The Writing Comes Apart, Face to Circle

To have in a head the idea of a story.  The bones and muscle
of it all flexing like a body newly waked and unsure of its own
limitations.  Unsure of the points where, yes, this fingertip ends
here and what is felt there is the space where skin does not turn
into low thread count fabric, but joins the surface of the media
and feels.  The space where the idea of being's is ends and
affectation, the extension of the being, begins.  The relationship
between the end of existence and the beginning of
something unpredictable.

I have been staring at a breast.  A woman is trying to
figure out what brand of food her cat will find acceptable and
toying with the idea that it is, after all, an animal and dissecting
within herself the reasons why she should care if the pate is premium
or not, because the cat will not starve itself longer than it has to,
but I can see it is a losing battle because she wants the cat to be
happy in a way it would not otherwise be without someone
to fawn over it and she grasps that there is no difference
to the animal, but the difference only exists within herself and
it perplexes us both.  Her reaching
for the top shelf.

As I stare at the breast, the woman in tow, the tattoos
trying their best to be colorful plumage half hidden by
the flora of Friday night "things to do, if only you knew"
question beggar's sweat suit fronds, I find it harder than
the question of enabled cats to grasp the question of
what it is men see in the cup or two of fat poking up
where clothing ended too soon for the weather we are having
outdoors.  Maybe in another season I would
clap her on the back and exchange something like a "good job
with the tits there" in so many, and different, words, but now
I am just weirded.

The appeal is long gone with my own changes and the logic
slips by like a wet plastic shopping bag in a work clawed hand
wishing I lived closer to the grocery store and hoping
the miles slip by with speed before I lose my grip and
demand answers from an inanimate object. She takes a step toward
the right and my vision focuses new, still fixed, on the previously obscured
face of a ten year old girl who has been watching me wrestle
with nonsense and compunctions of orientation and motives
far longer than I realized a ten year old
could fix on anything.

I am reminded of a story I wanted to tell as our eyes meet and discuss
several a many thing in a span of seconds before she realizes
her mother has moved again along the aisle of packaged meat
and she is expected and quite possibly late of course
for what could be the umpteenth and deciding time for a trip
to the wonderland of the cookie aisle.  I smiled and waved back.
The cat food woman sashays beyond me to the foot locker of foibles
to perhaps be drawn upon for later character sketches and
I am left to wonder,

left to hope that maybe in the time she spent she caught
a reflection of what I still chase and what she still has to learn to hate
or may never have an opportunity to and instead be, besides,
but beyond the paper lion and the twig mouse I am reminded
of a story I wanted to tell, as her face came into focus and trotted away,
about a time when I saw a man look at me with fusion in his eyes
when I was too young to remember and it ended
where the divide between memory and memorial stones build walls
too high to see above.  I want to be remembered in the way
I can't remember my own.  I want to be apart.  More than anything
apart from the story.

Waste

You half-caf buying,
cologne sporting,
paunch bandying,
chin shaving,
1% drinking,
vegan dabbling,
hazelnut creaming,
straw requesting,
checklist double checking,
sock matching,
finger moisturizing,
eyebrow preening,
tooth straightening,
slipper owning,
sideways combing,
piece of
civilized, middling, garbage.

I hope your MBA keeps you warm,

but then I know it does.  So I answer back:

I hope your MBA keeps you
out of my backyard

and we're both happy, you not knowing
how badly I would love to skin you alive and
you too small to do the work you delegate to me and
our paths only crossing
in a few scripted and well caged exchanges
appropriate to the workplace we both need
to keep on keeping on.

I warned you about the sarcasm.
I appreciate that you stopped.
Because if I am going to be fired for assault
you can rest assured you will not be working there
or anywhere
that is not wheel chair accessible,
with attendant sign language translators on staff,
for the rest of your life.

Wake and Bake

I don't know if it's normal
to wake up at 5:45 A.M.
to bake brownies,
but I also don't know
why I was awake
at 5:45 A.M.,
lying in bed like
I just pulled the covers
six hours ago and nothing happened
between then and now,
if not to get up and make
something I could thank myself for
when I got home from work later with
a massive appetite for mediocre sex and
sugar coated, fingertip sucking,
I am glad no one is here to see this,
regret laced,
peaceful like
an empty inbox on Tuesday
sleep.

Holiday in Series 7

It
is
all
about
the friends
I can call family
and the family
I can call
friends.

Holiday in Series 6

For Christmas I
do not want to be like you,
but half of wanting
is knowing what is
not and I would like,
this Christmas,
to be on the same page,
so dear Santa:
you do not have to love me.
I will not love you.
I will, however share a cookie
and I do not have a cold
so I will share my milk with you too
while we wait for tomorrow to come.

Holiday in Series 5

The second biggest day of my life
was crossing the stadium field
ankle deep in lake effect snow drifts
with my skip protected discman
belting Caroline Lavelle
like it was the last lullaby I would ever hear and
every snowflake fell
with the kind of certainty
that gives gamblers something close
to a breath of freshened air.
Christmas dinner at a fraternity
I could call my own and
call family.  It would not all play out
the way I would have loved,
but did it play then.

She plays so well today.
The want of the thought of the thing
and all of the potential
that buoyed every step
across a field I never thought I'd know.

Holiday in Series 4

I still remember
getting a copy
of Risk and being
overjoyed
that I would be so fortunate
as to receive
a board game and beef jerky
on the same day.

The hard part was
understanding no one in my family
played risk.  Or loved jerky.

It was cool though because
oneness was never really an issue
then or now.

Holiday in Series 3

Do you feel
so slighted
by this commercial
that you will
take grafted action?

Do you feel
so small
within yourself
that you will
ask for substance,
thinking it material and
comfortable enough
to vacate the difference?


Do you feel
you deserve,
at years end,
something to add to the charm
you haven't cultivated?

Then this is for you.

Holiday in Series 2

I bought myself
a phenomenal amount
of food and spent
a ridiculous amount
of hours preparing it
because, alone or not,
it's the holiday of the year
and I usually don't
give that kind of weight
to one in three sixty five,
but you only
live once.

Holiday in Series

You broke the lamp
and glued it back together so well
and stole from the corner store
and got caught
and read comic books
when I told you to clean your room

so

the beatings will continue
and the Christmas presents
you wanted are
indefinitely discontinued

because I never change
and you are

a mistake
after all.

It's okay, though.
Eventually I'll get old and
I am fantastically short sighted and
when you are taking
care of me and
I rely on you
for every little thing

it will be your Christmas every day
I sit in my own shit.

Geography Lessens

Like Brooklyn is the only town that summers.
Like Rockefeller is the only place that winters.
Like Long Island is the only place that autumns.
Like up state is the only place that springs.

The stars fall
wherever you are
if you take the time to step outside
once in a while
when the chips aren't down and
you take the time to look up
and all around
at the space
occupying you.

Sport

I have been hit in the crotch
multiple times at a go.

I saw them coming.  At least
the second and third swings
while my eyes were still open.

Now it makes me laugh
instantaneously.

Not that it does not hurt,
but that the thought can occur
to the antagonist
that somehow the conversation
ends with their decision
to sign
without reading
the curb stomp clause.

Not that I would do that.
After all, a misunderstanding is
a misunderstanding
no matter how many days you wait
to go back to the same bar

and go back again, and again,
but they never show up
to donate their teeth to your collection.

Kicked In the Nuts

Have you ever
hauled off and hit someone
directly in the crotch?

It's a great feeling
to see them slump
knowing your knuckles
are still intact
for not kissing plaqued teeth,

but more importantly
I have been restraining myself
from releasing the spring
and spanking my sixty year old boss
every time he needles me.

The joy of the exercise of
not today,
but soon,
is not nearly as fun

as connecting
repeatedly.

Winter Makes a Lasting Smile 2

I want it to snow so hard
that everyone is shut in doors
with their own thoughts, and
everyone is wary of their own fronts, and
no one wants to go out during the day, and
everyone wants to sleep until noon, and
red wine tastes good at every day's end, and
fire is not an excuse to get together, and
hard work always pays dividends, and
every trip is an adventure, and
seeing people you haven't seen means something, and
every kind gesture is a little more, and
everyone is a little more miserable by default, and
the wind plays no favorites, and
everyone is late for reasons they can't define, and
everyone is just a little more open
in the face of mother nature's
carelessness, and
the only one watching out for you
is the heart at your elbow and
the handful of names in your phone book.
I want it to snow so hard
that the world stops and
never starts again.

Since We Last

I've been trying to decide if you would think
less of me for drinking
my tea through the plastic stirrer
instead of from the lip of the white china cup.

Eye contact is hard,
I know, because
I've changed
more than I thought I would
before this was arranged and

though my irises are the same
the rest is
not so much.  Would you believe me
if I said I did not know how that happened?
That I don't remember
what I did
to bring my body from where it was,
where it fell and rose and knit again,
to this table, to this minute
to slouch and stir and mull,
but nonetheless mull, and stir, and slouch
back to back with you

pointing at clouds and seeing
rabbits and birds and witches under the being sun
and beaming some, just to be
collected enough to be seen.

