a hard-won piano stumbled in the rain,
stabbed out its cold rhythm--childish, I know.
I hung back in the brackish fog
and watched thunderbirds with broken headlights
huddle off into flat, roiling cities of mist.
Ritchie's dead but I hear from his charred fingers,
from his lips, groping and unembalmed,
that we belong together. I don't blame him,
what the hell does a dead man know. Can't fault
a stiff for being wrong.

there are streaks in the air
where stricken leaves have whorled to the brittle grass,
afterglows of fire colors stunning twilight
and her legions of clouds into red shreds of memory,
dusty dusky banners tattering off beneath the prow of the foothills.
These are the mourning notes of a hard-won piano,
a pain sung in the tender braids of veins
strung up for to dry, crackling strains
for fools who love to pluck and say,
We belong together.
The hell we do.

I am heir to an autumn empire,
a shivering sidewalk jutting against the
hot mouth of winter, lips like coats whispering
against the skinny hips of umbrellas;
brims of stetsons dampening on beaded sills
while unsure lovers cramp desire
in tiled apartments near the fire escape.
My needle's gone bad, and so Ritchie
died in a fumble of static that stung onward
through the thin, clouded breath of evening.
I slumped in a plastic chair staring
at the vinyl scar, thinking why in hell
did my last good record
shimmy off and die
as though it had leapt from my bare balcony
into the tense fog below.

The disciples were a tawdry bunch, steeped
in sackloth and robes with broken teeth and hurried
proud tongues--it's been
such a hell of a long time
since I heard the unsweet mumbles of violins
brushing aside clover strands and staring
like red-haired girls through wearily draped evening vines,
green gowns of twilight.
My disciple friends would not approve
of such movement, of such chintzy pleasure
derived of ashen smudges beneath lip-crossed eyes.

Last I surrendered, the crickets pawned their fiddles
for mouth harps, learned to play them all bluesy and cool
like bellowed smoke from the picketed camps of armies,
a martial assemblage of nocturnal maestros.
I suppose they lent evening a bitter air tinged with taut grace,
like the first liberating waltz of tense-lipped dowagers,
their shawls still black and soot-scented from
so many hundreds of midnights spent with necks craned
like herons, peering with pale throats and rosy eyelids
into reedy mirrors, cursing with whispers the empty
corners above their shoulders where silver husbands
should have stood.
Waltzes give ground to red salsas, routed by the sharp heels of tango.
Their nightstained veils slip off between
the sweating walls of the dance floor,
are ground beneath extended toes into
cinnamon-scented tatters.
When I saw her full eyes and their rainy discourse
upon her cheeks, I laughed loud
and said wasn't this all right, wasn't this a pretty thing.

Cheap thrills, my godly compatriots chided
from beneath their burlap visages.
Last I surrendered, and it was a pretty long time ago,
it felt fine as dowagers freed from mourning cages,
but it didn't last and never does.
That's what the tawdry bunch say.

when I see the slack lines of your portrait, I
love the afternoon burn churning about the edges,
hurried mortal mumblings of winter fire
funneling around the cold knuckles of winter hills--
I love the burn, but not you.

ink slouching out from my fingernails,
slumping like sweet black blood from beneath my eyelids.
thirsty love, the slopes and contours of other lover's lives,
a thumbing of your unquickened muscles and
a tongue fumbling against your throat, taut.
Somebody told me they saw winter hills and I
was ashamed for my eyes had slit themselves of sight,
curled up in brittle dry whips of blindness.

the sullen sculptors that shimmed your heart
gypped you and slipped you one
made from the same bone as mine.
Too bad, baby doll--
you'll wanna
get that fixed.

you'll need more than
an earthen fool with tin hands.

I feel sapped, Bonnie. And it isn't over yet.

Give me two more weeks. If I survive, I will see you at the end. If not, you were all wonderful.

Oh children, would you wait for me?

Oh children, I don't feel like hurtling through the frail fingers of these failing trees to find you. These cottonwoods are dead enough without my wails to illuminate their pale defeat. The mountains are sunken like the wan white fires of smouldering galleons into fog thick as copper.

Oh children, I love to wade in the irrigation ditches by the blindly patched leg of asphalt between the fields, swans to my right and crows to my left. When I surrender and bury me in muddied silver, they rise in a roiling cacophony of ivory and jet and shudder past the frigid light like brilliant crackling frames, old cinema.

Oh children, a passion that does not leave you heaving near death
is no passion.

* * *

I must not leave on a note like that. Tomorrow holds too many demands to retire depressed and exhausted.

Folk keep asking what I want for my birthday. I hate listing things like that. So I am going to drop subtle hints that will hopefully lead to eventual inspiration.

I have been reminded multiple times in the last couple of weeks in my musical forays that I still do not possess the second Thursday album, "Full Collapse." That bastard I call my friend (i.e. Matt White) wouldn't sell it to me last I asked. So, I'm stuck with the first and third. That's like having "New Hope" and "Return of the Jedi" without "Empire Stikes Back."

I was looking at my list of books that I'd like to turn into movies, and it dawned on me that "I Had Seen Castles" by Jane Yolen and "Where You Once Belonged" by Kent Haruf aren't in my collection. Strange.

I discovered an Irish playwright by the name of Martin McDonagh recently; read three of his plays. Fantastic stuff. It's peculiar that I don't own any of them. Yet.

"Topdog/Underdog" by Suzan-Lori Parks was the best play I've ever seen. Interesting that I can't seem to find any copies in stores.

Band shirts rock. Does Matt know any of my favorite bands? Gee golly whillakers.

I am tired of being a cheesy bastard. I shall commence growing a ponytail and becoming sensitive. I hope the blatant hints above did not offend anyone. They offended me.

This Friday, ladies and gentlemen: Dane Cook.

Matt and I went on Sunday to the Dead Poetic concert at the Pound. I got all band members, excluding the singer, to sign my insert. We walked out deaf and happy. They played all my favorite songs, including the first song of theirs that I ever heard.

The My Chemical Romance concert is for twenty-one years and older, so Matt and I will need to conjure up some fake IDs. Yes. Right.

I am directing so much right now that I could spit. If it were all one big project, at least everything would be homogenous. Unfortunately, it's a short film, a teaser for a series, a scene for my Directing for Stage final, and a one-act play for next semester's Student Repertory Theatre. I spent six straight hours typing up and cutting down that damn script yesterday.

"Three Musketeers" went out with a bang, and we had a gloriously smooth closing night. I went to bed at six the next morning, after spending most of the previous hours caring for Drew, who had imbibed a wee bit much.

I'll see everyone on Friday. Until then, please get more sleep than I have been receiving, throw a couple Molotovs in your neighbor's backyard, and keep oul' Erin's Isle in your hearts.

Be gentle with me.

Piano in the dark, trees

Be oh so tender.

I care not how it goes, how you rage and swell, your blushing anger silhouetted like crimson lace against the window corded with fog, your grey room veined in rain.

Be merciful, be sweet.

Your fingertips on my eyelids and tears on my throat, evening or morning I don't know.

Hollow, augured, I have no say none at all so
be quiet don't tell me that you're standing
in your skirt that smells of mute chamomile and cinnamon
that draws its lips back above your knees
in the peeling doorway with only balmy shadows slicking the walls behind you.
I want nothing of your handkerchiefs choked up with lavender
or of that bruised rouge cracking like old gargoyles on your eyelids.

Be silent, take and leave.

Corpses of lilacs, blue urn shuttered in dust pleading emptily,
vanquished.

Be harsh, suck in your lip turn
parade oh tragedy through the licking downpour,
gray satin leeching the scent from my
bent porch planks
I'll see you off but only from behind
the clouded muslin of the window good night
as evening plucks blue mutters
from the urn.

THE STRONGEST BONES

sallow orange membranes of autumnal clouds
mumble across the vestiges of twilight drifting
in the willows of your eyes
I
hear the slumber of your lips
chilling against my quiet jawbone,
the sully bedsheet ghosts of your brushfire moons
crackling like the dry throats of crows,
a sweetened blackness in my ears.

I
bear no tattered evenings on my moist shoulderblades,
I
clatter about in clay vessels ashy and whisperish
straining against bedsheet ghosts who seem to know me
I don’t know them
and they mouth off and thumb their stubby noses at
I
heard the ragged paper shriek of doves’ wings
muttering in the foyer on blue terra cotta tiles
beaded with morning and stirring hoarsely in the fog,
green whispers, green orchestras
stringing furtively for unseen concertos,
rustling:
This is me, This is you.

see that, girl?
lines on my hands and ink in my eyes,
a bristling potent rebellion
of bones, bones.
no proof, no flesh,
bones and dust,
the triumph of bones and dust
lording and laughing drily like
sallow gilt fermenting on the brushfire
edges of moons and twilight clouds.

what happens under the winter sun's flame--

The barges of the dead dragging foamy trenches
through the rilly pallor, blue as sickly lips, frail
and needy, lovely

--is between you and me--

Gravelly spatters of cold gold across
the rear window, shuddering through trees
with dead leaves covering their eyes, I
haven't scrubbed this thing for weeks
and the children who smeared their stubby fingers
in the rain-streaked dirt have staggered
off into the hard evening as the sinking light
stretched out the wrinkles at their temples and beneath
their eyes and I
heard the pavement's cracked hoary breath
as they laid down to
pass quietly into death
to the hollow song of no crickets (hell it's winter you know),
white spiders dropping down from the churning bellies
of hot cars burning by
to spin brass pennies across their eyes

--and nobody else, but between you and me--

I fell black in desire, hearing hounds
fringing night in crystalline howls, their breath
uncurling in shivery plumes,
that womanly silver slip of a bay writhing in the eventide,
cupping the clammy loamy flesh of earth,
tasting the cinnamon rot of winter
and your bluesy eyes snatching umber moments

--are only the crystalline howls of passion
uncurling unvoiced and tensely poised,
the silent want.

