Fireworks were cool. Framed metal chairs with woven nylon Americana on watered lawns on the outskirts of the edge of Los Angeles. Hairy neighbors, Miller Drafts and dog ****. Sally ****** Jim on the corner, and Jim drank, or started again and wouldn’t stop, but was good with a flat tire and chain adjustment. His kid had a glove like a vacuum. His daughter was a *****. Sally afforded a Mexican gardener.

Tim always had fireworks. He had gasoline and willed fireworks into his driveway. He had rope and a keg.

Schatzky keep her cool. She had to. She worked the 5th and taught everyone’s kids. She taught their parents too, 10 years ago.

Her son Donavan and her husband Keith lived for the 4th. Little pink houses and Jack and Diane kind of ****. So they watched fireworks on flag hill while their neighbors ****** and got ******* and burnt their eyebrows. Donavan was ecstatic.

Each year the hill was gilded in gold for Donavan and Keith and and Schatzky, because each 4th brought fire and explosives in a way they could never afford.

Keith was more patriotic than most. He waited and enlisted and became a hero. Donavan watched on TV. Schatzky watched too. We won the first gulf war and everyone knew it: https://youtu.be/4gNhs2SRacs?t=1m10...

They celebrated the fourth in baseball stadiums. They celebrated life and heroism and purpose, and they celebrated with F16s and the best explosives the peacetime nation offered.

And Keith celebrated and embraced purpose. He even became a leader in the 2nd gulf war.

Sally stopped ******* Jim. Jim wasn’t married anymore. His kid lowered Tim’s basement and didn’t steal the copper.

Tim’s house was worth a fortune but it had a radon problem.

Schatsky was accused of drowning her dog, but she didn’t do it.

Jim still drinks; he’s smarter now.

They all meet on flag hill every 4th. The fireworks aren’t as good. A lot of build up for a finale that feels like an accident.

Water seeps through my jeans and no one can see my face as I limp home with a broken rubber sandal and a bucket of ice, a dog tied around my legs, and a kid face first on the grass, a wife whose friend drank our last beer an hour ago, a phone with  two-percent battery left and my mom wants to show me what fireworks look like in California.

A six-legged Asian cockroach just washed up on American soil, and it can lay eggs on ice.

Roaches are infamous for the myth that they're one of the few species that could survive an atomic bomb. It's not science, but even Adam Savage and his gang of Myth Buster's say it's beyond myth: a human croaks after ten minutes of exposure to 1,000 units of cobalt 60. But for roaches, 10% of their population survives after exposure to 10,000 rads - hell, it's better than zero.

This new species is the most evolutionarily persistent thing ever - if surviving means anything, it win's life on earth, hands down.

But I'd rather be a monkey.

We **** up and **** ourselves everyday. We slip and **** ourselves with power tools, or smash our fists into soccer referees and manslaughter oops ****.  We shoot ourselves off of propulsion equipment to see what happens.  Bone-crunching splatter ****.

From 100 feet up, we look like ******* mad men.

But the roach shows up carefully and gets **** done with nasty perseverance. The roach with vapid speech and wide eyes, glued to efficiencies and body armor.

To exist plainly - to work, eat. and sleep - is done best by roaches. Success is a cockroach.

Its time to write about dogs
with embedded decency
to walk away when you take a drunk **** in the backyard.

We don't have the same embedded decency.
A dog ***** in the park
with no where to look
except for its watchful owner,
who cant figure out why it's weird to watch his dawtson take a ****.

I had a friend in grade school tell me
if you stared at a dog while it ****
and crossed your pointer fingers over each other and pulled,
the **** would explode inside the dog
and it would die.

And I tried.

The waitress said she didn't have any paper
As she took orders and names and personalities
And wandered
Tables ands kitchens and free bread
54 wants less water
Tom needs more water
Vinegar allergies and detailed taste
Unsalted saltines are a fountain of youth
As she takes my name and phone
And never calls again

What's it take to pump out
mediocre ****
that the rest of the world loves
because counter culture and poetry
are bedlovers
like Anne Frank and Led Zeppelin.

Jude Appetow
and Mike Judge
have nothing in common
except similar sounds in their names.

Late nights keep me awake hoping something happens.
But early nights keep me in
and I hope for late nights.
But they end with me
****** drunk
hungry
for something to touch.

I can write like Don DeLillo in Americana.

I'll show you your personal Patrick Bateman. How childish Palahniuk is. I'll show you advertising matters. Brands. My brands. Shinola. Dire Straights. Colour TVs. Refrigerators. Blisters on your thumb.

I'll show you my shoes, this shirt. These pants. My hair.

Fist over knife. Forks over food. Jerking off into a wishing well with next month's bonus.

I'll show you when enough is enough. I'll show you what it means to be hungry. Thirst. Blood. Sweat.

I'll give you an idea and take it out of reach.

I'll find your consumer segment. I'll find your scalpel too. I'll show you who you should really be.

A crooked jaw through the middle of my bottom teeth
is a reward for a night well spent.
Charisma and charm,
the loquacious chasm between a visionary and a car salesmen.
Spent time, people, and energy
on credit
so that no one was left to stand between me and the pavement.
Now a canyon runs through my jaw
and I can’t smile right,
and my ear always hurts,
my chin clicks,
my eyes sit deeper,
my neck aches from looking over my shoulder,
tongue bleeds from biting,
mind’s weak,
linguistic chess,
anticipatory dialogue ripe with plastic fruit.
It leaves me nourished with doubt to speak outloud
and move outside my shadow.

A walk through a town built on tuition, brings nothing but satisfaction. But nothing comes.
Write.

A jog through Halloween skin and choreographed stupor stimulates nothing.

Write, you poor *******.

