Mom's spooling the night out in the black; don't know where the hell she gone, out somewhere between the wet winter lights. What the hell you want? When she gonna stop crying, when she gonna goddamn goddamn goddamn I turn about in melodic splinters, I know where the tongue of God rests against the moon and bleeds cut up with metal in his great moist cold eye, his coal teeth throbbing murder murder blood like a shawl on my cheeks remember remember goddamn I don't know who that you what I am whisper whisper devil man give me the crazy.

Cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut slack muscle slumped out in long fleshy arcs
no no I don't no know know goddamn goddamn tell me
who died who left who still here oooooooooooooooooooooooh.




sob.

I feel fiery and clean, stirring.

I am working on a long poem, a multi-tiered project entitled "The Epic of Bouncer Sam." It won't be "The Iliad" or "Paradise Lost," but it will be the longest poetic piece I have attempted in a long time. It also represents a nascent experimentation in form and style. Tonight, it clambered past the three page mark.

I think I'll take a walk tomorrow morning, watch my breath. 7:00 sounds bass-like and cold. I'll do't. Anyone care to join me?

I finished filming my short film today.

Since you won't, I will. This is only for my sake, mind you. Give it no purchase. This is not an invective. You know me: a meddler in melancholy who feels more than is good, who charges the shadows of windmills and shakes his own hand in congratulation.

PASSAGE

I felt the grains of evening

and knew your ink to be tangled

in someone else’s hair:

seasonal fools and summer stretchings

sucking in the glints of yellow light

of these cold gaps beneath

the shallow mulberries,

me waiting

while radios spill out humid songs, wretched songs,

songs I don’t really listen to.

Evening flashed and I knew

your wind

gambled in someone else’s gutters,

clattering around

with silken chains

and violins

like crickets rubbing against

the roots of your spines,

loving.

A virgin’s robes are first.

Evening rattled like

white dice, the bony stars

tapping like fingers against teeth and I knew

your skin to be

in someone else’s wires,

a crackling mesh of

black want, the black

of your flicking inner eye

shuttering clicking gasping—

portraits of boldness with eager velvet frames—

who wants to wait no one wants to wait you

can’t help it.

When evening strained, fanned out

in pale strokes of blue light I knew—I knew—

your eyes were other eyes:

hot and keen

marbled green with

the humid refractions of summer,

blinking through rosy pallid

loving.

First to go.

School has begun full-swing.

Today, I took up a poem I thought I had finished several days ago. I did not alter a word of the original piece, but I was unsatisfied with the incompleteness that it left me with. The poem eventually more than doubled in size, and has become the longest poem I have written in some time. I also consider it to be one of the best. But for its length, I would post it here; however, I doubt that anyone would read it. Poems are too common a sighting here for anyone to take them seriously. Crying wolf.

In other news, I am currently taking 19 units' worth of classes, and it looks to be a challenging but fascinating semester. My Poetry class will probably end up being the favorite. My Poetry teacher also instructs my English 101C class, and I enjoy his style very much. He is weathered, with drooping, empathetic eyes--a bloodhound--, a soft voice and a deliberate manner. He is, however, far from sedentary, since he is constantly hiking or biking. Both English classes are a joy, seeing as I am finally getting the opportunity to deconstruct again.

Otherwise, I am taking:
*Black and White Photography
*Introduction to Oceanography
*The World's Nations
*Student Repertory Theatre -- I am directing Sam Shepard's Back Bog Beast Bait, which you will all have to see once we open. It will be in the second bill, which will not perform until May. Callbacks are tomorrow, and then the respective directors will wrestle and wrangle to get the cast they want.

That's likely the most concrete entry you're going to get for quite some time. Savor it; return every so often to read it again and cherish it for its rarity. In the meantime, stay off the smack and start having more babies.

For years, I have been unable to answer the question, "What is your favorite movie?"

I never knew. Nothing fit my tastes completely, never fulfilled every part of me.

I have an answer to that question, now.

When the credits rolled in on Jim Sheridan's "In America," I sat amid the rubble of my tears, watery and loose, sunken into myself in the darkness that had settled on the shoulders of the couch, that crowded in the corners of the room's dusty eyes. I didn't cry, but I wanted to. I wanted to laugh out loud. I wanted to hold someone, kiss someone. I wanted to sit and stare out at a dying afternoon and watch the sunlight stir through the lace.

I can't tell you why it affected me so. I share no common struggles with those people I saw before me; I had no moments where I gasped and felt "Me, too." And yet, when the last image faded into the clouded reflection blooming on my winter windows, I shuddered with release. I felt so damned good. I can't tell you what it was in that film, only what it made me feel.

I don't think that any of you will agree. I think that you would watch and say, "Yeah, it was good. It was really good," and nothing more. That's the nature of difference and taste. I don't expect you to share it, or feel what I felt. A part of me is sad at that, that we cannot feel that together. I understand, though.

"Hey, what's you favorite movie?"

"'In America.'"

Got one for you, straight from me. Fragile, filled with irony. I hope that you sincerely enjoy it, but recall gently that I revel in bitterness. My bitterness has so calmed over the years, until it has refined itself into a tender, molted thing, cradled and whispered, something nearly unlike bitterness. It has moved: it is no longer a thing of anger, of waspish hatred. It is a thing of quiet desperation, of slender doubts nursed beneath dark ceilings. This bitterness holds no blame or malice, only hesitant questions gliding toward a warm, answerless black. Human questions, not eternal questions. We all change.

