You see, I want a lot,
but verbalizing
is Vulnerability
and in my head
Cynicism is stronger
than Idealism,
always the big bully,
always laughing in its face.

[Don’t laugh at me.]

You see, I want a lot.

I want art -
all kinds of art,
and not just art,
I want "bad" art,
made with good – the best – supplies,
And I want it up on the fridge
because look,
we made it,
and that means
everything.

I want homemade zines –
Happy zines and sad zines,
food zines and PATB zines,
and everything in between.
I want homemade patches,
homemade clothes,
homemade food.

I want poetry
and essays
and writing anything at all.
I want nice journals
and nice pens.

I want music -
I want to walk into rooms
filled with instruments.

I want nature.
I want Beauty
in all the small things.
I want flowers.
I want a garden,
I want it to be alive with things
all year round.

I want a nice kitchen.
I want herbs by the windowsill.
I want good meals.
I want meals we ****** up
[because we don’t bother with recipes]
but try to eat anyway.
I want frozen pizzas and slushees
and too much candy corn
when it gets to be fall.

I want days of too much coffee.
I want London Fog days.
I want rainy days and
“A handful of puddle”
on repeat.
I want days of lying in bed doing nothing
whether or not we’re sick.

I want travel.
I want days of wandering around cities,
getting lost and
letting our feet
find the way home.
I want unplanned adventures.
I want abandoned rooftops
I want heights.
I want intuition.
I want Hope.

I want friend therapy.
I want solitude.
I want connections.
I want trust.
I want closeness.
I want safety.
I want stability.

I want Honesty.
I want vulnerability.
I want communication.
I want patience.
I want consent.
I want accountability
I want active listening.
I want remembering boundaries and triggers.

I want love -
any kind of safe love:
I want all my friends
to be my significant others.

I want shared meals,
shared feelings,
tea parties and tear parties.
I want good days,
and I want bad days -
the calm and the storm.

I want to lay down my arms,
once and for all.
Call a truce with myself.

I want to look upon
the wreckage within me,
clean it up the best I can,
let the broken parts heal on their own
accept the parts that don’t,
and build a Home within my heart,
imperfect as it is,
so it won’t matter
where I go or who I’m with.

I want to say,
“I am not Afraid –
of my parents
of the expectations of capitalism
of the Future,
of growing old.”

I want to say,
“Yes, there are unknowns,
yes, there will be fear,
but I will be Okay,
I do not have to die
because others did before me.”

[I want to say yes.]

I want to say,
“I do not have to prove anything
because the right people will understand,
and those are the people who matter.”

I want you near,
and if not near,
a voice on the phone,
synchronized meals,
these things will do
in the mean time.

Drag me out of bed for cookies,
let me be sous chef,
Kitchen kitten,
familiar,
scientist ****** wife.
[If you must call me that.]

You see, I want a lot.
And Idealism
is sometimes all I have
To keep me alive,
a wildflower that won’t be killed.
And if you want to know the truth
I don’t want to **** it -
I don’t have the heart.

[Don’t laugh at me.]

i am grateful for stretch denim on days
when
          **** it
is a fashion statement
for lavender laundry detergent
because that smell reminds me of the home i've built in my head
for tea at
2 a.m.
when all the things i've done race in my head
because the next morning, i usually get my **** together
for colds
because they make eating an entire roll of cinnamon buns
completely justifiable
for the mountains that surround me
for NPR and good, rated M fanfiction
for def poetry when i can't find the right words
for finding a pack of cigarettes when it is only
11:30pm on a thursday night
and i am well past drunk in a slightly damp armchair
for harry potter and neil gaiman
for when twenty dollars fills up my gas tank
for my grandma's potato salad and biscuits with honey
for feminist zines that make me want to smash the patriarchy
for burts bees chapstick and jasmine-green tea
for friends who let me cry on their
bedroom floors
for books that keep me entertained
(even if that means me crying in my bathtub while reading them)
for courtney love and joan jett because those *******
have ridden in my car with me over many
heart-breaks
for well-water and sulfate free red wine
for johnny cash and new orleans and whiskey
for salt-- because that **** can wash away anything
for farmer's markets and co-ops
for bottles of water  and for cookie dough
when my mouth
is the consistency of cotton  and my mind is a little bit gone
for warm days in January and cold days in September
for breakfast and for hikes that begin at five a.m.
for summer nights drunk on wine and a little too much fire
for friends who call me 'momma bear' and for friends that call me 'baby bird'
for poems that give you cold chills
and flowers stolen from my neighbor's yard
for skin that smells like the sun and sage
for beeswax candles
and the smell of clean laundry
for days when i wake up and realize
i could have died on a bathroom floor

Just alright are e-books  and
just okay are e-zines
I suppose they have their place in the
natural progression of things
but I
love Books...

