Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Scrambled

Jimmy plays a game like cricket in the field with a jagged tree bit and rocks and in many ways, Jimmy is me and the tree bit is you, and I use you to propel concentrated chunks of past among sexy blades of grass. If this is true of the very cores of us, this narrative of Jimmy/Morrison's Beloved (the tree)/Morrison (the rock), then how will we eat our eggs in the morning knowing we might never hatch any of our own?

Monday, December 28, 2009

World's Strictest Parents

God, you just want a fucking cigarette--to stick the crummy filter to your lips, slick paper gripping your skin, grind a flame from that little purple cylinder and suck in sweet tickling death with teenaged foreverness resilience.

You want to open a switchblade and expose every hole in their parenting wall. Must they insist toiling farm-labor to childly freedom-screams? No conversation as if perhaps equals on some less strenuous field? After all, remove time and there you have a playground of globular sorts (mostly water, several continents).

But their wall is solid, you see. Damn them! It's that exposed brick of the heart by which they warm their souls. Hard and old as it may be, the warmth is what is held in such high regard.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Einsteins

Postsecret.
Post a secret. What a concept.
Post a secret, but also keep the secret. Anonymity.
This word seems rounded like a bubble we hide in it.
The wife wants her coffee cake. This I feel is warm and gooey, but also slightly crisp. I mean the wanting, not the cake.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Optic Musings in Mid-December

Parallax, the way I understand it, is the way a lower cloud rush-glides in silence beneath a cleaving trail of jet exhaust, which is stationary, though it appears that the cleave is moving and the cloud is stationary.

This particularly happens on winter afternoons in a fit of wind-gust. The sky is typically of a piercing glass sort.

On these winter afternoons, the cold cuts in angles on the face that help us visualize the moving cleave: as if a wound which dances against the atmosphere, that as it heals in the place it moves from, it slices open where it moves to.

But we realize, suddenly as if we are God, or as if we realize what God might be, parallax. And then, because the wound is stationary, not the cloud, we may heal completely.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

What You Tell Yourself: Snoring in Morse Code

Not good enough. A set of words which evokes no genuine image or emotion, does not fill the white space coagulating like leaky egg cracks, yet, always, it seems to be so.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Silence and the Inevitable Chattiness of Such

I have nothing to say today. Oh, shit...

I believe this is the same as looking in a mirror. Try it!

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

The Most Important Thing About Windows

The edge is fantastic. What I like most is the lack of light and color--that it is mistaken for black rather than nothing--and how it cleaves me is especially satisfying.

Monday, December 7, 2009

lungs of our land

Sometimes the world's moonish, and sometimes it ain't. But when it is, it's just like you think, a silver envelope upon us, like some distant flashlight catches the wide face of our dime-world and in the shadow of Frankie's jawline we gaze upon our great oldtime movies.

But when it ain't, that's what one might call the tides. That is, a pulling of selves, like loons, upward, floating, waiting, wailing, alone, and that's how we spend most days. Being pulled.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

And also for measure fuck your dog

There is an altogether ridged-angling of houses that are not Hill House. This will explain very much why I am so fucking angry, at you, but also as you.

Having Been

Has it been a day? Fuck you. And fuck the day's having been, too.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The Ubiquitous Smoking of Cigarettes

I am very embarrassed and exhausted by this falling away. Think of wordfucking like the spaces are really penises and the non-spaces are like a woman's pubic hair, ravenously rubbing. And think of this wordfucking as happening, happening, happening always always happening. Think of me as the skin of the spaces, sensitive to the attack but never vocal of it.

I feel apologetic to this end, as one who loves the oppressor might kiss him deeply and with tongue. You might shout, is the tongue necessary? To shout such a thing is understandable. But you cannot shout after asking, because the answer is yes, and it is stupid to yell about the truth. The tongue is a form of physical silence. Understand?

Good. Then you understand the source of my embarrassment, and also of my exhaustion. My mouth is sore and words become difficult. This difficulty is compounded, because of the wordfucking that is happening, happening, happening always always happening.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Master-baiting repo dickheads 3

3. What is it like to be continually unwelcome? What is it like to be always pretending to be going home when driving his car or her truck, but knowing that, truly, there lacks destination? Geometry suggests of straight lines that you are forever going away from home. This state of perpetual unwelcomeness does not seem eased by the driving of his car or her truck. I ask of these things because I wonder, aloud, about causality: What compels a state of perpetual unwelcomness into being, as a choice of future being rather than a starting point (such as poverty)?