My grandparents are here right now.

WINTER WANTON

I know you are
like paper and that your skin shivers
under blue sweating lidless moons, dry sheaves.
Salty bite hissing up against the leeward side of the wind,
the bareboned white of your shiny lips,
the cedar in your dollhouse hair.

The breath of yours
that slithers between my teeth
and expires in a frail shudder on the cusp of my throat
does not remember its bellows, no patience
with the slow weep of the sun’s bleeding fire
across the uncurled fields languishing smoky and green,
their ruts hushed and expectant for the
silent-jawed movement of cloud driving cold
between them.

I know you are
like paper and your skin shivers
and is soaked in blind ditches sluiced open
with rain. I don’t want to disappoint baby but
your ink has run about under your eyes
and made you appear
so wanton.

White pianos belly up red when
the sun breaks like shivered ivory
into the horned foothills:
I know your mountains
and your music

White piano players belly up sad when
their eyes shine salty red
like seaweed been rubbed under
their delicate eyelashes:
I know you.

Sunday drifters in Sunday best
hammering rail spikes and picking their teeth
in white belly up sanctuaries with
redly-wrought stainglass
like bruises between the stones:
I know me,
and you don't know me.

When the gaps stretch raggedly open, small tears in the fabric of rush-rush, you wonder what happened to your friends. You wonder what the price is for their absence, what immense gains you'll have made without their distractions. What grandiose things I'll do without you, right? Without love, without true laughter, without your petty liveliness to draw me away. Right?

Man cannot live on visions alone.

Pummeled and sanded down by these hours; the days are so tiring, and this music cannot redeem my soul. Can't trade it in, can't pawn it for the silver of untroubled sleep.

Damned near stomped the snake in my hallway to death this morning before realizing that its head was a buckle. One of my sister's belts. What was it doing slithering out there in the dark?


Meet me out back behind the rusted flaking spear of the water tower, I feel close to you, want to carry you, ascending. We will remain, pressing our ears to her peeling red-brown skin, listening to the waters within creak like old warriors, their aged armor rustling with the punctured bellows of their shallow ribs, pocked swords in hand, point-first into the powdered cemetary dust at their feet.

Meet me out back where the barbed wire sags like long quivering violin notes. There you and I will confess, I feel close to you, want to hear you breathe against me and leave fear strung up on the exhausted strands of barbed wire that limp toward the far bloodstained foothills.

Meet me and I'll watch the moon sling up and rain still white fire on the curve of your neck while distant bobcats fling yowls rattling through gap-tooth shuttered houses. Yellowed piano sheets stir on ancient countertops near unbusied pots scented with the silver cities of spiders, tremulous.

Exhaustion.


The hand of night slides into the skirt of morning--they run right on through in a tangled willowy brier of smeary colors, washed-out violet limbs streaking in sweaty spokes through the gray gold of dawn's cold hips, her moonward parted lips, white with the gilt of lunar dust. She breathes alabaster.

A red flare hissed on the cheek of night.

Whether dead or not I don't know, a violin rustled beneath that dark brow and became a thorn within that eye. Christ, what they found was better than what I had, tension coiled under my tongue, a rattling in my hands. Give me song, I begged my embattled instruments, and they cranked up into an estranged melody. She breathes alabaster, they sighed through their clenched teeth.

what you want
I want to breathe it
breathe that alabaster,
chalk in my eyelashes, so foully rouged that I'd unbutton my cuffs and curl the dust into damp clouds with hot heels,
what you want, well what you gonna do, dame morning?

I could speak and see my veins wilt as that music sapped out to dry and stain.
no sir, no ma'am, night's palm is silhouetted on her alabaster thigh,
what you gonna do, dame morning, your lips fragrant with the song of night,
the hot heat of my hot heels harrowing the bent-backed grass, I cannot speak
and do not feel the need for it,
not for words like a red hissing blemish on the face of this tumbling deep.
am I not clear, dame morning,
that we are tangled and your alabaster is on my lips
that you are moonward and white
and that chorus is ascending, I feel that
like disquiet and the kick of my passion.
This is restless.

what you gonna do?

Welcome to the morning, for I know that you have not wakened yet. Who but I would get up before six when their first class is at 12:30? Go ahead, sleep until ten. I know you will.

One of the flaws of this American world today is that too many listen to music because it "sounds good," because it catches their ear for a week or two, sniffling through the radio. Their pleasure fades as quickly as the song blends into the station jingle. They have no respect for it, no great love for it, because it means nothing more than a brief jive with thudding bass.

I have been raging with "My Chemical Romance" of late. They are beyond intense, and I never thought I would like them. I don't know if I like their first album, which was independent, but "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge" refuses to let up. I think I shall end up buying it. However, I am waiting to see if its catalysm lasts. Coincidentally, "Three Cheers..." was produced by Howard Benson, who was also responsible for "Year of the Spider." Of course, he was also the hand behind Blindside's last album. Perhaps the band should be shot, not him. I'm not sure if the songs could have been salvaged.

My short film is moving. Locations are cropping up, people are rising to the occasion. I'll film it on Martin Luther King if I have to, although I'd rather not risk a REAL drive-by. If that's my only choice, though, I'll do it.

Music used to be good.

What is worth losing?

What happens to the memories we leave behind for a dream? Are they translucent corpses strung out behind in chains of werelight, tolling and haunting like blackened cathedral bells?

What is the cost of love?

It isn't free. That's a lie singing off the tongues of simpletons and the teeth of fools.

What are they afraid of?

Why do they hide amid stupors of vapors and liquors, arid monologues and flapping jaws, the bleary unfocused eye, the succor of desperate voices in a cray wash of cold brine: your stillborn savior who bleeds amber in the evenings that stay evening long into morning?

Why do I feel skinless and unreal?

Does music stop at our ears, or does it shudder through us into earth and reverberate, barely perceptible, in the far mountains and fields of distant nations?

Why are they frightened of their dreams, of the love that will get them there?

What happened to passion, and what is the punishment for having wasted it?

Do spiders build webs to catch their quarry, or are they striving to construct monuments, and insects just run into the damned things? If a cow trampled my Great Pyramid, I'd have hamburger that night.

Why do I hear the shouts of the dead and the whispers of the living?

Passion is not enough.

Wisdom is a long while in coming, and blood is its price.

From the carcass of love spring the roots of dreams undeferred. Dawn will come, unbidden and unlooked for.

Tomorrow is not a day on the calendar.

If I step across the cigarette ash
sucking up against the doorjamb,
the wind pushes its hips against the gravel,
there is a wet iron moon above the vineyard,
there are spectral lights leaning backwards
with pale shoulders pressed into my lips.

If I step across the gouged oak
bathed in cigarette ash,
I find that night knows piano, that delicacy
tastes of aspen lace, the gray thighs of orchards
curled out under the steaming furor
of a wet iron moon
that has caged my eyes.

If I step, what can I gain
that I haven't got? beaded moisture
jeweled on the smudges of sleeping crows,
the consumption of rapture,
the shadows beneath your cheekbones
away from the lamps on Tenth and Bowle,
your voice scattered between moths and stars
and not the fractured columns of vagrant tumbling newspapers,
your glorious tragedy cast in pearl and not gold,
for man spoiled gold such a greedy long time ago.

I have knowledge of nothing,
of spindle-veined plum trees moistly frail
beside fields gasping in the cool.
I have no way, only eyes
that see and then not always
so that my hands can grub in the clay
and carve vessels for moonlight,
to hold the moaning
of the wet iron moon.

Crab grass hard on my feet,
want my goddamn bluegrass back,
want the ditch where it feels
like my grandfather is buried, face emerging
sallow and sweet, leathery and painted over
in the blurred inks of just-gone,
though I know
he’s sacked out beneath a granite tooth,
don’t know if that’s where I want to go.

The willows moan
in moody low melodies of defeat; I get tired tired, tired
with dirt in the hollows beneath my eyes,
my mouth open and my arms in the bluegrass knowing
there is much you love
more than honesty.

Evening has shipped in,
smooth shards of blue susurring
into the clefts between the cold-off foothills,
washing down the moonward side
of the blue bluegrass, goddamn bluegrass,
feel you smiling blithely, I say,
this what happen
when fools look deep at each other,
think they see mirrors.

Name me a mirror that din’t lie:
closest I get is the burnished cheeks
of flooded rice fields, and all they showed me
was skies dragged down by the sagging
chins of clouds.
that’s how I know
they din’t lie.
I get tired, tired.
Gimme my goddamn bluegrass.

You Are Gilbert From "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" You are very giving and self-sacrificing. You're always there to lend a helping hand to family and friends. However, this generous nature often robs you of fulfilling your needs and desires, and may cause you to become resentful. Find a way to balance your kindness with your independence.

Take The Johnny Depp Quiz!






Ironic. It's the only Johnny Depp film I own.

I imagine that it's morning in Paris, and that the wet spokes of humid bicycles are shuddering damp cobbles like cinematic sprints of spasming light, a sunlit accordion staggering about with sand spread under his morning eyelids.

I love the keys. I saw lanky blue shadows smearing their sweaty dawn palms against my skin as I passed, passed, pressing mortal shades into me, into me.

Paris reclined, and she was naked and thorny against the hills, she was the crown of pale alabastered flesh, she was the cigarette smoke sliding against heaving ribs. Paris was born for morning, I said, because the fire of dawn was meant to salt the wounds of her reckless night.

