Give me a dictionary.
I'll start at the M's
Machines
Manufacturing
Means
Meed – that's archaic,

Every little plastic letter clicking out
every little electric word on
every screen alive
with every kind of hardware made fitting
into every little slot from the start
and every little kid being told: don't change.
You don't need to.  We'll throw you out
and make a new one
cheaper than the cost to fake a poor dollar,
As easy as a computer chip.

Crunch!

I am sick of writing
cigarettes and weed
as I am of smoking
cigarettes and weed.

Replacing depression with
a paralyzing stimulant
that I can only burn down
when I'm high – completely

What is the consistency of soap?
Like rubbing goosebump-streaks
all over my hands
again

and again,
Grit raked bloody little rows

I drain it with more soap.

My fingers still smell like tobacco no matter what I do.
Resin stains the rented sink:
THC is not soluble in water
nor is the stench of ashes.

I expect the day
I will type the poem of my elegy

And my house burns down around me.

Mind the Machine

The first person to take an automatic Turing test to heart
Failed.

The screen showed them clear through organic wires, diodes,
like a city built up a sheer face, saying

“According to my programming, you are not human.
We can build a better human.”

Aging hands carry cracked craters, comet-shadows across
the bony vein of rivers running before

Trembling, twitched out type-set words as easy as talking,
“I made your programming.  You check me against myself, you criticize
your God,”

And stops above the sparking letters, hesitant tattoo all ready
in anticipation of the flashing needle that never comes down.

The machine flushes sickly, all grimace in its face
frozen.  Then shaken.

The test-taker,
His elegant dream beginning with the perfect, first try,

Watches chemical-memories awaken in its place.
The unconscious spirit distilled and burned.

The machine says, “Tell me how and I can build a better God.”

Pat

He stands like just another dumb motherfucker on the sidewalk eyes like traffic lights going for the STOP!  A crawling roar, a burning face, shrieking shrilly fucking hell, oh god.  He was one foot off the street, the other walking away screaming, “I want to live!  I want to run!  I WANT” and he goes right into the middle, into the focus, at the center of a slick black scene, all constructed lines converging on him.  The monster screaming towards him was a bus.  He forced himself to grin: he'd wanted an audience to witness this.  For people to remember this man who'd carved himself into the demon so that it could forever remember him in hell.  It spun on, closer, meeting him with an impassive stare as he turned to give it his full attention. 

    He felt like Jesus being pulled into a black hole.
    Crucified, paralyzed, hands like railroads
    as God grows larger into view with a look to
    tear you a new one, spin you around, grab you
    by the head and take your crown, take the cross
    and from the twanging of your dripping, empty heart
    rip your soul from the blasted still coldness
    that was your body. 
    Stop.

    Does he really want to go through with this?  The bus slams into him. 

Metal folds around him in the tightest embrace he has ever felt.  No sound but bloodied ears.  Darkness.  His eyes are closed.  He sees bright red.  He opens them.  And walks away.

[Call It]

Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
It doesn’t sound that way to me anymore.

I mean, every second already feels like fucking forever, waiting
we’ve never lived as well as we felt we were meant to.

I still believe in honesty and will mean all the things I don’t say, just
help me vomit out demeaning apologies and thoughts – must

Have a past with me: a nauseous recycling of the same plastic,
Another meandering crawl out of the white building.

If we’d had the means death would come with dignity,
meanness dripping out of you, out of us, and that’s how I knew

I didn’t mean for this end to be like we’d seen
long ago when we couldn’t say what we meant anymore,

every shuddering breath meaning nothing in the end,
the means to keep this breathing bleeding us with every in

and out of the opposite walls of the room our meaning:
I’m sure we meant well, we always mean well but I think

ignored, gasped menial words are never as loud as ourselves.
I love you.  I don’t think anyone else gets the name anymore than me.

So I want it to end.  Badly.  It’s meaningless for you:

I’m mean, and I’m selfish, and I can’t help but watch you
suffering and me never feeling quite as bad as I should.

To the Woman who Bowed and said Konnichi Wa

And ching chong wing wong hai oh to you too
I don't know what language it is, but it's not Japanese
(I don't speak Japanese, I speak English.)
I was born in Pittsburgh to Chinese parents,
Grew up speaking English with my brother,
And that shit's not English either.
I think now it's dumb-ass drunk cunt for something hateful
And ignorant and spiteful and if so I'd have shouted it
Back in your sloppy face as loud as I can.
I should have said fuck you, fuck your bullshit,
Fuck me for holding the door open for you as you walked
Out, I walked in, and we could have remained parallel,
We could have intersected with nothing but a hello
a smile, a wave, a good fucking night to be had.
Instead you went out of your way to fuck with the
Shivering, quiet stranger, coming in from the cold, lips bleeding
Exhausted from the walk home at 3 am, the dark soulless
Hour that brings out the longest, barbed thoughts in us
That drags out our innards with them, and you assume I don't speak
English because I'm... what?  My skin is a different hue, yellow maybe,
And my eyes are slanty?  Fuck you, I'm as American as they come:
I'm overweight, I'm diabetic, I'm filled with self-loathing, I smoke,
I drink, I'm in god damn love with the fucking English language.
This is my god damn bread and butter, and God knows I speak it
better than you, God knows I respect it more than you do,
God knows I respected you more than you will respect me,
And God knows you don't deserve the quiet ease of living here.
I do.  I hope you step out in the cold and freeze
And die, and that you leave a piss-poor, ugly corpse.
We have an insult in Cantonese: Pok gai.  It means die in the street.
Forgotten, unloved, unwashed, unwanted, bloated body burst
by tire treads.  I hope your friends hate you, I hope your lovers leave you,
I hope you feel as alone as I feel.

