the glow pt 2, the microphones

i took my shirt off in the yard
no one saw that the skin on my shoulders was golden
now it's not
my shirt's back on
i forgot my songs
the glow is gone
my gliding body stopped

i could not get through september without a battle
i faced death
i went in with my arms swinging
but i heard my own breath
i had to face that i'm still living

i'm still flesh
i hold on to life with feelings

i'm not dead
there's no end
my face is red
my blood flows harshly

my heart beats loudly

my chest still draws breath
i hold it
i'm boiling
ooh oh oh
there's no end

The weekend frills are filled with lore
of kings shattered by the sun, who penned
the notations of horizons rain with the
artifice of one forlorn and rustling fellow
with an hourglass within his hand.

The keeper of protection's things chant
the ancient essences of courtship's velvet
hum, I walked the broken road of vanity's
understanding that experience brings,
I touched the cobblestones with care
and sheltered beautiful rings that bound
my hatred with idle wings and wrestled
magics with a dried up old and bitter thing.

I searched horizons wide and far for proof
that only the beauty of poverty brings,
I walked in step with women drunk with the
fumes that perfume sings, I ran through
golden fires with a robe of angel wings that
drank of heaven's fountain scent and scuttled
sour things.

The way I feel when you call my name
makes me go crazy to sane!

One day
I went walking
Whistling mildly
For the somnolence of the moment
Indicated a certain merriment,
Indicated a reason to live.

I worked my knuckles to the wooden bone
Like you, like all of us
Trying to find an answer beyond the fog of love.

There is no other way. If you don’t know this
By now, you might as well be dead, a Mexican Sherpa
Living in a box-car and singing railway tunes
Is more soulful than the corpses of the idiot middle class.

I wandered through the halls of an turbulent sleep
and felt the fight of winged black upon the paint of my mask,
when I kissed it it turned into perfume and set itself within
the dungeons of my heart's lack. I spotted the edge of a weapon
where it had dissapeared with marble blood flowing across a cobblestone
path, I spotted the empty words within its beak bleating questions
that no one had learned to ask. But within my velvet coat,
"It is all the same to me whether I fight or refuse to attack."

One day my armor grew a deep and blood red crack
below my chin and jawline where I chewed the ends of spaghetti
strands and where I worshiped cadaverous verbatims
that the barbaric Christians told me were black. But
the words saved my life like a silken parachute billowing
with the edges of a wild wind that flew back
in replete perfection of a dome made more beautiful
than Classical Renaissance artist's masterful tact.

And it was a woman who saved my life from scalpel's fact.
It was a woman who drove me across the wasteland with ribbons
fluttering as arm bands to beauty's army
enraptured with the rare gift of a desert rose
amid craggy mountainous peaks, amid a dust of stars
filling ravines with the sweet taste of nova particles
in the stream at my feet.

And with the edges of soup toureens we scouped our breath back
from the delinquance of hunger's artificial math.
We enjoyed the ones we loved
beneath tiny mountains and mountainous leafs.

With windows drawn across the shore of our beach
we ate strawberries soaked in cognac and brushed
with sugar's speech. We closed the doors forever
when the police sirens screamed. The fascist
lore fell off the cliffs of the sea into perdition
when the answers to their tests turned red and
didn't change back. I saw your features curve
in Renaissance colors that day on our beach.
I saw your curves sway with the waves as I
listened to the melody of your speech. That
was the day I decided that I wanted to meet
your sweet age across the glories of the shore.

Once Sweet Artaud

I saw clearly,
knew of poor once sweet Artaud
and heard the history of earth
in his lettered pages.
Nobody else
could have told me
so clearly what I already knew.

His sweet canticles
gone unwritten
due to the fear of Septimus.

His frail beauty lost on
his theater audiences that
reduced him to dying over
and over again on stage.

With subtle letters he explained
and explained and explained.
The surrealists thought he raved,
though they merely put Frued in art
while shitting out their subconscious.
Artaud, clever friend, traveled to Mexico
with the sequins of his intellect,
ditching opium as he wandered through
the hall-less wonder of ancient desert,
his mind enraptured with tender details
of a mythic people.

The doctors created his madness,
for doctors do not understand art.

Like why he carried a silver-tipped cane
and struck sparks off the cobblestones
with glib flits of his wrist.

In his torrid merriment, he told the truth
about Van Gogh.

And that is all you need to know about
once sweet Artaud.

typewritten on an office presentation notecard

The summer cars
Drag on.

A hall of bumper cars sparking with electricity’s heat.
The sound of bars, with fluorescent women dancing in their private drinks.

Too much smoke for me, we’re angelic as can be in the image of a pointless life.

The breeze curls in whorls of new scenes, which move somewhat unseen in the brilliance of a dawning light.

The dew held the gleam, you have been set free
From the horror of endless strife.

There’s a picture of you and me
Where it would seem
We had resolved the end of the pointless night.

Have no fear of men nor machine,
Your touch has been kept clean
By the entire sight of your life. You’ve moved within me
Like golden angel wings illuminating our loss of height.

The wonder of scenes, the ribbons on olive leaves, the perfume of blankets
Keeping lovers within their means. A sound of bars, the caress of stars,
And the sculptures of beauty’s relief.

Ancient perfume of armor mildewed in our wet nostrils
in the second hand store where the clothing had been
discarded and we locked lips in destruction's stance,
the beach-time lore of islands masked by fog's scent
that felt like memory and tasted like steel on your lips.

It's just another business
where the popes go to shop
for their Sunday vestments in
columns of monetary beliefs.

I had shopped for nothing
in the veils of aisles with
the summer at my feet,
when I bought I felt like
a subtle Orion
hunting with the star's sequence
for love's nova heat.

And they go towards the ancient backstep
when shopping is complete,
pedalling without balance through
the enraptured nonsense of
rum's spirit dragging at their minds
and feet.

Billowing fields wrought with isosoceles
and urban utopias turning red by sunlight
who bought the star with sleep.

In seer's gnarled hands
our bones like knuckles
and marked with lore of chance,
the gestures of robes gathering dust
below the masks of banners.

In the church,
we waited. In the urban church,
we hunted for a lust that could not
be sated, the rapturous secrecy of
divine guidance that would burn
our lives with grace.

But it was up to men to make of themselves
the angels inscribed in stained glass.
It was up to women to make of themselves
the goddesses they desired, in elongated
curls of free will's unadulterated choice.

The priest claimed that not everyone
has a soul until it is built like castle walls
around the garden of the spirit. The priests,
let it be known, talked backwards into radio
recievers and burned effigies of better books
than the mason's lore wrapped in the lie of
sacred bindings. Striken with horrible fumes
of tattered beliefs, the cardinals and bishops
brought down the faith of their churches with
their own words, with their minor gestures,
with their rot bound in the decay of the past.

We fought them off with gleaming stance,
with steps of flawed chance written in
the armor of our bones. We knew a simple
life, where food and love were more important
than the idle proclamations of costumed letches.

