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