into the mind

Fingers like evolution.
They do.
I stocked napkins and was not stuttering,
The sun was setting.
I sat down and shook my fist,

The girls walked on by .
Melting into sensuousness of their own movements.

I felt like I was throwing toads
with every glance
'cause most of the time I only looked once
then looked down
at my feet
wondering about gravity and how distrustful I am of it.
wandering on to the fingers. Like evolution is
bristling down to the ends of every capillary
flaring out into space and time
but always back to the sun.
It's 93 million miles away--
they might be giants but
they can't jump that far.

The soda pop can shuffles on,
the counter where coffee is bartered for thoughts
(or vise versa)
but where it is clear that the ghosts are licking
at strands of taffy and smiling
and where zombies are the dead canaries
of a bad dream.
It's a hard place with a few soft edges.
It's Disney meets Anton LeVey,
and they're both drunk.
And they're both fully open to experimenting.
It's Rodney Dangerfield and PeeWee Hermen sparring
in speedos while space ships circle
and hot dogs are the weapon of the revolution.

So,
Everything must be calibrated properly
but the radiowave is a form of radiation.
The radiowave could bounce rogue and haplessly saunter
like Charlie Chaplin between planets
before being discovered.

And what would the ears say
to the mouth when the eyes became
epicycles around the girls
that were not in fact the center of the known solar system
any more than the hand with the cane twirling?

The mouth could scream the color of a chuckle
before the brain could catch up with a sigh.
The fingers had evolved to flick the ash,
work the machine,
make manifest the magic and tragedy of commerce,
and they did their jazz autonomous to the smile.

The smile,
a subtext of which follows:
Dust on the dirt roads by the river where
care bears were shot down like disparate Indian tribes before the revolution
when men in fur caps jostled
amongst each other
each to have his way
with the beaver.
Or
Blank checks issued to half-hearted monks in turmoil over their faith.
Sharp blades in shaky hands.
Politicians shuffling like cards to turn Trix on kids,
un-muffled masturbation just one tent away.

It was chaotic geographic topography,
There was a motion in play
the sticky pop-and-lock staccato mechansism,
A shutter of the back and forth.

An Armageddon wind tunnel throat choking,
A mind alive like a seething hive,
fire-alarm-and-smoke-detector-disengaged intrepid.

With the sustained song of a choir to guide us
the wilderness unraveled into the stark
clarity of well-lit parking lots
under obscured constellations.

Left only to hold hands with each passing season
and eyes that were cannonballs sailing past the edge of a flat Earth,
I smoothed the wrinkles down to a smile
and shook cold hands with the time before me,
writing poems in which the word 'love' was mentioned only once.
With fingers.

Automatic machine gun
Automatic Alaska
Automatic coin operated praise generator
Automatic conversation abort button
Automatic Lindbergh baby
Automatic cheese dip time fluctuation device

Water.

Bartender Blues.

Lips like soft serve
eyes like a diamond drill
they said they'd kill for her
but lacked the will to make anything
that didn't stumble as drunkenly from their lips
as they did on the walk home.

And she could toss a man aside
quicker than liquor bottles to a trash can.
Intentions broken,
glass on glass shattered and resonating
crass fantasy inflamed by the ignorance of obliviousness.

She had eyes
and they were out to sea
when a million studs sauntered in
making passes based on how good her ass looked in those jeans.
They told her what she needed and it was always them.
Or their cocks.
They asked where she'd been all their lives
she said, "avoiding you. And your cocks."

And how many pillows were left saturated with tears.
How many monkeys does it take to make a man?
Or is it drinks?

She was in the rough
and tough enough to take it.
She'd had enough to know
she was sick of having to fake it.

Singing silently nightly to oneself.

If only street lights could assuage me now.
His gaze drifting past the wood of the window frame and into the monotonous, entrenching romance of a tree rimmed street washed in a quiet amber light as he drinks the night air drifting to him. His world as it is (pock-marked with the normal worries gathered in a life) seems comforting to him in moments such as these, his eyes sagging with melancholy and an enduring longing for the frontier of mysteries. There is Mickey Mouse and Victorian houses sheltered under torn umbrellas back from the wars and rain storms in which they were drafted.

Pausing, lips pursed as his distance consumes him and he walks the crossroads of a devilishly disheveled mind, he smiles that weary kinda lonesome smile. Putting out a cigarette and a prayer he relinquishes himself to bed. He has eyes to dream of tonight, and for that at least he is grateful. For the wood of the window frame and all of it, he ascends to a subtle state of grace.

