Fat Naked People

I wonder if my neighbors are fat naked people and when they have sex their skin rubs like silk in the spin cycle, slipping and indistinguishable in their wetness. I wonder if they smell like coconut lotions and sweat and they press into each other with their roundness, and he is lost in her and she is herself with him, for a moment forgetting the relief in the eyes of devilish skinny girls as they realize they look much more attractive to their men when she passes in the street, by restaurant tables, in grocery isles. I wonder if the pain in their bones, their hearts, her back, disappears, if they heal one another. If the pressure of being fat and naked in front of another person is taken from their throats without the numbing of alcohol, or if the numbing of alcohol is out of habit and shared among them. Or maybe they're always happy, with each other, without, maybe they're secure and that's why she groans without shame and he grunts while they fuck and that's why I am sitting here listening to my neighbors making human connections at 4 a.m. and sometimes I am listening to them argue without shame and like they hate each other. Maybe it's why they'll do anything to fill their apartment with themselves, their volume and their wetness and their touching, so full that it leaks through the walls and it draws me and I wish we all could have more.

A Christmas Poem

This is a Christmas poem. It is not a Hanukkah, or, Chanukah, poem. A poem about wood or sweat or liquified wax, red. It is not a poem about palm trees, as somber and drunken as July in the forty-degree Florida winter, wrapped with multi-colored strands to celebrate light golden Mexican beer. This is not a poem about limes and other things squeezed into bottlenecks. Skin and guts contorting to spaces they were never meant for. No, this is a Christmas poem. Not a poem about Christ in thorns or about Nikolaos of Myra in Ray-Bans. Once my family gave no gifts but gave the anticipation of gift-giving to one another. Once my family gave each other lots of gifts. Always, my family sits in a circle and thinks of wrapping paper.

A Story at High Noon

Midday is the time metal warms under salty rays and barrels squeeze lead penes until they explode and burn stomachs with the fire of their finishes. That's how the race is won, hombre. Until tomorrow, when twitching fingers know what the inside of a hole is, I'm watching the past and wondering how it ever got out of that place, under the sun, you and me wearing dirt like clothes, breathing smoke like air. But most of all the smell of herrings rotting in the heat. If you catch me taking a moment to inhale, remember what's in my throat, that smell that brings buzzing interlopers like the hum of electricity shooting through your skull. Dust it off and listen for the rattle before you reach in the eye socket. It's hard to think of home with your brain coiled, señores, unless you've got venom in the blood before the strike. And that's a story about why it's better to be dead than to be harmless.

A song about Tarpon season in Boca Grande, Florida

Why are the fish in the ocean so blue
and why does the dirt hold our feet just like glue
that’s what newton said; he was that apple guy
Why do the shimmering kitchen sinks rust, and why are we hurt by the people we trust
Why are Christmas trees lit up like a million multi-colored stars
but only in December

Oh I know we can’t go back home but
Why can’t we just call this home

Why are the clouds everything everywhere and
why does the sunset remind us of there and
why can’t we go back and why can’t we have that and why aren’t we there yet and how might we live best if everything’s shitty okay not shitty per se, but monetarily disadvantaged.
Why is the best we can give not enough if the kitchen sink’s clogged we can swim with the cups if the dog wont stop barking we’ll all yip yip yip til the police come.

Oh I know we can’t go back home but
Why can’t we just call this home
Oh I know we can’t go back home but
why can’t I just call you home my love.

Why are the fish in the ocean so blue
could it be there are plenty but none of them you.

Equations

The unequivocal equal sign wavers here a moment, not sure to walk away or shatter bone, stain knuckles Poinsettia and then be destroyed. We are unsure the answer to give the equal sign, who can neither choose nor abstain from choice. But it is only a moment and the moment passes underneath in the snowy night like fish underneath the ice we lost ourselves over and over and here is where we end. Not in a whisper but in a smile and a tear. I don't know why we cry anyway it spoils the paperwork. Running ink is the number one reason applications are denied. Equations are hard enough to solve without turmoil slipping between the numbers.

