The deal
I'm fighting against this poem
Because it reminds me of how desperate madness was to dance with me
Undone by its own weakness
I’d like someone to look me in the eye and know exactly what I mean.
I’d like a ditch instead of a city.
Like before the inventions stole the magic out of me
Before a wrinkled space replaced the feel of a labored manual embrace.
I want to smell the smoke of a climaxed match
strike it as I exile the love from the corner of my smiling mouth and toss the flame into existence.
Jerk and watch a deal the devil made with me in Vegas...
Exchanged a single heartbeat for 20 dollars worth of gas...
In that space between the beats
I pumped blind rage into my viens.
“Sign the dotted line my dear and watch the gates close on your dreams”
he said while leaving me alone with the sun in the desert.
Lets go,
Before the time on my shoes runs out and they forget the feel of the avenue
Before my listening too closely resembles another message from the dead.
Passover dinner
I promise myself that dawn will barge the rooftops opposite the sun again.
Staring at the moon laid stupid in a cloud,
as I’m eye to eye with brake lights
Taking inventory of my dreams.
I wouldn't want to spoil my appetite just yet,
already full of honored guests in the pit of my void.
I am not alone in this vehicle
Driving…
In the perfect flavor of my age
Helpless in the great beyond
Stupefied in the eye of eternity.
The unrest I find while sitting still
approaching stars like moving targets
misfiring my will crushed thrown in heaps with all the trash…
Taste buds bloom in the wreckage of caffeine,
unflattering
I drowned a phrase traveling across my tongue.
Its shipwrecked death sticks to spaces of my teeth.
Whistling I walked my mind away from it, proud of how I murdered it despite surrendering.
Unlike the
Locusts
And the boils
Or the blood of the first born
A taste heard only in my head
Refraining
I'm stealing some joy from the narrowing back of the river.
Take its ribcage deep into my eye,
sunken in sun...
Gifting me it's clumsy souvenir,
the ceaseless dance, an unrehearsed eternal choreography.
Around the muddy fingers of its bank,
despite the protests growing in its mouth from fallen trees.
I desire to describe the air between the captured images in words...its taste of me as it loses its name tangled in my tousled hair, its feel on me and its own feelings as it strikes and rushes past my cheek…
maneuvers around the corner of the groove above my lip- parted in syllables unborn and mysterious to me.
And I realize my flaws are perfectly refraining from a wish because they're flawless.
affair with words
A prelude to the ghosts of word
I'm an ocean oscillating
sitting in a Thai take out place
Spice infused the big FEELING rippling through my veins, explode out my chest with cumin
All the waters of me in attempts to confine press wicked against their own death, flooding to turn a void into an occupied deluge.
Some have a fling with words sporadic out of lust...
inflamed in temporary heat until the sweet and self serving release undoes them-
Mine's a love affair ethereal and engulfing...
indugled in privatized entanglement complete with rawness, newness, numbness and endless seas on fire …across all time and galaxies hung silent in my eyes.
Wore my comfy clothes to sit and wait for sustenance, so please do not disturb.
I am an event in process
in constance… situated between a pick up counter and someones loud breathing...and they have no idea about this wild ride I'm on.
My words are finite just as each letter begins and ends with the mouth of a pen- gives life to a word and ends its purpose with a graceful but heinous withdrawal from the page.
I will end not the words but the fiber that breathed life into them.
As I nauseously sit in my waters.
Holding an Ocean within my small frame is imploding...
Each drop on fire.
It's thunder in my throat.
It's lightening in my teeth
Walls around me closing in
I'm crumbling.
I am not made for love stories
Susan
She says “just look at the butterflies”
I talk to dead friends through live friends
while I walk the dog
into morning dew dressed grasses, plants and flowers feeding on the sun.
My thin fingered lashes play catch with the rays grasping the light to keep it, to bring it...
it aims its arrows at my skull
I am the keeper
The wanter of want
The escaped
Returned to myself in one morning
I have ghosts standing over my shoulder and the death toll is staggering…
I evoke their names
sometimes while driving and catching a sight of birds flapping into existence
or a motorized hum in the distance
Susan…
The dead heroes lined up and coded by color alphabetically entombed on my shelf are a joke.
The true heroes are the ones who tried to hero themselves out from under the teeth of sharks and got caught up in electric wires left out by idiots to smoother some sense of a spark.
I am writing this stream of whatever as this noise of a washing machine rumbles and throws itself against the neighbors wall…
And its mechanism isn't any different than mine
These are my favorite things...
Plays and carries itself past the candle scented in rain past the ceiling fans dusty embrace past my lips parched in need of some passion or a little change
past and through the opened window to the tips of the tree…heavy branch’d and ghostly cloud shadowed.
I once wrote about an ocean
thats inside of me
Oscillating
Overflowing
And how hard it is to contain such a large body of water inside my small frame
and how I cry into the iris of the night to be released from being tethered only to get wrangled in again by my own chains.
