Paranoia on Top of the World, Ma

Standing stoned on a balcony at Stanford, prestige in the ivy
climbing up the wall behind me and beneath the grates under my feet.
A doorway, more like a window in its aspect, to the back of me, unlatched
to allow a regaining of fraudulent residency by staying with the girlfriend’s friend.

Twelve thirty at night, doors wide open to design projects
and three-day weekend whiskey drenched witticisms
from the stiff upper lips of trust fund babies in such slack jaw
surroundings as a forest. Huddled in, four people crowd

a single with the sounds of bootleg Downey Jr. blowing it
as an all mumbles shade of the greatest detective, the one the Batman
was modeled from, on computer flat screens before loft beds.
They could afford to see it in theaters. Piracy indeed.

Laughing, thick without curves-girls in their earth tones stare curious
out at the intruder, with just the right modicum of malice swirling
in their sockets. Can’t help but sashay So Cal as possible with my hood
on like a carjacker. Fuck, I don’t care. I’m just trying to get back to the room.

Got lost, like the Donners, looking for that set of impersonal digits: 1-O-5.
Numbers that mean a piece of floor to borrow, thankful backaches
and odd dreams that leave you ambivalent the next day about these people
and the malaise that comes with money enough to have veganaise

as an option in the dining hall for a panini or a gourmet bacon maple log.

Concurrent New Year’s Resolutions from Birth to Death

We need to go to the gym, be balls of motion. Kinetic energy charged like Gambit’s cards, explosive. We need water, the translucent azure of 70% of your body bottled,
your new best friend. No more dillydallying with Mr. Pibb or Dr. Pepper. No more shilly-shallying with their bubbly countenances, their effervescence. We need rest, the sweet entombment of a pitch sleep. 8 glorious hours, unconscious and uncut, of rollicking, rolling, row-row-row-your-boat-lives that are but a dream-siestas. Like those of hombres slunk down covered in sombreros. We need to rape and pillage libraries barbarous. Double-fisting Fante and Vonnegut, chugging Plath not Plato while pounding down Ezra. We need to get out of debt with others and ourselves. Payoff the bottom feeders at the shallow end of the phone line. Extract our cancerous student loans from the marrow of our bones before they turn malignant. We need change, not as a platform but for a twenty. Shit, we need money. We need pro-active action, to get off our asses and just go, go, go ‘til we’re gone.

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/