LET LOVERS LOVE

and let livers live
when Moses came to Egypt land
let my liver go
Who's drunk here? Me, or my beer?

Boy

As a boy I wasn't like this. I didn't drink myself to death on a nightly basis. Don't like to party, my friend said, but my friends force me to. I feel this way sometimes too.

If you're gonna die, then get dead, is how I feel. So I go there, near the water, sometimes. To look at the black surface and its slight steam.

Ain't gonna do it. Ain't gonna die. Gotta be living. Gotta get live.

I'm on THE way to a premise

I promise.
And yeah, I'll bring drugs.
It's non-fiction, which usually means boring.
But really is the most interesting of all.
Fairy tales are for people with morals
True life for those with qualms
balmy like hearts of palm
olive-green eyes
and a heart of gold.
Yeah I said heart twice, brainiac.
I'm all heart, motherfucker.
Sorry for the french
but English isn't the only language I know
Fluck a duck and shuck an ear ya cornball fuck

Michigan (Taking Drugs To)

I'm taking drugs
to Michigan! Taking the barge
to the South! Gulf of Mex or Dex!
Already on that! Go! Go! Go!

Drug barge, yes sir, right here,
I'm in charge. In charge big & large
of the borough's barge? Yes sir,
drug barge.

I'm taking deer
to Michigan! On my bike! I killed
it! I'm drunk! I bike bike bike!
Pedal pedal pedal! Pedal till I break!
I look at the lake and I know it's not fake!
Fake shore drive. More like
Lake shore knives. Hot ass bitches
with they Fake Shore Lives!
Slice & dice!

For all the spoiled-ass girls with nice asses

I swallow NoDoz and Saran-Wrapped camel toes
all-night-Sahara Sandwiches, Adderall and Adidos
Shit, I mean Umbros, talking to girls like "Um... bros,
I mean, ladies," looked at me like Mercedes rabies
something pricey become dicey become like seed
for the Lycee -- I mean Lee-Say -- ...HEALTHY

burroughs documentary

there is some promise in here somewhere
of things to come; but why promise when
the things are already here; they are necessarily
words themselves. i shoot myself in the foot
not the foot but the part that walks; not the hoof
exactly but the genotype of the hoof; it can't
be made right anymore. william burroughs
said so after all he shot his wife william-tell-
style. why do i mention this? because it happened.
fate compels the black water to indeed
rise to the surface once in a while; to re-
collect itself as in a dream &      how
do we know we're not dead anyway? i know,
i invented the billboard for your entertainment.
look into my gravelly eyes for the thrill
of it. i have already done this; once; but not
just for any man; for a dead one i didn't
know. he's gone and there's no bringing him back.

Balm Covers, Ends Abruptly

Balm like Malbecs covers your chest.
I put it there -- whoa -- I put it there.
Awake in the West as nubile. Young fiction;
it writes itself. Like glory is to automobiles
pride is writing about Detroit. (In

so many words.) Another

city already you don't know. Move there.
I won't. Why the impulse? Grave rotting
notions of the American psyche. It's the
sidewalk but also the trash heap; I have
said this before. Are you a narcissist?

I dunno, please re-phrase. I heard the last
bit about the key phrase: IMAGINE OUR
APOCALYPSE, something only said by
Ben Affleck fans and poltergeists. 2nd
part's a lie: they don't speak well.

Harken to my ink well. Don't say a prayer:
recite a prayer/spell. Or tell your boyfriend: Out
of state doesn't count -- that's your toy friend.

I've created a man

Sign Language: A moral tale

This will come as a huge surprise to people who know me well, but last night on my way home from the bar I created some shenanigans. Somehow a sign had been knocked over and was laying there on the street. It said something about "Bike Lane Merging ahead." I encountered this fallen soldier less than a block from my apartment. So, naturally, I dragged the (quite large) sign back to my place and left it on the first floor entryway just past the double-doors. I actually remember thinking that it was an okay thing to do because it's something an ant would do. You know, I'm just gathering stuff and taking it back to my hole, Mr. Officer. Like an ant. Don't worry about it.

So this morning after awaking I was seized with mild terror. Holy shit, I thought, did I really drag a comically large Bike Lane sign back to my apartment in the middle of the night? Yes, I did. This was bad. The wailings of the ever-present Fire Station across from my place (The Chinatown DRAGON FIGHTERS) were newly alarming. Were the authorities on their way to get me? (All sirens sound the same to guilty men.)

