after Hot Chip's "Careful" and "No Fit State"
The alarm still goes off to remind me
there are things worth remembering
in the gut and bluster of shaken off cuts and muster
and hard high stepping into futures
proofed and untested and
summer's going to hurt you in the end
because so much bloom can only be chased
by an autumn if a world is to
take on the luster of time
with more dignity than some kind of
expansive space continuity stretched
dark mattered death.
There is and will be a song to a throat
in the moats between the Milk stars dancing wide and
the harmony, the resonance of
commonality and the warmth of experience
shared in the brilliance of the greening of
the bones of this soon to be
will be enough to sate and fade the cool
into the touch, the learning touch, of sprigs
to air not ready, but when is
a bruise prepared to become
square inches of receptivity
when it is still beholden to
the battery and summer lushed
storm fronted current of
flow from and to
the blue white spears of
me close to you and
careless fools in the dried tide pools of Summer love.
I am in no fit state.
I am in no fixed state.
I will take, but I
will take care.
original works of parts
Smoker 17
One thing I have come to appreciate
in knowing you
is your drive
not to win,
but to maintain spitting distance
to the leader
so that when
you wreck
someone new
will have a shot at greatness.
in knowing you
is your drive
not to win,
but to maintain spitting distance
to the leader
so that when
you wreck
someone new
will have a shot at greatness.
Dodechahedralite
I hope with all I can feel
inside me when I press my hand
through the cage and squeeze hard
until the bubbles and sponge pop
in complex mathematics and chip models and
crush solid states into water logs and
aniworks and air brushed fox fires
on dried grasses on the heels of
another sleepless drive
that you do not believe in me
in the face of sun and sky
and so much perfect line work
in the space of white and gold and
eggshell broken knowingness
spilling across the heat of your eyes
in fragments I can match,
perhaps, in self destruction.
Prescription Static (LP)
Mother's Day
Who's he talkin' to?
His mother.
That is a television in front of him.
Yeah.
A television with Mary Poppins on it.
Yeah.
So I'll ask you again: who's he talkin' to?
I have a new mother
to replace the one that birthed me.
A new addition to the fam and
riches esque Xerxes to end the famine of
you cans and love yous and
do anything because your greats and
makes me proud to know
you can imagine new ways to be.
I see in her what I've known in me and
that makes two of us where us has been
in the past your asking and
taking from, thumb to pies on sills and
sticky fingers in tills tended hard and
careful trading carded.
Playing war alone and phoned
only when he ran out of people
to tread on and stepped on you instead
of you watching him step on me.
So yeah I have moved
on to another who can and does
more than say about, talk aloud, love
even if it is just magnetic tape
in a black boxed bootleg case and
she says mean things when I'm bad
and comforts my sad and
boosts up my glad and alleviates my mad
with amazing things from her
magic carpet bag so of all
the mom's I've had she will and is
the best to me until I find
someone a little less Disney
and still not dismal, but free
spirited I plan to stick
with the words and advice
of Ms. Audrey.
He's talkin' to his mum.
On the television?
Yeah.
So his mother is fuckin' Mary fuckin' Poppins?
No.
Gayer Than a Rainbow
The cherry blossoms you see before you
were a gift from the Chinese consulate who now
own more interest in America
than America has been able to produce
in war time the people came together and
the men went to theaters and the women
learned how to smoke and spit
like sailors to one bedroom hotels
in the suburbs you can have
two point five children and no one will
think less of you for
getting married before you can legally buy
the leading cause of death in men aged forty to
18 years of age you are required to register in
the air and space museum is a tribute to
the men (and women) who pushed the envelope
in the name of Jesus Christ who dies for our sins
in dreams you can be whoever you want to be, but
for the love of Pete
why would you choose
science has rearranged the landscape of
power across the globe time and time again
a landscape that has monoliths of culture
trade and expertise rise and fall in
the blink of an eye was all it took to throw and
return a hand to the guard position
which made it especially difficult to fight
head on the monument appears almost Roman,
but you'd be wrong to say
the architecture has anything to do with
sexuality is a thing best left to the clergy and
beer brewers were not permitted within the city limits
as law prohibited the pooling of
water in the reflecting pool is actually
the same water you would see if you
stood on the shores of the Chesapeake and
looked across the waves and
into the arms of the Atlantic
when the winds are high
this time of year
the blossoms will last
for several weeks so take pictures
because time flies and everything is changes.
