Getting old… and losing your touch

Sure, you could say I’m in a slump lately. It’s the bump and grind of blue collar life and it ain’t getting prettier. Perhaps ill blame it on my age. This month spells out the completion of my quarter century.

Here’s the formula; maybe I have too much time to think. I’m in the truck, and within the first hour I’m spitting out stuff about how open and free the morning highway is, and all this imagery starts up with my dad and I in our early morning house moves. That was a long time ago, damn. We would get up at 6 and drink down some bitter Dunkin Donuts coffee and wreck our bodies for the rest of the day loading up our earthly belongings into that rented U-haul. It’s was always some shitty truck with gray tape across the faded vinyl and absolutely no horn. We must have done this together half a dozen times, and I don’t think he knows it, but those are some of my favorite memories of us. Sure, the moving was ball raking stuff, but at the end of the day we moved a goddamn mountain together, and that’s something to be proud of.

The creative phase can go on all day and I’m left at the end of the shift with nine pure hours of associative free form material about my life and relationships. It’s a daunting thing though, perhaps you don’t understand. It’s the mental effort of passing a grapefruit out your nostril. You need to do it in pieces, not just have one lump sum of citrus and mucous come popping out of you. It’s too much cathartic shit for one little day.

My notebook is something the cat likes to sleep on or paw at. I haven’t gone to a pub or taken a walk or kissed a girl in months. Wordplay is something used for little more than insulting obnoxious co-workers. On more than one occasion I have substituted the dizzy caress of bum wine for cuddling a lover to sleep.

Maybe it’s all just part of getting old, cranky and apathetic; but ill just call it a slump for now, until I break my hip. Maybe it’s the Feng-Shui of having a job you like and some goddamn town you can stand that evades me. Ah, fuck it, lets have some poetry!

Here’s to my readers, you know who you are. Daddy loves each and every one of ya…

We can't live without an enemy...

It is a mere coincidence that her face resembles yours,
In the clefts and pitches of pearl skin,
From the distance even,
That of half a parking lot.

It was an illusion that her eyes,
That beamed with assumption and confidence,
Found me steady in my tracks,
And revealed me for who I am.

It was a toss up on what bus to take,
Yet I picked the one where your soft voice sat behind me,
Helping me smile aloofly all of a sudden,
In the ways I will myself to suffer heroically.

I scribble your name with deep black chalk,
On the hallways and in the elevator shaft,
Ill do it all while I’m sleeping,
So I can believe all the waking day in my stalker.

Ill shut tight my eyes,
And the old woman’s Spanish chatter,
Reminds me of your bedroom coo,
In the way it pitches like a sinking tugboat.

I will put on that old movie soundtrack,
That we used to hum to in the car,
But out of respect and fear of ourselves,
Remained silent for her long song about failed lovers.

It’s a matter of chance that your name appears,
More frequently than I might imagine,
In a novel or an article,
As I sob pitifully to myself.

My stage is a congress of torpid memories,
And I play them all like a one man band,
Wiping my egoists tears into the crook of my arm,
And dreaming that I’m waiting for the search party.

It was a conflict of interests,
Yet a well timed event,
That we each uttered ‘I love you’,
In something like unison.

I’m lucky that carrying your picture around,
Grants me so much self importance,
So that at any moment of the work day,
I can feel my gut plunge like a water slide.

I’m fortunate that I can recall every detail of those months,
Because it makes for good bait,
As I look for ways to bring you up in conversation,
The cancerous trophy.

See here? I might be overheard saying,
And it was me pointing back on my life,
And instead of now having a hope or a dream,
Just pointing an excited finger at a blank portrait of you.

Lovely Red Herrings

Im so proud of my dearest Pash; she has been awarded a top honor in her class, and she owes it all to her devotion to the party. She is lovely... She can make a grown man cry...

Bombshell in Furs

I oft wonder how this feisty little commie bombshell found her way into my life, but together we most certainly are. Our days are filled with tummy rubs, agility training runs and quiet evenings on which we both work on our respective manuscripts and/or manifestos.

Things for me to ask, and you to answer…

- If babies didn’t cry, would it still be fun to spank them?

- Why is sex more fun when it’s in a public place,
instead of at home by your self?

- What did Helen Keller name her cat?

- Why are all the people on street signs black?

- What if people on airplanes wore barf hats?

- Why doesn’t Oprah just read the books she likes and just shut the fuck up?

- Why would you not vote for Christopher Walken?
http://www.walken2008.com/index.html

Plastic Faces and Rubber Hands

Colette looked particularly exhausted this evening, and with good reason. The hospital was overstuffed with the sick and infirm. Every isle revealed another atrocity in the making, a headline or piece of legislation in progress. Every bed was a fine example of a textbook ailment that stretched over a human face and frail body. This is her world just as much as burgers and fry sacks became the world of her little sister; and in all of this she found refuge in standing above those broken bodies and proclaiming her will to survive. She did not consider it a virtue to attend these fallen victims of living; instead a triumph.

She would think to herself in the midst of her small breaks about the poor bodies she encounters every moment. She reflects to herself on the harsh lack of funding, on the old equipment and short supplies. This is all a conversation in her mind, and maybe more of just taking notes and recalling all the ways that people don’t have to suffer. Sometimes still she imagines this as her refuge from it all, the knowledge that her foresight can prevent some of the mess altogether.

Its back to the floor, and it seems a senile dementia patient just tried to walk out the front door. It would have worked flawlessly if he hadn’t been hit by the ambulance. Colette runs with the frantic crowd, them grabbing up any useful machinery in the passing; crutches, gurneys; a flash out the door to red white wailing lights and a still body below.

“Who was on his watch?” Screams a twisted face to a sea of white smocks.

Turn’s out nobody was on his watch; he slipped through the cracks, barely a chart on the wall. Is anybody to blame; we will have a revision committee to find some blame. You can bet your watch on that.

She watches a few minutes later, getting some cold water from the fountain, he’s wheeled in on a bed. Code red, I think he shattered his spine; thinks Colette, hating this place for another uncountable time tonight. It’s a place of uncomfortable beds and tragic moments exploding left and right.

She wanted to go to grad school to upgrade the nursing degree a bit. Hell, she could hand out pills and take the measurements, change any size diaper and initiate a code; but damn if she didn’t want to feel a little more helpful.

“Being here is like being part of a slow machine.” She once recounted to her mother on the telephone. “You abide by it’s pace, and it chugs along as people curl up and die all around you.”

“Well honey, the system works that way for a reason…”

That’s all mom could say? Wasn’t she listening when she talked about needle shortages and medicine rationing? Did mom forget the stories about botched watch schedules and now that old man that died from having his torso shattered by a white and red meat wagon?

No, it doesn’t have to be like this. She talked to herself and recounted enough grisly details to make her feel right again, justified.

Mom doesn’t know what people go through; she is a goddamn secretary. She keeps this talk up, building an inferno out of maternal misunderstanding until it becomes tiring enough to drown out her consciousness on the living room couch.

The watch says five in the morning and it’s some re-run of ER on the television that has been on for hours. George Clooney is checking up on a rather difficult patient with autism. This happens too; special needs and special circumstances. Sometimes an injured person in shock and with a mental deficiency can be a dangerous situation; it happens time and again. Sure the kid can handle a little abuse before he figures out what is going on, but now he is embarrassed, bleeding all over the checkup bed, looking dizzy and showing the blood pressure of a serious concussion, and nobody can get him down long enough to get an IV in him. MRI’s are out; he doesn’t like the dark.

The elderly come in by the dozens, though many in fact do not venture out again. Sometimes they come in just for some routine irrigation and a glucose check and end up leaving with heart failure. For the second, you do not use the front door. Sometimes its broken hips and femurs waiting to explode into gangrene, or it crippling arthritis, or a plethora of new cancers metastasizing from old worn blood.

Within a moment of introspection, Colette passed her eyes through the glass of the waiting room in survey of the timid faces. She sees beyond the needy looks and broken figures, instead her own face and family in a dense crowd of onlookers. It became difficult to discern them as the tears began.

Please eat; you beg the little old man who lays torpid in his elevated bed. His eyes fix with a glassy countenance on the television screen as it methodically scans the first five seconds of each channel. Some screens are just gray dust and static noise, but his eyes are unrelenting pivots. They were bloodshot; they reminded her of wet marbles trustingly flecked in gold.

A buzzer ignites in the uncomfortable silence between an immobile body and its keeper. Colette’s soft hand brushes over his forehead, wiping away the sweat from his straining with a light cotton cloth and then lifting a small sincere smile to his glaring face before rushing into the hallway.

