( i )

I lucked out
on table 4 last night
window seat
baseboard heat
with intimate passages
from Ginsberg
in his purest
and most evident form

Cover-all Carl was draped
in his usual garb
(turning pages
of yesterday's news)
animating, culturing, bantering
on the fate of the
Greek barber
(in an accent of which
I'm not so sure)

His cronies
looked on
(with a twisted conviction)
countering
with their own tales
of ingovernance and woe
did you know that Panasonic
lost 5 billion last quarter?

The evening moved
in time lapse...
with painted winds,
streaming lights
and a host of
high school girls
running cold

Maleah passed
on her late shift
(checking the pile and trough),
patronized the boys
and called it a night

( ii )

The bald man
is back at it again
bickering at the till
(something about
a cold free coffee
or 99 cents
or the coloured guy
behind him who got it hot)
a kind Filipino
is trying to get it done
(at 8 bucks per)
losing her cool
and shedding a quiet tear

Wonder what the Purewals
or Haitians or Cossacks
would have to say
about this grim public reminder,
wonder what
this sad f*ck
will do tonight...
without his
bus pass
or sling sack
or broken Turkish stems

I shall never get out of this!  There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one.
She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality --
She lay in bed with me like a dead body
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.
I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold.
I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer.
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior!
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:
She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,
And it was I who attracted everybody's attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up --
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it.
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:
She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.
In time our relationship grew more intense.

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,
As if my habits offended her in some way.
She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded.
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces
Simply because she looked after me so badly.
Then I saw what the trouble was:  she thought she was immortal.

She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior,
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful --
Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse!
And secretly she began to hope I'd die.
Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely,
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case
Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water.

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her.
She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp --
I had forgotten how to walk or sit,
So I was careful not to upset her in any way
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself.
Living with her was like living with my own coffin:
Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

I used to think we might make a go of it together --
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.
Now I see it must be one or the other of us.
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

There are only two ways to truly know someone: sleep with them or take them bowling.
Phoenix Aime was the woman of my dreams. So, I took her bowling.

Paid for a game. Rented shoes. Got the little, sticky bracelet thingy that said Slippery Joe Lanes.
That way if we got in some sort of accident on the way home,
the guy at the morgue could identify us as bowlers. Anyway, here's the bulleted list of what I knew about Phoenix up to that point:

• She looked like Diane Keaton circa 1972
• She talked with great pretension concerning craft beer
• She only patronized two restaurants: Denny's and IHOP
• She was eight years older than me
• She kissed my sister once on a dare
• Her shoe size was 7
• She was perfect or a near synonym

The bowling alley was empty save a World War II vet in a wheelchair and his wife at lane six,
and they were barely there. Country music played over the loud speaker. And I felt cozy. Predictable. Like a payment plan on the QVC.

That was until Phoenix said, "I forgot something. I'm going to go talk to Mack real quick."
Mack worked the front desk, according to his name tag. Talk to Mack. She just talked to Mack. Mack was sleeping with her. I untied my shoelaces. Oh, Mack, love your red polo with blue tiger stripes.
I pulled my sneakers off. Oh, Mack, I love it when you dip your finger in nacho cheese and feed it to me. Slid my right foot into bowling shoe. Halfway in with the left, and my socked foot struck something plastic. A stick of tiny deodorant. Like unsavory truck-stop-to-truck-stop deodorant. Oh, Mack, I love it when you deodorize -- so hard. Pull the strings tight on the left shoe. Oh, Mack, rub the deodorant until your underarms are SO CHALKY AND WHITE.

"You okay?" Phoenix asked.

"Yeah, what do I look like something's wrong?"

She carried a seafoam green bowling ball with a ****** Mary insignia. "It looks like you triple-knotted your shoes there."

And I said something dumb like, better safe than sorry.

"Sorry about leaving you all alone. Mack holds onto my ***** for me," she said.  I bet he does. "I hate talking to that guy." What? "He's a vegan."

Now, at that time in my life, I was a vegan. And had planned some stirring remarks about the processing of sweet little piggies into cancerous hot dog machines on the way to pick her up. Thought she would think me full of passion, "on fire" for a cause, you know? The wise thing would have been to say, oh well, I'm a vegan. But instead I asked, "What do you mean?"

"You know serial killer's get a last meal before they're executed, right?"

"Right." Where the hell is this going?

