Muy Dulce

We Are All Spectators

Bears and Girls...

Composed

Double Duty

Riddle

Formative Experience

Certitude

What A Friend Says

One or Two?

Go Ahead.

Seeing

Full

A Way

Somebody

Rain

The Way

Very Hot

Must See!

Bags and Bags

Fast!

Depiction

Affirmative

Who?

They Dream

Everyone Needs A System

Punch a Pineapple

Strong, Strong

Carve

Early Evenings

Animals

The Whole Earth

Bulk Rate

Happy this happy that happy your listing marine feet busted a Monday window. Egg baby charcoal baby igneous baby gone. Rough cut ice cream, tumble down bastards at the wall ate free. This king, this emperor, childless guru with rustic charms and sibilant coordination, his shanty shoes and tundra pals went down. From storm eye fragrant leaves from shadows and bulk rate images dart circles and concert memories. Throats have worlds. Casting about for sheep eyes, our dice hands find a bier of burning nights, naked in water and wind. Grow cold grow without mercy grow 'til globe gets along.

My Tell

Old shack. New shack. New country for trees. I put my finger in my ear and shake a song. The snake shakes, historical mimesis retracts, envelopes us in pink and slothy pleasure clouds. We are all the mice, skittering over the body of a sleeping woman with dark unruly hair, dreaming of a nest. Narrating mindfulness goes something like falling down a hill. All your happy bruises feel connected.

Some Wolfman

Barnacles and the fright they elicit: hardly an issue in real time. Hiking and hiking. The journalistic tendency to document this thought. This time, when we ascend the mountain there will be cake, made by a future us that travelled there to support our struggling past. Rotors, fanblades, the gaze of infants, all have a way of doing the reminding. You and me and the undergrowth gather in untended places: radical distraction. Some wolfman I am, tending the most tender flower, yellow petals trembling in light wind.

Ethics

The horror of time was that beauty made us pull ourselves together, close our eyes and whisk stuff around in the kitchen. The things we said we’d say we said. Then we predicted what came next. The good things fell apart and you became an agent, investigating your illness. You pulled me under and I covered my eyes with my history of other love. Here’s to Saint Honesty, sack of grief. This is the worst. It’s not even a thing. It’s just what I get for trying to ride the dog. There’s some shame in saying I love what I love. Enough to keep me saying it.

Noh Goliath Noh Godiva

To tango. Underneath me. Hipswitch your mania. Gank the fiesta. To arise and go. Two isn’t free. Your mybody elevated. Or corrected. In handblown strands of air, a lake an island. A 24 hour film of us. We spent the weekend watching. Every cue had us quit acting and set down the night. Next to us. Then between us. Memorybuilt darkness. You, me, and the colloid of time. Obligatory poses of Noh-bodies. Some chatter, some music. Some whatever and some more. The feeling is with. Cave memories. A storm. My lumberjack jacket. Your ring.

All Contraries

Collective preening: this culture, this civilization, the “person.” What was it that looked along the seam a few minutes ago? Was it called me? A sense of heaviness and a sense of the round dark all. Some me pervaded, cloistered stick man, campaign of breath and return. Experience is not wholesome, not unifying, unitary or religious. All contraries are unitary in their silliness. Break down to arms and bones.

The Drugged and Stolen Night

Where is the pause and where is the fighter, where is the simple day of youth, where is the run-up to the show, where is the grey haven, the flitting look at the fairy message, the chanting steel toad, the bastard elbow, the crusted hashbag, the charnel house, the fractal enthusiasm, the smashing layoff, the frothy beard, the whispering foot, the hispering tundra, the show, the professional word, the incidental shyness, the bardic hymn, the gelid panther, the stinging past, the eclectic hum, the rotating powdermark, the sliding steed, the shale conundrum, the slowest dance, the rhythm of dogs, the window of gifts, the language crashers, the slandering philosophers, the insensate whelps, the sheer dogginess of time, the images of man and woman drawn large by animals, the half-thrown flail, the broken home on the border, the town where you raised yourself, the hair you shaved off, the weight of your past, the perseverance of history despite the lunacy of all populaces, the typecasting of the market, the unshouldered burden, the runt with the tickle in its throat, the goat, the herdsman, the New England irrelevancies, the lost and fully unforgotten loves, the bland stargazer, the revealed moment, the masterful giver, the Arctic African, the chlorinated burger, the sublimated post-it, the pudding-worm, the foot-breather, the depth-divider, the half-glance back at the lover who’s just left for good, the rusted ride, the bashful bicycle, the confidence of quarter-age, the drugged and stolen night, the sitting still, the mysterious new, the glorified expectation of non-recognition, the bored particle, the majestic bread, the waking yawn, the purposeful sunrise?

