Chicken Bones, Dice, and One Hog's Tooth

The t.v. tells me someone's checking out every six point five,
but I'm just trying to hold on to a reason to stay alive.
Trying to decide if this ten twenty nine will get me home,
or if I apply it to four forties and wander streets alone.

In this zone all you've got is what stands stark before your eyes.
Chasing dreams is the original drug that diverts from living lives.
Beneath your shirt and shoes you're old and your reel is unknown,
but the reality is obscurity comes wherever commonality goes.

Mouth to mouth you're talked around and down, but never up.
Not every hand is groomed clean enough to touch a golden cup.
It fucks you up to know this fact, but not enough to rage
and part of you is fucked enough to love your papered cage.

But it's not really a thing about you (vicariously me)
and maybe you've done it before, but I have yet to see
the value in the things too small to offset the greater ills,
but the hope is maybe college kids are busy working on a pill.

Change See Change

we were standing on the platform and my teeth were solid set
dead against any opportunity for man and woman threats

and connections between people and the offers to be made
and the individual qualities that develop different shades

and levels of music played and the music isn't a song
I'm hearing, screaming is the broken dial and radio still on.

the cubicles aren't in our offices, their riding shoulder width
and all of us aren't beings, more telephone poles in the mist.

the anxiety that churns my ego and plays the fisted bully to my id
is coming down the tracks and I know that something's going to give

and we're holding hands, and you're pretty eyes do mean well,
but I also know the smile is just tape on the face of a shell

that's telling me we're splintering in the grip and somehow still
believe the thing we have is nothing like a thing you someday will

and every smiling face and every passing eye in space
is one more suggestion of your better time and better place

and I'm staring down the barrel at the cherry and smoke's curl
and I'm feeling their all symptoms of a new and greater world.

Bush and Obama's War

More than anything else
when I read about the death
and deaths
happening in worlds
I have been shut away from I
am aching to throw myself
on the pyre and blaze
however momentarily
and perhaps bring
a tear to someones eye
knowing full well
that I
killed as many of those motherfuckers
as the balanced and well tuned sights
of my mechanical
and beautiful and reliable lover
would allow me to touch
out of a delicious and acquired taste
for otherwise unknowable flesh

and the peace of an afterlife
reserved for the softly caressing knowledge that
something I did
mattered to a thing
and a people
greater and abstract and still greater and fingering
the lives of everyone not
there...

...and that affectation
was all and immediately
and willfully
the result of a cause adopted
of my own heavily orchestrated accord.

To wear a scar.
To bear a scar unworn.

Let us not mince words
as intentions are so easily
minced.

A tear shed has little value
without its context
and its oh so very valuable
and more often foolish
impetus.

We Love Our Drunk

A fourth handle
tops off the trash bin
and I'm sorry for
the afternoon air
and school aged children
I will have to abide
to make another trip
to the pharmacist
in the same clothing
that bore me to bed.

Concretia

I have to admit that
I have not written much in the vein of experiences
I have had, but
I have thought a lot about the bicycle

I had that I crashed into the knees of my mother that
I had little thought about after the chills
I had from the speed of the ground
I had covered and before

thrusting my sneakers into pliant pebble work
at the mouth of the driveway and
the turn of the handlebars
from my grip when they
gored her like
an outstretched arm
into a pregnant and dilated womb and

I can say
with an honest tear
in my memory where
she cried and I stood more
and less
confused about the affair
that the concrete that
scored my left knee
hurt more than the
idea that she could
be equally and mentally
scarred by my young and
blustery callousness.

Smoker 7

100 centimeters is a reach
and 200 centimeters
is eating with my eyes,
but I'm lighting them
one end to another
like a box
of one night stands
I had in college
dreams
of becoming
a burdened individual
and- breathing.

Flow Coma

I thought today would be a great day
to cut myself loose into a stream of consciousness
like a man who aspired to occupy
the illustrious and esteemed position
of a barge captain (I still do)
because it really is one of the most
honorable things a man could aspire to do
since it is virtually impossible
to sink a barge
by fucking up at the wheel
and essential to shipping,
commerce, and the market,
though also absolutely
the least likely
by a fantastic margin
to lend itself to tales
spun of valor,

but instead I decided
to make something that held
as much spark and funk
in its title
as in its content.

Comedian

The whites of your eyes
are making your jokes
hilarious.  I am sarcasm.

Sudsy

I was thinking about
how great it would be
to have your hips
pressed to my own
cocked backward on
legs for days
and you reaching around
for your beer
that I didn't pass to you,
but we're at the dive
expressly to get drunk
and we're not gay
together
so I'm content
to occupy my mouth
with the lips
of my glass and my eyes
with the bartender's
tip garnering
blouse.

FPS Camper

You are the worst kind of booger.
Hard enough to cause constant discomfort.
Soft enough to ignore if one truly focuses on the effort,
and pliant enough to elude all, but the most determined attempts
to rid the world of your clinging
and mushy insistence
that you have a legitimate reason
to occupy the spaces that you do.

Something Breaks Upon the Moss

-after The Postal Service's "Brand New Colony" "Clark Gable"
-in the vein of múm

The life I wanted
in every word
cut loose from your lips
broke on the moss faced side
of stones taken and painted
to dress the front of a house
I lived with
instead of within

and while the marker snapped
and someone called action
while my mouth gaped
mid yawn
in the scene where we were
supposed to have kissed

my only thought was of
the uncut grass and the broken
bits of peach tree twigs amongst
the shriveled and unplucked offerings

and for the life of me, I do not know
why I invited you over
in the first place,
but we're here
and that is enough to make
for an October
better than last year's.

We Baked In Lieu of

I can't remember the last time I used
a measuring cup.
There's a stick of butter in there somewhere.
We'll get fat
together.
Fat and
happy.