open letter to LA

Where do I begin with you, oh fey labirynth of rot?
Should I describe your sinister automobiles, choking
travel with the gaseous excrement of dinosaurs,
screaming horn cacophony in accident spectacles
as boring as your movies and as fatal as your gentrification?
I might.
But I am waiting in a line again
to fly I am waiting in a line again
to become young a second time
while your aristocrats pay to have
their faces pulled back in adolescent
surgeries, while your millionaire housewives
slip poison into their lips to appear kissable
on yachts that circle shallow waters like
stupid sharks, filled with serated discourse
that moves in social circles around a foaming,
thrashing, bleeding prey. Do you recognize
that prey as the poor, or just as another
blood sport designed for callow entertainment
when your high definition television is speaking
in low qualification about the virtues of your narcissism?
Call me cynical call me with your ipod
but don't call me a liar
because I was born here and have left your letters
unanswered, crumpled by candle flame,
sodden in wine and destroyed as perfectly
as your puerile construction, your juvenille
re-construction, that raises rents
and causes rents in the breastbone
of my checking account with your blade
outlined smile that laughs like a wound
I had once when I didn't know how to love.
To call you a jungle invokes too much beauty,
you are most literally a desert
filled with corpses created by the
never-ending battle that goes unnoticed
except by your most insane, the newscasters
calmly asking you to accept police-gang
shootings as if there was a difference
besides the colors, cars, and uniforms.
There is more, so much more, your foreclosures
and misleading banks that drawn families
into rat motel housing filled with asbestoes
and antibiotic laced water, there are your
billboards bursting with utopia over
brimstone vistas choked with factory soot,
there are your dead you never honor
and your living that you never observe.
Too many numbers, not enough color,
rape sold in the liquour store and
racism bought in real estate,
I know you have no memory but I am
hoping that this letter sticks in your storm
drain and is picked up by a passing gull,
who will drop it on your filthy bureaucrats
so that its sewer water will only make them
more clean.
Superficially Yours,
Steven, South Bay Son

rubbish jigsaw

They abandoned puzzle pieces
on the banks of the freeway
in a human way that is hard
to talk about; the civilized
behavior of waste and ruin,
the apathetic act of
passive nihilists discarding
pieces that don't fit into
sexy commodity fetishism.
Plastic bag ghosts swirling
around shopping cart skeletons,
the reflection is as clear
as a lake's, its shores
wrapped with sodden shoelaces
and broken picture frames,
feeble waves birthing cryptic
miasma in the form of boat wood
and beveled glass.
We do not scavange the souveniers
of the shore, only the trophies
of waste arrayed like the
furniture in the drawing room
of some dead god, speaking
of love and carelessness
with the voice of an empty beer can,
historic intoxication discarded
with the lost language of things.

Maybe you remember the sharpened traffic stake
serving as a walking stick while you
climbed the mountain road, and
the crumpled Evian water bottle that pulled
clear pools from a wine stream.
You walked around the tattered magazines
because their gloss rags suggested
something as terrifying as a ruined face
and you tiptoed with reverance
around a pair of sodden sneakers whose
omen spoke through wet unlaced tongues
about the lost divinity of walking.
You drove here once, but now you know

that consumerism lies with a quantity
and insanity lies with quality,
but you wouldn't speak such sentences
in the face of towering pines
you wouldn't think such nonsense
unless you had starved in the breadlines.

walter benjamin and the water crisis

The scattered artistic impulse that has me detailing the iron pillars of 19th century Parisian arcades, using technology as an aesthetic homage to the ancient architecture. Thinking, somewhat cryptically, of Walter Benjamin, his devotion to the Parisian arcades in particular, but perhaps a bit more. "Do not start with the good old things, but with the new bad ones." This seems like quality advice, considering another sentiment of his. "Philosophers are interpreters of the world, when the real thing is to change it." Thus we start with the bad new things, and we should take them to there logical conclusions with the power of our reason coupled with past experience, instead of blindly living out those conclusions like consoled idiots.

What strikes me as a 'bad new thing' is the impending water crisis. By the year 2025, two thirds of the world will be without access to fresh water. Though such a terrible fact seems almost clensing in the amoral sense of the word, meaning that I have certainly contemplated the enormitiy of the catastrophe and the fact that it's disasterous implications somewhat justify any action on the part of the people doomed to die of thirst in the near future, I have to admit that the more attractive attitude for one to take is one that is responsibility combined with horror. If I as an individual do not feel responsible for this coming crisis, than how can the individuals within industry who are capable of affecting change feel responsible to any degree?

