Vegas
tore back
3:37 p.m.
24 hours of a
drunken dream
no shore
no horizon
but in full color
money
whores of every kind
instincts ignored yet tested
booze, food, booze, food
nap, booze, food, walking
carpets lit by losers in lights
struck by the visuals
the bare thought of
what if
-the dream that has kept
this town alive
I watch the asses in tight
skirts whisk past me
arms locked in the elbows
of cheesy men
hair product
biceps
shiny pants
the people flow through
the floors with such energy
past the old,
beaten down to
coins and leather
faces
feeding the machines
I walk the carpet drunk
biting down on
an overpriced cigar
and I have
to laugh
through the stupor
of us all.
Burning with rain (or Abandoned by whores)
morning
Seattle
rain.
coffee and the burning of incense
my plant on the sill absorbing
the rain, wind, and album
while it rotates on the player
my dogs full
head full
all the decades lost and drained down
my feet bare against a throw rug that costs
more than my last car
and my blood tricked by health
my body snapping back into form
mind tricked by money
but today remembering the old days
the shit days
the days of running on fumes
in every sense of the phrase
an inch close to suicide without
even knowing it
the road and cities and sabotage
the faces and
the teeth in those faces
the rats inside of them
the roaches inside those
and the rotting insides
of them
but I sit here and drink coffee
Disintegration belting out from the
speakers
a nice contrast to Bad Brains
while I fed the dogs
and stretched
-yeah, no shit, stretched-
and watered the plant
which I’ve named Tom Araya
because when it was given to me
by some woman last year
it was just a stem and three leaves,
and it was thirsty
and shooting up from a
small, dark pot
and for some reason,
my mild synesthesia
placed a summer orange glow
around the
dark blue planter
and I heard Araya scream his
famous intro
on Angel Of Death
I’d never had a plant before him
and today Tom Araya is much taller
and living in a much bigger planter
15 or 16 leaves, his stem supported
by a bamboo splint
and next to his trunk in the soil
a new part of him is shooting up
in three stems from his badass
origin.
I sit here and listen to the rain
the album
the burning of scent
and time
and maybe wonder
but that’s what age
must put between us and
the world
and it’s what we use
to keep feeling like there’s
a fight to win
but I think about my plant
both of us abandoned by whores
after birth
both of us rescued by
soft hearts
and grown
from those hearts with
the best that they knew
and even though
I let time and populace
and myself break me down
from soil to trash to nearly saying
fuck it
I held on through words
which became my own soil
and I became their synesthesia
a slave to the source
to that place, the core that
has never stopped burning
toward a sky that we will
never know
regardless of how much
we praise it and mystify it
and give ourselves over
sitting here in Seattle
the rain tapers off
and I glance at Tom Araya:
I’ll keep getting richer
and you keep
getting
prettier.
Big City Nights
…I’m bound by obligation. It’s the same as before, only now more gruesome, though mercifully fleeting. I watch her thick calves. She’s cooking something among the filth, the spilled and dried beans across the counter, the months-old cups and glasses filled with things horribly changed from what they were. Her cat runs over and takes a swipe at my dog. He looks at me with an eyebrow raised. I slam three glasses of wine and open the other bottle. I’m too tired to go anywhere else. I look at her ass wedged into her skirt. In her photos she was much thinner, much thinner. I owe her a fuck, though. I know it, she knows it, and Satan knows it. For the last 18 months we’ve been exchanging naked or near naked phone pictures. She got her taxes back early and sent me money for gas. I drink the wine and notice a pipe packed with weed on the table, next to a dried puddle that could be chocolate milk or beer. I tap it and look at her from my chair. Her broad back turns and she smiles at me, “Of course. I never smoke it, but I get it for some reason.”
I fish a lighter from the wreckage and light the bowl. She turns and keeps cooking. Her giant body is locked into my peripheral view. I think about her photos while I hold the hit. The devil whispers: It’s all in the angles, motherfucker. I nod at the living room and blow a cloud toward it. From the end of the pipe there are busted blinds, hairy carpet stained and uncared for, her belongings scattered across the place. I smell the thick and hot odor of cat shit from the bathroom. I follow it to the door. The litter box is full and spilling over with clumps of saturated grains and piles of feces. I piss, flush, and look at the tub. It’s dirty to the point of disturbing. I lived across the country as a kid, I stayed with junkies and punk rock rejects, I lived in the worst shit holes of New York City, Los Angeles, and the towns and scenes in between, and I have never been so repulsed. A rat crawling across the floor would give the place some dignity. I’ve been here for a total of twenty minutes and I’m already more drunk and high than I’ve been in a year. She sets the plates down. I don’t register what she’s made, but I eat it with her. Under the table, she runs the toe of her pump up my shin, “What are you thinking?”
I think she lives like an animal, but I tell her the food is delicious and I’m really stoned and happy to be out of San Francisco, which is true. I eat, drink, and smoke two more bowls until she’s bargained from her weight.
