Northern America In Bird’s Eye

Here and there, you can find bowels churning, pushed up against the buffet table in a stripmall. You can hear their gestation and digestion, the bad food becoming shit. The vitamins flush the patrons’ faces and the quiet scents of arousal permeate the neon sign four leaf clover air. The ceiling fans rotate, men hang themselves in gas station bathrooms, women scream over cold children’s bodies and cold dinners waiting for him to push the front door open and then, suddenly, closed.

And we wear our wants like medals.
And we wear our memories like bruises.
And we smear the walls of churches with our dispassionate hunger,
we claw at the steeples and gag back our wine
as it tries to pass by drunken lips.

 

Close enough to the wounded remnants and you can see the few of us, hammered off tall buildings and suspension bridges. The trees grow into our shoulders, the flowers choke our smiles, and our guts are desperate for nourishment. Even if we have to raze the stripmall. Even if we have to starve entirely.

One Inspired By Neruda (Or How I Learned To Be A Copycat)

The slight gone of his browned hair stabs
winter-lights and lightweights the same, the
stone foul hands of an unpaid poem held into
the wind’s scented whispers, grasped and fingered
into utter dryness.  How his father never (once)
ruffled his younger scalp after the treachery of a day’s
work for a moment’s pay.  His tongue gags more often
than it picks into the concerns of flower-women and their
thorn-mouths.  Each night drags slow with the calamity of
a motorcycle accident, each rider’s absurd heart clammy
on the pavement of a thin woman’s flesh.

His skin is a costume.

The flowers are all so ugly.

She kneads her hands into one another with the restless
intentions of an expectant father.
Where once balls never tossed, fish never caught,
fires never extinguished,
now her anxiety playing on the walls of a cheap bar
in Little Havana as his sweat begins to appear
on her throat, behind her eyes.

A Bit Of Honesty, No Honey Or Milk

Preach me gunfire under bed sheets, collected and dispenbsed over a period of one lifetime. Cull my heaved respite, the cautious tone of a human tongue caught in a mousetrap. A private autopsy condemned to the vibrato grey of 8mm film. Each footstep is a minute tragedy and a partially smashed clock; the flesh on each of us fashioned of knotted oak.

Fit me in a manila envelope, treasure the contempt of a freely lapsed thumb. The ink blot runs the marathons your sighing toes never began. The what I see. The what you say.

A hollow heart weighs more, the misplaced conversations never had with beautiful never women. The scar of a smile healed dark red. Often, bruises look somehwat like our out-reached teeth. Set me on fire, put out the boiling water and wait for me to fall into the soft slumber of a wildflower meadow. Cutting away each smile centimeter by centimeter.

I can’t blame the cold on the night sky when days clock in at freezing, my hands chapped from the early March breeze. My molars chattering odd folk songs. Where winter falls away and we sense the absence as our pillows warm the napes of necks. As blankets are pulled up to throats and the power’s turned low.

 

Can’t blame the cold on location when we’re caught in hot water, when morning threatens to close in.

Enough of this dishonesty.

Let me tell you what these words have been about.
Enough make-up. Let’s show the bruises.

Somehow she has made a crime scene of my body. The shower curtain used as a robe, she pulls her feet across the hardwood hips. The undulation and obstruction. My pen runs out.

Her hair was built to smell as smoke, the broken leg-heavy kick of those same feet danced under tobacco stained lamps. The bar all around her closing down as most pray to open up.

The jukebox stutters on and shuts off midway through my favorite song.

For Fuck’s Sake, You Are Plan A

I can’t even get a goddamn cat to talk to me.

Earlier, prior to work and driving my automobile into a short-term wall, I had noted how the animal had scowled at my hands while the sun warmed him through the cracked window. Sad thing, poor thing.

Tomorrow, I intend to study photographs of myself (only in negative), as an interpersonal experiment in following my eyes. In most pictures, I stare into the camera’s lens and the false smile is lingering and (okay, okay) most evident.

And so, yes, I am. I can leave the rest unspoken under this warm water. The wolf cried boy again, and his spine is a restructured device lulled calm by the intention of her (HER) typed, systematic, culling hum.

Ah glory, ah Corso, ah Shelley.

Ah automation, ah tortion, ah conservation.

My stomach is the gifted swell of grease and ashes, the car is totalled and nobody knew how to drive to begin with. I apologize ten times to Tuesday, I apologize to the unborn child, I apologize to my pock marked belly, I apologize to her glimpsed eye-shadow and coursed/cut/directed fuck-ups and the smoke they made me breathe.