They surely do not currently, for the only responsibility individuals within industries feel at work is a devotion to the functioning of their company and perhaps more largely some kind of responsibility concerning the management of their personal finances for the benefit of themselves and their families. This is constantly illustrated in the private agricultural industry, which instead of sending surplus produce as charity to regions awash in famine, dump surplus or destroy it in order to keep the market price profitable. Responsibility to the market, not to humanity.

But the problem you see is that the time is coming when responsibility to the market and to the corporate model will destroy humanity, and with it the idiot 'forces' of the market and the corporate ideology. I find myself constantly wanting to say to the world "Stop. Please, just stop," but people continue even if to their own disadvantage or destruction. As Benjamin once said, "Mankind's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience it's own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." Hence pre-occupations with figurative and literal apocalyptic thought, as expansive as Mayan doomsday scenarios or a more reduced apraisal of fascimilies of violence and murder being passed off as forms of entertainment. We are so distanced from the tangible forces of humanity and survival that the only force natural to us is that of our own deaths and destruction.

posturepedic poem aid

every poet has a posture.
my old one consisted of
photographs, empty wine bottles
on the kitchen window sill
decanting the late afternoon
sunset with me smoking
in the emerald light,
reaching for something
beyond the paltry notions
of morality and dogma.

now my posture is poor;
i drive around in motorcars
and flick embers onto
my pants with a stupid smile
that seems to say "Who me?
Alive? Well, ok..."
and even this is difficult
to believe, this like
everything else.

i used to imagine a swath
of wings called beyond my back
like something almost divine
but really more falling into
the category of a prophetic
birthrite; in essence,
"This is who you are,
now claim it." That
was another one of my old
poses, me trying to claim
me when others were claiming
others and lovers named
themselves after certain
tricks of the eye,
like slight of hand
or saw the woman in half
and watch her smile.

But who is to say what poses
are appropos (to use another pose)
and which are invalid?
I mean
you must pose in certain contortions
when trying to obtain a home loan
or when trying to get your belongings
out of the house because of foreclosure,
you stand thin as a reed in the wind
with a certain nervous dignity
and make timid jokes.
Yes or no, we hear, and so it goes
based on this pathetic pose
this insipid poesy
and our affected prose.

island roads and funeral homes (warning, rhyming poem)

I drive on island roads
that still are green
from grass trampled by tires
from the mining trucks,
I drive to dream
perhaps to sing
perhaps to seem

like i am getting somewhere.

And the trumpets scream
like melodious machines
built to mine that sound
from our heroic dreams
from music's bueracracy
from something that seems

beautifully arranged.

I'm at the funearal in the grange
the wilted mourners sob
the eulogy is strange and
the celebration is underground.

The island's mined
I do not mind
I do not die.

He fell into the earth
like he fell in life
with gradual conveyance
and flowers tossed upon him
that splashed petals
across his coffin
like photographs
like beautiful lies.

I drive upon these island roads
and feel a ghost
as the mining trucks moan
I feel a ghost and do not mind
since it is quiet and divine
like photographs
like beautiful lies.

Oh one time when we were young
like now only without the photographs
without the lies, without being mined
without our trumpets and bathed
in lucent green,
you played the concertina
and the trees seemed to come
up from underground
with the ghostly light
we dreamt was youth
with the specter's light
we felt was truth.

And I drive upon these island roads
away from the funeral homes
away from rhymes
away from light away from sight,
because our death is just
a fork in the road
and our home is a rhyme
with the music of a place
that we haven't left
because we haven't been
so I journey upon these island roads
where the grass is being buried in
I think about the underground
and the ghosts where we begin

with life, begin with life,
begin with life.

The War on NIghtlife

Pressing dead stars into sky
I wonder what kind of nightlife
is availible to those in wartime.

Do they sit in tenaments
with peach wallpaper peeling
around half-broken windows,
drinking vodka to the point
of poisoning?

Or are they brave Brits
hunkered in the subway
with jokes, such as
"Oh, I do wonder
what the poor people
are doing tonight"
as the German bombs
blow enclaves into cobbled streets
and crumple another
council tenancy.

I like to think
that they worship
on prayer mats,
heads pressed to the shuddering earth
praying for America
to change its religon
from weapons to a vision
as tanks crumble dead animals
on the boulevard, commanders
stealing the power of night.

