Z.S

This day has escaped itself

Into photographs of young virgins

Watching over a pale green ocean

Stretching out like a mothers hands

And breathing waves onto its glassy surface

Like a secret language of fear or acceptance.

I'm thinking about mountains,

Strange isolated places

Where hermits go to stab pin pricks

Into the evening sky

Exposing mercury or gloom

And drowning underneath a thousand songs of American beer

And decades upon decades of stolen sadness

Lining the canals of memory

Like abandoned train tracks

From a forgotten Canadian wilderness

Where even love is known

To stare questionably at its own reflection

Open mouthed and dumb.

In this waking world

I remember how you loved the color yellow

And would write ballads to the rain

For its generosity with the falling of each eyelid

I am not love

And I am not generous

I am simply tired

And looking for words

To speak definition into this persisting silence

But all I find is age

Descending from the medicine cabinet

And laughing at the birds circling overhead.

It's 1 am

And your breathing is so distant it sounds foreign.

How can I get used to this carnival

Of black lights and reverberated hums

Of nightmare pleasure

When you're so far away from me?

I want to go to a market with you

And smell fresh fruit and blood

And stale whiskey and drunken breath

And Barbican laughter and Camden punk fog.

I want to remember you as place

Or as a sound

Or as the feeling of falling

And I want you to remember me

As silence.

There are your legs

Way up there

Walking amongst the fat woman

And the skinny woman

And the laughter of woman,

The whispers and screams

Of purple pleasure

Coming down from that building

Like a bright red highway

And lying to the clouds

where are they going?

I'm drunk on margaritas

And my belly hangs over my belt buckle

In the sun and lips of this Monday afternoon

Youth

Stripped naked and dragged

To a place that looks foreign

While your lips seem to speak words

But all I see is a great machine of sex

Grinding and gnawing and moaning

Poems and grocery lists

And the names of men towards me

Like coins falling from the top of skyscrapers

When I was with her

I was Caesar Augustus

On a stained brown couch

I've been meaning to drop off

On the curb for two years

This is poverty

That moon up there

Is the same moon

That has spat down on me

Like so many times before

Walking home on drunken roads

Back to my yellow room

And breathing against my window frame

While I throw beer bottles at mirrors

And masturbate in the pitch black

To a sea of a thousand final conversations

About red paint and love.

Who are you in this waking loss?

You've seen it too,

Thousands of people

Stumbling towards some sleepless

Wavering idea of romantic death

In an iridescent Chinatown midnight glow

Or underneath a white church

Laying down beneath gods

Embarrassed smile

While the fat woman

With beautiful eyes

Dance with starving dogs and murderers

Like storms named after female warriors.

You've seen the hobos

And eskimos

And prostitutes

And presidential candidates

And professional sports bettors

Collapse upon this earth

Like forest fires on blood red world's

Spraying words of white light

And hanging trees onto these sidewalks

Where we gave up on fame and going to the dentist

And that moon is still the same old moon

It always was.

 In this tomorrow

        Or tomorrow's tomorrow

I’m walking down borrowed roads and screaming ecstasy highways 

Blunt pleasure and blinding gunpowder rain smiling down upon my slowing movements

Hunched over and aging against the hands of these naked hours

Roaring off the clock at the screeching redskins peeled raw and bloody

     And nailed to some evening sky overhead

Imitating a cowboys fevered visions in violent hills of arid western hallways.

I once belonged to this,

Daydreaming London poverty underneath the crucifix nailed to my stained kitchen wall

Now I belong to the memory

And big yellow bridges leading that way,

Towards the sound of sleepless passages and leather factories

Where only the shattered broken toothed starlight imported from Spanish love languages

Is known to fall upon the city scape without fear of knives or blue eyes

And wailing eastern tongues stabbing at the faint candle light of this dawn

Melting away like friendship or Alaska.

I belong to a crown of small victories and bloated sovereign regretfulness.

      Today I will buy flowers and vodka and feed sunlight to the ants in the basement,

Walk again with promised footsteps and smile at fat woman drinking black coffee in small cafes 

And I’ll rememeber fucking on patios or forests or brown couches or beaches or blood steeped beds

And suddenly death will be no more than a pear tree

Somewhere way up ahead.

Yes

what mercy

To wake up in this ethereal dim of suburban night

Looking down

Onto gas station intervals carrying me in and out of minor sufferings

Spilled coffee and word of 5 deaths on a backroad leading nowhere-

What becomes of those names is nobody's business. 

Ah, to have morning eyes,

To see past my labored breathing at the lovers and retired machine gunners

And my own melting porcelain disguise 

Reflecting red fingernails and death at the hands of stolen thunder

That was once buried into these borrowed skies

Coming down upon us like something we deserve.

On a day like today

I get this overwhelming sensation

That something immense

Is about to happen

I can hear the boxcars

And retired shoe shiners

Playing God

Underneath the blonde candlelight

Of the neon sun

Pounding their fists

At a sky that doesn't seem to forgive them

Driving home from the hospital

I see a beautiful barista

Or waitress

Walking home

And she reminds me of red wine

Or a place of mercy

That only undiscovered tongues

Know how to pronounce

And I imagine all the telephone wires

Strangling themselves towards western places

Carrying odes of her legs

To the wider readership

And a mescaline morning dancing

Over into what I can only know to be

"My day"

I imagine myself waking besides her

And her waking besides me

Talking about pretentious and boring and wonderful things

Fingering air that now seems heavier

Because it belongs to us

And I imagine dull mornings

Waking up with her

And feeling the blunt sun

Collapsing upon us

Exhausted

Underneath a sea of a thousand "fucks"

As I stare at a pair of her high heels

On the floor in the corner of my bedroom

Talking about sex

Like it's an image on a postcard.

No more cocaine

No more freshly squeezed orange juice

No more singers who can't sing

Crawling around on all fours

In their strange little orange rooms

Beer stains on the mirrors

Dying underneath satellites

And memories of old love

No more Mondays

Or talk of Mondays

Simply no more

The end.

There are beautiful woman up there

On top of the hills of California

With no names or faces

Just $500 velvet

And all American lightning

Looking down on me

While I sit think about Lightnin Hopkins.

There are dogs out there

Barking at the forgetfulness of a broken window

And what was the name of that woman

Who fed her flowers egg shells

And only ever touched men

Who reminded her of her mothers hands?

She's gone now

That's for sure

Maybe out west or to another mans memory

But today I'm thinking,

Coffee with cream and rain clouds

Fingering this sidewalk that once belonged to my teenage footfall

And when I think of my father

Who I haven't seen in so many years

Who's voice is almost lost to me

I think of the smell of burned coffee

And cheap cologne on the platform

Of a train station directed towards

More northern dialogues.

I remember being tired.

Now the day is a number

Melting towards me slowly

And my heart is beating in tune

With your pulsating sighs

While you sit on a red chair and read the newspaper out loud

And it's satisfaction.

You belong to a University of open mouths

And proud claims of having never

Fallen in love before

Meanwhile

Your sister moves through

The photos I have of you in my mind

Like shrapnel falling down

Upon some familiar lake

Like a vault of swords.

It's ecstasy and it's death.

It's distant

But not distant enough

And perhaps

It's Sunday after all.

Soft bones

And out of this window

Heroine music

Yellow howls

Yellow cars

Yellow fingernails

Cascading down

Like photographs of rain

Yellow moans and flesh,

Language of fuck and cum

And essays on the minotaur

Cigarette stained

Oil stained

Soft bones

And who's that?

Red hair with East Texas schmaltz

I wouldn't know who she was

Even if her high heels

Were neatly stacked in the corner

Of my bedroom

As I stared at the back of her neck

And listened to her talk

The way a lightbulb hums at dusk

While 8PM learns to become 2am

Gardens

And portraits of gardens

Mountains that belong to the memory

Children and day

And looking out of this window

At midnight

All of the yellow rooms

Look like gunfire shrapnel

Falling from a tired sky.

Trying to sleep 

The moon dying fast in that Northern place 

A man I see on my walks 

Keeps firing a rifle at the sky 

Claiming he's hunting the clouds into extinction 

But they just keep coming back 

And everyday He comes out with his gun 

And keeps shooting 

Wild eyed 

Suburban confederacy 

He's emptying his fears 

Into the attic of the Earth 

When I heard he died I visited his gravestone 

And it simply read 

'I failed'

If the old whores 

Who haunt the garage sales on that street

Where a biker gang inexplicably lives in utter silence 

Are to be believed 

It's the hottest day of the year 

Perhaps even the hottest day there has ever been 

The Canadian geese have long since arrived from up North 

And have taken the form of beige puddles of plastic 

Melting into the sidewalk 

And the clouds have retreated to the part of town 

Where children are commonly kidnapped during football season 

No names there 

No colors or whispers or strange sounds of modern love 

Nothing but shade 

Sad eyed women in hotel rooms 

Cheating on their husbands underneath broken ceiling fans 

Leaking moans through yellow windows 

That death has been defeated 

For now 

And all the ghosts from the federal graveyard 

Will gather together outside the house 

That leaves Halloween decorations up all year round 

But everyone will be too busy with their cool sunken dreams to notice 

Planning trips to France or New York or the dentist 

And before you know it 

Summer is gone again

The young lovers 

With backs turned on each other on broken beds 

Seem to be dying the way cactus blossoms die 

With starving buffaloes staring at the sun 

In the same places children go to cry 

The way their fathers taught them to cry 

And the cactus blossoms might think it's finally raining 

I travel North 

And then West 

Finding only long legs stabbing through the evening sky 

And pointing straight at me 

Making me feel nervous and guilty 

Waking up in the morning not knowing

Whether I just murdered a man on a beach 

Or if it was just a dream 

The radio is playing crazy train 

To see us through the winter seasons 

So we better stay inside and re paint our doors 

And fuck the way we've fucked a thousand times before 

Yawning at this idea of love While asking 

"Did you cum yet?"

Driving home

My lungs are barely working

And it’s screeching hot inside my car with no working A/C.

I’m watching the world 

The way anyone would from behind a glass screen 

With mountains of trees only touched by the sight of car headlights from a distance

And this big red sun, rare and shy

Slowly glaze past my vision like a turnstile 

And I feel a certain kind of sadness

That brings with it strange but important thoughts

Like when I leave this world 

I’ll be leaving behind all the wooden monuments and construction temples on the side of the highway that nobody ever seems to really think about

And all the big bronze men with plastic and tobacco in their heads

Floating unintelligible words past coffee steam and cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes

While infinite little me’s and them’s drive past to clearly very important destinations.

Back to make love to their wives or study for a test or train a dog to shake a hand

Or fight a cowboy bareknuckle on some suburban lawn over a dispute about an intrusive tree

Hanging over into the others property

Or something like that. 

I’ll be leaving behind all these odd little moments that seem to mostly consist of watching 

Instead of being 

Like watching a man standing by the open door of his truck on the side of the road 

Everything going by him

Looking all proud and uncaring and smiling to himself 

Because it’s Thursday and the evening is turning into a lazy golden memory of itself

And I feel proud with him for some reason I can’t quite explain. 

When time starts to move like money through the pockets of a whore

Instead of water through the fingers of a child 

It’s time to start appraising the little things

And holding them accountable for their worth in our waking moments.

