the flooded boarding house

Labyrinthine street tattoo etched in grid grime
where we skulk upon the shore of cities like
driftwood trash lulling in the tide. What you
mean to say to me is nothing that a little rudeness
wouldn't cover up, that the mannequin display of
fashioned silk couldn't survive, but we think
like fish in shallow pools spiraling in locked
rock, limited in natural gestures by the creation
that preceeded our generation's scattering from spray.

I broke a pencil when I switched metaphores,
from spotlight nature to unnatural illumination
in the boardinghouse halls of madness where you
learn the sun like a message and the tired trees
hang their exhaustion like the heads of drugged homeless.
Ancient pains are brought from heavy sadness through
the doorframes peeling like old picture frames
while suffering photographs lean out
through broken shutters, holding cigarettes and bras.

When the sea rises to swallow our poverty
is when I will ask for my rights to bemoan
my lack of rights in the face of a swallowed
monolith traced by opaleye and calico bass,
when the ocean heaves its mass above the city
shore is when I will professionally cry
on the arms of a coral statue guarding the
entrance to the sunken treasureship where I
found your pearl earrings and your lips found
my kiss.

once upon this time

I would throw on you all my aches in a fit of weakness
were it not for the wellspring connecting me like an umbilicus
to the mysterious present that constantly loses arrangement
and regains its meaning. Try the waves on the shore, they
receed to expose a barreness of sand glass considered beautiful
by children and salt spray lovers. Try the angel demon lost
in charity and giving from the hand instead of the heart.

But what solemn midnight belfry kills me with its tolling?
Their are many churches here without bells and the tide
is gathering its slime like an evil tongue across the breadth
of our uncertain shore, the edge of the known. Future tense
travels back to peasent demense; fuedalism, food riots, the
order of the sword, and this arcane armor has cracked like clay
in the blistering rust of the sea's hypnosis.

I would like to speak to someone of the old rhymes
where youths built fireships to mark the passing of great men,
and where poets were men of their word who captured the feality
of love's throne. I would tell you with a soft laugh that
we once were gods here, our travels made into marvels, but
you know how that has-been story unfolds without even the
precursing "Once Upon A time."

And I believe that suffering is man's heirloom, handed
down bloodlines through the wounds of birth. See the
war horses in the pasture, their scars are made in one
life and one life only, while we, we carry in us the
fate of our fathers like the fables carry the dark maths
of villain worlds.

Where do we carry the true Earth? Is it in our heads, lurking there with unspoken gravity, coloring the frames that our eyes manufacture in concert with our memories, beliefs, and experience? Or is it outside of our hands, related to our voices, the way we manipulate symbolic objects with the metaphors of our physicality, the way our speech casts us as individuals among a caste?

It is one of the great secrets that people do not know what the world is. Truely and unadorned, how it exists. Science analyzes its parts, but from these parts no agreeable whole has been constructed that advances our understanding beyond scientific label jargon for processes witnessed most often in false environment. The arts attempt to teach us who we are, what our roles and lives mean, but these often go ignored due to the inherent subjectivity of the author or artist. One wonders, in terms of Creationist myth, if God himself is a subjectivist. It is entirely possible that He crafted the world from the ethos of matter the same way that Pollock splattered his expressionism across canvas, the way Monet colored his lillies; complete in style but nebulous in meaning.

One tries to gather an impression of meaning from the immediate environment. Los Angeles, perhaps the most unmagical city in America, sprawls in every direction, yet it remains impossible to escape the totality of the sky. Smog, high clouds, jet contrails, and the mad rush of helicoptors give one the feeling of giantism and the need to duck ones head, the necessity of ceiling room. But then, their are these umbilical connections to the astral, to the celestial spheres, that jar one subconciously with the impression that man has scorched even the sky, which is saying a lot, considering the Christian value placed on the upper atmosphere regarding heaven since the infant philosophies of the Gnostics. Looking down the filthy runnels of alley ways and runway-width highways gives the impression of false space; an open plain converted into a psychologist's experiment maze. Gleaning substance from people is impossible; they have given up the pain of meaning and its weight in favor of the rather depraved lightness and ease of social congress, in favor of the percieved opportunity to be worthy of material accumulation.

My searches for meaning take place not in the valley of roads and suburbs, but rather in the cobblestone-worked lanes of books. Though it is true that there are already enough people in the world, I cannot hold that same statement to be true concerning imaginary people, made up by authors for the sake of exploring various facets of real character. It is terrible, but sometimes I hold the goings on in a character's life to be of more value and intrest than the happenings in the lives of some millions of Los Angeleans. However, on second consideration, this may not be wholly terrible, seeing how fictional characters are ultimately the invention of one who possesses a rich inner life. It is that inner life I long to communicate with, that I desire to find expression for. The world of hybrid powered sedans and glam perfume is generally an annoyance, while the words from a Billy Pilgrim or Holden Caufield highlight the emotional memory of years that we could never live.

The true world for me, is it merely in my imaginings then, lying in mental pictures, langauge comprehension, and philosophical ruminations? Or is their a world stripped of the human element that passes below our notice, unobserved, cycling like the invisible wind of a hurricane in swaths of time and space?

I voted for...

I voted for the rivers to run the land, in sweeping arcs of wine-bubblings
So that we may know the ease of fluidity among our days and the
Serenity of the river stone. I asked that only our thirst tyrannize
Our politics, with the calm eloquence of need sated by cool
And clean waters flowing through our lips like the mandate
Of some arcane spirit nourishing the jug of the soul.
We dip in and get out, no need for a life locked in drownings
Or the threat of desert answers to the questions of our mouths.

I voted for a calm cloud to lead us across a country few of us have lived,
And that its cargo may rain upon us with the emotion of storms when
We discover the scorched earth before us. I elected an errant hurricane
To demolish the old creations in brick winds and concrete floods,
So that we may know a terror not made by men of the ledger in our
Charted lives, so that storm surge may sweep the ink from off our
Records and give us the equality of the weather.

I voted for an earthquake as our general, for tectonic plates to
March in blitzkrieg against the stability of the era, that stale
Old stagnation based in petrifaction that has mummified our
Lives with the deposits of our enemy’s dreams, which mirror
The hopes of the dead. I elected geology as our army, since
Peace too is a matter of patience, layered like fossils among
The bedrock of our civilization.

I voted for you to be a leader, but only of yourself against
The other, that you may find yourself barefoot in a meadow
With daffodils rubbing pollen against your bare calves while
The cities shriek from murder and break cease-fires when
The battles have turned to embers. I elected you to march
Forth in surrender to the pleasing elms above the barrow
So that you may know shade in the summer and the work
Of farming until winter. I voted for you, not ending in
November, but starting today with the equality of the weather,
I voted for you in the eloquence of the river.

on psychiatry

Let them destroy the bitter dead
Who fill my head half with joys
And in part with sorrow, for after
Evening’s cloak turns red with dawn
And a new day’s marrow,
He comes at me with daggers drawn
Consisting not of knives but drugs
And pens that outline wounded birds
In their abstract chiaroscuro.

No, let for once my bitter head
Sour his sugar tie and sweetened
Belt buckle. Let for once the life
I’ve fed billow in plumes against
His sharpened harrow.

And in anxious night I draw the moon,
So full of stone that the ancients
Worshiped not the cycles but the
Weight of what does follow,
Let him destroy the bitter dead
But leave me light and even sorrow,
Let him outlast only the bitter wheat,
Scorched by drought and stuffed in a barrow,
Let me unfurl my anxious song
Before tomorrow bleeds in sorrow.

As orchards and orchids
once were seeds
say this small prayer for me,
that love isn't what
we've been made to believe
in an artist's scene
but rather these rich
shadows crossed in candle
light, made with no
electricity, just a flame
to me above these
tragic seas that reach
to us as I write.

That we lie in this world
softly unfurled like dreams,
that when we stand we must also
learn to fight with
the appearance of things
nobody sees
but our angle of sight,
the way it observes moonlight
on leaves while we quietly breathe
on the hill they call the night.

We have lost our reprieve,
and gained in disease,
have drank drops too sweet
for life.

There are those with ease
who lead one to believe
that love is a forgotten rite
as the shadows it seems
are too soft to leave out
of the feel of our dreams
out of the prejudice of our sight.

All i ask is that you speak and you sing
because of the simplest things that make
one believe,
that allow you to breathe in order to be
the gold locked in your candlelight.

sit with me, my dangerous darling.
the sea has spoken over the telephone
and the forest has wrestled with the circuitboard.
these petty dramas are abolished,
these soft pleasentries are the sum of our dignity.

who taught us to react? to take the blood of night
and raise it against the milk of the day,
to cower in cubbyholes when our agonizing rites fail,
to sweep cobwebs from our books has though
housekeeping were an accomplishment?
who can teach anything but obedience or rebellion,
despair or hope? It was in these tunnels they
call streets that i learned darkness, in this
waiting room that i learned light. But both were
false and dissapating, negligent of pure life
admist death, a ridicule of the spirit.

i walk with nervous twitch down cobblestone alleyways,
half sick of shadows and half wishing to dissolve amoung them,
sick of tradition and disgusted by innovation.
is this the ridicule of our times? That we are to
travel amoung dim scenes, ironically distant
while longing for the simple affirmation of attunment
to delicate shades, torn not only among opposites,
but also amongst the pillar of ourself? Or is this
my solitude, while you, you have drunk in the streetlights
with your arm around soft shoulders, dancing and
saying fuck-all to the wars and treacheries that
build a city street, that build a life?

