poetry

Glass Work

2012-02-09T11:51:00.003-08:00

She smiled
It was the next day
Her head against the hot glass of
The car window, her skirt stretched

She remembered kissing him first
Pressed against the still-warm hood after all
The fireworks above the river
Dripped across the sky, her
Drunk unfettered heart knowing

She would change if she became a mother

Valleys

2012-02-09T11:45:00.003-08:00

Drafted into warm rooms she found thistles
Growing in the window sills
Dead still in the Spanish music
Of the afternoon
Milk stains on her dress
A guitar refrain
Playing softly through the doorway
The creosotes seducing a distant storm

Mansfield

2012-01-30T23:24:00.006-08:00

You said you wanted to go somewhere warmer
I said warmer is what got you into this mess

That’s when it was cold and the world was Ohio
And I took your love every day outside
To the balcony when the air was splinters
And my cheeks bled

You saved for us to leave
And I waited for work

Your belly grew and I kissed it every night

You could have gone to school
You always said
But I didn’t care
I liked us poor, I did
Even as I bummed cigarettes from the corner guys

I think I remember

2012-01-30T23:00:00.007-08:00

I was telling you:
Happiness as it happens
vs. the photograph—edges fuzzed out
light all soft (that yellow coming through the faces),
some long summer ago, some drawn
out evening, everything setting, not watching
the camera, just captured
in it…

Or I wanted to tell you that, nothing else—and have you
remember there was hardly ever rain,
how the constant sun was an usher of
some welcome-oppression, and how then
you were always saying
“let's hole up here for awhile,”

...there’s a value to leaving things behind

For December 29th, 2011

2012-01-30T22:49:00.004-08:00

When the summer ran long and lightening
struck the mountains, setting the foothills to loud reds
and oranges, I knew you weren't to blame
but I hated you for it,
all the more so when
the flames licked the night
and I couldn't deny the perfect distance
from destruction
was breath taking

Once, maybe I was dreaming, I saw you with your head back,
you were laughing I guess. You were in love with someone or
something, or just forgetting everything, I don't know. That I didn't
share what looked like lightness made me hate you more, even as I pitied
whoever might feel
your glow was theirs too

When I open a door in the dark, drive over a bridge
at dawn, I expect to see
you, standing there, smiling
then turning away

Around the house,
I see you at every sink (cleaning dishes, brushing your hair)
or walking up the stairs.
I sleep on the couch. I sleep through the day. I sleep through sleep....
Then in my boldest colors I get up, I say goodbye to you everywhere
I go, knowing too it’s the best way to rid myself of you and keep you close

I bought paints with the money you keep sending. I threw greens
on the kitchen walls, which leaked onto the linoleum and into
the door jams.
still wet, I pressed my face hard against the wall,
then rolled my cheeks, my nose, onto the metal kitchen table

living, this is what must be done—that’s what my friend cautioned, telling me
with what seemed like glee, how he had always left before morning, how that was the trick of it... but you, you let her ruin you over and over, every day, he said,
time to allow that fire to pass on, leave way for fertile earth
imagine those first few flowers, white petals amongst the burnt dirt

He left as the sun dimmed
the green drying on my hands and face

the first one is free

2011-11-21T19:39:00.001-08:00

I remember being there without you,
before you, and missing you

you were beyond nostalgia then
and your smile echoed, in
wide-open fields even—I saw that early
and missed it right away, because I knew
it wouldn’t last or I’d learn
it wasn’t true

…there was the night you said we should climb
to the roof of the school. It was Thanksgiving weekend
and I threw rocks at the street signs while we walked and
you sang some old song I hadn’t heard

up the gutter to the top of the gym, our fingers bent stiff
in the Michigan air, no moon, just farm stars sewn across the sky
with careful generosity

we gloated at the top, you yelled
and when we climbed down, we went to
a late night church service where kids cried
and jumped toward heaven

the ground is scattered with reds, yellows…

2011-11-15T20:39:00.008-08:00

it was a wet summer
and now, the old strawberries and earth rot sweetly

my nose is burnished from the cold
and all morning I’ve been pushing over stones
with my feet

under a fist-sized one
I find a note, browned and crisp

Sorry, I cannot meet you. I wish you all the best.

later, I walk in
you have a fire going
maps and you sprawled out
on the coffee table and floor

you smile at me, and I back
as I remove my boots and shut the door

I walk to the fire, kneel down,
throw the note into the flames
and warm my hands

Summer

2011-09-17T23:36:00.009-07:00

I came back home
for summer, only
because I knew she
would be around

but she left
last second, accustomed to being out of reach and
having some better opportunity

I made the best of it

we talked sometimes on the phone, sent emails
and I worked long hours,
spending all those hot nights
on the porch or my roof thinking
of her
absence

when she finally got back she was
also gone again,
but I tried
holding on all the same

until one night on her parent’s front porch when
I was just saying goodnight and
she said
she just wasn’t ready for something
so serious, she had so much in front of her, sorry,
she loved me all the same, and always would, I was important
and so on, and then there was those years
we shared, which would always mean something, and we were
great together, but…

And I slipped away
saying there’s always only
one direction to go. And I didn’t hug her, which felt odd
but good, knowing
she had probably been planning this night for
some months

the one thing she probably never thought of:

she waited for the last real night of summer
the last few fireflies speckling the sidewalks and front yards
the last warm night too,
too warm to walk, but just right if
you had a moped
and I had a moped
heavy summer air made cool across my face, no helmet, me
bolstered, the night laid out

Time

2011-09-11T21:20:00.004-07:00

Walking, I’m thinking of

last night’s dreams of Spain

the morning cantaloupe-d open,
giving herself over,
because she too
is in love—
thinking
about a night spent, old and ready to be
forgotten, or
to make way for something new

‘here is the scepter young sun..’

and so I say many things like that, walking, talking to myself
tying my beard into knots,
because it’s been ages now
and my beard is long
and there is a crowing off some distant misused wire, because maybe
what I was first saying
was opposite
and here comes that old night again

not yet ready to slip away
the dust consenting to what it always was

it being hard to argue with warm dusk

if I had to bet on one
ultimately winning out, I would put money on night
every time, my bones waiting
for the white moon again,
and I’m wanting
to say repetition is a game of the gods
repetition is a game of the gods

...and tomorrow, rising sun,
I swear I’ll say it better

regardless

2011-08-14T12:28:00.002-07:00

we were men with
rock-sharped faces and hollowed cheeks
we knew what we wanted, said
no most often

we did not imagine much so we
feared little,
born with burning guts
of unmanageable love

she pushed off into the lake
looking for her father
the paddle dipping softly, echoing across
the water, like a distant drinking dog

then it was mostly running
the roots breathing off into the night
brisk cuts of air into the lungs
staccato

you will find me again daughter

With What Ease?

2011-06-15T23:16:00.010-07:00

I slaved to make the morning come

But the night stretched out
And my heart stretched out

Thin enough to wrap
Everything I saw

Into the coming-warmth of
First light

Yet I will not mince
I will not get down

She was small and lovely
And she died

----------

Across the table
They laughed

All stupid-heart, no articulation and
I wished they hadn't

That would somehow make
A more understandable space

But sorrow mocks laughter, I thought
(And yet how stupid to prize sorrow)

-----

Then the morning shown herself
Without modesty

And we had no choice

days

2011-06-02T13:49:00.004-07:00

whenever it’s an evil stretching
Sunday, I always find myself,
without thinking, back
at that old burnt down house
looking for, I don’t know, sometimes
her

with her uninterrupted back
towards me, and all that blown
up fierceness at once gentle,
overly intentional, waiting...

and in the ashes I find
I never really said
'yes'

and maybe
that’s what I’ve come back
to say, knowing
it’s too late

other times

2011-06-02T13:35:00.003-07:00

other times it’s snowing and
I’m sweating under my jacket, shoveling all that
snow while it keeps coming
down and there’s this
terrible burning in my gut
where everything plays itself over
and over again and the white just
takes over: trees, streets, houses, and
the world goes mute.

that's when I think
I’m beginning
to understand
how that fire ever got
started

And Chonologies

2011-03-06T23:59:00.004-08:00

------------

In a new city again,
no job, no connections
time switches from the classic sand
analogy—where you’re always grasping—to
a little house alone in the desert
where the wind is blowing and you’re
just everyday sweeping, sweeping

How easily something comes though

A cloud, lets say
a little thunder
and she walks around the corner

-----------------

When I was little
I would push around matchbox cars
for hours, with no instruction,
creating little worlds

I can’t remember how, but slowly
that became less, and less interesting

then one day I stopped

----------

At three am

a week before my grandpa died
I sat beside him as he begged
me to push him—along with his hospital bed—
into a hole
the one in the middle of the room

he was a very good man, and
not the calculated sort of good I often feel
myself and others playing

many times since then
and I’m sure
many times
before I beg
for the hole myself
I’ll remember him
and I’ll feel a great weight
pressing me to be better

How easily everything stays

---------

To See

2011-02-20T14:18:00.002-08:00

And today is clouds
Like jelly fish across the sky
The anticipation of being
Curled into
Your secrets during some evening spelling
Of light

Feeling like all the girls
Whose years get counted by summers
How they cry without bitterness
When love leaves
And will never
Really hear
Jukebox blues

something of the future

2011-02-20T14:10:00.002-08:00

Finally alone in the same room, some children’s toys
in the corner
That old feeling in the doorway
Her, leaning hard against the window

Careful, she said, of intense emotions,
they have a habit
of eventually betraying their objects

He looked her down
over his fattening cheeks
and he knew she felt herself
like an old weepy prayer
remembered some time later, on a
sunny day when there wasn’t much pressing
in

He said,
I’ve been thinking lately of Freud
I’m sure in all his ambition he eventually felt
less treasured, more resentful
that his mother
referred to him
in his boyhood as
‘my golden Sigi.’

What are getting at? She said.

He waited for a certain feeling to
pass through the room, like a stranger
between the silence of some intimate talk

Then he began again, saying
Most everything rises
from the cremation of our mentors

and in his head he thought of how fitting it would be
to light a smoke just then, only he had quit years back
after his friend quipped that smoking was either
the arrogance of
youth or a bad habit of old men.

Later he learned that was a stolen quote and resented
his friend for it, and resented the great power little comments
continued to impress on his life. Thinking back on all that made him resent
ever referencing Freud.

She looked to be ready to leave, her eyes fast
around the room, her voice counting the
beats. She said,
being a mother, and a bad one, and
having had several mothers to this point and expecting several
more before I die,
perhaps I’m justified in saying
just now, after listening to you, that all mothers, however terrible,
ought to always be loved.

And she poked his chest three times with her last three words
then said, for without them… and he interrupted.