All these little moments will amount to something in the end

Even if only a brief memory plastered to the brick waiting rooms of our minds

That we reserve for long walks alone or dying underneath a broken ceiling fan

Next to a fat nurse with a stained yellow thumb and powder burns on her forearms

With burning worlds dying out in the silent corners of her eyes.

Love will apparently save you 

And the road only ever belonged 

To the screaming light of the sun 

I see you 

In your bottle lens glasses 

And road kill resourcefulness 

Blinded by the dungeon days of your youth

Weeks and weeks

Folding in on each other like plastic oceans 

And soft forgotten voices 

You would never find in Israel or the dentist 

There are men up there 

Monumental and deadly 

With fish bowls in their skulls 

Underneath the eternity of silence 

Overhead 

Violins and knife fights 

Race wars and stolen water 

And they are watching over all of it 

I need to piss 

And I need to swim 

And the academies of tomorrow 

Aren't enough to stop us 

From spilling onto our hard wood floors 

Like gin and tonics at 7:45 PM 

Beauty is something to be afraid of.

Driving home from the city 

A bright neon green sign informs me

That fresh maple syrup is being sold 

Somewhere up ahead. 

All the cars going around me 

Look like little black corsets 

Dragging themselves away 

Underneath this sun that sits bloated

And arrogant lazing over me as if to say

"Better luck next time". 

It seems everyone in this western world

Is out and about today.

Every car park is filled up 

And driving by I'm looking at all the people

Eating ice cream in couples on stone

Chess tables outside of expensive cafes 

Or people walking their small German looking dogs across bridges 

And teenage girls waving to other teenage 

Girls with one hand on the handlebar

Of their sleek pink bicycles

And it makes me feel quite sad.

The girl I'm with and I are in the midst

Of what feels like a fight.

We're not talking and it's certainly

Because of something I said,

It simply must not have lined up

Now we're driving back in silence 

And she's playing shit 80s rock music 

Far too loud because she knows

It annoys me 

And all I can do is watch the world 

Look very alive and human

While thinking about where the fat 

Lonely girls with the messy hair buns

And waterproof jackets are heading to

On a day like

Today.

When we set out from that place

Marked by images of silent blue churches

And smooth golden tongues

Spitting gun light in that small evening

We set out with broken backs

And god hands hanging from

The attics of our failing youth

Wide eyed and open mouthed 

Past the silent armies and 

Whores bent over themselves

Like willow trees dying over

Into a red and open world

Of closed signs and the abandoned

Ribcages of liquor store silhouettes 

Yellowing into this morning 

That descended upon us 

Like a form of remembrance

After a long yawn of southern inspiration.

We kept moving and moving 

Until our feet spun below us like

Broken tachometer needles

Off towards a bleeding sun

and fuck off names 

And woman with anvils for mouths 

Yes

We were trying to find home

And years later I think we found it

And it has shit stains in the toilet bowl

And blood stains in the sink 

And a big fat white ragdoll cat 

Sitting on the kitchen counter

Waiting to be fed for the fourth time today.

I wake up to the news that the last honest cowboy on earth has died. 

Strange scenes of long Idaho Dust covered torsos dragging that bullet riddled corpse up and down the white light ghettos 

where alligators writhe in and out of empty beer cans within the iridescent pools of used up gasoline and the blood of wide eyed Jane Dos who died in mysterious excellence underneath the floating museums of forgotten New Orleans. 

Swollen dreams that imitate yellow nicotine clouds will be shimmering violently inside unwashed heads all over the nail varnish hotel rooms tonight. 

Old western dreams of Hollywood escape that barely breath against the warping window frames are leaking down in heavy sweat illuminated by neon billboard promises lining the concrete footpaths like sarcastic odes the crucifixion of countless modern Christs. 

It's raining abandoned wedding rings, silver halos crashing into the gutter view of ancient love parallels and running downstream past the closed blinds and failed first date flower bouquets of the university district. 

Waxy tear stained portraits of weathered prostitutes aging against the grand machinery of midnight are dying in magical ways in nebulous motel car parks. 

large pale hands and the moon is murmuring idiosyncratic solicitations over their depleted purple finality. 

There's a neo Nazi beating his wife to death in a pair of nylon stockings for painting the patio door gazebo-green in the midst of the hottest day of summer breathing dog piss northern wind into her broken jaw. 

Blue smoke outside left at the scene of a hit and run electrocuting the shoe box volcano community with the miraculous death of a small child while on the other end of town smoky eyed silver rib-caged Yukon strippers waver lonesome in the ham fisted light of the first day of man. 

Shadows cast over shadows depicting sinking libraries and wondering fleets of lonesome fatherless whores plucking their fingers raw and stupid in search of names carved in initials on the old oak trees where new lovers go to fuck for the first time with faces scarred by years of hopeless teenage tragedy. 

Empty names upon empty names desolate vibrating through the handsome olfactory organs of waking nightmare boxcar Wyoming searching for the angel in the attic watching over all the car rage supermarket brawls and oxblood wives drinking margaritas in malls on silent afternoons. 

250 lbs. toothless cops with latex tongues killing cop killers in gas station intersection sub states and cop killers with famous haircuts killing cops on apocalyptic negro skies with gun cracks that roar through the Idaho grass lands and into the peyote smoke of New Mexico desert storm memory where chain smoking atheistic cults retreat to commit mass suicide in the glassy Indian mountains spilling inky unintelligible words imitating general madness. 

They say some survived because they were too dumb to die and took off for Australia in the hopes of dying slow poetic deaths in video rental stores but when they arrived they discovered video rental stores no longer existed and in a collective stupefied rage began stabbing anyone who appeared to be wearing expensive perfume. 

The tabloids referred to them as "The dumbest cult in American history" and that's saying something. 

War Drums Pounding down the midnight rain 

          With greasy plastic hair And pomade sweat Dripping down his wax figure face 

                        Toilet water Gospel music 

             Vietnam veterans and sedated whores who sleep on their backs gather round to listen as if in a trance. 

All of those over sized moths in their purple sequin dresses and torn flesh colored stockings 

                      Race up and down the infinite strips with ecstasy in their Aquafina and a dirty yellow sun burning through their stomachs. 

                                                               'POOLSIDE ORGIES' 

        Hardcore pornography reflecting off the puddles Outside the X-rated movie theater called blue church. 

The taxi drivers are selling 45" snub nose magnums to strange balding men wearing tan corduroy suits in the bathrooms of sleepy diners. 

              The pimps just want it to rain 

                                                               And there's only one light on In the motel Just outside of town. 

Imaginary woman painted on my wall 

With eyes that lead To California gardens 

And they're crying For their loss 

In the wake Of the Vegas sunset 

Looming dull purple blunt 

Over all of the windowless rooms and blood stained pillow cases.

Race wars in bathrooms 

And waitresses being beaten to death In the name of rainfall. 

Lamplight headaches 

And water trucks on the morning strip. 

Everything is just as it as designed to be 

In the kingdom of God. 

There's a girl who works in a red brick drugstore and all of the lonely aspiring accountants and dental hygienists who retired too early who she makes love to underneath the orange painted railway yard anytime past 8:45 pm like to say to themselves "she's a lot of fun" or "she's a bigger girl but she has a beautiful face" and she likes to scribble poems on a tiny black notepad about wasps dying while fucking or about diseased bull riders from Oklahoma. 

Nobody in the town can tell if she's sad or simply distracted. She never seems to talk. Margaret Schreiter who owns the red brick drugstore doesn't even remember how she came to work there in the first place and the men? The aspiring dental hygienists and retired accountants? One minute they're buying blue Lexapro pills shaped like the faces of 80's talk show hosts the next they're thrusting exhaustively against her awkward torso and beautiful face underneath a graffiti etching of a purple swastika and the nick name of a local adolescent smoker who sells huffing enamel to high school janitors who name their favorite trees after names of prophets from the old testament. 

They close their eyes and when they open them again they're back in their beds with nothing but a quarter tank of gas and an overwhelming feeling of disconnection. 

Nobody knew anything about her but one day she was gone and for some unspeakable reason everybody felt ashamed to talk about it. Some of the men claiming they loved her walked into the ocean believing somehow if they went out far enough they would find her in their own reflection. 

Two of her former lovers both named Ted, one with a receding hairline who lived above a failing hardware store and the other a varsity quarterback with high cheek bones and a hatred for all female writers who's names end in "Ey" hanged themselves in their closets.

Margaret Schreiter developed agoraphobia and with nobody to run her drug store allowed herself to starve to death in her red leather armchair surrounded by newspaper clippings regarding the assassination of JFK. 

The drugstore withered away and became a squatters settlement for bikers high on mescaline making their way to Orange County and they named it "the orange house". 

On a Tuesday some week lodged between the years learning to descend from the calendar a native American rider who named himself 'fear the buffalo' got into a gunfight with the sheriffs department and lost with the menthol sky melting in his left hand. 

I could tell you she came back and she said something funny and unexpected like "I left to go to a college of failed first dates and phony coffee stained rituals but couldn't take the fake English accents anymore, what did I miss?" but I won't do that because it didn't happen. 

she never came back 

                      but to believe that she ever could come back is to accept the notion 

                                                                                                      that she ever existed at all. 

More bad dreams From the other side Of the crucifix at the end of my bed. 

                                             Lovers become slayers 

                  And drunk teenagers are murdering each other In 7-11s all over the tragic American frontier. 

                                                                                       Every man for himself mentality. 

           A drifter who the local kids refer to as God recently emptied the contents of his skull Into the bottom of a blue house 

                                                              In the dusty ribcage Of forgotten Massachusetts 

      And all of his ideas And dreams 

                                                                                                                                                 And agonies 

  Dripped into the basement and stained the corner of a wall with everything he once was. 

                           The basement spoke only when it rained 

                                                                                                   And only to say

                                                                     Even in death 

                                  America won’t die. 

Somewhere in a wooden basement 

Two young lovers share their first kiss 

While slow dancing to the howls of sirens and the moans of the ocean stretching out before the moon 

Somewhere in a wooden basement a child is being fucked In front of a digital camera and a sequence of strange, illusory men 

Wearing the jaw bones of dead wolves to disguise their hidden power 

Screaming mercury pleasure before tying a noose to a wooden beam and killing more than innocence. 

Love letters sound like rifle rounds In an empty forest 

And sometimes invisible sparks light wildfires in pitch black hallways 

Woven deep into the veins of apartment buildings 

Filled with desperate men. 

Tonight

Your body will slip away from you

Into the industrial districts 

And dance with whores who look like oil paintings of open mouths 

And car crashes in Canadian worlds.

It will murder memories of childhood

And tennis courts

And fucking what's her face against a tree in the summer 

And at last it's peace.

The ceiling fan is humming again in this English language 

And death is only a floating stain.

You look strange to me now, Mr. Castro

Like black and white portraits of forgotten poets on the back of books 

And names 

Memories of portable lovers 

Rediscovering themselves through your bedroom window

On a night you named

                                           "Western" and

                                                                     "Forgetful"

I remember watching you lifting your hair up and letting it fall onto your shoulders as you told me -

                                                                                                                                                                           "Gravity is free" 

While looking up at a thousand swords falling towards you like a vault of stars reflected off of stolen water.

