May 2013
2 posts
2 tags
yel-oh-ish
i imagine several fleeting trances, tipping over from stirrings to an openness—then a net. translucent shards at my feet, momentum vibrating… there is a place to breathe, to morph & caverns filled with black-hole ink.
a perpetual dusk sprayed across eyesight; blue-gray, needle shots of surging coral & smoldering white. a dance of light begins, yawns increase as etchings fade to bubbling.
...
2 tags
packing heat at the pearly gates
a woman is a weapon a man will use to kill himself
so grit yr teeth and cock one back let fly the buckshot into yr oreish heart
light the fuse deep in the mine of yr chest
feel the pressure of an ocean swelling happily capsizing all in its path
(and this means you means me)
pull the trigger spark the wick
go ahead drown
just remember to smile
that’s all peter wants to see
April 2013
4 posts
2 tags
unchecked sap
if it were possible to correct the course of time, i’d make it so i was born early enough to die before eddie van halen so that he may melt faces during the celebration of my death. otherwise, we commit everything else to the books and let these messy moments live where they lie and we’ll keep my father’s balled fists and let exist my mother’s infinite sadness, so pleased...
1 tag
new canaan 2
your father wears a hat like me, your sister lives her teenage dream, i take a sandwich to the game room i flip the channels like i am home. the patio furniture sleeping in the yard is thankful that we resurrected it from the basement around lunchtime today and it is spring so it can breathe something clean and once far-away now present, now completely surrounding. these are the magnificent...
1 tag
another night I spend
rubbing tights against my heels; a perfect square of carpet, a couple of feet wide and another few long the industrial grade threads beneath my soles, with my left hand on my stomach and the right on the neck, the cheek, the hair, a jerk motion and a fistful
my eyelids feel heavy and Otis’ croons echo against the four by four, the molasses seep through my door, take the US-29, head south...
1 tag
no limit records
some mornings i am the beast with a thousand opening day baseball cracks and i called each and every one of them over the fountains over the five freeway splashing in the pond of anaheim. on my side of the street it’s mexicans and in magdalena’s neighborhood there are more, with trucks in the lawn and speakers hissing fiesta like my loud cuss-mouthed family some of them even have...
March 2013
2 posts
1 tag
pertinent impatience
please come fiber-fuck me into patchwork that breathes wants fulfilled and say i am a seed surfing winds bathed in an easy breeze yes spring and springs coiled into my feet, honey i’ve got a future cascading in moon beams- each second a fresh cut into the flesh of what will burn me by exposure and i will suck sun from the sky and fissure gasps from the crust with silver stars...
1 tag
pushing down her skirt
it is the day after st. patrick’s which in l.a. is celebrated in muted forest greens and only a slight increase in vehicular horn sections, no streamers clinging to the concrete just the jesus man in new adidas arms outstretched and singing a psalm in front of an overpriced overwrought bar named after hemingway, which we couldn’t be paid to go to, another forced, dead relic of a bygone...
February 2013
7 posts
2 tags
Bouncin' Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling...
fingers fused, sandwiched between full body quakes, short, tight inhales, rocking in place as wiry tendons hum. the ball does not rest, colliding, colliding, drips of sound collect and pulse. dark earnest clothes and ivory walls that stretch entire mountains. eyes dart, trustworthy hair sagging, opals of sweat cling at the ends. alert, tuning in for the second ball, banging, smacking. rhythms...
1 tag
Hal
a tough, leg-swinging kind of man. remembered for how many yards he gained, what a neat car, too late to wake up. too broke to take a bus West, a titan. bare-chested on a Kansas afternoon. flags danced, harmonies rang from high noon until they purred to disappearing giggles. children, teenagers in the front seat of cars. whiskey breath and a bum. an honorable blue cloaked male who drove in...
1 tag
holy matrimony batman, pt. 1
went on thinking about a wedding, unabashed; envisioned the tangled branches of the willows bidding an entrance to a few lucky humans — strangers and friends merry and one all the same. lit candles in mason jars, beach glass I brought and filled my own pockets with, and green bottles, and aluminum beer cans and hard cider and Perrier, so form alternates function, so each flame lives on. always...
1 tag
archaeology
there’ve been a thousand sharp Santa Anas like these dusting optimism and blowing mountains of loss into my cracking, worried face. but i can pause winds and freeze frames and flex exponentially; brushing shoulders with the super-men with you unfurling maps inside my humming chest. for you are the rosetta stone of me; you are the key to everything i mean.
