Atlas

Atlas on the cross in the pit of my stomach, a ditch just like Sisyphus’, makes his march to the capital for his crucifixion through an acidic wasteland. A grotesque shimmering mirror ball of a world on his shoulders, soldiers of suffering shove his stress-induced gastrointestinal crown of thorns deeper
into the delicate pink contours of his brow as a way to keep things moving, the jerk
of a master on a leash. Spearhead of aspirin in his side tears a teardrop-shaped hole
that dribbles blood all ruddy to the earth being torn by a wooden post
dragged ever so slowly. Chained to a sphere revolting, not revolving, brutal and stygian.

Heading north this time, up and away from the eventual Golgotha of lower entrails, footprints of ash and fire up a weathered twenty seven year old esophagus, each an imprint of bipedal lava flow, each a reason to double over on one’s axis, to collapse out of orbit, in on oneself as the implosion siphons drifting debris, taking neighboring astral bodies out in the wake of a black hole of loathing all things biological and metaphysical.

One universe and its fate trapped inside of every single living body. Cells, particles waiting for their day of reckoning and atonement. For what purpose, what sins have been occasioned to coincide with such a processional of foe, fear and dread? Cloaked darksiders, pallbearers of hope, of trust, of the lust that makes life worth living trail this walking sarcophagus like animals sated on carrion flesh. They come! Roguish centurions, black-hearted well-wishers lowering the drawbridge of my mouth. Just like that, they cast him out into a porcelain abyss and I can’t say I’m relieved.

El Duende de la Lámpara

You’ve got no soul, when you’re the only guero on the block.
Mi duende es la puta. Kids with first names like Andres, last names like Aguilar
in the line for the shower in junior high, towels act as shanks. ¿Donde esta mi duende?
Lil’ Frankie and some baldheads jump you for pennies in front of a church. ¿Adonde vas, mi duende?

Girls, who smell like Aquanet, think you’re weird. ¿En mis manos? They come to school wearing lingerie as outerwear. ¿En mis huesos o mi verga o mis huevos? Your grades in classes where you sit behind them start to slip. No yo se, mi duende. But their breasts are so round and so new that you can’t help it. Estamos en la alma del Dios. First names like Yesenia, last names like Benividez that you caress before bed under covers. No se, duende.

So lost in a pervasive size 48 Ben Davis on size 28 waist-culture that you buy into your otherness. ¿No comprende para mi duende, las hermanas de los pantalones de viajar? You discover subculture, which makes you more of a target. Sus sangre es el miel por los lobos del amores con Tres Flores. “You dress like a maricon, chingon.” An esé will say. No se duende, amigo. They’ll befriend if you fight back and tell you to watch movies like Blood In, Blood Out. No se duende, chon chon.

They’ll say you’re honorary Chicano and invite you to barbeques in the park.
Tengo hambre por los niños de la mañana. You’ll eat potato tacos and their tio will aid you in getting boracho. Fuiste mi duende por la fiesta. Abuelita will sit watching a novela with you and wonder how people come up with these kinds of plot lines. Vaya con monos, mi duende.

Signal Hill Blues

Gentle leaf trickles apertly down Willow
near a swiftly bending tree branch,
glitter shimmers softly off moist Cherry
to force, to break, to blow and burn
or make me new. Touched myself, rather mad,
seeming to attempt to yield, not to seek,
strive or find. I swell, my gourd plump
for winter, a question batters my heart for you
and yet you breathe to inform, to relate the absurd,
to truncate the observed shine. Now discontent
attacks crudely and toughly screaming a vulture,
who ponders loudly, near sharp actors
of a mummers’ play, of all the western stars,
until I die a pretty green up there, up there.

Atlas...

NSFW video collage of two poems that will eventually be chopped up more before they are ever in print, enjoy and check out the rest of what Jaguar Press has to offer!: http://jaguarpress.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/209/

Baby

Her tum tumtum, his velvety time.
Good and deep, dipping down.
Put on the tongue, bury the rhyme
into the folds, into the ground.

Red rum humdrum, beg it to die.
In a little garden, it will be had.
Loud and hard, slipping down
in a little garden, it will be mad.