On Previous Days

You, that book, that ruggedized case, lost on logic. You took your meanings down, took down your peacoat, your savvy beatitudes, your empirical globe. You caught fish, showed the kids “how it’s done.” You weren’t prideful or too teacherly. You just wandered into the scene of the moment and gathered necessities. Sure, bodies decomposed under the floor and wraiths howled in dark corners. You were aware of them all, but you played life focused, also not denying librettos, spinning hubcaps, beach days. A man was responsible, then gone. In the middle of it a feeling of fellowship, rivers going by, rock formations in the sun, boots going up some mountains. Your own feet stepped behind you, on previous days.

A story told and a sketch of Vincent Price smiles and a laugh from a horse's mouth, doing a bit.

Daddy issues for everybody. Plenty of room for histrionics. Everyone was doing a stand-up job, but blowing the punchline. Even though you said your name, I still forgot your character. It was a disconnect, and it's personally insulting, despite the leather effigy and Mick Jagger's ability to do it right and be a scary good soldier. The scene cut is this: Two minutes before we grasp this moment, we find ourselves on skis, not even paying attention, but feeling like a million bucks. I love that feeling, like an athlete, without caring about approval. Who tells someone they are overtalking? People will strive to seek approval of someone who does the firing in person. Everything is sideways and you take it personally. The gnome calls you about all the reasons why, finally, and you want it to be true, although it's your imagination giving you the advice. Your performance watches you and says dollars are not really anything; very Buddhalike. At the end of the day it's you approving you, and the cliche of it clashes with the neuroses of the host, alongside the history of personalities. And I know you're doing this part, but when you find yourself doing it, it could be misinterpreted as weird, because of your family history of insanity. People who stayed the longest stayed because they felt like they belonged. Is the astronaut joke a joke, or just a reality? What was he looking for when he worked the probe, while he looked in my eyes, with his perfect afro? There was a ready symmetry to things. Like we'd made it to the waiting room during a long walk. Shiny, efficient, like we were going to win.

Mini-Twilight

How about a mini-twilight time, right after lunch, before we get back to work? We’ll meet before the day goes back to grinding, before all the real work needs to get back to itself. We can go into my office, turn out the lights, think some different thoughts. We'll write some stuff that’s free of the institutions in our heads. The world hears us listening all the time anyway; shouldn’t we make the most of it? The pants I have on are almost falling off, I’m always nibbling on seaweed, and I’m beginning to hear fish think, in my little apartment by the sea. In our Tiny Dusk we won’t make any plans, we’ll just crawl into a big sundress together and laugh at the glowing stars I’ve stuck to the ceiling. And music? Yeah, big guitar sounds like swans and blues riffs that guarantee a decent hermetic seal.

Invitation

What: Some long-suffering thing about Ways, and/or The Front’s ability to challenge all of Time’s harbors. Where: Beside (or right in) a desert of forgotten collectibles. When: Sixteen if you’re lucky, but probably more like thirteen, when you started realizing you had a reason (a mind or a piece of luggage like it) that brought more chaos to the halls than most kids around you could even conceive. How: via sitting and thinking, not by talking or writing. Who: anyone who appreciates the power in a nipple, or the utterly rebellious act of sleeping long and long.

"Cheeseman's Emotional Energy Theory"

(from the film Happy Accidents)

"--There is another theory, you know. That you can change the past. That you can really change it.

