Flicker Shimmer Glow

The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.  
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.  
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.  
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.    
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.  
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony  
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.  
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.  
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.  
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.  
I saw the beauty of the light within.  
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.  
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.  
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.  
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.  
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.  
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.  
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.  
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.  
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.  
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .  
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.  
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.  
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.  
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.  
I thought I was manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.  
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.  
I stayed healthy.  
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.  
I knew I wasn’t manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I told my parents when they came home.  
They thought I was manic.  
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.  
They thought I was manic.  
I was outside of my comfort zone.  
I moved to California. I found light.  
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.  
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.  
The light turned the car signals left and right.  
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.  
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.  
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August  I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.  
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.  
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.  
He threatened me.  
I called the authorities.  
They left me there.
He laughed.  
Then the violence came.  
****:  stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.  
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.  
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.  
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.  
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.  
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.  
I worked through ****.  
I worked to overcome trauma.  
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.  
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.  





















Lava

I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.  
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned.  They both left their homes before they left for college.  
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.  
His mother was not a Brahmin.  
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.  
She doesn’t say what caste she is.  
He went to his father’s house, then college.  
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.  
She went to India then Canada.  
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.  
My father signed a contract with my mother.  
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.  


















Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.  
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.  
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.  
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.  
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.  
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.  
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.  
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.  
Indians lived on plantations.  
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.  
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.  
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.  
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.  
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.  
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.  
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.  
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.  
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.  

My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.  
She thought all things, all people were equal.  
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.  
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.  
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.  
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.  
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.  
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.  
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.  
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.  
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.  
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.  
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.  
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.  
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.  
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.  
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.  
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.  
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.  
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.  
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh

The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.  
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.  
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.  
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.  
Railway strikes stopped the economy.  
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.  
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.  

My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.  
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.  
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.  
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.  
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.  
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.  
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.  

On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,  
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.  
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.  
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.  
On February 4, my dad met my mom.  
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.  
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.  
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.  
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.  
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.  
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.  
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.  
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.  
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.  
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.  
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.  
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.  
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.  
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.  
She also learned to cook after getting married.  
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.  
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.  
She liked working.  

A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.  
My mother liked working.  
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.  
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.  
Young people and the unemployed joined.  
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.  
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.  
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.  
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.  
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.  





Warm Light Shatters

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.

In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.

The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine.  A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.  
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”

The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.  
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.

My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.  
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.

Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.  
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.  
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.

The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.

The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.  

In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.  
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.  
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.  
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.  
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel.  Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.  
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.  
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.  

The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-  
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.  
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.  
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.

Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.  
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.  
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.  

My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.  
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him.  The branch he opened closed after that.  
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.  
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK.  My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.  
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.  
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.


Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.  
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.  
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.  
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.  
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.

The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there:  the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.  
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.  

When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and  intelligence organization had been destroyed.  
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.  
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.  

In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.  


Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.  
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.  
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.  
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.  
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.  

The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.  
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.  
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.  

In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”  
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.

The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.  
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.


Edelweiss

I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.  
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.  
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the  limestone,
frosted but still strong.    
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet. 
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.  
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.  
I grabbed my dad’s arm.

























The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha

Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.

I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.  
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.  
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.  
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.

If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.  

































Sound on Powdery Blue

Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.

Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.

In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.

Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.

Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.  

















Pink Graphite

Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.

In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.

After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.

The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.  
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.

A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.  

On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get  me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.  



































Flakes

I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.  
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.  
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.  

There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.  

In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.

Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,  
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.  






































OCEAN BED

The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.  
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that  person in my bed.  
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.  
Just love.  
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.  
I sleep with my hands, palms up.  
I sleep with my hands at my heart.  
They sear my compassion with their noise.  
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,  
but not burned.  
I want a man in my bed.  
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.  
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.  
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.  
I ran by the ocean every morning.  
I surfed in the ocean.  
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.  














Morning

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  

Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.  
The magnetic field flips.  
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.  
The winds change direction.  
Storms cast lightening and rain.  
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.  
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents.  The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.  
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.  
I follow the sound to the water.  
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.  
The green water turns black not far from the shore.  
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.  
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.  

Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.  
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.  
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.  
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.  
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.  
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.  

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.  
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.  
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.  





Blue Paper

Haze scatters blue light on a planet.  
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.  
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.  
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.  
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.  
She bends light to make shadows against  thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.  
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.  
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.  
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.  
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.  
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water

they're saying "all you do is drink and cry", "I think you're bad for everyone" and you're not saying anything and I'm saying I love you,
I ******* love you
And maybe I needed something to bring me back to reality maybe these bathtubs are always a little too deep for me but I fit so perfectly in small spaces because I learned when I was 14 that i was never gonna grow into a butterfly
but my aunt still calls me hers and I'd still flutter my eyelashes on yours while the earth turned to ash because I like things ending so softly
and you are a ******* miracle if I've ever seen one I want to sleep with you so badly, on a trampoline in the summer and I want to watch you do bad things and smile so sweetly at you and you'll know that I don't give a **** what you do as long as you're still loving me while you're doing it because baby we've got this one life and I've been loving you as long as I have known what love is and I know it's in the way you whisper and I know it's in the way you say you're my world and if the world stopped turning tomorrow we'd be the only things still moving with excitement you make me so nervous and calm and nervous and calm and deep breath you make me nervous I bet you'll make me nervous when we're older and I'm making you pancakes and I feel your eyes on me and I burn my fingers but you always kiss them better baby
you're an alleyway and the kitten that sleeps there
you're the rain on the windowpane and the water breaking the levee
I'm drowning in everything I have ever said to you so if I say one last thing one last thing,
while you're not saying anything,
I love you,
I ******* love you

surrender hind-legs
targets yellow spines
yellow stems
flowers blend into frogs
tree frogs tree apples
tree fruit heart numinous
nervousness next level
levitation into vibration
watermelon seeds
stars, steam, sand and shadows
i allow
keep talking spinning
weaving the stars
love is a happy motorcycle
bathtubs zoological
sisters straight eyed sailors
cumber-buns saviors
yawning in the wind
at the hint of a spark
gravity embarks on sacred journeys
desert walks soul visions
quest into westerly winds
pools of tough romance tough love
chances are that now and then
we will pretend
that we are more compassionate
then we are

This is a three-part, longer narrative poem, seen
as old photographs that follow the main character, My Aunt, Lillian Goldrick, across two decades.  It was written 30 years ago*
______

“Hey Kid!”     Part I

Photographs aren’t fair
stopping the soul where it’s not
in rectangular guffaws
surrounded by serrated edges, pickets, teeth?
to fence and stab in yellow, soft-covered booklets
with designated floppy phrase
“Your memories”

Happier than she could ever be...

A black and white day at Salisbury Beach, NH
hung over his hammock
Private pin-up girl
tilts her head against silver sheen of shoulder
Hair, dark chignon
except for a few wispy curls about her face
freed by wind
bleached by sun

Stopped

...for three decades
Legs slightly bent—long extended
that could stop trains, stop traffic

Stopped

Modest bathing suit, probably peach
cannot hide (not that she would)
the undeniable
And if there were question left
you could look at her smile—and love her
posed by he message scrawled in sand:

“Hey Kid!”

What kid? Where?
In the foreground?
In the camera’s eye?

In the background—
a Ferris wheel, a billboard
and  r-i-g-h-t  there—Can’t you see it?
Look again—behind her eyes
You can barely see it, but it’s there.
Remember?

The Depression
Only ten years before
It was April
Stroke, heart attack
Both of them gone, a year apart!
The priest came
Last Rites for mortally stricken
Candles, crucifix, the Catholic containment
of holy water that dams the tears

Kneeling around the bed
they said the Rosary

——————————

After VJ Day he came
to the house on the corner
of Commonwealth Ave.
She knew he was coming
but she could not be ready today
nor tomorrow
nor next week—or ever...

