this is a poem about happiness.
this is also a poem about how great life is, see? here's a metaphor
comparing nature to the faultless
form of a pedastalized lover,
here's a description of the
effect of changes in air pressure
and localized temperature
fluctuations
on physical matter in a given area.
here's a bland truism that
anybody can relate to.
here's a couple rhyming stanzas
about the ethereal shifting of
connecting threads which
cause all life to dance upon
the cosmic stage like food poisoned marionettes.
here's an ode to the wrinkles of
my ******* and
the bits of fuzz that occasionally
find their home in my *****.
here's a sonette to the drop outs
doing better than me
here's a dirge for the businessman
that hangs himself
and a jubilee for his widow
who earns nothing off his death
because he left his entire estate
to his catamite.
I'm writing a symphony in color,
notes of fermenting wood
dogshit and coffin dust.
the violas swoop and drone
the piccolos trill fast enough
to excise your gastrointestinal system
the barotone sax wheezes
and the timpani drum rumbles
(the flutes sit motionless because
**** flutes)
the pianists fingers are bleeding
hes banging with stumps now
his face contorted in ecstatic glee
as if the face of god has parted
the clouds just to scrape his gums
clean with his dietous ****.
and lo faint is the whisper
which climbs and slithers
between the
false,
bash upon life with both hands.
here is life here is death
let me show your life
let me breathe your wretching
like squandered
like roots in the soil,
paint your everlasting cave drawing
in the face of your kitchen
and dance around a fire
let the embers lick your heels
til pagan viciousness overtakes
your quivering form.
gasp it in

i feel sick
more sick
than i have in a long time

and i don't just mean
with myself
though
that sickness
is ever present
i mean
the back of my throat
feels like donald trump
cut off his *******
and shoved it down there.
and
my head feels fuzzy
and full
of water
like vertigo
without the dizziness.
i am cold
but i am not cold.
yet to me
the way my body feels
finally matches
the way i feel
inside

i need to finish closing this bookstore
i need to go home
to my bed
to my family
to people who love me
but this bookstore
is the only place that feels like home
besides inside your arms
in your bed
which, metaphorically,
i shat in.

today
i googled
how to buy cyanide
and got angry
at the website
for not giving me better directions
on ******* myself.

sometimes
there are people who enter your life
for whatever reason
and if god were real,
they would be angels.
one of them
today
gave me a reason to live.
he told me to keep writing
and i did
even if it's just me
typing
with tears streaming down my face
but it helps
it makes me not feel so alone
it gives me something to do
when i am lonely
and when i don't feel whole
instead of searching for my own inner peace
in strangers eyes.

the second angel
i met today,
they left a comment
on a piece of my writing
telling me
it brought them empathy,
and understanding
to a negative part of their life.

now, if i am a horrible person
and i don't see a point
to life
to being in debt
to being depressed
to hurting others
to hating myself
and everything around me
well, it makes it all worth it
if ridding this negativity
through words
can somehow
bring positive light
to somebody else.

somebody better than me.
i will write
and i will continue to write
until i die
from either somebody killing me
or natural causes
i will not
take my own life
not for the sole reason
that it would actually break my mothers heart
and she is too kind of a person
to deal with that
but because
my pain
becomes someone else's
closure

because
negativity
can become positive
if you transfer the power.

because
music
art
and
literature
are the only things worth living for
and the only things
that anyone ever
needs
as a reason to live.

thank you.

Many laugh and many sing.
Many mouths sit agape with a cheek-to-cheek grin.
Fire swirls in the air as the acrobats swing—
Elephants weep, extravagently, with a tusk-to-tusk grin.

Amidst the cages,
Monkeys sit,
Faces pressed against the bars,
Rubbing their *******,
Dreaming of the trees
From which they would swing.

The freaks and the clowns sit amidst lurid lights
Applying their faces with a cheek-to-cheek grin,
Constructing their masks,
Aided by the conjure of the magicians,
Those who draw salt from the air and harbour apparitions.

