Waddle

I've been to a cock fight. They are exactly what you imagine them to be.


Waddle 5/31

In the pit            lizard-legged cock
slashing            the second all flesh-ripping
flow of blood and puddling
Naked skinny green-feathered bird is
open-mouthed            a silence
hushed scream            blocked
by chanting men
In the pit            filled with sand
blood black absorbing drop of water
in sugar            you pick it up
This is a marble of violence
Cockspur slashing at chests            beaded sweat
floating in the air            calmly in stasis
landing as rain on deserts

McD

A French McDonald's commercial:

Prickly

I went on a pear kick for a second.

The weird texture of the fruit is fascinating to me.

The shape, color, smell. Fascinating.


Prickly 5/30

You hold the pear in your hand
and it is mutable            the skin is poking
Quicksilver flesh rising in peaks
soundwaves on water a green range
filling the spaces in your hand

Microphyll

Microphyll 5/29

It curls, bobs and darkens, it shakes off

eat slow weeping ferns in balsamic
We discuss sex, how it wraps us around it
convinces that it burns unless we water
A tight rope of hair barbing on ankles

It unwinds, pressing the leaves from its door
and passes into sunlight

On the end of the fork it drips, lazily unwinding
as if the sun were under the table
It knows which direction it's going
small black spores forming on the leaf buds

Knows how to let go

Confessional

These strange surrealist poems are what I consider dreams in word form. They resonate in a strange deep place for me. There are connective threads in them but they are tenuous.


Confessional 5/28

I say I want curtains to keep out the sun keep the rooms cool protect ourselves from summer and the bracing swarm of humidity

Dark wood-lined and smelling of oranges the box is always this damp - a tomb - a calm sigh from my mother - a metal grate a preacher

I crawl through the sharp inclined tunnel of blackness in my sleep and see into a valley of searing greens there is a tree filled with pears

What I mean to say is that I find myself thrashing in water while I sleep that the water is my bed and my bed seems to be made of bones

Pear flesh feels like sand soaked in cherries - harder - pearls - smaller - spider eggs - I feel like I am popping everything

And the sun always comes in year round it is light - a growing thing - but it does blind

I am n love with the idea of being in love I don't understand a picnic from a parade - there s a rose bush taller than Empire State and I am clipping the thorns...

Overstand

Santa Fe is a strange place that one strongly loves and hates.


Overstand 5/27

Santa Fe is a penny
A penny burning in moonlight
From here is it a puddle oozing down the foothills
Gray water filling the Rio Grande, flooding farms
Farmlands that are filling with locusts with man faces
Doll-like crawlers wearing green saris
Hopping clipping the wind and running the rain

Santa Fe is a brown square
A square poking out its sides
Lurching towards an ocean never seen
Again with water filling one thing emptying another
The ebb of some copper moon holding the last fall grains
A rectangle nursing burned grasses
Suckling arroyos

Santa Fe is a while
A whole sinking into mesa
Sharp sides pulsing the horizon
A gouge in landscape huge stroke of black coal
Against the redding night
It hops on all fours and calls like a whore
Her eyes done in spirals

Santa Fe is a fetish
A fetish doll on a shelf telling stories
Little clay-faced babies sitting on its lap
It whispers like a barn owl the hair on your neck stands
Feels like a shadow over the sun
A sudden rush of cold in the dry beds
A supporting hand on your neck while you sleep

Marinate

For many years I had a reoccurring dream where the room I was sitting in would begin to fill with water.

Every window and door would suddenly be fake. Painted on. As the water rose, I would take refuge on a floating couch. The room would suddenly be very tall and circular shaped.

After a very long time of worrying about falling in (I don't know how to swim) I would reach the ceiling. I would suddenly be pushed into the water. The couch still beneath me, holding me up enough to touch the roof. The water rising. My eyes the only thing above the surface.

Then I'd wake up.

Many years later I had the dream for what turned out to be the last time. Instead of apparently drowning, the roof suddenly flew off right as I was about to go under and a man with wings saved me.

I like to think it was Birdman.


Marinate 5/26

Do you have years - ?

Raise arms up like a bear and spin
slowly - this keeps the past at bay - sit
down sob until someone (mother) takes you home

Mirrors reflect - they bundle the twig
faces we make - hold them behind silvered surface
until we least expect - releasing self-ghosts as if
fire onto bathrooms - bedrooms - countless rooms

Do you have years - ?

That memory of drowning
where all is chlorine blue - sulfur smell
in your lungs - kicking disembodies legs floating -

A cylinder room with a cap top that flies off
and fish that slowly - there may be a shark - somewhere
a fan blade set to slice 'n dice
like a movie - some (derivative) nightmare - !

Do you have years - ?