Maybe this is why, when the equal sign looks to us for answers, we have no voice.

Black

Blurred vision rubs the edge to a blunt knob. Devastatingly, it does not open an emergency exit door. We forgive we forget but sometimes we remember. This is the worst part about being a dog.

Everyone who reads this can fuck themselves

And what if I'm not that anymore.
If I'm not good enough or don't have enough blood.
What if I don't feel like writing because I don't want to tell the truth anymore.
What if I'm repetitious. What if my word choice is poor, my syntax shit. What if I don't want to care.
What if I just want to fuck you until my brains are dead rose petals.
What if I don't want to die.
What if I don't want to hurt anymore.
What if I'm terrified of leaving you.
What if I'm terrified.
If metaphor is reduced. Simile like Hiroshima or birthday candles or worse.
So that when we are ash it's a shitty child's lie, the cinder is turned away from, their faces bored, relieved at the intermission from grief. They will close their eyes and breathe in. This is called childhood.
This is childhood.
What if I don't feel like not writing because it feels good to lie for a while.
Would you listen?
How many times do you think I can ask to be great
Before I am not.
How many times do you think
Before you cannot/
Do you think
we'll make it?
Or
Should I care should I have come back to this.
Should I dwell.
Is it okay if you don't have any of the answers.
It's okay if we're just quiet for a while.
It's okay to fill the room with breath
So that I can rest
So that I don't have to be that
that if I die tonight
if I
tonight
if
I won't be what anyone had hoped
I won't be their success story before I burn this whole fucking place to the ground
Where the dirt
the clay
and the black
are a pretty mess
This is how I prepare for winter.
Can we snuggle and be cute and make them sick of us
I feel so much compelled to disappoint.
So when the snow melts, there will be only us in this place, and no one will know where we are hiding.
Will you stay?
Because everyone who reads this can fuck themselves
and learn to cope with loss
and eventually we'll end this
and eventually we'll end.

The First Step

On the verge of good things rashed by the hard shoulder rubbing at our heels.
Makes it hard to walk, see. Makes it hard to be frank and unappreciative. Makes it hard and searing like the shoulder broad and concrete and turned away. And that is the Polaroid yellow washed, the sun laughing and we want to laugh with it though it presses its fist at our foreheads. We can forgive, I believe we can if we really want so pat the shoulder. The first step.

I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it

Not so clear the differences, between soft, and quiet, and tired. Between fights dead ghosts skipping suns setting. again. Daisy across the water dead men tell stories over again, emerald angles cut pictures looking glass. The water like glass. Not so clear.

Eskimo Star

If the sun is my killer, let there be.
If the sun is my lover, let it pass. Below the green.
Tell me a secret any secret.
The way you whisper glides easily against my brittle skin.
I need you to be quiet with me.
Though we promise to stay up all night sucking telephone wire
We wake up wondering how
The line died and how
The sun is my killer. Let there be.
The sky is like a lover, figure eight over cold glass, at the lake bottom fireflies swimming we cannot catch without a pole.
Cut a circle. There I will be waiting.

Nostalgia at Night

Could I write that song, it would be easier. It would come easy.
Could we be underneath. It is silver, the way silver simplifies.
And then it comes back and repetition befriends unfriendly.
And then it goes.
So don't let it go, don't let it. Stay here even if it doesn't make sense. Stay here and write songs that don't make sense and then make it stay.
Could we write that song, it would come ready. We would be ready.
Could I be beneath. Hold it up, hold love up, the way love simplifies.
Somewhere new, then. Somewhere new and that's that. Remember, that's all. And somewhere old comes back.
Remember somewhere old. Remember that song I didn't write, but wished I could.
Remember wishing.

Our Father Who Art

This is testament. Am not sinful today. Not today, dad. Not today.
This is aftermath. Not the end, no, God damn yourself, not the end.
This is a showdown. Draw you motherfucker. Draw first, dad, you motherfucker.
This is a question. Our love is broke down on desert roads. Why?
This is commandment. Thou shalt not have me under thy ashen fingertip. That means take your fucking hands off me, this will take time, give me time, it is all I ask, may we covet some time.
This is song.
So sing.