In the transom level of our sight,
do the rosebushes below our stained glass
memory invoke the scents of lower loves
than the sweeping glaze of a sun-jeweled
oak made full in the afternoon,
or is it our distance from gardens
that clear our hearts of bitter beauty
and make us amnesiac with the furrows of
a dew-crusted soil where beginnings choose
to unfurl in lucent green sprig of clover,
where the light of space reaches even the
lowest sprout?

Fecundity could be our rule.
But the neighbors have no gardens
and our supervisors wear no petals in their suits.
For once, we could see a sportscoat sewn with
the edges of maple leaf tallow and patched
together by the sinew of tensile branch.
We drive monsters to work at morgues
and wonder why our mouths ossify the wings of our words.

In giddy perfume of fermented glass
we whirl with new velocities where
our experience may have poisoned
where our love may had been frozen
where our fluidity dried in frost dust
on the panes of our winter glass.

We thought the arrows of love
would guide our wars to peace
in the fields where our old fathers fought
with tempered blades across the helms
and banners of dark armors. What we
didn't consider involved a dream
of gentle fingertips withstanding
a blacksmith's ax, of the song of lorn
minstrels marching battilions with the
strength of cherished loves across
the glens of elderberries and bramble roses.

A warhorse chortling in snorts of steam
across the ancient steads, rider emblazoned
with the crenelation of sculpted artifice,
the true banners kept inside within the
butterfly of his lungs that breathe for
one wind, where his lost kinsmen had
scarcely felt movement. A broken breastplate
caked in rust splattered fine as sand
by the sea wind, yet the real armor kept
beneath in ancient future of divinities
wrapped in leather harness and buckled with
angel knots. His lance-banner, tattered yet
loose, snapping the color red through the horizon.

We felt the after-war in echoes of king edicts
in the time before fame produced its siren face.
A maiden wandering in woolen rags within a shawl
of frost could scarcely lay claim to a bouquet
of swords. The bear-baiters losing hands and fingertips
to the gamble of their amusement. A castle sitting
heavy with acrid lime and marbled granite. Arrow louves
that eye travelers as warnings. And it seemed
to sing nothing of our cherry-stained lips that licked
the pollen air after the clearing of death's dust about
the diminished thrashing of green calvary.

In the somnolent goblets of red wine
our laughs seemed made for this earth
as the halls unfurled their banquets
and the alchemists spoke their beautiful curse
of wealth upon our heavy-lidded helms.
Wenches stayed with men, the perfume of wreaths
woven from rosehips rubbed upon their slender wrists.
Soldiers marked by war, we laughed and smiled
at the witch's cry of arms raised, though no
man held his blade.

Our knight in worn armaments wandered through the magician's ring
and as he did our banquet seemed to sing of the halls where the wizard
worked to bless our humble sacred town.

Revisiting Histories of the Soil

I was here before
in the whipping of rifle bullets across the meadow
where my cards spilled out on tree stumps and the
archaic language spoke in oak and shaded leaves.

Forlorn pleasures, say the apathetic-critical,
as they watched the leather soldiers slide
the cartridge into the bolt-chamber of older weapons.

Madness, say the high-flung literati
ensconced in comforts stolen from the rooms of children.

Fire, say the poets, pure and simply cascading sheets of flame
called the imagination in working whirls through out the
cryptograms of the world's languages, bedecked in ambiances
of lore's lust that speaks in glowing heat's edges with
smoke and light.

But I just wanted to be
a thousand thoughts of childhood
running like rivers over the small stones
of buried memories.

A million questions
more questions than their bullets
and bombs, words that lingered
on wind's notebook spirals
long after MLK was shot on
the hotel balcony,
long after prison bars stripped
Debs of his politics,
long after love had made hard writers
soft with death and brittle with impossible
standards of survival.

Was there love in Dachau?
Daring intelligence in a Black Maria?
Punctuations of truth underlying the
machinegun-typewriter staccato of
the world at war with itself?
Did the gods of questions
billow in the throats of man
like rivers of wine as their
blood splattered in rivulets
as dark as Roman sentences,
formed for the machineries of war
and not mere literacy?

Of course, but you rarely hear
such stories. Forlorn and in solitude
it is possible to contemplate
the great gaps of history.
Rifle shots make life appear as a battle,
and few accounts of World War II
will mention cherry-stains or
cabbage fields, or the simplicity
of a family in an old farm house untouched
by conflict who carry out their small kindnesses
without bearing the tragedies of the world.

We touched, during stereotypical Christmas,
when the essence of home reanimated us from
the gravel trenches and pulled us from square
dugouts, singing canticles loud enough to drown
out artillery. No-mans land quit vomiting Earth,
spirals of barbed wire became ribbons curling
in the morning mists. Our dead kinsmen rested
in the peace of meadows, letters from home
nestled in field jackets and the gaze of the
eternal nestled in their eyes. "We were
the happiest men alive in our day."

I remember a way-back when
through the golden gate of our childhood
where the warm grass faded in the pulsations
of our summer-dew toes touched with a light
thought of joy, an innocence some may say
but yet an innocence that may be reclaimed
in words like cardinals flitting redness
in the shades of some elder elm whose branches
are tensile and frail against the season of tallow leaves.

I remember a way-back when we ordered our lives with play
without becoming too furious or hurt, a little bit of star-dust
in our cardboard moon-suits and a breath of happiness after
a supple rolling down a blustery knoll one day in ancient autumn.

School was incidental. No kid would ever talk about fractions in games,
no middle-schooler longed for the dreary drudge of idiot lessons coupled
only by the dubious authority of some goof eager to impress young minds
with the textbook religions of some corporate publisher. And how the
blossomings were, when the girls took on the pantomimes of young women,
remember your first love? The one the adults told you was a crush at best,
but how you pined for her and even drew a pink heart around her black and white
yearbook picture to lend color to what you saw beyond official photographs?
The boys were comrades in arms, the girls mysterious scents on the edges of
some exotically foreign wind, and your serious old relative had to drive miles
out of his way to pick you up from the baseball field as the sun became a bonfire
in the auburn sky.

I hope this was you.

Not some cigarette-pawning letch dressed in grunge rags, seconds from the drug scene, who tortured voluptuous women with bra-strap snaps and murdered small animals with safety pins and purloined lighters.

Regardless,
what became of us? I don't mean
who's job is what and who's wife
does how many sexual positions
after returning from an office morgue
with the stink of dead lives shrouded
about her rubber hands. I mean,
as in the question of a simple child's sky,
'why?' Why the massive insurance coverage
for lives that have lost their glow,
why the massive work week for an economy
that fucked itself with its own greed,
why the planned diminishing of human value
in the spirit of oneupsmanship that leads
to only more and more oneupsmanship?
Why hold children against their parents
in the workplace, why hold parents against
their children in the social scene of shuttled
conformity, why design a rich world in order
to become miserably chained to material?

Other questions arise, ones that are perhaps cryptic to the novice non-writer.
Indeed, these questions are not meant for the non-writer.

There is always an answer to any of humanity's problems:
childhood.

With tired mouth I approached the question of mercy.
No, said the woman in pallid robes, no said the man
with a computer stare in the train station, no said
the laughing maniac who had just been freed from the
prison of his sorrow. And though I understand,
people think of me as a fool, people in their half-knowledges
emblazoned in their minds like half burnt quilts are without
the eyes of the wisest child.

