31 January 2011

Overcut

Overcut 1/31

I don’t want
to compare
my heart
to the forest
The Lorax
looses
but
it is hard
not to
given
the evidence
at hand

30 January 2011

Lawyer

Lawyer 1/30

Because they were filming Law & Order across from the Brooklyn Museum
all week the B71 wove around the trailers and food carts at all hours of the day

The morning I was mugged they were out there cooking for everyone
at 6AM just like they were the day before and the day after

Inside somewhere there were actors in suits wearing long coats pretending to
be detectives and when I was sitting in a hospital at 10PM blind from punches to
the face and I came face to face with real detectives in real long coats wearing
real suits and chewing real toothpicks

They were out there across from the Brooklyn Museum preparing to film a scene
where someone kills someone and people in long coats save everyone within the hour

29 January 2011

Poppet

Poppet 1/29

In my possession
            a rag-doll with rolling eyes

It is her face

Her hands
                        feet

Let the cat play with it
            let the rain melt its seams

Poke at it with sticks

You can see her dance nightly
            like her feet are on fire

28 January 2011

Languishment

Languishment 1/28

This is a desert – skin
                        a healing patch over the mouth

What is love but a breaking open of a peapod

The sand eviscerates – leathers
                        turns everything purple-brown

The peapod is full of sand – pours over hours

Love is a dry space bone-filled and breaking constantly

Take this pea on your tongue – it will clear
                        roll it like a pearl

Sand over the tops of dunes

27 January 2011

Acerbly

Acerbly 1/27

Three men pour concrete down a hole : ants everywhere
are screaming inequity : breaking the mould so to speak

They are casting the city : taking a record : hours later
they sweep away the earth

All that is left : great gray mass flowing out : ant parts all
over at every angle : inequity sir inequity

26 January 2011

Parry

Parry 1/26

Trees are between us
You are coming in the dark

I promised
I wouldn’t talk like this

Alas sir
I cannot fence

Harsh snow falls
Your fists impact in stars

Take care
Run like wind in alley ways

25 January 2011

Cherry Birch

Cherry Birch 1/25

You tell me to chew a birch twig and it tastes like wintergreen and isn’t that amazing that reddish wooden thing in my mouth : even in December I can tell that you are hot under your clothes that you have the itch to get naked and I won’t stop you there is an empty spot on the desk fold them leave them there : The sheets and hissing radiator are enough

24 January 2011

Burnsian

Burnsian (to a louse) 1/24

I move in weeds of ancient death
Pick my way from breath to breath!
These hats of wonder I cannot free,
But take solace in the notion!

23 January 2011

Biased

Biased 1/23

The 35th parallel is a labyrinth of histories

Conquests a melting framework feathers and horn

Storytellers dancing in dusts in circles around pueblos

Building cities and collapsing them being a birth a death

22 January 2011

Swash

Swash 1/22

Does the ocean sound like static or does static sound like the ocean

The table is feet from the edge
            where dirt packs and grass falls
            abyss –

The sound of water is the sound of airplanes over Brooklyn

It is one A.M. and the television is color-bars and national anthems

Staring into the void is Land’s End

The sound of dashing on rocks
            circling down and frothing
            pulling you in –

21 January 2011

Perigraphic 2.0

Perigraphic 2 2/21

You are throwing diamonds like marbles

Exaggerated hand movements – a showgirl posing next to a washer/dryer
Is there a ‘G’ Vana?

Wind is tossing grass into your mouth and it tastes like grass

20 January 2011

Round

Round (Browning) 1/20

I refuse that this city is a dark void
despite ghosts that come
round our ears morn to night:
            you are robbed
            starved
            beaten
            what not


Here is the ring and the book
cast by streetlights the moon the stars
All so over the heads of the people below

And on a darkened street in February
a man will be wrestled will
be held and ghosts will round off the night:
            you are robbed
            starved
            beaten
            what not

19 January 2011

Shading

Shading 1/19

Apple is the color of celery
The underside blushes to cherry blossom
The leaf is a crinkled juniper waxed until it slides
It smells like candles on the altar
            like spiced fall
            like a clean room in spring

Manse

Manse 1/18

Brahe aligned his house on mathematical divides
His feng shui popped across the island dropped
into the oceans off Hven and came up on the shores
of Denmark

There they grew into forests that reached the stars
pine needles scraping the sky poking holes over
all of the surface

Light streamed down
making maps over all of Europe

18 January 2011

Born

Born 1/17

1.
There are buds on the cherry trees

2.
My mother calls
I sit in the hospital bed
holding the ice pack to my eye
She talks about driving 4 hours to me

3.
It goes like this:
            cold dark            walking
            grabbing            restraining
            grabbing            punching
            taking mugging            sobbing
            hospital lights and police

4.
Oddly perfect morning after – here
a smile – a purple eye and sky

Radiant

Radiant 1/16

A box of light

14 January 2011

Woo

Woo 1/14

I follow you home
It’s the look in your eyes
That light like water in spring
That surface tension

I stand outside your apartment
And watch the peephole for shadows
Because then you are watching me
I’m the guy behind the plant

With the jacket
And the camera

13 January 2011

Swinging

Swinging 1/13

In the cold – breath-cloud of oxygen and hydrogen
hanging in the dark street

It diffuses – orb to spiral galaxy to sheet of dirt on a window

Like eyes unfocusing at the optometrist
while you try to read that last row

Here is that puff of air to the cornea – a sun flare
in your peripheral – sudden headlights at the end of the block

You are suspended above the street – you are walking on water

12 January 2011

Pursuit

Pursuit 1/12

For 365 days you follow me – what
then can you say about this body?