“Lill! Will ya come to the door?
She’ll be ready in a minute.
Hey Lill! Hurry up, will ya!
They’re waitin’ fer us!”

Upstairs in the dark hallway
her door clicks shut....
________


"Hey Kid"    Part II


The clock at Joe Rianni’s read 20 minutes to 12...

Crowd from the Phillip’s Theater—gone
though laughter lingers
in a Friday mood
in high-backed booths
where only an hour ago swinging free
were high-heeled shoes
legs crossed at knees....

Now on tables abandoned
deserted fields of French
fries lie cold in salt flurries

Only female straws wear lipstick
as do Luckys bent in ashtrays
Males, uniformly flattened
as powder burned, as mortar might
shells, casings—the evidence of war
Among explosions of tickled giggles
one was taken broadside...

listing     toward      stars
_______

...The clock read 20 minutes to 12

when she walked in--
And Rhea stopped swabbing black mica counters
long enough to absorb late-customer hate
and envy that such beauty can arouse
In voice hoarse and weighted like a trucker’s

“Whadaya have, Lill?”

“coffee”

The small answer settled at the soda fountain
and slowly struck a match...
She was falling from the slant
of her black felt hat
dripping off the point of pheasant feather
Gray gabardine suit
tailored from angle of shoulder
to dart diagonally
toward such a waist!
Turned to skirt hips
that arched and dove toward slit—
then seams that run the round of calf

that seem to flow
to ankles of naught—
...and all that seems

Black     high-heeled     above it

Coffee— cold, stale
Gray glassed-in stare
searches air and random walls
of coat hooks, menus, mirrors...
while lips ****** exiled words— replies

Dragging a demon from her Camel
slowly     purposefully
she exhaled a burly arm of smoke
that rose and laid its hand
against the ceiled atmosphere of embossed tin
Then leaning over her shoulder
in roiling emission of shrugs and sneers—

“Lill—There’s no way outa here!”
________


“Hey Kid!”    Part III

After kneeling backwards on their chairs
after nuns, catechism recited
After—
Five of them scuffed through leaves and litter
along the curbing
spotting cars that counted—
Bugs, beach wagons, flying bathtubs
A slower way home of hunting
shiny chestnuts and muddy finds
rare match book covers
and bottle caps that win ya things!

One breaks from bunch
and trials off to where
dimes turn to candies!
...at a dingy luncheonette...Joe Rianni’s
____

Here—behind smeary wall of glass
pleasure leers while holding back
those grimy fingers, lips that long
for jelly fish, gum drops, lollies
holding back the company
of Baby Ruth, and Mary Jane
O Henry or Bazooka Joe!
For less money but the same salivation
there were colored dots to chew and ****
from strips of paper that last forever!
For a little more, plus the sweet struggle
of desire denied
a kid could be proud owner
of a pea shooter or trading cards!
While in the mouth
were golden imaginings—
the chocolate foil of coins
and the candied pretense of cigarette adulthood
_____

Rhea didn’t see her in the line...

Only grownups with wallets and purses
Only grownups get waited on...
...because Rhea was a Gypsy!
Kids could tell!
by her big red lips and hair to match
by the nasty way she chased them out—
“****** kids!”
Only grownups get waited on....
_______

And the clock read 20 minutes to 12

While a child waits—
time stirs in a ceiling fan
   There’s a drift in attention
      along deepening endless walls
         toward a line of sleepy booths
              carved with

“I was here—in such and such a year”

Her aunt—at the last stool—like always
Their names too close
Confused too often

A little girl wonders
about the sight behind the sightless stare
loafers, ankle socks, the ‘40s hair
the gathered skirt that gathers ashes
as they fall from cigarette
held in yellowed fingertips
Tremors crimp the smoke that climbs—

              ...a strobing pillar

“Whataya want, girly?”

              ...the only movement

“Hey! What’s it gonna be!”

              ...in a shot—

“HEY KID!”

              Snapped

Did you expect it all to stop at the wave of your hand?
Like the sun's just going to drop if it's night you demand.
Well, in the dark we're just air, so the house might dissolve.
But once again we are gone. Who's going to care if we were ever here at all?
Well summer's going to come; it's gonna cloud our eyes again.
No need to focus when there's nothing that's worth seeing.
So we trade liquor for blood in an attempt to tip the scales.
I think you lost what you loved in that mess of details.
They seemed so important at the time,
but now you can't recall any of the names, faces, or lines;
it's more the feeling of it all.
Well, winter's going to end. I'm going to clean these veins again.
So close to dying that I finally can start living.

"Hi, we're back. This is radio KX and we're here with Conor Oberst of the band Bright Eyes. How are you doing Conor?"
"Fine, thanks. Just a little wet."
"Oh, it's still coming down out there?"
"Yeah, I sort of had to run from the car."
"Well we're glad you made it! Now, your album 'Fevers and Mirrors'... tell us about the title. I know there's a good deal of repeated imagery in the lyrics; fevers, mirrors, scales, clocks. Could you discuss some of this?"
"Sure, let's see... the fevers..."
"First, First let me say that, this is a brilliant record, man, we're all really into it here at the station and we get lots of calls, it's really good stuff."
"Thanks. Thanks a lot."
"So talk about some of the symbolisms."
"The fever?"
"Sure!"
"Well, the fever is basically, what ever ails you, or oppresses you... It could be anything. In my case it's my neurosis, my depression... but I don't want it to be limited to that... it's certainly different for different people. It's whatever keeps you up at night."
"I see."
"And the, and the mirror's like, as you might have guessed, self-examination, or reflection, or whatever form. This could be vanity, or self loathing. I, I know I'm, I'm guilty of both."
"That's interesting. How about the scale?"
"The scales are essentially our attempt to solve our problems quantitatively, through logic or rationalization. In my opinion it's often fruitless, but... always, no, not always... And the clocks and calendars it's uh... is just... time... our little measurements, it's like, it's always chasing after us."
"It is. It is. Uh, How about this Arienette, how does she fit into all this?"
"Um, I'd prefer not to talk about it, in case she's listening."
"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize she was a real person."
"She's not. I made her up."
"Oh, so she's not real?"
"Just as real as you or I."
"I don't think I understand."
"Neither do I, but after I grow up I will. I mean a lot... a lot of things are really unclear for me right now."
"That's interesting. Ah, now you mentioned your depression..."
"...No I didn't."
"You're from Nebraska, right?"
"Yeah. So?"
"Now, let me now if I'm getting too personal, but there seem to be a pretty dark past back there somewhere. What was it like for you growing up?"
"Dark? Not really... uh... actually I had a great childhood, my parents were wonderful. I went to a Catholic school. They have... they had money, so... it... It was all... easy. Basically I had everything I wanted handed to me."
"Really? So some of the references, like babies in bathtubs, are not biographical?"
"Well I do have a brother who died in a bathtub. Drowned. Actually, I had five brothers who died that way."
Chuckles
"No, I'm serious. My mother drowned one every year for five consecutive years. They were all named Padraic, so that's... they all got one song."
"Hmm."
"It's kinda like walking out the door to discover it's a window."
"But your music certainly is very personal."
"Of course. I put a lot of myself into what I do. But it's like, being an author you have to, free yourself to use symbolism and allegory to reach your goal and, and a part of that is, compassion, empathy for other people and their, and their situations. Some of what I sing comes from other people's experiences as well as my own. It... It shouldn't matter, the message is intended to be universal."
"I see what you mean."
"Can you make that sound stop, please?"
"Yes!

