1/10 of a day

in the afternoon, you too
change gears and refuel.

but bad bad blood
badly transfused
mixed with your metaphor
makes a regret-driven engine
out of you, supposed fool:

the bad bag of blood
seats you in the back
and belts you in
begins to take you up
and make dull threats
toward the landing gear

if you start to stand up
it's "don't you fucking dare"
but there is a way to get away
whilst tied to a chair
but you have to give away
1/10 of a day

it's not bad once
but it adds up, it adds up:

2 tenths, a fifth,
measure the time away,
a heaping spoonful
in a place with no name
it all corroborates
til' you can't stay awake;

this is but one way.

it takes only a first grain
to make a beach of frivolous waste
squeezed by the world
into the pearl of shame

because you suffered lust for
the tongues of the clam;
how they closed, dark and wet
all around your head and neck

this is just a note that says:
when you lose time that time is dead

I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes

try to stay still.

this thing is a process,

it is supposed to go-

you don't know anyone needs saving.
you can save everyone.
you can't save them all.
you can only save one.
you can't save anyone.
you don't know anyone needs saving.

don't jump around steps and quit holden on.

stay still and grow old. circles are closed.

day to day is not the way to play this game.

you can kill your soul, trying to save the moé.

this thing is a process- it is supposed to go.

therefore we think it best to let things die on their own.

the Seize City serial murders: ender's virtues

set stage: man with horn
set stage: man with violin
set stage: man with drum
run.

the rain like citrus fruit crushed
on the colander sky. This car is a lander;
its landing, a finger; the contact point
is not wheels on pavement;
it is a finger, white gloved;
in a long stroke on the moon;
condesention and tough love.

source: woman, eyes wide
source: man, bayonet hand
source: signature visible, corner of Wayland and Grand
source: waltz and march, game and watch, sleep and hunt
run.

the sky be witness; soak it up;
the ground be witness; soak it up;
this place withheld; soak it up; with this:
color a place; circle works-
square unstable, line unviable;
dark as one can but one has been trained;
trained to meet this demand;
make the void-ovum, put head and hands
and body inside, put head and hands and
body aside; still when one is soaked through
by the blackerthanblack; in the stillness
of this place which means calmness;
still, in this respite from guilt and madness;
where she cannot; here she is, to the left,
and backlit, backlit; a candle impossible,
her mouth moves where all is static;
in this vacuum of thought is this mind;
where all is silent sound comes out;
with no air to carry her voice;
with no body to carry her spine;
in this vacuum of thought is this mind;
speaking of to these crimes of mine;
speaking of choices; to live or to die;
run pogrom: "decide"

Yes son

I am in the garage finding my
good vice grip pliers.
After work, there is always
a bathroom fixture or appliance to mend.

the days, they have become years.
I am held by this routine.
today is thursday and
GODmurder, my son's band
plays fits and starts and seizures:
"with a gun on your back
you will make a pact
you will sell what you are
to who you can
nothing to no one
nothing to no one
nothing to no one"
most of their songs are about
weapons and suicide
though my son claims
they are about consumerism

I had to ask him for the lyrics
because of the way he screams

it reminds me of when he was a child
before we found his rotten first tooth

madrid

when we are in tunnels, in concrete tubes which hover under the city rediculously, we want to be still. we are in the familiar foundations of our very life's work, and we are used to these things being static, interrupted only steadily be the low rumbling of the train.

when we come to visit these places, our eyes roam hungrily over the concrete, stainless steel, posters, and plaster. these echo chambers say something incisive and succinct about this place, and we cannot make it out over the droning tides of people. we begin spending nights here listening for the message. perhaps it is only the arrival of a train.

when the station tells us nothing we look to the people, dissecting the covers of human books, looking for souvenirs of style or grace or arousal. we are truly tourists, then, looking for any kernel of truth to take home.

