Before Thursday, After Thursday

I live without you
like a Jew inhabiting
somebody else’s corner
your aura: Kosher
like a dill wonder world
awoke on Sunday morning to see everything in its right place
garden here, furniture over there
like an overt pumpkin or an orchard of a television movie
about learning how to hope in
causes worthy.

People, therein
on the lawn and inbetween
covert conversations, mooring pathways
from her ship of life to his
tree-house

mists of ephemeral
yesterdays
like stale oatmeal on Monday
becomes deeper and better partners
without anybody knowing...

Expeditions

“We were meant to be / We were supposed to be / But we lost it…”

Avril Lavigne, ‘My Happy Ending’

Outside it's raining and -- I'm sure it's been noted before -- it reminds me of tears. Of course it's raining somewhere in the world. Of course somebody's crying. And, of course, I might just too, what the hell?

You ring around the rosie so many times you end up like this: a lost ruffian, just lost, fucking about in the woods (such is the judgment of outside observers) but at least enjoying it along the way, yessir.

That is one step forward. At the end of the Purdue days, nothing was very good. Douglas got tired of being the only man in the fountain. And the fountain had stopped flowing. Not much but cracked cement and spraying water, but not the celebratory kind -- rather the excretory, the mistaken, unexpected spurts and children shrieking in mock horror (or real, who knows the difference?).

It was, so. Whaddaya gonna do about it

that's what Paul Simon would like to know

So I sit here, resolved to write more prosaically than usual, because most don't seem to understand poetry, and the dank diffidence it allows to bloom, but--here, soldier, you may be on to something. All I'm gonna do RIGHT NOW is sit down on my couch and write and there's not a goddam thing in the world you can do to change that. To change me. I cannot be changed I am the self-seeking goddess womb of the Earth. Mother Mary and Brother Douglas all rolled in to one.

There is, of course, one minor detail I'd like to get out of the way. So from at least August 8th until late September, a solid six weeks or so, I didn't smoke pot. Thought it would help clear the air, allow me to be less "depressed," get my "shit together" and get going and feel good, or at least better.

I started up again last week.

My initial conclusion is that: damn, the stuff really ain't that bad for you. In fact if I look at my level of writing and artistic output it's definitely higher this past week than general… certainly way above or almost possibly shortly equaling in size all that I “accomplished” during my weed-free experiment. I thought the weed was contributing to sleeping way too much but once again, this habit showed no signs of getting better and may have even gotten worse, actually significantly worse, during the time without it. I cannot explain this but feel justified in smoking again at least for the time being. Marijuana consists of unpollinated flowers, used by humans for thousands and thousands of years. It's more than you can say for Prozac, Xanax, and all these other synthetic neurotransmitter-altering drugs we take without flinching, actually thinking it's good for us. Both my parents for example have strongly encouraged me to take antidepressants, in fact, because in truth they think it's the best for me. Part of me has thought: well, maybe they're right. Certainly there is something deeply real, troubling depression thing. It has had me by the feet and I don't even want to explain where I am now, just the small nascent bits of insight I seemed to have accumulated in these pasts years and months.

I'm a 25-year-old gorilla. Who will now, for the sake of science, smoke a bowl of cannabis and see how that changes things. I doubt it will but I felt it important to get out these few trenchant thoughts while I was "sober," though sobriety offers little calm to a person whose troubles have not been solved in a sober state. It's really irrelevant--the point is seeing the results, producing the results. And here it goes:

Pack a bowl of good quality cannabis. The unsmoked smell of the plant is quite remarkable and sagacious; redolent and pleasing. Before getting high I can tell you it smells like opportunity, wild promise, and reminiscent of walking into a bank, deep underground, though somehow still lit by bright sunshine, shimmying to get a piece of this holy place’s currency, fruit of the dark magic Earth.  

It smells like approaching rain or distant skunk. But it doesn't want us to get away... no, the cannabis plant long ago learned that we like her delicate redolence, the slightly-bewildering magic and a million generations of re-birth, flowers and buds and hippies and high school kids and punk rockers and actresses and waiters and midnight lovers in the park, all passing around and surviving on the glory of this punk magic weed, marijuana.

Now I'll start smoking.