                    When you wake up

           We can go to all the places where escaped convicts go to write love songs about Mexican oceans 

Or women who escaped into Southern dialogue 

But right now you're sleeping next to me 

                                                                                   And I can hear I left the kitchen tap on. 

Tomorrow I'll see you as a stone garden

Maybe as a photograph of myself 

              Drunk and alone 

Underneath some foreign lightning

Lighting matches and throwing them into a metal trash can 

And calling it 

                                                          "My personal sun" 

                The truth is 

You could be the smoke over Manhattan if you wanted to be

                You could be all the secret words stolen from the mouths of naked woman 

                                                                                                                    Fucking flower vases in the months leading up to summer 

                                                       Writhing around in porcelain bathtubs 

                                                          Screaming at the stars 

                                                           That seem to break themselves just for you 

                                                             But you choose to stay here 

                                                                In this town where nobody dies 

                                                                  So today I'll just be grateful 

                                                                    You're sleeping beside me.   

And now it's day

I step outside and let the light fall down upon me 

                                                     Like jazz

                                                            Or the red silhouette of a memory on that mountain skyline 

                                           Or maybe it's a ribcage that belongs to an ocean of names 

                                                                                                                                            And green eyes 

Merciless 

And watching from behind the clouds. 

                                                                    It's nearly winter again and there are sounds all around me 

                                                       Like whispers 

                                 Great conspiracies' of imported snow 

                        And bland conversations about Connecticut.

A woman I once knew told me to wait for rain 

And her hair hung down her back like red violin strings 

While she gave cream to my cat 

And in her reflection 

I saw the hands of a thousand men. 

                                                                                       She looks like the evening 

                                                                         But something tells me she'll never know that.   

I'm sorry you married a dick

And I know the days don't burn like war fire 

Now that you're not beautiful.

You once told me that days are like windows

Looking out onto a great migration 

But now it's shopping for shower curtains that match the rug 

And water is just tap water

And God is no longer the burning cathedral signing the sky blood red with your name 

And the moon is no longer blue

Just ghostly white 

Like an Australian absence. 

You're slow dancing alone in your pale little living room 

Replaying the word marijuana in your head like a breaking carousel

And imagining warm young hands wrapping around you 

But really 

It's just Canadian winter outside 

And not much else. 

I'm sorry you married a dick. 

Two black dots staining the horizon 

Could be roadkill 

Or motorcyclists 

Riding towards the collapsed lungs 

We never see in our dreams 

But feel in our waking car parks 

And factory states of mind 

Passing through this evening

It's abandoned barns

Screaming at the traffic 

And unwanted 

By the ancient men long since dead

And watching 

Over the tragedy of the highway 

Wearing straw hats

While apocalyptic acoustics 

Hang over the moon 

That looks so foreign 

Over the Canadian forests 

In this midnight 

The whores in their purple sequin dresses 

Look like stolen jewelry 

Floating downstream in lake water 

Amidst laughter that isn't quite laughter 

Descending

Upon woman

And dogs

And trees that nobody bothered to name 

And a thousand years of gutters 

Lining the streets like corduroy suits 

When the sun comes up

The whores are gone 

They become dock spiders

In Northern water 

Or severed hands

Hanging from tree branches in Oregon 

Or spray painted murals

To dead presidents 

Overlooking the highway 

Sad yet beautiful 

In the bleachers, at 5:46 am

A high school quarterback 

Fails to get an erection 

While trying to fuck a chubby 

Daughter of a paint salesman 

And it is their chaotic youth

That keeps the garden flowers alive 

Through the winter 

While lime green trucks 

And broken down black civics 

Crawl to the factories

Crying into grey skies overhead

Clipper ships are sinking

The way families sink 

From childhood photographs nailed to kitchen walls

And all around you the agonies 

Are the same 

Raining down from prom dress clouds 

And as predictable as they have ever been.

And out there 

Is a sea of ruin

Out of this window

That looks out onto 

Presidential landscapes 

And statues erected to commemorate 

Teenage boys who hung themselves 

In small rooms or shoe closets.

I'm thinking about the year of the dragon 

While the sky collapses into evening 

And all of the beautiful woman 

Walk home from somewhere 

With their tits swaying back and forth 

In their flannel shirts or mohair cardigans 

And their hips moving from side to side like

Gunfire exchanged under water 

With an agonizing certainty 

In their evening eyes

While Turkey vultures circle overhead 

And Las Vegas is just so far away.

And in this ruthless passion

There are words 

Spoken across this English jaw

And shattered Canadian landscape

Known as memory.

Yellow roofs 

And whispered conversations 

Bringing life to these empty roads 

That surround us. 

We are fools

But fools together 

Dancing and fucking 

And shooting gunfire 

At this undeserving sky 

That fosters such apocalyptic 

Tenderness over us 

Like we deserve it

For a life lived hard 

And remember

dying is only dying

As long as it is done quietly.

Walking down 43rd

Past moaning woman and dying dog

Screeching vodka wind and my face

Plastered across the lakes of some inner thighs 

Sprawling out just for me 

And God whispering through vinyl rain

And reaching me through this artificial blonde of humming streetlight 

And ecstasy becomes the big fat sun 

Bloated and boastful and tireless 

But I have things to do

Past the places of pencil thin mustache 

And gin breath and heroin brown suits

And into the night

Black night 

Hidden underneath the great big bat wing 

And stars shimmering big blue murder

Down down down 

Like pistol ammo gunning for the ground-

Jazz is dead

The dentist is dead

The anemic blue whale is floating dead across the Atlantic like cigar ash on a beer puddle 

While gangs of bankers high on airplane glue dance in paper hats 

And fuck each other against Champaign 

Colored mohair carpets on Christmas eve.

Bliss and the agony 4:45am-

The music stopped 

A child once again underneath these naked yawns of mourning and numbered breath 

The rent is due and my teeth are twisting 

Inside my jaw with roulette precision.

This is my kingdom 

And I keep my yellowing bent memories 

Locked underneath the kitchen sink 

Next to the bleach and garbage bags.

Yes, this is goodbye-

Goodbye to the red candlelight evening 

Goodbye to the afternoon shits that leave stains in the toilet bowl 

Goodbye to the long country fed legs of Canada 

Goodbye to Buddha and the drunken saints 

Goodbye to the crying mountains 

Goodbye to swimming in warm oceans 

Drunk on lake water rum with sand in mouth

Goodbye goodbye goodbye

She feels lonely late at night 

Only ever late at night 

When she sits on her front porch 

Watching the beetles 

Climb on top of each other 

And the bulls silently lick the air 

And the horizon dip over the mountains 

Into a grey and beige monologue 

Dancing on the tombstone 

Of  a tangerine sunset.

Tonight she'll go back into work 

And that same guy 

Who calls himself "Red" 

With the milky film over his left eye 

And a stump where a hand once was 

Will aim a gun at her head 

While he jacks off into her hair 

For an extra 5 bucks.

He claims he killed 4 gooks in Vietnam 

By throwing a mine at them 

While they were bathing 

But he's harmless 

                                                                          I think

Sitting here

Amongst these undiscovered thoughts

Next to plants that look like flowers

Which upon closer inspection

Aren't flowers

I can't help but think of mercy

Sad tears punching through

This bruised sky

Curling up into the color

Of a sorry Germanic face

And waiting

Hopelessly

To get caught

For a crime

I most certainly

Committed.

The moon

Is spraying down

Government orange 

Like a memory 

Of an abandoned gas station

Burning triumphant 

And sorry

In the heart of Middle America.

Soon the beerlight of morning 

will remind us of the word

Ordinary 

             Again. 

It's summer time in the towns of never sunrise

Where the fields never seem to feign the touch of mornings glow 

Shit out by this Canadian sky with northern ambition. 

The farmers with faces stained by years of hard labor 

Are buying paint to pass the time 

Because they have nothing better to do

And money made to make up the minutes long divide 

And the feeling of former happiness stays with you like a military tattoo

And all the tress you pass look like something you used to call home

But "home" travels too much 

To be identified in the literal sense. 

Nothing but the memory to invite the shade

Nothing but brow eyes to remind you of your loneliness 

Nothing in the evening drunkeness but drunkeness 

Where once the static stood between your blue velvet thighs. 

The blue eyes are lying to themselves 

And the poets dying of loneliness never lost it.

The atmosphere is screaming 

And sweetened to poisin the silence.

Screams and screams from pink lips 

Falling down like dust on Gods deaf ears

But they need it

Don't they? 

Are we forgetting what it means to suffer on the back of times empty presence? 

Or have we camouflaged the suffering 

To look like some factory promise.

Teenagers are fucking their limbs against each other to mock death 

And faceless men lie in shallow graves 

Overlooking the corduroy fingerprints of Orange Valley 

And everywhere in-between the lightning 

Over the purple highways 

Wanting is being mistaken for needing 

And the stomach is always empty. 

Sex addicted teens 

With mouths like wolves 

Australian winter

And lucid iridescent dreams glowing out of that Australian winter

Hidden by the blue and toothless sun 

Grinning down and making promises,

Strange and silent deals with imaginary woman with long pink legs 

That seem to stretch out and say 

"Go that way, go towards the sound of laughter!"

Stories upon stories of having been fucked sideways 

By men and men and men 

And how creative they were with their hard purple cocks.

It's all so harmless 

Because it no longer exists.

Your pussy smells clean now and your eyes look brighter,

You truly did make it

To the other side.  

Who is the Holy Ghost of New York? 

Poisoned by the color green 

Watching the devil cup the murder in the city 

With shaking hands. 

All the leaves are abandoning paradise 

And the rain is starting to take the form of broken letters

Descending from broken languages.

The Phone is ringing off the hook with news of killers

Making a pilgrimage to the desert

Constructing key bowls out of the skulls of high school teachers  

And selling them to insurance salesman with manicured red nails

And wives named after muscle cars. 

They'll go back to their country states

And dance naked through the front gardens belonging to ex senators 

Who retired to paint portraits of African orgies silicone tits shaped like pink corvettes  

And everyone will know 

Summer is finally coming to an end. 

Put your failing hands out

And they will be met by embarrassed rain

Down on it's way to the places of rats and mice and cows and long moans from fat woman orgasm through cracked window or rocking station wagon.

The scene is this-

A house on top of a large green hill

With a gentle sloping wind more visible than the grass and a sun just behind the roof top peering over raging orange and expansive vistas of vibrating blue.

A house just like any other

In this one a long tan trench coat hangs over a long brown banister

And three unoccupied chairs sit around a small glass table in a disorganized forum

As if to indicate some group was here and left in a slight hurry

Wine stains and unopened jars of jam hide in the places the silence hasn't quite yet punctuated with stagnant gloomy visage.

To tell you the specifics as to the significance of this house would be meaningless

A man who dreamed of going to live in Santa Maria

With the mountains and the year long ocean and the summer that stretched out before the calendar like long blonde legs

And he would go there with his mother

And poverty would be the fog of a London morning

But death visited

And death left

And in the moments in between

Tears in the bathroom sink and basement apologies

And suicide in the blues of his eyes

Silent to the world outside

And silent to the houses just like his

And silent after the crack of the gun that sung to the hidden unpromised distance

Of 45

This is a story so obvious you won't cry reading it

Because you can't carry his death to the store like a newspaper

And you can't carry his name to your tongue any easier than you could recite mars

Once chaotic

Once undone

And sex

And love

And natural green things

Are dead

Because he is the death

And he is you

The final scene-

An empty bed

Once inhabited by laughter

And crying

And jumping joy and morning smiles

And evening silence staring up into the black black ceiling fan with thousands of thoughts swimming up ahead on a long red leash

What felt like a thousand years of human life

Is now a bed

unmade. 