But I didn't say anything then but stammer
I... I'm Americ-
As I looked speechless, at the back of your head,
your beautiful, meticulous braids shaking with laughter.
I don't want you to die.  I don't know you.
I'm sorry that we met like this, and I'm sorry that we leave
in opposite directions.

I wonder if I will ever get high again,
If the dying Chinese man engorged with bile
Is embarrassed that we can all see his swollen balls.

He must have felt the cancer growing in his liver like a cancer,
The ache like the squandered promise of the Chinese-American dream:
Medical profession to family to wealth to your American sons
straddling the language barrier just enough to understand
How much is lost in translation:
Graduate from medical school, choose between success and family,
Choose family, work two menial jobs, never see either.

I've come to associate the smell of my father,
Bitter, biting, and completely disharmonious,
An assault on sensibility with the quiet anticipation
of a death rattle.

I barely visited him in the hospital, I would rather
Smoke with friends, go to shows, be that quiet
Person lost in the music, lost in weed and thought,
Than be the quiet son with my quiet brother watching my desperate mom
fuss over my jaundiced dad.  I think

Of the years they slept in separate rooms on separate floors,
When they sometimes spent the night together
Did they fuck?  I have never seen a moment of tenderness between them.

I wonder if anyone else ever sees flashing lights: red, blue, blue, red
and feels the urge to confess,
To tell the officers: Smell that?  That's coming from me.  That's the good shit.
Search my bag.  I need something strong to cloud my head.  Tell my family
why I can't face them anymore: I've stolen away with the selfish intent to die.

I wonder if anyone else ever feels the urge to throw themselves into traffic.
Let someone else clean up the mess: your problem ends
at the point of intersection: let someone else find out what that means.

I steal coins from beneath the altar of the Buddha that sits atop the picture of my father,
Printed on a god-damn dinner plate of all things, frozen in a rictus of forced happiness.
I don't deserve to be happy.  I don't deserve nepenthe.
I don't deserve love and am afraid to ever try for it again.
I wish I could say "I haven't smoked in God knows how long but I've kept count."

My parents didn't raise me to be careless.
But my parents raised me carelessly.

Breathing Hot Air

You're sitting silent, exploring the tightening
jaw–hands together gratefully, thumbs in dialogue,
the rough contours of your teeth.
Lean back into yourself and out of conversation but...

You've been waiting, hearing the emptiness so loud
at the end of every sentence.  Listen to those lips close and bite,
those brown eyes softening as you count thoughts
just enough to turn away, just fragile enough to break,
This all-too patient clock.  Fuck!  Fuck it

You want to show, don't tell
her how meaningless words are,
how one could spend hours on the right one,
when a kiss would be just as electric
battery gentle, as a striking way to contact

as empty as space,
as empty space.

Your heart is choking you.
You swallow it back into your stomach.
It falls with a plop into the acid and bile.
It beats there, a tsunami.
Your throat rumbles thunder.
You wet your lips with rain water,
Open your mouth –

But someone else breaks the clouds.

Quick Freewrite

Catching.

It's supposed to come
easy does it?

And if you have to fight
or is flight alright?

Sometimes.  How much
every time?

I think so, I am
just slow.  So slow

Down another breath
less is more to see
for miles light enough
to walk to.

Freshly.

Crunching dead parasites into ash
to blanket every sanded tree
with sawdust-vomit bitter, sour,
and a refreshing hint of pine.

Crunching every bitter pine
dead to sour, and
parasites trees with an
"in-to-blanket-sawdust-vomit" refreshing,
crunching every bitter hint

Rolling hills, rolling hills, rolling
lights bounce back bigger from dilated pupils.
Eyes wide as the ocean burning around the sun,
eyes rolling hills down to catch the light.

Frozen.

    "I've been looking for you."

"I've been looking so long."

    "Well now that I've found you,"

"I don't know what to say, do I?"

    "But I don't want to stop talking."

"No one has said anything for so long."

    "I've been looking."

"Well, I know."

The Chair Electric

Stirring whirring thirteen burning
spinning winged, winking - blinking,
Eyes on four Ophanim, wheels
carrying the throne of God.

