Welcome To Thunderdome, Bitch

It's a palpable wrong, suited for diving, from suicide to Falun Gong
and the rageful river, Decepticons, All-Blacks kicking and scoring.
It's lost evidence, collections with lots of holes in them, missing.
It's the lack of momentum, laws that can't counter inertia, idling.
It's the list of stereotypes from every Irish novel, immutable.
It's the voyeur in love with every Irish thriller, beside a setter.
It's a shame the canal wasn't dug deeper. It was my pleasure.
It's a grounded enemy and soldier of fortune, waiving torture.
It's because I don't know how to begin writing a poem
Without providing some ridiculous context to hold your hand
And walk you through the wide halls, narrow sounds and threats
Of opinion, assaults on your character and capacity for feeling.
It's because you'll skim past the prepositions and settle on adjectives
That you agree with in your own use and context, arriving at a thesis:
It's too bad we've worked this long in vain, and for only artifice.

No Surrender

At the eleventh hour, when I have no choice 

but to make bullets out of kites

and sacrifice the coherent messenger beast 

for human agency and last rites,

I will light a stick of blended incense cake

from the Orient and walk home;

and that walk where a public mess of puke

made me stagger and groan,

I never crossed the street to leave my stomach alone.

I walked through the vomit

and then through the grass of the sanitarium 

cleansing my boots of repulsion

and went home on the dust of a comet.

I looked up at the fourth floor elevator bay

where we compared wrist stitches and phone numbers

committed to memory. 

From the doctor's desk nearby you could see my parlor

and yard, through my window to where I knit

and piece together chain mail for defense of drunkards

and the belligerent crimes we all commit.

The doctor is dead and no replacements can be found.

The walk home is hell on the arches

with only climbing shoes to wear to get there, curled.

Envious of the senior citizen center's relief of living,

the soft rooms of floral wallpaper and smoker's suite

ovening the hallway of oxygen and too-late pangs to revert

the fuck ups. The howling cell of secret regret,

the town hall meeting to discuss what best way to slay

the mandrake making a mess of all these streets.

They'll have to pool their nurses and orderly staff

just to mop up the blood from the femoral and jugular 

bursts, when she was like "it's my time to go"

and he was like "don't let the hesitation stop your knife"

--this was when the restraints came but to no avail--

the pressure from the stress position worked like a vise

squeezing what was left inside out into careless night.

Submariner Brainstorming

Hell, between the eyes, behind the visor, on a catamaran crewed by two,
sargassum flourishing, still.
Paranoid by vector proxy, attaining false light, bream, green-bronze deep,
roots and bloodlines, binary.
Sorcery, tongues, AIDS, Nazi comedies, fusing twins with whimsy, bedecked
faith, wreathed in catastrophe.
In an age of stasis, caught beneath heft of duty and aspiration, anemic whales
keep the sea level high by staying under.
Plankton and nekton, flotsam and jetsam, the scare you brought with infection,
all dead herrings lapping the gravel shore, putrefaction.
The walls drove out further to protect the cutaneous consumption, bad history,
unnecessary appendectomy, vermiform abscess, dull moaning.

NATIONAL

Here, you can

get away

with anything:

make the mistake

of making words

out of your

days, or days

out of your

words.

When work is

meant for you,

it will neither take

nor forsake

you by the hand,

as it were.

There are no

applications or

interviews.

Here, you can

get away

with nothing:

when even

your own

thoughts

are

unwilling

to hire

you,

perhaps it

is time to

consider

the perks

of slavery,

and the

consequences

of a

democracy.

FRUSTRATION

Although

some

days

I am

nothing

less

than

the

Lord’s

servant,

on

others,

I

am

nothing

more.