Nature Boy Sleeps

I don't write songs, I write anthems to hatch heads to.
How can you complain about accessibility
when I've tried for years and still don't get you.

In that time that slid away crossed by
political language and over exposed memories,
I tried to see where we all ran and
ended up face down on the sidewalk again.

I broke my bed sleeping hard and skinning sheep
while I was awake.  The box cutter delight,
and the burning faceless dream.  The thing itself
was full of bodies and everyone was smiling

until the thing turned fantasia and
one by one they went limp howling
in my hands made of razor blades,
egg timing ready mades, and staring at what radiates

from empty eyes and open mouths,
empty words and opened cows.  So I do write
where I cannot make right what I never understood,
but dream tight to beneath the hood

of a car that drives me and takes the long way
home, over streets and under world war roads,
the two of us with nowhere to go and picking
hitchhikers from the curb to see

what words we love in common and breath
the same air until they're in a headlit ditch somewhere
and the shovels in the trunk next to the wax rope.
The bags are in my hand and the saw is gone blunt.

I'm whistling songs at work and loll headed all day.
Licking my teeth til my tongue bleeds and thinking of a way
to make more sense of what I feel
and better sense of what you've known,

better sense of what I see and the voices so far thrown
they echo to the walls and fall like glass snow,
coming back to my ears like things I've never heard,
making all the gun barrel nouns into shark skin verbs.

I don't write songs I write anthems to fall asleep to.
I don't want to know, I just want to meet you.
Shake your hand, and say okay.  You are you
and I am dead.  Alive, cross planes, and fucked in the head.

Let me take this driver and torque on this screw,
blow the brain matter off and add it to your shoe box
of gifts that don't matter or shine, ice rocked.
Suck on it or sit and spin. Both of those work too.

Have you ever been so high you beat yourself to bruises.
Black and green bad jazz and a case of head flu.
Take a minute to think about hot wiring your skull
before you pull your own pins and come apart like

a bomb hand made by God and then
when you think you've reached the end of your fuse
and you've used everything there is to make a mile
in your shoes, screw that fuck into your pile

and smile at the waves of rerouted electricity
to will your power for days and understand
that I don't write songs or feel ready to be read,
just like you, and that the only home I know is real
is the one inside my comatic sleeping head.

Matters of Science 2

I am beginning to believe.
The earth is twenty six years old.
What is coming
from between the leaves of my plates
is liquid rock still red with the heat
of the push and pull
of the fabric of space time.

Not really.  I know what it is.

More than the knowing is
the feeling
that maybe it is okay to change
the landscape
if mother sees fit
to wear something new
every once in an era.

We talk about it
on and off
between high tea
and highest tides
and the moon likes
to chime in once in a while.

So we talk about it
and share our feelings
about tectonic geometries,
but mostly
I am starting to believe
what cums from the intersection
of intent and isness
is a heat I still do not understand

like starshine on the waters
of an ocean
where the forces beneath break loose
and push the heart of a planet
through a throat
to sip open air
it otherwise could never know.

The Midnight Run

Thirty five minutes out,
twenty eight minutes in.
Three thousand breaths out,
three thousand sparks alight  within.

Watch the lightning ride
the hill crests and outline
the backs of dinosaurs sleeping
through the wind breaks,

huddling noses to their tails and
dreaming stories in rhyme scheme's
measure less known by ear or
heart since the top of the world burned away and flowered

into warm blood.  The cold
is toothless though the mouth spreads wide
where the street light hides its face and the sidewalk
sinks into marble stones and standing water

rippling in its vigil for stars.
Climbing the bones, the rising scales of harmony
promising frosted fingertips
there will be a spread palm

waiting pressed against the prison glass
between earth and space,
there is level ground
that wonders what it's like

to fall asleep in the meadow land flats
hugging New York City
before the day dream falls away
as steeply and

skipping down the black vertebrae
to where the head lies still and snoring,
unmoved by heart's combustion and
rain's footfalls besides,

the sparks pour out of me in jagged clouds and
broken crank shaft shards.  The hills of Pittsburgh
sleep on and I run through the dream,
part dinosaur, part boy, part astronaut, part machine.

The Test

Press the button.  Keep on jawing
me.  The next one is coming
between the left and right hash marks
of your eyes.  Well maybe not
that accurate.  So you should
probably be wearing a helmet
or at least a cup, because I'm
taking none of the heat off
and putting a little extra
fuck you into the next fifteen
minutes of batting practice.
I stopped smiling
when I left my front door to meet you.

You Stank (the day after)

You smell like
malt liquor
and regular liquor.

Well which one
let me rock
your world last night.

This Is

This is the fire
without a spark.
This is the laugh
without a lark.
This is the moon
without a sky.
This is the burble
without a high.
This is spontane
without eous.
This is the me
without the us.
This is the stew
without the pits.
This is the new
without the tags.
This is the break
without the ins.
This is the noise
without the din.
This is the file
without the bin.
This is the start
so spin the end.
The conversation
and continuance,
I have nails,
and you,
hammer head
so let's
tear something apart
and put it back together
and laugh
at the great vision
for  a minute
because for once we are not
being graded
on accessibility or subjective perceptivity
and I could not
give two
about anything
more than where exact
this might tickle you.

Back to Black

Sometimes I hit
control vee
just to see
what I got up to
when it all went to black
and I tucked and rolled
out of my moving car
on the way to sleep
and she kept
right on
a rolling
as if nothing untoward took place.

Buck Forty

One dollar and forty cents
buys you a candy bar
or a bag of ice.
With what you've been up to
and the poor planning that led
to you showing up late for work
for the fifteenth time
I believe your most pressing issue
is not lunch
as much as
what you will do
to make today go down smooth.

Think outside the box.
By box I
mean reason.
By reason I
mean love.
By love I
     mean if you do not
take the time to love yourself
         who is going to get you drunk
                     and give you hand jobs under the table.

Buy the ice.

We Had a Talk

You can't fuck everybody
all of the time.

Everybody won't' fuck you
all of the time.

All of the people
who fall into the category

won't spend two minutes
talking to someone

who thinks in these terms
so I ate two dozen cookies

instead and spent
the rest of my karma points

sharpening the edge
of my machete and

checking my
online dating account.

Smoker 22

My teeth are bad
aren't they?  My history is worse.
Let's talk about something else,
and the answer is "no",
local weather is definitely out
and I wasn't driven here
any more than
a bird is driven to cut its beak
on a sliver of whale bone
clasped to its bars by a slip of
bent aluminum.
Let's dispense and let me tell
the real story behind
how I came to be gap toothed
before an age when the fronts
would have a chance to flee
of their own volition.  It was a day
when I saw a man's shopping bag
give up the ghost mid stride and I
was two inches deeper than my ankle
in runoff to garbage gorged drains
and I thought there was
no way
the day
could get
any
worse.

Age Ain't Nothing but a Number

The tears still flow
straight down
despite the scars
accumulated and
the creases of smiles
and frowns repeated
repeated
and repeated tonight.
The number I scrawl
on this piece of napkin
is just a number, but consider it
a counter offer.

The Ice Settles

The ice settles
and I chuckle
over the hours and days
I sought inspiration
in gin.

The ends can
not be the means
when your color picker
is wrong to begin with.

Results.  Results.
Results.  A
candle light vigil
for the late results.

Perhaps a toast, love?

Fire Truck

Off the edge of the Allegheny locks,
nestled in the scrap yard, stood
a bright red fire truck
with nothing more to say to anyone
about anything regarding history
much less how it came to rest,
so many years out of time,
beside the orange streaked brown body
of a tanker car with no more track to tread
and the head of a caramel and 70's
kitchen appliance green
tractor to whom no trailer would
be caught hitched unless it was dead.

Fashionably late, are we?
I am, fingers through chain link
that has seen no days more lively
than the industrial slump, overhead with
Totsy and Nod and we are
poking the grump with our eyes,
breaths caught steaming in Winter's coming,
as we wonder
where you've been all our lives.

I would buy it too.  Drive it to work
and park it across four white divided lanes
like the king it is.

Tonight it is gone.  Gone beneath the giant.
The magnet as wide as my kitchen
that grasps a magnificently clear,
from afar, silver orb
and then drops it through the metal skins
of things discarded
like a kid with too many toys
and not enough fireworks, matches, imagination or butane
to make things more interesting.

Now we stand,
the gang all here without you,
wondering where grumps went.

Our fingers slink away
from the fence lining the bridge above the scrap yard
and the neon bright green water
at the center of the pit the silver ball has torn into the Earth
and our fancies, like dogs ears pricked false
by mailmen who have already come and gone
and crossing the quietude of the disappointment
by filling the air with tales of other tennis balls
you would have to see to believe.