She found the door open, and inside the harshly lit quarters dwelled a mass of plain clothed folk around the tiny bed. One grappled with a handful of deep rouge balloons that bounced gleefully at the low ceiling. Colette shoved her way through the bodies and found the six-year-old resident of the bed sitting with her bandaged legs crossed and a two tired cake upon her lap. Another push through the flanks of birthday goers and it’s the wide bed of a terminal leukemia patient. The monitors are stable; the morphine drip keeps his groggy body asleep even through the tremors of birthday songs. It wasn’t his buzzer; she is furious.

“Nurse?” one of the guests beckons her towards the celebration, ignorant of the dying boy in the periphery of the room. “We though we could buzz you for some plates or napkins?”

Collete’s first reaction pulled the curtain closed around the sick boy, his purple and punctured arm disappearing behind the zip of a white curtain. Her arm quickly found a guests elbow and spun his spindly figure around to meet her eyes. One push and he was out the door, the other side of the hallway and holding steadily the silver lift bar between the supply doors.

Instinct, and she looked back to the impenetrable cloth wall. Barely above a whisper she commanded every onlooker out the door along the path of her pointed finger. Her lip quivered and her voice shook as the giant cake was lifted out of a little girls lap and the relatives left with angry grunts and disappointed sighs. A few expensive gifts laid about the meal table, but it was again empty and quiet aside from the snobbish mother consoling her sobbing child and the automated breathing of the sick boy in the corner.

Death followed everywhere, and through careful metaphors it even sat in the corner of the room as an inconsiderate birthday celebration was carried out. It garnished precious gifts for a coming of age six-year-old, and Colette had to wonder how that money might save a little boy of death from leukemia.

Night came quick tonight, and the nurses made their rounds closing the curtains for the front side of the building. The streetlights glared with such a sodium luminance from the parking lot that without the thick dark drapes, the throb of Incandescent might trouble the sleep of every facing window.

Colette went again to the room of the little old man, and though with a start, greeted her co-worker as she stood over his bed. Colette noticed the unsure look in her eyes, perhaps even a distended silence. She was barely to speak, when Emily’s eyes lifted to hers and confirmed her suspicions. “I think he has passed”.

Colette reached over again to touch the spongy forehead that she not an hour ago wiped of perspiration. It was now cold and moist flesh, loosely hung as the muscles began their atrophy and decline.

Her fingers sunk into some of the fascia of his face, her fingers tracing a path down the ridge of his nose and across the edge of a lip. Her hand brushed the eyes, closing one lid and leaving the other open to glare dryly at the overhead light.

Emily laughed uncomfortably, her hands in a knot in front of her. She wrung her fingers in a neurotic fashion, losing control of the situation. She almost pleaded out loud for Colette to quit her antics, but lacked the resolve and in possessing the curiosity for this lifeless body, she watched.

Fingers and limbs still flexed in the dead and in the subtle decline of flexibility they become rigid and freeze with every pose. Fingers curled back into the palm give strongly poised middle fingers. His gaping mouth shut by the pressure of a strong palm, only to pop open slowly and toss the top denture onto his bare chest. His eyes loll deeply into the back of the head, face contorted by small girlish hands both mortified and fascinated with a fledgling corpse.

Colette stayed the bathroom, scrubbing her hands and pulling invisible phantom flesh from the undersides of her nails. Hot water revived her face, her eyes raw from the stinging chlorine and the residue of soap.

On the phone her mother asked another unconvincing spate of questions unleashed for the name of small talk. Colette was daydreaming about the springy bones and dry eyes of corpses that now littered her sleep.

Each day was an exercise of staying alive and passing the baton. Sometimes you could sneak out of the fate of a sufferer by seeing what they did wrong in spite of their illness. Sometimes still, it was just a matter of time. Old blood and broken bones; teeth spilled out like a giant pearl pathway to heaven…

The Decline of Antiques in Western Society

Today I found a message in a bottle. It was wrapped in green and gray and tumbled down the wayside into approaching traffic. It was a burden along the hot tar; people watch from the sides of their glasses in hopes of hearing the satisfying crunch of it under wheels. They don’t know what I know.

I chase it down a rolling half block of roadside apartment buildings; nobody leaves their sets to inquire about the chatter of plastic down pavement. I keep up with a quiet pace of a drunk following his mistress home.

My hands are in my pockets as I see the opalescent bottle finally break into a rest upon the lip of a storm drain. I jog.

Now a hundred doors seem to open around me. Every piercing eye catches my limbs flailing in a running dance. A woman lugging an oxygen tank rears upon me with her morning paper in hand, startled by my fretful breaths. I ponder a hit from her tank…

I stop in the field of people, hands on my knees, my goal just out of sight.

Folks stand with jaws agape and eyes fixed, I’m paralyzed like in a dream. I see through open doors into homes and into lives. I realize that there will be no antiques left in the coming centuries aside from movie posters and photo albums. Photo albums that we buy of dead families to scour the past for what we are missing in the present. A timeless hobby.

I recollect myself and stalk the bottle like a curious cat. That bottle of opal green and gray with a hint of effervescent fluid and of which I am certain contains a message. I imagine these old fools are cheering me on. I grab its soft neck and twist like the murderer of chickens…

“Please play again.”

Feminists like Porn too!

Hey, I’ll be the first to admit it; occasionally I will pen a column with a title or subject matter that goes over like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl.

Jesus appears even on the main page, and if not being blamed for single handedly bumping off the Kennedy family, he is being pictured in the act of breastfeeding. The pope is revealed as a pathetic old man, god is demoted to a fictional yet self-righteous booze fiend, and the entire concept of religiousness is played off as a haughty psychological ailment akin to misogyny. Some people really attach themselves to this shit, so I guess I understand the complaints.

Within these pages, you can also peruse the nature of love and romance in accordance to yours truly. You may be supplied with a poem about a lover’s infidelity, the fallibility of modern romance, or a fresh page from the scrapbook of my personal bedroom anthologies. All those contents wherein might also be offensive to viewers squeamish about their bodily parts or who uphold some romantic ideal about modern love as anything other than a societal breeding strategy.

So do I hate love and religion?

I detest the marching of a million feet who protest for all of us to hear, that they understand the nature of love. This is absurd. Your love is found for money; and generally in some boorish hovel with an underage sex slave. Your concept of love is habitual co-dependence and ritualistic co-habitation with intent on negating certain daily cravings and to see to the bifurcation of household chores.

I do hate religion though. For anybody who wants to complain more about that; please make up another universal being and assign him the role of caring. I don’t care two inches of a bowel movement about how you came up with your inane ideas, or what life crisis made you weak enough to crack. Go peddle your wares elsewhere; or else look into the blinding light of my home-churned literature.

So yes, I would have to say that even with a small percent of stubborn and ideologically anal-retentive viewers, life is good. Some of you have even spent the time to tell me your human stories of life love and the absence of the afterlife. I encourage this practice, and with a few more of those excellent stories I’m pondering the task to bring in a guest writer to assist me in offending and humiliating the general consensus. Imagine a deep heartfelt conversation empowered by two lunatics instead of one…

So that’s my plan… More letters, more life, more heresy and deconstruction of society. Keep sending those letters folks, even if you’re one of the aforementioned complainers. It’s just good to know that I’m getting my job done…

my demands

My expectations from poetry,

Are that; from careful sonnets,

Exhumed from the living body,

There might be some tangible transaction,

Made to course between the tracts of time,

And the alien wastes of human understanding.

A Fortune in Love

I think it was an idea that we came up with to facilitate our drinking hobby; but somehow it got out of control. The little ruse that Love and I had going on the street corner telling fortunes; it was a big hit. People would gather all around that little table where she sometimes stood and lectured with raspy screams about the lines and meridians of our palms that miraculously affect our future. I hoped at first it was just a curiosity; that her immediate success had less to do with rattling of truisms about the nature of love than just her amusing act. She often proved me wrong…

 

How can I expect you to keep in the timeline when I move all over the place; that’s the question? Her life, her death; I can’t seem to keep these memories in check. Everybody remembers Love?

 

She is the drunken shapeless midget of a metaphor that I have had the fortune of making acquaintance with. She is sharp and witty, sly and spontaneous and more or less out of control. She is the life of the party and she will sign your suicide note: any questions?

