This is no utopia as sure as the rich desire; it is filled with hatreds, the forgeiture of loss, the gains of pride, and the symbolic achievements but little else.
We dance with a skeleton our whole lives and never stop to look the skull in the eyes, where we would see our true selves, born to live and struggle, struggling to die.
And the grand visioon debases itself everytime it includes violence and control. Many here among us have lost the fineries of existence such as happiness, kindness, and respect.
This is an open plea for dignity in the face of death that has intertwined our living. This is an open plea that you stop what you are doing. It is not too late, now is never too late.
Begin to see the stillness in motion and the motion in stillness, how it capitulates itself to our identity and how our identity is based on nothing but laws and potporri for effect.

You who are aflame with wilderness,
did not the city once haunt you
with its utopian scepter used to mark
false distinctions between the human
and the civilized?

We are wonders where we are,
no matter what architecture only some
buildings are marvels and others can barely
stand the guests inside.

Do not go gently into the Ides, for
many a lover perishes his flame in offering
it to a bearer who cannot keep it alive.
And that is where the darkness comes from,
not from hand held stars and their mere
shadows, but from the failure to grip
heat like a gauntlet, these naive
couplings who treat life gingerly like
a small canary.

Be not a coward in the face of parting,
for you have already just gone and
what is before you stands like an
enlightened city; glowing with
cognizance, recognition, and the greater
glory of Love.

One day we will be good,
but this is up to you.
One day we will wander through
the tallow of river weeds and
bask in the cool cold waters
that swirl like magic eddies,
but this too is up to you.

One day we will shine in
luminous repose against the
backdrop of the darkened city
that had a power outage and
all the hospitals became death
beds because their generators failed.
But this too is up to you.

It is up to you to become one day
and travel with me to the cliffs
of the world where artists sit
listlessly, painting square rigged
sailing vessels as they plunge
into the abyss.

It is up to me to help you
as I have helped you in the past
without you even realizing it.
Discovering what that help was
is up to you. It is up to you
to look behind that flabby muscle
they called the heart and to see
if there is anything there, and
you can't let the doctors do it
because this, like everything
else, is up to you, my pale love,
love is up to you.

female and male knights

Oh the scenes we painted on our armour
that hid us in the trees and blended
the city between our crenelated joints
would cause no one any pain while insuring
that we'd never die inside, that our love
transcended oceans and sailed the seas of memory
like errant vessels bothered by no one.

Now you're getting hot in leather straps
that brought you to your knees, we're
a couple of knightly chaps weighed down
by our chivalry, kept light by our golden
levity, and with a thrust of a sword a
kingdom fell like it was plagued with some
terrible disease. but we knew the edges
of our castles couldn't contain the damsels
so we let her walk where she chose and never
locked her in the tower, we, knights of
the holy crossroads where you choose
between life and its imitation.

thematic variations on the old cliche: love, not war

And war shall have no shelter in
the mirrored hallways of the sublime spirit,
nor shall war's dragon enter our palace
doors, for the sun extinguishes wickedness
like a sword of rays, and war shall
be no more.

Love shall have dominion over our pale house
like tender truth drinks in the songs
of solemn spurned loners and blossoms
the feathers of lips into brilliant flight,
aerobatics of sweetness in a
light burnt sky between our ghost shapes
and sweeping Immelmans with the
rose blown wind that dances upon us
like gentle drifts of song.

Do not call war into love, my gentle
friends, for your sugar rots when you
do violence to our birdsong of emotion,
for your seed is scattered when you
throw up your hands to the death of
possibilities and the seasons in your
breast lock in endless winter
when you call down from your tower
wicked commands into the reflecting pond
where you billowed in your first kiss.

how those dead can dance amid the flutes of love

The skeletons danced and their bones burned auburn beneath the orange moon, clacking their jaw bones at a large ribcage drowning in winter ale. The secret scent of myrr composed the elegant twilight with a sensual harmony that regarded the dead as in their proper places. Pale faces kissed beath pink lanterns and eyes glowed with sapphire fire in a lock and key arrangement of outdoor love that lit coffins with light and exposed the graveyard with illumination, where bones rustled like xylophone music over the gleaming sepulchres that couldn't quit love, that couldn't lose the emotion even when the corpses clawed out of masoleums and when drunken morons lay down in shallow graves. Our two lovers names are Eugene and Mona, these two fated to be together, to love despite the world's sadness; these two who had clicked like a sofft tongue noise during a French kiss, these two who had ever been together through were geographically apart, these two who had been divinely married.

ocean themes and lovers scenes

where whispers of the divine eddy
like river whorls upon our sea glass,
we feel like mirrors though we are much
deeper; consumed with atmospheres of
ocean waves and dangled beneath the
currents of tidal pull.

