hope worth having

you saw me laughing at myself in the mirror
but what you didn't see was beating harder
than the wings of the last guardian
angel, bristly blond locks waving
back from flight, harder than the final
fucked up father to spray the blood
from the nose of his woman, child
whoever raised a hand to lower his
I destroyed my poetry, however fickle or firm
in hopes it was enough like me but more
regenerative, like a phoenix
though lacking a reason to rise
my life was supposed to take
flight, but I had nothing to protect
no garden to tend
so I slept naked in the spit of intellectuals
while my heart spread mud from their shoes
all over its aching body
my eyes rolled out of my head and worms crawled in
burrowing into an overwhelmed brain
that wants and wants and needs
but breathes less than a flower walks or a flame
quenches the throat of a mute
my words loved to play or be played
my words emptied the contents of their emptiness
into no mind low enough to explore the soul
of someone worth saving
a rippling lake of glass swallowed my arm
my body spread and waving on both ends of the sand
falling through endless pillars of forgotten ideas
I made the mistake of wanting to create light
in the loveless void of art
constantly billowing with no wind to guide
only ash to fall from its treasured chest
ash and miles of sand before
the smile of smiles is torn from the world
what did you say, you said
I said
would you please love me as much as I love you
I'm sorry
I still can't hear you

incomp.

I'm not content to shout in an echo chamber
And let my words wash over me
Droning fingers squeezing the blood out of my body
When the goal was to get through to you
But that's the only hope

We're ravenous, vulturous,
We live on a deflating ball spreading humours
Like jam on bread from knives, sipping
Wine from ejected bullet cartridges
Who am I, who are you, who are we who
Feast on the fallen and pay for our souls with interest
Carving trenches into mother's back
[...]

I tried to make sense of my self
I think that's the first mistake we make before we realize
Not everyone has diamonds pouring from their wrists
If the ocean ever runs out
Just siphon the blood from my heart

Weightless, I collapse into the space of memory
Unwanted images flash behind my eyes
Wildly flickering screens barely able to contain
Spasms pressed up against their glass
I see her floating through slate-black washes
Inside slimy mires of mind
I hear her whimpering, nearly
Drowned out by toneless buzzing
Lost in cold, reverberating dark
I've forgotten her face
Once burned in so deep
Now formless, an amoebic frame stretched
Colorless and emasculated across
The backs of my eyelids

In a vast room furnished with shapes
Emerging from its caliginous tract
Husks lie prostrate in a corner, vaguely
Shadowing a religious intensity
Hearts battered and wrinkled
Stamped into flat black envelopes
Marked only with wordless scrawls
Spill out of dry-rotted chests
Where compassionate and murderous
Throbs slept in the same bed

Blood oozes back into the sun
While the sky rubs its eyes
Bodies reanimate, and, strung through
Them, tightened vessels relax
Meaning compressed into words slowly
Scatters about red-hued mindscapes
Occupied by memories pressed against glass
Untwisting and calming, cooling and filling with love
That drips upward, back down into deflated
Shells again made firm and unruptured
Sadness rewinds through ridges and valleys
Tears sweetly kiss their way back into ducts
Sobs gasp back into the back of my throat

No Rituals

Soul searching is forfeiture
Plains grazed in strained silence
Drip dry from epiphanies
Smolder inside of dust
Aquifers pulsate in odd time

Curtailed pride of a liar
Strung out on a fence
Dreams outweighed by darning
Eyelids, see no evil
See no truth

Sacrificial lamb, taking a minute to think
Autophagia or go hungry
Draped taut over a drum
Skeleton is the closet
Sky sliced, cataract pours frothy

Levity of a chameleon
Foggy country meadow
Sobs thrust voiceless into cloth
Tight around the mouth
Drone of rustling in an echo chamber

Climbing pushes ladders down
Leaves bury the trees
Perfect as root rot and blister rust
Stand in place for a century
Time is getting dreadfully old

louder

voice, raising, rising, arisen, rose
red, passion, passion, violent
violet, stinging poison, us
we darts, weed arts, clinging to the gallery walls
coughing, hacking away at statues of claret
begging for ears
pulling veils out of them
streams of regurgitation
yell louder
nothing
yell louder
nothing
yell louder
nothing
beautiful is so mundane
lift the body from the bedrock
dirt knows, dirt expands and contracts
keep lifting
keep lifting
it's a sublime body
it's a sublime body
it's a sublime body
it's a sublime body


edit

weed art clinging to the gallery walls
coughing, hacking away at statues of claret
begging for ears, pulling veils out of them
streams of regurgitation

yell louder
nothing

beautiful is so mundane
lift the body from the bedrock
dirt knows, dirt expands and contracts
keep lifting, it's a sublime body

