Painfully fucking drab,

this place -

With Sky flat-ironed and stretched over everything like an old dirty sheet - a faded out milkblue and yellowed at the edges and in corners. The whiskey and the sunlight - it's all watered down and gritty, like you took a long drink of day from a dirty glass.

It gets in your eyes, this place. A slow burnt in film till the world begins to tarnish - like the old folks and their kitchen walls all stained up in cigarette smoke and grease....Godluvem.

And the trees here, they don't know what to do. They're all just waitin, mindlessly, like the line at the Methadone clinic leaned up on the sky bare skinned and crooked, one after the other after the other after the other. The business is conducted at the obligatory minimum, with menial half-hearted gestures that, somehow, hurry you along from nowhere to no thing.

Everything in this place, everything, it all seems to pour itself out so quickly, too quickly, moving in nervous quaking motions like Embarrassments rush-away to forget himself, or slinking around corners with eyes weighted down to floor by Regret, and her hoping she won't be recognized.

And the taste of this place. The taste, its so thin -

So thin I'm afraid

i wont ever remember you at all.

It seems I've leaned 

Too far 

In the shadows 

 again -

Just make me smile and kill me 

slowly 

Its leaving me

again,

this Wounded Old Sun

to die in his copper guilded Fury -

Bled-out and failed-wide

 against

smeared canvas 

dried in streaks of Crimson

                      deep embered Orange

trumpet fashes of Gold -

And all of this raging like a

 Lunatics Brush

on the western wall of the world

You -

OldBoneWarmer

            your belly full-up with AztecHeart

You sank with the weight of

 your own brilliance

 Didn’t you?

Old fool 

Pierced through the heart with

mountain tips

to drown

again

in this damp solemn Earth.

Even now

       look at you -

Just a dull brass curl of yourself

sinking furiously behind the far edge of No-Where

With MoonSister snickering quietly 

behind her grainy blue veil -

And still

Like some defiant child

you cast the last of your 

impotent fire

at the metal bellies 

of these dumb lumbering clouds

Id almost 

feel sorry for you

if you didn’t pull this shit

every single day of your Life

This American Truth of ours

we prefer both named and evaded

A holographic ambiguity

where depth depends

entirely

on the angle one has purchased

Even Christ Himself

stepped out empty from his metaphor

and now lingers forlorn and

restless at the edge of town -

Points an anguished

finger towards

Truth

 he’d be happy to sell you

if you could spare a little change 

We sat there on the bench beneath a streetlamp that hummed and spat in a steady electric drone. The little puddle of light at our feet that’d been flickering dim since we first sat down, now finally gave in and buzz and puddle both were swallowed instantly by the outer dark.

‘Look’ she said finally ‘its like this...the conciousness of a leaf has a sacred urge to be just that - a leaf. Right?’.

‘Sure’ i said, sounding as prickish as possible. I could just barely make her face out in the dark but could tell from her voice she’d had enough of my sullen company.

’Yes its simple. Yes its very direct.

But its not so much different from yours or mine. It’s a sense really - all this business of conciousness, like sight or sound.We see and hear just enough - just exactly what we need to to get by in our own skins. Thats how life learns itself. Its taken millions of years, but all the conciousness spread out over all the world, every bit of it, it all hatched from the urge of one single solitary cell. There may have been others before it, but that one was the only one that listened. And definitely the only one that answered'.

I didn’t respond. The puddle appeared again at our feet just as suddenly as it’d left and the streetlamp resumed its buzzing. 

 ‘Anyhow’ she said ‘one things for goddamn sure’ she took a long drag from her cigarette and stared out at some unknown point in deep of night. ‘If we all started out the same... if everything was born from some singularity sat way back there in the beginning - then its likely enough we’ll finish out that way too.’

She stood up to leave then, but just before walking off she turned back and stared at me hard for a minute.

‘I suppose thats exactly why my dear boy,’ she said, and slapped the boot dangled across my knee ‘your isolation is so fucking absurd.’

They tore it down i guess

it was

73 maybe

Or 4 - don’t know for sure

 I was only a boy then

and hadn’t yet learned to

scratch out life

in these deep etched years.

