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.

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?

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

sometimes

nothing says

more than

anything.

the land where nothing sucks

down in the valley of
the land where nothing sucks
there is naught but a
forest of carnivorous weeds

it is the norm of the valley
for there to be no sun
and it is their way of life
to love darkness and eating

so not being one to judge
i avoid the valley
as often as humanly possible
and stay downwind

—

the butterfly in the valley

and once
a butterfly
i saw did
haplessly
flutter
into the
valley

and the weeds did salivate
as it was their norm
and who am i to judge?
looking away as
they devoured her
wholly

mountains
impress me
the united states’ highway
system
impresses me

how millions of men over
a hundred years built
concrete and steel structured
planes across the expanse
of the entire united states
moving
daily
an unfathomable amount of things

that impresses me

your
bottom drawer wit
and parlour tricks
do not.

i gathered up rocks on a beach
i put them in order and began
the inquiry

which of you will kill me?

these rocks being people, though
after the inquisition i
ran up a hill

lost my foothold and fell

passing through the void
i knew i knew i knew i’d
been right

but i could never know which

and this is how it always goes

the greatest speech i ever wrote
was told in front of the hangman’s noose
for a moments time the nearly departed did think
“why maybe this aint’ so bad”
and the greatest moment in my career
was communicated through the still, dead feet

no twitching

a relaxed hanging, i thought
is a good one

i felt most human then.

it’s the grey cloud
that will be all there
is to write down that
you were here.
frustration is not
quite the word for
what it feels like
screaming into this
thing wondering
what it will write
if it writes
anything at all.