Your opening caution, he pecked back, to avoid intense emotions,
I first thought
you were only wrong
in your reflection of intense emotion’s
motherly effect, that you hadn’t come to terms with the necessary tragedy
of spreading one’s own wings, nor the glory of flight…
but now hearing the word
‘mother’ leave your lips
I feel my heart crow for a stupid love
sorry that I never loved anything as much
as it deserved

she slammed the door
after looking at him with a sort of kiss in her eye

he kicked a stuffed animal and gurgled the flesh
and spit in his throat
as a begrudged sort of welcoming

The Pleasant Not-Yet

2011-01-21T06:40:00.002-08:00

Just Saint Helens breathing in her sleep
While I smile and caress her smoldered knees
Clouds
Or smoke
Quiet the sun
And make my heart soft

Awaiting Some Type of Opera

2010-12-07T10:29:00.003-08:00

As from a face emerging out of a bathtub
As from your finger above a button

After he said he loved her
Her hair turned to ash
And the light turned casual across her shoulder

In the yard
Warm water kissed cool air
At the most forgiving time of day

The Paucity of Angles

2010-11-17T13:19:00.013-08:00

we all sat
with our heads in some
years back
and Paul was talking about how he hit two
deers within two weeks
and some of us were tossing back cold ones

our hands were all ashed
and chalked with dirt

we watched
the fire slowly shrink
while the coals grew brighter

I fiddled a stick around
at the base, letting the tip
get hot enough
to glow orange,
then I flipped the stick about in the air
making little zig zags and circles

we mentioned the game last night, and
at some point it seemed we all cared about this movie
we had seen-- but that died out too
and then Paul said,

You should have seen that 2nd deer
I hit. A real beauty. I got out of my truck and
she was kicking about on the asphalt,
struggling to get up and outta there, only her legs
were busted this way and that
so she couldn't. I had to straddle her just
to keep her still... then I ran my
hunting knife deep across her throat .
(he made the motion across his own)
and that was it. loaded her into the bed.

nobody really had anything to say about that
and then it was crickets and the here-there snap of the fire

I kept thinking of that initial
rush, breaking
the sticks, searching for brush and getting
the first flame going

temporary gods & the gift of immortality

2010-10-10T15:27:00.010-07:00

at the coin & wash
oldies on, you were folding whites
on a yellow table
on my mind . . . a crumpled sky of clouds

----------------------

walled in on that too-large gray chair, dusty
bottles of gin
in the glass cabinets (leftovers from
previous tenants), I never got
comfortable, not once
the whole night

at 3am I walked home
knowing from then on
I would be much older
than I ever had been

and there would never be
much I could change about it

much later, I learned I was wrong

---------------------------

it was after school
i am tempted now
to say something
about the light, what the sky was
up to . . . but I won't

my dad picked me up in the old blue van
and we were headed east
toward New Mexico

we weren't really talking, but everything
was very good

we had something
important
to take care of

open air

2010-08-17T11:46:00.008-07:00

in an old VW Beetle, same color
as the stretched fading sky,
the two took to the
curving back roads
of the Mojave
their yellow mutt's happy head out the back,
sweaty tank tops,
drinking warm beers and tossing the cans out the window
whenever they finished

radio dial switched off
his hand on her bare leg
her mind on what her parents must be thinking
back in Minnesota, five days after reading the note
she left

she had never been to California
she had never reclined in the summer sand of the
west, eating raisins while his head grew heavy
in her lap

she had never felt so at once free
and afraid of possibilities

"I'm so happy I have nothing to write" --E.K.

2010-08-17T11:31:00.014-07:00

she enters the kitchen, made soft all over
from the lotion of night
her skin malleable and scented
as an overripe pear

the room floats with her smell and
she shows me she loves me with
the carelessness of her hand traveling my
neck and shoulders like a banister

she leaves as she came, pieces and scents
of her trailing lazy

the sun whistles a predictable, bloated hallelujah
the morning echoes
a mechanical, satisfied amen
and I check the morning market,
my losses... small all over

the morning ages and
I move on to some big city magazine,
its modern fiction piece
full of commonplace despair and paper hopes
I don’t finish it
I just lean back in my chair
and assume
exactly the look you’re imagining

Without Any Silver

2010-08-17T11:17:00.014-07:00

Joey knocks on my door
And I answer
He’s real drunk, which means
don’t say anything wrong or else

I need a ride. Can you give me a ride to my girl’s place?
He says.
They kicked me out of here, so I need a ride. Whenever you can. It’s cool.

Sure, Joey. I’ll give you a ride.

He smiles.
I mean, I can wait if you got another beer or something.

Which I have and offer, and he takes it, and sits on my floor to drink. He thanks me and reminds me of his great loyalty to me. He asks if I like doo-wop and doesn’t wait for an answer before producing a CD from his rear pocket and putting it on my player.

Remember last time I came to your place and you gave me the hard stuff?
Joey asks.

Sure, you punched out my screen and hugged me for a long time after. I remember.

Yeah, I’m sorry. The hard stuff does me in. I can’t touch it.

No worries Joey.

But after I drank with you, I left to get more beer with my boy. At the light some guys pulled up and starting shouting TAD, throwing signs, whatever. I looked at my boy and he nodded so I pulled his nine from the center…. Uh…

…center counsel?

Yeah, I pulled out the nine and let’s just say the driver wasn’t gonna drive no more. Then I got out, right there in the middle of the street, and… POP! POP! POP! (Joey uses his fingers to demonstrate, his whole face down, his chest up. The whole thing, feeling very cartoon like) And I Unloaded the rest of the clip into his chest while the passenger balled his ga-damn eyes out, begging for his life. Which, I didn’t have any more bullets so I don’t know why he was crying.

I was fucking psycho man. Can’t touch the hard stuff.

Right.

Anyway I’m sorry. I’m sorry for coming back to your place and acting all crazy like I did.

How did you feel after? (I know Joey is all bullshit. At least I’m pretty sure he's all bullshit, but what else am I gonna say?)

After? After, you feel GOOD man. You feel powerful. Like nothing can touch you. Like you’re invincible. But then you get scared. You get real scared and fucking paranoid, hiding in your room all day, not going out at night neither.

Because you think you’ll get caught?

Yeah, by the cops or worse… his boys. And then the guilt. I remember after once, because I owed a favor, I like knocked on this door and a woman answers and I say I’m this guy’s friend, right? She sort of opens the door a little to see who I am and I just bust in and shove her down on the floor and call her a bitch and she’s just lying there on the floor crying. I walk past her and into this guy’s room and pop him before he can get out of his bed. I didn’t feel bad about that because this guy was a fucking dirty G and I owed a favor to my boy….but shoving his mom down, his mom… I still think about that.

I won’t say anything.
I say, and
Joey looks at me hard.

I know it sounds crazy, but….
it makes you believe in God.
For real.
And it makes you believe in the devil.

I nod.

Joey starts to cry, just a little, and I get him another beer. We go to my car and he directs me down street after street, neither of us really talking. Then he tells me 'stop here,' behind some vacant commercial building in a dirt parking lot.

I can walk from here.
He says.

The city lights and not too distant dawn introducing themselves in the yearning blue.

Modern Meaning

2010-08-05T00:40:00.003-07:00

it’s right when everyone
gathers around an old pair
of brown shoes

and I say

These are peasant shoes! Real
ga damn workman shoes!
enshrined with years of dust and loss
and struggle!

and then you get a guy with
some stamp-sealed-schooling
and a goatee

he looks at the shoes,
puzzles at them while a
gray street cat leans dramatically
into his calf

he pinches his steal splintered chin, says
this is the beauty of the mundane

and everyone nods
maybe around a fire

on thinking

2010-06-15T12:59:00.010-07:00

Perhaps thinking was invented, sorry Aristotle,
not from an extravagant pour, time's overflow,
but on long journeys
to promises of honey land,
when it was first clear
her stomach took on a second life,
or when venerable gray turned to venerable ash

yes, says Aristotle or you, but this downpour of everything
has also been
the subtraction of thinking:
blinders set to action,
flesh devoted to flesh
technology becoming music to drown to
rather than dance with

and yet
along the way, whether in lull or bloom
there have been a spattering of them
who looked at stones until they became
just has as unmovable themselves

their minds, explosive little headlights
so even on nights absent of moon and city over-glow
little stretches of road lit up
like rays of daylight
the night giving up small
concessions everywhere they went—
they traveled the roads
of gravity, war, or Gala… among others

and whenever the night kept rapping on their door
or anxiety offered only solitude, they zeroed in on some
shinning stone placed on the floor
in front of a chair, in front of their headlights

often, we have assumed,
these minds had grown a vision of darkness itself, pieced together
from every night of recording, the workings of a great
splintered map

and we were in awe

...though there have been others too
those who were bewildered with stories of caves
as if there was a difference between
inside and out

these were the blind-minds, the minds without headlights
or sun, but armed with appendages to grope and kiss the night
from the beginning overwhelmed and
at home in the darkness.

maybe it just depends what you call him

2010-06-01T13:43:00.012-07:00

the supposed mistake:
getting down to specifics
…he’s in the details they say, which
is simply another way of warning
you will regret taking too close a look
pulling back the gloss of polished skin
all for the sake of….?
reality (maybe) or the pleasure of
saying I know, I know…
in some off handed way,
like as you
finish washing the dishes
humming between words
everyone else as her/him
shoveled into piles
at the kitchen counter

however:
an eye pressed against her chest
(the heart)
a microscope on the skin
(little cells squirming/making love)
can be (well it can!) another way
of closing your eyes until the red
burns through your lids

not to mention:
if the fear is finding him
I would warn too,
against climbing towers or
smearing the oils of your forehead
across plane windows

I’m not suggesting you should
like, carry your microscope up mountain tops
(though perhaps you should)
more that, maybe we ought to quit trying
not to find him

...as for 'escape' (if you’re interested
in that):
maybe I’m just saying
escape, in this sense, has (lately)
been knocking at my door dressed like a clown,
day old make up
it’s hot out
and at my best
I’m like
what the hell
come on in

the beauty/comfort of a myth digested both ways

2010-06-01T13:40:00.003-07:00

Your winter locks
Your bulletproof smile
You are beautiful in the background

The way you look on
And everything looks on you

My hollow head
My vulnerable hunger
I am swallowing the horizon

The way I look on
And everything is almost me

I’m looking though this book of photographs

2010-05-04T11:46:00.005-07:00

-------------
he is
dropped-faced in an old easy chair, glaring
into the ground while some terrible clouds
move in (view out the window)

a close up of this guy’s
bubblegummed skin folding over his collar
(he made bad decisions for the country)

a sad gut making
work for a pair of red swimming trunks
while luxury sulks in the background
(30 years ago women threw themselves at him)

all the faces, beautiful as hell in these
forever-seconds I flip through, these lucky people
escaping the crude chronology of time (for a time)
and its 'guess what happens otherwise?-gossip'
(the days of doing nothing, the brainless comments, the drawn-out
mistakes, etc)

the thing being I’m pretty sure
there’s some guy I can’t see,
and he’s there off the page
saying,

give me a despondent look, great, great
think sadness now, death…yes, genius
now smile like you’ve JUST fallen in love
your knees are flittering into your gentiles-
fabulous, just like that

or whatever guys like him say

and so I grin a little
looking back at my
(snap, snap…) life
hearing the photographer’s voice as my own
(with less of a French accent)

and it’s

her sure smile
the sun’s stale air across
the dashboard
that hacking surge right before
the nurses came running in
pipes on the back porch

and I’m, you know,
off scene, saying
this is love
this is loneliness
this is the pain of loss
this is happiness

In All Senses

2010-04-05T16:23:00.009-07:00

When I have to shit—I’ve been doing this the last couple weeks—I go in, I close the door, drop my pants and match white to white on that cold plastic seat. I drop my elbows on my knees, hands together, leaning forward so my stomach folds over my waist, all that old food and laziness turned to skin and sloppy flesh. Then I scan the grime growing between the tiles in the shower, or dial in my gaze on the scum growing out of nothing along the baseboards and cracking linoleum, pocked yellowing walls as a backdrop for the whole scene. And I stare.

I take it slow, not really thinking about it, I mean as in planning it. But knowing I could spend the next hour in there if it comes to it. Because, thing is, there’s nowhere else in my world with that kind of solitude...no TV, no phone, no people…nothing really to do but get some good thinking in. And it’s thinking that starts with my body, there in that little cell, even my breath ready to echo.