So i've done it. The magic spring whispers of the plant become impregnant women (meaning impractical teen's out shopping pregnant). Magic lantern slides. Like I was saying earlier, the past few days have been like a re-purposing, a re-branding: Do I Really Want To Go To Law School more than I'd like to do anything else?

I don't think so.

So that perhaps helps explain all the sleeping and the crass boredom and fake tears and real misery that I just keep kidding and hiding myself away from.

Look Main, we got it. You're miserable already. Nothing is right and you're never happy. You don't want to go running or take the initiative to join athletic leagues and do much to seek out new friends. As much as you're improving you still are moving slowly.

And at the same time, reign in the sly motive, that entity entitled "fake anger." It's not the real kind of angry that actually makes you get up to do something drastic; it's the feeling -- he or she -- which says, "I could theoretically pick up that TV and break it, would what good would it do?" Or more simply: yes, I'm angry enough to get out there and run a marathon just like that, fix it all with one big punch.

Okay, okay, so he doesn't like running. This isn't the goddam runner's club already. And we know it cannot all be done so quickly. He knows he prefers basketball. But there always minor obstacles which seem like marjor obstacles. He has to call up people, or oh, get an overpriced pass to the student gymnasium only to be constantly reminded YOU ARE NOT A STUDENT HERE, or anywhere, BRO.

That's all part of it, goddam it. Part.

My words speak for themselves,

but what of it

Hammond & His Purchase

The man below this sentence,

just bought a new cellular phone.

Disclaimer, Yo

Here's an important disclaimer I gotta share with y'all in real prose for once: read this crazy shit at your own risk. Cause this stuff right here, this shit is crazy! You know what I mean when I say dat? Cra-Zayyyyyyyyyyy!!! mother-lover you gotta step back before you get yo ass dusted, playa!

But seriously guys it's really potent gangster memories
(already breaking my own rule)
about things that were important
to the kind of parties only ruined by
self-impinging metaphor balls
just hopping out and horrifying everyone!!!

Eric's Freakout!

1. Before the Hospital


Here's what Eric said:

'I too had an abscess on my molar
the "doctor" solar-sore and obsessed
with excess said:
"You been riding the
bipolar express?" '



(watch me reverse standard rules!)

'So I checked in
to an Excedrin clinic
look at me look at him look at
Eric
that chill escalator all moving up on me
believing i'm a pepper worm
or somebody's effluent noxious waste.'

Geppetto's Oath or Someone's Personal Ad

You must name your dad Sycamore
or Mulberry if he acts girly.

I'm looking for a hip single gal
in her early thirties (i'm tweny five-
years-old, and swervy-curvaayyyy)

(there i go, all Mulberry)

But what I really mean to say is
I am a man who knows
how to snipe Jacktails,
and I ain't afraid of shit!

Nice slacks!

every time we lunch,
become brainiacs –
I didn’t say tongue because why say
got-‘em-back, or "Hey, nice slacks!"

(or "Shark attack!" so suck on that)

I’m outta town; I’m out of whack
when the stones look at me, they crack.

Snack on worms and pelicans. Warm me
with your "Them. It was not us but
Them."

The oldest level game
growing at your ear like something fear
some

thinking DNA has already written every
curve of every body of every religion let us fly
on into the wilderness of this crazy religion fever
flying red, flying green, every color but the color of dungaree
(blue lives those lives because of me!)

so just please believe me and let it be
we are becoming dangerous already. Please respect
the way I communicate. Please
believe in cinnamon; it is a flavor
uxorious to the point of
being the last "U" in the dictionary and a word which means
"someone like George Bush, who expresses excessive love
fer theyrrrrrrrrrrrre wiiife, Nancy!"

(what a boondoggle, dictionary friends!)

A flavor like love-me-in-specific-winter-situations way
that says: i'll bring you a Red Stripe and we'll watch
the United States Ski Team tank the other assholes
in the Winter Olympics, sponsored by CocaCola
and brought to you by
Sagittarius sex symbols
everywhere!

The Bipolar Express

I'm gonna name my kid Sycamore
or Mulberry if it's a girl.
Nectarine, if she's blonde.

I had an abscess on my molar
the "doctor" said it was
from solar excess, I replied:

You been riding the
bipolar express,? Alas
I digress - seriously,

I might name my kid Baltimore
like the Ravens, incidentally riding
the Kyle Boller express

straight to second place
in their division
which is not at all bad, I still really
like their chances for the wild card.