Go on, Paris said, her lips against my earlobe, and I swam through her tiled doorways, where women with long skirts swept the heedless stairways and closed their eyes slowly when the city's morning struck them blind. Iron trellises peered like ashes from the balconies, and I knew that they cupped the remains of yesterday's midnight under their fingernails.

In the ash, I saw Paris glory in the morning.

To what did I return?

I came home today at ten o'clock in the evening. It was my mother's birthday. I had rehearsal.

They didn't do a Goddamn thing. My father was listening to his fucking Spanish tutorial. They didn't open any Goddamn presents. There was a cake sitting on the table.

What is too much to ask?

She went to bed. Before she disappeared, my father had the grand consideration to ask her if she would like to check her e-mail. Thank God, the saints, and sweet Hell for his decency, for his impeccable thoughtfulness.

Fuck you, father of mine. Keep walking.


Poetry is a rigid corpse, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why seven billion words languish in cold unremembrance: they lost life. Somewhere in the iron tread of decades, they stopped writing of life and began to spit out numb phrases. Go ahead. Search for it. Find it. Every one of these modern "insights" is as stagnant and lacking in force as a regiment of toothless old men, their IVs sucking at them like transparent octopi. "Poetry" is perpetuated by a shattered minority of mute hermits whose passion is reclining on their lawns, harping on the sprinklers, and capturing such impressive phenomena with cages of indefinite, soulless praise.

Fuck you, poets of today. Keep walking.


The end

is not here, and you will not die. Here is fire, here is rage, here is the eternal -- stabbing out from your bony, fragile chest. Who can stop you, I ask. Who the Hell can stop you? When you ripped your bloody way from your mother's warm cage, God laid his angry hand on your skull and shouted for the suns and the worlds to pour forth onto your day, because he had forged you in undying flame. When you clattered upon the table in a puddle of your mother's substance, you screamed; you screamed "Goddamn!"

And God howled back, "Yes, Goddamn! For I have thrust you forth into a world where nothing will match you, where failure is beyond you, where you will be crushed and lifted, where you will be summoned and destroyed. And when you live on, you will win. And when you die, you will win."

She wrote in ink,
like blood on watery eyes.

I stepped from the doorway, found the moon
pressing her pale diseased flesh against the earth,
found the crickets screeching,
found you raking your nails against trees.

She wrote in ink,
like blood in my watery eyes.

I stepped from the doorway,
inside from beneath the sallow limpness of moon,
and I beckoned for morphine.
She handed me a syringe,
but when it hurried forth into my veins,
I found it filled with ink.

You draw blood.

No one told me that upon dying our souls transmute into vulnerable strains and hurtle bodilessly higher, burning through our hair and through heaven, and that when they reach the humble vault, they also die. Where is immortality? There is no such thing; there are only forgotten lips and half-pressed flesh. I took up the cup yesterday and forgot what I was drinking. I wrapped my body in a flag yesterday and forgot what I was dying for.

The ash of autumn became the fingers of blue lovers whose teacups became cold with altogether too much cream, not enough herb. And while stars hung down on the dripping strands of night's hair, pulling it down in thick black arteries, I heard sad crows giving haunt to her decadent hours, croaking devils in neon graveyards, a shoe-polish sweetness rubbing out soul beneath shine.

I let go of all.

I apologize to Emanuel for not being able to wish him a happy birthday.

It is hot, and begs for wandering this late at night, with the city a dimly jeweled beast snapping and curling about my feet.

I have not felt this in so long, that gnawing haunt that will not let you sleep, a vague restlessness that drags you, sags you. Tired, surly, angry, pulsing, waiting.

And what is there to do but sit, the dissonant Spartan hum breaking the air about my ears?

Nothing.

Nothing again nothing.

Why do you never speak.

I had not thought death had undone so many.

I apologize to Emanuel for not being able to wish him a happy birthday.

It is hot, and begs for wandering this late at night, with the city a dimly jeweled beast snapping and curling about my feet.

I have not felt this in so long, that gnawing haunt that will not let you sleep, a vague restlessness that drags you, sags you. Tired, surly, angry, pulsing, waiting.

And what is there to do but sit, the dissonant Spartan hum breaking the air about my ears?

Nothing.

Nothing again nothing.

Why do you never speak.

I had not thought death had undone so many.

I apologize to Emanuel for not being able to wish him a happy birthday.

It is hot, and begs for wandering this late at night, with the city a dimly jeweled beast snapping and curling about my feet.

I have not felt this in so long, that gnawing haunt that will not let you sleep, a vague restlessness that drags you, sags you. Tired, surly, angry, pulsing, waiting.

And what is there to do but sit, the dissonant Spartan hum breaking the air about my ears?

Nothing.

Nothing again nothing.

Why do you never speak.

I had not thought death had undone so many.

I apologize to Emanuel for not being able to wish him a happy birthday.

It is hot, and begs for wandering this late at night, with the city a dimly jeweled beast snapping and curling about my feet.

I have not felt this in so long, that gnawing haunt that will not let you sleep, a vague restlessness that drags you, sags you. Tired, surly, angry, pulsing, waiting.

And what is there to do but sit, the dissonant Spartan hum breaking the air about my ears?

Nothing.

Nothing again nothing.

Why do you never speak.

I had not thought death had undone so many.

DEATH IN AUGUST

A coffee man sweating through the steel nets
of the radio, swinging his throat about so rich that
he burning the shingles on my eyes,
he got my eyes swimming like
the frayed fish of Galilee.

Adonai, cryer of the naked cosmos,
the unfurled nudity of swirling universes,
oily and primordial with weeping;
Say, Adonai, my voice is yanked away,
the songs are razors burrowing
into my wailing throats, Adonai,
bawling banshee whisking the nylon veil’s dry fingers
up your milky thigh:
I cry unto thee, Adonai,
only because
no one else seem to got any answers.

A coffee man paints the streets
with a voice so rich.

This wasn’t supposed to be no prayer, Adonai,
but I sold my heart into a doubting thomas’s jewel box;
he sniggered and shut the ivory lid
and they felt so very sharp, those cold velvet innards.
I asked him
Ain’t you believe in Providence,
and he laughed and scampered off
into the granite fields of tombstones,
and when the sun too was slaughtered and fell darkly on the earth,
it felt so fearful
to hold nothing.

The coffee man’s rich throat is sucked away
into the skillfully fading horns,
toombah toombah toombah, rah dee rah,
Adonai, abandoning my moldy eyes
like the bloated blind pale thighs of
you, Adonai.
But you, too, are the rich throat of the coffee man;

don’t leave me weeping.

I would post a poem, but that has been a trend of late, and I would hate for those of you (I do not know who you are, or if there are any) who are regulars to arrive, taste buds cocked for something startlingly new, and say:

"Snaps. Another poem. God forgive the repetitive bastard."

Instead, I give you a juicy nectarine to comfort you in the hard times. "Year of the Spider" has hit Gold status, with sales numbering five hundred thousand, one hundred copies. This brings righteous tears to my weary eyes.

Have I told you that I fully intend to name my son Langston, no matter how pale or Caucasian he is when he is spat forth from my beloved's womb? Thus it shall be. I'll write it into the damned marriage contract. No wedding without the pudding.

A MEMOIR OF BEGINNINGS

I sucked in air between the ripeness of figs--
I felt, darling, like a pale wanderer,
and when I found soul, it was soiled by sweetness.
Soul ain’t sweet, think I;
it is the rusty taste of bitter wrecks smothered
in the redfire-fringed clouds like mad peaches, baby. This here is
too touched by liquor and contentment,
thick reek of juice and the limp angles of tired light
heaving like autumn in the corners of greasy doorways.
These days close their eyes and find the insides of their lids
Tattooed with stars.

Soul ain’t sweet like that.

Black as fire,
as hard and fluid as desperation,
when you get crazy enough to dance like greeks,
like gritty men sparring with persians,
slicking their black hair back with blood
over ghastly skulls, their wrists getting white and white;
spirit like passion,
passion like mad,
mad as beggars,
beggar-poor as me.

Don’t matter what I say,
ain’t no soul good enough, no plea like fear.

I ain’t got enough, says I,
And who should know better than me, ‘cept God
and the devil, who screech each other’s names
and scratch at my bones.

This is dry, concrete distance howling
with morning reminders draped over
those smudged, pregnant hills,
A booming throat of accordion stairways
unfolding in bleached, rattling syllables.

I got to go.







Doesn't life sometimes make you weary? A thousand deaths do not make the one easier. Yet a death suspended, hanging by a tensed and airless vein, this is the lowest of agonies, the rolling eyes and hoarse gasps of that which is waiting to die.

There is no summer, only the cold rage of music in stone ears.

I hear the muddy tread of tears, and I feel like murder all over again--
--under a ceiling of dull broken stars, their filaments gray and dead,
suspended from slack rafters of frayed strings--
--I feel like murder all over again,
like flaking blood in my eyelashes, like I have slept
in a red rain and washed myself with Shaol's sweat,
sweeping out dripping arms and opening my mouth
To spout blood with choruses of Oh Israel,
Oh God, have you borne me in your throbbing womb--
dissolving clay--to grind my bony face
Into the feeling of murder all over again,
to make me a murderer all over again.

The war drums do not beat,
they are the stretched skins of man shrieking
with ululations of terror and woe;
A wild-haired, starve-ribbed God throws out red limbs
and thunders There is no mercy only Red for you,
Red is the stain of your breath, Red is the blush of your shame.
I have no water only blood for you to drink,
I have no wine only blood for your drunken hours
between your dusken collapse and your dawn sorrow.

