I live like Ninja Turtles in the Sewers of Manhattan, NY, USA.

Ever awaiting Shredder in the Technodrome,
moving fortress affixed with eye atop it,
panic erased by patience and partying.

Episodic intrusions of disharmonious violence,
subterranean skateboarding, cement surfing, all
cowabunga, dude, radically bodacious. Eyes wide

under mask with the sensory wonder of it all.
The scent of methane mingling with the taste of pizza,
the sight of brick walls and barred waterways,

the sound of pipes and footsteps through puddles,
I can hear how cold the water is. I can smell age
in the wood and the chain of nunchucks

as they’re gripped between two fingers and a thumb.
But I am no hero in a half shell. I am not even amphibious.
I am ready to put myself on blast. This has all been a lie.

Suburban, blundering beach town baby, barely able to Ollie.
No stealthy maneuvers come midnight, can’t even eat cheese,
and no sais to shield this thin skin of a psyche fragile, exposed.

No lean green fighting machine, more likely found
in Dostoyevsky’s Underground’s dominion of obsession
and spite, no Giri: no honor, no duty. Still more assassin

than samurai, yet more burrito than Bushido. Hedonist sloth,
watashi wa namakemono desu. Oblivious to oblivion’s pull,
arbitrary arbitrations settled in the coded language

of the supposedly well-read walking dead, academics reveling
in the agony of their own dissatisfying obscurity over coffee or beer.
Deluded in deluge, a rogue’s rouge coloring their faces frustrated.

Disinterest, the castrator of notoriety, gestates. Ripening the need
to delve into tangential digressions on ‘88-’89’s mutant mania
for peaceable pleasure, for the fantastical pandemonium

of being cool, but rude in the wake of nobody giving a fuck.

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.