The movement of dollar bills, possession of dollar bills, but specifically, a sense of belonging to the chain of dollar-bill movement, is temporary motion. Surely this is clear.

But perhaps the driving of his car or her truck, that is, to be continually unwelcome, is confused with food, shelter, and family.

To understand the separateness of these things is also to understand the snowplow of big fat cocks he and she wish to inject you with as you drive his car and her truck away from home.

But this misunderstanding on their part: dickheads cannot be injected with cocks, though it is always dickheads they wish to inject. Instead they must cum prematurely and wither.

This is much like the master-baiting done by the Los Angeles Police Department. This word, "baiting," suggests an initial intention which is to lure. This seems especially dishonest because dicks and pussies are easily lured. An ethical boundary is penetrated because all Los Angeles Police Officers are forever fighting the urges of either their dicks or her pussy.

Usually we are in line waiting. This happens so often that probably once a day there is a pussy ahead of us in line we may have the pleasure of having temporarily and in secret, on the house, for our wait. But our having it is not an intention of the pussy, so it is not "baiting." What these dickheads do with pussies is ratchet rims to her clitoris, splay her on the counter and say in succession:

Stick your fingers in my cunt.
Stick your fingers in my cunt.
Stick your fingers in my cunt.
Stick your fingers in my cunt.

Dickheads do not have fingers, they are uniformly obelisks or rhino horns, so they are not lured by this specific configuration of words, and thus must be separate of the baiting.

But when the dickheads take off their uniforms surely it is clear fingers are involved again. What if the baited one was a dickhead without a uniform? Or, more probably, what if we are all dickheads either with or without uniforms? How do we reconcile?

Regardless, it is clear there will be dicks and there will be cumming on.

Re-run, as if Wishing to be Circular 2

2. It is this way, a drunken and bright-lighted bar where growth of the spirit is possible. Cheers then Frasier. Roseanne then a more capable, more wise and more decisively forceful (like passenger train) Roseanne in which Becky has become more beautiful so beautiful she's almost a different Becky, but we know better. These things, drunk, growing, happen in tiredly 2 a.m. brightness, like graveyard halo, in a period of weeks, months, childhoods. It is the drunkenness of sleepless wanting. Our spirits are hungry! And exhaustion also is needing sustenance.

Why, I write sternly, do the networks replay these re-runs of our drunkenness at midday? Why ever repeat repetition of programming? The way leftovers grab and rip off our testicles. Remembering the orgasmic dinner (itself a remake, thus the writing of recipes) becomes like remembering God. Remembering God is like remembering fucking, neither of which is at all like am fucked or, simply, am.

In conclusion, please do not continue to play these shows before 1 a.m. or after 3 a.m. These times specifically are crucial. Without them witticism, and also profoundness, dull and become a shade of grey.

I cannot eat a turkey sandwich while observing a shade of grey, because the turkey itself becomes grey, and as you know my stomach is a chameleon.

paper view 1

1. As I write this I feel I am more fucking brilliant than you, who are fucking dumb, I do not think this, but I feel it. Then I sit to write seriously, and don the mask of a dullard. To this the response is television.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

A Guiding Hand in the Garden

A directing of pedestrians, with a teacher's whistle poised to expel.

I now accept the prose poems.

It is a process, no? Like crossing.

Yes, like crossing.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Matter

How to become unsilent?
Scream that I love you violently and selfishly.
Love self, that voilent ly I scream, you fish.
Become how unslient, to?

It is a matter of volume.
Actions, silence, words. In that order.
Act sil i, on silence s, order words. t in hat.
It is a volume of matter.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Ode

He was my enemy. He is my friend.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Horticulture

I thought perhaps of making this story the third-persona type. "He came unstitched at the razor's rip along his neck. Soon his beard was again neat and the edge of sophistication sat where the neck met the underbelly of his words. Then he worried that no one noticed the red in his eyes, both the lateness and the earliness of 3 a.m. as he stood before a restroom mirror and had not understood the prose poetry he had read for a college course."