 

So here we are, one spring morning. It’s warm enough for people to start flocking the streets again without their mighty winter trench coats; so they look like naked moles. Large sunglasses and bright new once washed jeans make it out into the open. I spot some sneakers with some autumn leaves still clung to the bottom from last year. Everybody is buying hotdogs like it’s their first time outside; feels like a mass prison release except nobody looks horny. Even the old guys on the benches aren’t grinding their hips to any passing lady, humping in mid air. Wait till the benches warm up.

 

 Love is duded up in this ridiculous outfit: long flowing scarves, some boas and whatever jewelry she had lying around the house.  She looks less like a gypsy mystic than she does a whorish washed up actress, but people eat them both up anyway.

 

She starts attracting people with some photo-copied flyers that have a picture of a hand with some question marks floating around that seem to ask “what mysteries are prevalent within your palm?” It’s funny because people start to walk up and throw down a buck or two just to see what this little girl has hiding up her sleeve. At first they pass her off as a gimmick. I started to collect the money from the seat behind the table while she would close her eyes and rub some schmucks hand and show him his fortune lines.

 

Every wrinkle, she says, tells a story about the fate of its owner. Its life’s blueprint, all built into us to be deciphered by those gifted at seeing it.

 

Well apparently she was saying some impressive stuff, because that one guy would run down the street and bring back five of his friends. This would add up until we were surrounded by clueless Bobs and Mikes that were being told various shit about their lifespan and their child rearing.

 

What was her secret? She was Love. Bob A. asks a question about his love life and Love shoots back the perfect answer. Who is my soul mate, they would generally ask. Love would give them the name of their girlfriend/boyfriend, husband/wife. They are sitting there wide-eyed. clenching their fists, hoping to god that she will give them the name of some Swedish bikini model they have never met; but instead their future is with the complacent obese wife at home.

 

Though the answers are depressingly simply, the novelty of naming with first try all of her customers significant others; that’s something I couldn’t figure out. I wouldn’t be surprised if its some power that comes with being a personification that is hell bent on destroying itself.

 

Who can blame her really? She is Love; hear her roar...

Margo

Margo crouches at the end of her bed; those two crooked mattresses stacked together. They are high enough to let her elbows prop and do the work of sorting through a leafy stack of frail pages. Scissors clip lightly at some of the sheets as they are lifted individually to the cool yellow light at the end of the room.

 

To describe the space would be to do so in terms that reflect the presence of heavy shadows in the sallow umber light. It is a small scentless room with a singly blank wall bearing switches and a mottled wood door. The remaining alabaster panels are clinging loosely, being aged and showing more as a bruised powder to the touch. Their subtle whiteness begets them as a matte texture; this is placed upon the still photograph of the particular evening.

 

Her clipping make a small pile aside an open and nearly blank notebook. A few stark letters of standard sizes stare up from between the baby blue lines. The rest is blank or indiscernible from narrations lofty angles.

 

Again, another quick set of squared snipping and a bit falls to the blankets. This is perhaps her favorite part, a stunning example of a single word in a sea of color. This moment, what falls and is seen amidst the red and green stripe and florations of the bedcover, the word “Faithful”.

 

The leaves fall like some slow autumn, each wilting from the last pinch of sharp blade. Lifeless they fall, tip toeing the humid air, collecting en masse in a glow like candlelight.

 

Each cut catches a meaning, a profound human emotion, how simple for our narrator to ascertain. Each descriptor as forlorn as perhaps its writer. The local paper, there is a multitude of needy nomenclature. The section where people sell themselves. The part that asks you to explain why you are good enough for someone else to ask you into their lives.

 

She wields endless phrases from the personals pages, endless drastically intimate words. With a surgeons grace and a hunters prowess she separates each eye misting descriptor from it’s hiding place. With the final snip that huffs like an exhaled breath…

 

Attention accrues towards those papers in the periphery. Here we notice the building blocks of prose; of fine discreet poetry forming from the assemblage. Each word once a pitiful cry for help and plea from the lonely, now a verbal vase filled with the breath of a new growth surrogate.

 

She calls it “walks on the beach”; but the tender title does not carry on without burden. It is a poem about a faithless man who one day forgets his life and marriage promises as the result of an amnesia he suffers. One day the man leaves for work and never returns. She finds him after a month of searching, but he lives in a motel with a questionable woman. The wife then tries to bait him with back personal adds that she creates out of scraps of others, each day giving more clues to his past and identity until there is an adventure within him to find this mysterious woman who shares his love and perhaps last memory of “walks on the beach”.

 

I can tell what brews within this girl. It might be distrust, but I will call it honesty, and it is a truth that is paid to love. Can you blame a child of a broken home for distrusting sacred vows; nor could you this young woman of her own broken heart.

 

 

 

A Widows Walk

In the windows,
Widows crooned and nearly disappeared,
Hiding swollen eyes in yet to be finished baby blankets,
Ever the while,
Brushing but a stray hand over a cheek,
Like wiping a flake of falling skin,
But instead reveling in long past touch,
When he would reach from lidded eyes,
In a lovers shade of dark,
And press kisses to her forehead,
Kisses that were tears,
Each inside out.

Night became further night,
Now an uncomfortable strain of dark,
When shadows reflected objects behind them,
And the pulse stepped to the periphery,
And the garden shakes with a rumble of insects,
Each prying at tender stalks,
Corn bent lightly with the weight of dead eyed crickets,
Snakes treading endless circuits through stiff bladed grass,
Elk sleeping shyly,
Trembling at every insect sniffing,
The tender sides behind their ears,
And snorting soft nose tissues,
Exhaling what becomes hot morning fog.

The hot fog beads the windows,
That downward upon,
Belie a five stranded streak,
Much like the weight of a widow’s sigh,
As she all but trumpets her angst,
Mending broken old hearts,
With a nip of watered down grain alcohol.

It was those infernal ovens of night,
That sat between endless shades of sunset,
And an old mans yearning for the fertile soils,
That stretches the burden of blame,
To a careless and barren length,
With two dry hands finessing the twine,
And a lazy leg swaying the hammock.

Sunflowers made heavy cloven beats,
Upon windows long tainted,
By whorls of lonely dusts,
And low scratching branches,
Even a limb of lichen,
Brought surely up from the moist and sunless sill.

Was the fog any less for closed eyes,
As the widow crumpled to the mass of sensation,
That was the swaying of the vegetation,
The rutting of swine in dwarfed hemlock,
Muddy bricks collapsing under wind and rain,
Loose white laundry howling in the nightly tempest,
Each fallen leaf shuddering like breaking glass.

As the windows digress,
Into the hunt of night,
That bares its black teeth in stare,
Sating the whine of feral pups,
Reared in the background of pitch black absolute,
Runts reared on spongy wild mushroom,
That lightning starts their heart,
And their race to daylight.

And the widow pitched,
At a gasping lean,
At the front door splayed like a ribcage,
A trail of wet frightened animals,
Peeking through the bright white of lanterns,
Lapping heavy cream from black fire lit saucers.

Nuzzled pups feed,
Finches fall from posture and sink bellow their tiny legs,
A kitten lags skittishly,
With two front hands on the window ledge,
Only to be startled by a deafening thud,
By a lopping sunflower,
Beating pensively in a breeze.

The widow stood,
Motionless behind a stoic stance,
Merely to confront the facade of night,
That seemed so suddenly,
To take the face,
Of a million wilted loves,
Those gone in a trembling rush,
Much to the tone of this selfless dark…

A Few Favorite Things...

I do still remember,

How with a fury,

I would count each of the speckled tiles in your bedroom ceiling.

And trace them each violently with my retina,

As you answered your phone, hushed,

Saying, ill call you back later.

 

How could I say that my favorite thing, was dying,

That my tulip was wilting under the snow,

And if only my breath on your neck could keep you warm enough,

To remain coursing the veins in your petals.

 

How could I tell you,

Without piercing the moment,

That our world was falling apart.

 

How your photo album,

Pulled out as though I could sort it,

As you thumbed through each archived and guarded memory,

Adding spoken notes that disappeared with each turning page,

As they push me farther away.

 

On the plane there was a lot of time to think,

To cogitate the mess I was hurdling to the middle of,

How I should have stuck to my guns,

And stayed home wondering instead,

How your room looked with me in the mirror,

With my arm draped delicately around you.

 

I made it just in time,

For the biopsy and then,

A quick game of jealousy,

Before the talk came of irradiating your body.

 

How could I expect from myself,

Anything but a calm whisper,

To describe what I love,

And how it was dying.

 

And how you took my hand when the plane landed,

Like you had forgotten your lover already,

And ready for me to meet your mom,

My other hand is open to shake,

The same mom I forever avoided,

By asking you not to swallow all your pills at once.