You have no exorcism, says the wild God.
You have only the barbs in your tongue and the poison in your ears.

sorry, says me. sorry I had only sorrow
and murder all over again. only chains
of jagged broken stars that once burned like the wild eyes
of a wild God, these are my light and my salvation,
my mossy, damp tomb. I'd lay you there with me,
but I haven't the courage for murder, only the feeling;
I've got the wet swimming of blood in the cradle of my jaw,
beneath my tongue,
and I feel like murder all over again.

We are not alive,
we are dead,
and that taste of salt and tears
is the blood sighing from dry veins.

I have no

I have no
answers for you.

I have only this tongueless guitar.

I have no courage, no blind red-horsed charge
from beneath my quavery eyelids--

--only this crippled violin.

I have a thousand rising moonfire sonatas, Sweet Baby Midnight Blue,
but I don't know if any of them, any one of them
is for you.

Man can't cry, man can't sieze the strings and wring them,
not with arms crowding and cudgeling, not with the caged white moonlight,
Sweet Baby Midnight Blue.

Don't know what to do, Sweet Baby Midnight Blue.
I have no

I have no sonatas for you,
No answers throned in blues.
Only the quiet between mustard flowers.

There's a slow drum roll over the water, the whispered rush of violins crowding in like hurried grass. I held a vintage Hughes in my hand, and forgive me if sometimes I get sad when a dead man's lips cry out from the sweet darkness of bleary heaven.

I know they've got music there, I know they've got a band in heaven, because I have heard them stomping and thumping and romping and heaving the quiet earth about with their dusty feet. I know that they dance, and I know they lean over and take sips from the river, that they summon and arraign all their roaring passions and hold them out like firedrops running from beneath their fingernails. I know, Lord, what they do in heaven, because your hushed shuffle of violins and vintage Hughes told me so, they seared into my eyes like firedrops and gave me birth, a gasping life from the brown clay, Lord.

I cry out from the sweet darkness of bleary heaven.

Mister Hughes, will you pour water on my head?

Mister Hughes, have you got words for sorrow?
I ain't got none. No one seems to have you on their porch
Or on their shelf, nowhere where I can feel you,
Not in Taos, and not on some nigger night when the moon's been flattened
Into nickel and is brassing cheaply on the waters,
Moving on the face of the deep.

Mister Hughes, my friends are cracking like weedy midnight concrete,
And their eyes are humid St. Louis streets that cannot keep dry,
Sighing like dead black records,
And I feel them darkening like drying blood,
Mister Hughes. Why ain't you got no words for them,
Mister Hughes, where is your smoky comfort,
Where is your bitter whiskey and harsh silver microphone,
Where is your bright dress dance of ebon-flavored women
Swaying and thumbing their hips, with sweat on their calves?
Anything would comfort right now, Mister Hughes,
And they could use a drink. Haven't you got feeling, Mister,
Haven't you loved and then hung it blue-cheeked
From a dry green oak under a burning July moon,
Hung it like some poor nigger hope drying and dying,
Sapped and sobbing with the red-tongued wails
Of children with long eyelashes?

Ain't you got no words for me, Mister Hughes, for my
Friends with ripped shirts and torn undergarments,
With cuts and slashes on their slack-jawed muscles,
Screaming
Adonai, Jesus God, ain't you got no words for me?
Speak 'em sweet, Mister Hughes,
Give 'em some whiskey
For their bleeding hearts.

I do not regret today. It was quiet and good.

I am eaten by a thousand silent passions, I've got a thousand crying horns whispering like cold tin in my ears, Elvis wailing about cold Kentucky rain, makes me want to weep.

"With the rain in my shoe..."

There is so much life stuffed like stars into hushed skulls, and I love every grief-bleared drop of it, like old cold tears, herbal tea with cream on screened porches with holes in the wire.

"...searching for you..."

What should I regret? I have a moment for everything, and if I die, I die shouting cymbal-sheeted drumbeats of hope and truth, of the trembling struggles I love so much. What should I regret? Only that I could not help you see what I saw, to surge with the same fire. But hell, that's the way it's always been.

"...in the cold Kentucky rain."

I feel like saying something to every one of you. Perhaps I will. I am filled with a brazen recklessness, and these are the moods where I whip my horse and thunder down the mouth of the cannon. Unfortunately, these clatters usually resemble the Charge of the Light Brigade in the end, a bloated scattering of confusion, wreckage, and noble intentions. I want to tell every one of you, because you leap into my throat, because you are the instruments of my orchestra, you are the passions of my songs--without you, there is no music.

Jessie. You could sieze your ambition by the throat and slit the carcass open and feast on the great meats of your desires. But you are so scared of the knife you hold that it fumbles and drives its point aimlessly into the ground. I do not understand your hesitation or doubt, but trust me: what you fear you lack, you've got. You are horribly dear to my heart.

"Life is too short for doubt. There is only time for leaping." - Johnny Appleseed.

Matt. The most patient human being I have ever known. By now, I would have started slapping someone every time I heard the word "housewife." You may be too patient. Do not let your dreams choke on the dust of patience. If I don't see your name on someone's CD, "Produced by Matthew LeGrande White," within seven years, I will hang you by a guitar string. But I will never tire of talking to you; I know that I can confide in you until God hangs up his drawers on the moon.

Nicole. You would shoot yourself in the foot for a guy. I do not know if you are aware of how much you change yourself, how much you bend and sway when the man changes. You've got a core to you, an iron will and a hell of a fight that steams and hurdles like a molten child. It is the child in you that never got out, the fear and the fury and the pain and the purity that seethes and cannot be murdered. It is rare, dangerous, and a lucky thing. It is your completion, and it is your flaw. A child likes to please. You will grab hold of your humble dream, provided one thing: you don't shoot yourself in the head for a guy.

Bonnie. I can almost hear you snorting for seeing your name included. I regret not being able to say more. I brushed a surface. I brushed the same surface that you gave everyone else. There was a mask in your eyes; not a defense, but something that allowed you to look at me with your thoughts in your eyes as clear as roses, totally indiscernable. It was easy to see that they were there, but impossible to tell what they were. I will not pretend to know what inferno you are paddling inexorably through now, but I have the arrogance to think I have seen glimpses of it. I wish I had known you better. Perhaps there is still a chance...

Stacey. You are the most fragile thing I have ever touched, a strange melange of contradictions and broiling emotions taken to their utmost extremes, a vibrant and melodic symphony, violent and captivating. I think you direct a lot more fire at your mom than she deserves, but to know for sure would require a history lesson. There is blame and begging in your voice when you speak to her; your speech is loaded with a latent bitterness and undeniable need for her. You mix me up. The world is far less against you and far more for you than you think. You're going to make it, kid, but you're probably going to have to make one helluva leap.

Kyle. There's a little too much cooking in that mischievous cesspool you call a brain. You always come out sounding arrogant without meaning to, and I haven't been able to figure out how that happens, yet. You better hope your friends know how that works. Maybe they've got some remedies. I respect your passion. You've got a whole lot of it, and I like that. Don't go in half-assed. Not ever. And for heaven's sake, get out of your head. It's useful, but it has been your downfall at many a turn. You're not quite black, but you got soul. You care too much of what people think, and not enough of what they feel. Eat more greens. Fight the good fight, and always remember, son: it's about the people.

The man from Resurrection Avenue can't hear the crickets when they're battering violins against the window screens. That damned deaf man has got to go, say I.

I shot him and watched him slump tiredly with the blood rushing out of his head.

What else did you take, oh Resurrection man? Hell, I run like a mad blind red rage through the morning, thundering in a spasming chest of fear and contempt, shadowed beneath the sovereign crest of the glowering peaks, and you sweat in during the blue fire of nights that cannot breathe through their shame and touch.

You touch. And touch.

I will tune my sorrow higher, I will fume my fury hotter. I will kill you, Resurrection man, deaf man: I will be the needle in your eye. I will murder the filthy memory of you, until you lie dessiccated and shriveled on the moonless floor of an attic filled with the rot of forgotten flesh and bone.

You will not touch. You cannot touch.

I will laugh. I will guffaw in delicious amusement until my ribs crack as your flesh is flayed until it crawls like writhing worms. I will shriek with mirth when you dance on eternal coals, you damned deaf man.

Next time, you will hear the refusal.

Don't touch.

Oh bleed, bleed, scream on until, like coal tar as black as me, it thumps out from your shriveled skins and won't don't hurt no more. I ain't words, I ain't tears, I ain't black, but I am as hard as winter crows and as cold hot as passionate circles in Tuscan dust in bare damn feet and your wicker sandals--
--Was that a yellow red flower print on your white dress that was bare in smooth places, that hung and furled like a twilight maple in a Spanish wind, was it not you that stirred me, scarred me, slurred me and cried unto my burnt skin, you ain't black baby, you ain't got moves, you ain't got the jump or the shimmy or the soul--
--And I slung back, but baby I know ain't black but I am BLACK, as richly dark as the weepy terrible face of the deep, ain't that good enough for you?

what say my pale raven, what say my black, black woman of the second floor?

Say she, you crazy, damn boy, damn young bull fool, a thousand fires in yo eyes and seven thousand clattering out yo fingers and boy you got to see it--
--See what, wicker-sandal raven?
--Hell, boy, you ain't black.

--Naw girl, I as black as they get. I ain't colored with it, I ain't got the flavor, hell, I ain't even got the style. But baby, I got BLACK, you see--
I got night plastered into my flesh with tin moons flung ripe as summer oranges into my face.
I got songs twanging my bones like blue harp strings, like a porch banjo.
I got vision screeching wild as owls furrowing the warm evening with the great hunt.

And damn, baby, you can't beat that.

I put some cash in the hurry box, and found that I had squandered morning with a rush into night. I had not checked, not with velvet blinders slumped over my eyes like coffins. I greeted the doorman with a smile and a tip, and he gestured, showed me to the seat of my fiery ship. I manned the oars until my hands burned and the clouds roiled underneath with oil slick and rage.