"Well, have you ever heard of someone on death row requesting a last meal that didn't involve some sort of animal product? Gacy had buckets of chicken, Bundy had a medium rare steak, even uh, ****, what was his name, McVeigh, Timothy McVeigh he had two pints of mint chocolate ice cream. Dairy."

"I'm not sure how this refutes veganism."

"Nobody is a vegan for their last meal. Nobody. I'm not going to subscribe to a diet that I can't follow until the very end. Live every day like your last, that's my motto."

"That's your motto." I said. To be a great listener, just repeat the last three or four things anyone says to you and raise your eyebrows a little bit. (Examples: "My dog died." -- "You're dog died.", "I never ate breakfast burritos again." -- "Never ate it again.", "I love you." -- "You love me.")

Over Phoenix's shoulder, over by lane six, the wife wheeled the World War II vet up to the lane. And he tossed the ball. Good team, I thought. Want to know someone take them to the bowling alley.

Phoenix removed a glove from her pocket. She had her own ball. Brought her own badass, jet black bowling gloves. And if her carnivorous tendencies hadn't already put a ***** in the Golden Days of Josh and Phoenix, that glove did.

She typed her name first on the scoring computer. Didn't ask if I wanted to go first. That's fine. Approached the lane, three fingers inside the ****** Mary. She brought her bony arm back with the grace of a ballerina tucked away stage right in the shadows. Mary cut from grace slid down the lane with a spin.

Strike. I couldn't really see the pins from my angle. But I recieved a transmission via the "yes" and arm pump. That was two marks against her, and I was going to three. I'd call it strikes, but well, the whole bowling skew.

Here's a bulleted list of what a "yes" and arm pump immediately taught me:

• She takes bowling serious.
• If you take bowling serious, when do you relax?
• She'd never relax.
• My life would be tucked shirts, matching belts and shoes.

For six frames, I picked up fours and sevens. Phoenix, though, nothing but strikes. I threw a gutter on frame seven. Like a normal human being, I shrugged. Made a face out the sides of my mouth. Kept it light.

"I thought you were a grown *** man," Phoenix said.

"Me too."

What happened next, I willed. I'm not god or anything like that. At the time, just cosmicly ******.
Her step stuttered. 7-10 split. "Mack!" she screamed. "Floors are slicker than a used car salesman's hair."

From across the alley,
"Sorry, Phoenix, baby. I'll bring you some nachos. That make up for it?"

"Ain't gonna knock down two pins is it?"

"So, uh, no nachos then?"

"Actually, go ahead and bring those."

She lined up. Back straight. Legs together. She rolled her neck. "You're about to see how it's done."

And I didn't. She broke it down the middle. Field goal. In that moment, that holy moment, I was knowledge plateau. Vindicated.

For about 10 seconds.

Mack swaggered over, nachos in hand. "Phoenix, sweetie, you okay?"

"Do I look okay?"

"No, that's why I asked."

"Just give me the nachos."

"Ah crap." Mack had gotten his pointer finger in the nacho cheese.

"Let me see it."

And right there, right in front the ****** Mary seafoam green bowling ball, she slurped the cheese off his finger."

Frame seven, a good as time as any to call it a match. The wife of the World War II vet kissed her husband's forehead. Handed him a ball. As I walked by, hand on shoulder. "Struck gold, dude."

The Revolution will not be pay-per-view,
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~
NM 10/17/15

I hear the thunder meddling
its way among the raindrops
that permeate through sunlight
and realize
that the weather is a motif
for God's emotional prognosis.

God is but a ******;
he and I stammer upon the same boat.

Our existence makes a pair
of helplessly hanging doppelgangers,
orbs of confusion that contract
whiplash with every turn they make.

Two repressed housewives
that put all their hopes and dreams
in a ****-stained smile.

This collision of light and malevolance
is but His way of symbolizing
my shame-patronized indecision
in a way that makes people tear up
at the joy of beauty.

Haters  rapidly continue
Spreading hates and lies
While lovers smile
warmest hearts
kindest words
Love can never be patronized
Haters will one day
succumb to love.......

Somedays I think of how I will wait until the skin drops from my bones
To tell myself that I am beautiful
She will be there at 5 foot 2 the smallest skyscraper ever
Gleaming shades of tan and amber
Defending the shape of her thighs and the queries of guys.
Disallowing herself to be patronized
I won't need you anymore
I will love myself, in fair or morose health
For when your hands shall leave my *******
I won't even feel the ghost of your caress

The kids chemically induced
Reduced to ego threnody.