 

When nights later we came close to making love,

But you had tears in your eyes,

Because it was to soon to be with me again,

You were still thinking about him,

Or you wanted to avoid confusion,

As warm limbs seem so similar in a dark room.

 

And we walked that big bridge,

Over a half frozen river,

You will admit that you were petrified,

And part in jest and part in suicidal mood,

You said it might be best to throw you over.

 

You wore faux brown fur,

And the rims of your glasses,

Were as cold as your lips,

And the tip of your trembling nose,

 

We could steal out into the night,

Or see the sights by the complacent daylight of winter,

Watch freezing rain accumulate on the dinner steps,

As we munch cherry pie,

And meatloaf.

 

I avoided your eyes,

Through three flights of museum,

Seeing all the work of dead Andy Worhol,

With a floor for JFK,

 

I made poetry in the antique shop that your mother frequents,

Where she took us to see sculptures,

And an enclave of old lamps and wall hangings,

Where you picked out a table,

That for months you said belonged in our home together.

 

Every site was shouted out,

Like a tour bus driver,

As I took second seat,

And sat with hands folded,

Posture designed to look calm,

And misconceive everyone around me.

 

Every moment in your city,

Like a tumor of my very own,

A reminder of where I am not needed,

When we pass by the brick towers,

And I imagine he is looking down waving,

From the cozy apartment,

Where he took you away.

 

It’s not your fault that the city is vile,

And that each time you neglect your phone,

I want to look inside,

Out of pure animal jealousy.

 

The human species possesses several strange breeding strategies…

 

And I do remember,

Each dimple and dot in the ceiling,

As we slowly fell in love again,

And back out to something more like resentment.

 

I still remember,

How you sleep when you’re angry,

How you hug when you’re genuinely glad to see me.

How you pretend to love,

How you use.

 

I told you that day on the telephone,

That it wasn’t a good way to say goodbye,

By trying your act all over again.

 

I remember the note you wrote,

Saying all the right things about why we should be together,

So long after the fact,

So long after your lover.

 

I remember eighteen long miles,

In the evening ride home,

With your head in my lap,

The occasional smile up.

 

I remember less as the sub tropical sun bleaches my mind,

And as the cocktail of depression and dystopia wear on,

Yet I will always remember,

That my favorite things die.

Send Help

The frightening thing, is that when I revisit old notebooks and dusty abandoned computer files, I feel like I'm peeking into someone elses life. I was there a month ago typing out those lines, but as I read them again and prepare them for finished work, I have the feeling that I’m stealing. It looks alien to me, every letter posed like a challenge that only the myself of yesterday would dare spell out.

So little to re-write. The conclusions flow in effortlessly, and provide a dramatic uptake that I had forgone that month ago. I have the answers to the rhetoric that was posited thirty plus days ago.

I try to start everything with a quote, a line that ties together the philosophy of the piece with the same simplicity it takes to scream “help” in a fire. But sometimes it’s like a voice from another throat.

Maybe its a voice made raspy from smoke inhalation; but it gets harder to tell. What am I trying to say about the state of literature and the written word you say? I'm trying to convey the fleet footed nature of an idea left to sit. I'm attempting to get it through all of our heads that things dissapear when we sleep, so our cause is hopeless until we scratch out our plan on the calloused skin of the earth.

Ill probably forget all of this tommorow… Ill have only the few family snapshots on my wall to remind me of what I am doing here. The bills here have my name on them; that should be enough to form a solid identity before I step out the door and into the open wilderness of city life.

Regards,

Johny Manic

P.S. – Send help

Borrowing Time… prologue

It was not uncommon for me to listen well into the long hours of the sleepless night; because Tara had something to tell. She had a story from the deep, thick heart of the street; a tale about barely surviving that captivated me. She would remind me in those long evenings spent in thought; about how we all have this select amount of time to tell our stories before someone puts the lights out.

I used to think that maybe she was more neurotic than need be, that she is still running from the poverty of childhood and fear of displacement. It’s not difficult to be made paranoid by a society that lets a little girl slip through the cracks. It’s not hard to be scared in a world that buys and sells human commodities much like a flayed fish at market.

The more I heard and the more I walked with her in a life we rebuilt for ourselves, I learned I couldn’t be more wrong.

She is dead on right… We are borrowing time baby, and there is no way to repay the grace it has given us. My fingers pounce at the opportunity to get this all down at the end of the day; I’m fevered by the reality of life. I rest when my body forgets to do all other things. My sleep is now a pattern of images that draws sharp parallels between the snapshots of my waking life and the yearning of my subconscious. I watch all the characters that play major stage in my life somehow united and joining hands in lifting us out of this farce.

When I first saw Tara on that dirty wood bench in the pouring rain, eating a tuna sandwich out of tin foil; I would have never expected her sharp response to life. I saw gleaming eyes through wet fallen hair, and not her will to survive.

If only things were so evident when looking upon the fellow faces in our cities. Would I know that within Stuart Pica was such an unfailing desire to stand upon his own two feet that he would begin to overturn an ageless prejudice? Would I in lesser times see Tara in the rain and not value the sacrifices she made to survive? Would I fail to find these bitter truths in myself? Would I alone discover the facts that turn me against my dirty city and its treachery of whim if it weren’t for each of them?

Tara is as right as ever. We are living on borrowed time; and as she sometimes points out, borrowed space too. We try not to burden ourselves with the thought anymore, but the fact remains. Someday, someone is going to come with the bill; so there’s no better time to start running than now…

Yonder Emily

A stroll through downtown shows the shops boarded up and the little taco stands with sandbags at their doors and white snowflakes of tape on their windows. The tape is to contain the mess after the windows implode. I don’t buy it.

The hurricane is coming; I hear it is building up great speed. Emily sits outside the barren coast and premeditates an onslaught.

The rain ended hours ago; amidst the klaxons and foghorns. The television overlays warning for six passing tornadoes were in vain, but they did so as the windows leaked grainy rainwater on the sill.

Emily was headed right towards our crowded Wal~Mart’s and other places of inevitable safe haven. For a moment out little city was blotted out by a larger and more reckless cloud; a cloud that destroyed not so much out of greed but obedience to low pressure.

The winds blew above a whisper or the sharp exhale of a lover; but in the end it was only the cat that was annoyed for having to give up his windowsill for the afternoon.

Tomorrow is a big day though. Tomorrow I am going to urinate in a cup to assure my brethren that I am clean and free. I will piss to the rim of that opaque jar and send it off to be sniffed by noses trained in the art of detecting narcotics and opiates. This will be my key to a new future, and for that I am glad. My ambitions are wearing off just like this sour hurricane…

My Walls

You might not know this, but I am not a person that takes it one day at a time. I will not invoke Latin to seize hold of this auspicious day. In fact, opportunities can be too fleet for my tired and timid fingers.

I have an envelope of small black and white pictures of that one person I wanted to share the rest of my life with. Sometimes it's enough just to hold them under my thumbs when I get that strangled feeling that I will never be loved again.

When I talk to my little daughter, I can hear my voice in her anger. She deals with so much. I also hear her resent growing like a tumor, and I lay with open eyes at night wishing I could do a damn thing from thousands of miles away.

You might not know it, but every city is populated with the same basic people. They are the folks you seen in public and who only intercede in minor ways. They share facial features and mannerism, its frightening to hear the public talk.

I’m afraid that I was a burden to my parents...

Sometimes I meet a person exactly like the girl in the tight white envelope. You weren't that unique. Anybody can learn to hurt.

Sometimes I think about how hard it is for a guy to disappear. You gotta start over on occasion, just declare bankruptcy and get yourself a new face on the other side of the sea. It should be a joy, but there is a big national record with your ass print on file.

Someday she will find me, I know she will, just for her own ego.

She will say; how was life all this long time without me (because we could have been beautiful); and my careful reply would intone the years we have spent apart since I abandoned her with her baggage and dirty secret. I would say, I never went a moment without you; but thank you for never hurting me again.

I repeat my mantra; I will not desire the undesirable.

in Sleep...

In my dreams, though peppered with other logistical fallacies, I’m rarely a hero…

Given the probabilities of an endless horizon, I choose a cluttered cityscape a flood with pieces of people. These are selective tracks of friends and family, reduced to their simplest. They are definable and simple, with motives and an unfaultable consciousness.

In my sleep I build a world that I can’t control.

Machines build impossible things, jutting their impossible beginnings into my comfort zone. Walking will always turn into running will always turn into fear…

The brakes of cars will never work; can only be steered by leaning, or with the cigarette lighter.