--What theory is that?

--Cheeseman's.

--Cheeseman's?

--Cheeseman's Emotional Energy Theory. It's true. Cheeseman believed if you can concentrate enough energy in a moment in time...then you could alter the past and create a new future.

--What kind of energy? Nuclear?

--Emotional. Love energy. Hate energy. It's very potent stuff, you know.

--Really?

--Cheeseman worked with fruit flies, and then he realized...they didn't have enough emotional energy. It was kind of low. But then he thought, humans are creative, sensitive creatures. Maybe they could muster up enough energy to actually...break the causal chain, alter the past and create a new future.

--So then what happens to the old future?

--It'd still be there. There'd be two futures. The one you left and the one you're creating. They'd exist simultaneously, parallel to each other.

--No. Not parallel universes.

--It's only a theory. It hasn't been proven...

--Yet."

The Cradle

Shaking hands. Busted tablature. Fiddle sounds and a rejected swimmer. Tingling sun moments and a bright beach pail from your earliest memory. Cue the piano, line up at every restaurant that wants you. That’s all of them? But your green dress, that easy smile, I fell so easily. I whisper so loudly now, through tears, about what we once held. We were a cradle, you must sense that, that nurtured everything we wished we could actually say.

Staying

Tickling the ticking world, the giggling girl. The freak resonance of sequins in your hollow fists, the sheer butter of the pavement you feel when going fast. The trance of the past. Continuance of night deliberations. All and more, and more. Once you saw me enter and my talk dropped off, I was something beyond a telephone, and we bodied. It was effective and there was a slight intermission. Shady telegrams from the future quit arriving. The intelligence of cities and plays was all full of music. Even the movements of our hands overlaid us with pauses. We were some kind of void that time could fill. Then dim pillars buckled and hands opened on wings and someone’s loved one passed away, then another, another. We held the beats within us. The wonder of the future is a crash of waiting and staying cold. Some knowing is too much. That’s the brink we walk away from. How walking wakes our wonder, we may know.

The Hat Of The World

What is the pantry and what the relic, what the groundsman and what the fuse, what the fidgeter and what the quay? The pants and the sheets and the queasy feeling and the trying after glory and the dancing and the apartments and the staying and the leaving and the breathing. The it, the it, the it, the identification of it, the shining, the sadness, the shine and sadness and lightning and stability of children and stomach. And seeing, the them, the endless them, the them-ing and the us-ing and the we-ing and the fleeing and returning and going and simple happiness of making words and going with ease. The going with ease the non-tooth-pulling aspect of freedom from fear and staying in that bubble. In Tahiti, in ease in Tahiti. In finding, we get happily lost, in oceanic striving, letting go of striving, getting lucky as it all happens away from us, close to us, we seek to sit in a silence that golds us up. And we do. That silence golds us up and we shatter the rain-frame and we run into it, collide with the pervasive sand in our shoes, in our eye-corners, in our happy peopled skin, brown in the sun and sharing it all without wanting or waiting, just sitting in the gold of silence, the hat of the world. _______________________________________________________________________________________________edit______________________________________________________________________ What is the pantry and what the relic, what the groundsman and what the fuse, what the fidgeter and what the quay? The pants, sheets, and the queasy feeling and the trying after glory and dancing, and the apartments and the staying and the leaving. The it, the identification of it, the shine and sadness and lightning and stability of children and stomach. And seeing the them, the endless them, the fleeing and returning and going and simple happiness of making words and going with ease. The non-tooth-pulling aspect of freedom from fear and staying in that bubble. In Tahiti, in ease in Tahiti. In finding, we get happily lost, in oceanic striving, letting go and getting lucky as it all happens away from us, close. We seek to sit in a silence that golds us up. And we do. That silence golds us and we shatter the rain-frame and run through it, collide with the pervasive sand in our shoes, our eye-corners, our happy peopled skin, brown in the sun. Sharing it all without wanting or waiting, just sitting in the gold of silence, the hat of the world.