I Heard You Were In Town (after you came and went)
I ain't got nothing to say to his punkass.
I know, right?
What is wrong with him?
He's just a fucking retard. That is some
retarded shit he did so you
don't need to be worrying
about that shit at all.
What the fuck. Who does that?
I heard you stopped through
about a month after the fact.
Actually I did not hear
I saw the photos of
places I have been
with you. It tore a little bit of
my heart out like dog teeth
to dead still raw meat and
for the life of me and I could not see
where the ends abut the means and
team up to make reasoning seams
in a fabric of lost logic and rationale and
whys out of howcomes. But I do
get it now and see in my outcomes
how some see there
is toxicity to me. So I do not blame
these days as much as I claim.
When I grow up I'm gonna have three kids
and a house and a garage and like
four dogs and it's gonna be awesome.
You're gonna be just like your father
when you grow up
and you know it.
Dog Star
You can swallow a pint of blood
before you pass out
from the loss.
There were questions
when he started showing up
with bruises,
but Cindy I have a date tonight and
I can't go like this.
He'll think I'm a freak and I
don't make friends with salad. I need
something stronger
to hide the pain of
hunger claims more lives in the third world
than the cause of death was
blunt trauma. We're still waiting
on the rape kit.
Pillage
one letter away from a village
from claims to fame and the mercy of
rain on a forest of flames and
a vision to proclaim in the reading and
red stains of time's folly and infinite game.
Proclamations made sane and less
from the loneliest peaks of the blessed
crests of outlook peaks and mountain tests
coalesced in the single sound of
hound's cry to the moon and for whom
the bell is tolling for truth and by
tooth, nail, hook, and crook
forsook in the pages and margins
burn the book.
Gone missing, is what we call it out here.
This place is a wilderness. People
have to respect it
or die.
The Maginot line was designed to be
side stepped and they came in force
to destroy
years before the countryside
was reborn. Before the soil
healed itself
There were bands of thieves
tearing the stomachs out of cows and creating
a need for law. For order.
There is no peace
without those willing.
Lost track of sight and sound
off to a pack of kin
I'll never know, insides thin and cheeks pulled back
in the grim faced smile chasing shame's taste
like a wounded deer to replace it's
voided space with something
stronger. Something nascent and virulent as
the concept of violence and twice as licentious and
lip smacking as the glut of rage
or the promise of vengeance weighted
with patience and the dewy glaze of
moonlight wandering to bide
the hungriest hours and working
emptiness of jaws and the minutes
until you slip from your heaven
and fall into my wide spread hell
howling through night.
Red Aura in Black and White
I can see the future. If I concentrate, I can know
what's going to happen. To me. To you. To all of us.
Am I going to die?
If I ever looked directly into your thousand yard stare
I could clearly see the skyline and heaven's stair.
I could see the reservoir and the pump house where
the old man touched you when your parents weren't there.
I can see the heat radiating from one hundred closed in rooms
full up with one hundred bad memories sealed in cocoons
until the change in time to one hundred forgotten dreams
and fly away like moths to eat tapestries spun on other's looms.
I can see, in the space behind your brown eyes,
the fifty four good things you want to do before you die
and the twinkling night time windows of the days you had to cry
because there are no shooting stars or short cuts for the whys.
To hold your hand and feel the broken skin at your wrist
is to know a little of body heat running in rivers of red bliss
and the touch of God on the wires of your nerves,
to witness the sidewalk split open, and hell held back by a stitch.
Sitting in the grass above the speed and steel of life,
the sun, hung low, and time full stopped above our common fief,
I can taste the red in you and you the red in me
and while all our parts are falling, you're light is beautiful to see.
Interlude
Has lead 498 of 500 laps and lost it into the wall.
That's right, folks. A two second lead and locked
up all the way and he scratched what could have gone down
as the single greatest performance
in the history of motorsport.
Unbelievable.