Hawthorn Bones

'Twas a long hike over steep and unsteady terrain
Typing up lost favorite poems for some class again
But in them I find new instructions and tech support
For the mechanical sea where I've gone swimming.
Typical night. Dress destroyed by soot. A father waving
A white handkerchief spotted with bullet-sized blood
And dragging the near-dead through lead hail.
Not sure what happened to them all. I wasn't there.
I was watching a film about a photograph changing
Played through a computer in Jeannette Rankin hall.
But I found the picture in my research on Belfast.
It must've been taken in Derry in 1972. No internet.
I have family bones buried there, unable to visit,
Saline lungs and purple heath, violating the inviolate.
Andy's families who opened the ground for filling.
Then one day from out the mounds came my energy,
Sent to collect a message no one alive could translate.
It came back to bother me in a dream about good living.
That was before the griffin stopped running, so late;
Running gerunds into the ground with easy endings.

Through the Keyhole A Roomful

from basement horizons made of melted lac resin
peasant curds fill the butter dish and demitasse
when the earthquake of our acquaintance
left a pleasure to wish for in the still concrete
the swaying halls of stone and stripped shutters
terminable beat that laughs at near-black violets
whose bashful tremors of drink make shells
and echo krebs cycles of citrus puckered Esox
the shipped pickerel of deteriorative acid fish
and the drunk walk home of unprofound animals
breaking fevers for feverish crimes uncommitted
beauty's inherent power is the urge to fuck well
and my noon digest of timely verse at waking
is a germ of pinhole flesh leading to everything

POEM

To think something is divine.

To think something is divine,

is divine. But to think something

through, from image to mind,

mined and displayed on the

page, with a graceless

brain’s tactility,

grabbing at rhymes

and stretching its tentacles

towards similes, is the injustice

of mishmash

philosophy.

If I needed to tell

you I loved you,

surely I could have

done so without this

circus, without the hunch-

backed letters, or the faux

warmth of this old

red-and-bird-

yellow tent.

I like their machines. They've got a pale, peachy glare, and obviously like to bathe in pearls. I wouldn't be surprised to hear they die on the river next summer, or leaving the bridge where  divers drown with broken necks. The kings of mythology are out of earshot.

Sirens, I'm easily distracted. Strays, ditto. And I must have offended the muses with narcissistic defense mechanisms and by flashing passing traffic. I hope they know it wasn't meant to go that distance, but I have no regrets. That's the best defense around. In judicial matters, the ebb and flow of convictions and careers blossoms by proximity to remorse and gavels. A bejeweled veil and natural hair color, enough rain to grow through every season. Chains like nails in a tree. Suck it in. Big sky, an awfully large head to dream. A system, most importantly, of abject clarity. Without paperwork to hold, the need for shovels. The need to etherize the opposition and commit arson. The stale odors that need a breeze, and professional cleaners. Risking impact from a passing tram, the street below feels just right on my feet. I've got arch problems, and require the tracks. The abyss of casino compulsions. All that I love is too clean for me to touch. 

If you've got a better idea
I'd like to steal it
make it my own intone
transitive
                  bandshell white
patina to crack the looks
at her zesting a pillow
of sand with purple sage
on the cracker thorns
pouted nibble springer
the range of celery and corn
flakes that will not burn
and out from the crisper
comes the freezer and ice
soldiers melting sexily
at me in a mascara smear
hula hoop holocaust
and other make-light-ofs
like the lake paintings
oxidizing amidst salt bath
drawings on the blade
of a dervish crawling
dyeing head scarves in ink
the blotter doesn't try
to stop the congress
or dam the river
or dub over

A Nice Shit Brown

tachycardiac duress, let go the gate
the cemetery trench, sunken grass
and the backsplash of gray matter
on goal post, backboard, conscience

have to sit and wait out the battery
life, the snow mice, manmade snow
man, made by Stevens, gallery row
short-fall gallows, Grey's Anatomy

all the children I never had will meet
me at the station, crowds and apologies
swarming for reparations, dynasties
and nothing but rectal prolapse to eat

like a like a like a like a like a stutter
and sweet melody, harsh stops along
the route, the bus hussy and the louse
in the same seat, itching mad together

nothing behind that door, not a room
but practically everything else, imagine
a world where I was your dictator, weak
with a remarkable set of facts, dope sick

they say warrantless self-praise leads
to greater depression, my expectations
and what the brain held back from acid
the flash-forward of recovered memory

the evil girls of my magnanimity
those fake curls and colors
and blue's universal hue
still looks espresso on you

