"proximal" poems
remember...
when you were young,
very young,
recently untethered from
proximal parental strings...
that liberated freshman
rushing into a .... cave
of independent studies
and uninhibited sexuality...
that mulligan phase
of impulse and irrationality
and...yes...experimentation...
of wide-eyed science interns with
mother's cheeks, daddy's visa
and the best animal-testing lab
on the planet...
with live uncontrolled studies of sleep deprivation,
orgiastic tolerance, *** toxicity
and the effect of extreme jello-shooting
on graduation rates...
and, of course, the ultra-rad LUG/GUG philosophy,
the ultimate pregnancy-avoidance plan
guaranteed
or your STD back...
then you got a degree,
a real job,
and a surreal 5-figure
student loan balance...
or was it 6?
or maybe you just
dropped out
like
bill, steve or mark...
and started a revolution...
~ P
(7/21/2013)
Jul 21, 2013
Jul 21, 2013 at 3:59 PM UTC
nobody likes the full name.
the class is known simply as "Cell."
stephen king is just as lazy with his titles.
that fool fears blood.
i was listening to rain washing out the gutters
when our teacher called on me,
asking me to explain in my own words:
"How is molecular transportation so highly organized?"
i posited that organelles are not organized.
they are only civilized:
self-governed by apoptosis and a blueprint of proximal culture,
their manuals inefficient, but honed for cooperation through trial and error.
"I'm predisposed to disagree," he said with a tangible glee.
knowing we all adore his berating honesty.
his question stuck with me.
perhaps because i was working
for the office of sustainability
becoming regularly incapacitated
by the shame and exhaustion of preaching.
leading an uprising through the power of teaching.
i decided the only organized transportation
is an axial conduit to the electorate's war,
always social and hierarchal
because that's what culture is for.
at 19 i was loaded up with a sticky elixir
to be protected from being called a *****
i will never forget how I spotted lightly for three days
-stopped for one week-
and then for two straight months, it was a downpour.
we are only tearing apart the bitty ants
and there is still blood on our hands.
i believe blood looks best on our hands.
but we were taught to meticulously detach
and to prepare our matching bargains
beneath the atmosphere's volatile dance.
poison is in the body and the air
ready to be bottled and batched.
even when i find my friends
whole and happy in France,
my key stays clotted in the latch.
Mar 3, 2018
Mar 3, 2018 at 5:13 PM UTC
sauntry and sultry,
a fraudulent check written
in a moment of disclarity.
if you've got a bridge to sell
I'm buying.
I've got stakes on this land,
broken with till,
seeded with pain,
nourished with blood,
razed, salted, travesty, and sown again.
a faulty playpen snaps shut on a toddler,
a man trips over his Pekingese
and puts his hand in his brand new
20% off buy two get one blendtec
brand blender,
showering his mother in law
with shards of wrist bone
and strips of lacerated flesh.
this is my foot.
these are my fingers, broken,
distal, intermediate, and proximal
phalanges.
these are the carpal and metacarpals.
I am a Spartan of a shitshack.
I was trained in the wicked art of
long arduous bowel movements.
squeeze one out for the ones you love.
in some small musty room
in new York city
there is a cocknballs paying $200
to get ****** on
by a wombwalker
and thinking about his ******
Pekingese.
you know its true.
don't try to think too hard about it
or you might lose an eye.
Apr 8, 2012
Apr 8, 2012 at 2:36 PM UTC
April is retirement time
Triple hot memory stream
Of months that March close behind
Febru and Janu very kind
Not far still to remember
The days of cool December
The long talks in your chamber
The sweet eves of November
Not to mention the embers
Of love that warm up members
May be rain or hay day noon
July finds an all wet June
But days come like August guests
And busy with just inquests
Time turns September Rians
forget-me not, you asters
Full of morning glory stares
You Octogenarians
All contain within a span
Of sweet memory expanse
You too collecting pension
After superannuation.
Its nice to see you colleagues
Always glad without fatigue
Chatting and pat the other
Cracking jokes on your attire
The young baby look you wear
And the nursery kid's fire.
