Saturday, October 31, 2015

Journal XX - Banshees and Unrestrained Liberty

The clouds are falling out of the sky with the screams of
the banshee leading the wind. The screams don't scare me
at night behind the camellias. The wind though. It blows.
People don't believe in the banshee but they do demons.
It shouldn't surprise. The Bible talks about demons but not
banshees. Yeats does though. He was a believer. I'm a
believer. You are a believer. We are all believers. We
believe in rainbows but not in their meaning. We believe in
laughter but not in its medicine. We believe in beauty but
not that it's real. Colors aren't real, they say. Mental
constructs. Like the matrix. I have a mental construct of a
scientist being honest with the ancients. I have a mental
construct of a philosopher being open to religion. Storms
are distant and dark and beautiful and destructive, filled
with shades and gradations and heavy with the weight of
the earth, tough love for the growth and cleanliness of the
world. Sometimes I see animals in the sky. Trees like
people dancing a harvest dance, little pine arms turned
upward and sideways, swirling around in browns and reds
and greens and fifty shades of grey in between. I see a girl,
a beautiful blond-haired girl standing in fifty shades of grey.
Fifty beautiful shades of black and white and the half-light
of a charcoal morning. I want to take my eraser and wipe
away the words I said that made her stop twirling her hair
when we talked. Stop staring at me with dilated eyes.
I want to erase my eyes and my nose and my hairs, but
leave by big belly. My swelling belly reminds me that I am
in need of restraint. Unrestrained liberty is death to the
body and soul. Yes, give me unrestrained liberty and you
will give me death. My liberty is swallowing me, chewing
me like a bird being tossed about between various rocks
like in an alligators stomach - she stares and watches with
sympathetic eyes and a compassionate brow, while
laughing with her friends at my ridiculous confession from
the wet street, standing in the rain with a white shirt
plastered to my skin - no longer white. Her vintage round
sunglasses hang from her nose hovering over a smile that
says so much to anyone who has the ears to hear. I alas
am deaf to the incalcitrant sirenic songs of women. I am
deaf to the words coming out of her eyes and her smile,
her fingers and her hair. I am deaf even to the song of the
cardinal singing high in the bare tree in winter, snow
covering the land like a giant down comforter, soft and
silent and almost even warm looking. The cardinal sings a
song like something her eyes might sing if one knows the
way to look and listen. My left eye is empty. My right is
dying. I am trying to listen, to listen to the voices of my past
and my present to decipher my future. She hangs in the
balance. Any minute could mean bliss or torture,
depending on a language I don't speak or follow. The
language of eyes and brows and smiles and head tilts and
hair and leanings in and out. Crossed legs can say so
much.  I want to break the wind and push the clouds back
into the sky, stop the swelling of the rain in the streets. I
want to end the storm that has crashed into my life,
spinning me round and around, saturating my soul with its
uncertainty and lack of direction and predicability. The
storm in my soul can have been the work of Eros only. You
may know of him as Cupid. He isn't a sweet cherub. He's a
demonic asshole. Ready to drop you in the eye of the
hurricane and laugh at you as you are ripped apart while
stuffing his mouth with popcorn. What can calm a storm?
Who? There is a story I've heard about peace and
stillness. Peace. Still. Dreams that visit at night and vanish
before you can wake up with a realized smile of still peace.


3.22.2015

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Journal 84 - Gettier and the Knowledge of the Moon

I discovered the moon late in life, and late at night.
The red moon hanging over a swamp at night, hearing the
critters and the creatures singing in your imagination the
dissonant sounds of heir swampy minor songs, rough and
rhythmic in their passionate cries. The moon hangs there
reflected in the water still but for the moccasin slithering
through the water with a tongue tasting the air and the
swamp, the cottonmouth swimming side to side in the
redness of the rising moon, preyful and cocky as it
shifts its weight around in the starry night. Stars shine
through time but the snakes and the rut-less deer and the
other nocturnal creatures don't notice or acknowledge this
ancient miracles of mathematical models; they eat about
their business happily ignorant of any questions of art,
induction, knowledge, warrant, fundamentalism (whether
physics or Protestantism) or justified true belief. Or
justifiable true belief - or Gettier's knowledge of luck -
ignorance is bliss is not a negative insight - regardless
of a dissatisfied Socrates. Three pages of Gettier thus
confounded the philosophical world...of epistemology, and yet
how many happy people smile happily day to day and pool
to pool, knowing full well they are happy and that they
smile, the wet smile on their wet child's face as she
jumps into the pool in a solid cannonball, splashing all
the other kids with true and justified laughter, is a smile
spread across many thousands of people throughout the
blue marshy world - smiles known to be true and justified
despite Gettier's or Plantinga's attempts at falsifying or
affirming this ubiquitous sample of natural human
knowledge. But can we trace the source of this glad
expenditure of commonality, this common human nature -
can we trace it to God our ontological Father or the cold
mixture of chemicals, accidental in their appearance of
predictability and spontaneity. Civil Wars come and
go in word and song but each day we feel the
presence of those who gave their lives for their word
and those who see the Civil Wars as a metaphor for
ourselves - our relationships with each other and our
proclivity for conflict despite our oh-so-knowledgeable Age.


12.5.2012


Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Journal 83 - Sound of a Bloody Sunday

The moment in the evening when there is a general feeling
that everything is all right and good, when you smile at the
thoughts of the kids in the yard spraying each other with
green garden hoses is a June bug in November - a quiet
harbinger from heaven, fleeting except to those whose nose
she files into. My nose hurts only on some spectacular
rare occasions. These occasions of visits from heaven-
painful as other-worldly visits are apt to be - slip in under
my eyelids while my eyes rae back and forth with red
blood vessels swelling into scary rivulets of overflowing
panic, and they (those extra-terrestrial parakletes) blow back
the bloody waters, to my surprise, as angels and gods should
instill despair, right? My despair is my comfort and my
vice. My depression is a yellow wildflower in October-
beautiful and in days dead. I sometimes wonder if
depression is a sin or a blanket draped over a child at
night in december - shielding an onslaught of cold sickles
assaulting what is left bare in the openness of our over-
heating world. Contradictions are sometimes, it seems, all
we have to lead us to the hint, to the whisper, of the
share of truth - the sand(?) of shepherd's pie & fish & chips.
That which is fast is fast, and that which is slow, slow.
And in the end it is we who are fast and slow, not food.
A shaved head & glasses for some reason says disciplined
intelligence, but my stats say intelligence is common
but discipline a relic discovered by a swift spelunker.
The sound of a Bloody Sunday should mean so much
to the world but I think it's just the quaint refrain
of a familiar song. BTW - my pen rests when my thoughts
sink. Why do we have to swelter here on Earth in
constant question of that which is and that which
isn't, craving like a drug addict for God's response-
only to have more questions with the answers in the
Bible while walking in fear of the sweltering threat
of never-ending hell itself? Why is the sirenic call
of the Walking Dead so sirenic? Paul cried out with
a loud mega cry: I would that I had three years alone
with Jesus, Immanuel, He that which none greater could be
conceived - though no lesser excuse could be conceived.


