let go
or he evaporated
when I doubted he had lived.

Pressing my cheek against the glass
I reversed my propulsion
like the flown insect
and sounded again
my body's tinging
reverberation
on every surface.

It was the best I’ve seen
They said about me
And my parents were happy
I don’t know why that matters
I wasn’t, but I was proud
And there’s a difference
Pride’s something you can wrap up in
Happiness is a window display
Success was mine, and nothing could change that
We won, because of me
And I’m a winner
Today it’s in the papers
But that’s the last time it was
Because I stopped trying
Maybe if I wanted to
I could lay one down again
Then I’d jump
And ****** my arms
I look to left field and my smile crosses space and time

Your subjectless Objects of capital, the agency bereft GDP drones, O! America,
They are spilled on the pavement, an upturned ice cream cone of discontent
puddled and lackadaisical, they fester beside the hydrant.
Your news agencies and malls, the damp dishrags of industry,
snagged on the nail of defenselessness and exploitation, only infect the wound.
Each mess of a person, walks through the sugary malaise of your suffering
dragging it on to the next in communal forbearing; its contagion, its disease
is so many cysts on the mind of those syrupy vacuoles for capital; the private,
malignant caverns of dewy-eyed trust in humanity, insipidly drawing the rancor to a boil,
without understanding a thing.
You pride yourself on much, without eyes for the condition of your people,
O! America.
People, shackled in your jails, are so many ideas bubbling as to the cruelty of your nature
punctured by the ignorance outside.
Draped in your obnoxious flag, the cites are as malicious as the countryside, toward life, toward knowledge.
You prop-up the price of their crops, the know-not-whys, who plunder the earth to prolong population growth and consciousness-decline.
America, you eradicate discontent with cattle cars, filled with questioning life forms, gasing our minds and burning our bodies with your arrogance.
Like a popcorn bag steaming in the microwave; you have been left alone too long, and have developed a flame-- an inextinguishable flame of reason.
You have been disavowed too LITTLE.
You must not be allowed to expand any further, lest the impoverished bag of flesh which is mankind will burst.
But still you stagnate, until your violence curdles with drones and bombs patrolling our synapses.
Our brains digest your violence against us and **** it out with an abused dialect of greed and hate.
Then you ask us only that we eat from your refuse heap of burnt kernels from the “truth” of market economy.
You taste like cancer. You rot the mouth of competent men, and satiate the anxieties of those who would turn against you-- with a refreshing ice cream cone of absentmindedness
dropped on the ground and melting.
But the stains you made will always taint the sidewalk of man.

Go away
From yourself and you will find
Everything
And everyone will laugh
But you will know that you were
Wrong
And come back

A wasp flew in when I left my screen-door ajar, and I blew on it, saying
"go away."
It's clinging to my balcony.
Now, in agitation, knows I hold nothing for it.
And the dogs bark, confused by entwined seasons.
Wind shouts with orders “Combat your deaths!"--
but I acquiesce to darkness in my mind; waiting for the summer
to submerge this springtime
which has momentarily come and outdone
winter.
Breeze carries, or generates, the wings, of my living
solace in the stinging tip of malice on that minute body
--ignoring tendrils which voice gratitude to day--
supplanting laughter with its ***** on down the road.
I want to see the child's face cry as it is initiated into suffering,
smile breaking as he comes to see its transience.
Then slowly I will look down. In shame, walking past this station
toward my exit
and
the street which bears your name.

Laurie, it's almost Christmas.
That's why so many quietly desperate people
wear old woolen sweaters, fantasizing about being in
on a joke,
just this once.
Your friends are wildly cackling,
you're not dressed like the others.
I prefer my desperation loud, too.
I'm rather skeptical,
however,
of
forty-year-old Lauries wearing lace tops and wedding rings,
with wet words
sloshing from dank tumblers.

Each seeming mispronunciation evokes
excedingly excessive expectations
in the form of imagined saliva beads extruding
between bottom and top lips.
But they aren't mispronunciations, are they.
It seems that, over time, words have come to sound this way,
for us.
And you've done nothing wrong,
But twenty years ago, you wouldn't have any reason
even to speak to me.
It's fascinating to watch
the canopy of aging shield
youth's shallow perspective
from those rapidly fading stars
of disquieting mortality
which fall, bringing with them
forty years of confused burning
into vision.


How many times have you come to a place,
chatted with a stranger,
and gotten them to leave with you,
in your life?
I've never been able to, myself, but it's different when you're a guy.
I struggle with subtlety, but not as much as you.
There's just no room for ambiguity, were I to brace their lower back,
then casually walk by.
I have no doubt this approach has worked for you.
Only, from my perspective, your effort pulls
that growing chin
further from your forehead,
leaving room for misused eye-
contact with me.

Laurie, I know where you are.
You're in on the joke
outside this bar.
You're still in Nebraska,
as far as bodies go, so am I.
"The Good Life!" you slur,
having never left home,
you never want to go.