April 29th stream of images

In short bursts of rain
I left my last passions
to soak,
to shake well into infinity.
with dull eyes
I looked up and the sidewalk
was trembling and tearing itself apart and the pedestians never questioned a thing. I think it was night. Let's say it was night when I sat down in the shadows to melt pennies down in my hand just to be a little more worthless. The moisture was soaking through me. I was washing away. A grateful, weak smile. I had run it through my head over and over again, coming each time to a definite singularity. I had touched all points of perspective without washing my hands once. It was filthy. Armchair armageddon(sprinkle me some cyanide, make your mouth a rusty blade and sing to my heart)like the breathing of a blood-thirsty gorilla in a play pen. At a point of time when the Confederacy was running out of bullets(And coffee). Some said the end was near. Snake-handlers and preachers dancing the life out of the cause.

I looked up to say, "let it rain", I was trying to be brave but I was still trembling harder than the ground beneath my feet. I wanted my old world gods back. I wanted to bite down on lightening bolts and give Thor the finger. I wanted to cause treachery to each of Poseidon's seas. I wanted to shrug Atlas and slap Ayn Rand in the face in a single, fluid motion. For no reason. There was no destiny at work here, and I knew it. There was a future rife with the possibility of paper cuts. The jagged edge of time's inertia wracking itself against my skin. The labored breathing of a blood-crazed gorilla in a broken play pen.

They said he didn't wash his hands. They formed bi-partisan committees to commiserate on the causes of such a catastrophe. They wore suits made of paper and took turns screaming about nothing. And the blood dripped from the ear. And the head echoed with the sound. And the heart-beat was the pattern of a nothing intrinsic to the echo. Birds fell from the sky, tear drops slid up cheeks to the eye, the rumpled steel of bumpers smoothed itself and withdrew from a point of impact.

Standing on a New Testament battleground and watching the sun set for a final time over the silhouettes of four riders on the horizon I said, "Yeah Nasty, 'It's like that'" and beat the piss out of Willy Wonka and all those fucking Oompa Loompas, wondering all the while 'who will be there to remember the end of time?'.

4/23/07

He had a method
like vice-grips.
He had a process
like a mile high stack of dirty mugs.
He was a fretboard,
and every note was based on tension.
He was the breeze
through the bar-room door,
he was the hope hollering
in a vacuum.

As suns sank low
over the tops of trees
in towns like these,
there came the persuasion
of dreamers and derelict prophets,
carried on the strongest(strangest?) of terrestrial breezes.

Among a populace straying
over sidewalks
and each other.

Among a populace stranded
in a paradaigm
fat with the myth of paradise.

The cause of chaos and
the cost of consumption
are always,
two different things.

He was the shoe-shine on the glass,
and class distinction
among the depraved.
He was brave,

Home-grown and whole hearted.
He was rotten to the core.

Prayer for the entrenched and generally wretched.

Presumptuously unadorned,
storms & tea kettles,
clouds screaming,
Happy meals singeing
the body electic.
Clusters of
stars and people repeating,
drifting.

Listening to the freeway
and classic rock.
Listening to the ruckus
of old drunks
and the dreams
of charlie brown.
Listening to clicks
of lonely pinball machines.
Listening
to the resigned silence of millions of them.
Don't tell me you're not one.
Somewhere behind your guts there are men with translucent green visors & money belts
tallying your transactions meticulously.

Somewhere behind your eyes there are wizards with machines processing the constant input of light and filtering,
filtering everything you see.

Pay no attention to the man
with the knife at your back.

Know only the whisper.
Hear only the words,
testing the air quietly, assuredly.

There are the things in there
that want to get you.

Lets talk about an alien invasion
because, it's comforting to believe
your enemies are otherworldly.

Pure Shame Manifesto in HD

Was it a catalyst for
the manufacture?
Was it that your eyes
were dripping--
dripping onto the windowsill,
as I nudged slugs closer
to an ever certain reckoning.

Was it harmless
or prostitution and shame?
Was it the shape of a gullet
built to swallow anything
or simply the coincidence
within the configuration
of a standard, modern keyboard?

Too many numbers jostling themselves.
Too many words screaming to scramble themselves into existence.
Too many politics to fashion a functional rhetoric,
something that sounds
and acts as if it is sane.

an oligarchy characterized by witty t-shirts
built a house of sandwiches
shifting restlessly
in the scenic of the sand.

And the poets congratulate themselves,
like dogs licking their balls.
And the poets shake hands
with the rocks they've collected,
whispering truculent secrets
to varying wavelengths of light.

There was a dawn once,
and now the static on the television
rings in our ears.
shimmying restlessly like a bum,
(on the edge of the vision)
there were parentheses and hills,
shambling and staggered
like tear drops dripping,
dripping onto the windowsill.

Was it just the catalyst
for the manufacture of a theme?