It is all too much and I wish there were a simple ending,
like the glowing faces of drunkards laughing in acceptance.
But consolation is a far penninsula and conclusion is a gravestone,
set in stone like the disaster of the earth, sewn with veins
of basalt like eternity conspiring to creep into the everyday,
immobile like the tragedy of fear in the face of what we must change.

this poem is like a television show,
you don't need to know anything to understand it,
it is your uncle laughing while the dancers fall
in limelight tragedy and your mother not listening
when you tell her you were only sleeping.

this poem is so sure of itself,
cock-eyed braggart with a cigar in its mouth
and wearing one of those stupid hats from the
late 1940's that men used to wear to the office.
it is telling you with gin-sweet breath
that you will not amount to anything if you
do not do anything, it is the voice of your
drunk father beating on your door and asking
to borrow your pornography magazines

this poem is insecure;
it puts up a front of adult proclivities
with words like 'proclivities' while wetting
itself in the corner like a derelict,
this poem tried to hide its dunce cap beneath
a toupee and tried to hide its ignorance by
being loud, and inspite of itself, allowed
you to hear the intelligent whispers of the
peach-splattered clouds as they rushed over
the herring-bone of Lighthouse point, neither
threatening nor promising rain, just burgeoning
like another paranoid night before you, wrapping
around the curve of your arc with blankets of
darkness, whimpering.

this poem is not a poem,
it is a chariot for lightning cast out of the heavens
by a baleful god, the one who created landlords and
voted against Spring, the one who called you on the
phone in robot voice to inform you that your credit card
had expired, the god who gave you the guitar and ten fingers
but not music. Now the chariot brings you a rent check,
damp cherry blossoms, a new credit card, and the recording
of the first rock and roll song sounding like a burning tin can.

so seat yourself in your decision of what this is
while the audience clamors for the curtains to be lowered,
while Fifth Violinist imagines he can play drunk,
while the poet slams his hand in the silverware drawer
and has to write for a month with his left hand,
while the old songs wind across the jib of salted sailing ships
and reach you at walking pace from across the hidden sea:

You are allowed to begin.

elegy

something i dont remember popped up in the form of a futile poem;
some insipid diction maligned with a sociopath's cunning
and a pedant's flourish, telling you about my sickness,
the sickness of expecting consolation.

so i shed this paltry disguise;
the firmament of the myopic scientist,
the numerology of the bureucrat,
the mysticism of the politician.

i ruined my articulation for the sake of a highball glass,
and I ruined my health for the sake of individuality.

flourishes of courage like rose petals in the arctic,
articles of love in the fascist newspaper,
dandelion wisps in the gangrene sky,
these are what I hold on to in notebooks,
these are why I have no photo albums.

bury me in the ancient waste like any old object,
for i am object enough for you, say nothing
like you have said nothing for those before me
that you fragmented with control's power
and thus i give the fragments back to you:
laughter in the hospital, a magenta leaf
upon a pub table, and some wine stains
on the funeral suit.

There is something vulnerable about the human animal in the morning. Grass-haired and askance from rhythm; not yet fed, groomed, or conversed; the creature has not yet put on its skin or climbed successfully to its first challenge of the day's labors. It is almost sick, like a crumpled flower, it is automated in the lack of a program like those early toy robots that flail in sluggish mechanisms appointed to being by lack of clear meaning: bathroom, newspaper, coffee, breakfast, teeth brushing, etc. If any man wishes to learn humility, he need only observe his activities as they bumble through the veil of the morning.

bar talk

"My parents concieved me in a flash of literal lightning beneath a wry old oak."
"This is what you tell people you're being introduced to, normally?"
"Well, no, but I felt some kind of energy between us."
"You thought you felt some kind of energy between us, no doubt, thinking of the kind of energy your parents must have felt when they concieved you. Why bring up something so weird anyway? Did you think I'd be impressed?"
"Um, just an interesting fact about myself. I could tell you about the time that the forest wolf stole my favorite blanket when it flew in a hunger fit through my parent's farm cabin."
"Look, you're way to self-conceited for my tastes. Cheap talk, cheap laughs, that's all I'm after."
"Don't you want a genuine experience?"
"Yeah...but not listening to you tell me perverse stories about yourself. You don't seem that interesting, to be honest."
"But I've had a lot of interesting things happen to me."
"That doesn't make you interesting. In fact, it can make people pretty boring because they end up resting the entirety of their personality upon anecdotes that are of little consequence to the actual conversation at hand. Like, I was going to tell you that you should buy me a drink, and now I am insisting that you buy me a drink and walk the other way."
"But, I just..."
"Ok, no dice, I see. Have a nice life imagining scenes of your conception and thinking about how your parents made love."

demarcation

the answers
to my pretty window
are inscribed in notebooks
that sunk to the ocean's bottom
on a lost trip through the dark

the questions
to my darling doorframe
are coveted with the fringes
of hinges made from rust

so dance drunk with merriment
upon this marble rainment that
lasts like a grave that speaks
in silence like a slave that
devours our play as fast as
we can win; the soul's forfeiture
upon Buddhist sin, the lines
that don't matter and infringe,
laughlines, tired lines, waiting
for fines, and at last a love
within this sepulchre marked
unknown, marked blown by leaves,
settled in crumbled earth's relief
like security, like life set free,
like sequence delivering all
the roses to the living as they
wait behind frontdoors for the
heat to pour for the sun to reveal
the shore, for the dance we promised
after life had burst like a raspberry
upon the skein of linen framed by
fate, by desire, by destiny, by
laughter at it all again...

discursive esoterica

It arrived with a delicate speaking voice that sounded south of New York, this person dressed to the nines and even the tens in blue suede coat and tan trousers, splattering words at a meter a second though the group sat in doldrums, leaning heads on palms and sighing wistfully. “All you have to do to avoid mind readers is think of a single word and you throw them off track, it is like me, I am only Korean Su and there are only two others of my race, so I don’t get caught up in the doomsday forecasts and the dark desires of my fellow man. I am a Christian, I believe that Jesus saves and God forgives.”

The moderator felt adulterated by all the religious talk and motioned to the door for Mr. Korean Su, while the others picked up on his train of thought as if they had been riding in the passenger car their whole lives as observers to the mystical esoterica of the subjective blue coated figure. “I read letters from the clouds, great big ones.” “My sister had a seal put on her so her gifts couldn’t be used against her.” “I am not spiritual, but rather spirited.” The moderator twirled the curliques of her hair into tighter ringlets, chewing on a pen. “Ok,” she began only to falter in the storm of private confessions.

“Listen, I’m angry,” a Pacific Islander began, “I’m not angry, I’m angry,”

“Sometimes I imagine a rainbow protecting me from the broken glass of other people when I’m at the supermarket, and it is healing to both me and them.”

“Vines flood my apartment when I go to sleep. They confuse the dream-tigers.”

Soon the doctor himself was in the room, interrupting the free form jazz speech singing like a flat piano note in an otherwise brilliant orchaestra. “You have to realize that the fundamental cause of mental illness is a belief in magical or delusional thinking, you all must obtain some kind of control over your individual realities to the extent that you can go shopping for milk at the gas station without digressing into rainbows and dolphins.”

“Hey, what are your beliefs, doc?”

“They are private matters that I keep to myself.”

“So you believe that you’re better than everyone here, is that it?”

“Well, I went to school for eight years to train in pharmapsychiatry.”

“That don’t make you an inch better than anyone!”

The doctor left, beet-faced and opening his hands in a gesture of relinquishment, considerably consternating the young moderator, who had an even more rambunctious set of patients on her hands than before.

“He’s like cancer, when you get it they open you up and once the air hits it it dies.”

Korean Su mumbled some casual comments touching upon the legality of cigarette smoking, how good it feels to suck brown smoke through a fiberglass filter into the delicate pulpa of the pinkened lungs, and how glorious the sound of an opening cigarette pack sounds. The others in the group agreed with knowing nods that seemed to know about nodding beyond the simple act of an affirmation particular to a single thread of conversation; their affirmation included all that transpired; the doctor’s immolation, the humble embarrassment of the moderator, the magical techniques of other patients, life-status, the vans moaning on the street outside the facility with cylinder chortles, the trees shushing over the manicured grass like the ghosts of old lovers, and the idle banter echoing from the hallway between receptionist and customer. They even affirmed the inaudible sea, rising now within their breasts, drowning out matters of unimportance and filling their swimming heads with the delicate watercolors of dreams.

Stale chalk slab walls molded by auspicious smell,
when they took me away the sirens called down in echoes
across the steel doors bolted with key's ceremony of
in and out, like candles snuffed on and off, the binary
of the catacomb hospital all rust and Catch 22 with
drunken drugs and sober dreams cognizant of spice plants
and muslin shrouded women working their way down concrete
embankment alleyways with short term memory malfunctions
past sarcophogi laquered with blue linolium, nurse, nurse
feed me please and don't call my hunger a false disease.

Taser threat first then manacled wrists, plastic backseat
pressing into the column of the spine, Orwellian paperwork
and changing memories, hot tar burn on police plexiglas.