The gangs all here.
This one time I saw this fire truck in noontime daylight.
It was amazing.  Where did you go?

Flight Combat Simulator

FFS is much easier to type and
I am courteous enough
to abide by the colloquial chatter
in the Brit dominated open arena,
but rest assured,
you aerodrome camping bastard
who likes to pad his ratio
by knocking off the noobs
while they've still got their socks down,
I will respawn and fly to the edge of the map
where I will have the peace and quiet I need
to compose a 17 line string of expletives
that will leave no branch of your family tree
unmolested
before I track you down and
give you a full facial
from behind the sun's covering fire and score
the only kill that will matter to me at days end.

Smoker 21

Having a cigarette
instead of lunch
because the time it takes the microwave
to heat a cup of soup is equal to the time
it takes to walk out front and back and
still catch the last fifteen minute
chunk of paternity tests,
littering day time television like
half smokes in the cracks people walk
when they've important places to be and
time enough to complain along the way,

of course, minus
lukewarm soup
pretending to be garden roast garlic aujou
with real steak
coming up Campbell's
in swallowed burps hours later.
The television
by itself
goes quietly into the white noise of the day.

Picking poisons
can be an art form and
today I am Beat.

Catch and Release

I am Moby Dicked.
Lying down dreaming
to the beat of the ocean and
curtains of light that shine like
blue movie magnetic tape
dangled from an opening fist
miles above where wave tops
lick the keels of wooden things.

Everything is alright,
you just have your eyes closed.

Through gills I see
less clearly.

My heart still beats in its cage
that is an amphitheater too.
I swim through heaps of dead roses
when I go
to see it play on Saturday ever nights.
The dresses.  You should see
the cuts,
pleats, hems, and strings
work loose as it spins and belts
to the bones and boxes overhead.

Lying down dreaming and Moby sicked.
When my heart does not play and
instead drifts away like petals
to a vase, draped in dust, to a table,
to a home years vacant
after the wind through windows
left broken

I give myself
to the chase, but pace myself metronomic,
rising sandy and dusk eyed,
my thousand grained bed erased
as my tails leave glimmering tracers of silt.

Hold yourself to what your heart desires.
They do not tell you the shortcut
through the wavering woodland of
high water grass is to know what it wants and
then meet it there, but even so,
I am Moby gripped.

I have bitten the score.  I have tasted
the shore.  I have gone back for more and
I have gone again to the Saturday theater
for lust,
but when I've needed it most,
the heart plays the ghost and
the silence between my ribs
becomes a pounds per square inch
retina bursting crush.

Chase your dreams,
chase your screams,
chase the krill fireflies in daylight and
spend their insides into your fingers
one dozen at a time.

The hooks, you see,
with fine metal plate and
hand stitched whatevers,
the slow rise to where it goes
to cuddle with the moon and play
sporting games with harpoons,
the little scars and the big scars,
the places where we meet,
the hooks that have settled
where scale laps to scale
are all part of
the catch and release of short lived Moby Dick dreams.

The Sex Ain't Gonna Work but I'll Try

You want
me
and I want
destruction
painted large in red blooded letters
and quiet breakfasts

so lets go.

We'll see where the rainbows end and turn
into buckets of gold medallions and
kettle pots and
more than likely knot

into safe words poorly heeded and
unbridled bridled enthusiasms and
yes
I do not want to talk about it
because I am as hurt inside as you are out and

done with making rookie mistakes
so are you going to let me eat
this oatmeal
or are you going to be
the start of another almost there day.

Anyone Can Memorize

Anyone can memorize
but that shit is hard
so I give props
to the ones that do it well
in whatever fields
to which it lies,
but I am far from inferior and more
like a species departed.
Vice and all the things
you'll never be privy to know,
though I do let so many of my bones
show,
aside.
I just want the record to know
I am,
bad clothes,
bad conversation,
bad humor,
and tasteless to boot,
possessing of a value
improv's artist's love laughing at what wrote never knew.

Holiday

Thanksgiving was terrible, but
awesome because you were there
wincing at the awful collard greens
that never fail to show up

and your face screwed up
like a bad Saturday morning cartoon
to the taste and
all the spite in the world
could not stop me

from blowing red wine through my teeth
across the heap of turkey on my plate
scowling at the stuffing,
wishing it could be as soft.

Millen Boulevard

Even though the street lights
are too weak to illuminate
the places where the road has fallen in on itself,

I can see the bends in black and white
as I bite down again on a half eaten toothpick
and tongue the winter chap
starting to bleed where road speed and
wind speed conspired to flay.

I rest my arms on the headset, crossed,
while greased horn bells and timpanis play
noir diner small talk behind my nose and eyes and
David Lynch whispers sweet nothings
to the tune.

Some day you'll find the one
who doesn't care where you've been and
where you're going
with the same abandon you've put into forgetting.

I close my eyes and
let the silver bones slip and
as the brakes go and my feet clip
I blow a kiss to the stars above and see
how long it takes to cream
before the road turns
to river water again.

Highway Men

We had a time of it,
sitting on the edge of the bed.

Thinking about the river and
the women there
who think "hey sweetie"
is not a conversation starter.

The water still chops
this late into the dead of fall.

Matching eyes, my browns to his orange,
wondering where the edges
wear rough in this one horse town and
we blend in like stripes on a horse,

we yawn and exchange the wharf
for the bed
because some of us have work
in the morning,

but we had a time of it
while we sat and snacked
on the big peach ball of the sun
doing it's best not to sweat in the water

and the weather too smooth too late,
like fresh pudding skin when you're already prepared
for night caps and long sleeps,

and we agreed
not to rely on another soul,
spitting into the waves,
because all a highway man needs
is a cat with at least as much scratch
to watch his back.

To See a Man About a Horse

The wind is kicking again.
High in the hillocks and
trying something Venturi
enough to ease a head
strung out and spun higher
than the banks of water color
pretending to be.
Bite the air.  It tastes
like good weather.
The kind of weather
that begs new memories.
The kind of weather
that sings sharp and clear
like band saw blade
contrails cutting with the grain of
golden blued violent cloud wash.
The wind is kicking again.
The cigarette has gone out.
The moon will be up
over the valley and
the hill is a terrible place to be
after dark without a jacket.
Time to go.

Hurt so Much

I hurt so much
that I run thin
of words to make it
music and palatable.
They ask me
scales of one to ten and
I ask what ten is
and they tell me about things
I can't identify
with so I choke
and swallow and think,
but god damn.
It is all
ouch and
second thoughts about
picking other paths,
but I won't pretend
to tell you about my troubles.
I've been
baiting.
Because what I want  I cannot find
within my limits and
sometimes if I just hear it
once through someone else
it falls into a music
I am hard pressed
to make on my own.

Grasping to Straws

This journey

devine

tounderstandwhyyouleftandileftyou

is a pipe organ jammed against

wall studs and screws

leaving me in the hours of a car accident,

wondering in buckled seconds  

counted out in bad songs and

worse minutes of countered touch

when I am going to feel it.

But there is no touch to wake,

no fairies tales to fake,

and I think

that is what still

chokes.

Shanice 2

You unforgiving bitch.
You unforgiving
stolid bitch.
I dote on you.
To no end.
I think
this is how you repay me and
I lose sight of the fact
that you can only
repay me in kind
to what I've asked,
but that makes you no less
a complete
bitch
whose envelope is thinner than
rice paper and one who laughs
when I say "how high" and you ask "jump now"
in an inside joke
between you
and the square inch pad of
the contact patch
between you
and our road
is the fact that
when all is said and done
I am the one
who wears the conversation.

Shanice

How good can a rainbow taste
without someone
to taste it with
and compare
notes.
Every time we sit down together
to talk about it we are
twin sided like old coins
in the same pocket and
for every time she wrecks
me there is a time I
pushed so hard she collapsed
and we impasse and I
cry for a mechanism that has given me
more scars than adrenaline, and I
keep at her because I
am so bored with life that
to not continually throw it
to the wind and the pigeons and
every sad whim she is willing to entertain
would be a waste of
the music
Shanice and I can make
together.
So ride.

Tangibles

We are all hurting
for grip.
Movement is easy
like smoke
appraisal
in bad lighting
that begs for
black and white
filters,
but the core
of the problem
is subject,
object,
relativity and
the heightening
of the link.
Verb like,
but not so nearly
blunt.

Lethality

Sings like a blade
and plays like a well tuned guitar.

Full bodied and dancing
where my left and right eyes meet
in spaces near and far.

Falling like stars
dotting well intentions
like serifs on a birth certificate
to make the moment
more significant and less comical.

Sings like a guitar
and plays like a knife
edge on and disappointed
with the fade of initial intensity,
but willing

to go the barred distance
if fingers will
join the contract and
make something beautacious,
wherein is hatched the doldrums of
end credited boredom,
in the mean times.