11.11.12

Friday, August 7, 2015

Journal 82 - Dylan Understood Revolutions Per Minute


The cold rain slipped in like a thief in the night to save
us from the perdition of summer. It is cold and wet and
the leaves glisten in the fallen moonlight and Ik now no
deeper thought. My eyes are bothered by this slippery beauty,
burning in the windy night, crying reluctant tears at all those
who have fallen in this beautiful wet world, like boxers struggling
in the last round of their last fight; like matriarchs who lie
to dance and shuffle their feet with a wonderfully wrinkled
smile and fought for twinkle in her wizened eyes, who passes through
this wet world with hymns and hugs and prayers and squeezing
hands. A hand squeezed can make the venom in a grin grown
sweet like a six year old at her birthday party when that one
certain person arrives ful of warmth and smiling laughter
conquers all anxiety. Red wine is so good outside at night in
the cold. Cold is a state of being and my being tells me I'm
cold. I see the lights strung around the small white fence
around my deck reflected in a semi-circle in my wine glass
like the lights on a runway (were they in a semi-circle) or the
pegs of guitar strings on a giant 27-string guitar; or the
illuminated connectors of a memory board stick, maybe
SODIMM;- and it is good. It is good to see no matter how
or what the method or what the content, no matter the
comparison - it is good to be aware. It is easy to judge and to
correct but to understand is a gift of God. To drink is not
to understand. But still Dylan understood. Life is a record player
and most of us are on the wrong speed, the wrong revolutions
per minutes - we are too fast. Thirty-three is good. Life is a
slow revolution of punctuated equilibrium that settles at the
bottom of someone's dirty ocean. Life is cycled seasons of laughter.
Life is learning ephemeral contemporary thoughts of you and me
and technology too, knowing too late these thoughts are
dark like a whore who has a trust fund in 3 banks. Life is
a song full of warmth and heartache on a record with a
scratch that keeps repeating itself over and over, always finding
a new audience with the birth of another credulous generation
who finds itself enlightened with the spirit of man. A child's
laugh is caulk for the scratches and cracks in this broken
world. The world may be a teetering pivot in a silent cold
vacuum but I hear the music in the dark spheres and i
feel the heat in the distant emptiness of our blank verse.


10.8.12

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Journal 81 - Time Wraps Mathematical Models

Time wraps around my space the way a snake
wraps around a wet rat, wriggling but unable to
scream. Soon the clouds bellow with their water world
and grimace in anger, dropping their wet weight down
upon our hairy heads. I raise my head and poke out
my tongue to taste the moisture and absorb it into my
overheated self, hoping it would surge me like brown
bourbon on labor day...or any day really. Water means so
much to our hot world. My kids and I dance in the
rain and the rain puddles in the gutters in the street
stomping on time like a child's beach ball, waiting for it
to explode and sing its exhausted dilated tune for the
leftover observers in this virtually unobserved world of
ontologically suspicious elements - but who doubts explanatory
models really but the foolish? I do. That's who do. I
laugh at the beryon who briefly appears and then exits
like an actor who enters before her cue. Time is brief but
it's matter in the end, wrapped in a warped singular
nothing that pops in and out of existence in reported
symmetry - nothing being re-defined as something becoming
nothing close to being. I see the stars and I hear the
music of the spheres, the land of darkness and the helping
phriendly book; I see the elements burning and recombining;
I see the dust and I see the black decay. I see the stars
and I see the heavens. I hear the angelic host singing
their angelic song to the Creator. I hear the chorus of
man and lizards and I laugh heartily at God our Father,
the warm laugh a friend laughs upon seeing a long-lost
friend emerge from a snow storm. I see the pink on
God's cheeks and know He cares. He cares about waves
and particles and music and words and symbols and
love and hate and all our lovely labels.  He smiles at
our incomplete mathematical models, no matter how well
they predict and account for our observations. There is
an order and there is a mystery. There is music to
the subatomic spheres, bending the laws of our words
as we have described them. Particle physics doesn't know
it but it's a blues scale, bending reality in 3rds and 5ths
trying to reflect the experience of our rational minds
in an irrational world.


9.1.12

Friday, July 24, 2015

Journal 80 - Word Games on Bourbon Street


Words are games the philosophers say. Words are games
and games we play, but words as games leave nothing to say.
Words may not mean much and words may be sophomoric games
but beautiful women in the distance, blond and tan and wearing
a yellow sundress and smoking a cigarette in the rising moon
light mean something. And it isn't naughty. I cough when
the wind blows beauty my way. The world is wrapped in
beauty like in a child's worn blanket, and the world throws
rhythmic fits of coughing like a James Brown hit - levelling
knees and leaving smiles and rainbow eyes. The night bugs
click behind me in some natural Motown accompaniment. They
make their music and they make their itchy presence known.
Beauty itches when it moves your blood. Dragons live inside of
slender flies; they are the color of ready-to-burst soap
bubbles outside Gilead I hear. Beauty pops as Beauty should,
if the Buddhists have their way. I think Beauty should
stay and play and dance the simple pentatonic jig with all
our Southern souls. Beauty paraded is Beauty unbraided
and decomposed in a cold pedantic distinction of atomic
parts, atonal splatters of night-time blood on a warm hand.
Bloodletting is an ancient practice of God's mosquitoes,
desperate in their desire to appropriate your life for their
insignificant symphonies. The symphonies of nefarious bugs
pale in comparison to their larger cousins. There is no metaphor
for us. I know it's been long but I had a little break you
see. (stolen) I stumble across Beauty on bourbon streets and
wet humid sidewalks shifting and swinging in a warped
nocturnal dance with the streetlights of our present universe.
Despite diesel I still love our world and those who drive.
I wish I was a rain drop falling from the black sky, consorting
with my siblings to assimilate ourselves into some large slung
stream of water to clean and nurture the world, slung as
though from the large water pale of God - smiling as he
knocks us backward in our dehydrated comfort. I would
slide down the stalk and nestle in the nutrient filled earth,
while others slapped the smiling homeless soul man across the
cheek, drenching him in cleanliness while the self-rinsed
rich man cursed me for disintegrating his rich "Do." I
would leap up and slap him one last time from my sharp flagellum.


8.7.12

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Journal 79 - Serial Killers and Conformism


I caught a glimpse of two lovers sneaking a kiss behind the
trees on the other side of the Art building. I found a virgin
furtively watching from a nearby car, rubbing her hands together
but not smiling, studying like a sexual anthropologist. I wanted
to open the door to her car and grab her and bring her head
to mine, kissing her with longing and remembrance, kissing
through her into that reticence yet no further. I wanted to
kiss her on her lusty wet lips then smile and say, "You're
right. It's better when it matters." Then thank her for re-
giving me my lapsed youth, my lapsed youth spent chewing
nicotine gum, staring at pointillistic dots on my computer
screen - green dots of distinct individuality, before the virtue
of the technological beauty and superiority of conformism,
at least regarding visual artistry. I think conformism is under-
rated. Conformism can be good, like the computer screen, or
the serial killer. Serial killers are bad but to succeed is to
conform. Hiding in plain sight. Of course I'm always suspicious
of the non-conformist. The tattooed, pierced vamps who
make me wonder if there is any substance underneath the
makeup, the painful makeup of black and more black clothes.
Screaming children screaming "Look at me, I'm different and
I matter, I promise; can't you see? Don't judge a book by
its cover but don't ask to open me." Forcing me to see you
as different leads me to believe there isn't much there to
see. But surprises rise from the steam of the gutters and
the cabins in the dark lovely woods. It's Frost I hear.
I want to walk the path most travelled and still make
it mater, versus the easy way of the path less travelled
where anything you do (shit in the woods) or say (there
are ghosts in the machine) catapults you to original infamy.
Anyone can be original when it's never been done. Give
me blue jeans and SUVs and corporate jobs, then make
an original work of Art so I can shove it up your
outcast ass. I of course am not me, but some other
similar who actually is original and actually can shove it
up your vampiric ass. Originality is personalised, infused
derivation of those personalized copyists before you who
also stand on the shoulders of their original peers. That
which has been done is that which will be done. No new sun.