Intake, voluntary, ITU, clinical psuedo medical names
for disastrous loose slavery mechanized behind burnt
out florescents and cruel hammered faces staring away
the simple supple truth. I ask for a shower, I ask
for a piece of paper, I ask for some food that cant be
bought in stores, not even refusals reach me just
pale pained apathy slipping through the dark hospital
on special socks silk screened with anti slip and
sometimes back up is a long way off and sometimes laughter
is all but forgot.

help is manipulation and honor a stuffed animal bursting
over with pride...so they say, so we act, so the miserable
obeys the miserable, jargon walking with brain soup settling
into false social niches, lexicon unraveled like a torn
parachute across the sky of lost enlightenment,
when will they learn to learn, that is my only question
and it sticks in my rib like a gaffing hook
so tell me delicate that i will never go there again
tell me in preterite that my bad luck is at an end
tell me some saturnine story about the moon's eclipse
over the dried sea of tyrannical sin
and I will lead you to my favorite door where commands
dissasemble and fey misery breaks apart at its end
met by the bodys euphony signed with relief that
we dont break but only bend.

The artless hospital devolves artisans into minimalists
the loveless corridors entomb catacombs of cleaning solution
into the hallowed architechture of the self,
the nondenominational angels took off their masks
and were ridiculed for their beauty,
the engines are churning in the glowering light of the heart
but there is some poverty between me and you
when I called you after the names of children's books
kept on cobweb shelves between the mind and its ear.

prophetic dreams buried within this skin
false prophets tunneling to sleep within
like miners crushed by timber beams in the
coal day's exhaust strewn about the street's arenas

all these sleek sins were fashioned by misers
in the history of love, all those crude lies
became our enemies tools that conspired through
the dark millenia to seat us here behind pale windows
where we hunted another's disgrace; this precision
built with consideration of the ancient lake,
call me without a phone upon the airwaves,
let your languish become a replacement for pride.

Revisited

Living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
your friends all wear knife smiles and your
family thinks you're crazy for singing when
the cage has wound its tight mesh about your
life. Living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
the television stays the same and the movies
are all violent, they put you at odds with humanity
in order to steal your source.

Yes, living in a fascist dictatorship isn't easy,
they put truth on sale in the form of lies,
there is poison in your food and they put
poison in your milk, they make it look like
a utopia if only so that the beauty kills you,
and the police are on to someone in the declared
silence of acts, and the police are onto you and have
been onto me, in the silence of acts. They
are waiting for you to fuck up, they are waiting
for you to act out, they are waiting patiently
but they know they can't win, which is how the
story goes, they know they can't win because
they are deeply paranoid about every person
because the thing about living in a fascist
dictatorship is that it has no power, that is
the truth, that it is all internalized by the masses
in the form of media, movies, magazines, and
the internet, that is the truth and don't you
dare call me a liar.

It is easy living in a fascist dictatorship when
you get away from your family, it is easy living
when you get away from false friends, it is easy
living and breathing and singing and making
collect calls when they try to find you to tell them
how much you hate them for what they have
done to you, and it is easy to leave, just don't
forget that.

It is easy living in a fascist dictatorship when
you have forces of nature on your side, it is
easy living in a fascist dicatorship when you
knew how to escape a mental hospital, and it
is easy, way easy when you know secrets kept
veiled behind false temple doors.

It is a false fascist dictatorship, this, what we call
home, this is a fascist brothel, there is a fascist
supermarket, and there is a fascist bar where
all the drunks try to cut you down, and there
is fascism in love, there is even fascism in love.

fascist habit

and the famous literati found themselves in a world of bound books
and the delicate architectures were no longer appreciated with dirty looks
and the solace of simplicity became measured by the meters of beauty

and you and me,
and me and you
and those are few words
to describe the complexity
of two coupled by the vows of love

and bad poetry all around
and answers lost but never found
and questions asked
and certain elocutions through
the miasma of nebulas could not
discover the ancient harmonies
that had gone, that were lost
due to pettiness and greed.

goodbye internet writing,
as the old saying goes
if you do something well
get paid for it,
if you go through hell
never tell, never tell.

ink travels on train track
while paper prefers a plane
and pens sometimes drink
in the words they have writ
while books begin to look
like print and hallowed
scripture made a song of
the cataleptic fit.

fresco lives in time wild
with the coloration of form
and painting travels like
an old man starving for a bone,
and painting travels like a
fluid river looking for a home
in the idle sea that burgeons
around the delicate mystery
of evolution's archaic prophecy
that gave what swam a little
land, that gave what flew
command of the draped blue
arena, that old sky.

pottery stilts our architecture
with vain containment of art's
gardened meadow stretched vaster
than a weathered cloud cover
upon the plane of rainy refrains,
upon the pain of many disdains,
upon the age of sculpted ideals
formulated in the veins of marble,
upon the refrain of art.

the fulminous pentameter of pale pink artistry

Who's clothes are we wearing now?
The blackened coats of filthy foot soldiers
obeying the orders of mad generals drunk on whiskey,
or the petticoats of ladies who blessed us with
clownish love, the ornate decorations of vined
embroidery sufficing to make us laugh as we
made fools of ourselves in the Veterans Day
parade? Who's circle of a belt are we wearing,
is it the one that we tanned ourselves after
stripping the leather off of the cattle,
the one that we sewed with our calloused fingers
in the dark heat of some Asian sweatshop?

I might ask the same about your mask, the one
that your father gave you on your fifteenth birthday,
all rosy and cruel and delicate with features of
some idle bank robber's sentimentalities, fitting
like a glove across the face, that old slap that
weakens our bonds to what is familiar.
Where we wear masks, it is obvious, where we go
without them is not.

Shawls are terrifying, the ghost-wraith fabric
wound around the wind in fumes of threads,
the beggar's breath that with undulating tassels
speaks of charity, companionship, silence, and
what more, curses. But they demonstrate the
way in which supple form maybe be accentuated
by a mask of silk, of coarse cashmere curving
around humane architechtures like wisps of willow
about a branch.

Who's clothes do you have on?
Who's mask have you stolen?
Who's ancient angelic hopes have you rotted with
the symphony of decay, with the secret sublimity
of control, with the dangerous spirits of intoxication
and with the vespers of power's praise?

What dance do you prepare yourself for?
The old plague rehearsal, that child's game
where they all fall down in a ring and giggle
but for the posies? Or is it the office party
where you imbibe and demonstrate your talents
at hanging lampshades across their heads to
mask the light of the eyes, the parties where
insanity goes unobserved but for the inevitable
hangover that crumples the weapons of the spirit
into nothing but ash smoke? What fulminous
pentameter calls across your musics, what
passion-play has made you sick with longing,
what innuendo's reminiscence has broken your step
in dark desire's theatrics, where pirouhettes
aren't practiced and the orchaestration is tied
by strings and thistles to the machineries of
the gulag?

Do not ask me any more questions about myself,
you who have posed so much in the artifices
of joy like a gargoyle lying in wait for sunset
to extract its stone from your veined flesh.
Do not command me to obeyances of urn's formulation,
to the machineries of meaningless transience
where routine becomes a blessing, and do not
formulate me into a receptacle for your insecurities,
for I have had the same, and fought my way out
instead of waiting for some flitting whim to
curtail the miseries of modernity, instead of
hallowing the artificial angels languishing
in brain death on godless pews strewn with the
langour of authority's lack of vision.

Where the people make nothing themselves,
nothing shall be made; the simple and stupid
equation that belies the truth, that animosity
towards the creative is like a death-sentence
of self-destruction, that antagonizing the birth
of pale pink artistry only antagonzies the future
of security and peace, that developing the
darkened manipulations of gears within the pulsating
flower of mind foreshadows sinking in the great lake
instead of being floated like a blossomed lily
upon the water gardens of an Impressionist master.

You do not believe me
because you do not believe anything.

love and hunger

So I walk upon these diamond sidewalks
with a heart in my back pocket, peddling
playing cards with faces, asking only
for a second time to hold your hand
beneath the cold avacado sun as the
fire engines tear holes in the aura
of silence, as the police are blocking
off the roads in displays of arbitrary
whatevers, as the whatevers are becoming
whoevers in the miasma of suburban
esoterica known as the disorganized mass
of community.

The traffic stares, the traffic cares
about vagries masquerading as substantialities,
about substantial gasolines refined by
the delicate operations of greed, all that
glass and aluminum rushing down rivers,
all that smoke and dross and ancient motion
manipulated into acceleration (this is the
physicist talking) and all the hurried
completion beneath a dark moon as the
night unfolds its shadows across the veldt,
as the veldt unfolds its fiction of emptiness
across the great expanse of asterisms.

Ruined by melody, defeated by perfume,
a short man in swimming trucks once told me
that I wasn't going to have a room,
a suburbanite informed me that the ghost-faced
killer drove a motorcycle and wore a halloween
mask, but the ghost faced killer told me
that some of us had to last, some of us who
drank harmonies in the cadence of sloshing
vessels could shoot lasers at Saturn's moons,
a woman i met talked with too many hands
told me that my life essentially was ruined,
but I did not believe any of these things
all too soon.