Then I let it go.

Bring me to the lies, baby, and sell me the skinny with a thousand cigars packed between your teeth, like hissing icebergs in a darkness that curls away between the dead, parted lips of God. Throw me some hearts and grab me some souls, we'll load pockets until the lint suffocates and the living blood runs down our legs and fills our shoes.

Then I'll let it go.

Won't you let me touch you? Am I an invasion, that I should be thus repulsed and hurled back in disarray, leaving the battered field shrieking with the bloat corpses of questions whose answers have not come to gently stretcher their bloody white faces away?

Nothing. Nothing.
It is nothing.

Where, then, lies the reason? There is no shame in revelation, no pain in response. The only hurt resides in confusion, the muddy mad need for clarification with no meat to ease the cramp.

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

Hello the Devil for me, I'm going to the mines. I'll see you when I have shuttered my eyes with coal black war paint, when the fire is gone from me. I want to swing until I bleed, I want splinters driving into my flesh, I want knives prying like sickles under my fingernails. Topple the towers in a cracking mind gummed up with feathers and philosophy, despicable druggish foolery.

For Christ's sake, I don't believe in me.

What would you do for a smoky chamber and hot metal kiss? I would lick the barrel clean; I would oil the trigger with tears; I would laugh while loading; I would whistle and bang away; I would scatter my skull in silence.

There is bliss in annihilation.

I don't believe in a drop of it, not a mouthful of the blood I am spreading too thin. Won't God give me some solace? When will his thunderous jaw clatter down from between those glass-eyed stars of his and give me a bit of a blessing? Or is this favor, and are my mutinous mutterings fuel for righteous wrath? To argue is not blasphemy, my God, my raging God. What world is this that you have made, that reveals itself and shakes your hand while fingering your pockets? Are the flaws that squeeze our veins in tight cages about our red throats your concern, or your amusement? Jesus, God, the more I discover, the less I know.

Can't say as people love anymore. They love not wind, love not crying, love not love. It is a paper passion, a morgue of gold and bribes that lay me down.

How much does it cost for a funeral?

How much will it pain your pocket to throw some dirt in my mouth and separate my rot from the beaks of crows? Which will be cut deeper, your soul, the earth, or your wallet?

Jesus, God, what black clay did you use? What bitter, brittle bone did you draw forth from the face of the deep? Was it the thirsty wishbone of broken Rahab? Is that the flesh of which we are formed?

Goddamn it, God. Some answers would be nice.

Run.

There are stones of light scuttling up the walls.

Run.

Why my throat--a dessiccated creek?

Run.

Bring me some water.

RUN.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE WATER?

Have you seen the water?
Is there blood under my fingernails,
Is there a burn in my eye,
Have there been any more twilights?

Have you seen the water?
Somebody say to me yesterday
Johnny Fairchild, you got to git out a yo head--
Next I looked, they was laying like sculpted ash,
Bloodless and dry.
Didn't even get no time to cry.
Have you seen the water?

It ain't no Jordan,
But have you seen the water?
Christ, but they all licked they lips,
Gave up nervous sighs, and throbbed out blackly,
Like damp candles, smoking
Have you seen the water?

You only blacken if you stick your head out the Dodge windows,
If you crumble yourself in broken moon orchards--
I been inside too long,
But have you seen the water?
It look cold and torrid, I bled myself on the rocks
To get here.
Christ, somebody got to go in.
You die if you git out again,
But I reckon I can float awhile, fighting currents
And drowning like slow maple leaves.
Somebody git my harp all ready--
Johnny Fairchild's clambering into that water,
And there will be no more twilights
Until he as bloodless and dry
As sculpted ash--
But he will have seen the water.

CRY FOR THE MOUNTAINTOP

Morning, concrete.
The asphalt eyes troughing tear dream streets
By your windows--don’t crack,
Don’t slumber, don’t shudder sweet gorgeous.

I get crying
When spiders nudge the stars over silver falls,
When you funnel your tongue into my throat--
Sweet gorgeous, I am not your voice,
Sweet gorgeous, you are the cold dawn water
That soaks my chest and gives me birth.

In your white clay,
You are unsunder-sullied, you are childless,
Barren of shame, sweet gorgeous, but you
Crumble beneath accordion shadows,
The fumbling stairways slattering nightly upwards.

Get to crying, sweet gorgeous,
Ain’t no mountaintop that didn’t take crying to get to.
I walk beside you, cry too if I got to.
But cry for weepy feet, cry for weary suns--
Don’t cry for shadows, don’t cry
For the pale illusion of a cloud.

Have you breathed of despair?

Something reeking of possibility has stolen upon me.
I hate the possible.

Fuck it. Fuck possibility and what can or will or shan't or should be. I will burn like a funeral pyre on the mountaintop, and I will shudder with the quiet power of what can't be done, because I will fucking do it.

Stop me stop me try and stop me, I'll run through like a red-hoofed bull.

I just want to tell the damn story.

How loud can I play you before you tear me out? Lord, when that harmony cries up it sounds like its shelling out the ghost, throwing pennies onto eyes for the dead.

Do me right, and love me for when I lose sight and when I lose sleep. God, but I could sleep for days.

Lack of sleep has been bringing me down.

Today, I will buy The Killers new album, and so help me, I will find the Cold EP that is supposed to be at Target. And if it only comes with the Psi-Ops game, Target shall fear my wrath.

I need to know more black people.

I ran this morning, it being a Tuesday, and Tuesdays being nice. It was the clearest morning in weeks.

I would like to know Miss Bonnie Valentine better than I do.

White boy gonna make a black boy movie.

Must have air.

How did your weeping rip forth my song, when did you become my sighing voice?

I haunt to your harmony.

Jesus God, but you've got a hell of a cry, sears like lit oil or burning violins through my lungs. Your fingers strum along my vocal chords, fly upon my veins--shiver shiver.

Interpreter, I know you're hurting. Are your troubles in your mouths, ringing against your teeth, ringing out like dirge bells, oh beautiful, that you can sing me so.

Sing me.

Sing me so.

When the moon shuttered her raggy windows last night, I felt her pouring and grinning like a Cretan widow with a lover waiting in the orange grove, scented with olive oil. The glass of her window was the deep green of heavy jade, black and scattered over with shards of light. I know she felt me good. I know she loved me like motown, because Cretan widows are as dark as pale gets.

Hey Gorgeous, did I play that accordion right? Did I sung the keys like you done told me with your lips as perfumed as lemons and peaches, with your hands like soft eyelashes, like you done told me? Oh, my blood can play the banjo like summer fire on the porch, because you've twanged it and jangled it and given it the swift heel, fast as little Jess Davies and his sassy mouth harp, you heard him play come last Sunday, did you not?

Ha, but you give me the soil and the sugar. You got me going, and I don't like stopping.

I want every one of you who reads this journal (I have no idea who all that entails) to get the song "Blackout" by Muse.

I would perhaps throw my latest poem on here, but I know that every one of you would think it was dirty, even though that is not what I had in mind when I wrote it.

But all I got is sweetness for you, all I teem with is the eloquence of my sweetness for you. Don't let nobody say I ain't sweet for you.

Ah, Lord, have you got a nail in my spine? Those wretched haunts of clouds crouch over the mountains, tearing at their hair, yowling. Oh but gently, I feel ghosts. Where did that song go? Where where did that song I was singing go? Reach on and die on, your fingers scraping under my eyelids, somebody's blood in my hair (oh baby, is it yours? I swear I think it's yours). There's white-rooted grave dirt in my nostrils and, tombstone of mine, I didn't tell you why.

These quizzes: I am strangely disturbed at times by their absurd accuracy. Perhaps I should read this book. Thank you, Bonnie. By the way, I own "Catch-22," it being both a hilarious and marvellous political satire. May your life forever follow its tragic circular logic. In a good way.

You're Ulysses!

by James Joyce

Most people are convinced that you don't make any sense, but compared
to what else you could say, what you're saying now makes tons of sense. What people do
understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once
brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in
the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you
additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Ain't you in love with anybody yet?


GOODBYE MISTER SORROW MAN

Hey Mister Sorrow Man,
Have you got a breath to say goodbye, crammed
Between damp walls of wist and regret?
Mister Sorrow Man, everybody’s got to leave sometime,
Ain’t it true, did I ever lie to you?

When you and me danced in Rio,
Mister Sorrow Man, you and your mocha woman
And me and mine,
I got scared and ran across the threshold
And tripped with sour heels.

Here is my map, Mister Sorrow Man,
And these veins are my red highways,
The simple spirals toward nowhere I’ve been
And everywhere I’ll be
While you’re back here being sorry Mister Sorrow Man.
I’ll be tearing hell, I’ll be spitting on worlds,
I’ll be thumping giants, I’ll be thrashing Olympus
While you ferment among bottles of tears
Between damp walls of blindness and decay.

I ain’t scared no more, Mister Sorrow Man.
Let my mocha woman touch me, let the dance
Coalesce into fiery shots, I’ll down them one and all;
There is no time for doubt,
Only for leaping.

So get your hands off me, Mister Sorrow Man,
I’ll claw my way free from your crying tyranny.
I got songs to roar and blood to beat.
I won’t see you again before I die,
Mister Sorrow Man, but I hope you get to heaven, somehow.
Remember, though, doubt won’t get you there.
Only leaping.

THE SATISFACTION ORCHARD

To that tune,
I’d sweat it out among orange blossoms
And lemon redolence pouring into the air,
Tearing night from slender strings
And tender songs, like gladiolas slipped behind the seashell ears
Of raven women, the quiet gleam
Of a sweet and mortal God
Taking a sweet and mortal stroll
In the cool cool of the evening.