miles of corridors and train tunnels later, we have sharpened our non-belonging into something acute. we stay silent, obeying signs. we believe we are invisible, local, unnamed cells in the bloodstreams of a tightly coiled snake. we sleep here where the motion warms us and even begin to bathe in the spit and change of the affected.

when the city is frozen and the snake in torpor, the cold ceiling of our home is shaken apart. the spell of all these months broken. a thick screen of dust begins to encroach from above. it is cold and we have chased warmth all the way into the belly of the beast-machine. we cough and climb and are blocked by debris and circumvent. perhaps we can carry the poison away.

we exit the underbelly, feeling our way up greasy ladders. under emergency light the concrete tube has been paved with flesh. if it makes noise we lift it onto our shoulders and carry it over the rubble and dead into the cold wind and sun. laying down the groaning and oozing cells on the pavement, our hands and feet are slick with snake blood. "be you angel?" "no, only antibody." we are tired now and the bellows of our lungs pump a red spray coughingly on the sidewalk and we must lay among the wounded. through the very street we feel the snake spasm twice more and then lay silent as if it is dead.

lord orange

lord orange in an eyedropper
is citric ice-nine.
a twenty-minute orbit future to an ion;
both eternal and over.

lord orange is an idea eaten
in sections-
and it may be a life's work to find a slice.
it coheres once ingested, delicious and crass,
even past death the taste lasts.

lord orange was born
with his own idea intact.
his ropy strands of memory
connect everything nontraditionally.

lord orange the connector
joined the sky and earth with a hinge.
join me in supplication and when it all is open
he will let both of us in.

watermeter

you bring a dull grey
to a boil and spice it
on weekends, dump
a horde of red creatures
on a table in the suburbs,
and tearing them apart,
pulling their single intestine
out and flicking away
the tube of dirt, is tradition. a hound
is deaf, though, and
the local color is red
with veins of yellow.

the watermeter caps
the sewer and is thread
binding the roads
to our houses.

the tunnel connects
our kitchens, needles
of chlorine which
wash our bodies,
and runoff from
the flat and barren
miniature plains of
the dead.

bury me in snakeskin
shoes if I stand pat,
newspaper and twine
if I am debt collected,
I guess.

Refrigerators grow
out of a field, hanging
open, and ugly people
come here to be
beautiful. The horn
players had a tryst
but were washed to
Houston. Life is merry
and ominous, all smiles
and storms, in sinking cities.

organ donor

we was clapping our feet
all through the through way

way too willing to break
fire and live peacefully

spotted a beatnik squatting
under the over pass, we shot

not exactly at him he flipped
us off and as we sorta gasped

holmes had a foot on the break
and the gas and all fast

we flipped the car over
now we all organ donor

THE EYES ON TOMORROW

THE EYES ON TOMORROW
SEE THE MOUTHS OF TOMORROW
ARE HUNGRY.

SEARCHING LIKE BABY BIRDLINGS
FOR LIFE AFTER GOD
AND ELECTRICITY.

I AM A POET,
I WILL PUT OUT THE SUN.

THE EYES ON TOMORROW
SEE HINGES GO BY, TODAY,
ROOMS OPEN HOLLOW,

SEE A MAN WITH A PRYBAR
WALK PAST THE COAL CHUTE OF GRACEFUL ESCAPE
AND PAST THE SEWER GRATE THAT LEADS OUT.

ALAS, THEY ARE EYES, NOT MOUTHS.

love while i scoff and grow dedicated

over time & in an out of reach place
some fucking miztic lejjend or other
past life heroic fantasy stand make
heroin stand kill father fuck mother
be fireman be biznessman never
explorer do not ask to be legend
jolly red button extinction lever
exists history goes over head
lamp out lightbulb explode sleep never come
synthesis love story some ol sperm & egg
meet and fall in love in fever fuse blown
say nothing rattle tickets in brain stem
but like broken aloe plant bleed love sudden
so she makes heavenly slovenly me gradually
& i love while i scoff & grow dedicated

where my towel is

they scanned my head and chest
and found nothing wrong.
how odd, I thought, that this heart and mind
are fine.

three days ago I swore to my closest friends
that I would kill myself in three days.
I am so often the last one awake
with a working memory.