But 

America

was big in those days -

Grown-full with herself and

 propped up there

 fresh on the worldhead like an        

                    Iron Crown -

 Big enough she could take                      GodSteps

 backwards and

from the shallow end of

Nothing

 clear a live earth     to a dead moon

in

      OneGreatLeap

That’s why I’d say -

If i had to give some account of it

Why they’d have rubbed it out from skyline entirely  

without so much as a

streetlamp or hitching post left

to say it was there -

As though the town itself had been

born directly to that

slate-grey drab modernity -

Born and then served back

to itself

in hard blank cubes  -

Because everything back then

American

had to be as big as the

idea of itself -

Everything charged through 

with our own 

arrogance 

In that sense 

you could say it was a matter 

of destiny -

that the very nature of our

national identity

would’ve

 necessitated the need to 

wipe the old world 

out clean 

to make way for the

 NewComingBIG -

The Big industry

The Big bombs

The Big cars -

 Even the towns couldn’t 

bare the thought of 

small 

    especially the small ones -

 and the smallest thing in

a small town was

anything

Old

But who could’ve known 

in those days?

Who could’ve 

possibly?

Before the interstate

rolled its slick tounge out

over Appalachia -

Before The Walmart clawed 

itself

         up from the dirt like 

a newborn antichrist-

Before the tobacco and cotton was

ripped from the earth-scalp

by the roots

and the fields laid back 

thick 

with rolling oceans of corn 

and soybean

Before the TV screens filled our

homes and closed our doors 

shut

Before the Internet rendered 

knowledge 

arbitrary

Before we were all reduced 

to inventory

Before we were Big 

when we still 

free 

to...

...because god and love are words

and I don’t believe in any

word

I’ve thought myself through

this living enough to know that -

that all the words

I weave into

thoughts are just

pale smokes from dim flames -

impalpable

indicative of nothing

but the idea of    some thing

At best

Dumb hints of

              possibility 

Words claw deep -

They strangleout mind

and suffocate all they would 

Attempt to invoke -

So ive learned to  stand clear

of them who’d believe

in the smoke they speak

and breathe

or blow

in tiny boxes

to assign the world -

I give a broad passage

to them who’d

see shapes in smoke

for which to issue edicts -

or declare truth of the clouds

to raise

Up crusades-

Ive learned now

that smoke does not stick

or stand still anywhere in this place -

and the boxes

are always empty

when you bring them down -

Id as soon

shut my mouth entirely 

of this sooty filth 

Sweep my mind out blank

till the Fire i believe in

so Religiously

Rages

“I was born there sunk      

back deep

in the

hollow

of great things

              torn          away”

 (holds near to him still these dim embers - the only heat he’s not yet exhausted - the living memory he cradles through the cold like religion and is certain cannot pass beyond)

“I was spat out

in  the         deadstone air

of worlds

split

        open

like continents”

(the emmence blankness rolling out in sheets of ocean void from the what Was to the what Is - blankness lapping up time like a dog - leaving what existed between Now and Then as though never there at all)

“I was dropped like

lead

shot

between the wax

      and wane

where no drift flowed

 to catch”

(would’ve gladly set himself ablaze to light the new nations cold with Memorys old heat- if he’d  only been built of something more substantive -like tar -  or as alive as straw)

“I grew      here

in a watery sun on this

   bare rock

 grew and nurtured  

      with the old production

prepping its

close”

(though he feels himself, in fact, both the empty space between two edges, and the unmet potential of that same space filled, where might no edge have ever been between their birth and death)

                “And I bore   

 WITNESS

 to an altogether

 different rendering 

of

                  American

Ill be goddamned 

if i did not 

bare that witness”

(Who’s to say? How should we know such a weight? Or been pulled down towards earth with such)

“I watched and

my    

         heARTBLED”

(notions of failure? or such loss - even perceived? We don’t lest we’d seen what light has touched his eyes)

“this stoneyhEART  BLED

as they

   poured

            themselves out of this”

(and from what angle it touched them from- We’ve seen from the lofty heights of)

 “land just as they’d

        filled it-

Slow and

A t t e n t i v e”

(the destructors - them who come and broke it up for fun of it - for souvenirs - and we’ve seen from the)

“with Convictions

Proud Hand

THEY

   POURED         themselves

               out

 of this world”

(vast distance of these blank eyed inheritors of this impostor country we call a nation - but)

“one precious

vessel”

(to see from there with him - there amidst the dust and the rubble)

“by one precious vessel”

(from his childseyeview)

       “leaving now”

(holding his grandfather’s)

“where they once filled”

(weakening)

“only”

(hand)

 Always (until) Empty  (gone) 

                  Forever