I can jump a flight of stairs…

It can feel like I’m floating, flying; even when I run too fast.

I never wake up with a concrete realization. I wake up playing word games, dizzy and confused.

When I was upset for a while, I would play a game where I would read words and break them off into fragments of letters to see if they were odd words or even words. I could do this well into my sleep. It was my OCD.

When I was a child, I had a clothes hamper that was a clown, and you would stuff your dirty clothes into his fabric belly and make him bigger… He would chase me down the steep wooden stairs. That’s when I learned about jumping stairs.

In my dreams, nobody has anything important to say. They don’t even turn into zombies. They are just mad at me.

I always dream in close ups…

I remember an entire city that doesn’t exist, but that I have been silently exploring since I was a child. It has homes and parks, secret basement and a maze of forests, all found in the same place I had left them.

I forget to wear my clothes a lot; they don’t disappear in public; I usually just get on the bus without them. The police always ask me to put them back on. Public Safety!

My perfect companion is always this big gray cat, never a sexy girl. The cat might be a girl, but we haven’t really talked about it. She helps me through… Her and I meditate; but it’s done with wide-open eyes in a live green field or from the bough of a tree.

When I was 8, I dreamt about finding my fathers skeleton at the bottom of our pond and wondering how he became that so fast. My tummy hurt. I told mom, and as she cried she carried him back to the house and put his bleached bones next to her in bed. I sat with my hands crossed on the blankets over his legs. I was trembling… I woke up and checked on them. I snuck down stair and through the open door I could see the tight tan skin of my fathers face. That is when I swore I would never let him die.

I would dip little sticks in cement to make them look like gray match sticks. I would dream they were fireworks…

One time when my father was angry and left for a while, I took his broken shoestring and put it in a can. I dreamt that night that he would come back and I would give his the shoe string and tell him that I was thinking of him always. He came back the next day and I was overjoyed. I still have that shoestring; I still think about you…

I dreamt that when I moved out of my parent’s house, I would be leaving for college and would pack up everything I needed in the back of my truck and give everyone big hugs. I was 16, and lived with my fiancée instead.

Sometimes I have dreams that I just walk into work and tell everybody how they make me feel, I get to swear and then storm off. Sometimes I just do it in real life.

I’ve dreamt about what its like to die.

I would hang batteries off of my little radio antenna. I would dream about Martian signals.

I’ve had dreams that take me through the whole process of committing a crime and being sentenced to prison. Up to this date, I have always woken up a free man. It’s just then, when I lift my hands and touch my face that I cry; without fail, I always cry…

Rains Upon the Plain…

When it rains in this burned ochre valley,
Everything is quiet,
By that I mean,
Every beast and alley cat is petrified,
At dew drops beating the ground,
And agitating the tall gray grass.

Snakes close their eyes,
And still themselves with trepidation,
Wondering the beat of these foreign foot falls,
As though it were predating,
And the pond frogs look skyward,
Their song in elastic pause.

The grackle eschews the downfall,
Yet uses the falling gush,
To clean his legs,
One by one,
As he shuffles his feathers,
By the safety of my aluminum door.

Children freeze motionless in their lawns,
Ice cream in hand,
Each child with a different sherbet shade,
But the rain drops that glitter their faces harmlessly,
Eat away at their colorful cones,
And puddles bright vermilion and ivory on the driveway.

The cat and I watch,
Enslaved from the corners of our eyes,
Watching upturned insects struggling in the liquid muds,
All the while pondering death…

Ha! Prepare for new "Blog Daily Doses"...

Well, for the record, there is nothing more beautiful in this petulant little world than persistence; so that’s just what I’m gonna do. Instead of being a piss on the party kind of guy and posting these 12 page monstrosities every two weeks, ill take a hint and lighten up a bit, work the daily post routine and even try to show my personal side. What will this accomplish? Well, it will be a more formidable essay into my existence and a much better opportunity for me to bitch… For those of you that give a shit; good for you…

Today I would like to tell a story about a dear friend of mine named Chastity. She is a darling girl from the distant and northern USA, and though I consider her a close friend and a like mind, she is doing something unbecoming today that I will point out and harass her for.

Chastity is going to, that’s right, Ozzfest.

For those of you who have lived in buried busses for the last thirty years, Ozzfest is the rather annual opportunity for mediocre heavy metal-ish type bands to propagate their following and to spew forth their product in an overpriced forum. This year will see the likes of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Mudvayne among many others much to my chagrin. You might know these bands from hit singles often talked about and relished in pop culture satires such as “Wayne’s World” and “Joe Dirt”. Appalachia greatly awaits your rhythmic strumming sections and bass ass lyrics that bring to mind the travails of a young man trapped in a magnetic field; his body forced to emulate iron to survive.

If you are unfamiliar with these groups, or have fallen out of the loop; please feel free to walk by your local Hot Topic Outlet and engorge your senses. You will find a myriad of band appropriate t-shirts, patches and bumper stickers that will appease your quest for knowledge.

Well, good for you nonetheless dear Chastity. You ARE getting out of the house for a little while and you are being social. Plus you are doing something a bit more spontaneous than eating celery. I have a few friends that have bad taste in music too, yet I don’t shun them entirely. Mind you, they know there is a time and a place to talk about such things. You still have a higher place in my book; knowing that you hesitated for even just one moment. First instincts count for a lot you know!

Anyhow, I’ll miss you for this day; and strangely I will hang close to my monitor for stories about the whole trip. Your fierce insights into this event will be enough to quell my anger; cause it’s damn good to have one of US on the inside!

So keep rocking that classic crap rock, and wish my girl here some fun! Nice people will send her money and items to help her purge her lovely brain after all of this is over. No, I’m not kidding… Send her some nice DVD’s or something. Anything…

How Jesus Skips America

Albert Gore always brags about how diligently he worked to bring us this cheerful little spy network called the Internet. Bill Gates promises us an eternally less fragile framework to run its voyeuristic little heart on; and Roentgen gives us the deadly X-ray at the press of a button, truthfully the only method of scientific introspection of oneself aside from being cut recklessly apart.

Edison gave us MP3’s in a backhanded kind of way, and with it the fraud of modern music culture. Cervantes opened up a whole new world of faux literature when his masterpiece was contrived as doable by countless Kings and Koontz’s of the sublimely mediocre era of book making. Dense New Guinea jungles hold the key to the origin of cannibalism and its foray into modern politics and news coverage.

Chuck Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic so we could do it a hundred times a day, sucking up the world’s peanuts like a giant elephant whore. JFK took a pop in the head so we could value the pope-mobile and cars with roofs; we learned too what a troublesome sight it was with some hopeless woman trying to play brain doctor with all the bits left of mister potato head/ president. Ted Kennedy drank so we could all forget; bless his family and his rosy red cheeks.

Lippershey gave you the moon, Naples gave you the Pizz-A-Pie; and add to the mixture about four eyeballs, vitriol and all and I think you have… Amore!

Jesus on the other hand, seems perilously trite.

Plato was scripting the language of love with his passed down account of the symposium. Archimedes was fucking around in the bubble bath and doing some serious algebra. Newton was smacking fruit together and hoping it meant something profound.

Yet the history of the world need rewriting for some backwoods hippie who happens to be the product of a cosmic blowjob. He’s got nuns rabid in the street screaming about the horror of condoms. He has loose flapped soccer moms chucking bottles of gasoline at Planned Parenthood. All of this in a country he never saw or knew about; that’s right, we kidnapped him and made him bless the ol’ red white and blue at the point of a derringer.

When Jesus was smoking hashish in Jerusalem or Hezbollah, America was just a little girl who was succumbing to a landslide of population from her North Western territories. The climate fueled the descent of these African descended yet mutagenetically Asiatic peoples from what was to be her left shoulder. In the meantime, her limbs became shortened due to the erosion and disappearance of global glaciations and she became the tight little bundle called North America.

Jesus would have loved this observation, I can say with confidence. We would share all of this over a thimble of absinthe and I would ask him why his dad had to kill all the dinosaurs; on which he would reply “…because you touch yourself at night”.

It all makes sense now. God isn’t really looking for me. God isn’t pacing his room with an occasional quick eye out the Venetian blinds; wondering when I am going to come home and spare him the monotony of soap operas and adult undergarment adverts. God isn’t even hung up at some cheap bar waiting for ol’ Mary to stroll back in with tonight’s earnings.

That cheap bastard left town a long time ago, a stranger in a strange land; left us all waking up in the morning laying next to an uncomfortable design of skin and bones. It’s all the same down here, except when wondering the inevitable big question that you get when you understand you’re entirely alone in the universe. Who is watching now?

