Basquiat poetry
coffee grains
in my teeth
and dreams
I wake up to the walls in speech
recollect
drunken journeys
Emma the girl who
sits at your window sill
mourning the death of night's child:rain
and it is September
or either
August
I am lost in a booklet of ancient nobles
Upstairs
reading mythology
drinking
***** brewed by patients of poverty
Piano skin and noises
leak into the fire place
all alone
There is no more Time
only windows that shine
only windows that are dark
only women that lay naked on my bed and kiss me
Do not worry
I am not here
writing these
rusty poems
as I slowly push them into the sides of your eyes
Shakespeare eyeball
Ginsberg Navajo
Gas station clerk
high on
crack *******
I give her money
she gives me
a smile
a pack of
Marlboro cigarettes
that stench up the church
hiding the smells of
sad prophets
cheap wine and
oyster crackers
85 cents for off-brand large bag
Adam and Eve
clock time forget sleeve *** spoon food coffe-table
Death moving in down stairs
room
103
or was that the opiates
crawling into the tree veins roots wooden finger tips of my
body
of my
soul
of my
bulb
of my
Skeleton that is colored like you
Termites
mistook
a dying flower
for a limb of a tree
that grew sideways
too avoid the hum buzz of Vehicle Highway I-435 Kansas
Age 400 and 3
Child at birth
Man at death
oh how the seasons brew into a facade
oh how
the *****
sleeps with me
I make her coffee
3am
we smell of smoke and tired souls
pointing at the color red
as we
take lefts
and rights
into a city into bowels of streets and sighing police men and sighing homeless
I take off her clothes and
she falls apart like pedals attached by scotch tape to a rose
Nothing it Rains
Nothing it is Cold
Hello
We are the Nothings
and we
sit alone
on bar stools too high
and our knees are bruised from
praying to the bartender
to
pour
one
more
Whiskey
Yet we drank it all
and the juke box is broken
so we listen to
Homosexual men ******'

City Cough
Everybody has lung cancer
or is
walking to a 24/7 grave yard
Will I be buried with you?
I ask a mouse
climbing on my walls
to catch a roach

But he says nothing
and the roach escapes
only to reply
with
“Yes, you and I.”
my mouth gutters “And he and she.”
and the Rat complies
“And sometimes Why.”

Get another drink
April Angel casting a shadow into a lake of bass and crawdads
“Geh me ahnothur dreeenk” drunk lingo speech
***
***
***
Fill your bucket mind
with spatulas
Broken television screens
the toe nails of angels
Piano Keys

Spit into a well
Spit into the wine
500 dollars a bottles or 6,154 pesos
make a wish
make a diamond
make steak
make wool
make love

My starving father filling up on the apples of Vice

Number 3
lights a cigarette in the dark
and the shadow glimmer dance of her
Eyelashes
cheekbones and
Eye bones
and
lip bones
are projected onto the cement wall
an art show
a Ballet suicide attempt
a winter experiment on the Indians of North America

Ride a Train
Rise of Tides
Ruthless Killer
Ruthy big breasted girl in my dreams dancing about a fire that I built from
old paintings of my
Grandfather
as Kansas was spilled like hot chocolate milk

“Get up”
“and where are you”
“can't you tell it is 1am”
“why has the clock mistaken me for someone who cares”
“lover”
“where are you going”
“the river is too cold”
“you will die like Hemingway did”
“you will die”
“i will die”
“Hemingway will die”
“but not tonight”

Shakespeare.
Tapping on my window.
He gives me.
A pill.
We take a bus too New Orleans.
And visit the grave of William.