Old books and new books
soft books and hard books
to sniff an stroke and even listen to  
when antiquated stiff bindings moan
after sitting unopened for far too long
I just love books...

to pile up beside my bed... and
trip over in the night
to scan and browse and finger  titles
and check dates of copyrights

to feel the vibrations
from cover to cover of
previous generations of
fellow book lovers

to peruse
for forbidden doodles and
marginal ramblings
personal rememberances
and briefly noted things

purposely yet
inadvertently left
for future word finders
like myself

Okay... so...  e-books  and even e-zines
now have their space  
in the way of things
but I still hold
a special place
for
Books...

Hello all. I have been pretty busy with projects I've been working on.

I have been putting my poems up in PDF format and all of the new poems are available for download here:

http://deadbeatantihero.wixsite.com/thereisnothinghere

This website works best on a desktop. I tried accessing the website on my phone but some of the titles are buried within the other titles so I think it is best if you just access the website using a desktop. All you have to do is click the title that you want to read and it should automatically bring you directly to the PDF format of the works. You may also download them for free if you wish.

I am converting these works into PDF format with the intention to turn them into zines and chapbooks in the near future, given the right price and resource people to help me come up with the projects. Feel free and read away, all of the works are free and downloadable.

The website currently has 19 titles for you to read and download (if you want to, that is). Let me know if I could help you with anything!

she thinks I am not listening,
her breath upon my neck,
so she pitches me 'zines:
ALLURE, allure me?

she lures me to beaches:
soft amber sand
settles in valleys
between toes and heels;
tanned images dance;
a lounging goddess shimmers ~
ebony strands weave lace,
pattern after pattern,
into a creamy satin gown;
sapphire laps flames
from her eyes to mine,
mesmerized.

the caption reads:
only the finest *** comes from Puerto Rico.

witches adorn the front covers
of ecofeminist zines
in an anarchist bookstore
nestled on the Left Bank
of Seattle's waterfront

rare rays of sunlight
filter through sheer curtains
photons glimmering
through fading droplets
clinging to cracked panes
refracting multicolor

i sit in the window-seat
listening to a homeless
balladeer's somber renditions
of Jonny Cash and Woodie Guthrie
serenading the locals bustling
down Pike Street Market
while the Olympic Mountains
keep their vigil
across a lonely bay

Emma Goldman whispers
for Alexander Berkman
and i balance on mismatched cushions
considering Proudhon's insistent
inquiries while Bakunin smirks  
nursing secret heresies of insurrection

colorful posters are paper-machéd
across the walls with slogans of struggle
scrawled in sisterhood and solidarity
stickers plaster the narrow halls
encouraging visitors to Smash Capitalism!
or Read A ******* Book
as jam-packed patrons chance
sly peaks at the black flag
suspended in the back room

a faint breeze flutters intermittently
drifting across the open threshold
lifting spirits as if sifting
through grains of sand
not unlike a child
digging for answers
armed with one
monosyllabic question

why?

the banner
cheerfully pirouettes  
for a revolution
without dancing
is not one worth having

ash stains and cosmopolatin zines
bathroom savoring night-rain
like lorn and lone trucker tobacco
sky forged in dark blues outside a cracked
window, like you in the closet ****
but the door opened up enough to tell.

1. flesh simpering but the voice a sullen
conversation of silence and broke dreams
television with hundred and forty channels
and half open beer cans.

2. silence still drags kissing and murdered
autumns, shadow of hands over flush skin
lurking moonlight invited.

in morning i'll wake with a human
but tonight you are a god with your hands
roaming my hipbones & sleep with
you, my mind running thoughts
like trains on spinal cord railroads

I had visions, wasn’t in them
They’re reflected into the mirror
Absence couldn’t be clearer
There’s nothing left inside of me

Fingertips have memories
Sightless, jaunting above my body
And then they feel a little bit naughty
I run it up the flagpole and see,
Who salutes, but no one’s ever does

I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And I’m so hot, cause I’m in Hell

Went through the roof and found
That only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding
And I’m not even watching T.V

Absent minded upward in the place of nerves
Something wrong about me
Starting to seem a bit crazy
They cut off my limbs and now I’m an amputee, ******* you

I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And I’m so hot, cause I’m in Hell
I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And it was a sin, to live so well

Torn blow the covers of ‘zines
Ripped in the cogs of machines
Forced to hold my tongue
It doesn’t hurt, it feels fine
Precariously sublime
I’d like to turn back time
And **** my mind
You **** my mind, mind

Paranoia, Paranoia
Everybody’s coming to get me
They are all pulling at me
I’m running underground with the moles, digging holes
I hear their voices in my head
I swear to god it sounds like they’re snoring
But if you’re bored, then you’re boring
The agony and the irony; they’re killing me

I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And I’m so hot, cause I’m in Hell
I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And it was a sin, to live so well
One, two, three, four

After reading/listening to Rochelle D'Silva's "There Will Come A Time"

I woke up to a dream,
which we call reality,
eyes wide open, senses intact,
But who can really differentiate?

