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.