Ide

I didn't beware the march of I'ds
Before or after you fell away from my arms on the 15th
Came back empty and fooled me again
I'd never do this
But I did it and the memory is carved into my every pounding migraine
I held your hand as if you were all that separated me
From rocks jutting up from a bay one thousand feet below

A2?
A2?
Tons
of
alcohol,
no
stabilization
gyroscope

I let you drop (like a rocket, baby, oh oh-oh)
I'm still washing you out of my eyes. . .
Whenever I look back to that back seat I see a. . . a banshee
With a shotgun blast for a face
All covered in black ink floating in from extradiegetic space
Well that's a tongue lolling out
I think I see a tooth dangling
Perhaps perhaps, you were once a human being
Guzzle guzzle, drink and smoke and drink and smoke
The black ink keeps floating
My throat keeps tugging itself down
I'm home
Lucky I no longer smell your ghost
Or find your hair
I should be able to wipe my mind clean
I should be able

no Irish

I'm surrounded by grey sky and ground but a horizon is hardly distinguishable.

There's whistling but no wind to carry the tune.

I hear it all around me.

The sound isn't shrill or particularly sure of itself.

Something that looks like the Rolling Stones mouth and tongue logo materializes in the distance.

The whistling mouth licks its lips and advances towards me.

Its monstrous size becomes more evident as it draws near.

Piss leaks down my legs onto the floor.

Don't laugh.


This had been a city street like any other city street in fact quite a shitty street with buildings looking like used toilet paper and crumpled cups scattered from a trash can while no other bodies linger to contribute to the pervading stink.

Cars parked their asses like good little children of god in single file waiting to guzzle their communion blood and bodies of christs yes scrawny and ragged cross-bearers with their goofy looking neckties just dying for each other's sins every day working several jobs with no insured benefit driven only by their own immaculate conceptions of youth and orgasmic longevity,

now scraping pennies from bottoms of cup-holders.

Christs haven't come back but everything around has retracted into the ground like a cuckoo into his clock.


I've got nowhere to run.

Look, this isn't funny.

The mouth belches like a toilet just done swallowing a near two-flusher.

It smells much the same.

“Rape! Murder! It's just a shot away!” it eructs/instructs.

It recedes into the background and disappears.


I thought I was gonna get gobbled up there for a minute but the city is alive yes the buildings are back like adult teeth coming up through kids' gums cuckoo cuckoo.

“Waah waah mama” cry diapers soiled and sniveling from every nook and cranny some of them piled high like little mountains on street corners where even street lights turn up their noses and tear up oh it's ridiculous.

I look around and see the “Jesus Christ!”s and “Learn how to drive, asshole!”s and it becomes more evident than it already was as they shuffle and jostle each other but not loose from their routines stopping only for coffee at Starbucks on some otherwise bare corner where acorns knocked from their trees get stabbed and bleed out night after night to a grey horizon with no janitor to sweep up the trash but maybe a De Niro circa “Taxi Driver” now and then.

“You talkin' to me?”

Babies bawl and bawl, shrill wails reaching out for reassuring mothers' coos.

This, my friends, is the zombie apocalypse.

Take a deep – oh SHIII

O, YOYO!

I am chaos
I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms
I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy
I am chaos
I am alive, and I tell you that you are free

ǝʌı1ɐ ǝɹɐ noʎ ʇɐɥʇ noʎ 11ǝʇ ı puɐ 'ǝǝɹɟ ɯɐ ı
ɹǝpɹo ɯɐ ı
ʎuoɯɹɐɥ ɹouıɯ uı qos suɐıpǝbɐɹʇ puɐ sʇ1npɐ ɹnoʎ ɥɔıɥʍ uı ǝɯɐɹɟ ǝɥʇ ɯɐ ı
ǝɔuɐʇsqns p1ınq sʇsıʇuǝıɔs puɐ sʇsıʇɹɐ ɹnoʎ ɥɔıɥʍ oʇ sɯɥʇʎɥɹ ǝɥʇ ɯɐ ı
ɹǝpɹo ɯɐ ı

Upside down stanza reads (my edits/reversals):

I am order
I am the rhythms to which your artists and scientists build substance
I am the frame in which your adults and tragedians sob in minor harmony
I am order
I am free, and I tell you that you are alive

The first stanza is the original paragraph verbatim, separating each sentence with line break instead of period. It can be found on page 9 of the Principia Discordia, here.

I was just -

This cliff calls for a stampede
Of learning to fly, dead weight,
Golden balls of blood.
Life flows back into the water,
and

in the woods...

