Picture yourself  taking the first of many punches
Picture yourself blowing out a few birthday candles
Picture yourself watching a doorknob turn with wide-open eyes
Picture yourself clutching a pillow and weeping
Picture yourself watching a ewe with a broken leg being shot
Picture yourself being guided by old hands who've seen war.
Picture yourself perforating a decaf coffee can
Picture yourself in doubt and guilt
Picture yourself damning a missed chance
Picture yourself gesticulating wildly and arguing about a parking ticket
Picture yourself telling a friend that you love them, and not feeling weird about it.
Picture yourself sipping the greatest cup of coffee you'll ever have
Picture yourself hand-feeding a small animal
Picture yourself shakily trying to appear like you know what you're doing
Picture yourself naked under a full moon
Picture yourself lost in a new city and loving ever minute
Picture yourself walking into a room and hearing everyone drop dead silent
Picture yourself roasting a marshmallow
Picture yourself looking down at a horrible injury that doesn't hurt yet
Picture yourself carrying a heavy load up a staircase
Picture yourself in an empty echoing room
Picture yourself making ceviche
Picture yourself illuminated by the blue lights of a police cruiser
Picture yourself staying cool and detached in front of someone you want to rip the clothes off of and make love to, right that second.
Picture yourself startled by a loud noise
Picture yourself cleaning something inordinately
Picture yourself in a boat on a river....
Picture yourself finding something funny, then feeling bad about it
Picture yourself remaining calm when a step-parent judges your choices
Picture yourself with the trappings of a more successful person
Picture yourself, standing in your best clothes, two hours after graduating college, drinking cheap malt liquor, on the balcony of a cheap apartment, beside the best friend you'll ever know.

Life is brutal
Life is brief
Life has got you in its teeth

A wave of nausea, not hatching in your stomach, but leeching the strength from your legs, out through your feet.
The sound of a slammed door has coursed through the air to leave an indent, an impression, in your shoulder and side. It echoes and bounces inside your fleshy cell, spurred on by the brushed drum of blood
and ticker-tape heart.
What a body.
What a carcasse.
Hear the clicking of thoughts through carbon paper to long-dead wood pulp.
On Endless rolls wide as your *******,
your ticker nails down the free, lively thoughts.
For two ticks in ten you'll capture a word that deserves a second and third glance.
This.... thing. This wholly unholy, sacred little jewel will divide it all.  
It's as good as a weapon.
But, to slip through fingers, land in mud and be buried; as fate would jump at the chance, a truth worse than fiction.
Everything is rushing towards an end; some end.
Spotting patterns in cycles in routines, like an amusment park ride with a thousand
spinning axles
pinning
branches of branches of branches down.
When you, in your little capsule or gondola, reach the end of the long arching journey, things speed up.
Everything's true shape is revealed in a blur.
Here we go, this is the end.
No.
This arrangment,  and exact shape of whirling arms, shall come again, and though it seems like you'll be thrown away, you'll crack the air,
leave a vacuum where you just were,
and whip-cord shimmy-shuffle back to the center.

Will I remember the reminder?
To turn on my brain again
I woulda thought I'd be kinder.
Dead red-eye at the day's end

Leave the silver in the sink
Let the dishes sit and soak a dream
Spot the terror in your rearview
So far closer than it may seem

Spot the drips drip dripping down
And I'm speaking like a black-white clown
Full of thoughts, but they're in your voice
Nothing better than a broken toy

This kid is churning like a big machine
Just like a cheetah on a T.V. screen
He's just an elemental, mental boy
Iguana man: search and you'll destroy

Make up a letter from the magazine
Pair of nail scissors and the short clippings
Nothing so near and dear and true to you
as how familiar smells the duct tape glue

You know nobody told the bumble-bee
And now you know that it was news to me
Strung out coyote stepping off a cliff
And he could fly except that he's scared stiff

You know I'd like to change my name
Into the curlicue, ampersand
So that I'll always stay an inkblot stain
Until the books all rot and turn to sand.
III

Pull* "The dog says: 'Bark'"
Pull "The cat says: 'Meow'"
Pull "The human says: 'The human says: 'The human says: 'The human says: 'The human says: 'The human says:......