Then you get to relive this each time you look
puffy-eyed - twinkle less - you
standing in a toilette in your own water staring

In your eyes - you can see this now - sudden
rolling credits - a trampoline of guest stars
pasts are bouncing around in your eyes -
you can name them - your mouth could begin to move -

Do you have years - ?

Mysterious

Mysterious 5/25

There is a dead cat on the sidewalk - mouth open in a scream
eyes oozing grease - black - hair matted into fuzz

I am listening to a man sing - about how good you look in a dress
and he's right - you do

Red-light

That's right.


Red-light

            - face into the wall hard
the bed is making those groans - it will fall apart - the neighbors!

            - and he's going in and out hard - inside you
the head is a cylinder of ice - exploding

- tensed -

            - grip the headboard - the posts - anything really - he's
really fucking you now - the sounds - a saliva on your ass

            - roses bloom on your neck - white threads on the sheets

Non-associative

This started out as a poem about me writing poems every day.

It feels like something else at the end.


Non-associative

The whole project is falling apart            The whole project is becoming just something you do            The whole project is a ghost            The whole project is a flailing dolphin in a stream            The whole project is a ghost            The whole project is a pile of quarters The whole project is a mess            The whole project aligns in stacks of yes and no The whole project is a container of sunlight            The whole project reminds me of my childhood            The whole project is reflecting less light The whole project is just less            The whole project is a stack of paper in a warehouse on fire
like a field of clover            like a worn out bunker            like a jar of fireflies            like a skin wrapped over a lamp

Mintage

Imagine a penny. This is the image I was writing about in this poem.


Mintage 5/22

Hills of words - a continent -
                        along the edge of the coin - a face - a secret

            Rough hewn fingers rubbing
- lines of feeling strings from sweaters

                                    His is the face of the dead
                        this President with numbers on his chest

Pull the world down to this inflatable pool - let the copper
reflects greeness into the whole -

The hills are cascading - lines of code falling
                        snow even - erasing the history - the future

Saver

Saver 5/21

At the top-heavy point of the world
the bludgeon becomes ice covered - enraged
it comes hard - tilting with the caps
and comes down splitting

Like that child ice skating in that song
falling through the ice - freezing
tears like diamonds on her face
a bronzing glitter look

You could take the cubed person home
leave her in a cold room - look at her sadness
propped on some pedestal
touch the surface - polish it clear

At night would she blink out
the days - watch you
in your nudeness and be scandalized
does she dream about hearing?

That bludgeon - on the precipice of
the ice-covered spaces - does it feel
similar as it drives down deep - come out dripping
heated - red - does it know the seal pup as a lover?

Just Cause Civil Rights Is Law...

Rachel takes us to school.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Anxious

Scientists in Maryland have successfully produced a living man-made cell. THIS is a link to a Huffington Post article on the 'breakthrough'.

I would assume I am not alone in worrying over mans venture into life creator.


Anxious 5/20

                        - only answer

burn the sleeping man - heads on pillow anyhow
            feet in socks on the dash

                        window open - air flowing in
                        no stifling stop here

gasoline -
gasoline in the trunk

                        - back to town alone

Football

I got dressed up very very nicely today. Tie, vest, white shirt. I looked good. I put on my new rain coat. My new shoes. I walked to work. I walked home.

In New York there is a lot of police tape. The yellow kind. You ignore it and go about your life.

I walked pass some. And saw a sign with burning candles. Saw a wet sidewalk. It hadn't really rained all day

I noticed I was walking through a pool of fresh blood.

My new shoes left little red footprints for a few steps.

This was a new thing for me. A new kind of 'city living moment'.

The poem below is about death. Not the one I walked into today. One I drove near 5 years ago.

I came upon a dead deer. t looked alive. The fur shone like a coat in a closet.

I wanted to set it up on its legs and send it on its way.

Leaving those red footprints today. Passing a grocery store clerk who signed a gun shooting at me as I passed...

I wanted to right so many things. And I felt silly for feeling like that.


Football 5/19

There is that in the gut and
            there is the ball-shaped thought also

Filling a pregnancy a worry in
            the void, cirrhosis of emptiness

A dead body begins to swell a
            ball shape bouncing, your ear to it

Air mistaken for breathing
            for oneself, the sound, rupturing cells

Require

Require 5/18

A project starts out full canteen clear
liquid running on the chin A clear
night stars breaking foam on waves
twinkling in the eyes forming new
thoughts like holes in a sieve A broken
speaker draining thoughts from the
mold

A project silts down into a gulf posing
as a statue of a dead singer staring into
dead oil-filled gulf waters A boring word
of the day repeating for weeks A shoveling
record warping itself on the voices of
the Andrews Sisters

