Brewing Beer

poetry

—for Mike

I can make a clone
if you give me the right ingredients.

Brewer: Me.
As far as batch size is considered,
taste my preferred draft first and if you like it enough, have as much as you want.
The color should come as no surprise: Dark—one might say brooding—and ambiguous with a bite.
Yes, it’s very bitter.
ABV? It’s called intoxication for a reason. The less I have to think, the better.
And most of my fellow brewers would agree.
I call it the All American Dream Ale.
Equipment? My equipment, of course. It’s all anybody’s got.
The Boil Time is all day, every day. Never know when you’ll need to be ready.
Don’t want to be caught unprepared.
Mash Profile: Single infusion, heavy body(burdensome even), and a lot of mash out.
Taste Rating: As long you’re not a connoisseur you won’t be able to tell the difference.

I can make gallons of this stuff
so close, you can’t tell I’m a counterfeit.

what should i say?

poetry

i understand the river
of thought and learn
to breath among the
creatures of the riverbed

i speak but the words
get carried away
back down the curvature
of the giant sphere

i add my own water
to the stream but it
seems a pointless
endeavour

it becomes foreign
immediately
just like my reflection,
the morning after

one thing remains true:
that i cannot breath
in this land
of fish and mossy rocks

i feel freer with
my feet hovering just
inches above the ground
and drier, too.

Lest We Forget

poetry

And when they gunned you down
with your friend on the phone
I hope you knew why they sought to
shred your flesh with bullets

and I’m glad to hear you were rent
so you yourself could rend no more,
that the red poured freely from each
puncture and tear, that your eyes
rolled back and your fingers twitched,
still clutching that toy gun of yours

and I’m sure your heart was black
and half-dead, anyway. And I’m sure
that your soul was as empty as
a six-lane freeway in Southern Pyongyang

Bloodletting (I’m sorry)

poetry

So it was a cold dark January in Michigan
as they often are and we
would pull together for warmth every
now and then and I would consider you
and I think you would consider me, also

While the cars screamed down the avenues
and gangs of howling young-adults roved
to and fro before your otherwise relatively
peaceful abode I tried to steel myself
from the knives you would find

The lacerations always sting a bit but
they usually heal quickly enough with
a lot of pressure and
a little bit of time but they cut
somewhat deeper than they look sometimes,
those knives of yours

Sometimes while nursing a particularly
gruesome slice I would be speechless,
though I never mean to keep you waiting
and I want you to know that I won’t bleed out
and I need you to know that I’m sorry

Sometimes during these long cold Januarys
I know you have your own wounds to clean
because it’s still cold and dark here in Michigan
and I find plenty of my own knives, too.

she hid him beneath her bed

poetry

if i could only write one good
poem
it would be about when we went
south
and the humidity of
the middle part
of alabama

how it did fog up
my glasses in
just seconds

it would be about how i felt like
a stowaway
the whole time i knew you
a small puppy hidden under
your bed
and when we got to golf shores
i felt the foreboding of
being set free
by your sullen parents

in this, the best of my poems
i would remember and in detail
explain the last moment we
spoke
in person
but only the beach remains
that
sunbleached afternoon
walking barefoot and
the new freckles
i would fall between

and i would end the poem
very poignantly
and much before i spent a week
at my grandmother’s
in ocala
far from home
vomiting out religiously
all the sickness i had
endured.

When I was fourteen I learned that only Americans use AOL Instant Messenger because the people I met on forums that were from Canada or the UK were not familiar with America Online so I downloaded an MSN messenger program because Microsoft is a pervasive sort of multinational entity and I used it to talk to people that I have never actually seen face-to-face and who eventually stopped logging in to their own messenger accounts because Facebook Chat has since all-but-killed anonymous instant messaging clients but boy nostalgia is a thing sometimes.

poetry

I no longer chase ghosts
through a wasteland of slow-
loading forum pages or a
frigid sea of unreliable chat
applications but some nights
when I sit up (half as late
as I once did) I can not help
but wonder what became
of all the ghosts I left behind

Interview with a medical technician

poetry

‘Everyone’s heart is leaking’
she said, as she looked at me sideways

but all I heard was we were all destined for nothingness
that everyone is dying all of the time

