"smokestack" poems
Ears pressed cool against
glass tables and vinyl flooring
words score high drained slowly
slow like wasps caught in guttered draining
not like velvet names etched in casing, but weathered like bricked and beaten graffiti –
Waning like wax always melting
Tools: spelling and grammar – uncheck
Don’t fret too many gerunds grounding air suffocating hearing between the lines that past lower truths out straight in dirt and stinky face: eyes drawn with pensive staring
lines drawn global remains of words unused: boycott form because it isn’t daring.
Adopt sonar because it traces the smokestack between eaves drop
and scrap metal hearing like thorns prickled cut by cleaver.
Clink, clink, clank.
Unlatch cellar doors of images fixed in meaning: glances slanted
heads poked out behind legs enchanting ink under eyelids.
Clank, click, click.
Wishing: Sunday morning came to rest and the cat perched rest without the windowsill and the space between my legs lost meaning.
Forgetting: Painted houses haunting furniture misplaced, training lessons in memory fading.
Dreaming: Sounds dipped in vegetable oil, Van Morrison in teething states caring.
Still lost without my last breathe wondering…
Mar 2, 2011
Mar 2, 2011 at 1:31 PM UTC
MANY ways to spell good night.
Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.
They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.
Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue and then go out.
Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar.
Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying in a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields to a razorback hill.
It is easy to spell good night.
Many ways to spell good night.
3.5k
5:00 am - Happy New Year!
I look like I should be a musician not a poet.
"It's so easy being a poet
so hard being a man"
- Charles Bukowski
----
5:14 am - Passing Rocklea, no sign of the dawn.
Coopers Plains station.
3 people get on.
Florescent lights cast a spell of sleep.
I wish I could sleep right now.
Eyelids droop like sad flowers from a convenience store.
I write metaphors like a drunken amateur.
Trinder park - Sounds like a bad neighbourhood.
**** ME ITS WOODRIDGE.
Where even the McDonalds sign is ******
XxXxxxxxx, Xxxxxx Xxxxxx :
She could be fun. So tight, she sometimes felt illegal.
Tight and bald. I would slide up to the *****
She loved it rough,
golden hair wrapped around my fingers
as she was pushed into the pillow.
She was loud in the mornings.
I could feel her tight ***
grinding against my thighs
as I ****** her harder and harder.
Until I came :
either inside her.
Or on her chest.
Or in her
prim
pink
suburban mouth.
Tightening my grip on her hair as the hot ***** spurted against the back of her throat.
The head of my **** throbbing as she gulped it down with silent satisfaction.
That only happened twice though.
----
5:37 am - The Dawn begins to rise over the Suburban Nation.
Final remnants of night
twinkle like stars
against the silhouette
of society.
House lights
Street lights
(and the omnipresent)
fluorescent light.
Beenleigh station - A pinch faced older woman gets on.
Business suit, lunch box.
Short hair, glasses.
Her earrings are imitation mother of pearl
(step-mother of pearl?)
She sits next to a window covered in graffiti.
Prim, tight mouth
incarnadine lipstick.
Over in the distance a smokestack cuts through the sky above the horizon.
Trees do mask the sun and sky.
"Hippies; they spend their whole life trying to get to a microphone and when they do, they don't tell anyone to **** off." - The Wolfman.
----
5:52 am - One more stop.
The clouds are the colour of smoke against the pearl blue sky.
----
6:00 am - Arrival.
Clouds are tinged with fire and blood
incandescently.
You can watch it spread and grow
with intensity.
Taxi driver was a foul mouthed Indian.
May 22, 2013
May 22, 2013 at 2:25 AM UTC
You're a breath of fresh air in a world of smokestack trees.
Jan 27, 2016
Jan 27, 2016 at 4:28 PM UTC
Here, at the end of the world,
the flowers bleed
as if they were hearts,
the hearts ooze a darkness
like india ink,
& poets dip their pens in
& they write.
"Here, at the end of the world,"
they write,
not knowing what it means.
"Here, where the sky nurses on black milk,
where the smokestack feed the sky,
where the trees tremble in terror
& people come to resemble them. . . . "
Here, at the end of the world,
the poets are bleeding.
Writing & bleeding
are thought to be the same;
singing & bleeding
are thought to be the same.
Write us a letter!
Send us a parcel of food!
Comfort us with proverbs or candied fruit,
with talk of one God.
Distract us with theories of art
no one can prove.