The human says: 'I can understand that.'
                               Sternly command that.
                               shear and plow and smelt and can that
                            
                               I can make a plan
                               to catch and **** and roast and feast
                               on that hard quill and bristle beast

                               And I can stain his image on the living rock
                               no, not to mock
                               But to remember what feats we drew
                              up from ourselves
                               As the javelins flew
              
                              My hands are clever
              They chip the stone, and scrape the wood,
                      and wind the sinew

             My tongue is cleverer still
             My words are the creeping shadow of my  thoughts
             And just as a shadow is drawn along behind,
                     and stretches in the late dying sun
             And snaps to attention in the noonday swelter, to heel,                                                  obedient
­             My words precede me, and linger behind, and snap to my side to attack
             And defend
             And manipulate

             For well you know, dear reader
             That words move men to move mountains
             They can drive him to brave the tusks and teeth
              And reward him with praise, as the fire flickers against portraiture
             Of a hundred beasts
             Deadly, proud, roaring
             And in the end, delicious.

            How splendid am I
            To suss out basic truths
            From straight-line scratches
            In the dirt
            I can learn the rules
            of all that ever was
                            And to learn, is to understand,
            is to become unfettered
            
            I can cleave, dissect, *****, inject
            And figure it all out
            And learn from a loosing bout
            
             Every monster brought low
              will be investigated
              To see how we can end him easier

Until the last monster
Is man himself

The restaurant where I often eat has a raw cinderblock shell to show the world
It was painted a long time ago, when a new owner bought it out
It was meant to beautify, it didn't work
But I guess it's the thought that counts.


On the East wall, near one corner, is a rectangle of thick white paint
in a field of grime. Always fresh, always clean.

It is marred by a series of looping black slashes.
Stare at them for long enough, relax the muscles behind your eyes, let them slip out of focus
And you'll start to see letters
In the dipping and diving bands of black.
It's writing
An alien calligraphy
People as woefully uncool as you or I weren't meant to decode it

There is energy in the strokes though.
It's a performance frozen at it's moment of completion
You can see velocity, grace, excitement, a little fear, and a deft, darting contempt.
All of these things in the broad and narrow ribbons of paint.

When I'm in the right sort of mood, with a full stomach and a lazily sunfried imagination, with the heat from the asphalt making things in the middle distance quaver,
I can make out the dim shape of the artist.
See where they stood, the sweep of their arm
the turn of their head, wary of witnesses.
Days in and out, it goes on.
Bare white one day,
blackened, besmirched, beautiful the next.

The snowy rectangle grows thicker.

Why the owner never stakes out his restaurant one night, I'll never know.
Why the artist doesn't venture beyond that one little pen, or choose a new wall entirely
will remain a mystery, probably for all my breaths to come.

It's like some mad story penned by a poor, gibbering lunatic.
Each is doomed to a war neither can win, and neither can lose.
I bend double I'm laughing so hard

They take it so seriously.
But then, don't we all have our petty conflicts?

A good friend with a basset-hound face is on his feet
The rest of us are weak
as newborn puppies,
from the late hour, the numbing glory in our lungs
But, mostly from laughter.

This young man is a connoisseur of altered states, an apprentice butcher, and one of the chosen few who breath music in and out effortlessly
And he's preaching
Prosthelytizing

Three minutes before,
he had been happily day dreaming
Three feet from the floor
with the ****-tube beaming
happy
simple
moving colors

The man on the set shows us how to stir-fry chicken
Our mouths water, but we're content to sit.

But with the fire coming up that glass pipe
and setting his boiler to churn along feverish
He caught an insight
or it snared him, like a spiderweb across a peaceful hiking path

On his feet
He was beginning to see connections
And had to share them with someone
Now

I'm a limp doll at this point, fully immersed in the body-high
Thoughts are glacial, movement glacial

Oh, my friend.
You're talking to the wrong audience
We can't hope to see it as you do.

But he keeps on keeping on.
And tells us a thing or two.

Cooking
He says
Is like ***.

As our laughter dies down to a dull roar, he continues

The speeds and heats and intensities can all vary
to give you countless subtle differences.
But the true constant is care
Loving attention to the finest detail.

His brows furrow, his toes test the fibers of the rug
and he glances back up, and I imagine a podium in front of him.

Or maybe it's like Jazz. He says.
We learn, or glean out, how things are supposed to happen
But in the moment, the twanging instant
Beautiful things will themselves to exist
and they defy all well-laid plans.