Through my failing foreign love I see

Oceans dying honest deaths

Behind the red brick places in the blues of your eyes where you once silently beckon me,

We can talk in knife slit tongue

Like words shot from decommissioned guns

Wildflower skies dreaming their way past your bedroom window on this afternoon or that tonight

While all around us imported snow falls in all the countries you imagined into my colonial gloom and federal glow

But today is today and we're breathing on this road

On our way to yet another grey slab ash tray city scape

That falls around the places we know to be home like prom dress sequins that disguise all the Gods that sit fat with hate watching down with smirk and grin and arrogant gum

From some guarded garden state

And to your ribcage!

Your ribcage looks like a broken violin

Beautiful and blunt

I don't know how to play you yet

But keep you close for the illusion of fun

Something I will learn after my list of "things" to do are done

But never seem to be quite done

So for now the sight of your cat gut strings

Sitting amongst all my other undiscovered things

Varnished

And cured

Like abandoned wedding rings

Will simply have to be enough 

Riding down mescaline strip

Glowing fuck light bursting out of steel and teeth

At me

All at me

And my green green money

And there is a nervous response from stars

In the xanadu chandelier ceiling of night

Like radio static

that's dragged over this

Waterless place of dying cat and pin stripe suit

In and out

Taxi cabs carrying murderers and loveless Sopranos past us and gone again

As fast and as deadly as lighting bolts

Driving like machine gun rain

Meanwhile my head is all cotton candy and vertigo weight

It's all so pink and sleek and long legs directed towards amphetamine tongues

And there are overly chlorinated motel swimming pools behind the eyes of all the woman you'll meet in a place like this.

Tangiers and buildings shaped like famous buildings or fresh fruit

These walls are melting and the freaks of the 70s are the blood streaks that line the sand of the desert that keeps creeping inwards

Like aces and snake eyes and broken thumb.

We're not supposed to win

And true love is simply the name of a Hollywood cocktail with a small umbrella hanging off the rim.

Don't believe in soulmates

Believe in quiet

Don't believe in hope

Believe in struggle

And learn to be good at it

Don't believe in people,

Just don't believe in people.

Don't allow yourself to become a dick.

Look at life with a revolver in hand

And scream at the forests for your loneliness

Scream at the trees for their constant indifference

Scream at the fat woman of North America

For never learning how love

Scream at the mirror and blues of your own eyes

And the stains on your walls left by her or him

Or that

Just scream and go mad underneath God and the weight of lost nostalgia

Because that's all any of this is worth

The poems you wrote for all the woman you wish to forget are burning like Morocco and you dont even know it

Your mother is dying and your walls are closing in and the rent is due and you never got those oil paint stains off the wall of your shower-

This is the nature of being

You are just one screaming bullet

Bloody and small and gore

Crying past blind eyes

Indifferent

Towards the waxy dreamlike blue in the sky

All agony and instant

And gone.

The final mantra:

Just get up

                 And go.

End. 

This is my summer day

Presented to me in passing like an image on a billboard or a song being played in the distance of hallucinatory winds.

This is not an ode to Rimbauds arrogance or Arthur Miller's frown.

This is simply my acknowledgement of another day just like thousands that came before it.

I'm driving somewhere

Maybe a grocery store or to walk in a forest

And all of the front lawns have what look like small white pages

Battered

And strewn across the grass

And nobody seems to pay any mind to it.

I'm imagining they are love letters belonging to some poor fool

Who lost

And in some poetic attempt to relinquish his failing tragedy ripped all of the letters out of their rightful place and threw them to the suburbs as if to "feed his sadness to the moments of the day the way one would feed mouldy bread to the mallard ducks in the lake".

In reality they're probably just leaves

And although I often see the sun as one huge blistering orgasm moaning down upon us in an infinite sigh while I'm looking up at the lightbulb in my bathroom while taking a shit

I can of course recognize that it is in fact

Not that-

That all of the things that surround me

That I allow to add poetic definition to my waking moments

Are just as ordinary as their nature intended for them to be

And perhaps that's what most of life is

Inventing definition into indefinable banality

Placing a price tag on its ability to distract you from grey feathers and Sunday evenings

And leaving you again

With an exit wound and stolen sentimentality.

In conclusion

This poem is an ode to some-

To the poets who don't masturbate onto their bellies and call it "white wine" or "Shakespearean",

To the failure of 25

To the sinks in my apartment that won't drain

To the seasonal loneliness of Alaskan clouds

To the final whimper of dying dog

To the pills in my medicine cabinet that make it hard for me to get a hard on

To the ex lovers of mine that once swallowed my cum with utmost enthusiasm and now respond to my name like a mosquito bite

To the fleeting notion of love that crawls on my ceiling like a big black fly, laughing at me in a yellow yellow laugh

To the unpaid bills sitting neatly on the blue chest in my bedroom

And to the absolute hatred of all of it

And much much more. 

That sun up there

Has been communicating down upon the earth for far too long

Now my arms are red raw and flies and insignificant things of wings and stings

Are biting at my flesh as I piss down the quarry

Pissing and alive and drinking coffee with an ex lover talking about van gough and niplle piercings

And I'm watching the swans wash themselves with all the obliviousness and arrogance one can only get when devoid of the knowledge of Germany or the dentist or certain death-

In my life I have heard so many woman

With hammers for tongues

Breathe words of love and infinity and breathlessness into stale air and lick it back up again

yellowed and disfigured

Words spoken a million times over with our backs to grass fields looking up at hopeful evening skies of impossibly good fortune and ecstasy

And words driven at me like nails or bullets or cannon balls about in laws or money or debt or boredom while leaning against blood stained pillow cases

And it's all so beautiful and benign and I miss it

But I'm being watched always

By that big black dog that disguises himself as woman's hair or light residue shitting down upon our world from the dead stars broken apart and lonely over there somewhere

Yes it's death

And he's in the back seat of my car pointing finger guns at my ears and smiling like a papercut

And he is neither an enemy nor a friend

Not a fantasy derived from silent dens of green eyes

And not the lingering hopefulness of youths naïve passages

Through motel jaws and vaults of white light beckoning the break of a lasting moment

Through the long yawns of yesterdays gone

Just war in the wind

Echoing gun cracks and dead deer leaping for dear life but with no luck and throat slit,

Now,

You reading this

Just think to yourself

And ask yourself

Are you really beautiful?

I, for one, am not

I am a blonding and curdling reimagining

Of my mothers labored sighs

And my father's big ugly blue legs

But you will probably say that you are beautiful

And maybe you are

And maybe looking at a crucifix nailed to a beige wall would bore you, wouldn't it?

Maybe the mountains stretch their aching backs out across the beheaded and sinewy midwest nowhere just for you.

Perhaps that's what you imagine looking through your window where a small graveyard sits cross legged over there in between some willow trees and fentanyl patches and it's called something like "New Hope Cemetery"

Well

There are some cemeteries where only famous people can be buried

Or only people that died in Paris

Or only people that never used a cell phone

Or only people that never hit puberty

All these cemeteries

Like quiet and merciless gangs

Don't want you

But right now you're beautiful

And Jim Morrison was just "unlucky"

And the word cancer is just a bug named after a flower you can't quite pronounce

And your boring little legs could carry you to Istanbul if they only knew the way

And me

In my long and familiar reflection

Can cry tears that drop into my bathroom sink like bouncing Betty's

And I apologize to all the birds I've hit with my car along the way

Because right now there's no new jazz in the air

Or wild eyed artists drinking paint in the gutters of relevancy

Or pimps riding east or west towards Mexico to have sex with children while high on Benzedrine

For all I am overcome by is Canadian trees

And vending machines that sell live bait

And clocks that moan at you through the hallways like tired midwives

I dream of a bomb dropping or God returning disappointed and bloated

And I dream of then

Those dusty elbows of then

Of youth 

Because now has become a sinking garden

And I've grown too tired to steal the flowers. 

Tonight

Sitting on the edge of my bed 

I'm wishing for mercy wind 

To come down onto my windows and broken car

Like smiles from the superbowl 

And speaking of superbowls 

Through my ripped up window space 

I can make out the slow and tactical movements 

Of a once great quarterback shuffling down the road-

He still has hair that he slicks back with pomade

And he still has fuck off broad shoulders 

That are slowly losing their battle against gravity-

Wine stains on his lips and a dirty dirty brownish dog following close behind him in seemingly ashamed canter.

Today, as I got undressed in my bathroom

I looked down and saw a centipede crawling out from underneath the floorboard

And I squashed it with my big toe and proceeded to shower.

I'm thinking about all of the poets who died before anyone read their work

And I'm thinking of lakes of fire hiding behind the moon 

Untouched by any naked bodies

Sick and in love with it 

And of the smell of my step grandfathers fig tree

And the big fat spiders that lived inside it

Namelessly and as dead now as the poets nobody bothered to read

There's no secret or meaning to any of this.

The birds up on the telephone wires

Looking for roadkill 

Are not much different than the youth of America 

And there's a holy glow falling down upon the countryside like curtains falling from purgatory 

In this strange summer heat 

That I'm passing on my way to work 

And watching videos of foreign North American 

City scapes in the evening

Belonging to the past 

And belonging to places I'll never go but look very familiar 

Im filled now

In this moment 

With tremendous sadness and loneliness 

And dislike of life 

And the dancing shadows that run down past me

Like children playing 

Communicate to my movements like muffled laughter behind a glass door-

Silhouettes of beautiful woman on bysicles and cherry blossom trees and purple skies that emit a gas station glow fill my field of vision now at 25-

The grass is green because it's envious 

And apparently there's a lot to be envious of 

And I've seen so many dead faces

So many 

Laid out and disfigured and uncomfortable.

Some had heart attacks and broke their teeth during the fall in such a way that they now look like rabbits

Some had panicked yellowing eyes locked into that final moment of fear before death 

Some look too dumb to be dead but are lucky to be more dead than the rest 

I've seen this army of death in the basement 

And that will be me

Naked and damp and sticky and another job for another man 

And it's all enough to make you want to sigh to your stomach and back to the pupils of your eyes- 

I miss nothing 

Because I already had it

I already did it 

If life was a gun 

I've already emptied every roaring chamber 

Into an attic of cloudless skies I couldn't see

And now it's quiet 

The gun now lighter in my hand

And my parents raised me better 

Than to cry over that.

Your ring stretching out towards me gladly

And I will gladly receive it 

I am sick with the shades of green and purple this summer is producing 

It feels almost violent 

And all the eyes I pass on my walk through the suburbs are wretched with suspicion and distrust 

Like I am the grand inquisitor of a town born without a moon to mock their evening emptiness 

We are all sick with something,

Travelling towards golden light and money money money sitting for you out their with legs spread

Sick with the desire to speedball into a heretics death like some soldier of fortune 

Fighting fentanyl weight on a futon he borrowed from his mother. 