A television showed a horror on its screen
while a strange instrument emitted dulcet tones

But the pain in my stomach was tightening
and my heart beat faster and my ears rang out and

Everything spun in the darkness
Or that’s how I felt, at any rate

She did not seem so concerned however
still jamming her wand in to my chest

so I laid still like I was instructed previously
imagining my heart as it undoubtedly leaked out

a frozen ghost

poetry

i spent night
with my aching past
t’ward the poorly
lit 31st street

it’s been so long since
i spent time in that world
we built ourselves

i wait, breathless
to hear the whispers
of only 17

i am a ghost in this
world
and to stay too long would
freeze me
have i been on this couch
before?
with the record player on
the shelf
reclined, afront a vinyl
big-screen
you nuzzle your freckles against
my skinny
frame
did we watch the movie flubber?

was it cold like this,
back then?
i wasn’t
disappearing.

of that i am
certain.

Bigger Better More

poetry

Robert Creely imitation—
“The Warning”

I wish my hands were bigger so that I could hold more of you;
that my arms would grow longer to wrap around you like mummified linens.
I wish I could exhume your deepest secrets like an unstuffed taxidermy;
pull them out, pile them up, and print them in the dailies.
I wish I could pluck your out your eyes,
stringing them like Christmas lights that would glow through July.
I wish I could trace your outline with police chalk,
so I could snap photographs of your curves to shelve in the evidence room.
I wish I could crack your breasts like eggs, pouring them into a molding cast
to preserve them in bronze marvels at an excavation.
I wish I could rip off your ears like pink mushrooms growing along trunk roots;
clasping them up to my throat so you can hear every sweet nothing whisper.
I wish I could swallow the looping licorice crescents of your lips
savoring the finest cut of rare steak with each bite.
I wish I could knock out your teeth and tongue to keep in jars;
shaking an instrument the emanates the sound of your voice.
I wish I could replicate your hair, unsheathing strands like scrolled blueprints,
thumb-tacking each down to sketch the angles with a pencil.

For bigger, for better, for more of you, I would.
And yes,
For love-I would split open your head
and put a candle in behind the eyes.
When I say I love you, this is what I mean: I am never satisfied with being close enough.
I wish I could graft myself to you with a blow torch,
heating our skin until it melts together.
Like when our fingers intertwine into a ball of squirming snakes,
hungrily swallowing each other to get warm.
I want to cross section every piece of you,
So that I can know you inside and out like my own personal Mudder Museum.

it wasn’t fair, no one said it was, now go toast the happy couple

poetry

the lights were
still on the music
still loud when you
ran crying into the
cold night

the sand ate up
your steps and
when you met the
sea it was so cold,
and so uninviting

what did you expect?

maybe a caring and
warm omnipotent
cloud whose womb
you would climb inside
of and wish it all away

yet the air outside
the wedding tent was cold
as was the water that
lept at your toes
as you stood backwards

let go
fall into
the ocean
wait for
the dj to
stop alltogether
and the
party to
come for
you

drift into
the icey
ocean of
your feelings
and your
ambitions and
your perfect
universe never
to be

or, don’t you have the balls?
or, walk back to the tent
let the sand eat your steps
wipe the salt water off your face
and toast the happy couple.

some things die slowly

poetry

others lay around and slowly
beat the wind with their wings
refusing to give in
fighting to keep on resisting
chasing life support
from the sun or the iron lung.

knowing the difference between
the two
and when a situation calls
for one and not the other
can be the difference
between slow
and quick
death

Poem From The Woman Sitting Across From Me On The Subway

poetry

Poem From The Woman Sitting Across From Me On The Subway

Look at this boy looking at me.
Tossing his eyes so secret-like.
Like I don’t see him each time
I look up from my book, pretending
he’s embarrassed to be caught.
This is not a game of cat and mouse,
boy, I just want to see how close we are
to Canal so I can get off.

Stop

trying to see what book I’m reading.
No, you probably have not read it. No,
it is not exciting that we both like books.
Stop taking all your books
out of your backpack to show me
that you have them, it does not
look like you’re organizing. It looks
like you’re trying to show me all your books.

