Here there is a metaphor solution and an actual
storm. I could have pried out another
scenario but didn’t. To be alive in a
gale,
which needs to be
dusted. To
prepare the chicken
dinner, mildly, as previously, as if
in any other kitchen. You chop vegetables.
The chicken is tangential
not because of direction or actual
amount of heat—
you seasoning the meat—
but because of fierce pulses, hair scooped
all over a face, a hat blown
off, just one moment.
And one wooden
slat pried away from the hatch.
I can see the olive
trees on the shore who castigate the wind.
We try with our anchor.
We hold ourselves to marks.
These aren’t some kitchen stairs here.
Night in the ruin-boat, which
heels. To-and-fro.
To- and-fro.
5/31/12
Poems without a title
&
Here comes the screen to free
a wingspan wide enough to reach
me in Nebraska.
But with all that great falling in
Your thicket of fading jay’s
and distance
where’s the calm?
You thought to think
anything unmade doesn’t
harm
but what have all
your unmade bricks
made for you?
‘A wasting’.
The sound of Oklahoma
unshapes its face
and sheds
So dirt is held down barely.
A few black clouds raining age cover
the slim distance between
the whole earth and Gold
the only color.
&
My skins a shade today
A halved sadness.
A displaced gray and white
Turning mud to muscle
And bone also
It turns
to wood
to clay
to a vase of ate foliage
and then to I don’t know
rage I guess.
&
You hold it.
Then you hold it
and then you hold it
and you hold it and
I never hold it.
I have nothing but my hands.
This collapsing.
I do love you Russell
Your endless engine. Your shifting windows
Wet from the road with your half man
half kicked to the mud under the hoof stomp
of the whole godddaamn hemisphere face.
We are the least difficult of men. All we want is boundless 3s!
And rings
&
Fuck the world
there’s a headache to swallow
and this beard will smear
the entire unfurnished plainness of May away with a kiss.
I put my mouth where I can see it.
a rack of teeth’s
an animal’s landscape
where I stuck a deaf song to whistle away the weeks
I wake to what I meant
In some unused way
With all these muscle of endless edge
unmanned unmyself
I lift up my hands.
I will leave this place
Hawk my hair
And respond to God:
The Sixth man of the year.
5/29/12
CUTLASS V
- Michael.
- Matthew Truslow
- Jenny Drai
- rachelise
- Alisa Heinzman
- an antler
- also
- sars
- Joy Von Ill
- d.hu
- justin ryan fyfe
- JESS!CA
- Ruth
- k
- Joel
- Jason D
- Alexis Robinson
- PHC
- dylan
- Kelsey
- mandibles
- Thomas Flaherty
- REGICIDE
5/26/12
The Tag End
And living-rooms aren’t lava suddenly one year---
the bales stacked up for a children’s maze---
unicursal, cul-de-sac, spiral storm.
hints at one junction asking:
are you stumped yet here?
So felling a tree just for that, I too was just that...
but later, driving a nail by hatchet
you didn’t know if I was, making any sense that way---
in the look an optometrist gives
riving apart the lines.
And waking up, I cracked a joke:
your arm’s in my rest, I said, watching you sleep.
And as the game goes, unfrozen is someone passing through you;
frozen is someone’s touch.
So open your mouth to drown or not to drown
the trick is not touching what’s everywhere.
This love-seat leap, this ottoman isle
and our hints are folded neatly at the junctions.
Run through it while, I say,
god knows where it’ll all be tomorrow
5/23/12
If you had said “ninja,” I might have fallen in love with you.
It's so obvious. Look:
This is cutlass ivy, two-three smoke stack alleyways have come together. Twenty three plus eye-zero plus zero-vee is thirty eight, which is as close as I care to smell. I have to go to work. I have to make eggs, and buy eggs. Have of thirty-8 is seventeen, so then if you add two back in and add the 4 to that...
You're left with 23. It's so obvious. This cutlass is eating itself.
This cutlass is a perpetual sword swallower.
Look: The cat might be a whiny little bitch, but she's right.
I say: bury the cutlass.
The cutlass: a fun new toy.
The cutlass: a fun new way to love someone.
Mother, our mother, my mother told us never
to run with anything sharper than your ear
not to love them.
How do you know what's sharper than your ear?
Imagine I'm eight.