Hurt is not destroyed, I was saying.
but bridging this gap is like weaving a masterpiece.
then I asked my chemist friend about how a towel dries
as we walked around a sleeping town at five.

is it true, I asked, that the change is valence?
an electron lost and gained by heat in a chain in the breeze
all across a stream of moving air? one loses another gains?
the rubbed charge picks the molecule apart? breaks it up?

will someday dioxide tempt the hydrogen again? across what scar?
I have no polarity, carry no valence, I said, and so I lost my charge.
If I was Shinto I'd cut out my guts right now,
but they had mastered timing and I am just a white liar.

Yesterday I shit out a spark the size of a starfruit.
the lights flickered and went dead.
Morrissey, you fucking liar. Every filament has an end.
How odd it is to be alright in the heart and head.

to muscle grow a stone

the hands are rough and nicked up
the back and legs veined with the lift.

this is an abandoned city street,
the smell of burning garbage and industrial solvents
is light on the air. the half finished buildings,
cinderblock affairs, look down and live softly
shifting with lost or stolen pets or people.

how the boulder came to be in the street
I could not guess. The prometheus does not see me.

I squash the urge to help him for I do not understand
his mission, and, turning, I light a cigarette, his grunts deep and heavy, the voice of muscle tearing.
later it hits me: is that the center of the city?
a hammer of doubt at my back stops and I wrest it out of thought,
now I am going back to smash the rock.

she keeps pace

she keeps pace
with all that I say.
as we match our scars
they disappear for a day.

Angeline, I can only
keep you this way.

each trauma agreed upon
in a pissing contest
new yarns spawned
and we agree again.

what I meant was,
find me someday by
accident, under a truck.

take a pen knife and straw
and open my airway up.

this push you have
toward perfection
-close enough to touch-

is fucking sharp as hell but
doesn't mean enough.

all edge and bluff and cliff
and middle fingers up and
shouting 'so what'?

I came to light your face
not take away your tough.

Angeline, I can only
keep you this way.

I swear to god
on my death bed or his
I'll come back to recieve
your hatred.

I will act as if I was gentle,
surprised to find that change
has penetrated the glass case,
surprised to be cut by a clean break.

With my old eyes and
hands raised, giving you power,
trying to explain, I will say

'Angeline, I could only ever
keep you, this way.

the market was broken your
love was no good there
I had no where to put it-
nowhere'

rainscape touchbase

I am not the basest, but I know him well.
out of my own chest
came a demon: a sort of apocalyptic slum lord
and we waited together. I had a croissant.

Abnormally open, speaking in mono
there is a thing like a tongue that hangs
and is good for nothing. At times in dreams
he tells me why it is so.

A method and question and message
we spoke writerly and said with this thing between legs
there is no such thing as success and too much motherfucking
symbolism surrounding this damned world's edge.

creature feature

someone's always saying
how there's something
about her

a generality becoming to the
whole of your desires O are we not
easy creatures

then you find yourself bridling
when she names her favorite
feature

& evidenced by all the times
you do not call or write but
reach her

& all the times you do not call or write- but reach her

Al-Zawahri the terrorist

“My second message is to the American people,
who are drowning in illusions.
I tell you that Bush and his gang are shedding your blood
and wasting your money in frustrated adventures.”

if this is not wrong it is anti-american.
if this is true you are a bomb and a leftist.
mohammed and christ have left the building,
there is a sky beyond the ceiling which is also falling

as our two languages are dipped in glue and glass.

too damn white to have the blues, too damn poor for punk tattoos

STAGE

a white space exists with no face only defacement. a throne exists where the grey race sits.