Shoe Shine Boy
Now listen and listen good: we don't give in to demands
from thieves, hostage takers, or extortionists so if you think
for just one second we are going to cave in
to the demands of a madman because he claims he can
destroy the world you are entirely mistaken.
Light him up boys. When we go in there I want
to be scraping up what's left of him
with an index card and a Dixie cup.
Mad royal. Mad mad loyal. Some people
all they know is broken backed toil. Till in the dirt,
body cut up hurt and then ground up
for all it's worth to feed the greed and
nurture seeds of an up and coming class of
upperclassed asses class acts. Class action
is like spun wheels at fun house games,
placating claimants so nothing is change, right?
Join my party. We're just getting started.
Three acres to every man and a gun in every hand.
A hat for every head and for every home a bed.
No, but seriously, power is God
and like it or not you will nod when will to power
says jump you say when 'til.
Power to the people
with address books of enemies and
means to lay them low in foreign policy domesticated,
in this party legislation is demonstrated
in trigger switches and switch blades
laid to fat throats and hammers to gold eggs.
We'll get ours and you'll get yours
and stuff the bodies in a gorge,
because our first act will be cleaning house
of owner, cat, and mouse
our second act will be a pact
to never turn our backs on the least of us
especially since every man to a head
will be obliged to pack.
Ice Cream Social
I got you your favorite flavor.
That's not my favorite flavor.
Yes it is.
Staring at the clock and counting cups
of warm beer in you to see when your view
of me improves to better than 20/20
and you feel moved to maybe stand closer
than your previous mood could collude.
I'm grooving on the music too, but
can't understand what I can do to move
your world like Superman when Lois died
and why I am or have not been
this tall to ride the ride.
Circle circle dot dot
now I've got my cootie shot.
Circle circle square square
let me see what's under there.
Underwear. Under where? I can see
you are too high to try the things I've got
in mind, so I sip more to even our score
because this is a social
is it not?
Listening to you talk
about the streets you've walked and
thoughts on the body politic and
art centric nakedness's bliss gives rise,
in my eyes, to a new mesa of respect
and longing licked in orbital subconscious
tongue flicks to my bud dried lips
because maybe, just maybe,
you are conscious of the line
I have tied to the stern of your ship
and foolishly so, do I try to turn flips
wake boarding your clip or do I do
what I usually do when the party ends
and pack it all in for home's known.
Father's Day
Life is a patchwork of stones and
fallen trees and sunsets along mountain ridges
and a river runs through it
to the mouth of a sea of being and
it doesn't matter if you can swim
or if you wave to shore drowning
because whether you live or die
in the span of decades
the fact is you made it and no one can take that away.
In the pictures, the movies, the big budget eclipse,
there are happy endings engineered and
organic sadness tended tenderly to turn
long minutes of waiting into something
more cathartic than the simplicity of the passage of time
counted by seconds of bucket fills of popped corn
and enough butter
to drown an infant.
In reality, the show, the low rise sprawl of being,
there are happy endings bequeathed and
organic sadness tended tenderly to turn
long minutes of waiting into something
more cathartic than the simplicity of heritage and
poor planning
counted by seconds of bucket fills of drugs
and enough alcohol
to drown ambition.
There are still sunsets on hillocks and air blued
and blown side wise in the twilight hours of knowing
before the moon rises and after the sun falls.
There is beauty to be held
on the ground you stand on and in the mouth
of passion and the body electric
if you can zoom far enough away
from the bricks and the grout to see
the majesty of cityscape and far enough in
to see the metal and stone activate
in July 4th showers of color and fire
in the face of every man and woman and child
in the face of every
obstacle and cloud dotted straight away.
And I will unlearn what you've beaten me to know.
I will kill everything you've made me to grow.
I will unmake the known and dismantle this world
until I plant my flag on the wreck and smolder hill
and fly it full unfurled
to the cheering in my mind
against the tide and march
of dire and deathly time.
When we are finished, that's it. The only thing
that will matter is what we left behind. Will you
come with me?
I don't know. I'm afraid Viedt. I want to believe
in you. I want all of what you said to be
the honest to God truth, but I'm afraid. What if
you're wrong?