Truncated resolution
and thoughts strung like straw dummies
across the horizon.
And there were harvest songs
And there were stories told.
Forever afterwards (happily ever after),
and the all the jargon
that seethes in the fairytales.

And then synthesizers and shotguns
were ringing in the future
And the hairy arms of man
entangled themselves
in an overwhelming cascade of technology.
(they had created things for themselves)

They wore skin tight leather suits
and were told to be fabulous
so they were fabulous
and wore skin tight leather suits.

They used words like
'truculent' and 'oligarchy'
they drank whiskey
and molested taste into extinction.

Whiskey

Will work it for whiskey,
maybe just a jigger--
Do your shot like you shoot a gun,
just pull the trigger.
And yeah I met Mephistopheles,
but I've grown much bigger.
Slap his ass just to save some caps,
a devil disfigured.

A procession of days
a calvalcade of bartenders.
What have I becom
(in the interim)
my ears were not on
my heart was lonely drum.
Eyes staring backwards eternally.
Drop me on the sidewalk
leave me gagging,
just like your favorite guitar hero.
(I was stumbling, I said "don't touch me".
and what I meant
was something to be found
only between the strings
I pulled to created my theory
of what this life really is.)
Just like Hawking,
But not a genius,
and not a wheelchair,
but a backwards grin
leaving me crippled and
my voice was always just a machine anyway.

One time my body was hurting me very badly. A friend gave me a pill. It made me feel funny. In spring I was sitting on my front porch with a type writer, using cinder blocks as a desk. I was doing bad things. This is the result.

How can you describe the procession of a life of nights in this swamp.
The night has me,
sleep will wait.
It's so fucking nice out. I can't even write the usual poetry.
I'm going to go take a long walk and look at the stars
I'm going to time travel.
I'll be back soon.
sometimes I find myself laying on the side of the road bleeeding and pick myself up and say "Now why'd you go and do a goddamn thing like that?"

"Which part?"

"All of it! You're a maniac! You are absolutely insane! I never dreamed it would end up like this..."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"It's nice out."

"Yeah."

"We should walk now."

"Yeah."

"You're going to have fucked up dreams again tonight."

"I know. It's getting kind of exciting. I never know what to expect but it's always so much the same. Aliens, oceans, x-girlfriends and dead relatives, flying, tornados. That's about it."

"A man could get used to a world like that."

"Tell me about it. You know, I don't say this much at all, but I love you."

"I love you too. Fuck those band-aids. I'm fine. Let's walk."

"Word."

"Word."

Modest Mouse orbited by the Radiohead

By the time things begin to make sense
it's time to sleep.
It's time to let the world do it's work without me.

I'd like to remain conscious long enough
to say one thing,
just one more thing
before the sun rises,
before the sun ruins
sight for sore eyes.
I told her it's easier,
it's easier to see in the dark.
She said she didn't get it.
I told her to look up.
Look up.

Those are my friends up there,
those, the ones exploding
so much,
so much larger than us all.
I told her
those are my friends up there
and once a second
one explodes with the sort of force
that would be unpoetic to discuss.
listen hard enough,
just listen.
The sound is not the ear is not the source.

The sound is a history
A history of violence,
A history of epic proportions,
A history,
calling out to the little creatures,
the ones with the hearts beating.

Every 60 million degrees
and a critical point is reached.

Every once in a while
the little ones can look up
and see what they're made of.

ghosts burning ash into life.

We are simply
the dreams of stars.

We are.
simply.
the little ones
the ones with beating hearts
born to burn away slowly--

We save the explosions for the titans.

Our Town

The kids around here
they dream of tornados
threading voices through their fingers
idly, pieces of strings,
melodies tucked just so
clutching merlot and huddled against gales

The kids around here
they've got the knuckles to prove
just about anything can be accomplished
the wrong way

very much confusion
very very much
rubbing of cranium
as the complexities of life
seep violently between his fingers
and there is no numbing persuasion
tot eh persistence with which they coarse.
No cloak

no Dagger
just a trainwreck as
screamed through the lips of McJagger.

They said love was an isane chemical
capable of nearly anything
and we have myspace and emo to prove it.
Bout how many
back-snapping acts of bravado
does it take to get to
the center of a
spine dangling
and a man unravelled,
staring at his own strands
of him from all
points of perspective
to disregard previous patterns
of thought
to churn wildly in
the mess of this progression
without shame
without fear
without fear of shame
or shame of fear
and none of the distraught satellites between.

Motioning for discomfort.
pleading silence with
a symphony of machine guns--
but I heard the whisper
of a single word
between the concussions.
When the hand fell limp.
When in a single second
the world fluttered
and came crashing,
"rosebud"
like a molecule left to drift.

but anything



when left in the hands of a magician





can become a bird.