
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
"The perverse allure of a damaged woman."

Monday, November 02, 2009
In Homelike Need
In grungy cross-boats, everything changes and everyone ruts. The hills on the shoulders of men and ladies go daring their chasms collide in spoken inertial dampening buffers and boots. Like ten times ago you cleared your throat and shook a tree to see if people would grow away from their silks. Like switching to a new childhood that didn’t have a swingset or a pizzle or a shard of wild glass. Liver and runts go togethering in your window or pan, so wicker and shake to the sound of the old man has had his fun so whisper and shake to the day the old man can’t dance so wisdom and steak for your dinner or some such baloney, compadre. That washes away the hurting or the frame of mind that made the sting go feeble, shook the stench from your fingers.
In dream, he held a sharpened sword and showed his friends how to cut paper squares that floated in air. All was well, or at least possible, and the edge was sharp indeed. In homelike need I’ll find myself and your tan brain or your fishy upbringing will trigger a way to the smashing top of all this. Yes, someone said smashing, so that’s the verb of the day, accept it as adjective, too. She asks how the day goes, she says how the waves are full today, she is Lady Liberty and we’ve decided to bring her down this night, but instead we’ll get mints. The double cigarette technique produces the continuous expectation of non-recognition, so it could make you horny or something, if you have a sheer constitution. That was my somethingth declaration, I’m too terribly bored to go back and count. Plus, I was a graffiti smear on your highway bathroom.
Then the children we were came out to see the adults we became and a breadlike thing did an uncomfortable dance in the oven, once it got cold. The heat hardly ever worked poorly, we were always warm enough, and the floors were smooth enough to slide on in your socks. Even the dog slipped sometimes. You could play music and run circles around the living room and kitchen and the dog would slip and yip after you. So you did that. It created a message and story about dogs to tell the future. See? Them hands I’m wearing, warning my old caged bottom up from the basement. Shake it and run and feel the thrill of the approaching Boogeyman. Now I have only star stickers in my wallet and can feel the worth of them with my fingers, in the dark, if I’ll allow it.
Why so much discipline, why not think in terms of yes, and sure? These days have to be gotten into line, I guess, or else they’ll just go any which way and you’ll become a little bit of everything. That’s not delightful, by the way. This is a drafty something else. You understood that from the getgo, you in your corner and my watches on the tables of this young country. There will be a lot more shelves in my future, I can feel it.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
What Then?
His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'
Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'
All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'
`The work is done,' grown old he thought,
`According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought';
But louder sang that ghost, `What then?'
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
My Friend,
everything elliptical,
everything fathomable.
Not enough bike rides.
Not enough air.
Not enough chewing.
Last night,
before bed,
I made a grilled cheese sandwich.
If you had been there,
I'd have given you half.
Shit. I would have made you a whole one.
I'd have shaken your hand for an hour,
showed you old pictures,
told you about my dream.
I'd have listened, too.
When you fall asleep tonight,
remember this game.
We Say Accident
Even rays of sound went thataway—or was it thisaway?—I came running, showed you my good ol’ messianic side. You (we, that is) or me makes a beat true: You? No. No: You.
Who owns a town of feeling? Take them up, your divining tools, et cetera. Time to tag a cleft in The Rock of Attention. A shepherd becomes a singer, becomes a salesman.
Muses busted through my engine block, left me handless, beaming. Dream, or you’ll go.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Beating Due Headfakes
Friday, October 09, 2009
Doing Something With A Strange Caravan
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Sort Of A _________ Craquelure
Light steams out my old window face, clears the crucible city and runs home in a rush. Some sonic landscape. A declination of magic makes its own magic. They (those ones with arms and loss) ripple an entire beach, redo spasms of new memory, travel further in. Glinting metal everywhere, surprise meat shudders away, plays the uncomfortable witness.
We made machines. Then machines made time for us. Substantial as knuckles or national will. But the city is a device of time, home to all the souls that ever were--catch them in photographs, a headstone, that mossy old tenement brick. All those nouns squirting reticules of memory.
Who is the sheriff of time: fundament or frangible thing? Pauses, expectation of an event. We got caught peering out of a loophole in luck's curtain. Something crenelated, something drawn. Stand next to words, fake or freak meaning, hamper every permanence.
Shin guard, chin guard. We look away, but always bend back around to original seeing.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
The Auroch And The E
I felt that the correct and most effective way to do this marvel justice would be to turn it into a piano-forte or harpsichord and invite all my old friends and lovers to come and appreciate this beast as well as my own appetite for curiosity and endless innovation. Besides, it is not every day that you have an auroch with which to theorize over a glass of soda with fresh lime.
