Skatepark
There's a fire settling on my shoulder blades, cracking under the weight of the white sky.
And there hasn't been a city yet where we haven't met.
We're on this bloodless highway sprawling like tentacles of thoughts forming out your mouth
every word is a delicacy,
even here in the desert…
Where an ocean labored to fashion life out of its sand
eaten up by the sun upon the take of a first breath.
And I'm left trying to turn this heat into a single sun ray, tuck it deep inside my eye for later…
Holding onto petals of flowers I've murdered to press inside a book…
So later we can know this again like we did today.
Not quite 9
In 1989
I awoke in Ladispoli,
an inception of consciousness rose from the bed with me…
disarming my sleep,
against dust with form and rhythmic quality
I tiptoed to the opened balcony…
Bums in the sewers sang in their
sea salted skin.
While the Tyrrhenian nightfall aired, gasping from dream
I slumped my eyes over crumbs and a council of pigeons beneath…
The timing and tone teased unrest from my heart.
As I watched the galaxy part with its lights.
Enough for walls of the buildings to weep.
While the sky opened its eye and stared right back into me
I went BOOM!
and swallowed it whole with the stink and perfume making gods in the point of the light in me.
I grow a visceral fever right here
in between line breaks and stanzas
where time shows and
reveals in a space
my Borrowed
and Drifting
stages of Wandering
10 minute walk
In the park there's Gypsy technicians
engineering freedom around the oak trees that lead to nowhere.
And I would have hung around
saddled in the stars titling in the shadow of foreheads passing by.
I would've dragged the constellations nearer to the earth.
A midnight blue scattered around my waist.
Turning gold in the pink flesh of the crooked arms of the moon.
In February.
But,
I'm capturing blood in my head instead.
Dashing mentally into what seems an eternal corner.
Rolling in cross legged nothings of restless meditations and spent cigarettes choked between my fingers.
I am hungry.
And I don't dance very much anymore.
I sigh about it and start to believe it.
Sing it like a song.
Biding my time
battling the urge to break bread under a bridge...
Losing my sense of traffic upon the rivers dimpled wave smaller than a hush- booming-
make room for my eyes caught in the privacy of trash bags whistling against the wind.
The deal
I'm fighting against this poem
Because it reminds me of how desperate madness was to dance with me
Undone by its own weakness
I’d like someone to look me in the eye and know exactly what I mean.
I’d like a ditch instead of a city.
Like before the inventions stole the magic out of me
Before a wrinkled space replaced the feel of a labored manual embrace.
I want to smell the smoke of a climaxed match
strike it as I exile the love from the corner of my smiling mouth and toss the flame into existence.
Jerk and watch a deal the devil made with me in Vegas...
Exchanged a single heartbeat for 20 dollars worth of gas...
In that space between the beats
I pumped blind rage into my viens.
“Sign the dotted line my dear and watch the gates close on your dreams”
he said while leaving me alone with the sun in the desert.
Lets go,
Before the time on my shoes runs out and they forget the feel of the avenue
Before my listening too closely resembles another message from the dead.
Passover dinner
I promise myself that dawn will barge the rooftops opposite the sun again.
Staring at the moon laid stupid in a cloud,
as I’m eye to eye with brake lights
Taking inventory of my dreams.
I wouldn't want to spoil my appetite just yet,
already full of honored guests in the pit of my void.
I am not alone in this vehicle
Driving…
In the perfect flavor of my age
Helpless in the great beyond
Stupefied in the eye of eternity.
The unrest I find while sitting still
approaching stars like moving targets
misfiring my will crushed thrown in heaps with all the trash…
Taste buds bloom in the wreckage of caffeine,
unflattering
I drowned a phrase traveling across my tongue.
Its shipwrecked death sticks to spaces of my teeth.
Whistling I walked my mind away from it, proud of how I murdered it despite surrendering.
Unlike the
Locusts
And the boils
Or the blood of the first born
A taste heard only in my head
Refraining
I'm stealing some joy from the narrowing back of the river.
Take its ribcage deep into my eye,
sunken in sun...
Gifting me it's clumsy souvenir,
the ceaseless dance, an unrehearsed eternal choreography.
Around the muddy fingers of its bank,
despite the protests growing in its mouth from fallen trees.
I desire to describe the air between the captured images in words...its taste of me as it loses its name tangled in my tousled hair, its feel on me and its own feelings as it strikes and rushes past my cheek…
maneuvers around the corner of the groove above my lip- parted in syllables unborn and mysterious to me.