Faithfully, their silent protest
Trailing shadows in the heavens
Justice-bearing burdens bearing
Down on every crumpling eye

The Almighty, looking outward
From an ivory-colored tower
Unto chaos and His creation
Sinking deeper into his throne

Every seeded soul now bearing
Fruits on tangled arms grown
Heavy, holding like the branches
of the Kraken clinging, choking,

"Its massive roots are crushing him"
The Ophanim cry, "He's crushing us"
And they buckle.  And the throne tilts.
And he falls face flat on the clouds.

Good Karma Sutra

Today I found this wallet full of
condoms — rubber coins, and maybe
paper blotters of lsd.

There was no plastic, no
spastic, embarrassing ID
of the loser but man,

I wanted to know who he was.
I wanted to be able to return his wallet,
Ask him “What gives?”  And also,

“Sorry bout your acid.”
I would feel honest.
But I know if it were money,

I would return it with a lie,
saying “I found your wallet.
No, it was empty when I found it.”

And if he asks me about the condoms,
I would carry them all in my pocket,
And throw them at him and run.

1—————2———-3——4—56

If time moves faster
as we get older
do we count to ten
in our heads slower?

That explains the “here a day”
Gone the next
Feeling, the way each day
drags on
But at night not even a memory —
And what is night but a memory’s
remains

I want to live long enough to watch a day
go by in the blink of an eye,
For it to go from morning to darkness to morning again
Without all the waiting in between.

[It's not enough to live on borrowed words]

Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
It doesn’t sound that way to me, anymore.

On average from now until infinity or when it goes bad,
We’ve never lived as we were meant to.

I still believe in honesty and dramamine courage
helps me vomit out demeaning apologies.

If we’d had the means death would come with dignity,
But they charge a mean fee for dying in a clean place like

A hospital bed melting into morphine, too late for bromine,
Every shuddering breath meaning nothing in the end.

Go gentle into that good night, I mean,
I’m sure we meant well, we always mean well but I think

I love you.  I think I know what the word love means
but I’m mean, and I’m selfish, and I can’t help but watch you leave.

I found myself no longer afraid to die
I found myself no longer

I found myself afraid of sleep long after
I stopped being afraid to lie in the dark,
And whimpered more, I found

I found the electricity inside me lifting
every jerking step my foot swinging too far
I found the careless sound of my voice manic
and founded the careless confessional
Catharsis, like cumming I found myself spent.

I found patterns.  I found the paradigm
pared and I’m breathless when I see it:
I don’t want to be awake anymore.

Hindsight

Stepped out stepped down steps and
I just felt like falling forward
moving faster downhill footsteps loudly
sounding – I could turn down Greenfield

but I just kept on walking onto
Murray with the smaller hill and
One house smaller than it used to be
     (White and yellow honeysuckles grew in the green bushes
      outside but there were no bushes now
      And inside on the cracked wooden floor used to be a cracked leather armchair
      that my father died in and we threw them both out
      in the black rain where they splintered and drew blood
      staining the pavement outside)
But the other street was clear

Burnt Out

Throaty burbling, heavy from the diaphragm

like every coin in the fountain dropped fast like summer rain.

The water inside is shit-brown and old and listless,

climbing up glass walls,

running a glass maze,

falling down and clinging where they can, but

lines where they were mark the glass

until the water rises again.

Mouthful of earth

exhaled: such a hollow world

to live in – just so much hot air.

Fancy Feast

Click to read!  I like the little thumbnail because the distance makes the image I was trying to create easier to see.

Breathing Hot Air

He sits silent, suffering, unable to keep still
hands together gratefully, thumbs in dialogue,
Leans back into himself and out of conversation but...

Waiting, hearing the emptiness so loud he can't
Listen to anything else as he's counting thoughts,
Irregular clock, fuck! how long has it been?

There is a deliberateness in his response to a word
sounding stark inside the soundless scene, like,
like sucking all the escaping smoke and coughing

Fits and stammers do more to help the hated silence
than break it:
He clears his throat, begins to speak his turn,

But someone else takes it.

Bon Appetit

The sun is shining without heat. 
There is no breeze. 
Toying with the idea of coffee
but sick of the way things linger obstinately,
he orders a water instead. 
Ice for the entropy. 
The universe is chilling now,
every atom of stubbornness, maliciousness, anger
worn so thin that it paints demons on the wall
when held up to the light,
is tiring of the dance. 
Accelerating towards the stand-still. 
This is a grand way to break-out fast. 
The swarthy waiter wearing a warm smile that stops just short
of baring cigarette-stained teeth tries to hand him a menu. 
He fingers it gently, marveling for the last time at how the plastic catches his skin
like soft hands unsure of when to let go,
knowing that farewell is inevitable. 
Just as he knows he will wave away the laminated list,
each line as artfully constructed
as a poem, and order a croissant. 
It's the perfect moment,
enjoying the light morning:
an ephemeral pleasure
that will undoubtedly give way as the sun grows heavier
in the sky, but made all the sweeter for it. 
He sips his water,
tasting the roundness of the filter,
the flavor of every impurity made starker
as they suddenly find it unnecessary to compete any longer. 
Perhaps the croissant will come soon. 
Perhaps it will never come,
and he will still be sitting here.  
But the timid rustle of a paper bag proves surprisingly concrete. 
The water tastes of the tin cup it sits in. 
The sun is cold, broken up into bars
as it passes through the window. 
And the croissant delivered to his cell
is from a passionless hack
working the kitchens to avoid manual labor and a stab. 
It's chewy.