This is what my chest looks like if you open it up:
Trees like paintbrushes dabbing a sky of coarse fibers,
Fish jumping to loosen their eggs or something,
Water that plays the world back to itself,
Birds singing to each other just trying to relate,
And a lumberjack emptying his bowels behind a bush.
It's not so beautiful if you've seen it a million times;
You'd probably close me back up,
Remove your gloves, wash your hands, and call it a day.

a-b-b-bah-buh-bah-bah-b-buh

Sun-bleached swine hang by the neck,
Tears rolling down their chinny-chin-chins,
Bursting little piñatas
Sugary intestines pile miles in square feet
Of the muddied pens of fucking idiots.
Every part will be put to use -
Heads, tongues, and brains -
This little pity went to market!
This little pity had roast beef,
This little pity had none.
This little pity stayed home.

roksez2leef

Rock says to the leaf, "I need a new tongue."
"Why?" ponders the leaf.
"I'm colorless, heavy, and dull.
With a new tongue I may taste
which direction the wind is blowing."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"I have no nerves."
"Well is there no other reason?"
"There is. So I can love and maim you."

smashsmashsmashsmashsmashsmashsmash

14 s's, 7 m's, a's, and h's just to title this,
47 smashes just in that first line,
Smash the keys, until they lock up
Tryin'a dress to impress,
Shittin' all over myself with the same basic colors,
Brown, orange, green, in
Clumps, balls, lincoln logs, liquid discharge,
Like a sputtery old car choking and dying.
56 is the word count now, 62, 63,
Smashing these keys with nothing in mind,
Nothing in mind 'til I project it on,
But no amount of revision can save
A steaming pile of smashes.
Creativity lost in the ubiquity of the spiders' web,
Just playing in shit.
Forming it into new shapes,
getting wrapped tight.
An entire existence in denial.
Smash. Smash. Smash.
Chomp.

plum brandy

Drop the bomb, here I stand,
Got the next one on hand?
gonna drop like a #1 debut,
off the charts, on the top,
Somewhere in between,
Walking around,
Don't know what to do with myself
My hands write
My mind's not
Hey let's have a bath,
you and me, let's get wet
Sog like prunes in the blankest rooms,
Mauve stains all over the carpet,
All that's left

Teller

I'm scraping my sleep out of crusted china, or you know, every now and again
Rubbing eyes with the backs of my index fingers,
Careful not to get soap in them,
Slowly forgetful and here's where things should've been written down,
In the suds of a kitchen sink,
But I'm curious about what's for breakfast,
While I'm not even hungry,
Or am I?,
the pain and the rumbling are disassociated now,
Clank, scrub, hissy splash and clinkety clank some more,
Rinsey rinse, dry dry, dry, thump.
Mmmm, the smell of bacon.
No, it's just my imagination.

Shower

Rain drops music ceaselessly
A body swallows splashes down its bare back
Muscles awaken beneath the drumming baptism of dirt
Dewy blades dance between concrete cracks
Trees moan with a delicate sway
The body staggers a step to the wind shifting west
with a pull of the clouds the sun glares through
Its rays glistening off myriad beads of water
Fighting tremors of cold, vacillating
Breath, cenesthetic
Hallucinations, clamorous
Thoughts about life too turned over, rarely claimed
Tears seek refuge in the downpour of slippery billows...
Feet now callous, collecting grass
walk back to the same rooms they'll always know

I'll Huff and I'll Puff and I'll

I.
Eraser spent to the ferrule,
Flat graphite-black
Like grinding teeth, rim scrapes
Sheet, rips, blurs the mark,
Image persistent, a little uglier,
Error slightly more spread out

Onto the next page,
Led to the imprint pressed from the last touch,
False trace, last ditch effort,
Breaks and oh no, slides out,
Rolls off the desk
and onto the floor

This is what it took
to pull the box out,
Pull another out of the box,
Pre-sharpened,
and resume.
...

II.
This is not a suicide,
Or even a wan, divested dress-rehearsal.
It's more like a scribbling,
Down to the quick,
Or a slow repression of
Welcome thoughts.
". . . granted you never sang on key,"
You say that as if you'd heard.
Although destruction is reform's strong arm,
Perfection is incomplete.
Masturbation for a while,
Then a soft rain in the dark.
In the morning, dew on the grass,
Lavish a hazy blue,
Birds trade songs,
and I've forgotten of you.