The Polar Express Motif Begins

Walking home was filtering through orchids. At 5 AM I left the green den. It was gloriously foggy. The city lights and buildings were straight out of Polar Express--Welcome to the North Pole. A Christmas-lidded parlor yonder, and over there, the community center, where you took pottery classes with your girlfriend, who isn't anymore your girlfriend.

Moving on, down the road, we'll ignore the Peking Garden, and go to my car. The Santa dorms in the distance are quite spacious-looking, brilliant-lit and lovely.

To be continued. 

It used to be

Swimming in the orchard;
Swimming in the rain;
Swimming in the flood!

It kicks in—so, like a
shot of vodka to the throat
I believe in somebody’s vision
of holy—it wasn’t mine

My eyes have once again proven that
your cloud, blanket and my 50 cents
are raining on your front lawn.

Carry on, until it’s gone.

It always was
after all.

Rad Ideas

1) Life is the result of unprotected sex; the result of the best feeling you can have, during the act which you cannot perform unless you want to have a child (i.e. create life)... or are for sure your girlfriend is taking birth control medication... or are a lesbian.

2) New Restaurant for Champaign, IL: "Fuck Illinois." This fine restaurant/bar would serve as the hotspot for all a manner of non-Illini fan. Possible motto: "A great place to watch your team lose to Illinois," or something like that, to compensate for the whole "This-place-is-called-'Fuck-Illinois'" thing.

3) More later.

My Dear God Pastrami

My pastrami is off the chains, young-blood,
this movie's about freed pasta, the kind that'll cost ya
because it isn't slave labor honey,
we keep our liberty about us;

like scarves or cloaks,
you'll find me in muddlin sheets
meaning swaddling clothes
sheets for the dead.
A baby arrived for adult business
parallels an
infant scoping the porn industry
and finding it wanting.

Why I'll Learn Mandarin

I should have said
"...became a diminished lake,"
which is what it all becomes
in the eyes of the old

I smelled my China-maid hat today and imagined it smelling of its home country. Myself, the hat and I had a little discussion: can I embue the hat with my essence regardless of its material? I mean, I like the hat. But there are details: Preferably I would know where the material came from... the patch of land, the grower, etc. That is the natural way of things. And fuck you if you don't agree. Also, what soul does it have? Were the plants grown in good conditions, those which gave this hat it's material? What kind? What color green are they? What type of farmers are they? Kind? Honest? Does it matter?

Of course not. Going too far there. But you see what I mean. The point is: where was the hat made? By whom? Were they pregnant? Do they hold hands on first dates there? Can you really only have one child?

All our materials
come from foreign meals
and flights of fancy
we shall never comprehend.

Oh the hat. So the point is: is the hat just an empty vessel, in which I can instill it with my essence? Eventually the hat becomes "mine." Obviously, from a financial point of view, it's mine. But spiritually--not quite yet. For one thing it doesn't probably smell like me yet. I haven't "broken it in."

Is all this just bullshit? Things I think
retain value because we give them it
ghosts of spiritual handshakes
around every corner.

More Like PolterGeist Reservoir

You'll find PolterGeist Reservoir in Indianapolis. She was birthed by underpaid immigrant laborers in 1943 by damming Fall Creek. This breezy beer pond became the second largest lake in Indiana, providing residents 7 billion gallons of water (all of it with a healthy trace of atrazine). Nobody asked the salamanders what they thought about the loss of habitat, but we hear they're... dead.

The damming also killed all a manner of veteran woodpiper and sand-creek fir, whose heavenly (and intoxicating) redolence was never sniffed again.

Clarence PolterGeist, a former owner of the Indianapolis Water Company who foresaw a deficit in Indianapolis's water supply, first envisioned PolterGeist Reservoir to preemptively address the problem. Unfortunately, a gang of cocaine-addled hydraulic workers attacked PolterGeist's mansion in Carmel. They succeeded in scaring his family and burning down his house. PolterGeist was never seen again. Some say he became... a spirit.

Geist Reservoir

Geist Reservoir is a reservoir in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., constructed in 1943 by damming Fall Creek to provide water for Indianapolis. Upon completion, Geist Reservoir was the second largest lake in Indiana providing approximately seven billion gallons of water.