But the complications in viewpoint of such a story would be no more useful to me than the prose poems I could not understand, merely words, as upturned and annoying as the pop of my dog's tongue along her snout, producing an anxiety like an unkept lawn beneath my cheekbones. Fire!

So to hell with stories that aren't written for me. I'd rather the unpleasantness of horticulture.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Jean Luc

Jean Luc is a diplomat the color of blood across his chest a star along his breast a red-haired woman in his heart.

And on a farm in southern Illinois one day he turns to me and smiles and says it is the way of people to kill.

He said Don't read too much into the things they do but walk among them and believe in them even if you don't believe in them.

So at the speed of light we look into the eyes of one another and the way the stars reflect against the worries of our lives.

It is the slowest thing there is he said to grow into a man and then you rocket through the sky into your death in all the black but I have never seen a thing so fucking beautiful and if there is a God he's sitting there in emptiness.

Jean Luc is a patriot if space were like the USA he'd bleed just so Orion and his friends could spit on him when he returned from war and just to find his red-head had moved on.

And so it goes of the broken hearts of diplomats
and farm boys
and reading men
and mirrors
and rocketeers
and patriots
and dreamers with a star along their breast.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Boots (inspired by Dan Bern)

Cookaburrah
How ya doin'.
How ya doin'.
What'cha chewin'.

Cowabunga.
Eat my shorts.
Eat my shorts.
Life is short.

Alligator
Catch you later,
Then we eat.
Boots on feet-steps.

Even then,
Even then,
We are friends,
Even then.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Abue

Sleep well.
Pero despierta también.

Dream like a bird.
Pero des us paso adelante despues.

Kiss the hand of your daughter's daughter.
Pero recuerda su sonrisa.

Speak Spanish.
Y di lo que sientes.

Forget this place.
Recuerda porqué despértastes.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

An outstretched hand

Does # love &?

Does & hate #?

If # said # was sorry, would & forgive #?

What if &# became &  #?

Every time ^ thinks of ^, ^ understands that ^ is not &#, ^ is only ^ and will never be more than ^.  If only ^ could tell &# what it is to be ^.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Intake

If a tree goes hungry, everyone notices, so it happened.

If a tree is well fed and mild mannered, though, and never falls, what happens to the forest's GDP?

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

A rest, to cry, to forgive.

_

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Somewhere in Mangroves

Somewhere in mangroves I saw you say,
I want to sail and would you smile for me.

Because the wind is like a smile
And tears are just the ocean.

And stories are just what sleeping children
tell their parents with nightlights.

And parents are just what sleeping children
float across like the ocean.

Somewhere in morning I saw you say,
I want to burn and would you smile for me.

Because the world is like a smile
And everything else is just black and cold.

And one-legged seagulls are just pretending.
They are not children sleeping.

And one-legged seagulls are just pretending
To dream of things like gravity.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Tortoise

Sometimes you walk and sometimes you run. Sometimes you stand still and sometimes you crawl. Sometimes you fall over or trip.

Sometimes you stop thinking about your feet. At that time you no longer walk or run or stand or crawl, or fall or trip. This is because you have arrived.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

A free bird leaps

Chelsea K. walks the street of a familiar neighborhood--blue, charcoal, brick--the order of houses she remembers in her muscles, the chortle of birds on the wire soothing. Billy who is six waves from behind the sprinkler. His sister grinds the wheels of a pink car along the driveway, her concentration heavy. Chelsea walks for many blocks, passing neighbors and cars and street signs, on her way to meet her future self.

Chelsea K.'s future self, she thinks, will be quite nice. An accomplished college graduate with steady work and maybe one daughter and no husband; that would be preferable.

Upon traveling one block further, Chelsea K. reaches an end in the road where the asphalt drops off into the center of the Earth. There is nothing past this point except an expanse of sky.

I hadn't expected this,
Chelsea K. thinks. What shall I do now?

Though the telephone wire had broken where the road ends, there are several birds still nesting atop the pole nearest the edge. She looks to them for advice, and of course when they speak the answer is simple.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Life

Which is the correct path to follow?

a.) b

b.) a

c.) 7

d.) b

You have 100 years to complete the exercise. You may answer as often as you like. Time may be deducted for each incorrect answer, or for each correct answer. For each incorrect answer you will be dropped two letter grades. For each correct answer you will be dropped one letter grade, and another letter grade to be determined later.