Here

Here’s what you remember: You remember the rain, and going into the rain. You remember trees giving way to ashes and ashes giving way to hands. And you wished for a galaxy of grey panels, of rain in cloaks, of melted nights blending together on trains, near lakes, in puddles and fields of blackbirds. You gathered in your sheets, moved with the movement of air through a window, placed your hands against cool glass. You preferred everything, in general, and you spoke always about flowers and young mourners and celebrations with fire. In every word you spoke, you heard the echo of water. It began as memory and became a drumming of white petals against a wet roof. Animals forgot themselves and you twisted into their happy movements. The pink angles of Everything made a return and you wore a flower to commemorate Everything.

Being Interested

He talks and talks again, making a theory into a candy, a bike. There is a beyond, for purposes swim in 365 pages, appearing in a book, making things for the impulse. There is something interesting about being interested in sitting, in scythes as fair grounds.

Clouds and Flood

Spend all energy on what you fear, you broken rapturous fleeting thing. You try to bestow meaning and the pram falls over, the baby you spent months and years on turns into a plume of colors and goes away, for good? You don’t know and can’t. Every broken thing is born, vice versa too. Your eyes are knees. You fall on them when awe takes you away to an ocean of wonder, of regret, the oceans of so many thinks. Clouds in your vision are as hard as slowly spinning stones, they geode open like books as rainglass falls into your drinking cups. You try to ride away, but your hands make mud as you crawl into your bed. You thought it was the road. Here is the blank page, that makes woe something to get around, into something unafraid. Is woe afraid of you? You look to the soil, to the box you’ll be burned in, to the spare decorations on the pine, tiny hash- and burnmarks, birdfeet on the outside. Inside, unseeable, are symbols made by a carpenter’s hammer, hard to make out in the zero light of ground. You will not end in the ground, but as ashes on the sea, drifting down from mountains, reassembling a world from nowhere. A dog squeals when no one whispers. These meditations, these retried phrases; you retire them as soon as they make it to the world, this broken ball’s paper pocket. Then a vast suchness, a knowing of numbers, brimming in reedy retinas, all gone and full of open phrases. Brackish arms come up from bogs, pale and grasping for your face. Transparent, you see them before you are born into the flood.

My Fridge

My fridge is the best fired thing, it goes and goes, it can find a way to emerge from any rubble, from a voice within your head, from a collective sigh. O my fridge plays the harp on all records, only making them better. One day soon my fridge will be a theater, a small child, a winning lottery ticket, a lottery winner, a lovable stone. My dark fridge hands me crickets when I can’t find my garlic powder, it’s a dentist and an Aquaman. My dear fridge has all the friends I wish I had. My desperate fridge has been to the Whitehouse, discussed fiscal policies with the president, recommended a path to a fruitful life for all peoples of earth. My determined fridge has been to the top of Everest, has collided with a radio wave beamed to this planet by an extra-terrestrial civilization that no longer exists, as it sent the signal 80,000 years ago. My dank fridge waits in the jungle, ready to snipe the narco-traffickers with a silenced .50 caliber U.S. Marine issue sniper rifle. My sad fridge wonders why war is always the answer. My sudden fridge hits me where it hurts, in the knee, on my orbital bone, in the solar plexus. My switching fridge has the nerve to chase other people’s dreams, accomplishing wondrous projects and getting full credit. My deep fridge knows that the future of reality is the cold void. My compartmentalizing fridge doesn’t fear sadness. My death fridge puts in a good word for me in its imaginary heaven. My broken fridge fixes itself, stands on the summit of a growing mountain, marvels at shale and the seismic roots of our tectonic past. My master fridge painted the caves at Lascaux, Chauvet, and built Chichen Itza in its infernal, interminable youth. My bleary fridge takes me to a bar, gets me high on ice trays and crisper drawers, and walks me home in the rain.

Flies In Bellyholes

Flies in
bellyholes;
tundra;
a snowed-out
bungalow;
stone houses
with frangible
guests.

Such are the
metaphors
for thought
I’m thinking today.

We flit
and quaver
the way we do,
each successive
mind moment
lost on the last.