Geist Reservoir was named after Clarence Geist, a former owner of the Indianapolis Water Company who foresaw a deficit in Indianapolis's water supply, and envisioned Geist Reservoir to preemptively address the problem – but not without a casualty. Planning for the reservoir began as early as 1913, when hydraulic engineers estimated that White River and Fall Creek would not provide enough water for the increasing needs of Indianapolis. Geist gradually bought some 5,000 acres in Fall Creek Valley in the 1920s and 1930s, including the small town of Germantown, which today lies at the bottom of the reservoir.

Although controversial, the reservoir was completed in 1943, five years after Clarence Geist's death. In the 1960s further controversy arose over plans for commercial and residential development in the area around the lake. A proposal in the 1970s to triple the size of the reservoir was defeated, and a housing boom began in the lake area. In recent years the Geist area has experienced rapid growth. The area is noted for its unique topography and the reservoir. Reservoir.

The dam which creates Geist Reservoir is located at the lake's southern end. Fed by Fall Creek on the north, the lake overflow is directed into the creek again at the south. The reservoir is mostly rather shallow (ten feet or less). The area has undergone rapid development, and many high-valued homes now line the reservoir's waterfront. Including Peyton Manning and Peyton's bi-sexual friend named Janice.

Poltergeist

Flowing like a free
style
reach for the dial

reach for the vial-
a vile concoction
of whiskey and beer

and whiskey, as well.
my relationship with vodka
is on the rocks, you see

I keel over - or, more aptly,
I try not to vomit. There are
people around.

Rightfully stifling my right to revival,
but I'm a lifer, rife with survival.
Triflers, travelers - meet my rifle.

Call me a criminal, smoothie king
I was suspended for scooting
too close to the front of the class

professors need their personal space

Scorched Unicorn

Larry, what'd you do with the hammers?
Asked Ed, who was looking like a dead-ham
dad, it's the dead hamster alert,
everybody freeze,
it's the internet speaking. Don't believe
anything you read, just some
of it, some of it's bound to be entertaining
or, hey, Ned, how 'bout a microcosm
meaning he's another steamblood
regression to the unicorn state
humbled, no blood
one horn,
magic.

Lemon Pepper

This fucking morphine drip- I don't think it's working
stir-fried muffintops, Tom Gugliotta,
maybe it's working.

Cold pony jumping jacks
I've got the waffle house blues
kayaks and canoes

slivers of jam
dam rivers
and livers.

Snubbery

I had an idea that as a prank my law school friends and I would snub someone in our group of friends. Just completely ignore them in the halls and in class, ignore phone calls, texts, gchats, the whole deal. Total alienation. I really feel like Jason – um, I mean the person we would snub – wouldn’t take long to confess to something horrible he’d done. He would take me aside after a day, maybe two of the snubbery, and say something like “dude, is this about me farting in your toaster? It was a joke!”

Mangrove Ascot, Possibly

Everybody seemed
to remember me. As if
I had some solid selection
where i'm posed like a brilliant root
to the hoi paludal, swamps emerging
out of every suggestion.

Every breath, indeed, becomes reduced
to something understandable;
imagine, for instance, that she's a new bride
a-shower in her matrimony
glaring but forgetting
for whom her glare recedes.

Animal, OK?

More than it has ever meant. There are large levers
where the people lived before, where they people the
ledgers of the brass war; the tally still mounts.
Like slowly the crows they reveal
(of/from what i hear)
they are shrewdness moreover animal
akin to none before displayed
or whosoever mount whereupon
we declaim a claim upon you!

Frail Boy In Woods

Frail boy in the cedars
talks about Michigan Wolverines
(not the animal but the football team).

Drake in the AM

Every morning, Drake Googled himself, then looked in the mirror, then went to the bathroom. First he'd make himself three to four cups of coffee. And drink a beer or two. Then he'd jog. A great, phantasmal jog, sweat profoundly effusing from his joints, his rancorous heart, his long problematic legs. They were more like chisels then legs... they were too long, they swayed to one side or the other. In short he had trouble getting not where he wanted to go, but deciding upon anything. It was if his heart were in remission, recovering from a glaring transmission of something as deadly as cancer or as innocuous as childbirth.