I began my preparations in earnest, wringing my hands daily, deliberating over whether to have the creature embalmed straightaway and then install a keyboard over the top of the form of the great animal; or, to carefully cut into its hide, open its prehistoric innards and coat the ribs with several layers of a fine shellac, and then build my instrument within its dried guts. This seemed to me a grand question: Should I support an art that forces itself beyond the boundaries of occasion and setting, or should it complement and accompany the unfoldings of its immediate environs?
I was at an impasse.
To this end, I took particular note of the gorgeous “e” at the end of the perfectly plausible and temporarily comforting word “impasse.” The letter spun endlessly through mental space, now pulsing hugely and with crackling potential at the start of a word like “erogenous,” now playing a supportive role, yet not imposing its will or ineluctable identity too harshly beyond the boundaries of the scene, as in its second appearance in the word “cathected.”
To be sure, I was caught in a pleasant conundrum. One sunny afternoon, after days of indoor contemplation of “e” while sitting over the carcass of my auroch, I came to an illuminating realization. I decided that I should, for inspiration, wedge the heel of my bare foot into the eye socket of the great auroch, and with my hands build a great “e” out of lucite and place within it a coiled string of blue Christmas lights. I did so, and upon entering homes of friends and old flames, I would plug my creation into the nearest wall socket and proclaim it a momentary bridge between thought and deed, object and action.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Tangerines From Your Crow's Feet
He brandishes a cutlass during an endgame morphology presentation. His cordage is wavy in a nautical light. He sees the microchip in your wobbly hand, notices you're fine, memory's fine, nostalgia's fine. Wearing a suit, he has every intention of showing you his cover i.d. He makes lemonade with tear gas and a battering ram. He figures out a way to keep force out of the equation. And this time, he knocks.
He ossifies your weedy arms, trundles off to probe symphonic destiny. Grins hang heavily from window trousers, beering around after the old dark. Negative ray, positive horn. An elbowful of mystery parties jangle on the docket. Music is grout in the space between you.
He rues time, bumbles lines before a Naga King, rearranges green curry molecules, feels the sting of an old sea tune, "as hit is breued in þe best boke of romaunce." And, amid an ear-y clangor, "bronze by gold," he "hear[s] the hoofirons steelyringing." Is he goatman, dogbeard, beewolf, stunned electric wire...something in between, perhaps? A turnpike of the feelings, trying and new. Some kind of field resonance.
He has been relegated to the "Obscure" pile. His hair and nails keep growing, though, while his nose hunts around corners, looking for a sandwich or a Karate-town.
He parties with one ear open, listening to your baby blue hair, running sideways down a sideways alley. His arms go down into the earth and his neck flops thisaway on the pavement. You see him spin, giddily, in a fly eye. His pants are made of cannoli and his shirt of broccoli di rappe.
He toils in sand with an old radio, bings out to roller-chango music, and stands reacting cagily to windpipe's gurgle. When you wake to clacking trains, think in a similar fashion. People get up every day and look down at the earth. Fields of muscles sweat out strength, and asphalt actually needs cars to stay viable, pliable. Holidays abound like so many founders of thought. Thus, record your celebration.
He pockmarked the sun today, used a stain instead of a hose, ate seeds of true rain. Can't wink to shave a few monies off your benign rumor? Toe the hammer, tundra down your knees. He'll meet you at the anti-freeze. Is there a dog you scatter windward, enough to make it back to burnt lands, hover and run in blues? Then go. Your field awaits. He's all sorts of there. Merely, merely, life is but a seem.
He chatters and sticks a new cat in your nunchucks for your Bruce Lee, blazing from your bike wheel. Limbs all akimbo, revenge in the torpid air, whiff this pong for your hangman game. Why go rambling when you have mind waves to walk on? And you do walk on, year after fall, down again in a storm of baying dogs. Roll to see if you survive a fight with a giant man, a ticklish grackle, or a world without chance.
He is in the middle chance and weeds or gloss with smooth stone and kids meander in a remembering place. Fire for a chill stove opens a stone gate without ancient purpose or an animal smattering. Living in vast thought asks how to wake the eating mind this day; forgiveness postures up the road and sheds light, guilt, and every sick, together with what you need to begin an old lizard séance collecting biting stillness.
He reads uncharted books, maps to your quest, robots get you all the way to a knowing country, maybe India. Horses in the clean streets, washing fish in handy rain, yellow carvings. All carpenters wander in search of inspiration, eventually end up in trees. You look to the end, your proximity makes him an origami man.