Here at the end of the world
our heads are empty,
& the wind walks through them
like ghosts
through a haunted house.
2.1k
Who's that leopard in ecstasy
(and Ampersand Cornelius Gray)
who learned to trot briskly under lamp poles
and rescue a ***** worn mug from the clay
that which bore them.
She signaled with a passing glance that the entrenchment should pass,
giggling eyes that sparkled from pearls and concrete teeth.
I pivoted on the unmoving coordinates, the universe revolved.
From within her a spirit rose up and clasped my face in its hands,
and I, red with terror, dove head first towards the sands.
He howls out, burdened.
He is unaware of my condition, beneath the waters;
here I lie in wait,
too, in weight.
Here I lie
beneath the crushing force of the universe.
On the bottom of the sea, the top of the Earth,
a smokestack, of golden flames, fills my heart,
rumbling, confident and unafraid.
The Leopard sits, its paws splayed out on a bed of ferns.
Upon its raised position, it lies, basked in ethereal warm light.
The fierce awe of strength and knives of metal,
racing above ground on knees of silent, yellowed corduroy.
Who waits with the Leopard, alone and cold?
Who knows the beast the captures my wonder?
Here I lie, in servitude, enslaved in my claw cave.
My paws are pale, in this oddly worn nave.
Apr 29, 2013
Apr 29, 2013 at 4:17 PM UTC
Today, my train of thought
Is a bit off track.
It's a dark and confusing smokestack.
You see, questions abound.
So buckle in as I go to town.
Which cider you on?
Apple or hard?
If a tree falls on a copier
And no one is around to see it,
Does it make a forest?
I'm rooting for yes; but quite unsure.
How many coins can a fountain hold?
I wish I knew.
Is Paul dead or the walrus?
Is Paul dead AND the walrus?
Coo coo ca choo.
What's the beef about red meat?
It fills but kills? It sells but fells?
Who knows!
The proof is in the pudding.
All other desserts are unsubstantiated,
I suppose.
If peanut butter leaves Los Angeles
Traveling east at 100 miles per hour,
And jelly leaves New York
Traveling west twice as fast,
Will they become a sandwich when they meet?
What a treat if they did.
Maybe one day these
Universal questions will be solved.
But for now, I'm quite dizzy
From all the lunacy involved.
Catch you later...
Apr 14, 2023
Apr 14, 2023 at 3:42 PM UTC
my cheeks are blushed in the glow of your midnight kiss
i stand blinking in the corner
i am a smokestack, i rise above roofs and water towers
the space above this city is never populated by heaven
fear of ****** in the streets
in a hotel room
or a bus
bombshell crawling over flesh flashes metal neon
i am a coffee mug gripped by puncture-marked knuckles
exuding white dreams and pursed lips
I went into the dripping door
I drank the yoke of an ostrich egg
I am a hog in sunlight, a dead rabbit on asphalt at dawn
I lift a palsied hand to beg a cigarette.
Dec 8, 2011
Dec 8, 2011 at 12:44 AM UTC
Hot box a cigarette , sawmill gravy and country ham ,
Entrenched in the morning paper , dishes scrubbed , drumming of pots and pans ! Blue collar people with somewhere to be , buoy's chained to the bottom of the sea ! Sweet black ribbon covered in fire ants , May honeybees , wildebeest crossing the wild African plains..
White smokestack dens of endless toil , black tar factories , dead fish waterway , boiling star infrastructures !
Biscuit , tobacco , hot coffee welder , plumber and electrician
Caviar , flounder , after dinner mint doctor and lawyer ..
Goody powders , soda pop cures , work induced migraines for
societies 'riff raff' , high atop steel skeletons , life hanging in balance .
Xanax , blue cheese , marriage counselor soccer moms , yoga , wine party ..Young people lie in their own blood , candle light vigils are like all others . Repetitive anguish falling on deaf ears , billion dollar football stadiums , homeless freeze to death , Good Morning America focused on the Grammy Awards or someones *** , Miley's tongue , Scientology or Donny and Marie !
Bath salt possession , teenagers are shot full of bullets , Kelley and Michael promote Hollywood garbage , their so ******* cute !