On stage now:
Rotondo, the clown.
He dances, naked, with an ear-to-ear grin,
Rubbing his *******-belly,
Penetrating the mind of the big-top ring,
Shrouded by the coiling laughter of an audience who yearn for the lights of deformed suffocation as Rotondo, the clown, paints a new face and ushers in a parade of freaks and deformed grins.

if ted berrigan's
sonnet xv
   isn't a testimony to me
venturing to say:
keep the paragraph
custard away from us...
if ted berrigan isn't
an optometrist...
     then i'm vague,
blind... my eyes aren't
playing hands
  in a pub throwing darts...
because i have to say:
fiction is wholly linear........................................................
..­.................................................................­..........................
......................................­.......................................................
now i really appreciate what you're
doing... as every smart-*** does
laughing: thanks for the *****!
but... no.
          i've been prescribed
a celibacy where i yank and call
for Beelzebub!
    veal in a veil of sodden trademarks....
and once it was all about
making poetry jazz, but they
made it too obvious by reciting
their poems to jazz... only one
improv gets away... and lives
in this town...
and ol' teddy was in on it...
but i'd like to return to the tornado,
the crazy-eyes of reading poetry,
up
down
up
down
right
left
backwards
forwards
it's total freedom man...
a bee flies past
my neighbour's dog
walk in the garden looking
for the bark and the night...
i'm getting ******
and i'm thinking about
getting ****** with
the Jim Morrison tourists
who come to his grave
at père lachaise - funnily enough
i was there, once...
and once will do it for me:
i need the vampirism of
distortion, tackling imagination
with memory...
but seriously, why are all the competent
men of our age, lodging
thought into the brain?
that the brain somehow emulates
thinking...
there's also another gym opening,
turning brain (fat) into bicep (muscle)
by doing crosswords religiously
and all other mensa crap-a-*******-too
on the didgeridoo... qua quan quank...
for some reason i hear a didgeridoo
i only hear q... and testicles in a
wrench...
             but it really is optometry with
ted berrigan... in his sonnet vx...
up
down
up
down
              i.e. in joe brainard's college its white arrow
does not point to william carlos william.
   he is not in it, the hungry head doctor.
   what is in it is sixteen ripped pictures
of marilyn monroe, her white teeth white-
washed...
  so it has to either be optometry or gymnastics...
because i swear i just did a cartwheel there...
up
down
up
down
             and it's done with such force...
like a pigeon talking cuckoo...
    and then the hope that the dust does settle
down, and our modern narcissist
  steers away from looking into the darwinistic
mirror and incorporates other animalistic
traits into defining his sole possession...
     i'd like to see man imitating man,
rather than create this chasm of:
    like jacob unto god, so god unto jacob,
but given we're dealing with realism:
like man unto ant, so ant unto man...
           and you really can't say you'll turn
myopic reading poetry...
   painting, in words, not mere graffiti...
if like me: you get tired of colour
  and feel no need to experiment with
colour emphasis high on l.s.d.
   well: you're coming to the party of miserable
sods, with Dante at the fore.
      and if i really did mind the Geneva convention
on punctuation, i wouldn't full stop
and refresh with an
and...                               conjunctions don't
belong at the fore, nor at the back...
    but here's to heresy in the secular realm!
but seriously: why say thought resides in the brain?
and that we need more brain-power?
      brain-strain, ice-cream stashed as quickly
as a turkey might say girball in between that
cocky-glug-glug while being forcefed / stuffed...
  and would you believe it: it still won't
sit on a dusty mantle-piece... but glittering like
oil and gold... on something as intrinsic
         as an impermanent table of pilgrims.
male turkeys yes: where once there was a larynx
there now hangs a angry-red *******.
but you really can't say that poetry
can strain your eyes, you can't say
the writing is claustrophobic,
   that it really does strain the eyes in
paragraph litany...
       then it's at least that...
written like advert 1 and advert 2 by the side
of the road, two miles apart, on
giant billboards... albeit without
the fancy writing or the fancy colour...
but it's there alright.