But you know it is worse
than this.
Grenades lobbed through curtains,
a child with a chinese assualt rifle,
and a blonde haired doll
laying on top of a fragmentation mine.
Curfew is at sundown,
the bars and dance clubs
are catacombs
and the only music
is in the tempo of machine guns,
good for making corpses dance.

haldol

The apocalyptic joke, the slapstick armageddon, this vaudeville doomsday in the lethal injection chamber. Worse than forced here, we were born here with syringes planted in us before we could speak and say "No thank you," before we could walk out of the hospital room. My executioner will give me a red lollipop that tastes like cough drops and tell me that I am a brave boy before placing the black kit of hypodermics upon the mirrored table. The old methods are messy, the politicians say. Not every child in this condition makes it through college, many are left simpering in dank bedrooms lit by video games. Others do the work themselves, like the young woman who took all her lithium and expired in a coma like a tub of yogurt with patches of live culture writhing inside.

I want to make a confession, I hear myself saying. I hated it, I continue. Hated every minute of it. Hated gazing at the lucent green leaves in reckless wonder while skipping to the conveinience store, hated drawing elegant pictures in English Composition books, hated feeling my heart flutter when I looked shyly at teenagecollege girls wearing certain kinds of glasses. The doctor is taken aback by this lie. Hated it? It's easier if he feels he is doing me a favor.

You've all seen the insides of a doctor's office, with the L-shaped hallways leading from low shelving in the receptionist area to the patient examination rooms adorned by floral print ceilings and tongue depressor jars. It's like that but without all the things to calm people with medical authority. Steel wool carpet and a doctor in a full black suit. It sounds almost unbelievable but I tell you, this is how it is.

His voice, liquor smooth: Oh, and how is your mother? He talks to her on the phone. Steven has not been taking his medicine, she tells him. My mother calls the drugs 'medicine.' As if cough and cold were being treated, as though wellness could possibly be achieved through a regimen of drugs. These are not antibiotics, these are drugs. And the injection is not just a drug, it is a rape.

He pulls a syringe out of the case. Your mother tells me, he begins, that she found your medication on the floor of your apartment. What's it doing there?

I can't even humanize this man, but I'll try for your sake. He's always on vacation. I never ask him where he goes since he never asks me where I go, which is nowhere. He knows this and cares. I should go to AA, he told me once. I don't know, I began. No, he broke in. You will go to AA.

The last thing I need is a social network after taking an injection designed to erase my identity. Would you buy a house without a driver's license? Could you sail around the world without a passport? Yes, without stopping. And I desperately want to be somewhere else without stopping.

But if I run out of the office, he will use the telephone. It sits on his desk, stupid and beige except for sometimes when the secretary will phone in to say something mysterious. I like to think she calls him with flight information for his next vacation. As soon as you inject the intramuscular Haldol, she might say, your shuttle from Virgin Airways is outside, so you might want to hurry up. Oh, and tell your patient not to make a scene.

I have to fight myself instead of fighting him. I imagine turning when he poises the needle over my lower back, grabbing the insides of his wrists with my thumbs like I learned in Tae Kwon Do, and relieving his hands of the syringe. Before he can stand up from his wheeled chair (he usually performs the injection sitting down) I jab him in the leg with the needle and plunge the full dosage into his thigh. Have a nice flight, I would say.

But I stand their quivering with my office shirt held above my belly button. Jab. Entry. Release of chemicals.

Maybe next time, he says, you'll take your medicine. If I could hit ten human beings without legal repercussions, I would hit him ten times and then go to jail for the eleventh.

I'm out. Partially. Just at the desk, making a new appointment for another month. The receptionist's hair looks untroubled, dense, as if formed by granite convictions instead of holding spray. I squeak a thank you.

At home I feel it working on me. I lay in bed with my face in the pillow at three in the afternoon. Tense, stupid, and tense. I have a feeling, than the feeling becomes an idea, then the idea an action. I lose a framed picture I took of Monet's Gardens to the edge of the kitchen counter. Since a coffee cup is filthy, I break it in the sink. The phone starts ringing during this and I pull the phone cord out of the wall jack with both hands. I go to the tan bookshelf and want to topple its five shelves upon me but thankfully this is desire and not a fact. I tell myself, this is a desire and not a fact. Myself, a desire. Haldol, a fact.