birds to the moon ma

it’s hard to tell your mother you’re a beast. to tell her what it’s like/erase. to tell her that nothing matters and everyone is making up as they go. to tell her that it’s HER fault you’re here in the first place (father to(not that you blame her but its just a fact). explaining that nothing MATTER/S till you input the trail of semantics you washed up upon. it’s not that she hasn’t had any experiences in which she found some teleological tune; having children (painful i heard), loving, smelling a new car, two step on the dance floor. i had to tell her that i didn’t believe in IT anymore; the myths, the choices, the fragrance of her new car. no injustice no determinism, just behaviors, assumptions.my mother works, it’s sad. i didn’t want to devastate her, she listens with papal concern, sensitivity of influence, she believes in me. the cherry in her manhattan swiveled the round of her glass, roulette roll.she sat down looking into the glass with little recognition of it's shape. a game ma, one that required destruction. no more ontology, just listen, taste, disaffect and dream. we breathe MEANING/S into it from a diaper to a toe tag, all the way, told what to think. not the beast once infected with something. it’s not fair to learn this at her age; too much built behind to destroy, foundations to thick, world is too big to pummel. i put my arm around her and we started talking about the apocalypse, OUR version of IT. the angels with face paint, elephants with shoes, birds to the moon ma, birds to the moon…

Buck knife Between Men

4 Quatrain Stanzas/4 Couplets Stanzas

Sitting where a buck knife protrudes from squishy river bank mud

Two men lower catgut silver string to depths where fish flaunt space

Zagging circumnavigating the prankster-hook-bait they chuckle

Chasing earthworm cuttlefish tackle box and doom

The wind

Caused in tandem

Thought; where

Do dead fish go

In natural death,

They never float to the top

One turns to the other lighting the half smoked cigar smiling

He loves the sun much more than Frank the Irish one

Who engages the breeze in intervals of sighs and leaves falling

On the oily spread lazy consuming restless and holy

Stillness

The illusion

Preys upon

The balancing word

Time is earth

Better captured by refrain

‘What happened last night Frank’ gripped words in smoke

Insult the manner of negligence here to be virtue

The line casts plunking, a look arrives ‘screw you Jack’

Forward remorse bleated eyes, an envy and abyss

In matters of honesty

Nothing more than the moonrise

At four

Gives men trying to be friends

Something

To look at

‘Tommy at the Watering hole said you hurt him real bad’

‘I did, is that so’ winding his jaw moving light in his whiskers

How calm all this violence is when the season is a frame

A small snag one rod Jack and the chance to look him hard

The buck knife

Has spread

Stringy roots

Apart

Cigar in dirt smokes

No fish caught

Poem for the Morning

And to the morning

Why not to you

And nothing else

To be green in upbringing

The new soft exchange

So many miss

And what of it

If you do

You might ask

To sleep and rustle

In a lover’s breath

Or warmth alone

Are we not justified

In getting rest

When we are weak

Even to miss this

Thing you pace upon

Called a morning

Why not to the day

Why not to that

And nothing else

Is the specific

Your excuse

For being a poet

Must you eat

Each grape

Nodding mmmm

Should you

Do anything

Other than praise

Why not sleep

Why not to that

And nothing else

Jackhammers with Dreams

Seeing darkness, honey-like enough

To gouge with an eye tells us

The technicolor remains are hung

Sky-paved with Clementine disaster

But in comfiest shoes longest yawns

Flat lining telephone poles and velvet

Our heavenly heartbeat can precipitous

Be unwholesome when confronted by night

Feathered in its blackest spray paint gown

The somnambulist buzz trots

The slow hoof over brown grain roofs

And angels fit with Cartesian axes

For earth-spouts to prosper

Dead gorgon juice

Flow soda fuzz in men

Disdainful, in love

And unhurried to work

I know this madness like I know

My aches are born virgin, composite

Restless enough to rebuild Chartres

Should I decide not to invent a dance

Or design shovels with wings

Pitchforks with arms

Jackhammers with dreams

Why are the children not bombing the moon

Snapping equal signs with hopscotch

Moxie, identifying with waves

Little Nannas never becoming

Natarajas sleep behind scrims

Draped of alleyway gilt

In the Xilbalba of our hour

[Identity] For: Sarah Jo

Perfume I’m Gone

I could never tell if I was more whiskey or you

If this fibrous clad tomb was ever honest

Or if it was a million ephemeral moths

Drunk and painted martyrs searching for neon crosses

Electric lip-gloss kisses or a fuck before death

Whatever it was we shared it

Perfume, I’m gone

I could never tell if I was more shelter or you

If the hidden fortress was more than memories

Or if it was a city of castles built of fingernails

Desperate stone tulips planted on our grave

Holding up the sky we once believed in

Wherever it is the ivy has taken over

Perfume, I’m gone

I could never tell if I was more bed or you

If the wetness of our dreams was ever more than tears

Or if it was a quilt of skin sown together with

Past lovers sweating heart-drops of our unborn children

Whenever it was the scent of our disaster is flesh

Perfume, I’m gone

One Line Poems

When do you have your midlife crisis when you’re immortal?

Half way through the sentence.