8.4.12

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Journal 78 - Forged Dreams and Rotten Teeth


I wonder where dreams are forged, in molten imaginary
lava to spur on the inquisitive dreamer. I wonder who thinks
these dream thoughts of unicorns and iron-clad monkeys, parading
around the circle like two storm clouds hovering over a zoo
with their broad brooding wings of circumspect clouds. Just
as a car needs wiping for its windshield eyes in the thick
of an August storm, so my eyes need a passing wipe of
their reconjugated vision of a modern heaven and hell.
Hell is so blase in this post-everything world. We live
for tolerance of everyone but always exempt ourselves as mere
satirists satirizing such unenlightened traditional nightmares
inculcated by our evolving and devolving times, our post
intellectual pasture is littered with the bird shit of
yesterday's "dire portents." Premonitions aunt our western sub-
conscious like a wolf in the shade of the evergreen mountain
shades his hunt for the procreating jack-rabbit. We hunt
our prey from the pedestal of enlightened tolerance aiming
beady eyes and eagle fingers at our subordinates to Shhh
and Suppress their bigoted outcry with our satirical holier-
than-thou spittle flying through the vapid void separating
us in some wet attempt to reconstruct our parched ways
of communication with winks and smiles, hugs and light
pats on the back saying "Yes" and "No" but I'm hearing
you not mocking you with my sardonic puerile gapped teeth -
my teeth are clean and it takes work to make teeth clean.
Ideas are like teeth. Rot, molded with colored rubber-bands
they are born and nurtured until unwieldy and coached to
truth by some B- doctor who forgets that grades matter.
We don't like our judges to judge us in public with marks
that could walk the line too far to the right or the left -
we who think with laughter in our thoughts and red wine
on our teeth want our thoughts to blend two realms of
faulty lore - the liberal with her satire and her wit
with the rigter and his certainty even when the shit
of words covered in tradition's blankets lands on tongues wiped
without a working blade. I try to navigate these wave-worn
words with oars on both sides and eyes in front and behind -
but pulled on each side by the undercurrent of their venom -
I gulp and yelp with water drowning every thought I give them.


8.1.12

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Journal 77 - Music in Starry Nights

I'm quick to ramble about sad themes and sad stories
of sad people crying in the bathtub at night with their
wine or bourbon, but what of the beautiful happy joy
that envelopes each day? What of the hug of a friend
just returned from some dreadful trip? (see how I snuck
that minor mode juxtaposition in there?) What of sunsets on
the beach with bacchi ball and volleyballs and surfing
and beer and dogs, laughs saturated with the sound of
the waves and the music? Music keeps the world from
imploding or bursting into flames. Music is our world
and our sustenance the way water is to the colorful
fish swimming in that undiscovered land of wet joy.
Music is our life and our breath in it we live and move
and have our meaning. Music is the breath of God, the
soul of our Creator - the creative (and saving) force that
holds the very strings of our being together in their never-
ending dance of ecstasy and survival. What drives dance
but music, and what are we but dancing strings? Again,
music is our life and our marrow. I've got to get away
to where men don't wear masks or hide their out-of-tune
motives. Discordance drives the mad man. Tolkien knew
the creative force of music, and the power of dissonance.
How many people were conceived to the prompting joy
of the notes of the guitar or piano or violin? Lyrics are
second fiddle to the swaying motion of the drums and
the bass. It ain't over till it's over. Music is the seed
that grows the purple flower and the yellow bird and
the magenta clouds and the green frog and the red lady-bug
and the blue-black Starry night; the green algae on the
wet gutter is beautiful as it glistens in the soft distance
rays of the moon. The moon patrols the undeserted streets
at night, or so I've heard. I don't want to get away,
but I do want to fly high with the eagle and the red-
tailed hawk. My friend the slug draws silver streaks of
snail art on my floor - gross and beautiful in its turn
of shiny nastiness. Music watches from the cheap seats
and laughs a hilarious laugh at those jaunty folk fighting
over a front row seat to the show. She closes her happy eyes
and soaks in the Art defecated by the magisterial flies.


7.21.12

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Journal 76 - Buzzing Voices and Bladder Ruled Thoughts

Voices are like busy buzzing bees buzzing their cute
buzz words around my slish-slosh ear. My ear is
distracted by these tattooed words like a ship tossing
about in the ocean on a full moon at medium tide. Words
come slovenly to the thoughtful minds of the drunk at
the nearest Irish bar. They've left their minds under
the oil-can of their rusted car, lost in a neighborhood
wanting localized context, like a man glued to his
phone at the meetings at the office and the bar. It's the
experience of getting the tattoo not the tattoo itself -
tattoos are words that you can never recant no mater
the depth of regret. The pain and significance brings meaning
and uncovers the thought that mattered most at the time.
The tattoo is the permanent timeline of the life you lived
and the regret means nothing except that the idea is
something you once loved. The skin changes and renews
but tattooed ideas persist like roaches and mosquitoes.
I forgot to mention that the blimp is the hot-air balloon
of the intellectual thoughts of drunk minds splattering
their thoughts of life and death and permanence against the
swollen ears of the laughing scientist, so sure of his
warm logical analysis of the life and death of the
unfortunate child. The night is filled with still-born
dreams and dismal flights of fancy about the future -
whether dates or work or hobbies or roaring trophies
in their taxidermist grin. It won't be awkward to
dream about a life of egalitarian equality, a life where
the man and the woman and the rich and poor and the
black and white are the same, sitting at the dark bar
ordering white russians arguing over who can afford to
pay the bloated tab. My thoughts are ruled by my bladder,
and a swallow-tailed kite is kissing me in my tattooed
dreams, wearing a cap to block the black and white shite
that parisails down the nighttime sky in tiny bombs of a
glassy-eyed terrorist drinking the purple tea of ideological
ecstasy tauting the virgins in the wet ether with their
dopamine smiles and serotonin smiles making grandiloquent
excuses for their credulity. I see the kite in its thermal
soaring for the world, drugged in tattooed words, flustering
downy birds.