Call me what you will, we are all just
graveyard holes to be filled, call me what
you will, we are all just dancers with
the starlit fumes, we are all just disasters
masquerading as masters, we are all just
candles glowing in this ancient room.

open plea

Delicate preoccupations with the stuff of light
Shading the brow in a fury of darkness, these simple
Metaphors that the subconscious won’t get rid of
Because I see it in all of you, the stupid duality
Of Christian banality subverted into guilt complexes
For living life, I see the harmonies of joy patient there
Within you, waiting for a chance, well you have
To know when to join in, you have to sing through
The cliché thick and thin, and you’ve got to manage
As best as you can when the rain is gathering in the East
And cellphones are blathering ancient threats in new
Technological voices, and the frighteners scour the
Suburban streets with childhood masks soft and sweet
Like an oleander Halloween…

You all have something, you all have yourselves,
Build your temples upon those foundations and
Lend your towers skywards in articulated columnar
Architectures, build upon who you are, not who your
Neighbor is because your neighbor could be an idiot
Stuffing turkeys in a supermarket for specialty
Thanksgiving trimmings, your neighbor could be
A life failure without knowing it, and your neighbor
Could be the guy who wants to hit you with his car,
So for your sake, please forget all this old religion
Made for life in the desert, please forget all these
Conceptions of nonsense placed within you by the
Teachers of the dark Academies,
If not for your sake,
Then for mine, because
Parties have become abominations
Driving is a suicide risk
And love is the only thing that makes the day ok
In glittering gowns of arrayed sunlight.

two poems undivided by formalities

the mistake is religon,
those marred catherdrals of locks
placed on heaven's gate,
the mistake is free decision,
as if Jeff Buckley chose to drown
while falling off that dock into the lake.

engine symphony, materialist substrate,
idealist repetoire, and false malady
darkened by failure kings.

and i dont plan on answering
any more interrogatives as
they cross my sequence like jokes
with hooks, and i don't plan
on sealing the deal of ancient
harmony in exchange for a bunch
of shifty eyed dirty looks
because the rhyme scheme is really
simple; there are godless saints
and there are saintly crooks,
there are birthmarks in Van Gogh's paint
and there are death sentences
in popular books.

if i had a choice
between being loved by one person
and hated by everybody else
or being loved by everybody
and hated by one person
i would choose the former
because let me tell you
that it is impossible to love everybody
but it is possible to love somebody
like everybody,
it is possible to see everybody
in that one person, as it is possible
to become a part of that person
instead of being torn apart by
everybody. but,
don't let me tell you about possibilities
because you have to figure that out
on your own, you have to become possible
before certain possibilities become impossible,
like being in love with a person who isn't there;
like hating who you are,
like ------------------

remember that bad advice
either has no context or comes in the form of a poem,
remember that bad advice
comes in the form of ultimate tyranny
masqurading in the form of friendly suggestion,
and remember that I don't remember;
I am just someone who read the newspaper one day
I am just someone who walked to the park
and I am just someone who delivered a couple
of letters from out of state on the porches of
the recently confused, I am just a somebody rambling
in the shoes of a nobody,
my deepest friend.

ignorance climbing down into the canyon

The whirlwind of possibilities described in swaths of sunlight
make me bleed my nonsense on the floor of my steps like an accrued
night of the spirit and the darkness in between my neurons fashioned
like ancient trees highlights experience's gallery of beautiful disease
garnered like the motions of a sparrow's flight by the photographer
behind the eye who closes the shutter on the lens when the picture
is obscured by a disembodied hand that turns each image into the
palm of lined and reaching fights for freedom against the grasp
of a prison's handshake sealed with the lock of moonlight.

It's not a dance you've seen on the television of the spirit
or a man who walks with briefcase during daytime and in the night
chases after golden haired women; its a mechanism that's been seen
within the source of being's light, it's a delicate disease that
forms when you have to fight and it's a way to lengthen joy across
the boughs of blossomed branch with gentle twigs holding flowers like
tiny hands out to the reach of someone's elegent moon sky.

But we've spoken here in the neon cafe where the sun is absent from the day
and we've drank this cup before with sugar, and no one knows who has the right
to order the waitress nude upon the table just as no one knows who fashioned
light from stardust seeds and candled columns glowering from temple stairs.

And I don't know what I speak of when the flock of birds sweeps across the
burgeoning blue of the hallowed sky. I don't know even what fire is as it crosses
our mirrors and nestles in waxen feathers like a burden touched with flecks of
destruction's burning night, I don't know who appointed our dreams upon our sleep with feathered curls of dove-tails, and I don't know why I scramble across river-stones with a hopeless head as the rifles open fire in ravine nestled against the mountain, where I raised my voice high and shouted down my edge tales where the lightning snaps the flatness of the sky...

See me humble with my mall clothing as I buy another red wine, see me drink myself dry, see me ask for imagination's red sails to flutter high up the mast with the weekend wind manipulating the tell-tales above the heaving ocean's din...

What once was a treasure map has faded into the day, what once was a column of support became the rubble of clay, and what washed me with clear water has pulled me down the dark canyon with the torrents of tragedy, with the shattering of my days,

so here we are in sequence of time's graceful delay, so here we are in evening dress while the summer moves away, so here we are in our majesty while the rain moves its own way,

let me speak as I sin, oh traveled instrument of skin, let me sing if they win, my tired bones becoming flutes in some lost and unexplored weathered canyon...

dah dah de dah, dah dah

dee dah dee dum, dah,, dah duh dah

poetry by association

the unfamiliar clothes placed in the art gallery
to remind us of fashions statement crossing out
the ancient reverence for acts of nudity upon
the funereal ceremonies beneath the high point
of sunlight...

the dinner left in the slaughterhouse for the murdered
to eat before their execution brought untold retribution
upon the holders of the long knives,
ghost rebellion in the moonlight...

the engine placed within the horse's chest
to propel its legs in mechanical gesticulations
of material permission, the monstrosity of
mechanics blended with organics...

the empire lost with the past's pendulant motions
across the politics of removal and amnesia
that destroyed the starfish encased in lucite
with buzz bombs, landmines, toothsome bullets
and napalm that turned evening into daylight...

what have they given you,
but ritual and a sliver of starlight
some cigarettes, a cough in your chest
and a diminishment of firmament inside
your pulsating breast that turns your
flight into a heavyweight fight upon
the stones of antiquity encased in the
smiles of entertained god's who don't
meet out punishment, only happiness...

there is the possibility of finding the void
between people and calling it responsibility
to the loving voice that calls us on the wind
after the roughest weather,
and all the rains are overflowing the souls
lit by lantern in the glen of nature's gallery
where they let the horses ramble on snorting
like children glowing in the eve of birthdays,
where the empires build roads and public services
for the public servants and slaves taken care of
by kind masters who wash them with sunlight,
where the banquet unfurled across velvet robes
of tablecloth where jugglers walked on tabletops
and cracked jokes about spilled cups overflowing

where the clothing represented our art upon
our bodies like architecture covering only
our bare supports and reinforcements that
keep our ribcages from groaning at all the
ancient strife pulled out from beneath our
organs and shown as our sufferings in testament
to the value of false judgements...

basic leaf upon the pond,
in water both cold and soft
pushing wrinkles across the skein
of tension that made floating
fully formed with love and
sinking down into the mud
just a pasttime that happens
when the sky is storming...

elephant

the words are brightly colored elephants
remembering the characters we've kept in our head
and on the savannah they are traveling with tents,
parcels of spice, ornate women, and a caravan offering
prizes to the willow wisps of the ancient dead.

there were tortures that didn't touch us in there
where the airplanes hunkered like griffons amid the
florid smell of aviation oil swathed in the underground
hanger, and the engines stopped only when the aviators
failed, when the pilots locked their lips with bottles
of pain-relief called liquour rain that seeded the
soul's earth with desire's demand...

and the caravan scorched with napalm parades in between
its ribbon of flames with the priests kneeling beside
the heads of the long gone workers brought from Mexico,
touching their cold lips with blessed water that serves
as the salve of a notable archipelago where the secrets
of luscious cups had spilled across the meeting ground
until they were evaporated by the bonfire of community,

and the airplanes cut the sky into smears of engine gears
that fly machines through life towards the auspices of
the dead, they pushed their bombs into the earth and billowed
out scalps and little fingernails, the caravan wrapped
with ribbons of flames, the priests all touched with something
dark that had grown there below the catacombs inside the
coiffiture's of their aristocratic hairs, sometimes a sequence
is more than lost, like our caravan flaming before the airplanes
took off, and the airplane bombs returning to wing pylons,
carrying explosives from the Earth back to the underground
bunker where time travelers fulfilled peace's demand.

we seem to be caught in between the disasters that were unraveling
when the elephants pondered upon memory while traveling in the
savannah of snow, their eyes like glass orbs seeing what goes unsaid
as their tusks could only grow in curvatures made for defense of the
young from the insane old, and our lives are brewing inside the cups
of what the caravan brings with its enflamed and fiery tune that
could teach us how we long forgot about what was softly said
inside the nomad's room, so now we come back to drink the pilot's
liquour painted red.

weapons in the meadowed moonlight

...thrashings of morality in the firmament of banality
these wonderous engagements that lock us to rearrangements...

...instead of drinking my desire to the bottom of the floor, i've had a couple pints of courage and now i'm on fire like only flames can be, i'm dancing in the moonlit graves where order locked its grid across with rows of tombstones fashioned after some artificial geometrical sequence and i'm laughing on the floor with a steel-toe boot in my small intestines, the pain is so close that it looks like a mountain floating over a comfortable forest...

...and the rifle sounds stopped me alive in my tracks like snapping twigs across the stacks of hay that melted into the auburn meadow like gorgeous ladies outdancing the grassy floor and it was a light upon the shadow that caused the old fight between the horse and mare, the misunderstanding of colors locked in an ancient stare, it was me there amid the guns in the black sunset's light, it was me out there in the meadowed forest scrambling with heart beating for the humans behind the triggers that zagged quicksilver across the heather...

...and you will find the glimmer of the gun barrel in untouched meadow curved white with the moonlight, I pitched my weapons into the grass and smoked a long forlorn cigarette when I realized that it was only me I was trying to fight, and the decay of old orders rolled on like a pendulum swinging left and right, only the motion gestured arcs across the sunlight that we called the history of humanities bright progress amid survival's fight...