Nov 9, 2015
Nov 9, 2015 at 10:35 AM UTC
Each smokestack tranced across the side of the rust colored Hall
As an ancient Chinese paper dragon
Bobbing and
Weaving
With feather pentatonic tea leaves
White and green
Silk and screen
Opaque paper culture
Dec 10, 2013
Dec 10, 2013 at 2:55 PM UTC
Sometimes I write nights, in the séance of the city
to the thrum of the sidewalk, the fume of the smokestack;
I scribble the madcap of it all, I furrow my nails in vinyl and dance
in memoriam,
my face blackened by storms in the crematorium;
there are those that watch the world through a window,
and those that are watched;
and if they have no voice in their manic stumblings; and if instead they
mutter
to the shadows for traction, to the swirl in the gutter, the outer rim of
silence
they will find a friction
to descend upon cement with an electric lunacy;
and though they will be outliers, they put out the candles
and write nights too;
within the funneled starlight, and the wheel of the sky,
we string our bodies astral,
in procession and out, similar in divergence, until similarity diverges
into steam and carbon
and time surges backwards to rejuvenate nights
and our visions are left clotted in their seams by
the dark.
Aug 19, 2010
Aug 19, 2010 at 9:01 AM UTC
The porch light barely illuminates the overflowing ashtray
Moon, abandoned home, smokestack, alleys: view
Orderly circles of leaking lunar spectrum serve as steady sight
Otherwise torn by my mouth like a hooked fish to the angler-night
The streets are full of holes like the stories of conspirators
Kitten of gender nondescript plays in the corner, jubilant
Clouds pass and pay no mind, don’t associate with our kind
I hope she doesn’t find me foolish when I interject
Approached by vendor of the thieving sort with stolen radio offered cheap
Promised to turn potential customers his way as I planned retreat
A character amongst graffiti and gritty blacktop, the type I always meet
Nobody waited for us as we signaled from the crosswalk
Back to the quarters, friend needs a ******
Try to concentrate and write despite the bang on the walls
Distraction from *** I’m not having; she’s a screamer
Dark brewed beer is a bitter taste for bedtime
Mar 18, 2011
Mar 18, 2011 at 10:04 PM UTC
your mind is screeching over itself
fast forward looping
stuttering to sta-finish it's own sentences
before they begin
begin again
again rephrase
in a foreign tongue
sputtering auditory train
each song sounds the same
same thought new place
pacing backwards yesterdays
yester-year's dream spawned oiled seas
see the lochness creature seeping tar from smokestack wings
cleanse the river
boil the stream
seems where the hydrogen and oxygen meet
the breath drowns
defeat
retreat to your fiery cocoon
lace your wounds with spit and delusion
dilute your medicine til it tastes like lover's skin
again begin
begging the stars to swallow you
howl til one becomes two
rebrand suffering to resume
your pleasurable consuming death
Jul 21, 2015
Jul 21, 2015 at 2:14 PM UTC
35,088 feet over Nebraska,
(Nebraska-imagining me climbing a ladder, me upwards, Jacob’s angels coming down, off to a high school All Saints wrestling match in a cornfield town)
a place not on my bucket list, just a blue bias of an eastern stater’s unknowns, a sure sign of how much he doesn’t know
reading Patti’s slender volume “Devotion”
slender like her body, some would call it a wiry woman's
sparse but directed, connective, word-worshipping,
old familiar strangers she delivers to you that you have never met, her phraseology striking me and strikingly beautiful simultaneous
scan it and understanding instantaneous
she asking,
why do we write?
her answers are fine copper wire threaded
into a coil and I close it quick cause the loving ****** desire to
plagiarize such an oddly gorgeous offerings is overwhelming;
I feel the wire words piercing my temple, intending to
emerge out the other side, a decorative symmetry,
I don’t own
my need to script some cursive on my smooth body parts,
on my god-given papyrus, always at the ready,
is a methadone itch, a dulling urge needy for fulfillment,
that needs satisfying but me, soundly second rate,
write like the flip side of a hit vinyl record, no one is expected to play, fulfillment meets futility
thus the title is a modification of a Patti light touch
my alchemy never made any gold and my present presence now over Iowa a reminder that my prescriptions are 1200 evacuations; they are negative commandments,
proscriptions, not prescriptions
do not write, do not wrong words with a middling diffidence,
hide your face and put her words on a shelf above your head
hard to reach, so you do not be tempted
why do we write?
“All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words.