Go down south and you will find care free woman who were birthed from sloping hills where exiled clouds watch resletlessly over their fucking disappointing reality 

And go up North to find quiet,

Whatever you desire 

God with gin in hand and God buried underneath your breast pocket 

More pills than a horse could take and in my sloping retard slump I have London folding underneath my filthy fingernails and all of the old friends I once hated looking up at me with ugliness in their creasing faces

In my life I have been a spectator and my mother says she is the invisible woman 

So what sword would fit our hands in our battle against nobody? 

This thing that I lack 

I lack it well 

This absence in the glowing hallways of your dying vision 

Mark's the days spent on days of hopeful ambition

This thing I lack

I lack well enough to laugh mad at in the mirror

This thing of love that crawls away from my world on all fours like an ill one 

 I remember train platforms in London and Cambridge that were numberless and dumb and my time spent waiting alone was numberless and dumb 

And my father was a dumb and violent child in my world

And now I lack a father 

But the sun is hiding my smile behind clouds that look too great to be real

And I can't remember the last time I looked up at the clouds and admired them 

For they deserve to be admired more than most people 

More than most poets 

Or dying men losing limbs like months of mine 

Gone behind my eyes 

And what I remember is like a secret to everyone 

Because everyone is a secret to me 

And the forests I drive past on my way home from work 

Anxious and angry and young but not for long

Will go undiscovered forever 

And that is as sad as the death of you 

This thing that I lack 

I lack without grace 

And with a nervous face 

And with fingers projecting from my eyes like grasping desperation 

I will find my own madness surely 

Before it's too late 

While my lungs refuse to respond to my desires 

Lustful and ugly as they are

Another day has escaped into the murky riptide of inky, unintelligible number lessness 

Dead waitresses 

With water lilies 

Flushed into the ocean of forgotten Hollywood celebrities'

Who died under mysterious circumstances in their bathrooms 

Clutching old love letters 

Marked with names 

Naked

Disguised by secrecy 

The secrecy of sacred towns 

Perhaps real,

Perhaps not

Where singers form cults in mountains turned sunlight suburban 

And farmers wives drink paint out of Listerine bottles-

They all get flushed out somewhere 

Somewhere below the forbidden light of Gods immaculate jealousy

Resting eternally 

With another day

That has escaped me.. 

Some woman come into your life

Like warm rain on the first day of summer 

And leave like screaming yellow tow trucks crashing into ditches of black ice 

Sometimes,

It's the other way around-

Some swim in portable pools 

others in great lakes 

When the water is so cold 

It feels like your heart is going to stop-

Some have beautiful eyes 

and not much else 

Some have perfect arses 

And know how to play the piano 

Some have scars on their tits Some have even spent some time in the mad house

Some eat all the food in your fucking fridge 

But give the best head you've ever had-

They all just 

come in...

With their own unique knocks 

Their footsteps like their own unique language-

All those memories of woman 

Insane and shark mouthed 

Seem to howl 

From hidden forests named after government lakes 

And although I'm thankful 

For everything 

I can't help but wonder 

Why I'm so uncomfortable 

Calling a woman 

Whore in bed. 

Who's New Orleans John? 

These are the days leading to the massacre of youth 

Young pimps crawling towards the cathedrals in the sky 

And buffalos being beaten to death in subway terminals 

Blood and tooth paste commercials 

Smearing the walls 

Where retired cops with guilty consciences 

Lay their hands and pray to the spiders in the attic 

Dancing like shadows of shrapnel fire

Through the slits of sunlight breaking through 

Silently echoing the mercy of day-

  Birds that look prehistoric in the obscurity of their distance

are murdering themselves into the windows of banks 

While a mescaline dim of imported fog

Descends over the heads of prostitutes swallowing 

Cock and balls and pussy and piss and pills and death 

High on all of it 

High heels hanging from telephone wires 

While broken jazz and slaughter music and broken bed frames 

Hiss through the alleys that belong to the loneliness of night.   

And he awoke to war

Death in the toilet bowl 

And powder burns in the paper sky overhead 

It was screaming that haunted afternoon traffic 

Wild apache tribes dressed like dead senators

And extinct animals that belong to the imaginations 

Of small mountain children 

Riding through the suburbs and cutting off the scalps of overweight woman who smell like children 

And in the right light resemble polaroid images of wild flowers 

Or large timber wolves

                                             Dancing or dying or sleeping 

            Somewhere in the blurry distance 

When he walks outside 

He's in steel city 

Statues of racecar drivers who murdered their wives in their bathrooms 

Seem to line the streets and point towards the consolations

That no longer belong to the mirrors of provincial lakes-

Word has spread of a man who was killed in a knife fight down by the docks 

And they found his body clutching a note 

That listed the names of all the famous people throughout history 

That claimed Shakespeare was a fraud

   I believe he died with a new understanding of mercy 

One that waited for man in the nothingness of our absence 

One that waited for man in the nothingness of our absence 

And will undo us in our creation of kindness 

Bloodshed and porn stars saluting their immortality in rooftop pools 

Will be our shade while we rest underneath this space tonight 

And God is a warm bottle of beer and the hot shit that follows.    

There's a certain light in this Texas 

Looking out of the window of a motel 

Where murderers have both murdered 

And died 

Outlaw sun slaughtering the darkness

In the corners of the room 

Without permission 

And a girl 

With a face that belongs to a sadness that's not hers 

Sprawled out on your bed 

Like the remnants of an iridescent crime scene

Above her there are paintings of oceans and broken plates 

Where empty space should be 

And murals dedicated to disgraced outlaws 

Cast in the image of empty ash trays. 

God once belonged to this land 

And God once watched with baited breath 

As cops were shot dead in Gas station car parks 

And whisky breath fog 

Descended in place of winter 

But watching from this window 

You can almost convince yourself it's exactly 5:43.

To the perfectionist 

Screaming words

Powder blue and terrified

At the inner jaw of the a that never belonged to you 

        I wonder if you know that you will never die. 

                                                                  *

Unshaved 

    Uncut 

            Unwashed 

   Watching a cat scream 

      At a bruised American sky 

Too lazy to become night 

                                                                   *

A young man was found beaten to death 

Outside the doors of a neon brothel 

               While God sleeps 

                Fat and grinning 

                                                                 *

The sound of trains 

Roaring into the architecture of the the evening 

                       Reminds me of love  

There was an ocean here once 

Now it's chasms and sunken ships 

Forgotten into the shape of the great state of Oklahoma 

And wild haired hipsters that could be killers or drug runners 

Or prophets descended from an ancient religion descended from the east 

Ride through what should be formally be referred to as "old world" 

And they are driven mad by the understanding 

That the apathetic blanket of sprinkler dims overhead 

Doesn't belong to them 

That they are simply wonderers 

Remembering themselves into the evening light of New Mexico 

Or somewhere similar to New Mexico 

In the same way the cowboys and shadows of Indians 

And forgotten Gods had done 

And throughout the valleys that once belonged to the sound of water 

There must be that prehistoric belief echoing through 

That the answer is simply found in moving.  

In the quiet places 

You won't see Texans hanging 

And the moon is a dying dog 

Howling down hopelessly onto the murder music 

Hobby shops 

And lakes that look like frozen ash trays-

A not so famous artist 

Not so famous for painting pussys 

With violent colors and oil paint straight out of the tube 

Was shot to death holding a picture of a young man 

With an academic beard and sand stained shirt 

Opened up and exposing gold chains and dark skin 

standing outside of a mud hut 

Smiling and obvious and strangely foreign-

Could be a father 

Could be a lover 

And it rained for the first time in weeks 

Onto the chalk outline of her body 

While the children with eyes of white light 

Danced snarling like old fashioned ideas of killers 

Until the clouds descended onto the streets 

And the grandfather clocks began

To die again. 

Now it's silence 

And it's summer 

A fog of soft country music 

Is burning through the desperate clouds overhead 

I have this feeling 

That if I kick my right shoe off 

Before my left shoe 

Something horrible will happen to me 

And perhaps it will 

But right now I'm drinking warm beer 

And pissing in my toilet every five minutes 

Looking at a picture of my girlfriends mum 

Over the sound of sirens screaming at the color red outside- 

Fat women who look like pictures of antique vases 

Are walking their dogs past the graveyard 

With an East Texas schmaltz 

And the heat is too lazy to notice them. 

The sky is cut open 

Reveling bone 

And imported Carpathian stillness 

The static of the radio is faintly gargling secrets 

About love or the devil or dying in your dreams 

I'm thinking back to the time one of my old lovers 

Told me I smile too much while she's upset 

And how my friend 

Who I used to break windows with 

On quiet nearly forgotten days 

Died on his 21st birthday

Now evening is inventing new colors 

And driving past the gas station at 9:45 p.m. 

I see the same teenagers that have likely always belonged to this town 

And they look like stained floral wallpaper 

Melting into the sidewalk 

Where they've died a thousand times before.

There's lady justice 

Just outside my window 

Holding up a torch 

And stone tits solemnly facing east 

Towards the banking district 

I'm limping across my living room,

Naked 

Waiting for the footsteps of police officers to drag me away 

But until then 

There's time to cry 

And the air seems to be filled with tears today 

Floating through the slits of light breaking through my window 

Without cause or explanation 

But I will welcome them 

And I will not question their purpose. 

My bookshelf just broke 

The shelves Just popped 

And all of the books just came dribbling down-

Turns out my copy of war and peace is too fat.

I gave up trying to read that fucking book years ago 

And it's been trying to get revenge on me 

Ever since. 

I remember when the helicopters used to circle around here 

And the woman who loved me were still young 

And defied the loose grey wing of growing old 

And I used to sit at the table next to the backyard pool

And smoke cigarettes,

Now all those days when I walked everywhere 

Have walked away from me 

And I feel the heat without seeing the sun.

The end is near 

Kids with Christian names are riding bicycles through the suburbs 

With their Dads war medals in their pockets 

Old poets are hiding from the kingdom of God 

Jesus was a poet rock star

Reclaiming the west 

And he doesn't want to be found 

Ants are burning themselves alive for a shot at minimum wage 

And toilet rolls are more valuable than oil

The forgotten children of God 

Are wailing at the moon 

For showing up to work drunk (with red eyes and pupils dilated) 

And late

And when they wake up with a hangover 

And have forgotten why their tonsils have been ripped out

The only thing that remains is the knowing of hatred 

The only ghosts that never die with the prostitution of aging.   

I thought it thundered last night 

But it was simply the sound of gravestones being kicked over by local eunuchs-

Apparently

They were mad because people kept stealing flowers from their front gardens 

To lay at the foot stones of dead senators-

The only stone that wasn't kicked over belonged to a Vietnam vet

That died while masturbating in a hotel lobby

And all around town people argued and fought about the significance of this.

One strange, milky eyed woman in her late 70's 

Triumphantly declared the apocalypse was upon us.

Well

Days passed and still no sign of Christ of locusts with the heads of lions 

Although every time the stones were put back up 

They were kicked down again the following night 

And now the town is in an uproar 

Panic and retired Governors bored enough to kill run through the streets-

Book stores were burned to the ground-

Cops wearing Halloween masks are beating to death anyone who doesn't smell like cheap perfume   

And priests are throwing themselves off of the roofs of banks to break their legs.