And I realize my flaws are perfectly refraining from a wish because they're flawless.
affair with words
A prelude to the ghosts of word
I'm an ocean oscillating
sitting in a Thai take out place
Spice infused the big FEELING rippling through my veins, explode out my chest with cumin
All the waters of me in attempts to confine press wicked against their own death, flooding to turn a void into an occupied deluge.
Some have a fling with words sporadic out of lust...
inflamed in temporary heat until the sweet and self serving release undoes them-
Mine's a love affair ethereal and engulfing...
indugled in privatized entanglement complete with rawness, newness, numbness and endless seas on fire …across all time and galaxies hung silent in my eyes.
Wore my comfy clothes to sit and wait for sustenance, so please do not disturb.
I am an event in process
in constance… situated between a pick up counter and someones loud breathing...and they have no idea about this wild ride I'm on.
My words are finite just as each letter begins and ends with the mouth of a pen- gives life to a word and ends its purpose with a graceful but heinous withdrawal from the page.
I will end not the words but the fiber that breathed life into them.
As I nauseously sit in my waters.
Holding an Ocean within my small frame is imploding...
Each drop on fire.
It's thunder in my throat.
It's lightening in my teeth
Walls around me closing in
I'm crumbling.
I am not made for love stories
Susan
She says “just look at the butterflies”
I talk to dead friends through live friends
while I walk the dog
into morning dew dressed grasses, plants and flowers feeding on the sun.
My thin fingered lashes play catch with the rays grasping the light to keep it, to bring it...
it aims its arrows at my skull
I am the keeper
The wanter of want
The escaped
Returned to myself in one morning
I have ghosts standing over my shoulder and the death toll is staggering…
I evoke their names
sometimes while driving and catching a sight of birds flapping into existence
or a motorized hum in the distance
Susan…
The dead heroes lined up and coded by color alphabetically entombed on my shelf are a joke.
The true heroes are the ones who tried to hero themselves out from under the teeth of sharks and got caught up in electric wires left out by idiots to smoother some sense of a spark.
I am writing this stream of whatever as this noise of a washing machine rumbles and throws itself against the neighbors wall…
And its mechanism isn't any different than mine
These are my favorite things...
Plays and carries itself past the candle scented in rain past the ceiling fans dusty embrace past my lips parched in need of some passion or a little change
past and through the opened window to the tips of the tree…heavy branch’d and ghostly cloud shadowed.
I once wrote about an ocean
thats inside of me
Oscillating
Overflowing
And how hard it is to contain such a large body of water inside my small frame
and how I cry into the iris of the night to be released from being tethered only to get wrangled in again by my own chains.
All fingers extended at me with a smirking and knowing
And she says “just enjoy the butterflies” from her grave in ash forever sleeping in the wind of her laughter spread about the air - thinly- whispers in the ears ever so slightly - barely..
and I laugh with her- audibly
so that I may catch her wave
I never said goodbye because there was no need
because she knew all this
2011 1/2
Eat your trashed goodbyes
I found that scream I screamed into
it was just my own history
good enough for concrete where history don't mean a thing
Listen to me for just a moment
I am somewhere tired in your stores
your shipyards
your shoes jumping into big business and politics
drunk in your pockets
Its becoming harder and harder for me to recall the wallpaper
my memories are a million lost corners
so go
go somewhere
Climb a fence…
Get caught
trespass and get lost
because I could get thirsty or hurt in your industrial trap
ghosts of word
The reader stops believing
all rendered by the same hand that devastates and subdues.
Triumphant and trivial
bent to the keys all hell in her eye she write this:
Just give me ONE good window
Bare bulb
No blind or shade
Just a starved little kid burning out the old roaches stuffing their guts with history
To the streets men
On the blocks boys to the gutter…
I stand reflected in mirrored sheets of rain
My art falls onto paper
red like the devil and his skin
Lines people spoke but never heard of…
I am an everyday word in an everyday world mistaking magic caught in the jaws of light on stage behind bar stools and secret destroyers.
Set to confuse the dreamless sleep pregnant with headlights in only a sweater flirting with rivers I run with a saint yes- tired- along the banks, roofs - music note wires-
The opposite of enlightenment is an envied edge and weightless drop into the emergency of brilliance…
The truth the memory the indecisions
snap my fingers sharp and starve an echo.
Vanished in the ecstasy bouquets of faceless hopes stuffed inside pockets
I spy the world in tongues found dismembered at the base of Babels tower
Unshaved
Uncooked
Placed in a pot
Terrified
I’m just an empty ghost convincing you how time does not exist
As you read this in my future, your present is written in my past.