All Drunk Writers Are the Same

gain, speed, volume
tone of parchments
dry erasure stains
on the whiteboard
of profit, ocular ado
the splits with her
on back of a empty
card, a mounting hi
to the relative skin
porous dermatome
laser sights, pistol
shot, magnum lotus
beams of skylight
torn-down sailfish
blown back by fire
from afterburner
jealous twenties
cocktail parties
centipedes on me
wanting to know
why I won't hurt
thee, unhelpable
and culpable enemy

The Band Plays On

whether we stay along
or outrun the big guns
the talentless, he think
cannot play any song
though they want one
though the day is done

So Stupid I Could

in line for distraction, unable to let the caress go, from winter's wait-out
to a harmful train and spring snow, the cable breaks, it's a long swing straight
down before the clap and jaw, venture, ply, carapace crushed under breath
a jutted loan from eaves and masonry, what of the sharp pains, hot needs
and canaries, aquarium settlements, holes drilled, waiting on an estimate
clawed, the hook teeth, the cogs, terrapin moccasins on the turtledove
flitter, flutter, jam, out of patience at last, don't let the press know
I demand satisfaction, I'm running low, the snapping crawl is all
I can manage to exile from the dream-glean.
Exiled as they were through the mail slot to infinity
or the vacuum of a black hole's eternity, I mean
callously they remained, growing insane by the day
then the hour, and because there was no maximum
occupancy, their density engaged the mass criticism
and briefly all was well in Roswell
but we were in Winslow eating the land crab at a bottle bar
later we woke in Wellington, in a cold sweat, unable to enjoy the Wellesley's
founding company, or the family silverful pockets I love to hate plentiful
it was late in any state and it was  a sleeping winter bear
that skated to the stereo to play the album neither
of us cared to listen to these days, what with air
and light speed, traitors, benefactors, Cajuns, transistors
sequels to unfinished treatments and media arts facilities at big universities
the tattered brawn, the liquid lawn, the cavernous yawn
all the anger in that young man's heart
left to seed in a long stare at the TV
fifty years ago: TV set; blue jeans
now: television, as distinct from internet
and jeans, with every color available, are not distinguished but from fabric
and drapery should have been standard curriculum
foundered, floundered what with mud, muck of this town
how many voices are littering this iron core machine of god
bring me virus and calamitous, all tenses tween and twixt
nothing left with which to write all this, mandrake spawning frowns
oh Lawd! the girls are gone growed up and gone, the brown river
flooding lawns across the divide, an envelope bust with anthrax
a cagey Samuel thumped and buried breathing beneath the hutch
hippies hiding in cupboards, singalonging clapping hands
and frantics in need of dickings and laments.
Lamentations, hold my prick with both hands
it's the setting sun of the backwards clown, spotted
and the dawn of the age of verity, lack of vice and clarity
of mission, condition, I'd like to open the floor to human sacrifice
I'd like to buy a trowel, resolve the kerfuffle, carve up Vanna White
just because her last name is White, which gives me the creeps
like the white-haired lightning kids I once knew in school
verve and pilot moxie streaming down towers on rope
lunging the spear through the pig in a poke to squeal, sq-sq-squeal
and the answer key was coded in the tablature of aspiration
hopes and all that shit, and even if it worked out for you
and what I'm hearing is that it certainly did not
nothing has changed, certainly not you and her larva
stuck in a genius mix called progressive house, the tavern's out
of the question, clip-clapping wooden floorboards, rarities, gas heating
window-glass hairlined with crack, candle-flame
candelabra, penumbra, numismatic shadow
you can't finish what you start, and did't die
lyrics and despair are still making a mint
a Monday testament to early mornings
and hard work, campus fires burning in dorms
the wheelchairist is so modest for not coming down
waving ostentatiously from the pillory room
giving up so soon?
Breathing a sadistic gasp of pain-spite and taunting
gimpless missing the masochist with limp wrists
what of the sandals, the leather and pliers
why are the acoustics so austere and parliamentary
representatives misrepresenting resentment
pigeons for my cabal of plotting ledges
curb-loitering crows menacing hedges
tell me more about reality's ultimate intransigence
homework was a gas, and now it's time to give up visions
or acting on them, everyone wants to be heard
and nobody wants to hear, not me, not no more
"HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME"
and the widow's wig is filthy, what else, the dentures dry
hasn't eaten since Bobby Sands died, but his mural is alive
and that's more life being given and kept around
than what's here, looking back at you
we've thrown away the parameters, right place
wrong time tell me about it, his clothes in your closet
"HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME"