Take Heart
In the space of vacuum,
the vacated throne of what is and
what can be
there is you
and there is me.
Together we are.
We make.
We believe.
We smoke and we drink and
we get wet in being.
And I believe that is all there is
to it. You are free
to argue and
I will rejoin, but
the beauty of us
is in the morning
because, though we both do dream,
we both do wake
into a universe not of our design and
where the night falls
we will rise
until our engines cease
and our bodies are given over
to the timelessness of earth and trees.
Bury me in California,
would you?
I've always wanted to see the Pacific.
Who's he talkin' to?
His mother.
That is a television in front of him.
Yeah.
A television with Mary Poppins on it.
Yeah.
So I'll ask you again: who's he talkin' to?
I have a new mother
to replace the one that birthed me.
A new addition to the fam and
riches esque Xerxes to end the famine of
you cans and love yous and
do anything because your greats and
makes me proud to know
you can imagine new ways to be.
I see in her what I've known in me and
that makes two of us where us has been
in the past your asking and
taking from, thumb to pies on sills and
sticky fingers in tills tended hard and
careful trading carded.
Playing war alone and phoned
only when he ran out of people
to tread on and stepped on you instead
of you watching him step on me.
So yeah I have moved
on to another who can and does
more than say about, talk aloud, love
even if it is just magnetic tape
in a black boxed bootleg case and
she says mean things when I'm bad
and comforts my sad and
boosts up my glad and alleviates my mad
with amazing things from her
magic carpet bag so of all
the mom's I've had she will and is
the best to me until I find
someone a little less Disney
and still not dismal, but free
spirited I plan to stick
with the words and advice
of Ms. Audrey.
He's talkin' to his mum.
On the television?
Yeah.
So his mother is fuckin' Mary fuckin' Poppins?
No.
Gayer Than a Rainbow
The cherry blossoms you see before you
were a gift from the Chinese consulate who now
own more interest in America
than America has been able to produce
in war time the people came together and
the men went to theaters and the women
learned how to smoke and spit
like sailors to one bedroom hotels
in the suburbs you can have
two point five children and no one will
think less of you for
getting married before you can legally buy
the leading cause of death in men aged forty to
18 years of age you are required to register in
the air and space museum is a tribute to
the men (and women) who pushed the envelope
in the name of Jesus Christ who dies for our sins
in dreams you can be whoever you want to be, but
for the love of Pete
why would you choose
science has rearranged the landscape of
power across the globe time and time again
a landscape that has monoliths of culture
trade and expertise rise and fall in
the blink of an eye was all it took to throw and
return a hand to the guard position
which made it especially difficult to fight
head on the monument appears almost Roman,
but you'd be wrong to say
the architecture has anything to do with
sexuality is a thing best left to the clergy and
beer brewers were not permitted within the city limits
as law prohibited the pooling of
water in the reflecting pool is actually
the same water you would see if you
stood on the shores of the Chesapeake and
looked across the waves and
into the arms of the Atlantic
when the winds are high
this time of year
the blossoms will last
for several weeks so take pictures
because time flies and everything is changes.
I Heard You Were In Town (after you came and went)
I ain't got nothing to say to his punkass.
I know, right?
What is wrong with him?
He's just a fucking retard. That is some
retarded shit he did so you
don't need to be worrying
about that shit at all.
What the fuck. Who does that?
I heard you stopped through
about a month after the fact.
Actually I did not hear
I saw the photos of
places I have been
with you. It tore a little bit of
my heart out like dog teeth
to dead still raw meat and
for the life of me and I could not see
where the ends abut the means and
team up to make reasoning seams
in a fabric of lost logic and rationale and
whys out of howcomes. But I do
get it now and see in my outcomes
how some see there
is toxicity to me. So I do not blame
these days as much as I claim.
When I grow up I'm gonna have three kids
and a house and a garage and like
four dogs and it's gonna be awesome.
You're gonna be just like your father
when you grow up
and you know it.
Dog Star
You can swallow a pint of blood
before you pass out
from the loss.
There were questions
when he started showing up
with bruises,
but Cindy I have a date tonight and
I can't go like this.