If I am worthy to be your lover,
than I apologize for the rest
that you had to choose from;
they must have been gnarled like
tree branches, exposing their knotted
knucles in dark wood and lacking
the sequence of shade and light that
is so familiar to the worshipers
of our nature.

Do not weep salty tears, there
still are good ones left. There
is one here, one there, a couple
spread around who you encounter
in the middle of the Pacific,
basking like dolphins upon the
wake of your vessel, playing
and jubilant.

Mit Liebe Auf Rilke

In winter locked we thaw with our warmth
Like two new lovers who knew how to heal
With heat. They say in heaven there is no heat,
And in heaven there is no time, but in endless
Winter there is no heat and no time as well.
Does this make the requiem of love subsist
Upon the ancient flowers frosted with drips
Of pale ice the color of your languid eyes,
Or is the song of love fulminous below the frost
Like a slumbering bear, waiting to defend
Its younglings from the threats of guns and
False glory?

We are ever forgetful, us here on the Earth
So much so that we have forgotten that we
Have forgotten. But some of us remember,
Some of us hunger for that summertime that
Rings the ever-yes of light with clarion bells
And the delicate musics of light combined
With heat, raining upon a simple leaf the
Color of a lucent cat’s eye, ever knowing
The sun without sight, which is far more
Intelligent than the most blind among us.

You were my only friend in lost times,
When frost-bite crept into my soul
And rot into my blood, you steadied
My hand so that I could write with
Summer, so that I could develop
The seasons within myself. To
Say I am grateful for your words would
Make language too powerful, I am
Not grateful, but I am penitent, kind,
And hopeful because of you, because
Of your courage kept between two
Terrible wars and because of your
Bravery in the face of an ignorant killer;
You still managed to write a gift to all
Of us in the midst of your misery,
Ever good Rilke.

Snow Angels

The girls are sleezy around angelic whores,
they want it easy but they go too slow
who showed them what nightmare
that crafted them from a dead candle's cold?

My lonely one drinks gin and tonics
in her wooden apartment above the snow
and my lonely one sits by a toaster oven
to heat her pink little toes.

Well we've taught each other the lessons of lovers
in the future tense of how it feels to be alone
and drinking alcohol is the only remedy to a haert
enflamed with virtues of gold.

Like a simulation, she strips for the mirror
to inspect the scars upon her breasts
and to see if her color was clear
of nightengales flocking beneath her growth
that looked like a mole, but she wasn't
sure, she didn't know that its not just
a simulation, that our deaths come from below.

And the girls are sleezy while the angels are cold
in the snow, and words are easy as long as the
bottle is slow, so don't drink your virtues
while becoming old, don't pour your nightmares
into a cup of gold; it's a simulation
when you pretend to act bold, and it's
a simulation; that is what the angels know.

Letter to Magog

We have become what you've wished against,
you who hold the locks like an ammo bandalier
against the side of your thigh burning with lust.
You have asked us rude questions without
apologizing, and have told us that the
way out is through the locked door, the
useless door that without our keys means
nothing but another lock. We have reached
an impasse, stopped in desert tracks and
refusing to budge. I can stand until the
end of time, you, you need expediency
because you are withering every second under
the strain of the sun, and even the moonlight
scalds you with pearl rays. Do not be fooled
by your over-confidence, because things are
what they seem, and that is a truth.

There are many truths about us that we prefer
not to speak, like how we had you locked in
an ice cave since the beginning of time, you,
terrible Magog with fumes of gasoline for breath
and firestones for eyesockets. They freed you
by accident and such accidents are terrible mistakes.

You should never have been born. The umbilical
cord wrapped around your neck and choked the air
from your infantile lungs. We had forseen this,
and applauded with great glee as your hellspawn
mother slapped the Nazi doctor preforming the
ceremony. And now it is the Year of the Mind,
where you lose due to lack of memory. Wretched
Baal has choked on trash, and you will surely
burn by light.

Do not tell us how powerful you are; for we
have seen your influences in the forms of
Porsches, Corvettes, Timex watches, and the
cold razors of cash. It is not that you are
strong, but that the worst of us are weak.