Ever seen an orchard that didn’t give
Satisfaction?
I could sweat it out
To the sly beats of
The glass cymbals in the leaves,
Feeling pretty damn good.
If you could feel it like I feel it,
Strumming like sap in my fingers
And on my cheeks oh baby
Some good tears and a shameless dance,
Oh scandal, to dance in an orchard
Beneath the rampant heart of a bare moon,
The sour wet heart of a bare naked moon,
Feeling pretty damn good.

I can hear the throaty scent
Of your soil, I can smell the silent mountain
Of you, a cool seduction of me
Under stars as pearled as garlic;
You are the sweet and mortal orchard.
Be my shivering midnight, a trembling
Under the bare naked thigh
Of the freshly rampant moon.
I declare,
It’ll feel pretty damn good.

I remember last year's thaw.

Instead, here we count eyelashes made of lonely guitars, the glaze of your skin breathing on my face. Looking back, when they look back on me, I hope they do not look back upon my looking back, that it is not all they remember. If I didn't remember, I wouldn't cry at familiar songs, but the honeyed static of memory is far too underwhelming to be the bones of life.

Play some old guitars for my sake, for mind's sake. Deafen your fingers on the steel and give it easy. It'll be worth it, I hope. For my sake. For mind's sake.

You've all heard the music. Why didn't you dance?

My muscles are sore with life, and I keep wishing that evening were here and that it were warm, that it were clustered over with high-slung vines of stars, twisted chains of fire in the night.

You've all heard the music. Why didn't you dance?

I would hope that the kitchen window would gasp and tumble with the scented thrust of breezes from the gray skin of the bay. It would salt the fumbling children in the streets between shadow houses; it would salt the lips of chestnut women gliding from velvet-shaded cars; it would salt the opaque red wombs of the clouds hanging like pulsing, pregnant, somber lullabies, softly now, over the streets between shadow houses.

You've heard the music. Why don't you dance?

I breathe the chestnut women gilded in dresses the colour of cool moon eyes or hot moon blush on evenings when empty cobwebs whisper between wind chimes. I breathe children with fervent dreams scorching up their hurtling limbs. I breathe sweet and hurt and want and the gossamer shaded membrane draped across the earth and the dead sun and the stillness of the porch and upon the pale shoulders of frail music throbbing through the tattered screen door. This is what I have been and shall ever be.

You've heard the music. Why aren't you dancing?

Ha.
Sometimes I get mixed up in bittersweet desire, a longing that is so wondrous and beyond me that I lose track of who I am; it doesn't matter.

Oh to feel it in the waking moments, in the noontide and the after hours. I hope you're singing someone's song in warm bittersweet desire. Ha.

I hope you love someone. That'd be nice, I think. If not, I hope you find someone. That'd be grand, I think. Posh, what a romantic I have ever been. Ha.

I never intended to stay.

There's a hole in your head, and I am running out.

Run, red river, to the sea.

"And I remember your aspiration, dream to fit in..."

But I must wonder if it is worth the time.

What's got you weeping, or do you bother weeping? They are curious, have you seen them, or are you jigging and ambling and lisping still still still? Are you as raw as I? I had not thought death had undone so many.

A nice phrase, not mine, having lost the gentle foreplay of words, having replaced gentility with futility and a mumbling stumbling foolery, watching silent songs in mute rooms. A nice phrase, nada más, mis compañeros. Screw the lid on tight and screw the lips that might set loose the cannons of exposure.

I request a delivery, Señor Eternal. How about a light, a match made in heaven, reeking of phosphorous with its brief flare. Oh, but give it a long stem, Señor Eternal, for there is no sun, and I should appreciate the illumination.

"So sleep child, no one can touch you now, no one can hurt you now, not here. Anymore."

There is no light on mornings such as these, but the wind can deceive you as it rushes through the tube of cloud and earth--it seems almost warm. Yet, when you step back inside after muscling through it for half an hour, your skin is deadened and cold.

I wrote a good one last night. Typically, the protagonist (presumably male) is the victim when it comes to wronged affections. In this case, however, the central narrator is the one who wins, with little effort, the malleable heart of the lady, and enjoys the fruits of such a relationship. It is not a cruel usury, and the shallow desire of the interaction is not intended to harm. It is instead implied that this is simply the nature of the passion.

Thursday will be better.





www.livejournal.com/users/poetblood

YOU HAD ME THERE, FRIEND

I’ll stick that boy
In the red corn in the humid garden,
And when the cicadas croak in his ears,
I’ll feel the shrill pant of his fear
Stoke the corn to hot oppression.

This is my red corn,
Where I can feel the movement,
Where the harsh beat of crows
Rattles between my ears;
This is me drawing my blood into my eyes.

Put that boy in the humid garden
Stemmed over with red corn.
Here you are without knowledge, without the feeling.
Have you got the feeling?
The breath in the corn
Is galloping the crickets in my wrists,
Stoking their violins and stopping up their chests,
So that they play and die,
So that they shimmy and cry,
The blood in my eyes.

The melodic sinew of dry jaws
Has given you solace, I hope;
The cicadan hymn of bannered tongues
Slops over into the south field.
Tell me, friend, to the south field,
Is this where you go, is that where your
Sweet ash is sifting,
Through seven cringing circles of red corn
In this humid garden?
Is that your dirge I hear cracking in the throats
Of the locusts,
Or is that only the forked tonguing
Of their dry membranes,
Speaking one hand to this red ear
And one hand to that red ear,
Reaping a red harvest
In this humid garden
Under my bloody eyes?

Who is he?

He's the same as he's always been.

Who was he before?

How should I know?

Then how do you know he's the same?

He hasn't changed.

But you have no point of reference.

Why should that matter?

How can you tell if a song has a chorus if you don't know the verses?

You should just know how it flows.

To do that, I would have to live the song. I would have to inhabit the sockets between the notes and pray that no one discovered me humming through a life that wasn't mine.

If that's what you have to do...

That's not what I want to do. Why should I compact myself into the claustrophic existence of someone else?

Why should it matter what you want?

Don't I have a choice?

One would think.

If one were to think, one would inevitably come to no conclusion. The complete circularity of both logic and irrationalism inexorably steams you back into the starting gate.

Why do you think that we become so childish as we die?

We are being shunned into the current of someone else's song.

Why don't you sing your own tune?

Sometimes I lose my voice.

So what? Hum along if your chords are worn out. Or whistle.

Sometimes I want an orchestra.

We can't always be a symphony.

That's true. Sometimes I don't even think I am an off-key whimper.

Well, hell, that happens to everyone.

Yes, but suffering makes you want to be unique. It is such a purification, a burden, that you want acknowledgement of your sacrifices. If everyone has made those sacrifices, who's watching?

Is that what you want from your travails? Shall I snap your picture and stencil "Martyr" beneath your sour mug, so that you can staple it to the wall in pride?

I didn't mean that. I was generalizing a human truth.

I would not go so far as to term it universal.

If it's all the same to you, I'd like to rest for the coming struggles. I am beckoned towards unconsciousness.

How often do we talk like this?

Not much, anymore.

And you would pass it up for the stirring of latent subliminal yearnings?

Yes. I have guilt enough for the both of us.

Then goodnight.

Hey Jude,

It wounds to refrain. Wish I could still dance, but I do not remain as much.

Hey Jude,
Trippingly on the tongue, salting into the pianoed remnants of silently lipped cathedrals. Build me a temple so that I may fall down and worship slowly towards an unhurried, unimpassioned death.

Hey Jude,
Don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.

But if the notes are already dead, bury them under your tongue and swallow them like plucked virgins' lies, silk silk. Lose the name of action.

Hey Jude.

Thanks to Stacey's penny, callbacks went magnificently last night. Superb.

"Say that again."
"Superb."

I picked up Tiger's ashes yesterday, stood for a few minutes in the choke of that stale waiting room; Fritz, Alaska, and Tiger all succumbed with that septic air shuffling and hacking out of their lungs. I sat her on the seat next to me in the car and spoke to her in the way I always did, and it got to me again.

Here is a song for all of you to download; I think that even those who do not normally enjoy my music will enjoy this song. Go to www.momentsingrace.com and click next to the flashing orange arrow. Enter some bogus e-mail and, when the new window pops up, download "Broken Promises."

This entry is dedicated to Bonnie, since it's the closest to her dream journal entry that she will ever get from me.

I slept as though the wind had rushed into my skull and broken the ice sculptures which wail there, as though the glittering towers had tumbled tragically into the swirling air, and I slept with ungentle dreams fermenting and sighing with stale shattered age.

When the blue clutch of dawn singed the stooping bare heads of the hills, I did not wake. I slept on in the strange hollow of ungentle dreams.

I am thrust into the sunlight with brute remembrances clinging like lank dew to my dry bones. But hell, I can forget these ungentle dreams.

I will forge on.

According to my mole inside the DR-OTFH (Denny's Restaurant - Open Twenty-Four Hours) Organization, the waitress with the gorgeous ass is married.

In my well-educated opinion, that is a shameless waste of gorgeous ass.

The "Three Musketeers" auditions are today, children. Pray for me.

School looms nigh. Thither go I.

Denny's had better get a replacement waitress. I'll be damned if I'm going to be satisfied with a mere glimpse of spectacular married ass for long. I will expect a ravishing, well-formed, single waitress upon my next arrival.

Stacey:

Now that you have become Denny's incarnate, can you hook me up with the waitress with the nice ass?

Sincerely,
Kyle

Will you open? Will you cast off your fear like a torn garment, a ratty shroud that screens off sensation; do it for me, if not for everyone else. Unburden yourself and collapse softly into us like a fountain's liquid curls folding in upon themselves.