7.20.12

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Journal 75 - Clouds and Life on a Sunday Afternoon

The dark side of the moon lives in the corner of my
eye, snuggled like  a ripe sty waiting for its day to burst
into my lonesome field of view and misappropriate the
light for its sinister dealings - misanthropic principles fill
my body with gory scenes of fake horror blood on fake
horror smiles. I am fake when I smile red-faced and
cool in the air-conditioned luxury of these hot torpid
days, I am fake with my books and my notes, my second-
hand ideas regurgitated from a 16th century fool who
claimed to beset the language's Bard. My ideas float through
my mind like a newspaper dropped on the ground
in a busy subway, the wind of the times and the
rides carrying each thought through the maze of
various perceptions, trying to attract like electrons some
meaningful bond of covalent minds - covered with the
words written by someone else on a tight schedule but
still more depth than I as I tip-toe into the shallow
end, the warm shallow end where the children gather
to reflect their parents' shiny ways of living in this
rainbow killed world. The drizzling of the clouds on
a Sunday afternoon says we live, we live, we live today
in reverse anti-matter undecay of smiles over buck-
toothed bright dismay. We live another sunny rainy day.


7.19.12

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Journal 74 - Living in Cloudy White Balance

I want to live in cloudy white balance, warm and
yellow in my smiling caricature of our human exchange
of emotional and vain ideas. I am drunk and unashamed.
I've had the sweet pleasure of water and tubes
and acrobatic knees on acrobatic wakes. I can
fool ten thousand smiles at the local ephemeral
bar wrapped in its own glimpse of ecstasy and musical
joy. I am starved and thus (man?) inducted into this
lightweight ring of Kentucky-infused inebriated
blurred eye-twitching and double-centered novel
revolving around the gravitational center fo*
this God-induced single spaced single stepped simple
Gas-caddie broken image of our self-aggrandized
image. I love you all and I am seriously not kidding
AT ALL.


7.15.12

* - not a typo; that's how I wrote it in my journal. You shouldn't
    find it too surprising given the rest of the completely
    non-sensical drivel in this one.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Journal 73 - Marinated Thoughts Dying Like Roaches

After a three year drought, I began again with these silly songs.

Once it seems I noted each and every thought that
floundered in my brain, marinating for a day or a
second - no matter. I still recorded the lame
limping ideas like a dutiful stenographer. These thoughts,
these plaster thoughts are now cracked and broken,
wide like a drying lake in need of rain and
dry proof caulk. Only they receive liquid in the
form of wine, blood red wine fit for a two-
cent vampire. There is no restorative power lurking
in the foot-stamped vine. Ideas dry up, leaving deep
caverns that tempt but yield nothing but dry air,
hot dry air, choking and claustrophobic - stuck
in the dry cracked caverns of my alcohol dehydrated
mind. No flame burns for me; there is no ember
slowly glowing in the bottom of my soul - I am
drenched in wine and tears and mine and mine,
not yours. Hope dawns they say in the waking
moments of each day, granting us another trial to
reconstruct and reattach the broken bones of what
we de-throned & deconstructed in the previous
cilantro day. Many mouths are cleaned and purged
with the testament that is cilantro - I need a
cilantro bath for my gorgonzola soul. My thoughts
are dying roaches, on their broken backs wriggling
and eliciting pity in your kind saucy souls - striving
for one more attempt at impressing you with their
resiliency - to economic mildewed mattresses, to children
and their ever present selves, bundles of unbridled
regurgitation of their small world, their brilliant
colorful small world, impressing you with their unnatural
ability to soothe you when quiet and absent. Quiet
absence is the seduction of the daemonic voice inscribed
on your dehydrated cortex. This wine is dry and
cheap, but there is a bottle. It feels good to drink
again, even in the sights of my executioner. I have
a hole in my heart, carved recently through the
attempt to make my strange heart plain. I welcome
dry, decayed thoughts as notes from an antique violin -
lifting my insecure world from its misappropriated sin.


7.9.12

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Journal 72 - Pillows and Philosophers

This was the last one of these I wrote for 3 years.

Ants carry their lives on their shoulders aligned and
disciplined like a military outfit of a middle eastern
country, surviving on their obsequious cooperation -
no time for ridicule when the next batch of eggs is
sagging in the queen's ass. I carry nothing but shirts
on my sagging shoulders - separate from the voices of
america I sing the song of the doubting self-doubter
I sing the body corpulent and deteriorated. I co-
habitate with the mice and the roaches watching The
Wire on my two-color TV. Feathers accumulate in
my bedroom from the pillow taking a mild beating
after trying to drown myself in Nietzsche, Wittgenstein
and Rilke - taking a drowning bath I punch the poor
pillow in defeat. The next bottle will comfort my
orgasmicless soul; the next bottle will float my body
electric on the river of Lethe in the valley of Megiddo.


7.23.09

Monday, May 18, 2015

Journal 71 - Naked Bird Biblical Roads

The jungle is out there on the road again, out
there on the naked bird road again tweeting and
twittering like heckles and hydes jeckylling to the
toony bird tune of twelve tones syncopated pride.
The jungle stands with eyes n the trees and limbs,
eyes in the damp light breeze of the voluptuous western
wind, stands with music in its hairy ears and herbs
on its long skinny nose. Scents of backyard shovel built
farts harangue in limp afternoon snorts of another refugee
lost in the traffic of the modern man's man-made jungle -
there stands on the field there, there on the dried-up
football field, tiny footprints made with tiny cleted shoes
trample out-smoked hope and cures. Footprints of faded
feet trails away like an ancient galaxy turning blue in its
lugubrious retreat. Feet of mighty minds and sour men
careening in their circumambulating aimless wonder trodding
over nothing but images of the dawn when Adam first
saw Eve, or thunder when Noah first looked into the
water breathing winds. Faded images of yesterday's bliss
defecate on calculated theses and well-plotted afternoon
plans of life in fifteen well-worked years, well-termed
plans of life in parties and cocktails and morning tea
shooing away the flies and the wiping away the warm
snot from their well-worked clothes. I welcome the tardy
yellow smile from the barber's jungle, welcomed for this
is the apricot year when spirit-charged grouches will
sniffle and cheer with their tin garbage hat on, cheer with
the nose of a reindeer lost in the eyes of the slaven
stars, stick on their forced mathematical course like
sheep about to forget themselves in the neighbor's terminal
cave. The jungle is wet with black flashes of black
shiny light, painted on the side of its face like a big
subway after the circus comes to town. Drops of water
from the chamber pots of the demented evaporate before
touching the living evaporate in this pallid earth before
corrupting the minds of the youth. Beethoven sings strange
songs the poor in the palm pit of the man longed jungle.
Cross the winds with the sign of the Constantinians and
sing a strange song to the rich in the palm pit of their city.