It is quite edifying to do something mildly wrong and suffer the mental / moral consequences. The machinery of rationalization was already in progress. Well, it's not that big of a deal, the sign was already knocked over, my removal of it probably won't kill anybody... Should I admit or deny my actions if directly asked? Who could prove it was me? Is there any camera evidence? This is NYC, you never know. Camera central. When would the sign's absence be noticed? What will be done?  

So I had to intervene in my own thoughts, saying: THIS ISN'T HYPOTHETICAL. THIS IS REAL. MAKE IT RIGHT.


So, I walked downstairs. The sign was already gone; the landlord / invisible-but-surely-real-lady-who-does-a-good-job-of-taking-out-the-trash-and-recycling had already moved it to the trash pile outside (aka the sidewalk). I already felt better. The action seemed to speak of this feeling by whoever removed it: "Why is there a sign in the hallway? Oh well, I'm going to put it outside on the trash pile." [No further ruminating or wondering or moralizing required. It's New York, honey. Once again I'm making up stuff without any merit or defense. The impulse was probably even simpler: "REMOVE ITEM."] But this wasn't enough; I had to take the sign back to where I got it. I dumbly stood there for about 5 minutes, "scoping out the scene," and readying myself mentally. Got a text from Joe: "Have you ever eaten 'tacos'?" Responded, "What r tacos?"  Finally, I picked up the sign and heavy metal pole to which it is attached. I started walking. I could have scarcely been less inconspicuous. There were some sidelong glances and people actually took small notice of me (unlike usually). But nobody said anything. I crossed the street and set it down. No police. All was right with the world... I returned it to where I had found it. The end.


PRESSING QUESTIONS:
Who does sign censuses? Who will notice it's knocked over? If I didn't move it back, would it be thrown away? Where do the police factor into all of this?


EPILOGUE:
I celebrated by walking around and discovering a new cheap restaurant on Essex and Delancey.

Band Names, Part 2

The Wonder Beards
Fort Sumter Boys
Clothes
Men of the Cloth (First gay christian rock group)
Frosty and the Snowmen
Fad and the Black Crow
Muslim Brotherhood
Goat & Friends
The Supremacists
T.I.G.E.R
Lil Swag
Pyramid Scheme
Waffles and Sex
Rennie Clemons and the Fritters

This is in no way true

either. The absurd neither helps me nor detracts nor does it not help for writing skills that are good. real good. for a period i was using commas, but recently i've had a case of low capitalization. But Those Things COME and go you know. I'm liable to flow, float a syllable boat. Drummer beat hit that cymbal note. Oh like a nimble stoat, weaselly frees the mongoose from his own trappings. Drummer boy taps, summer toys like hats, summer toys like clothes. I wear those the most. Shopping is my least favorite. Even (especially) shoes. The only thing I don't get anxious about shopping for is a sandwich. Unless it's a po' boy. Then I'm still anxious. Rolling up the window in my mind so the black people can't hear the hip-hop blaring in my mind-car. Leave the sandwich shop, can't find my car. I tell my friend Fad that someone jacked my car. He's like no way dude, what did they take? I say, my car. Fad immediately grasps the gravity of the situation. He has questions, I'm patient. No I didn't have insurance. Yes, I was pretty sure I'd get some sort of compensation (taxes, or something. government). When you use parentheses it's hard to know whether you want to flow with the parenthetical or the words immediately preceding. Sometimes that predicament can derail a post entirely.

The Beard Years

The Beard Years were full of fear.

Boners had it on good authority (their own) that their erection would carry the day; they could have scarcely been more wrong.

On the polo yards were waiters who handed one another fat pelts of gravy boats -- the gay kind that kept moving. They were just so jolly. I mean animatronic gravy boats with real feelings and intention, meaning & attachment. There were whole plots about their love lives, how they felt to be living gravy boats, how they felt about Sebastian and his Vulcan death grip on status of "most loved living candelabra." It might not have been Sebastian, but I refuse to look it up.