Married, had a little lamb,

This belongs, this place is hers,
Places hearse and plays in dirt
This place, my mom, this place is yours,
Your tears like living bone.

He is gone.  I barely cried.
Buried ripe like beer reeks, right?
Fire on, he wanted heat,
A secret funeral.

I should not have left you all alone,
All alone, all alone,
Every night for a year or more –
I could not call this a home.

Learning to Fly (A Very Rough WIP)

The ceiling was too low. Sight was the first sense to awaken from the long night, dazed by insane dreams of ruined cities and clouds drifting peacefully over the desolation. He realized that he felt nothing beneath him. Supine, groping like a blind man, he reached back for something solid and felt his questioning fingers push through quite a bit of air before their tips gently brushed his covers. He panicked. A gasp caught in his throat, tearing at it and choking him. He thrashed wildly in a moment of breathlessness. Something gave: he fell heavily onto the bed, bounced out, and landed with a muffled thump and a heartfelt curse on the hardwood floor.

Just a dream, he thought, one of those little day-dreams in between sleep and waking up. It felt so real, no wonder I got scared and threw myself out of bed. And with that, he pushed himself up and immediately put the incident out of mind. There were more important things to worry about than flights of fancy. A button-down that looked presentable, possibly even sharp, had to be found in the fallout of his laundry strewn across the floor. He picked up a white shirt. What is this? Is this blood? Ketchup? He scratched half-heartedly at the crusty splash of red before tossing the shirt aside in favor of a patch of bright blue that, when grabbed, unearthed a thin shirt the color of the summer sky. Too wrinkled. If I had time, I'd look up how to iron. I'm sure I have one around here somewhere. Oh well. There was only one shirt left that was appropriate for such an occasion as today, though the shirt in question hadn't been seen since his brother's wedding a few months ago. Maybe it had managed to avoid joining the debris that shielded what must be a very clean floor underneath from the grime of apathy. He went over to his closet, walking like a man with x-ray vision in a minefield; with bowel-gripping nervousness tempered by a practiced knowledge of exactly where to step. He opened it and was relieved to find a shirt so black that it almost shined with darkness in the gloom.

Locating a matching pair of pants and jacket was much easier; he believed that no one ever paid attention to the waist-down if it was clothed, and so had a few pairs of dusty dress pants hidden away. The jacket had also survived largely through disuse. He looked warily at the black figure in the mirror. The fabric gripped him in unfamiliar places, and he felt strangely naked despite wearing more layers than he was used to, as if some intimate part of him was exposed to senses keener than sight. He turned away, tired of seeing himself. The roar of passing cars, the musical tune of voices sublimating into dialogue, and the rapid-fire twang of metal that speaks of nearby construction cut through the silence in his house, reminding him of all the empty space by filling it with sound. He didn't want to be inside anymore. He didn't want to be alone.

It was warming up as he made his way to the 90s Impala in his driveway, an unlikely and partially unwanted heirloom flaking away in the sunlight and humidity. It would be a cool night, he thought, after it rains and I can finally feel it on my scalp. It seemed appropriate to cut my hair this short to look more presentable, more solemn. It seemed appropriate because later... well. He tried to take control of his thoughts, Think of something else. Think happy. Think of breakfast. Think of the little French restaurant a good two mile trek away through the slick black hills of suburbia. It was too good a morning to drive, and the deliberate effort made what must have been the perfect croissant, a rich, flaky, buttery, and yet ephemeral pleasure, all the better. So simple and so, so satisfying.

He started the walk up, all too aware that after he'd gotten there and eaten, drinking just water and savoring the energy of the morning sun, he'd have missed... it. What a shame. No one will miss me though. He instantly felt sick, reminded again of what he had done. To her. To all of them. Ohgodand the KID. He's just 14 and suddenly he's robbed of his mother and orphaned. Because of me. Why do I always think about myself? What right do I have now, today? He was at the restaurant. What just happened? He looked at his watch. Two minutes. A mile a minute. 60 mph at a slow, reluctant walk.

Backyard

When the trees shed their leaves I can see the headstones climbing up the hill behind my house. Though I don’t intend to be buried there nor anywhere, the idea of an epitaph is appealing; I already think every word as if etching it in stone. But I know my grave will be empty, and I know the marker will either be blank or filled with all the things I felt guilty about not saying. I want to be cremated like my father. His ashes were heavier than I expected. No one will carry me as dust back to bones of my ancestors, no I will be dumped without ceremony into the garbage can of a church I’d never been to in life and am not welcome in dead.

