Friday, July 24, 2009

Journal 42 - Footprints of Mojo


The music has stopped or the music's over. The
Lizard King may still live in the deepest parts
of unexplored Africa (whatever that means – apparently
true). Yeah Right. Mr. Mojo (ain't) Rising. He made
sure of that. I'm curious as to how much nonsense
I can excuse from my regurgitated brain. It seems
I write a lot about wine and drunkenness (like now) -
this should probably stop. Aber. In vino veritas. That's
obviously a lie. I hate reading stream of consciousness
bullshit in writers of recused fiction – style changing
fiction – but here I am writing adolescent secondary
words that fall out of the convoluted crevices of my
haphazard brain like gum-balls from the oak tree.
Blown about from the indecisive churnings of the
well-laid wind. I'm no Aeolian Harp though -
Shelley and Wordsworth were full of their own shit -
though their shit was less bull than my own – or
so I would hope. There is a subtle tan beauty with
a pink shirt – brunette with black toe-nails. Amazingly
it works. Beauty and Sex are distracting when they plop
themselves down in living color. I should sometimes
prefer the cold death of the painting or the indirect
abstraction of the poem. Contrary to popular belief,
well – expected belief – I'm not that abstract. It
betrays me and overwhelms me in its career building
opportunities. Sometimes I wish I were an air-
conditioner or a satellite dish – serving a well-
known function that provides some sense of sweet
appeasement. But it seems I (we) want more than
that. Our lives are short and potentially final -
there comes a point when the footprint we will
make rises up out of the shot-down warnings of
our fore fathers. Should we live our lives as though
there is something after or not? If so, it seems we
need encouragement (treasures in heaven); if not, there
is the ambivalence – it matters not or this is our
only shot. Leave something behind. Our children are not
exempt from our own immortality. But immortality is
just as much a drug as cocaine ecstasy and alcohol.

5.2.09

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Colorful Words


Surely I have not let go - surely
I have not let slip - surely I would have not
not known that she could replace the
moon, and refrain from blending her red lips’
warm smile in a sad disarmament of sense.

But surely now she’ll never know what
snug music we could have undercovered.
Surely now she will forget what art we
witnessed together. I must surely take
my wine and smile and prattle and whisper
undone, in fragrant discontent.

The wind blows cold through the trees.
A brief winter tease.

Laughter


How many many pasts must we
survive to remember that the dream
has died. I have waddled, crawled,
walked and run only to fall to the
bed and cough with sobs of regret.

Soon my wife will awake. Soon our son
or our daughter will be born. And soon
we will make the mistakes of all our
terrible pasts. And smile at the lacerating
idealism of youth. Laugh at the arrogance
of the passionate youth. The dream that
permeates the ripe mind of the ever-young
has died. And yet we smile and laugh
at those day we lived. We smile at the rain
and the clouds. We smile at the days we have
yet to see – we laugh with the lack of
decision.

Rhapsody


I
‘It is impossible to say just what I mean’ J. Alfred Prufrock


lilacs have withered in the dawn
geraniums lay splayed in St. Benedict's hands;
down the alley, among the shadows, a throng
of black-hooded footsteps echoes off the wall –
while blood-stained thorns penetrate his death coronal

I have kissed the rusty orangutan
and found him not my own;
I have lain with the signing rhesus monkey
and still I am alone

in no dank corner of this dark world
have I followed empirical meaning;
but on a ledge, on a cliff's edge, searching
the nagging depths - my mind begins to groan,
and at least find meaning in the arms of a girl

Philosophy, that comes to men
Men of Age, with unassuming ties
confines me to my heart, and refolds
my crumpled mind with never-unified lies
where Kant and Hume and Descartes’s voices end


II
Song of the X-Generation


we do not care we do not care
we do not care what song you sing
we who wear our colors in our hair
we do not wipe our soiled hands clean
with one more wasted political vote -
do not dare disturb the universe
with one more wasted discourse
on laws to end all pain;
we let our willow souls lapse into a strain
of a songbird's unrelenting note
for a life not so diverse

we do not care we do not care
we have our PlayStations, we have our games
we walk the crowded streets with faceless names
that even you would recognize; -
that's not the sun that burns our eyes

we shall not measure out our days on
frequent flyer miles
and country club dinner-dates
with fine Riedel wine glasses, dancing drunken spirals


we will not walk the streets with our fingers straightening ties


III
‘Hirtengesang : Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm’


we care for the chimneys, the sparrows and rabbits;
we care for the sheep and care for the fences;
we long for a present with less past-tenses
that batter our days with unbreakable habits

just the winter frost on morning’s window pane;
bald eagles flying high above the grimy rain;
we care for the breathing; we mourn the dead -
we hope for a vision of promises lost, words left unsaid

December Rose

I

nevermind the lofty faces that you meet
the faces that you nod to quickly on the street

recall....the dance of the yellow-jacket’s ritual
around the nipples of the honey-suckle stems;
the nights her pants would lie beside your bed;
songs of birds singing well past breakfast -
her leg around your waist, arm across your chest:
recall the plaintive face staring out your window
and sighing - for another breath to relieve her of
the strain from more uncertainty.


II

below the afternoon bridges, under
a street-lamp flickering and unstable -
I swallow the crisp dusk air and
watch the violet sunset recline
into a cloudy chamber of forgotten repose;
while she returns a letter
written by her abstruse young friend -
         (my irreverent brother)
when the seasons were less cruel:
but forgiving in quiet December evening snows;
when the mornings were less forced:
resolving themselves in capitulated scenarios

Friday, July 17, 2009

Journal 41 - Technological Toenails


Papier-mâché pedicure flip-flops, orange macaroni
cheese vomited sheets draped over the bathtub -
my BlackBerrry silently ding-dongs with its berating
red light – attention starved like a 2 year old.
Except that I want it to flash like a hooker at
me – I'm the sex-crazed starved 2 year old it seems.
I'm not sure iTunes can sync to my soul – I
wonder at the efficacy of downloading the content
of my life from the media store. Now is the time
I recall the outdoorsy tree-breathing lake-fishing
iPod-less cell phone nary having days of my oh-so-
glorious youth – bereft of these concrete jungle
technological trappings of the remnants of the
western Industrial Revolution. Science is king or
haven't you heard? What else would be? There
are contenders. But I digress (No!) I won't decry
the interior life I've nestled down in to. If I'm
this way now, blogging and Facebooking and Googling -
how did my childhood without these things somehow
benefit me or make me 'better?' Nature versus Nurture -
I know, so Yin and Yang, or Chicken and Egg. Nurture
is hard to beat but Nature difficult to overcome.
My jeans at least have self-inflicted holes, like
last year's philosophy class on the virtue of
epistemology. Ethics it seems it the foundation
of life and philosophy and religion and yes, even
science. The ethical is certainly a base layer of
interpretation. Brute facts are like leprechauns or
Santa Claus – such a good story to keep the
masses at bay. Masses exist in the white-walled
world of science. Infected. Like my jack-rabbit
heart – under the radar of awareness. I know,
science turned on the lights and washed our dishes
for us. Indeed, it also decimated Nagasaki and
Hiroshima. I don't think stem cells are all created
evil – nor is their use worse than everyday passing
hypocrisy. I want to start a jar of my fingernail
and toenail clippings as a reminder I am nasty and
dying and filled with deposited excess.


5.1.09

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Journal 40 - Blue Nights

She walks in Beauty like the night – Byron was
one crazy son of a bitch. To whom is the night
so beautiful that Heaven denies any gaudy day-
time joys compared with the alleged tenderness
of cloudless skies?1 So far removed from a quaint
apparition of delight that we must remove ourselves
from the tender innocence that starry skies seem to
bequeath. O the blue of the nighttime sky -
O the night in blue and dark-blue – illuminated
by the light of weak reflection yet faint commensurate
joy – Jesus and Socrates enjoyed that yellow moon
bulging in the nighttime bluish sky, like a big
pale yellow child's balloon floating away into
the starry skies, the chemical explosions in the
sky, the beautiful random unintentional poetic-
infused human-personified starry chemical
imbalances that light the dark Charleston green
of the celebrated night-time sky. Van Gogh
understood the blue of the night. My life is
a cheap forgery like well-copied forged documents
of an unimportant merchant of salt and pepper -
spices dominate war just behind religion -
that is world-views in conflict. I'm a world-view
in conflict. I hang my heave grape-laden head
over the imaginary cliff of the lethean canyon
of behavior. I stare at overgrown toe-nails
listening to the regurgitations of the famous
Pole. B-minor is the key for me. Well, that
and C-minor; I am Pathétique. I would gladly, at
least, tear the wings off the dragonfly or the
ever-grooming fly just to have a taste of
Keats with a Grand Vin from Haut-Médoc. Ah
the Left Bank can be kind indeed. No subtle
binaries though – the Right possesses its own
enormous gems – artists are surprisingly split
across the paths of the brownish green world.
Yes I enjoy blue. Colors like adjectives of any
kind will only do for a time and place not
contracted by me or you – but absorbed into the
blackest blue.2


4.27.09


  1 If that doesn't make sense to you, you're not alone.
  2 In fact, if that entire post makes less sense than most of the drivel I post here – you're not alone there either.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Journal 39 - 2nd Round Bye


It’s nice to not have to coordinate my eye-
lids with my belt or shoes. Oversized sun-glasses
are a drain on my better judgment. Purple (or
fuchsia) is the color of royalty – well, those who
pretend to such royal diadems and celebrated
atrocities of social adjustment. Adjustment is the
Epimetheal desire of the ignorant and callow
breeding. The sound of the parties and laughter and
dance music waft over to me in undulant
affirmations of my lost life. Not everything
lost is desired. All of life is a burden not
shared in my bestest dreams. My pen has decided
to be generous with its drawing ink – how nice.
The pressure is over. Especially since Melissa the
waitress is curious if I’m writing stories or
poetry. I say something in between. Since
I’m in between thoughts right now. I want to
be hugged by a beautiful stranger – I suppose of
the opposite sex. Opposites are nice but difficult
and troublesome in their unfamiliar differences.
I haven’t carried my children to the bar yet
but apparently it’s the thing to do. No worries –
entertainment is just around the corner in a
2 year old mixed girl picking the flowers under
the watchful and corrective eye of her experienced
mother. A love for beauty is a wonderful thing –
when does that love turn destructive, the
plucked flower losing its battle for life. I wonder
at times when I lost my battle for life? Before
children and marriage – yes. that’s the point of
those thing right? Resuscitation. I need the
paddles applied. Wait, been there done that –
about 5 times. Nothing’s happening – each day
is like taking steps in the same footprints I
made the days before. Alcohol has me in a
rut listening to music copulated in the 1980s.
Robots have more freedom of choice than I –
stuck relishing in the thought of a 2nd round bye.