With travels before and behind, all of us move in the rectitude of
experience, and it should be said that the horrible thoughtless acts
of children scarcely change in the horrible thoughtless acts of adults.
The beauties, it is true, are few sometimes
like a self-conscious awkward woman who donates baked goods to the blind
at church on sundays, or the tired old man who writes to dying schoolchildren
in hospitals in order to tell them kindly of great stories of the brave sick
that have gone untold in this culture of soul-murderers and thieves of the spirit.

Brilliant phosphenes traveled without our knowledge through the dark diminished halls of man's petulant constructions. A snowflake here, a snowflake there, where aisles of mansion walls flaked paint as old as histories and no more.

Let us rest in each other
on the broken back of rooftops cracked with gothic lore.
The enflamed moon is light enough
to embarrass the town with its misdeeds.
You and I here,
sick with survival;
the only trick of power's poor manipulation
that cannot outwit the stars strange glories
as we grapple with softness on the bed of our
embrace.

I searched the faces of enemies for an answer
out in the prison world
but all I found were the old childishness
of poor actors dismantling their fears
by showing stupid hatreds instead.
As for the rest of it,
I could call it madness
but that raging ocean is not large
enough to encompass the condemnation
of humanity's horror.

We could be simple with a pint of beer,
telling old stories of by and bys gone
to the roadside in the manner of cliche
musings, we could be lovers on the stretch
of shore where no ship has lain anchor.
We could be anything.

But instead,
the ones you've known have suffered through false choices
regarding us. Expired checkbooks, red rose petals,
cars that drive around in circles, and a downtown
desolate of the curious and choked by the mundane.
Who said that sparks had to be condemned to exile
from the human face, who was it that claimed that
all imagination and flux should remain outside the common
man and woman's grasp, who was it that sent legal orders
across the polished desk in order to dismiss an elegant truth
for the purpose of fear and shame?

All of the truth is conspiring against lies
every moment you breathe words as sharp as arrows,
all of the writers you knew left America
all of the great minds and insightful personalities
left this godforsaken continent for the sake of life.
Let me tell you:

Talk to any stranger and the first thing you will notice
is a paucity of conversation. No metaphors, no poetry, nothing
but flat simple words uttered as quickly as possible showing a lack
of pathos and a complete transparency of motive. Friends and family
varnish over this with the veneer of caring, lovers poise ornate daggers
with the thread of their lips above each others eyes and call that fear
and pain love. Who have you known who has worked to escape this
prison brothel? The monstrosities with cowcatchers shoving masses of people
into sealed pits, the office manager insinuating despair and hatred in his
thinly veiled innuendos and jokes, or the Horatio Algers of the nation, concealing
the generational theft of their families?

What I mean to say
is that there is no need
for masters, there is no
need for any of this.

The Story of Archie

It is said, my friend, that spiders are hardly small or benevolent and that the insect world itself is wrought with peculiarities of struggle. Yet what is little said is how the cockroach is merely a cockroach in our perceptions and our language. In their world it could be said that a roach is fashioned from the gilt armor of royalty and covered in ranking spines that may twitch in communications of golden pleasures, and yet somehow you may not believe this though you have witnessed roaches settle for life in the same direct motions you scuttle for in your procurements of mental speeds and claws of motive.

Our roach here mimes old passages of a world-weary Don Marquis who travels insectile across keyboards to deliver small granules of truth amid honesty. Like Mr. Marquis' psuedonym you can call our roach friend Archie.

In bathroom-tiled temple floors Archie crawled through bird-chirp love's lore and saw something a human normally wouldnt see. He saw a rebirth in coiled old cords knotted with wound's brand of property, and let it be said in such a way for Archie is highly figurative and rarey literal for such is the life of a roach that leads sometimes to dreams of finer dreams.

Archie here in tiled-temple licked his wounds with rasp unfurled and adorned askew antennae with silked spittle dew, these wounds from former flight alone in day's night of blessed and cursed markers of destined loves and hatred's old lights.

Saw old cracks in tile pavement and spotted marks where blood had dripped in scarlet punctuation but yet a symbolic splatter from early days he hadn't seen but with now-bent antannae and his golden wing sounding like a small telephone talking in buzzing rings. But Archie flits from map to map, so is not responsible for the order of his things, his things said or brought, bought or singed.

No sentences in cockroach eyes, just whorls of colored shapes. Woman-whirl with man-sweep in arms afire as desire's woolen leap. Old hatreds dissolved in water-splatter of ancient mildew cleaned from off white-porcelean where blades of speech could not shatter the steam-loving mints of temple's shushing lyre. Sense in poetry is not Archie's finer style.

Rube Goldberg Striations (JJ 87. 09)

Crumbled stations growing with swirls of dust
and marked by superstructures exposed as if they were splints
of some old army hospital, jagged and cruel in the summer wind.
A building for you and a room for you,
here, a warehouse there a dry school
and inside the common lack of art.

Choose a profession and you have chosen your character.
An actress there and a writer here,
a broken office manager warbling thin musics in the form
of business letters. A CEO, a restaurant owner. You
have seen everybody. Now you have to live, and
you must change your life.

Humble experience informs scribes lesser than me.
A once exalted position poisoned by fame and the
industry of immortality, where they freeze token folks
into bronze statues and shove black gold words into their
ever-frozen mouths. Too late for a lack of fame, too soon
to blossom with the summer winds. MLK said that,
only no one knew.

We reposed in old fortunes of a decadent labor camp.
Our room, built on stilts above the starving mad lusts
of people who wanted a simple kind of life found in a coin
or a friendly smile. Love-mad, the world you refuse to see
turns in the motions of time-locked whorls. A moon on my
birthday once mirrored in succinct metaphor
the photograph of our spiritual cities.

A bed of ancient dust called the Sea of Tranquility.
A cemetary without a name, tombstones jammed in like old
office files thrown in the basement. Nobody could speak
about the unspeakable. They had to learn. Concentric
barbed wires running with electricity and a world that
has as its reflection a barren moon.

Tell me lover, where does the earth find you today?
In sequins gathered by family crimes or in the beds
of lust unsated by all he offered you, a joy that
had never been unearthed but by his plying bone
and a contentment fettered by the statues the others
dared to touch? The only people who forget
are the ones who have nothing to remember.

A quiet flute in the shifting wastelands of cities.
Honest harmonicas and a can of soup, a tarp tent set
with clothes and hummings of the ancient humanity
soiled by new wardens who forget that they are the prisoners
to marked men.

I, oh mysterious letter, cannot forgive
the motions of the gift of Alcatraz
your free citzenry would bestow upon
my unborn daughter. I, oh mysterious sound,
cannot forgive the gift of flowers
placed on unmarked roadside graves
as salve for the living that leads them
to believe in their own virtue. I, oh mysterious word,
cannot forgive the piles of printing presses
tuned up to lie to the face of my unborn son.

I cannot forgive any longer. I began with myself.

The sea wind capturing dandelion seeds. The dried love of summer
like a preserved apricot in her ear. A drunken fight. Some bronze
keys. A golden apple. A virtue locked inside the furnace of the
only sun. Tell me that you love the winds beneath the pale willow
sweeping up the dew of spring lakes. Tell me that you love the rays
of a smiling face in love. I cannot say with words the sadness that
has echoed inside the cavern of my breast. You will have to tell me
with words that aren't there.