...the machinegun blossoms bloom under a tortured weather, fiery tongues stitched across flesh firm and young, the mechanical insects hissed with their buzzing...

...and its not some simple game you play to keep yourself busy during the day, it's survival and its wearing an executioner's smile, but when you flirt with death and roll in her hay, she's kinder, softer, and even delicately warmer...

...the misted windows with crumpled windowpanes where we threw our gasoline bombs into in the old refrain of fire mixed with dark deep smoke and how the house of order turned into a sickle cell swath of cinders across the former building...

...they crackled with lost tricks and crumpled with the sound of auto-backfires, so scarred of what was forming that they took off from the cities and finished their warring, too soon do we travel upon the earth's arc like little bullets filled with a spark, its not humane to whisk across the mountains, and inside tunnels long and deep the angels are all fast asleep dreaming up their next desire as it billows like weather freshly storming...

the only autobiography i will ever write seeded with paranoiac theme

and the drinks are piling up like towers on the tabled surface of earthen platforms
while the brink of life is edging after those who are vociferous in the mountain day
well so what, barely anybody sees me, I am replete with paltry wisdom and some cigarette
smoked meanings that flew from the air in the form of flames...

and decayed aircraft train their shattered lenses to stare at me
because i've drank the waters of the Lethe and instead the Lethe
forgot me,
and the mountain's are fair
and so is your hair when it wavers
above a molar shaped boulder
that we held onto with our fingertips
and embracing arms tamed by the sun

see those aircraft take off with my best friend in the cockpit,
crooked wallet in dangerous hand held to shade the light in his eyes.

please

please tell me that the stars are not our vultures, hovering
that the light they bleed out into darkness surrounding the
lanterned world is for us to use with ancient measures of
navigational lore, following the twins, leaving the bull
behind us with the crab and the scorpion as our protector.

please tell me something I will listen to,
I am sick of masquerades that devolve into Dostoyevsky,
mantlepieces thrown across the banquet table by some
drunken soldier.

please help me answer to the presence of no questions
when they should be warrented, like how I got arrested
for walking across the street and asked where I thought
I was going after my ex-father informed me that he was
protected from danger by the ghost of a dead baby that
hovers over his head like a shining plastic ornament,
please tell me that justice is not an agency of man
for the laws we seem to learn are only concerned with
limits of velocity and prison philosophy, please tell
me that tonight the stars will burn away the archaic
haze that poisoned our vision since the inception of
the camera of the eye, please tell me that you love
me without material conditions but that when I fuck up
you will do what is best for the both of us, please tell
me that the songs I sing are quaint and without effect
because I would hate to be lulling all these internet
sojourners into a false sleep with the mistaken beauty
of a few bright colored words here and there while the
sentences war with each other, letters raised like iron
swords across the meadow of the page.

and please, please be your kind self upon the plains
of community, please tell me something, but with
immanence and importance, and please, please, please
tell me the truth, and please, (this is my last request),

please promise that this time you will make it right.

patchworked skies born of intellect and a gnawing dread that articulates the distances between oneself and the dark moon with space, that ancient tune

sometimes I am alone in this alternative dimension
where the holes in the sky foreshadow our dark ascension
in a serial flaw of reductionist materialism paired with
the vespers of an irrational spirituality
because i've been flown into the miasma of broken images
that I patched together using the universe as my template
and the serious guardians of secrets lie about even the most
banal ways to put your life back together when you're bleeding
in the violet heather and there is always something to hold
on to that burdens you with weights and glue, that says
let us remember why we are anchored to earth but no
one ever can because its not clear if it is for the good
of the gravity of our lives or solely for our comfort.

let the machines win their supplely stupid game where all
the church steeples mechanize the spirit's refrains of
ghostly demonstrations enslaved in the wordly buttressed tradition
of damaging rituals consisting of rolling on the tile floor
with distances between outstreatched hands holding rosaries
like the instruments of black witches burnt not by man but
by the eloquent gesticulations of a vengeful Pan who with
the seeds of night blew all the sparks into fires forming

lights held in the cracks of the catacombs that snake in between
our favorite buildings with corpses resting in thick tallow beneath
the blankets of cobwebs, with ancient clergy tending to the wounds
of death like doctors drinking volatile spirits for the numbness
ingrown with surgery's butchering war upon the catalysts of our
inner dominion.

and I am listening to the radio while trying to be polite,
I'm crying wine tears in the ancient night
and no one seems to burn from this longing,
it's not a fear, a flight, or a fight
but just some simple loss of light
that burns us up with the dark engines of inquisition
finished with flags that dragged their blood
across the horizon during national twilight
and kept our artistry from fully forming.

i'm on a ledge seeking the edge of endings fully kept
beneath our dark dreams within the cold night billowing with
ice wind beneath the candled moon and speaking with a mandolin's
frail rapid tune about how even the most forlorn of us are in need of warnings
from simple birds and difficult words that grace our sequined sky
with life's angel verbs and call us down from our mountains with
the force of turbulent emotions storming like vibrant explosions,

leave your disease and breathe ginger whispers instead,
leave your hated street and follow the streetlights to their end
where they become set in shallow sky with the most ancient of lights
called starshine locked within the veldt of space's shadow revealing
asterisms rather than some fabeled bull's inarticulated head,
you're made to rest with strength upon the hills of troubled states
you're made to leave into the forests where they greet you with rifle fire
instead of lips and flowers softly forming the ends of desires storming.

i'm on the shoulder of the Broadway exit, my feet are cankered
my soul is quiet as I gaze out on the Spanish tile rooftops
where the calcified lives are laid out like a Rubix cube of
tudors and boutique shops.

people atop this crucifix of broad daylight, scything with heaven's light
the art of synchronizing the flawed remarks with the winds that travel in the universe's hallway, those nebulous conversations breathing with the strings of an atomic theory, with dry desire locked up in Jupiter's tower, with socialites barred out and all the wounds of my sufferings healed up from language lashings on the deck of the diamond sidewalk.

and the lines of flight were catalogued in the wild hearts that terrified the simple minds without a light, the answers of serious questions came upon us like a hurricane tearing down the crystaline cathedral dedicated to milk and gumdrops, and a cautious handsome god who raised his shoulders in an act of surrender so that old grandmothers may tell their grandchildren stories about the Santa Claus god who parceled packages of the spirit like an assembly line worker placing mechanical parts to fill the orders of the longest walk to the shoulder of the freeway, to the ribcage of the airport, to the delicate wristbones of the pier.

and the holes were stuck between the cashier and customer in the decaying flaming markets where loss is what they have to give and gifts are what made us live in the slight aisles where all the frost was forming.

they put engines on aeroplanes to make them mad with power and put chains on bicycles to keep them from quickly roaming, they put wheels on grocery carts
to turn the rattled cage across the desert of produced trash they call divine, supple, and soul bonding. they drank upon the stack of bodies like two gladiators
who had just finished for the first time all their warring, and they sleep
upon the fettered bed stained in blood, its feathers red, and drank themselves
to stupidity with empty wine bottles that showed the color of emeralds in the
young light of some blue steel morning.

it is always about a girl
it is always about a boy
who got sick of being some human toy
and smashed the store to its iron moorings

its always about parents
its always about the gods
and its always about you and me,
this paper land i've managed to built
where we can pretend with alphabets
that we are free

i'm on the shoulder of the freeway, the divine trash is conspiring to smile down the beatific vision of some ancient math that buried all the meanings in its measures,
i'm on the collar of the skyscraper, watching beetles crawl by in candy colored shells
i'm on the nose of the archaic mountain, freezing my ass off in a wind that smells of soft orange rinds gathering the forest dew in a swath of mottled glory
i'm on the fingertip of catastrophe's handprint as it stamps out all the sand bees with calloused palm and observes with touch the sweet crescent of the secret beach like a gallery of granules mote-speckled and periwinkled, sand piper flecked and opaleye fingered, i'm on the worst of it, i'm on the best of it, and i'm on to both of you who weren't willing to begin to comprehend, and i'm on the motion of a curvaceous valley that sings with its condensation the sweetened veil of a woman's song.

the texture of curious assositations

well call me unassumed anarchy, chaos magic hat wearing dismal cigarette smoker,
the interest you refuse to eat
catatonic hyper-venelating robots locked in causeways motion, turning in their sleep
mumbling bright things about shiny treasure earrings, locking their doors
with their mouths and wearing gloves upon their feet.

ambulance rides and dismal technicians in fascist uniforms trailing IV lines
from their fingertips into the inner crook of elbows, this is where they
call you just another piece of meat, well limo rides in the edge of August
and bicycles driving down the broken street, finding you in the depths of
a dismal wine-soaked dream

hypocritical business platforms cut out of paper dolls relying on the placement
of falsely worded votes, and blanket shields for nightmare engineering on the
roads that made me weep.

engines go towards what should be called backwards
when the direction forwards is with your feet.

calico industrial recycling power in the form of restaurant lanterns kept to
keep an eye on the rope hanging from your collar, fighting the dishes
that fashioned us as quixotic in reactionary leaps, while you say go towards
the edge of disaster, I am clutching at my aching feet,
while you say march forwards into the shrapnel hereafter, I am content to weep.

hypocritical justice in unfairness of appropriation of the means for production,
engineering, transportation, distribution, and even lying awake in the miasma of the dream

farmer's yields shaped for the sake of economics, and liars with no beliefs.

anachronistic political stews bubbling for the sake of vegetables and towels drying in the sewage breeze,
horrific cockroaches crawling outside the riotsphere and drinking in their sleep,
idle work and damaged words upon the magazines, printed with replete curious hypnotic gestures
to make imprisoned illustrations speak.

call me business, call me cataleptic word engineerer, but don't call me what you believe
because love is my only mistress, and not the billowing figures of interest in the broken bank.

effervesce the waters in the dark canyon with the heat of the sun's array
and glow in billowing tragedy at the dawning of the day
because the armature of greatness lies within your pulsing breast
like a battleship painted navy gray and the apparatus of beginnings
works its mechanics during all your fey rests, so let the gravity of
treasure maps sweep away your darkest day, let the flash floods
signifying the end reverse in time and fade like a waterfall flowing
up a canyon, like a dark fettered play where the actors talk backwards
and the curtain is made of rain.

sight upon the shelf in the middle of the corner,
laundry piled in smells on the armchair of the coroner
see the way ancient furniture is made up with upholstry
sewn to grown-ups like clothes that we wore all day...