3 tags
every 1's a winner
who ever said it was a damned liar
life is tough and filled with nails sticking out of wooded planks the ones used to build boardwalks not yet stepped by laissez-faire bare nines with three-week chipped polish
life is tough as miniskirts (and what’s under them) just out of reach floating anaerobically in the warm sunlight of a february happy hour while you slaved away like...
1 tag
pep talk
oh you lazy fuck your friends are dying or’ve left you behind stay in the house eat all the groceries you bought in one sitting eat all the grums in your crumbum skull and squawk.
it’s tuesday and awful again saint san vicente isn’t the same soft man he used to be.
(i thought california would be different)
it’s easy to say just don’t get like this just...
1 tag
moviematically
NORA, twenty-one, never home anymore — now congregates in hotels with her true love, asks questions when the trusty bible isn’t in the drawer in the night table on her side of the bed, the right one, and she says, the rolling paper, we forgot the rolling paper
so FITZ tears a piece of zephaniah, ch. 1, v. 14, she sits on his thigh, more bump on her bone than the last time they met, but it...
January 2013
5 posts
3 tags
Thuggin' It
Please enjoy this poem submitted to us by Ikay
Life never goes as planned so I’m thuggin’ it,
Police shot my cousin right where he stand cause he was thuggin’ it,
The world don’t care if I live or die so I’m thuggin’ it,
The cops caught me hustling and my own mother took the stand and testify that I was thuggin’ it,
Lots of cold nights on cold corners with hopes of getting warmer when you’re...
1 tag
spaces
i got cut in daylight it was a sunday and the air undulated a hum.
i know a guy who works 40 plus a week sixty nasty minutes both ways in traffic he comes home in a drag but then he lives because he’s making it work.
he should be the fucking poet.
what business do i have sucking salty air in the cut-rate glory days of my wasted youth in the spaces of my life forever surfing couches...
1 tag
backyard rocketry
a lightning pole stretches its metal bone into humid emptiness like a blonde sunbathing in harker heights texas where she is waiting to be struck dumb with electricity or loneliness. my father curses his cut hands and folds his denim shorts compounding interest rates in his crooked skull praying for rain and when it comes how he will holler. i knew a perfumist through sheets and she talked...
2 tags
reality check
we have dolphins posing as tuna, being purchased like slaves at auction.
not to mention sweatpants playing the part of jeans, amongst an ensemble of pallets, underneath a halide-lit glow of a discount retail club theater.
o denim! you conquerer of destinies; you equalizer of genders; you thing of the past; now, a dream assembled off continent.
only the pigs remain (claiming to be in...
1 tag
I am cracks.
On the way to the bank could I hear the city want, could I hear the open hearts sing pedestrian fulfillments. I am a map and my map is cracks- I am a flawed dad waiting to be had. Pin pointless medals to my bare chest and make room for strange smiles to home in my wounds. You couldn’t pass me without pasting your equal waiting into my irrigated terrain. I am cracks and these human...
December 2012
6 posts
2 tags
Wesley Carls visits for an observation.
I returned from my disgustingly sober existence in the echo of a death knell to visit you and see how you’d grown. Cross-coil visitation is still imperfect, naturally (or, should I say, supernaturally). My appearance, or my presence, appeared at 10:44 PM as you stood bundled in three sweaters in your disgusting kitchen. Mushrooms Cherry tomatoes Turkey Cheddar cheese, sliced Salt, pepper...
1 tag
that nagging feeling.
a young man in a blood orange jacket glides through traffic passing the cold parked cars who’ve forgotten every hue but blue and a bright orange bead is pulled effortlessly by invisible string across blue still water; gone its wet contrail folding back over itself forgotten & fast .
1 tag
a smoking pipe & a swivel chair
i learned to glide on ice and chalky spaces in the winter of 1967. only wearing a bloodless t-shirt and workman’s pants, the air tensed, charged to expand, as i carved snow blocks and piles, freeing forms trapped between frozen particles. there was an audience, quiet as the only sounds of a curious man skiing, observing, breathing, multiplying, filled the range. a...
1 tag
sunday
and i wonder how my bones know my bones grow rootlike and rocketship and i wonder if michelle branch or vanessa carlton could really ever strike and su per im pose
but i bet alicia keys could and me i can too.