Amidst chaos he possessed influence.
Would disregard coincidence
And curse at the omnipotent.
Known as lonely pessimist
Could laugh at their own ignorance.
Pops was drunk.
Waved goodbye
to any kind of innocence.
Patronized
Sympathized
Irrelevant
Sunk below the sediment.
If humans could be celibate
This death would have ended it
Instead of only him.

It's all gone out of me, the hammer falls and I'm not ready to answer
Trembling, weakness supporting a tub of jelly
The pollen-filled air flies past like the
Pelicans at the edge of the harbor
Taking us gliding for an unpleasant ride
Down the corridors of plastic colors
Through the one word answers that bubble forth from
10,000 years away in hyperspace
Where the mechanisms of language become so convoluted
That they disappear completely out at the vanishing point
Coming up behind you again to drag you into that smoky allure
You remember hating and pinching your nose from
And hiding in the car, but the new fear is of becoming addicted to it
Just like your addiction to ego games and
Intellect, just like your addiction to pleasure and constant validation

The validation's there in the eternal self, they say
But I'm an intellectual
Too impatient for meditation
And lost along the way to enlightenment
That I truly want,
But then I'll never have it if I continue to live this way

It's wilderness calling from a tame fool
Sticking up for you the overgrown horoscope signifies
The shapes of skydives,
He comes in and out of our dull lives
And there's an electric current that solidifies between
Him, Us, and his music
Iron rods jutting up from scorched earth
A broken paradise
Crumbling in a whisky tumbler
Blackened by fiber filters, creations
Unlocked by flowing ontological
Caricatures, open wounds gnashing
At attention-seeking osteopaths
Fortune seekers clamber down
Soccer field bleachers,
Somebody lost his sneakers in the woods
Once there was a set of barbells along the trail
We fell in line and started
Counting each other
One by one it seemed like the green apples would never fall
It was up to us to wait for the shower
It would feed our kin
We'd begin to rise up together
But it could never keep up with our pen
We wanted the ghosts to follow us and overtake our mortal foes
But we couldn't command the armies of the dead
We derive all our pleasures from films and campfire stories
We contrive our adventures but we wait for them to happen to us
We take a passive role in finding love
And it blinks lights at us across suburban streets through windows in the dark
The mind begins to writhe with new memories it composed of old
An idealized time of a child with the perverse mind
Of a hogtied adolescent
Guessing that the course of existence
Isn't determined by the speed of your calculations
Testing the warm water on a naked toe
We could dive in and forget to breathe
And the water could carry us forever
Alleviating gravity
All the obstacles we perceived in past lives
Remain with us like
Chimney swifts on the bottomless April days of a
Klu Klux **** telephone operator
Who believed in the spirit and the holy ghost
And burned a quiet altar to Satan's minions every Sunday night
Drinking nail polish and
Obscure references to the films of the
Ancient Greek philosophers, who
Saw the medium as a means to a message
And patronized the elitest filmmakers to study the ancient Runes
And reveal their findings to a power-hungry public
That would not outright reject it
But that would have to follow it down the rabbit hole
Through the wide mouth of the trumpet around brass fixtures
And into the tight hot moist mouth of the trumpeter
And the elemental warriors would strike oil beneath the whole affair
Ending the time we spent hoping for any entertainment to create itself before our barren psyches
Busying ourselves with incomprehensible tasks and letting our indolence take the reins until we found our heads again out there amid the vapors of
New car chem trails and old railroad bunkers where spruce and cedar grow through cement earth, they force apart the ground with just their roots

We weren't ready to keep watch the following weekend but we
Had no choice when the government bond expired
And we had only technological solutions left to hope for
And wrongly we abandoned our research posts to fight the enemies
With giant weapons and uncreative slogans
Our drummers played so fast we marched along and killed all that remained in record doubletime
Rendering the events of that victorious day immortal in the ingenious accounts of
Philosopher/poet/historian Michael Jackson
Who gave one final performance
To save himself from what must not be

what is it with you and hurting me?

is it the way i hyperventilate that makes you want me?

is it the way i lay in bed and
sob and
sob and
sob
that makes you want me?

is it the way i force sleeping aids down my throat
that makes you want me?

what is it with you anyways?