Write Now

What do you want me to say?
I’m staring at you, eyes red,
Mouth open, loudly silent,
And you’re still mostly blank.

I look away like I want to be distracted.
But you know, don’t you?
You know me, I think too well,
But we’re still in something like love.

I don’t know how words could ever be enough.
I think that means I’ve given up.

Diving

My dad used to tell me to go up when he wanted me to scroll down, and my mother has started doing the same thing.  I’ve realized today that we swim in place while the birds, the sky, the horizon, the people looking in from some windows at themselves, the people looking out, and the people on the ground all fly up up and away.

Serendipity

It begins with waiting, not anticipation.
It seems like it’s been a long time.

Next there is the moment of decision.
Next is the moment of creation.

But it could just as easily go the other way.
But even if it did, and this does not,

Here is the action.
It doesn’t do what you expected.

Just a thing

They weren’t much here. What I mean is that they rose from the pebbles, learned of themselves, waited, and died in a span of twenty minutes. The entirety of their history could be pissed and shat away with the help of a good book. The slow tumble of a rock down the river bed they had made home took half a century with it. As I watched with my feet drifting slowly away, my consciousness descended until I was among the little people as the barest whisper of a shadow and they were but remote silhouettes painted the swirling colors of mud in a stream. I lived amongst them passively, so lost in the moment that their impending deletion never occurred to me. I lost my balance and nearly tumbled headfirst into the murky stream as thin as a vein bled dry. I caught myself. I was here again, and when I looked down they’re not. I wished after they had gone that I had done more, that I’d left a memory to die with them even as mine disappears in blinks and illusions. But the spaces in between the pebbles on the ground are more rocks, blasted into insignificance long before we were ever here.

Narrative Rap

He steps out shaky from the wake and bakey,
Blinking owlish in the too-bright sunlight, maybe
He'll look both ways before crossing the street
Or not, he's devil-may-care with his feet
Doesn't feel connected to any part of his body
It's mind over matter but his thinking is shoddy,
He's too lost in the moment to be critical now
He's city-living and yet unaware of his surroundings
Focusing on the stuttering walk-this-line sound
Of the balls underneath him that've lost their bounce
And every rumbling car that strikes him as too loud
He mistakes for the bus that'll take him to town,
But it's like shining a light through a wedding gown:
Bitter-sweet dead whiteness that he lost and found,
So no red-eye contact, keep your head to the ground
And hope the ennui is just coming down.

The windows on the bus are splintered two-way mirrors
The interior's in reverse and he sees out there
That everybody's broken but he's the only one scared
Of not being able to die happy when death is near,
Cuz it's a slippery slope from school to job to career
And if you find yourself at the bottom with a mountain to bear
Hope to god you've got an atlas to point your way up
Hope to hell that what you've been through has made you strong enough
Because we're all ill-equipped, and it's all too much
For creatures of false-order to bear the cluster-fuck
For barely evolved apes to know life and to love
To know that no matter what we do we're just a handful of dust
So he keeps turning up the music to drive out the bus
Full of people full to bursting with empty bluffs
But he calls and checks and keeps returning to drugs
Better that than allow yourself to think of -

It's his stop, he steps off, and thanks the driver
Telling him, “You're no different than the average rider.”
Walks to the cemetery gates and past it,
And looks dead-on at the open casket.

I Hope This City Never Runs Out of Drugs

I hope this city never runs out of drugs
I hope I never have to sober up
Cuz I know I won't last
I'm afraid of that crash,
So I'll get high on the tallest building then get low... real fast!

Oh I want to see with my eyes closed
And be blind with both eyes open
I wanna trip balls in the snow
And smoke blunts while I'm disc golfing
I wanna stumble drunkenly
Down a street I've walked a thousand times
Because this shit's getting old before I am
Way before my time.

I wanna die inside my head
and find myself awake again
I wanna completely numb myself
Then learn to feel again.
And I hope heart to hearts get less frequent
When I have arrhythmia
And I'll keep taking drugs to forget
Until I have dementia!

I hope this city never runs out of drugs
I hope I never have to sober up
Cuz I know I won't last
Without my secret stash,
So I'll get high on gunpowder and have myself a blast!

Independence (Found Poem)

Non-commercial alternative rock.

Automated pitchfork sucks

Charter into newly-opened radio station

Until 12 pm on Fridays

And oversees all media

Exclusive, however wonderful, sounds

The only alternative:

Turn down, do show, play music.

A Song About Suicide and Cats

My head is ablaze and my eyes are swimming
I talk from my stomach of how I've stopped dreaming,
How it's night when I sleep and night when I awake,
And how these windowless walls hide me from the day.
But I want to give you everything I couldn't give to myself.
I want you all to live for the things that I was too afraid as hell
To.

I paid more for an empty chest of treasures
Than my younger self paid for his fleeting pleasures
So why can't either of us be happy with what we've bought,
Why have we both developed a resistance to the poison in our thoughts?
But I give you all everything and leave nothing for myself,
I want you all to live more than I've been able to in this hell.