In the movie "Wonder Boys" Katie Holmes' character said to Michael Douglas's character something like: "You told us writing was all about making choices. And it seems like you didn't make any choices [referring to his script of 2000-some pages that discussed, amongst other things, the dental history of character's horses]." It was true, of course. He was a smoked-out college professor who had to get real. The point being that writing on Abz sometimes glorifies in making no choices, or refusing to make the "ordinary" or "normal" kind of choices that typically bind "sane" writing. In some ways that's liberating -- and why, of course, throngs of millions of sexualized young co-eds read Absurdists Inc. each and every day.* But it's limiting in another way -- I fear it may not foster the development of a serious writer who, in order to produce anything even resembling something some entity would pay for, has to make almost limitless choices and be constantly conscious of the reader and the implied meaning(s). Yeah, I just put an "S" in parentheses. It almost seems like refusing to make those kind of choices is a fundamentally bad or wrong-headed thing, even as a lame hobby that doesn't amount to much -- to hone the obsessive and intelligent scent of a real writer, one has to do it all the time. (THIS IS ME SAYING ON THE OTHER HAND THAT THIS IS BULLSHIT AND I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT. I AM ERMINE.) I mean to be a really good one. Being a really good writer seems almost impossible. You have to deeply familiarize yourself with the details of everything you discuss -- several layers deeper than the depth at which you plumb the impossible. There I go again. I meant to end that sentence: "...several layers deeper than the depth at which you discuss it." This is a not-so-occasional rebellion against that kind of succinctness -- again, a word I'll initially puzzle over and spell wrong: not something I should ever be allowed to get away with.

I'm allowed to get away with anything.
I'm allowed
I allow myself.
I allow. Scrolls of half-dead meridians. Danger.

*This is in no way even remotely true.

(Not) Snowed In

Sounds more fun than they sound
Sounds for fun / Banned on these grounds:
the semi-literal caved in masses (snowed in)
sweated, smoked out vastness
a lastless vastness without mass.

Chastity. A mold as old and forgotten
as the slime of God. Gold water in the
bottom of this pumpkin. The first four words
made you think it might be nice. It's not --
It's snot(-like) gold brimming over, bursting
(what?) out every goddam pore of the
pumpkin masses, choking out demands
for God, for Gold, gold-water...
we want this drink of ours to be heaven,
this think of ours (word) propels us like
God-designed flagellum, intelligent-design
like, toward the unwholesome dome of
sky, once held water, now it doesn't,
so antediluvian it hurts my face. Things grow
even where you'd think they would not.

DFW

There are several movies being filmed inside of me at the moment.
This isn't true but it seemed funny when I said it earlier.
Also: Why you drinking that energy beverage? Dunno, just a redbull without a cause.
Tomorrow I'm filming an animal cop.
My ankle hurts.
Klonipin is nice, but it's too long lasting.
My new thing is carrying around gallons of water. Girls find it "erotic."
Are bats descended from primates? You decided
it wasn't true, but I'm not so sure.
Convergent evolution.
I really don't know anything.
Okay, I know very little.
I shouldn't have volunteered by undergrad GPA tonight at dinner. My advisor said, "Yeah, that is low." It made me feel :-(
Who cares.
Why do I say things like this? Who cares. Who cares?
Whom cares. Cared about by
Whom Cars
are for they drive. (They drive, they
are driven.)

Here there hey. Academics are godless.
Should I say Godless. I am the ghost
of David Foster Wallace. But I went to Holy
Cross, not Yankee Ridge.

You cannot start

You cannot end. Should have
over had I should have
left the skin in the dresser
look -- a giant -- Giseppo's kundalini
a word Mailer taught me -- open,
open word of dogs, open for me
mouth of mouths. This heaven
we haven't seen is all around us
it couldn't be but it is
green wonderland like Ryerson
stepping into a puddle. Was that a dream?
Slow motion (Groundhog's Day) the
clock falls -- meaning the numbers --
Chagrin's halls -- East Side Cleveland --
dresser phobia. --the numbers fall, it's
the next day, put your little hand in mine...
outside, it's 9 degrees and steady. Stop.

I came through

the uterus, let's face it -- she was an island --
an archipelago; -- to her side, the pelagic
backward I don't want to say backward
but deepdown pelagic, do you feel me?

I'm rough like dry skin in the winter
a tiny camera flows through the blood
to find a splinter. Puss forms. Eventually,
I guess, the thing moves on, or it doesn't.
Who has enamored loss? Loss of any
kind doesn't give you anything, hello,
I know where I am. --a dish of mold
or a Jello commercial --are two things
Rembrant wouldn't have painted. Redact.

I came through
the uterus, let's face it -- how i started --
how'd you get here? --a research told me
(not at a luncheon, but with some pretext
of a delicious meal in the near future, let's
face it) how do we get here? is a question
nobody can answer. but, human, for once,
not even for once, that wasn't in question,
with a calmness nobody would notify, would
bring attention to, (was held off, paid attention to,
was held off, paid attention to) these are how
mental disorders begin. He said, whoa... So
whaddaya gonna do about it? That's what
I'd like to know.