lint remover in the toilet, boxes full of porn

cat runs and coke dust, spoons of bubbling water

the table spotted with distrust and regretful egrets

cotton slaw of colby cheese on the baconator crumble

odds and ends of dish trends hotter than a rumble

in Ballygawley during the drunkest depressing summer ever

streets running blood red, the deluge better lead to something

"HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME"

not gonna do it, wouldn't be prudent, dislike the capitol too

recapitulated in the sleazy slumber of hooker love

from the sewers and strewn, the burden of me and you

"HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME"

an everlasting confoundedness regarding the arid plains

the drained pool, the carbon trash, the badlands

"HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME"

and before it ends peacefully and on time

"HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME"

it will skip, stop, seize, cease, and die

On Whitman #97

walk with me, while I kill the grass with my loafing fat ass, scratching sloughing skin off my hairy, pimpled body, stinking up New England for the next century, and wherever else leaves are the lamest metaphor for the paper I waste on my hippie writing, with fold-overs and endless praise of myself and all individuals, endlessly sapping and hocking.

If a mirror is a looking glass, then
you bending over is a fucking ass
but I'm not allowed the spread
nor the philandering, instead
I pretend not to think about you
while doing nothing but, thinking
about fucking you in the butt, growling
like an abominable bear angered out
of torpidity, loafing in the grass
after climax, no longer new American
poet of impact, but a badger of pointillist
prose, a wolverine, a rehabbed Fisher King
leading elders to death in battle, for absolutely nothing.

Richmond, Full of Virgins

bad anima, rash of caves, stalactite hooks

biscuits, graves of angels stinking across:

pepper wind

swamp hug

state flower

bleeding vag 

unprepared

prag bungling

the buggery

and horror, Wade Boggs is gonna die in Tampa, 2031--

the liquids drain along the small fault down to the gutter, where the sewers rise greetingly

spreading the ashes and obliques, a bed of dirt in which to leap to break the fall, ylang-ylang

Liszette Dancing w/Celia, Burning

blond washout, continuum victim in a white coat
the pleasant odor and punch meridian, florin, guilder
or a pastiche of alchemical blues inside a fighting mitre
hell in etymology on the back of lizard lashes
innuendo, inured and nurtured, cricket match slur
from banana legs and fried horseshoes, crabs
so much for the soft shell, the migraine
the flicker of the taper of the candle
and the brass and pewter snuffers
are not enough to spell either snifter nor muff-diver
but the invented methods were here, in spirited pledge
floating on spite to encroach upon waterspout-- vacuum
extraterrestrial optical hardware for seeing space mites
crawling galore, subcutaneous prismatic lowland lice
the weather hugging you sick by the high road way
the deciduous per diem of another annum
the perennial advice of backgammon
muffler hair pie, diamonds courageous
bleeding from the head, lost in a vent
dust and chads, asbestos loaves
Mars bars, mercury fishes

WORLD SERIES

After the

game

tonight,

I will continue

Job.

When I stopped,

Bildad was not

begging, but

insistently

wondering

how long it

would be

until

his friend

would stop

using his

words

in

orders

equating

no

statements.