Its all fare and just affair
One more phase to maneuver
In the course of your orbit
On face of earth to be fit
To gain and do maximal
Service to its proximal
April too is time to thank
For the net balance in bank
And set your mind on the crank
And care for fitness and fun
To re-register and run
The vehicle with new paint
Not to shuttle and to taint
Nor to settle in confine
But to scuttle along nature
To look and learn and nurture
And listen to the pristine
Wisdom from the Lord divine.
Thanks to you all who retire
And wish you keep up the fire!
Apr 6, 2019
Apr 6, 2019 at 2:17 PM UTC
Inter-wreath souls communicating in silence
Despairing distance just making it more intense
Slow dancing fumes of proximal hazy memory
Flashing lights of the destined future glimmery
Fateful rendezvous of unprepared agitation
Acquiesced drift along the preordained creation
Out of the blue we fell in love,now suffocatingly confined
And why love, the grey shade concealations so refined
With silence, we endowed recentful persuasion
With lectures, we plundered for destined evasion
My love, we lived love for life sustained both
Now we travel opposites as we found loathe
So long, what we came together for
So long, to our ever enjoyed rapture
Jan 13, 2014
Jan 13, 2014 at 3:08 AM UTC
*Heavy Rain,
Under the umbrella in vain,
Exigent and ostentatious,
An egotistic hostility,
Filling the purge atmosphere,
Rain drops ebbing,
Conceiving an enchanted assault.
Fenced with free fall,
Falling into zero,
A faith so sick,
Ready to twitch.
Sanctified reminiscence of a remorseful purge,
Hateful conscience of a disgusted now.
Don’t know how,
A will to amend,
A limitless descent,
Wandering in extent,
Chaos down the ascent.
Extremity too proximal,
Grey beyond despair,
A reverence so brisk,
I’m frittered and devoid of retention.*
Feb 25, 2017
Feb 25, 2017 at 2:55 AM UTC
The proximal end of my soul is no longer safe
Decay has dilapidated the space
The raveled fragments fester
Leaves wilting with vinegar burns
Where I have tried to **** the infestation
And found I was only killing myself.
I can remember when my mind was softer, but not safer,
Hiding in the hallway to the den
Watching the scene of the desperate father
pulling his dead son from burned rubble
My child mind imagining
Blooms of orange around my bedposts,
tendrils of cinder and smoke,
Placing my hand against the back of the door
To feel the phantom heat.
And now I hold the matches to my own bed
The quiet comforter can only stifle them for a moment
There is not enough weight to press
These dreams out of myself
Maybe I still crave heat because it is the pain that is also comfort
It is the fear and the foment, the ailment and the aid
It is my body asking for enough feeling
To know it is alive and safe
While my mind is screaming fire
in a crowded
theatre.
Sep 17, 2021
Sep 17, 2021 at 9:12 PM UTC
This is not the beginning of my story
Nor will it be the end,
Hasten or not, it must be told
In my undying grief I can no longer go on without His strength
I am Sir Thomas de Charney, of the Order of the Knights Templar
Born in the Year of Our Lord 1270, now a man, 20 years old
My Father is William de Charney, Grand Master of the Order
He is currently headquartered at Acre, I Master at Gaza
Our lineage dates back to 1119, with the nine original Knights
The Order and my Ancestors names will live on forever
Until I was 18 I was unaware of the outside world
That story is for another time
At present the Christians control most of the Holy Land
However, the Muslims, or Saracens, continued to wreak havoc
They pillaged and plundered the villages outside our fortifications
The infidels accomplished this madness using vagabonds or tribesman
This story is about my love, Dagung; ne’er was a woman as beautiful
I was Master of the City of Gaza the first time I laid eyes on her face
While our garrison remained strong, proximal towns were under attack
Rakish strikes by Muslim non-essential forces made them dangerous
This we knew was the first line of assault by the Saracens
At the moment they were just toying with our minds in ludic form
Bearing assault on our townspeople like poltroons I took umbrage
Therefore I dispatched my men accordingly to make well the trouble
On this particular engagement I decided to join my men.