Only His

He wants to ask you questions, so many fucking questions that he cannot, like What is it you see in your eyes--and what is it makes him shiver so, as blood lets from the wound you give with glimmer in your lips. Questions like what makes words stop coming, why not the cruel answers, why will he be shadowed in your skin this way, the way hornets are to children with fire.

Eat me inferno, eat me whole, eat me with a glass of water in case you are too weak to burn so: Cheers, darlin', the Irishman says with tears. Or is it the buzz glazing over what you tossed away after brief caress.

But you have not been caged so you may go. You may go. That he may not is only his to keep.

Pony Up

Beyond is a place that we all seek to be, when everything else is just waiting. But everything else is a place we can see, so close to the edge do we wander. Eat now, sleep now, die now, indeed. Finding out fast the hard way's the only way down. So pretend like the curtain is raising and when it falls shout as loud as you can. Yes the world is founded on shouting, and in all the best ways we grow hoarse. In all the best ways we grow hoarse.

This is What Winter is Like to the Dead

Ice on your lips. Snowy breath huff, huff, hearts twined this way. Cut off the blood, turn it slushy. Burns the roofs of our mouths. Don't forget that song. Don't forget me.

That Day

If you can feel the rub of water, the tops of your feet drifting under, your ankles thin pilings barnacled and you can't see beneath the surface but there is reason to believe anchoring.

If you can believe, lethargy overcomes. Maybe he'll meet you there. Maybe he'll lift the water, if you can articulate, and maybe he'll leave your drying breasts never to be seen again, if you're lucky.

If you're lucky you'll never read the things written about you and maybe none of us is lucky and just look at obituary writers talk about unlucky talk about self-reflection, God, you just can't stand it.

If you are God then are you also fond of me? This question is unrelated to luck. I will blame you but that's what happens when love is no longer complicated, down on my luck and bitterest wind roughing the knuckles, you understand, you've been in scrapes.

If I don't come to lift the water, try to remember what it's like to imagine imperfection and then on that day you created imperfection, and it was good.

Home

I keep shiverin and I'm not even cold, keep shiverin to the sound of music to the ache of dyin to the silence of your voice the way we can just sit wordless even we get sick of words they're so goddamn old and ugly when you and me, we can just sit wordless and fuck words anyways fuck all words fuck every last word

___let's just burn under starlight, waste away to ashes at the gaze of Ursa Major gotta go big or you can never go home,

__________________________________________________come home
please

____________________come home

These are the reasons I don't want to believe in you

Blaming you weakens me. Thanking you is just another way of placing blame. Trusting you is disappointing. Living for you is dying and dying for you is no way to live. Loving you kills. Killing for you kills love. Your book is shit. Your people never look up from the sunlit pages, never have to squint at anything bright. Wish I could see real well and read real well, wish I could look down, look away, look anywhere. Wish the sun wasn't everywhere at once, blinding, that I could see it long enough to believe in it, long enough to stop believing in you, because it wouldn't hurt nearly as much.

The Black Tornado and the Hurricane

I'm full of regrets when it comes to meanness, I don't want meanness but here it comes, riding my leg you can see it like thorny black anaconda vines. It's part of a complex algorithm known as a barrel of fed up. Listening to stupid songs by Dan Bern, fuck you Dan, you do sound like Dylan. Ride that shit to the moon, people like Dylan.

I'll try not to be mean anymore.

Sometimes Don't Feel Like

Not much to say sometimes, don't feel like saying much sometimes, not clever. Just the base feeling vibrato in the veins, the base feeling, when the bag boy stares a moment too long when I pay with the food stamps. The base feeling, when there's not much to say sometimes, don't feel like saying much sometimes, not clever, just repetitious. It's that base feeling.