Any Old Station (B. 36)

Whose pale order approached behind masks frozen in speech?
The ash-work of Pompeii settled in our souls, and through the
Resonance of music we discovered the shapes of what wasn’t there,
A fascimilie of man and woman locked in a death embrace
And the lost last words of an landslide volcano.

When earlier we had been simpler.
A glass of wine in the Roman veranda
And sprigs of lilac in her charmed hair.
Now the sky has boiled black and burnt
With the edges of curled flame like the wrath
Of an ancient god, smoking cinders peppering
The air like ornaments to transformation.


The sequence of the sea’s waves lost our orders.
A broken lute lay on the shore in seaweed’s disarray,
Mistaken for a whale bone smiling white in the gleam-star
Of the sun’s wealth. Who knew old instruments could
Carry the resonance of such beauty in the glens of the sea,
Who figured that the discarded impliments of old irons
Could be fashioned into such a picaresque screen of
Antiquity’s lore?

Pompeii, Vesuvius. The beach, antiquated in looms
Of wind and the skein of sea spray, a shop for the
Senses and a chart for any old road to immerse itself
In time.

the lost highway

Drawn in relief, the ugly machineries have shattered
Into pale representation
Humble in life, our meals were nettle soup
And our thirst met with the steam of silver kettles,
Parching and rough.
But we sang and we joked,
We lived through the open door and
Outside of all doors,
When most of the rest lived from false
Memories.

I’ll sing you a war of lovers
A simple cutlass given to him by his father
And a winchester gun that shoots flowers,
But know that the worst shots came from words barked
For the sake of luxury’s memories.

And in the mist of battle’s penance our souls lost their lover’s
daggers which adorned them like gilt upon the quickened tang
Whipped out of cracked scabbard by the old cannon fires.

Know that the seeds of dandelions grow from our bodies
After we die, that during life our house slipped in shoes like
A walking goddess dedicated to love and her forefathers.

All of our lives
Are just windows in the rain
All of our days are subtle old refrains
All of our spite,
based in love's ruined memories.

The Idle Movements of Ancient Libraries (P.47 TB)

A poem, a poem, a small poem.

Here the women lay reposed in the day
Here the wild wolves sulk in labyrinthine castles, wary of the minotaur.

Hear the quiet fields, the silence from the end of the last war. There the bodies lay wrapped in ribbons of lilac and splattered rose red. There the fields lay until the bodies and the earth become one.

And the sound of old irons clanking like war desires in the rusted tombs of dead chivalry’s renaissance armor, and the music of swords open to the love of whores who brought us our finest ribbons to pin upon our helms before we marched in coated horses out of the marrow to tilt at dead machineries and broken gear teeth. And the languished ray of darkness sitting there behind us, we call shadows but we don’t know even why they are.

In the shaded glen, free from the company of men, lay our blossoms of nourishment in vessels of painted clay. In the pig pen, the slop is sluiced through troughs, and where we saw the farmer’s wife we knew that witches had been real.

In the lost decay of old formulas we wrote in our notations the workings of a simple tool, the ancient spade that mortars and smooths, that digs hallowed hollows so that our fire may keep in the cold stony bog until what the earth will say when it goes away, “It is day and it is night.” The woman stretched over a man, the two as lovers wrapped in sun and twilight, made lithe by the draperies of the stars.

And is it for us to understand the sound of the world’s (sic) words, the quiet moon and the taciturn smile of its cratered canyons? Is it for us to interpret the flows of even a river as it lazes out and ever? Hold on to water, hold on to an ocean, hold on to a love that never says “blossom,” and you will discover your true weight like Sirius the star.

The robot of robots in the office of offices. The sleek slap of laced ribbons flitting like tasseled whips in the lines of orchard dreams. Dusky scent like mirth and white vinegar. Trouble in the ancient talk. A fire crossed by water. Old light meeting new darkness. Old darkness amid new light. The end of shadows is where light begins to open, for void is a closed closet and light an open window. The robot office of robot offices.

In the lost decay, in the shadowed May, our whistling rain whirled red by the whipping wind has snapped our fondest nightmare. Dead insects in the shoebox of ancient memories. A glass of wine, a glass of glass, a liquid rouge blushed by the age of old grapes. You were born amid this. You were born amid the wild flits of an ancient wind.

Oh how terrible to be told! What worse than for the truth to be said, to hear with uncalloused ear the steady rumble of thunder’s lover, the lightning quick flash of truth shocked into the heart of the ear. “You are dead.” And yet never more alive with electric nerves flowing in fire flame the snap of sparkles whistling with the tone of human thought, with the desire of the polyglot who asks for a dessert sherry in four different languages. Ask, nay, demand, and you shall receive. Descartes was right but kept it in a lie. “Do we sleep or do we dream?” should have been “Do we live or do we die?”

And the saints were open to the sound of listening unlike some of us, unattuned to simple words like a drummer beating the march of war upon the breath of sweet lilacs until they wilt with loss of dewy sweet dangerous life.

You have come a long way for a short poem. You have come a short way for a long life. Time will not abandon you my sweet sad friend. The ticking of seconds is just a manner in which the measures of movements we call situations instill themselves through all the coordination of a drunk dream. Whistle through a thistle and shave your name from your chest, what’s ours is ours unless we make a gift and even then it is made more and not less.

Here the day reposes in the soft arc of women’s curved daliance.
Here the minotaur has already died long ago, and is wary of mere wolves.

Here dot dot dot you may begin to live period exclamation point

los lobos del sol, the lyricism of nonsense (FW 190)

Someone sliced this city in geared flame and left a swath of orange blood,
All the slickness on the streets in the debt of drugs and sex that gluttons collect
Like a whirling bracelet upon the arm of the baron’s dominde.

With the edge of fey fate we slipped the knife through the ends until they met
With a bridge of gleaming steel over the waters of shoals.
With the debts of old friends, we remarked on how easily memories become forlorn.

To this debt, we raise our best, we toast when our minds are wet with the lucid fumes of alcohol’s loans.

Hoy poder la tierra en un traje de azul, los firmas son regales en la piscina de tus suenos, la habitad es un major contenta y soy un major. Con el amor es possible para personas viaje con los pajaros y la major paloma de tus brazos. Un boleto de me historia es un libro de me via. Es la verdad, la muerte es una via del destrurian los peligrosos. Y con un cuchillo de nosotros somos angeles de la noche. Fortuna es marveloso para ti, ye la gente es su novia, con los fuegos artifices.

With rising strands of reflections we puzzle out the sun, with strands of desires fulfillment we descend upon the power of our blood unnoticed but in times of loss and want, where we are yours. We collect all the mess of the sickness swimming in trees, we excempt spiritual debts on the basis of compassion and need.

Hoy poder la playa del mundo en un carafe de naranja por tus amorres. Hoy poder una miraculo en los curios por tus santo de proteccion.

Yo ya major…

With engines of night we travel in repose like a sailor guided by his nose through the shifting whirlwinds of storms, with sails of daylight we gather our weapons of the spirit and search out banknotes to serve as our soul’s cloak.