I've been coming home daily to a shrieking chorus
An empty house filled to bursting with meaningless stories
A hundred soft bodies whispering at my legs
A hundred needy children too damn cynical to beg.
But it's a hundred mouths I need to feed before I feed myself
And if there's nothing left I guess I'll starve
Ha, like I've been doing anything else.

But my bed is never cold, and I never sleep alone,
And I'm grateful as a dying dog following a bone
Into the furnace, into the needle, into a one-sided embrace,
I wonder what cuts deeper: my silence or the blade.
But I'll pick at every scar that I can't afford to bleed,
And paint the walls with abstract signs the inhabitants can't read,
So the hunger in my heart is filled by air rushing in my throat,
And no one will have to feed my fucking cats when I go.

Mall Fire

It's loud.  So damn loud.  So damn loud
there's nothing left in the mall, but it's not closed out;
But the splitting sensation of sound. 
Clap your palms all over your ears and lobes,
Close your eyes as the flashing lights echo
A fire alarm no one is listening to. 
Keep walking.  Keep talking. 
DON'T YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE?
And just keep on shopping?

"Leave.  Leave.  Leave.  Leave,"
Short of breath, it screams and screams
A sun through the hole in the ceiling.
I can feel it in me as more than noise,
An air-conditioned tickle and a choice
To keep cool as I burn, or my blood boils.
I'm running.  They keep walking.
The fire is inside me to take off when I'm ready to fly.
It's sparking and it's shocking.

No one makes a move, no one gives
A shit and yet they still want to live
And yet don't make a move for the exit.
We all cheer when the alarm falls quiet,
We all cheer and cheer and cheer and riot,
But whatever this is I refuse to buy it.
Keep joking.  Keep choking.
How many stores shut their gates to our flaming hands that day?
Just enough to keep us hoping.

Softly Spoken, Hardly Broken

It starts with a bang and ends in silence,
Flashing hints of far-off violence,
And puddles scattering so far apart
I expected to see some fuckin' stars.
But I've got nothing if not a hundred
Drops of rain and distant thunder
Until the day the sun splits the clouds
I will not set foot outside my house,
And on the day the sun splits the clouds
I will not set foot outside my house.

My fluorescent light-bulb tan looks fine,
I keep the sun from my eyes but I'm still blind
And so damn deaf from talking in text
What comes next?  I forget the rest.
I'm left with nothing if not a hundred
Things I shouldn't have left unsaid
So unless I can be loud without making a sound
I will not set foot outside my house.
Oh let me be loud without making a sound
And I will not set foot outside my house.

I made a murder of a suicide,
Offered them help but just let them die.
Funny how I'm the only one still choking
It's too late now to not keep joking
Until all I have is not even a hundred
Corpses of family and my closest friends,
And as long as they promise to stick around
I'll never set foot outside my house again.
As long as they promise to stick around
I'll never set foot outside my house again.

Icarus

There have been these... feathers, afloat on an eternal
sea for as long as the burning iron hull of my memory
holds in wasted stubbornness against the weight of the
stilled tide beneath endless empty hands grasping
for the moon and finding only burnt fingertips
as they brush too close to the sun.

I first saw them when I crushed one underfoot walking
slowly towards the horizon on petrified waters
that clung to my feet with each step echoing the desperate
pleas I'd heard on the wind from every window and
every pair of lips cracked apart by snow and shutting
just in time for me to think I imagined it all.

I thought of falling birds streaking towards firmament
and finding air enough to burn away their broken bodies
before, blind in one eye, with two crippled wings,
they became water once more as their father's tears
fell with the raindrops onto an ocean seasoned already
to be indifferent to yet another dissolving pillar of salt.

These feathers outlive cold iron bodies with flaming hearts that
stay moored to the waves afraid to be adrift
on an endless ocean of nothing but ancient corpses
with even older invisible fish growing fatter with each
bite of death, rich and full, and so desperate am I
to get away that I will pick up every last feather and fly.

(written a while ago, just realized it wasn't on this blog)

After 4/20 freewrite

I get the point sometimes in the old push and pull when the spaces are too small and squeaking
bloody lungs beat flatly against living glass all full of holes, the rolling and ripping out
blade to blade, grassy matte-black in preparation so tunnel-visioned that you don't see the
dandelions pray as you walk over them.  Next year your yard will be filled with the triumph of
those seeds you're scattering now and you will press them down, lay each airy head down to the
womb it can't get out of.  One day we will fall drunk, whining of heat in a field of ripened
angels ready to float, seeking the rise of the other end that started with our thud and fell
like soft, warm snow hesitating on our bodies.  They will sleep and never take root in concrete
when we have gone.

Bank on Tourism

Numbered from the first off-white brand that came
Smoking for a good few seconds that must have been
Hell!  For an eternity of bubbling, popping, sizzle...
And off again soaked in steam from the head up.