The Way You Taste

Radio lines hum hum hum in the rain the way we slide into black sea crests, AM frequency 3AM frequency hums in the cones centrifuge like God's last ugly firestorm, firestorm hits the sea and it's oily Hell lighting up the curves in your cheeks is that a smile? i like it when you smile do you like it when i smile or does it remind you too much of the hanging in the street the way fireworks lit up that woman's last look at the neighbor's dog what a fucking awful thing to see before you die even if it was a good dog, he always was a good dog, we understood each other that way and that's what i like about you listening to Dylan and trying to forget the death under the skin but it isn't working so we'll just hold each other now and listen to the hum hum hum of radio lines that draw us together in chorus.

Our Architecture

Panorama wide open horizon of burning skin pink and brown and swaying this way forever against the shore. Silhouette black as dogs of the thin bone of a steel forearm rusted up high against wisps of twilit days past, and I wonder. I wonder how easy that bone breaks, wonder how many stories it builds concrete rib cage where you look some day from the window. But the color is behind you now, you look east now, and you can't go back there because nobody looks at paintings anymore and someone told you that one day and you wanted to shove your knuckles through every canvas just to stand back and take the hole with you. Wherever you go, wherever you end up, wherever we set down our architecture. That's where the touch is reaching and what's really beautiful is the way the sun never sets against your pupils like that's where it used to be. That's where the touch is reaching and that's where the dirt roads all lead every dirt road if you follow long enough, wherever you go, wherever you end up, wherever we set down.

All

He calls poetry an object. He calls her an object. Mary Anderson Franklin doesn't love Johnny Pinkerton because objects do not love like the way the sun only hits the water, the rusty boat beds, some ways some times and Johnny Pinkerton isn't his fuckin name anyway so fuck her anyway, 'cause Mary ain't her fuckin name anyway so who the hell were either of them to love or read poetry. Just two kids without names just two kids without nothin' but poetry they didn't deserve and not deserving it made them better just a minute or two even if it wasn't theirs and it wasn't their names it was saying and even if it said, who the fuck are you anyway, nobody, that's who. It was all about that sun, somewhere under the boat bed, somewhere stretched underneath. It had to do with the birds up there under the rusty bow smile cut the way their mouths couldn't turn, kissing the way they couldn't, slumber, dreaming, and that was all there was. That's why. Because, Wouldn't it be nice and soft if that's all there was.

Ballad of Marty McFly

Sits in my gut this way, that way.
Ours.
Ridin flames lining the asphalt like mike fox nick cage the loneliest spectacles
Sad, if you ask them you won't
Ask them.
Rides my gut like hummin
Our AMFM wave
Chewin on cumulonimbus cotton
Fed a wisp to the doggie
Fed a wisp to your mother
Hopin prayin
Though it holds no sway
With Her but maybe with she
I still hold
Tight fisted
Tight as a fist
Bitter on tongue tip
Bitter in the eye pink
Darling, you dance in my Gut
This way, that
May I
Join

The Stomach

This wails in my ears We will fucking die no other words come no other words can describe the cold crawl under a layer of skin not even these and not even these can give the silhouette a name not even these i am afraid of this wailing This wailing does not cease This wailing is thickened by blackness You baby you are all that glows it's silly to say this but we are silly together and no one can be heard over the wail and what lies between the Syncopation of b-b-breath l-l-laugh l-l-love don't c-c-care at all and all I don't hear and all we hear now is the sound of our own dying like the feel of warm air exhaled across your stomach and it does not end

This is a Father's Day Story

1980 is the year, when he says it I imagine it clearly, a room of men in deep-lensed glasses with wily curls of hair, with stubble, one man in a lab coat with a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk in his hand, standing at the head of the long conference table. They have never seen this before. The man with the disk smiles and with a fling of his wrist the hard-plastic square is airborne. It impacts the table quickly and bounces once, twice, three times before sliding to a rest near the other men. They ogle around it / THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.

The disk is undamaged.