Will you not open? Leave it be.

I can see the beauty in a fall. I can see the tremulous temerity in a tumble, when I shake to the rebellious marrow of me.

So I raise my fist in pedantic defiance toward the suckas who think they can take me! Ha!

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

To share: who looks? I hope you do, for my vanity is such that I wish for you to rise with my heliostic surges like violins of grass, and tremble when my throat quakes in grief, and harp when my eyes sag under the weight of heaven.

I am dishonest. I'd like to take off a few layers; my own complexities have borne me under like so much soiled wool. I do not like the hookweights that I have placed at my temples to dirge about in leaden arias, slumping short of the gilded ceiling, unable to surface and breathe in the angels swooping sistinically in molten arcs through the firmament.

I speak too much.

I feel too concocted, as though I have nailed down my bones without intention, and confined myself without knowledge. I wasn't always this way.

I think some of you know fragments. Some of you know the whole of it, and I have given you little of that painting of late, only a blurred smear of darker colors.

Can I be simple? I want to be.

Good luck with that.


Loneliness is an easy commodity to come by.

There are names we cannot bear to hear.

Tell me what you see, you who have eyes to see and ears to hear--do you click your tongue and think of the gray offices where I could recline and eschew the jagged assemblages of my thought? Do you wander in trembling troughs of worry, thinking Oh when will he smile? And will he not come again?

What gives you the patience to wait? What monstrous charm availed itself that you would suffer until I emerge, wet with rebirth, and hand you my newfound grins? Will they not become regret and bitterness and wretched anger again? This is the sweet rancor of my company.

I blame you for things you have not done. I am driven away from you by sins you have not committed, by imagined wrongs that I know well enough are fiction, but whose power I cannot refute.

There are names I cannot bear to hear. To Hell with you, you bastards I have never met. I can hate the faceless, and I can hate the faces I know better than my own. I resent your candor, I resent your doing the things that I would have done. I resent that I would not have been strong enough to do that which you have not done, that which I condemn you for. I will remember next time.

In the sorry meantime, fuck it.

I feel like a lie.




All this fragile air breaks me. Is it not strange, that I should be broken more easily than fragile air? Is it not love--no, it is not love. It is such a just injustice that I cannot shake its inarguable judgment.

READ ME, why do you not TELL ME who I SHOULD BE, what stricken clause in your muddled skull does not let you--...................ah, God a key. A key.

I sleep with the rust of ire flaking into the cracks of my brain, like the drifting shifting agony of a grief observed. Tusk, but I have grown so tired tired. Every moment I spend with me is hate, a lonely hotel room of echoes jimmering around asking -do you hear me echo? Here is the bloody socket of my sweetness, can you taste me in blue shadow garages, thrusting shallowly into red evening with fingers in my eyes -do you hear me echo?

Only guitars with crimson strings--your songs are your own. Here is what I ate, and here is what I gave, and here is what I have when the crickets have impaled themselves upon their own white violins--why do you never speak speak? You do not speak speak, thus when I resent, there is only the spattering flicker of bored-out lights and nerveless mouths.




I feel like a lie.

You can't go back.

The shattered muses of who I was recline in their grand lack of minutes and laugh oh they cackle at me in crackle-glass titters, throwing their heads back and grating
-Oh but you feel so good, so good.

You cannot go forward, my inner friend. They cannot go back.
But here is a massacre, the interrupted riff that splits up my ribs and bleeds out the heart of me. Do you recall the sweet blade, the merciful swell of blood BLOOD on your cheeks. Is it not words, is it not expression, the spindly branches of red slipping and slurring across my face
-Oh but it feels so good, so good.

I laugh at stainéd memory,
For I cannot cannot go back, must not will of course go back. I do not hope to turn again, but I am sure that while my veins scream and pine and die and force the sap from their yellowing tubes. Come to me, keen catharsis, give me a cylinder for my thoughts, a brassy one like a band or a false voice that rocks out tittering memory that squeals, like rats and women
-Oh but it feels so good, so good.

You can't go back.
You cannot come back.

There is no song between blood and death, only an ungentle silence that cracks grins into
-Oh but it feels so good, so good.
You can't come back.

Hurry and slide against the ragged lip of mourning;

Observe the crow-flecked field, snowed palely under with bodies, bodies--
Tell me that I should not withdraw, that I should not pull up my bloody stakes and crumble back and away, a clay martyr with no mettle only
straw, only rain pocking my shambly corpse.

There's a fleshy newness that they want to stretch on you,
Hold your face still and let the furious reek slump into your wrinkles,
Can you feel it flow and fill it is slumming between my teeth so
Kiss me kiss me kiss me kiss my ragged lip of mourning.

"All my spheres of logic cannot prevail against you." - Frankie

My eyes are like orbs of red-lashed pain. I suppose it works for me.

If I may be "desolate," might I not also be "isolate"? I cannot be "desolated."

Thus sit we, isolate and surrounded in the sick refracted burn of bony daylight. Only the dead sing for the dead; the living pay them no mind.

If I order, I'll order the same as her, who ordered the same as her precedents, juggling on toward the inevitable beginning--doesn't that feel good?

Hello, do I know your name? I think not, and you know not mine. It grows late, and I suspect that you will tumble into my ink before I can remember your face.

Even small dreams die. I suppose it was a small dream, an improbable ache made impossible by the glacial press of time, frozen and suffocated.

Louder, louder, cry me down from the mountaintop.

A strange and unusual update from your neighborhood downer, who says unequivocally: "Screw depression!"

There is immense satisfaction to be had in good music. There is a hard rock band named Dead Poetic that I discovered more than a year ago, and I thought they could be far better than they were. I longed to give this band a chance because of their name, but they screamed far too much.

Well, their second album came out earlier this month. I decided to test it out, since I liked the single. I have an uncompromising report to give: they rock. I am going to buy this album at the earliest opportunity.

In matters of other interest, I have begun writing a play. To be perfectly honest, poetry doesn't always cut it. I find myself breaking into new forms of storytelling, now that I have more resources on hand: my films are becoming bigger, more ambitious projects; I have written a novel; I am forced into either complete innovation or dire repetition with my current poetry. The way to keep your art alive is to avoid the same patterns, the same expressions--you will notice I do not say anything regarding style. Style and flavor is an excellent thing to have, a signature. However, having a style does not entail repeating one's works over and over.

Thus, I am writing a play. I wrote the first scene yesterday night, and was impressed with the characters. Naturally, they are not fully fleshed out yet, but two of them have already taken on their own lives in my head, which means that the writing begins to do the work itself, and skates along more effortlessly.

Isn't it grand?

Awake.

Awake. This is the herald, and there is the summons, the streak of blood scarring dawn and conjoining like the crucifix of a song, the jab and spar of searing notes. Immolate me.

Here is the confluence of consciousness, the one you cannot see, the vague vain apprehensions of that for which you have no care. It's just a song, you see. Immolate me.

The frantic ferocious flailings of our flamboyant failings that we bray on about like banners are mere mitigations, justifications--I can't feel yours and you can't feel mine. Immolate me: perhaps we'll see.

One more repetition for God's sake, or for mine. This is the jade glass that imprisons my impressions, the caged microscope of my weeping harem with sirens lithe that writhe and have themselves a fine time. Awake, and immolate me.

Awake--you are the heralds.

You'll notice the time at the bottom on a Saturday morning, and I feel quietly absorbed. Dead Poetic's "The Dream Club Murders" is on my headphones, and I think it's buzzing me with sonic madness. It feels good. Is that hard to understand?

Do you see that? Or have I for so long hammered out this flat image of morose despair, of wordy grabs in the dark for company, for solace, that you cannot imagine it? When you see me thus, do you see it only as a lame projection, an illusion that will last until I step from the cab and swing like a gallows through my door?

I hope you don't. I hope that is not what I have given you.

"How do I get back to where I want? You were smiling." - Dead Poetic

Smile again, eh?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you to take "a long hard look" at reality. Now, what would you regard as rational behavior: an individual who chooses to speak to a friend, particularly when that friend initiated the conversation in question, or the inexplicable pejorative of a desperate, lonely individual who had been left to themselves for less than two minutes?

Ladies and gentlemen, my client, the defendant, has been accused of self-destructive behavior and of disregarding his most intimate relations in favor of a romantic relationship. Examine, however, the evidence which is at hand. We have proved that the prosecution itself displays a long and violent history of self-destruction, and is prone to extreme emotional instability, particularly during high-stress periods such as that of the night of April 14th.

No, ladies and gentlemen, I say to you that this is no case at all. The prosecution has none! It is merely the scrabbling, jealous attempt of a solitary individual hoping to drag my client into the same lonely madness from which they suffer. My client has committed no offense except in the haunted imagination of his accuser who, in self-righteous satisfaction, has attempted to shunt the blame from where it truly belongs.

I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to search your hearts and your consciences. I also wish to implore the prosection to examine their motives and their concurrent pain, and ask themselves whether they know what they think they know, whether their sight is really so clear through the red haze of slashes and abandonment.

At this time, I wish to reaffirm our upright plea: Not Guilty.

I am done.

Don't ask again.

Ticker-tacker, clitter-clatter, crow to Death's moping matron, the spewing, crying, soaking, dying dress bundled about her ruddy shoulders and slumming to her ankles. Down, down to the tired old spindle of my throat, chalked up in a dry lack of lips; swallow me down, a draught of salty scars. Pour me down.

Here's to all our brilliant conversations.

Move that beat along, miser--don't hog it all to yourself.

Here's to our closely woven myopic brows. Here's to our narcotic masterpiece of desire, a jumbled and classical monument, an enumeration of all that speaks to us of humanity, of foolery and of loss.