Boy,

why are you wearing those bags
under your eyes so proudly? Why
neck cracking like a mating call? We
are all tired. All beat. Your legs
are not more sore than anyone else’s.
It is still okay that you did not offer
your seat to anyone, this is New York,
but don’t think you deserve it.

Hey,

they call it stealing glances because
I’m not looking to give them away.
When our eyes just met, it was not
a cute mistake. I was staring
to fucking intimidate you into looking
at somebody else. And
I saw you fix your hair in the reflection
of the train. Making it the

“right”

kind of messy. I’ve got my finger on the trigger
of your intimacy now, don’t I? You let it slip.
The way you made sure your hair was flat
on the sides and double checked the cross
of your legs. You wont ever say anything.
I can smell pent up pick-up lines
on your breath, you’ve been holding
them in your mouth for that long.

Look,

I don’t want that one-way ticket
to your day dream. This is not a poem.
This is the N train. I’ve got places to be
and no time for the type of silence
your kind deals in. And anyways,
I do not need wooing. My heart
does not need the keys you hope
to shape for it. Some of us

don’t

keep our hearts chained.
So erase all of this. Put away the pen.
I’m just someone on the subway. Not
the vehicle for your epiphany. Not
the photo thumb-tacked inside your
heart locker. I do not need
to be written about to be whole.
And anyways, I don’t need help with that.

You do.

masturbating to pornography

poetry

it is dark she smiles at me shyly i stand up unzip my pants she sits on a couch i won’t let her speak i want no one in my house to hear her

her skin covers her
fat cells
that are
proportioned perfectly over her delicate bone structure and to me she is a vision of beauty and she stares at me like i am a million gaping mouths and i am hard for her in the dark silence of my bedroom

everything goes down perfectly
she strips slowly and takes time
pleasing me and when i finally
get into her it is pure euphoria

just like i imagined
just like she wanted

when it ends the silence floods back in and i pull up my pants up as she revels in semen

her name is candy bar or something
she won’t tell me her real name
she puts her clothes on and smiles at me again
this time her smile makes me sad she is leaving with money and doesn’t want to know my name, either
when i turn off the computer screen we will be strangers once again

i don’t know why i feel this way but i know she wants me to
i don’t know why i want her to stay
i don’t understand
like how bugs are attracted to lightbulbs
but sometimes they are designed to destroy.

the essence in the flesh

poetry

how many freezing winds has winter breathed in this man’s face to carve lines so finger deep? and when did these twisted, ashen roots spring forth to replace his fingers? these could not be the fingers of his youth. even young man’s hands do not play claw as well as these. it is these claws that must have filled his mouth with hay. his voice is thick with paper, kicking out of his throat with every bullet sentence.

still, he is the cardboard delivery man who looks the most like a cardboard delivery man. his coat, his hat, his boots, are the clothes of his profession. the snow knows to ignore shoulders sloped like his, the cold has given up its assault on his toes. his hands, twisted as they are, lift and push the cardboard as if we were meant to watch this. and his voice, grappling its way down the shotgun of his throat, barks orders so efficient we begin to learn dance like him.

under his strict guidance, the back of the truck blazes and we all turn lightbulb, so fast are we firing cardboard onto the dock and into the warehouse. the cold turns around and goes home. our aching arms stop creaking so loud. our grease remembers what it is here for. it takes mere minutes to empty the truck, so cardboard delivery man is this delivery man.

when he goes home, does he keep everything on the counter in order to avoid opening a single box? does his wife massage lotion into his shriveling skin? does he throw off his beaten clothes and drape himself in furs? I imagine instead that he sleeps on a stack of cardboard. that he loves the smell. that he knows he is the best, and proudly teaches his child grace, waltzing boxes back and forth across the living room.

and if he ever dies, and I wonder if it is possible, I imagine him buried in a box made of cardboard. I imagine

he would want it that way.

At Last

poetry

Where men are finished with their speeches and can finally hear God
I hold my arms above my head and gravity pulls them down against my muscles
And I can hear the earth spinning—all the groaning of millenniums—
Trucks braking on abandoned highways, wheat stalks bending in forgotten fields,
And all of it spinning—held close—and forever fragilely intact,
With the precarious balance of a top—that in a moment it should fall.