In other words, Drake was a maniac. After the 7 AM sweat-run, he'd take a shower and pound out an orgasm or three in the confines of his dusty apartment. He didn't believe in pornography and instead relied upon the graphic interior of his mind, all swelling and contingent upon strange continents for its fragile alignment. The jogging helped this all, of course.

Then, around 8 O'clock, he'd start talking to himself.

"Time get out of the shade of the weeds," was a common cat-call to get the morning started. "Time to pull myself out of these acrimonious suggestions of lament."

Then, he'd run down the stairs, careful to duck lest he hit his head on a jutting short part of the ceiling, and explode with laughter upon bottoming out. He routinely couldn't stop himself and tripped through the glass window. For this reason he was badly scarred and nobody could stand to look at his face, always scarlet with duress and battle.

Eventually he got up, dried off the blood, and went to Aroma, a local coffee shop hot spot amongst the sexually active and middle-aged laborers.

Touching & Reading (PG)

Change my ways.
When I’m trying to get something done, I pray
for better luck next time.

Or when I try to explain I instead rely on magic
to bely my failings: fall, the season
of the tailback

covered-up gardens and a betrayal we couldn’t stomach
astonished

we do not rely on ourselves,
but are stewards of something great:
a deeper cannon,
a stauncher true
wherein nobody is shot
but our dreams just continue into day;

Perhaps
a song somewhere will catalogue
everything I’ve ever thought
and I’d have no reason
to any longer live.

Meanwhile, the boys
are playing at the anatomy game
in the corner, can’t you see?

We believe in the colors true
which relieve us of our
doubts and shouts and strands of cord
are falling on us now.

Whoever reads this
touches a person.

Murder

There's nothing funny about murder.
But tonight, I killed a man.
I think his name was Jordan.

Not only do I not regret it,
but I will forever wish we had never met.
Which means: I have never loved.

Everything Burns

I owe no excuse to anybody

this pile of dead saplings is livid enough
alive enough, groused ruffling
those who disturb are disturbed,
you know...

so i light the pile and let the whole
goddam thing go. nobody respects
you until the blaze rends, & oh,
how they stare! when up in flames
it goes

Adam Smith's Invisible Hand

"It takes a chicken-thief to catch a
chicken-thief," said FDR
about Joe Kennedy. That's actually true,
she said...
hello.

& when you said,
"I don't know. What is it?" I know you meant,
"I don't know what it is." Meaning:
don't take me to the opera
if I don't wanna go, honey.

Talking about rats here. How culpable are
the feeder funds? That word has several meanings.
Culpable. Legal or moral?
Not illegal unless they were directly involved.
The prior court decisions said they weren't culpable.
But we know they are immoral.
They do little research and fall for the same thing
that we fall for, us non-smelling masses.

Project Jennifer

Jason's sister.
Shoulda known.
Wouldn't count. Could have grown
plants this summer but I didn't. Might've
saved some face but I didn't: YOU ARE MY
FACE, she said, in the sandy windy and exclaimed,
"You don't even need water, here!"
(She meant for bathing)

And it wasn't about Manganese nodules after all,
was it, Mr. Hersh? Not those little presents
of chemistry fresh and unsettling and intimately
slow though they grow... they are alive, as alive
as Russian submarines and Dan Marino's Id.
The bottom of the ocean, Mister Hughes.
The last place you would expect.

1. The Great How-To

I am very tired
of this ambiguous warfare
in myself. Moreso with the self
that doesn't return his gaze. Moreover
the proud glint of rural men hustling into shadows
like a long row of dirty dinosaur teeth
gleaming with crimson envy

Yes, I have entered the war
on the side of the man who is losing
but cannot lose because he has
planned it all, planned this pitched tent
and that battlefield, where the Orange
will beat the Blue
into that late summer sunset, and everything
sheds, a locust consuming herself, every
corner of the world becoming a twinge less
full of unrest and suggestions about
where-to-go or how-to-get-there.

You know, the second part--nobody
really knows, anyway. The most basic question:
How to live? How to live.

There is no How-To under the butler,
no grand map scheme or plan of plenty or
shortage of dross to re-comb

there isn't a guide here,

we are a book without an ending;

trite, but true, writing itself, where does
she want to go? who wants to be himself? wherefore
are though Romeo? Why are you Rome?

His had, her dad, our dad, looming and shrooming and
ballooning into tonics of gin and shit and herself and
crab moons on the nebula circuit, again.