ACT 2003:

if yr

attitude be leased

can you make th' monthly payment?

by credit card and cell fone

from yr throne on
the slave ship?

feed the dead to the sea or bury them in your basement-- feel guilty for dancing cool or doing a hand jive

ACT 2005:

throw us a rhyme at 100 beats a minute we's sit around and smoke and pretend y' didn't take it. because that's what being white is. anti identification. may be a father keepin' a slave ship in the basement, or a mother who hated her old neighborhood or a neighbor that burns crosses on your lawn a cop brother, a rich sister, a big anger--

whenever it touched you first it hurt and when you look at it this way there never were ever any good old days nothing has changed cept' now we're all sposed to be the happy maroon and we are all the slaves and the war is class but there's money to be made

the names on the bank accounts have changed but the launderers, the hidden executioners, the pockets,
these are all the same.

get militant, escape to nowhere, or be despondent--
fight and die trying or wind up chopped & processed.

this is just a short play at a coffeehouse no one cares much about. it's dragging on for decades and the audience and play are full of short-tempered children acting increasingly depraved. the curtain seems to be a germ some will call jesus. and all because of the whiteness we found from a false throne upon the slave ships.

ACT 2006:

"what happened to your concience?"

"they dragged it out of the car and beat it to death. four or five, knees and clubs, wasn't much left."

rubber bullet broadcast: presidential diarrhea

he says "..."

somehow. he can speak ellipses.

a small croak comes out of his mouth.

never heard Ché say that,
even between teleprompters full of bullshit.
its a slow leak in the basement
not a gunstock to the brain stem-
a hood over the head not a bomb.

the shock troops are tubes
for order out of chaos,
weapons who are many,
hardly knowing, as they harm-

this is how things are taken,
how small wonders become gone.

I spit. He stutters saying "freedom".

an after-advertisement ultimatum:
"with us or against us".

WE DO NOT HAVE TO CHOOSE: WE ARE THE MANY AND YOU ARE OF THE FEW.

at non effugies mios iambos, at non effugies mios TRUTH

jason shirts

jason's shirts
are everywhere,
partied off outcast yardsale style outside the
sleeveless dance party.

beer cased,
that brand new form of
self immoliating, being drawn
to the scene of the most

intensely available debauchery then
curled up like a child and sleeping
while we say hi to him
anyway.

we break bottles
and piss on each other, pretend
our piss is a weapon and tomorrow
never comes and later wonder why

jason is well rested and we
grew up dumb

chorus animus

you are standing in a field of cats' tails. they do not wave in the wind; instead the tails cut the wind and communicate to you; they seem to remember, prehensile and tendon, flesh and cartilage, the tails are soft and curve out of the earth; seemingly the same, dark and striped; "look closer", "we are different, but one" in a great silent chorus-- like an earthly anemone, you think. and at first it is droll they are soft and novel but here paralysis settles with a great and slow weight the sting starts seeming like only feeling home the surrealism circuit breaker blows and so your eyes try to open yet this is not a dream unless dreams are real you are still standing in a field of cats' tails-- "and the scythe-man will be on down the trail when comes up the bloodshot sun." "save us".

true stories of remembering dynamic instability

a certain true man exists who
must look at his arms
to know they are there
must look at his legs
to know they are there--
a glance is not enough:

he says he has to reason it all
out before his limbs appear
& before he can use them;
and when he sleeps he as
a whole, he as a total
is completely gone fully &

he does not dream

as we do.

his mortal coil
shuffled off slowly
because of a birth
defect.

at night he is unborn,
dead.

in fits and starts his
body

left

as if on a train &

he at the station

does not dream.

paid from the wrist

one thing one moment
or whatever this is
a koan for the wordsmith
who paid from the wrist.

his money was no good:
he had none.
"I open up my wallet
and it is full of blood."

in everything he made and said
he made circuits and paid;
loyally paid from his pen, wrist
eventually; begin again.

the price of sin, he said,
is on the collector's last friend. and so
then he died in their eyes
for them. and each and every

walk in the veins of the city
made it easier to put
the metal in, which he did
only for him. begin again.