Small Things

Small things get smaller. The life lived is for choosey choosers. This won’t get used, so I can reveal secrets here. Once I imagined me a girl; I did me up in brambles and berries and stalked a rooftop, colluding with voices pointed outward. I relished the stomping sound of rain and being a slanting body on a rolling day. I chose time for my thoughts to wander in. I shucked music, shucked prayers, shucked being elusive, gave myself wholly to my new gown, woven of cakes and trains. I felt good in my gown, walked without stumbling, awed myself silly. The rain was good to feel on my hands, on my rippled skin. I looked up the hill and saw the outline of the steps I would take. I took them. I felt I could fit into any bottle, any shell. Even sand was known to me. It was a dream or something. I thought I was rusting and that was all right. Someone was sighing out of my mouth, using my voice to get away.

Them Just Goes

We’re not about giving up or giving away the mental. We’re about correcting for echoes. We’re about gathering details and the smoky bottom. We’re about trash; like all the waters, we refuse to go down hoses…but we go. Them is a way to start; them raspy details, deets, hangtags wimpling in the storeshadows of a frantic year. The fervent all-out sureness makes us seem ugly to the bodies that grew up around us. We, in our bodies, in our aches and skin, in our swilling holes full of robbers and liars. We laugh and cry, return and pick some how-to chatter. Them is not a way to go, them just goes. The phone you were on was a stalling effect for doing what you do. If you coat things you touch with sheer, you’ll touch elusive fingers under your smoking ghost hands. Smoke, it really has a hold on your imagination. This is a problem, as your imagination is not an organ. Not a skinnable thing, just a skinning echo.

Your Own Spring

This is the article without phrase. Then the going gets away from us. I’m to familiarize myself with the machine. I’m the machine. You watch the way the water bends. You bend water and live from a long way away. You stand in a pile. You collect, gather, and grade. Your hair is the hair of the earth, the reason for dreaming, the smashing tulip of a trajectory foretold. These eagles, these talons, these scallions smell like spring essence; it’s always more another way around. Then you ride by the path where you are the journey, the child, the instant of lines on a window. Someone looks out at you with a hand waving. You notice skin and wonder in colonies. You visit memories as a visitor. You are a new darkness made whole by the secrets you enjoy. Yes, you enjoy them, they make you, they represent your own skin, as it folds over you, in vegetal coolness. Think of children, of being a child. Your wondering takes you very far away.

New Poems Published!

I have some poems in the new issue of Esque Magazine.

The magazine is sharply constructed and full of superb writing. I feel honored to be published in this collection. Big congratulations and thanks to Ana Božičević and Amy King, Esque Magazine's editors.

The Wash

Pants in the wind and pants on the screen. Only way to train is the number 5 in gold. Your paper is here, in the middle of the letter L. You hassle me, I hassle you, we go our collective separate ways, there is a transient click that happens and happens again. I miss the you of me. I remember the me of you sneaking into you. The when of us has a number of times and means to evanescence, and staccato blossoms bang down on fire-bandaged tings. The ness of whispers washes over alternating memories, a South America of mind. A gale of unconscious fleeing masters castigating gaze of inner eye shadow. Who forgives and who blames? The me of me is all about both categories. Darn and swell are the old whatever. I can’t seem to get behind any of them.

Pictures Of The Thing

Well, Ben Cramer and I zapped Zoraspace with some wild stuff. Thanks to all who crowded in on a mellow winter Sunday. Here are some lovely pictures taken by the excellent Hope Hall. Thanks, Hope!





And here are some pictures of Ben and me at a recent mountain biking race:

Blue Light Poem #3

All One And Alone



Please come join me and my zany compadre, Ben Cramer, at Zoraspace in Brooklyn this coming Sunday at 3pm. We'll have lots of telephonic fun!

Bluelight Poem #2

The Familiar Slush At The Top Of Your Drink



Please come join me and my zany compadre, Ben Cramer, at Zoraspace in Brooklyn this coming Sunday at 3pm. We'll have lots of telephonic fun!