Johny gets a Pet

It’s not nearly as ridiculous as you think. Pets are nature’s way of forcing us into selfless acts of love and affection and to also prove to prospective mates that we can keep ourselves and another organism alive and well enough to take on another constituent. Pets can provide company and affection, even a breed of compassion that cannot be easily fostered in people interactions. Enough said!

Today my roommates and I took a walk along the Rio Grande in the mist of a choking 102-degree day. The sun blared hot like an interrogation, the filaments of it incandescent brilliance almost visible in red outlines on my forehead. It was a hot goddamn day.

Our journey took us beneath a massive span of the international bridge that was strung over the Rio in heavy blocks of dull gray cement topped with coiled razor wire. Tiny bird clung to the overpass, each steel girder either a perch or a home to many clay nests that hung like ruddy spigots down to the gravel below. It was here that a small bird must have made a mistaken tumble from its home on high and found itself burdened yet unscathed on the steaming yellow dirt.




It flittered, afraid of our footsteps and scurrying into the grown grass that flanked our path. He merely needed time to plot and build up the strength and gumption to flap his little heart out and return to his adobe abode. My heart is with him. That is not the story of my pet, but it reminds me of him.

---

My pet is injured; and NO I didn’t do it. It was a funny set of circumstances that brought us together, but am I damn glad that we found each other. Just imagine this scenario; discarded on the top of some rubbish pile, left mutilated and uncared for, a snail making its home on your face. That was the fate of this little guy, until I found out about it anyway.



See, this picture shows his distinctive arm injuries, actually appearing to be missing both arms below the elbows. How long he has suffered this disability I am unsure, but he has seemed to adapt extremely well.

Here is another shot of him sleeping in the little bed I made for him. We are rather new to each other, so most of our time is spent getting comfortable with the company of the other. He seems to appreciate his nickname “Chuey”, but will respond to most any name spoken above a whisper. Aside from that, he seems very intelligent, well mannered and inevitably house trained.



We did have one little incident involving a bit of violence, but at the time I was too busy rescuing his fading body from the top of the trash heap to care too much about my approach. It was folly, but without thinking I tried to pluck him up and assess his condition. He was surely scared, cold and confused. Either way, his substantial weight pulled at my back causing some light pain to still be present, and he did manage to bite me somehow from the side of his mouth. Strangely enough, though it was a very deep bite with blood and gore aplenty, it healed up within an hour of getting him in the car and stopped bleeding nearly the same time I got my little friend into the back seat. Life sure is strange.



Here we are playing a little bit of peek-a-boo in the grass outside the garage. He is very visually acute, but cannot play with balls or other similar toys due to his obvious disfigurement.

So far, he hasn’t eaten a thing, but I’m not too worried, it’s only been a day. I am unsure what types of foods he is interested in, and he only seems to show interest in getting into my wine cabinet whenever I try to feed him. Maybe he is used to a warm dark environment like the cabinet; who knows?



In the first day, I have actually trained him to sort and deposit the recyclable garbage. I’m very proud of him. With recycling comes the feeling of personal responsibility to our planet earth, which I think is an important bit of humbleness to be found in person and pet! Just kidding. I just get sick of putting on my shoes to walk out to the alley every two hours, or whenever it takes the household of six people to fill up another bag of trash. He instinctively has very tough pads on his feet so can travel the tough terrain without wincing like a schoolgirl under the bleachers. Either that or he floats; I don’t care as long as we help each other out.

So far into day one and I think the pet idea was a success. Chuey has made a full and healthy recovery after a long bath and some scrubbing behind the ears. He is brilliant and alive, has a nice gleaming coat and always impresses me with his ability to use his stumps to the best of his ability to function in our complicated environment. I have plans for some creative prosthetics, but in the meantime I think we will find ways to foster his independence and help him feel at home in our little house.

I honestly can’t wait for the holidays; something tells me that this little guy will have something to share with us all.

Truck Stop Angels (an adaptation)

- Trust here that the prelude belongs to an entirely different individual; he spoke in unpublished and un-hushed tones about a breed of femininity that was exuberated by modernity of women in service settings. Unfortunately his callous thesis (drummed up while his lover was in a brief stay at a mental hospital) lacked the attempted feminist tone, and suffered us only his mild interpretation at being a lusty object with a frown and soiled apron. -

When you spoke of Goddesses in pale sodium light,
Angelic wings under tunics,
Under heavy laminated name badges,
That read something like “I can help”,
And “my name is Suzie”

When you illuminated us to truck stop venues,
That quench a myriad of hospitable deity,
Bent over slices of cherry pie,
Examining each side of the toast,
Doling out the little jellies so everyone can get something besides grape.

When you dared us to look under the epaulets,
And beneath the loose aprons,
To sober fledgling Angels,
To make viable and persuasive homage,
To they that still labor with unknown names of sainthood.

To those hearts that flitter,
When some half emptied sugar bowl is lifted,
Is elevated in the procession of cleaning,
And found beneath,
Is a crumpled five?

They too elevated,
Ambient beings, merely halo’s to the meal less eye,
Read about only in waterproofed menu’s,
Beneath items like grits and corned beef,
And mentioned in every jukebox love song.

You like to imagine,
Each young and whimsy fed mind,
Alert to your scribant ways,
Wondering with open mouths or braces exposed,
Will it be their big break into formal canonization?

The miracles performed are as follows;
Not spilling even a scalding drop upon you,
Carrying those large trays,
Piled with your filthy dishes,
Even higher than her eyes.

Angels that sweat slyly under casual starch,
That sneak cigarette break out the back door,
They thumb sexy novels before shift,
They gather and laugh at the leering men,
Even the ones that scribble away at their note pads.

Should god shed them no mercy,
For they are the milk of his breast,
As you look at the slim hip,
Of some nubile barista,
Plying you with dark black eyes and creamer.

And they work too in harshly lit shopping centers,
And fortunate back road 7-11’s,
That greet you with gasoline and grins,
And thrumming fluorescents,
And ripe biblical fodder draped femininely across the countertop.

- A footnote is relevant here for the purpose of clarifying motive in the multi part deconstruction of feminine objectification amongst service positions. There is no underlying PR concern in the blood, bear that in mind; just a hearty dissatisfaction with sycophantic gender praise that underlies a prior authors disabilities at coping with an apathetic wife to be. -

· References (angels under fluorescent lights) by Josh
· See Also (A Radical Defense by Josh) by Josh
· See Also (A Reassurance to Josh) By Johny

Fingers

(A small sweet poem about love/drugs)

Sleepily I ask you,
With a hand in front of my face,
Digits rigid in extension,
How many fingers; my dear…

You squint through lamp shade light,
Turn your head upon its side,
Let your palm rub your lids,
Grope in tender phosphorescence.

I lay across the cool bare wall,
The bed rickets as we play,
I hide my hands from you,
When you jump at them in the dark.

How many you say,
Head across my lap in resignation,
How many pink fingers, you ask,
In the shade of salmon light.

Enough, I say,
Blood still settled eerily in my ears,
Such that it gives and audible pulse,
Like valves sealing and popping free.

You have little pills,
On your chest and across the linen,
Baby blue vest buttons,
Tumbled from amber jars.

No quantity of ironic kisses,
Can repair the moments,
Spent kicking the air,
Because it was merely too hot and constrictive.

My eyes are red too,
You look fierce,
Like the mother in labor,
Like the virgin on the stake.

It’s a small climb out of bed,
Your limp arms over shoulder,
Your stomach churns like a turbine,
Borborygmus.

Walk with me,
I plead to deaf eyes,
Your steps clop indolently,
Hair being inhaled and wet.

A cluster of small sudden gasps,
The bitterness of you bile,
I hold your brown hair,
I rub the small of your convulsing back.

Two you say,
From a relieved mouth,
As though you are regaining spirit,
Almost immediate.

I shoot a glance,
It’s intended to look puzzled,
And you, motioning to your rasping throat,
Two… pink… fingers…

as it stands

As it stands, you were but a stain in the twilight. I will recall that tune on the radio, it’s an older mix, and you explained that you lost your virginity to the very same recorded track. Sounds as though the melody itself took a hold of your young thighs, bent upon penetration, but yeah it was only a backdrop of sound upon your complacent coos and sighs. It is a set of concussive beats that will live forever in conjugal infamy; and you even wore the shirt too. What garment you say; the same that was flayed from you in the heat of the moment; was rent from your pert breasts in the moment he took hold of you and planted this tumbling seed. I like to recall.

