the warrior is shackled
and puts his blade
to use cutting appetizers
to sate the gluttons
and the all-gods of money
be they mystical
or real as the shackles
the cutting
lasts for 8 or more hours
a day
and then his hut for sleep
and then back again
and he might do this forever
but maybe his shackles
are made out of pride.
there are no horns
playing for you
no matter what you do
a horn is played by
a person and that
person is just like you
and people don’t follow
other people around
waiting for important moments
to emphasise
with horns
there won’t be any
horns for you
ever
no matter what happens
no matter if you hear them
no matter what you’re doing
they won’t be there.
ALL OF YOUR FAKE POLAROID PICTURES
EXPENSIVE CLIMBING GEAR AND
BEAUTIFUL SCENEREY
DITHERED AND BLURRED BECAUSE TODAY’S
MOMENTS JUST DON’T HAVE STICKING
POWER
AND YOUR LIFE MUST HAVE STICKING
POWER
BUT YOU’VE LOST IT ALREADY
UNDER THE PRETENSE THAT
YOU MUST EMPHASIZE ANY THING
AT ALL.
i pissed myself laughing
and broke my ribs and
turned blue-close to
asphyxiation
and the tremor giggles
were painful for days
and i shit my pants
and oh my legs quivered
at the all-holy
and wept at its feet
and then i went to work
and came home and ate
some food and then i
saw another one and
in my youth i used to
disconnect our family’s
home telephone and
run a line up to my
bedroom and call
girls or prank
call businesses
i was on the
internet
giving out my credentials
chatting
and
sometimes even
recieving phone calls
from california
or ann arbor
or iowa
even after punishment
i would run this wire
in the night
like a spy
i never knew
you were dying for that
and
i’ll be turning
24 this year.
oh child today may be warm
but the night is not so forgiving
and if it makes me sleep well
you can call me foul
but those of you who spend
their whole day smiling
will freeze in the night
for truthful men
know no conceit.
i was found but now i’m lost
on the sidewalk by the corner
and there are super-men in the streets
with their batmobiles and money
and suddenly lost i am sitting
the world now so foreboding
on the sidewalk by the corner thinking
about how much i owe and have yet
to earn or pay and work and starve
for
i’m almost fucking 24
and my mother came to remind me that
standing is for the impoverished.
i wrote and wrote
with eyes i wrote
scientifically
and left the only
footprints in the
cave of the troglophiles
how could you know
how much i love you?
the knee-prints can’t
the hand-prints can’t
the finger-prints can’t
tell
even if they followed
the new lines in their
opaque world
no guess could be had
at me
even if my breath
reached any nape
no energy would pass
(even if it did
i can’t put a
blind lizard in
a prom dress)
i wrote and wrote
but only those with
eyes ever saw it.
there are no words for when
things are a-okay
and you’re a man in the sun
on a raft in a bay
and you couldn’t care what
the moving mouths say
every thing be damned
if just for today
they are impermanent
and pass like a wave
there are no words
when things are okay.
it’s about what you think
and how it drips out of your
forehead in confident drops
and tip-toes down your face
too small for you to feel
and it’s about what they think
and about how they smile when
they think it
and as their smiles grow there
are a million grating shreaks
growing, too and it sounds
like pulling a rusty rake across
a rusty tractor
in an aluminum barn
it’s about caring
it’s about how you’re all wrong
and i’ve stopped offering corrections
stopped giving out tours
to the lake from which to drink
only
if you’ve learned what direction
we took to get there
no one has ever made it
there and back
except
for those of us with coke-
bottle eyes
then
then
everything is far too clear
and there is water everywhere
everywhere
that you are not
the pens in my room
are like dry ice
and my bed the
softest coffin
i lay down among
the velvet and
stare longingly
at my desk
and feel the cold
reach at me
and when the sun
touches the floor
it even is cold at
first,
but you brought me
lunch
your smiling face
i started to feel
the warmth again
and the velvet
went back
to cotton.
the mcdonald’s man talks to you
but he doesn’t want to be
your friend
and neither i, his
because fuck the mcdonald’s man
and every dream he’s ever had
and for that matter
fuck me too
his paycheck lies behind
handing me my plastic
and my satisfaction lies behind
this transaction going flawlessly
so i can put it in gear
and get down the road
and foreget his face
and he mine.
we’re forgettable people,
i and the mcdonald’s man
we are seen yet unseen
or relativly anonymous
we are unimportance personified
with no books or pictures
in our names
and i am uncertain
if that will ever hold any weight
at all.
you’re simple like a tree
in that every story you
tell is really about
yourself.
no one’s leaving notes for you
in the paper that you pretend
to read
it’s all there
in black and white
standard fonts
the fresh news is miles away
being tracked and flashed to
you by satellites
but you crinkle it up
“this is all shit”
you say
they’ve filled your pallette
but you scour your carpet
for a new taste
and you refuse to love the sun
and stay in-doors
praying to your false idols
you believe in magic
like a child
and you won’t be hung for it
but you should.
i take you daily now
to where the bone rot
sugar rests the nerves
and there we roll around
and i am content with
staying
pale yellow sunday
mornings burn our shadows
into the walls which
no one else can read
i woke up today and
sighed
i cracked my neck
i stretched and swore
i’d never have to
do it again
and if you take the
window for just its
light and not its
vista
this seems just like paradise.
i love you in the only
way that i can
the way that is unsure
if it is good enough.
and i’d travel great
distances to prove
that the smile on your
face is a real one.