Imagine slicing with your ears,
loving with your slicing.
Turn your ears to plowshares.
Turn the soil with your ears.
We're made of dead things; we should return the favor.
I'm mostly dead things from Nebraska.
Here we go on about burying again, about berrying again.
About floating, with wax berries in your mouth: an unsettling sun.
If your father says "you're dead," you can't listen to him
anymore. You just can't, Sara. You're still so covered
in dirt from your berry picking.
Knock the dirt from your ears. Knock your socks.
Learn how to float, keep the learning just a little bit longer. Your father says
"if I ever find the man...", but he's just mud.
I'm sorry your father's dead, or he will be, or I'll carry his skeleton forever, blinking. Blinking something noble, scrawled in my face, in my jacket, under my desire.
Any fool can scrawl their name up a tree, but it takes a special kind of fool to build pyramids in Nebraska. It takes a special kind of fool to desire a hot sun, or, we're all fooled in one way or another.
I don't know. Maybe your father was right, or maybe he wasn't at all. It just seems like I might need more trees. It seems like I might need endless trees, up trees, up trees. A Winchester Mystery Tree! Wax lips! Wax teeth! and other endless amusements.
I tend to make up amusements. I tend to slice things up like that. I think I got a little bit of real blood on the last one; it's dismembering all these imaginary bodies with my bloody hair that's the hard part. Organizing them. Arms here. Livers here. Toe nails in that corner. How to attack it? One part at a time? One body at a time? Let's make charts and graphs to examine. You do the slideshow; you're better with transitions. I'll be the straight man.
I think there are several men, some women. I think "dying is a part of the process of living" is very zen, but also very much bullshit. It's about realized consequences. You can have as many theories as anyone, but you're still dead. I think dying naturally is when each of the plural me have arrived and expired. Obviously, this is interrupted by motor vehicles and firearms for some people, but I don't know. Maybe not.
I think I'm evaporating by breathing this air. I'd like to think I'm going to leave a mark. I'd like to think I'm going to leave a tree soon. Like I'd fall from a tree and rest up at it from the grass. Damn sure is a big tree. Can't believe I was ever up that branch. Can't believe I'm here and breathing now.
The air all feels about the same after a bath. All you really want to do is smell nice as long as possible; to see if you can make it to the next tree still smelling like apple blossoms. It's tough to argue with smelling nice, with that cute thing you do with your nose, with chewing gum. I wish you'd stop smoking. Stop burning when you don't drink.
Let's try something new with glasses. Try a different arrangement, if you will. Something more comfortable than a one-bath-room-no-bed-room-tree. Take some kerosine and an lens. Make a clear spot for resting knees, knees, knees, and coming home to. Don't you worry about my blind eye; it's been like that for years.
Like this house, for instance. Do you think it remembers how it used to be so many living things? Every strand of wood muscle fiber is taciturn, curled into this living room shape, this kitchen shape, this had to keep warm shape. Clearly, a failure. Clearly, a wax pyramid, shorter and wider every summer. This is how life is.
I used to think my home was a safe tree. Now I know the difference, and I make plans to escape at night. I make plans to fling my body between every tree in the neighborhood. Sleeping in parking lots, waking up to the no longer hum of the lights of dawn, grease on my cheek, gravel pressed into my ear fold, the smell of gasoline in my hair, the dull ache in my hip.
After all, 'the fuck would I want a regular coke for, when I can have one with cherry?
This is cutlass ivy, two-three smoke stack alleyways have come together. Twenty three plus eye-zero plus zero-vee is thirty eight, which is as close as I care to smell. I have to go to work. I have to make eggs, and buy eggs. Have of thirty-8 is seventeen, so then if you add two back in and add the 4 to that...
You're left with 23. It's so obvious. This cutlass is eating itself.
This cutlass is a perpetual sword swallower.
Look: The cat might be a whiny little bitch, but she's right.
I say: bury the cutlass.
The cutlass: a fun new toy.
The cutlass: a fun new way to love someone.
Mother, our mother, my mother told us never
to run with anything sharper than your ear
not to love them.
How do you know what's sharper than your ear?
Imagine I'm eight.
Imagine slicing with your ears,
loving with your slicing.
Turn your ears to plowshares.
Turn the soil with your ears.
We're made of dead things; we should return the favor.