...and your goal?"
"I don't know. Uh, create feelings, I guess. A song? It never ends up the way you planned it, though."
"That's funny that you say that, do you think that..."
"Do you ever hear things that aren't really there?"
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Never mind. How long have you worked at this station?"
"Oh, just a few minutes. Uh, now you mentioned empathy for others. Would you say that that is what motivates you to make the music that you make?"
"No, not really. It's more a need for sympathy. I want people to feel sorry for me. I like the feel of the burn of the audience's eyes on me when I'm whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone. When I was a kid, I used to carry this safety pin around with me, everywhere I went in my pocket. And when people weren't paying enough attention to me, I'd dig it into my arm until I started crying. Everyone would stop what they were doing and ask me what was the matter. I guess, I guess I kinda..."
"Really? You're telling me you're doing all this for attention?"
"No, I hate it when people look at me. I get nauseous. In fact, I could care less what people think, about me. Do you feel that? Wanna dance?"
"No, I'm feeling sick."
"I really just wanna be warm yellow light that pours all over everyone I love."
"So, uh, you're gonna play something for us now. Is this a new song?"
"Yeah, but I haven't written it yet. It's one I've been meaning to write, uh, called, "A Song To Pass The Time."
"Oh, that's a nice title."
"No it isn't. You should write your own scripts."
"Yeah, I know!"

I have been to the mountains where I have cried.
I climb hills not for the vista.
I climb for falling down the rabbit hole.
Then, I plummet down the icy gully.

I have drowned in bathtubs where I have smiled.
I swim in cold bathtubs not due to recklessness.
I swim to delude my presence.
Then, I hitch-hike upto the peak.

I do these things I cannot understand.
Reality slips away,
like fresh snow and water slip from my bare hands.
I climb to the mountain and fall to the bathtub.

frayed edges of the putrid words
spewing out of your mouth
droplets of spit spotting my face
burning acid holes in my cheeks
i'm bathing in a tub of radioactive filth
and your angles tangle in the drain along with
the hair and the dirt
but i still love you

I returned from a foreign land
The land of Jesus
Israel.
I had only forgotten one thing
Over the course of two weeks
I forgot I had a blue bathtub
The tub of blue took me offguard
I stared at it for a long time
Then I had to accept the fact.
My bathtub was indeed blue

Harassed light is cut and divided
coming of the day is decayed in milk,
the haggard moon is the latest unwelcome intrusion
Detached body parts are the new order of things
retracted senses ignore the smells of yesterday,
A quiet mayhem to each passing moment,
Each thought wrenches like sand under fingernails,
Settling into place briefly has no explanatory value.
Time is retracting wrapped in plastic,
Guttural cries the sea is a bathtub of regret
Formless burdens illuminated by the sun blunted and captured

Got new job today
After hanging up phone
Went for smoke on deck
Looking up at gloom laden sky
Down at wet vermilion leaves
Felt nothing (empty blessing sickness)

Bored
Want for whole charade to be over
All this *******
Therapy and

ADD meds
That make me feel like a zombie
(Dead eyes in mirror look through you)
Abuse them anyway
I don't want to stop

Pretending
To be so much better for family
Really still useless (dead weight anvil)
Really still high dreaming
Of tall buildings on rainy nights
Or ketamine bathtubs
Ready for the end

Tired
Of worrying about the girl
Remorseful poison
Afraid it will take her away
Says she can't stop
Don't want her to go

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My mother raised me under the belief that monotony was a worse state than death and she lived her life accordingly. She taught me to do the same. About five years ago, my mother died. Her death steered my course from any sort of seated, settled life and into a spiral of new experiences.
For months after she left, I skulked about each day feeling slumped and cynical and finding everything and everyone coated in the sickly metallic taste of loss. I noticed that without her I had allowed myself to settle into a routine of mourning. I pitied myself, knowing what she would have thought.  Life was already so different without her there and I couldn’t continue with life as if nothing had happened, so I jumped from my stagnancy in attempts to forget my mother’s name and to destroy the mundane just like she had taught me to. I had to learn how to live again, and I wanted to find something that would always be there if she wouldn’t. I had a purpose. I tried to start anew and drown myself in change by throwing all that I knew to the wind and leaving my life behind.

I was running away from the fact that she had died for a long time. When I first picked up and left, I befriended the ocean and for many months I soaked my sorrows in salt water and *****, hoping to forget. I repressed my thoughts. Mom’s Gone would paint the inside of my mind and I would cover it up with parties and Polynesian women.
I was the sand on the shores of Tahiti, living on the waves of my own freedom. A freedom I had borrowed from nature. A gift that had been given to me by my birth, by my mother. I tried to lose myself in those waves and they treated me with limited respect. More often than not, they kicked me up against their black walls of water. They were made of such immense freedom that many times made me scream and **** my pants in fear, but they shoved loads that fear into my arms and forced me to eventually overcome the burden.
As time slipped by unnoticed, I created routine around the unpredictability of the tides and the cycle of developing alcoholism. One night after a full day of making love to the Tahitian waters, my buddies and I celebrated the big waves by filling our aching bodies with a good bit of Bourbon. By morning time, a good bit of Bourbon had become a fog of drink after drink of not-so-good *****? Gin maybe? I awoke to the sight of the godly sunrise glinting off of the wet beach around me, pitying my trouser-less hungover self. With sand in every orifice, I took a swim to wash me of the night before. I floated on my back in silence while the birds taunted me. I felt the ocean fill every nook and cranny of my body, each pulse of my heartbeat sending ripples through it. My heart was the moon that pressed the waves of my freedom onward and it was sore for different waters. The ache for elsewhere was coming back, and the hole she left in my gut that was once filled with Tahiti was now almost gaping. It had been a beautiful ride in Tahiti but I had not found solace, only distraction. The currents were shifting towards something new.
She had always said that the mountains brought her a solace that she never felt in church. They were her place to pray and they were the gods that fulfilled her. She told me this under the sheets at bedtime as if it were her biggest secret. I had delusional hope that she might be somewhere, she might not be gone. I thought if I would find her anywhere it would be there, up in the clouds on the highest peaks.
The next day, I was on the plane back to the States where I would gather gear. The mountains had called and left a needy voicemail, so I told them I was on my way.

In Bozeman, the home I had run from when I left, every street and friend was a reminder of my childhood and of her. I was only there to trade out my dive mask for my goggles. I had sold most of my stuff and had no house, apartment, or any place of residence to return to except for a small public storage unit where I’d stashed the rest of my goods. Almost everything I owned was kept in a roomy 25 square foot space, the rest was in my duffel. I’d left my pick-up in the hands of my good man, Max, and he returned her to me *****, gleaming, and with the tank full. I took her down to the storage yard and opened my unit to see that everything remained untouched. Beautifully, gracefully, precariously piled just as it was when I left. I transitioned what I carried in my duffel from surf to snow. I made my trades: flip flops for boots, bare chest for base layers, board shorts for snow pants, and of course, board for skis. Ah, my skis… sweet and tender pieces of soulful engineering, how I missed them. They still suffered core-shots and scratches from last season. I embraced them like the old friends they were.
I loaded up the pick-up with all the necessities and hit the road before anyone could give me condolences for a loss I didn’t want to believe. I could not stray from my path to forget her or find her or figure out how to live again. I did not know exactly what I wanted but I could not let myself hear my mother’s name. She was not a constant; that was now true.  