___________________________________________________
To be continued
Dec 28, 2014
Dec 28, 2014 at 6:04 AM UTC
The internet connects culture.
We used to not know how to act
and took cues from proximal role models
or distant stars.
Now we take cues from the internet
or those who are
and we become one person.
Everybody wants to talk about the daily melees and brawls
nobody wants to talk about Super Smash Bros.
and how when it came out the internet wasn’t really a thing
so people had to learn to play on their own
and each person you faced was a new experience
but now everyone learns the best strategies from the internet
and pick between only a few different characters.
Apr 17, 2020
Apr 17, 2020 at 12:15 AM UTC
The Mother in space demands
that we all learn to read Hegel
in the original German.
She pours me a glass of lemon
grape koolaid and rubs
my eyes out of my head
but the sugar in the juice
is so thick in my body and veins
that they clump and scratch
my capillaries.
I feel the pressure in my fingertips
and the inside of my nose,
the part I push on to relieve stress.
A lonely doe in small grass,
perched roughly near the space commander,
is proximal
approximately wrapped in gauze
from bone to toe in shawls
of dead wasps, strips in equal length running up
deer thighs. Proximal to my soul, my essentiality.
This is a technique called “Relocating
The Issue”
Jun 30, 2015
Jun 30, 2015 at 11:20 AM UTC
I am that which must always overcome itself.
Every morning I will wake up and tear down what I've built.
Feb 14, 2019
Feb 14, 2019 at 6:42 AM UTC
Disinfecting myself from the rays
These blotches I feel
Squeezing the liquid
Straining my arm
Lubing up the branches
Covering proximal to distal
Not quite transverse
Ten minutes
Dispense and rinse
Evil flowing down the drain
Plundering materials of blood lust
Soft spoken memoirs
Papers shredded
Covering the ground
Pictures explaining what words cannot
Hole in the corner
Blocking a figure from view
This figure portrayed in the very nightmares
I awake from with hasty revolts of sadness and angst
The very presence unnerving
Oct 20, 2011
Oct 20, 2011 at 10:35 PM UTC
the rain beats down
and makes my hands sting
down to the center of my proximal phalange
creating incisions under my fingernails
so they form a pool of lavender and ashy blue
and the cold does not help
droplets will hit the ground and freeze
cutting down into my hallux
making my steps just as icy as my voice
and when the sun starts to run off
it leaves me alone with darkness
i cannot see
i hit walls
my head
and my knuckles
until i tumble down
and down
like a droplet
into the center of my proximal phalange
but this time
i dont feel a thing
Oct 23, 2014
Oct 23, 2014 at 10:10 AM UTC
Plunging a blade
Into my chest cavity
To see if I would feel
When my ribs
Fail to protect my heart
Letting go of the wheel
On the winding road
To see if it I would feel
The glass
Splitting into millions of pieces
As my skin synchronized
With it
And did the same
Punching the wall
With my anxious fist
To see if I would feel
The moment of impact
As all five proximal phalanges
Burst away from my metacarpals
Crying hysterically
At the extremes I would go through
Just to know if any of it is even real
To know fear
To know pain
To know sorrow
To know any sort of emotion at all
And most of all
To know if I am faking all of it
Feeling forever lost
Confused
Mistaken?
Lost.
Definitely lost.
Lost in this unfortunate existence
Constantly questioning if I feel
What I feel
And never gathering any useful information
Always just more questions
Filled with wonder
But never with the emotion
Letting me know how I feel about any of it.
Just empty.