...we've made the way, now show yourself how to play...

hearing treasures locked in audible trunks scraping on the sidewalk
all you pull your belongs away down the street towards the legend
of your map, the one that you made
with cheesecloth and periwinkle shells,
and with embroidery's dusty remains
find the edge of the city's canyon all covered with grass blades.

and in the winter of the morning when you're sleepy and fey
recite humbly the values of your loving life in a pattern that stays
close to desire's pushcart all wrapped in silk and humor's golden fruit
of a face, remember that tragedy is how you perceive something to be that way.

in the eloquent natures of our suburban fringe forest where the trolls had all walked away
from the answers grown narrow and languishing in the test of the meadowed day
we escaped the inset spiral locked in the dark grass that twirled the world's clay
into steeples made of people's bones, that graveyard of mansions in the coast light,
bleached with star light like an eerie banyan moving over swamp grass in stillness
in the heat of swamp night, in the delicate and pervasive moon light.

mercy belongs to the angel in man, the supple grace of the hesitation of flaming scythe, and sometimes it stops below the chin only to regret the decision, but this is the problem with mercy, which delegates weakness upon the moral character to make it all the more principled.

and love is an allegation of desire pressed into the servitude of a miasmia of kaleidescope emotions, love, the old wine bottle afloat on the seas yearning to deliver its curled letter in the swirls of ocean currents proclaiming the windy path we must travel sometimes to find each others hand that delivers words from deep with inside the vessel.

and justice is a condition of judgement, a balance kept by the weighing of certain scales kept uncognizantly within the market of the soul.

and madness is wisdom, madness can be genius, but madness is not insanity.

oh tilted earth swimming on its axis, the angels wept the other day when you tried to call it down from its revolutions, when you tried to order ellipses into square circles without the Zen mentality that moves like delicate cherry blossoms slightly undulating in the emerald breeze.

oh ancient harmonies that lock repletion with a silver key, where does the repose of your locks build prisons and where do your prisons build freedom within themselves like an archaic paradox that says the least free are the most free?

heaven-sent articles etched into sand with a yew branch, learn to listen and to see, learn to care for the ancient melodies, and learn to love something as simple as an old oak tree.

send me off to war for you, lead me to my surrender
i've wrote a whole bookstore for you and now I can't
remember how we ever talked with the blades of words
because each page I mark is soft as snow.

send me back home for you, lead me to my bedroom
there's dust and cobwebs gathered there beneath
the ebony credenza, and I fought all the wars
I ever will with my heart's reflecting iron will
but my brain began to break like an old broom,
crackling with entropy inside its golden room,
my headaches warned of something close, my ideas
warmed like bread to toast.

And the elegance would have claimed to you that I
was disarranged like a remedial highschool,
and the eloquence would have rearranged for you
the facts which I might have explained to you
in verses, stanzas, words, and arrows
scrying from the sky's blizzard built like a meadow.

the writing life

Since I was a kid I wanted to become a writer. Now I have become one. I don't say that about myself usually, but often times you have to reaffirm your role in life when the bastards are trying to make you into something you are not. I am a writer, a writer of poetry and fictions. Whatever else you say, you cannot hold this against me. Because the truth is that people know little about writers as people, because often times people fail to listen to what writers have to say. People should listen though. Writers are full of wisdom. They eat wisdom with their breakfast.

My goal in life is not to travel anymore. I have seen enough of the human creature to know that character studies are best drawn up at home. I have seen enough of the world, not to call myself worldly, but to call myself seasoned. People call me an old soul sometimes. Maybe they are right.

But what I really want to say is that you too can write. It takes work, patience, and takes you to the edge of madness, but you too can sit down with a dollar pencil and sketch out a scene from your day. You too can drink coffee in cafes, propped with a notebook and record what you see. It is truely that simple.

But the grace of writing comes from the antiquated notion of what human beings call a soul. If you don't have one, maybe you shouldn't be writing. There is enough of that. Works on sexual escapades that are tantamount to the common biology of a half a million year old species, works on gossip, cute little books about how to really stick it to someone you hate, these have proliferated bookstores in the place of modern literature. It is possible that the people with souls grew frustrated long ago and quit, saying goodbye to their faith in the human race. It is possible that the people with souls hid underground long ago, for fear of what their former captors would do to them should they show them the light of the soul.

Soul is such a cliche word; you can substitute 'life' or 'essence' but I prefer to call it 'flowers' or even milk toast with a slice of tomato, because the people without flowers are jealous of the people who have grown them, the people without tomato sandwiches are jealous of the ones who have them. It is the old kindergarden game from here to eternity. What do you have that I don't? Please give it to me so I can ruin it. And so on.

But writing is also a means of developing the soul. If you don't have one and you want one, start writing in all honesty. Write about what a sexist prick your drug dealer boss is, write about why you hate paying eleven bucks to go sit in some fridge of a movie theater, write about the time your father took you fishing for trout at some lake overgrown with weeds, write about anything. Because the place that you write from is your home, it is the talent of the heart that you are developing, not some way to become famous, sexy, cool, sleek, clever, or a hit at cocktail parties. I never liked people who were hits at parties anyways. They always struck me as insecure masturbators who failed at getting laid because they tried too hard. Writing is like that too. You really can't be a hit, or try to hard. It has to come out as it will, maybe a trickle there or here, sometimes a frightening torrent, but its always there.

Writing is a home. As a home, it is a good place to start building, to invite friends over to look at your accomplishments, to sing the praises of humanity and to sing their curses like a wild bore. Because lets face it, the reason people don't write is because they find it boring. Compared to a machine that gives you a thousand orgasms a minute like television, writing seems like a complete and boring old waste of time. But it's not. It teaches you to trust your mind, even the lunatic ideas that keep you awake at night, wondering if you are a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personality disorder who might be a liability to loved ones. But you're not. You are uniquely you, and so is your writing.

Lets face it. People can be jerks. If you decide to dedicate yourself to the writing life, people are going to make fun of you. "What are you doing in there, pecking away by yourself with all these imaginary characters?" Well, writing, you should say. But it is easier sometimes to break down and cry, to blame the act instead of realizing that the people around you are insecure in their own occupations, so they want to take it out on you for finding something that appears to be bringing you actual and genuine joy. Don't listen to these people, as much as you want to. They have no idea what they are doing, and can't even do a half-assed job of anything. Sometimes they are clever liars, but that is about it. There is no need to even talk to them, unless you are planning an extravagant character study.

So what I am saying is to write. Get up from your sofa or bed, place a pen on the page and move it in little spirals until you get enough gumption to form words, which will string themselves into sentences, which in turn form paragraphs. Who knows, you might be on your way to your very first novel. Just sit down, and write.

For Erika

two-eyed lady, sing awhile about the light of Dover.
red-haired lady, stay awhile and write about the clovers.
well we hunted around the shopping mall block for a cart
that would conceal our deepest clothes and mirror their lot
in spirit of what sealed their lives in trash talk, and
now the war is over. so blue eyed lady, sing with your smile
and tell me about the rovers who travel the meadowed land
with flippant and brusque style, who gather up the clover.

we played in the room with the vanilla perfume of old wallpaper
and love letters, and when the angels came to sweep with their
brooms we laughed about how we felt much better after the wine
had tapered our thought into a humming sound the sequence of music
played after we fought for all the towns named Dover.

Drink to me lady, and we'll sing awhile about the angles of the corner
all ornate with silken spiders and cobwebs dwindling their skeins across
the former governor. So two eyed lady, lets lay in the sand when the
night is over, so black-haired lady, stay awhile with eyes that smile
wider than the wild gift I offer to you, the one well you know that
they couldn't close or drown, the gifts of chirping sparrow sounds,
yes two-eyed lady please stay awhile and watch how we grow older.

where the moon curves streets into moss pearl bends,
you find me bending song into a violin with equity
for bow and instrument, drilling notes with delicate
trills, and not for me, but for you love, for you
my loves.

I speak in silence with the eloquent whispers of starlight
coursing through bloodlines, my ancestors name was "Morning Star"
and like him, I subsume new monikers for new places, and assume
old names in ancient homes. But do not call me a liar,
for I have never told a lie, well that is my first lie of the day.

I wish to meet you at the train station, you who threaded my heart
with golden curls of love's ancient lace that traveled from truck
to boat to track with the delicate loopings of a dragonfly's ease,
buzzing with tensile power. To you I dedicate this memory of sights
in Seattle, the buses moaning, the women slowing, and the coffeeshops
closing me down; the ancient scenes plucked like harps from dreams
that taught me just how to calm down.