1 tag
man who jump off cliff, jump to conclusion!
sometimes a strange vision appears. wrapped in white powdered memories. a solid, saturated silence, surrounding you like a blinding, static lake. marching to syncopated friction, tracks in rust colored dirt, tossed d a y d r e a m s fusedunderneath worked plastic and swiping chords of misty indigo, long exhales, smoothing grooves & reflection. recalling a suppressed sun dog, your...
1 tag
they should have never cancelled 'awake'
sunny paul simon south of the finger lakes and diamonds stitched with cloud thread
yr geode skin.
sat quietly several seasons in ice-shard diners and never once read my book.
canned laughter & depersonalization.
i can shred my skateboard
through forty human hells and dream without looking-
somewhere a slab of concrete still sighs my name.
November 2012
10 posts
1 tag
glacier babe
gone now the days darkened- que suerte! and if only you were lonely- camel cut and turned into rust; gouging fried eyes and without love for yourself nor future.
carve so hard! night glass skimming and brimming with limitless capacities.
videotape me tasting moments and swallowing your kiss- it’s instances like this that buzzburn nick thorburn basslines through my bursting bloodline...
1 tag
two hands
my hands went numb for precisely five minutes. measurement never stack for me, i mulled and scraped until they felt like Bruce’s, blemished in crystal clear beauty. dropping to joints, my mind dunked into a wounded, opaque lake. the gray clay rested, inches from humanity, appearing untouched, but the atoms still trembled. only one golden earring can stay.
1 tag
potential energy
today is the day of the big race. Today is the day of the Big Race. Today is the Day of the Big Race. Today is a big day. It is the day of the Big Race. Today, I will run in the Big Race. Today, I will not stop until I finish big, on the day of the Big Race. Today, I will not stop until I cry on the day of the Big Race. Today, I will win the Big Race. Today, I will wince at the Big Race, ...
1 tag
rocket-man
one jolly waiter steady with orders. looks twice, left & right before every goddamn decision, asks hello three times for the second time. a sigh from t he d i s t an ce of one telephone to the next. he uses two pens at once! we are all going to perish of biological trickery! someone will finally answer! this is my second time eating at this diner alone. and...
1 tag
nicole kidman and a colt 45
someone somewhere dragging my hide through thirty shades of shit will need a toothpick soon.
but there’s fifty watt humming and hot yellow bulb sparks even in crummy house parties.
wrapped in spiced rum and speaker wires saw some brave shaky graffiti on the wall some pretty petal things signed in sharpie e.e. cummings.
then i think i
wish cans were like cans used to be, punched, those...
1 tag
mishy #1 (no body)
the cornstalk gentleman of wilt and worry bent skyways and wept with the knowledge he had a magician’s body which was no body at all. in college he sidestepped a child and in youth he sword-swept flailing roots it was in helmet-heads that said the earth was a burden. so we covered our backsides in coats of ivory cotton and stitched together tenderly a harness to hold ourselves and forgive...
1 tag
feliz cumple
TO MY own private Gabo from Guayaquil, where it burns hotter and briny to the taste, on a Sunday, early Sunday, you arrived pink then golden then gray, and had you saved a dollar since you were three, we’d live tonight a little more comfortably — but on a similar note, I admit, I am running out of lead to anchor our feet. See, and I implore that you see: twenty-one years of solitude, two of...
1 tag
lets take cues from the trees and grow forever
call me saint sorry for the way i acted and hang my heavy arms around your neck like a locket you’re another feather falling slowly in my sullen wind achingly pulling
when i can’t even keep the plastic bags from dancing
1 tag
973 mi.
tonight we light a candle in memoriam of the phone wires and curls that tangled around our parents’ ankles and the metal railings that held up their mattress
to the copper vines wrapped around our infant wrists in February of 1989 when Limbaugh was your dad’s fave
to the relief that their absence has not stopped our pacing around and over the coffee table, not even the coasters can...
1 tag
fall queen
hey it’s hot on the weekends still crisp coast the week and i’m terribly beaten last night pissed in a sink but i’ve emerald boogie-blood and palm-tree-worship your grace but you fucked up my back, babe can’t sleep with so much space.
1 tag
pocket trash
IN THE DARKNESS THERE IS NO OTHER LOVE EXCEPT YOU — JEREMIAH THE INNOCENT I cannot write the frost into your skin. You cannot feel my nose — colder than a witch’s bosom in a brass bra, as Adam has drawled for two months — freeze-burn in a hallow’s eve night in Charlottesville. I cannot write, It’s cold, so cold, and I am, too. I cannot write you into your place, here with me with...