My truck made it half way there and across the Canadian border before I had to set her free. She had been my stallion for some time, but her miles got the best of her. It was only another loss, another betrayal of constancy. I walked with everything on my back until I eventually thumbed my way to the edge of the wild forest beneath the mountains that I had dreamt of. They were looming ahead but I swore I caught a whiff of hope in their cool breeze.
With skis and skins strapped to my feet, I took off into the wilderness. My eyes were peeled looking for something more than myself, and I found some things. There were icy streams and a few fattened birds and hidden rocks and tracks from wolves and barks of their pups off in the distance. But what I found within all of these things was just the constant reminder of my own loneliness.
I spent the days pushing on towards some unknown relief from the pain. On good days there fresh snow to carry me and on most days storms came and pounded me further into my seclusion. The trees bowed heavy to me as I inched forward on my skis, my only loyal companions; I only hoped they would not betray me on this journey. I could not afford to lose any more, I was alone enough. My mother was no where to be found. The snow seemed to miss her too and sometimes I think it sympathized with me.
I spent the nights warmed with a whimpy fire lying on my back in wait hoping that from out of the darkness she would speak to me, give me some guidance or explanation on how I could live happily and wildly without her. Where was this solace she had spoken of? Where was she? She was not with me, yet everything told me about her. The sun sparkled with her laughter, the air was as crisp as her wit, the cold carried her scent. I could feel her embrace around me in her hand-me-downs that I wore. They were family heirlooms that had been passed to her through generations, and then to me. The lives that had been lived in these jackets and sweaters were lived on through me. Though the stories hidden in the seams of these Greats had long been forgotten, died off with their original masters, I could feel the warmth of their memories cradle me whenever I wore them. I cringed to think about what was lost from their lives that did not live on. I was the only one left of my family to tell the world of the things they had done. I was all that was left of my mother. She had left her mark on the world, that was clear. It was a mark that stained my existence.
These forested mountain hills held a tragic beauty that I wish I could have appreciated more, but I felt heavy with heartache. Nature was not always sweet to me. For days storms surged without end and I coughed up crystals, feeling the snowflake’s dendrites tickle at my throat. I had gotten a cold. Snot oozed from my nostrils, my eyes itched, my schnoz glowed pink, my voice was hoarse, and I wanted nothing but to go home to a home that no longer existed. But I chose to go it alone on this quest and I knew the dangers in the freedom of going solo. The winds were strong and the snow was sharp. New ice glazed once powdery fields and the storms of yesterday came again and there was nothing I could do except cower at the magnificence of Nature’s sword: a thing so grand and powerful that it has slayed armies of men with merely a windy slash. I was nature’s *****. I felt no promise in pressing on, but I did so only to keep the snow from burying me alive in my tent.
And I am so glad that I did, because when the great storm finally passed I looked up to see the sky so hopeful and blue bordering the mountains I knew to be the ones I was searching for. I recognized them from the bedtime stories. She had said that when she saw them for the first time that she felt a sudden understanding that all the many hundred miles she’d ever walked were supposed to take her here. She said that the mere sight of them gave her purpose. These were those mountains. I knew because the purpose I had lost sight of came bubbling back out of my aching heart, just as it had for her.

These peaks as barren as plucked pelicans and peacocks, but as beautiful as the feathers taken from them, were beacons in the night for those in search of a world of dreams in which to create a new reality. From them I heard laughter jiggle and echo, hefty and deep in the stomachs of the only people truly living it seemed. When I was scouring the vastness of this wilderness for a sign or a purpose, I followed the scent of their delicious living and I guess my nose led me well.
A glide and a hop further on my skis, there the trees parted and powder deepened and sun shone just a bit brighter. Behind the blinding glare of the snow, faces gleamed from tents and huts and igloos and hammocks. Shrieks of children swinging from branches tickled my ears, which had grown accustomed to the silence of winter. As I approached this camp, I saw they were not kids but grown men and women. It seemed I had stumbled down a rabbit hole while following the tracks of a white jackalope. I had found my world of dreams. I had found them. I had found a home.
I was escaping my lonely, wintery existence into a shared haven perfectly placed beneath the peaks that had plagued my dreams. A place where the only directions that existed were up and down the slopes and forwards to the future. Never Eat Soggy Waffles did not matter anymore. By the end of my time there, I had even forgotten my lefts and rights. The camp had been assembled with the leftovers of the modern world and looked like a puzzle with mismatched pieces from fifty different pictures. At first glance, it could have been a snow covered trash heap, but there was a sentimental glow on each broken appliance that told me otherwise. Everything had a use, though it was not usually what was intended. The homes of these families and friends were made of tarp or blankets or animal hides and had smelly socks or utensils or boots or bones hanging from their openings. There were homemade hot springs made of bathtubs placed above fires with water bubbling. Unplugged ovens buried in snow and ice kept the beer cooled. Trees doubled as diving boards for jumping into the deep pits of powder around them. The masterminds behind this camp were geniuses of invention and creation. Their most impressive creation was their lifestyle; it was one that had been deemed impossible by society. This place promised the solace I had been searching for.
A hefty mass of man and dogs galumphed its way through the snow. Rosy cheeks and big hands came to greet me. This was Angus. His face grew a beard that scratched the skies; it was a doppelganger to the mossy branches above us. But his smile shone through the hairs like the moon. There are people in this world whose presence alone is magic, an anomaly among existence. Angus was one of them. Not an ounce of his being made sense. The gut that hung from his broad-shouldered bodice was its own entity and it swung with rhythms unknown to any man; it was known only to the laughter that shook it. Gently perched atop this, was his shaggy white head that flew backwards and into the clouds each time he laughed, which was often. Angus fathered and fed the folks who’d found their way to this wintery oasis, none of which were of the ordinary. There was a lady with snakes tattooed to her temples, parents who’d birthed their babies here beneath the full moon, couples who went bankrupt and eloped to Canada, men and women who felt the itch just as me and my mother had. The itch for something beyond the mundane that left us unsatisfied with life out in the real world. All of them came out of their lives’ hardships with hilarious belligerence and wit, each with their own story to tell. The common thread sewn between all these dangerous minds was an undeniable lust for life.
The man who represented this lust more than any other was Wiley and wily he was. He’d seen near-death countless times and every time he saw the light at the end of the tunnel, he would run like a fool in the other direction. He lived on borrowed time. You could see that restlessness driving him in each step he took. Each step was a leap from the edges of what you thought possible. Wiley was a man of serious grit, skill, and intelligence and never did he let his mortality shake him from living like the animal he was. He’d surely forgotten where and whence he came from and, until finding his way here, had made homes out of any place that offered him beer and some good eatin’. Within moments of shaking hands, he and I created instant brotherhood.
The next few days turned into months and I eventually lost track of time all together. I could have stayed there forever and no day would have been the same. I played with these people in the mountains and pretended it was childhood again. We lived with the wind and the wildness the way my mother had once shown me how to live. I had forgotten how to live this way without her and I was learning it all over again. We awoke when we pleased and trekked about when weather permitted, and sometimes when it didn’t. Each day the sun rose ripe with opportunities for new lines to ski and new peaks to explore. The backcountry was ours and only ours to explore. We were its residents just like the moose and the wolves. My body grew stinky and hairy with joy and pushed limits. Hair that stank of musk and days of labor was washed only with painful whitewashes courtesy of Wiley. Generally after a nice run, we’d exchange them, shoving each other’s faces deep into the icy layers of snow, which would be followed with some hardy wrestling. By the end of each day, if we didn’t have blood coming out of at least two holes in our faces then it wasn’t a good day.
I never could wait to get my life’s adventures in and here I was having them, recalling the unsatisfied ache I had before I left. Life was lost to me before. I had forgotten how to live it after she had died. Modern monotony had taken control until my life became starved of genuine purity and all that was left then was mimicry. But the hair grown long on these men and smiles grown large on these woman showed no remembrance of such an earth I had come from. They had long ago cast themselves away from such a society to relish in all they knew to be right, all their guts told them to pursue: the truth that nature supplies. Still I worried I would not remember these people and these moments, knowing how they would be ****** into the abyss of loss and time like all the others. But we lived too loud and the sounds of my worries were often drowned in fun.
     We spent the nights beside the fire and listened to Wiley softly plucking strings, that was when I always liked to look at Yona. Her curls endlessly waterfalled down her chest and the fire made her hair shimmer gold in its glow. She was the spark among us, and if we weren’t careful she could light up the whole forest.  She was a drum, beating fast and strong. Never did she lose track of herself in the clashing rhythms of the world. She had ripped herself from the hands of the education system at a young age and had learned from the ways of the changing seasons f

Bathtubs spend alot of time empty.
When used they are never filled completely.

