Author: David X. Hugo

songs to never be re-peated, re-membered, re-played

poetry

we drunkenly drove
on long high-ways,
curving around the planet,
foretelling of it’s destruction
with no words.
higher and higher the
high-ways climbed,
and drunker and drunker
we all became,
until our car crashed
like the melody.
songs by candle light produced by
electric keyboard, drum machine,
the occasional bongo,
only to be played once,
are always, always, always
the saddest.
i remember thinking that
we all must be the same
sad,
so i painted everything
indiscriminately.
you reached for more,
but i drove us all home,
drove us all back to
the funny farm,
leaving sanity and
tunes to never be
recreated by the
candle light.

the highway to madness is madness

poetry

let us not be uncertain,
this map of ours is always
changing. let us run gallantly
towards insanity, headfirst, in
cart-pull-horse fashion.
let us listen with all ears
to our dead fathers and
contemporaries on different
parts of this path,
let us study their madness.
go now,
run,
dauntless till body gaunt
and thinner wire than current,
strung tighter than now,
let us get there because it
is the only way.
but how?
it is not the only direction!
let us first discern with
certainty the next direction
to follow from our map of
great confoundment.
let us get there or we,
gentlemen,
are all nothing.

my tombstone should include “wide-eyed” on it somewhere

poetry

i am wide eyed and high floating
above rivers of happy
philistines and i find that
everything is funny because
it’s all so very grave.
waves of irony end their journey
from: our massive sun-god
to: my face and
amplify my smile;
coloring all things in their
deep, deep comedy.

i smile and graze over the
earth with my eyes lightly
so as to not break a thing.

“humans are bad balloons”
i think and
look down
as i deflate
the crumbly breaky surface
giving way at the thought of
my come-down. sunshine
turning into heat
bird chirps
turning into traffic
smog
all things blackening and
crumbling as i come down.
i grab at the comedy but
cannot hold anything,
not even the air.

i walk this lonely road the only one that i have ever known

poetry

going down the streets i don’t know
the same way that my fathers have
drunken and beaten and all that mess
all of it just like it is in my mind

any time i’d thank you for a dance
of transcendental nature
any one of you walking this road
any one wandrin’ at any pace

today was a sunshiney beautiful day
the best for beatin’ yourself up with
kickin’ a rock between your steps
the same way that my fathers have

dim light, on still

poetry

is it the black walls
and black carpet and
black floor and black
mold? could it be the
gradual blackening of
my skin,
my organs,
the essentials?
is it the black ceiling,
with the black monsters
that live above us…
or maybe the big(ger)
black ones that live
below? is it all of
these things that suck
my lust from my chest
and the smile from my
face?
i wish i had cleaned
this truth-less place
the first time i’d offered
to,
i’m
beginning
to
mistake
me
for
it.

50% opacity

poetry

losing myself
daily
now
brains eyes ears
dulling
every day now
all these things looking
sounding
differently
either that or i’m remembering it
wrong
again. is it the light…
or the sleep
wearing
me
down?
these thieves in every air
particle
even now stealing my
breath.
too tired to get me
back.

tea

poetry

there’s a fire in the city;
it was not started by me,
whiskey drunk.
i am only dancing,
dancing in the ember-
snow.
the reds are killing
the blues, i am green,
my things can fit in
a backpack so i dance,
dance,
dance in the fire.
my eyes are fed
with the fire when
the wind blows and
if a big enough gust
comes along i
wont fight it.

loveless (or call the dogs off, jesus)

poetry

nothing can be more appealing
to me than the beauty of a woman;
i see in her figure, and in her form,
(or what she shows me of it)
the chesapeake, the rockies,
the sky.

however, much unlike a good book,
or an album,
the insides of a human are
much less appealing than the
outside. i venture to say:
this anomaly is not found
outside of our personal
shared condition.
the slow and painful stuttering
dive of disinterest that forms
once cracking open the spine
of one of these most
appealing vixens.

i hear the retorts of a million
dead poets in my ears, the
sheepish cry of billions
of single-celled
omnivorous,
monogamous,
thoughtless populi screaming:
but for love!
oh, i hear you all,
all of you shape-shifting spineless
oafs,
willing to subject yourself to
untold ignorances under the
name of some vague emotional
and societal ploy.

i say,
we have multiplied
many times over,
jesus,
now call the dogs off.
i am loveless.

circus

poetry

i buy tickets to the circus sometimes
with spare
hidden
paychecks.
and i am enamored, i suppose,
by the beauty and the tact of the
horses with the long black mains
(although i am not sure of
what breed).
i think for a moment about
another life
where i am a horse trainer
and i bask in their majesty.
for these moments
rapt in contradiction
never last.