Bluelight Poem #1

Night of the Reformed Pirate



Please come join me and my zany compadre, Ben Cramer, at Zoraspace in Brooklyn this coming Sunday at 3pm. We'll have lots of telephonic fun!

The Very Winters

Your ocean’s broken at the sea side, at oxygen, at the club for dancing yourself into the floor. The downed flower was the way you knew the case was over. There was everything everywhere and you switched hats until you warmed the very winters within. Usually you’ll have the usual. It’s expected. Debt is the prick of reality’s vapor, makes you know that number’s real. And debt bums you down, too. You feel and age, an old whiskey feeling. You work so you don’t have to try so hard, but things—phenomena, the world that is the case (all of it)—get all the way in the way.

Take It All Off

Stash the ’bot in a major drawer. Stand alone in the rain cabin. Find a human in your mumble. This is to be shown, to be exploited in the first place you find. You shave your face free of your body, point at the moon, find a way to crow. Look at the signature across the cold hand, the knee that answers. It’s downright lyrical, this hallowed humane coat. Both of us nattered and palsied. Hey, you know how we used to go up on the roof and get down to our underwear and fancy ourselves important? Yeah, the fish tank has only gotten smaller.

Induction into the Society of Epic Wanderers: Cancelled due to non-attendance. We got high marks in vision, mysticism, high school. We fancied and felt admired. Something came down from a cave. A figurine and a bat had a message: Watch your tender head. Nobody talks like this, seriously. Except this freaking page. We have that, at least.

Textually, there are no seasons. Only Summer and Winter, Sandwich and Fall.

Description of Us

for A.M.

Taking it slow controls the weather.
Citizens are gathered up and bit by bit
Tossed into major and minor piles
Of gentleman road dust.

Some constructions are paper,
Some fancy sand.
Some ask a person to hold on
Way too long.

We both have haloes now
From all the brutality
And waiting.

But I must have you know,
In poems and in weather:
My ness is heavily you.

Going With Fortune

In broken fields of what stays open,
In standard hominess of over days,
We found you
Building a Wall of Signs.

Calculating people are lonely
In shadows, boards and potatoes,
Ranking Shoes in military highness.

Battlefields and handkerchiefs and battlefields
And Battlefields; something profound here
In the thoughty middle:
We saw Doing as a way to be sad and happy.

Stun-green seas wink to life
On Yearning’s floating carpet. After finding danger they
Dethrone Survival as Chance’s closest homie.

The Whale

Candles and sommeliers and pasta for my kindling pantlegs-pusher whispering the hype in someone’s frantic ear and you appreciate the cards the first time the whale takes the road and not the sea. The turnout was pretty intense and the last fight between the two parents and everyone up in their seats waiting to see the ending and the battle was sooo tragic and yet victorious and we have to be something more than what we expect of ourselves and so many damned mistakes winning ourselves back. Something like that, you know? Yeah. Something like that. You have to do different things, when you have all the beef you’ve been having. Like you have to be prepared not to come down all the way, you have to stay up, you don’t know what might happen mentally, you have to keep the engine running. You have to mimic someone who’s not tired or dejected at all.

I'm (I'm?)

I’m:
Breaking into jail
Breaking out of jail
Breaking my bones
Owning non sense
Putting up the sepulcher
Pasting old cuspids
With curious muck
Murking in the dark
Lovely
Pouncing in a noose museum
Able to sleep a rain
Cranking the top off bottom
Exhaling old frames
Nuancing charm-chatter
Reducing noise/ calamity boys
Diatribe/ omnibus
No mess/ no fuss
Fusion in elision
Harps in rhyme
Elastic decisions
Marked in plastic
A tease of sculpture
Ardent repose of conscious self
Tea-drink waterfall
Et al.

Coming Up: The Faster Pussycat Reading!

Yes, indeed. I'll be reading at The Happy Ending on May 19th, 302 Broome Street, in Manhattan, at 8pm (doors open at 7pm). That's a Wednesday Night! Don't miss it. It's going to be a strange evening and I'll be accompanied and "curated" by Ben Cramer, a crazed adventurer and journalist I've known for over 20 years! What does it mean to have your reading curated? Come find out!