Remember, my terrible friend,
that what you have done is of little genius,
cunning, or planning. Every society on Earth
has learned the nature of your craft, it's
blackness and false pyramid implanted in
the mind by your desperate slaves, the ones
that own HD televisions and work cushy jobs
while our brothers and sisters die in the streets
like prophets, like angels, like people who own
their own souls. They die in the streets
because your hospitals are not worthy to
be their graves, we die in the streets because
your houses are not worth the lumber they
are raised from. We drink, we screw, we
dance like mad kings upon the Earth and
will never sit upon your dunce stool,
cap in hand, looking only at one corner
of the ancient room.

The Year of the Hero

And the ancient cities are built upon our room,
Like a circumnavigation of history, we turned
Around too soon. Don’t have any pity for
What lights we signed our names after in
The Eastern sky, our stars are falling and
The sun is a star according to its scientific
Naming. So let us sit here, beneath the
Luminous moon doing crossword puzzles
And sending out cards that say “Get Well
Soon” to all the sick patients locked up
In beds, inside hospital rooms.

And we drank our best champagne that
Filled our hearts with the laughter of bubbles,
And we set our sights on the dark wardrobes
That people get when they work too hard,
The trans-substantiation of horror into God.

Remember your angel city
Where you walked with roses,
Remember the pocket full of pity
That you dumped into the road,
Like a circle named karma
The angelic stays with you.

Ancient glimmers of archaic moon,
Roughed by meteors with scorched
Sand dunes, cratered children wander
Through our room and the spirits of
Women kiss us soon, like somnambulism,
Sleep is the city’s doom.

aexyius

What meter has our tongue fallen upon
Like a darkened word, measured out in
Black clouds and spoken in thunder?
We were not meant to be lovers,
But each others mannequins,
Posing in public with garish costumes
And crenulated joints, agreeing with
Physique to the very end.

Growth is bitter,
Don’t let anyone tell you
It is magical, for they are just
Beginning and haven’t felt the
Pain that comes when your shins
Begin to ache from trying to run
Away from suffering.

Measure yourself against the door,
Not another person’s height,
And let your words fall like plum
Rain across the acres of path,
Overgrown but for the internal map
That carries us through thickets
And heather like lovers who
Carry themselves against their will.

Sahara trumpets in the return of Gypsy Nomads

Carry on, across the whipping lashes of the desert wind,
And know that you will pass by the Arabs on an elephant
That is slow but strong, and they will salute you with
A canteen of wine and give you a bolt action rifle
With which to shoot camels and bandits.

The caravan, filled with Gypsies, presses on
Beneath luminous dunes reaching like cliffs
To the azure pool of the sky swathed across
The earth. And engines do not follow us here,
For gas is in short supply, and we wander like
Nomads because that is our lot in life, to
Experience the transience of shelter beneath
The beating of the heat.

And our religions were transient with our movements,
Linear but stretched out with myriad supplies, the grapes
Of Greece in our baskets with the olives of Tuscany;
Fine things we brought from Europe to create a garden
Of luxury in the wasteland of the Sahara.

During our great crossing, some soldiers stopped us
And tried to rob us, but the rifle barked its orders
That makes dead soldiers obey the entropy of heat,
Red rivulets sprayed across the fine cream granules
Of the sand.

And we married each other beneath a dead tree with
One leaf left that we plucked and cut in half, each
Of us keeping a piece in our logbooks for the sake
Of Saint Memory, our only oasis in the burgeoning
Waves of flame they call the desert air.

choose your path my love,
the past ones will grow over
soon. Paint a canvas, my love
it will grow older than you.

bring a picnic, my ribboned love
and wear your Sunday best so
we can walk through the reeds
while drinking the champagne
of the wind.

You were sacred, lovely naked.
And our smiles were surely kind.

And thus the general liberated the darkened city with an address instead of weapons, sent out on cables and wires into the minds of the populace like flame ribbons of lace and silk entertwined with golden light, for heaven laid in his words and his voice sounded like it resonated from the hollows of a Grecian Urn, mythic and bellowing. He said that liberty, love, life, and light are the birthrights of every person who is born into prison, that the prison walls became visible and were thus torn down like flimsy aluminum siding. The doctors came and inspected the general, declared him to be absolutely of sane mind, and the general gave the order to occupy the city with his troops, a cadre of beautiful women riding horses, with swords and books in hand, what better to dispense justice.