I was so tired from all of this that I must have slept through the apocalypse 

And I awoke to complete silence 

A blood red sky and a town devoid of gravestones-

When I lay on my back 

I wake up with a shooting pain up my spine 

Because somehow I broke the wooden planks supporting the mattress in my frame

Likely caused by a slightly overweight Canadian woman 

Jumping up and down on my bed

At inappropriate hours of the night 

I have this idea of innocence

That scares me 

And why is it that I have never met a happily married couple 

In their 40's 

We're all crushing our guts into this strange champagne pink dream 

Of growing old like flowers bought at a roadside

And left to sit on a window sill facing a brick wall

Unattended 

But clearly formally beautiful 

And that's supposed to be enough

Watching a sky imitating and ancient Manhattan blood blistered face

From a patio pool part province 

Where the trees appear to remember the deaths of those who once walked beneath them 

With forlorn expression descending into winter 

For now it's stress 

And deep sleeps on silent afternoons

Laying on top of a stack of unpaid bills and parking tickets 

I didn't even deserve in the first place 

And all of the hopeful platitudes of better days to come 

Aren't enough to wake me up 

In time for Jeopardy repeats.    

It was a warm day 

One of the last warm days before winter really arrived-

There's talk around town 

Of a local high school students 

And in the letter he left behind 

Explaining all of it 

He described her legs as 

"Maple hangers painted blue and nailed to the wall of a beach house"-

A man like that would probably try to escape to France 

But get lost and end up selling red shoe laces to young skin heads behind movie theaters in Portland, Oregon

Claiming it's all "romantic"

Now they have pictures of that young girl 

Plastered all over town 

Even hanging from the clouds 

With glassy eyes descending descending descending 

Like strange yellow sonnets about love onto these starving rows 

Of glowing suburban homes and broken trees reclaiming the roads 

They'll call her a martyr 

Before she's even old enough to pay her own taxes-

She's already experienced the awkwardness of backseat sex 

In gas station carparks with a savage "rapist" twice her age 

But personally 

I think she'll be just fine.  

Strange sounds 

Underneath the wailing moon tonight 

Echo's in the reflection of rainfall 

From the lungs of farmers wives 

Who attempt to commit suicide in the blackest mountains 

By drinking green paint 

And the stars are the eyes of former lovers 

Blanketed by the veil of cum towels in the sky 

Distorted 

And waiting for something more 

A famous baseball star 

Who had a face like a meat locker 

Was recently found 

With two dead hookers 

In the bed of his hotel room of the Marriot-

He told the police that they fell out of the slot of a cigarette machine 

When he tried to buy a pack of Pall Malls-

They let him go 

And two days later the Yankees lost the world series 

And now I hear he's giving motivational speeches at Universities in Oklahoma 

And he spends his evenings swimming with coke addicted supermodel's 

Who apparently 

Cut his hair for free.

Standing here 

At youths final entrance 

A cave is carved deep into my chest 

I know, even through this veil of clouds

That loom over me disappointed and ashamed 

That I have certainly loved 

And been loved in return 

A crook under stolen lamplight in London streets

And a drunken fiend wading gun like through torrents of green and Gods favored nature 

With women and friends and traitors alike

Blissfully gone and gone well 

Into that deep stupor where death is only 

A laughing game

Seen somewhere up in the stars through wine and dim sex

Something to taunt from a distance with smirk 

And quivering drive 

And now still I stand and stand just as I did

All those years ago 

When time seemed to flow through me like fingers through stolen jewelry 

And I know the game well enough 

I understand the promises

And I understand the certainties 

Well enough 

But not completely

And perhaps I won't allow myself to.

I respect the swans 

And I respect the abandoned houses of nowhere in particular 

And I respect the shabby ornaments some try to sell in little antique shops nobody bothers to even look at 

But I certainly don't respect dust 

Or your greedy and dumb dog that yells too much 

Or your failing loyalty 

But I am in no position to blame you for it either 

You are just young and lucky 

Some with lake water supremacy and some with Chinatown heroin yellowing or art gallery dullness 

Stand up and tell me about your first date 

And your first fuck 

And your first love 

And your first agony 

And your first rejection 

Stand up and tell me with blue eyes and shaking hands 

Stand up and tell me what uniqueness is undressing itself behind your red and peeling back

Behind your peripheral vision you usually reserve for middle class sunsets and the avoidance of God 

Or even talk of God 

Because of how boring it apparently is.

Through my window it doesn't matter if I'm watching snowfall slowly like breath onto that grayness out there 

Or the sun dance down and possess young and beautiful woman holding ice cold cans of coke to their foreheads and stand around entranced by a gallery of their own flattering or burning reflections

I am thankful for the sight of it all 

And you're somewhere out their watching out of a window of your own

And perhaps all you see is butchers blocks and anvils shaped like houses dreaming Grief past the places you can only see now in feverish memory 

Or maybe you see cherries and cream and places of shade where children go talk privately in languages of their own design

And perhaps you'll smile 

I would like to think that you're smiling.

Today I'll take a walk through a graveyard of famous poets 

Who died in steaming pots of shit 

Or drowned in their toilet bowls 

That imitate government lakes 

Or got shot in flower shops 

Waiting in line to ask if they could use the bathroom 

And in that stone I'll see their wives 

Living like wild flowers stolen from the sides of secret freeways 

Making love to sleepy bankers with their shoes on. 

If I had a wife 

I would go to her in the bedroom as she takes her socks off 

And I would sit at the end of the bed

And tell her the greatest poet on earth died today. 

I would sleep on my back and she would sleep on her side 

Facing the door.

If he was still alive he could write poems about moments like these 

About how her naked and slumbering body resembles strange things 

Like dying antique cars or the silhouettes of scrapyard dogs in Southern places

Or something like that 

But now he's dead 

And this poem will just have to do. 

She was the sun

Stretched out on the carpet

Some ghost moaning through the walls of Arcadia 

And down onto the traffic of the world 

And in her mouth is the gutter and alley of the worlds secret places 

And the world is whispering through her 

In the form of silly love 

Replaceable love 

Love replaced by John and then Ted and Then Alex 

And then what's his face 

The one that liked to hunt and pick sunflower seeds out of his teeth

And the ugliness of all of this is making her sick 

And she calls herself the mother of nature 

And the fuck toy of the greatest poet of all time 

The one who nobody wants to publish 

While she vomits the names of used up men 

Onto a Moroccan rug she bought from an antique market 

While high on LSD 

And all the while the sun just keeps beating it's head down 

Onto the tar bubbles and chalk swastikas of the sidewalk 

And the world itself is just the name of a former lover 

And in her isolation 

She's painting a smile onto her face 

That only the ceiling can see. 

The day is long and quiet 

There's a bookshelf in the sky 

Painted blue and hanging from the moon 

In a mournful kind of way-

Black cars are crouching motionless in lonely farmers driveways 

Waiting to see winter dig its huge white claws into the land 

But until then 

I just heard news that old John Fair recently bought a second hand speaker for his truck 

But it won't quite fit.

He smiles and says 

"Never tell your wife what you really get paid". 

He always seemed to have that genuine smile wrapped around his face. 

When lakes of fire are streaming from gaping wounds in the clouds 

And when new wars are being waged in lands that smell like flowers 

That can get you high or simply don't exist 

He will smile still 

Probably thinking back to the days of ancient luck 

Falling in love with strippers named after racehorses 

Or riding over New York city bridges while high on acid 

But on this night I don't seem to be able to smile-

I want to cry at nothing and imagine a pair of legs waiting for me 

And the days get shorter and shorter 

And colder 

Bubbling into the fever dream of endless cop cemeteries 

      And the color of heather 

I'll think of Johnny Fairs. 

Through the hatred 

And sailors curses 

Through the tales of souls trapped inside seagulls 

And beating skulls against the rocks of the peers 

Through death 

Fair and unfair alike 

And through screaming faces 

Fist fights and sodomy outside of the lighthouses of New England 

I can with confidence say 

That through all the cow shit and afternoon traffic 

And pussy tastes of battery acid 

I am indeed proud to be a part of the human race. 

The ocean is swallowing itself 

Crying to the moon sympathetically 

Tales of home invasions infiltrating the formally safe suburbs 

Leaving huge shits in the kitchen sink at the scene if the crime 

And nobody can understand why,

It must be their calling card.

A stewardess was raped in an airplane 

Flying over the Grand Canyon 

And everybody applauded 

As a child pointed out of the window and asked,

"Is it true there was water there once?".

Two long 

Pale legs 

And one big mouth 

Sitting at the end of a couch 

Looks out of her window 

At the grand forgetfulness of winter

And all of the stolen civil war trophies 

Laid out like the chalk outline of a huge body 

And she imagines all of the windows emanating that lonely light  

And blurry images if shattered teeth raining down 

From the mouth of a forgotten president. 

The day is Wednesday 

Wednesday might as well be what I call my future son or daughter 

It's familiar enough‐

I'm sitting here

At work with less than nothing to do 

Like a dumb ghost 

Sometimes standing up to stand up 

And haunt these hallways slowly 

But I'm not bored 

It seems I've lost the capacity for boredom 

And these closed blinds are losing to the sun 

And then there's my colleague

She has a sneer perpetually pinned to her face like war paint and I don't know why 

And every time she talks she insists on doing so with a tone of utter exasperation and depletion 

I don't know why 

She waddles when she walks because she's so fat 

She has a cheap neck tattoo of a Celtic design 

And has never so much as stepped foot out of the town she was born in 

Yet someone out there loves her 

A truck driver with a failing hairline and bad teeth

But the love is just as good as any other 

And fair play to them 

But lately I've been sick of her and I'm struggling to hide it

In fact I don't hide it at all 

And there's this silence in the funeral home 

That even clock doesn't know how to respond to

But I'll respond for it

It does work harder than me after all 

And it deserves a break

And I deserve some gin

Standing here 

At youths final entrance 

A cave is carved deep into my chest 

I know, even through this veil of clouds

That loom over me disappointed and ashamed 

That I have certainly loved 

And been loved in return 

A crook under stolen lamplight in London streets

And a drunken fiend wading gun like through torrents of green and Gods favored nature 

With woman and friends and traitors alike

Blissfully gone and gone well 

Into that deep stupor where death is only 

A laughing game

Seen somewhere up in the stars through wine and dim sex

Something to taunt from a distance with smirk 

And quivering drive 

And now still I stand and stand just as I did

All those years ago 

When time seemed to flow through me like fingers through stolen jewelry 

And I know the game well enough 

I understand the promises

And I understand the certainties 

Well enough 

But not completely

And perhaps I won't allow myself to.

I respect the swans 

And I respect the abandoned houses of nowhere in particular 

And I respect the shabby ornaments some try to sell in little antique shops nobody bothers to even look at 

But I certainly don't respect dust 

Or your greedy and dumb dog that yells too much 

Or your failing loyalty 

But I am in no position to blame you for it either 

You are just young and lucky 

Some with lake water supremacy and some with Chinatown heroin yellowing or art gallery dullness 

Stand up and tell me about your first date 

And your first fuck 

And your first love 

And your first agony 

And your first rejection 

Stand up and tell me with blue eyes and shaking hands 

Stand up and tell me what uniqueness is undressing itself behind your red and peeling back

Behind your peripheral vision you usually reserve for middle class sunsets and the avoidance of God 

Or even talk of God 

Because of how boring it apparently is.