All fingers extended at me with a smirking and knowing
And she says “just enjoy the butterflies” from her grave in ash forever sleeping in the wind of her laughter spread about the air - thinly- whispers in the ears ever so slightly - barely..
and I laugh with her- audibly
so that I may catch her wave
I never said goodbye because there was no need
because she knew all this
2011 1/2
Eat your trashed goodbyes
I found that scream I screamed into
it was just my own history
good enough for concrete where history don't mean a thing
Listen to me for just a moment
I am somewhere tired in your stores
your shipyards
your shoes jumping into big business and politics
drunk in your pockets
Its becoming harder and harder for me to recall the wallpaper
my memories are a million lost corners
so go
go somewhere
Climb a fence…
Get caught
trespass and get lost
because I could get thirsty or hurt in your industrial trap
ghosts of word
The reader stops believing
all rendered by the same hand that devastates and subdues.
Triumphant and trivial
bent to the keys all hell in her eye she write this:
Just give me ONE good window
Bare bulb
No blind or shade
Just a starved little kid burning out the old roaches stuffing their guts with history
To the streets men
On the blocks boys to the gutter…
I stand reflected in mirrored sheets of rain
My art falls onto paper
red like the devil and his skin
Lines people spoke but never heard of…
I am an everyday word in an everyday world mistaking magic caught in the jaws of light on stage behind bar stools and secret destroyers.
Set to confuse the dreamless sleep pregnant with headlights in only a sweater flirting with rivers I run with a saint yes- tired- along the banks, roofs - music note wires-
The opposite of enlightenment is an envied edge and weightless drop into the emergency of brilliance…
The truth the memory the indecisions
snap my fingers sharp and starve an echo.
Vanished in the ecstasy bouquets of faceless hopes stuffed inside pockets
I spy the world in tongues found dismembered at the base of Babels tower
Unshaved
Uncooked
Placed in a pot
Terrified
I’m just an empty ghost convincing you how time does not exist
As you read this in my future, your present is written in my past.
writers block
Caught up in things like self narration hinged on a single screw inside a head that rattles loose-leaf novels, texts and paper clips without a job…
I'm stuck froze at the intersection
of a strong “maybe” and a weak “why the fuck not”.
My historical compulsions to maze without an entrance aimless as the pen lay cocky offering me a tiny violin in jest.
My art is a tree branch that I shake to death- like when Dali the boy beat overripe fruit into pulp to mimic the feel of a soft breast- I love in the same way- against a different need
Tripping over dead relatives who just roll their eyes at me…
They say something like “Oy! we died in these flowerless camps so you can sit nude staring at pages all day?”
The pressure is real
Yo!
And I waste some more time wondering if Boris from Tropic ever took care of the mites in his crotch- or if that little boy in the renaissance painting I saw one July was able to eat the fruit painted in feelings of his hunger, more alive than my soul at the time.
If he was ever able to feel the comfort of socks.
Or just some clean feet on his legs or fuck a canvas to sleep.. forever would be great...
Submerged in crimson paint is the absence of color, a crinkled void in the cloth escapes from my focused intention… and to the edge of the frame where I stand and shoot my gaze in my bra chewing cold pizza- aroused by the majesty of color.
The hairline crack inside the painted eyeball has an eyeball and it winks at me, a joke time’s had for me to ponder some 900 years… a fuck you to me.
My muse on a hunger strike for 39 days, I’m stuffing its choking mouth with my rage. Naked. Mosquito lands on my thigh, old lover coming for more blood. Hearing a dove outside. Laughing. Thelonious aims his greased fingers at me from inside a box spat at by god- I raise my brow and curl my lip, ears red hot pushing windowed sunlight through my veins moving to frequencies I can barely capture onto a page.
my research into death
On the 49th day of my bardo I'll climb into an ugly womb to be expelled with all the sticky things, my histories flushed down the drain. And I'll enter this world again just as I have at least 913 times before dressed in waxy skin belonging to the wind.
This is the door I'll choose: orange like the angry sunset protests over times neglectful motions- chased behind tall buildings of a city gone betray me.
I'm painfully enlightened by its cracks, my fingers trace in spiraled patterns spelling out my old discarded names.
I'll enter the doorway knowing to forget the sea and leave its mystery for someone else to worship.
9 fruits
Time loiters at my gate with fruit, and fights my grip of a meaning…
right back into my laughing lilac mouth-
tooth, fang and claw I spit the pits into a bucket… it settles...
with the violence of a note in B pushing off from C back to itself on the piano keys -
Hunts the fucking mercy out of me.
Makes me taste my own heartbreak in silence.
My eyelashes contoured to the scent of my morning desires wound up in the wrinkles of my sheets…
Finding music and stories unfolding inside the mouth of my bed, stuffed with nothing but my own wreck.
And I just may find myself in an awkward bend against the morning amidst lampshades falling
as I set fire to the rain inside my head.