I opened my wisecracking eyes
to a photograph of father
grinning so wide, I mistook him
for an uncle I thought I’d forgot.

Prints of the past are like
yesterday’s prints of stale newspapers,
you don’t hold onto newspapers for the news
you hold on them to clean car windshields
and protect shelves from grime,
for chat-pati namkeen and peanut containers,
and then you thrown them away,
which probably get recycled;
but the prints of the past stick, no?

You cringe at the things you said
to the right person at the wrong time and in the wrong place
or five other permutations of the three.
You close your eyes hard
and frown while remembering the times
that you slipped your tongue mispronouncing
words which are in your second language,
or said things that you thought were funny,
but no one laughed.

Prints of the past are like laptop kept on for days,
just because you’d opened some tabs days ago,
contents of which might be unnecessary now,
but your mind’s stubborn to read them all.

*

Poets love the past,
it’s the foundation for words,
pain and agony, and also love,
probably forgotten in those browser tabs.

Without eyes looking out far or behind
without a past and a future,
we might feel hemmed between two walls
closing towards each other at the speed
of retracing your steps back towards
where you’re now, in the present.
What now?

When prints of the past and e-zines of the future
come to seize the end or even the journey for that matter,
when you find yourself extricated from the
vicious cycles of love and lust and and pain and hope,
when any ideas or thoughts seize to entice you,
you resort to memories that don’t make you shiver,
a delicious rub against a sack cloth to relieve an itch.

The crash of the milk bottle racks on early morning errands,
the shutting down of back doors of the bread vans,
or something out of time, something that is funny
and embarrassing that you can’t broach about it.

How seeing someone snorting back the mucus and then gulping it,
makes you nauseous but when you have cold,
you do it yourself, because the handkerchief is far,
and you'd rather not use your hand, "Eew!"

Or memories of an old friend, which is a song
by Angus and Julia stones, but also a song
of blissful senility, it’s been so long,
that you don’t remember her face,
but you still remember what it felt like
to play outside, hand in hand, panting.

Home is where the heart is, heart is remembering.

Or instead, you look at things with a blank slate,
where there’s nothing to left to think about,
you shut your eyes, get lost, probably get found.
By someone on the roadside, staring at you with concern,
perhaps that person is you.

Repeat the vicious cycle of cob webs -
love and lust and pain and agony, hope and thought,
intermittently, and then find words to write about it,
before you can’t anymore, again.

satisfaction when falling
into the bottomless
two minutes slip by

all my lifetime of trying to recognize
spiritual masters, instead -
potential parents
flood the tunnels with the bad manners and
dressed in dark grey and green

such repugnance -
decadent as **** malevich
i crawl into his smoky rib cage
forget that the language
is dead.
he pauses, rushes and pants
paints his face skeleton
eyelids blank like i pictured - but
no seattle sound. math rock and machines going off they rocker
no rolling stone
**** her string along that neck
come back reborn. shut the door
collapse in the bathroom, throwing up
into the telephone -
sa ding **** made up words
or looped cuban songs -
back in the day is gone
not anymore not anymore

what do ripped jeans mean to you?
or 16th century persian poets?
when your mind is set afire
swarthed
you like women in klimt’s canvas
light beams through your slits
so you won’t drown in
ruthless thoughts stream
when your deafened ear catches
the ovations
pervading, dying blue note
still not the ending

madame blavatsky unfolding the envelope:
i’m the circle on palm leaf manuscripts
with a dot in the middle -
you’re the reason. the clarity and the void
the eye in between
the missing capstone, i am the folklore
strange beings with fishtail and
i might be the lizard
king, violet violent dressed in crimson
you squeezing them lemons
tequila so creamy
when spiky black leather rips through
the wires, sound effects are your favorite
print shops, in them zines. your dialect
you savor - licking your lips,
saturated and smeared, paranoid
black sabbatical
moon-kissed.

i know you all umbilical visceral
bite your teeth into and cut
catalonia - two halves, dry mouth
and scorching sun
you know i’m subtler than the red
a lotus flower growing in the west
silk sheets in ultraviolet, as soon as
you come to rest
i can smell the war in your curl
jet black and charcoal -
no matte.