Human for once, with feelings,
blunt trauma curtains, floats with hip hop artists
atop them, the Italians booing,

I promised

Ooh, I'm floating, goes every beginning,
you've got to wash your face, Amanda said
she couldn't get to sleep without it. Well, evidently,
you know, you know, this would be better in conversation:
evidently I can.

Baby sleep with me, is a suggestion. I don't even mean
it sexually, not necessarily, not fundamentally. Necessarily
sexually is a proverb, that's how you think of us, isn't it,
it's not your fault; I hate ellipses.

You know, my mind is a falcon, a harpie eagle, just
discovered for the first time in Belize. Belize me,
I'm not lying. I wouldn't make up  things about
endangered species. Point being -- sharp, here,
for once a rainbow that's just a rainbow, of
course it's not complete, it's just raining, prisms,
-- maybe consider it. Think of how much

we could learn about each other. I'll breathe,
like a man, decoding prison sentences with
each breath. Later we'll wonder about capital
punishment and how this fits in. Later still I'll
make you promise not get angry when your tears
excite me. I'll promise not to make a pun
about how each sentence is a sentence
enmeshed in words, forever hidden
inside this gray box or cyclid, we'll never know.

Baby language is inside us, then it comes out,
thoughts is white and pale, Shakespeare told us
maybe not to force things. Thought is pale, cold,
foreboding -- he of all people knew the incalculable
distance between "I could" and "I did" or even

  this is a sword
  this is a word. (not wordplay)

the difference between "to being," which isn't
infinitive, and "to walk." One's a goal, honey,
that other's magic. Don't make similes often but
it's like the scrape of a wing on a petal, and I
have to admit:      I
have to admit nothing. Blank space.  

I name it first

A) Then I write it. If I didn't, why be frightened? Where my eels at?

B) This is my new daily cross to bear. Hey there, Monsieur Bear. It must be hard to be so ursine

(Ursine that's your sign. Ursine that's our sign.
Our bear, up there. Sequester your smellables.)

C)
miasma
of her cigarette
no top on
coquettish
childlike, a foxstar
voice like software

Hello? Where?
I'd like to tell you, Rita.

D) I know where I myself am. Can't say the same
for the boxwear. You know, the stuff you buy in the box and wear?

Oh hell, not hare, I mean, not hear again. I hear my waves becoming oceans becoming words spilling out again. A sixth grade girls poetry. And pretty good for what it is: "My hand spills out the ink from my soul..." etc.

E) The point is I'm going to force myself to do this once a day even if it's really bad (ooh, self-reflection, judgment, not like a judge's judgment (they aren't PEOPLE like we are, they send people to prison, I don't send people to prison, and if I could, I probably wouldn't... I don't want to!)), do I really care what you think? Are we kin? There's that word again. An ancient one, kin. We probably aren't but I probably feel like we could be, or have the same approach to each other, the same feeling in our hearts meaning our throats for each other, I'd kill for you, friend, I'd be killed for you, That's what Mailer meant when he said there was a sniff of murder in real love, the kind you don't want to call love because you know... love and all. Nothing is what it is anymore. I don't have a teddy bear. I miss everyone, all the time. I find happiness, I don't know much about anything.

But must importantly,
I'm not string
and never knit.

This post sponsored by Pathmark

1) Mrs. Ottey's attempts to foist further tripe upon me were futile.

My adamance was rewarded
...with nourishing ox-tail soup and dumplings.

[[ Should be ignored:
2) Which is perhaps much to say
to play on the field, to lat [lay] there
to splay Um, Here, Um,
we are who we've been waiting for.
Dumb bitten lunches of thoughts. ]]

3) On my way to PathMark I saw lots of things, notably trash collected in crenelated dumptrails on the ground; strewn about cleverly, almost ironically; completely without merit were all these observations. Passed the Rutgers "projects" to my left that line the East River. ("Projects" is a loaded term... I felt safe. Unnecessary self-reflection: My beard makes me look pretty though, though.) Thought I had gone the wrong direction. Kept going. Was rewarded. PathMark. A huge real supermarket. I will go there again. I bought water purified (by reverse osmosis OR distillation) because I don't want to drink POISON. Specifically fluoride. Fuck fluoride. Fuck it in the face. I got milk, cheese, some disgusting "cheddar flavor rice crisps" and "FRS: healthy energy," which contains quercetin. What I really wanted was Red Bull because I was feeling drowsy after two beers and it's been adeptly marketed to me as something that will "wake you up."

On the way home my eyes revisited a tree by a housing project. It has a large blanket of some kind in it that looked like a person. Smaller constellations of other plastic bags and remnants like ornaments. Made me think of this story about the kids who slept in Central Park.