I went to Circuit City to take a shit
but I couldn't find the bathroom.

Back in Block

I'm back on the block like J.Lo in 2002 so it's time to invade.

This masquerade is a phantom of the office and a fire has started.

New bookshelves can break if Chilean and transported on a small dolly.

Pardon me for the infinitejection.

Dont Fight Win.

Ampersand (Truly Insane)

Ampersand
8.22.09

Astonishingly,
nobody fits, not
anymore.

<>
In the woods
breaking bread with the undead
cantaloupe mind, rind, melon
then comes the verb.

As in, what the fuck are you looking at?

I’d like to talk about something important for once.
Owls.
You heard me.
Owls.

Are they wise? Or is it just their
wide-set eyes (over there!) that set them apart?
As if it made any difference? As if
it made any difference. We cannot
completely live if we don’t
completely rid ourselves of the belief
that we are the most important animals.

Which we are. Animal magic and the so-forth
speeches of the gods, we are all just a bunch
of alien weirdos, speech, chat, thumbnail

…and you go on like this—floating—not really knowing
what you want to say or how to say it. Nevertheless, the impetus remains. Something needs to be said, after all.

Who is that?

Nobody. Nobody’s forest or nobody’s desert or
maybe you have become too free at this writing thing,
wouldn’t be the first time, remember when
old Jackie made up a bad joke and wasted everybody’s time.
That’s right a joke, grandma.
First of all there aren’t people.
They are all just a milieu. Oh, snakebitten. Trap door arm-rest. And everything else
was
was
frightfully unjust.

But what are you gonna DO about it?
That’s what I’d like to know.

Saving face is saving grace is bundling
cans & cans & cans & cans of mace
like a factory canal
pirate turned backward
turned inward
turned hopeful, like a breezy salmon,
like a kingpin, like a dead beauty queen

who are thou Marry? Marrying whither and whom
you want, down the alley like a pile of bricks,
clunk, clunk, magic. Happening at random times like
bricks in the wall. Keep going back to this brick thing and
it’s really beginning to creep me out. And this time I didn’t
take the pill so you get the output, let’s imagine it’s like
putting our feet on the ground and fucking dragging them
at least you’re getting somewhere, and at worst you’re leaving a mark after all

after all after all
spooking at David Foster Wallace’s shadow,
where did he live,
who did he look like (me)
ransom, handsome kidney the unicorn thief
Disney
was a Nazi killed somebody didn’t he? Reagan
faking the pregnancy test arrest
military zone pregnant
cocaine, drug-test, zombie
arm-rest, again

like a spiritual without cause or direction or reason
a hope-fest, a clunker-up, a good hard fucking
where you’re mind is so dirty it’s turned into a cave
a tenement, a sordid crawfish lair,
a cobweb home

wherein everybody combs their hair
or doesn’t, or has flair,
or couldn’t, like James Cagney
in a knife-fight, skilled as a badly burned Albanian boy—
the random lamp factory of dead regrets and Kanamycin
(spelled wrong) and microbial resistance and ants and crayfish and sex
and orgasms and pornography and vaginas and cunnilingus and the clitoris
and wet wet wet heat like magic fire dark the night burning until

oh, just then, just then, oh wait…
the magic fungus awakes and it says,
“I never existed.”

&

“Goodnight.”

White Lightning (& cranes) Pt. I.

EVERY body, like white lightning illuminates a snake:
here, there, where, everywhere?
The next part, the next centimeter,
the next (alright, ...) moment
(where time becomes space)
& (of course) something changes.

It is not without fanfare. But the challenge is
acceptance.

Sure, there's James, immaculate.

You know he's read the gospels.

Believes -- God Bless Him -- In everything
ABOUT WHICH HE
was told.

And these prepositions
keep sidestepping the terminal
unknowing that
one is a fine thing
to end a sentence with.

So many fucking trials.
So many destitute
pathetic outlets.

If you were a river, you would
flow, like so, like so,
pollution, like so. The delta. Minnesota
to Iowa. To Illinois/Missouri. (Not one.)
Kentucky.
Tennessee.
Mississippi.

THE GULF!
Poor Black people would watch you
without your knowing --
you are water.

Black Boys

You cannot see
the Black boys at night,
not because of their hue but instead their size
darting in and out of the corners
of our apocalypse, a lapse of better
judgment.