Maybe I'm like a bathtub.
Cold and clean.

Well...

I'd hope to be clean. But I find myself ***** more often then not.

But I could shine. I could be filled to the brink of overflow.

You could lay on me for awhile.. Close your eyes and just relax.

I'll wrap myself around you and welcome you into me.

****...I'm like a bathtub.

i am life in all its forms
gardenias blossom in your garden
roses and geranium are in full bloom
sun, rain and wind nurture your soul
all is held in a vision of beauty
suspend judgement for a moment and relax duty
just be still and see the quality of life unfolding
have you found the rhythm yet
take time to wait for it to come to you
so long as you chase it
it will fly away faster than an arrow
but sit back and wait
and it will return as fast as it can
solve nothing and situate yourself between all limitations
as for pouring out your heart you must do that in stages
send messages to the ladies you are in love with
tell them you are always willing
to partake in the kindness of their salvation
send them flowers by way of mental teleportation
insanity is courage spread out upon the table
like a banquet we dine and resolve to try all the flavors
sorrow and madness are two tastes
that you remember from your childhood acquaintances
a long time ago there lived a boy in a basement
he had no friends or other people to educate him
so he set off on a course of morose self effacement
and learned the secrets to yesterday’s replacements
so many mornings he woke up
and found himself in a shallow pool of water
not knowing how he got there
he decided he would try to have a daughter
so he found himself a girlfriend
that he carved out of some stone
and into the water he tossed her
so he would no longer be alone
what a small child they had inside the pool
a tiny being the size of a pebble
yet they loved and cherished her like a princess
since they never left their home they could stay together
frequently his mind was a vacant island
surrounded by water on all sides
a perfect getaway for a tranquil vacation
next to the galapagos
there are seventeen dragons who take the form of turtles
he sold his hair for cash
and stashed it in their pockets
he sold his eyes for a sack of rice
and borrowed visions from the earth
she was a huntress
who gathered all her weapons
and sent them out with magic
into the forest to look for food
her legs had given up
but her mind was as strong as a lion
her spinal column danced in lightning’s garden
successful at shooting she could **** a bear in thirty seconds
her most altruistic side was alive
the day she discovered their burning child
instead of rescuing her she stoked the fire higher
but before she could be immolated
she untied her wrists and ankles
she ran away screaming but her mother didn’t even move
her stoic features held together like the stillness of a mountain
down, down, down deep in the valley
her laughter echoed loudly and her smile could cut through diamonds
all of the creatures that lived in this canyon
could only hope to be devoured
by someone as naughty as she was
and now the snow melts in summer
slowly as a snail
and dry are the fields who get only hail
and never rain nor shower
only thunder and the brightest flowers
for lightning fertilizes the soil
and soil is precisely new matter
that is waiting to be born
turning in the womb
the child is torn from her mother’s body
and pierced with the red spear of the dawn
shadows of mercury remain
in the warm amniotic fluid that is collected in a jar
like dew its is the moisture that holds the nectar of the stars
shreds of luminous light from the moon are shining like knives
tearing the sky to pieces as quickly as a kite darts past the sky
birds return to their nests as the day is over
and now its time for all to rest
so set yourself a placemat and prepare dinner in your sleep
yes you are present but at the moment talk is cheap
like porous cheesecloth used to strain milk and butter
long hours spent working tirelessly to prepare meals for
seven little brats
your music is a carriage to take you far away from that
pain and isolation that blooms despite your breath
never ever let them see you like that
start a journal or a blog
and tell the world how you feel
about chickens and turtles and the rest of the farm
stars are our teachers, for in letting go of beauty
they fall from the sky to finish off their duty
studious and serious the child plays with nothing
all is work and study in this day and age
of modern educational slavery
a stage for violent revolution is set
yet we fight the battles in the bathtubs
with our children’s hearts breaking
each day new devastating accounts
of tragedy and violence everywhere you turn
who will brush your hair
who will look out for the little ones
several hours pass and their is no sign of the rain letting up
its pouring harder than a drummer
hitting all the symbols at once
symbolic language a variation of music
variance and broad spectrums of diversity
amuse the angels who see only unity
lounging around on solid ground looking for happiness
this residue of yesterday is all over the flowers
targets in the city street are lighting up one at a time
next door to your house i see the writing on the wall
left there by a writer neither short nor tall
mint tea with honey drunk from a mason jar with almond milk
a stallion rides through heaven and raises up a storm
the sky he rides upon gives way to the stars
and like the bottom of a canyon
venus, earth, and mars are all slowly trampled upon
by the steeds powerful form
meditation is never ending
in full bodied harmony
our strings are being pulled by a puppeteer
he is a father figure
dreamed up from the pages of a story book
yet all the words are meaningless
until you’ve held that spark of luminous silence
that echoes in the darkness of the heart
yelling out loud but no one can hear you
through frozen windows you scream that you are lonely
come on outside and play in the Sun
hanging from the treetops are your old classmates
you tied the noose around their necks and let them sway for days
anger is a poison yet it heals many wounds
forgive the collective unconscious
or your destiny may be to wind up empty as a shell

My heart is wrapped up in gummy wires,
Splayed on the ground like an ugly wound
It is frantic scream, a doe bleeding out
It’s not soft and it’s not easy and it doesn’t
Open up like flowers to the sun
It is dark castle, with secrets planted in
Walls and a torture chamber that calls out
“I promise I’ll hurt you so good”

my heart is not petite and pink-lipped,
it is not coy and delicate, wrapped up
in a beautiful box with a bow on top
my heart has scars
my heart is ragged and filthy
my heart is tired
my heart lies to me

my heart is not easy and refreshing
like a fairytale daydream
my heart is ******
and any poetry in her
is the ugly kind that spawns
like grass through the cracks
of the concrete.

My heart has a warning sign
“do not enter.”
It has a trap door you may fall through
It has electric wires sitting near bathtubs:
My heart will shock you.

But as ugly as she is
She keeps on pumping
Red blood like ******
Shoot up with love
And she’ll lay down her armor
And her scars will kiss yours
And turn them from black
To red to a fertile, nubile green

I come from
Bleeding gums
Skinny arms
And ketchup smothered chicken
From dyed blue hair
And chipped black nail polish
From
"There’s no use crying over spilt milk"
And
"You’re not the first person to fail history"
I come from
Cracked bathtubs
Cracked skulls
Crooked teeth
Oversized sweaters
Overly sweetened tea
From diabetes
Breast cancer
And depression
I come from black heads
And pimples
Frizzy hair
Half filled journals
Half empty coffee cups
Purple lipstick
Scars from dropping the oven mitt
Seared flesh on wrists
I come from
Cigarette smoke curling under summer skies
From fake fire places
Freshly baked cookies
Poetry in the form of blood cells
From mental hospital stays
From blinding headaches
That vibrate through teeth
I come from
Pentacle necklaces
And pearl bracelets
Apple perfume
New York City visits
I come from
Trees
And grass
And flowers
I come from the beach
From salty air
And sandy toes
I come from everywhere
And I’m going nowhere

Cathartic dirt,
I lay.
Letting dust and bugs settle
On my skin.

Breathing damp musk,
Breathing particle air,
Skin cooled by old tile.

Embrace this darkness,
Embrace this entropy,
Give love to the chaos.

*I love it.

She's in love with a bird but she doesn't even know how to fly. Five times in persistence I gave fingertips and fingertips, thousands of eyelashes, more than 700 changes of the guard. Three years of talking about the flowers in the post, the letters on the dresser, and a firm ruler over the top of our hands. Death's saliva plagues us thru the night. Into morning, the rain soaked our mattress and pillows, my lips are chapped, peeling like chipped paint off a 20th Century bathtubs' feet. I tip over the hourglass but the time does not reset. Our sisters become even more valuable than ever. Each year adds one more invisible number to the rest, and still we don't know how fast the train moves.

