looking up,
that’s all there was;
and as the question hung,
what answer could there be?

and that’s when we turned,
and walked away.
never looking back.
never holding on.
never regretting.

our bodies are not designed to cope with such a universal human experience. our stomach lining melts away before us, our brains fill with images of terrible things and wake us from our slumber then refuse to let us return.

vomit colored vomit surprises no one
on the way out. their shock is more
in response to equation they’re running
in their head to include the resistance of both
air and gravity, and this projectile’s seeming
insistence on ignoring the interference.

i’ve got to shake this feeling
but it won’t be shaken,
sneaking up again,
catching me at unawares,
just when I look away

THERE IT IS

laughing,
grinning,
feeding;

NOW IT’S HERE

IT’S ON MY BACK

clawing my shoulders,
scrabbling to hold on,
slowly burrowing;
forcing its head
into my head;
forcing my head
out of its head;
until soon,
all that I was
will be gone
and all that I will be
is parasitic.

the voice of reason shall be silenced
even should it be the final thing i endeavor
to do

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 are 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