The Black boys at play; is anybody listening?
I have grabbed handfuls and handfuls of snakes
in the littered dark and wondered:
Has anybody looked for me?
Is anything going to occur
if not that which I have caused?

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...


<>

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.

Like An Agreement

Do you like apples?
I got her
number
how'd you like 'em
(& so forth)

number as in
more numb

i meant
is what she said
is wherein we went to bed
like an agreement.
A good one.

<>
Blockbuster summertime
dropkick bummer why
everybody strums the scribes
for anybody, nobody, herein let us be there for it
forthcoming bloodwork blood perks bold quirks
and everybody says
like them so so so big
a whole old big daddy
crape myrtle and so forth
growing around the eaves
of the sanctuary.

Gayer

It might be getting better. But that doesn't make any better the fact that this blog has lost it's central pulse; there is no reason for it to keep going. This is not a place people go to "check things out." People don't hang out here. My frown is a Rembrandt, and I am gay!!!

Daughters, Ballparks, Or Neither

Of course you probably don't wanna
fire on these, these manta rays I call
"guns." They swim until they arrive;
they swim until they're
done. You know where I'm staying, Starks?
I'll get you that platinum-laced Jersey at
the stroke of midnight, ya heard? Eesh, cameras.
Everybody hates cameras. Just look at them,
looking at you, taking your picture.

Eesh. Anyway today
I grew some words, like celerity, which means "rapidly."
Like rapid celery with celerity these celebrities wither
away with amphetamines and not eating. Tiny,
invisible hair covering their bodies like brineshrimp,
(which is One Word in my dictionary, harumph, yaaaas).
Bulimic is the new bucolic, transplanted like a houseplant
into the cemetery, cool and austere and stripped-down
and unaugmented, as well as serene, not-to-be questioned.
But with all this said it's hard to believe we will continue to
afford the dead the physical space they seem to deserve
when all the living ones keep writing petitions and retching
sweaty violence toward our daughters and
let's just keep them all apart, anyway. Separate but Equal
brand Mouthwash is good enough for me. My gums sparkle
clean and pink health and my sheath never quivers, because
I don't have one, because I don't need a protective covering
over my unit, because I'm a man, MAN, and my testes
hang out like this and my huge Andromeda straw just lays
there, gathering legend, because sperm need to just chill,
brother? Can you feel it? All that biology so thick you gotta
put on some anti-shades to see through all the layers of complexity,
so complex that no sarcasm can put us to sleep tonight; instead,
it's Pure Quality. And an understanding--
as simple as, let's say, "Lay still now for eight hours!"--
of anatomy and miracle glands.

Even Pharaohs Eat Lunch

Daddy's got it backwords, i mean backwards,
back toward the woods i bear my sideburns
meaning firearms: WANT TO FIRE ON ME?

I scuttle ships with the best of 'em, scoop
skittles like the rest of them, chest in chin,
feeling brave & thin, like a mushroom grin
on a day-glo necklace Santa--Christmastime on Mars!
Not again!

& so-forth, Mars bars, broads at the bars with
the Farmar Jersey on and I say, "Hey, nice
Jersey, what's the deal?" And she says, "Hey,
nice try kid, I'm pregnant, feel," and I say
"Great belly. Oh, a kick? Nice talking to you."

(This is needles-haystack--meaning needless--
to say: I'M IMAGINING EVERYTHING)

And her name is Cynthia and her breasts are
fucking fantastic (while we're imagining we'll picture
her topless, hotter than Megan Fox)
and this fantasy tops the list of weird things
to talk about, like cysts, or conversation with the
wife about your lurid trysts.

& I insist not to be a night-bear, not to be afraid
of the nightscare, everything is a nightwear
possibility: the rug, the furniture, Jones' hat
that was mine which was Amanda's and now:
who knows? Time moves like a globe sometimes:
Around, moving like a clown on steroids, getting
angry for no reason, quoting Danny Glover,
telling Mel not to kill himself.

But that's not the point. Another comma, another mid-
spin re-direct check-point check express-lane bypass
and I die of grass--Digress like Reader's Digest
(now online only)...

Throat clearing done. So I want to say:

I can communicate quite well. Deft language becomes me.
Or, I create it with ease. See how concise we can be?