Laurie.

Laurie.

Laurie!

Please move.
I'm trying to shoot.
You impede my cue,
thrusting between my fingers.
My actions, words create an un-registering ricochet.
Fine, mock me when I miss.
I am not good at this game,
but I don't want to be.
It's not flirting.

If Nebraska IS the good life
it is the good LIFE, for one.
Like Jesus lived once, so do we, in this room.
He would also agree birthdays are meaningless.
Regardless, I can't be with you here,
because I don't know who is living that one good life,
but it isn't you or I.

I didn't ask about your husband,
I'm left to speculate. Assume.
You'll buy your children presents
and give your husband head he's used to.
Isn't that what rings means this time of year,
or is that only what you used to do?
Did he stop eating like you tell him?
Does he take care of you.
You probably think someone like me
would be willing, know exactly how to.
I can see you touching my arm,
I can feel your friends
rubbing me with their eyes.
My thighs recoil with every shot
as people say their goodbyes.
I know you're ready to leave me behind
and take my body's memory with you
to sleep within your head.

I'll miss you, Laurie.
You remind me that there may be one good life in this state.
Or, at least, someone who wants to **** me without knowing my name.
But the closest thing to a good life I can hope for in Nebraska
is to be noticed by a woman
who will help my imagination
think of a place better than here.
Before I reach your age, Laurie,
I want to find her.

Youth's last call yells loud,
and quells years of chased memories.
I know you can't hear it, Laurie,
but those years are over for you and me.
If you keep the thought of me alive at all,
do this kind and silly thing:
give your children gentle kisses
on their heads before they sleep.
Tell them that they have the one good life
the way my mother lied to me.

Totalitarian menace
refined, tailored pants
bleed malignance and
fear.
What stalks the passage,
normally?
Tear off my clothes, with subordinate cruelty
and tortured fiefdom from the sun
invading damp alleyways
and musty cement corridors
abet you enthroned
on that sidewalk stump.
I curb,
the habit
blindly happenstances about
yore salty ruins
we yodel, indiscriminately.

You hold my hand at a distance by grasping my wrist in two fists
and I swing my arm with determination, to swat the fly
that circles beneath your pupils
but it dips and swerves and palpitates in anticipation,
causing you to blink--
I wish your eyes stayed open
“slowly”
you said
“slowly”
I laughed and gave up
then sleep overtook me
and whatfor? a brief intermission
I was only really scratching an itch
for you.

If I come
to rule a small kingdom
and should be so picky as
to have you live inside
you’d only have to knit
for me a pair
of socks and hold
my heels
In your soft cloth.
I'll give you money and keys,
ensure
you won't be killed.
Or hurt.
I’ll learn what you need
when you are shy
or expect something in kind
for your time.
My ringed fingers fancy
walking up your legs. My tongue,
running between your thighs,
delighted.
But, when your toes curl, I don’t
know.
And you've removed yourself
by inches, from the ground which,
like me, bounds after you
desperate
to replace itself beneath your
lovely form.
I’d fall out of exhaustion
onto that throne, imagining your face
and your thin ankles midair.
But you’d soar on
past Evening
making the moon your own,
me your last planet
you my new star.
Take cash,
for these socks
which warm my mind.
These thoughts
climb into open doors
in my kingdom's only car
then drive away with you
on unbuilt roads
with plans appropriated
from taxes
on socks you knit.

America-- you’re about as inspiring as vanilla ice cream puddled in the summer sun
a damp dishrag, america, you can’t clean up the mess you are.
Your subjects, or should I say, Objects--
your agency bereft gdp drones--
they hanker, they brood
like a syst; they’re ****** vacuoles: private, malignant, caverns of capital
your pride? starving children, dying cities?
it’s a grand ole’ flag, you pathetic ****.
How about considering this:
The people, inside your prisons?
They’re free.
The people outside?
minions, hackneyed excuse for existence, and pestilence.
the ones who know oppression are free, and the ones oppressing do not know.
that’s why I love you, America.
You are what humanity needs; a slow, painful drain on our existence.
Consciousness slowly being ignited and swallowed, only to be ******* out and flushed away.
You, america, are a popcorn bag popping in the microwave, left on for too long.
You can’t expand any further, and you taste like cancer.
America, you are beautiful, and the death you bring tastes like lime flavored popsicles
that we lick to take away the taste of reality.
Your society is a cattle car, for the mind, and your messages burn the body
when it gets there.

Apartment recommendations for a city I’ve never smelled
in my mailbox. Empty wine glasses and static electricity
the air, the dust, the heart, the tip, the flotilla----------------
mercy.
me.
mercenary. bible camp.
jacket, jacket, hobble; ****** keys.
You’re a smudge, you doornail, tack.
Tack-- tack, tack. Honey, a floating bungalow========)
Pull off the danger, rose, it’s a time for campaigning.
Awash in grassy knolls, you hidden scavenger.
Grassing, grassing with watering hide, you scrivener!