And so okay, I don’t really think, not in the normal sense of the word anyway. I’m just in there with my body, excreting what I can’t handle, my head slowly leaking back into my limbs and hollowing bowels, my thoughts filling the freshly emptied spaces in the furthest basements of my gut, everything inside now unsure of what to do with the extra room.

Next, I crumple waifs of toilet paper into a manageable wad. Wipe while I’m still sitting. Sit a bit longer, forgiving my forehead against double palms, lids arching with the pull. When I'm ready, I stand up, sometimes light-headed, turn around, survey what’s happened. I Flush.

By time I wash my hands, staring into the mirror, letting the water run long, I’m thinking more in my toes and fingers than my head, my elbows and knees flushed too, bending different, or bending noticeable, like each tendon is moving up and through to my heart, which is now beating small and singular, yet pulsing hard in the back of my thighs and neck...throat.

I listen and feel the beating...even in the mirror, everything, beating

I sigh, ready. Walk out
into the noise of everything beyond and outside
me

re-telling

2010-04-05T08:16:00.004-07:00

it’s the little pellets of rain breaking
on the corrugated metal at midnight

you, picking granules of sand out of
your sunburned bellybutton

below that, naked starched white
and a folded up orchid, untouched

the rest of your skin, like soft linen
thrown over the firm abandoned mattress

of your thin muscles and bones
echoing your upturned lips and breasts

you ask if I think less of you
for being like this

forgive me. if I say nothing…I lie
if I say anything…I lie as well

Pushing 70

2010-03-27T16:33:00.002-07:00

Driving with the windows down, the morning splayed open and vulnerable, the after math of a generous night—a night that didn’t know when enough is enough, just kept pouring and pouring until it was stars, more stars than anyone knew what to do with—and I’m wondering, should I be sorry (wondering if I am sorry) to find this scene beautiful: a church pouring out like mascara down a puffy cheek of green lawn, the clouds respectfully showing sympathy with their dignified brand of pouting, the hearse slowly pulling away with all the antithesis of an ambulance, a girl in a black dress, her eyes marked with the darkness of half-grasping eternity, and this contrasted against the brevity of her youth, her apple-skin face and knees. Now, I don’t know what I’m sorry for, maybe for everything…and I’m deeply pleased about that.

Translations

2010-03-07T23:14:00.007-08:00

At the Verdugo Taco stand
A man stops his cart
And lifts the trash lid
Inspecting the contents
As unabashed as if he were choosing the perfect
Apple at a farmer’s market

The pigeons scatter out of his way
Talking to each other about how
God damn interesting economics are

Down the street
Two high school students wield their spray cans

(A penis and a phone number)

What’s the essence of this piece?
Asks a mother
Walking her kids home from school

Artists should avoid forcing interpretation
Pipes one teen, touching up the cock
That now appears to be smoking a cigar

The mother and her children stroll on, contemplative
Not on the graffiti-art, but on how joyous and at once
Stupid the pigeons seem

The Off Handed Nature of Gravity

2010-03-05T08:52:00.010-08:00

Robbie has her head wrapped
In a golden bandanna

She motions for me to sit

Her head rests on the back of
Her palm, elbow on counter,
Cigarette burning between
Her fingers

Mr. you would not believe it
Shot in the back of the head
And he chooses to die on ME
I do not need that

I’m sure you don’t
But I’m betting he didn’t need
That bullet to the head either

Right outside the apartment
Are those tall glass candles with pictures
Of saints on the front
Laid out like a cross

A traffic cone cautions cars
Around the spot

When it happened
The kids was in the parking lot
And they’re scared now cuz they seen
The man who done it

My ten year old keeps pissing himself

Sure, kids shouldn’t have to see that

It’s just too much Mr.
Just... too... much

I nod, surveying the tubs of food and
Clothes floating around her living room

After excusing myself I thank Robbie
For her time, telling her it was good to see
She was holding up

Then I walk across the street
Past the candles, toward the train tracks

My heart exploding white at just how alive
Even the concrete seems

if you run out of gas, read this:

2010-02-23T18:37:00.011-08:00

driving a white Chevy Cobalt
as a white guy
can be a little less white if you
blast some Nina Simone

too loud though, and you won’t
hear the beep, low fuel

eventually the Chevy will sputter
and the freeway will begin passing you up

(all that careful speeding, wasted. I know)

coast as long as you can
don’t get mad or worried
it’s a challenge
and as life goes, a small one

put your hazards on
but don’t turn the music off

once you roll to a stop
get out, lock the car, and
try enjoying the rain

you’ll have to walk maybe a mile
to the nearest gas station

buy a gas can
and a lighter so you
can smoke the black and mild in your pocket
while you walk back

sure, the attendant will look at you strange
he’ll say, “gas can and a lighter eh?”

that’s when you tell him straight-faced, “everyone is allowed
one mistake. she made three.”

you and the two attendants will
all laugh—them a little nervous

next, point and request the latest
Playboy explaining, “consolation prize.”

one of the guys will get the magazine
because he has to and isn’t sure if you’re joking
then he’ll smile, forced like,
shaking his head

on the way out, give the magazine to the guy
asking for change

fill up your new red can under the awning
cap it, and grab some paper towels in case

create a distance between you and the pumps
then light the black and mild
crouching behind a large electrical box

head back to your Chevy rental
as the rain turns to spit

while you’re walking,
resist temptation, don’t
ask yourself what
moral you should be learning or
what truth arises out of nature

instead, pinch the plastic tip of the smoke
between your teeth and slowly exhale. then
notice the conjugal joy of a long awaited reunion,
the clouds nestling into the desert mountains

a terrible poem written for you/2009

2010-02-08T21:15:00.004-08:00

late Saturday night

i’m purple tongued
taking a piss

door swung wide because
i’m alone

…but not completely alone

my skin smells of your bones still

and a cockroach crawls
under the cracking linoleum…

i grin at his brainless
scuttle and life’s
ugly price tag
for survival

there’s an intermittent flicker
from the 100 watt bulb
naked above the mirror
such negligence it says

yet this too charms me

i don’t miss a damned thing
right now
except maybe

right now

i mean
if you were here i swear i would love you
call you the pleasant ache
of present disappearing
your head collapsed in my lap
my fingers slowly jogging your jet hair
as you weave between consciousness and sleep

but as it is, i must say
and out loud

i’m glad
you’re gone

instruction/s for solitude

2010-01-19T17:28:00.009-08:00

in the shallows of 3am
if you don’t have paints
or access to legs other than yours

get ready for the flush
of absence…you might as well

call that mutt
before he comes on his own, ready

yourself for the hum that grows
from the corners of your room
into a personified wind

while that mock of a swinging
overhead light somehow brightens
the darkness

stay away from empty cupboards, letters
and pictures of childhood
or
old lovers

-------

No, no, that’s the worst thing you
could do

punch that light out, dead reflections
now sown across your
wood floors

guttural, yes, it must
be

like a wolf
who knows how he stacks up
against the night

phenomenology of a muse

2010-01-06T19:34:00.005-08:00

her broken head amongst
broken glass in the sky
both gold from the shine
of a beckoning

spoke as from--here
it comes--lips
pushing though the
surface of the sea
released from the sand
miles below
ages ago

move--ment

2010-01-04T00:27:00.016-08:00

it's gripping, really

the austere croppings
of everything you love

shelled out
across the horizon
like that

like little spaces muted by
........expanse

playing dirges

with that old smile of rot-beauty
on their faces

where
do you start
now?

Part 3 (redemption)

2009-12-18T21:50:00.012-08:00

You know how it is
Patches of clouds and
Sun squares shinning down
The Awwah arching your frame and
Showcasing your hips

Morning glories
Pressing your chest out
Proud
Of births

Blessing the night
Rain that had
Spit shined the sky

So now even the smoke
Stacks
Spew something new-
Fresh and strained
And blazing

While the yawn of power
Lines stretches towards the clouds
Above the
Snow dipped hills

chronology of desire

2009-12-06T18:07:00.011-08:00

I was just a kid
and you were stark raving mad,
an old man,
Don’t be afraid of envy
you said

I tried to follow you
but it was hard to keep up

-------

then you were 9, sweet red hair,
and I was 12

we saw each other at the fairgrounds
through crowds of teenagers
and fat couples

your dad
said you couldn’t stay

I watched you walk
away, your hand in his
and you seemed older than me
because you were happy

then the world was shoved
into a corner
with the expanse of youth and night
mixed with dirt and

the smell of creosote and horse shit

----

years later it grew cold
and neither of us could sleep
so we dressed for the ice and sky
and dark

I tried
to keep you warm

right after (part 2)

2009-11-25T16:46:00.013-08:00

-----
it was right after
those raw wires
reached out and kissed
the rebar balancing over his shoulders
sending him to the ceiling
while his intestines
reeled out
like the line to an anchor just dropped
into deep blue

that is,
it was right after he almost died

when everything went white
and that old bearded fact-man
with the look of
I’m sorry, but the sheet doesn’t lie
was standing in the distant light

of course, it was
those swooping clouds of
cackle dipped evils holding him
back, when a mother cast out her hand to him

not yet
she said

and as sure as Sunday
she called him her
child

then there was the hospital table-
imitation light everywhere-
and someone screaming

Don’t you die on me Lennie!
DON’T YOU DIE!

-------

right after her frontal lobe began kicking
off switches like a janitor after the
big game--each flick
echoing off the bleachers
and steel rafters--

it was that slideshow of memories:

love, nostalgia, and the pang
of misdeeds

and through the clicks and screen
came hands that pressed hers

the warmth of a reckless iron
fusing to a shirt
traveled from
her palm to heart

then it was a fuzzy,

There’s my baby doll. Oh God, we thought
we lost you for a minute.

----

they sat down to breakfast
it was right after that
when he was pouring
some juice,

that’s when his heart
beat into his brain and gave up

first it was humming quiet
like the sound of aftermath
or neon

next it was scattered little glows of
we-must-keep-warm-fires
seen as from a single eye
stretched over the globe
like a condom

then the whole thing
began to
shake like the loosening phlegm inside
the chest of a waking
old man

causing a few fires to catch wind
and bleed together
while a thundercloud
patted her drooping belly and milky breasts,
the sky whispering
as to a dormant lover,

ahh! now we begin…

then it was slap, slap

Eddie! Wake up! Wake UP!
There you are...
Don’t you ever pull a stunt like
that again
-----

The Difference, The Almost-Individual (part 1)

2009-11-12T18:54:00.010-08:00

when he woke up
he thought of saying something
about the birds chirping outside his window
and the connection between
feeling life and crisp air

when he made the coffee he thought of mentioning
how the smell filled the house with comfort
without using the word aroma

he thought of putting Brahms on the record player
sitting down to read the paper and
stopping sometimes
to stare out his bay windows whenever
he read something
particularly harrowing

or maybe
he should put his flannel on
and rake the leaves littering his front yard
into neat little piles
waving to his neighbors when they walk past

the neighbors will stop
and ask how the kids are
or say something about

like how chilly
it is

he’ll lean on the rake
smile generous
and make good talk

but instead
I think

he got his type writer out and
set up shop on his front lawn

the day went and
early evening came
a few bottles of half drunk bourbon lay
around his folding table, some from
days before, the late sun
making amber prisms through the liquor
and onto the green
and scattered colored leaves
and discarded papers

he typed away
into the dark

it was probably
50% genius

or maybe it wasn’t that

maybe instead
he pulled from the hallway shelf
a leather bound book
with old pieces of pipe tobacco
once scattered and now stuck
between the pages,
notes in the margin from his
grandfather’s pen

and he sat between his bed and wall
reading the words of a saint

weeping over thoughts
and old apartment nights
knowing he must wrap himself
in the flesh of Christ

or no...

it was at the DMV maybe
sitting next to him
a woman
her stomach sitting on a bubble of fat
that rested on her flattened thighs

and when she began to cry he took her
hand and said everything would be
alright

but

it could have been
a hundred things with him

and maybe he looked into that
and felt a sense of
being born for the
third or fourth time

but surely not the last

almost an introduction

2009-11-03T00:17:00.008-08:00

on the bus
in the language of
…if only…
quiet against the hum of
…again, again…
sadness shining the beauty of
…into a softness I’d like to hold
or control

how you’ve…
along the way of
…touched everyone…
with your alabaster face of
…what is resolute and distant…
while I make what is splintered
or unborn
mine

Lexington Waiting Room

2009-10-15T01:32:00.006-07:00

Her eyes were attentive yet
glazed over
with a film of slowness
and probably the last years of the 70’s

I asked her
Do you know anything
about the motel across the street?