He'll think I'm a freak and I
don't make friends with salad. I need
something stronger
to hide the pain of
hunger claims more lives in the third world
than the cause of death was
blunt trauma. We're still waiting
on the rape kit.
Pillage
one letter away from a village
from claims to fame and the mercy of
rain on a forest of flames and
a vision to proclaim in the reading and
red stains of time's folly and infinite game.
Proclamations made sane and less
from the loneliest peaks of the blessed
crests of outlook peaks and mountain tests
coalesced in the single sound of
hound's cry to the moon and for whom
the bell is tolling for truth and by
tooth, nail, hook, and crook
forsook in the pages and margins
burn the book.
Gone missing, is what we call it out here.
This place is a wilderness. People
have to respect it
or die.
The Maginot line was designed to be
side stepped and they came in force
to destroy
years before the countryside
was reborn. Before the soil
healed itself
There were bands of thieves
tearing the stomachs out of cows and creating
a need for law. For order.
There is no peace
without those willing.
Lost track of sight and sound
off to a pack of kin
I'll never know, insides thin and cheeks pulled back
in the grim faced smile chasing shame's taste
like a wounded deer to replace it's
voided space with something
stronger. Something nascent and virulent as
the concept of violence and twice as licentious and
lip smacking as the glut of rage
or the promise of vengeance weighted
with patience and the dewy glaze of
moonlight wandering to bide
the hungriest hours and working
emptiness of jaws and the minutes
until you slip from your heaven
and fall into my wide spread hell
howling through night.
Red Aura in Black and White
I can see the future. If I concentrate, I can know
what's going to happen. To me. To you. To all of us.
Am I going to die?
If I ever looked directly into your thousand yard stare
I could clearly see the skyline and heaven's stair.
I could see the reservoir and the pump house where
the old man touched you when your parents weren't there.
I can see the heat radiating from one hundred closed in rooms
full up with one hundred bad memories sealed in cocoons
until the change in time to one hundred forgotten dreams
and fly away like moths to eat tapestries spun on other's looms.
I can see, in the space behind your brown eyes,
the fifty four good things you want to do before you die
and the twinkling night time windows of the days you had to cry
because there are no shooting stars or short cuts for the whys.
To hold your hand and feel the broken skin at your wrist
is to know a little of body heat running in rivers of red bliss
and the touch of God on the wires of your nerves,
to witness the sidewalk split open, and hell held back by a stitch.
Sitting in the grass above the speed and steel of life,
the sun, hung low, and time full stopped above our common fief,
I can taste the red in you and you the red in me
and while all our parts are falling, you're light is beautiful to see.
Interlude
Has lead 498 of 500 laps and lost it into the wall.
That's right, folks. A two second lead and locked
up all the way and he scratched what could have gone down
as the single greatest performance
in the history of motorsport.
Unbelievable.
Shoe Shine Boy
Now listen and listen good: we don't give in to demands
from thieves, hostage takers, or extortionists so if you think
for just one second we are going to cave in
to the demands of a madman because he claims he can
destroy the world you are entirely mistaken.
Light him up boys. When we go in there I want
to be scraping up what's left of him
with an index card and a Dixie cup.
Mad royal. Mad mad loyal. Some people
all they know is broken backed toil. Till in the dirt,
body cut up hurt and then ground up
for all it's worth to feed the greed and
nurture seeds of an up and coming class of
upperclassed asses class acts. Class action
is like spun wheels at fun house games,
placating claimants so nothing is change, right?
Join my party. We're just getting started.
Three acres to every man and a gun in every hand.
A hat for every head and for every home a bed.
No, but seriously, power is God
and like it or not you will nod when will to power
says jump you say when 'til.
Power to the people
with address books of enemies and
means to lay them low in foreign policy domesticated,
in this party legislation is demonstrated
in trigger switches and switch blades
laid to fat throats and hammers to gold eggs.
We'll get ours and you'll get yours
and stuff the bodies in a gorge,
because our first act will be cleaning house
of owner, cat, and mouse
our second act will be a pact
to never turn our backs on the least of us
especially since every man to a head
will be obliged to pack.
Ice Cream Social
I got you your favorite flavor.
That's not my favorite flavor.
Yes it is.
