Thursday, October 30, 2008

Don't be frightened. This was intended to mimic W.S. Burroughs. OK, I guess be frightened.

October 29th, 2008.
Manhappenin'.
In search for some relief we took our subject, an O.D.ing-mixed-breed-bipolar-paranoid-schizophrenic kid, to this polyglot of a Russian Shaman. A spiritual materialist he was. He had some deeply rooted obsession with handling mixed breeds in a "magic circle"—a pair of words he repeated to coax the participants into obeisance. Typically, he conducted ceremonies in that circle to invoke or wake up Grandmother and Grandfather. Our Shaman spent a great deal of time in Amazonia, where he learned direct from the Shamans proper. (Note: Grandmother and Grandfather are phone-tap-safe alternative names for Ayuahuaska and San Pedro respectively.)
Well the O.D.ing one couldn't be brought down as we tried to pour the viscous brown mixture down his throat. It was full of tongue—clogged with frothy mucous bodily excrement or just disintegrating evidence of the medicine cabinet cocktail he managed to concoct. I found him floundering dry heaving bubbles. His skin boiled and limbs flailed shapeshifting maybe into another kind of man.
On dark days, he took to digging through his neighbors' sock drawers or nightstands. Something always turned up whether it was an expired bottle of codeine or oxycotton or even some prescription cough syrup. He took it all in any case just to get that whipping sense of lift. Stumbled often to the fridge to take a few hits off the canned whipping cream. That became all the comedy on subsequent mornings when his parents tried to top their waffles and all that sputtered out was some white wet fart resembling that shitty froth he had tried to vomit the previous night.
Grandmother was like straight acid scraping the internal organs like it was nobody's business. If she had her way with you, she'd take your head right off. She would've been kind to this one. Wrap around him and reveal her self as a protective vine, but he had his fill. His nerves took over and there was no mind in that body, just electricity and chemicals back to electricity shocking stopping and shocking again. He laughed reflexively and battered himself as though demon-possessed—smashing the back of his skull into the edge of the brick fireplace. His pupils slid upward as if to gaze up at his fluorescent halo. I took the fiberglass insulation and laid it all about him to catch his fall, but he got microscopic glass slivers in his rashing epidermis.
He wasn't trying to die out of his half-life. Taking in by mouth or smoke might make him double alive. I thought I might reverse the situation by telling him that everything was its opposite, but this disturbed his nervous system even more. Every nerve was crossing and crossing back again. Like a braid of sensory overload he was visibly tangled inside and then a full blackout. Just humming. Buzzing.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

I roll Dekalb. I
watch color walls. I
illegal scrawl. I
feel
Fall. I
keel haul to
port of call. I

kill oak gall. Jackal
dolls bawl in
mess hall.
Ah !
ritual alcohol
non-habitual. I
waterfall

default to
thrall crawl

no wherewithal. I
drawl to
downfall. I
anchor

ancestral temple I
follow falsetto to
steeple to
people to
purple pall. Je
suis pas mal. I

Overhaul big
basalt ball
bearing to
Nepal. I
maul dhal
enthralled
by witwall craw
FAUGH!
I
am
salt
to
this
call.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Sundays I am Full, Not Me

[You] Script stitched
the inseams of my legs
I would like to ride it out till Thursday
if I can
I avoid hot baths
distract this temptation by braiding
felled telephone wires
no one needs them anyhow
we might as well make art and table salt
from the things over which we might otherwise trip

Boards fill the arched windows
indicating the interior is more than shady at night
cracks spill that familiar artificial quality
fathered by fluorescent tubes

If I were a native of this town,
I’d devise a new calendar
based on absence and the reflection
of gathering sidewalk moons
and the cracks that fake us
into jolly arms smashed
between a glass slide
prepped for inspection

Man will gaze down at our limbs
naming each after a day of the week
everything between the follicles
of Thursday and the cuticles
of June

Jazz hides in the cement
with little crevices where ants assemble
in configurations
which from outer space
resemble chevron and gingham

Alas, the neighborhood hound huffs them out
chews on the housing of my wire corn rows
I beg the wet of his nose to translate
the cursive I walk

Still Evenings in Dry Apricot

Still evenings hit
the woody stems
of jasmine in pots
on sills curling
from the steam of content and radiator.

Something is so blank outside
it attracts nameless
birds of exotic origin to paint it
briefly here and there
chasing the idea of occupying
air of someone else.

And what is the point of a pencil
wearing it all down
from belly and beak undressing an angle
of blackened brick stack and the eastern twist
& texture of a decaying iron bar.