After the

game

tonight,

I will continue

writing.

When I stopped,

the stanza was

not importunate,

but untiring

in its

quest to

adopt

a friend

and say

to him,

I forgive

our master

for ignoring

us.

For now,

let them

play each

other,

settling

scores

old

as

Sport.

AFRICA

I do not need

another white

woman. I want

her black

with a

hairy heart

and shaved

privates, like

the lion

I imagined

hunting me

on safari

in the

centuries

more

liberal with

honesty,

and less

predatory

of the

joyous

perversions

between

woman and

her men.

POSSESSION

For the machines we have

invented, we generate precautions

and operate with regulations:

take the red auto: airbags,

belts, how-fasts,

ages and licenses.

Whilst driving my

obsession, I crashed

head-on into you

making another man

smile (through no and every

fault of your own): nothing

to hold my desperate,

red thoughts from crying,

‘Stop’, but the tether

that binds the book,

allowing even

the most

uninsurable of us

to handle love

unpermitted.

GOLD

Have we made

it where we were

going? How would we

know? We would

not, not

know any

more about

ourselves

for marrying

God

with disbelief

in our

existence

free from

ring, ritual

or veil.

But I asked,

and you,

you

answered,

Yes.

Home. Our

home. Removed

of all proof

other than

the glow

generated

by our

first

nudity,

the first

light

after

what

is felt

but never

avowed.

Will you

forgive

me

for all

of the

times

I have been

here

before

without

your body?

ENVY

Swamp, and brown

sun somewhere South,

like what you can

never tell him:

I love dryland,

bricks and the

unnatural,

as well.

We do not suffer.

She points her

camera at The Great Blue

Heron. The Snowy

Egret regrets none

of his beauty, and

does not mind

whose

wayward eye

he charms.

If I knew you any

better, she thinks,

I would suspect

your suspicions.

She downs her

head towards

the marsh at her

knees: we choose

what is recorded

and what we edit,

not what we see

not what we love.

The early dinner

fish swim just the same,

not knowing by which

animal: not man, bird

or God: they will

be swallowed.

ESTRANGED

It may

very well

be that

the yellow

pain

we have

began

to no

longer

notice

is

nothing

more

than

the

happiness

we

forgot

to bring

in from

the top

of black

mountain.

Thievery Admix

"Shaolin Satellite" primed for "Encounter in Bahia" 
"Assault on Babylon" the Zion Park crash "So Vast as the Sky" 
you pretended to pray to "The Oscillator" for "Transcendence" 
"The Foundation" endowed "Treasures" of "Samba Tranquille"
on the bridge "Facing East" "Heaven's Gonna Burn Your Eyes" 
and "All That We Perceive" lasts "Until the Morning" "Resolution" 
"From Creation" "Marching the Hate Machines (Into the Sun)" 
 "The Supreme Illusion" "A Gentle Dissolve" "Sweet Tides" 
"Vampires" "(The Forgotten People)" "Mandala" sandblasting
"Beautiful Drug" "Blasting Through the City" on fire with love
"Light Flares" smokestacks frack and jog high with low shoves
resting with clever       "Fragments"       out of guns and ammo
               in plastic wrap, caught                    "Free" 
   when you asked               "Is It Over?" and I said never

Round, Canonical

to the image heap, we'll retrieve our blocked-out memories, gleefully
at the dumping ground, another scout has found the thoughts once lost
and longing for ownership, closure, but now the sounds of resurrection
wicker bust of charm again, winter bundling hood strings, one mitten
on, one gone missing, the harm of icicle drops right there up above you
only a lonely pond below sea level, tricycle rust, bent wheel, dead child
the blood of Baltimore on a pike looking west to infrared parsimony
guts and glory-hole gore, quaking, quailing, opened up to trouble you
for the dogma, the Escarpment Dogon,  and file cabinets of Manet teeth
and drop-cloth comas for basement naps beneath the fumes unmasked
the smog and impasse of a ranch hand's murder in Harlow, suffocated
no memories, no memes, no mystery to knowing, only in when to show