She said
Oh honey don’t stay there
That’s a crack house

Then she looked me over
With those slow dark eyes of hers

They got whores over there too
You can pay for a room by the hour
Cops are always over there
I don’t know why they just don’t
shut the place down

I laughed a bit
without really thinking
I guess it seemed like the thing to do

You know of anywhere else
close, not too expensive?
I said

She twirled her hair in her fingers
humming
She seemed far away
Happy to be older

A silent minute came and went

We could hear rain on the asphalt
parking lot

I said
I guess if you’re from a place
you don’t know where the hotels are
you have no reason to
I mean, you don’t sleep in hotels when
you’re in your own town

Well I don’t sleep in hotels around here anymore
She said
Not in a long time
Lets just say that
Lets just say
It’s been a long time

I agreed

as if remembering thirty years ago
when I bought a room in that motel across the street
paid 40 dollars for three hours
my arm around her waist
us laughing
fumbling to get the door open
smoking cigarettes
then…

not happiness, but something else close
enough for the time

Later, the night old and dirty
in the oranging sky
closing the door to the motel
not looking at her
I couldn’t
not knowing where I should go
or where she was going
at an hour like that
an hour as empty and broad
as the horizon…

but that was
a long time ago

lets just say that

after

2009-09-13T04:25:00.010-07:00

you are pouring (everything) water

into the kettle

for two teas

the tenor of
the room slow--ly... rises

stops
when (?) half full

....need.....

i --want to-- stare
into (you)
glow

smile [while you
debut] into jasmine

into

(us) cleaning away the sounds
of a calf (maybe hundreds!)
stolen from her mother

now o(h!)pen our
double doors
into warm

nude

night

return

2009-09-10T01:36:00.004-07:00

Las Vegas drowns in its own water
we can see it now from above

illusion sings her own accolades

surely 99 degrees is a better deal
from inside, up high
breathing cool recycled air

across from me
a toddler won’t stop screaming
and the mom is saying loud enough for
everyone to hear

I know your ears hurt
and your teeth are coming in
be quiet now
it’s okay
be quiet now

the kid screams still

behind me
an older woman says to her husband
but loud enough for
everyone to hear

you don’t know whether to
spank the child or the mother

and for reasons that must be profound
or at least
must be hers
the lady sitting next to me has a blue rose
on her wrist
a sword piercing the center of petals
she rolls her eyes and looks
out the window

landing in Tucson
i think
i know you
old lover

water

2009-09-02T01:16:00.011-07:00

-------------

i think
24 is too young for anyone
to be
good friends
with nostalgia

but nostalgia is
the wrong word

i feel something
existing above

the clouds of nostalgia

--------

i’m on the Oregon coast
and the ocean is swallowing
the sun

but it’s doing it slowly
as if to savor the process

as if the sun is the final
bite of steak
the last joy of the ocean’s last meal
before it’s execution—a hungry night

in contrast:

fog is dressing sandy hills
and small mountains
in lingerie

---------

it was a summer night
on this same beach
i had just met love and
the sun was already deep
in the bowels of the sea

i held her
sitting in sand
near still-burning coals
from some abandoned fire

by faith and grace
my lips found hers
within temporary death
by a velvet night

our movements were
awkward and sloppy
our tongues young

our hands were braces
on our hips and each other’s
faces, and we made space
to say

i love you
i love you

in that kiss
i was sure

God was there

---------

now, again
on that same beach
my bare feet in cold sand and
the breeze rolling off
the sea
smiling

the waves give a constant
low growl
no doubt, protecting
some love of their own

i’m filling my pockets with
stones, recalling
some story i’ve been told

but i won’t walk into the sea
because it’s cold
and i know the waves
and i know how sacred
that sort of love
can be

------------

my insides begin to glow
like an orange moon
rising against fading twilight

i watch the breath of sky
kiss the earth
between a burning midnight
and the breaking holy dawn

i’m in love

with the generous passing

----------

August

2009-08-28T02:00:00.002-07:00

The summer stretches
The lazy dusk

On the sidewalks
And store fronts

Of our
Flower town

Thin clouds river across
The firmament of elastic sky

We watch our shadows reach away from us

Good Walls Make for Good Walls

2009-08-25T20:02:00.005-07:00

Mel lived next door
I could hear him every night

It was a practice he had
And why not?

He had a factory job
Putting combines together
In a windowless warehouse

During the half hour lunch
And the two fifteen minute breaks he got
He rarely talked
He just drank black coffee from
Paper cups

Wednesday deliveries were revelry

He turned bolts
And spoke
With the solemnity
Of those mourning
During a long-awaited funeral

Until he got home
Where he lived alone

He picked up his mail:
Bills, notices, promotions

He poured some whiskey
Just one glass
And walked to the back

He thought of falling in love again
Of moving to the desert
And building a trout pond

Then he would laugh
With his head un-sewn
For half an hour straight

His neighbors could hear him

Love's Noon

2009-08-21T21:19:00.004-07:00

You were hungry
For the torment
So you washed her
With perfidious light

She was lonely
For privation
So she kissed you
In the marauding night

In the hollow
Of a day bright
The secrets fled

what a monk taught me on the train

2009-07-28T04:03:00.014-07:00

i'm seat #3
there's a table
on the table is a beer
it's mine
across from me
is seat #4
in that seat a Vietnamese Buddhist monk sits
his smile as bright as
the orange cassock he's wrapped in

he tells me
he doesn't mind my beer

he's happy to tell all
about his life in the temple
about his last seven years learning different
bead chants and practicing them

i tell him
i would fall asleep a lot
if i were him

he smiles like a bullfrog and says
when he is hungry or tired or wants to have
sex
he asks
who wants these things?
then he answers himself

he is no self at all

then the desires vanish

he uses his hands to show what he means

i wonder 'who' it is exactly
that asks that question
and where he gets off using so many pronouns
but i'm not adverse to contradiction
in fact, i live most my life
swimming in it

so i let him keep talking

he says he sleeps only 4 hours a night
even when he's away from the temple
and he rarely takes dinner

i put this look of awe on my face
partly because i think he wants that
(and i'm nearly incapable of not contriving)
and partly because
it really is impressive

finally my questions run out and he has
nothing to ask me

so i return to my beer and book
pleased to be a self that can say
the hell with moderation
and eat
and drink
and sleep
and love women
with gusto

at 9:30 the monk
starts to meditate
his legs folded underneath one another

by 9:45 he's sleeping
he sleeps the whole night through

the whole world is full of bullshit
i say to my bullshit self

and I smile

Siren and Odyseus

2009-07-16T02:08:00.007-07:00

It wasn’t easy for him to say no

My darling, she said,
Come here

He almost always came, even when he
Didn’t want to
Even when he was angry with her

It was that melody in her voice
And whoever she was
And because of what happened
He was close to her now
Or at least under her whims

Kiss me my darling she said

He did

Get us a menu and buy some food darling

He did that too

After dinner he was lying next to her, sweating
In the coastal humidity

I need to tell you something, he said
I have to go back
I made a promise

She wasn’t happy
She sat up
Am I just fun to you? she said
Her eyes unforgiving

No, but you’ve got other things going on
And I can’t afford this
You know that

Don’t think like that way
Don’t ever say like that

I’m going now

Don’t go
Why do you want to make me so upset?
Why do you do this to me?

I'm sorry
Maybe I’ll come back
I don’t know if I’ll come back
Maybe, maybe in a few days
Maybe much later
I don’t know
But even if I come back
I can’t stay
Let’s be honest

She dug her head into his chest and
Wrapped her arms around him tight
She started crying
It was almost terrible

He pushed her gently back so he could kiss her
Then pulled her close again while she stood limp in protest-
Something she might later regret-
Then he walked away

On the bus he said no to himself, he swore
He wouldn’t go back, but
Now, six days later
He still doesn’t feel good about it
He’d like to hear her say ‘darling’ again, song-like
He’d like if he hadn't lied to her
Or made her cry

But a girl like that
Will let a man kill himself
While giving him reasons to smile
And he still has a few things left to do

I still wrote about it

2009-07-16T01:48:00.008-07:00

we were in the alley
to our right
shirtless men and boys ironed uniforms in a room with no back wall
there were a few shops with little to buy inside
the lights mostly off to save costs

the clouds were fat with water
and outlined pink from the setting sun, but we knew
it wouldn’t rain, and it didn’t besides a few sprinkles

we set up a folding table and sat on plastic stools
Shay bought some whiskey and soda water
to share with his friends and me
I passed out cigarettes as fast as they could smoke them

Shay’s wife came out with their son
he was a shy boy and
she was a fat woman with a flat face
and she smiled
and I smiled too because we didn’t share a language

just like me with everyone there but Shay

and that’s the beautiful
thing about not being able to speak to people
you just smile and smile
you cheers a lot
you give each other food
you light cigarettes
you put your hand on their backs or touch
their shoulders while talking
you smile some more
and at the end, maybe you hug them

but before the end there’s these bodies
and your body
and you see these bodies and you talk with these bodies
I mean, maybe you talk with words, and maybe they do too
but if you do that
you might as well sing to each other
because it’s really the sound--
and it’s a lovely sound--
that really matters

their words are like a thick forest
where you couldn’t pick out any one tree
and would never want to escape the indiscriminate shade
as you near sleep
without reaching it
because you’re really not tired
just happy

and right there
right at that place
you almost wish your own words didn’t
mean anything
because when you speak them
they take something from you with their specifics
they bring you back to your brain and your mouth
and away from your whole body
which is where you want to stay
which is where you want to feel everything
as the whiskey slowly starts to flatten out the night

Jenny is 15

2009-07-12T19:29:00.005-07:00

She is selling bracelets on the beach
She sells other things too

Uninvited
She works a thread
Between her fingers, ripping hairs
From my back
I tell her to stop
You look like a monkey, she says,
You won’t find a girl friend
You're ugly
Six dollars for your whole back

I tell her love is deeper than that

She blows air through her teeth
And pushes my shoulder back
With her hand
Not true
She says

When can you go home?
I say

Soon, maybe six o clock,
I will go home
Take a shower
Take a nap
Then go out
She says

You should stay home
I tell her
Study, play with your friends or something

She goes to slap me on the cheek
I push her hand away
She says
Cambodian girls can drink with the men
When they are twelve years old
At 15 they have two kids
I’m 15. I don’t have any kids
I can take care of myself
If I don’t like a guy
I tell him to fuck off
If I like him
And he has money
I go

She laughs
Really, 2 dollars and half your back
4 more and I do your chest too
It’s ugly
I give you very special price