October 2012
11 posts
1 tag
a carver
left a coal with little smolder wrapped forests quilts of wet leaves slicked in night covered concretely in corn grain caves until the burning pad of her thumb balanced the spine of the blade kissing moon reflections in careful swipes, repairing careful light, dripping nickly solder; a lighthouse, a carver.
1 tag
expansions.
i want to fuck a cloud crack creams into nothing smash auras not belief systems strip status to free range and float around. which version of me will general sherman three hundred feet and fondle the futures with branch-hands over the husk-boys beneath? certainly not Lord Worm with his useless toothpick wrists and his overgrown hearts, searing the beauty in his eyeballs against the blue...
1 tag
svevo writes an ode to ashley smith
may all the glory be given to gapped teeth on pretty girls your gummy vacancies are the instrument through which cold air flows the absence of bone the tiny reserves that need be filled with my mouth
1 tag
oolong I'm lovesick
I went to the Tea Bazaar tonight it’s a smelly burrow built above the fantastic shithole that is Ike’s Underground and a man sat and he sang and sang he played the kazoo and whistled and he did things I cannot do I can’t whistle I can’t even swim can’t tie my shoelaces nor can I keep a tune, but I’m in love every night — I mean, dearest, my admission here is my...
1 tag
night palms.
morning pre-acid-absentia my bed now an Italian shell! and Venus in a chem-trail capped sun-tea-brown wrapped upperly in forest green, pinching a waist-down pillar of milky ivory- this is how i float and surf oil slicks called puddle rainbows- there is a current and it chandeliers from my feet every goddamn minute of every goddamn day- you’ve autumn hammocks in the treated woodgrain of...
1 tag
fuck it; it’s autumn
tuesdays are droopy days filled with day old bagels and feeling trapped between a piss covered park bench and green laundromat.
[morning wood & a sip of joe]
billie holiday orange days, wrapped in the arms of your favorite jean jacket. a bb gun shaped hole dominates its left sleeve. someone always said that character comes with a price.
[two elongated kisses & a chat on the rail]
...
1 tag
An Awful Joke
tell me the one where the egyptian fox eats too many marbles & never wakes up again.
what do you get when you mix tree branches and a sea of children? i never remember the end to that one. it’s too complicated and too blue.
don’t you hate when people refuse to cry at funerals? don’t you hate weddings without an open bar? mourning tends to be measured and calculated. where...
1 tag
October In Los Angeles (2/3)
he grinned at me and I knew he hadn’t had a single dream that night. there was a bass line playing somewhere in his head but I didn’t realize it until later. I was tired of making promises and he was tired of breaking them. maybe he had hair like rough grass. I can’t remember. that night I see a beautiful American couple laughing in the front seat of a blue cadillac with City...
3 tags
so let them eat cake
too many roots clinging to life through the cracks in cranial concrete
too many gift horse mouths washed away by Nashville floods
too many green Americanos in cups stamped and labeled not for human consumption
too many delegates at the convention voting for g-d knows...
1 tag
parade
let’s get our father’s faces emblazoned on our suck skin peel anchors through our bloody babies and make it on every surface of every sun times ten making sacrifice to my pearl on your flesh to kneel beneath unbroken bloodlines that spat us into the fire and wilted us with earth saying fight or fuck eat her hair like air and howl a hemorrhage into each other.
September 2012
17 posts
1 tag
acid trip in newport
Roof like Mersault sun I saw Vishnus moving in swirling glass sand and my life flashing phantasm like in the cavernous bark of a dog. Hard to hold a bandana full of your belongings in a champagne Crown Victoria watching the past drip down the cool leather seats with all you’d left at the beach.
1 tag
croon to me
like a sorcerer with his sleeves too long casting from his sprightly wand notes of love tripping over his velvet robe, unraveling himself to me with a mangled bouquet of casablanca lilies — four cheeks pink and cool in the imminent solstice’s crisp
like a calf in the woods, dear, stumbling — the hooves on his tiny, narrow feet sounding with full force the heartstrings of the old Romantics,...
1 tag
coyote comes down from the hills and stays.
I’ve seen orbits in your eyes when they wipe wide and cannon shock ear-kissing smiles that fuck me into doubled-overs grinning and in microscopes filling three-stacks miles with binding blinding love makes maps make sense and city glinted moons shift dancing cross-continental nickly giggling at silly myths like the existence of distance like when my lids lift to brow and how...