4.25.09

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Journal 38 - Rooftop Capacitors


I’m here on The Rooftop drinking reluctantly
Yellow Tail grape juice, a lavender draped event
emerging from the bricks of the rooftop below
me. The harbor is on the other side of the
condos that spontaneously combusted forth last
year directly in line with my view of the
afternoon water/drink. I want to explode the
artificial skyline like a ten-year old on the banks
of the Tallahatchie. Ah, sailboats sail the windy
sea with such comfort and ease. The boat – not
the boaters. Coming about. Life sometimes knocks
me over like an unannounced boom swinging across
my droopy visual field in shiny aluminum shards
of perception. Who’s sailing this keel-less vessel?
The wind from over the tops of foreign roofs turns
the pages of this mathematician’s journal – I wish
the wind would turn the words and images over
in my head, turning new lines like a farmer furrowing
in the alphabet field – combines have their use.
Yes, a mathematical journal – applicable to me if I
were actually plotting out or graphing these words
with care and precision. But alas, it may as
well be the wind over the water flapping the
stalled sails that is blowing up life into these
inky words. Rooftops have a circuitry of their
own. Really. Chimneys and satellites and
bezels unknown to me. Air-conditioners like capacitors
pipes like resistors or flat soldered wire. The taste of
man drops on the big and the small. Drops with
re-used components of our aggrandized mediocrity.
Reusable components are an integral part of the
fight over God and design. If design why so many
different types of wings? Creativity is apparently
not an option. Arguments of a mediocre scientist
raising himself up and lording his self-professed
intellect down upon our infantile minds – receptive
in their mid-afternoon snack of sippy cups and
animal crackers. Biological development is a
fascinating study – of wannabe philosophers drinking
green energy drinks.

4.25.09

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Journal 37 - Monkeys and Willows


I think the wind in the willows is the
sound for me; the wind in the willows as it
tolls as it tolls as it tolls with glee in the
sound of the leaves of the back oak tree -
the wind in the willows is the sound
for me. Willows and oak are a down-
laid joke leftover from the birds in the
limbs that broke. The wind in the willows
sounds so close to you, the sound so close
to the dove and the mountain dew. Ahh yes
there it is. The mountain dew – what else
to rhyme with thoughts of you. I touch my
toes and list my woes but never today do
I not blow my nose – how silly and quaintly
degenerate I have become. I need a code
of Harry like the bloodletting Dexter. I can
cough up blood but how did the wind in
the willows, the cool breeze of the wind
in the willows transmogrify into discussions
of you and blood? You? Sure. Blood – No.
Blood is the sign of the grape on the vine.
Excitement, a 2-year old's excitement over
pooping independently on the potty is worth
more than blood on the backplane of my
retina. Feebleness is my only virtue, or gift.
How quickly laughter becomes tears in the
hands of a toddler. Bundles of unbroken
and untempered emotion – purse as the death of a
gazelle. Ewww. Pretty but not fast enough.
Mediocrity flows so easily under the influence
of cheap or expensive wine. Thinking under
the influence. Many a relationship have crumbled
in that mistake. Unfortunately not jail-worthy.
But still fermentation is the Yin and Yang of
our consciousness. Still the weak nuclear force
of our souls. Battered souls are like unbattered
souls – they're fucking souls. Not to be discarded
like feces from a rhesus monkey – cousin in every
way that doesn't matter.


4.24.09

Monday, July 6, 2009

Journal 36 - Hogs and Mysteries


I think I'm past the point of pulling the covers
of Ennui or TV over my misanthropic head to tune
out the squeaky music box of the world's grand
noise – out of tune and painful like a sore throat
in the middle of April. April may be the cruelest
month – but not of geraniums but pollen. The live
Oak lives. My throat constricts like an anal sphincter
about to be probed – in an undesirable way. What
would the desirable way be? I don't know, a gentle
finger exploring dirty erogenous zones. Something like
that perhaps. The undesirable? An exercise for the
reader. It's the constriction not the sphincter. That's
twice. I think my mind (or my soul, whatever)
constricts like that when surrounded by people who
finally started to think when they got a 'real' job
and had kids. Suddenly they pick up one book and
are the next Gautama Muhammad Confucius bar Joseph.
They say things with such matter of factness that in
addition to convincing themselves they're right they
almost convince me. Silence is so misleading.
Nothing nice, nothing said. The noise of the
tuneless world surges up from the bowels of the
magnanimous Earth like a demon or a Balrog breathing
fire and strutting like a rock star. I want to puke
on such nonsense. I think a cracker is a cracker;
bread is bread. Something mysterious could happen
but not to the non-believer throwing the faux
consecrated baker-bread cracker in the unconsecrated
trash can. Mysteries are mysterious, not confusing
until the right theologian runs along and explains
everything in quaint academic terms. I wonder if
floating high above the Earth beyond the ethereal
blueness of the atmosphere, outside the nitrogen and
oxygen (so cold) – if one could hear the multitudes
chattering and gossiping and singing and screaming
in bed – would it sound like a symphony
of amazing human emotional breeding, or would
it sound like hogs snorting in their own
shit and mud? Hogs aren't so bad you know.

4.16.09

Thursday, July 2, 2009

To a Spurious Memory

I sit, to pick the memory apart –
it stares at me with a wrinkled heart:
yellow-strawed lofts and green summer scents
attack my withered countenance.
A pair of smiling faces, images of bliss
unfold out of a hike, a ride, a mother’s kiss.
I hear a sound, a river’s gurgling song –
children’s voices laughing pleasantly along.
Like color and taste, I have no firm measure
of comparing this vision of distant pleasure
with reality. I must admit adorned perception
a stage of unacknowledged self-conception,
and store the memory in a mindful place
that only I can touch, and taste.

Journal 35 - Love and Extinction


I'm not sure the dreams in which I'm dying are
the best I've ever had – but it certainly is a
very very mad world. I've been nervous at
more than just the thought of all the eyes and
teeth at school – I see those canines at work
and dinner parties exercising overtime. It's time
to recount the alphabet just to verify my brain
has not degenerated into oatmeal mush. I'm
not sure the ABC's accomplish that but it's close.
That or Twinkle Twinkle. My daughter it seems
re-arranges her pillows while she sleeps -
it's nice to know that someone at some point loved
you enough to sit by you in the middle of the
night and rub your tiny back, or rock you in
the chair while battling pneumonia – or alternating
all night in a sort of medical vigil to save your
tiny soul from pre-mature extinction. I suppose
most of us do become individually extinct after
death. Regardless of what comes next – something
or nothing. (Both are in the 12th round right
now) What is individualism if extinction is just
around the corner? Band-aids and Tylenol don't
work when the death of the soul is at stake.
But maybe it's a very mad material world and
Band-Aids are just as helpful as religion or
psychology. A purple cloud descends upon the
night like a giant down pillow inviting us to
rest our hypotropic souls upon its royal enamored
bands. Seems I've found my way into a dark
sound-proof tunnel in which I can't hear the
right music to provide me with a direction
worth risking. The only sounds permitted are
the cries and moans moans moans of my
small children (and the shrieks of my disgruntled
disappointed wife). Love is a record player
stuck on the same song through an inadvertent
scratch – repeating the same words over and over
and over – and each time you tell yourself the
next verse will come...the next verse will come.

4.15.09

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Journal 34 - Silver Streaks


I watch the shiny wet slug slovenly wriggle its
way across the brown carpeted floor – silver streaks
of mucus unlike silver linings stretch like poop
contrails behind the water fattened polka-dotted leech
cousin. It's hard to see a slug on a brown carpet -
silver lining aside. I'd like to watch the performance
of a slug under the cyclone of a hair dryer. Water
has a weakness. I have a hard time believing that
tomorrow will twist itself right like a cockroach
left on its back. My 'nature' images can be so
urban for a Southerner. Oh noes, I may lose
my passport. The tiny bubbles slide down my
red wine glass like stars dancing before your eyes
after being punched in the nose – there's probably a
correlation – a causally related correlation. Cause it
seems is a difficult thing – not so simple as every
effect has a cause. What's the cause of her
hitting that winning billiard shot in a fun haphazard
game of friendship? I know friends don't come
and go like laughter but they certainly come with
laughter. It's true as truth may be (Eliot) that
laughter is the best medicine, at least the best
placebo; the best mesmerizing triumph of our
conscious minds. Organization is a beautiful thing -
self-organization is quite miraculous. Two cups
of sausage and 3 eggs is not a bad breakfast. Who
ate the first egg? Psycho. Who threw the first
piece of raw meat on the evening winter fire
to be startled by the juicy aroma of beef sizzling
in that flame? That first bite must have been
like the first orgasm – no matter how overdone.
I feel my throat and my heart are conspiring to
overthrow and constrict on me like two small
pythons in a death match for the big game prize.
Good thing I'm fattening myself up for them – not
quite like a sluggish leech but less removed than
one would hope. Hope – again it smuggles itself in
through the slimy back doors of my drunken mind -
like a mutt insistent your smelly home is where his
sleeping blanket lives.