The words that will penetrate ******
territory, crack unclaimed
combinations, articulate the infinite.” Patti Smith
disambiguation she relieves us of uncertainty
my combinations over Waterloo, Illinois
are ordinary smokestack gray, a spewing wastage,
the angels conforming that my words Cain-fail,
my confession
meets no one’s standards, not even mine
7:07pm Central Time
Mar 25, 2018
Mar 25, 2018 at 8:47 PM UTC
night falls w/liverspot clouds
broken
stars . . . deep blueness . . . fat-full moon.
nights are that autumncool again
(week of +20° unseasonality)
basement stone wall coolness
cigarette *****
a smokestack!
peepings &
oo-ings &
cracklings
in the woods.
the ceiling creaks . . . creek runs
bedroom lights a-burnin'
& m'tired dart is down to the filter.
Oct 19, 2011
Oct 19, 2011 at 9:08 PM UTC
Like a hypnotic beacon in darkness
guiding oily ships,
like this same rhythm,
I sing to myself
so much the same beat,
the song of
apathetic thoughts
of ignorant tranquility While
smokestack clouds
loosen tears of acid rain
that rust metal on boots
will this prevail?
Dried poisoned earth beneath my feet
Yawning gaps and cracks
frown their crooked gruesome frowns
upon the dust crumbling ground
Micro-macro things float in the air
in which we inhale
Farts from smokestack gases
carbon emissions from cars
forever excrete poisoned
cougher's body-coffin-clouds
of black and blue
Trees as if on bending knees smothered
by accidental fluoride
little and feathered bodies
plummet and land
on polluted blackened ground below
Smokestack refineries
make fishy lakes
into crummy toilet lakes Oily
ships clumsily spill oil contents upon
the sea to oily sea
Yet so crazy a world
so crazy a song
of easy tranquility
I sing sheepishly,
among TV commercial smokestack wolves
of sitcom ***** darkness,
who gleefully watch all the lambs go by
in **** TUBE" harmony
Sep 22, 2014
Sep 22, 2014 at 6:46 PM UTC
DYNAMO
consciousness tossed
around in the heavenly night,
illuminations and poems in us all
as an asphalt drum bounds
oak to flat
dispersing lamentations to
the brain and barbwire ribcage
clawing at our lungs
PHANTASM
pain,
the behemoth cause for all inspiration
the pressing crucifixion
the shrill cry of harmonica overcast in
this bizarre moonlight
sinking an oceanic shadow
for my memory is high off melancholy
but i keep at it because the morning is beautiful
A PRAYER FOR WARMTH
(in my opinion)
nothing feels stranger than
an empty bedroom
we are each others loneliness
SOLIPSISM
Oct 21, 2015
Oct 21, 2015 at 1:28 AM UTC
the
smoke
fills his lungs
like a smokestack.
the butts litter
ashtrays like
little potholes of ash
throughout
his room.
stacks upon stacks
of the disgusting things,
brownish yellow- just like
the **** on his
teeth.
his
breath
smells
and tastes
as if you were
lying facedown
on the hot
pavement, tongue
to the ground
gravel, dirt and gasoline
on your tastebuds.
he burns
he yearns
for the fix.
when he works on his car
in the hot sun,
his fingers shake
unless he's
holding a smoke.
And every day when she comes home
she kisses him full on the mouth and
breathes
it
in.
Mar 15, 2012
Mar 15, 2012 at 3:57 PM UTC
smokestack mirrors the smokestick in my hands
who is the cause of my trembling these days?
who is the cause of the causality in my body?
is he a "what", or is he a "who"?
Lord, may I never know, he seeps into my skin like jasmine
am i a "who", or am I a "when"?
never have i breathed in a bed so dark,
(hallelujah)
or seen the sky lit just so;
the smoke and the lies (one same separate changed twisting tangling entwined twisting twisting)
spill lazily from my lips to meet the ground with pride;
the object of my idolatry sleeps without a stir
until he rests his eyes for slumber, the sickening truth to be sure
My last intention is to be harsh or cruel, but there you have it
and oh, he is cruel
...hallelujah
what I wouldn't give
(where to be begin, the question goes)
to bury my tongue in this spot,
to bind it to the shadow of a spectre
or to one of the forgotten gods so that I may, too, forget
hallelujah...
who is this deity in the kitchen who ignores my kisses and leaves me to my breath?
who is this shell that feels he has the right to touch my face?
and in my shame, I cannot help but smile in ecstasy
A joy from the deep, a desperate and aching Need,
a chasm in chest and in heart, a chasm that hangs in the air with our pretense of conversation
hallelujah
i weep, I pray, I moan, i am empty
I come to him with my naked body ready for the worshiping
and he looks at me like he has never seen me
hallelujah
and he holds out his hand to Me, and for a moment I am rested
but i am weak and weary
and i am never satisfied
but I scream my praises to the night
while i roam the halls of my mind crying out and ripping my hair
and i know not why.