En la casa de luna, un mujer de cinema no tiene la verdad porque es una triste soledad.
Los ciuadeds no tienen las coches de la noche, no tienen los guerreros de la negro, solamente los guerroes con los caballos de la luz.

In the engine, our thoughts are scrambled with the gears sickening speech. We adapt, and turn our minds to rocks and fires that have no measure of weight or heat.

Los avions del azur estan miserables de los peliculas y no tienen la amor.

The airplanes of blue, miserable as motion pictures, and they don’t have love.

In the dentistry of mercy, our stone teeth look unnerving, but it is how we survived. In the hospital of love, our claws scuttle like undeserving women across the ladders of social climbing, and perhaps this too is love. But in the ends, our knifes will mend all the sickness that crept through this dream, to be sent to the end means to live like you want by your seams.

On the 14th of December, we forgot to remember, on the 9th of September, the war surrendered and the lyrics of this song changed back to the pale embers that had begun in a fire of old parchment marked by old lore.

Tu estas una dio, la produccion de evolutiones y muchas muchas anos. Tu eres bonita y muy felicidad de los viajes y los jovens de la tierra. Las almas de amadura son corozons del batalles. Yo ya mejor!

Wilt them out until there is only spirit and form for the cowardice in their looks that stole and have torn your lover's desire as if from a supermarket aisle. You are a goddess amid rotting logs...

How To Read Someone's Fortune

There are a few ways.

Look intently at them as if you know something about them. You probably already do. They are dressed nice, they are dressed poorly, they are dressed like the asshole who side-swiped your car this morning, or they are dressed like your grandmother the day that your grandfather proposed to her. Then tell them what you see in them.

To a man drunk on his lunchbreak from the office: "I see a sad turn of events in terms of your working environment. If you don't change your life, you could end up getting fired."

To an over-dressed woman at 5pm: "Your love life will flare up, but it is uncertain whether the future will hold a lasting love or a flash in the pan."

To a child-"You are your own fortune. Write it and read it yourself. Forget the slut ready to jump on any guy in town, forget the drunk who can't spell 'chickadee' when he is sober, not because of idiocy but because his hands shake to much to hold a pen or to type on a computer. Forget everything they taught you. You are the future, child. I am sure you know who the Beatles are by now. All you need is love. Or was that a line from ---?"

How To Be A Poet, free MA lesson

Here is a poem I dragged up
from the simple mechanism
of writing in stanzas like a poet.
You see,
you just take normal speech
and put it with line breaks
where you want the line to break
and where you want the words
to go. It is simple, not a trick
or a greatness, but just a thing
like a spoon or some cigarettes.

They teach students this in school
for thousands of dollars.
So if by chance you were thinking
of becoming a poet, or that you
want to be a poet, you can thank
me for saving you thousands of dollars,
all of you would-be poets out there
all of you real poets out there
and all of you poets out there who
already knew.

sequence in summer of night embers and daytime lovers

This night in day glenned softly with the down of timber flakes strung along the open meadow has breathed in musky sequence the art off all our fellows, for too true is it that they are dark and clinging but yet also, there is something in their being that makes the blades of grass and yarn of heather flow with measure of what cannot be measured, through mere fertile contenance of adversity’s pleasures do those who hate us for their speckled beings make us shoot like cannon’s blossoms into the art-arch of the sky.
And in this day gleaned night we rust in tombs prepared by automatons who burst in billowy dress the day when it is no longer day, who’s art in lies is no art at all, but pale unreason as meaningful as a quick drawn blade.
Earth shutters its windows in tired repose, ill-seen and unrepenting before the beauty of even the ugliest rose, for not are we meant to live like flowers but rather to spend our petals on our roots that grow tender by spring rain in the early morning hours.
This night in day and this day gleaned night glenned softly with the down of dandelion embers does spark life anew with loving dust and brilliant white wisps of curled soft whiskers feeling for the air that lends its flight to the justice of distant laws and letters.

agape

I tell you that you are beautiful,
I cannot tell the waitress that she is too
nor the man with a peckish face manipulating his dinner
with a cheap fork.

I tell the waitress that she is beautiful
through a couple of ugly dollars
that say "Have a drink on me, as is custom,
have a pack of cigs on me, as is customary
when we are rewarding beauty caged by
robot behavior."

Far better to reward broken robots,
the ones who paint the chaos of paint dribbles
across canvases of life, like the man who ambles
down the street with an antique cane, the woman
who in the middle of the night with the stars shining
few, speeds down the middle of my street in her
electric wheelchair, intent and with banner flying.

Tell me I am beautiful at the love novel factory
and I will point to my broken parts. You, if you mean
what you say, will understand, as you have always
understood. Emptiness fails to realize.
Voids entertain beauty in orbits leading to
loss, and only the black hole of the collapsed human heart
draws its own death towards it.

Tonight, I declare the obvious.
Love and trust are worth more than money and deceit,
which is not a question of value or measures
but a question of authenticity.
Can you buy life with lies?
(A marriage to a job and a car with a woman you
see for a few hours to have sex with is not a life,
but the worst deceit ever pulled on the human experience
by you and the others.)
Can a person fool another into loving and trusting them
for the rest of their life?
Like I said, hideous obviousness.

But, listen...the obvious should be beautiful too.
Who fashioned it so that those who speak in swords
about old wounds should be laughed off, persecuted,
written off as mad fools feeling out the horror of our
mutual prison? You and I in our half-measures of love?
Others in their full-measures of hatred?
The tattered spirit, much misunderstood, poisoning
our lives with pretensions of greatness placed their
by our own childhoods and derided as egos by
the miserable misinterpreters? Fuck them
and fuck me too.

The moon, some stars, a few rays of light,
a painted prison blooming like a garden
and a handful of old coins from the penny jar,
beaten copper amid the worn glass of the world.

You were the only one to show me your weapons
amid a people deluding others with things.
Light-knife kept in your boot, all I saw in
other shoes were crusted socks and outlines
of broken heels. All you needed was an interlude
to glint an edge from your ornate hilt. I needed
a hurricane of pages and letters, poor documents.

Let us walk as lovers separated in our two worlds,
I promise I won't laugh at your void, as
You have never insulted my emptiness.

Too many beautiful words, so few weapons.
Words without hope, weapons without wisdom.
And so on...

habeas corpus

Here, drink through sorrows until they pass you by
There, think through tomorrow and future reads like lies.

Mere words disembodied from voice, spelling
Torn from the codex of the alphabet. I see you
Blooming softly beneath an enflamed and desolate sky.
I hear you singing sweetly amid the concrete silence
That serves as music for wilted eyes.

Words disembodied from actions. “The nebulous
Mystique of mysticism serves as a mural over
totalitarian factories as the vampire’s beauty
deflects the eyes of your heart from his fangs.”

Actions untold by words. The swelling of the ground
In an earthquake of anger, the split shock in the earth
When Lorca fell and poet’s blood warbled in ribbons
From his thin pale mouth. Spanish fascists painted
Picasso’s Guernica with Nazi aircraft howling earth-bound
In the way paintbrushes don’t. Machine-guns rarely
Crackle grotesque pointillism through canvas, and
Explosions lack the ease of cubism’s two dimensions.