It will begin to stop Mother Nature’s magic clock
And everything will laugh and sing as if it were
a part of everything. So grab its wretched hand
and watch it expand, from life to death in a breath.

This angel with bat wings,
this creature you’ll come to love,
Red veined skin and other things,
this creature you’ll come to love.

Slayer's "Chemical Warfarre"

It gapes, this catatonic toddler’s mouth of a city. Rancid greens of purification
streak the sky all Impressionist, marking the lines that segregate and delegate
the flow of traffic in the throughways of the air we breathe. Gridlock

now antiquated, these oxygenated denizens roam where they want to,
all around the world. Their flight path an abyssal abscess,
but these lepers flying, floating freely through the cosmos,
cosmopolitan ideals stripped down to stars and garters, they feel

love like Donna Summer’s eve, douche! No gas masks, no respiratory devices.
Just pure death in shades of gaseous smiles swirling in thick vapors coming
for you, all over you, all over the land on a loco motive of smoke

in the way that tangerines

taste just like the way tambourines sound
all alone in the quiet of jaded stone, a pretty lime hue
like that above encircling, entering, penetrating us and our defenses.

I’ve come to watch your gardens grow, mouth breather township. Don’t disappoint,
don’t let me down, deliver,

deliver,

deliver.

The Drive In

8 red doors under a mosaic crucifix,
sacred heart nailed to wood flying

and burning red/yellow, red/yellow
like a phoenix. I saw them sleeping

smiling toothless on Phys Ed mats.
All right with being alive, OK? Okay

with 3rd and Junipero on any Sunday.
Drove past, away fast and clasped

the steering wheel hanging a louie.
Parked in the interior of Carroll Park.

Didn’t want to trudge by, upsetting
their sleeping. To my understanding,

there is some Romance in rationalities.
There has to be, that brand of Damage

makes a notch on us all in gray moods
under trashcan lids. Fear of shag carpet

grouches, green like kindergarten yarn.
Agents of the economy coming to pod

people us into submission as serfs and
slaves. Paranoia helping to fuck up a

parking job. Walked the extra minutes
home, looking over both shoulders.

Shelley’s Curse

Fall feels subterranean, Poet of the dead leaves driven like ghosts.
Arboreal hair loss tumbles across sullied , over-trodden landscapes
repenting replete. Dispatched, spelunking the depths, charged

with vital health points to battle mini-bosses of days that never
cease maturation, chained to love laborious, while the guard
has not been changed for some time, while we’re all under new

management.. And so do I, with my hair full of dead leaves,
let these flakey bastards take me through the dirt to be the satisfying
crunch under a child’s feet, the shitty chore under the same kid’s rake.

Drug ‘til bloodied, over terra so jagged, on a September morning
with the you removed to be just another day of decay, a plain one
unassumed. Not yet buried, exhumed to be exalted as Caesar’s crown,

brownish orange laurel leaves quilted complacence. Mere and mortal
garnered exclusivity in the soft simplicity, Seasons age as well
as the people who’ve lived them. Great, worse, great, worse.

Holy Fuck: A Fucker’s Prayer

There are no words other than Fuck,
a grandiose king is Fuck.

Decency: a propriety parapet against obscenity,
a less than great wall vaulted with ease by Fuck.

Reverie proclaimed on the tongue tips of whorish angels
and we say, “O, who is like you, our lord, our Fuck?”

Heavenly father, bestow upon us your kingdom,
give us our daily bred and our daily Fuck.

And we shall write upon our doorposts and gates,
enshrining the word, Fuck.

Master of the universe, bequeath your teachings
to those who don’t know Fuck.

Let swords be dulled into sex toys,
so all might feel the might of Fuck.

Let seas and legs be parted in the holy name,
the holiest of holies: Fuck.

Let Alan be a prophet unto believers in all things,
all things Fuck.

Bi-Coastin'

L A X terminal, waiting on a flight to Newark.
No one uses deodorant, locker room funk and rolling suitcases.
Tonight I’m steady people watching, an intergalactic observer
soaking up the mostly non-local color. So many different nationalities
waiting at these gates, characters from hundreds of stories in different languages, sitting
like a Rainbow Coalition in faux leather seats, reading Us Weekly and USA Today.