C:\> a:
A:\> cd the fucking future is before you and you will die please insert floppy disk into drive a, the floppy disk must protect the delicate pathways, dir

one time three brothers inserted the floppy disk much to his delight one time the youngest brother lied he told the two older brothers that the hare (hero) beat the tortoise (villain) and the secret level was three-dimensional this was unheard of so all of it was taken for a lie but part of it was true (everything is three-dimensional) and childhood lessons were learned
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the image is loading

he paints an image: one day, the image will load "like writing history with lightning." His only regret is "that it is all so terribly true."

Given what you know about this time period, why do you think we can never go back to this place?

The Only Thing

Seven minutes until 9 p.m. This is the only thing in life that I am sure of.

What Waterfountains Do

Water cones from the center, endeavoring to be air. It falls and rejoins the congregants. They are sad to see their prayers have failed, and shout, "We'll never be air, not so long as we're water!" But in the same moment they realize they had never known what they were until they were not air, and had said so. Thus, so they will not forget again, you will sometimes see water in this way. During these times it is important to be clouds.

Give Thanks

For peeling my cape from the stigma, so the wind will not carry me up, so the air is worth loving, because I cannot have it.

For frailty, when I will remember God wetting my cheek all the time. He cries rough against my neck, and laughs, because we are brothers this way, frustrated with the other.

Knowledge of Life and Death. For transience: it means only to stop spinning, dear.

For stripping the pretense down to the pale falling chest.

For love, which is sad in its context.

For the glare of a snowbank so I may rest and be numb

For the words I stumble to whisper in my teeth.

For listening to the wind I used to know, beating memory from our heads. For sailing closer, pressing completely, and we cannot remember whose breath.

The Way Foolish Lovers Die

Naive is ice because it talks delicately, like it doesn't know how the game is played. But we like it better that way. We pretend, too. In that way it does a good thing for us. We may walk slower, we cannot feel when we touch the rough edges. We don't whisper in fear of shattering, but we may shout, to obliterate the thing we love.

Snowbank

I am a snowbank, winter is a time of watching for a snowbank. This city that soaks you in the shade of oranges, blues, reds, and you watch under the starlessness of light pollution. You watch yourself and you think you’re watching the city the whole goddamn time, you think you’re watching the heel-shuffles of empty guts scrape the icy sidewalks, they’re never warm, lacking material, but what a thing to see it’s a reflection the whole time. What a dirty trick. This city’s full of dirty tricks like that. What a clean thing spring is.

The Great Fire

After the great fire, everything straw was subject to the wind.
After the fire, we all decided never to take air for granted again.
We were in love with fleeting things, like afternoons and saltwater.
We got to thinking that maybe the great fire encouraged us like an uncle. We got to thinking, you know, about thoughts, how thoughts are encouraged by uncles. We hoped that fire never forgot us.

Mayflower

I am disappointed in my mother tonight. Her narrow nose, pointing down at the dirty Earth beneath her as she sweeps blood from the porch after each storm. Toting the proper papers around in a bag bearing the names of former husbands; (Marcos. Francisco. 1848 she changed her name. 1853 she bought her freedom.) Setting a plate of las papas fritas de la liberté for the neighbor children. Humming over the thunder that shakes the mountains, not hearing the quiet sobs as each time the thunder shuffles away. In the mountains the three sisters distract themselves from her cool song, the oldest by shucking, the middle sister by cooking arepa, the youngest with dolls in corn husk dresses. “How can you shoot women, children?” “Easy. You just don’t lead 'em so much.” Are the neighbors’ mothers hiding their red cheeks behind the mask of Dinah? I'm tired of seeing her ugly face, like dried clay, Adamah, I'll walk until she's behind me. “The dead know only one thing: That it is better to be alive” alie Water the brown back of David’s Son is drank from a bottle. The valleys of her lips are filled and she speaks of Mesopotamia. She is called Mayflower. For what else would I call her when I am no longer welcome?

Biography Hippocampus

To have knowledge is to be disappointed in the world, to become hopeless about hope, to be disgusted at the dirtiness and ignorance of the human animal, to worry constantly about inbound asteroids but also to anticipate a kind of relief from sudden, catastrophic death. Wisdom, then, is the acceptance of these feelings, foolishness a retrograde movement at the equator, where you find me strolling forgetfully.

