The city's shrouded in smoke today
smoke coats my mouth, throat & eyes

& I know, I know.
       I should be writing in form,
in rhyme - villanelles, sonnets, terza rima
      some say there's too much free verse, some say, it's like
everyone's jumped on the bandwagon
       yet the most of the magazines still all want rhyme
                 but sometimes this is just the tune
                                    your heart sings, a broken smile
                                    & the way the images build up
                                        waiting to sail like ships in the harbor


& besides, should we really be writing in villanelles when we are the Mad & I see now, the best minds of our generation, the gifted,

the naked wastrels of the coming apocalypse,
talking to lamp posts, screaming of Ginsberg's Moloch

& the wrongs they did us, yet not destroyed even as we scream locked
behind whitewashed walls in razor-blade glint & halogenic

glow of ECT or walk the empty streets at guerilla dawn
& dusk, bearing the ample weight of our drugged-up minds

like those martyrs of the old Soviet Union & clinging
on to memoirs of our stolen, interrupted, spiritual awakening,

searching for the redemption of litter in this hobo life, 
changing countries like some change bed sheets,

others rooted by the invisible chains of familiarity & home, still calling
for the road, oh Kerouac, the fallen angels of tomorrow strung out on sweet

childhood memories & jazz in starved sunsets,
picking themselves up to pick at their scab wounds,

spitting at corrupt governments, bitter with alcohol,
writing poems of unrequited love to poets

far better than us, while Elvis croons
in the background & a Baboushka spits sunflower seeds

in the Russian town of my ancestors
& an open air film plays in black & white

& this colorless summer is nearly over
& they still haven't lifted their sanctions

them with their stone gods of war & psychiatry,
always lining up the next undesirables :

you could be next, yes you with the rainbow eyes
you the believer, you the dreamer of visions

Oh pity them, the children of smoke,
blind to the vagabond, the poet, the lover

lost children always seeking out the same roads
the city is shrouded in smoke

& I wonder if it's not always been there
& if we're living amongst blind men

ones that never read poems
or else how could all this happen

I extolled them as they went about their
Menial tasks in suits of silk;
Sunday bests amidst the concrete, the earth,
The broken shards of
Bamboo splintered skin, hiding interiors
                          And further, the broken mirrors of
                          The broken memories of the
                          Broken histories upon the
                          Broken backs become names wrought ancient.
Though further from fractured, a family calls,
Beholden to the absolute intent, but one wish –
Eternity amongst the bountiful brethren left behind
Atop tea-brimmed Mountains and a
One malevolent, revered benevolent,
Mao.

One more saga prerequisite this newer dynasty red –
                          Witness the
                          Wives huddled plowshares,
                          The daughter scribbled arithmetic
                          And sons assumed thrones to legacy.

I scrutinize soiled  – smoke amid pear peelings,
The dirtied – unscathed and archaic,
So very fatigued – just one more nail,
For his eternity, with scratch and
Sliver of blood, a sanctity upon chin
                          Beyond cradled hammer,
                          Hand hugging thumb,
                          Thumb beyond nail, iron or the
                          Heart impaled homesick;
But I and hand asserting tie, freshly pressed,
Almost gleaming with an embezzled prestige –
Born unto Arcadia, a puzzle near complete
Continued to run, with only second’s pause to admire,
So very far from the fields of, “father,” or first blink,
While Sunday’s best weep, work and wither.

This man with joint autographed, “end,” and
                          Soon to be mound, history wrought dust,
                          A chipped Henan ceramic
                          And hours in attempt to breach;
                          Behold the back of Chen.

*The title of this piece was inspired by observing constructions workers wearing suits we'd typically wear for an interview. That being said, my venture in China is near an end - years in the making. What's next? Ecuador? Japan? Morocco? Montana? Either way, I could never thank China enough for all that'd become naked before I and my pilgrimage christened, "world."

I summon you Kerouac
from your travels
your sad sofa days
show me the way
to the stars

I want to write it all; all of it. Every last word, sentence, phrase, poem, story, tale, feeling, joke, song, garbled hunk of nonsense streaming from my mouth hole like from a tap until the whole world drowns in just what I want to say; to let them know that expression is here, in my mind, in theirs, whispering in the trees outside, singing from every atom that can bump and grind and make things feel or see or sigh.

I want to sit within friends late in the night heads bobbing nod nod nodding as we agree or disagree or pedigree our intellect as we refine the phrases that make us sound like we know. Cos when you sound like you know, that's when you get heard, and if anyone's gonna get heard, ain't no one better nor worse than us. Cos nobody really knows; no Oxbridge don could ever write the wind, measure my kiss on my darlin’s skin, capture what the rosy points of her cheeks do to my brain, my body, my soul, my Attachment to this world.

So Hear me, O merry gentlemen! For I am alive and feeling and that is all the PhD I need.- If only you could see what’s dancing around in my skull... but you don’t have to! Use your own ivory mug! Really stop and think and you’ll see more than in a million poems roar within an eyeblink. Know it and feel it and see it all; the whole stupid shining racing roaring- untameable- restlessness of it all! Put down your pen and paper and rush out in the air and rejoice truly in the warm company of lovers and friends, in the sweet hum of guitar strings and in the savage itch of the insect's bite. In loneliness and mourning. In boredom and steady working with clever hands. And love, never stop loving, or hating, or appreciating, or caring, or crying, as long as you are feeling. For sometimes it seems we should always be in pain from one thing or another, yet mostly from the bubbling exasperation of positive go-get-em ***** for life.