Could've sworn a man speaking one of the two major dialects of Chinese yelled

“lesbian!” in a moment of English clarity. Scottish grandma offers
a candy cig to a repulsed granddaughter, too young to realize it’s not the real thing.
Off duty yuppie in a suit, rumpled slacks, slumped down, Corey Hart nighttime shades

because his future is so bright. Fred Schneider in Buddy Holly glasses says,

“This is going to be fun,

this is going to be fun.” Poindexter in skate shoes reads Wired,
the cover story posits whether Craig’s List has been the source
of one too many dead hookers. Inquiring technophiles want to know.

My father sits breathless; he can’t walk five steps
without his stomach acid Santa shooting back up his throat chimney in retreat.

We’re going to visit family upstate. Albany in August, humid and damp. Sunshine shinning

through chinks in grey skies.

Bugs sound like buzz saws and sci-fi laser fire after the rain.

Butterflies flutter freely

without fear or worry about droplets weighing them down.

Nameless birds in the distance call to their children or lovers.

Cottontails scurry away from footsteps coming off

porches of multi-million dollar manmade

intrusions in this Endor-looking landscape. Simply put,

it just all makes me want to smoke pot. Nature encased in a burning Zigzag

and that's paper, what’s paper but trees,
these giant arbors reigning over this land
long before the people who own them now.
Just want to sit in their shade and feel my mind sink into a foliage-laden oblivion.

It's Out There... For You to Find

It's out there, a chapbook of some of my work. It's from here as well as there. I'd like to thank Vita Vox aka Marna for putting it together. Hit me up for one and expect more in the future.

Poets

Poets, I read them
and there is always more to read. An unfillable void,
a vortex of not having enough time. Life is not only short, but a progeria case. It grows older, but stays the same size, a distortion of the fullness of the generally held average of height, weight, width and overall appearance. Creatives live a doll’s life. Innards still grow old
and die. The body of work stays the same,
hopefully a carefully crafted carapus,
eventually a sarcophagus
of loves and laments, musings and music.

Poets, I read them and poet, I am one or at least I pretend
and play at it. Imbibing their midday Meyer’s Rum, white chocolate liqueur and soy milk. Gulping half the glass, I stand outside, weed-tipped cigarillo, sparked. Gray hot Long Beach silt under
and over my feet, covering and filling
the tiny crevices and ridges of my toes.
This soil is to dirt
and sand as a mule is to a donkey
and a horse. Yet plants grow
like the Lewis Carroll orchids to my left, who sway
light crimson in the breeze with indifference
over the spotty patches of grass, the ground’s pubescent attempt at facial hair. Going further, being wary
of spider web tripwire, I stare at the trap’s maker,
its engineer
and I wonder how does
this little eight legged brown thing
survive? How does it get out amongst all this? I know how it did, “they were here before us,” a voice says
as the brown leaf paper is almost
burning my fingers,
singeing the first couple of layers
atop the musculature and bone of my pointer, my index. Scrunching it into the base of a planter,
I dance across the hot gray Long Beach silt.
The mule dust’s heat, a test of faith and self. Rocks
and white dog shit in the noonish glare, obstacles
to keep me away from

poets, so I don’t have to read them, and a poet, so I don’t have to be him.

1003 S Beacon St San Pedro, CA 90731

All the drunks
and the junkies
and the crazies outside Beacon House
could fill tomes, scrolls and gossip columns
with all the shit doing the backstroke in their heads.

Acid washed theories and treatises
on our healthily unhealthy love of sin
and all the other puritanical nonsense
turkey basted into the collective conscious
of suburbanites, city dwellers and the hicks
shitting bricks out in the Styx
with all that old timey fire and brimstone.

Every time I drive past Beacon House,
I see someone new like brother man
in a red polo pullover
saying words unheard and unheeded
to every driver that scoots on by, trying to be incognito. Looking straight ahead attempting
to ignore what could be freestyle raps,
evangelical ramblings or regular, run-of-the-mill-bullshit.

I’m one of those motorists, but not before I pass him.