Friday, October 9, 2009

here.

I can't help but think, these might be our best days. Something to fight for. We own nothing but ourselves. We are stupid, and thus we love too much, maybe. Try too hard at the expense of time. The value of seconds is hidden from us. It makes us turn against the clocks, turn towards us, each other.

I can't help but think that. Because you're here. And because I cannot believe that days exist when you are not.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

About Thursday Night Football

Laundry
Day and I can see
Why a friend says these
Games don't matter.

He watches the
Sunday squad who play
Clean.

I watch the
Saturday cowboys (not
McNeese State or
Dallas), all the
Ones who play 4 years
Then graduate.

Their dirt seems
Dirtier. Their plays more
Legendary.

But,
Their laundry,
They bring their dirty
Laundry home and that is
Why?
My friend says what he says about
College ball.

He chose a
Self-fulfilling prophecy to open
Commentary against, Smart
Move.

And tomorrow is only
Friday.

(To be fair Saturday feels more Legendary than
Thursday.)

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Books

She once read a book about this sort of thing, where nothing much happens unless you lend yourself, just a bit of yourself, though you must lend completely, away.

The trick then was finding the right kinds of books to read next.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Nothing

In another life, Joseph might have been an astronaut, a pole vaulter, a doctor in South Africa.

He might have been what the world would call something.

But Joseph was not in space and he was not pushing into the sun and he was not facing death, Joseph was shit-stained and scrubbing a portable toilet.

When he was done, Joseph walked into the afternoon sun and let the caked shit dry and crack on his sanitary suit, and he watched the sun until it burned him deeply.

Then because Joseph lived in a corner of the park that was dark at night and unused and rangers rarely checked there, he laid quiet on a rusted bench and watched the stars until they surrounded him, fireflies.

Joseph fell asleep and wondered what it would be to die, to finally rest, but then he woke, and the sun compelled him to stand.

He walked off, to clean shit, to be nothing, and to understand everything.

Monday, October 5, 2009

A Poem About Frustration

phcs multiplan ppo network

Monday, September 28, 2009

The Old Friend

Hopes and dreams were as good as it got, he believed. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

What if?

What if one day I fail so completely that I do not succeed?

What if, the next day, I succeed so poorly that I fail completely?

What if, the day after, and the next, I am afraid to try because I have failed twice and so my choosing to remain static is, in its very essence, failure?

What if the next day I try again and I fail? Then what shall I do? It is not easy to fail and fail again.

What if one day when tossing rocks because there's no goddamn better thing to do with myself, I come to think that failure is fallible, that the whole shitty idea has holes big enough for a big first-down play, and maybe even with some spice and a juke I could go all the way with busting down the god-forsaken limerick. What if the seed of doubt is planted?

What if the next day I doubt my failure, and I still fail anyways? What if I don't accept it, what if, for fuck's sake, failure's such a shoddy concept in the first place I have no real choice left but to call it something else.

What if I call it success? What if no one accepts this new designation? If I am the only one who accepts it, does it exist?

Does it not exist?

And what if it does or does not exist? What then? What if I resign to do nothing about it? What if I do everything I can to change it? Does it matter?

What if everyone and everything fell into either a category of failure or success? And what if failure was success, as I now believe?

What if you failed to succeed?

What if you failed first in order to succeed second?

What if you succeeded first only to fail in the end?

What if you lived a shitty life filled with successes?

What if you lived a great life wrought with failure?

What if you asked every one of these questions and recieved no answer?

What if you didn't?

Thursday, September 24, 2009

In Response to a Poem I Wrote One Night, Alone as Fuck, On a Bench at USF Sucking On the Future (I Later Married the Poem)

I think, I think I can still look through the branches and touch the candles of heaven with eyeballs wide and stupid.
The horizon has grown dim: I remain.
The night has grown wintry cold: I remain.
The streets, empty, the ivory tones, faded: I remain.
The horizon explodes, each morning. I sleep beside her. Fuck the sun.
I am entwined.
Complete.
Is it okay, I wonder, to be lost in me?
Am I okay?
I think, I think so.