Our sex was never sacred, all too often just a breaking of the dam. Perhaps like prison sex, other options worn out, not as desperate as consumed. We ate of each other; took our own bodies as communion, liquid blessings. The wine was of grapes pressed with toes, or was it spermicide, ovumcide, bleeding foils of coiled latex. The crucifix, however, atonement with an unequally armed cross made by your legs skyward. Never ashamed; staring into pillows at the humble mercy of the other; driven out of our minds and thus our dedicated organs. Yet love was the word afterward, when we tumble to our respective corners and litigate.

I know the precise fashion of scent that evaporates from your legs when I buffer them in cucumber and avocado lotion. It mingles with the oils of your skin and creates a specific pheromone. I sometimes recall you on my sweat, is that alchemy a feasible consequence of our mingled blood. With a start I sense you close, but it’s just my body remembering.

If you are alive, would you read this and frown? Would you accuse me of pretension because I have memories. Would I be victimizing you because I accuse you somehow of not caring. It’s not you I’m after. I resent the love affair with love. I resent you for conniving me with a dirty word. I detest your taste of promises. Just what could you deliver? A moist preoccupation?

I’m angry that even with the rancid medicine (your lust) this state of existential loss is incurable. The world is dying; we are dying, and all we can manage is to shut our eyes tightly and press to one another’s perspiring bodies. I sense a monster in our ranks, the monster has a name and a blistered grinning face, but it looks too much like the rest of us to discern from the crowd. Remember, we are dying, the word is dying, we are dying.

The dead pope haunts my sleep...

The last dream… He called it the Vatican, but it wasn’t; it was more of just a large skyscraper; he read my eyes and let me know they were all over the place. Vaticans? Yes, perhaps hundreds. I stood shocked, it didn’t feel magical anyhow; either did Catholicism. I looked over and edge and felt a pain in my stomach. Didn’t even see the ground, just the hundreds of floors vaulting down the building across. I began to slip; dreams make you more awkward than in life, or some brilliant track star, unpredictable. The roof might have had twenty feet each way, then… fall. It was paved in a slick marble, no grout to grab into, just slick. No edges, no rails, just a pitch into free fall. I don’t want to fall, but every motion or wiggle draws me closer to the edge. I think about jumping, my body pangs, I can premeditate the damage to my nerves. The flight, the fright. Can you please help me, I ask. Whomever rushed to my elbow and pulled me from nearing the edge. I’ve got to stop picking on the pope so much, maybe the repetition of his name is driving him into my mind.

The Vatican looked like some gleaming Chase Manhattan building, I’m just noticing that. Is my brain being equally blasphemous in my sleep; that’s funny. Cold, clean, religious named spires, threatening to spit me off into oblivion… It ends with my sticky eyes opening, I need more sleep, I hate heights…

Poetry for bastards

Poetry is a last ditch effort,
A way to cohere the solid things,
That cannot be bound to you in life,
That you refuse to find in others,
Those things that teeter,
On the wire of need and want,
And fall in the pile of necessary,
When the heart stops,
Mere seconds after the pen.

Poetry; not an explosion of champagne,
Nor is it the vaulted cork,
Or the gaiety that follows,
It is instead the verse,
That follows moments that I would hate to relive,
So I revel in a safer explanation.

Poetry; not the observation of life,
Maybe as the explanation of your own,
And a plea to reason to stop the fight,
Of heavy words and interjected spite,
Of lost old loves,
Childish girls in vignette,
Sepia chemical hued recollections.

Latter Day Refugee’s

“Maybe if they taught the Mormons how to read… They could mail a fucking letter instead of clogging up the bike paths.”

This was her sour, yet perfect response to organized though; it’s total bull shit approach. All while sitting with her knees pressed together on my stiff little bed, arching her back like some lycra wrapped feline. “You like this one Johny?”

I backed up a bit with my camera and watched her swing both legs around and hang her dark brunette head off the edge of the springy mattress. Two hands grabbed the gray green collar and lifted in a pouty upside down rendition of a girly Elvis.

“You are simultaneously stunning and ridiculous!” I say from below the heavy lens, my laugh shaking my hands.

Her lip sank a bit lower (or was that higher) as she mocked my insult with twisted faces. Suddenly serious she rolled onto her belly and stared into the center of my shutter with a gleaming intensity. Her lips were furled like an old map at each side and eyes with reddened capillaries from the quick blood change.

“That is fucking outstanding.” It jumped out of me like a scream. I’m looking over the Canon in disbelief and then back to my squinted eyepiece. Her colors stream perfectly in the natural light she has just put her fragile face into, her long cheekbones, her rosy cheeks.

“Am I one of those Greek Goddesses Johny?” she slipped those words through tight posing lips; then a grin. “Compare me to some sculpture; maybe a little lovers poetry?”

“Lace, Greek chicks usually have potbellies and conical tits.”

“Well…”

“Or are missing their arms right about shoulder level.” I interject; catching her looking down at her flat tummy.

“All natural Mexicana” she says, grabbing her left breast and examining its pert shape. Obviously pleased and letting her hand down.

“But as for poetry, don’t get me into any stuffy Victorian crap, ok?”

“I like it in some foreign language” She settles, leaning back with distracted eyes. A couple more shots go off as she finds a really impromptu position. “Like some German guy talking about the meadows and eternal love, just in that throaty love language though” She laughs again, tossing her head to the other side of the pillow. Perfect shot!

She tucks her fingers under the tight linen and in a quick move pulls her shirt off and to the floor. She just tosses it like a valueless fiber, on the floor to be cleaned by maids or scrubbing bubble restroom cleaners.

“You get a lot of girls in bed like this?” spoken softly as she turns her head to look softly over her shoulder blade.

“I believe it was you who asked me for some pictorials Lacie” I grinned back, rolling with her giddy playfulness but somehow unsure of her now.

She looked smooth. Deep almond skin stretched over slim bones, erect muscles. Her baggy jeans, shiny teal bra-just a moment too small, dull white socks tossed on my floor, on top of her sheer shirt.

“It just seems crazy to be alive and have nothing to show for it; fuck!” She gets another momentary start of seriousness, this time, heavy lidded poses, she looks straight at me with arms straight and fists punching into the mattress. Her short hair bounces, no, hops at every sudden flick or change in finger position.

“I’m gonna make you a star babe.” I repeat in a dull gangster voice, catching her new grin on digital media forever. It’s like watching a flower bloom, except this flower can bite your tongue off.

“Jonhy, you smoke? I thought it might look cool with like a cigar in my mouth or something…” She trails off and sits up to look through her bag. Pulls out a little striped polo shirt. I get a good shot of her eyes searching through the old backpack.

“Lace, do I look like a smoker?”

“You drink like a smoker! Hah!” Pleased with herself she turns her back to me and fumbles for her bra clasp. Three, four tries, enough time for me to get her hands closing in on the metal clips, fashionable picture. It pops off to the cluster on the floor, my mother would be pleased with this site, a photo of the mess for prosperity and maybe Christmas cards. On goes the Polo, loud stripes unraveling down her torso.

“Where you get this?” she says, fingering a little postcard stuck into my mirror. She looks to me and then pulls it easily out of its nook and searches the back for evidence. Blank.

I laugh quickly “Guanajuarto...” I say, recalling the story. “Just a coincidence, I found that around a place I was working at the very same time I got asked to fly there and help put together an independent film.”

“Was it beautiful? Always wanted…”

“Nah, the deal fell through, never heard from the artistic director again. Weird shit.”

“Let’s go on our honeymoon!” Lacie giggles, those same red cheeks spinning around and giving me the most enthusiastic hands on hips of my careeer.

Her nipples made sharp dents in the deep green line that ran across her chest. You could see them like dark candies wrapped individually in hermetically sealed cotton muffin papers. Her arms crossed her chest, elbows pulling at her areolas like stiff roots in honeyed soil.

“Ya, if the kids don’t make us go to Disneyland”

“Shut up!” she jokes. “They need some culture from my motherland too!”

She fakes her best mean frown; I’m immune and snapping more racy shots.

The way she says Guanajuarto, its like oral sex, it’s a rumble. Ill trick her into Spanish at any chance, wish I could speak it all the time. Problem is that we could only talk about beer, bathrooms and the library. Damn.

The loose legs of her jeans get pulled up like Capri’s; good city look; I put a baseball cap on her too. She is screwing around, got a little bow in the bottom of her shirt and it’s pulled up to the bottom of her chest, her tummy bare and glowing with rich dark skin. One hand on her hip, the other on the brim of her cap, toes pointed at each other, what a goddamn rock star.