Our eyes deadbolts for that ephemeral spec of time
and that does nothing to assuage him.
Now there for that smattering of seconds,
there is an audience and I’m writing this,
I wrote this to prolong his exhibition,
his soapbox’s longevity just a little longer.

There’s no rampant urge to go back there
and search him out to Rotorooter his conceptions
of truth, love, good, evil and other such vagaries.
I’m content to have this as measuring tape
for my own battered semblance of symbolic normalcy
in the comfort of this mobile room I pay for.

Content to snicker and roast
as much as to be an empathetic voyeur
speeding away in a Corolla of secure separation,
the ultimate segregator between an us and a them.
The only way to see the world
without ever having to be there yourself,
just a submersible under the tides of psychic pestilence that is wrought like so much sewage runoff. I love what you do for me, Toyota!

Angxious

All but pitch, the bathroom has natural light
cascading like the most half-hearted trickle of piss.
The kind with as much pressure as an ant crawling
across unaware skin, in through the window over the shower.

The pounding is in my head,
like the heartbeats of Jim and David’s little China Girl, “loud as thunder.”
The digital green flash of AM 12:00,
AM 12:00,
AM 12:00,
AM 12:00,
the steady Indiglo metronome compliments and mirrors my conflict internal.

It, the woe, comes in flashes, the woe.
It screams don’t marry him.
It screams I am destitute.
It screams give up.
It screams let me put it in there.
It screams my kingdom for a cheeseburger.

With a hackneyed grip of either side of the bathroom sink,

I pray for sleep and calm.
I pray for solace and understanding.
I pray for closure.
I pray to the big fat unknown standing in the nudity of eternal darkness.
I pray for answers.
I pray
“just to make it today.”

Detroit Cock City

Like a chore, like a necessary evil in stagnant July air, I lift my balls like a house frau lifts a rug to vacuum beneath it. Death Valley asphalt heat rolls off, volcanic microwave steam wafting up into the darkness of the room, hot with two light breezes, one manmade and one of more of a natural origin. They sweep through the place as if they are afraid to touch my nuts and me; to give us the grace of their cooling embrace and they cannot be blamed. They’re just doing their job, albeit poorly.

My right hand, a mother’s cradling arms of thoughtful separation, attempts to shelter and give ease to the acids and bases-effect of skin-on-skin. Women thankfully will never understand what it’s like to have to peel the flesh of the sack off of an inner thigh on a night like this one, an experience not unlike and definitely akin to dealing with the most stubborn Velcro. Do it too fast and you’ve involuntarily waxed yourself. You’ll want to scream like hostages do in movies when the duct tape gags have been stripped off their faces.

Tal Como éramos

Memory is an apparition of attrition, it spends like tokens at a car wash or arcade,
pragmatic and purposeful or urgent and impulsive.

If it’s true then I’m a collector of ghost coinage. Folder upon mental folder, teaming with ducats and doubloons
that I thumb over
like a parent with a photo album of an outlived child.

Things you can’t get back, reeking so much of regret
that you can’t help but gag and choke up.
Emotional onion slicing, you know what fumes will do, but you push the cutlery on through anyway.

Nostalgia, an ambrosia, flows so freely that the damned inundation can’t ever hoped to be dammed.

The Girlfriend’s Birthday Party

Baked chums around a patio table, high in her backyard, contemplate the macro to the micro. Such deep discussions, punctuated with Simpsons’ quotations and other miscellanea shrouded in obscurity, are softballs lobbed so carefree.

Shake, the crumbs of emerald buds, stare up at us from the tempered glass surface as another joint is being rolled while the blur takes hold and no longer are we mid-to-late twenty-somethings still acting like teens, we’re kids with contact lenses of slurred imagination playing eye-spy around such a maudlin landscape or at least I am.

As if action figure were in hand, all I see are a miniature amalgam of a distorted metropolis, post-apocalyptic. Clotheslines, now power lines, stretch out into the darkened distance, while an old clothes hamper has morphed into a fucking skyscraper, the BBQ? A crematorium. Plant watering pot cum water tower nestles the neck of a water cooler bottle brimming with cigarette butts suspended in light tar-hued-nicotine swill. It has all the charm of a terranean sewer system; complete with an ashcan underneath as the foundation almost giving it the credence it needs to exist. This inversion brings itself to the forefront of conversation as a potential candidate for an anti-tobacco PSA.