Sex and Gunpowder

Steel melts me up, melts so hot triggers pull quick! bang.
It’s all on your shirt now.
It’s all on your hands now.
Pump it out, let it out, we fall down.
Rings around the Ashes.
Fuck the sun I have kelvins in my smoking fist. A smile ablaze and it’s arson.
You can’t make me eat. But I can spit, watch but don’t blink.
It’s all on your shirt now.
Red eyeballed white of hands.
Breathe breath out stop.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

The Time of My Life

Played the Lotto yesterday.
Cried.
Slept.
Got no reprieve. Tossed. Turned.
Went to work today.
Got pissed off.
Went home.
Worried.
Ate dinner.
Felt sick to my stomach.
Then I had a second left with my day.
So I inhaled. You were there for that part.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

On Talent and Lightning

"I do not know if I am talented or handsome, or untalented or unhandsome; I have no propensity to worry about those things," said the writer. "I will write because I desire to write, and I will reach for the cores of all of you and rip them out and show them to you because that is what I want to do in this world."

He said, "I do not give a fuck for talent. Those who are concerned can keep it."

He cared about heart, and he knew he had this because he felt the lingering silence between beats, the sound that has stayed with us for some reason. And then he pushed that sound outward.

"And that," he said, "is a story about lightning rods."

The MTV Video Music Awards in a poem

Christopher Walken
Hosted Saturday Night
Live 7 times and then
He leaped from a
Balcony and then
Fatboy Slim lost
The Popcorn man to
Three hookers, literally,
And then I stopped watching
The VMAs until Kanye proclaims
Beyonce empress of the endangered
Music Video and Taylor Swift chews
His arrogance,
What
A
Fucking
Douche.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Pleasure of Waking

Roger looked at Veronica, looked at the hard shell of her face and listened to the hum of the airplane.

"Roger, you are a nice man," Veronica said en francais. "You say you want to marry me, but I do not believe in it. I believe we should spend time together, for as long as we wish to, but make no promises."

Roger shut his eyes and saw their nakedness in the Abbeville hotel room, but he was sad because when he opened his eyes a profound thing occurred: their nakedness was gone.

He spoke in English

"I can't," he said. "We are from different places. We do not understand each other's languages."

She shrugged. "C'est vrai."

Roger decided to blink as little as possible for the remainder of his flight, though he was growing tired and knew soon he would have to shut his eyes to sleep.

Veronica walked to the bathroom stall and never returned. Perhaps she found an empty seat in another row, or perhaps she disappeared altogether from the world. He would never know if either were true.

Roger drifted to the constellations of distant lights crawling along the blackness beneath him.

As he transitioned from his window seat to a dream, Roger understood that this dream would return each night and would sadden him, but he took comfort in the inevitable fleeting pleasure of waking.

Blind Mice

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they see. See how they see.
They all snuck up on the scientist last night,
Who put retinal stem cells in their eyes,
He never saw such a sight in his life,
When they ate his eyes.
(The Government wasn't surprised.)

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Personal Effects

By my desk I keep a jar of skin, in case I am not in concrete.

The Motion of a Broom at Sunset

Her cheeks cut into her face, and they met with the edges of her lips which, like hydrogen and helium, violently cradled fragility.

Then night fell, first from infinity, then from Milk, then from the moon, then from clouds, buildings that scrape, treetops, then from the curves of our brows and to our lids. Then, behind the lids, it was day.

When we woke we hammered until our differences were shattered garbage, and we swept with them the rest of us, too.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

A verse

I am on your side.
I am all ears tonight
We are infinite,
just like Charlie said
in the pages of
us.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Gravity

"I ate 16 pecan pies and I'm still not full," said Gregg.

"Maybe it's guilt," said Nancy, who knew. "No pecan pie will fill a hole like that."

He frowned, sticky, then thought, then smiled, and cried when he said, "Tomorrow's your birthday. Maybe we'll have cake."

B is for Bouyancy

The blackbird Flies and the eagle Soars and the woman dreams of walking away.