4.14.09

Monday, June 29, 2009

Journal 33 - Invested Teeth


The Easter Bunny is hopping like a white frog into
the cheery dreams of my 2-year old blond-haired
daughter. Blue eyes are odd in this family and
odd are the words of her chatter. Therapy is
around the corner, and at such a young age - loss
is an abstraction of Pez denied or peanut butter on
the spoon refused, her loss is a thing conjured up
by the by-gone wonders of yesteryear's panoply. Loss
is the smoke that rises through the vents and sucks
the oxygen from the room – seeping in through the
accidental igniting of kindlin' from a backyard
beer guzzling fiesta with queso and piñatas. I
want to strike the head of a made-up animal
and be rewarded with fruity candy rotting out my
well-paid-for teeth. I've invested years in my
teeth – 401K be damned, see my white smile. -
how toothy. I do want to get in trouble – I do
want to start a fight. I can twirl this pen
around my hand and fingers, and etch out these words
with knee-jerk scratched on well-lined paper but
thoughts impressed are chalky and heavy with
eyelids and pressured lungs. The day was a big
grin from the child in your 1-year old's class who
pulls down the pants of another student – not
knowing the lewd compulsion that is being
fondled. The teacher laughs it away each time -
until her pants are pulled down by a drunken
daring date – she realized they being so early; guns
are known a-priori. Along with ridicule and
gross infatuation. There are châteaux in the left
bank of Bordeaux that will knock the latent
buds off your salient immature tongue; oh so
cruel in their war for your soul and your wallet -
not unlike the up-scale hooker. Would I pay
to have sex, when it is free as long as one is
paying attention? I guess I pay for television
and internet and movies; sex is more than mere
entertainment – it is a mixing of bodily drippings
such that no two people have sex the same way
with anyone else;- survival is key; lust is life.

4.11.09

Friday, June 26, 2009

Journal 32 - Mold Cancer


I don't want cork in my belly, even if it's
cork from the Medoc region – corks are so invasive
and tasteless when they lurch into your throaty
world. My throat has diminished in confidence and
authority these recent springtime days – unfolding
like pollen-showered daisies with their nasty
mucus-generating cough. My throat feels like
mold cancer – if cancer could feel. My joints
snap but they don't hurt. My throat hurts
but doesn't snap – I think a good thing. The
room I sit in smells, reeks of sweaty gym
class clothes and socks mixed with a liberal does
of 2 year old vomit – very distinctive in its
milk-based stench. Each breath is like a
breath inhaled among the corpses of smelly
feet and bio-undegradeable waste kicking out
a post-mortem living in prime real-estate -
do not tread on the paths of the dead: ghosts
could be real even if I've never shook hands
with one. Ghosts are such close cousins to
the ancient fairy tales. Counterpacts or counter
points are always needed; all we need now
are the realists hacking away at the fine
chiseled beauty that is the Davíd. So cut
in his naked hard looks – Michelangelo knew
the ways of love, sought the ways of sweet
unrequited love – decisions can be such
surprises in their natural furtive state – whom
now I love is a mystery as old as Plato
and King David – older than the dead throbbing
lights that call to us from the ancient
night – penetrating this man's brush and that
woman's pen – asleep in deep thought the misfit
beckoned from his rocky path I grabbed his
arm and tried to prevent his physical in-
trusion to their manicured home – one more
death senseless countless death, since men
convinced Jesus and the Holy Spirit to sit back
and observe how wise man cures poverty and
homelessness.

4.10.09

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Journal 31 - Divin' Duck


“If the river was whiskey, you know I'd be a divin'
duck” - words indeed to live by – even sober in the
waiting room or your daughter's pediatric care; she's
young and resourceful, able to bound back like a pro-
fessional drug-less athlete. (assuming they exist) What
is it about the fertile dense gravity pulling nature of
Louisiana? Particularly New Orleans. Accidental
discipline can't explain in the gifted talent-drawing
pull of NO, nor can accidental materialism. The
blues is against the predictable strictures of the
white-walled brilliant scientists. I've seen the fly
snipped by the quick flicking tongue of the bouncing
frog. Predictable in its belly-filling encore; I want
to believe there is a significant difference between
the fly and between me. Something more than mere
complexity of disparate organized cells. The fly can
see so much more, or at least more angles. These
asexual amphibian egg-like eyes are spooky in their
unblinking assertiveness. But how annoying to lick
and clean them every so often with your crazy
spiked legs – quivering in the cold dark corner of
the room where once couples danced with great wide
smiles on their un-reluctant faces – where happy feet
skipped round the room in art-inebriated joy,
heads tossed back in silly ecstasy forgetting the
heavy-headed task of dilly-ing out appropriate
political-laced rhetoric; heads with happy toothy
smiles of sweet carved pumpkins the night before
Halloween (when the hapless teenagers will happily
destroy the succulent jack-o-lanterns with the swift
destructive force of a military-laced booth). So
damaging to teeth – whether made of vegetable or
calcium – the gaps are there for all to see and
snide or sneer or cry or laugh. Laughter it seems
is common these days, laughter manages our lost
days with deceptive ease. What seemed so silly
to us yesterday has resurrected its severed head
with adolescent defiance, not what one would expect
after so many years. OK. Time to squelch bruised
apple heads.

4.7.09

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Journal 30 - Free Willin' Cells


Was that the wind light in the remnants of
the bye-bye storm or the sound of the sheets
and the covers as she shifted positions in the
big bed – it’s all blurry to me as I stumble into
the bathroom, tripping over toddler stools in
the dark – life is what you make of it my friend.
(Silverado) The wind still nestles and nustles and
rubs elbows with the leaves in the spring trees –
brief cycles of memories of all the times the wind
in the trees meant something. Fill in the sordid
and topaz blanks of your own throat deteriorating
lives. It has been said (& quoted) that “you’ve been
dying since the day you were born.” It has a
certain ring to it. When is that real turning/
tipping point when the cells in your body stop
predominately growing but predominately wither
away, losing their moisture and drying up like
along mocked toyed-with snail, homeless in its
thirsty quest for a silver lining that is real and
meaningful. I sometimes (e.g., now) wonder if my
life is but a cardboard box of cheap wine –
popular among the sweet unrefined undisciplined
mediocre yet beautiful teary indisposable and won-
derfully unintellectual keepers of the light that
actually reflects a soul peaking out of its leathery
shell like an ancient bird in the Galapagos Islds.
The evolution of a nose – who knew it would
mean so much? Our cells are free if we are free –
but I repeat myself. they may be free but
apparently doesn’t mean bright. A pensieve would
be cool to have. Or a direction – velocity is
a bit overrated when it comes to human to
human interaction, or interface as the cold
scientific philosopher would have it. I swear at
times the wind sounds like some giant, or a
supernatural being, is breathing in through the
big gap in her front teeth in a gasping – slow
lugubrious gasping –furtive harbinger of not very
delightful phantasies to come – nightmares in
the chimes and the trees and the bruising of knees.

4.6.09

Monday, June 22, 2009

Journal 29 - Duessa's Sister


Words were cotton swabs for my inebriated
brain – soaking up the drivelling drool and narrowing
the seeping thoughts until there was at least one
coherent idea. That was long ago – now the words the
broken letters tumble out of my head like pieces of
hurricane soaked scrabble puzzle pieces. Sometimes I
just say, Fuck it. Not as much in recent years – ironic
as it sounds. The toilet doesn’t sound so foreign to
the girl standing alone on the dance floor at her
last prom waving goodbye to her date as the
mascara drips down her cheeks in dirty ash-tray
rivulets like a melting vampire. Black streaks are
much cooler in thought than in practice. I’m all
black-nailed now; look at me – don’t you want
to see the beautiful yellow flower underneath if
only you wouldn’t judge me by my cover. Wait –
what’s the point now? I’ve seen the mirror
pecked away where nothing’s left but the plain
white boring next door neighbor thoughts and
plans – cosmetics is so overplayed. Cosmetics is
a rose garden over a bed of rattlesnakes. I
wonder where the biker cries before he realizes
the other bikers cry too? It’s not unreasonable to
believe that crying is an overflowing of water for
the growth of the soul. I feel that marijuana
cannot do what my two-year old can do –
make me smile laugh and dance without regret
at artificiality later. Alcohol is a kiss on the
cheek or the pecker from Duessa’s lost sister –
daughters of Lethe. It’s not yet time to die –
it’s time to begin to remember and recall and
cast away such secret little spells conjured by
the li’l leprechaun of laughter we call a tall
glass of wine and beer. Thirty four years have passed
like a busted pipe under an overcharged land-
locked dirty apartment – spewing forth muddy
water with no-one to soak it up. Something
should happen in 33 years. Jesus re-defined
humanity in that time. I haven’t defined myself
much less re-define it, or allow a healthy roundabout.

4.5.09

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Journal 28 - Streaked Mascara


The sky was streaked today with wet mascara
from the soot and shit dispersed from our lovely
fuel inefficient SUVs and trucks trolling along the
highway, which of course was built with its
own fair expenditure of waste. Waste is inevitable.
Ask Newton. Entropy likes to bite us in the ass –
especially when we try to subvert it to our own pleasures –
like the ID guys. It seems organization is not at
arms with entropy. We’ll see later. I need someone
to double-click on my heart or my soul or my
pecker – whatever they can to jump-start me like
an old ’72 Dodge – gaskets blown all over the
road. I sometimes wish I were colorful like the
variant creatures of the controversial kingdom –
say a red-shaled turtle or a dazzling prance of
the shameless bird family; lorikeet or peacock.
The Eyes of Argus are watching the way the wind
blows up the peacock’s skirt. I could be a shimmering
snake in alternating turquoise and green – red tossed
in for completeness. I know where the mad hatter lived –
along side the other mad women of the former years –
equality tends to attenuate sharpness and edges.
Perhaps that’s why women chose the opposite pole from
men – that is, men without penises. Or rationality.
The effortless weight of the wine bottle in the
over flowing bathtub has sent me to the toilet in
a spasm of 1 year old contractions – lost in my
own inability to control my movements I wallow
in my exhaust like a happy shiny child shitting
for the first time in the neighbor’s bathroom –
it’s all good over there. The physical act of writing
is stressful and cramping and enough to require
another drink to appease the revolt of my
addicted legs. I could be floating, floating down
the muddy Mississippi on a wooden raft
on my back, stretched out like a 2-D paper
cut out of Flat Stanley – absorbing the sun’s
twisted rays on my splotchy skin like a blistered
sponge. There go the white bones of Huck Finn,
smiling at Nigger Jim.