We laugh the laugh of ages, a deep rumbling of seismic hilarity that shakes those around that know not of what we speak in our cottonmouth tongue, our humorous tremors carve more of an age gorge than just a gap. How to contend with the rollickingly recklessness of creatures like us is a talent they have yet to acquire. They look at us ancients in rocker suits, one even more different than the next. Fingers can’t be put on us and we don’t care. Makes us punk rock as much as it makes us metal as much as it makes us gangsta. It’s all just rock n’ roll to me.

Let them be uncomfortable, let them storm the backyard looking for mob justice. We will take these villagers’ torches and smoke their contents like spliffs. We will use their pitchforks as roach clips. They’re just not that brash though, they sit quietly with their good friend’s boyfriend’s friends, who’re my friends as I am the birthday girl’s beau.

She sits in a white dress, black prints of butterflies are scattered in equidistance across her petite frame. Our eyes are instruments of sex, while facial expressions are comically child-like and this balance typifies the union so far.
She’s drunk, but amazingly still standing. I would say tall, but she’s much shorter than me. Looking up into my face, hers scrunches in mock disgust like an overly discerning two year-old and I can’t help but love her all soused on Belgian lagers and blood wine. All other cares are abated and disappear as all the riffraff, hers and mine, leave and we slink in almost a low crawl like puppies into the pitch embrace of early morning.

“Every face in this town reminds me of falling down.” – The Murder City Devils

When I Go Back to Pedro

They all look the same, just older. Faces I saw at 14
unchanged but I’m unchained
yet the bonds to the town are intact
in fact I’m there more often than some would like.

Our lovely seaside black hole
swallows
more like a street whore
than some feathery reptile
revisiting Capistrano.

It’s hard to picture
the mighty T-rex
looking like the giant cock
on top of Slavko’s on Pacific,

his deep fried brethren
the lasting legacy
of terrible thunder lizards
in the hearts, minds, and bloated bellies

of Pedran patrons gorging in perpetuity.
Evolution’s a joke
when all we have is this
generation after generation

choking on potato logs,
belching out offspring
to work on the docks
to have money

to have more children
to have future longeys

forever

hens pecking aimlessly
in the shadow of the Vincent Thomas,
that green behemoth of a bridge.
More tyrannous and royal
than the fossils

we too will become.

Out to the Races

I dreamt that I ate your girlfriend’s pussy last night.
We were in the room of my childhood home
and she asked if I would do her a favor
and I tried to say “no” but she convinced me to keep going
and I started to work
and manipulate the tender folds of flesh, odorless
and wet.

She came in revolutions like racecars making checkpoints around a track, giving me
the spectator’s desire for an impending pile up. Her hips raising to signal the dropping of flags signifying the end of a lap, hers.
I felt her pressure against my face like it was real.

Fingers inserted, the heaviness tremendous,
enough to decapitate a deep sea diver
and as she came that last checkered flag-time, her clit,
the malformed head of her penis that never was,
got caught on the corner of one of my two front teeth
and it felt like chewing gristle. We finished

and I reared back to survey the damage, “you’re bleeding,” I said. The blood collected in a bead
against her still inflamed skin
and she said, “oh” as if she hadn’t noticed.

I awoke to a pounding on my door,
I awoke to no one beside me.

I like to help

http://thenoiseoftrouble.blogspot.com/2009/06/forward-four-word-forward.html

“I put it between my teeth like a dead mouse and let the blood drip down my chin.” - Gerald Stern

I Get Wet

Ferocious and feral? I’m peripheral. On the exterior of my own dreams, a starving vagrant outside of a baker’s window.

His patrons like to pretend I’m not there. Disheveled and tattered, an unsightly distraction. Salivation, as opposed to salvation, dribbles like a slow-mo Spaulding off cracked lips as that spit abets hunger’s codependency to hope, a delusion born of desperation.

For the price of a cup of coffee a day, I could be filled with an unspecified elation called bliss. No money for such a beverage makes for a hackneyed voyeur on the outside looking in, while the idealized occupants of fantasy still gaze away.