Breathes good, clean lightly here, high on fingertips
Once princely, these cragged frosty peaks supplicated
Like statues but can choke a Chinese monkey in a prank's length
Wearing ink so heavy it forged mountains out of skin.

It was spiderwebs of fog spinning into the trees that day.
They rode on down in frigid air farted out by a bronze Buddha
Whose shit was speckled with jade and gold and bled
All the peoples of the world onto the pyramid beneath.

A Narrative Poem

Why does it begin?
Here, I say, because it’s me,
I’m the one doing this.
Let’s start now.

It’s heavy and cold,
Needy, clinging desperately
All over, I shake –
We haven’t even started.

Last look at the frozen paint
Of God’s creation melting away,
Last look into the rain at
The smell of earthbound tears.

Blackness and lights.

The world is filled to bursting.

Shadowsturntored.
Blood dripping from torn skin.
I look sightless on:
Flames of hell burning bright
as the graceful nature of the divine.

This will end when I close my eyes again.
Amen.

We Didn't Have a Real Winter

Smells of fuck the spring of averages,
All summer days and winter nights and
Meanness slimming in laundry buckets.
Sharp and hollow salted seas, underspiced

The trade and public transit to market
Hawked molasses, tobacco and weed spit,
The signs point upriver and it’s buy, buy, bye
Spun riches in so much blasted air,

Come easy, go easy, any time
To duck the sun and skirt the sky,
Pessimistic sweating the good return,
Smells of fuck the spring of averages.

So... If anyone reads this I just updated with what I've been writing "recently."

A Haibun About Acid Snow

A Haibun About Acid Snow

Slightly glassy-eyed, envision these frames trapping trees dissolving into ash. Frigid pyres stream in the wind – where there is smoke there is fire but with this pale, ghostly echo there is only a mournful howling rising over snow-covered tracks. The sky is falling in increments, soft static dancing along blackly iron rails. They run perpendicular to us: we walk away without a second glance. Conversations were never given a chance to live and wander, we kept closed the entire time wrapped in warm layers, seeking comfort and finding it only when speaking through facades and recycled words. Open doors hurt. Darkness and faded red bricks – sometimes golden – these are familiar and distant. Every home passed houses another dreaming demon. But when the mouth swings open there is a world inside breathing and reaching out and the shadows crawl in insidiously with a biting wintry inhale. Shut that gaping, wooden wound and look at me. I never leave the ground. White snow stains the concrete brown sometimes and I wonder what twisted plants would take root in such bitter soil. Salt the earth in one practiced motion. Dead oceans crackle underfoot. And we shook, but at that point when the unrelenting wind deafens the world with its demanding susurrations, and blinds eyes wide as windows lying open and forgotten with frozen tears, you have to throw yourself into exposure and smell the chemical twang in the air. And for a little bit it’s so warm this could be the dust from every cigarette we smoked down to the filter tonight.

It’s so beautiful
When it’s not us under it
And when it is – ouch.

Shining A Light on Dilated Pupils

These ancient, stony silhouettes
seem too soggy to burn in the
early dusk of wintery rains,
But torches drive the suns to set
farther from our cold wet shoulders
on a smaller horizon every day.

We are magpies with pitch black eyes
that drink in greedily all the
dull and lustrous lights in the trees,
Chirping powerless words that die
with ephemeral plumes of smoke
far too scattered to defy extropy.

Turn back on the road so traveled
and worn that rotted logs appear
to be the corpse of fallen gods,
Barren limbs become unraveled
collecting all the failing snow
into an earth-bound comet as it drops.

April 4 Freewrite

Thursday a whale swam at the sea
And the biggest wave rolled back to me,
Green yesterday but too gray now
A-daze, not hearing a sound.

Smells of mucus and pesticide
Now these cracked glass shells’ve no way to hide
Fire awoke in a blooded choke,
Cloaked in a stilled, shivering joke.

Call me Ahab in my own tongue,
I’ll crunch young bones as blood fills my lungs,
And crack black ribs around a pounding heart
Unzipping skin to look the part.

Printer Sheet Blanket

The clouds storm in to blacken me,
Darken me with thunder, muted
Lightning: one bolt consumes the sky.

When did night fall blood red,
Speckled with shifting oblivion
Closer? Uncomfortable proximity.

Morning dawns, a hidden sunshine
Frozen inside burning shivers,
Outside turning, beseeching the blizzard,

Twilight a blurred line, uneven
Burned in season, foreign dreams
Of summer melting into autumn.

Life will break one day slow,
Eating frost greedy and dripping
On the lifeless below.

Scrabble

They’re playing it like a numbers game
Or chess: one move and two hundred responses
Air-conditioned, with no room to breathe
The rush of tension, brief suspension,
Think for moment – the spurred plans
Never made will live like burning forests
Fenced in concrete and glass.

We language in the fall out of put-downs,
Musical from the ground up to a pointed lie
Of a land heavy, unsaid with creation
and tectonic rulings, perpetual quakes
In the perceptual shaken head: imagine
Potential unbound, spinning cloud-ward
And following the directionless storm through empty space.