A project stalls a Pinto on I-40 on
the way to California A smearing
butterfly on the windshield its spreading
blues mixing with washer fluid clears
and running like a river A sudden dam
Hoover strutting out of the hills
and grabbing at Texas

A project sits down at the table breaks
loaves and drinks sand A spread
of mustard A calming down and stillness
babies in cribs covered in blankets paused
rotating reels of film the edges worn out
tracking and falling tracking into frame

Literator

Literator 5/17

The words are ashen-
burn holes in the paper
a fingering of hollow space

Thinking sent into sky offering
the clouds something to build
storms

Books will unhinge themselves will
come out of shelves tossing
leather at wondering animals

And you are the opening shot
clenching jaws holding
doors open for the flowing page

What purpose this drowning
this wavering hand
What can one see through the holes?

Masculism

Masculism 5/16

After a few hours of talking at the bar he mentioned that he had a vagina...

Moth

When I was little I would touch butterfly and moth wings. The scales rubbing off color on your skin is a kind of magic. It destroys the animals ability to fly.

But it makes you look like glitter.


Moth 5/15

            - dust held
making a flap -

thing are continually damaged

            the gray ash lands
in a cup of water - flakes of salt
in oil

you touch them and they fall

            - scaled and thinning -
a network of lead without glass -

flint in the quick of bone

            flint in the quick

Don't Stop

Strangest combination of famous people singing a personal favorite.

Meddling

Life isn't necessarily like a noodle in a sink. Just kinda like it.


Meddling 5/14

Writing the mind out of the mind out of writing like a sieve of pasta pouring out the starches clouded and falling over themselves tumbling like the mind out-writing itself, this is how one wants the world to be, a constant tumbling over rocks, water flowing, washing away whatever needs to go down the drain, but it's usually the noodle that drops into the sink and sticks there dumbly, the one that cannot be eaten, cannot be thrown away -

Tryst

I gave myself an internet free day yesterday.

I potted house plants.

There are two weeping cherry trees in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. They are all twisted and ancient. They look like mirrors of each other. Like you could press them together.

They look like old lovers. Mattresses with the shapes of their owners pressed permanently into them.


Tryst 5/13

The weeping cherry is a body wrapping itself over itself
            it's lonely warmth makes it forget the taste
            of saliva the smell of armpits memory makes it twist
            makes it bloom sad - deep inside pink
            it has seen its share of meals - seasons - blood

The weeping cherry has never touched the ground
            its branches fall to the calf - soft hem catching
            the breeze as it walks over subway ventilation
            purring against thighs knees
            all knobby bending against railings like lovers

The weeping cherry is a cast of a body reclining on a body
            entwined in sex act - engorged
            the lover long vanished - would fill all spaces
            where one branch seems smoothed out hollow skin
            pressing on the air like an old man's arm on glass -

Porthole

There are plenty of scenes of drowning in movies but the shot of Vesper at the end of Casino Royale is one of the most fascinating to me.




Porthole 5/12

an opening
small blue pools
swirling

rivets popping
purple
umbrellas of seeing

thick underwater
and tasting of
glass

Reck

Reck 5/10

She's cleaning up all the time and organizing papers. She's placing her clothes by season and color and selling off boxes of shoes. The furniture is moving in circles and there's a space under the window for what is called the 'eventual bed'.

She's walking more and doing stairs less.

The car is always sitting.

She's got a tumor or a cough or a tumor and a cough. Both are hacking and filling. It's all moving parasites in caterpillar all sliding black bar codes in cellophane. She's cleaning up things and leaving her life. She's placing it all into boxes.

The bosses come find the house empty. They find cats unfed. They find a pile of warm clothes.

Inhibition

Inhibition 5/10

Sluice
a pomegranate open
red
pulsing lip

Pull the eye seed
bleeding
magnetic
pulsing

Seeds a flower
yellow
honeycomb raising
stare into a cloud

The sky is
an open purple wound
Airplane sticking it
to the heavens

Tipping the velvet
combing

Morph

Butter stains on cardboard as a horror movie.


Morph 5/9

Butter stains on the cardboard spread, a seeping movement
making faces of saints in the fibers

I watch the rain fall gently (so gently it is baby hair) into the trees,
outside the street is quiet

The pavement is cracking under itself, and
I'm watching the seams pull, render their clothes
and tossing their hair in anger

The lines are all wavy

Under water aquarium photograph wavy, they derail my eyes
and make the rain softer

The butter makes the paper clear, gives it a medieval glow, I
expect light to bed around it and cast
shadows on the wall in the shapes of fear and hollowness

I eat a muffin from the box and watch the circle it casts grow,
first into a skull, then a widening -

Pestilence

I find that I go through periods of obsessing over iconography. Be it religious, literary, scientific. I get hung up on a single image for long spans.

