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.

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.

A kid was thrown in, and he sat by the toilet, which was in open view. The kid was insane, sores on his face, a tic that made both eyes jump. But after the spasms, a look of pure psychosis took him over, extended his frontal lobe and made his stare sickening. One of the inmates looked at him, at his hair high and scattered, at his facial hair just beginning to sprout, and the inmate laughed.

“Looking pretty on top of your game, homie.”

The kid sat there and stared at him, and the stare became worse, Helena. The kid’s eyes were killing him, and a half-smile crossed the kid’s face. The stare began to eat him alive. The inmate, a big, black guy with short dreads, cocked his head at him:

“You lookin’ at somethin’ motherfucker?”

The kid stared harder, the smile became worse, and the black guy got up off his chair and threw his arms out.

“What, motherfucker? No, you ain’t fuckin’ clownin’ me, dawg. I’ll clean the floor with your goddamn peckerwood ass!”

The door opened and two deputies came in holding their pepper spray. The black guy ran back to his chair and put his hands up, but the deputies only glanced at him. They stood over the kid. One of the deputies looked at the other.

“They fucked up. He was supposed to go into a single cell.”

They took a step back.

“Alright, Rodney, you’re going to have to stand for us, do you understand? We don’t want to have to spray you again, and we know you don’t want us to.”

The kid looked at me, but it wasn’t a look of madness, it wasn’t a look like he’d given the other guy. It was a look for help behind the calm psychosis. I raised an eyebrow at him, tried to think to him: stand up, kid, don’t let these fuckers take you by force, it’ll only hurt you down the road. He stared at me, and I nodded to him. He looked back up to them then stood, turned, and they cuffed him. The black guy nodded at him, “Yeah, bitch. Best to get your punk ass out-my cell before I kick your little bitch ass back to the suburbs.”

One of the deputies turned around.

“You’re lucky we didn’t let him rip your fucking head off, player.”

They walked him out and put him in a cell across the hall. The black guy leaned back.

“They just did that motherfucker a favor.” He looked at me. I walked over to the toilet and pissed, flushed, washed my hands and sat. A group was called out, four of them, chained and walked down the hall to a courtroom. The black guy stared across. It was the two of us.

“What you in on, man? You look like a smart motherfucker. I know you ain’t done no real time, because you got some real color in your ink.”

“Don’t talk to me, man.”

He leaned back and laughed.

“Oh, one of them strong, silent woods. How about I come over there and slap the shit outta you, boy?”

“I’m not a wood, motherfucker. But be my guest. Catch a new charge. I’ll let you hit me right in the face.”

“Chickenshit.”

“Yeah. I’m going to trial. What are you pleading out to?”

“Man, fuck you.”

“You’re not my type.”

He rested his elbows on his knees and looked at me, then broke up laughing. I stared at him while he laughed, and I looked around the cell. Bars, concrete, a bare toilet, and screams from the cells across the halls. I smiled at him and had a laugh. It was all that was left.

typing on the empty side

of an abandoned letter

but you will not see

the mistakes and laziness

-just the finished product

of another

motherfucking

poem.

…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.

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.