the sieve and the sand

I was an action figure
with my legs taped to a model rocket
and when the experiment took place
the rocket did not fly
and the exploding solid-state engine
blew me to smithereens

I was a Wagon Driver
out in the Old West (Probably North Texas)
and when those bandits waylaid me
I was left to starve and melt to death
in the harshest of the desert suns
over someone else’s delivery

I was a Brittish Grenadier
back in old ’39, and there was
not a place for me to hide from
the flying, screaming, burning shrapnel
of mortar-fire that ripped out
my throat and guts

And now, I am a poet
and I drive an old car all day
and my radio doesn’t work quite right
and sometimes my ends don’t meet
and I swear to God, some people
just get all the luck

my afternoon suddenly makes sense
of people placing needles in them selves.

My friend John,
He’s a sonofabitch,
and he knows just what to expect
when he steps in to a room
full of every other motherfucker
that he hates with all his passion

And if he could,
I know for all but a fact,
he’d take a Louisville Slugger up-side
the skull of every motherfucker
in every room that he walks in to,
because he hates them with all his passion

Really, that John
is no friend of mine,
but Jesus Fucking Christ they all
seem to love him so, and even though
he only wants to brain them so
he can laugh about it with his Jo-ann,
An acidic bitch all her own

And if I could,
I’d send them both downstream
in a side-by-side, custom-made Douglas Fir
casket with pontoons to keep it floating
and maybe even a sail just to make sure
it got the fuck away from us

But I can’t,
I know, because Douglas Fir
is a high-priced commodity, and the wind
just doesn’t blow so consistently upriver
and anyway, these motherfuckers, they
love their John and Jo-ann and I guess
they’ve never seen John’s bat
but I have

you can temper fear with panic if you play your cards right.
and lust (they say) can be overcome by love.
but most fascinating of all, (and certainly least awkward)
is the way in which chocolate seems chemically designed
to compliment wine
and destroy beer

it’s been a while,
and i have whiled
sweet time away
with little to say
for three months;
six months.
nine months;
twelve months:
that makes a year,
and that is a dear
thing to waste,
in want of haste,
with lack of foresight,
and too much hindsight.

my brain will atrophy when this bruise decides it is not enough to slow me down to the speed it has chosen.

sleeplessness is playing its role perfectly; standing outside my window and wielding scalpels and other instruments of both death and salvation laughing like an evil uncle, or mocking child.

the fragrance of the sun-burning-holes-in-my-cheek through the magnification of the window to the right of where i’m productive reminds me sickly of the wood chips they used in elementary school to cover the vomit of the kid we all knew with a weak continence.

my pen sits idle on the blank notebook i purchased on discount and in which found more pleasure in the binding than the words i hoped to use to fill it to bursting.

Vortexes swirl as
wheels spin on the
vehicles that carry
the people and the world
in to the next set
of tricky situations
and arguments concerning
politics and economics
and other ‘ics’ and
then there arre the
wrong turns and then
there are the routine
police-initiated traffic
stops and then there
are accidents and fender
benders and trains and
deer (always runaway
deer) and all that just
before we roll in to one
of a million spinning vortexes
that pull us somewhere
that’s nothing like the future
and nothing like we’ve ever
been.

Bring in the buzz, and the death too
at the foot of our homes
swimming knives
merry whores
lift my dress up
pray Buddha pray
beads roll under your thumb
like chanting bellybuttons
hammering
gauging
love
Y?
Kill the buzz, and the death too

like clay pots we break open not out of disgust for the clay but out of curiosity. our wonder is greater, more mature than that of the child. we watch in anticipation at where exactly the cracks will appear, hoping for one separate from the seam, perhaps a vertical one across the horizontal lid. yes, our sense of curiosity, while rooted in childhood, has matured. we break clay pots to hear the crash and wonder if it’ll be a B flat or a C sharp. there’s a good chance if you break enough pots you’ll eventually get two or three in a row from the same key. something playable on a funk album. something you’d listen to while watching pots fall from a roof, to set a beat, instead of determine a melody. because our wonder is no longer like that of a child’s.