3.31.09

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Journal 27 - Mannequin Legs


Legs are so much more than practical automotive
muscles. Long tone curved tan beacons to sexual
desire so far removed from the everyday matter
of evolution of locomotion. And then there’s
the muscular toned ass at rest atop like a
bust on display of a beautiful pedestal by Rodin.
Round and inviting in its effortless in-your-face
‘sweetness.’ I digress. Deliciously. But a fine firm
ass can cover a multitude of stupidity. It’s
true but only partly sad. In any rate of exchange
a woman’s body is the same across any point in
time. I’ve heard of the Renaissance belly but
bring Michelangelo or Raphael here and tell me
the bulbous plump is sexier than Halle Berry or
Evangeline Lilly. I know these thoughts are reeking
with the stench and steam of shit sifting out
of the sewer on main street, or King Street –
outside the CHS Place Hotel, O but tall boots on
long white legs. Color of course is a secondary
attribute – accidental in its subjective interpretation.
Consider the nature of cheese. Injected with
color or aged to rust in its beautiful trio of
texture, smell and taste. Why must things I enjoy
be administered by the smug insecure snobs of
pseudo-intellectual egomaniacs? Wine, cheese, books,
music and cigars. I suppose I must be one myself –
if it walks, talks, looks and acts like a duck it is
(probably) not an anteater. I won’t lie when I say
that I can’t help but watch a thin fit calved woman
walk across the lobby with blonde hair and perfect
clothes with ‘fancy’ flip-flops - she is most likely
a mannequin in bed. But I still lustfully watch,
glue-eyed. It’s stupid really – the air-brushed throb
in magazine is as likely to mean something in my
dream engulfed life. Hemingway said to stop
writing before the well was dry – I should heed
his experience; these words are drivel and a bit
below a placeholder for my wannabe mediocre
existence. There are so many to blame. Unless
I’m honest. I have spiritual glaucoma.

3.28.09

Monday, June 15, 2009

Journal 26 - Death by Ether


I wrote on Facebook: lost in a gauze of soaked ether;
dissolved in poached decisions and precisions; yes – a
patient undone upon a table. I always associate the
word 'undone' with Isaiah 6:5 (KJV) – but this time it is
definitely the image of a body on the autopsy table.
Though unstitched would be better. Perhaps I do like
the double entendre of the Isaiah reference. The
passage is important. And obviously I've been reading
Eliot again. Of course 'undone' is associated with
him also now I think about it – via Dante – I had
not thought death had undone so many. Apparently
the world is on a crash course with constriction and
absorption into the supernovae of the Sun's future
outburst. Death by fire not water. The prophecy
should hold according to science. And we who walk
the accumulated dirt of our forefather's ashes and
shit, having oozed out of the chemical laden pond,
somehow aware of our meaningless plight through
the magic mysticism of quantum fluctuation and
simultaneous duplicity, only accidentally favored above
the cockroach crushed with a loud snapped back
under our booted feet, swarming under grand intellectual
edifices, that portend glory and worth in their fight
to control through religion or politics – all thoughts
thought before – you know there is nothing new under
the sun (except lust in the heart is adultery) – we
trample on our own meaning haunted history with
webbed feet and circumcised tails, marching
through our conscious history with a machete not a
scalpel – removing and swiping away anything im-
material. My friend and fellow cousin of the stuff
that composes our bodies – my friend the slow-moving
silver snot-trailing slug lifts his wet head to my
big toe and smiles. I douse him in salt and laugh.
What's the difference? It's all made up anyway.
Goodnight moth. Goodnight cricket. Goodnight daisy.
Goodnight monkey looking over the forest for a hazy
place to call home. Goodnight sweet dying sun. Have
hot fun in your long-last blast. Goodnight tree; goodnight
moon. We'll be together soon.


3.24.09

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Journal 25 - A Blue Ribbon Eunuch


The shadows crept along the wall and curled about
the shade of the inappropriate lamp for the brilliant
minds of yesteryear. Is it wrong that I just want
to toast a blue ribbon beer to a friend from the
other side of the proverbial pond? Each night sticks
like acid in the stomach or psilocybin in the shitty
shroom. It's hard to eyeball quantity in the round
purple-stalked shroom encased in a patty of
moist cow shit. Juice can be made for amateurs.
But sardonic laughter falls close to the tree when
someone who graduated to professional drug addict
has the opportunity to ridicule a future cell mate
(whether physical or mental) – puffing up his joint
and his head. I need to visit the sea and stick
my oval head underneath the heavy comforter of
the water and smile like a lover upon seeing his
beloved risen from the murky deeps. Murky deeps -
clichés can't escape my attention deficit mind -
I need it seems a pill to undo my mind's erratic
and debilitating behavior. I did not know pills
could re-do so many. My niece lists her pink
pacifier as her prized possession and guards it like
a gold diamond necklace – she is 7. It's okay though -
she lost her father before she could stand. Perhaps a
primary-colored pill could revert the proper path-
finding chemicals to the rainbow stream of
well-connected neurons and easy-firing synapses.
Ah, synapses, synaptic cleft – listen to me, I'm
so intelligent. Next I will dazzle you with words
like bereft and conducive. Or speak insipidly about
strings and worm holes. Electrons have free-will
they say – that is, if we have free will. They
can also be in two places at once though – we, not
so much. An army of errant electrons is driving my
material soul to the brink of a grand theological
realization – I just need to realize it. Insights
are like the no-seeums down South. I must have
been born with a skin oil of OFF for insights.
High idea productivity – just not good ones.
An intellectual eunuch.


3.23.09

Monday, June 8, 2009

Journal 24 - Yellow Crusted Sleepies

To think under the same light as the so-called
Keepers of the Ancient Light – to watch the
rising and changing of the same colorful moon
waltzing in the same exploding remnants in the
night sky, trying to recapture Beauty after her
desiccation by more erudite foes – it is indeed
difficult. Pound knew out the ways of words;
Eliot searched the torpid paths of grinding thought -
I am left to waddle in my still-born intellectual
infancy wiping the yellow crusted sleepies out of my
alien eyes. Translation of thought tempered or
sautéed with feeling into a well grown poem is
a job for someone else. Someone who knows
the intimate ingredients of his cabinet along with the
cabinets of other nationalities. Perhaps I should
resign myself to surfing or shrimping, even trapped
in front of the computer all day – with gusto.
Instead I am being quartered and split among
opposing realms of thought. Today it is theology
or the philosophy of religion – the life of a
pedestrian academic. Tomorrow it is the computer
programmer – lost in logic and flow-charts pacing
the carpeted concrete halls for the perfect 'algo.'
Then it will be the writer – abandoning all
attempts at survival and home and food for my
demanding family. Perhaps today I will learn a
language – Greek or French; C++ or Java?
My intellectual focus is blurred by indecision and
alcohol, as I pause for another sip of Marcus
James wine. Cheap and grape-y. A mind split
is mediocre and ambivalent – unable to surprise
and elevate itself to a new step on the ladder
of mindful growth. Plateaus are for the tourists.
I'm a tourist looking in on the ideas of the past
shivering in the cold – oblivious to the snow
and sun and breaths around me. Intellectual pres-
byopia is settling in upon my mind – calloused
and hardened with responsibilities and roofs and
air and gas and clothes [TV internet too] – I stare
at people with intoxicated souls crying - mon semblable.

3.22.09

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Scattered Gutters

       Variation on a familiar theme

And the sun stretched forth his orange-yellow
hand, and groomed the city streets, and
followed the country roads, and even scanned
the island retreats for the slender hand he so
longed to hold; and finding none of his
desired worth strolling through the day,
He reclined - to reflect on Cabernet, and
determined to assign his son the task;
the son, who with his father’s borrowed light
patrols the undeserted streets at night;

And through the dank alleyways of beer-glass broken gutters,
his pale arm crept softly over our simple heads, and
under concrete bridges and over cardboard beds,
in over-populated three-in-the-morning bars, and
theatres filled with song and dance and weeping bards -
he filtered through those sound awake and sleeping
to find the earthy hand his father now desired instead
of the emaciated sky;
but nothing here on earth - and nothing through the sea
could be gathered to compare
with her infinitely finite blue supply
of cloud-swept grace and star-borne flare.

Wilted Grapes

Often upon the wilted rose, I
hang toward earth and swing and sway,
fold my arms in feigned irreverence,
furtively murmuring prayers I know;

So soon it seems our lives unfold
So soon we see in doubtful reverence;
We chomp on this our undernourished day,
pleading for just one quiet afternoon.

Heavy with the weight of foot-pressed grape -
We glare blood-eyed and thoughtless yelp
Of every unsuppressed, disreputable tale
On which we squint and contemplate

Ourselves, our world and our soul-isle;
Alone and beached, our stare dead-eyed
sucking air like a spectacular washed-up whale:
Between each breath our secret prayer to die.

Our world is clinched between the structured
And the free; both giddy and forlorn.
I have nibbled the imprecatory psalm
Tossed and thrown, smiling and wave-worn.

Wood Chimes

It's all too complicated, or complex
I never know which or what or why;
Is that the Oak Leaf shouting the words
Or the 5-year sleepless nights down

South, thick wet hot; thirsty for some
No, not water; nothing too reasonable -
Red red wine should slow the neural effects,
Until words drop like drool from numb lips.

What was it I said before she departed
From the televised speech and touched upon
A note Battle herself could all but will
Into her voice; What? Was that a broken noise

Of shattered panes of glass? It happens.
Shit happens. So comforting; I now can sleep.
I now can collapse into a deep wine-cooler
sleep, waking to the slobber on my sheet.

I mentioned it was all my fault? All I know
Is much to confess. I mean; didn't I just
Pass the church's test? It was bearable.
I bet the church don't know what now is best.