Here, think through sorrows until they read like lies
There, drink through tomorrow and the future passes you by.

Words as actions. “Fuck you.” A hot prickling on the inside and a gasp.

Actions as words with idiots slurping their newspaper bowls for sugar-flavored gruel and calling themselves informed and cultured. Well, they have opinions like you and me. On hairstyles, what is the best button to buy for fifteen cents, and a single poem about the dream figure who will one day make them king while they moan in self-pity about Nietz Che and his philosophy of Marvel comic book heroes. But they know that their money is safe as long as they deposit their tongues into the right investments.

Words as activity, flowing velvet. Peach rhymes with a similar mouth. Roving poet. East lines drawn through a telephone’s shout. Morphing sub-let into deep freeze storage of furniture meat. The birds called collect. Wonder-movement under a whorl of amusement. Laughing whirlwinds. Long-distance regrets.

Oh, we have lost our involvement!

Don't you deny either that our workings in whirlwinds
are ways along a torn road where our crumblings
scatter like new dust from urns. I have seen your
labor devoid of pleasure, and know the tools you
cherish are not your own.

A speed of cars with human hearts
could drown the blood on the streets,
and a halt of prison stuffed with men who move
could not rot the crimes a driver keeps
behind his oil light, beneath his hood.

What motion seems picture-sane
in this cobbled crippled heap?
A flash of a knife, the arc of a gun,
a violent show-down on a motionless
screen?

Or perhaps
a honied lamb with golden wool and curls
who cherishes the grass it eats, the
flock it meets, and the razor edge
that makes it butcher's meat?

Oh, we have lost our involvement!

The truth we mourn lies in sandy dunes,
shifting with flourishes of acrid wind.
But its not the ripples, the color of land,
nor even an old camel tooth.
Its not the desert, nor the sun, which
meet each other like two simple hands.
Its not the moon set in the black above,
its not the oasis, though like a jewel,
seems set by love. Its not the dew
of one-time rain, its not the howling
old refrains, its the simple and speckled
grains that with no rhyme nor reason
continue to remain.

Oh we have lost our involvement!

Give me Lorca's green guitar
on which to sprinkle our sand,
give me Laura's red violin
on which to notice our hands.
Give me Robert's yellow clarinet
on which to mark our land.
Give me Melissa's blue flute
on which to play our stand.
Give us instruments painted red white or blue
give us a piano the color of the moon,
give us a lute like a comet or two,
for you have taken
what little music we have made with our hands.

simple sky

Allow us simple unscientific sky.

Who wants to live beneath information,
To lay in fields among nipping night
And hear the descriptions of chemical nomenclatures
Echoing within starlight the statistic’s rate
Of miles per second, or to feel in breath
The patterns of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide
Predicted by measured descriptions counting
Off new numbers on each numbered day?

Our lives are numbered enough
For us to not breathe blue.
The distance between allotments and bills
Are astronomical enough in cycles
For us not to know the black holes
Of the human mind. Tell us
Instead that gravity is love,
That we are held to the earth
As though by a lover
Until we slip away into her embrace
To be wed in earth forever
With the sky arched as a forest bough
Blooming with the flowers of silk clouds
That mean only rain or thunder,
That mean nothing molested by a number,
That mean ‘always’ and ‘forever’
In sky and light, in night,
In sunset leaving it’s pink embers.

Sick of the yellow moon,
Its firefly light ignored by drunkards.
Mention the moon and you become a fool.

I am a fool, constantly and ever stupid,
Attempting at the wonder of a mere moon
Or the sublimity of quiet clouds as
They pass between astronomical distances
With only the help of a little wind
On a cold night. You were my little
Wind, and I the fool, large and ugly
As the everyday.

And now our small musics.
Passing in store aisles or a little
Comment at a restaurant, you who
I recognize in all women remain
Too kind. This jazz in the hospital,
The flowers at the prison, your
Little lips. How your beauty
Thinks of everything but ‘beauty,”
How your lips cautioned mine
Against hate.

Too traveled now, the two of us,
To know the old phone numbers.
Too traveled now, the world among us,
To ring like bells for the limit of our old youth.

Sometimes I am in some times like times some
razor clock hand slit like dying farm birds
and other times I could but speak
of the cloud's shadow speech concerning
other times.

It is too late for pretext,
you leave your reading clothes
where they're donated to the war.
The great weak widows frail in house
and desperate in home will rise
to collect the garments of your luxury
just as the policemen came
and beat your grandmother with a hose.
Your context is a foot bloodying
your magazine rack, your meaning
just lost in tragic circumspect traveling
to the safe parts of the world
known as insane asylums by the dangerous.

Sometimes, other times.

In other times, sometimes
swept female hair licking wind with perfume
and embrace's velvet voice singing nonsense
at his and her's melodic choice,
their audience not made from eyes
but others who touched touch in a kiss's
red woman whirl, in the wind's strutting
through free fall hearts pulling on love's
parachute twirl,
above everything
though with everything above,
a feeling like that.

Do not make me compare the contrast
this time, other times it has cried my
tears. Sky, bird, sky, plane. Burning
houses with flaming wind and rain.

another place, with a different purpose

http://localehate.wordpress.com/

new blog

http://rubegoldbergvariations.wordpress.com/

Sometimes I am candled and lit by sunlight streaming straight through cool clean sea wind, setting my wonder aflame with the mellow joy often found in a glass of wine, ablaze even in the outdoors as I trace sparse and ornamental greens upon the branches of what counts as city nature. Call me a kid, but I could inspect the topography of garden soil for an hour even as the loam pulsates with worms, call me an idiot, but I could place my face into the folds of a rose blossom for minutes to let its perfume dissipate car exhaust about the corners of my couch-fabric coat. And in these small moments I am alive and unafraid, ready to donate money to the homeless after marching in a Labor Day parade. But then I get the feeling that something isn't real beneath all that joy, as though an adult walked by and told me to take a shower. I am fortunate for the wonder even when it passes by as quickly as it swelled from a secret way kept under all these clothes and skin.

For those of you who are free from the establishment of terror that bureaucratizes thoughts, I envy you. Such an existence almost seems like innocence and naivete when agents of suffering are gaining new footholds on the world. But also, I am terrorized by conventions, harrowed by the routine matters involved in micro-economics, angst-ridden after too many failed dealings with institutions. School couldn't help me graduate, mental hospitals couldn't cure me, and life only sends its best regards in the accomplishments of others. Larger and less self-centered is the suffering worldwide; famines, corruption, droughts, disease, wars, and death which we ignore in order to hum happily along in tune with our fellow happy hummers.

But we have lost our wonder, our child-like appraisal, despite retaining our ignorance. We can lose our ignorance and improve our wonder, it is possible, just difficult.