rubber bullet broadcast: live live live

they found him
on television,

pulling down the tape,
trying to break
the film, jerking the
image out of the square,
reaching out
and screaming about
v-hold, trying to move
the camera, after the
shot was made, and pressed,
he snuck into the programming
in protest.

his rehabilitation
was long and trying.
the contracts, signed in secret.
the cameras, hidden, surgically,
for the safety of the subject.

and spiderlike
across the
fat of the land,
the broadcast.

eyes on tomorrow koan

some of us are possessed and something says
"go for the rest" to me; so we sing "admit defeat".

the feeling is stuck, but I got friends to tow me
if they can handle the weight.

sometimes, we can snap chains and kill winches
at times even I admit I lock the transmisson.

it is after all hard to tell the difference
between a cliff and a ditch
until one hits.

bottom: "some of us are possessed". go for the rest-
I here speak of a button who brought life to death.

blind

there is a place to go
when time is running.

away from the metaphors
of sand in hands and hourglasses.

where not a drop gets away
from your awareness.

each second held up,
held up to the sun and higher.

held up to the sun, and
more to the center.

a place to point telescopes
to burn out our weaknesses.

we will consider them together
where there is time.

snakebite

with my head down
on a desk,
the snake came
and delivered.

the size of
a subway train,
jointless lithe
and weird.

I didn't see it
until it was
upon me, its spikes
in my brain
stem, changing
how I think,
down to the
most basic
instincts, even
my acceptance
of distance,
my heart's one
rhythm.

no super powerd hero's
story, this; only
exegesis, no savior,
just a loss pure and tailored.

the sudden failure
of a mirror, a fading place,
I and I was there,
still innocent, but darkly different.

he must have
been full; I wonder
at the great meal
he must have
swallowed, and how
I could encroach upon
the territory of
the great snake;
a being head down,
motionless,
the last few breaths
of human blood,
mixing in my chest.

all i know

she loves her grandmother
because she is supposed to

the smell she tells
her girlfriends
is sickening

a love that is optional
is not unconditional

meanings are pinned
down and opened
at the chest

she loves me like rest

poor choices made moment

bootleg scriptures and spiritual snake oil,
belief boiled down and bottled to take home.
books burn in the background as the poor get warm,
eating ash and ink with a christ in the slum.

all over the world was one real time:
poor choices made moment.
two large in years later
we still cannot compare the prophets.

copied down by hand,
a conversation piece:
mistranslated,
good to eat.

shark fighting band vs. street fighting man

these men have a channel
one channel.
one room one night only
one one hundred square foot box energy.

these men travel. these men
have a channel.
more than a tune, a ritual
more than a noise, a rite.

the rest of us have unison.
the insecure are gone
but the rest of us cannot
touch the fire.

these men travel. these men
have a channel. more
than a tune, a ritual. more
than a noise, a rite.

admiration of focus
turns to lens and burns us
jealous. we exit pointless.
clutching sweaty setlist.

we walk, not travel. we
do not have a channel. we
do, but it is brutal disunion. it
is to draw back the fist and knife.

octaroon shoes: $109

always two sharp edges on everything
working like some stunted greasy mirror works
poetry picks shit apart and infests it:
kids burning maggot wood in a squat.

open your eye at the walls in there
try to be surprised that they aren't your ideas
two sharp edges on every damn thing, it seems
sure is expensive to be conscientious.

the kids are saying how it costs
money to be conscious, seems the asleep
would agree, outside. the worms in the wood
pop and steam.

bend your eyehole back to back the marionette transom fret

behind bent lines
curtain calls couldn't catch or everfalter the applause
when I was.

all war lines
falter blur and pause when I whistle walk along
I was

& girl if you ever put your self
in another one of my songs
well espionage
and be gone.

so waiting for exit
tapping a finger on the bill jogger girl joke killer grey air & grog
as I throw up the sign (dodge)
after every god damned meal.

behind, bend me a line
curtain calls could never halt catch or put a perceptible pause
on what I was