It’s boxes like these that say
the world is blank also.
I age like an astronaut
suited for a new moon. Meanwhile,
I can’t prevent the squirrel
from getting winter fat,
figure out what keeps
tomatoes green. I look around
all I see is steam
beside the jasmine, some empty red
wicker baskets and outlets
with nothing to plug. Condensing.
All the natural sounds of a world
with nothing to do.

I’ll bet there’s a sphere
where the loterĂ­a cards come to life
and the characters pretend
they only dance while you’re asleep.

I don’t want to do you
Saturdays anymore. It’s too late
for that kind of continuity.
I’d rather kick the radiator
activate a gurgle
sketch the dullness out of my 2B
find an eraser to introduce light
interact with space a bit.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

She Brought the Contents of an Ode By Way of Lady’s handbag

The Gun Metal Grey Clutch She gripped
As she tripped past but the content blew
Like a silver clam belching or a compact coughing
Nude dust Out came the talcum powder
As she lay snowing her hosiery

Toffee Brown Tote Floats Along the Thames like a maiden sailboat
Meant for fins Inside soak the batteries for the remote the moist toilettes
And a bachelorette’s street maps and Maoist leaflets miscellany O ketchup packets O saltine cracker packages O soup yesterday afternoon…

Basura Bags O Yesterday’s Soup and Crackers
and Socks you will send To the kids overseas
Who wait with empty juice containers and pop rings a laminated portrait Of a Papal order and the impossible 24-hour lipstick of every possible red To smear the collar of an infallible landfill

Chinese Laundry Oversize Zipper Top Hobo Bag & Braided Buckled Small Bucket Satchel—Inside, which sits a license to drive in some state
A pocket-sized journal that states she might even sell her clothes at a stoop Sale & trainhop westward with nothing to wash but her darkened hair Held up by chopsticks reading all the literature folded in the cookies and Greased on the metal cars

Money is a kind of poetry. Wallace Stevens

A kind of currency. Lingua franca. Electric voltage to jumpstart a body or fry it to a crisp. Everything is bark. Words. Mots. Palabras. Pesetas. Copper. Argent. What a verbal illustration—a tip dessin vert—a mint species. Poetry is green olive and foliage. It will buy you a lover. Keep you in debt. Make you use bills for scratch. Jot your bliss. Spend it. It is vibrational. Tonal. Clinking in your pocket. You’ve got some. Everyone hears it. Wants it. “Just keys,” you say. Honestly. We’re bound by an imaginary trust to compensate for a world we could never afford. A cent is more magnificent in its power than its form. The opposite is true sometimes too. Shells. Buttons. It attempts to replace all things it cannot be. Tender to feed children, who will always hunger. We want it we want it until our change is perceptual. We see trees different. We learn the value of patching a deflated tube inside a tire on the shoulder of an empty highway. No promises, but to leave a memory imprinted on the grooves and creases of our palms and fingers. We exchange notes on a history of dead men and wonder. Is it a means or an end to suffer? I drop heaviest coins into the mouth of a washing machine to shake the debris from the skins that protect me. Spin. Slide on a magnetic strip of data. Plastic. Rarely seen or held. Easily drained.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Ascent

Beyond your name came a love absolute
Neither trick nor gesture could prove this truth
But the height length and breadth of fields & countries—
O, oceans I would traverse! What yields me to you?

Like two rocks pressed—
We magnetize
If seasons shall blow us
South as migrant flocks
We both shall plunge
If just one in flight may fall
What sweetness to descend & reach;
the varied pitch of madrigals

What peaks! To find the surprise voices that rose within
My chest sinks to my insides where posies appear
At the touch of you—I invert you—inside out of me
like a kirtle I have swallowed in the cold
you are the fragrance
of purple-
Black
Oval
Berries
From my myrtle

You came to be the wool on my eyes
As you pull me into your rumination
My skin emits steam into the cold
Until coated
In the heat
Of your black gaze your gold

In permanent Spring we are perennial buds
From a perpetual night sky protrude these fine studs
That glister as beads trickle
Down your purple-black
& move me to speak in words I do not understand,
but love

Soaring uncovered regions to sing
As high as a morning eagle
You move
Possessed
By necessity
By love
Of broad wings
Lifting

Thursday, October 9, 2008

A Red Breast Passes

Not possible
To know the point
at which Blue Possible was
no longer.

Blue Possible
nested in the grass
Reckless mother robin
I thought
to be walking around
like that
No proper time
set aside
to give birth.