I Am Waiting

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
Of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the second coming
And I am waiting
For a religious revival
To sweep thru the state of Arizona
And I am waiting
For the grapes of wrath to stored
And I am waiting
For them to prove
That God is really American
And I am waiting
To see God on television
Piped into church altars
If they can find
The right channel
To tune it in on
And I am waiting
for the last supper to be served again
and a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed
and I anxiously waiting
For the secret of eternal life to be discovered
By an obscure practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and TV rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting for retribution
for what America did to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty's clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeting lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

If you could tell me the work of worlds
I would not listen unless
your words involved the play of hearts
upon love's orbit which brings the seasons
and hardens thin blood to warm frost.

The science of locks repels me
from a supple clever key,
the physics of hatred demands
movements that have nothing to do
with the style that you sing.

And in the last world that magnified
my broken ankle from past and future
to agonizing present, we fought for
grander things than the safety of our
knees.

The edges of a scientist's dream
must be rational indeed
to account for the old trunks
we carry with us while waking
and while asleep. God forgot
to give us the combination
on this world where beauty
locks itself inside the blossoms
of a billowing cherry tree, he
forgot to make us study love
instead of the Earth's engine
while ignoring spiritless disease

I saw the yard wide open filled with bleached tree trunks
emptier than bones. The dead garden struck me like
my own confessions set to the difficulties of songs
fashioned by small birds and at the driveway my
mind began cracking open like the pavement's
silent verse, filled with a concrete degradation
of soil's softness spread about the earth.

As for the hospital's intervention, the nurses
really hung their words at the gallows where
frail meanings break their necks before
rebellion saw its birth. The rooms missed
artistic expression and smelled cold like
a dead bird taken from the freezer before
cooking in the hearth.

Patched up effortlessly by some pills and cognac,
then discarded to the Earth.

Made difficult by old musics cliched conclusions
and the perfect circles drawn vicious by coins
leaning against art's worth. Made easy by
idiot watches counting numbers lost even
when you come in first place.

I saw the formula for oceans in the tired
waves sweeping shorelines around shipwrecks
I heard the gulls open up like conversation
as the ravens warned of storms and the
spirits of dead captains lined up to navigate
hell for the chance of brandy beyond the
hurricane horizon.

It was Earth;
I could feel it,
it was home and not on drugs,
it didn't drink
but ate only mangoes
and flowers on a path
too difficult for solitude to traverse
with its heavy pack. But here,
the sea wind conceals the swirls
of gasoline, the ocean burgeons
before the waste of ships and
the streets burn with so much
false light that you no longer
want to keep your eyes open to belief.

The birds I sent you in those letters,
did they sound like the lines I erased?
The winds I gathered for envelopes,
did they sound like fate collecting feathers
strewn where oceans end in desert?

We will eat boysenberries plump on dying vines in our free time
and listen to harmonicas beneath freeway overpasses hum
like wind chime rhymes. We will graffiti property thefts and
mural slave halls in fresco as the engines of monolithic design
shear our breath into labored pain, as the factory smokestacks
choke us with their ashen refrain, as the missiles screech like eagles
inside this cage of blue. We will sell our speech for new
rose petals, we will drink the river meshed by pollution's
fetters, and we will reach a tower where the sun tells the
hour if only to celebrate heaven while we painfully age.

We will be excused from lectures once we have had too much
to think. We will send in papers scrawled with hieroglyphic
letters and call professors late at night to inform them that
ideology too wears argyle sweaters and speaks in structured
diagrams of chalk safe from the weather unfurled like
a flood behind our kitchen door. At night we will read
the charts of the stars and ask to be lead through the
waters rising above parked cars into a home softly free
and floating like our hearts.

We will forget how to speak as the television informs
us of a thrilling new disease, when the radio names war
by failing to list any recent casualties, when the papers
bleed in blackened ink we're still able to read like
the price of gasoline versus the cost of our destructive
machine that we decided to lease from an institution
charging us hidden fees, well you know in the end
you just do it to make amends and not to think about
permutations that could have been.

your average charity

Three courtesy pennies dulled as beaten tin on the counter
nestled in a Joe Camel ashtray.

Water fountains burnished with tan stains and aluminum scratches,
faded as though by nuclear war.

History books dog-eared and thicker than halibut, page edges
swathed by permanent marker. Book plate reads: "This Book
Belongs To Your Momma Is Gay," the crowning achievement
of famous activities as performed and related by white European
mongrel males.

A fingernail sized piece of gouda at the supermarket,
free parking on holidays, a sun that bathes us in a warm
watercolor wash of frescoed daylight.

Museums with donations. An ocean of air sliding
through the narrow hallway of earth and ozone.

Helloes, pretty dresses on strangers, and a free credit report
once a year. Some time upon the weekend and a checking
account if you are a student.

Goodbyes. Disease. Dreams of fresh mangoes pregnant
beneath a banyan tree. Scattered stale cranberry muffins
beneath an unlocked dumster's lid. A shoe on the highway.
Eyes, ears, nose, lung, and limb. Swirling pale arms in fluid
arcs beneath the ocean's skin. Kissing. The soft fire
glowing in euphoria when you take a chance and win.

Allow me to ask of you, rare reader, to entertain my indulgence concerning the floridly lit labyrinths of my neuroses. I have to admit that they will probably leave you feeling the worse for having entertained my favor, however their is a slight chance that wading through the rubbled drivel of confusing yet terrifying visions and emotional fears will benefit you in identifying and isolating some of your own. It is for that outside chance, the three cherries in the slot machine of writing, that I continue instead of dispensing with the activity and the awkward formalities necessary in this instance.

I find myself often at uncommon odds with persons I meet who lie on the edge of my limited social circle. From such an egotistical perspective, it should be no wonder that I am at odds with them, however being introduced to a friend's cousin who I will probably never see again leaves me with an aloofness and subtle thin hatred for having to construct a tailor-made set of impressions for a person who I will never or rarely see again. I feel a deep pointlessness during the brief meetings, followed by an empty sort of apathy; in short, a feeling akin to watching the Tyra Banks show or the accomplishment of beating a terrible video game. It feels mechanical, unnecessary, and like none of it should have happened. It wouldn't be frustrating if the spontaneous took flight on our words and nestled on the dinner table before us in the display of peacock-like beauty, but mostly we discover what each other does for a living and if one of us has a new truck, girl, or disease. It is kind of like watching commercials, except instead of advertising the benefits of new products, these conversations reflect advertisements for the self.

This is not to say that human interaction isn't valuable. These meetings and strained encounters are the very foundation on which people begin to know each other, though it remains a rare experience for me to consider myself worth knowing or the other person. Immediately my social radar designates who is useful, threatening, dissimilar, comatose, or volatile. In some situations, when a person who could be described as a character is encountered, I feel an immediate distaste permeate my mouth followed by a desire to leave into the kitchen for a glass of wine.

In my instance, this could be caused by the gaping chasm created by establishing a false parity between actual and literary life. Writers and characters in books hold so much more fascination for me; I'd rather be listening to Rashkolnikov than mild mannered conformity masters, to an obtuse Marcuse than an acute hypochondriac. Another important facet of the problem involves the way we interpret the people who populate books versus the people who populate the world, a manner in which I usually fail to ascribe to unless I'm benevolently drunk or suitably bored. Protagonists in books have to be inherently interesting to survive the submission process in writing, but people in real life don't have to meet this qualification in order to stay alive, more or less fortunately. Plus, in real life, everybody is their own protagonist, driving their own narratives, which sometimes can make the problem of overpopulation all the more frustrating when it means dealing with an army of thematically scattered yet self-interested and effacing consciousnesses. Like reading a book written by a hundred different authors, life turns out to be brilliantly varied or catatonically confusing, depending on the page you find yourself experiencing.