No, I say, I’m fine
I like looking like a monkey

So she picks up her things
And smiles under her hat with
A pink scull and bones on the front
She says,
I’ll see you tomorrow
Have fun tonight

You be a good girl Jenny
I say

She says
I can do what I want with my life
Let me fix your back tomorrow or
You have to buy more bracelets

She waves
I wave

I stay sitting in the sand
Heavy summer clouds are resting on the
Distant edge of the ocean
It’s almost six o clock

yellow

2009-06-24T04:34:00.002-07:00

smoked a cigarette
blew every clear hot day away
played my radio
scratchy bass and saxophone

slept alone
dreamt of snow
read you a poem
on the phone

the summer was
absence’s microphone

the melody of trace

2009-06-06T04:43:00.007-07:00

I was bursting at the scenery
Pulling at the streams
Smothering all the stitches
At the foundation of our means
Who are you
When the wind I sullen coos
Who are you
When our ache nears the moon
I will paint all the birches
And erase what we learned
The brazen will be faceless
The lapping fields will burn
In the corners
When the dogs of waiting sing
In the awe-tome
When the breeze
Absence brings
Is our love
Is our pining veneer
When this song becomes
Caressing waves
On your pier
Of lullabies
Of repeat goodbyes
Who are we
When the wind
You sullen coos
Who are we
When our ache nearly
Blooms

other ways

2009-06-02T03:17:00.009-07:00

A French plane went missing over the Atlantic
Every person on board was in love
Or loved some other person or people
Somewhere else
People who were waiting at a terminal
Or nervously checking their cell phones
At their homes or work
Unprepared to let love become
All the more
Whimsical and absent
Than it already was

Missing?
Over the ocean
That played on repeat
As they felt loss become
Oddly urgent

Is there anything
Forgiving about love
Sinking into the deep kiss of
Eternal blue pressing against
Eternal blue?

All those loves, wrapped
In small spaces
Of flesh, lost
For one, for many
Absent of witness
Of splash and scream even
Swallowed by forgetful sea
At least from here
Where we’re learning
What missing means

What is it
That those who lost
Must still make rent?
Must still buy
Toilet paper and socks?
Must, at least for times,
Drown in some-thing
And forget?

...ism

2009-05-26T15:25:00.006-07:00

Everyone touching
Not thinking of feeling
This is the privilege they gave us

The lead singer grins and points to reaching hands
A few small children look on
Who knows what their minds are taking of this
Our night
The day happy to be done
The wars all finished

On this field of grass
Where our mothers and fathers
Are buried under our dancing feet
What happened is a distant story
And it’s not ours

The beat and dirt leaking slowly
Into the moment of our feathered limbs
What we have to say is curious
When we make it
And for everything we can produce a laugh
As our former lovers walk by
Wrapped in other lovers’ hands
And we smile toward their skin

How we grab for
The palpitations of this gossamer crowd
In the glories of a night
That’s forgotten the sun
And shut out the moon

With light poles and ceilings of stringed bulbs

the order of things I or IV

2009-05-17T07:26:00.011-07:00

Arched over skinny pleas
Of nude night

My deafened waitings
Under fresh snow

Pockets exposed by streetlight
I walked with want for the lofty

To my ticketed car
4am

Time to drive home

The next night
In a closet with clay hands

Dark hiding against soft cheek
No need to whisper

The building was empty
But we stayed quiet the same

Cornered away

the order of things II

2009-05-13T16:20:00.007-07:00

And somewhere the philosopher is erasing
“time’s empty passing” because he’s seen
a woman in a ravishing dress.
In a different hour he’ll put it back.
-Stephen Dunn

somewhere was on this café patio
and I was erasing like mad
all the humming
and whiteness of the last few weeks
happy to be corrected
by her breezy smile
and the morning yawn of her movements
everything from her, a balance
mansions built on pins
my heart and fingers
those of a first time surgeon

how could emptiness interrupt
as she softened me slow and small
unable to keep up with her worlds
so light and unbearable
like the summer sun
I can only give glance to

but a different hour came
in the same somewhere
because my pencil only need be
turned around, my heart and fingers
slightly slowed, to better record her

In April, Remember December

2009-04-28T08:14:00.010-07:00

irony on a subway
mistaken for sleep
three or four stops
hanging human plants
stretched arms
sleep mistaken for happiness
mistaken for stupidity
all applauded
somewhere inside
for a foothold
or a crevice to crawl up

it took me
I was under it
I’m always under
a someday-walking luck

who can cripple this droop
of a downtown?
I don’t want them to
I like it like this

the city air was
a song almost on the radio
and there he was
sitting on the top of his lungs
every breath was pretentious, enduring
his and my second album loves
a reaching for a break from
but just another too many of
I love you, stop asking me why
don’t try to make it
more faded
or burnt
than it already is
I hate that

that dark pub with green writing
on a busy corner
with expensive food
I missed you there
in the afternoon
even while we
allowed it to rain
and paid easy
after two stouts each

I loved you more
since I missed you already
in the way that
coils around everything

my finger-tips covered
with peeling paint
green, black, white
oranges on your kitchen table
you felt low
and I wanted you to listen

my car finally started
and I drove
down that snow covered road

I was heading for my April

Happiness

2009-04-18T05:20:00.005-07:00

I wrote that word
on a blank page
and starred into its
nine letters
for half an hour

it seemed right to leave it
surrounded by white
to protect it from cliché
or definition…
even poetic tinkering

but also
the idea itself
kept me from writing more
happiness is
after all
a common breed of languor

ah! but to express happiness!
you say

yet this too
if it were left undone
would be unhappiness
so you see
how unhappiness
drives us
happiness lulls us

since I couldn’t write
happiness asked me for a walk

the light from the sun must have been
coming down in splinters
because cracks in the woodpile spoke up
nice and clear

here would be a good place to sleep
happiness loves sleep
I thought

as I lay
smelling the dirt and cedar
my body began itching bored
with happiness and
it’s lazy-eyed lullabies

in my grating teeth
I discovered a rising desire
for a distinct
single unhappiness
to bless me with movement

my jaw and skull
smashing into one
I rose from the dirt and browned leaves

I wrote this poem

on a park bench in winter: thin veils, poetic straw men, ironic simplicity

2009-04-10T15:13:00.011-07:00

money comes from somewhere
just enough most times
and before you ask,
enough is always
whatever enough ends up
being

remember that

anyway
I have so much else
that needs considering
things much more important

(his voice was older than
his face
and his face wasn’t young
his words were sticking
to the insides
of his cheeks
lazily slapping around
the walls of his mouth

there was something soothing
to the sound)

you know, I’ve lost countless
hours of sleep
thinking only of Hitler’s dog?
a key exists there
I know it
and I believe I’ve neared its fruit
possibly even ate from it a few late nights
but as sleep sooths it can also punish
in the morning I only ever had
the residues of truth
like those pieces of a deep but forgotten dream
specifics adrift in sleep
only an aching pull left in my stomach
the morning made absent of corners
and a daft desire to renter sleep
with a pen and notepad

though
maybe that’s how all real truth works
maybe truths on notepads are
always truths made too small

but isn't that
a so called notebook truth
and so according to itself
not really true?

I suppose so…
but your rebuttal is equal irony
perpetuating the stupid cycle
as is mine and so on
until one of us
speaks a real poem

it’s so cold today

yeah, freezing.

forget what I was
saying earlier
it feels stupid since I
said it

no, it’s fine
I really don't know what
I was saying either...
I should get going
it’s so cold

right
me too

it’s freezing

For Human Glory in the Spring I

2009-03-23T17:28:00.006-07:00

with early shorts and plaid jackets
on the steps of Kyle’s half built house
we each named our black and mild smokes

He—a friend who laid awake
the night before
beside himself for feeling
his girlfriend’s breasts

She—a humble woman with troubles
who wanted to mother us
her heart large and fragile, from
amongst other things,
too much warmth

He—a lispy cocky theology prof who
despite knowing better
we always mocked

each glowing drag
a little eulogy to the living

for fifteen minutes
we gave them each
concentrated thought
right down to the wood tip
and the flick

For Human Glory in the Spring II

2009-03-23T17:21:00.002-07:00

during chapel
that protestant closet catholic
with a large wooden cross
hung around his wrinkled neck
worked the congregation
with his scratchy trumpet speech

remember the saints

the minimum wage health-care workers
who buy gifts for the lonely dying
during their lunch breaks

the mothers with mentally handicapped kids
who cook and pray
who wipe and wash
and who love
with unwatched hands

remember the saints

those born with
bodies that won’t listen
or faces patchy and bloated
or faces deformed and dripping
who manage yet to hand out little
pieces of sun
to every sliver of night they meet
who manage yet to
love this skin-deep world
while thanking God for his
steady
loving
hands

remember the saints

our mouths closed
his preachy poetics
still ringing in our stomachs
we walked out the chapel doors
standing on ground just freed
from months of snow

For Human Glory in the Spring III

2009-03-22T07:21:00.011-07:00

somewhere in Iowa
on a street in a neighborhood of manufactured lawns
one corner house had no grass
but piles of rocks
stacked as monuments
in honor of any
the old man thought were deserving

his long since dead mother

a late-aged farmer he saw last summer
smile at children playing in his crops
his Dutch eyes, a dueling display
of joy and small envy

a solid old friend who
he’d lost contact with
some time back

a woman he’d seen
sitting in her front yard
with the right kind of silence
paying homage to the breezy pleas of
another fleeting spring evening

his dead wife

they each got their own stack
to be taken down later
and, who knows, maybe rebuilt
some other day

each rock a slowly carried thought

I remember watching him work as
winter begun getting its things together
and the spring-sun
blessed his aging back

if he were the night and you were his songbird

2009-03-12T22:41:00.005-07:00

the moon is muted behind jealous clouds
sway grass fathers the crickets’ song

trees welcome the night
their leaves attentive and gentle
to every whimsy suggestion
of his darkening breeze

and how the night itself
gets carried away
wordy with every expression
of his myriad lovers

like the dark feathered songbird
who can’t close her eyes
for fear of missing something
special the night may say
the intimate gesture
of a sacrificed star
the prolonged flicker
of a promise to hold
back the coming day

The Senescence of The Sun

2009-03-05T21:31:00.014-08:00

Damn that yesterday blood
And fists bruised on pulpits

Enough with maddened men
In crowded markets
Speaking the mass’ confessions
Pointing to the second round
Of crucifixions
The second erections of hollowed idols
And poor faith prostitutions

I've heard it before

The sun never tires of
Burning fresh flowers
Even now, hanging dim and
Flirting despondent
Nearly caressing eager
Rises of earth and rock

Yes you are
And are not
And always, you’re not quite yet
A body brimming with nothing
Knowing better than those monks with souls
And ancients with essence
You are now
Condemned to choice
Or reification’s conviction of
Mindless repetition

I mean, every Friday you’ll wear
That same black dress
Or choose to sever
The word and way home
Finding every road needs filling
With new words

Our windows are cornered
With yellow dust
The television, the piano, the books too—
All faintly covered with dirty snow
In this late and hot afternoon

Updike said sex or death
Nearing the latter himself
He was recording what he could see:
From dust to dust, and in between
Some carnal lust
A great American mind

Yes, another like him confessed
I was an animal once
And would be still, only…
My blood has begun to rust
And it’s back to my pen and pages
If I want a fuck

For me
With the heat as it is
I take Rimbaud’s gold chain
And string it from his steeple to freezing star
Happy that my only limitations
Are my permeating and infinite fragilities
My broken limbs that somehow
Still sleep
With the drug induced dreams
Of a comet-youth who
Gave up at twenty-one

The beer, the tea, it’s warm
On the porch
My mouth sticky
The air still
My eyes squinting

Goethe’s young Werthers are
Floating in nearby rivers
Love sick men with swollen books
In breast coat pockets
Swollen hearts silent in their chests

He was young himself
With a scribbling pen
Surprised at the forests
Of men blown down by
His careening little whistle

This morning
My friend put Dylan on
In a way that doesn't believe
The man's still living
The song
Tangled up in Blue
He had been waking with these lines:

And then when the bottom dropped out
I became withdrawn
I did the only thing I knew how to do
Which is to keep on keeping on

She asked the other day
If he wanted another woman
Or at least what she could do
To become that woman
He replied
He didn’t want anybody
Liked his solitary life
Felt that nothing
Can be accomplished in this world
Tied down to anyone, and had no intention
To ever get married whatsoever
She cried

His mom called the next day to ask
If he meant
What he said

(The two women had talked)

He did
His mom cried

She asked if she had done this to him
He said no
Smoked another cigarette and
Waded back into his apartment of discontent

On my porch, after talking
I wondered what he meant
Or dreamt about accomplishment
And what he’d make of Updike’s
This or that
Especially as this torrid noon drags
The day’s blood long

Will it happen
Months down the road
After his girl is gone
That he remembers her topless
And concentrated
Putting her make-up on
Almost the right sense of innocence
A beauty that softly, nearly knows?