Disgust and revulsion disguised as mock pity hangs like spectacles on their alabaster countenances. They don’t want me to know that they loathe me.

Such a revelation is kept quite hush-hush and far away from the beggar or vagabond safely beyond the glass. Those who have attained what I want fear revolution constantly.

So as an actor on their screen, I have to bring the drama to them. To make them care, aware of the misfortunes of those still laboring in the mines of mediocrity.

First, I present the blade, one I forged out of my own self-righteousness. Bestowing it as an offering, as tribute.

Second, a ceremonial sword dance commences. All the trappings of tradition must be observed, because what would we be without it?

A spin here, a plié there and heads begin to turn. No need to make a sound, they can’t hear me. The long and hard straight edges of the saber strike out into the cobblestone night, eviscerating oxygen molecules like the kiss of a cool death blow.

End then bow, some begin to cheer. At that moment, I pull the shark sharpness of this killing bow across my fretless neck and bathe in my own arterial spray. My finale, my ta-da! My life for the corneal spotlights of those here in the present.

How to Leave Bill and Vanessa’s

Explosion!

Shark blood,
a crimson carnation
blooming
on the screen
in the Deep Blue Sea.

Movie’s over,
use the bathroom
one more time.

Walk in, marine foam
tiles glint
beneath the light.
Unzip and take
a sobering piss.
Woodland creatures
with demon eyes
hide behind
a bamboo shower curtain.

Finish up, shake it out.
Wash your hands,
white liquid soap,
an aloe plant
on the bottle.

Look around.

There is love spell
on the window seal,
Singer’s Saving Grace
and empty syringes
under medicine cabinet.

Dry your hands
on the white towel.
Walk back out,
dawdling equals awkwardness.
Say your goodbyes, trip out
looking for your ride,
realize again
that it isn’t your car
when you have
to manually unlock
the doors.

Ignition!

"For the Jew, the world is a cage filled with wild beasts." - Henry Miller

I Liked Tropic of Cancer, But...

Henry, that dirty old man dreaming of Jewess cunt,
describes us as defenseless lion tamers
gifted with neuroses,
tell that to those at Warsaw or Masada
or Judah Maccabee

or the IDF,
when you aren't too busy verbally spitting on them
like hippies on American GIs
at airports long since less picketed.

Without revolver or whip, gesticulations as effective as karate katas, bedazzling and inefficacious.
Fear makes them fearless.
Perhaps he was playing us up some,

but picture
Woody Allen done up like John J. Rambo.
Jerry Seinfeld as Indiana Jones.

Hear
Ben Stein as the voice of Darth Vader.
Benny Goodman playing Death Metal.

You laughed, I heard you.

Question though.

Does it demean the gentile as much as the Jew
to be depicted as creatures in need of breaking,
being made to parade
through hoops, potentially flaming?

Maybe. Yet when they look around a room, they probably assume that everyone is in the same ark.
Lambs huddled
two by two
by their savior shepherd, weeping
and gnashing their teeth.
Benny Hinn believers, telephone and credit card
in hand, ready to buy those indulgences
from stained glass Home Shopping Networks.

As a child, I went through a period of hating Jesus
for being our Judas, our Brutus. But like Morrissey,
I Have Forgiven Jesus.

Minus that cross to bear,
everyday’s a struggle
to step beyond the preconceived
and into notions less derisive,
devising ways to be

more,

more than just a penny pincher and a punch-line.

I've made gopher holes into Grand Canyons
searching for a quarter.

Truly, the only difference between pizza
and my relatives
was that they screamed going into the oven.

Guffaw for me, bitches.

Time would be better spent

devising ways to be

more,

more than weak pride backwards masked as deprecation.

Scaring and scarring
those who misconstrue our reversed vinyl record
of life in the Diaspora as Satanic verses
just like they did Stairway.

Oh, here is to my sweet Satan…

there’s a bustle in your hedgerow,
don’t be alarmed now.

Let me tell you though.

I've drank the Christian baby's blood at midnight

and yes, I do want my pound of flesh.

So bend the fuck over and don't squeal like trafe, would you?

Waiting like Lacerating

Scratch
and shake
and break
these arms
that hold all
there ever was.