This Ain't Carver's Goddamn Cathedral

Close your ears and hear your music. Close your eyes and see the thing you want most. Close your mouth and clench your teeth for the sweetness of blood we share beating. The beating of fists against chests because our ribs won't give, goddamn them, we hate them. When does hate become make love? Honey, it don't fuckin matter when you're blind, when you're deaf, when you're mute and your breath lingers in the taste of pennies. I pray, tearing the delicate skin from the caps of my knees, that you are close enough to smell it.

The Legend Of

Sometimes I wish you could tell me what it's like to be a super hero, to take me underneath. If you could tell me what it's like to fly underneath. From what great altitudes cheeks pull back beneath a thin comforter. So thin that, if it were not for super powers, we would feel the outside air encroaching.

Let's Make a Deal

I'd like to live somewhere no one's been for the time it takes a sun to sink. The religion would be sweaty. God would be the space between us. For once, a God who is cool on the skin of my chest, not stale air on the breath of hypocrite car dealers. I'm so fucking sick of Fords and Chevys.

Say Hello

Goodbye, today. Hello, baby, ice on our
teeth and a dark blanket to keep our laughter between us. It all comes
slower, see. Watch it fade; it's nature, it's the nature of ember.
Watch it fade. Orange is the color through which we must see through each other, and whatever that silly thing is on your cheeks. I said goodbye already, do me a
favor, give me a fucking mercy. Say hello.

A Brisk Thought

Looking down the cliff wall and filling the wind with you.

Excavation

Sees himself through the reflection of Earth-pressed stone behind your knuckle, the haunting man he's always wanted to be.

Calcium Deposit

The cold wraps, long, sad blanket, an echo of ghost-water in a one-woman little waltz on home to you, where 3 a.m. tucks me to your bones.

lla < 3

Love lacks apology.

Garbage

If garbage didn't go in a can, where would it go? I would put my garbage randomly around my apartment, but then arrange it so I could use it.

Maybe a Beginning (read: middle, end, etc.)

After a shot rang out and Eddie's forehead leaked something red, something red...she couldn't place it...and his eyes rolled up as if floating to the surface of some invisible body of water...and he slumped...she couldn't place it...Jane continued to describe all the minute flavors of her tea, very confused now, but maintaining the decorum as if she had stepped into the middle of the highway and it was the swerving, horn-blaring, tire-ripping, metal-crunching, automotive tonnage hurtling towards her that she addressed with the details of her tea. It was not until nearly three minutes after her teacup had fallen and shattered, bits of century-old porcelain and puddled brown water on her wood floor that she heard the shot.

Things that are sharp

Lots of things are sharp; tiredness, awakeness, ice sculptures of lonely people, combusting lonely people (though hardly spontaneous), lines on dark roads, dark on lined roads, hollowness (though hardly spontaneous), fifty-seven mile-per-hour tire hums, the smile of a guitar neck though I bet you never saw it and thought of it as straight-faced though you'd be sad to find out you were wrong, the translucent skin of a window through which you hear the young heartbeat of an old 3 a.m. city, the memory of summer's coast pyrotechnics and the echo of bang along the wall of your inner-ear and gunpowder mist tickling your nostril at the salty outstretched hand of an ocean's shore somewhere you grew up too fast or didn't grow up at all or grew just enough to watch the salty shore betray you, good china, Hải Ninh at the Chinese border and at the border of a salty shore like yours, duck quack, a mirror's tempo, a mirror's gait, a mirror's swagger, a mirror's polite shared glance in public, a mirror's private brick-powder stare, a mirror you can't see into, a mirror you can see right through, a mirror that remains in one piece, a collection of many jagged mirrors, the opposite of stars, what happens to stars when they have been sad for a long time, what one wishes for upon a blue giant versus what one wishes for upon a red dwarf, biting wind, swallowing softness in the center of her palm, vows, fighting (for, against), the smile of a guitar neck you will never see it if you yourself aren't melting along the edge, melting, but shaped by the edge, angled, and always sharp, angled, so that you cannot turn your neck to see what dull things have been cut, yet you are cutting them, and melting, and there comes a time when the dull things will realize that to not be cut is to deny sharpness, and to deny sharpness is to not be cut.