He may find his way back
To L.A. where all loose ends live
But can’t quite meet
He’ll walk Skid Row or Spring Street
And find a bar
Where he can’t
Rid his mind of
Chananski or Arturo Bandini
And the candence of his dreams
Will be some Camilla or another

Meanwhile, I’m dreaming
Under this sultry sun
Of that maddened lonely man in the market
God’s death lingering on his dried breath
How he’s now a household name
And I’m thinking of how he died
Womanless, diseased, and insane

In my front yard
The mud has cooked into hard cakes
And that damning sun
Resists cooling from the hush of dusk

In what might be called boredom
Or being flattened
I’ve took to kicking around
The idols I’ve brought down
Since burying them is something
I can’t bring myself to—

I’ve grown accustomed to their
Unrequited blood
And what it takes to play both
Sides of a fake and otherwise broken
Love—which is nearly no love at all
But you’d be mistaken if you believe
I’m beyond smiling
My lips are speaking now
Wry and something
Like satisfaction

Our outward desires
From strings we tied
To make us jerk and dance
Play scratchy on the old gramophone
Under the needle of the afternoon

Our windows are cornered
With yellow dust
The television, the piano, our hearts too—
All faintly covered with dirty snow
In this late and hot world
That, after we've tired of
Pushing words into everything
Will set too soon

A Human Parade

2009-02-26T07:20:00.008-08:00

A human parade
A female dance
It hardly matters how they move
No shake or leap is forsaken
Terse isn’t a possible world
Here where the
Youth of the first
Summer sun is
A gloated fire and
Grace of half-truths
Lure the smooth moon faces
Toward starry night lit pools
A shade from clarity
A human parade

An all in bet before the river
Is known
A stupid smile
A smile won
Or traded
Why someone learns to juggle
Or starts to smoke
A human parade
A human struggle

The stick in my mind
Of a day aged yellow
Their new clothes on
The first day of school

Twenty wetted eyes
From a sports team just defeated
Two trying child stars
Millions of neon signs
Pop songs on the light posts
The pop songs of your heart pumps
That radio plays little love
Images show
Images play
A human parade

The Morning, This One

2009-02-23T15:50:00.003-08:00

I woke up in that one way
Where the world is seen only
Through a window

All is lure

A girl with a pink cello
Shell strapped to her back
Two slender suits at the bus stop
Cut jaws and product hair
The balding flower shop clerk with
A dirt floor office and his bible

Soft morning clouds
Make soft the morning street

And through a window
All is soft: past
And remembered
You might call it nostalgia
For the present
And you might be close
To saying it right
If when you say it
You long for the time you
Could have meant the words
Knowing they’re now unrecoverable
And knowing now is the first
Time they’ve left your mouth

I may be weary with all this
And my weariness may be wrapped
In strings of amazement

A businesswoman trots
Across a vacant parking lot
Pays her meter

A boy on rollerblades
Holds the back of his friend’s bike

It just might rain

First I learned to laugh
And make the sounds
For food and rest
Then I was taught to sweat

Much later, perhaps on a
Windowed day like this
I learned for a moment
To reflect

But habit always beckons quickly
And I always step back in
Always a new breed of silence

I may be amazed with all this
And my amazement may be bundled
With twines of weariness

where I'm going

2009-02-06T10:28:00.011-08:00

I shake the hand of
Every cancer
And every rabble-d soul
With spirit patches sewn on their clothes
Off their backs I ride
Off their backs I ride
My feet indebted lips
On the step-ping stones
Of their sullen ash-ed heads

I raise an un-washed glass
Of bitter wine
Bought with flesh
To every war
Men believed in
Or cursed dying for

I praise the gruel, the gruel
Every new ledge of these
Infinite steps

To the heights! To the heights!
To the air that ices my lungs!

There, those gray-ed past their truths
Can scarce steal a breath
There, those too fresh
For their truths
Must recoil
To gentle foothills

On these stairs
I have understood
Refuse piles set on fire
In the coat of a moonless
Starless night
Take even the hands of the blind
If their noses have
Learned just right

To the heights! To the heights!
To the air that ices our lungs!

Las Cruces in July

2009-01-27T16:48:00.014-08:00

I take to theaters during the noon hours
of summer
afraid of the sun’s scrutiny and
weary of sleep
every film I see is
dreary—two hour train rides just under
my dirty
skin
the scenery is usually
red oceans of cooking dirt
love shattered or unrealized
a thirsty man who stopped caring

today
the film is over and I’m
back outside
my eyes and mind
are screaming newborn babies
angry with rude light

behind the theater
there’s a guy of 25
sitting on the sidewalk
blackened hand on his mutt’s head
he has a beanie on despite the heat
we start to talk
he shows me some pastel drawings
he made on paper pulled from trashcans
they’re awful
I say they look nice
and regret doing so
he says he doesn’t believe
in houses or any of the shit
that goes along with ’em
it’s a big trap he says
then he pulls his beanie back
to show his short red hair
and wrinkled tin foil spread over
the top of his head
he tells me
no worries, they can’t
listen to his thoughts
he smirks sideways
then him and his panting dog
take off

it’s 4:30 and the sun is
in my head
I walk into the gas station
and stare
at the cheap beers

standing there
I think I’d like to meet a girl
named Hannah
she is her name
every soft consonant in blending submission
to the restful vowels
breathy innocence and pleasure

she gets
excited about fresh oranges
and never has anywhere she
has to be
doesn’t understand my jokes
but can laugh at most everything

the door dings and a large woman walks in
wearing gray sweatpants
her name isn't Hannah
she has on
a stretched t-shirt with Tweetie on the front
her two buttered kids are getting
neon green slushies, tonging the spinning hot-dogs
and arguing about who gets the front seat

I don’t buy anything
I wish the cashier and fat woman
a good afternoon
ding
I walk out
I stand and smell the gas evaporating
off the asphalt

I believe there’s an old man
cabined up high in the Rockies
where it’s not so hot

he spends his afternoons
wondering what it takes
to refute life
then smiles a bit
as the evergreens
glow orange
and he marvels
at all the different
ways
5 o-clock has felt

I woke up in the form of poem

2009-01-18T06:34:00.008-08:00

how I woke is not
poetry, but the form of
poem
like a woman
may be the form of some body,
pocked, rolled, ballooned and bulldog jowlled
or curved with symmetry and spring apples--
these forms
alter her completely, but are also
only her form,
her-self happening
like this or that…profound and enveloped in skin
as all forms are
her particular admission, a particularly shaped flesh
to what inside, some call thought, but with true women
as with the best men and all winged children,
must be understood as swallowing much more
vacuous and especially its opposite
innocent toward the scribblings of men with gold
generous with all things
--and after the pounds of sheaths are paid...
what’s found inside is outside and otherwise too
the birds and knives of words
like arms of a red wood mother
like the arms of poem
like the arms I woke with or
the world I soaked into
with vows and songs and diatribes
that mixed with wet
and wormed dirt
as I bit into my grassy hair
singing old hymns of the multitudes
discordant and sacred
likes humpback whales beached in
over-grown glassed cathedrals

My Rock

2009-01-07T09:43:00.006-08:00

There is consequence for
Breaching ethereal lines

The first is one of vision:
I am now witness to
The nether sides of godly limits

With that
The gods have melded
My earthy hands to stubborn rock
And death will never
Due us part

From this vantage I see
What the faithful often know
Best, and fear:

This bland landscape of violated limits
Long since
Harvested of hope

I know what they wanted
What they set me out for:
The work of emptying…

Everything I do
I know will
Be undone
And redone
To be wrecked and
Wickedly
Become new
Again
And again

But on my best days
When the rock chaffs my chest
During a lucid noon
My lips press against that stone
And I manage a kiss

Sisyphus

2009-01-03T22:32:00.008-08:00

The gods must have their secrets

For no congregation gathers at clarity’s feet
And no man lights the incense of his kisses
On a woman he consumes
And interprets without prayers

Thus, before I received my rock,
The god’s secrets I stole
My wife, I controlled and exposed:
Her love was in servility, and was not her own
She dragged my corpse through town
Just as she was told

I awoke in the underworld
I crafted a plea:

Pluto, may but for a moment
Death be bound in my chains
That I may return from dirt
And rebuke my wife

Freed from the underworld, and with death’s
Hands forced still
I conceived a punishment for my spouse
Meant also to goad the god’s
In their once secret hearts

The punishment was thus:

I set out to enjoy the seaside
And the company of friends
To grow a garden and eat well
To play my guitar and sing love
Songs to the earth and stars

on the edge of it

2008-12-31T03:55:00.011-08:00

Stephen and I, we left that town
with the windows down, smoking
Marlboro 27s and talking

the wind was cold for May
and we were letting our beards grow
without trimming, unruly
like our youth: imperiously spiritual
and weak, pleasant when viewed
from aged whitened maturity

I told him I wanted to feel
the heavy hand of God
then we ate some cookies
his mom made us

we left the cornfields and badlands
camped at the Devil’s Tower
made quick work of Montana and Idaho
spent a few days in Spokane and Seattle
watched a Mariner/Yankee baseball game
argued relentlessly for hours
with my cousins in a hot tub
about what one could
or couldn’t say about God

our car was faded red and dented
at rest stops we stood on the hood
and added quarts of oil

we sang song lyrics
and felt the words our own
we let music make way
for miles of silence

in Vancouver Canada we stayed
at a college friend’s house
he gave us small pictures he painted
and we spread shit and seeds
in his parent’s garden

outside an old wooden grocery
we smoked our pipes and drank
jasmine tea, pretending to know something
of Canadian politics and eastern philosophies

we listened to live music at a bar with a cover charge
stayed up late at the band’s house, listened to
him and his friends talk and play guitar

we left for Alaska, dirt roads and moose
200 miles between gas stations and food

we were losing weight back then
brewing espresso on coals
making pay-phone calls to girls
we would marry or lose

it’s trite to always be on the edge of something
we were always on the edge of everything

we stayed in Anchorage at a professor’s condo,
an old friend of my family’s,
we drank lots of dark micro-brews
and ate fresh fish
all on his dollar

he drank our eager ambitions and dodged
our questions, told us stories instead and
drove us to Seward for deep sea fishing
but we got beat by the stormy weather

no fishing, so we played pool till late at a bar
where Stephen got kissed in his ear
by a drunk woman, nearly 40, skinny,
toothy, and in love