III.
Cigarette smoke familiar with these yellow walls
Holds its breath til a window -
Sauntering to the radio, a squelching boar
On a limp rustic half round table,
hiss, squeee, thud, just in time for
"We interrupt this broadcast to regrettably inform you
that your life is meaningless; and now, back to the program."
- is raised, gosh it's stuffy in here,
What time is it anyway, quarter to six on a Saturday morning,
and the lights are just starting to go out
In da neighbahoid,
Come on in the city . . .
There's a war on,
I'm lucky enough to barely be able to tell,
"Morning, Sam." "Oh hello... um, Ralph. Have a good day."
and that's good enough, I guess . . .

giddyappendix

Hi-strionic------DADA

eso--t-------------Eric
----r-------------------
-----m-----------------
-------a----------------
---------y--------------
----------b-------------
-----------e------------
------------n-----------
-------------o----------
--------------t----------
de ea re ita censuere

LOL

COST OF LIVING INDEX
A dissonant string of words speckled calamine ear brass...
Never learned from my mistakes,
The
sound of
a heart that
knows it's almost beat
like a despairing child who
smiled at a joke Then
grew to understand
it Swans
around
questioning grace-
lessly failed suicides in progress,
A muffled pattering of raindrops on a cotton hood,
Oxygen rich, megalomanic fight or -
Running water,
- [structureless] flight,
a Peel to the Census.
Risking hypoxia, readingreadingreading,
--Emergency Masks Have Been Deployed--
...unlikened, not ferromagnetic,
yes more like a sieve,
CHEMICAL ENGINEER

runner

Under that rug, corrugated documents of love,
With anyone else's name in any of the blanks,
Too many to count, none of them as whited out
As that fourth or fifth one,
And still more tears; why keep any fragment?
Why not burn them like the tenderness left
Drifting tenuously in the names...
Eyes without a face, a sadness more saddened
By the wearing of its mask...

duckyyy

duck floating along, lily pads twirling, finds a nook, preens,
coughs up blood in his hand,
looks up into the tree limbs o'erhead,
spider inching down sings
"fuck a doodle shit/
blood thar's shooting out lickety split"

I dedicate myself to the end of the world

Hi you, interminable voyeur eye, you, unblinking, stalwart
I, hello. A smoking incision right to left across a blue,
Yellow goddess wrapped in nuclear explosions,
Say hi, say thank you.
Counterclockwise merrygoround,
Licking up vomit off the pen and paper.
I am looking up helpless, these moments tumbling,
As the warhead enters (pinpoint precision) thru
My interminable voyeur eye, hi, say thank you -
May I have another___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

poem for Emily Apple and Val Swain (et al)

Black noise uniform disrupted by white noise,

Splinters the righteous indignation with throat-grabbing,

Worms in the dirt spitting on his shoes won't help

A screeching logic halted by abuse,

Pressure points on the neck

Kicking up dust but is it really necessary to tie the legs?

An apathy synonomous with atrophy,

Intelligence more a croquet mallet in the presence of the megaton hammer cock

So pale, weakly defiant of a nonsense, still only white

noise to the steaming off cement,

or in the back of a truck,

detained for no reason

Other than noises colliding

only one of which sensible,

Which is to say stifled

There are no checks and balances.

Dust off, arise.
Spit in his cloudy eyes.

\\--|--\\

etilletas yarts a
hgih gnilcric tibro ni tsol
ffo stuhs yllanif

(2/5/04)

say the same things over and over until they're pretty

yea, hey, am I refining my vision?
which is better, 5, or 6? 6? hmm
which is better, 1, or 2? bout the same?
just picking scabs
off my eyes? off my heart? some other organ? no?
I'm just trying to get a feel here
injecting meaning like steroids,
forgetting why

yea, hey, am I making it clearer?
no?
5 was clearer.
I'm obscuring things.
rest your chin there, forehead here,
which is better, bout the same?
which looks prettier?
S G R Q 9
X L T 8 F I

addendum:
things are obscured because that's the nature of things,
my vision,
or at least, everything blurs together now
on some metaphorical level

dilettante

Can't have
Laureate without aureate,
Voluminous without luminous,
Diminutive without dim,
Learner without earner.

strictly distilled

Thick fog crawling through grassless hills,
Wearing tight like Ourmoney suits
The naked skin of god's brown girth -
Pale erosion's laceration: evidence clear,
A singing orphan's mouth emptying the land
Of stark frowns; folks ride, do die down

Tripping on obscured booby traps, falling down,
Hidden vines the only life among the hills
Save the starving jackals roaming the land
Ravenous, quoting ravens, eat what suits;
Eyes in back of the head, coast is clear,
Follow them within the landscape's girth