Through my window it doesn't matter if I'm watching snowfall slowly like a breath onto that grayness out there 

Or the sun dance down and possess young and beautiful woman holding ice cold cans of coke to their foreheads and stand around entranced by a gallery of their own flattering or burning reflections

I am thankful for the sight of it all 

And you're somewhere out their watching out of a window of your own

And perhaps all you see is butchers blocks and anvils shaped like houses dreaming Grief past the places you can only see now in feverish memory 

Or maybe you see cherries and cream and places of shade where children go talk privately in languages of their own design

And perhaps you'll smile 

I would like to think that you're smiling.

Sometimes 

I have to remind myself to uncurl my smile 

From my face after watching people laugh 

It would be delightful 

To think that we are the chandeliers 

Dangling circular and massive over our own heads following death 

That the light we emit from our own greatness 

Could be our everlasting chandelier 

All cigarette smoke and whisky break and poetry

Overhead blitz like and otherworldly  

And Corso was no great mind 

No "maestro poet" 

He wasn't even good at being ugly 

He was just a begging lower lip 

And a fleet of listing words about the failures of people greater than him

sleeplessness 

Some dumb haze

But the environment around me

The world itself 

Appears to be communicating 

distant desperation 

A soft desperation to be heard and seen 

I’m driving slow because I feel I could fall asleep at any moment 

Being kept awake by French sopranos beating themselves to death lamely through my radio 

A passion secretly uncurled before my childlike lap

Foreignly 

Leaving me to look impressed yet glacial

Even the clouds are fingering through their places in the form of stuttering beams of light 

Reality itself no longer dancing like a restless virgin

But instead broken legged 

Done with 

A fat Spanish whore forgotten to a cemetery of never promises

Everything appears to be sharp and deadly, 

Even the orgasm that I’m being deprived of 

The edge of an orgasm 

It might as well be Portugal

Or my ideas of it driving home having never been there 

And she won’t let me cum 

And “SHE” is a giant bat 

Spread out and camouflaged into this night 

Only making its presence known by the blocking of stars up ahead 

Making us feel more alone and unobserved even by time itself 

We are crawling you see 

And I have a hunger to go to the wounded towns that look like they were forgotten in the gold rush era

Over there is Hemingway 

Cutting up grapefruits and eating them off the stomach of a whore 

The forests are burning up into black monasteries in Russian skies 

And all the while Greenland isn't actually very green at all 

And Bukowski never knew how to dive 

And Sylvia Plath was a whiner-

We simply need more wars 

And less whining 

More bloodshed and slaughter sports 

We need to bring back the coliseum 

Let the tigers rape the woman 

Just so long as people stop whining

But for now the lake is enough 

I have distance from what I call my reality 

There are girls here

They're young and miserable 

And constantly high and they're stealing my alcohol and they walk around during the day by the water like a family of ducks in single file

They never seem to smile in public 

But at night I hear them laughing in the solarium

They're singing and fucking and drinking and smoking and most of all they're young.

I go down to the dock and take off my dirty white t shirt and military hat and my dirty shoes and bare my belly to the more civilized society of man and they stare at me with contempt and I clumsily dive into the water, I make I big splash and slap my thighs against the water but it feels good

I come up for air and my woman is there watching me with less contempt than the rest and if I'm lucky the sky is gray 

The people here love to laugh loudly

And dance wildly around the fire under the moonlight and howl at the stars and let love sit in the quiet places of their eyes when they take time to be still and they writhe around at night like death is just a small gray serpent cowering under their lighting for now

This is ugly but it's good 

There's one woman who has fake tits and lays out underneath the sun all day and another with a large scar on her forehead and a husband who's dying slowly of cancer 

And another who is wealthy but unhappy and another who could be beautiful if she just took time to see it

I ate my woman's pussy and it tasted like lake water. 

I ate tahini and drank white wine and smiled at people who were disgusted by me and I slept in an uncomfortable bed next to a snoring woman

She was beautiful

I laughed like Nero. 

This is good for the soul.

My fridge is empty and my cat is starving 

Burning 

Howling at the sink trying to make something happen 

Outside I hear screaming

"YOU'RE A BUNCH OF FUCKING IDIOTS!"

and 

"THEY'RE TRYING TO KILL ME! CALL THE FUCKING COPS!"

Usually I ignore these kinds of things 

Usually a drug fiend who wondered a little too close towards civilization and freaked out

But this just kept going on and on 

So I get up and throw some clothes on a run downstairs

Right opposite me four men with beards are pinning down a man and beating him like a dog

The man on the ground gets some good kicks at their faces and ripped one of their t shirts 

They weren't trying to kill him 

But the man on the ground clearly wasn't aware of this. 

A long cast of characters stood around watching shamelessly. An old woman, a Mennonite farmer, a middle aged couple who looked like golden retrievers eating ice cream from cones, an Indian family with red paint on their faces, me-

I sat down and watched 

Feeling at peace 

Nothing brings people together more than the spectacle of senseless violence

Finally we all have a commonality

A pure stillness 

I sit and I smile and I stretch my legs out

And I strike up a conversation with a Dutch woman who calls the police "daddy" and tells me she has a stalker and that her rent is nearly $2000 a month.

She kept touching my arm and laughing while the men squirmed and bled and town's people gawked and whispered and laughed, one fat girl who works at one of the local stores started crying. 

Suddenly the fun was over.

The white sun up there looking down on the mountains like a bullies Mother 

The fire the fire 

Look down there 

You can see footsteps snaking up through Dantes sacred desert 

The killers are on the run 

And God gave up looking for them 

Because they believe in something bigger than God 

They believe in hiding 

And at night those killers will look up at the sky 

Black ceiling and napalm stars stretching out like a tiger's stomach 

And they don’t know what they’re looking at 

They just know that it’s bigger than them 

They think it’s dumb because it doesn’t talk 

And they know that not everything that’s silent carries a secret

They took the saloons with them 

The whores with legs up to their necks and poison in the shadowed corners of their smiles

The slit throats of bar fights and beer stench and sandpaper palms and general cruelty 

Oh the general cruelty 

It carries itself like a cloud throughout the ages  

They scalped the moon and sold it to the west

While the factories out there in the great North American sleepiness burn like Joan of Arc 

And the hearts of all those lonely souls locked up in their small pale bedrooms or prison cells with no windows to see the sky wilt away like flowers that nobody ever bothered to name in Latin or French or acknowledgement

They just keep moving 

Underneath shade and white light and candle light and blood light and gore and flesh and cathedral bells in the distance and drunken death and drunken wishes to die and sweaty grim sex and legs and hanging hands and sleeping mouths and promises and tattoos of the word “HATRED” on chests and thighs and cold water and dim hope and lost hope and LOSS-

You could look at those killers

Making their way along through the desert 

In single file 

And mistake their souls for good 

Lost but good 

Damned by the strange fate of their certainty 

Certainty 

They just didn’t know what to do with it

So they killed 

Perhaps in defiance of God 

Spill the blood of man 

Who knew Adam anyway? 

Let the flowers grow in the places where the people lets the flowers grow 

Let the happy people walk along the streets where the happy people are safe

There’s always a body of water to look out at in the arms of your lover 

And there’s always a place beyond that water you can’t see 

Where not even your imagination has grasped with its tendrils and shaking fingers 

That place is yet to be colonized by your possibilities 

Brutal 

Savage 

Loving 

Very much on fire

And THAT is where the killers are headed. 

Perhaps you will meet them there.

She used to lay on her stomach when she slept 

And if you wanted to play the radio past 9:00pm your soul be damned

You never loved her apparently 

She’s out there now in the blue light 

The cities the mouths the industrial genitals of what she wanted 

Drinking 

Laughing 

Death is just a word 

Fucking in rooms painted jaundice yellow 

Screaming in the beaches of her quiet desires 

I walk down after getting out of jail for battery assault or skinning a native woman alive for calling Kafka a desert beetle

I see her in a small French esque café

Sitting with a handsome man 

They looked happy 

The world felt like a small room with spiders in the corners in that moment

The cities became the legs of tarantulas

I walked in and shot that man dead 

I dropped the gun and walked outside 

The moon turned into a spotlight 

My skin turned absinthe green 

The police came like ants towards molten lead 

Guns drawn 

They were young and handsome and bloodthirsty 

They had nooses hanging up next to their winter sweaters at home 

And they wanted me dead 

She used to sleep on her stomach and she hated having the radio on in the background.

He was bigger than life

He would fuck his woman and rub his gut 

And light a cigarette 

And drink wine with his dinner and smile at his ugly youth 

He wasn’t scared

He had a big cock 

He wasn’t smart but he didn’t need to be

He was 32 when he walked outside his apartment building after getting sucked off

By some bird who looked like a pornstar who wasn’t broken yet

He was still smiling when they shot him dead

Nobody knows why it happened.

He wasn’t bigger than death

Nobody will remember him 

Not his smell or his words or his quiet power

And he died in a bloody way.

This is the story of a modern prophet.

After unholy conquest on my double bed 

We laid in silence 

Smoking cigarettes 

And through the smoke she turned and said

Leaning close 

With eyes half dead

"Surely those who live in fear 

Are those who live without regret" 

Axes are in short supply in the places where rich kids pretend to be poor 

They take pictures of themselves next to broken down cars and abandoned houses 

Did you ever stop to think that rain couldn't exist without clouds? 

The highways are painted black for a reason- 

Escape 

Escape through the telephone wires 

Escape through the eyes of the vultures 

Escape into this new oxygen 

Escape into marriage-

Burned coffee and smeared lipstick 

The building are lost in winter

Tomorrow comes 

Whether you like it or not. 

I know we will die bloody 

We’re drinking in a jungle with no name 

Songs of our homes play in our minds 

We know that at any moment a bomb could go off 

A bayonet stabbing into our stomachs 

Barbed wire around our throats 

Death at any second  

We’re all dressed in green and compared to the moons of space we’re tiny

But try convincing the stars of the agony or murder 

Why are we dying? 

Who am I dying for? 