no, we break things for more mature reasons

Now you’re gonna be a manager
and run things just like you always
dreamed you would but what you
don’t know is you won’t be running
anything except yourself into the
ground for the good of all the other
ungrateful little pukes that are useless
but to bitch about the state of things
and call in sick at the least opportune
sorts of times but there at least three
good employees aside from yourself and
they run in to the ground too and just
like you and just like four little mounting
screws and you won’t ‘come undone until
twelve years from now when they decide
to remodel and a pair of large men with
crowbars and hammers come in and knock
the whole place down. Sweet Sweet
Corporate America.

the focus of the reader was the first casualty
unfortunately followed closely by the attention
span of the writer.

leaving our poetry every day shorter and shorter
until we choose to leave the poem behind
in a tweet rather than on digital paper.

a medium we’re certain has a shorter life, to better suit our shorter attention

i let it rain on niko bellic for ten minutes
i felt like Vonnegut
watching him stand in one spot
shaking off the rain

You are as a fish
stuck in the same little bowl
and though it is
a nice bowl,
rife
with all the trinkets
that a fish could ever need,
it is just a bowl
and there is such trouble
leaping out.

Instead, there are lungs
to be had, and claws
to be grown from fins,
for to climb atop a small stone castle
and leap so very gracefully
from the bowl-rim to counter-top to
kitchen sink, which is
not much better,
but
at least you can
flush on down to stream that way.

i wrote a poem filled with crap
and put it by your door.
i lit it on fire and rang your bell.

because if you can’t enjoy it’s verse
you can at least enjoy its smell, as it
sticks to your shoe this week at work
and nearly burns down your house.

There is a New World Order
but it deals directly with french fries
at fast food chains and I
think I’ll have a large if you can manage.

The Gods are being dug back up
and in equal parts tacked on sandwich boards
and being hung out to dry, for to prove
the points meandering that nobody
knows anything and everything
is ending, and soon anyway.

but that’s okay, ‘cuz
even if the seas rise up to swallow us,
or the winds blow everything down to Texas
(What could be a worse Armageddon, after all, than to wake up in your own
home but down in Texas?)
, with all these things I’ve done and seen
I’ve had a pretty good run, it seems,
and even the very End Times can’t
take that away from me.

One was asked permission to breathe,
the other granted,
and soon they were huffing and puffing along
as if they knew what to do
with these intricately overcomplicated bodies
of theirs.

One felt is if they were falling,
the other as if they were
The Walking Dead, and together they
made a pair of fools with
too-high a limit on their credit cards
to be healthy.

Then they got to jostling and one,
he bumps in to the wall, and the other,
she falls over, and it’s all
his fault but she’s the one that
takes the fall and now everyone is screaming
and now everyone is slamming doors and
now everyone is leaving
and now everyone is gone except for me,
With only enough nails to board up
half the broken windows.

viscosity

sometimes
you find yourself
washed up on a foreign shore
and you must get to know
the indigenous people
the language
and look around
and blink
as if you’d woken up from
a dream
as if you’d been here
all along

It’s been 36 hours
and with all
the smoke
and haze I
can still
smell you
on my fingers
but you’d
think it’d have
rubbed off
on the car
door handle
by now,
or the
cold side of
my pillow or
the shirt
I wore that
day.

You are: here.
Unseen narrator: the ravine lies before you
and it is narrow.
Walk through, the path is present.
Do not wander, do not touch.
The walls, they appear as stability,
as opportunity.
They are distractions.
You must discern the difference.
Stay vigilant, focus on the task at hand.
Walk through.

When the walls end,
you will have come to the other side.
To: a valley of efflorescence.
A verdurous mountain rising.
in the vista’s breadth.

He is in the mountain.
You will meet him there.
But the people are in the valley.
Life more abundantly awaits.
Go: there.

my life would read like a red cross
volunteer straight out of a brief
bio in readers digest or a lifetime
original movie. everything played just
right and everyone cared for in
just the right way. but really while
i’m tying the bandages around this guys
leg, or helping this old lady across
the street . . . while i’m scooping
poop out of the clogged septic tanks
or de-toilet-papering a house for a
neighbor, the whole time my head is
in town. at a pub where i plan to go
the moment the sun hides behind the
mountains. a place i know where i can
climb inside a bottle, hole up, and soak
into every pore, the brewed nectar of
the fruit of the earth. enjoying life and
joy in a bottle so many others are there
abusing. just waiting for the day to break
so i can hop back in my thirty-year-old
chevy truck and head back to do
it all again.