A is for Apple

The dog goes Woof and the cat goes Meow and the man cries.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Clubs

No! Woosh, ck.
No! Woosh, ck, thump.
Woosh, ck.
Woosh, ck.
ck.
ck.
ck.
ck.
Huff. Huff. Huff.
Gurgle.

Hearts

Thu thu thu thu thu thu thu thu.
Thu thu, thu thu, thu thu.
Thu, thu. Thu, thu.
Thu, thu. Thu, thu.
Thu. Thu.
Thu. Thu.
Thu. Thu.
Th.

Spades

Dig, dig, dig.
Crunch.
Dig, Dig, Dig.
Crunch.
Sweat, wipe, wipe.
Dig, dig, dig.
Crunch.
Dig, dig, dig.
Crunch.
Tumble.

Diamonds

Jingle, sparkle, sunshine, wince.
Calm. Warmth. Full.
Bloated.
Nauseous.
Bile--gralg! Strings of vomit, gag, gag, gasp.
Sob. Crying, crying, sob sob sob.
Fist, trickle sticky between fingers, stinging palm.
Open fist.
Jingle, dull, red, blurry tears.
Tilt palm like cloud.
Rain.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

I Will Give Them Singleness of Heart and Action

Joe, he was angry as fuck. You should have seen him. That fucker spit blood like lava and wiped that lava from his volcano spout, and Joe sayeth onto Robert with a great mountain of knuckles, you shall devour the Earth. And Robert did. And it was good. Pay-Per-View good. And men cheered Joe's wrath. Men would change their lives for Joe, they would pray to him, worship him. These men were afraid.

This Dream Has Stayed With You For Some Reason

The thing about this beach house is that I’ve never been here. I am here now, but I have never been here before.

A small cottage home on the Bonita coastline on the Gulf of Mexico was my uncle Gary’s every summer and we lived there and solved crossword puzzles with the smell of suntan lotion and sand all over everything on the second story patio for a week. It was ours. We read library books and laid in cold bedroom sheets with the smell of aloe vera and the cool burn the sun left on our backs. In the other room beers were drank and conversations were loud between Nana and uncle Gary about whatever the ocean breeze brought to mind. When the lights were off in the bedroom the conversations kept on, and the light of the livingroom shined in from the alcoves atop the wall. Their voices crawled under the door and banged against the walls.

This beach house, this one here with the rear slider, with the fancy oak and glass things, with the sad and empty playground out back in the dark of midnight, the solitary swing, this isn’t our beach house. I’ve never been here. But my family is here; not uncle Gary. At least, if this is his beach house, like the one he shared with us and made our home on the Gulf, I do not see him. Dad, on the couch. Sean. Nana. Mom’s upstairs in the bedroom. Let’s go for a walk, Nana says. Sean says, Okay. The beach house with strange oak and glass is set back from the water; the old metal swing is in a back yard, with green grass, and a sidewalk to the right leads to the sand and black licorice water. On the coast, to the left and right, are buildings, high-rise condos and multi-story homes. This beach house is nuzzled behind those buildings that Nana and Sean are walking toward. They left the slider open, so I step out, watch the moon a moment reflecting soft white on the buildings and the sidewalk and the water and sand. The breeze sways the swing a bit. But there is no breeze. The swing is swinging alone. I go inside quickly, afraid, pit of my stomach knoting as I slide shut the door to this strange beach house where my dad sits on the couch.

As the door slides in front of me I see him; reflected in the glass but not a reflection, transparent but real, on the swing. A dog. Dark, black or a dirty dark brown, short hair, I don’t know if he has a collar, if he belongs to anyone, if he has a home.

Push me.

I’m frozen, looking in the glowing tiny embers in his eye sockets. They are the eyes that take me from my quivering body and an inch to the left. Dilate my pupils. Jackhammer my heart. They are sickening, orange tiny dots sunken into alcoves on his face that are grotesquely too large for them. Yet, they are sad, frustrated, alone.

Push me.

I can’t push the dog. I can’t walk to the swing. I can’t open the door. I can’t move. I’m sorry. I can’t. I break eye contact. Walk away. Breathe and feel sick.

Something’s wrong. A deep, guttural horn roars. This is not our beach house. Dad sits on the couch, staring at the television. Sean and Nana still aren’t back. The horn growls and shakes the air. Mom’s upstairs. Mom.