Pleasure dwellers and Jeep keepers. Relics of the 90s still left in cardboard boxes. It's the drugs that make time tolerable, but Tylenol sadly doesn't qualm the ails of an inevitably ending world. We ate pizza, drank wine, and kissed all the time. As time would tell, I don't actually have dibs over your left breast, but I really would've liked to, though I'm not sure where I'd put it.

I got a tattoo of the bird put onto a branch, it didn't seem right to take it's friends away, after all it had been through, I couldn't bring myself to say there'd be no more songs coming. A little empty house, with just a table, one nest, and some sunflower seeds in the cupboard. That might be something that would have been offered to someone nicer, more sweetly, less confusing. Instead, I don't have trouble sleeping, it's just getting myself completely into bed, otherwise I'd just wait around outside waiting for the other shoe to need restitching. An unfamiliar sound shapes the mouth, something unfamiliar but quite refreshing. All the people who hear it first repeat it, but no one is exactly the same, each person certainly acts a variety of ways in what seems true according to the early ones who felt it. Was it a disease or a way to forgive, maybe uncertainty will challenge those who find it to face forgiveness. Turn the heat up on both knobs. Target the marker and sink the submarine. Silent summer steps buried into the summer wind. Laughter's cackle resumes again.

Bathtubs don’t work for quantum suicide
But every time I take one,
A part of me dies

What was nice under the crescent aglow?
Drunk on stars, or the moon lit show…

Ash of night, cradled what was once mine,
The repertoire of ever-syncing- jawlines.
Puissant is the chalice, its exaltation shined so bright,
Bestowed liberation underneath the chatoyant light,

The open windows left  niveous  fogs-
Breathed -stained –air,  against crystal *****.


Alive and one, under the entire earthly tempo,
Together left her organic imprints of art nouveau.
Beneath the warmth and petrichor ground,
The Lord and Lady commence to be crowned.
...Tree roots sink as veins of gods.
The serpent whispers his mellifluous facade...


The sharp shove of love’s first arrow
Lover’s spit, a seed for cupid’s bucolic furrow.
Scripture of Solomon’s *** temple of doom
All within the nicotine-stained-blue-infrared-bedroom,

Velvet allure, bellies of vigor,
The cold point, the pulled trigger.
Dance of Thelma, ancient cults of non-lovers
Feasting north, under the Horned God’s antlers.
The concoction of the widow’s deviated lust
Skins alive, the excited wolf-mans’ husk…

The gun’s mouth ex hailed bullets of smoke
Piercing hot wounds became tender lilts in up word strokes.
Still, they brought, perforating ice knives through the chest
Catching fades perpetually, just until two came abreast.
The shadow dalliance and hair pulls leave those weary,
The anise flower seeds sanction the suffering query.

What was once so beautiful at night?
Forgotten, as I turned red-haired-heathen in morning’s sight

So I take my hot bath, inure in my offing.
Emollient paean of the porcelain,
...which is my skin
See you, my ethereal being,
In short time spring will be fleeting

two MTA

workers play invisible baseball across platforms at Union Square

the runs in my tights mimic the skyscrapers
whose marks I see across the black sky from the rear

window while he ***** me in the backseat of his Audi

an alley in Brooklyn,
the threat of a subway slasher,
the likelihood of getting lost,

but the questioning by tourists for direction

if I say “I am one of you”, it

discredits my memories here:

[pumpkins on 34th in July
kisses in bathtubs in Meatpacking
top of the Whitney]

but I am not (yet) one of you:

impatient drivers,
L train riders,
rainbow bagel obsessers

I still feel a hand grip my throat when walking down 5th
and throw my bones off the Chelsea Pier
before I spend 11 hours wondering why I haven’t yet committed myself to you.

my mundane life
is all too trivial
I am a child
I still live
in my parents house
the one my father built
with his words,
the one my mother
blew spirit into
with her macaronis
the one I sat
in my room
studying in
useless packs
of forgotten information
trying
to cry.
into new notebooks
and ukulele
filling bathtubs
opening windows
letting air
form an air
of beauty
in my ugly
homely
country
unloved country
every being here
utters poorly articulated words
of loath
to you
how do you stand
so strong
whilst staggering within
adversity?
would my life
be more
or less
mundane
if I were nabokov
living in russia
transcending and transmitting
beauty?
coated with cold
and cruelty
thats cruel for cruelty
and aesthetics sake,
rather than
heat
and rage
and silenced
misery.

Glaring light
and white
bathtubs.
Steam and
high pitched
melodies.
Running water
spreading warmth
spreading legs.
Silky cloths
for the freshly
bathed human.
Confusion and
worried faces
all washed away
by lukewarm
bathtub water.

There are two ‘Institutions for the Mentally Ill’ in my town
One is grimly Victorian. Lunatic Asylum.  
Forgotten by all but the pigeons and pylons
As it thrashes and wrangles and mangles the memories
Of the ghosts of the ghosts that lived out their non-lives there.
The other is a modern, glass, Christmas tree
A circus tent in brown and beige
Like sepia and coffee stains.
You aren’t Lunatics anymore, we got told
Like renaming a problem could diminish it.
You slip past us just a little too quickly
So that you don’t see the woman who smokes cheap cigarettes
Out the front
And who bites December like it was something that could be torn from the walls
And pressed out of sight somewhere
And the metaphors in her head get muddled in her oesophagus
And she speaks to a man who’s never been evicted from her right ear
And who’s never been born or been buried but has simply whispered
With meretricious comfort
Up the road you could pay to gawp at the carol singers
But why bother because she’s singing
Driving Home For Christmas
Like no-one ever wrote her a melody or an audience
Gives a nice festive atmosphere, our psychiatrist said
And I asked the car park if optimism had ever been so odious
And if the snow around our feet was ‘festive’ and ‘nice’
While a girl as papery as December
Tried to smother herself in it
She rolled it in her bare hands as if hoping there’d be nothing left of her
If she could only freezer her heart
And scrape back the whiteness of the snow and her skin to the ivory
That still lingered beneath
Unstable death trap, rigged scaffolding
Although it was threatening to slice its way out
From her shrinking face and arms and thighs.
She lay down and made a snow angel in the hope that she’d become one
If she could only riddle out a way to please Anorexia.
And did the car park see that no one cares that there’s a fourteen year old
Who’s hung a cigarette from his lips and is chewing on it
Because what more damage can be done
That isn’t already curdled and notched into the skin of his wrists?
And written into the lining of his skull
Or branded in each heckled vein or carved into his gums
By the lip piercing he’s worn since he was twelve.
He has pulled the arms of his sweater beyond his finger tips
And hugged them into him to stop the secrets
He’s stashed there from spilling in front of a car.
If only he could forget what he was.
And I kick my boots against the curled up world
And want to shout it out of my vision
And want to ask if I’m thinking ‘nice festive’ thoughts
Because I’m thinking about the snow I’m ploughing  
And the way that I’d like to tie fairy lights
Over my eyes until I can’t see anything but fairy tales
And I’m thinking about our parade of broken-bottle people
Wearing masks so empty that we don’t look human
Not to you
And I wonder if this is enough of a pantomime for you
That I’ve dressed my thoughts up in drag
And they’re telling you a ****** joke from a ****** Christmas *******
Thoughts rolled and congealed like the rims of strained bathtubs
Thoughts broken and fleeting and self-imploding like headphones
That got left to tangle beyond redemption in a back pocket
Too far gone to be saved
Thoughts that are forever curled back to the replay button
Re-destruct, re-punish, re-****
Pink Elephant thoughts that will never be sorted and thrown out
Cynical self-disposal
I’m on a retrieval mission that never knows what it’s trying to find
Because I’m a Chinese doll
And each face is cruller
And uglier
And blanker
Than the one before it
Until at the centre you find that the last doll is missing
And there are only a few jumbled messages where she’s supposed to be
And fairy lights
And maybe a memory of when Christmas meant stockings and fireside
Not carparks and frigidity
If only all my ******* repeats led to redemption.
Look;
We’ve built you a snowman, is that enough of a freak show for you?
Can you move on and join the carol singers in glorifying God
Safely out of Purgatory and back on holy ground
Or do you require something more?
The pitiful Christmas Dinner that’s currently being counted out in teaspoons?
The girls and the boy who’ll press their fingers across their lips
Like prison bars
And keep themselves under lock and key in their own
Lunatic Asylum