When I got home I drank a little of the FRS energy drink. Eh... not good. Not terrible, maybe, but not good. It smells like what your urine would smell like if you ate and drank apple pulp for a day. This is an educated guess. As usual, then, my shopping trip wasn't with errors. But I have to mistakes to learn. It's the only way I operate. How do you operate?

Pathmark.

Endorphins

Where we lay
in hollows of flesh or door --

collect tea leaves before a stroll
in the park to find acorns --

this is how (organically, for once)
we have seemed to felt --

notice, in other words, the words
themselves -- they aren't practiced --

they have rhythm, fairly -- they aren't
escaping anything. In Indiana I played
Abe Lincoln, beard and all
shortly before being fired. How does
a man deal with shame? He hides it,
does not discuss it. It's a closed
locked door. This is a law. And I'm
a law-breaker. Not as a child, though --

always followed the rules like, ...whoa
now, maybe we're getting somewhere.

Just as you might say we are leaving
somewhere. The tents rolled up --

she's still wet -- she'll dry off tomorrow
or the next day in the driveway.

What I meant was there are rules
and rules of law -- binding and bound,
dead and alive, milieu. This isn't helpful
to expound.

Dead and alive, just like everything --
one hand, is a serif -- a letter -- a door post.
On the other -- ILLINI. Our nation's sweetest
despotic team, trading blows for bows for
hope for shame for victory... something
becoming lame. As you know, edited --
this could really be something. Moving on.

You have to, sometimes. Move that is.
From that to this is
now, this is where I put my mouth, this is
how I used my words. Already becoming
the past but even better than the explanation --

they are the explanation and the story itself.
This really is working. --

I've always joked about horseflesh. Never
eaten it, (as far I know) never want to.
I've used glue, never eaten it
as far as I want to remember. Like a puff piece
this tail is curled and then uncurled, curled then
uncurled -- David Foster Wallace would say
"Up, Simba!" as the camera man said in his
overlong piece about McCain when McCain
still seemed to be a real person. Champaign
Illinois' finest writer, at least so far. I'm coming
at you, Foster. Coming with you, Wallace.
Please give me this gift, David. You already --
you already have.

Especially

I click on MONETIZE
make that 'paralyze': my problems dub
with money; now they terrorize;
just as Terra Fries. Friend of Terra Form.
Martians had it good--now it's New Era Dorm
Earthling Planteries. Co-Eds Sanitary.
Had a whole planet to themselves--
now it's Poli Sci fairies. (Literal sprites
of the Earthworld invaders).

Shared a dream with my meathead friends
on Skype today. They didn't get it; they tensed
up heartwise on me like Type A. Call that
Likely. Item 2A. The Specimen especially...
well, especially likely. Especially the specimen
from Friday.

Apache

Four o' clock in the afternoon
I haven't eaten all day.
Guess I'll grab my knife, see if I can kill a boar.
Realistically, it's tubers and berries.

Too bad I lost my backpack,
and was subsequently marooned on this island
three or four or thirty weeks ago
my sense of time is fucked.

There's nothing but knives here
knives and forks, I'm dreaming of eating
pork chops with chopsticks
popcorn, trail mix.

A savage shot me with a bow and arrow
yesterday, morning or something.
She must have thought I was a boar though,
cause she fled at the sight of me

Can't remember where I was going
with this or when I was struck
with the realization that this native
was the most gorgeous woman I'd ever seen

I'm fresh as watercress

I'm thankful for family
thankful for strippers
pajamas, slippers.
big tits and little dippers.

cabinets of wicker
apples with stickers
bite-sized snickers
with hairpin triggers

Marinaranating on Sauce

Saucy stegosaurus
I got Grants like Horace
plants like forests
planned verse, no chorus.

par for the course: forced flawlessness
Fort Collins-ness, Tom Collins mix
On my margarita flow
hummus, and pita, yo
jalapeno grigiot
red pepper revolver
evolver in a macro-sense
Darwin, Agro-cragg
Farmin carrots and radishes
ravagin cabbages
lavishin on average shit
Pocahontas, Savages
like Ben and Fred
Ben & Jerry
Tom & Jerry
cats taking ice cream from mice
Rats! I'm losing focus-
*hocus pocus*
Geronimo was an eskimo
frozen as a yogurt
igloos are mad chill
Cold, even. Hypothermic fever.
Coffee, tea, coffee, too
throat thoughtfully soothed
yo, could we get a booth?