i am sure if i trained horses
i would hate them too.

so i get up before the lights
have raised
(with the idea of anonymity)
walk out to the parking lot
and commute back to my
home
which will never be just right

as long as it’s mine.

favorite bland

poetry

dumping ashtrays in parking lots
on brochures about the effective-
ness of time as a decomposition
agent,
lighting fire to the pedestrians
in the nova,
saturday before the big let-down
sure was fun,
was wild,
like your eyes.

stranded and strung out chasing
strippers,
sex
and
success
’round the street from
old men in book stores closing
down gotta love kalamazoo,
michigan,
the homeless.

oh why i gotta love the break
down like i loved the build-
up aint so easy to understand
staring at this whole thing,
this whole big thing,
running away again.

nightmares, government, love

poetry

sleeping with your memories
can make for a bad night laying
in bed all day next day thinking
(circles)
going on for hours about how
they are here to get you or will
be soon, you are sleeping in a
(square)
sweating through the ghosts
shooting glances at your love,
in the back of your eyes like
(stars)

climbing a fence

poetry

blah blah you
self-assured like the civil war
full of shit sayin’ god put it there
standing at a gate
with the key
someone inside and i wish it wasn’t
me
seeing like a blind man with a
telescope and some other
metaphors that would cut real
deep
if i had only used your name.

heroin spoons

poetry

heroin spoons

ice glazed in
grass

cat piss white
t-shirts

from
smoothing edges
to
running
from
police

notes to yourself
reminding yourself
that you are not
being
your self

perplexed by
that concept
you ignore your
old friend

stems

giving up by
sitting down

a man made of
mist and a man
made of stone are
yelling at eachother
on your television,
you cannot
turn
it
off.

passive-aggressive

poetry

sitting in your little
room,
shaking,
pressing playPRESSINGSTOP,
you grin.

you continue shaking.

you breathe a sigh of
relief,
“at least no one knows”
you think to yourself,
sating your nerves with
positivity.

your eyes see a bathroom
on your computer screen,
brought to you by apple
inc. and your girlfriend
is sleeping in the other room
and noticing this you get up
and walk what seems miles
to hear her loudly snoring and
you thinkSHITILEFTITON
and you hurry back and
you realize that you’re shaking
again and this sigh stutters
out of your mouth and falls
to the pit of your stomach

again you press play

you skip past the part
where you set up the
camera,
past the part where you
leave,
past the part where she
uses the bathroom

again you press play

the shakes come on
hard,
real hard,
you smile
grin
you smile and grin
i see you smiling
and grinning
cheesing
pressing play
i see your white teeth
through your smile
i see and i know i smelled
it on you,
i smelled it on your breath
trailing every word that
you said,
i wont forget that smell
and i wont let you live
with that.

not with that smile.

do not associate the focus of this poem with any type of pre-existing ideal or concept that exists within your brain unless, of course, you’re right

poetry

you have shown me how
to get things done
you have shown me what
emotions can do
i have seen how you let
random entities bounce
chaotically off of each-other
for eternity

you have shown me how
i can be fooled
i have witnessed the steadfast
nature of your creations and
i have listened to old men
talk,
old men who really had it;
i listened and understood

i have seen men beating
their heads against walls
until they bled out into the
streets,
i have seen how little
communication exists between
people,
i have heard how much
you have to say–
i have listened when i could,
i am afraid i have not understood
much;
i am also afraid that there is not
much to understand

i cannot tell you how life is
across the universe
but i can hazard a guess that
will come very close

i can still not understand people,
i cannot believe;
which is why i cannot understand
you,
or much of what you say,
however loud you say it

i can never let the ink dry
before i throw away today’s
draft,
because i wake up with the sun
and see it erase the meaning
of all that i had imagined that
very day with it’s waning
over the horizon like white-out
over a dissertation written by
humanity,
who, collectively, is unsure
when exactly the paper is due.

alpha

poetry

back in the
d
a
y
we used to ride the dead
leaves through the hellish
michigan winters
all shady hazed and listless

and my blue car was nervous
around college girls

we made it out like kings of
a shit-hill-made-of-gold,
crowns reflected in our
bloodshot eyes

and we forgot all the names
of the days and the places

now, between stints in county
lock-up and governmental fines
we breath in deep and waste
our time waiting;
because they always catch the
fire but they never catch the
fireworks.

stick man

poetry

your the stick man and
they made a pencil outta you
woah your friends are all left
and your tryin’ to keep it right
they got a number for you
and you know it’s no. 2
you see the blue lines in the sky
nothin’ quite fits inside of them
you celebrate your loneliness with
nights by the sharpener
woah and you’ve got nothin’
nothin’ to write down.