What can you tell me that my cat cannot?

Whisper under your breath whatever
this secret is – if it changes the sky purple
I would hate for it to get out

11 January 2011

Perigraphic

Perigraphic 1/11

Poorly drawn clown faces perched on a shelf – knock that shit off
get a print of that Picasso that unbalanced woman fell on in New York
Who likes clowns anyway?

10 January 2011

Read-write

Read-write 1/10

I wanted to make a metaphor about the mind being a computer file – about the way you can read-write –

I wanted to talk about the pulling of information the acquisition of knowledge – See there’s this resemblance computers and humanity – locked unlocked – erased completely form the records –

There is history – rise and fall like tides like balloons

I wanted to talk about the universe – it’s read-write – the stars circle in their spheres they explode – open like a vent pull everything in start again –

09 January 2011

Table Glass

Table Glass 1/9

Doctor Dee stares into his onyx mirror

Wavering silhouette and candle-light

In there is a black world that Dee thinks he understands
He presses his hands and face into the cold surface
Feels the warmth rubbing off from him

There is a room in there with a man looking back
There is a darkness on both sides of the divide

Doctor Dee snuffs the candles and divides a stack of books

The room empties

08 January 2011

Comprehensive

Comprehensive 1/8

The birds pick at sticks – they weave
together baskets that glow with foil
wire – they green with plastic
and tinsel from Christmas

07 January 2011

File

File 1/7

Clothespins
the old kind – wooden – no moving parts
holding up photos of the dead

The sound of the retractable clothesline
in my grandmother’s yard

Whirring – the sound of a hard drive
spinning up – of a DVD

A string across a room
            taut
            holding a curtain
            images projecting on it

Honey

Yet another thing the Chinese are winning at - Honey laundering - for reals y'all.

06 January 2011

Notch

Notch 1/6

I’ve slept with enough – have tricks – have toys

Pother

Pother 1/5

Someone said that you were Eeyore
that your house was always in a state
of falling down

That your nonchalance was scary
was depressing that it was awful

Like Winnie-the-pooh was a fucking
ray of sunshine? Like Tigger wasn’t
some sort of psychotic?

Don’t get me started on Piglett
Piglett was a neurotic

04 January 2011

Restorative

Restorative 1/4

I imagine myself wearing a long dark coat
standing at a rail by the ocean

It is freezing cold my hands are in pockets
the tide is beating and coming in hard

Sending mist into the air onto my glasses
my vision is droplets

I imagine that this frozen body is in process
of rebirth

The limbs need numb to shed the layers
old skin worn out thoughts

In the vision I have hair that whips about
my face and the sky is that gray monotone
that is so close to being the same blue
that circles in your eyes

I want this to be a restorative one drink
and everything changes

Some would say that I am incapable of
being truly madly deeply happy

That I put myself on that rail in that cold
horrible coat

The turn isn’t the new year but the idea
of the new year clicking in place

Sudden gears that stuck long ago making
the collective decision to move

What I forget always forget
is that the sides of the gray sky are bleeding
with that warm melon color and that there
are birds chirping along as well

03 January 2011

Partial

Partial 1/3

See
It’s your hair
The way it’s thin
                        on top and your
                        skin is pink underneath

And your eyes

I can’t help but feel warm
                        all over

02 January 2011

The Room

An extra poem today. This is from college. 2000 I believe.

The Room/It Is Me Thinking

Tasting salt off the back of your shoulders a wire-thick scar runs
blade to spine small white pinprick holes along the sides

I roll my tongue over the skin

This is your seam the place they pulled you open threw your batting
tried to rip your arms off

            He looked like a scarecrow when they found him
            the runner almost didn’t stop

You roll over and tell me it still hurts when it’s snowing
The same times my knee swells and I lay in bed trying not to move

You smile say that you aren’t Matthew Shepard that you were just bruised
I kissed every break

            Frozen to – tied to a fence-post and bleeding
            Crows blinking not understanding

I watch snow collect on the window frost crystals turn the world to glass

            They keep track of how long he’s been dead online
            There’s a recording of a scream – ‘listen to Phelps’

Someone left a note on my door took a marker wrote in purple ‘AIDS cures fags’
They called me told me they knew I get up early for work go into the parking lot alone

            He had blonde hair and clear blue eyes when in 1998 –

You roll over I pull you near and smell you it is warm
A sound like buzzing fills the room

It is me thinking

About tomorrow the day after and the day after the sound of a voice in my ear
whispering

            It was cold – so very cold

Pyramid

Pyramid 1/2

Megastructure – a mile out at sea
you can see it rising
out of Tokyo – a sloping beast
tsunami-proof and full of people

We are turning into ants – maybe
if you scale it out enough
everything is ants
pushing their dirt and making tunnels

The light off the glass structure
would blind anything – ziggurat eyes
and constant wind ears – salt foam
in your hair – some kind of paradise

01 January 2011

Martingale

Martingale 1/1

I canter at the edges of the room
These guys drinking and looking

I go in the bathroom there are naked men on the walls
These guys are watching the door for me to come out

If I move forward
I feel like I come
back twelve

I look in the mirror
and I see myself as
a fifteen year old

Standing in a gas station in Pennsylvania
Looking into the eyes of a 30 year-old
for signs of my fate

I fucked him on a washing machine
These guys don’t know that

Every time I get naked I want to move that way again