...hallelujah.
hallelujah.
hallelujah.
May 4, 2011
May 4, 2011 at 6:25 PM UTC
******* life
that makes me scream in
pain and
ecstasy
Thoughts billowing
from the smokestack of my mind
polluting the air and
in turn
the universe
Mar 25, 2015
Mar 25, 2015 at 10:20 PM UTC
Bodies jostle toward the heatsource,
Foot stomp, elbowed in the rib,
Muttering voices hoarse, exhale mists
That swirl like deadmen's ashes in the wind.
Pale lumina saturates the cinder skies,
Under which the aged remember
The suns of former lives,
Their memories the glowing solitary embers
Of a world we've left behind.
Ahead, a mother veils her babe with rags
From a passer-by's ravenous gaze.
A man automatously drags
A rattle-bag of assorted human remains,
Leaving trails in the dirt,
Leaving trails in the dirt.
We have splintered apart the frame
Of this landscape of hellpain,
Against smokestack sequoias and asphalt seas,
We stumble toward the crematoria.
My God, the coldness hurts!
As upon the canvas of this frozen Earth
We enact the terminus of human innovation,
The burning of every breath,
The engineered suicide of civilization.
Out, out, brief candle,
said Macbeth.
Into the cull chamber I step,
Hoping there at least I will find warmth,
In death.
Sep 23, 2020
Sep 23, 2020 at 6:33 PM UTC
It's bitterly cold,
And my breath trails behind me
Like an industrial smokestack.
I take a greedy gulp,
And warmth penetrates my chest
Like new love's first kiss.
Happy Ballantine's Day.
Dec 1, 2014
Dec 1, 2014 at 8:46 PM UTC
We need more Martians , they nattered at me all the time,
More monsters—people like to be scared,
As if those callow youngsters,
Growing up with two cars in the garage
And three sets at the country club,
Their fraternity mixers at Whittier or Occidental,
Knew the first **** thing about terror.
Still, they wanted me to grind out the harum-scarum hokum
They enjoyed watching two-reelers on Saturday afternoons
While men were doing hard work in Leyte and Manila,
As if the transitory fear of some ghoulish bogeyman
Would last through the thirty-second epics
Featuring some cartoon bear shilling for beer
Or bunnies extolling the virtues of toilet paper.
Let me tell you what fear is, I would say time and again,
*It’s a padlocked fence and a smokestack
Which isn’t churning out a **** thing.
It’s the jobs you can’t get because you said something
(And more likely, you didn’t) twenty years ago.
It’s one more envelope from the bank or the phone company
With bold red lettering on the front
That you don’t open because you know what it says
And how it doesn’t matter one bit,
Because you can’t do a ******* thing about it*,
And these promising young men would just look at me
Like I was some poorly made-up extraterrestrial
From one of their Buck ******* Rogers potboilers.
Several of my neighbors here were among the men,
Mostly boys in truth, who marched with the 126th New York,
Taking fire at Petersburg and The Wilderness,
At Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.
We have spoken about the horrors of war,
The kaleidoscope of confusion and dread,
No direction leading to shelter, no road guiding the way to home.
They have said that, as frightening as the sound of the minie *****
Zipping overhead like malevolent flies,
And the cannon were, what they found truly awful
Was the manner in which those fields,
So like the ones where they had flushed out quail as children,
Became foreboding nightmare landscapes,
Containing a dark madness
That they never dreamed could have existed.
Mar 6, 2017
Mar 6, 2017 at 10:28 AM UTC
who am I?
it is a question i ask in vain
amidst all the terror my life has brought
i find time to inquire.
who am I?
the answer never comes
through all the screams
i look up at the sky and askk.
who am I?
my name never mattered
instead i was given a number
tatooed on my arm in burning ink.
who am I?
in order to stay sane i speak
to myself or others
and together we try to remember.
who am I?
i do not think i will ever know
and i stare at the black doorway in front of me
with the smokestack up above.
Aug 2, 2012
Aug 2, 2012 at 10:40 AM UTC