Dec 20, 2013
Dec 20, 2013 at 1:08 AM UTC
And sometimes I drive by your place
Just to see if you
Can feel me care
Like love is some kind of
Proximal lifeline
Oh sweetheart
Demons don’t listen to prayer
May 1, 2013
May 1, 2013 at 9:41 PM UTC
[Brecht: ice | water | steam]
I. To Thaw
an uncompromising war against emotion
and its content is of total
concession
closer to the body in fervid heat
you are a patron of this commerce
after you a water-lasting event:
your fluidity that deflects an accepted mass as if sacrificial
on a venue or a passage fitting the body
II. To Consume
and when you cut through with infinite fatigue
you are proximal to an agape jar housed
the question how vast and accurate the detainment and the quench thereafter
how when a flood renames
a corner and turns number to record of wreckage
making a memory innumerable
III. To Dissipate
is initiative when anterior and disparate
cannot be held and accounted for in
an erroneous register whelms in hems right shut
passing through an interstice your affinity to console
and when in a flash of a scene
unfound
Jun 4, 2016
Jun 4, 2016 at 3:03 AM UTC
i, jus now, walked to the store to get some water
and - it's weird but - the sun
hit
me: and, somehow, i felt
detach e d no more;
one lit plane, arrayed
beneath my sandals
and walked my feet
along the woven pavement, which had
either come alive at that moment or
had always been so and i just never noticed it before.
but then, i felt
some weird s i d e inside of me grind
its bony armor, elide the light, and
glyph into existence, dark. it spoke; it wrote
me down. it captured me with an adroit hand. it
fed me lines. lines. lines. lines brighter than star proximal.
my insides stood divided.
i got home
and drank
the water: straight from
the jug.
Jan 19, 2016
Jan 19, 2016 at 6:06 PM UTC
But those hands are cold
despite the glowing heat
from the proximal heart
next to them
and the comfort
of tangible happiness.
Extemities are irrelevant
until quakes
threaten the calm
and demand
immediate changes
and rescue response
Still, the body is quiet and warm...
Mar 9, 2013
Mar 9, 2013 at 7:29 AM UTC
[Adonai]
as if asked to bathe an angel
father drops mother
from an open
first floor
window.
with little effort
my brothers move a trampoline
over her body.
I talk over
with two actors
in prison garb
how to shoot the scene
having only
one phone and one
pane of glass.
all were rich
father included
when the window was closed
and he was on fire.
~
[mall nuns]
a chicken with its head cut off
takes part in a melodrama
fit for a swan
-
both halves of my daughter
live thinking they are survived
by the other
-
mall nuns.
just nuns
taking a shortcut.
-
my daughter uses a pencil
when pretending
to smoke.
nesting failure
makes her sad.
-
I spend my days seeing things.
as if
youth is a museum
-
poverty isn’t
~
[virtuoso]
mommy I am stones. I am in the blacktop river. my veins have been used to unpiss cows. like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are. the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten. they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move. I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed. I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing. if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t. there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped. I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.
~
[cinema]
when as a father
one arrives early
one is lonesome
and given
by no one
the task
of remembering
the empty lot
roped off
and daughter
needing both hands
for the rock
~
[podium]
a toy tugboat
in an unfilled
baby pool
a dead spider
beneath it
I could talk nightly
on these-
my dreams would look for missing children
my dreams would turn to salt
~
[proximal]
this is the holding father
bent from the weight
of his child
ear to eardrop
a hospital tree in aftermath
hunched to the loss
of discovery
this is day 39 of 40
observations
each day I have so many
children to name
differently
I don’t remember the first time you were here
anymore I am blessed
to see your toes
hear a storm
when the storm
is distant
Nov 23, 2015
Nov 23, 2015 at 4:13 PM UTC
this is the holding father
bent from the weight
of his child
ear to eardrop
a hospital tree in aftermath
hunched to the loss
of discovery
this is day 39 of 40
observations
each day I have so many
children to name
differently
I don’t remember the first time you were here
anymore I am blessed
to see your toes
hear a storm
when the storm
is distant
Jul 25, 2013
Jul 25, 2013 at 4:26 PM UTC
Ergo; distal;
two of my proximal
favorites,
I've wanted to weave into
a write since
I thought of them-
now I just sort of lead with them,
not quite weaved, and tell me
could I?
I'm thinking on my feet
or rather my ***
just typing, ergo
the distal part of my buttocks
aches a bit.
I want this to make sense but my fingertips
ergo the distal tips of my
appendages
are now tingling,
a bit of carpal tunnel,
I suppose. Some things just
are not supposed to be profound.
Ergo distal
Nov 9, 2017
Nov 9, 2017 at 10:31 PM UTC