6.27.09

Friday, May 15, 2015

Journal 70 - Drop of Time in the Ocean

Time is a drop of rain water in the middle of the
ocean, tiny ripples of self-same waves dying out and
retreating only to return and fold in upon themselves
in another slow assimilation of vapors. Condensation
is good for time to reveal itself as self and mattered.
Extension into our world, vibrating like a physicist's
wet dream string tossing about in the embers of
cold fusion. Nothing is cold at the moment of death.
Tomorrow closes in like the lungs of a violent asthmatic,
with next week a mere coughing attack brought on by
the light cigar smoke and smog of the present day's shrill
enervations leading t a drink and a thought that
the time to make it all make sense has passed like
the spectacular unknown beauty of the northern lights
or the humpback whale. TV is another leveller and
anti-climatic equalizer. Time is a wooden sailboat
rocking and creaking in the middle of the dock, tied
to the pier with loud croaking rope - a wooden boat with
three tall masts for show - unable to sail anymore these
days, unable to unwind and afford the guy a chance
with the girl. Time is a display of jewelry in the
5th Avenue window sparking in the view of layered
faces or dirty teeth. Dirty teeth are sad in this
veneer world of sycophants. Breath of duck mean pizza
and cheap wine with lemon ice-box squares is the breath
to capture the firefly in the summer evening. Sometimes
time lies in the hammock and stretches its old brittle
bones on those firefly catching evenings with the glowing
jars and flashing faces of unbreakable children. Time stretches
long enough for the kid in the towers to catch a bullet
watching the kewl gun fight down stairs in the piss-
bucket street. Time stretches and yawns like a slightly
inebriated uncle on loan from the probation officer. Eyes
the color of ether and the excitement of a fat tick.
The moon has caught up with the hammock and scoffs
at the laziness of time, scoffs at the unchanging care -
less nonchalance. The moon is young in this game.
The moon shines down its flashlight rays onto the
writhing streets of Earth's concrete back yard with
red eyes.


6.23.09

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Journal 69 - Words, Laughter and Absurdity

The word to sum up the world is degree, no -
perspective. No, it is. The world to accumulate
the dust particles we refer to as birthdays appears
to be non-existent, nothing, impossible, incommunicable.
The word to refer to laughter isn't laughter for that
is absurd. But the word for absurd can't be absurd
for that is laughable. Words it seems are contrived
and disconnected from the world. Words are irrelevant
but alone in the quest to co-habitate. Meaning is
tautology for the mathematician but little bits of
soul for geographically split lovers. Words are without
meaning except when Shakespeare says, "To be or
not to be" or "Shall I compare thee to a summer's
day" or even the abstract, "Let me not to the marriage
of true minds admit impediments." But force is still
equal to mass times acceleration, whatever those ostensive
words mean or allude to. Allusion and probability bubble
up from beneath the foamy pond of universal drying
primordial drivel. A chair is not the word chair
but it is not an anvil either. Unless someone sits
on it. But then it is an anvil being used as a chair.
The signifier is not the signified but it is also not
insignificant. Does the chair require four legs? A back?
Arm rests? Ah, to define precisely the chair. Philosophy 101.
Quien sabe? We still know what a chair is. And that
it's not a word like chair or ______. Justice of
course is the tougher battle. Justice is the dark side
of the moon. Justice is the dark matter of the uni-
verse. justice is an abstract base class, a late-bound
instantiation of a virtual conceit. A reference to a
postulate of another pass in the night debate. Conversation
would be so much easier if meaning really was a
cell-phone abandoned and left on with minutes remaining
on the side of the street of the gutter of last night's
liquor piss and vomit. Laughter is another word for
absurdity while absurdity is another word for on-
the-hook thought. Processes live in shared memory for
a time before the out-of-memory killer trolls along and
kills it for abuse of power and resource management.


6.22.09

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Journal Poem - On Hope

Hope hangs her damaged head like a daisy,
In disbelief that hands could be so cruel -

-------

Hope sits in the corner of the bar silent
with the music and eyes and feet -
pressing along with dirty fingernails and
tight clothes on top of folded skin
waiting for the perfect vacant seat -
On which to seduce another damaged man
With dreams drawn on naked bodies;-
Naked wandering beer glass broken streets
For the true and the real life-loving grin;
Hope stretches her arms and yawns
Searching the alternative choices she pretends
Will charm her when the music quavers and ends.
Big sunglasses can't suppress the out-cry
Of a socially dependant grown-up lie.
I just saw Hope wink from the corner of the bar
At the tattooed convict strumming his guitar.


5.22.09

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Journal 68 - Language Dried and Wriggling

Language is not a wooden baseball bat you beat
people over the head with, hoping to straighten
them out or convict them. Words are life
preservers thrown out into the wild winter ocean,
necessary for survival but always to be improved upon
and reconstructed like Charlie Brown's red kite now
lost in the waves of the adolescent spitting ocean.
Poseidon is pissed (pun intended for my English friends).
It seems knowledge and facts are hidden underneath
the modals and the simple tenses lost in the distance
between our minds and the "world." The world is a
conglomeration of disjoined perceptions that swarm
like maggot flies inside our material brains searching
for a way out through the ancient tunnel of
meaning but meaning was crippled by the Qoheleth.
For all our random pseudo-intellectual bullshit about
the noose of meaning every day and each minute
we assume words' meaning and communication. I'm
sorry officer I can't be held responsible for that
accusation; your words are meaningless to the context
and daily life I live. Facts are by-products of the
classical physics of Newton and Aristotle - both
wrong and frustrated in our internetized world of
mass information and probabilistic communication. I
live in a constant state of affairs that changes
with each breath I see from the anti-misanthropic
TV. Yes, constant change. If TV weren't anti-
misanthropic perhaps The Wire would have survived
beyond its adolescent years. Sometimes I wonder if
network TV (including FOX) isn't taking over the
role of psychology and the church - a mild analgesic
story to assuage and reconstitute our worries in a
magical framework of justice and the Hook Up
for a manageable construction of the social political
ways of the new secular world order. Religion has
had its hand in this since the beginning - another
topic for another day. The secular world doesn't
seem to be much better off. The world is a
bundle of potentiality and degree and perspective
dried up and wriggling without the water and the spirit.


6.18.09, 2

Friday, May 1, 2015

Friends



Friends are spread over the coast
Like lookout fires at wartime
Distant warmth and covered backs

To be rejoined only amid tear-hid
Laughs and clinks of glass
Around the fires of our funerals

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Journal 67 - Blog Nobody Reads

I write a blog that nobody reads. And in this
blog I write that no-body reads I fill with the
pages of this little journal. So now I pressure my
self to write well and clever for this journal for
this blog that nobody reads. As the images scramble
away like the hoppers left in the pit when the
five-o unearth themselves. I walk around like
Omar the stick-up artist whistling to the dead
dark night dead dark lullabies while the images
of the blue black orange world scatter fearless,
scatter in the alleys and the brick apartment
buildings fearless in their selfish clutch on their own
primacy. Soon the winter will stand like a stripped
Poplar on the street; like a Japanese magnolia bared
in November, not even the remnants of its purple tinted
leaves lying rotten and beautiful on the late winter
ground - the winter standing decked out with downed
electricity lines and sharp icicles drawn like a
nasty comic villain. We stand in the street naked
with red wine in our hands and cigars in our
mouths smiling at winter's icy stereotype. Then we
look at ourselves and the cigar falls from our mouth
like AIDS. The bug is here to match wits with our
goofy brethren. Words can be hard to follow when
games easy games are played with the signifiers
and the signified; puns are the mark of punsters
not geniuses. Genius may be a necessary condition
for a punster; not a sufficient condition. Language and
pronunciation is a tricky localized relative endeavor in
evolutions & rights. It's la-fee-ette in Louisiana
but la-fayette in Oxford (MS). Both are correct.
If the localized region uses a phrase or contraction
illogical and irrational it is a boy in Baltimore who
only knows Baltimore radio stations. Nomenclature
carries the weight of the king. Language is a
drug dealer ready to change-up whenever the five-o
try to incarcerate the girl watching the street.
Language spoken real language is not an inscription
on a tombstone reminiscing of the days of yesteryear.