Sometimes I miss the holy grace of ignorance,
Sometimes I miss the comfort that I felt when I read about David and his caves,
About his moody eyes and his harp,
About his *** addiction and his jealous, musical heart that only a god could love,
About the way he loved with abandon, reckless, selfish, taken aback in naivety, balking at those who dared disagreed with his unwavering need to be as he was

David made me ***
David made me feel closer to God and my mother
David told me a story of lust and ****** and protection and angst and a sweet tortured easily patronized self

Maybe in all of this, one day this flawed, beautiful man who murdered a giant and sang to lambs

Would be me

A woman, self possessed, soothing sheep and culling sleep in her victims.
Passion dripping from her honey harp.

David, thank you for the awakening and for the saturated hedonism that you spoke to in me.

I´ve been thinking too much of a past without a body
of a spirit who felt a little shoddy
with a mind that wanted control of heart it could never fully control.
I´ve been thinking of the taliban, men dressed in faith for what they believe in
I´ve been thinking about belief and in what I believe in, if I believed enough to sacrifice my body for a future I can´t be sure of,
I´ve been thinking if I were givin time as my present where would I like to be, well, the present is a gift worth opening even if only for one life my life a life will affect your life and in this time we´ve been givin we make choices based on handouts from a god who loved you more then you thought possible of a soul that shined perhaps too birghtly of a heart which holds nothing but silence in a world created by our majesty
I´ve been thinking that maybe I am god, that maybe I was created as the image of myself to learn a few lessons from hard times and grow a little hope from good times
I´ve been thinking I could be a great man, maybe I´m already great man, that I am still a boy trying to recieve his addition muptiplication division arithmic badge of honor in second grade 2 plus 2 was all I could stutter but it didn´t matter cause I kept going until I dropped out for reasons that could seem a little sadder but I believe in a world that I can be me even with out a college degree, that when Im ready I can go back without a worry of how maybe it should be
and I´ve been thinking about a beautiful place thats really nowhere when I sit in silence with silence with myself, I find it there but for some reason I make the road bumpy and with too many hills where my imaginary feet get ill from too much foaming from all this guilt that maybe I´m not good enough to reach where buddha sat and I´m not worthy to make a change in world where judgement doesn´t really mean a thing except for what we think of ourselves.
Yea, I´ve been thinking of blue worlds where blue´s jazz and blue´s slide guitar and blues harmonica and saxophone and trombone and trumpet is all they play because it speaks a truth no ones heard before even with out words then I start thinking thats what it means to me how can I portray that feeling to somone else
I´ve been thinking as I cook myself some toast that maybe if I work a little bit harder and don´t expect everything handed to me I could cook something better which requires more than a couple strokes of butter
that
Maybe if I belive in what I think that I can make any reality real with just a thought that if what I say in my head is actually what I believe then what have I been thinking with thoughts like ¨I´m afraid that no one can love me¨and thoughts like ¨I wish I could be like someone else¨that if what we think is actually what we create then I should be thinking that hey I am great.
So I´ve been thinking change happens with thought so maybe I am changing more than I thought with just these thoughts I think when I´m lingering through time and greeting each wave of negativity with something close to positivity which could be said is the same as god, that love that the devil so fondly loves to hate is really the image that I´ve always been its just that I forgot with these distracting thoughts,
I started thinking then I need to stop, destroy, annhilate these demon thoughts of hate hate hate which really are just fear fear fear but then I realized that I only patronized that fear with more hate and I added gas to a fire that quickly ate my soul before I realized I was on a downward spiral, confused on thought alone of I´m supposed to be a better man not a sadder man because when I added something else to that fire it spread and I realized I needed some sort of water which could do things a little bit harder
Thats when I thought to love the hate the same as you love that love.
When I see those thoughts tromping through this sacred vessel I don´t get angry at their muddy feet instead I say its okay, sit back relax make yourself at home, and they slowly settle into this vast expanse of infinity which some have called your heart. And thats when I began to forgive myself for all that shame and anger I cast like a shadow and I began to forgive myself for all that guilt and suffering I cast like harry potter and I began to forgive myself for when I was too scared to talk because I thought that somebody out there wouldn´t like me and I began to forgive myself for all that I had embodied with this false self I had thrown out to protect this oh so holy body,
I´ve been thinking that maybe being vulnerable isn´t as bad as its been cracked out to be and that maybe one day I´ll finally become what I am in silence
that
what I´ve been thinking is maybe this is just another thought that could be forgotten, but thats exactly when I need to remember what I already know of how the future should be exciting and the past has always helped remind me that when I´m living right now I no longer have to hide behind thoughts which no longer scare me.
I´ve been thinking it all starts with a thought, something I believe we should all be taught.