Gathering the Caucus

I have been writing exceptionally detailed notes,
in my opinion,
to myself.

Conscious has been
tenuous
at best, to say nothing
of contiguous.

It is the least I can do
to pass the maps
between our selves

that we might carry on
a conversation
until which time
we cease to be

on second hand speaking terms.

Which Is More Unreasonable (false breast)

That you saw a bird
with feathers taped to feathers
that were the wrong color
and did not laugh
until you cried
because the bartender would refuse to serve you
for being too conscious

or that you saw a bird
with feathers taped to feathers
that were the wrong color
and did not laugh
because you thought the sex would be amazing
instead of self conscious and
sorely vulnerable
on the sort of scale
that makes eye contact afterward
a hazard, at best,
impossible at worst,

or that leaving a home
colored like a kindergartener
with a box of glitter wax sticks, carrot orange,
smoke blue, and nothing else
could be a good idea
in any version of any reality,
if and only
if, you showed enough skin

or that you saw a bird
with feathers purposed and few and
thought that bird
would relinquish his spot
on the high tension lines
with a good view of the sunset
because you're over done plumage
was hard to overlook
for its volume, but not loud enough
to drown out any fraction of
your ear splitting personality?

The answer is:
no, I cannot give you a smoke
because this is the
first of what will be my last nineteen and
I am saving my last one,
all nineteen,
for my invisible friends
who are more real to me
than a significant percentage
of what encompasses you.

Rolling In

The atmosphere outside is
too thin to breath, but if you could
see the cloud tops
lit up in 5:30 P.M. gold thread gauze,
sweating blood red where the Earth curves
away into night and feel
the press of apparatus to your mouth and
the heft of your pressure
suit against your skin
hugging you tighter than any love
you ever thought you knew,
with afterburners
daring you to lick the stars
and black depths beyond your canopy

you would cut the power too and slip,
speeding meteoric,
through the mist,
tipping your wings and sliding sideways
through the streams of fire light
to revel in the slow
persisting orgasm of the vertigo,
rolling in and kissing
the whole of humanity
breaking and tumbling loose beneath you
as you spin into her cradle grave and
relish the tug and war of elemental force
so many of them will know
only by degrees

You Should Probably Eat Something

I still do not understand
how people can have weight issues
that are not paired to their genetic make up.

I have a hard enough time, as it is,
making time to make food,
let alone setting aside the time
to actually eat it.

Lately, maybe sadly,
I have the time to prepare it,
the time to store it,
the time to reheat it
and make it edible again,

but no time to actually put it
in my body.

I thought I was brilliant
when I reduced it all
to fluids, but apparently
that road leads
to shitting out your guts
and death

and while I am prepared
to die, I am not prepared
to die by violent diarrhea.

So I am making an effort to eat
things that nourish
and coddle my frame

in ways that I can't actively
or subconsciously pursue.  However,
if your problem is a problem
of too much consumption

the solution is
that you are not adequately invested
in your own potential.
Do more.  Make more.  Destroy
and then build.  And then
watch the world you knew

the comfort of the known
melt away like
frost on a windshield
as you pick up and learn
what it is to really taste speed.

Tensile Strength

Meeting a new manager,
he swept his hand wide of his hip and
swung it back level to clasp my own and
we saw eye to eye
because he was as short as me
with a grip as weathered as mine and
a set to his jaw that let
muscle say more than
stock photographic greetings.

"I bet you fuck
like a king
harried by rebels
on hillsides who
would set themselves
against a pile of stones
if it gave them a reason
to shirk working
for their bread,"

"Keep your head,"
I remind myself
as I am in a perpetual gutter and
easily distracted by flights of extrapolation and
indulgent in long skips of wide throttled glee,
inappropriate
as gone commando uniforms.
With a grain of salt
I take it all and
write notes in my pocket fit book

about how the women sometimes look
like beasts on the savanna
as they hunt
for baking powder in the wrong aisle,
eyes to angry, hungry, slits.  The gents
perusing baby food and
engaging in conversations with me
to prove they're not there by choice.
With a grain of salt and

my hard on has everything to do
with reliving the memory of a scene
in a film I saw a decade ago and
not the scene itself, but the
memory of how it made me
so thoroughly aware of what turns me on
at an age when I didn't know
what being turned on was.

And so I am a live wire
on the cusp of snapping
direct into the inseam of my pants and
trying to serve my hours
that I might eat for another week and
live the high life
as far as I've known it and trying
hard not to break and
say something so far out of place
that the damages sever
body parts and put an end to
what I've earned and
what still may yet come to be.

Player's Coach

To help someone understand vision.

Difficult.  By itself.
More so
when
it is clear they want to write pornography and
their hang up
is finding a way to frame it
in story telling
geared to illicit
masturbation
more than wonder and
expecting wonder
to somehow follow
of its own.

The old adage comes to mind:
do not give it the old college try, but do
go dick around,
go get laid,
go
do whatever.  You'll find your voice and
you might not,
but

right now,
with the things in hand you can see
along with the things
you have in hand
that you cannot see
with eyes not your own,
is a bad time
to flirt
with edges.

Wheels of Steel

Relax it all and mellow out,
the ladder rungs are greased, no doubt
so chill the fuck, Winston and once
you let the beat stand still
and lay a screen like wheels peeled
against starting line cement and seal
yourself in the drum and beat pill box,
fortifying your shoulders like chopped rocks
against wave tops you can be

individually freed to swim the sea
of music and see where we and you
actually come from and tree
like blood on a sidewalk cut free
from your body into the cracks,
into the soil, where truth boils
black to clear in beds of tin foil and
needle point.  Ebb and flowmatose,
conscious and catatonic,
tripping the light fantastic
in the darkness, life shelled sonic.

Aren't You Worried

Worrying is
for people with something to lose
and if you were to ask me
what it is that I have now
that I would miss later
the answer
would be nothing

so don't call me liberated,
or somehow in touch,

because the fact is
I have nothing to hide,
because I have
nothing to show
in reserve.

My kingdom is still
an anthill in your schemes
of what is and should be,
the difference being

if I am on top of that
hand full or two of sand
I am happier than
others will ever be
with 32 ounce fountains of youth
and milk and honey landed.

Single

One of those things
that takes exactly two words,

like
bad timing,
get well,
bring booze,
be there,
shut up,
take two,

that you can see
everywhere you are,
where you've been,
where you're going,
with no camera
taped to your forehead,

and the photos are
too easy
because it's just so damn literal.

Dropsy

I taught my left hand
to do many things
and in return it tried to kill me
and I couldn't help thinking,
whilst tying it to the arm of my chair,
that my last thought
prying it away from my throat
was "you ungrateful bastard."

We've made up since then.

We've graduated from box cutters
to alphabets.

Things are looking up.

The Break Up

Wake up.  Someone is selling a miracle.  Gadgets to make you slim.  Because you eat too much.  For your line of work and it's showing inside.  Your belt line.  In the creases where your belt line wishes it could still be.  But not your's.  Time is hard to come by.  To eat.  To think.  About making food.  Between commuting.  And doing your time on the clock.  Someone is selling a miracle.  Right now.  Earlier you stared through commercials.

Not as long or antagonizing.  Through the amber of your squared off bargain.  Bottle to nurse the child in you.  Climbing to your feet.  Can be done in stages so you press.  An elbow to the couch hot from the side of your face.  Cold in places.  Where you drooled snoring.  And woke.  To the nudge and tuck of fingers prodding your skin.  Where the veins come millimeters close to.  Kissing is out of the question.  You've been smoking again.

In nodding conversation with.  Beasts.  That come and go like cats through the kitchen door.  At the back of your mind.  Where things are burning.  Smoke detector free.  But there's no denying the damage.  The black streaks across the roof.  Of your mouth.  The television is off.  Has been off for hours.  The bedroom door is closed.  You reek of try try again and who are you to interrupt someone else's.  Dream.  Wash the dishes.

At 4 A.M.  Or don't.  You are fully.  Shit faced.  But only because you have not washed that face.  In a proper shower.  As though it matters.  The face of Smiles is clear enough.  The silent murk spins into a smile.  You mirror toddling.  Laughing to an inside joke he's spun to Totsy.  Who lolls along the baseboard.  Near the living room window.  Like she usually does.  Waiting for Mouthhand to show.  And start the party.  With a kiss.

But you are unkissable.  Equal parts chemistry set.  And throat like a cancer mossy flume.  So wash the dishes.  Smiles sings from between the rungs of the fire escape.  As happy to be.  Out of doors as you are in.  The shit.  You promised you would.  Not drink too much.  Tonight.  You promised you would leave.  Work at work and pay.  Attention and sleep.  Like other people do.  Like the people that populate.  The rest of the world.