no hole in your chest - yet
microchips, they flicker
under your skin as the muscles twitch
in the rem sleep;
black madonna’s humble soft gaze
through the painted veil. marble or onyx
did you feel defeated? when you’ve fallen?
into the bottomless - unknowing
fungus-like growing
upsidedown along with the
torus

cycles and waves, when it’s not subatomic
i wish we’d perceived past the
electromagnetic; distant planets and stars
tease my potential. if only
i wasn’t eclectic, if only
i was in zazen

i accept; sit back sense the vibrations
mind-vacuumed perception not split into parts;
a black whole: if you, color, still there
up high; this deceiving metronome
sound time-travelling in circles
splashes across; carmen in carmine
a girl walks home alone
feline; l'via, cygnus,
jimi,
come on
why don’t you set me free

zealous
not jealous
make a zen
count to ten
will be in the
zone
no zip
no buts
all those
zzzs
and
zooms
let's turn them to
zephyrs of hope
zines of bravery
zero negativity
but trust the zodiac of love
for every year is
always us
yours
and mine

xo

You're not an Alcoholic but sometimes
you wonder.

It's not how drunk you get,
it's not even how much you drink,

it's the way you do it.

It's the way
you come back to the word
Alcoholic
like it's a girlfriend,
like it's a Lover,
like it's a soul mate,

like it's home.

It's the way
you keep telling yourself
that you need a break -
not Sobriety,
which you think
is maybe what you really need,
no,
just
a break.
But not drinking
is just
a little bit
terrifying,
and the zines you've read on quitting
aren't enough,
and in the end
you break your break
the day you make it.

It's the way
you don't need an excuse
to drink when you're out.
One, two, three, four drinks,
hey, if someone pays ...
once again
dissolving the barely formed
boundary you set with yourself.

It's the way
you sneak
your drinks
when you're at home.
Wine, beer, ***,
anything you can get
into your system
not because you particularly like
what's there,
but because
it is there,
because
it's something
and
you're not an
Alcoholic,
but you need
something.

You're not an
Alcoholic,
would be out of place in rehab or AA,
but sometimes
you wonder.

“The Test of a Man...”

                              -Ecclesiasticus 27:5-8

Friends are the chief ornaments of a man’s life
Through fishing trips and schoolyard baseball games
The brotherhood of barracks and camp and field
And ideas served and volleyed in courtesy

Among those men who have seen something more
Of the world than movie screens and gossip ‘zines
Men as familiar with rifle and rosary
As with a crescent wrench and single-malt

Men who can work both plow and metered line
Then lift a glass in thanks when the first stars shine

The Desperate Princewives in Toronto

On Christmas eve a lineman hoists herself
Far up into the blowing ice to mend
The power that keeps our children warm at night
While waiting for good Santa Claus to come

On Christmas Day a cop patrols the streets
Alone against snipers with ‘47s
Keeping us safe while we grumble about cops
She’s left her children with her mom to watch

The morning after Christmas another mom
Jump-starts her ten-year-old car so she can drive
The slushy streets to her shift at Dairy Queen
For her career ladder at the deep fryer

In a studio in Canada two men
Well-guarded by their secret services
Well-fed, well-dressed well-chauffeured in their ‘zines
Escorted, piloted, guided, scripted

Express their happiness that working folk
Are wealthier and healthier than ever

I sit in an ocean of empty Budweiser bottles,
Upon an island of Johnnie Walker Blue,
Mind flittering  through topics,
Whilst Steve Martin rocks the banjo,
Pickin' those old folk tunes.

I'm in a happy spot,
Between buzzed and blitzed,
That place you can only get to on a summer evening,
Or perhaps a bachelor party or two.

But listen to me ramble,
Please,
Come and take a seat,
Your dogs must be barking,
Would you like a cig?
Or perhaps a drink?

If it's neither that's no matter,
It's the company that keeps,
Just ignore my rambling when it crops up,
Treat it like a bad **** on a spring breeze.

You remember old cartoons?
What care and expertise.
Every cell hand drawn,
Fufilling every child's entertainment needs.

But what of old television programming?
What the hell happened to MTV?
Just give me my music videos and rock music,
Even if you can only go as far back as 2003.

Oops,
I'm doing it again,
How embarrassing,
Just a tipsy old fool,
Remember,
A **** on the spring breeze.

But seriously,
What about Vault?
Saturday morning cartoons?
Products as seen on tv?
Cha-cha-cha-chia?
Myspace?
Zines?

Perhaps you don't know what all those are,
Too young to remember the scene,
Of ska, skateboards, roller derbies,
Of Cribs, **** my ride, skating videos, and terrible tv.

Remember it all,
Those strange years,
Young and transitionary.

I remember it all,
Those strange, strange years,
Back in 2003.

my man is holding out
a brave face in a drought
he pleads
on heavily
magazines
i fold zines
i draw three
my ends aren't means