McDonald's or Stouffer's? I've seen my share
Of two-year old's celluloid fat scrunched up like
A hair-squiggy from 1988. What? You watch
TV? Don't you know your soul will surely die?

Single vision would be nice to have. I allow
Double. It's the least I could do for me
or for you. It is the very least to not dry-heave
Awakened to another sweat-toothed August day.

Now is the time for all men to stop, to hear.
(Ah, yes, I know; now is the time for women too)
We've had our share of dark European beer.
We've heard the Ballads; we know what's new -

We stood like Harps; we followed our minds
Left only with mirrors and old wood chimes...
I feel drawn back to loaves of flat bread,
Drawn from the stains of my tossed hotel bed

Journal 23 - Cute Dichotomies

The soaked wind was a falsetto as it stormed down
the cute little street with children's push toys
abandoned in mechanical yards. Manicured yards
are okay in their clean lego-land look. There is a
poor standard where manicured is uppity but un-
manicured is lazy and dirty. I'll settle for being
whatever they label me. I have no time for their
projections and wish-fulfillment atrophies. The solution
to Beauty and Love eludes me. And yet I hear Phish
with Slave to the Traffic Light and I know that the
mistress Beauty is resting with a full soul tonight.
Two opposing realms of faulty lore? Perhaps this
cute dichotomy is resisting a sensible resolution.
Both could be constructed as the yin to the other's
yang. But I'm still a loving slave to the Slave of
a Traffic light. My toes scrunch in my attempt
to close the sonnet. No more sonnets. They aren't
dead except when I try to complete one. Harry
Hood could do a better job. Sometimes I regret
not being a poet. Perhaps.... the ending to the multi-
tudinous endings to the effervescent Perhaps is an
arm grasping dream – the ending could be trite in its
accusations of an improper environment or praising
in its selective favorable reminiscing of singular moments
where Beauty showed herself behind Love's flamboyant
gyrations. Excuses are like assholes, or something like
that. My back hurts and my wine glass is empty and
purple-streaked – like my dry lips. I'm not sure it's obvious
but I have nothing to say. Yeah, it's probably pretty
obvious. The drool leaks out of my drunken mouth like
the thick slobber of my teething two year old (18-mo).
I wear, or should, a surgeon's mask to collect the
refuse of my wet mouth. Each micro-second that
passes I become geometrically more stupid. I blame
T.V. - but the wine may be more culpable – I
of course am innocent. I could be a sample in a jar.
Discarded and left as an exhibit in a court house
somewhere as a sobering example of how not to spend
one's lonely days – use '93 gas, not '87. It matters.

3.21.09

Friday, June 5, 2009

Journal 22 – Lazy Rivers and Morning Ghosts

Morning film is blurry on sleep-sodden bleary eyes.
This sentence repeats and rolls around my soft
morning skull – vainly trying to raise itself to some
stylistic pleasure. Gone are the days of Shakespeare.
Beethoven stole the show and used up all the cognizant
available yarn. But there are others. Pound, Eliot, Joyce,
Rilke, Auden, Cummings, Dickenson. Dylan – Zimmerman
that is – surpasses them all – after Shakespeare and
Beethoven that is. Fear not – Dante has his place of
exaltation. Arnaut too. I admit I'm a bitch of Pound &
Eliot. The moon hangs like a ball of cotton candy
in the early evening. An illusion I am surely
told. It still smells like cotton candy or the dying
electric blue of a short lamp post in 1938. Keats didn't
return any yarn to the spool you know. Dying young is
not a mulligan or do-over. Kovacevich is close I think
to Beethoven re-incarnated as a performer of his dead
ghost works. Ghosts are such petty silly stuff these
enlightened days. I once was told by such an enlightened
man his belief in ghosts was acutely pre-empted by his
disbelief in other wonder-filled things and beings entailed
by belief in minor beings as ghosts that to believe would
surely be intellectual suicide. Would I were enlightened.
Lazy as an inner tube on a lazy river on the other side
of the magic kingdom life would flow like an
effervescent dream where beer and wine and cheese
are offered each pass by the arithmetically distant
starting point. Oh so good. Lazy irreverent rivers
are a thing of the present pounding and trilling of the
black and white keys of the time-blasted keyboard
of Beethoven – strong and practised. The performer
is everything. Anxiety about our flailing economy and
waffling angry seat of the pants leadership should have
me tossing in bed like a goldfish dropped from the
Wal-Mart bag on the way to the car – but instead of
nutrient rich water I have the soul-swathing rich elements
of Yeungling and Jim Beam to lay me down to forgetful sleep.

3.19.09

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Journal 21 - Delivery Precision

I feel like a drawing or painting painted by
a pointillist - like Seurat. Each distinctive point
independent of any yet dependant on the rest.
Connections that seem obvious at a distance but upon
close inspection reveal a separation that contributes
to the belief in the disconnected but congenial
world. Words look so foreign sometimes – error
or world – outcasts in their hand motions for
acceptance. Now is the time to engulf myself with
tales of death. No deal. My heart, my physical
mechanical blood pumping heart is an erratic
attention wanting starlet – bulging in its pericardium
sheath with knight-like pounding. Its delivery
precision is diminishing in this corporate milieu
of disclosure. Short term memory loss is invading
my soul. The verb that predicates the subject is
lost in translation from my brain to my talon-
scratching pen. Losses are not always gains. Tonight
at 11 – reconstructed body parts for sale at a
local church – get your salvationed cells en
mass with a voucher for your immaterial – mas
importante – self, just in case. Conche su madre.
Words to be killed by. But so meaningless to my
English stricken tongue. Would I were a synthetic
language sponge – absorbing each tongue and dialect
like Brawny absorbs liquid stains. A quicker language
picker upper. My ego is too reflective to be a
genuine writer – characters elude me like the
dance of the basilisk or the brief flash of lightening –
fascinating but beyond my grasp and control. I
suffer from egomania with late onset tachycardia.
Racing to the finish line of death’s dream kingdom
or death’s other kingdom I know not for certain –
is that a jertain in my curtain? Words are fun to
play with but more pejorative when life is in the
formula. My position has declined in recent
years – it is not concerting; it is a mismatch of
desire and ability; drive and impetus; the catalyst
of poverty has not made itself fully known. I cry
at night.

3.18.09

Monday, May 25, 2009

Journal 20 - Picturesque Garden

The world is such a picturesque place with its
on-cue frowns and thumbs-up. Smiles are the samurai
swords of our correct century. I hear the clock
tick – tick tock tick tock – loudly while it always
obediently measures out each indifferent second to
our wannabe rebel lives. The flush of the toilet
whisks me back to swirling reality. The pope
himself must turn and flush the toilet of his
eminent refuse. What was it like in the 1st Century
of our Lord? Or in the garden for that matter.
The real first century. Did the turd falling from Eve's
beautiful ass smell and reek like 2 day old chitlins
in the dead heat of a Southern summer? Were
the movements of Adam noticeable to the beasts
he named just days before? It's late in the
toxic corners of my shrivelling mind. Well, brain.
Is there a difference? I once knew there was.
Dennet tells a different story. One filled with
emotionless objectivity. Except for those times the
objectivity eluded the ambitious eyes of the young
scientist with his career on the line and his
raise in the interpretation of the ancient cell
residing in his drying Petri dish; Kuhn was
wrong but not that wrong. Revolutions are difficult
to pull off without personal damage. Even Jesus
and Mohammed couldn't escape the leftover doubt
and disbelief of their soon-to-be-obsolescent
fathers. We are trying to erase such accidents from
the collective memory of our once-again correct
culture – not even the primal miracle of wine
can save the worker from his work. Our minds
are sedated with the waves of the television –
please let's all get high and wander the streets
in child-like wonder – grasping anew the mystery
of grass and stars and moon-lit beetles on the
concrete walkway. Spider webs shine in the moon-
light if you manage to cock your head right, perfect
in their patient craft. TV is the Kevorkian of our
prosaic world – pestiferous in its grasp on the dying
consciousness of the next generation – an incubator for
the written off soul – dried teats of dreamy apathy.

3.17.09

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Government

The air is thick with automotive farts
My eyes burn with the sewered scent;
The television warns our dimes are parched –
My pocket book weighs less than rent

Sulphur isn't so bad with the proper guard,
Tomorrow the leaves will die and fall
Sautéed and golden: a perfect rosy park -
Removing the deer for the industrial mall

I watch the air move and feign its way
Through dark clouds of labour-laden breath;
Mockingbirds, robins heave and sigh –
Songs deprecated for a small swallow's death:

O I miss the sheared green grass –
Blue skies have mated with epic adultery;
Oil is brandished on our helpless lives
Imputed for our swollen Uncle's perjury

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Restaurant Writing

He walked into the narrow restaurant with a green satchel strapped on his shoulder wearing round dark-rimmed glasses that certainly made him look intelligent with his suede sports coat on. He attracted the quick eyes of those around him when he pulled a small notebook out of the green satchel and began to write in slow spurts – looking up and around periodically as though drawing the scenery with a journalist's eye. The waiter brought him a bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône and poured a bit into a small table glass. He nodded and thanked the waiter and took a drink of the wine before continuing his writing. He felt that he was getting along well when the door opened and he saw his friend A------ enter the café. He sighed quietly then smiled and closed the book.


12.16.03

Slow Whispers

I listen each night in bed
for whispers; whispers of a home
absent of the closed-eyed headache
of my own. My wife is good
at curtaining the shadows of
our world our worries our wisdomless
spending of our waif-like souls.
My children smile so sweetly, and
laugh so greatly when I implode.
They all make my sad world explode
with a circling sense of slightly sober
tinkering. It is not fair, the whispers
knocking at my rain-rusted door.

I ache still surrounded by such playful
drippings of concern. It is not known why
we stare outside our warm busy home,
drawn toward the whispers rapping at
our window over cold November snow.
It seems there is a land of effervescent
slowness. A land where snow and rain and
wind consort to perform a languid trio of
imperishable desire for this irreconcilable
earth. A land where laughter and forgetting
teach us how to remember each slumberous
mediocre inch-by-inch silly day.