I'll be reading as part of the Faster Pussycat Reading Series put on by The Feminist Press, in celebration of Upset Press's new book Halal Pork, by Cihan Kaan. The other reader's besides myself and Cihan Kaan, are the supercool Denise Galang and the hilarious and radical Nick Powell.

la forme

DOG

CAR

And Again You

And again You: face for a gathering. A YOU face, a-you-fAce (Italian accent), my doll, my Matt Doll (my mom’s accent). Oh you held me and I wanted to stay.

In the classrooms they are chanting vowels. Who’s chanting? A lesson. Chant now: “Where are you going, Big Pig? To dig. I’m going to Dig. And What will you dig, Big Pig? A bit white turnip.” This and the vowels as they unfold, or unfetter, or calcify in soup or a name for a place, or a shaming place.

Your face hears its name and brightens, collects, redraws old storybooks, maps to the treasure in the yard, the hidden coins, the snakeskin, cigar box with some of your baby teeth, a tonic against memory loss. But it goes, you watch it. Muhammad Ali, his hands shake now almost uncontrollably, says:

““I was twenty…twenty what? Twenty-two. Now I’m fifty-four. Fifty-four.” He said nothing for a minute or so. Then he said, “Time flies. Flies. Flies. It flies away.” Then, very slowly, Ali lifted his hand and fluttered his fingers like the wings of a bird.”

Smoking in Demonland

Recitation of a very old poem of mine, "Smoking in Demonland" in the snowy picnic gazebo at Oyster Bay's Theodore Roosevelt Park:

Snow Dancing on Oyster Bay's Theodore Roosevelt Beach

(In case you're interested, I was dancing to Madonna's "Ray of Light" in my headphones.)

Weird Gravel

Vanity makes its own hole. I am the tip of an honorary spear. Then forgive me. Forgive me again for my thoughts. My homegrown cadence of betrayal and confession. All of imagination. Then the newness of a bruised love, recovering. Then tragedy of sex. Then octopus of orgasm and pleasure of you slapping my face. Togas at breakfast. Syrup and tears. Too many if only too many to think. Someone has to watch your back, even if it’s me.

The First Good Word Of The Tetherball Bastards

Heck!

You’ll go gladly, you’ll go. You’ll wake it all in some string. That one, that’s window. That Shake. That Make It To The Store before you get there. That One, bet you go. Then you get a flavor and A Rice, an even cold. Then you mix them up in a recipe, go The Desire Path, collaborate. You’re some kind of fun hominid, you show yourself, you chatter again, you go down in a cloud of this Darn Universe. Then saying things you intended are fine, then you do those things, then they do them, then everyone did them or some kind of Sitting Collects The Corners. Going round, going to come around in a car, a right vehicle for the time, more or less a vision of the believing that causes belief. It’s just an action, you know it, that Thought Stuff. Happens to happen in the every day, nothing special for Ten Days Straight.

2^nd Move

Stew gives you strength, you blow on the bottle, you re-gather with friends. Someone laughs, you move your arms. You raise them up, tell “em” to raise “em” up. Everyone feels real, or good, or neither, but still someone feels something, which makes it different from Last Night, when you all thought about someone you kiss. Yes, you make it so, you and your Little Happiness.

The Freaking

Him that go-gets a goiter, gets a pursuit in the belonging stance and for very announcements wish this was a horse. Tetherball Bastards, your fambly team on crutches. Your crotching past. That sifted dream of a red face huffing above you, taking your thought like aerosol fuel for Her Fire. Ting. Sounds to you like some kind of drink you drank, busted out of your scuttling coal pail, freedom in derangement, a chef. The thoughts you think you think all belong to me, you swimmer, Dinner.

Shambling Forward

Wearing your slipper running errands, bending your knees in a rhythmic way, tacky you don’t care. You loss, you shame, you Chiclet, you starling. Breath Hero. How you get that out of you for care, for a luck card, for a swing out to The Farm, where the inexperienced you (The Uninterpreted You) still rejoices in the loneliness of being alone. Do you now?