6.18.09

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Journal 66 - God, Meaning and Incompleteness

The world itches for meaning - the world hurtling
the world spinning and hurtling through space
like a big blue streak, a colorful cold comet; the
world in all its wet wonders and glimpses of life
itches for meaning. And like a poisonous itch that
is scratched at until it bleeds, there is no relief
for the itch of meaning. Meaninglessness of Meaning-
lessness; Vanities of Vanities, all is meaningless
vanity. Words the preacher spoke with a fevered tear.
Meaning it's said is lost in structure and context
and meaningfully lies in the grown eye of the beholder.
The eye of Elmo glue pasted letters and cut words
blown apart like a dandelion in the wind with
meaning reaching out in horror to clasp onto another
meme, another lexeme or mytheme to rearrange itself
from that horror that is Dante's 3rd circle of hell.
Meaning vibrates inside the nucleus of the hemoglobin.
Crying out for attention meaning screams with no sound
like an explosion in the dark matter of space. If
there is a listener who can't hear does meaning lose?
Meaning vibrates off the E-string of the acoustic guitar.
Hiding inside the duality of light, spreading its wings
in broad waves and penetrating each dissenter with particular
precision meaning surprises the scientist in the white
blue-stained lab with its unsolicited itch, the scabbed
itch scientists have doused with various itch-relief
formulas of relativity and deconstructed uncertainty.
Gödel and Derrida are unlikely bed mates on the
path to incompleteness. Tapping on our souls like
Chinese water torture these drippings, these continuous
disconnected drippings of splattered meaning resonate
like a tuning fork to our own miserable incompleteness.
Vanities of vanities we try to attach meaning to
our wandering ghoulish lives like prisoners in the
muddy prison yard. We touch ourselves incomplete.
We children of God wander the night like runaways
ignoring the hand of broken experience slapping a
random pastiche of experiences together to form a
broken world of rationalized meaning. Vanity of Vanities!


6.8.09

Friday, April 24, 2015

Journal 65 - Witch's Eyeless Squalor

I reach outside my car window and grab the
lightening, grip it like a witch's broomstick and twist
it into a tiny ball of dust, silence in the heavens
on a dark gluttonous day. I have no time for silly
quadropedic misdemeanors heads arched up toward the
sky like bodies sung electric. The rain it is said
conducts the electric bolt the way a crow-bar conducts
pain. I stand in the middle of the storm and the
rain, and laugh at the skies like a starving hyena,
laugh like a ribbed skinny hyena for the rain and
the lightening to slap me and slash me and slice me -
throw me across the back of the earth like a gibbering
holy man, a holy righteous man laughing at the
stormy scowl of the trees and the wet wind in the
dry leaves I stand back arched, laughing at the
lightening bolts erupting around me like distant jagged
spears thrown by that temperamental adulterous Zeus.
You wouldn't know if those were tears or rain that
soaked my cheeks in the mid-day heat. It takes
guts or ignorance to laugh. I laugh often but
ignorance is often capsized in my world. I feel
lost drowning sometimes. And then I find myself
standing on the surface of the water and playing a
short game of soccer with the other man of faith.
The man on the shore with the fish doesn't laugh.
And I sink in the sea like a flooded engine block.
I twist the lightening in my mind to elucidate the
gravitational pull; the gravitational pull is nearly
irresistible next to massive objects. My mind is
twisted by massive questions of mediocre care -
leaves in the gutter and spaghetti monsterians. The
world is against us the World is against us the
old world is with us like the new world is
gasping in its eyeless squalor. Eyes are the visors
of the windows of other souls. Eyes invite the external
into our internal world. My eyes are being tested
by the pileated woodpecker. The tones of home
sound like children on the football field trying to
start a fight for the flighty eyes of another pretty
physicist.


6.7.09

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Journal 64 - Free Willie and Ontological Equality

The light shines down in the light of the orchestra
down like a slap in the face in the morning to wake up
for work or school. Life is one or the other. Music
instruments lie silent in their cramped crate clumped
together like forgotten stickers in the back of a child's book.
The stroller sits broken and empty, unable to scramble life
in its tiny plastic seat and wheels. These signs are not
so. They live they breathe they cry out with connected
notes when the new born breath of children breathe the
dormant notes into them like a patient etherized upon
the table. Frankenstein rises from the dead toys each
day ready to destroy with mirth. The earth is old
and damaged creaking like hardwood floors underneath
our feet to those with the hearing aids to hear.
My ears have receded in availability the last few
years, locked on the absence of the ancient music of the
spheres - I toss and turn each night out of tune with
the lady at the service desk in Barnes & Noble. She
has a name tag. She has an identity, like my neighbor's
cat. Rachmaninoff wasn't far from the truth when he
put his warmed cold hands to clefted paper to pen
the 2nd & 3rd piano concertos. He was Russian though.
I hold my head high, I hold my lazy head high
to avoid the quicksand and the rain. If only her
napkin could wipe clean the stain that penetrated my
epithelial tissue. Science doesn't make it all better; nor
do scientific terms. Science is the performer at Sea
World containing the killer whale and forcing him and
her to bow to its every need - controlling it like a
lower pet while claiming ontological equality. I'd
like to free my willie. Yours too but the gravitational
constant keeps me down. I'm stuck wriggling and
writhing to the quadratic equation and Gauss's
summation theory lost as a 3 or 4 dimensional soul
in a multi-dimensional world. Soul? Souls are not
allowed; this is biology not poetry. Therefore poetry
has no meaning in the biology class. Not vice-versa.
And thus God has no meaning in the science class;
except now that means no meaning in any class; Not so...



6.3.09, 2

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Christmas Notes



Gods come and gods go
Gods shapeshift and shit shapes
Afraid of yesterday's red sweat
Under a back-city olive tree.

Dreams are not a warm blanket
Or a cozy home on another street,
But an orange flower spurting
Forth on a cold November day.

This day once was Saturn's day
Commandeered by faint subjects
With too much dirt clogged between
Their swollen calloused toes;

And once this day smiled with teeth
Brown and Whole and Musical. People
Dancing hand in hand around bright
Flames eliciting unfeigned smiles

Wrapped round and around bright
Sparks prodding silent brittle feet,
Hopping without cause and without 
Merit. Merit is not a god's homage.

My dehydrated alcoholic brain misfires
In slow spurts of garbled words
And disconnected strains of thoughts
mired in unsympathetic virtual merit.

Upon this distant pantanomic scene
I raise my brown glass and toast
Quietly to the unheard divine voices
Ruminating amongst themselves.

These voices shatter our porcelain hearts
Like lyrics from drums and guitars
Screaming for one soul to stare and hear
Their trampled song among the wordless throng.

At what point do you recognize the
broken face in the mirror, and at what
point do you cry instead of laugh,
weighed down with myopic soggy eyes?