Wash the dishes.  It would be easier.  With some miracle soap.  And a rag.  That cures musses like high dose radiation.  Or was it stem cells.  That realign.  Brain matters.  A bath of salts?  There's no amount of lithium that can heal.  Dislocated fingers.  Totsy is sighing.  While you scrub.  Knowing.  Full well that you are there and your love asleep.  Because you cannot stand being.  In the same room.  With her.  The gang in tow.

There are not enough dishes.  To span the hours left before you leave.  To hack away at work.  Though Smiles coaches.  And so you settle back to the couch.  Mapped out in cold saliva dots.  The place where your head belongs.  And wish.  She could sleep and never wake up.  Again to see you so broken up.  Symptoms playing like a continuous infomercial.  For nervous corruption.  And so you walked.

And they danced.  Around their fire.  In the cottage on the hill top.  Burning its way into the Earth.

Pittsburgh Black and Whites 4

My eyes are tearing up
where the 62nd street bridge bows
like the breaths I hold
against the night air cold when
I am gathering myself to run
the last midnight mile home,
but it is not the cold or the wind
threatening to wet
the corners of my lips.

Stars are not winking
on and off like downtown signs
in the water of the Allegheny.
Stars are bathing
naked in the current
unabashed beneath the moon and
I am more homesick
for a town
than I thought I could care to be;

the sleeping scrap yard,
the grumbling, heel dragging, coal trains,
the stairwells to nowhere and
the bad graffiti,
the bars with no windows,
the one bedroom huts,
the trash without race and
the messes of geometry
they have made, and all of it,
to a wonderful I and T,
all of it still there
waiting for me to come home.

The Line Drawn

I am finding it harder
by the day
to not get into screaming arguments
with animals.

Somewhere in there
we are on the same page
and I have not the knack
for whispering.

It is I who should beware the dog,
but that dog would be well advised
to beware me, too.

Sea Foam Chevy Bel Air

Around the block
there are chain linked fences and
brick and mortar smoke stacks.

There is a church
that used to be a brewery
that used to be a church and
knee high grass
where train tracks are sleeping
to the sound of flood canals
quarter filled with run off
from the highlands.

There is a dealership
with paper taped windows
waiting for the painters
who promised to show
years ago and
open socket apartments above
still dark in daylight
for fire damage.

Around the block
there are dog walkers and
a couple of gas station way points

and a Chevrolet Bel Air

standing like a sea foam and cream
drop of water atop a bucket
brimming with as much time
as can be held in a hand
cupped beneath a broken faucet and

with beauty tensile enough
to strike notes against the chords of
afternoon's five barred song
in it's three hundredth interpretation of
a year long overture and
loud enough to be heard above
the ensemble familiar.
The body, the curves and points begging to be
TLC'd.
The chrome defies the suck

and winks broad
across the bar of empty lot and street.

There is so much you know
about me,

it speaks,

and so much more you have to learn
if you could spend the rest of today
with your body held tight,
fingers to my thin wheel,
with my pedals at your feet.
Glimmer shiver and tongue bit,
a heart weeps
to taste the glory of
a Valedictorian from another world,
another time, that will never sleep.

Arguments

There are arguments to be made

for a lot of things.  This is granted.

Given.

And so we take two again

because without it

we will punch someone

dead in the chops

and regret it, 

either instantly,

in the ensuing beat down

rained on our heads,

or later,

in a quiet moment of reflection

interrupted by the arrival

of the assaulted,

hours and days removed,

along with several of his friends,

who have been waiting for a reason

to prove their solidarity

and express their 

pent up misgivings

with life's unfair highlights

by educating you

in how unfair life can be,

so before you march

stiff shouldered and tuck lipped

against the current

like a modern day Quixote,

remember it's never over

until they say it is and eventually

you'll be back at that bar

with your pants down

facing a urinal and

focused hard enough 

on steadying yourself 

to not hear the half dozen sets of footsteps

filling the tiled floor behind you.

Chop Shop Socks

I am looking forward to the day
when ailing and worn body parts
can be swapped out as easily as
shoes and socks and, in
the most complicated cases,
a contact lens or press fit earring.

Which sounds fantastic still
to my soreness, but
can you imagine
opening your sock drawer
with all of the socks and
underwear with holes and
waist bands that could not
hold up a bank
with a soap carved, shoe polished, gun
if the tellers were cardboard cut outs and
the safe was as secure
as an open box of donuts in a break room?

You could rummage
all day through that mess of
caked blood and tubing
searching for the right heart
to plug into your chest and
come up empty;
instead deigning
to wear Sunday's
for another week
when it's already half past Thursday,

but I am still looking forward
to the day when
I can have those body parts
that change out like years old clothing
I cannot throw away
because there is something to be had
in the choosing to run with it.

Discored

If you have to ask then the answer is "you're not."
If you want to know then start
with knowing who you're not.
If what you know is what you don't
then you know very little,
but more than what most got and
when it comes to reading meaning,
making sense of your dash and dot,
all you need to do is trace
your negative space like abandoned plots
and face up to the vacant windows,
pockets full of rocks,
and throw them at the glass as hard as you can.
The act itself won't magically turn you
into a new man, but if there's music to your ear
in the smash of boundary's last stand
and you can move in, cot and cat on hand
and sleep good nights in your no man's land
then you need not ask a thing to anyone
about who and what you are
because you know what you were not.
What you are is changes
what they perceive is
stills on a rotating drum's cut slots.
Ahead of you is dirt dusty jungle
and behind you will always be
a trail of needles
between the wings
of all the butterflies you've caught.

Get Up

Get up and go,
let's rhyme, let's shine
like Glory Days
Jovi used to have
when he was
twice as relevant
and thrice as mad
with his ability to twist the kids,
mangle language
and flip the lids.

It's a day of days and
fuck what makes
the world go round
or who finally pays
when the tax man cometh
in springtime days.
We're travelers
looking for monsters
to slay with broad swords,
shields, hit points, and more

credits to play than
Trump in Chuckee Cheese.
With ease we leave
the world behind and mind
your business in back seats,
churn up your lawns
with laid away cleats
and thoughts that make
your chiefs beat up war drums
and hum tunes to appease
the falls of feet

on war paths
warring against
sore pasts and
more glass breaking
in micro street riots
with pilots targeting
gaggles of us
gathered on corners and
looking villainous,

but really all we want
is a place and time
to turn stunts and
stunted growth
into things magnifique
and a chance to dream
bigger than the span of
street to curb top
because we may not be
the best or the worst
at everything we do,
but we are

living in the shadow of you
and to deny us agency
in the face of all we've been
and are going through
is a crime truer to
reality t.v. and made more
unreal by the cut of
your blunt tooth, so

let the p.o. box stand empty
in some black and white and
let the rusted bike by the
unfinished porch be photographed
in poor, nude, draped light,
because we don't care
and couldn't give two
for the visual artist's plight
because we are five hundred horses
draped in gold sheet metal and
when you're pens and brushes,
paper pushes, and finance crushes
make you sleepless by absent daylight
we don't ever give a fuck
because what we do is write.

Mixed Drinks

so does whiskey
poured into a 12 ounce beer can
sink
on its own,
or does it linger
fart like
in the butt of your pants
in line for an amusement ride,
unable to mingle
with the breeze
of fluid dynamics?

Play Nice (we could never be together)

I will not be happy
until I have your hair in my closed fist
pulled away from your scalp
like bandages to wounded thoughts.

I will not be happy
using words to say
what my body has
always said better.

I am wearing a
poorly fit mask
every time we bed and I
play you slow and cool like

an unfamiliar bicycle or
something brand new and liable
to be the death of
one or both of us.

I will not be happy
without demarcating
the edges of your envelope
with drops of your blood,

sweat, tears, and safe words
unheeded.  If you thought
for a span of seconds
that I was not looking

for a whipping toy
I am sorry for you.
Never mind the privates,
your skin is what will be blue, and

eye blacked.  Though I am
flattered you would choose
to fly my airy lines,
you should know

There is no such thing as a free lunch,
hunched body to a body,
when I am done you will wish
I buried you, calm and quiet, like Gotti,

but I am not a complete super villain
and I will never leave you
for dead
because what am I without you?

A lush with an affinity?
A mirror with clouded infinities?
We could never be together
for blood and razor wired history

but I can and do love
you with the me
that can and does ask nothing
farther than set boundaries,

but if you have testicle and testosterone,
marrow and muscle enough,
to step into the circle
marked with arrow and raw intestine clutched

know that I will not be happy
until I rip your skin away
and with my bared teeth
your heart touch.

Smoker 20

When you are down to your last
and we are out back
with nothing but bricks and stars
and jobs we could not love
if we were the ones responsible
for creating them,

I am in love
with the fifteen minutes to be had

because I feel close
to discovering the god particle
every time you pass me
your cherry chap stick tipped happiness
and I know I will not owe you
a single cent
in the mean time
and you are

so kind as to dream
with me, and feel
the Tropic of Cancer's sands
between your toes
in every moonlit contrail
over our midnight bleary eyes.