This is part of an ongoing problem I have with horses and their connection to apocalypse imagery.

Other things I am hung up on:
horseshoe crabs
fireflies
the life cycles of stars
eyes
twilight
romantic love
green


Pestilence 5/8

         - a horse   riding itself   over sequined
dunes   Full on thinking
         that shoes make the
               man.

Extemporary

This is why people like "dangerous" looking magic acts. People want to see them not make it. I know that it's morbid.

But it's true.


Extemporary 5/7

She's wearing that sequined number
        the one with the sheer top that makes
        it look like you can see her tits

All waving hands and red face
        fingernails flashing airport
        traffic controllers - LOOK OVER HERE!

She's pointing at the giant glass box
        all filled with water, you can tell it's thick
        because it looks blue around the edges

He's in there again
        chains, the whole number
        I'm here because I'm waiting for the keys
        to drop the lock to catch
        the jacket to snag

anything really

        just to see his face go purple
        rise up that fear face n the eyes look
        out at her really not there tits
        and think...really think...

Heavy Lifting

Sometimes I think I'm trying to be the lovechild of Hart Crane and William Butler Yeats.

I promise not to jump ship.


Heavy Lifting 5/6

One could talk about the bridge as if it were a cauldron
Large, black, possessed with foot soles
It is a marching thing with tentacles of steel
A holding on between sides of a river
Large cascading handles spreading hypnosis
Of progress from above the liquid void

Like it is the root of something
A questing darkness, nothingness that is searching
For a key to unlock its powers and bring the dead
To life to roam and flock the towns to bone

Mortar and pestle of hope, that is failing in every aspect
Large alright, but spindly, tiny narrow threads
A spider-hold on a moving continent
What falls into the darkness? What pulls itself hulking out?

Caffe

I try not to write about work. I like to keep my lives separate.


Caffe 5/5

It's 6 o'clock and the gate is rising
the sidewalk wet from hosing a box
of pastries melting cardboard

On the front of the Times there's
a war happening still Vonnegut
died and his calm face stares up at
bombings above his head

Ducking in and out the whir of blades
in a rotary bean box the sudden
coffee smell a vomit smell

Death always gets the front pages
look around for an Anna Nicole
while you drink and eat look at it
his book sales jumped 10 fold.

Instance

Instance 5/4

Construction sites smell of campfire
Which reminds one of the Boy Scouts
Those little scarves held with wood loops
I picture a climbing wall
Small selves attempting over and over
Little legs against wood
Nostrils inhale s'mores and then alcohol...
Later a fire in a mountain hides from view
Blankets and a tank of watermelon drink
The hush of leaves attending you
Small yellow faces snapping in wind
That's Aspen for you nosy and loud
One large root system with forcing fingers
The tremble like frightened children
Little legs bicycle in the air
So fast smoke pours out...

Macro-flora

When I first moved to NY there was a Corpse Flower blooming at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. You had to wait in this insane line to see it. I was impressed by the sight of New Yorkers wating in line to see a flower.

If anything it proves we are not going to hell.

Yet.


Macro-flora 5/3

corpse flower in brooklyn
engorged hibiscus
tea-pot honey-filled pendulum
bell jar flies collecting
streaking red over green
phallus in blacks and slime
pointing at moon eye

Narrow Cell

I went to a very fabulous wedding tonight.

There were these great arrangements of flowering tree branches on each table with lanterns hanging from them.

It was on the roof of a film studio in Brooklyn. It was August hot and humid, but an amazing breeze washed over the roof during the ceremony. Dark clouds rolled in and by the time I was catching a car to come home it had cooled off greatly.

It makes me want to fall in love. Which is terribly cliched.

But true.

This is a poem about death. When it comes, like love, unexpected but right around a corner.

Or the next.


Narrow Cell 5/2

And I rap my knuckles against the smooth spot one more time.
And I feel the groove, depression, spoon-like and cupping.
And I notice the trace of moisture around the seams of everything.

It's like a waiting, it feels like there is nothing to wait for.
It's the calm press of soil, overhead, under, around - peace-filled, moving.
It's low-pressure days where you float on your feet, always.

Some people think of angels, flies, the coming Jesus.
Some manage a throw, vaulting, slate slapping.
Some do, but, it's just slipping between parked cars into a busy street.

Moonshine

May!

The new header is a photo from a moving train that has just left the Philadelphia Amtrak station. It was taken on April 16th around 11ish in the morning. It says ASAP!

There was an amazing full moon on Thursday night. I walked home the long way to see more of it. These are the things I miss about living in a place with fewer obstructions to the sky.


Moonshine 5/1

...the better you look!

slowly leaning to one side

...as you drunk I am!

arm dangling, leg slipping...