This Christmas wine weighs my wet body down.
Matthew died tonight with a smile.
Words convey neither more nor less.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Journal 63 - Hope, Tchaikovsky and Tears

I want to dance outside in the sprinkler, dance in
the sprinkler in July laughing with my neighbors
playing with my children to the distant reggae
tune of Marley over noises in the scentful summer
afternoon. But it's hard to see the bee dance its own
little food tune. The bee is there don't you see it
don't you see the black and yellow pin-striped food
dancing jig fool; don't you see it there on the stem on
the blade on the yellow water laced flower dancing in
its wild honey mood; don't you see it; don't you see
it dance fucking dancing? No I don't see that. I see
my son and the notes of his laughter erupt from
between his teeth like a playful arpeggio of Mozart
or Schubert, to which the yellow black pin striped
bee dances like a ballerina on the night - I see the
bee I see the bee and its concomitant dance with the
yellow-jacket and the 2 year old; I see the sprigs of
light clamor for sight and sound, bounding like love
notes from a gong in the midst of an apathetic symphony -
subtle and desperate in their struggling dance to be
seen for the beautiful buoys of independent hope they
call from. Hope is tortured and Hope is laughter; Hope is
broken and Hope repairs broken smiles in mid-life crises.
Hope is Tchaikovsky in the 6th and the D major. I see
the dragon fly bat light with its phosphorescent wings
in splayed remnants of color like the first time Newton
spied light fractured in his prism; I see the purple and
orange and blue flutter around in animated free-for-alls
crying out to the drab colored rat, the blah hoary rat
scurrying under the house in fear of being out of key
with the fly and the bee. I'm with the whory rat
under the house with skeletons and broken busts staring
with white darting eyes through the poisonous grate
like a prisoner in a foreign land. I do see the bee
dancing I see the yellow honey bee dance fucking
dancing with the arpeggio laughter of the girl and
the boy; I see the mother try to shield herself from
the joy of the sprinkler spraying cool water in July.
I see it. I see the bee and I see the child.
And I cry.


6.3.09

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Journal 62 - Illegitimate Words

Yeah words are inadequate illegitimate children
clamoring for meaning in this fostered reductio
world of phonemes and lexemes, strings and quarks.
Why must the smell of flowers beautiful blue
flowers assault my nose and throat like a German army
of molecular Stazi? My head manages to succumb to
the lung-punctured short-breathed coughing mucus
splayed breathing of my evaporated respiratory system.
Writing that sentence elicited one cough from my red
lungs. Small talk eludes me like existentialism and
post-structuralism.  Post-modernism wants to elude thus
is found head to the ground separating the soil
from the toil. Small talk is standing outside the
auditorium during intermission listening to two strangers
pontificate about the pitch quality of the third violinist
during the third measure of the third movement. No
wait a minute - that's pretentious look-at-me bullshit.
Small talk is rambling about things that are of
tangential concern - weather and occupation. Though
a rainy day can mean so much more than the next
report for your boss's boss. Small talk ends where
alcohol begins. Small talk is impersonal; the personal
is the spark that livens intimacy and round-the-table
knowledge. Small talk is the fake laugh at the post
office joking about the long line, or the sports comm-
entator "enlightenment" over Frosted Flakes during another
homeward lunch. the Structuralists marched through
the streets with Dock Martins and shot guns holding the
universe hostage with Her Majesty Science at the throne.
Order and context reign supreme were the signifier lords
the signified. But that bastard post haste meta-structuralism
poured oil and kerosene on the streets and lit fire to
the Queen of Philosophy crowned through a coup of
military success. Damaged the Queen limps on with
her mathematical dogmas and evidential head-banging.
Order lies on the ground smoldering in the balance
of the structured and the free, coughing up bits of coal
with ancient writing reminiscent of the script used
by Daniel in his fight for the supernaturally natural.



6.2.09

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Journal 61 - Flibbertigibbets and Moonlit Slugs

The night sky was faintly white with the white of
the moon shining dimly down like a dying flashlight -
one small opossum stuttered with albino eyes and giant
rat tail before sauntering off to his dirty hole behind
the air-conditioner. Birds rustle the leaves and awaken
the silence of the night - the eerie silence in the city
one can catch at certain undisclosed times awakened like
a meadow at noon by the quiet songs of birds with
undisclosed names. The wind is artificial in this
brief flash of night time mercy stirred by the fans
on the porch, artificial but still comforting on the hot
night air. It's past the time of crickets and their
string section accompaniment of the percussion of frogs
and the winds of chimes and cardinals. The squeeze-box
sound of cicadas eludes me too this soft August night -
how many sounds do I not hear because I'm not listening
closely enough? What is the sound of the beetle tapping
its hard feet on the wet brick? Does the belly of the 
snail rub itself against the concrete like a washboard?
No? We can imagine. He may create a layer of silver
film between himself and the ground he slides over like a
wet banana slide in the wet yard. The sound of the cars
passing over the bridge on the interstate annoys most moments
with its loud noise-machine white roar, but tonight the
distant waterfall sound is nostalgic in its own ancient way.
The renaissance is around the corner but scoffed at by the
stoned local intellectuals; the flibbertigibbets of our
bored apathetic been-there done that it has no meaning or
influence in my life X generation. The label is not a
misnomer though maybe due to the predestination problem.
Did the label cause itself to not be a misnomer, or was
it actually originally accurate? Yeah, who cares. Jack Bauer
doesn't concern himself with the past only how to move
forward. I'm stuck in a ditch outside staring at the
white light of the moon watching slugs wriggle down my
nose wondering how I got here - so I can get back -
oblivious to the exit sign on my right of my daughter's
ocean eyes and my son's gaping grin and my wife's sober
hand held out reaching through the muck like through a
dirty lake...


5.25.09

Friday, April 3, 2015

Saturday Night Discourse



This discourse rattling about my broken head
bruises brittle bones and 
plays my busy mind with ideas still dead
but borne with the stale breath of
Pegasus imprinted upon the malformed words.
Fanciful flights of neglected faeries
lift my mind to more delectable tastes -
Why must I wither in this hollowed state?

The death of a bird means so much.
The death of a little hoppy bird, so much
beloved with its red and green and blue
singing to clouds the pure love of pure art.
The muses were killed long ago, along with
God and the Divine. Divinity living within us
is a divinity so ubiquitous as to be
full of bloody darts and borked ideas,
ejaculated for the zeitgeist-infused sense
of our Holy-blackened-Ghost-unhaunted
world - drowned by the scientific voices of
philosophy-decrying scientismic philosophers.

Knowledge is limited by our estranged experience -
effects yield limits to conjured colored paintings
from perceived causes, but our causes are not
limited by our still-born perception.
Hume's Epicurus may not appreciate the full
effect of inferred causes, but our divinity
stares out of hollow eyes, with torpid
smoke rings circumambulating her plastic
face and concrete hair. Each tap of her chipped
fingernails on the false marble is a quiet
beat of defeat, unresisted and uninterested.

A soul means more than the death of a bird,
even a painted bird with iridescent wings.
A soul means more than the modern defecations
of the university trained mind, so certain of
its uncertainties and its known unknowableness.
The soul has survived the pontific perturbations
of its putative patriarchal pornographic assaults.
The soul means more than the life of intravenous
bourbon, imputed to our empty souls like the
revived wings of a broken dove, entertaining
the crowds while trapped in its mellifluous
cage.

I live inside an uninvited text of mal-extant
sufferers. I part from the world of dragons
and werewolves only for the sake of my child's
sanity. My children are so unforgiving when
they say a brightly forlorn Hey after dancing
in silence with Monkey Joe. They bounce their
buttoned butt on the cush floor, trying to ignore
the meritorious laughter of their hyena friend
as this laughing bore circles in his frayed
pajamas, afraid of the flat smiles of the group.