Why why why

Right now we’re numb to death 

Fear is a new stranger 

Walking in lamplight slowly through the night 

Smiling as he goes

Because surely this is all just an ancient comedy

And all we can do right now is get high and drunk 

Hold our rifles tight and curse our wives and wish death upon our neighbors

Laughing as we turn into scenes of hell 

Killers, all of us killers 

Wearing faces we stole from our many victims 

We are the rapists of the halls of time

Give eternity to those slit eyed chinks 

Slaughter them in their sleeps 

Open up their stomachs with knives like cocks and laugh as their insides spill onto their laps 

Poetry is for fools

Death is for all 

Murder is for the chosen  

War is coca cola 

War is Andy Warhol's blonde wig 

War is Marlboro reds and orange juice 

Smoke me down and wipe my name from my wife's thighs

Kill me before I kill them 

The night is silent and there are no rehearsals 

They’re watching us 

Death is a game with no rules 

Small town, North of somewhere  

It's 7pm in July 

He's sitting in the bleachers with a quarter of the town watching his son play baseball against the team from the next town over 

The mountains sit looming huge and prehistoric in the background 

The dad's are drinking ice cold Coors and the mothers are hanging their smiles from the ceiling of the atmosphere like clouds 

Laughing loudly and feeling like air 

He sees some girls his sons age watch from the sidelines and one of them looks like his wife looked when she was 13 and he imagines this girl naked 

Walking in on him in the shower and giving him head

He gets hard and leans over and kisses his wife on the cheek and she smiles at him

Brushes her hand across his cock before continuing to cheer at the game and feel happiness 

The men are getting drunk and the sun is going down and the woman have left their loneliness at home tonight 

The boys on the field don't know they're 1 million miles away from being nailed to a cross in some nameless promised land and the girls don't know what the dad's are thinking 

It all works somehow

And nobody locks their doors at night 

There's no wind 

Just warmth 

No promises of war tonight 

He'll drive home drunk 

And his wife will give him a handjob from the passenger seat while their son sleeps the game off in the back

And in the silence of their dreams that night 

You could mistake their quiet secrecy

For genuine contentment 

And I suppose that's the best we can hope for now

Music disgusts me 

It reminds me of the freedoms you lost 

Walking your house all day

Muttering words 

Sometimes just sounds 

I see you look in your reflection

And I can almost fool myself into believing that for one brief moment you see yourself 

You remember 

That not long ago you were more than a job

More than a chore 

More than someone people got paid to man 

You could shit and piss and change clothes

And drink wine and fuck your wife and question ideas and sit in silence questioning death or Plato or life or love or suicide or any of life's evil sinews 

But you fell into that evil pit 

You forgot everything but the ring of your name like a housecat

Your wife kisses you but you don't know why 

You walk walk walk

35 thousand steps a day 

Heading nowhere 

Less than destination 

You pass sexy girls laying bricks and strong men cutting grass

Old ladies still in possession of their faculties call your name and wish you good afternoon with pity 

My god you're gone 

So gone you don't even care 

I see you every now and then 

You cry but forget instantly why you're crying my god you walk endlessly 

You have lost the cruelties of the world 

But in doing so you lost your world too 

And my heart breaks for that 

We can walk together

And my hand with be on your back 

And I will whisper kindness to you 

But it's simply not enough 

To simply say 

I'm sorry

The P.T.A board

Milk and salt in the scrambled eggs with some hot sauce

The churches that are burning need their vengeance

Not enough money, he’s a bum! Let him whither and die! Churn his guts up! I wouldn’t feed his trotters to the dogs! Don’t even give him an unmarked grave! Throw him into the ocean! Don’t even give the bum a name! Take away his genitals, what does he need them for anyway? Set him on fire! He’s an automaton!

Too much money, she’s a pig! Cut her belly open and feed her to the poor! What does she need with all that, anyway? If we kill her and distribute her money to the poor the world will be a better place! If we kill her we’re hero's! We care about the people! She’s laughing at us, don’t you see? She looks like the cunt that fired me when I was 18, back when I couldn’t afford a candy bar for dinner! She’s mocking us! Don’t you see she’s mocking us!

The grocery bags are filled with $15 beer and maps of Indonesian provinces 

Plans to escape somewhere strange and die alone with a smile on your face

Trying to figure out how to beat death while laying underneath a fig tree in mid July while all the beautiful woman with thick legs and big swinging tits and expensive sunglasses head somewhere to get fucked

It’s all so exciting and the lesbians are being crucified while you eat peaches and cream

The world is spinning impossibly fast and the odds of the moon being that exact size, that exact shape, in that exact position and that exact distance from the earth is 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000/1

Yet we don’t even question it

On November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 deliberately crashed the Ascent Stage of its Lunar Module onto the Moon's surface; NASA reported that the Moon rang 'like a bell' for almost an hour

Yet we don’t question it 

Generally, we only question that which we’re confident we have dominion over

That way we can evade the scary notion of not being in control 

Yes, we definitely love control 

He’s fat

She’s ugly

That cunt isn’t funny

What the fuck is he wearing? 

I couldn't take him home to my mother, just look at him! He’s poor and I’m not….What will they think? 

She’s a loser

That war is beautiful 

This violence is cute- 

I think we’re all afraid 

And many of us are just one bad parking ticket away from madness, incest, murder, rape, straight jackets, self mutilation, suicide, etc.

Once you go to that place, there’s no coming back 

That ultimate realization 

The evil absurdity of life 

It becomes more vivid and real than the aurora borealis

And nobody can go with you to that place

To that place you must go alone

But until you get to that place

It’s best to lay underneath a fig tree somewhere 

Anywhere 

In mid July

Listen to the cicadas whir like broken machinery

Watching the beautiful woman shuffle around sexily 

Claimed by love or agony or obsession or fantasy

Practically naked 

Talking on their phones or fixing their lipstick or carrying novels or newspapers or asparagus stalks 

Rest your hands behind your head and close your eyes

Smile a little 

You only get this strange chaos once.

Let the arrows become the sky again 

The black birds replace the clouds over your house 

The arrow heads the stars that humble your tears of vision 

You’re crying again underneath all of it 

You used to call humans a cancer in the lungs of the living world 

And now you spend your evenings dancing with the ghosts in the strobe lights in the backyard 

You set out to find a new flesh 

And you signed all of your letters in a name that didn’t belong to you-

Let the bridges close the gaps between troubled water for you 

Oceans kneeling down dumbly before your quiet steps 

You never looked at your reflection and you fed egg shells to the ants 

Your clothes smelled like bonfire smoke and you walked naked through the dype svarte skoger om natten

You used words to travel through your thoughts but they stopped making sense to you eventually 

You began to slice your palms with rusty daggers and let the blood fall onto the moon reflecting off of iridescent gasoline puddles on the asphalt 

Witchlike 

Your fingers moved like a flame dancing over a candle wick in a small dusty room

You started to hate the sound of your own breath 

That was when you were finished 

When the silence possessed nothing 

No weight or fear or loneliness or agony

No more fun 

That was when I knew you were finished.

Sitting here

Trying to read a hand full of poems 

My cat is asleep with his belly up to the sun 

He trusts me, that's why his belly is up to me 

Knock Knock

Open the door 

Nobody there 

Shrunken head in my freezer 

Camembert and sliced pickles in my fridge

Not much else 

A few dirty dishes in the sink 

Go and sit back down to my hand full of poems 

Before I start reading again I grab a Gurkha knife and slice open my chest

Take a look inside 

Nothing there

It's just around the corner 

Slutty Sally with her shredded up knee caps and crooked smile 

The one that hasn't had an orgasm since the crash 

She's buying a bag brown on 285th 

A bag of ketamine and a bottle of Aquafina

Her big shop

Hobbles back to the apartment she shares with a meat head wife beater son of the Virgo moon named 'GOD'

He, just around the corner, is high on PCP

Just murdered a cop and unzipped his fly 

Put his flaccid cock into the mouth of the cop

Pissed

Saw the sky turn orange and the world vibrated around him like a concerto concert hall remembering Vivaldi

They snort the brown in their broken down shack apartment, just around the corner 

They fall back onto the stained mattress on the floor 

Uriel, Barachiel, Jehudiel and Selaphiel crawl across their ceiling like huntsman spiders 

The walls become open wounds 

Heavens trumpets yawn down into their eyes

 The angels on the ceiling turn their heads towards the drunken moon

They've seen this picture too many times

When the Coroner opened up slutty Sally and GOD's chest

He found wildflowers inside their abdomens 

Aplectrum Hyemale and Malaxis Unifolia and Liatris Spicata 

The flowers burst out of their chests as soon as the scalpel opened them up

Their eyes were heroin brown and sad

Now kids go to that broken down shack apartment at night with compasses and flashlights 

Because they heard somewhere that it's haunted 

Somewhere just around the corner  

Slumped over that piano 

More dead than alive 

"The longest suicide in human history" 

That's what they call you

High on heroin 

Hitting those keys lazily 

The notes came out so perfectly

Like breaths floating in front of your face on a freezing winter day

You breathed so easy 

A settled ghost on American soil 

Your skeletal hands 

Your cool black shades 

Your black black hair slicked back 

Your Ill fitting suit hanging from your body drunkenly 

So so high 

Heroin high 

That good good brown 

That muddy muddy sun up on the ceiling 

That greasy sleazy tragic hell below your feet

That base bouncing off the walls 

Your nose touching the floor

You heard them clapping but you heard nothing 

That saxophone screaming like a tortured child 

You heard nothing nothing 

The world had no color 

Play that piano you high high fool 

A genius of the drunken game 

A magic man 

A tragic man 

You died with your wife and daughter in that car crash 

And that black black piano animated sounds out of you like breaths from hell's quieter quarters 

You had something that needed to be heard

Through your own personal hell

Into our nothing ears

We are thankful

Surely 

If I could be something that flies 

I would be a kite with you holding the string 

While Sally Brown in her Roman novelties and Imperial godliness swims with the leeches and forgotten rocks in the streams we walk past peacefully 

Forgetting that death exists just for the afternoon

Looking for somewhere to have sex 

Or to curse God and all the arrogant angels 

Another day with you 

Johnny Zap is giving head in that neon diner 

Just outside of town 

To a guy wearing a zoot suit with cigar stains on his purple tie 

And when he cums Johnny will groan and we will be somewhere safe and Johnny will swallow 

And we will hold each other 

While the bombs drop 

And we fall in love again 

Suicide

No more naked thing exists 

I've seen many suicides 

Touched them 

Felt the cold flesh 

Hangings mostly 

Heard the stories summarized

What drove them to it

They had deep red gashes around their throats 

Like misplaced halos 

All of them looked peaceful 

No horror in those eyes 

Tensed up

Blue faces 

My god what an ugly way to go 

One man

(Who was born a woman) 

Hanged himself in his kitchen 

After a failed genital surgery left him a eunuch 

His ex wife showed up to the funeral 

And she put a small photo of him next to the coffin 

It was taken shortly after the surgery 

He was smiling in the corner of the kitchen 

She told me she chose that picture because that was the very spot he killed himself 

I couldn't tell if she was being malicious

Or poetic 

She seemed to really love him 

She was enraged at him for killing himself 

She told me how they met 

On their first date they walked around a harbor looking for beautiful rocks and stones 

As geology was his passion 

She didn't care that he was born a woman 

She didn't care about the surgeries or the pills or the depression 

She said that she fell in love with him on that first date 

She said he was gentle 

And he had a beautiful smile 

When he killed himself 

He tied a sloppy noose around his neck 

Got on his knees 

And leaned forward 

She told me he would have been brain dead in 40 seconds 

Dead not long after that 

I don't think she really believed he was in a better place 

Just a place where no pain existed 

When she left 

I never saw her again 

People like this pass through our lives like ghosts through morning light 

Reminding us of something bigger than ourselves 

Something very naked

Indeed

In this town

A town really like any kind of small, farming suburbia outpost settlement lodged into an earthy green and yellow North American plot of general humming geography there exists a man 

For the sake of this poem and for the sake of contextualizing this man we will name him 

'John Parker Furnace' 

But really at a passing glance he's just like any kind of man you would find in a town like this scattered all across the tragic North American frontier 

Yes he lives in a house

It’s a small and generally unimpressive yet modest house

He has a credit score of 607

He's too old to be called young but too young to die without people discussing his death in whispers and sighs

He's quiet and he loathes himself 

He's married and he has two kids who possess Christian names and spend their days at home doing dull things with their suburban imaginations in the backyard 

John has a wife and she is also quiet 

She snores when she sleeps and she has a penchant for pickled confectioneries 

She doesn’t have much of an imagination 

John is jealous but lazy