Stephen and I drove further north
we got two flat tires, 80 miles of dirt roads from
anywhere, so we rolled smokes
cooked canned soup and laughed
drank a six pack and got to truth around a fire
that kept the mosquitoes away

that northern sun dozed
for an hour or two

the next day we hitched until
the tire problem was fixed
met some real nice strangers
who took a picture with us

we camped near Denali, drove our car
up cracks in the foothills and fished
for hours under small rain at a glacier lake
never got a single bite

later, at a lone café, another camper told us fish
don’t live in that lake
we laughed
we didn’t care then
our waitress evangelized utilitarianism
we ate our bacon and listened
asked her questions

I drove our car into knee-deep mud
we laughed again
and swore too
walked until we found
a man hunting for black bears in his dually truck

with some struggle, he pulled us out,
shared some family secrets and
a cheap warm beer with us,
splashing the last sips onto the ground
like he was cracking a whip

he popped open another and we said
we were alright with just one
and we thanked him, waving too,
as we drove down the road

Back in Seward, Stephen’s dad met us for a few days
we took a boat through the choppy bay
watched ice cliffs avalanche into the sea
pointed to some distant waving whales

next morning on the Kenai River we
each caught a beautiful King Salmon
to be smoked and sent home

we listened to sermons in the car
and the possibility of doubt pushed us along
in faith
like one might love after watching a tragic film
so serious and skin deep

everyday: new revisions and surprising
stomachs for resolutions

we sold our car for 500 dollars
to a nice young couple in Anchorage
bought plane tickets and flew home

it’s trite to always be on the edge of something
but it’s tragic to always be on the edge of nothing

here is one balance among thousands to walk
as years go by and we continue to wake up
with time persistent as Alaska's summer sun

now: a bird, a good read, a rusted trumpet

2008-12-23T09:08:00.005-08:00

i’m a tic talking maybe
now and then
i read the New York Times

pasted on old pair of blue jeans
my head keeps humming
a dirty little tune about you

i’ve been everywhere i will be
i’ve borrowed oranges and stories
i’ve got a sloping spine

sprinkled pieces of morning
i press delete without worry
still move the sounds
down your leg

i’ve got politics up the
coat sleeves of my jacket
i’m a room-glider with borrowed eyes

grew up paying circling hands
shook the sand out of my pockets
walked without shoes or looking down

posted art on bathroom walls
wrote you love poems in the stall
grew old in an east coast basement
saw the sunrise, paid my waking tax
found some cheap eggs and ham

i waited for you
to be quiet
ate up closing towns and radio music
through my dirty windshield
on a summer drive

sermons about sleeping
i could go months at a time
nostalgic for your fingers
touching elevator buttons
we were always sweet
yellow balloons on the street

today, i’d be the right kind of lonely
if I had a dog to follow me

A Tribute to the Showdowns of My Pocket World

2008-12-19T18:04:00.006-08:00

This morning I'm pissing in my
Coffee mug with a police officer
Over my shoulder

I’ve been to better showdowns

The other day I unzipped with
Two mosquitoes planted on the urinal

The cops didn’t bring any paper-cups,
So one offers me the mug from
My coffee table,
Some small
Coffee residue at the bottom

OK

The others dig in my trash,
Drawers, and examine my pipe tobacco

Do I know what hashish is?
Have I ever smoked it?

I’m watching, thinking, how can
This become a poem?

I’m too hot under my sweater
My armpits are a southern summer

All this: another comical showdown, reformatted
To fit my life

Like turning off the television
When my mind’s already shut down
Hours ago,
Grumpy to be shook awake by lack
Of distraction

The thing to do now: become great
Punch holes in walls and write ‘honestly’

That’s a joke

I had a dream recently:

My friend read my poetry and laughed, said
He found my poems drained of all humor and light,
Reeking ridiculous, over-infused with weak
Attempts at depth, missing life completely

He said, knowing me, these couldn’t be my poems
Or if they were, he was sorry I wrote them

Then he slapped me on the back, still laughing

OK

Maybe he doesn’t know me

Maybe we have different senses of
What deserves laughter

Maybe I’m an insipid poet (thesaurus.com--see dull, lackluster, monochrome, hackneyed, trite, anemic)

Maybe today I’m trying my hand at poetic vengeance
For comments my dream-friend made

Isn’t that funny?

Those cops lay out 6 tests,
For THC and methamphetamines

OK

They videotape the whole thing
They tell me I'm coming in for
A hair test

Let's go

I sit in a black van for an hour
With a man who speaks no English

They let me go

If they wouldn’t have
Took the tests with them
I would have posted them on my fridge
Snapped a picture and sent it to my mom

My little guns are red hot and smoking
My laundry needs to be taken down,
Folded, and put away
I have to walk to work

as the moon goes, comes, and goes again

2008-12-11T07:42:00.010-08:00

It’s 2:48 in the morning,
my friend,
teary and wine-eyed says:

Jesus come back
Jesus come back
he’s just gotta come back…
hasn’t he?

I hug him, and hug him, but I don’t know
for sure
where he’s at
I walk upstairs to my apartment
I sit at my desk

I recall one verse, written in despair, or ivory,
or both,
which calls all this nostalgia
for the absolute :

we might as well wish back
first love
and father’s without sin

my chair back bends—weak metal vs.
my weight—
I bend it
back to place, knowing
some day, it must break completely
as each back and fourth makes the metal weaker
and weaker

yesterday, I heard a priest of non-realism
preach salvation through conversation
from a god of our ever-changing words
from a god who’s just that

(everything is god
everything is not god)

my chair is slowly bending
backward again
my posture worse

I met a man once, subject to God
and much age
I sat at his table with some coffee
and my friend
we listened to him speak and speak
then bang his fist to make the cups shake

IDEAS! IDEAS! There is nothing
more important than ideas!

my friend and me, we shook with the cups
his wife kept ironing the shirts

it seems
to be convinced of most everything
and know it
is to be convinced of most nothing
and know it a bit deeper

I press hard now against
my chair-back, laying it and me
nearly flat

I bend it back up

it's more flexible than I thought,
though surely, not flexible enough

erudition

2008-12-07T07:32:00.003-08:00

I want to eat the meat of the mundane
in wastelands of cavities laid open and sweet
wet red strawberries and bright couch stains
new mistakes in rooms of blossoms that weep

five-hundred dollars for a room to rent
gum-stained sidewalks when the sun’s too much
a Sunday noon-nap, my body well spent
weathermen-friends with calloused hands to touch

my shins like aching tin, gift wrapped in skin
God in my fingers, hair, and growing gut
a gas station pump, letters to begin
impulse for sex and several books kept shut

mango juice, a cigarette, and a radio
a moon, a breeze, over too fast, too slow

my lights are out

2008-12-01T16:21:00.004-08:00

I’m pulling the grace of solitude up
under chin. I’ve left the flesh and refuse
of wise men to time with fingers cupped
where dirt and sex speak mute or obtuse

I’ve wished their wise vestige of this and this
into my less and less stumbling breaths
so their presence I can now both love and miss
as Adam’s desire calls for space in our chests

the every-day drift is emetic death-
the puerile bishops of circus and laughs
the noonday drunks of spring lilies and rest-
the swirl and slosh of passive suicide baths

soon enough I’ll no longer wake nor sleep
I’ll float and wisp, severed head, severed feet

I am shrouded in short-sightedness. Example: I revert to alliteration. Still, there is hope; I am nearly 25

2008-11-26T05:30:00.011-08:00

"Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different opinions to express."
-T.S. Eliot

Quite right… opinions, emotions, the
Whole works

Last week, aged 24 and some,
I put down Pablo Neruda
And picked up my pen
Hardly allowing the ink
Its proper breaths
I wrote on the nearest lost paper:

It was love, its absence-- it was
Hollowness, the north pacific—
It was all you’d expect from me,
Not quite 25

I penned a poem of youth, —whatever age—
It has its place too…

Only a poet like T.S. Eliot could be so bold, so ironic,
So stupid perhaps,
To mention a specific link to the twenty-fifth year
And a poet’s development,
To imply such movement isn’t also, at times,
Traversing itself—like a dog to vomit, a
Wise man to Carthage, smiling, smiling…

Still, some half-born poets--poets with their legs
Stuck in the womb--go on writing
Like college boys with women on their minds,
Women that could be
Won with force-d ABAB, and a display of half-thought
Acoustic-two-chord-sadness, a childish suggestion
Toward owning

[Inwardness]

I’m on the eve of that 25th year
-So I believe-
Like a blind man convinced
He’s seen the world once and will
See it again, though his eyes have
Been glossed since his mother’s own
First loved him

On this eve
The sea (back again)
The sand, and the grass it meets,
Are made gray by that time of day
When the sun is hesitant
And clouds receive
The long gray-glow of a drawn-out dawn

I'm outside
And my expectation is
Snow
And what I wouldn’t give for some
Coffee
And my mother
Wrapped in a blanket,
Smiling, spiritual, and quiet
With all she knows

A Poem of Youth

2008-11-26T05:27:00.003-08:00

Oh oceans, how often
Must you enter my poems, like
The word sadness, my ugly-blessed
Child, my flesh,
My reminder, my joy
My pain, my distant and
Vicarious redemption

i am a transition. nice to meet you again

2008-11-15T00:44:00.004-08:00

toenails, hair, and dead
skin
are my reoccurring sins

I clip, cut and
scrub
but I am never

finished...

When I was a child I was an adult and I was a cowboy too... and all my poems rhymed

2008-11-11T16:28:00.005-08:00

I’ve been waiting here
At the Dixie line
I’ve got a warm beer
And some fishing line

I rode my horse till
He wouldn’t ride
And with cigarette in
Mouth I’m singing
Clementine

I’ve got burlap sacks
Of stolen cash
My shirt is off
And the sun stains my back

I’ve got whores
I need to confess to
And priests I’ve gotta pay

If only I could
Get a new steed,
Salvation
Would be...

Mine

a complete poem

2008-11-09T10:20:00.010-08:00

On the walk to my apartment
There is a pile of trash
Next to an urban garden and
An ally

There
Is a discarded
Nearly life sized
Stuffed bear, once white

Once, perhaps, the prize
For a girl on arm

This Saturday morning
Five boys with sticks
Teach the bear a lesson
They get his secrets

Later, on my
Way to the corner store,
The bear
Is alone
Propped against the wire-garden-fence,
Head hanging,
With a 40 ounce bottle of beer
Stuck into his ripped crotch

That permanent smile stitched on his face

I grin back at him

Life is often
no more
or no less

than this

an easy one to love

2008-11-02T01:20:00.013-07:00

He
Moved drunk
With age

He was
Some type of monk-
With force born through
His intimacy with corners,
Even in open fields of lilies
Adorned like the glory
Of his inwardness

His voice
Was aged in oak barrels,
Wet with cellos

So I bathed
In the melody
Of his words-
Always to the
Other-

He was, as it were, incapable
Of not praying

And his pauses...

...you should
Have heard them

I am, fat and holy, my tired mother

2008-10-15T08:23:00.002-07:00

I grow tomatoes and bell peppers
Amongst poinsettias and greens, and often
I see baby Christ swaddled in leaves, weeping
As any child would weep…

Does he know
Of sin already?

