30 Minutes, Unfiltered

The words of everybody else just swirling in my head

in my brain’s space like a brain’s pace set apace

of a mean monster rap rhyme, doing my time, getting in line

to do the tanning bed, get cancer

do arrhythmic arithmetic and so forth & so on

unto those golden lights hewn...


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I have known women. Beautiful, mellifluous girls. Creatures I cannot begin to describe

without confessing to lack in some large way

remiss the ability to express

how darling are they

who linger here.


<>

Fuck your GDP. More like QDP. Flipped is PDQ

Pretty Damn Quality, Pretty Damn Quick,

mind your P’s and Q’s and everything’s just cool ask Wayne

pick your poison: mind or money

the latter being the tell-all, the former the source of all

heart-attacks and joys and loves and everything felt and unfelt and heard and spoken

Absurdists INC is not so much dying as being born again. With the most absurd premise of all—perhaps the anti-premise, like the Catholic Church announcing that, well, thanks for asking but no, as a matter of fact, Jesus was not the Son of God, and thanks for all your donations and countless lives lost or devoted or prayed away or preyed upon or raped like an altar boy or mortified with the flesh-- …we hereby renounced our iron grip upon the bleeding hearts of the world, and yes, as a matter of course, our leader is not infallible, but is just a man…

In the hearts of many

are carried the hearths of Mary

Holy Mary’s, Mother of God,

the Lord is with thee; the

modest, intemperate, compassionate fate

awaiting whom she awaits where she awakes

all that dawdling virginity going by the wayside

and collecting like flotsam or rancid jelly in the wading—oh! how holy art thou

the holy lawd wading pool of old! holy!—

collecting like root beer foam in a creek

and I realize that it’s all been too much

to get across, and yet my soul is here for trying

which is the same as saying

we cannot be perfect, but we do our best?

false. not everyone. it cannot be.

even I, the Saint-of-Me, admits to

being humiliated. Being defeated.

Hiding! From it all! Not looking up!

Because: face it. It’s frightening. Bald, lapsed,

unhappened future. Oh glorious path ahead,

where will you lead me? What tender sprigs whilst thou

upspring from the loam oh My God please let me

let me into that garden, allow me to gander upon the geese

and orient my brain pulp onto the geography of the town

allow me goose down and feather beds and just one word,

any words, a single dose somewhere—some jewel—must be enough

to say this: finally, something worth being said, something

worth sweating over, something worth fighting for, something

worth being anxious about, somebody worth

making sacrifices to, in name of, FOR.

And it comes back to the wayward nature of it all,

the mystery and the backalleys and the Gnar

of these back-street, urban side-cats


grizzly, grizzly


a fresh girl,

an overcoat,

Paris. A tangle of brown hair

I remember being blond. Monica Morrison

and Nicole Sugar and

that blonde who everybody looks at—

is there any star not brightened

by us (the light shining back)? we see

exactly how the light shines—at us,

for you, to him, to her, these things are certain,

they are getting better

we DO just know some things


like lightning is a force none shall betray

For Fear of Death, and

we shall never understand its holy, shattering,

deadly, life-giving! power, oh God, let us understand

we are not alone here, You are all around,

you are in the sentences that hold us together

admitting to know immediately that nothing constrains

the ugly tenements of the human heart except silence

the ugliest science in the silence of kidney stones and heart attacks

and moreover in the stones themselves—the ones we never fully

appreciate, the ground beneath our feet! because every boy

is a fantasy fulfilled,

every day is a heaven to un-glove and hold, Good Morning wonder cat,

I believe in this gold; behold this golden glorious day masters! And mistresses!

Mistrust not each other but in God trust,

yea, in God fear, and only God, in Him, Fear,

that to Not do unto others as you would

is to not live, is to pardon yourself from the party

to the ashtray to the cylinder

gouging down the hill next door the alley, next door the picnic,

next door the rambling old shanty house down the way where

Allan and Gillespie and the Spoonerism man live

dog the lampshade bed-spray and whom he

we

where

what

all those stupid questions

leading nowhere.


a book of faces

glorious, beautiful, sad, imaginative,

porous and Horace faces staring back

inviting us into some magic we don’t understand

but hold like imagined pony-tails

of human women holding

(hopefully) our hearts in theirs

metaphorically speaking, of course.