Then Go Forth

A million miles under the lamps. A million miles in rain. A mile for every shoe you've never worn. You can see them now, shimmying in the given starlight, becoming soil in endless graves, worn and waiting in the foyers of a billion homes. And the planet wrinkles like a crow's foot, chuckles onward through night. Statues and statues of selves in the tsunami whorl of history. And history is a ruse for thinking that we make time. Of course time makes us, then lets us go. These horses in this field...what bridles and what bonds can hold you, when you see beyond the rim of the world?

The Charm Of Making

Songs and stories of infraction. I need to tender my heart, huge and weevil-addled, unfurling in wind. A demon ache. A love. If there is a love in me, may it swirl forth. I am unproduced. This is the stuff of silliness and myth. Whatever me there is begins with a goof and continues with death. The outline of my body in time. The digital wisp of night in the internet.

Calamities

It strikes me that I was replacing how much I missed you with how much I wanted her. But she was the stand-in for how much I wanted to rescue myself, like the old sea turtle. I watched her lay eggs in the sand, 85 years old and still trying to save her species, still willing to swim the high seas, through oil slicks and past the ghosts of battleships.

Restive Nocturne Two

I had your favorite music playing while I twisted her. It was the best. She was in love with me and I was in love with the you in her. And none of us was actually there. 

It was the perfect seance. Cherubs crushed their faces against her windows, trying to get out. It's been years and I can only write about it now. Because I am in time, but not of it. 

And time recalls me, works me back to those cracking moments with little bruises and short breaths. Eyes were on me and I didn't know how to do spring in autumn. It was okay to be alive, but not okay to want. In this nocturne, I'm counting the faces of my former selves like beads on a rosary. 

Your arms were long and I was in the rain. We turned wishes into earthquakes, chuckling away while the world fell.

Let X

--after Laurie Anderson

Then we went where two rivers met. We saw how we held hands the first time and laughed. We saw ourselves in pictures and stepped off the canyon edge into a willing sky. We flew for a while and knew every blue flower. This was all the roughness before civilization. We had to make complete cuts, meaning nothing and nothing again. Up against every word. I'm up against all of them and they form a thirsting army. You had a knife on the rim of your halo. Your scent was gasoline. There is nothing like a corpse. It does not wait and it does not want. It changes every minute and it does not regret. There is nothing like where bees come from. Not springtime, and not God. That was always a thick and foolish foolishness. Then we put our hands in soil and our hands were covered in soil.

Now You Do

Quick breathing in the open break, worlds away from toasty destiny, I'm with you and our past, shivering in alleys and cold hallways. In cold walls and eastern walks we gathered our stolen hearts and shared them up again in brightish light. Then fire bit our hands and we shoved off, our cabin wheeling. Cave spun, hair tangled in smarting roots, we dozed for a while and struck racking seas. The wreck of storms was for us and for distance and in my life I saw you polishing drab stars. My shoulderblades unbuckled and trees bent sidewise in a warming wind. I was all for finding perfect moments in our veering mind.   

Occupations And Some Satellites

A cheery band of brigands cradled the thicket of silver in their eyes, retired forethought, afterthought, and simply went where the growing was warm. They took toads with them. Old toads that stammered and halted until their feet could hardly kick. Stunted feet in crisp envelopes. Under a bush a painter sat, wondered aloud in the silence and made do with hooey. The gun stunned the fly and the liar. A hokey shadow named itself King Me, and played at the lacquered instrument until my hands could almost move without. Water poured on things that grew, then went back down. A tired functionary filed the form to end addictive delirium. A banker unfroze the accounts and went warbling through the town for the sake of songbreaking. He skipped in the rain. He rejoined the fish and added the day to the list. And the names, too.

Old Man And Ants

Filing into the hovel, towards tenderness, the ants gathered at the feet of the squat old man. He had long since gone beyond disgust. He would never harm them. They were old and he was old. They were dying and he would sweep them into the jungle when they expired. He would sprinkle them onto good soil so their dead bodies could nourish it. They were confident in their feeling that he would care for them. How strange for the ants to think this way. Of course, they did not exaclty think. Their thoughts were, in fine, formations of the old man. 

Four Friends

Long gone from the boil, an old pot gathered in the corner and shouted to everyone: "I am old, a dead vessel, full of ruses and knuckles and the way you look at me is broken." It tumbled forward and extended its arms out into the dust, awkwardly rolling from side to side, with nowhere to go and no one to help it. Everyone was gone from the house years ago, and only the beams of sunlight were there to witness the scene. The old pot, rolling from side to side, the cold blackened fireplace, the sunbeams, and the dust. They made a family and agreed to stay together until that grande dame, night, came calling. Then they would forget themselves again and roll about in wasted solitude. It was an altogether fine reality. The walls leaked cold air all around them and no one had a care in the world.

Quick Silver

To be in touch with sides, and to walk along a shifting sandline, these are approaches to civilization. Then the rocket. And the fault lies with earthquakes. And children discover the mystery of solids. No souls, only spheres that vibrate when we approach. Chives and potatoes. And mercury. That silver quickening of black blood waiting in the trees. A proper face and a warming hand that adjust the collision. The comfort of dolls, the slats between the moments in time. The boy with his hand in his mouth. The boy with his speech sliding to the horizon. 

My Poem-Comix in Drunken Boat Magazine

I have some poem-comix published in a recent issue of the fine online magazine Drunken Boat:

Click here to check them out.