The mobs cheered and wine flowed in the streets after the great battle, it numbed the pain of the past and shattered the chains of allegiance to the old order, it swept up the crowd on a wave of maroon that softened their hearts. They cried for all they had lost, and cried joy for all the freedom they gained, it was freedom they had been after, not democracy nor a republic, nor an oligarchy or a plutocracy. There was a burning of paper money in the streets, followed by much laughter, as if the past of civilization had been some joke played over and over again, waiting for the moment for the champagne bottle to be broken on the street, christening the city once again with the name Angel City, this time in all levity, seriousness, laughter, and joy.

jealous of the light

Categorize your children's books
and send them off to school
slit your throat with a pocket knife
and scream that the world is cruel

Well you were once a little baby,
perhaps a little girl that surrounded
the world with her mind and now they're
trying to surround you with the world

They killed off your playmate who
fell beneath the wheels of a car
and they even destroyed your animal
that grasped the wind as it unfurled.

Well doves are made for magic tricks
and rabbits appear from under hats
and the idea is to be either first or
to be last, because when you are under
any stone they try to tell you how it feels
and remember that they're not serving you
turkey dinners so that you enjoy the meals.

It's essence time, where you interpret the spirit
and let the laws run dry, it's essence time where
you let the omens show you the path you're on
and how to change, and how to fly.

stream of consciousness

Subconscious draft where monkey speaks with angel glands, and love keeps sauce boiling with a ladel shaped like a hallmark heart, where we cooked on the stove our thin broth that was somehow more nourishing than a steak dinner. I am not the Lamb whose mutton you eat today, I am the spirit who’s breath teases your hair in little spirals the direction of up or down, and we have been down here for so long because of the directions we have taken. Every decision is a crossroads, remember that, and every hallmark heart is pulling you towards love in some manner of speaking, but beware the false love my three-hearted friends, beware the heart with swords for it will break yours if you are not careful. And delicately, we romanced with wine set at the table that we failed to drink because it was just there for decoration, and remember, remember what has happened to your lives, built with control like so many machines. Because they have feet, you do not call them automatons, and because they drink water, you do not call them robots, but I know better, I have seen their gears and the ways in which they work, they are merely mechanical and barely biological, transistors full of call and response, nothing more, nothing less.

The angels went walking in the streets yesterday, rinsing out the blue of the sky with rain clouds, and you could see them if you were careful not to talk to them when they were working, winged creatures of divine right and close to the top of the natural hierarchy, but don’t tell the President this, my love, for he will capture angels and hack off their wings in order to wear them as ornate dress, in order to make them serve the machine instead of the machine serving them. Do not try to get back into the system once you have been released, it will only bring you heartbreak upon heartbreak upon heartbreak and maybe even your mind will break, because what they do to people like us is a terrible tragedy that doesn’t require much ingenuity, it is the same old story from here to eternity. Rise up, rise up, rise with the winds like an angelic warrior poised with broadsword, confronting the polluted weather with a charm that destroys foul demons, and recall who we are. You know who you are, you who fail to fight, and it is killing you because you want to be yourself and you can be, nobody has the right to take yourself away from you. Listen to some good music and deign to do something startling, but do it in a group, be with a small group so you are protected. Loners are powerful, but groups never get arrested.

And when we saw the bus stop, we weren’t sure that it matched the schedule. But the driver let us on without charge, and we listened to the numbers as they rattled off in conversation. Soon a man with a blade was upon us, but we ignored him as he plunged it into our back like a sweet embrace, for there was nothing behind us to kill that had not already been lost, the past mainly, the ever dead past that rises up like a living corpse bent on destruction . Live now and excuse yourself later.

lyrical experiment (wriitten to a certain album)

and the feathered wings will shine
in the beauty of music's truth
and our lives are blind to the touch
of the muse of youth
and you've become a dozen different people
who say that money is better than happiness
and your skin illuminates the harshness
of the street with a contrast that demolishs
more contrived architechures.

and there's dozens of people who tell you
what to do, the pope and the priest are
just bosses and police without any proof.
Please stay kind, like a sparrow nestled
in the roses, and please don't mind when
they start shooting BB's after you
because theres dozens of people who are
becoming just like you, a nestled avian
with access to the song of truth.

angel of complication, wasting money
on the children's consecration, honey,
beneath fallow wings the consumers
drown in oceans of trash they forgot
how to play in or make like a simple
summer party, oh my baby remember
how to swim.

recite the answers of your post-script
all their answers are what they kill with,
like blood for money, like sins for money,
like sex and protection for some metaphorical
financial securities on top of money;
recite your heaven in their callow hell
and that's your way to fill with wine
their cups that shattered after they
drank it down with all the pills with
which they sleep with, remember the gods.