The Toilet;

Monastic brown boxes

The little autumns of life

America;

At least you can still have a BBQ

My dream of you was so dirty

It was condemned

When he tells you he loves you

I mean it

How many gods does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Depends on if the light bulb really exists.

For Emily Dickenson:

If god is the weight of my brain

Satan must be 6 inches tall

If I wasn’t such a fatalist

I’d turn bunt toast into croutons

I mean it this time

I mistrust you

Together we are tuberous

And cassava like in tapioca life

She didn’t pretend to like Robert Johnson

Come on into my kitchen she said

She entered from the dining room

I entered from the bathroom

Her black dog humped my leg

I hope they have high school reunions in heaven

I’d love to see who died first

Or who died most successfully

If this were a metaphor it would be

God

Lipstick on the barrel

Handguns don’t go well with love

Parmenides on Psychotropics

An Eliatic Ate Mescalin

(And came down with a bad case of Heraclitus)

If I said

Nothing matters truly

I’d not be

Trumping the deck

But rather asking

Has it

Till now

Been hiding

Somewhere in the

Wear

Or

Meanings

Gathered like blood

For beauty

Tulips for grue(l)

Still blue

Still

Bleeding

As in Mercy

Just now

For now

Just sleeping

I'll scream

(He screams)

But

For wanting

It to matter

Now that matter

Must

Mean something

Or is it too

Oblong

Spreading towards

The desert

Wondering where

It will end

It’s good that

Endings are forever

If I said

Nothing matters truly

I would be

Begging the question

To kiss me

With Its darkness

Sermon From the Floor

LIKE A MAD MAN BRANDISHING A RAZOR

History of a friend and his guitar (for Eben Stewart)

As a little boy somewhere on this brown, blue, and green ball called "here," I decided to leave a little structure my fortune had given me and wander the roads in search of the present. Finding the world indifferent and malevolent I found solace in a cobblestone well on the periphery of a small potters field. In a small alcove within the well I spent many evenings discussing the spherical changing whole above me with companions of slippery creatures, which I would tickle to sleep by rubbing their bellies. What one may not know is that in the bottoms of wells lives an ectothermic animal called a pillow-fish (not to be confused with the “cuttlefish”), which is not a fish at all, who feeds on a special edible moss that grows from the splendid dampness in a potent stream of light, short lived in the acute minutes it is aligned with the permeable opening O I had chosen to live in. While frightened at first by the sounds from the potters’ field darkness, I soon began to speak openly with the sky and acquired new companions of unnatural men wandering the ubiquitous exoskeleton of my home. These ghosts, as they are referred to, told me stories of the world far gone and spoke of the fate of the vain natural man. After many evenings hearing tales of adventure and myth I decided that, due to the increasing size and constitution of my person the bucket would not bear my weight on the cat gut rope, and that I should leave and fend against the world in order to obtain some stories of my own. On a summers’ eve a gentleman quite capable of lifting me from my depths retained a bit more in his bucket, I am sure, than he had planned for. Being a gentle rambler and seasoned troubadour he told me tales of ships, planes, guns, men and beasts. Wanting to encounter them all with amicable delight I set forth against the dawn. After many years spending my dreams in the world of adventure along the banks of the Euphrates, on the coast of Nantucket, in the jungles of Africa, and on the heights of the Andes I felt a strong sentimentality and pining towards the well and my boneless friends of the field. I knew that I was too big for a well of any size and that I couldn’t spend every sunless hour wandering around with the unnatural men of time. So I willed a well of my own that I could carry with me wherever I meandered. I built myself a moveable well out of horsehair, goat teeth, and an old oak crippled by fire from the sky. Inside this well I discovered that I could visit the ghosts of the earth who without bones could no longer beat the skins of day in the ever-marching orchestra of men and that there lived inside me another well which must have a well of its own. Thus, there must be infinite wells reaching all the way to a world where all songs begin. Here, our voices, the living and the dead can be one and time is lulled to submission like the ghost of Orpheus had lulled the judges of hell. Now, with this finely strung friend I can bring songs that speak of ghosts and natural men who live in the darkness of my eternal well sleeping amongst pillow-fish and delicious moss. If I may meet you one of these days, so that I can lend a bucket to your well, we will share a drink from the moist spring of all timeless men.

And as Our train Sang our last Song in C#

This song lived is a train in the key of me

Flattened under a fifth of whisky sound

That falls in an ascending scale of tiny fists

On the slattern land whale we rode into night

A young girl bent path in violin wooziness so deep

Inside her pedals roots danced against hell

Between steel crossties and shrinking Pocatello

She was a Viennese waltz and a red carpet too

The conductor asleep drank with mermaids

Who played broken ukuleles on shipwrecked coats

And as the train sang our last nightmare in C#

Darkness bowed an invisible cello strung to the moon

The chandelier hadn’t any will power left

Swinging a ticklish light on the denizen song

Us, the orchestra unable to hold the splintering baton

Was all smokeless air turned time signature by seat ticket

An aged pinup girl longed for a life sized martini glass

The walrus sucked vermouth with salted olive eyes

Toothpick teeth and a top hat large as a circus tent

Both wondering like I if the brakeman truly loves his lever