I'm mostly dead things from Nebraska.
Here we go on about burying again, about berrying again.
About floating, with wax berries in your mouth: an unsettling sun.
If your father says "you're dead," you can't listen to him
anymore. You just can't, Sara. You're still so covered
in dirt from your berry picking.
Knock the dirt from your ears. Knock your socks.
Learn how to float, keep the learning just a little bit longer. Your father says
"if I ever find the man...", but he's just mud.
I'm sorry your father's dead, or he will be, or I'll carry his skeleton forever, blinking. Blinking something noble, scrawled in my face, in my jacket, under my desire.
Any fool can scrawl their name up a tree, but it takes a special kind of fool to build pyramids in Nebraska. It takes a special kind of fool to desire a hot sun, or, we're all fooled in one way or another.
I don't know. Maybe your father was right, or maybe he wasn't at all. It just seems like I might need more trees. It seems like I might need endless trees, up trees, up trees. A Winchester Mystery Tree! Wax lips! Wax teeth! and other endless amusements.
I tend to make up amusements. I tend to slice things up like that. I think I got a little bit of real blood on the last one; it's dismembering all these imaginary bodies with my bloody hair that's the hard part. Organizing them. Arms here. Livers here. Toe nails in that corner. How to attack it? One part at a time? One body at a time? Let's make charts and graphs to examine. You do the slideshow; you're better with transitions. I'll be the straight man.
I think there are several men, some women. I think "dying is a part of the process of living" is very zen, but also very much bullshit. It's about realized consequences. You can have as many theories as anyone, but you're still dead. I think dying naturally is when each of the plural me have arrived and expired. Obviously, this is interrupted by motor vehicles and firearms for some people, but I don't know. Maybe not.
I think I'm evaporating by breathing this air. I'd like to think I'm going to leave a mark. I'd like to think I'm going to leave a tree soon. Like I'd fall from a tree and rest up at it from the grass. Damn sure is a big tree. Can't believe I was ever up that branch. Can't believe I'm here and breathing now.
The air all feels about the same after a bath. All you really want to do is smell nice as long as possible; to see if you can make it to the next tree still smelling like apple blossoms. It's tough to argue with smelling nice, with that cute thing you do with your nose, with chewing gum. I wish you'd stop smoking. Stop burning when you don't drink.
Let's try something new with glasses. Try a different arrangement, if you will. Something more comfortable than a one-bath-room-no-bed-room-tree. Take some kerosine and an lens. Make a clear spot for resting knees, knees, knees, and coming home to. Don't you worry about my blind eye; it's been like that for years.
Like this house, for instance. Do you think it remembers how it used to be so many living things? Every strand of wood muscle fiber is taciturn, curled into this living room shape, this kitchen shape, this had to keep warm shape. Clearly, a failure. Clearly, a wax pyramid, shorter and wider every summer. This is how life is.
I used to think my home was a safe tree. Now I know the difference, and I make plans to escape at night. I make plans to fling my body between every tree in the neighborhood. Sleeping in parking lots, waking up to the no longer hum of the lights of dawn, grease on my cheek, gravel pressed into my ear fold, the smell of gasoline in my hair, the dull ache in my hip.
After all, 'the fuck would I want a regular coke for, when I can have one with cherry?
5/22/12
Morgue Blog
Good morning I’m going
to murder. Spent the weekend
hugging. My best work dress
already has a hole And
you should really stop drinking.
Stop smoking. Go
on a health kick and fuck me
in the hallway. When I think
of Obama, I get breathless. I’m sorry.
We didn’t let you listen
to rap at the party. Put in a piece
of gum. Now
put in another piece of gum.
5/15/12
MORTUARY ACE
hello, the dead
hello, non-muslim feeling
bad about his skeleton
hello, the pressed into boxes
hello, the trussed up in sacks
the roped up like hams
hello, skulls bobbing in boiling pots
hello, sparrows wrangling over
scraps of lung
hello, patented spring-closure coffins
hello, coffins outfitted with
cast iron corpse straps
hello, patchouli and cardamom
post-anthropology
well past the gates
of cadaverdom
hello, blue silt wriggling
beneath blue skin
hello, mirrors
hello, wax casts
hello, carrion
carrying saline messages
hello, eleven seconds
and still blinking
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