Leading Away

Stem in This Now Life. To regret is to choose time. To fracas! To carpentry! To hands themselves. Well, everyone you see, being well, being good to their cuckoo core, being glockenspiel, baloney. Shoe up, Shoe!

O Where Are You Going?

by W. H. Auden

"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,
"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."

"Out of this house" -- said rider to reader,
"Yours never will" -- said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you" -- said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

"The perverse allure of a damaged woman."

Long have I felt that the writings of Ayn Rand are pure shit. Every time I've cracked open one of her books, I have been repulsed at the sentence level by her ham-fisted and unbeautiful prose. Her ideas have always struck me as not much more than a precocious and angsty teenager's inner squawking at a world that just can't appreciate true greatness. I am perplexed at the adoration shown for her work by people whose ideas and opinions I have tried hard to respect. Thus, I am delighted to point you to an article on Rand in Slate Magazine about two new biographies of her. Perhaps, like me, you will find it both sad and enlightening. Click here or above for the article and enjoy.

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.

What Then?

by W.B. Yeats


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?'

My Friend,

I'm sick of everything spiritual,
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

Grand with a wish of cave men, grainy with kindling, crackfall of jar, uneven pavement stands alone, rain without sound. Some kindred hollow stun is gratified (drops in a bottle, too). Yellow dogs snarl once around the house and fall to sleep, dreaming upside down. Once I was upside down, saw shards, after superb velocity and drift.

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.

Beating Due Headfakes

A window or an asp will show you where you took your wrong turn. Neptune has certain objects that we possess, as fellows of the universe, but now is not the time to claim them. Nor is it the time to let Neptune know we are cohabitants. In time, in time. Hands agree to write as we get smarter, even as the fundaments of knowing fall away. This is the age of tessellated thought. Images bounce back at us for a grand undoing. Alone or along the window, our serpentine mental actions come back around. Time is the culprit, even as it is merely an invented thing. Yesterday, or the future, only exist in thought, and thinking only happens in the present --> the present is the only thing. Don’t think of it as a gift. It simply is. If something simply is, and you know it, don’t clap your hands.

Doing Something With A Strange Caravan

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Oh Yeah.

Read two of my newer poems in this summer's recent issue of Ekleksographia.

Sort Of A _________ Craquelure

Magnetism by fire. Seams chewed free from the afternoon. Skyscrapers. Long nights with a great friend.

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.

The Auroch And The E

Upon moving into my new apartment I discovered under the floorboards the remains of a perfectly preserved auroch, which had died suddenly but not violently, some forty thousand years ago. It still had its pair of piercing horns and a musky leather smell emanating from its impressive hide. I ran my hand across the body, marveling at what was once a great musculature, the kind that inspired earlier persons to paint its likeness upon the walls of their caves, in and out of trance. I found myself riveted by the large gaping holes where its eyes had been, and the hooves seemed as if they had just come from some magnificent thundering plain, bits of rock and ancient brown moss clung to the shaggy hair at the end of the forelegs.

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.

Tangerines From Your Crow's Feet

He wallops a few flim-flammers on his way to the breakfast drizzle. Chlorine eyes and a shank of ice function as a makeshift pen. He knows about his target, trusts his team, and stirs ellipses into the mix. Frogmen gather at the corners of his mouth. Their assault on civilization and its hortative practices is imminent.

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.

Embrace

Big books, big seasons, melting everything in bug sounds, no sleeping in that decayed secret. Beginning with slumber, you tear your drunken hair out. You fall down into text, stop breathing air, taste a version of death, know one star. We devour each other's messages, study meaning, make homes with strangers. Trying for growth, we find only the short mystery of a water dream. Smell the hot lavender of summer and embrace a ghost, exhausting your way of seeing the past.

A Happy Quaddroid

Abscond

Holy grapes, hearty mouth, harrowing hearts and tinny sobs, sunny arterial ceremonies bounce new waves of winter off memory caves. Even tongues find a pictographic road to tarnish, make contact with forgotten love, and release. Words return to trees and die when the leaves fall.