The Thief

A thief sits in a landscape he stole even though it was already his. He is throwing away everything of value. The sunset. Birds. Wind on the water. This has to be done to make room for the beginning. He throws out ownership and the myth of things. He throws away language and the calliope of symbols. He throws away plastic. Cantaloupes and cardboard and air. He lets his own mouth do the breathing for once.

Restive Nocturne One

Wondering a oneness, a silent conclave. Nothing goes hurtling across the sky. Everything and everyone, all shouting down from disappearing clouds. Hands shift in hands and nerves leave them behind, to grieve in their own cradle. Goners get gone. 

Distinct in the shadows: these old feelings. The dark awake, when the bright cold buildings meet me at my window.  Then a heavy breath is routed and I am without. Just a shift of thought, a glistening scarf on a velvet chair.

Meek tones in the margins, a paraphrase to busted longing, a mute descent, these coarse cuts. Hear this, and bend in thought. Hear this, and go below. Attunement. 

Home is where the cieling is. All blue and far away.

The Edge Of The Ember

Death and its requisite implications will have to happen whether or not we make it to the edge of the ember. A lonesome stinging thing will see us confused when the windows play tight and envious. I woke up and knew you, and in knowing you knew I was known. Then I lived some more. You watched and panned for me in streams. There was also how the light moved across the floor. It carried vast shoes with it, dust in a teacup, nothing for a sung hero. Our bed had a hand in the drink without losing us. Who falls? Only the story that won't listen. A court will find us holding each other in the storm, laughing. 

In the want of an original title I have ventured to call the following piece a remonstrance.

Elk train vert. A few years ago, no one imagined that the spines (foliage) of pine-trees could be converted into wool. Roanoke ember auroch, bos taurus primigenius. The problem Saxby Chambliss faces is that he has maxed out his support base. What about: “I don’t like you, do you understand?” Keep in mind, keep leaves in mind, keep then, using the habitat template approach, that hydropeaking pressure is related to biological quality elements, such as the ellipse of the half-moon. Lunatic lollers and lepers about, and mad as the moon sit, more other less. When passing a senior center or other facility primarily used by senior citizens, contiguous to a street other than a bleak highway and posted with a standard "SENIOR" warning sign, a local authority is not required to erect any sign pursuant to this paragraph until donations from private sources covering those costs are received and the local agency makes a determination that the proposed signing should be implemented. One thing about this, the longer you last the less you care.

What Snakes?

What snakes
in this reality hotel,
what perfect traps
and nooses,
what cliffs
of shale
might we
fall from,
wandering beyond
limits of love?

The Articles The Particles

True roaming, the everything way we go. This had me down and I was down and something made me say go up there and find the bottom for the plumbing and should you see him or her or that way that they do, then you might get in the middle the way you want to. That is just the down way of saying this is the thing. So, I said it. That had me saying it over and again and of course there was no me to be there, but I said it as I said it and something true happened. It was a cool treasure and there was a way to extract its great bulk from the bottom, but it required we go live at the bottom, so was the worth really inherent in the value? There was no there without us, you have it. Than me, she was something with something growing, and I stood marbling the hallway with my smile. Everything hit the eject button at about the same time, and nothing blasted, it all just heavily drifted upward as a sprint might fuzz out. Was good. Was real good and everyone cried all along and alone and there was both of us zanting and melting and skipping away when the prices were told. We knew they were more so we held our heads out, hands in mouths, fingers getting wet and our eyes starred the way they do.

Dear Friends,

My longtime friend and craze-art collaborator, Ben Cramer, and I are pleased to announce the launch of our very first album, Carmelita Velasquez, which you will soon be able to buy on iTunes or listen to for free on Spotify. It's been years in the making and we are simply tickled that it's finally a reality. If you would like an advanced taste, you can listen to it for free in its entirety (free!) by clicking right here.

New poems up at the On Barcelona blog!

Dear Friends,

New poems of mine can be seen at the cool blog site On Barcelona. 

Enjoy, enjoy!

Our Hero (#1)

Our skinny, messy-haired, 19 year-old hero wakes up in his small and shitty first floor studio apartment to the sounds of “Still Life With Hot Deuce On Silver Platter” by Titus Andronicus playing on his Red Firetruck Radio. He jumps out of bed, wearing only his boxers. He does 17 jumping jacks and 4 push-ups. He pulls on jeans, and a T-shirt printed with the phrase: “I’m all about understanding Anarchy." He tucks some rocks in his back pockets and reads Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody! Who are you?" to his frog (which looks at him quietly from inside a small glass bowl next to his toaster). He fries himself an egg and eats it out of the pan, drinking a coke and reading a worn 1977 edition of LIFE magazine.  Occasionally he tears a page out of the magazine and tosses it into the air, yelling: "Montage!" (Meanwhile, outside, two thieves wearing ski masks and black leather gloves are preparing to break into and steal his neighbor’s car.) Our hero, coming to the end of his magazine, yells “To work! … Or NOT to work!” He quickly ties a blindfold onto himself and sprints as hard as he can out of his apartment door. He SLAMS into one of the thieves, whose head slams into the head of the other thief. THWACK! The two thieves fall unconscious into the street, thieving tools falling out of their hands. Our hero yells “Sorry...Maybe!” and runs off, zig-zagging, down the street. A beat cop turns the corner and comes upon the fallen thieves. The cop grins strangely, with a thought bubble reading “Now what?!” while our hero careens down the block into the distance.