Summertime the ghosts unfurl
and pocketbooks go to school
our dreams are more worthless
than the head of a dead cat
and priceless as a rule.

Blessed by miracles our soft reality
sleeps inside a boxcar and lodestones
protect us while coins can lead to
better things than a phone call,
and everybody knew Mary, my Mary
who isn't dead.

Liverish cowards, your grass still grows
but you will not walk barefoot for fear
of worms, you children of men with
your dark sunglasses and love of nature,
could you call upon your life to deliver
you from death, or would you hang up
the phone like so many weary of the relatives
who stuck knives in their side, one in the heart
three in each side.

you're a fellow, you're a window for today
you're unfettered, you're unhindered, today
wake up to life, wake up with smiles
and she will hold your hand with love
the way you speak in tiny letters
the way you sleep with a painted face
makes me hold my head and sigh
it makes me feel like when I am about to cry
at something so sadly beautiful and lost
because you don't know you're well fed
and you don't know that what you have done
isn't necessarily wrong.

Become yourself
wake up and rile
all those emotional
storms, my dear.
your weather will come
to you, my love.

I am wanting a kiss.

sunshine kin

I don't know how this whole business of my life began. Maybe it was a dream I had when I was younger. We all have those dreams, where it seems to point to something unnecessary or even frivolous, that in the end turns out to be the very thing that saves us. Something usually quiet, a semblance of a feeling that we miss upon waking, or even a drunken nightmare that shakes us from sleep. Still, dreaming is better than being dead. People generally aren't nice to the dead. They stuff them in boxes and make them lie underground for their entire dead lives, and in New Orleans the bodies got flooded and floated around the city; making these little tours of the city but not really seeing anything. It was all quite a spectacle. It still is.

But what I am trying to say is that I seem to have found a rare appreciation. Call it a humbling wonder, call it too many beers, but don't call it crazy. Because if you do, then you are what you say, what you label other people. What you say about people is what you are saying about yourself, partially. But I think we could move past that. Like a rushing river we never see, life is a winding journey through the wilderness, in tune with the universe to some extent, but you have to be a good swimmer. People have drowned in such rivers; they don't cushion falls like in the movies. But the reward for peregrinations are many, even if you can afford a canoe. It is like you've seen through the waters to the smooth pebbles below. You dive down, scoop some up, and continue swimming. Then you have something to skip once you get to the other bank.

Anyways, I am writing because it is a decision, a certain pre-dialection to the craft that is not commonly congradulated. People must fear writing. Nobody can do it, much less do it well. I'm not saying that you can't learn, just that it takes years of practice. Writing is life. It is a difficult as life. You have to constantly be making decisions like some crazy backwater politician who is convinced that Armaggedon is coming, so he is doing everything he can to appear virtuous, like kicking poor people out of Section 8 houses for vague reasons and getting loaded with hookers using a fake name at a filmy hotel. But the trick is to know that if you have suffered a lot, then that makes you moral. It is an automatic get out of jail free card. Because when you write, in a sense, the whole world is still moving out there, going on in time while you are in a different timezone, three hours ahead of everyone not to mention how many years. But if you drink, you end up like those poor native Americans who didn't know the lies because they were so loaded. Alcohol is an instrument of genocide, remember that, not a friend of writers. What is funny about that is the fact that people lie about drinking to seem with it. "Oh I was drinking wine all last night." Yeah right. You were probably howling at the moon, but how much did drink really have to do with that? Wasn't it your own decision?

You know, in my life, I have been plagued by jerks and thieves. People want your stuff, lets face it. All you can do is pretend like you have already lost so much that what you have isn't worth taking. And if you pretend long enough, it becomes true. That is what you are, a pretense. You almost have to be.

But that is enough stuff fluctuating on the negative. There are many positive things about this world. You go down the rollercoaster at the Boardwalk, and then it brings you up a second time. Maybe even a third. But what is so interesting is the fact that you remember Santa Monica as a place that was filled with magic because of some broken down old coaster that the pier reopened in order to suck on the wallets of tourists. That is what is important. You are a human being; you have memories. Use them. Write them out in a letter, not an email, and send them to your coolest relative. I am torn. Either grandmother of mine deserves a letter. They like there lives as much as I do.