Here's to our grief, to our singular sight and the voices that cry in ecstatic choruses of Handel and God knows what else, shaded youngly in the rearward pews of our skulls.

Here's to hope and here's to death: we swallow them, and I know we'll choke on them in the end, but both of them taste so tender, tender as blush in her, in me, in you.

You. Yes, you--you don't know how it makes you feel. Does it bother you, does it make you sag into yourself, or do you brandish the sweet whip and grind your jaws--will you strike me when I come to you again, or will you let it fold you. Suppose I cannot be what I wish to be, so as I lie in gentle time cry I, let me be, let me see what I will be when I be without your being at my elbow.

Here's to our magnificent end.

I wish only for my pain to fade.

Yet, do not worry about it. For once, I fight it; it has not taken control. I will not let despair ruin me again. We have seen what it does, what I do. Even from the sunless center of it, I tell you that there will be light.

BizANG. With emphasis. With mac-daddyin', foo. Sitchass down.

BizANG.

The silence is horrid, unbearable.

Now must not be a time for words.

I feel that I owe it to the whole of you to spread out something of a less self-destructive nature than what has been displayed of late. I want you to know that as I sit here at five twenty-four a.m., bopping to the melodic strains of "Have You Seen Her?", I am content. It may not last, but I am content.

Now, sleep on, my beauties. I go forth to test these young muscles of mine. Sleep on.

Do you feel it? Or am I the only one here in the predawn dark with my shuddering madness? STOP SHAKING please please please.

I wept yesterday morning. I can feel myself cracking and shivering into fragments, to be lost amid hours and the touches of fingers.

BURN, GODDAMNIT. Burn. The cry grows weaker and less intelligible.

Oh wreck,
Sister Ravenhair, you're killing me, Sister Ravenhair.

Jesus oh Jesus is it so easy to find? Was it that simple, was it so replaceable? A shot in the dark, were all her fumbled cries shots in the dark.

Whisper--I love you.--
Lies, lies. I never heard more lies. Love is not so easy to find.

It is not so FUCKING EASY to find.

NO ONE EVER LOOKED AT YOU THAT WAY BEFORE.
Surely not, since every faded one of us shaded himself into the black of your ravenly memory, a singular vision of one pair of eyes. You can only see the carcass you're picking. All else is gone, all else is none.

Jesus jesus where is my razor, where is my solace? Where is my blood, where is my fire?

Hey God, remember when I bled like Jesus against his tree in Gethsemane, when I rubbed my bloody cheeks against the mulberry and sobbed? Did you love me more then than when I believed?

Oh fickle, fickle love: you did not/do not/will not exist. You are the teeming betrayal of my imagination.

She throws her head back and shrieks -Oh you drive me crazy.
The wanton black of night sucked into her nostrils
-Oh you drive me crazy.
She cradled and forgot, writhing with -Oh oh you drive me crazy.

Cup it to your mouth and drink every sickly sip of it. Drench your deceitful tongue in it and grin. I have seen your paintings, too.

Will it never be day? The Everlasting may have fix'd his canon 'gainst self slaughter, but doth he forbid my hand to wreck me? Nay, I shall hurl myself into the full face of my pain. We will see what comes of it.

I will wait for it to break me. And it will break me. But oh God, I swear, I would rather be the thousand bloody myselves that I will see than one of those who has no memory of sin, insisting that I am pure.

It is useless.

Where is my razor?

Oh, your violin is slaughtering me.
There is barbed wire in my lungs, sucking up inside my throat each bloody damned time I breathe.

Oh God, I keep shaking, I keep shaking, I cannot stop shaking.
My skull is thundering in upon itself, and my ribs are imploding. My hands will not cease trembling.

HELL! I CANNOT SHOUT LOUD ENOUGH TO DROWN HER MUSIC, the murder and sway in her HELL in her shifty trauma in her tattered voice in me.

It will not cannot stop halt die Oh God Oh God Oh God. No words will keep my teeth from chatter-clattering together like nervous bones.

Do you suppose think accuse that this is hyperbole? Come to me, look at my red eyes my wracked hands my crawling jaw my spasming muscles me.

Run run run find someone--find it before it mixes your songs together in a vinyl cocktail of our sweet blood, of our black blood, your guilty circus of blasphemy, your niggardly calm of death. Red red red.

Keep speaking talking writing fleeing Oh God Oh push it away louder louder. Run Oh Jesus Jesus damn I cannot see anymore. I want to crack I want to burn I want to drill a Goddamned hole in my skull, I want my brass requiem. Will you play gunshots at my funeral mass? Will you cross yourselves and cry? Will you pound at my coffin and beg me to come out with bruised hands?

You will do none of these.

Here is leaving here is dying here is my only solace.
You are still here, you are still wringing my tears from my flattened eyes. Do you see my dullness, do you see my sorrow? Do you see me? Louder, louder.

If I keep writing, will it leave? No no no it will not go. It will rise like a fiery vengeance and spit in my fucking face. It will strike me like that, oh Father of Mine, oh Sweet Father who wrecks me and breaks me over his thumb. Can you not will you not have some jesus mercy, some crying mercy on broken I, on swindled I?

Suavecito, I liked to dance. I liked to dance, oh my love, to an unchained melody. Dear God, I am sorry. This is the last bullet. The hollow sulfurous cylinder of me is too much. Today I say, today. For Christ's sake--did he die for my sins, did he?--they are bloated and floating up into my eyes on the bent spines of tears. Oh my God.

Morning sounds her keening death knell. Mourning sounds her weeping horn. Tear me JESUS or I will tear myself. I will rip myself and I will burn like the ashes of me did before I was ashes.

So sleep on, sleep on. It is better to bleed in silence. Take me, you crows, pick my carcass and take me with you, scatter me.

Scatter me.

Forget it.

I have nothing to say to you; what will you hear that has changed?

Every time I come to this place, I feel myself shaking on the raw, bloody threshold of anger and despair.

"Come with me under the shadow of this red rock."

Forget it.

Oh burn me, burn me down.

Fuck this. There is no poetry left. There is only the dead clutch, the shrieking grope of nerveless blood reaching for...

Nothing. Nothing again nothing again nothing.

FUCK.

Good morning.
Is morning not glorious? Is it not the great awakening of our potential?

Here is to our potential, foundering and suffocating in the fluid of its black-slicked lungs, thrusting tarred hands into our mouths and eyes. Bitter taste, bitter sight.

Here is to us, blissfully pressing ourselves into night, spilling the syrup of our eyes into the asphalt that clogs our veins, the slow Vatican chant of suicide, of smoking brass cylinders clapping our wrists in blood. Oh, but can you feel it? Can you feel that iron edge of life? What flavor! What a fantastic blend!

Here is to us, a toast to the white guardians of nothing, the keepers of no knowledge. To our jaundiced lips. Touch me none, oh speak me none: I've got a yawning grin on my throat, ear to ear; a violin slit me open while I lay twisted in the morass of my two-cornered unroom.

You read, read, you do not survive. Your eyes flicker and your hollow chest doubts, your fingers freeze and your skull shouts Wrong! Wrong! Something must be wrong!

Blindness is the only illness.

Have you ever sat, bludgeoned into silence, with Van Morrison on your headphones, on your summer radio, with the sun baptizing you whitely like God, like morning? It makes your heart baroom and seize up, makes you dead like God, like morning. It makes me want those things I used to want, makes me feel like I used to feel, tragic and so fearfully alive that I can't give it to you. You won't see it.

Those hushed horns and that furtive guitar climb the mountaintop. That scent, and my arms thrust outwards on the triumphant summit, like glory, with that god-wind haurring through me. Just an image, a thundering movement in my dry bones, an eloquent music and silence tendering within my ugliness.

"I wanna rock your gypsy soul...And magnificently we will fold into the mystic."

I guess I've got that dream, that one from me, the one where I take that nothing face and slake it on the walls before you. It looks nice when I point it the other way, when you see the piano shadows in the cusp of the hills. And sweetly, you cannot see me.

I cannot give you my visions. Or, I may, but for it I rupture quiet air like a stifled wound; oh, make me whole. I just need a song, I need you to see, as long as you don't look at me. Look past me, look at my inner eye, unscarred, unmarred.

I knew you would understand.

Ha.

"I wanna rock your gypsy soul."

borderline


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How horribly true.

A TIGER WITHOUT CLAWS


You left today,
A golden day, and the mulberry shadow was gray.
The sun hung hotly on a dusky string,
And it felt so damned good
Until you died.

We were pressed with grief
Into a dying room.
You left four old hairs on my shirt,
Lit against black, because oh baby
I carried you,
And you did not fight,
And you always fight,
So I knew you were dying today.

You spent the day anciently
In the roses and on my bed.
It was hot, and I know how much
You love the sun, thumping stonily
To yourself in bars of morning,
Like a diesel, baby, like an engine
You always did.
So when you would not speak to me,
When you cried only once
In the weeping car,
I knew you were dying today.

I left you quiet behind me,
Widely eyed and oh God so hush-hush
On a the metal table where they toss
The ones they know are dying today,
And you did not glare at me
The way you did, the way I wish you would;
Come on, baby,
At least be angry with me.

There is no more lurk in the porch,
No more sway in the summer shadow,
Only concrete and rustling.
I am not my baby’s keeper,
Not no more, no more, no more.
I left you on a golden street,
With your sweetest sun dipping down,
Like iced tea that slurred in me
When we jived without sound, without movement,
Only with summer purrs,
For those are different from any other.

I left you on a golden street,
I swear; I knew they were your favorite,
For they are mine,
And I hooked one for you
While I was crying, because I love you,
When I heard
That you were dying today.

Tiger's gone.