The day we fell in love, the world stood still for the first time.
No movement other than the midsummer air humming electric,
the warmth of our words rising up into dense clouds
and gray atmospheres of sticky potential.
I remember thinking, as our dewy skin melted into the grass,
how strange it was that the world kept turning constantly.
Cars speeding on hazy interstates, babies being born in porcelain bathtubs.
Screen doors slamming in distant houses, ivy crawling across
the windowpanes of writers who will never see their name sprawled
across musky paper spines. Houses torched, brakes cut, hair trimmed.
Somewhere, an arthritic old man sets his newspaper down. It is raining.
He dances, flood water cascading around his ankles. He only thinks of her.
City lights paint taxi exhaust bright green. It is nighttime in the city
and teenagers drive recklessly through underground tunnels,
hands raised through the sunroof of their father’s cars
as the yellow light bleeds into their corneas.
Everything is set in motion, the day’s suffocating inertia of color,
a spinning top cacophony of mindless rebirth.


It is different today. You kiss me softly, velvet-lipped and eager,
and the world stops turning. The streets of Mumbai are silent.
There are no babies screeching in the quiet rooms
of church services, no hearts in the midst of being shattered.
The old man stops dancing.
His eyes are closed, her face still sketched on the backs of his eyelids.


The sky sees nothing but us.

Seeds Of light spilled out when they wished to torment the clouds;
Your farewell sooth's me, like a smooth stone leaving its prayer on my fingertips.
Memories whispered somewhere behind the shadows of the moon;
Covered in satin cloths, Bare bones, cold, lying on the floor of an abandoned house.
Falling pointless falling.
I was the house.
Left neglected and unneeded,
Bathtubs, and cigarettes.
Endless misery.
My soul spidering up a thread dampened in the rain; someday.
Once, twice, three times, gone.
Towards emptiness is where I drifted, where what seemed real dissolved in time.
Where we abandoned fake smiles and white walls, for I'm fine and therapy;
Traded warm walls and late night phone calls for Hospital beds, and Medication.
You get used to it, Tubes down you esophagus.
Misery.
That’s all we know; they say I’m crazy.
But when white walls and hospital beds is all that you know, you begin to believe it.
Endless Misery, That’s where you lead me.
Held my hand and turned Rose pedal and kisses into fits of anxiety and bruises.
My knees are bruised now,
And when you've fallen all things hurt.
Then suddenly nothing.
The world doesn’t stop spinning just because you need a break.
Fake smiles, when you've forgotten what happiness feels like, that is all you allow people to see.
But to no avail misery is all that you feel, and all the world will ever allow you to know.
Blank spaces and hallways leading nowhere, someday.
But it seems as though I've forgotten what comfort feels like.
When the world gives you someone that makes you feel special and that is taken away,
It’s like saying "Oops this gift is for someone else".
I cling to what is given to me, because I know to love no other way.
Something about tomorrow seems to torment my soul;
Yet the idea of waking up to someone there makes it okay to hate myself.
I've fallen for a gift that was never mine to hold onto.
Towards emptiness is where I followed you;
Where it seemed okay to be empty because I find comfort in what I know.
Suddenly I've fallen, and have managed to let every piece of me break.
Shattered like fine china.
My knees are bruised now; and I tell myself that being hurt is okay because...
Because...
Because...
NO.
It's not okay but it has become something I've learned to accept.
Falling, Sinking, Drowning beneath all the sorrow I attempt to contain.
That is all I seem to do.
Because: A word used to introduce a phrase or clause expressing and explanation or reason.
You left me with not a single “because”. Now I am shattered glass.
Unfixable, But I manage to pretend.
Walking around with a smile when in reality I want to burst into a puddle.
Yet no one seems to understand,
Because I am only seventeen and it is somehow unfathomable to see that I could have been in love.
"Because" is all I asked for
"Accept that I won’t tell you" is all that you left me.

I don't watch ****.
You're more likely to see me squirreling away pictures of elaborate bathtubs, in shame.
Sometimes,
in the still of the night,
I look up well thought-out Murphy-beds and closets that disappear into secret home offices.
I keep a hidden stash of blackout poems
and lewd photos of street artistry around my neighborhood.
I savor notes my best friend gave me during middle school.
I walk a crooked walk down to the seedy underbelly of my past
and read feverishly all my past feelings and relive them to remember how vivid they once were.
But,
just like ****,
in watching and re-watching and savoring all the same flavors
everything tastes like mud now.

How old are we all, really?
All the years you spent playing catch up.
Running with your broken legs.
More sinister than it seems.
No patrol, no not today sir.

Dead hair in sink drains.

I forgot everything I ever learned at 14.
Fell down the rabbit hole.
Ivy clinging to houses, pulling down walls.
You're pushing up daisies, at least last time I heard.
Somewhere your mother cries and the bells begin to toll.

Blowing old dandelions out,
trying to cash my expired wishes and bring you back.

Wonder how old you were the first time you died.
I was 7.
12.
14.
After that, 16.
Ask me again tomorrow.

Drowning in bathtubs.
Falling out of nests.
Our baby bird wings weren't ready yet.

Cutting your hair at night, rainbows blooming.
Empty train stations with bricks as our luggage.
Nothing left to dream of.
Green water spilling out from beneath the potted plants.
Life is a domino effect.

I've been living in shades
since the day they buried me in robins egg blue.
All I'm really trying to tell you is babe,

I miss you.

Break
my <3

&
I'll
break
your
******’ spine.
I'll curb
stomp
your mind
right back into
the gutter
it was hiding in.

&
I'll kick
your lie- leaking
teeth in.

Guess all the
Cut cauterizing,
Lemon- juice,
bathtubs
I bled-out
in.
Messed me up.

My bad for messing around
with
a ***** up.

fifty years later



you girls wear their old dresses
over sky
blue leggings
lace
and fabric that smells
of lost time

you found them
in stores
with high ceilings
and a sloppily simulated
rustic vibe

you love your
waists tastefully
cinched
and collar bones
concealed

you twirl before
the full length
mirrors and
wish oh how
you wish
you could
have been born
then instead of now

everything
was so much classier!
the women
were a different
kind of beautiful

women
who smoked
in their bathtubs
cardboard hairdos
unraveling

women
elbow deep in
baking
soda and dishsoap

soft secretive
smiles overtaking
their
faces
as they rattled
through the
medicine
cabinet
for a snack
(twice a day)

pregnant again
for
the fourth
time
yet
thin as a rail
somehow

ghosts
in their own
skin

silent but
deadly

crying manically
because of
the smoke
in their eyes

choking gently
on the powder
all over their tight
lovely complexions

dinner ready
at six
sharp as a rusty nail

fantasizing
about what it would be like
to fall in love
with another woman

scuffing their knees
and showing the raw
skin off to all
the young men
with sunlight left over
from childhood still
swimming in their
eyes

or walking home
in the rain
without an umbrella
and having that be ok

slapping their
own faces
at such trecherous
thoughts

obsessing
over how
their mothers did
it with
so much **** grace...

but yes
girls
their clothes
were simply
divine

Don't read if tyring. Don't think this is absurd. Don't don't love me.
My grandmas hands were gentle as the skin was raw from water. I loved her.
Now you know me. She loved me. always. wanting me to wear a cap not to freeze deep. I always beat up my brother at chess if we play slow.
Clocks bounce me out of my natural rhythm. My thought processes are sheer speed as light and love is. Now you don't know me. The best ice cream I ever had was in Köppenhagen. The best strawberries are from the nearest forest. Not there. Aaaapchoooo.
                      We posses only the internal first right to grow

