I suppose at some point
we are all going to starve.
Bodies halved in quarter selves and
every cell emptied of
its course and scourge.
Eyes full of sunlight and lips parched
to perfect white ironless film,
veins abuzz with the lifelessness of
some kind of reconstitution,
reclamation to the dust that will
cough up our stony bones for a time,
along with the restlessness of
the rest of this existence that cannot be
swallowed to fill the little holes grown large
inside until they burst skin
like looping bits of field guiding rivers of
tensile rage until they overcome
and shiver and balloon free
from the core, left to rejoin
systems by way of one thousand
incisions and severances and
reductions until
the only sign our passage leaves
is a fistful of artifacts and points of invisible light
in the background radiation
in the shadows of corona.
I suppose at some point
we are all going to starve.
We are all going to pluck at our mouths
with the leaves of skin that come loose
like translucent scotch tape
and tongue the sand between gum and cheek
and wonder at the marvels of our
seven hills and the marble struck down
in shapes more compelling than
the art our eyes saw in
the hacks and stabs of pencils to diagrams of
golden ages because this
"this must be
the greatest time we are yet to know."
Teeth hidden
for absence and disuse
our appetites alight on the dream spars of
the tomorrowed worlds and the crunch
of small and bony conquests
at our heels amid our ruins majesty and
in the gaping cages of our inner spaces,
in our kingdom more eloquent
more founded
for it's collapse and
it's weight of relentless night
we will wait with our necks ready
for our earned passage and
the return of the torrent and beating
hearts. The horsemen come sun rise.
Scrapyard
I have been tracking the activities of the scrapyard
on and off
as the seasons go by.
I should have known
warmer weather would mean
more work for them.
More shipments,
more trains,
more hours of smashing things apart.
I did not know
what it would sound like
and that it would take all day
for the trains to arrive and
all night to reduce piles of aluminum and iron
to profit. It has been
jarring
and sleep bereft, but mostly I wish
I could be there to see it happen.
The Docks
I rode to the docks
and "No Fishing" signs abounded.
Apparently you can kill yourself
by eating fish plucked from the Allegheny,
not because they are in and of themselves
bad fish to eat, but because
the runoff of years of industrial abuse
has rendered them poisonous.
Years of yes and aquifers of nos
as they slump to obscurity and
brown lots and planning maps,
and realizing that
taught me a little lesson in
friendships lost and the fact that
dead smoke stacks
do not mean impotence.
"and now we're ready to go public."
I wonder how many years it will be
before I can be fished with abandon
with glittering
hand crafted this and that, but
in the meantime I stand
and pitch rocks across the inch high waves
of her waters and see how far
they will skip and dance and fly like
lame birds at the edge of an F5
before they sink and
regret we found each other.
The chicken legs are so beautiful ,
aren't they,
dotting the lines like-
Simple Text
Whatcha doin?
Nothing you?
Just wondering, not up to anything
special.
Neither am I, watching
the paint dry,
avoiding artifice.
Artifice?
Creation for its own sake.
Dreaming?
Not quite. In fact, wholly different.
Are you coming over or not?
Be there in ten.
No Knives Out
I can say with one hundred percent fidelity
that I no longer sleep with knives
because I slit my wrist in my sleep
and did not realize it until I was
showering the following morning
and now it hurts to
do very simple things
in a way that it still hurt to do
very simple things
except now I can feel it
in my flesh instead of
only in my brain and I was not prepared
at all
for the difference.
Breakfast
One, two, sated.
There is a joy to breakfast you will never understand.
Partly because there is a joy
to waking up that you will never understand.
A joy to being
that you will never get, not because it's not given,
but because you've never had it denied
or even seen the whisper of a promise that it would be
so. You've never heard the hooves of night
riding hard on the heels of your own footsteps
or heard the burble
of the water higher than the depth you could swim
with abandon chuckling at the lips of your ear,
chanting sweet everythings
if you'd only let go
for a minute.
How good does this egg taste?
Ask me tomorrow.
Near Death Experience (Part 23)
What does it feel like to almost die?
Nothing like cinema would tell you.
You don't dream about your past life
and everything that could've been different.
You don't relive the last few seconds
leading up to where it all went off the tracks.
You don't curse everyone who
almost killed you before
whom you wish now will be sorry
when you're gone for good and it's all eulogy.
You don't care about everything that lead
up to the moment or how you got there.
You don't think about heaven or hell
or afterlives or reincarnation or if
you chose the right religion or if
the right people will remember you.
The only thing you think about
when you really are on the cusp of dying
is if this really is it.
Is this really the one that takes me
after all these fucking years
and am I really going out
with these motherfuckers watching it happen
and am I really ever, ever, ever
going to get a chance to live it down,
and really, after every other initial impulse
dies away and it starts to go to black
the only thing occupying your mind
is a chance to do it all over again,
maybe not the same, maybe exactly the same
but time compresses and the one thing
you do know is that given the chance to make
one last decision, that is the decision
you wish more than anything
to be able to make.
Riders on the Sun
Come lances in hand
to challenge the men of earth.
Come bite the steel
gripped against heaven, the boys of earth.
Come watch hands spun
like axes in executioners palms.
Come with it, you
and all of you.
Leave nothing to
the test and interpretation of time.
Let us settle this,
us eyes to another sunrise
and them to the death of another night.
Bring your angels and bring us our hells
and let the ocean tide
determine the difference in the swell
of bloods spilled so thick
it lowers shores. Let the God's
chalk the scores and tally
up the gold and whores too numerous
to speak of in human terms.
Let the Oroboros be the one left jealous
as our combat churns the planet's very core.
May our combat be something
so intense that collateral damage
cannot be fenced and when
the bodies cannot be counted
and hunger still writhes
for more blood shed
may there be given rise
to the already dead
that something might give
and in giving find and end.
Tragedy Strikes at Sunrise
You wake up in a panic in a trap house
on a mattress with someone else's phone
and you can see the dust beneath a couch
and you're catching your breath
but that shit won't stick in your breast
and the sunlight tries to lay back like afternoon
cookie milk snacks, but it's far more
serious because you haven't had food
in at least two days and your skin
is closer to black and blue than winter grays
and you keep shoving the mother fucker
next to you, but he's been dead for hours
while you slept dreaming about super powers
and what you would do if you weren't
being chased and everything everyone
says about you leaves you chaste all over again
like you were the source of original sin
and you want to be in the shower shaving
off your skin, hoping for a chance
to be given a spot to begin it all again
and everything hurts like electric current
from your fingertip to your elbow
and all you can ask is for the sunrise
to go slow that you might get to know
the new self you've woken up into and
the old self still in tow, but you have not
the luxury nor the lip service to perpetrate
any kind of perjury so you wash your hands
and bird bath your face and get the hell out
of there, out from out where, you know not
from here to home is, you know not from there
to home was, where the hell is
everything you knew as the sun rise comes on
like a stampede in too pure a lock stepped song
and you go doe eyed and freeze. A painter
pictured on too poor an easel and
the horsemen of the sun
wait for no one.