Thinking About the Mortality of the Crab

and Spanish daydreams on loan from Kalispell with interest
order, disorder, turpitude, disgrace

strand, beach, peace, water-wing sinking with a wreath crest
police, brood goal of death, feeding

where does that control go, though, if the shell is gone to eat
and the boil dispersed with vengeance

does it revert and contempt, stop needing star charts to march
or cobble, nail, hammer, Heidegger

nothing much, but what of us, wondering apart, in an altar zone
before the reliquary of Nietzsche

or the missing history of story, suspiciously, of missing history
not only handshakes, Derrida gloving for martyr

Red Trillium Drowning

damn these harmonies in my line of strings on hard crush rock
with pericardium curls on huffing pearls in starfish swells
under the murmur of light water and octopi footing--

a startled canopy pocked by blue heron can openers, toes popping
before the vetiver strain compounded a zither in a cistern
Siddhartha hawing on a deck of cards counting backwards
through the temple clouds of forage, in the end, with keys
and the tumbleweeds tumbled to poison sky of brushes painting

damn these species breeding in the naked lounge of acting crass
with parietal battle and the trampoline of a stretched limo
above the sterile hunger of heavy chatter and grunting

upside down, the synesthete's bough, negative space
a bright yellow trauma, the black-eyed buzz of commas
a blue two, orange four, a waxwork chanteuse blind with hats
a flop splat with the danger split of Ghent
on a lime-cream chair from Coco Chanel
in an alcove turret overlooking Bruges
a slaughter from Belfast of spaniels
warlord, chanting old collusion

Rain City Fires

the pick stuck
under the hill-
bottom's troll
pouring tears
from porous stone
just for thrill kills
unpaid dragon
at the wet door
under flood red
weight of ages
Satyricon cackle
mud lust pushed
to hilt and Nome
blue black snow
iridescent aqueduct
flowering Rome
with viral pills
and lushed rows
wedged heels
sackcloth togas
penultimate meal--
the borrowed bed
the junk-thief
the bus wait stained
with wormwood

The Caldera

the story of my life of women not leaving me alone when I'm pissed off
and sticking around to poke and prod when all that's asked is solitude
and you can't walk away and give me some breath to time out this rage
on my own terms, alone, like I know how to do, specifically w/o you.

leave it to some slag on Jersey Shore whose comment I picked up passing
the television she left on before she left in my truck to not listen to me again.

this is not what I had in mind writing about, i.e. musicked song-along.

leave it to an extrovert poet of slam.

leave it in an envelope at the gate to finance my arms in defense of Islam.

leave it at the bottom in the magma of microbial millennia, pronged.

The Faggot and the Farcicist

or Bono referring to himself
in third person as THE White Nigger
fucking narcissist, without premise
but the anecdote of a black man's
compliment, without evidence
and the shambles of cracking up
on staged sham-charade
driving very, very drunk
across the Santa sky at night
ho-ho-ho, blaring The Soft Parade
c'mon c'mon c'mon now TOUCH me babe
whiskey mystics used to be the rage

Blue Hooded Snapper

while forming gills under the calamine tundra
the ferrous and zinc commando lands in Basra
cross-stitching coordinates that sew-up incidents
to thoughts, breeding water mains to tall orders,
skinny ties; up embankments and to power lines
on pole tops with cats that cuddle in the yowl
of Cheops resized--the Hoon of advertised treasuries
kept products from the palace of tea-- scratches
on records and unfed presidents lost--wet matches
laws of mercurial insights on neurotoxin anima
kicking and coughing with strychnine back-bends
punctuations from pressed dimensions, your wedding
and the pantomime bluster of a Chesapeake ghost
reading a brand new copy of Tender Buttons in the sun
pulling out of the Bay, dragging skeletons of floats
and roiling cold water through the diesel wheels
leaving never-seen whitewater abandoning the coast
and the love of nitrogen narcosis-- slow sinking sound