10.16.08

Journal 19 – Talons and Vicadin

If the heart only has so many beats I hope
I have the heart of a camel; though I think
I may have the heart of a jackrabbit. Though
it's said rabbits are good at something else. That
may be up for debate in my case; or not. The
cyan evening diminishes in glory when the new
moon rises to meet the dark night of the woods –
where great horned owls talon people mindlessly
wondering in pretence of fat-lopping exercise. As
can be seen my pen died and had to be replaced by
one less refined. Perhaps there can be a rebirth,
though hopefully not by flame. My heart has
converted but not in the religious sense though I
would it were. It just now sucks the blood in and
spits it back out correctly, without the wild erratic
gyrations it fell back o. But my legs still twitch and
ache from their abstinence. Abstinence makes my
heart grow fonder, or calmer. But it makes my thighs
and calves feel like they have dead tissue – allegedly
a painful thing. Vicadin is here to save the day. My
voice is out with the moles in the ground tonight;
recalcitrant in its adjustment to the new altered state
of being. Things are different when sober. Lots of
crazy shit out there. Pathetic is the sound of the
words reverberating in my hollow skull like a
million pinballs ricocheting off themselves in
shattered confusion. A vision in words would be nice,
reaching for the tree of style and plucking a
leafy branch or two would be just like the
derivative hack I am. Will my thoughts congeal
into thought one day – one coherent stable and
developed thought? Instead of the jumbled
third world mediocre drivel that drips from this
pen like drool from a slow 18-month old with
no teeth. They should have come in by now.
What's the word for longer than latent? That's
right – there is none – it's grasping at dandelions
in the wind. Wolfgang glares down at me with his
prodigious condescending eyes. Einstein stares back
with his pool-black eyes.

3.10.09

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Journal 18 - Sangiovese and Nietzsche

My heart still beats to the sound of its own
drum; literally it manically pounds inside my
chest – quite visible to any eye. It was a mistake
to take the Sangiovese. The cowslips and the
purple bowers are diminished with their lost voice –
Romanticism is such naïveté. Why mark a word up
so – the Romans weren't so cruel. Why must I
have a large appetite and a weak heart? It shouldn't
fail me but it could. It is troubled like a foster
orphaned girl exasperated with the cat-calls of her next-
door friends. Friends is such a tossed about word;
like love. If English could be Greek. Phi and Theta share
so much and are so different. Nothing to see here, pass
along. I glance at the bikinis bathing in the sun at
the Food & Wine Festival – there should be a law about
who can and can't wear bikinis. And those who can –
must! Sidewalks are ambiguous in their unclaimed owner-
ship. I mow the grass on the other side though. Smells
good however abused in poems and others. Bent grass
tells lots of stories and betrays many stow-aways. An
eyelash looks a bit like some expensive bent grass –
the kind people sit in bars and listen to experts,
inaudible experts, pontificate about. Philosophers
are no longer real – having taken up comedy or
cheese. Wittgenstein did close the book on philo-
sophy; so many still don't want to believe. They're
good historians of 19th century problems and 20th
century solutions. Correspondence is not coherent;
yet coherence is abstract. Math is tautological yet
dictates truth. I know, math is more than mere
tautology – at least so say the mathematicians.
Empiricism and Rationalism are either circular or
self-contradictory. Leaving us with nothing. Nietzsche
took a baseball bat to the head and laughed his
big German laugh. Was Berkeley crazy? (Yes!)
But there is no real answer outside of God – and
yes, which God matters. God is like the unknown
uncle who has been following your life paying for every-
thing and remaining in the dark – receiving no credit
when the police reluctantly release you from prison.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Journal 17 – Greasy Reflections

My heart has turned against me and now
pants while beating to a ditty of Schoenberg.
I taste metal in my mouth and my breath
stinks when I yawn; waves of heat and
dizziness proceed across my oxygen-thirsty
veins while my arteries cry for a little more
thickness and air. My eyes are either tired
or bleary like someone just punched in the nose
for laughing at his girlfriend's scabby haircut. In
each day is enough time to do all the things that
uplift the soul – produce a painting, wander a
museum or a few acres of trees in autumn with
living creeks and pregnant ponds – write a poem
or catch a fish – read Shakespeare or track a
buffalo over green plains in Wyoming – stand
at the head of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls
and try with all your strength to not raise
your arms to your side, smile the smile of a
martyr in plain sight of heaven and jump into
the beauty. Death by Beauty isn't the worst way
to enter the kingdom of death's dream kingdom. I
often think I am ready for death to visit me
when I can no longer see the beauty in a
rainy day, though children ameliorate the tendency,
as the poet says, My three year old's red coat hangs
on her door screaming No. But still the threat is
there – you're either that person or not; maybe the
categories are the same, populated the same, as Weak
and Strong. When I do see death out of the corner
of my eye glaring with elongated white eyes I
shudder in cold fear – suddenly the blinking cursor
on my monitor or my boss's blather or my
life's waste doesn't weigh so heavily. The greasy
reflection of the pine tree in the puddle of water
behind the benches at the park looks like a portal
to a world I don't want to leave behind. My
daughter's hair, out-stretched while swinging pulls me in,
while my son's laughing teeth in his sweet mother's
cuddling arms set me down like a duck on the feeding pond.


3.7.09

Monday, May 18, 2009

Der Mond Naturlich



And though your smile is hidden in a stare,
    cloistered near a chastised grin –
    seductive – knowing I will never win
your treasured hand from his inconstant care:
fleeing like a vulture whenever he is there –
    trapped inside my nourished sin,
    I pray you would with warmth begin
to steal my vagrant eyes; steal his devilish glare,
and escort me to some strange esoteric ride
    where women, bathed in sunlight’s close embrace
    wisp and moan each other’s withered face:
and I, with you – and you alone along my side
    will naught but smile at their unlucky plight –
    content to have you constant in my sight.


From 2001-ish.

Foreign Streets



In foreign streets of drunken lore
I sigh; and sigh a little more...
Struck like William in his final draw
Finished like some Cretaceous dinosaur
And left to decay like any worn-out, legendary
animal will do; to be replaced
by some more adapted carnivore;
Into the ground my withered carcass goes
on unclipped fingers and unclean toes
like some forgotten outlaw of 1888:
into the dusty ground must I lie and sleep:
stuffed inside my grave - sullen and strait:
forgetting how to weep;

Upstairs, the bed it creaks and moans -
like my late grandfather, it wisely groans
for more of what it lacks:
Women's ripe and fruitful tongues - that
follow in tempestuous cracks
of sensuous shrieks and cantankerous tones:

supplying dreams for drunken splendor
and endless nightmares with innocent, tender
farewells and young forget-me-nots...
(hearts that swell and minds that hinder)
lusty seductive plots
thread with indecisive pleas
of lovely, playful, sultry kisses
upon her water-laden eyes -
with tears and tissue and blushing lies
in a dream she silently wishes...

that we would wake without good-byes


From 1997-ish.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Journal 16 – Entropy and Something Else

I was told the large rising moon is an illusion; the
brain is fit for filling in gaps. I have many gaps
in my liquid grey brain – could they be filled by its
three dimensional cameras to instill a bit more
consistency to this well developed post-everything
world we've stumbled and tripped our way into?
I don't think ducks quack any more than I think
rhinoceroses snort; lorikeets flutter in bright
wet green kaleidoscopes of light licking the sweet
nectar from the clear plastic container – oblivious to
the toothy joy bequeathed to the tiny placeholders
of future lawyers and executives. Placeholder
sounds like an objective insincere pejorative insult
to our carpe diem children. It is. Entropy lasts
for a lifetime but disorder is a subjective flash in
the pond. My marrow is at wallowing ease with the
cheap wine siphoned in from the drab cardboard
carton on the floor. I asked for a leather wine-
skin but cardboard is so 21st century. Indeed
death is drunk and angry around the corner waiting
with a silver blade in hand – unsure of time and
space but aware the frayed yarn is nearly spent.
Death is like a dream before the big track meet. It
was only a dream; won't happen to me. Death is
slow and calculating, having its way with us from
the day of our entropied birth. Disorder is subtle in
its clever deception. More more more my bones call
to my cortex for its inebriated cry for more intoxicating
injections of inhibition. Alliteration is a pitfall I
slip into like water running over a small ridge –
falling in inanimate bliss; or an old worn pair of
paint splattered blue jeans. Alcohol is a worm
eating away at my corporeal soul with tiny little
chipmunk teeth, anticipating the day I forget how to
spell 'I'. Certainly a day to be remorseful about.
Worms make me shit and puke. So does mescaline
but one is preferred over the other. My mind interprets
'one more drink' the way my 2-year old interprets
'one more story' – one more then one more then
one more – ad infinitum. It's OK though; just one more…

3.6.09

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Journal 15 – Elections and WASPs

Laughter bounces down the hall with the pictures
arranged in chronological procession, filled with teeth
and snow and leaves and swings and fences. Our
fences plunge themselves into the dry earth with
wry sinister smirks of demarcation. Election day
is the most pretentious day of the year. Lines
formed of the dead, the quiet dead in the year –
filled days, placeholders when politics bubbles to
the surface, broaching the temperate topic of
PC conversation – hoping to remain quiet so as not
to betray their own inherited ignorance as to what
the current conditions and proposed solutions are;
their party vote is what counts. Silent bud deadly.
I've seen the cousin to the viper coiled around
itself next to a clear plastic bag of rabbit food –
silently waiting for its young springing prey. I
could be prey. Though I've marinated too long in
wine and bourbon – a brown purple glaze for the
diner drifter – perfect for the exasperated and bored.
Ennui enticed Baudelaire – I find flowers quite
charming in their ubiquitous ability to bring candid
smiles to the sullen faces of this hindsight generation
of well-wishers. Well the mistakes that I've made;
they do sometimes bother me. If I could only show
you how I feel – you would then say to me –
hey hey don't bother me, you and I are the drastic
terrific same – same as the Nazi bellowing for the next
twitching death; same as the fish-flopping death of
one who puts his head in a plastic bag – what a
disciplined way to depart. The ivory of my skin is
said to say so much. The chocolate of hers is
off limits. There is no double standard except with
WASPs. We bear the weight of the world's ills
on our flogged shoulders – beaten and spat
upon. We still look up with incredulous tear-filled
eyes asking Why. Such a deprecated question. We
should recognize our obsoleteness with wide white
eyes – shameless and vesseled in our attempt to
adapt like a 4-chambered heart in the Palaeozoic age.
Disconfigured.