Cold coffee
Caramel popcorn
Southern Cut Marlboro
Telephone
Lampshade crooked
asking
attempting

Under my eyes
engravings of a crescent moon
from gazing up
on so many nights

Journey through an empty house
Emma
Your Middle name grows on the footsteps of the mice
crawling up the
neck back bone
of the chimney
a dinner table eaten by the termites
Either I or Michael the III
sits on the
window sill counting the rain drops that
tap to the syllables of your name
My typewriter sighs like your mother leaning on a wet window sill
journey through an empty house
in the middle of no where
outside rains on the fields of
tobacco stores
pastel rusted orange lipstick molded Volkswagen parts
a few
rubber tires
****** Indian Cadillac Van Nostalgia Highway Bandit
Opus Utopia
Moonlight Sonata Father Movement No. 1
and as my leather wool toes and toenails and heart and lungs and nostrils and Ceramic eye ***** painted to match the Season of Tornadoes creak through an empty house
where music is not played
and the wallpaper
is peeling off
like fake eyelashes
on a *****
stuck in driveway
Main performance
TONIGHT!
Rain and the cheap perfume of making love as the carpet doesn't move
doesn't budge like Grandmothers Tomb
Beethoven! Beethoven!
I am dipping your piano instrument notes
into the fire
Beethoven!
Beethoven!
The moon is so quiet she stares at me
and the wooden buttons of my gasoline washed swede stolen jacket
falls off
Look in here
there is nothing but hardwood floors
a few windows
letting in the
monotone gaze of the night
swaying wheat fields
crawling up the eyesight sleeve
In my peripheral

Highway
Highway
Highway
To the Ocean
To an empty house
that bends
when the sky yawns
like a dying old old old man
as he sits in his
crooked rocking chair
that a mexican Boy
welded together
with twigs and
coffee mug pieces
the empty house
its skeleton shows
like a sick dog
as it walks the endless boundless streets of a city where the lights are kept on too keep away the thieves
but the moths
and other
unidentified insects
flutter around the Bulb
like gnats
over a man's sweaty face
its skeleton shows
copper wiring
electrical entrails
the bowels the wood keeping the roof up
the insulation
the concrete and the bricks
like decapitated teeth
An empty house
is not
so empty
There is still the left-over hum
of a family
of nights
of windows open
letting in the
Summer breath
There is still
the hardwood floor that creaks like the chipping paint of an old bench painted white
There Is still
the bathroom sink
molding like the aging face of a wrinkling man
There is still
the windows
letting in a
slight breeze
you can smell the rain
the rusted locomotive limbs of discontinued Trains

Let Death be spontaneous
as will I

Shakespeare

I am a little boy
drawing the midnight wings of a moth
that I saw in my dreams
on the damp window
of a nomadic van
crossing the sea of a limbo AM highway
1993

Mother mystery night crossing Texan dirt roads
high grass
I am laying with my black lab

Death is a wild animal
birthed in the sands of a desert
that I traveled
****
holding the Bible
holding Hemingway
holding a
sternum of poems
to keep me
weighted from the sky

In a vision
In a vision
As a boy
Crossing the life span of a symphony
Crossing the life span
of a musical note
of a man growing old under a highway neck drinking my whiskey
from my Camel Wise palm

I am grace
I am Evil
I am the Devil's brother
scribbling war paint
on the bathroom walls of
Latin American 24/7 Neon Churches

Blessed with a passion
Blessed with a vision
Blessed with
the Night
on my back
that slants like the sunrise
that slants like
the eyes of a widow'd mother
of a widow'd goddess
of a widow'd song
of a widow'd night
of a widow'd Boy
stretched out on the Lawn
of a rich man
Who sleeps with silk
and hope

And I
I am a child

Exploring the tiny beauties
of things
that do not happen

I open the swede coffin
of imagination
of foot steps
of Beethoven's finger tips

I climb the roof of Death's condo
of Death's shack
of Death's
Widow'd cat

LifeX70
if you are lucky

Emma
girl with black hair
hair like sleep

On a Violin
On a Piano's back
On a Dog's color blind eyeball

Let Death
be spontaneous

I will wait for him
in my stained sweater
holding a bottle of wine
for the two of us

I know he won't say much
like the pavement

I will offer him a glass

Where does the poet go when he dies
Does Death favor him
Does he let him
become a bird
or a crooked lamp post
that shimmers
that shines
Like Youth once did

Highway child
Nomadic boy

falling in love
listening to the shapes
listening to the wrinkling skin
listening to the story
for ******
in a symphony