A definition

love
    Show Spelled [luhv] noun, verb,loved, lov·ing.

–noun
1. protective railing, as along a road or stairway.

2. a rail laid parallel to a track to prevent derailment or to keep derailed rolling stock from leaving the roadbed.

-verb
1. to execute or put to death with a bullet: to be shot at sunrise.

2. an act or instance of exploding; a violent expansion or bursting with noise, as of gunpowder or a boiler (opposed to implosion).

—Synonyms
1. smash, level, waste, ravage, devastate. Destroy, demolish, raze imply reducing a thing to uselessness. To destroy is to reduce something to nothingness or to take away its powers and functions so that restoration is impossible: Fire destroys a building. Disease destroys tissues. To demolish is to destroy something organized or structured: to demolish a machine. To raze is to level down to the ground: to raze a fortress. 2. extirpate, annihilate, uproot.

—Idiom
catch fire,
a.Also, catch on fire. to become ignited; burn: The sofa caught fire from a lighted cigarette.

Origin:
bef. 900; ME sterre, OE steorra; c. OHG sterra; akin to OHG sterno, ON stjarna, Goth stairno, L stella, Gk astḗr, Skt stṛ

A Moment of Irony

Jeremy let a harsh breath from his nose, amused at the irony. What a goddamn tool this Freddy is, he thought. Mister big-shot tough-guy wise-ass. Mister slick. Let him go on about it, take his time; tell them all how many he's killed and how many years he wormed out of with his big-shot tough-guy wise-ass lawyer, slick to the heels in Louisiana gator skin. Let him try to tell it through a throat-hole Jeremy's grandaddy's revolver would give him in just a few minutes now.

Summer of Love

Afternoon is a time when the axes cut in shadows, pendulum, slow, the sun's gaudy execution of smoldered cement. What they call the sweet release of death is, as the roads might tell you, as cool as a lemonade's summer sweat, but swift, also. So swift, in a moment the cracked and boiling roads forget to die and burn alive. But for this we forgive them, because we love to be going, and it is our shadows which kill.

A Timeline.

After is comes was but not before is not.

Love in three words

Love lacks apology.

Pop Quiz

How is your hair not like the ashed skeleton of a Ginko tree in 1945 Hiroshima who was fucked until shining by a foreign gal Enola?

Tonight

Today is the sharp angles of a window frame cut against pale white-blue atmosphere. That is all today can hope to be; tonight blurs.

Blaspheme and become swallowed in salvation: a bible

What if
I can't bear to love
God theory
so much
as I
love
you? Will it all
f
a
l
l, our lovely fire storm?

What if the boy-
s who say,
Jesus is the one
way
up,
don't understand,
what it is
to want
down?

And fall,
fall,
fall
is all I can do
with
you.

Inside a chestnut, I know the pain of passion, inside of you I slide cross milk stars, and dream of things less sharply angled.

That if
God
wrote
you,
I will read
and might believe.
That no
old
book,
might show me
Him
but
you.

Letter to an Insomniac

Indiscriminately I slide down to bad posture in the chair.

Would it be that which determines my fate, this slide, let's cut the shit, think of the curve of the crescent moon against the chair of Cassiopia, and the lesser, duller shine as it rests.

Racecar driver makes this decision constantly. To refuel or to press against cement.

But tonight it feels...easier. To rest. To ignore fault. To heed the blue and yellow striped flag. To heed the expanding universe and its patterns, silver pinprick freckles of some obliterated Goddess.

Gravity is not so much a result of hurtling now, as of the illusion of lethargy. A turtle shell pressed upon by a palm.