3.4.09

Friday, May 15, 2009

Journal 14 – Sin...pretty much

Sin once dictated the behavior of my young
fearful self. Sin crept in dark corners where cob-
webs sat, where rats – wet stench laced rats –
wobbled along; sin left numbers on bathroom doors
needing friends and wonderful times; sin walked
out the back door of someone's clean house carrying
her entertainment center in the palm of his
hand. Sin is a smiling face on a public bus –
laughing at the call being made to your wife at this
moment to release your funds or sacrifice your
son's life. Sin was once so clear to me – echoing the
low bass of Paul's deep voice – concrete and
physical in its subtle manifestations. Abstraction
and indirection is difficult but necessary to relieve
oneself of any responsibility. Sin is a grown-up
with a pointed finger and shrilly voice squealing
that every pleasurable thing will bring death in
the afternoon. Sin is a drunk, drunk driving his
small children through the city to mid-day
practice of some uplifting art – football or piano.
Sin is throwing darts but missing the bulls-eye.
Sin is sleepy at 10 in the morning once awake
at 4 in the morning. Sin sees church goers smile
on Sunday morning while cursing their children
on Sunday evening. Sin never cries foul –
unless it isn't. Sin is a bloody sheet. Sin is
the small gathering of vomit on each side of
your bed dirty from last night's womanizing in
Jim Beam's comfort. Sin is laughing heartily at
any discussion of the merits of sin. Sin is in
the mother or the father's reaction to the eternal
crying of his or her child. Sin is wandering the
streets at night with a wad full of money and a
pocket full of goods to sell to all the drooling addicts.
It seems that sin is everywhere and all around
us – what then is it really? How does sin mean
something in a sinful world with nothing to contrast
with it? Unless the stories of Jesus in the Bible
are true; but they just say – He was without sin.

3.2.09

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Journal 13 – Scepticism and Hope

I suppose research is tedious yet irresistible in
its call, like whole fish flounder with crusted
crab meat – bony and overwhelming. When will
research discover hope – real hope in the brown
toothy smile of a basketball bellied African living each
day in hope the new American Junior League funded
business will perpetuate and stimulate her fly swarmed
economy and territory out of its great drastic depression.
I've seen the excitement in the eyes of wealthy
bystanders feeling the call to support of a good
cause – unable, well unwilling, to act themselves,
they flood non-profit organizations with their semi-
hard earned money. They1 can't be bad. Sure we can't
know their expenditure or balance sheet, but to
doubt all they do is just stupid right? Right?
No-one would ever do that. (Ebbers, Madoff, Stanford
others...) Hope is the bread winner of so
many starving Africans that our faculties are
almost unnecessary. HA. With so many foundations
why are we still in such a terrible wretched mess?
Not enough folks like the good Birminghamanians?
I'm being obstinate and ignorant. Of course we're
stimulating their economy. Of course without us
their life would be utter shit – as ours is so
wonderful and fulfilled2. Each day the skin stretches
tauter against my brittle jaw bones until it
flaps in the lightest wind like in a G-force machine.
It's the grape of the Rhône valley. Our bonds are
easily broken and re-forged with that bastardization of
hope we wondrous Americans call practicality – or
pragmatism. Realist. That's where wisdom and
good behavior reigns. What did Nietzsche say
about the realists? Nothing good. Pragmatism is a
philosophical ground based on no more certainty
than its own assumptions – that what works is
right; just as reason is not based on anything but
its own assumptions – namely, reason. Lines with
circles arching backwards get me through my faint
struggle with the possibilities of time and accomplishments.


2.28.09


  1 The organizations.
  2 I realize there are lots of problems and holes in what I wrote above (and below). Snippets of arguments, like most of the other stuff written in this journal. I just thought in this case I would make it clear I don’t agree with everything I wrote. Remember this is a journal that I try to use as a ‘write whatever pops in your head as quickly as possible’ journal.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Discipline (Speaking of Knowledge)

Somewhere someone in some back-room
Of a pipe smoked sofa laden club
Said Appearances are all we'll ever see;
Appearances are all we'll ever groom –

Nibbling French bread and sipping warm tea,
Licking tobacco marinated lips
Doesn't surprise the children one bit –
Grown accustomed to such philosophy

Knowledge is a slippery, layered thing
Not found in some finger-printed book
On an oily shelf in a well-observed room;
It is an acquired taste, a third look

At letters, sweat and bloody rules;
Penetrated through calloused, hardened skin –
Sometimes learned in pedagogical schools
Sometimes found in accidental discipline

Appearances are all, she said; they're all
We'll ever know; all we'll ever see;
I asked in a most understated tone,
Whatever could a prime number be?

Journal 12 – Rainbows and Knowledge

Saturn raised his ringed head in defiance of nectar
dripping from Jupiter's last lick of the tongue
polishing off the last dish of ambrosia. Knowledge is
a tricky subtle elusive object. When do we know
we know that knowledge is elusive? When does
the yellow school bus really appropriate yellowness?
Inching along with misplaced keys I wonder if I
know my location at all. Is it ever consistent or
coherent? Does it correspond to the chatter I
receive through various wet channels? I know when
the fire is hot; I know when the road is turning. Do
I? I believe in the past I experienced a now faint
feeling of hot pain when grasping the blue of the
fire; I remember not crashing into that other
car thingy that looks like mine. They say crashes
can be deadly. We believe. Do we know? These
questions are simple and formulaic I know. What?
I know questions about knowledge are formulaic?
Knowledge is a shadow flashing in the corner of our
eye – brief enough to alert us to its presence
but fleeting enough to not sit still and be owned
or possessed. So we grasp at lightening and call
ourselves enlightened. How nice. There are so
many things we know except the foundation and
truth of knowledge. But ah I have God – the
great coordinator and linker. I know I'm sleepy
or I feel sleepy? Sleepy like a hound dog. Nodding
off is such a delicious treat. No knowledge but
words talking of no knowledge. Meaning? What
is meaning; what is what; what is is? What
happened to receptive reason? Drowned in a tired
Fibonacci sequence. Symbolic logic has no meaning
but great consequence. I turned the wet leaf
over in my hand and watched it stick like a
strip of scotch tape – yet colorful in its late autumn
death; science stands strong with raised sickle
in hand – slicing the beauty of the wet leaf on my
hand into the beauty of hydrogen oxygen and other
ostensive molecules – cold philosophy unweaves ten
thousand rainbows leaving us without a foundation
of knowledge.


2.27.09

Monday, May 11, 2009

Journal 11 - November Love

November is the saddest month, breeding glum gifts
out of the dead only to return them for nothing worse.
hope is like bypass surgery. I've bypassed many
opportunities and forays into a world where dreams
are apprehended by the divine, where the first
syllable of the sentence is a simple introduction to an
elegant development of grace and deliverance. Each night
the crickets stroke their spiky angled legs for my
aggravated soul. Moths can be interesting in their
cultured black/white camouflage. Very modern with
their simple adaptability. How quaint. Where is the
nearest Science journal to assuage my forlorn fears?
It's all good since it's all neither good nor bad
but just left to matter. Energy was the darling of
our forefathers. Matter was quite socially predictable –
Haeckel (not Hegel) danced the nature dance and spun
great tunes of philosophical blankets in the cold. I
remember the day my teeth shivered from the point of
the gun thrust in my young face in the convenience
store at night – Haeckel made it all better. Hope is
a worn out pair of blue jeans with little holes forming
around the knees and splayed at the bottom where
the heel of my boots grinds it into threads. Jeans
can be patched or replaced. A river still runs through
it – runs through the eroded yards of fun filled children's
dreams – runs through the city taking in bird-levelled
aircraft – runs through the water-carved canyons of
the water-stricken west – runs through country and
19th century wedding feasts and dances – runs
through our largest continent giving up its water to
overrun our banks where experienced natives smile
at their welcomed preparation – runs through the
songs and the fathers and sons and mothers and
daughters – the river runs through heaven and hell
absorbing everything in between, vomiting random
bits of swollen flesh. Love is hard like living with
rat extermination. The blood and fur isn't easy. Love is
hard like fat bellies that so want to be flat but without
the discipline and work. The ends – not the means.


2.25.09

Journal 10 – Presidents and Happiness

The dawn belched that morning though it may have
been the frogs or my wife. I didn't bother rolling
over to feel the cold side of the bed; my...



The dawn felt like brown sandals in Zaire
on July 4th – firecrackers flailing and cracking
around in mock celebration of a has-been
liberating country. Now soiled we wallow in the
sty of liquidation and timely bailouts with
Monopoly money. After dinner I walked
outside and belched as loud as I could at both
Presidents, at all Presidents. The office has
slowly deteriorated since breathed in by that
slave owning Jefferson. Where will Barack take
us? Is he a political belief? I sigh at the
breathless tycoons who manage our money from
their penthouses and corporate jets. I wish
I had a corporate jet; is that why I berate
them and disown them? Envy? I chipped my
tooth while eating ice-cream from a cheap
marble slab; drunk I sued the owner for
willful intent of personal harm as he never
tried to improve himself. I've found I
think in a piss poor way after many sips
of broad red wine -> or thin. A vanilla
flavored cigar only accentuates the happy
laden influence. Happiness is a fleeting
apparition of some laughing half-cocked
loony convinced there is something better
waiting on the other side of dreamless death.
Loonies aren't so bad this time of year.
Happiness is floating on the suds of dirty shit
flowing happily down the street or into the
tunnels that feed the beautiful harbor of our
holy city. I've felt the ending and fleeting
gestation of happiness. My neat drink washed
it away like the wasted toilet paper it is.
But there is the voice that sings the song in
the sparsely seated church on Sunday evening.