She’s on her back. Her legs are massive, pale flanks and they’re spread, bent at the knees. I’m looking down through the moonlight, which is fucking bright enough to beat the dark, and I see her naked, morbidly obese body and the reality hits my cock like tomahawks, but I keep going. The moon shines in the window and it makes a rolling neon marquee in purple, and the marquee spells words like fat, failure, rock bottom and suicide, and I let it roll while I keep going. I ask her to get on all fours. She manages the move and I’m moving in and out of the flanks. Her hair’s short and she’s grunting. My hips propel waves of fat over her back. I think about my father digging a trench. I had a job with him in Arizona on the same crew two years after my mother died. He’d been homeless until a fat woman herself took him in and bought him new teeth and health. He was lifting weights in the backyard during that time, and his body had become servile with bulk muscle and bad labor jobs. I’d moved into their place for a short time and we’d gotten the job together. The weed is strong and I’m looking down at her, pounding away while the devil whispers in my ear again: Look at you now, motherfucker, fucking the flanks of your father. He’s dead now, have some goddamn respect. Shame on you, motherfucker, shame... I have to stop and lay on my back, while she puts her weight on me and shuffles herself forward and back above my hips. Her stomach is anchored upon mine, and I hold strong and look at the window. There has to be more than this. The love I’ve lost because of jail, the traps I’ve sprung on myself because of my hatred for the workforce. All the people who read my work and write reviews and send me letters are in their warm living rooms, two cars in the garage and maybe one in the driveway. Shelves full of permanence embedded in photos, in proud souvenirs of commitment, rooms of furniture and success. It’s bad thinking, the city says to me. You’re a fucking writer, you’re a writer who lives your art, streamlines through the lies with beauty and fists. You suffer nothing you’re unaware of, boy. You alone create your living nightmare. Stand up and shake off the filth, the hot liquid shame that has found you at birth. There is something out there, boy, something in the world is moving in on you, something to find and keep you, to bring you home for good.
She’s wailing now, her head is back and she’s wailing at the ceiling, “HOLY FUCK! I’M COMING! YOU SON OF A BITCH I’M COMING!” She presses her fat palms into my chest, quivers then collapses onto me. I exhale quietly and deeply to support her weight. A big leg finds the floor and she presses off me and walks to the bathroom. I unroll the condom and jack off thinking about the girl who poured my coffee in Medford.
Failure
White wine
scallops
the ocean breaks the shore
fucked up thoughts
pervasive through
the centuries
drunk and sober
the failure of love
the failure of time
the confused and hungry
years
failure is the heart's
excuse to accept
mediocracy
do your best work
piss gasoline
on the flames of fear
failure is
for the rest of them
not you
not me.
hammered and on fire
in Santa Monica.
birds
hovering
prey
beyond
the big sheets of glass
while the wine sits
chilled
and
the world fails
with
poetry.
Surf and slam
Friday
high noon coming
the water sheets the life below
like glass
on the Sound where
all is disconnected then
connected by true carbon
the Sun burning pure above
the whales
the Moon moving the tide
just so
all the electricity of time
burning through the board
and running volts from
foot to shore
in a web flash-bulbed
and captured
like moments in music
moments sealed within
a kiss fronting
a city at night
all the deaths on pause
all the goodness
released across the
water
electric blue across
the glass
pushing
stretching
reaching
across time broken
by speed
paused in the snapshot
of knowing
we can
take it with
us.
While the new millennium moved toward us.
we were sitting on the steps
in front of her house
smoking cigarettes
she told me she had
sworn off sex
since her last boyfriend
I didn’t say anything
but I knew what
she was going through
because I had also just come out
of a bad relationship
with somebody I was in love with
and I could tell she found my
silence offensive
so I told her about a seriously
fucked up girlfriend I was once
trapped with for a year
I gave her a couple of stories about the
relationship
and told her how it left me
feeling
and I explained to her that I am
quiet when I see her at work
because I hate being around a group of people
and I explained to her that I’d never asked
her out because I was broke
she brushed some ash from
her leg and talked out of the side
of her mouth,
“We’ve all been there.”
“Yeah, but I live there.”
We had sex all night.
Sucker. (circa 1999 salad days)
I sold my TV today for $100 plus
a smaller TV and this typer,
which I find too white and impersonal
this upped my money to $140
I drove immediately to the casino where I
immediately lost half of it
I have this guy on my ass about the utility bill
here at the warehouse, my dog needs her shots
and I need food for a week
plus, I just spent $7.98 on paper, lunch meat, bad bread
and air freshener to subdue my slovenliness
at least the damned TV is gone
one of those built-in VCR jobs
all I did was lay around and watch movies
I will miss the pornos
but overall I’m glad.
Ripped bare
the clouds above California
have burned to waste
from their film
inward
thinking about
Hemingway while
I walk my dogs
thinking about
Ask The Dust
and Fante's
inimitable beauty
of language
and the way they both
went out
the beard ate a bullet,
and diabetes took
away the living heart
of Bandini,
took from him
his warm blood
that became mine
and many other
writers' reason
to keep pushing
the sky burning
blue
the fur of my
dogs getting warm
I stop and feel the
street and it's still
cool enough for
their little paws
and my warming
skin
watching the Sun
up high
and remembering
nothing at once
then everything at once
and across the street I watch
two yoga moms stretching
and bending
shoving it high up
from their palms
their shoulders
beneath a bright sky
devoid of clouds
ripped bare
of Bandini
and the
old man.
My Thoughts
Loki is always looking for mischief. Perhaps that is simply his card. I know not of it but can only speculate. Loki is not the problem, though. The problem is boredom. People fall out of love with life and find alternative, unhealthy, unnatural means of entertainment. But how could one not be entertained by all this? This paradise. This game. This celebration of souls and essences. My father probably has insight on these questions. I shall ask him now.