If you do not believe this is an illustration of the flaws of time, I fear I have already lost you to lying ticking clocks/hearts/electric currents of our tongues. If my introducing the image of a tongue confuses you, open your mouth and allow whatever may to combust and burn. Listen to the metamorphosis of living tissue to ash. This is all you have to say in a human lifetime. Until you burn alive, then rest, you have never told the truth.

If it is easy, then, to rest, consider it a beautiful meteor shower.

The Sea of Tranquility

Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don't. But we mustn't forget the times we do feel like a nut, which, invariably, cause us to slip between the creases of time and space into a void of loneliness so great as to cause one to howl sexually at the only other creature so large and so lonely as us--the pale, languid, horny tide-puller moon. If, by chance, sometimes we do not feel like a nut, one might suggest a moonlit, coastal walk, where the tits and ass of the ocean have never caused a more violent erection of lunacy.

Who Knows What the Fuck I'm Talking About

This is the beginning. There always is one. The yellow-bricked road had one, the brickless dirt path's got one too, we all reckon.

Too bad the beginning is also an indication of the end.

Indicating such things feels just like a kick in the left nut. It swells and seethes with spermy rage, and the other, the one just wanting to yelp, "Yippie!" can't but stretch his shoulders (had he shoulders) and the left nut's bumping into the poor guy with agitation written all over his face (had he a face). Such looks about the face are transmittable, like yawns.

Look I know nuts don't yawn and look and shout silly words beginning with "Y" don't you think I know that? Doesn't mean when that flesh grape gets kicked it doesn't make it hard to walk. That's what I mean about beginnings and ends and all. To enjoy the beginning, you got to steer clear of long-legged old fucks trying to kick you in the nut.

Reference Material

I am sitting in a library that might have hunched against the edge of a green mountain on the island of Jurassic Park. Dirty white walls cutting against the sky, you would imagine vines hanging in prehistoric dreadlocks from the library's roof--a perfect backdrop for a T-Rex to wail.

But all that is outside and the implications of my being inside are thusly more the matter of my future. Or our future, as you must admit we're linked by the circular nature of time.

The nearby book pages smell old, as old as any culture, and with as many colors as the people you pass from moment to moment, too. Brown, yellow, sunless white.

Some would say I'm an old soul. Out of place in the immaturities of youth's playpen. Better placed as the worried eyes of a mother near the fence; an observer.

I wonder if the book pages will humble me, or call my bluff, or maybe both. And I wonder if they'll, adhering to the rules, be quiet about it. I hope not.

The spiritual journey of a firefly

Sometimes I feel like being the spark that spontaneously combusts this pretentious fucking archival in its bear-rug adjacent easy chair, burning it as if the vengeful payback scheme of the nearby crackling fire log in the place.

But sometimes I am the flesh, and to do such a thing would surely, at some point or other, hurt like hell.

And also sometimes I am the berm of the boat that crosses a distinctly magma-filled river in the hell Blake wrote so fondly of in his marriage vows. So in those instances the pain, like hell, would be a necessity.

A burden is sometimes a necessity. Duplicity comes to be thematic in this way, like thread and cowhide.

Why cowhide, though--I don't fucking know, ask the Hindus. It's their animal, after all, and my late aunt Louise knew about the cows and one time when she slept on the pullout couch in our living room she and my father watched Planet of the Apes and laughed. My father will never be that happy again in his life. In many ways, neither will I.

When you lose someone, you are not the same person. So naturally, when my father changed, I had to change also, or be left behind a bastard.

To spontaneously combust these words, then, or rather, not spontaneously but meticulously planned, would be a great relief as they would then not ultimately lead to the core of my behaviors, my fears and my painful memories, opening my chest like a clam shell for dirty fingers to shovel...

But I cannot. Because while sometimes I am a can of oil and a match having conversation with a Buddhist monk, while sometimes I am the flesh of the monk, and other times I part the river Styx with my teeth, I always am the ink of the words. To write of the combustion, then, is to solidify my being. The ink which coats the idea is non-flammable, though the idea itself still burns.

Thus if you look closely you will see the glow of my fucking heart.