The formatting will be, of course, all wrong. Blogger doesn't seem to know what the "Tab" key is for.

Eucalyptus finch,

tripping about in scalded air, the summer

crawling, the summer bawling turbid, rabid

with misty morning sweat, your black hair curled

against your forehead, tasting me.

The pasture’s tanked with the shades of slaughtered steers,

missing, skinned and burned

already fermenting in the hot steel belly of summer,

the tractors clambering bug-eyed over the

flesh of the fields, my fingers strung out

like pale naked bodies hung in your hair,

my mortal crown.

Your legs churned like origami wings

against the summer wind

rilling through the red canvas curtains

like rippling snakes—

pardon, that’s not what I want what

I came for, and I remain pale:

slumped in evening against

eucalyptus sad with hard, stirring summer

pungence,

rubbing dirty hands against my eyes.

The mares, slack-ribbed and used up,

too rutted for riding, whipping ratty tails,

your blonde hair straying behind brown ears,

the shore of your throat and the cathedral of your lips,

I cry like a paper samurai,

humid grasses teeming against my legs,

the eucalyptus sallying forth

for their shadow war

with bare fireflies, my lights in you.

Your radio begs for a single reprise,

the memory of a bruised Impala

shaking cans up your gravel to rest tinfully, tunefully,

with bleeding, whispering seats

before your ice-tea kitchen, your red canvas curtains

and your red hair stooped like cranes over the sink,

grins across the driveway, white through glass.

See, I remember.

I must wonder how many of you have stopped looking, have stopped wondering. So many of my posts are windy poems, vague and uninformative.

What do you come searching for?

You know me far too well by now to believe I would give you anything simple and straightforward. The post just below this one will give you few clues as to my status. The setting is fictitious, the representation of the dance is entirely subjective, the language abstruse and--no doubt, by this time--annoying. Hell, the crimson coat doesn't even belong to the person represented as wearing it.

Have you come, time after time, only to be rebuffed by rhetorically coated ciphers? What do you do? It must have come to the point where you flash by a couple times a month or so, just to check. Upon seeing the most recent poem ("Another one?"), you skip away, without allowing the page to load fully.

I am certain that my diction is tiring after a while, my themes redundant, my style familiar enough to seem flat as hardtack.

Well, hell. Too bad.

The fenders of old Fords glitter

in songs of frost, winter stones,

the green curves of your eyes sharp

against the snow, the purple

of an iron twilight silhouette, the red of your fire

flayed out, your silent hair

like prayers leaping

from electric fingers over tombs.

babe, you so tense, sshhh—

don’t speak while

winter’s throwing her pale stars,

stirring like translucent freckles peering upward,

whispering beneath milky brows

and tiring of the band inside won’t they just

sshhh—I hear your collar rasping against your skin,

the blood in your lips pressing

in fragile vacillations, susurrant battalions

teeming for

Me I clamor to say.

The rigid burn of the lights behind sullies up

and hurries up and stammers against the windows

with moist fingertips, the guitar

and the bass juggling each against other—ssssshhh what

are they saying meaning longing.

The fenders of old Fords gleam

like the precise shudders of cold hawks

cocked on sick white birches,

shifting and exhaling,

their coiled breaths gnarling away into

twilight. Time well bandied.

Speak why do you never

speak

they gander into a song I think I know,

strong and slow.

The young girls sigh out the wintered windows

and draw spirals in the fogged glass.

Twilight ails, founders in the drifts and banks

bundled on the hills, smooth as women’s bellies.

Speak I’ll never speak, not to auger

this low immutable air.

You in a crimson coat like a tulip dead in snow.

The drummer downs his chaser and

those cymbals spray against the sills, grabbing for evening

like rouged eyelids, cupping instead the shoulders of young girls

and drawing their heels to the floor.

Your twilight’s gone glassy with moon,

suddenly glistening in a lucid luminous charge

across the stalky land, pallid as silvered opals

flinging the scent of cold sap

against me, standing

like a battered cellist, empty,

a voiceless warden.

Will you never Speak

speak?

the singer, blanched, lilts

across the acres of thinly clothed flesh,

leans the girls back against frigid walls.

The fenders of old Fords harden and grow white,

burgeoning in cracked mutters of old metal.

My heart turns in a sallow faded land,

and I gather myself under that piano-painted moon,

because I cannot gather you.

I heard Manhattan's metal
stinging in my blood,
a slithering of wild.
Another place I've never been,
another greened copper bulwark
mossing about in the gashes of decay
between years, sloshing between memory and desire, eh?

I feel the harlot,
having bunked under bridges
unraveled like silver bones of smoke,
unable to see, peeling the warmth
of my breath off between surges
of Hudson snow.
Having not seen.

Manhattan rain's the slickest,
cold as tin gutters on cardboard cafés,
cotton-tongued lovers crying
between newspaper sheets, I and my
blue harlot eyes,
stirring to a dim Sinatra
scratched out among the window bars,
dented radios with frost on the dials.

The streets have quiet tongues
numb with Hudson snow, oily
as pistols, firing dull clamorous cabs
full up with sleeping cartridges
mutely toward death.
Your hair draped
against my ear, the warm vibratto
of your voice nested
in the cusp of my throat.

Manhattan's a mockingbird.