To become longer and thirst. . . for each other to be subjected to
                                       heart throat belly sweet feet wrenched longings and the Psyche subtexted and restored on our Path
                   saved from the diaries of diabolic old id

Awww the crazy romantics overlaps my reason frequently thinking of you
overflooding my boiling red rivers, being genuine blooe blood blooms

                          The Enchanter Neptune is here within this perfect I am entwined making love to my Venus and the Arrow of Eros flies impeccably from the bow's tangental string long before it hit me in the core of my radiant formidability
                            formatting the infinite flowers open from the rose bleeding             tears of honeysuckle nectar alluring even the still air around us
              
                      breeze deep lovers
                         our written diaphanous dreams untangle this fluent love of fluctuations - "madam i'm madly intoxicated with thou love" - spinning
                    mind to body
                             pinnin' up our glowing souls to the edge of the nearest galactic centre approaching as a dark unforgettable symphony
                        attractive spirits permutating
visages, forms and visions
                          zebras, donkeys and magnificent horses stampeding
to the shores of passionate burning collision    

I have had this most magical dreams of different creatures emerging out of the ocean waves forming in the foam of their peeks, or as large as mighty waves when they grab you and swing you on their amplitudes. We are all velocity swimmers, for others we dive, for me you floaat above the mundane... I love your thoughtful elegance This style of a heart budding into ions of ineffable revelations
I was walking under ancient palm trees and healthy pines . . . on the Riva dressed in linnen summers dress . A humble content joyful human being Castaneda's legacy dreamer ... A spectator of energy waves on the real coloured gem deep dark azul and deep blue see . . . emerging flamingoes and pelicans transforming into dolphins, fish, little birds, turtles, lions, whales  
                          each other merging
as a cluster of maidens in Roman bathtubs waiting for Turkish honey to be massaged and soaked deeply into their bronze white skins as they were a perfect medium for younger mystics : As they are tempted to be untamed from untainment again
What I do  know
         is that        magic is floating all around me and I don't convey this simple fact with exact assurance in no time : are we sinking or gliding as a spectre of wave lenght

My friend din't love Aurora Borealis. He's too much of a loner and I felt that the triangular topography of my electro charged notebook
was a magnetic love tale from the enchanted forest. I was mistaken. I could . .  in my utter..  the immediate intricate love crush occured

Unintentionall y
for The Northern Exposures went surfin' south. From here we switch easily from one Galaxy to another. Easily! Come! Choose wise, my inspiration, my
Nebulae
    before the cosmic wind rattles my green bones and crush them into nonexistence, brawling and wavering the micro humus for the next generations.

now i know why twenty-seven
is the age where
people bleed out in bathtubs,
or asphyxiate in the attic
swaying from an angry beam
with a face as blue as
the gown their mother wore
when she introduced them to misery
in a hospital,
or put a bullet to their busy brain
leaving a red Rorschach reminder
of their final moments
on the hotel room wall
that will only be seen
by a 42 year old maid
amidst a guilty type of jealousy
she doesn't understand,
or standing with shaky hands in a kitchen
emptying a bottle of aspirin on the counter
& greedily swallowing the little white teeth
following by gulps of water that feel like boulders
tumbling down a throat
with nothing left to say,
or even spreading their arms wide
like jesus on the cross or like a relative
at the airport waiting for a delayed hug
& jumping from the highest bridge or building
they can find so they can feel weightless,
once.

this year is my year
i cut my teeth on the years before
i scraged my knees in '15
bled from my bitten tongue in ‘16
'17 saw me merciful and forgiving
and then loveless on the bathroom floor
sitting in bathtubs
my existence held
in the displacement of water in porcelain

this year is my year  
try and take it from my bloodied knuckles
take it from my hanging jaw
the years before chipped away at me
with chisel and work roughened hands
the years before cut me out of marble
carved my mouth closed
swathed me in veils, made my stone flesh
look soft

this year is my year
your chisels will blunt on my skin
and when you turn your back
to find something sharper
i'll slip down the stone steps
leave my veils on your studio chair
and melt out into the night

this year is my year
there’s no material thing keeping me
nothing mortal holds me here
this year i am free to drift
between the realms and rifts of space
i will be interstellar
hung in the place between stars

this year is my year
******* try to take it from me
i wonder if the years before
made you into diamonds too
the only thing that can cut me now
is me.

Fred’s a peddler of dreams
Between caked on make- up grins
And a dime sack of ****
He puts holes in logic
Like gaping buckshot wounds
While he sells his wares
To a corrupt, pretentious, college indie scene

The kids who sat in the back of high school dances
“Jesus I wish they’d play some Rooney!”
Are now ******* on the tongues of frat guy’s
Who’s favorite songs are narrowed down to a lists of hits
Played by Journey!

The same girls who dressed for cold New York days
In a California heat storm.
Who listened to Bob Dylan and The Doors
But now they’re covered in the sweat of a ******* without the hope
Of *******
Listening to Jay-z
Not because they like it, oh no!
They need to dance
And at least he sings
On key
While kids who made
Wordless promises
Sit in the back
Dropping LSD.

Fred’s a peddler of broken dream
Reach your hand in his satchel
For a fist full of glass shards, and rusted cutlery

He speaks in Biblical urban
Like “Thy shalt not give in, give up, sell out, buy in, peace out!”
And fred is a prophet on E
He’s the only holy man who’s ever meant anything to me
Or spoken a word more then the lessons I learned on Sunday’s PBS specials
I need Fred like a savior needs second chance
And I can find them at the bottles of these sugar coated alcoholic
Drinks.

And I’ll fade to a dim reminder like the scars
On the wrists of the girls and boys who wore the
Nightmare before Christmas hoodies, and understood so well
When they were younger that the only way
To achieve anything
Was to slice themselves under dull razor blades
In bathtubs payed for by parents
Who’s love was occupied by a 200 $ pay cut.
But now the bloods dried and the scars are gone
So 200 miles away and they haven’t learned
A thing
Or done
A thing
And when anything was possible
They need a multiple choice, with an E
For all the above

Fred these are my sacrifices, no love
These are old and weary so now I can sit
And watch the girl drown herself in alcohol
Fred to you I give her.
Put her in your bag of broken dreams
And sell her back to me as a blood alcohol
.40

Fred these are my payment in things I don’t own
The guys in meaningless vintage clothes
Dropping acid
And convulsing in chairs
Until their nothing but blink stares
And steady green lines
With the white noise swan song, and the time
4:40 am
Put him in medicine bottle
Marked “Lysergic acid diethylamide- For mild post college depression”
And Me and you Fred can share a nice chuckle.

Fred’s a con artists
He’s got an empty bag of *******
He’s got all the money he needs
He’s the **** all poster child
He’s the God I always imagined
He’s the best part of the week
He ‘s a lie caught between
Some tongue and cheek
And if I only knew what he said
Was a cautionary tale
And not some well thought out pitch or sale.

Well then Fred’s a messiah
Handing out second chance
In his knapsack.
But his advice
Is deafened by the constant hum and irritating beat
Of a floor drums that’s moving the youth into an early graves.
-Kevin T.

little creature
little creature
little creature

You talk the talk, all sunken-eyed from a not-so-scant dilaudid habit
but you are a dilettante and can't straight walk the walk
compared to she and I, the comparable brunettes.

You go to the bathroom and snort drugs off your lap b/c    u     r     v   sick.

When your girlfriend goes to rehab, don't call me to *******.

You want to **** me because you like the idea of being loved
and you are two-years-too-late out of touch with being a scene queen,
draghino druggies into bathtubs and baking with Lil B.

You're slipping
and I know that, for sure,
because you tried to kiss *me