For we read this clunky tongue of ours and say it’s what should be but there is more! For life through all its prisms can impress upon your vision a beauty neverending, yet to sense it quivering within a page is a spectacular sight indeed. So let’s leave the rigid, the impersonal, the stymied words behind and let's form a new expression, devoid of convention, one that cries joyous face-first directly into our souls!

So, Cry, onwards! And let's weave this tender tongue of ours, golden! Let's stack this world full of less-than-sane streams of speech tangled images driving shards of true experience into each other’s minds, until we drop dead deep in our bones from exuberant exhaustion. Let’s follow Kerouac to the grave; cheering, and keeling and full of tender feeling and find a meaning in words that can transcend into being. Let’s **** and watch and listen and do and learn and laugh and notice laughter and mark it for the concentrated joy that it is. Let’s sit quietly and attend to those things around us and ruminate without ever forgetting our surrounding- which include, of course, the ever flipping ever spinning and unwinding tapestry of our mind and others'.

Let’s find joy, or the maker, or whatever, same-meaning trap clap-trap of a name he (or she) has in your sticks, in what we can touch and feel and see, and inside those we know and those we don’t. Let’s make language a human thing that radiates warmth for all, and bridges us to those around us so that none may feel alone or scared unless they long to for glorious masochism, or curiousness, or any things they so do please. Let us travel, and dance, and loose hope, and find it, and live it.

And write tenderness into this world.

dear
1957,
*******
and take him with you.

It’s weird to think
these intertwining 13-feet-wide sheets
of concrete connect the sheets
between which we sleep.
There is something about seeing
every         boring        mile

between

that proves we’re more
connected than we think.

everybody’s angel bodies
find happening midnight
on Kansas pavements
hipsters’ motherwords are wholely robed by time
instant everything is ordinary
buggered city  immortals --
annoyed, parentless, marijuana everymans
swiftly digging unknown eternity
groaning strange in the long mysterious night
roaring, vibrating kindness
from their holy tongues
blazing inner hideous human gold
draining ***** forever
draining everything
forever -
Moloch, Buddha, Abyss
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Looking heavenward, I see only the earth.
The stars align and the planets turn,
But what of the holy?

Archangels sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
And the collared cherubim bleed into the rainswept gutters
Like cut dogs in cardboard boxes by the highways of New York,
Or the roadsides of back-alley Brooklyn or Paterson,
Where the demonic masses lie naked in the streets,
Their souls bared raw to heaven
And their hair as messy as sidestreet dumpsters.

The misted rain fogs on the busted double glazing,
The bare limbed trees outside fallen victim to a long winter
And a late spring.
The air that blows through the streets of these mundane cul-de-sacs
Has passed through the lungs of cancerous dodgers
In those hell-indulgent cities,
Where children find their kicks by freerunning
Across buildings of bricks made from c-grades,
Or by standing atop high-rises in the grey wind,
And biting their tongues only to feel their own consciousness
Burrowing into them
Like parasites from the condemning schoolhouses or university halls.

You’re alone when your skies turn grey,
And the rain falls with all the purposeful intent of a neon god.
You’re alone when your smashed milk bottles and broken plates
Are like music on those drug-dampened dawns,
You’re alone when your cold, ash-stippled roof gardens
Are your only way to heaven,
You’re alone when your fingers are cut on your own writing
And you are dizzy from spinning yourself sick
Alone in your splintered art lofts.

Your stars are misaligned and your planets need engine grease to turn,
And you sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
But you still look heavenward.
You see your madness in the same silver moon
That compels the tide and transfixes wolves,
You recognise yourself in newspaper clippings proclaiming ******,
You acknowledge your expression in broken syringes
And powder remnants
On the glass-topped coffee tables of water-dripping apartments,
You feel your heartbeat in the gasolined engines
Of stuttering Cadillacs
And taste your own warm lifeblood in the burgers of roadside diners.

You see cosmological galaxies bursting like Van Goghs,
Horrible, bitter-cold starstorms underneath white skies,
Raindrop-dripping garden leaves in shrubberies and verges
And earthy rockeries,
You dream of enlightened, ***-smoking boys in beat-up trailers
And the cluttered box rooms of sky-high apartments,
Of screeching atop stone-cragged mountains of green in highlands,
Of bell-rung harbours in the white seaside towns of England,
Of the salt-chapped lips of fisherwives
And the bone-skinny children of sailors,
Of visionary angels in stained glass cathedrals,
Of the cobbled thoroughfares of lamplit cafes in a Parisian purgatory.

And yet you lie naked on floors,
You lie high on floors and let visions spill from your hands
Like the whiskey you drink.
You are under us now,
Under the earth like meat sacks.
But your vision lives on
In every piece of self-indulgent fuckery written for you,
In every copy of your collected works
Or your novels.

Seek,
Live,
****,
Die.
For you are immortal, in the end.

Ginsberg, Kerouac, Whitman
understood the importance of poetry,
words from a good universe that make the world
admit a secret: that the best way to live
is to grab hold of life
and not let go,
to love
and not be ashamed,
to write from the universal soul
     for what hides in the universe is verse.

Everyone thinks
    that not everything
can be fantastic
     but the secret is
that Everything is

     Kerouac wrote,
'no time for poetry
but exactly what is”
     the truth is that everything is poetry:
tying your shoes to go to school
a cool breeze on a too sunny day
a lover's warm thigh
the stars,
that remind me that we all have
something in common

     Is the earth not poetry?
The wind on your cheek
     not the meaning of existence?
The music you hear
     not the voice of god?
This love, at the very least,
     not a reason to wake up tomorrow?