2.21.09

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Journal 9 - Broken

The road was long and the gravel splitting his
bare feet, dry in the July heat. Each pebble felt
like a burr in his toes, each fried step fired pain
signals to his waterless brain – fully aware of where
his bitter feet were leading. He cursed and flicked
his dry-sucked cigarette off to the side of the
road into the crisp leaves of the forest; that wasn't
his problem. The wind blew the last drag of smoke
into his eyes so he squinted and relaxed,
then kept walking and cursing. She left him with
his shorts and shirt but everything else she took.
As she drove away – with her friend driving, her in
the back seat, head turned – she didn't smile or
mock or even flip him the bird. A tear slid down
her cheek, leaving tiny cakes of mud with the dust
on her face, like a dirty rivulet. He watched her as she
drove away and watched her try to not wipe the
tear from her face. He turned his head and spat
on the ground and then watched her motionless
until he could no longer see her. He glanced up at
the whiteness of the sun, shook his head and
started his painful hot walk into town, tying
his shirt around his head and lighting his last
cigarette. There wasn't a cloud in the sky as
he walked.


2.15.09

Journal 8 – Dried Currents

The breath of the afternoon was gray but warm –
somehow transparent in the evening calm. Another
bridge before the day decays like simple plutonium –
whatever that is. Forgotten is what I see each day.
The bees are forgotten and the ants; the sycamore
tree is sliced to death when the fever comes to
town. Night night. The afternoon delays my thoughts
like a constipated woman in tight underwear. My
thoughts are dried and parched from the winter sleep in
heat and wine – dried up like a desert stream, no
currents to fire and connect ideas like webs. Spiders
have so much to teach about design and beauty – the
unapproachable kind.

2.11.09

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Beauty and Love

How many poets, who at their wits end,
Have raised their dizzy heads to a dead muse –
Hoping after hope's last breath to portend
Glory in their quest for an image to use
To compare Beauty's pleasure to Love's pain?
Learning rhymes and tales of lovers' rich store
Has left them more to learn and less to gain
Of how to blend two realms of faulty lore.
For Beauty finds pleasure in deceiving
The weak hearts of countless untrained men.
And Love, the fickle harlot, prizes weaving
Grand fated plans with an infernal grin.
    Undaunted by Love's sideways back dealing,
    I assault your beauty with words (un)appealing.

Journal 7 - Rancid Sleep and Ennui

The fall afternoon glow is forgetful in the twilight
of another day where penguins chatter like cocktail
parties pretending nothing is coming but the wakening
tides of tired eyes and scampering feet. The days are
long and tiresome with eyes glued together with
sleep that eludes the father and the daughter.
Why have mornings become torn with rancid smells
and stumbling feet; walking through hot milk and
dry coffee? Yawning never seems to accomplish
much, but stretching the skin over my jaws and
squinting my horrific eyes. Salad is nice on days
like this. Dawn lays down an orange kiss that
follows tempestuous little sisters to their sleep,
hollow and watches the teams of reindeer slip
drugs to each other waiting for their time in
the limelight. Nothing sacred when the world
is secular and no longer in need of the sacred –
crucified on the cross of selfish anonymity where
each religion is treated the same – with condescension
and faux tolerance. Religion was the opiate of the
masses. Now it's entertainment and psychology.
Ennui is the new god – praised for making it through
another day in a lonely disembowelled cold universe
where all that is is matter – not even understood by
the experts themselves. My back hurts but so what.
Teamsters carry the day, and shallow thoughts
of each Neanderthal descended person drop like
stones in the ocean, leaving ripples that betray
influence but lead nowhere. Lead me to these
shallow oceans and let us begin again with
first principles and unfold the layers of the
world until we find again the hand drawn work
of the divine smiling like a happy mother playing
peek-a-boo with her children. Always there even when
not seen, God is like a hangover hanging around each
torpid day reminding us of our previous misgivings
that is cured with living water only obtained from faith
and tribulation. When the night comes from passing
through to the other world what will I do? Will I smile,
yell, jump or piss my pants?

2.8.09

Friday, May 8, 2009

Journal 6 - Blood and Laughter

Blood is all around us. Seeping out into our nuptial
beds, standing in a bottle of fine red wine, covering
the names of books and the themes of our best songs;
it rests in the setting of the evening sun as it wipes
away the dreadful sins of another menstruating day – dry
scalps on covered hands. Blood is not haemoglobin or
plateletes. Writer's block is an African mask hanging
on the wall of a single broker, on the single wall
by itself. I don't want to write in women's
clothing depressed with the passing of our yellow
daze. Each tick before dawn I hear the wolves
moan on their personal cliffs a wailing mournful
tune to the bright dampened moon. The end of
the night is a sad time for them. And with
hanging eyelids heavy with last night's drink I
roll out of bed and put on some shorts. The
TV is barking at no one about new sales and lowest
prices. The days have ended that found ourselves
fat and jolly in our late afternoon happiness with
ice cream and watermelon keeping us occupied. Now
the time has come to eat with cornbread fingers and
gravyless biscuits while the water turns brown
in its chemical treatment plants failing with the
laughing economy. Laughter is a dream that fell apart
when the government tried to walk us to the tune of
freedom and protection. The dream has died with the
little pieces of teeth kicked in with a presidential
boot after offering his serpent wrapped hand. The
smile of the green serpent haunts me in my dreams
like an African dance of the dead. The dancing
should help the passage of time but the noon is
here. There is no more chance to kiss her now
than before. My breathing is heavy with wheezing
with the blood-dried baked snot and boogers in my
reddened nose. Everything is regurgitated from
yesterday's failures with the last ring of hope on
the teetering ladder falling over the emperor's mansion.
The sky is dark in the noontime meadows where
thunder is another word for day. A crying spell of
a tired and heartless earth.


2.6.09

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Journal 5 - Dishwasher Mice

I hear the dishwasher squeak like little mischievous
mice in plot to overturn their wet world. I
recall last night that I was shot with round lead
bullets, from a musket from 1865. It hurt, like
a minor heart attack or a bit of an ablation. It's
sad when mice sing songs in the dishwasher, songs
of a lonely heart broken with their little feet
made of cartilage and flappy skin. Smiling with
buck teeth doesn't endear them to my wife or
to me. They squeak. And scurry. Why scurry
if innocent? The days are ending when the dishes
are quiet in their hideaway rocking back and forth
knocking wine glasses off their high horse. There is
folly in the other room, and folly in this here room –
these words are scratched at, known to be meaningless
and filled with nothing. If nothing could be
logically analyzed where would we find the empty
conclusion? These little gifts of a broken down
prostituted muse have wormed their way into
some part of my head that I don't quite understand.
Could it be the Greek that I claim to study?
I'm cheating. Torn blue jeans are inevitable. Like
books on a rainy Sunday. Intemperate I crawl
back into the clothes I mocked yesterday on the drunk
passed out in his own urine behind the liquor store's
dumpster. Sleep could be sound. And silent. The little
man who watches her count the coupons on her new
shiny pocket book smiles to himself in some crooked
sly way – knowing things not known before.
Shiny little truths like ink on paper, discarded
with last year's hit movie. What was the
name? Yeah, that one. Where words are crammed
in people's mouths like cinnamon rolls gushy and
tasty but left with nothing but a false high
and lard. Foi gras is easier on my hand than
this writing. Need to slow down this fast writing
before my hand cramps into a masturbator's clutch.
How droll. Stop the coach.

2.5.09

Monday, May 4, 2009

Journal 4 - Orange Cliché

The night sky was an orange cliché where silly
men in standard manly boots strut sideways into
the gasping sunset – tired of their stubble and
hoping for another scene to capture the faux visionary
mind. He steps on the smoked cigarette and looks
into his splotchy horse’s blank eyes. Where are we
goin? he asks. Neigh of course is all the
splotched polka-dotted horse replies. Horse speak for
everything and nothing. He places his spit-laden
boot in the cracked stirrup and puts all his weight
into it – just to aggravate. The horse bucks –
2 can play at that game. Again he tries to
make the horse his servant – and the horse knows
who’s stronger. Flat on his sun burned back he
smiles at the placid horse with his stupid little eyes
pretending to know something. The horse almost runs
off to the next town, but doesn’t. He doesn’t
know the way.

2.3.09

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Journal 3 - Antiquated Aphorisms

Evening in the antiquated village with the mouths
pouring forth old-timey aphorisms in the light
of another foster program where the news is carried
from house to house in little sealed envelopes
licked with wicked tongues that no longer re-
verberate the sordid reality breathed by
the whole clan. The day passes by like dirty
dishes left in the grimy sink – intentionally
neglected. They will clean themselves we hope.
Hope is such an ancient concept – contorted with
human philosophies and world religions. Hope is
like a soap dish on the side of the toilet
where strangers wipe their dirt and mask
what little dignity they continue to lie to every-
one they still have. Why is hope no longer
found in books? Books have such great smiles
on their rigid cases. Since the time to come
to sleep the years have passed in obsequious
mercurial apathy.

1.29.09

Friday, May 1, 2009

Journal 2 - God's Damp Moon

The moon was cold damp and sad in its wide
eyed following of happy sounds in each other’s
ear. No-one could believe the voices in the coffin
where he lay dead for three whole minutes....in
a coffin? Why not on the slab of concrete,
where they all die cold and snuffed out like
Eliot’s match flame. The universe has nothing
against the world – nothing but its own selfish
meme to continue living the lie that nothing
really matters. What would matter if all
the world was matter? I find the writing of
quick words easy but no good. I find the shower
the happiest part of the day until dreary sleep
when who knows what will waken us from that
death portent. A cloud in the sky could be
the fluffy head of an elephant or the nasty
lips of a pontoon boat. Maybe the elves left on
purpose and intentionally to rid us of our sickening
dependence. It’s not so bad to depend. It’s crying
time for the children. What is there to cry
about – everything and nothing. When will I hear
God’s voice in the musical noise of the city?

1.28.09