Watch
and take
and sate
the scantily-clad
urges of bygones,
not so forgotten.

I’ve been looking
for
a means
of escape
from this
hand held nightmare.

I’ve been looking
for the slightest
mention
of a life
less caustic.

Searching back pages
of periodicals worldwide.

Searching the soul
I might not have.

Searching
and destroying
my mind,
a scimitar
of perversion.
Incising
with scalpel-like
precision
into the very taproot
of a solemnity
I have yet
to find.

The bulky blade
trembles,
much too large
for such
a delicate
operation
and I start
to wonder
if that
has always
been the problem.

Naked Integral

Eyes stretch and trace lines,

etchings

of some

ethereal

handiwork,

beauty

ephemeral.

Sacred

calligraphy

in the hard brushstrokes

that outline

the skin mountains

capped with coffee-colored

flat-brimmed fedoras,

adorning your chest

as signs of maturity,

eventually maternity.

The unseen hand

that formed them

must have quivered

as it joined the dots

between upper

and lower torsos.

Tortoise slow,

the painstaking

pace

to craft

fleeting perfection.

When the Bough Breaks

Saw my mother standing

by the car’s hatch,

she was done loading items

out of the cart, where I sat.

A strong squall came

and I felt

the wheeled metal move

with that gust then with gravity.

I was a toddler sitting

in the seat made for my kind

and I was falling hard

against asphalt

not a rabbit hole

as Alan, not Alice

in front of a K-Mart

on pavement without any hint

of a slant.

In Her Bed, One Night

She started to doze

while I

stared out

into the sky, then

we rolled

towards one another,

teeth fluttered over

by tongues.

Maw produced lubrication

commingled:

her nicotine saliva,

my cannabinoid

cotton mouth.

Hairy palmed

hands,

lecherous

tarantulas,

whose digits

blasted and banged

as their comrade,

the tongue, trickled

over

tobacco fume pussy.

Our new spit progeny

birthed

the caked tar

of an alluring

sludge sundae, a flesh flood

warning, lungs filled

with smoke

and slathered cunt honey that

screamed

lusty,

gutturally

symphonic motifs

triumphantly

trumpeted.

And yet thru the window, you could

hear R&B, faintly

in the distance,

low and distorted.

Some nondescript

FM diva

vocalized the melodious

crackle of a gentrified

genre bred for homogeny,

but it was barely heard

over

our din.

Saltwater-Based Pastels

I am tired, I am weary
I could sleep for a thousand years
A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears

- Lou Reed


Saltwater-Based Pastels


Paint your face

with love and grace, dear,

bewitching dreamily

the shattered smug. Sharpen

your prehensile pencils,

grasping your blanched canvas

for hopes of release.


The waterworks arrive,

florid salvos of colors

ashen, the rainy run-off

of human expression

carving future Grand Canyon's

of age and regret,

defiled deceit.


Purely emotive

Day-Glo dalliances,

these droplets of mania gush

ever driven, forever draining.

Deriving sense from delirium

found

in a clichéd heave of chest.


Eyelids wilt in twilight,

still life flowers

with swollen petals

whose buds blossom and balloon

into portals of perception,

ocular instruments which bequeath

a tonnage that’s torrential.

Blue Jean Reverie

Eyes stare, avert, stare, avert.

Islander flesh smiling,

peeking through

from a horizontal slit

in cutoffs, pointing like a finger

to the vertical slit nearby

that leaves one

punch drunk.

Hips sway, enchant, swain, enchant.

Sun baked pigment, the same

as everything else

visible and less sacred, but

closer to the cotton-covered

birthplace of all things

cosmic and karmic.

In we go

into

indigo, these vertigo transmissions,

cerulean, never certain,

always searching for something

to define the transitory effects

of a young girl in shorts

on this old man’s mind.

Heart sparks, crumbles, sparks, crumbles.

Crystalline

I like you better
with the lights off
in the backseat
on a dark street
by the beach.

I like to picture
in my head
what I’d prefer
you to look like
as you’re giving it.

I’d like to not
feel the dread of
knowing that
I’m a hypocrite,
superficial
like the ones
I can’t have.