I wish to speak with you under lamplight at even a slovenly restaurant
that serves ample props to enact a consolate conversation; the margins
of love are what I am after, the footnotes, appendicies, indexes, and
jotted notes looping with serpentine innuendo.

The only promise I make is that one day I will bring you flowers,
violet germaniums and softened peonies luffing with the weight of perfume.



I am not a robot, I am not a creep, I am not a blow-off, and I will not be put to sleep, so carry me with the cradle of your hands to where even the redwoods lay low, and marble arches crenulated in the twilight carry volumes of both star and stone.

Bainbridge Island

Bainbridge Island sits replete with various curiosities, sandwiched in between Seattle and Quimper penninsula, it offers many an allurement to the brief guest, and has few amenities. But what is most interesting to me about the place is the people who frequent the docks, restaurants, pubs, and boardwalks with the stifled negligence of the recently castrated, the apoplexic loss of passion paved over by a yearning for the natural in only the external. What I am wondering, and it may be a glib question, is where do these people come from? Surely I know of their location, but of their homes I know little to nothing for I have never been invited inside one, indeed it is uncustomary to invite travelers into anything here, including the most banal conversation. Exceptions include the boat-owners, who appear as a kind of outcasted rabble with little unity or connection with each other besides their amazing passion for sailing and power vessels, a connection which many people often lack. But this brings up an interesting observation in my mind at least, which is the concept of home. What is home, anymore?

You are probably imagining a two story white house with a picket fence, maybe a garden, and a family consisting of husband and wife caring for one or two children. But a home can be so much more than that, and simultaneously, so much less. For home is our sense of place as we move through the world, some people leave it, others are looking for it, yet others claimed to have found it, and some people never will. It is a troublesome topic. As Ursula K Le Guin says "You can always go home as long as home is a place you've never been," which brings up interesting ideas, home as a transient place, not locked down to the meaning of structure, home as a place in training perhaps. Because wherever I am is my home, no matter where I am. I am always with myself, so myself becomes a home.

But the people here try to invade my home. It is as simple as that. They gawk, make rude gestures and comments, and have never engaged me in anything that can be called a polite conversation, though one man tried (really it seemed more like information gathering about these 'out of towners,' as if strangers were ever really a threat to anybody). So it is with due confidence that I relinquish my home from them, the one's they both neglected and punished, ( i am thinking of a lady in particular who tried to charge me $50 to use the computer), while obviously their homes served as mere facades for the acceptance of the death instinct. Settle down and die should be the motto here, though I'm sure that mottos galore must be coming out of the mouths of the townsfolk.

viewing pleasure on the balcony of the apartment with cigarette and wine in hand

see me drinking malt beverages on the corner of the ocean, where the sun plays its warm pulp upon the skin of certain flowered moments, but who's there with angelic walk outs from a strike that became what locked out my desire from the false systems of the world.

verily, we were all talked out, and wearily we began to walk out of our plastic cages arrayed like museums in the desolate days of old order the color of marble.

ancient singing in the belfry, no bats this time, only soft relief of sculptures singing like painted masterpieces upon the darkened spires of our dream city's desires, the ancestral homes where we spoke out like archaic speakers torn out of an antiquated radio. so speak with me about the block out, why does it work and not for everyone who recieves the fall out, do you understand?

Who is this man?

Seething scenes from the post-ambulance chariot ride, what we'd bring came from the white halls and room 33, where they silently waited like vultures in the desolate dance of an exasterbated dream. pianos lined the ceiling, and what more, the violins were stinging all the nurses and doctors who couldn't imagine play.

Angel of songs, release your wand, you don't need their magic anymore, angel of love, release your dove into the soft sound of the wind carrying dandelion seeds across the brows of lonely desperate people who are at their end.

And were we seen, their memories would be blocked out, by serpentine flowers vined around what was chalked out on the pavement, a child's drawing with wise words that say "who are you? and who are you? and who are you? and who are you?" as if it were just a hopskotch game.

Do you really drink from the fountains of antiquity or are you drinking ale in the house of inequity?

Wise men say...

arched trees scything sky over the reddened crevice of the canyon

stretching free like angel wings above the mercies of small things and what is levened by our heart strings.

see me look up in awe at the skies blue silohuette burgeoning with light and shadow
see me wake up after death and become purple with rage at the lies of the doctors
see me there where I woke up, because honey we weren't made to be broke up, but to lay gently against the flowered window pane. See me there in the exhaust fumes, a little cautious there in someone else's room, but see me as someone who knows how to play...

i came from beneath the floorboards after drinking hurricanes with stories of live-aboards, and hear me say "What do you want?"

I want love in the autumnal meadow, I want to be changing the light with the smell of your perfume, I want the delicate life, I want the toughened spirit enlightened by the quinissential sea shells calcified on the beach by the sea spray, I want not to want, I want to live like a king among the poor.

I had a dream that doctors put my brain in a virtual reality progream to see if I was fit to live in society,

I had a dream that I told the doctors off, that I said they didn't have to do it, because i'd be ok anyways.

I had a dream that vespers wrapped their vined light around my torso and carried me off to a tower in space where the earth was subject to mockery and the food was all disgusting space junk.

I had a dream that wisdom spoke to me in little verses the color of death, that little tiny words were making up the sense of guilt we carry around with us.

I had a dream that doctors were made to be told off, that they got everything wrong when they said truth without desire was a disease.

I had a dream that you and me were in a velvet room painted by Rodin, where everything was set up as carefully as a chessboard and we played all night and all day though we didn't know which was which.

I had a dream that the eloquent harmonies coming from our mouths might be made to resemble the eloquent harmonies of the heart.

I had a dream that people should not be controlled, I had a dream that people should not be told, and I had a dream that I would never be too old, not really, but you know how it goes with dreams and dreaming, they are semblences of what we are after, protecting us admist old useless disasters.

Erika, I love you.

I love all of you.

in the cadence of cacophony

what tempered justice is this that we discover when goodness reaches its flag towards the edges of the sky, not in a gesture of surrender, but in propogation of war? Do the flowers come into play, or are they a window dressing, like the people we once knew to be well, the people we once knew to be good?

Scatter leaves upon the brow of engine hoods and wipe the dirt from under your fingernails when it is time to travel, when it is time to take off in an expansive flight the color of long roads and various transience. Do not be afraid, they will not hurt you. Do not stay with fear, for fear only hurts the afraid.

Idle quotations among creme wallpaper apartments, glasses clinking to the misery of the impoverished. What beauty is missed, what beauty is fostered, is beauty even a word any more that one can use to describe the disambiguation of the elite?

I smoke cigarettes, which have been trying to kill me for years.

I smile in the moment and frown in the future, for tanks are made for traveling and machineguns are made for stationary words, the rattle of the keyboard staccato augmenting our ancient musics with cacophony of crackling light and sound.

Be with me, someone, and we will move to the North where they whistle on oxen bones and flair their ears with flowers, where they amass their lives like armies in a cathedral, where we scour the pulpit to find the last honest priest.

wellness is a virtue, in body, mind, and spirit. when the three align, you have happiness.

let me speak to you of shallow platitudes that hunger for the genuine, let me remain silent, let me humble myself before the good of humanity and let me lay on the grass with my hands arrayed to accept the vespers of moonlight as light glances across my hands in replete form of soft fingertips and pulsating ivy.

they don't know us anymore, the ones who forget. they forget because of their own lives, they forget because of things, and they forget because they forget.

Rest my head across your arms,
it's been a long week going love
and the cackling in the city isn't
just the sound of ravens because
we fought for once and the flowers
exploded in purple and yellow articulations
of something else entirely, like
explosions of truths in people,
like dancing with the devil with no shoes on
like calling down thunder upon the city
of hive minds, nestled in wax catacombs.

It's been a long time coming love,
it's been a long time since you came around my door
and it's been a long time loving girl
because they can't sell us love at the liquor store.

but we were so beautiful once, we were so beautiful
twice, and we were so beautiful in the quiet scene
by the boat on the river, moving drunkenly like an
idle leaf upon the skein of effervescent waters
with the reflection of street lights wavering like
candles, with Paris offered to our love like some
insane bounty, some festival of soft lights that
look like people at last.

Oh nightengale tail splayed like feathered fans across the arc of the watercolor sky,
was it you that lead me nightward, or did i lead myself? For I have been traveling the solo path for two long, I have lead myself and others have tried to interfere, but for the fact that I know who I am.

If you are out there, I love you, and I mean that like the mist that rises in pink dawn. I mean that like the wine bottle travels on seas in curled journies to deliver a sodden message to a destined discoverer, i mean that like a mountain means itself, i mean that like hope meeting fulfilment means happiness, and i mean it like i mean it; sad, sullen, somnolent, vivacious, burning up with all this dry garbarge people call wealth.

If you are out there, please answer.

Love,
Steven

Seattle

singing is some kind of illegal apparently, especially when your song is better than all the part time schleps scuttling around like busy body ants, climbing all on top of each other. I didn't meet a single kind soul in Seattle, among thousands of people, not a one, maybe slightly a barista who was getting paid to be kind, but that is about it.

It has come to my attention that very few people are having genuine experiences anymore. The reason being that the people seem so wrapped up in materiality and the grotesque pursuits that they have long ago given up their humanity for a Nokia phone, for a white picket fence, for a disasterous marriage; that people are giving up their souls not for safety, security, or even love, but for the base disambiguous concretia of urban banality.