But the usual limits bore me, I do not walk here,
ON THE SIDEWALK, rather in the grass
(maybe pulling up weeds for the fun of it, fuck you
Monsanto)

Which is why I write like this
like a child who absconds from the bus
mid-transit and gets hit by a semi

yeah, i got a semi
every time I look at pictures from semi-
formal Junior year, drinking that potion, juice
& everclear, ever clear that this year I would be
having a lot of great sex, fucking in the old train
station, but that's getting tawdry.

I mean,
The usual inexact man would say
I color outside the lines.

This is kind of true: It's accurate in the same way
that I'm a kind-of-honest person, which is something
we all attest to, but which is almost always a dangerous
lie, more dangerous than the lies we speak.

It is really this: most of us want to be truthful. We want
to be honest people.

But we fail in that. Every single day
it's like I don't recognize the person in the mirror.
"Hi, Douglas Brain here, um, sole survivor of
a recent airplane crash, um, borderline personality
syndrome (something must explain this madness),
borderline drug-addict who thinks he can write well,
well...." I've already stopped talking because it's the
truth, at least the last part,
and they aren't expecting that... but what if it's
all true? What if nothing really means anything? Such
hard work being a Nihilist, yeah right The Dude.

Let me try again:
"Ok, that was an exaggeration. But you probably
wouldn't hire me or date me. I stay up late and am
remarkably slow at ordinary tasks. I'm regularly late.
Women floor me. Drugs have abounded
in my personal life, like friends, except they aren't friends.
They're drugs.

But so am I, DROUGHT, Drugged Main, an animus
you cannot comprehend, a complex snow leopard
in an otherwise warm, canine world. I am a wolf,
a sad legend. My eyes are capable of tearing up
often. I say things I don't mean
nearly as often as I do the opposite.

I am spoiled, undisciplined, sloppy, somewhat arrogant.
But worse of all, I'm entitled, slopping about like an
over-educated busboy.

People at McDonald's probably work harder than me.
Even at 25, you've got to start somewhere.
From now on I'm taking life seriously, but don't
quit reading just yet, I feel prodigious, like a mummy
waking up, casting off the quilts of dead lunches and
a million sad sandwich stories.

Since you asked

1. Dielectric breakdown

I am a horse blinded in a thicket
shielded by everything and nothing
rambling, rambling, rambling;
completely lost.

So this is what it comes to. Angry at most everybody, and probably most of all, myself.

Live cleanly. Drink moderately. Seek adventure
only so far as it fits within a hallmark card
or your online journal
nobody reads, might as well keep it in a fucking diary
locked to the world.

Live clean. Work hard. Be effective
but recreate, give people money,
buy all sorts of things. Want love? How about
an airline ticket to the nearest lovely destination.
Low fares straightaway. Want companionship?
Well, there’s always the internet,
which we swear, says Match.com, connects
actual people. And Mark203 met Skier_hottie24
and damn if its wasn’t sex on the first date,
a spring marriage nine months later and
a rainy divorce two springs hence, with one
unhappy, mistaken child now on Our hands,
groping about like a misshapen question
or an accusation.

Be good, be normal, Do Not Be Strange,
unless you’re a character, wherein TNT welcomes
you (or is it USA?), although you have to be on TV.

Fit in, get a job, move ahead in the world
while the human race inexorably
pushes back the limits of the Earth
thereby poisoning limitless tracts of land,
rivers, lakes, oceans, air, coral-reefs, wetlands –now
practically gone – our rainforests, our heavenly
world right here on Earth the next windfall
for the goddam Gold-Diggers at Mobile Energy Inc.
who give generously at all their local houses of
Jesus, making them helluva good citizen
may God bless them for their charity,
& so forth.

Gross, Comma, Comatose Lime

Aforementioned limbs:
none, as yet.
Still working on it. It was so slippery,
she said, embroidering her daddy's glove.
"Dad will wear this in honor of me and
my great success raising honey bees,"
she said. Her name was Mathilda;
of course, she was a Mousavi supporter.
And Dr. Dre said--Nothing, you idiots!
Doctor Dread is dead! He's locked in my
spacebud! He withered, like the arm,
just now mentioned, of the T-Rex,
(what a scavenger fake!)
when we pursued engagement.
Which won't work. Of course. John Bolton
said so.