I run to the upstairs bedroom. Mom’s sleeping on the bed, atop the covers and comforter. Everything in the room is nautical; a life preserver hangs on the wall with red stripes. Mom wears a sailor’s suit. Mom, wake up. Wake up. Something’s happening. Mom rouses. Something's happening.

Out the window, there she is. Her horn groans wildly, and then it is quiet. She glides in silence, the monstrous ocean liner called possibly Titanic or perhaps Lusitania. Ghost lights dotting her sides like stars stare dim on into forever.

There is no sound, it is calm and windless.

Mom. I hold her in my arms, against my chest.

This is not my beach house. I didn’t push the dog with the ugly, tiny, lonely eyes burning orange. He wanted to be pushed. On the swing. He asked. I didn’t push him. This ghost ship is his frustration. These ghost lights are his loneliness. These cheeks with the tears are my regret. My shame of the fear that froze me. Kept me from grabbing the chains and pushing, back, forth.

She’s gracefully crashing up the beach, crushing palm trees, smashing condo high-rises as she clears her path. She is poetry and she does not blow her horn to interrupt my terror. The bow looks at me as I hold my mother in my arms and I look at the bow, the ghost ship’s supple breast, no longer crying, just waiting. The nipple offers her milk and she collides with the beach house I’ve never been to.

Cradle

Cradle the child in your arms, the child me, the child that is us and we might make it through this one. We’ll make it through this one, this soggy wind, this shingle shamble, it’s dry and warm and we’re safe in your arms. And I might sleep with the dust of you in my eyes, and I might wake up with the grain of you under my skin, and I might listen to your voice for just a minute.

The nightlight, it sends the past shooting like rockets exploding through our very souls, and it fades to teary eyes but don’t cry, oh no, puddles all muddled in the present, a wet walk to the future surely.

Just touch me, I miss you and I love you tonight like never before and that is true from the depth of it all. Just try to see the bottom. Just try.

Read the bedtime story with the sleepy lids please tonight

Carpe Gutter

Frozen starlight filled her eyes, echoed long through ivory remembering.
Vast and eating is blackness in its final stages of nothing.
Starting over.
Starting ov
er.
And was it anything to wonder, to watch lucid and night-eyed.
You tickle in my throat through ventricles and twitch the edges of a smile, a drop down face skin.
Blueglow touches the edge of everything, but we own black, so it is ours.
The blue, the glow is tomorrow and it is not mine, it is not yours.
But we own the black, so it is ours.

December (the cliche)

Dying isn’t so hard, look away and it will pass.
Glass is brittle as bone trees, breathe out she says.
Snowflakes are just like everybody else.
A clear sky, overrated.
If my fingers could find the bottom of this bathtub or the conflagration of this chimney top.
Wouldn’t that be something?
Yes.
And time and minutes and moments and forever and never.
Ever.
Snowy, isn’t it. I can see my breath I can see my breath I can see my breath.
All misty on your silly smile, melt.
And the world dies with you.

Is It Raining On You?

Yesterday can't be taken back and tomorrow can't be taken yet and today is.

Coming from dreams. In. Deep depths maybe never.

Only real thing worth sleeping finally is a tear from you.

For the taking, my one.

For the taking

451 and Something Wicked in Green Town (in brief review)

Men selling lightning rods in storm colored suits. Wild adventures between book pages and the smell of cotton candy and licorice, the sound of a calliope. One boy Ying, the other boy Yang. Contrasts in poetry, uncle's carousel of darkness comes to mind. Brilliant.

The temperature at which paper burns isn't the only Ray to catch the eye.

I Think I Saw Myself in This Puddle Once

The walls are different now, but they’re as empty as the ones 150 miles from you. In these moments of innumerable depths and dark sadness, I catch glimpse of the nothingness of being without you. It makes me sure, it makes me steady, it makes me found.

It makes me look at the sun setting, filling the sky with orange soda and all the beauty in the smile of a star, and realize how absolutely fucking ugly it is without you to smile back at it.

It pulls through my throat, my heart, my eyes, it pulls me to you. It’s always pulled me to you.

No matter what, no matter where, no matter when, it’s you and it’s me and all those songs, all those words, all that sadness, all that emptiness, was a place in my arms you were meant to fill.