A few more pics to go and we are lying on the bed and sorting them through. We have favorites, plan a few more funny faces and get one of us together with our eyes crossed.

She collects her old stuff from the floor.

“Want to cuddle in front of the TV, or you still saving yourself for marriage?” She offers, untying her shirt, turning and lifting it off again, her bare back at me, hands on each arm, looking back at me.

“I should go Lace” My eyes are getting a little wet, hard to be here…

“Cool man, can I tell you something?” She pulls on her old stuff fast, buckles the bra in front and pulls it around. She turns to face me, walking me to the door.

“I was just kidding about the Mormons you know.” Damn she looks serious, but I can see a grin brewing.

“Ya, how so?”

“We could never teach those fucks how to read…”

Keep on Pope'ing

It was just a month or two ago when I watched you squint at the tiny screen of a laptop computer in icy contemplation. It seemed to baffle you, but even if you held the knowledge of a networking saint, I doubt your unforgiving body would let it show. It was like a careful show of faith, us in you, you in computers, the Vatican in the providence of god intermingled with the ignorance of the world. Yes, perhaps you knew your way around windows, and what better of a plug for that multinational entity.

But now; now you’re deceased and stuffed, like an old gammy turkey, stood up to be viewed in the front lawn of the pontificating state. It’s sad but reassuring that another life has left the world, but I am not left hollow. Instead I wave good-bye to a frail and kindly old man that just happened to sit weakly on that throne as an enemy of free will. I salute a nation less gesture, and see him off and dearly departed, leaving perhaps for a moment open the publics mind. Will they awaken to the world they slumber through, one where god died a long time ago and left them alone to fend for themselves. See, it’s a little known fact that as god passed down the plate of free will he simultaneously brought a large caliber handgun to his temple; it was assumed universally that he didn’t have the gusto to pretend he had a choice in the matter.

Forget About the Roses Birthday Girl

It’s in a dream,
And as the bushes turn and tremble,
I somehow think I see you in them,
With eyes like tiny catastrophic seeds,
Felled like mighty acorns,
That crackle when they land,
From the soaring boughs,
That lick sunlight like lazy walrus do,
Lapping at icicles and frozen sea.

I remember your birthday,
How we celebrated in a surprise ride,
Taking us hours out of our hometown,
Where I worked indignantly,
And you spent hours on a volunteer hotline,
Then back into each others lives,
Plotting with the insistence of a kidnapper.

I remember that ride,
Because we almost didn’t take it,
Because I sat up all night thinking about a stupid moment,

And then we would fornicate,
Under sharp thistles and weeds,
That excrete a sticky milk,
I can barely discern from my own,
In a mess of transgression,
And tangy fluids.

And back on the road again,
Your face flushed with arousal,
Your steps quiver until we get to plush seats,
Hair a mess of outside things,
The tang of dirt alights our shoulders,
The pinch of regret,
We are smiling like we did as children.

And the bushes turn again,
In a blur,
But the eyes behind them aren’t yours,
Because yours are in your skull,
Pressed behind lids as we thrust,
Pushing into each other until that moment,
When I stopped to see what flitted behind the shrubs,
And never returned again.

I would drive you home,
I would lend you kisses to help you to sleep,
I would talk you out of cutting your skin,
Or drinking too much of your medicine,
One feels unordinarily guilty,
For wanting to let you do it,
Because of your filthy motives,
And another girlish stupid moment,
That tears me again into the undergrowth.

It’s too much to handle,
Your abrasive smiles,
And canted cheekbones,
That jut up to me as to say,
Leave me Johny; in my peacelessness,
You didn’t want it anymore,
It was an embarrassing responsibility,
When you had suffering to do,
And eventually I avoided your eyes,
And watched the ferns rustle instead.

Exquisite Playmates

Outside, it’s an insect the length of a heavy fist,
Colliding with hot tin; with a clamor,
A sound much like a snowball impacting,
Tossing slush and gristle; and the smell of onion,
But it’s a humid evening and,
The smell of mesquite on fire,
Makes the reek of insect death,
Seem like burning hairs.

The cat prowls the thud,
Back; like stone bridges with wheat grass atop,
Stoic in the line of sight,
Of legs instinctively flittering,
And wings crushed under a pâté of gray juices,
A head gyrating like our mammal heartbeats,
I’m making eye contact with the kitten as he ponders on haunches,
Each as unsure as the other.

It’s like an ugly fallen bird,
A finch with beetle like pinchers, proboscis,
A once eager feeder upon suckled honeydew flowers,
Or perhaps shunting its million little eggs into heaps of florid dung,
Each a near asexual replication,
Of such a tropical specimen of carapaced beast.

The cat and I,
Exchanging casual steps towards the felled giant,
That in a world less robotic,
Could have been an acrobat with feathers,
But stands in its own acrid puddle,
Outside a hot garage door,
Sporting a ding the girth of a pebble,
From a speeding brazen antennae.

From above the squashed goliath,
Our heads, one primate, one feline,
Draw shadows over an airborne predator,
With bristled legs and clamping hands,
Like a sun charred king crab,
That muscles through the midnight air,
On a nautili principle,
And tossing headlong into fate.

The kitten dares not sniff,
Not here to assess the wiggling,
I think we are here to ponder death,
It’s a human-less death,
That smells like vinegar and ash,
Of a big vigorous body that I can imagine chasing,
A million tender butterflies, or licked up ants.

The cat turns hesitantly and breathes a sniff,
I imagine it is a sigh,
An exhale that signified a dissatisfaction,
That the hose has to come again out so soon,
To wash the spider down,
To smear the oiled guts off crackled pavement,
To push the still squirming shell,
With sterile streams,
Into an fire ant nest,
To be chewed thoughtfully,
Like so much new searing meat,
Sating little bug bellies,
As the kitten and I sit in the shade,
And silently with staring eyes, ponder death…

Sporadic Monstrosities

And the truth is,
That in surviving twenty plus years,
Although in a mood that is something less than a stupor,
And a façade less then graceful,
I give your credit for originality.

And the most bottom line,
If there were such a concrete thing,
Is that I need to hand the blame to you,
The careful caress and thought behind,
Lulling me to bed and then…

When the ships turned away,
And ignored your plotting beacon,
I was still set adrift and floating unconscious towards lights,
Though those fires were your half shut eyes,
Lulling me from sleep, and then…

When running becomes difficult in the hot sand,
And we sit together and indulge in company,
Its because its easier than trying to get away,
And then being pulled relentlessly back,
Coaxed into love and then…

When all other ships avoided the course,
Of your sharp rocks and thighs,
Of dangerous tides and slipstreams,
I was just a tiny body in the fog,
Plied into lust, and then…

And the planes all channeled a route around,
Your sublime forests, and suggestive peaks,
Knowing in textbook format what I was about to learn,
Through hard facts, and with the though of escape,
That your fooling me to trust; the end…

letters from america - part 2

Today america and I woke up on two very distinctive sides of the bed. I hadn't quite noticed the extreme until a series of events unfurled me to my inner emotions on said nation state. It was the exposure to "america; love it or leave it" bumper stickers, "god bless america" church signs, and of course the ever present reminder and unrelenting flap of all the overhead flag parephenalia; those left flying by a crippling nationalism.

Im concerned that my poorness at being an american is not reversing itself, but at a further glance, im not trying very hard at all.

When all these fine people are bent over in the extacy of song, screaming out with teary eyes the fruitful nature of purple mountainous plateus, I find it best to laugh in private. Palms tight to chests, lips rigid with an eerie drawling dialect, the oblivious certitude clear in their vacant eyes, I can't be witness.

America and I, sepperate sides of the bed, and if told of my perdicament the average shlep would ask me just what the problem is with his fine republic.

How can I respond. This goliath is still an indidual with a pretty face for the upper crust and a metal hand for the rest. How can I tell him that america and I are on sepperate sides because we cannot stand the look, smell or taste of one another, someone we have spent all of our lives with.

How can I tell the plebe that I was abused as a child by this very america, and as I grew, I grew only regret through such a partners scorn. It was an arrange marriage, a slavery of prostitution, fodder for the cannons.

It's not like you would believe me, im not trying for recruits; I just need to know america is put aside for the time being in a place that it cannot hurt me. Can you blame a guy for trying?

Lets work things out in the morning, america says. Can't take it back that easily, but sometimes its just better to shut up an close your eyes. It hurts less when your eyes are closed and you can't see your body twist with every strike.

God.. bless it or leave it, im ready for a big change.