Fog of frowns, hugging holey girth
Receding with the pulling of the flag down
Half mast "Sympathizing, we're in the clear."
Sweat machine hides that the hills
Hide also the handshakes, blood crusted suits
Spattered by the sweat of the land

Apologies apologize, buttered up Darkland
Outside of Homeland's ostensible girth
Stacked on stacks of stacks of lawsuits
And other doom on its way down, down
Everyone, run sprightly to the hills
The earth is shifting under the fog unclear

Till it lifts, nothing can be said to be clear;
Stricken, thoughts polarize and drift and land
While bombs exploding laughter erase the hills
Erase erasure, father time's immeasurable girth
Clipping off eons on top of vague dressings down
Deconstructionist humiliation, tears in suits

Cards undealt remove their limiting suits
King, Queen, and knave all quite unclear
As to the orgy of numbers; dissidents trickle down
Thoughts perpetuate and refuse to land
The sky worn by fireworks, beyond mere girth
Built are the mental institutions, on recondite hills

The fog has lifted;
The voice has carried through, thus,
Here we go again

existentialism

existentialism

abstraction, philosophy;
questioning, making constellations
shot in the dark
x² + y² = r²

noncents

I'm coastin' on this paranoia,
Magic carpet of anxiety over two thousand twelve jar(s)-
en (sick) Sawdust Arid-labia,
Worried tin foil did I use Dutch?
Cockney: Out wiv dee _old, in wiv dee knew;
Cock, knee, all needs patchin',
My love, like a category five hurrican't, Saffir-Simps[on or off],
Who gives a (who)t/shit
?

prey or paradise?

Ostriches don't actually bury their heads in the sand,
But that won't stop the only kids what hold the conch.
Did you know soldiers used to throw babies in the air,
And catch them on bayonets?
Why should anything be easy to understand?
I saw a kid coming down off a sedative-high ask:
"Is this real life?"
I'm to the point where reality doesn't mean anything to me:
Reality is full of myths, idiots with megaphones,
Babies impaled and mothers ravished, or discarded,
Children merely born to go through the motions,
Palimpsests scribbled on (an eternally deep griffonage),
Every human memory a smeared exposure of light
Draped on an empty inanimateness that will outlive us all,
Every poet laureate descended from a fucking monkey,
at a typewriter;
Escapism is much more my style.

ergo: gnomics

forefathers' faces on the oxidized coins of
boors and bohemians alike, flicked into the fountains of ichor;
fresh wishes residing in wishes residual, accidental love
or incidental happiness, accepted graciously or
as the slug drops onto a salt pile

joke

Q: How can you tell one's not postmodernist?
A: A clue: whether he is a scientist.

Q: Is this title a double entendre?
A: Must you ask, must you let your mind wander?

Q: Why, but with a question you just answered!
A: You questioned an answer yourself; absurd!

Q: Why? What's all this say?
A: Don't know. Shouldn't you?

Q: Oh, I get it, A.
A: Do you really, Q?

Q: My quest: trivial?
A: Quite, and quite unreal.

the thing about experimentation; a fragment

making false things ring truer than true things
by strapping cleverness to a table,
forcing it to swallow fish hooks,
and tickling its belly with a feather

Y O Y

how does a numb heart keep with the beat?
in whole or in part
collective unconscious produce meaningful art?
the canvas is white again,
paint no longer pumping
through its network of tributaries;
cut and splayed by the virginal acumen

of a jaded parvenu,

stupid stupid,
why the fuck should I please anyone,
"we're all mundane"
what keeps us sane?
the answer, no; the question?

thought is devalued and has no place
human is dehumanized and has no voice
sponge rapt in free verse,
the tired ruminations on rumination,
skipping the beat, muting the noise
effortfully futilely, noise
noise, noise,
a louder silence,
a deader calm

still

lightning-struck,
bearing dead
pears dropping,
green bearded
stalagmite -
standing still/
still standing;
would it cry,
pray to die?

auto-baptism

curse of a crumbling, impermeable rhinestone
sulci/deepening graves, a sundered jealousy
spilling the paint on vine and lattice;
hands pulling water clinging,
up and free from the basin, dripping/returning,
the half-vivification of a blurry face...
mud drifting back into the skin -
it's raining but there is work to be done

this

centipede: segmented but linear,
doubled in feet, crawling in blackened leaf
the charred remains of clearing out bad spots -
fell in love with a spider, kissed blankly;
no hundred foot marathon, just a step

sequester

Peeling the onion, looking for fruit/
On dull knees, a deaf mute
Clasping the rhythm, choking off bars/
A vaguely tragic pantomime/
The universe/ a great non-sequitur laugh track