Beyond the analytical pseudo critical phenomenon of meeting people, there is the somewhat more realist problem I have with trusting people. Some of the worst people I have ever encountered are the ones who insist on fulfilling the duties of their employment without imagination or compassion. But this isn't really worth getting into, as it seems everybody hates those people except for those people themselves, whoever they are. May they not be people close to you or me, is all I can hope to wish for. And yet, their is a note of empathy left in my slow sadness that would extend warmth towards these folks, for whom perhaps experience and necessity has dictated a loss of sensitivity to the world of dreams and kindness. Yet, these still are the people who have ruined my faith in trust, and not the obviously evil or malignant. The latter can generally be known for what they are avoided, while the former have an unfortunate tendency for appearing in institutions such as business, government, education, and medicine. Their basic humanity demands our human trust, yet their actions often demand that we ally ourselves with an odious bureaucracy if we are wont to recognize their humanity.

Lastly, their are my own foibles, which amount to stalling like a car on railroad tracks during certain social interactions. My thoughts leave me like a frightened driver hearing the oncoming train, and I'll sit their wincing invisiblely before the inevitable disaster happens. I have a penchant for encountering multiple trains somehow, those extroverted super-personalities engineered by the undiagnosed mad socialites of the world who cajole me into the third world of introversion until I gain enough energy to propel myself to an empty room or the outdoors after creating a meager excuse. Alternatively, their are rareperiods of time where I am that super-personality, crackling coal in the furnace while shining my mono-headlight down on some poor waifish fop who had the bad fortune to find me billowing with intensity.

What I don't understand, given the relative lack of solutions for anything mentioned, is how ordinary people are expected to form communities of emotion and transcend the necessity of business and familial interactions when the minor problems I have mentioned foster such a strongly negative experience. I guess the answer for me is to just deal with socially awkward situations that I should have mastered in high school. But what is the answer for an auto-mechanic getting fired by a boss he spent thirty years pretending to like, only to find out that unemployment is just around the corner? What is the answer for the single mother struggling with a waitressing position and a young mouth to feed? What is the solution for the family bombarded by medical bills? Are these people supposed to contain their desperate situations and unobserved tragedies in favor of social cohesion? Are they supposed to hide who they are, or embarrass themselves with revelations about their lives? This is why I fear strangers, why I don't trust them; because of my own unique problems that do not translate, because of the unnecessary suffering involved in pretending happiness before the face of someone you haven't an idea of how to care about, and because of the artless ways people react when you are at your most genuine.

heads they win, tails you lose

The dwindling machinations of a few dispersed themes writhing like common words in the soil of the mind. So much to consider and so few places to act, as though our access to the world is blocked by rubble and offers only the chance to wriggle through in our fleshy vulnerability. Money increases our levels of available activity like a back-hoe hoisting barricades from our labyrinthine paths and lack of it sets up new obstacles with a hideous ease reminiscent of fantastical conceptions of magic. Welcome to the world, the flowers bloom in April, the leaves die in April, and you can only get what you want if you pay for it.

I am stuck observing the comfortable while they live out their dreams. The recession has changed the amount of piddling pittances doled out the poor, while company executives screech cross-country to plead for billions in hand-out money even though they are laying off works, raising prices, and generally using the economic downturn as an excuse to save money. Credit has all but evaporated, and the dream of a decent wage is being replaced with the possible loss of the income tax refund. It is rarely pointed out that what people are losing is not only money, but lifestyle choices and experiences, education opportunities and idealism rooted in an optimistic appraisal of their dreams. It is enough to lose one's life in the slow procession of aging, but to be sapped of faith in the future is quite another thing entirely, raising the low-level emergency of day-to-day living into a desperate pleading against forces which are paradoxically within our power to change and beyond us.

Personally, I would like to finish my education and move to Portland. But the budget cuts in California have ultimately timed themselves perfectly to add stress and nervous disappointment to my desires, since I am partially dependent on state supplemental income to make my way in the world. The only comfort proffered to me exists in the form of spiritual fantasy that tenuously grounds me in a world that has made too many mistakes while destroying the individual for their own. I would wish again for an ideology for which I can measure the world as if through a garden fence, but cynicism dictates that I could only be fascinated by grotesque depression brought on by noticing the severe lack of blossoming flowers.

I am a little disturbed by the great and somewhat innocently ignorant faith Americans convey by placing their faith without question into the government concerning the current economic crisis. As if the workings of the system hadn't already proved themselves to be far more inefficient than a logically-minded family possessing a savings account. It has been operating on borrowed money since time immemorial, and the recent policies of handing out money lack the real growth potential as developing new industries such as alternative energy and green technologies. It is disheartening to watch the treasury run the money printing machines while businesses have quit expanding. But, let it be known here, Americans have always been for the most part, a rather faithful people, excepting the American Revolution and perhaps the 1960's. Little improvements have been made in terms of changing the way that government and business is ran, just has few advances in combating social problems such as poverty, addiction, and underlying racial issues have been achieved.

It seems though as if the rest of the world is having similar economic difficulties, not to mention countries who are not even considered as developing nations any longer since the word 'developing' became too optimistic of a term to describe whatever buildings and groups of people counted as industries. America's problem is the world's problem, and the world's problem is America's. This means that we can no longer function with economic policies that act as a clever child flipping a coin to settle an argument, basically "Tails, I win, Heads, you lose." We must work to honor our interactions, first and foremost, in order that our communication and relationships honor us with side effects of prosperity that will salve the wounds of financial turmoil.

I thought the road began running
as I walked down the highway of fossils
where I became as ancient as unobserved moonlight.
What was that old sinew taut in my arms
exposed as I waved to passing cars
that wouldn't stop for strangers after midnight?
The powerlines in my nerves were still running
as I figured the streetlights looked funny
glowing in sodium yellow against a canopy
of dead stars that with their last threw out
the brightness from their hearts that
traveled to this darkened defunct road site.
I continued to gather nebulous signs
that exhibited messianic lies and
heretical truths captured in a glance
by the peripheral function of my eyes
and aS I toed the center divider
and passed between fast cars I could
hear a false wind take on a voice like
a loud and rushing sign that said
we suffer just to die that said we
rush in hopes of flight until a
true distance is shown by symbols
better left alone if one desires
happiness in their small life.

Now, some of us know
the language of fallen leaves
scattered across an
asphalt destiny,
and our wish is to lie enraptured
beneath tangled forest trees possessing
a madness that with ease discerns
the meaning of nature's solemn feats
instead of the idiot facts interpreted
by drivers sitting at stoplights.

The sublime, you find it easily when you're not looking
(even in hard times that make the body sing in fear
with the hunted wildlife).
The sublime, you feel it breezily when you're out
and running with the deer.
The sublime, you'll know it certainly when you
pack up and disappear until only the heather
knows your movements where the constellations
mark the year.