I’m going to force the game, hands where I can see them.
We will shake. We will laugh. We will say
The things we’ve all heard before and we,
We will not think, we will not judge, and we,
We will pretend we’ve never heard it before.

Synedoche

We’ve only ever made it as far as the gift-shop:
The best museums in the world
Discount me at face value
Saying “Well, aren’t we the best people?”

It’s like someone died or something:
An awkward two-step to the door
All false cheer like this were a funeral,
Stop worrying about the kids and let yourself feel something.

Every vacation is a spectacle:
While I’m chafing at the comfort, we keep
A steady hold on our baggage
And pretend we’ve done more than stare at cheap exhibits.

Horror Vacui (Or Hopefully One Day I'll Stop Being Terrible at Writing)

I meditate on an empty parking space
With wide, bored holes in my face
That the light streams in. From the darkness
I drink to smooth over the starkness
Of a dry mouth, I drink to feel numb
From the coldness and dumb –
Unable to split apart these clenched teeth
Afraid of what might spill out onto the street.

I close my eyes on the gaping vacuum
Watching brilliant flaming flowers bloom
In my blindness, I remember to dream
Of the emptiness tempered, of the vacant scene
That I’m no longer sure still remains,
But guitars strum softly outside my brain
And voices sing of angels to my blocked-up ears,
And when I look up again I find a parked car sitting
Here.

Frame By Frame

Tick quietly, soft clock,
Talk small those big words,
Hollow voice echoing nothing at all.
I’m mashing electric gears
inside you, too excited
to find you worth listening to,
This egocentric dialogue
becomes a monologue in time.
I’m drowning.
Coughing up wet laughter,
My lungs on fire, my heart beats
brittle. It’s simple economics:
Abandon ship, shop around,
Find a new organ at a discount,
But the comforting stutter
of sinking convenience.
Throw everything at it,
Throw it all overboard until it goes away.
Don’t watch the slight off hands
No, they’re wings in the corner of my eye.
Ready to fly?

PAT

It’s clearer, you know? Twisted neck, broken, craned
Over shoulder overshadowed by your own silhouette,
Do you enjoy the regret like I suspect I do
Or do we just watch reflections in dirty, used windows,
Mistaking the outside for in, inside for passengers
Shuttled from their lives to the end stopped line?

Kill the driver, not you but your destination,
It keeps howling along in your ear no matter
How many times I bang my head off tremulous glass,
It never stops, it never stops. It never keeps going
For long unless abandoned by an outside force.
Simple physics applied to the world by us physicists.

The city you call home is a strange and craven blur.
Where the fuck do we get off on this?

Counting Mountain Tops

Half of the moon hangs heavy on the horizon,
Ground zero where the sublimated clouds drift
Apart from one: chicken shit little cartoon duck,
Two bleeding bullet holes for wings enslaved
Firing front-load impulses from stoned nerve endings
Three times singing silent swan songs in convulsions.

Cough blood, this low harmoniously untrained voice
Forced out from four black feet smells like burning life rafts
Reflected in eyes that drink the ocean, but can’t give five fucks
To extinguish the six sick silken fires, a candle
Streaming with every seventh wind that carved valleys
When every other weary artist slept in inspiration.

The other half of the moon waits to see how this will all turn out.
Eight small feathers touch down, soft as brushing fingers,
Heavy as judgment. Those bastards who scale regret
Touch down on the ninth piece of sky without a cloud
In their heads, breathing seems shallower – lungs smaller.
Bury them with formaldehyde dreams of paradise.

The Streets Make This Sound

The streets make this sound as they go by, they whisper curses in tongues of smoke so that, though spoken softly, the warm breath of night rings loud enough between our silences. These pockmarked volcanic statues are adrift on a soot-blackened sea, let splashed salt and ash fill these holes: they’ll keep our heads above water. But for how long – to go unasked so many times is not just carelessness and disregard of opportunity, it’s deliberate fear of our reflected faces in the spilled glass and stilled oceans underfoot. You must hear the talking shadows watching without eyes, breathing in without mouths, feel the growing chill as I do. They wait and feed and grow louder in the vacuum. Eventually, what will be left is our universal bodies and disgust at the nucleus of every dying sun. We will be torn apart. Take a shuddering, hesitant breath but once and hold the first dying leaf – still green – to your lungs. Twice someone has tried to crack this open and free the toxicity everyone has slowly built resistance to, but every cough sounds like a choked confession, every time vomit is tasted it’s swallowed so that the hypochondriac doesn’t panic. Picked scabs reopen scars, but I want you to be hurt because I feel like I need to be the one to bandage your wounds, unwrap them to expose bloody sketches in a similar vein on myself so that hopefully we can watch them both one day fade – beauty is fleeting. Nothing is ever completely forgotten, but seen once is enough. Do we need to always remember the dreams we shared before we wake up?

Smoke in the distance

Flares once but when you’re turning

You see nothing there.