From the fridge to the desk at 2AM, to write, means nothing.
Write, you fool.

Write, because most nights don't belong to you, but still, sit down and try.

The coolest girls in the world put rings in the places where doctors disconnected them from their mothers. Guys put ink in their forearms. Spaces in their ears. Their parents say things like, “what the ****?” But even they know ink and plastic gaps are better expressions than dead Vietnamese and ****. Better expressions than a vote towards Michael Reagan’s father, the movie star.

You were the fools that bought homes, cars, and color tv’s on unprecedented credit, things for your daughters and sons that they would probably disparage if only they knew the word. You were the ******* that made Sam’s Club, because Costco and Wal-mart weren’t enough. The one’s that plugged us into free AOL accounts that Stater Brother’s gave you with your purchase of Pop Tarts and Cookie Crisps. I guess you could say the ink in our arms is yours as much as ours.

The thing about ink though, is that it’s more constant than anything this generation has ever known. When our TV’s become internet, and internet 4G, and 4G spaceships, the **** in our arms will persist as what was once alive. It will remind us of the life we lived before we were tattooed with the consumerism and media that you did nothing to stop.
  
Maybe you should have kept doing acid, you all were much more promising in the 60's.

Vonnegut was easy to admire. He gave you the sense that he'd seen people die, that war was something he lived - like an oracle saying, "Hey, this is what war is, it ***** *****. So it goes," you know? Then there's trenches, and Hemmingway.


But what happens if more people actually split an atom?

I'm a writer. I have no idea.

I did watch a guy get beheaded today - on Youtube. Almost. 30 seconds in and I couldn't do it. I've never lived war, but I watched an English aid worker, at the mouth of death say, "My name is David Cawthorne Haines. Following a trend amongst our British prime ministers who can’t find the courage to say no to the Americans, it is we, the British public that, in the end, will pay the price for our Parliament’s selfish decisions.."

Then a faceless man starts to rip an aid worker's head off.

So it goes. Writers go to war. I never had to. But I watched from home, between a Friday and Monday, and do my best to warn my children about the end.

Mother Do You Think They'll Drop The Bomb?

For most my childhood, I was lucky enough to ask, "Mother do you think they CAN drop the bomb?"

If you know Floyd, as far as breaking my ***** goes, done. I finally get that, pops. ***** will always be broken. But the bomb? That's not too different than the ***** is it? There's always someone. The hippie's now, I feel, just hope a little less, and pray a **** ton more.

Wild eyes of digital natives
rolled back in their heads,
hibernate and build
chasms to screens
on autopilot dreams;
vacant windows to the soul.

Official offerings of time and energy
Space occupation
***** in seats
Flashes of ******* resemble work
For bursts
But mostly stagnant heat maps
Reinforce ***** in seats
The sun moves across the tech center
No moving shadows
Make an 11 o clock lunch hour and me
King of the ghost town
Fat concrete cowboys saddled down indoors
An hour
I am king of an empty jungle.

What a weird sight,
on the other end of Nokia's snake.

Trapped in a car between 9th and 28th from north to south,
for a wild troop of humans.

What's a 10k, if we boil it down to biology?
There's nothing **** here,
no reproductive purposes.

Still, 55 thousand people line up and run 10k,
maybe to prove they can.
Like the way we collect guns,
or write poetry,
or hit our children,
or eat deer.

We prove to ourselves we're half animal still.
Archaic is a word
we're yet to learn
on our job evaluations.

If the alcohol gets me
Before my wife
Or job
Or kids
Then it got me good.
(And it worked.)

Where did you go, my muse?
Have you wandered
bored
into the Colorado wilderness, as I stay in and watch tv and read non-fiction.

Are you too good for a blue-collar diet,
when I come home from work and loosen my collar,
when I ring your bell before bed,
where are you?

When I drink all night and wake with vapid women
who don’t read,
do you pity me enough to find a better vessel?
Have I abused my body too long, like a tired mare you refuse to take out west,
duck past the city lights and deluge of skylight white night,
where the sounds reverberate against the stars,
where just an echo
rattles through me and I feel alone.

The first page of a new notebook
And the first sip of
Nascent ink
Deserve so much more
Than a scribbling man
On a stranger's latrine.

The happiest feeling in the world would be to grow old with my wife and my brother, my sister and friends, my mom and dad and uncles and aunts, grandpa and grandma and Bradbury and Ali and Mark McGuire and Prefontaine. Bukowski and the family dog and the sun and the blood moon and the solar eclipse of 2002. The last one for 40,000 years.

To bridge the chasm between words and affection,
it's tempting to start from a poet's distance.
But you are not a chance hiccup of beauty or emotion,
no tree sap bend or light-ray twist,
not a fabric wind dance dangling cloths-lined above
roaring Brooklyn.
You are you.

Pen to paper has a sound and the people have named it: scribble scrible scrilbbe, lift, scrvbl.

The sounds keys made have been named too:

Click
back
click
click click back
click.

(also by the people).

Hoopla says it's all too purposeful and certain.

Borrar. Borrar.

Bukowski says the computer made him efficient at the keys.
He has thousands of post-80's poems to prove it.
**** him (says the people).

For us (you and me),
keyboards are less frantic and poetic,
less thoughtful.

Chuck wrote something called 16-bit Intel 8088 chip,
we call it new-English.

You reverberate through yourself
While you pull meat from your teeth
And squeeze fruit
On aisle 2
Or braid your daughter's hair
while ******* your neighbor
Or pray in tounges
To cut in line
For a $10 cover charge heaven
I won't get into.

The sound of a broken heart
Reverberates mostly
through empty *****.

10 words grab attention
by the back of the fat furry neck.

Hooray.

Someone nabbed a B-.