Staring at the clock and counting cups
of warm beer in you to see when your view
of me improves to better than 20/20
and you feel moved to maybe stand closer
than your previous mood could collude.
I'm grooving on the music too, but
can't understand what I can do to move
your world like Superman when Lois died
and why I am or have not been
this tall to ride the ride.
Circle circle dot dot
now I've got my cootie shot.
Circle circle square square
let me see what's under there.
Underwear. Under where? I can see
you are too high to try the things I've got
in mind, so I sip more to even our score
because this is a social
is it not?
Listening to you talk
about the streets you've walked and
thoughts on the body politic and
art centric nakedness's bliss gives rise,
in my eyes, to a new mesa of respect
and longing licked in orbital subconscious
tongue flicks to my bud dried lips
because maybe, just maybe,
you are conscious of the line
I have tied to the stern of your ship
and foolishly so, do I try to turn flips
wake boarding your clip or do I do
what I usually do when the party ends
and pack it all in for home's known.
Father's Day
Life is a patchwork of stones and
fallen trees and sunsets along mountain ridges
and a river runs through it
to the mouth of a sea of being and
it doesn't matter if you can swim
or if you wave to shore drowning
because whether you live or die
in the span of decades
the fact is you made it and no one can take that away.
In the pictures, the movies, the big budget eclipse,
there are happy endings engineered and
organic sadness tended tenderly to turn
long minutes of waiting into something
more cathartic than the simplicity of the passage of time
counted by seconds of bucket fills of popped corn
and enough butter
to drown an infant.
In reality, the show, the low rise sprawl of being,
there are happy endings bequeathed and
organic sadness tended tenderly to turn
long minutes of waiting into something
more cathartic than the simplicity of heritage and
poor planning
counted by seconds of bucket fills of drugs
and enough alcohol
to drown ambition.
There are still sunsets on hillocks and air blued
and blown side wise in the twilight hours of knowing
before the moon rises and after the sun falls.
There is beauty to be held
on the ground you stand on and in the mouth
of passion and the body electric
if you can zoom far enough away
from the bricks and the grout to see
the majesty of cityscape and far enough in
to see the metal and stone activate
in July 4th showers of color and fire
in the face of every man and woman and child
in the face of every
obstacle and cloud dotted straight away.
And I will unlearn what you've beaten me to know.
I will kill everything you've made me to grow.
I will unmake the known and dismantle this world
until I plant my flag on the wreck and smolder hill
and fly it full unfurled
to the cheering in my mind
against the tide and march
of dire and deathly time.
When we are finished, that's it. The only thing
that will matter is what we left behind. Will you
come with me?
I don't know. I'm afraid Viedt. I want to believe
in you. I want all of what you said to be
the honest to God truth, but I'm afraid. What if
you're wrong?
Take Heart
In the space of vacuum,
the vacated throne of what is and
what can be
there is you
and there is me.
Together we are.
We make.
We believe.
We smoke and we drink and
we get wet in being.
And I believe that is all there is
to it. You are free
to argue and
I will rejoin, but
the beauty of us
is in the morning
because, though we both do dream,
we both do wake
into a universe not of our design and
where the night falls
we will rise
until our engines cease
and our bodies are given over
to the timelessness of earth and trees.
Bury me in California,
would you?
I've always wanted to see the Pacific.
The Children 3
I never cut with you
in high school.
Not that I wasn't cool enough.
I still had big dreams of
sitting in a cubicle
crunching numbers and
a desk stash of sweets
to bide the minutes between
number crunching and copy making.
How did that work out for you?
I wonder at things like
where you went
with your talent for society and timing and
whether or not I will get to
see you
in the headlines of
a blue movie or if
that's just another pipe dream
from a time when
everything not right
now was a little less important.
in high school.
Not that I wasn't cool enough.
I still had big dreams of
sitting in a cubicle
crunching numbers and
a desk stash of sweets
to bide the minutes between
number crunching and copy making.
How did that work out for you?
I wonder at things like
where you went
with your talent for society and timing and
whether or not I will get to
see you
in the headlines of
a blue movie or if
that's just another pipe dream
from a time when
everything not right
now was a little less important.
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