The Boy Who Cried

Thinking about how many times
I've almost bought it,
one of the few time stamps
I am able to track
through the years
that tell me
it really has been a contiguous trip
from then 'til now,
I am impressed
with the part of me I do not know
well enough to sit down and share
a few cups of coffee with
because I will be damned
if I have not tried,
consciously and otherwise,
to wipe him from the face of this Earth
like a bad tattoo
showered in laser light.

I know someday I will
have him in a moment he has slept on
and I will tuck a sterling fork
into his eye socket and pluck
tender white fruit that will
run down my throat
like a gently salted soft boiled dumpling.  I will be
a wolf in a pen of fleecy thoughts
before the light
and after the ghost, leisurely
like cumulonimbus on a form fit hillock
with no hint of thunder or rain
to be spoken, smelled, or seen
between sky spanning beams of
ocean and baby blues and a
dry eyed orb of sun
draining into the horizon and
the promise of moon rise whispering
into the fade and starfall, and I
will be able to love
the tastes and scents of myself
in ways I never could
while I breathed.

However there are still
many things yet to do
by heart song and blood flow
and so
I do not expect my will
to succumb to the impetus of
transformation and I will cry,
not knowing where the boundary hides,
where the threat of self annihilation ends
and the fence begins, but I sigh
swooning against pursuit and the heady clutching
for a tenth life
in a space I am not sure actually exists
beyond the end of the line.

Special

Everyone should be so lucky
as to have a friend with nine lives
who doesn't also have a tail and
halloween creepy, dilated, green eyes.

Granted, I do have a problem
with vomiting about as often as a cat and
sometimes pee
where I shouldn't but,

when was the last time you tried
to talk to your cat about
anything politic?

I know tens times as much
about the world as
that bastard and
I bite half as hard and a quarter as often,
though my decision making is
probably as ill advised as
his passions, if not worse.

Sure, I am not as quiet or
sociable as I would be
with fur and a taste for
milk and butter and
shitloads of catnip,
but I am at least as adventurous
and enjoy long naps
in sunbeams just as much,
if not more,
and am absolutely golden for you.

The Children 4

Six Flags Great America was a hell hole.
Sixteen years old and
the manager was nineteen.

She spent a lot of time
in the bathroom and when
she was not there
she was busy
writing her name,
in puffy letters
with the insides of the "A"s
shaped like pudgy, irritated, sphincters,
on every blank piece and back side
sheet of paper in the red ink
reserved for till totaling and
performance reviews.

When I wasn't busy
explaining to customers
that they could not have their choice brand
of pop and would have to settle
for equally fattening competitors
because posting a sign
was frowned upon,
I sat next to the funnel cake fryer coils
watching white bricks of lard
melt into amber pools
listening to them groan
against the background of screams of
thrill seekers unable to find
excitement enough in their day to day and
wondering why ear plugs
are acceptable in less jarring factories and
not in a mill whose only purpose
was to extract violent sounds from
every throat that passed through its gate.

Afterward, turned on and off and on again
by her antics and
the stink of sweat and some kind of
poorly defined fear seeker passion
mingled rich with wave tank chlorine and
head spinning sunlight, I sat outside the gates
in air too cool for late August
waiting for my parents to pick me up,
knowing they would show
eventually and
the children sat with me.

Fumbling in the flowers
patterned after American flags and
bursts of fireworks
fallen to the grass and all
various shades of street light silenced orange and black,
they clawed and danced and tagged one another,
climbed up my back and lolled in my lap,
yawning and laughing and itching my
polo shirted elbows.

They fell over each other and poked
at my cheeks and asked me
so many questions, but they
kept me company
against the eleven P.M. winds of
another summer night
burned away and replaced
with the stiff, flaky char, of
"this really is, all there is" glass shard scattered
flights of "one day at a time" fancies
they kept me warm inside and
tuned and uncoiled my knotted nerves and
laid them straight once again,
that my hands could play a song
in the absence of the sun
on an instrument
not too far out of tune and
not too far gone to,
once and for all, put away.

Call Me

The internet
has ruined creativity and
imagination
for some
who demand
pinpoint accuracy,
as though
before the zipping packets
and flying bottles
of island notes
ever existed,
people went to libraries
to fact check
casual conversation.

This Blind Date Is Over

I've been listening
to the music of the late 90's
religiously
because it speaks
to the deeper plight of mankind
in ways other periods
could not understand.

If we keep spoiling the Earth
climate change will
put significant portions of the population
underwater.

Smoking is not bad
by itself, but second hand smoke
destroys lives and
it does not matter
what you've been through
if you don't find
a positive way to cope.

Every
living
thing
has
a
soul,
even though
not everything that is alive
is actually living.

I wish I had a time machine
so I could change
the world.

I wish I had a time machine
so I could
change the world too.  I would
go back to the summer of 1985
and push your mother down
a long
long
stairwell.

Chips

You're chippy,
difficult to handle and
poisonous as paint flakes
in a crumbling home and
twice as sweet
across the tongue.

You're chippy,
sharp and witty and
cutting as a thin bladed
flint ax held checked
to a handle by threads and
skin splitting.

You're chippy and
give me fits of glee
in the way
a man trying to fell big game
finds joy in the conferral of
a bow and stone tipped arrow.

You're chippy and
give me fits of teething pain
in the way
a man trying to be himself and nothing more
must give in to wearing hats
if he is to keep his cheeks dry
in driving, unpredictable, rains.


A chip on a shoulder
makes a body hungry,
makes a body lean, and
that hunger does
make a body mean.

When you are not
all pepper and vinegar and broken glass and
you are tempered
with purpose and
perhaps fixed
on targets pointed
away from me
you are always a joy to keep company.

That Easy

Some days you wake up
with a mouth full of blood.
Some days you don't.
Those are the good days.

Steel Town

My body has become so hard of late.
Hard like metal so pressed
it sings in perfect pitch when struck.

I have been listening
to the tones shining up
into the sky and my locked jaw gives,

laughing along the tracks
my voice joins the melody,
a dog dancing and nipping at butterflies and knife wise notes,

and while they dart and tack and
teeth snap missing at road flare brilliant wings
I piece together the loose parts

you left in my head and
make a new memory out of
every context torn word you said

and up there in the attic of starshine
inside my fractured night crawling head
you sing right along, skipping across the tracks
as my body and I belt out
our hammered iron blues.

The Way It Went Down (a salute to the infantry)

Have you ever taken prescriptions?

My physical was exceptional.  My mind
is capable, of oh so many things.
Impressive things.

Have you ever broken any bones?

They have all been rehabilitated and
can do things over time
that few other collections of the same can.

We are going to pull your medical history.

How far back will you look?
I am a changed man and
everyone is young and stupid.

Are you aware that falsifying information is frowned upon?

Are you aware that adversity
is a stud in the wall of
the house civilization and "family" builds?

You can check the boxes however you like.

I feel like there is a "but" in there
not given voice.  Is there something else
I should know?

Is there something else we should know?

How much time
would I do if my statements do not match
the foot falls of my history?

Apart from the proven,
the drive, the acumen, the muscle and
the flow, the taste for the adrenal and
the nonstop go, the penchant for the push
at the edges of corporeal paper envelopes,
the tiger behind eyes loose chained and
the erring on the side of the slightly
self sacrificing insane

the fact of the matter remained
that I am psychologically ill equipped
to deal with the storm of enlistment's shit

and admitting that my denial
into the brotherhood
had nothing to do with
the physical or the store house of
knowledge built or train-ability or
shear toughness

and everything to do
with a well documented
glass brain

has been the hardest thing
with which I've had to come to grips.

They are there and
I am here and never
the two should meet
in any configuration of a world
in which we both exist.

Cycler

Have you ever ridden a white horse
is a question that stumps me and I
lose my hiccups because I
am given so much pause
in vision.

I have ridden many
kinds of things,
in metaphor and the more literal,
that would qualify
as white horses
chemical and otherwise, but
what I can say

is that I have ridden a white rabbit.
My bicycle is
named the white rabbit
because when I am on it
I am in a wonderland of
song bird simplicity and

become one half of the whole
contraption.  One half of an equation,
one half of an apparatus,
whose variables turn math,
sweat, and blood into
the most potent speed
my head has ever ingested and
my thoughts soar
like avian "V"s across mountaintops
with enough tail wind
to knock on heaven's
snow peaked back door.

So, have I ever ridden a white horse?
Yes and no, but have you ever tried
to chase a white rabbit?

Solitary Refinement

I used to know what people did on weekends.
Where people went and who with.
I used to clap hands in dives and
pat backs and match light deprived
dilated iris blacks and catch ember breaths
close to campfire conversations fed
with shreds and bits of the week's shed tourniquets.

I used to know what people did on weekends.
By day or by night and it was cool
to be another particle wave
in the thirty sixth hour accelerator
set to collide and divide my mind
into a bubble chamber of spirals and aerials
alongside everyone else
trying to reach a more stable state and
exploding instead.