My own children long grown and gone, with children-new,
I’m happily barren now, and yet my gown flows loose
As my stomach keeps stretching too

My husband is an evening fog
Smelling of fish markets and smoke,
Giving a goodnight kiss every night
On my lips which prayers just spoke

In the dark of the morning, as mercy is made
With fresh glory,
I’ll bundle and waddle to morning mass
I’ll bow to taste blood and flesh
At the sounding of a bell
Holy water fresh on my brow

I may cry, but for beauty,
I may waver, but for the profound
Power in my sloppy skin

For every mumbled simple prayer
I touch my match to Mother Mary’s
Or Saint Andrew’s wick
And I imagine how the Devil must wish
For amnesty
For joy like this

I am the free poetic:

2008-10-15T06:49:00.007-07:00

I am, amongst other things,
My mother-Freud
In his masturbatory solitude, in
His genius built
With sticks of arrogance, piercing the
Previously concealed, and bruising
Pockets of what deserves
To never be mentioned—my knife sharp, but often stupid
and I know this

I must likewise be demonized and pigeon-holed by dolts,
I must likewise be ignorantly elevated

In short, intimate with everything, and always misunderstood

This, after all, is the path of the magnificent:
Crucifixions
Happen daily within Christendom, and
There’s the ancient hemlock too,
Then the lauding thoughtless disciples,
And so on…

So I need not be reminded of
Freedom found in solitude
However grotesque
The foundations for such

How my 'friends' are indebted
Oh happiness!
Oh happy loneliness!
Oh genius so profound
My only reprieve is me!

I am a dog

2008-10-15T06:39:00.006-07:00

I’m a dirty black dog
On a Mexican street
My head swings and surveys
All my worn senors and
Senioritas

I taste the sun
the dust
Caking my mindless tongue

I stroll with the power of a thousand
Fallen gods
Rediscovering pleasures
Of the fleeting

By The Train Station

2008-10-06T06:30:00.006-07:00

That gray man,
Who knows how
Or why
Has no arms
And one blind eye
And a basket hung round
His neck
To collect money

I wonder if he knows himself
Better
Or worse than most…

...And there he goes, talking
To himself,
Or the rain sprinkled
Asphalt

I think,
What profundity… could I be
More separate?

Me:
I panhandle undetected—even
By myself—through distraction,
With a basket
Round my
Neck
To collect accolades, comfort,
Meaning…

I jog back to this wandering
Rotted wise man
Put a dollar in his basket
Put a dollar in mine

in the absence of

2008-09-30T06:12:00.008-07:00

a wise man would keep
poise just now. his eyes would
blink only when necessary
but when shut, they would
rest a bit—as if to fully absorb the present—
then he would say something simple
and
nearly sad

sometimes
you wear the wise man’s skin
when you close your eyes
you plan
your next move—
(or think of
nothing)

a man of compassion might
hold her hand
and listen, turning his eyes inward-
through hers-
so she may feel his concern
like a summer’s teenage evening

you are, always
as you say-
you play this man,
her hand clenched in yours, you can
almost weep, yet you think

she’s too old for these
type of tears, too hypocritical
and too cruel in her expectations
I feel nothing
for her

yet you weave your fingers through hers,
ignore the sweat

you know you've begun painting
your master-piece-self
in the canvas of her head

my nature and yours

2008-09-18T07:53:00.006-07:00

---
the girls are held down
in a shallow stream
while a bold hand
applies a jagged rock
and cuts their clitorises off
the blood and water,
the pain and shock of parental
guided terror

-------

a dark and silent
nine-year-old daughter
gets a needle to the arm
-it helps her swoon-
she is blank and naked as birth
she will be used up
and wiped down
for 60 Euros

she will hurt

--------

every
desire
rots my breath

I eat until my stomach
bursts, and out flows
my hungry, dull,
hatred for all present—
how they reflect me
so accurately
--their words, painfully hollow
and ill

talking is such filth

I am so small, and yet so…

-----

an Austrian man locked up
his daughter
for some 24 years,
raped her for the result of:
seven cellar-born-children
never to see light, or the outside
hustle of today’s modern and
constant atrocities

he was doing it, of course,
to protect them

-----

what was and is

2008-09-07T08:37:00.005-07:00

The mountain parked Chevy truck
Overrun with grass and daisies
And golden rust

The girl-child with a dog
Running through
Greenery with
Innocence and gall

Oh audacity-sun and the
Afternoon you kissed our
Necks
We promise not to ask
For anything back

The abandoned brick-built factory
With impotent smoke stacks,
And cement steps overcome by
Moss and time

The man with a smashed face
A swaggering paper bag and
Memories of youthful hands on
Youthful breasts

Oh the seduction of dusk
And the lure of over-flattering
The ephemeral glowing lust

to fall short

2008-08-25T05:57:00.007-07:00

he is
one of the great thinkers

alone
at his modest kitchen table
slowly, and
with all his age, spreading
too much butter on an English muffin
inattentively listening to world news on an old
unromantic radio

his eyes well up
as if to weep
but for no articulate reason
beyond the un-thought
general toil of existence,
the silent weight of mankind and
nameless tragedy

his joints ache in the background of
his sensations,
like his throbbing sense
of life's fragility,
nagging him as it were
his bitter mind-wife, the constant
backdrop
to his thoughts

but that he understands
and even sleeps with weakness,
he is in turn occasionally
offered ripples of reprieve,

he grasps this too—and despises it

all these thoughts run mechanical
and distant
like a healthy pollution amongst the
details of…
and observations mundane:
the faded red of his teacup
the old jelly stain on the tablecloth

And let me talk to you with your silence

2008-08-12T06:36:00.012-07:00

-Pablo Neruda

I built a boat
in 40 desert-days
for our
coming oceans

I was careful

I used all the words
they sold me

I stretched the sails, bleached
with things I’ve told you

as always
I left the whispers for myself

and when waters come
I’ll wait for the winds of sin
and precious lack

then, on the bow, I’ll carve
everything out
one-for-one
simple

and by noble beauty, by the
penumbra of the moon, it may
seem senseless

but you'll watch my stern
cut the waves with all the grace
practicality can afford

a corn of wheat, a summer evening

2008-08-04T16:34:00.005-07:00

I sit on a wooden bench by
the riverside
and my book speaks:

all things are good and fair
because all is truth

people jog and walk past
with golden heartbeats, which work
without decision

no doubt those pumping hearts have broke
and been broken themselves

a factory man walks with his daughter
she offers me a grasshopper
pinched between
curious fingers

I accept and smile

bright green, the insect ricochets wildly
within my palm-to-palm cup
she looks concerned so
I carefully return him

without words I hand her father my pipe
he takes two big tokes and holds the smoke
gives a cigarette to me, leaves with a bow

all creation and all creatures, every leaf is striving to
the Word, singing glory to God,
weeping to Christ

the sun uses the chemicals of pollution like a pallet
on the mixing smog and summer clouds

somewhere a man pays a whore
a child groans alone
cancer takes residence in a mother saint

‘ah’ said he, ‘how good that is, how good and beautiful
is all God’s work!’

as it grows dimmer the city lights float
and flicker across the slow river waters

creation from (outside) me

2008-07-31T17:19:00.005-07:00

I made every space
s)meared more red
and fluent
(with less) breathing…
(do) I need more of these second-s-paces! (?): I am paint-ed
on the walls—
pushed them a)part (into small with distance pieces)
like my=breaths
crumpled in that grow-i-n-g corner, like me
looking naked…but some-how-?- natural,
de_spite -(I am)- being born
clothed

a meeting, truth and transcendence. or how words...

2008-07-19T07:05:00.014-07:00

(of course he said dinner, but he
meant something quite different, or
maybe that's what ‘dinner’ was for us,
as even a scroll can taste of honey…

I forget
how we met. the room
was ill lit.
he was the first to speak):

so you write poetry?

uh yes… and I believe one should always flush their
face red when
suggesting such a thing

for the irony, thank you, even if subconscious,
but no more spontaneous conversation
I’m a man who values the virtue of
knowing
when patience simply becomes stupidity.

so give us some lines then

here it goes:

He was a man like many: caught between
Detesting women for
All their stupidity, and worshiping them for a holiness
Which remains mysterious
Even unto the fairer sex themselves

that was trash.
there’s poetry and there’s
the poetic, but mostly there’s trash.
nevertheless, trash has its place, or rather
sometimes trash isn’t trash, but somehow rightfully
bears the same name,
of which a story
comes to mind. you will hear it and you ought
to sip
on every word, for I mean to retell something
with depths of importance,
or
something that passes time
in a particularly human way

but first a memo: I alter my tone for stories,
punishing them for not being poetry:

and now the story, or the trash that speaks:

--------

I knew a man—perhaps it was myself,
perhaps it was someone else, I no longer
know—who was caught up to the third heaven
of anti-discourse,
or orgasm, or wine,
or a lazy afternoon walk that means to go
nowhere and thinks not of returning,
though eventually… a return happens
as if by accident

he soaked in back alleys of silent truths
which cannot be spoken with time’s whitened lips,
or gestured through the stretching skin-like
envelopes of human language, concealing what(?)
and always spoken
with so many seals
pressed with foreign signets

or so it seems, since we have this word
missing
which feels like soft skin on skin to say…

yes, he left his mind,
his this-is-why-self,
he even exited his
I-can’t-know-why-self,
and became stupid for the sake of wisdom
or perhaps elation… or at least so I remember, and
so I must have been told,
from another, or myself
I can’t recall

but as we and they say,
‘with every high there exists also a low’
thus when he fell from the third heaven he fell also
into an instant
lifetime of despair,
for he had tasted
eternity’s sweetness,
which dripped down his chin
like thick juices from a motherly vine,
and with his chin dry, he learned
the depths of true bitterness
within the empty dissensions of a rotting time,
a taste so poignant it pulled him apart
like a chicken ripped
between the two muzzles of a rabid past
and future

or so it seemed to me
when he winced on the street and said,
so this is pain,
or maybe,
so this is separation

and yet that wince, I confess,
could have been
the raw beginnings of a smile at himself,
set to conquer time
and grow tall with its stretching

-----

A tribute to the neurosis of myopia and the resulting symptom of 'meaning'

2008-07-08T07:02:00.012-07:00

He often leaves his shirt unbuttoned—
His stomach soft, his confidence
Covering any social repulsion

I’ve heard him say,

You know, you’re not as pretty
As you think you are. And nobody talks to me like that.
Get your things, and get the fuck out

We took him seriously
Because, at one time or another
He’s told everyone to leave

On the stoop with me, bourbon, Max and the boys:

Listen to this:
So she calls me,
and I know
she’s been fucking some other guy. But she's crying, she says
she loves me, she made mistakes, she's sorry,
she wants me back. she actually said that.
Who the fuck does she think she is?
I just hung up the phone.

I don’t think I’ve ever clicked, “end,”
While anyone was still talking—me, meanwhile alone
On the other
End,
Denting drywall with the phone.

I mourn this.

I mean, sure, I could do it
But I couldn’t feel it,
Not like him anyway

Nothing appears worth it to me…

But he’ll call you an ignorant ass
And refuse
Further conversation because you admit
To liking Coldplay,
And never listened to Elliott Smith
Until you saw
Good Will Hunting four years after its release… and
Even then
He imagines you only watched the film because
You thought Ocean’s 11 was so entertaining, but
Have no idea who the original Rat Pack is

He has no time for you and your bullshit...

Women worship him
Or
Despise him
But usually they do both
And end up waking embarrassed in his filthy room
While he lights a Camel Silver and says,

If you don’t like it, leave.

With every sentence and movement,
Self meaning is spoken—however perverse
Doesn’t seem to matter

This
Is the strangest envy