What people don't realize is that a Mercedes isn't going to save them in a car accident, that a college education isn't going to prepare themselves for the trials and tribulations of married life, and that a steady job isn't going to keep food prices and gasoline from soaring through the roof.

People have a real problem. That problem is that they are generally trying to get other people to do something for them, whether it be growing food on a corporate pesticide strewn farm, or raising their children instead of letting the television do it for them. This is a disgusting way of life, this is the way of life people have picked over kindness, compassion, love, and all the genuine experiences that make life truely worth living.

It is a vicious circle; you lose your soul and its hard to stop losing it. But at the least, if you feel pain when you're loosing parts of your soul due to various machinations, you still know that you have one left.

"But I don't weep,
do you?"

were we woken from this dream,
who would find us in bed...a wife,
someone else, or would you be by yourself?

escape from this dream
before your father hears you,
escape my lovely one, please escape.

way down in January our icicle thoughts
resided in our annual tax brackets and
way down in February we drank until
our tears came out inside the curtained
veil of simple luxury.

Find another dream that listens to your worries,
find another place that fathoms all your hurries,
discover what we placed inside the books of yearning
it was a lock, it was a key, but now its you and me.

say an angel were to cry, what would it mean for
lurkers swimming around the holy grail, around
the replete mania of frenzied thought effervescing
like a railroad engines steam whistle, what would
it mean for you, because I have a gentle feeling
that it would cover up me in tracks of sand like
a beach reaching out its crescent hand, that the
way we've been raised is what our enemies are
trying to erase now,

in the veils, of certain faces, there lies disgrace...

see me talk like a rock, hear me whistle like a thistle,
listen:

anonymus love letter #7

drinking wine on the fourth of july like a lonely heartache
trapped within an aching muscle, we who are condemned with longing
like a flock of seagulls cawing towards the inside of the city.
Do not stay with fortitude and do not go without it, for the summer
is coming in resplendent hues and the girls will be laughing to
the ancient tunes of your instrument in the soft grasses where
the disarrayed repose like sequined veils above t he truth of
earthen vessels.

We spoke in nighttime like guilty cowards, we addressed each other
like milk-eyed menders and drank whisky to completion of some
ethereal feeling they call drunkeness, we who live to die and
are taught to die to live.

Fields of sorrow for those who do not follow beauty, fields of
meadows for those who marry love, with splendors nestled like
treasures in the lucent shaded grass beneath the weeping willow,
with trestled bridges overflowing above rivers, and the sound
of the archer who could not be called down from his star will
ever more ring through the ears of the damned were they to reproach
him for his true shots. But this is after death, where it to occur,
in the fields of the seas splayed golden like tinctures of blue light,
ethereal and jealous of the sky but somnolent in its being.

Where in does the comfort lay? In creating, in imagining, in the dark
robust knife that they call the mind. Send me your ear, oh love, and
I will send you mine. That is some kind of love, with a purpose,
but unknown except to the most starry eyed, the ones heavensent
by certain articulations to infuse pale dolls with heavy meanings.

Dream, dee, dah.

Here I sit reposed inside the belly of a vessel,
here I sing unnoticed like a whisper from a candle.
Here, we met and talked out when the seams burst and the sun got blocked out,
see me stand in pale anguish when the city turns to gold, when the stories
of fantastic men have gone untold.

Harbor the advantages of what is locked out, when your keys break in the door
they call you locked out, but listen to what the wise man says.
"Do you really think, that anybody gives a blue goddamn?"

neverland wakefullness in rabbit hole dreams
amid a sequence of mirrored glass in the vain
city, watching raindrops fall on delicate tongues
curled like pink mementos of true speech. The
early morning brought us instincts that talked
in verbs, and the afternnon brought some delicate
architect to the cathedral of the heaet.
But where we lay tonight is not the lion's den
nor the scattered vespers of the moon's silent dreams.
we lay in dirt, we lay on stone, we lay in what
the ignorant could not call a home, but merely
ourselves, our quiet selves silently moving
randomly through labyrinths until the exit is clear,
silently ever warrenting our creations of sleep.

remember the rhyme in the ember that frictions
it to such a billowing fire, remember this side
of Jupiter to send more letters out into the
veldt of urban miasma convulsing, contracting,
and expanding like a writhing storm of concrete
asphalt and glass.

nyosis

glimmering steel rims on painted bird camero, swinging in screeches
downtown in watercolor afternoon, effervescing ancient rituals from
spherical rotations revolving in brainwork, thinking softly about loving
you and life, drinking coffee on the dashboard.

Eyes gaping at talented repose beneath picaresque columns, Samson beneath
the veil of visibility, roaming like a hurricane through the blind-eyed
drama of urbane department store glitter and bank credit manuals, steering
his feet with the handlebars of dreams and dreaming with the bicycle chain
of simple engines, ever long and soft.

Greyhound station after telephone call after telephone call, they drink us
in with thine eyes so lusciously opaque like sunset in a cup of coffee, the dark
night of world's black half living inside of us.

"Oh, so your bus leaves tomorrow?" And a laugh.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, well, you know the old story about tomorrow.

We smoke our cigarettes in eloquent wisps of blind emissions, we call collect during intermission, and we make solace seem like a tranquilizer, sleep like a pale fish curving nightwards in elegant sweeps of pearl-laden tail, we awoke, we awoke, if only just to sleep again in this transient dream.

do not project your darkness onto others,
it is very unbecoming.

by the river

oh delicate nighttime of the day pressed into our eyes like soft illusion,
how the traffic stares and stops to gape at prescient notions of elaboration
on the old theme of control; control made beautiful? If only the control of the
self, we have deigned into what Jung called rare and emerged the better for it.

Golden harps in lounge restaurants and lizards louging in quick flits of tongue
conversation, these are the contrasts of life sometimes like a hurricane's calm
in the center of the eye. And the houses lift up, the moon pulls them up with
the shapes of light intersecting in the middle of the clouded sky.

How dare we, you ask, well you dared us to, and now maybe this is nothing
but not a fight, because every living thing is concerned with survival
even when they are removed from cognition of death, well, almost every living
thing, suicide is man's exception, but don't quote me on that, it comes from Camus.

Eloquent afterlife's shimmering in harp chords played stylish verbs like Masoch,
see the elvin shoes upon the woman strumming and singing, hear the elegant intonations of audible flowers, smell the musk of centuries beneath the floorboards
rising to the sky, taste the judgements of a writer asking you to listen, because there is little room for error in the bloody skies.

Words are carried in hallowed french horns the color of your neck, and sentences
interlock within your mind, hear the goddesses who spoke in terms of love bring you basking in the sunrise, oh Aphrodite, your strings are carried in interlaced words the color of veiled miasma.

There is a rusty love in this engine heart tonight that scrapes along the surface of petaled marrow, there is a musty look in these mirror eyes tonight as the conductor calls upon the scarecrow, but there's snow in the nighttime, and wind in the tinkering chimes, which says of love that there is something between truth and sin.

dedicate your life to charity and a pocket ful of roses
drink some absinthe by the winters snowing of what is billowing
you drink to forget and forget to drink
again, and dancing in the streets
and walking nude out on the lanes
and a mother with plans and they have plans
for your mother, and they sink their teeth
into your father and they break the knees of
your sister because this is what it is all about,
it was just the old story of power the old window
where they lost their way.

charles violet's angle was that anyone could become a star,
he told me how to play, well, and that is how i've got this far
but know that the engines of mercy only extend to the gracious,
know that the engines of mercy only extend to the good because
religion was built as a means for community survival and it's
not just a joke after all, because when charles violet had me
at the table, he raped my soul with law. XOX

Bring the television to idle mercy,
and sing old familiar songs,
eat wine and drink bread in verses
and see that you are wrong.
That the elocutions of physics are
not in the laws, but in the quantum
flaws.

Misery is a butterfly, or so they tried to say
but I have known sweet misery that delegates roses
on your biggest day. So cut the crap and align yourself
with the stars and with the moon, you're at the mercy
of psychopaths and you can't get away too soon.

the cities

Artistic leanings towards the open door,
i've been wandering through paint canvases
and spelling my name with a horsehair brush
on the doorsteps of the ungrateful, of the malignant
and it frightens sensibilities, well the problem is
that you have to look within to see that who
you are is a projection on others sometimes
upon a tattered movie screen, and the trick
is to recognize who you truly are, but most
people won't because they find themselves
dreadful, or they find themselves inartistic.

But place my violin upon your brow with
its resonating chambers that lock silence
in your ears, place my pen across your wrist
because sometimes people should understand
that artistic leanings are for their benefit,
and sometimes people should understand
that artists and musicians are better left alone.

Gibberish, sweet and supple nonsense, call
me upon thine lips with subtle grace, the grace
that easily erases all that you've done.

Heliocentric spinning wheels on the top of candied towers,
eloquent helicopters losing gasoline and certain
fluctuation of uncontrollable hours, why don't
we have a nice time for once? People are too
concerned about power, it hurts them sometimes,
and I don't mean to be wishy washy but let
me tell you the truth.

lkjaslfiwe woaieur a oa oeiroiadjmn aoiuewoi a
oaiueroia nfnsaoieuiora awoieurnn ouawer u
nodasfuouera
asfi
aweriou
oauoeirn oajousad aoweiurn aouenjd
ouoeaeu noiaueoir aoiweurnajnsd

our bodies are exposed as the sky spills through our mouths