I used to know people,
dedicating myself
to the call and null
to the rush and pull
to the shrill and lush
to the bang and the buck,
but like hearts,
times change.
Now I only know me,
the hillsides once dotted with little fires are
so far distant I
cannot see, but know and take
some solace in not being
the last man on Earth
still walking beneath the stars

because when the wind blows right
I can smell the touch of their dressings
to gold and red glowing sticks
circled in stones,
wounds bathing in the heat, and
though I only know me
crossing time in single, determined, steps
I know I am not alone.

Rattle Bone

Tick tock
ting tan
tip tap top
schwit wak
shill stak.

All units of time.

Units and units and
so many units of time
enumerated in the
swish smack of
fluid against
aluminatic solids of
can bottoms and
foils.

I wonder who
my foil is and if
I will live
to meet them.

The thought crosses:
maybe I already have and
was too unkind
to greet him.

But I know
as the bones rattle
in the bottoms of beer cans and
handles turned hobbies and
visions turned
like clock hands when
springs unwind and places
beckon for presence
without a keep to store time

that I have many ways and
many roads still to go and
it's possible
in the inifitum,
the stupefying
space timed lines and
mulligan divergent wood
that I've
still yet to meet him.

Settle Bone

I know I'm not
stable, by any stretch of the term.

I have things to harp about.

Strings to pummel
with pick and tooth and
notes to make and take and
rummage and make new again.

Adoration is
too often worlds apart
from worlds occupied and I
try to dance to drum sounds and
jam to foundry unsound.

I pursue the losses and
fire wildly at albatrosses and
karma sutric, copacetic,
vain glorious
loosed leaf
be damned.

Approachable in
stretches, dusty dirty
desert licked
horse skinned, but the
words of whorls courses
can't make bossness
out of card board and
glue fumes for days.

I am trying to imagine
a universe where
you never left and I never gave
reason to.

A universe where
the wire and finished wood
of the loom made a tapestry
somna-beautiful and we
spooned two souls cocooned
against the noise.

I am so
and thus
and such
that like as
to be
we are and
who we
so are
and so we
through this
maybe
for that
it too
and will
go back
come forth
divide
we were
and in
become.

I know
I'm not stable
by any stretch
and adoration
will not come
of it's own free will,
but I wish

and the wishing
is what I have
and what I refuse
to let slip.

Bones

Driving nails and staples
into the floor of a home
void of occupants
is jarring.

Every hammer fall sends waves,
but not the curling
looping wave forms of sound,
against the walls and from those walls
to the floor and through that floor
to the floor below and from that floor
through the ceiling above and back
to ears already raw
with the echo chamber brilliance of
a halogen in a tin foil nest
so close to an iris
the pinned back tears
hiss away in steam
before touching skin.

As I work
without muffs or plugs
to turn the caves into rooms ready
for chairs and couches and
smiling, wine glass clinking,
two point fiver having,
picket fence dreamers
it is hard to swallow
what wet the air has to offer
over my tongue gone
dry and swollen anxious

because I am driving
the spikes and spines
into the bones of a home and
desperately,  left and right hands
unsteady in the wash of bang and moan,
ears so hard relied on to sort
the real from the unreal
my eyes so often feed my head and
rendered vestigial,
trying not to wake her bones and
pluck the thread thin nerves of
her sleep, because the body of a home
can reject the incursion of human step
in ways violent.  Ways I wish
I did not know.

And so, I work swift and pray
the shadows do not rise and
walk among late afternoon's rays.

Sunny Side Up

Trying to win in all phases of
the game, but still running in place and
slipping up on the sunny side of the street
with busted laces.  Like a redhead kid
with Bond Jaws braces I
smack obstacles down and
try to give dreams chases. I'm
going to take my bad luck down
to the numbers makers and dog races
with my Springfield in the mount and
bit chomped up so long
the pieces go down tasteless.
Going to pick a winner
one of these days, a sure thing
to set record paces or
gun down every last missed guess and
misstep until my misfortune
trips high pair, diamond spade aces.

Block 6 (Day Tripping)

"I had a dream last night and
you were there."

"And you were there?  Okay Kansas."

"I'm serious, you were," drops of rain
are cutting the single pane window
into a Dali clock disco ball,
the turning leaves
four thousand high output LEDs
behind  safety scissor cut streamers of
Autumn dyed silk.
"We talked for hours
before I realized I was
talking to myself,
reading your parts
in a screenplay, but you were there."

The air conditioner is still
in the window, the rain
turning it into a one note kettle drum
with enough reverberation
to rattle our empty house
with the snick and snack of
ghost canines at a Tuesday night rave.

"Let's go do something.  I want to be
where the people are."

"Okay, Ariel."

"I'm serious, let's go."

"Alright," the key ring is nestled in its dish
with a pair of D cell batteries,
their plastic casings stripped away.
They all fit in a hip pocket and
throw off heat as the afternoon
drains away while they touch and
ward off Winter chilled glass flights,
painted and breathy
as dry ice bedded tree formed shots of
one fifty one along flaming boughs, "get your coat."

Block 9

Sometimes the hardest part
about recollection,
the memory of what it is
you wanted to say
when you did not have the opportunity
to say it
is remembering,
not all of the good things,
but the choice few
worth saying twice.

Once to yourself and
twice to the people
who could have used a smile
when you had one to gift.

Log Out

When we say goodbye
you don't have to log out of the internet
immediately.  I know
you aren't running off
to tend to tend to your puppy
baying at your door to pee
or are so gripped by sleep
that if you don't lie down
you'll pass out and fall
face first to your desk.

It's all asynchronous
still.  So feel free
to say goodbye
for whatever reason.

I'm not going to hold it against you.

People got things to do
and last I looked
the universe isn't all me and
that span of stars and
destinations ain't all you.

Death Star

Wake up late for work on a night off
and there ain't shit been rested.
Head spinning like cloud cars
drunk driven over Bespin.
Rollin' high and deep like Lando
with no cape to impress heads.
Just a gambler out of time
with no chips to grease hands,
but many words to make promises.

Double suns and dueling stars,
long waited nights and sunsets.
Trading blows with an empire crush
that's taking any and all long and last bets.
That's no moon in the sky
it's the eye of final dooms
dawning like a bad dream two hours
before waking clears
its throat in your bedroom.

Ain't shit changed about a god damn thing,
you're still one slip away from obliteration.
One nod, one switch, one arbitrary
move of a gloved hand in arbitration.
One sneeze, one blink, one pair of pants
pissed in before the sword of legend
makes land fall in your skull and grants
release to the agony of dreams wished in.

The death star is Polaric and you're just a puzzle piece,
an eyelash for the wiping
before a finger of unrelenting justice
you don't believe in or ascribe to,
but that doesn't matter because
it ain't your universe and you're not the master,
you're just a table owning number
running asshole trying to make disaster
into something other people can invest in
trying to make the most of your exile
to a fucking cloud city casino
in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant
to which you weren't called,
that shit was destined.

It's not your galaxy, but is your world
and on the planet that never sleeps
the dice is still in your hand tight curled
and making something like a fist,
remembering the stars undead
on which you used to wish.
There is no rest to be had
no pain small enough to be lessened,
so hold the sharp edged six faced
dream machines and make a wish
against all reason, chance, and the empire's rule
because the mechanics are quantum
so even the all knowing
are educated guessin'.

Talking to You

Talking to you has been
like the moment when
I get out of the shower
and tip still hot water from my ear
and it runs down my neck
across my collar bone
from left to right
and sinks down the hairs on my chest
and I stick my little finger
in the hole
and scratch the air
between nail and drum
and, for the life of me,
if I were a few genes more
in common with a pup
my foot would drum out
something fantastic
against the bathroom tiles
in Morse coded
nonsensical
thank yous.

Stock Boys

Lock, stock, and two
smoking barrels where eyes
were once used.

Max is an ex-marine,
Desert Storm vintage and still
sleepless for days
at a stretch..

Kel's got two kids
by two different mothers and
he keeps coming to work
as though the police
cannot arrest him
for warrants related to child support
when the customers leave,
though only flirting
with twenty three.

Georgie's a bastard,
but so are we all,
in one way or another.  I heard
his uncle owned fifteen dogs and
they all shit in the house
while he was away
in elementary school.

Around the office
they tip us off
as night stalkers.  Owls
out and hard up
for a buck.

Mel's pushing
her mid forties and
Daunte simply pushes.

Chrystal comes in tired
every damn day and
who could blame her
with two kids of her own and
a mother half dead, but alive
enough to demand
constant monitoring

but nothing close
to the daily morning film review of
what we all got up to
on the overnight shift.

I am a bastard too,
by way of a Bible and
poor programming and shiftless
in sleep
for the weight of history and
the blows of time, and
enough neurosis to make some
pharma-chiatrist dream wet.