Aging night
leaning on my window
I would offer you a cigarette
I would offer you inside

But I know your tricks
I know that the moon
is awake

When does
the poem stop

When the poet stops writing
or when the truth is lost

There is a Cicada following me
like rain on her long hair
as she walks to a river

There are too many books poetry
too many lamps that wont let me sleep
too many poems I have stained
too many nights I have lived
Like a Moth
or a wandering bull through a cities lights

I ask April to stop the rain
I can hear scraps
from the storm
falling into the flower ***
where nothing grows

Let Death be spontaneous
and I will study the rain

He was going to shoot himself
in the department store parking lot

but people don't read sad stories
not even the beautiful ones


So I'll stop here.

It was 1p.m.
When the sun came up
when the sun came out of the sky
It was 1p.m.
When the world was shaking
when the world was breathing and talking and moving and
happening
The walls in his living room were sad
He must have fallen asleep on the couch again
Listening to the neighbor's Vinyl Player from the other room

He looked at his watch
He looked at the window that was on the wall
He saw the sun
streets
the world
He said aloud to himself
and to the sagging furniture in his living room
“The world is a big place, and it fits in my window.”
He smiled
Then looked at the couch and noticed it didn't smile back

So he got up
Looked into his mirror and decided the half-grown beard looked okay
and that his hair was decent
and that the oil on his face
gave him color

He pulled out his ironing board
found the Iron underneath the kitchen sink

And began ironing his blue button up shirt
Making sure the sleeves were straight
Making sure the color was crisp

He kept on ironing
Then he imagined what his funeral would be like
“What would they say?”
He imagined a hairless priest towering over his coffin
“He was a good man, a quiet man, He was loved, not only by God, but by his family, his mother, his brother.”

His blue button up shirt was ironed
It was now 1:30p.m.

He looked at the oven's clock
The clock on the oven must have been wrong for years
Even when the apartment complex was forged by the poor for the poor

The oven's clock said “8:21a.m.”
He was not sure why he ever checked the time on the oven
But he always did
He then put brown socks on his feet
Pants that were a faded Tan
Like an old photo of sand
Then his shoes
Tied them
Put on his Button Up Shirt
buttoned the buttons

And walked out the front door.

The life of a caterpillar
it waits
it does not know what it is waiting for
so it waits
the caterpillar wonders
it is sad
it waits
then the caterpillar
is a butterfly
and the ex-caterpiller
questions
if this
is what he was waiting for

So he waits longer
and white things fall slowly from the sky

and the butterfly questions
if this
is what he has been waiting for

So he waits
his butterfly wings grow weak

the ex-caterpiller dies
and he wonders
if this
is what he was waiting for all along

not the wings
not winter

April air
her perfume
a little asian lady
looking at the flowers for sale
towers collapse
so do hands
caress

April air
everyone's dead

A father and his girls
3 and 7
getting
snow cones in the heat
as the workers
stand and sweat
smoking
spanish cigarettes

April air
his mouth is dry
pupils tiny
like the midnight sky

April air
I smelt her perfume
Watched an Asian lady
look at the flowers
that were for sale

Lets just
lay here naked
lighting cigarettes
like forest fires
we'll fall apart
in the Chimney
Holding the strands of your hair
on my face
as we make love

In a suit and tie writing down the
speechless things
of the sky
at the church with a pistol
in bed with shoes on

April air
her perfume
I passed her by
looking at the
garbage bag
in the tree

the leaf
stuck in a hubcap

the women
following their man

I got a call
from a payphone
in my dream

I'm over due
for a dream
said the ******* the other line
I remember
her hair was blue
she was
wet concrete on a summer night

My beard doesnt grow
Youth is at my window
knocking on the glass
for bubble gum
and mother's smile

April air
the night is
always Sunday

In the parking lot
of a supermarket

looking at the City
with 2 eyes

April air
the day is almost over

She was 16
I kissed her
red red lips

I am a bee
she is a rose

April air
Everyone's a fool
taking walks to the woods.