I wish I could
transplant your brain
into the body
of fantasy.
I wish this
didn’t matter
that much to me.

Lorelie

The couch is crowded
with clothes and golden gift boxes,
the kind used to hide sweaters
from thieving eyes on holidays.
Wedged between them,
my once again attired form
has taken residence
while she sits

Indian-style, unadorned,
unencumbered by any covering, comfortable
in her paper bag carapace of skin.
On a single Easter egg pastel blue sheet,

which drapes over her divan
like a dust cover over a car,
like a slip over a stiff in a morgue,
we talk the talk of old friends
and not strangers.

Coco

Her mouth,
the elderly smoking section
of a Floridian Chinese restaurant,
is on me without asking
as her hand cradles my head
like an incestuous mother.
Old enough to be just that,
she barely speaks my language,
coos in my ear
these words I can’t make out
that sound-like
distant and distorted cousins
to the ones I know.

Melodramatic moans made
at the slightest of touches,
her skin is smooth
and smells like nothing
but jasmine tea. She stands
in a summer dress, carmine and yellow
like a South Western June
with my hands in her hair,
jet black, jet straight
as I sit on the table
as these arms are pulling me close
like women half her age have
when they have loved less sincerely.

A Fruitless Orchard

Everyone in my life is insane:
The men, women and children.
Have none yet, biologically at least.
But I’m parenting everyone
from my father to my best friends.
Counseling as both psychiatrist and rabbi,
doling out prescriptions and advice
when they all need me to talk them down
from whatever tree, window ledge
or altar of sacrifice
they have dragged themselves
on top of willingly.
Their instability eclipses my own,
I allow it and that begs the question
of who I should be mad at more?

In them there is a craving
for structure and order
often belayed by
a self destructive pattern.
Yet no matter how much
they polish and fellate
the phallus of chaos,
the worship is pointless.
Eventually backs are turned as they get older
and deny it at the moment of climax
like a time stingy whore would a struggling john.

Those moments are the end of gestation
for the epiphanies that teach us
that everything is an attempt
to crawl back into the womb from
sleep to sex
and asking for someone to care
about anyone else’s woes
is pretty much the same thing.
Any hope of stitching the chord back
between us and the peace
of existing in nonexistence,
the watery warmth of pre-birth
or possibly death, that was severed
on our zero birthday is shed. A waste,
not a pity.

Desipramine

The pill they’ve got me on worries me. They call it one of the “dirty TCAs,” tricyclic antidepressants from the first wave with all the bad side effects. So now, it burns when I cum, I cum, I cum, I cum when I do anything related to the sex type thing. Ejaculation AKA splooging AKA jizzing AKA creaming one’s jeans AKA the most pleasurable part for a man supposedly and I’m inches away from tearing up like a kid who touched the stove after Mommy expressly told him not to. With the sting of salt in my eyes, I wasn’t sure if I should get a cold compress or a Kleenex to mop up. If that wasn’t the worst, I spent most of yesterday without a hard-on for the first time in 15 years. Instead of staring around a classroom thinking about what the brunette, the actress, might look like without a shirt on, I was thinking about some morose shit like the futility of existence and how flawed the search for meaning is. My thoughts a carousel as they spun from the philosophic sublime to the pedestrian facts that I’ve had cottonmouth since I started six days prior and that I haven’t taken a good, healthy shit since two days before that. My nose has been stuffed up for about as long too and I can’t take antihistamines for fear of a fatal interaction. The anxiety, the depression and the stomach aches that it was supposed to cure are sort of gone. Mostly the tummy rumbles and I’m more stoner-mellow-placid now, but I think this is the most melancholy I’ve been in awhile. Speaking of which, I can’t even toke up, because I might go into cardiac arrest. So I’m going to the doctor on Tuesday and I’m going to switch to Prozac, a name you can trust from your mouth to God’s ears, Tom Cruise.

Another one like the other one

It seems like everyone has one of these. I've been on Livejournal since I was 19 or 20. I'm 26 now and I figure that diversification is a mighty good thing. So I might use this as an outlet for poetry. If you are curious about more openly personal entries then there is an RSS feed of my LJ underneath this.