I want you as my wife. I want you as my friend. I want you to twist inside me until there’s no letting go.

I want you to know that I know who we are, and I want you to know that who I was is almost yours and nothing more.

Please come home soon.

Don't Slow Down

Have you ever stopped to catch your breath and realized, OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING I CAN DO TO STOP IT. YOU CAN'T STOP IT EITHER!!! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??? AND WHY AM I DOING ALL THIS SHIT TO BETTER MY DYING SELF??? HEY! YOU THERE! ARE YOU HAPPY? DON'T YOU WALK AWAY FROM ME, OOOOOH! IS IT BLACKNESS? IS IT BLACKNESS WHEN I DIE? IS THIS GOD GUY GOING TO BE MAD AT ME? I HOPE NOT. WHAT'S ALL THIS ABOUT FIRE AND BRIMSTONE? BRIMSTONE? I MEAN, COME ON WE HAVE METALS NOW. STEEL POLYMERS AND ALL THAT. HEAT RESISTANT CLOTH MAYBE? HOW DO I GO BACK? HOW DO I GO BACK TO BEING SMALL? I'VE GROWN FOND OF THIS LIVING THING. IF YOU DON'T MIND I'D LIKE TO STAY HERE AND....HEY! DON'T YOU WALK AWAY FROM ME, OOOOH....

I don't recommend it.

Yellowstone Road

I ASKED HER, "SO,YOU WERE ALIVE DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION?"

I asked callously, not because I was a callous child, but because I had been alive for less than two decades -- two decades which were securely distant from accountants jumping out of windows wrapped in ticker tape, or middle-class homeless people, or cities made of boxes.

To a kid that had been born in 1984, words like "great depression" and "cardboard city" were nothing more than size 10 print in a high school textbook. The apathetic nature of my viewpoint was not intentional, but rather an inevitable circumstance of the human mind in which experience can never be an equivalent of non-experience. My mind could not attach a genuine emotional response to the depression era, because I had never in my life experienced the things I read about this time period. It was interesting to me, but I hadn't thought twice about it when approaching her with this question.

Like a bull in a china store, or so the cliche goes, I asked with a big stupid smile on my face. Her reaction made me feel more foolish than any single event I can recall in my brief existence here on this planet.

She didn't speak at first. Her face tightened, eyebrows brought together and lips tight. She seemed to have quietly taken her leave of the present, as if where her journey ended was so vastly distant from the chair she was sitting in that the act of processing thoughts became delayed like a radio transmission from the moon.

She was quiet, and still. I waited silently.

I don't remember exactly what she said after that -- it was something like "I don't want to talk about it." But it wasn't really what she said that effected me so deeply. More accurately, it was what she didn't say.

Hazel Gallagher (or as we all knew her, Grandma Hazel) was a woman who lived for one hundred years in this crazy world. Although some of us knew her only briefly during that one hundred years, and couldn't possibly begin to piece together her entire life, we knew that she was a good person, and a caring person, and a strong person. We knew that whatever it was that she had been through in her life, she had somehow gotten here, and that had to count for something. Perhaps it counted for everything.

I didn't know where Grandma Hazel went that day in her mind when I asked about the great depression. Honestly, I don't think I'll ever know for sure what she was thinking. But I do know that Grandma Hazel is not and never was an old lady lying in a nursing home. She was not wrinkled skin or hearing aids, as we remember her most recent physicality. She was not a mentality of delusions and mirages of the past.

Hazel was many things which we know and many things which we don't, but she will never simply be a victim of a dying body, in the same way she will never simply be the victim of the great depression. Sometimes things that are brilliantly complicated are also beautifully simple.

Hazel Gallagher was my Grandma Hazel. You may never understand what that means, any more than I understood what Hazel couldn't bring herself to say to me about her past.

But I guess the point is that understanding and knowing are not the same. I don't pretend to understand Grandma Hazel's life, but I know Grandma Hazel.

I think it goes without saying that everyone who had the privilege of knowing Grandma Hazel loved her and misses her. But I also believe that the perseverance of her soul will forever outlive the longevity of the human body, and perhaps that is something we may all take comfort in.

Love you always Grandma.