Growing up
means understanding that a
Possible predator
stole it
dropped it

Growing up
mother is justified
Save that egg
Pluck it
Out of shady showered grass
embroidered shed patch
old pigeon coup

Brother and I
adopted Blue Possible
Tucked her under our iron woodstove
No idea nor measure for sufficient heat
but steady watched
waiting for a kettle whistle
No steam
No beak
It quailed
collapsed

the Room is Smoke

Smoke has filled the room.
Surely the vegetables are filled with carcinogens.
Everything is downtempo and that’s alright.
We have only a finite set of breaths.
I venture to hold them at times
to relish the feeling of verging on death.
I practice at the School of Evanescence,
where we study the expenditure of living
like we’re dying and discover we have little
to say, ergo we go soft upon the damp carpet of leaves
in such a lightness we leave no footprint.

If you are not accustomed to the television-regarding world
no need for constant conversation
commercial interruption—
How is it that you could want more than a consumerist could?
I want it all and I want it all for everyone. Real bad.
But it’s not working.
I must be tired.

If every channel could hold a dimension
and each dimension had several truckloads
of buckets—buckets in abundance on every station—
then we may have the amount of buckets required
to alleviate the ocean. And even more shelves
to store the dirt.

If we tuck all the stones away into drawers
or treasure chests from cartoon environments,
then where might we bury them?
Will we be able to hide them well enough
to where no one could find them
or wonder what might have happened to such a thing
or eventually—generations hence—
the significance of a wave or sediment?

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

All Along the Billyburg Bridge

I slalom shalom and salaam
inhale the aerosol vapors evaporating
from the infamous anonymous like, “Spaceinvader”
I scan the dried up ostensible words misspelled.

“Save Domino” is code for “Welcome home, Sugar.”
The repeated stencil that reads, “you wish you knew,”
becomes a refrain to the path on the way.
Throughout the day you wish you knew who wrote that
and what they meant. You wish you knew
becomes an unabating audible taunt and I wish I knew
where I heard it first.

We skim the constructions to measure the progression of time.
Steel red bars run parallel perpendicular acute and obtuse above us—
a tricky sundial to reminds us that we’re all asymmetrical shadows.
Plastic steel and wheel have stopped beneath us
as we barely steal a glance at each other
a smile perhaps a nod perhaps in camaraderie.

Where are you going and where have you been
“I wish I knew”—cries the collective reverie
Gotta go Gotta leave Gotta run Gotta arrive Gotta be there
not here now the painted arrows agree
and disagree when the towers are barely lit and barely
extinguished. Somewhere someone can see the skyline
a cutout of skyscrapers adjacent to the headstones.

Everything asks for an engraving beyond the graveyard.
Like the sleeves of the riders rapidly representing a rainbow
Charged and Ephemeral passing swift in Deep V rims of wheels
all colored hoops and drop bars and flat bars and riser bars
and all manner of hats and caps and bells and hoop earrings and dangling things
off the bodies we will never know as we dance past Sad Gleeful. We ride on saddles giddy together as we cut each other off Unspoken
etiquette constantly a broken etiquette. We choke together
over gridlock over carbon and the east river running

I wish I knew you in 1903, but here’s the Queensboro majestically
manifesting terrestrial rays from the morning sun and the Manhattan
and the Brooklyn and the armpits that unite them. Signals change
and seagulls always stay the same. There will be messengers below
guarding the passage to no end suspended
no beginning cantilevered.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

everyday is a festival where someone is always cremating a demon

if you sit still enough
there will be a handful of maracas and djembes
to shake you behind a conga tree
entrain your heart to beat in between seams
sewn as sheets of sound within me
boom and clang can circle round
and hollow melodies found to embody the things
in the habit of emerging from the ground
recognizing that underneath a microscope
our veins might be knit together seeing
that blood moves centripetal this way
and to be perforated with 32 arms akimbo and radiating
looking something like an occasion
to which you may invite your mother and bring a drum
someone who resembles the madhatter
and sits on bulging roots at the base of the tree
swigs from a crinkled paper sack intermittently offers a whistle

vow to come every Sunday as you recognize old people who resemble aged versions of everyone you know.
like the one who looks like an extra man
with a pink backpack slung over his right shoulder
legitimizing the swagger in his gait
and the baby girl jounces along
which explains the waggle in his walk

the extra old stand on the walk
wearing all white tennis shoes curtain skirts definitive hats
starch and bold and bald and the flow surges by default
everyone belongs and the asian with drumsticks and mother and the man with a laundry cart and all wood barrels make sounds with beads and rope draped and off the sides and tied on like a hauling bump and shack and stars of david and frankincense with whistles and saxophone the resonant force of going. some stop

on the path with basketballs or the curiosity of an archaeologist picking twigs what remnants from the trees and smoke and dancing happens on resting leaves
there’s a reason for boots beanies and beards and repetition and interruption