in a world of smoke
and mirrors
you are a cool breeze
and a warm sun,
and
i am sorry
for sometimes
being unsure
in miracles.
when it’s cold outside
and facebook is slow-moving
and the city-streets are grey
and your wife don’t love you
no more,
and the kids won’t look you
in your eyes faded from years
of looking
will you turn to your hope
chest
set up as
a time capsule
to remind
of what you asked of yourself
long ago
and will it be too late?
when i see you
standing in the cold-grey
street, my head barely
above a desk,
with your arms like propellars
i will wonder for a
moment where you’re flying
off to until you get crushed
under the weight
of the commute–
then systematically you
get cleaned up off the cement
like a stain on a white counter
that stretches for infinity
for absolutely no reason.
ah the phoney drunk on
god’s greens in this modern
age they’re much easier to pluck
which plays to the phoney’s luck
and the critics agree
that his poetry on sitting
is of the highest degree
and his necketh doth strain
as he rigidly rambles
repeating retarded preambles
his living quarters in shambles
his bookshelf lined with candles
about hypothetical rain.
this, with none to gain
but the lull that come with refrain.
once while hallucinating in
the northern woods a beautiful
fairy did come to me whose
soul was twice-size and she
spoke and made me feel bad for
those like lost and confused
out in the murky-ness pissing
in the wind (thanks neil)
and i thought of you, janelle
and having not felt bad for
you yet, i still cringe watching
you play out your favorite scenes
from friends out in public
at the bar
with that nerd
on your arm
who will put his dick in you
finally, while across the
city i write this
and the thought of you was not fond
because the real test, i feel
(and never expressed to the
fairy) is when a person gets
kicked when they’re down that
they get back up and remain
honest
and i believe, janelle
that the first time you pricked
your finger on a bush, you held
it against the allmighty himself
and took up to acting
to get your dopamine
when not working for it like
everyone else
and here i sit, insulting you
in prose
because i don’t believe
in fairies.
the television is deceptive
in that it seems to project
but really it injests
all your time and energy
and people being frail
things then go unfixed
you
gotta grease a human’s palms
to get him to do a thing
or else he’ll sit right
by his television,
and it’s deceptive in other
ways, too.
why are you living today?
and if that doesn’t bring
you rain then why are you
looking up at all?
will the glare that you
catch every time
going up the hill to work
get you tomorrow too?
and when it does
when it does
will you look up
and will it finally rain?
i surely do see clouds
but in my years i’ve come
to not expect anything at all
–
it didn’t rain on the
president
or you
yesterday
i suppose it never will
and in the name of the
great drought
i pray
amen.
i thought i’d try and tell you
about what might be going down
around here these days but
weird things always seem to get
in the way of what i mean.
we don’t have to live this way.
i don’t know if the
road to peace has any
mile markers on it but
i’s counting my footsteps
up ’till today and i
wish i knew how much longer
to go cuz i’m so so tired
hiking from atom to atom
to the tempo of all of the
multi
cellular
war
drums
and
their
chanting
sounds so beautiful, some
times
and their eyes are so
beautiful some
times
and i get up
things spread back out
and disappear
and that beauty is replaced
with waves of electrons
and even then things are
beautiful some
times
and lo my thumb hits the air.
hear hear a year’s worth
of sentences
whispered to oneself among
the frenzied crowd
crawling at 8, 12, and 6
buzzing all around a
universe to their own
sentences, sentences,
that perspective’s glare
won’t penetrate
the naivity of this year to come
the rotting of the innocent fruit
and agony whispered all the same
cyclical breezes,
migratory patterns,
and what to the man flipping
through the paper on a park bench?
and what
mothers will grease the wheels
while the age-addled trumpeters
volley their breath against the silence
war chariots march onto
the swamps, t’wards the dragons
with eyes watching backwards
waiting for someone to save them
these are the days of our lives
the callous cannibals crowing
for corpses with
the great imperial shield
on each chest
the signature verifying
the combined hopes and dreams of
wall street, main street, cork street
gandhi may speak to me
however those things may be pronounced
tolstoy, probably
the buddha, too
but one thing i can’t quite understand
is how to forgive one for his ignorance
when this ignorance takes shape
of fist
or otherwise
t’wards me
or otherwise
and then yet when his fist
has been planted
and the light shine on him
so he may reckognize the
err in his step
or
otherwise
and yet a second is thrown
or otherwise
i must ask you
why forgive?
to have ones meals prepared
and to take walks
to be able to focus on reading
to not think about much
to find a spot
and watch the sun set
there
to no longer be late
or indebted
whether to grow old
or to let it go
if that is the coward’s
way out
then i ask you
what is the
noble one?
before i knew not
to love you
winter was our
season
not by design
it just seemed to
amplify
every
situation
so now when winter
rolls around
it reminds me most
of just down the street
ps2 and coffee
and the gentle tugging
on my shirt
every time
i took a corner
too fast
in
the
snow
none of this was by design
but this year i wont
be searching for drugs in my own car
or biking to work
in the cold of mount pleasant
michigan
finding out the car just
won’t start
i don’t think i will feel
lost
or like i need to take a walk
and that’s why i
am glad i learned not
to love you
or, you could say
thankful.
(i just wrote a thanksgiving day poem)
23 years of
feeding pigs
other pigs
and lost
the rhythm
ears ringing,
and somewhere
a metronome
devi
ated
stickman falls
to the
stretching
of a new back
illusioned still