Some of us are
still young enough
to be boys, but by and large
we are men and women,
some too soon of age and
others too late
to do what we do.

Some of us remember
when the plot was a school and
some of us remember
21st birthdays and feel
the hangover still.

Some of us remember
second marriages and
nurse broken wings and
some of us remember
when every night off
was exactly that.

Sure, we are stock boys,
but boys we are not.
Grown up skewed and
screwed, at times much too soon,
 to a head, the lot.
Stock boys we are,
but boys we are not.

Cloud Life

What did you listen to, Daddy,
when you were my age?

I listened to pretty much
everything I could get my hands on.

Did you have any favorites?

I starred and favorited a lot of things,
but I never had a particular one
above the others.
The music scene is always developing and you have to
stay abreast.

Why?

So you don't grow stagnant.

Why?

So you don't get stuck
listening to the same things
for the rest of your life.

Why?

If you listen to the same things, and
other people hear those things enough times
those things begin to define who you are.

So you are undefined?

No, I just don't want you to see who I am
and forever link that person
to an artist and then
never be able to appreciate or realize
who that artist could've been
to you.

So you hate your parents?

Yes.  Yes I do.

Turn Out

I went to a beach and found
a radio whose battery compartment was full of sand
besides a piece of sea glass.

Maybe there was another person
who slept there the night before
on a towel, black and blue striped,
sunning through the afternoon and
too in love with the sea
to be with anyone else.

Their radio played
a cassette for a bit,
play button depressed, and then
the tuner to see what was wrong
and right with everyone else inland

until the air falling away
to points cold and wet and lonelier,
cloud sized sighs and yawn saws,
pressed them gentle to their door.

The batteries were
beneath the waves by now,
chucked like stones perfect enough
to hold for a minute only, turn over, and release.

I had my own from a radio set in my bag.
I shook the black box, careful, and
plugged them in.
Nothing happened.

I sat in the sand
where my foot stumbled upon it and dug a little hole
so it could sit too and we talked for a while
about capacitors and
resistors and broken transistors
until the sun came up.

Breakdown

Some of us are never alone
because we can't be.

Our brains don't work
the way they are supposed to,

but, just remember, you're never alone
because you have me and

when I'm right, I'll always
have a minute to spend with you.

Cool

"Rise and fall,

you know.  That's what all of

the day to day is,"

you pulled up the zipper 

on your white sweatshirt,

the one with the red block letters

outlined in gray

from your parent's alma mater.

The red fades

close to the depth of

your eyelids where the spring

afternoon light falls

autumn sleepless, but your

smile is still sharp,

in glimmers,

as upended shopping carts,

at empty bus stops.

A piece of the curb,

yellow chipped and pitted,

skips like pocket change 

along cobble ribbed 

river waves 

dotted with ten ounce dixie cups

filled with milk sun.

"Come on, man,"

I don't reject 

what's left of

your cigarette,

your fingertips grazing my chin

in the exchange.

Our hoods are too loose

as we head into the breeze,

motors silent, but tacking

in steps that fill the width of sidewalk

like a cross eyed bartender,

sails full.

"When you've made it,"

ignoring the burn of wind jostled spark

in the corner of my eye, 

"it all blends together?"

I pull the strings of my black sweatshirt

and smile back,

the homeless man and his

garbage bags of late nights

disappearing from above

my rows of teeth still hurting

from the side bursting laughter of

running out of ways to 

describe myself to human resources
"I've been thinking of becoming
a full time Eskimo.  They're always
hiring in Alaska."

Our shoulders 

play a soft note against each other,

our feet taking us 

into the same square of cement,

"Something like that,"

you touch the chap of your lips

with a fingernail days out of polish

the way I would have

in a different life.

"Every year, this time of year,

I look forward to more leaves

on the ground than dancing above

in the trees I've never been tall enough

to reach on my own."

Your sneaker catches

against the cement and

we laugh a little more

in the cool of another year's afternoon.

Call Sign of the Dragon

Though it's been long
so so long and
so so
in its being
I'm still watching out
for your call sign
on the civil band radio
because I am
flying kites
in a tropical storm and
what good is bottled lightning
with no one to
show and tell.

Four one one two two
and I like it.
I like it.
Sixty nine one oh one
and five zero one two.

Tell me, tell me
everywhere you've been
because I am tuned
to the called signs
of a world ending
planet spanning
star light dragon.

Radiate

Chipped paint and
stale chips.
Pool tables and alley cats
taken in riffs.
We were Kill van Kull
trash ballsy out of
Staten Island.
More guts and glory
than admiral Hallsey.
What you had to eat
silly snacking
we stole on streets
from delis and
drugstores
and had more games
and stupid fun
than Rick James.
Parts and parcel
to tar papered roofs
and carpet staples
still plugged to naked floors.
Valley living
and so far away
from Hollywood.
Popsicle sticks
stuck to lips and
hitched up language.
Being young and dumb
and gifted on the island
of dumpsters and brown lots.
We grew up
a different way,
tough and tuck
for different reasons.
We were boys and girls
for all seasons.
Able to do
what never before was done
and able to go the distance
from the addressed
to the from.
We don't party hard.
We live it skin tight.
We don't own
what we do is
gift the night.
We ride the lightning
and wank the knife.
We don't even scores
we keep the game tight.
While you sit on
champagne and orange juice
and lament the
morning rain
we stay audible
and walk with aviators
regardless of the time of day.
We drink forties and
push more of these
because every minute
is another executions stay.
We were whipped dumb
and succumbed
to generational short circuits,
we weren't first
or the fastest
or on trends out the gate,
but, fuck, we'll be some
sad ass day time t.v. story
if we don't push shit back
bite your face
and take
just a minute
to fucking radiate.

Walk Like an Angel

I'm still getting used to
the hammer falls
of your heels on our floor.

The recklessness of the sound
that charges like gunfire
against my eardrums.

You weigh not more
than the sum of my little finger and
when you wake
the feathers of your wings
touch my nose
to giggling tears,

but you walk with a carelessness
I am unaccustomed
and I cannot understand

how something so beautacious
so silly gorgeous and sporting
so fresh a pedicure and
artful a nail job

can walk stunting and with
abandon, until I realize
I've walked on my toes,
catty and twice as squirreled,
for twenty odd years
because I was born to a hell

where each day was
a new way to learn
how to make myself
and my own wings
small
so the monsters couldn't find me.

I'm still getting acclimated
to the ease of
heaven's promenades,
but I'm glad I have you
to teach me.

Scars

I've been looking for,
not answers
or reasons,
but alignment.

The sort of alignment
that explains the bleeding,
that explains the where froms and
makes the how tos
less magic.

Tracing broken skin
with a tongue and
tasting the sides in and
the buzzard circled numb.

If I make a fist
real hard
it all pulls
together
like a tide without a moon

and I know
every knuckle
sitting beneath
every blood red tear
can speak on its own,

albeit in
Morses lesser known
much more
frustrated code.

Pineapple

There are times
when I wish everything could be
so simple as
naming a thing
for what it is, because there is
a cellar door
beauty to the isness of
being pine and apple fleshed.

In Box

I'm not antisocial.
I plan on celebrating
the new millennium
when my unread messages
hit 3001,
since I missed the first one.

Empire

Kingdom come
slowly.

The march of dimes
to fountains.

Apartheid, apartheid!
Modernity!  Apartheid!

History, vainglorious and
oh so
one night standing
fantasmaglorious.

There were names for these.
Names incisive.  Names
provocative in the way
interpolation
could only be.

We were gods.  We were
gods with no ambition and
lackadaisical in our votive.

Perhaps soured
in our thinness,
our absence of motive,

but we open up our wrists
to see if we exist and
the question hangs,

is this our empire,
is this the swan
and the lake
and the ugly duckling's take

or is this the profundity,
the profundity of becoming,
the hours and seconds after
some kind of tone deaf detonation
demarcated by camera lens and
cloud burst veins.

The empire,
hard won.  Lives lost and for
what?
The empire.  The empire.

The culmination of years
spent in gestation and towering,
dreaming of its own
dismemberment as it breaths.
Dreaming of
its own dismemberment
as it seethes.  Reconnitered and
in the bed of sight
unrecognized?

So you open up your fist
to see if, in its own flight,
the you unbound,
can still persist.

Radiator

Do not look at me.
Hold onto the radiator.
Hold onto the radiator.
If you don't hold onto the radiator
it's going to be worse.

Do not look at me.
Do not look at me.
I did not make you do
what it is that you did.
Hold onto the radiator
or you'll make it worse for yourself.

This is going to hurt
me in the way
seeing a light switched on
with abandon
can hurt an eye.

This is going to hurt you
in the way
after images can cling
to retina and spike nerves
years gone.  Phantom limbs
of a chimera.

Hold onto the radiator.
Why do you not understand
that stealing is wrong.
Can I not
beat the truth into you?
Can I not
make right in God's eyes
what has gone astray?