The cat was happier earlier, when the shine caught it’s ears and made them transluscent. The prison bar mathematics of the blinds and the warmth of morning rooted in security. The safety of confinement and wish for such terms and conditions.

His face grew sour as I picked him up, petting him, begging his acceptance. This is the way in which we pardon our own sins. This is the very beginning.

Beyond Such A Point As Reason Allows

It is Sunday.

No, I won’t be going to church.

Don’t feed me the disambiguation, my gut churns with the ocean floor’s symphony, sing sweet night.  Here: she stands in the awkward vulnerable coldsweat stance of her mother and grandmother, hands tucked into front pockets, the masquerade of lose change playing a war march in her tiny hand.  Where things (such as keys) fit things (such as locks) and nobody knows “Cry yourself to sleep”, not even children.  When and where the sullen remainders?  Where do we walk?

The roads are paved in light, and they drugged the water supply.  Tap water comes from the sewer pipes.  Her hair is a dragged river, moss caught in the wettened tangles.  I tell her that she smells like sea glass and feign to hold her hand under my nose.  When I say “feign”, I suppose I mean “need” as in the way “timid” acts as a short apology for my unmoving mouth.  The alarm clock has no need to be set, she’ll sleep late tomorrow.  She wakes up with me on the floor.

She’ll notice that my boots are still on, my jacket draped over me as a blanket.  And maybe she’ll stare and wonder where I walk when I am asleep and whether the boots make it an easier road to follow.

Half-asleep I stare through the spider-web of my eyelashes at her short, kicking legs and understand why comfort is only half of my need.  She is out of reach.  No use returning to sender, no one checks the mailbox on Sunday.

GAG, a work in progress

Small wonder with legs pulled up to her chin daydreaming playful infant laughter to burned rooftop city squares at night, hummed moan of solitude by day, excess of masturbatorial deficiency at night glowing street lighted corpse hues gone old egg-shells. Spoiled gas cans and caps again back to her knees softened pink on the beat-up crimson of a whorehouse carpet. She later explained past the brutishly demolished lips I’d given her that once, for a small sum of American money, she had sold photographs of a cucumber thrown into the soft divide of her worth. Some women, you don’t even ever kiss, though deep as sweat might find yourself staring at the nebulous entrances to their innards.

Hammered eyelids gone tanned cement as one’s mouth slips into a pile of triangular pills and the neighbor’s car alarm and dog take lapsed turns at keeping her spine awake, though I also begged her to keep that monster skull off the pillow, to swallow night as the water it wishes to be while her eyelashes tickled my forearms with mathematical precision. The soles of those feet fit for railroad tracks as scoundrel felines pit-pit-patter through the congealed semen outside my bedroom window (you see, she always opened the sash and spit me out in the same area).

My cock is a disease unto itself.

Let us presuppose that if tilted in the worst of angles even the love under losing warmth weighs more than the soul lonesome cough of early morning, the catfood smell of dried sweat caught in unwashed underwear stung with the gruesome articles of carnal depravity, living while windows crack with earthquake tremors and there is suddenly a haunted house working a day job at the docks in order to fulfill a promise made to an old maid on her dying bed (though the house often eats out) he does prefer to cook a meal in the shallow silence of the pay-by-week kitchenette he rents to get away from the damned chitter and bang of the lunatic typewriter belonging to the lunatic playwright who rents out a cabin next to the haunted house’s birthplace. The writer wailing over some cold wavelength on the other side of the stars, he buys pornography on the days he misses his childhood the most, but the cunt moaning only makes him seek out the mouth singing.

Via Separation Anxiety

You could toss me like a grenade and hide in a foxhole from the shrapnel I give off. I give you complete permission. With words as my weapon, the battles hard-won, familiarity with Pyrrhic victory, model America is depreciating in value along with the weight of your wallet and the pills you take to keep your wife close to home. The same way in which her love stares cruel, unsightly dramatics my way independent of her involvement. Though the girl might never imagine my light as anything more than a candle-sick lantern. Graciously I will involve the snares in my daily routine, encourage wormholes to swallow the grease stain of space, lingering with sad delight around whichever bar room shouts loudness; whichever bar room drones with drink and speed high playthings dangling their loosened arms around businessmens’ necks.Here where fear is easier to drown than money and sand castles are fit for kings, symphonies filled with amputee musicians who carry over notes weaker than sugar pills. The inflammatory nature of evening surrounded by the culled heat of lark song. The placebo heart taking hold of molehills.The mountains I’ve spoken into being, concerned with the hardened womb of the sky, wrapped in twine and halved by the granite sun come crashing down.