Sometimes I walk about the foggy town, wistful
that this fog was the 20th Century smoke of
ignorant cigarettes, the smoke of a young Eliot
or flouting Joyce: the broken sounds of a street
piano, garrulous in its off center singings.
I smile at the purple-haired girl sitting vacant
at the piano. I smile with her silver tooth
and her gold eyes: unstealable with their
bright glow.

Journal 60 - Plato, Goethe and Frogs

What if my IQ were 195 rather than [what it is]?
Would I behave any differently, do anything differently
with my life? Would I too be a bouncer for 20 years
while working out some new theory of the mind/body
problem? Or would I just sit and read Virgil in Latin
and Plato in Greek, Goethe in German and Baudelaire
in French? What about the Russians? Are they worth
an absence from the calculus of the mind? Fortunately
(perhaps) these thoughts are about as relevant as my
own licking of my balls like some strangely contorted
dog. Desire is asleep under the house with the leaks
and the fungus and the skeletons of trapped cats sinking
in the soil with bone white softeners. My draperies are
stuck in Idaho with the corn and the potatoes, stuck
in a farmer's converted truck looking for the next big money
maker since our crops are out-sourced like our location.
I am lost in the den of my house on the other side
of the river where the trees fell in ancient burials of
the neighborhood. Replaced by melodramatic hysterical
giggling wall-eyed women and red-eyed man strafing
like a burnt ass on a desert walk with no underwear.
Each time I glance past my glass door shielding me from
the wind and the rain and the sun and critters I
see the shadow and outline of a man in the night
smiling with bleach white teeth holding a sword in
his covered hand, then disappearing with the flash
of lightening and explosion of thunder. He'll return
next to the rain-happy snails, homeless in their own
crashing economy, and the glass-adhesive frogs clinging
to the door and the light like the last stand of a
jilted bride meandering into a Bat-mitzpah. The throat
of the frog flutters like a eukaryotic heart pumping
everything throughout the thin near transparent skin
of his squishy body. How many squishy deaths of
frogs and snails occur each night after a rain? There
is no record or names of the dead. The day we count
the names of the dead of the distant frogs and slugs
is the day I recline on the beach and piss at the sun -
dispensed with taxonomic equality, drowning in lesser fun.


5.23.09

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Burning Ennui



I

they can trap me in the chemical dungeons
of my mind, yell at me with shrills
like Mephisto on a walpurgisnacht
extravaganza, der hölle rache

in meinem herzen brennt. flames
are not limited by the infinity
of hell, hölle, gehenna - ready
to melt soul and fate and limb,

teeth gnawing in dumb worn-down ecstasy
toothless grins of grandpa or baby
oblivious to the black vultures descending
like death eaters at a red dawn;

but there on the edge of hell’s burnt ledge
a common yellowthroat sings to the warden
of my misplaced spring a common warbler
song, prayerful call to earthy arms

where rain drips down in long-suffering
gifts, חָ֫סֶד portents on a sun-dried field,
dire with its inside-out flabbergasted
yield of willful seeds and unintentional

disguises. the mountain lion passes by
with silent footprints on charcoal grass -
dark and violent with her playful death
paws. why, why must I short-change every day

in burning anticipation of a dead angel's
cry of Impostor Impostor Impostor -
you boring hypocrite lecteur, infamous
brother wanting credulity and fame?


II

I cry out to the cold of the snowy night
with two hands cupped around my mouth
screaming into the steamy cold night
No! No! this cannot be the end, the final

End to the sleepy authorless comedy of
life, burning hot and dark in trailed
songs of warblers and buntings, bright
notes of heaven's choirs hidden behind

the colors of songbirds, yellow green
blue red - this is not the ironic finale
of 21st century artists, folding their arms
and turning their heads in disgust.

I have seen the street artiste begging
behind the notes of a defeated violin,
fiddling among rock dove and tourists -
I have felt her song in meinem herzen,

my broken worm-eaten burning heart
worn out by the pew at 2300 hours -
I turn my head toward the stained window
where the hidden choirs congregate,

stare at the empty colors around me,
whisper forsaken words of love and merlot,
laugh at the reflection in the ancient window,
hoping more is there than this Ennui.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Constipated Words



Life passes through our words
constipated like a bowel movement
stuck in its scratchy reluctance
to breathe the same smoky air
the periwinkle trails wreathe,
resisting the green and the pearly white,
the scarlet-scattering dim moon light.

Our words may be tight and brown
smushed between our lofty eyes, but
this world was built on ancient words -
musical notes that formed fierce waves
in beautiful orders, rising and falling
sharp and flat in interweaving winds,
like a familiar song in the woods
at dawn, with warblers hopping one tiny
branch to another in yellow bursts -

these world creating words descended
upon our thrashing wave thrown world
like a counter-balancing tsunami,
where wave and trough cancel each other
in opposing sines. These scenic
words spawned dew from the spray of the
highest land-breaking wave, drifting
with the salt and the semen of life
toward the slow drying mud lands,
growing the curious mud people.

Bring me to these forgotten forlorn
worlds, waves of warbler wafted words
creating the moss and the lichen, the
rusted brick and algae covered gutter,
the oily ocean and the warming clouds,
pearly whites and black tar;
these blind visions of happy heaven and
gnawing hell impress me into drink,
an intoxicating mixture of slurred
creative words and duck-billed platupi,
lost between the drowned lake-weeds
and the sun-burnt rye grass - 
mistakes are the loins of creativity.

I wipe my mind with words tarnished
in yesteryear's cutting edge insights
dulled only by their recycled tedium,
the cold breath of once upon a time
sages spread their old beneficent
experiences upon our globally warmed
minds, implacable and unthawed -
our words no longer sit immobile and
contemplative...they jumble and bumble
into each other, crashing thought into
thought, lapsed like a word ex nihilo,
ex cathedra, exited in our self righteous
babbling towers of fundamental particles -
our words bounce about unbonded
by our own ancient God-imaged personness,
limping along in primordial muck
without a righteous thought to fuck...

Journal 59 - Promethean Phoenix

I missed my rooftop kiss in flights of callow and
ignorant fancy - fancying myself not a tease but not an
indulgent twenty-something either. This accomplished
quite the romantic feat - basically an exercise in masochistic
annihilation of the desire for a future penguin or wolf.
You know it's said we aren't the only ones who mate for
life; though we're devolving to our carbon cousins in
this ritual of congruence. It's hard to deny the self.
We know single raised children, particularly those of
divorce are worse off in the long run but still we divorce
over 50% of the time. We know the cigarette is toxic and
a carrier of cancer, and yet even with the tobacco companies'
advertising against themselves they still mint money like
a third-world country. We know that alcohol has
more mental disaffects than marijuana  but still we
drown our livers in its inhibiting seductions. I suppose we're
destined to survive in old age divorced and mumbling on
fancy dialysis with brown cracked skin and purple
teeth reminiscing in nursing homes about the lament-
able mistakes we knew we were making. The good old
days are myths we arrange for ourselves like religion
philosophy and politics. The good old days awaken like
a phoenix in the recesses of our dying embered mind,
cawing with bright sparks of breath illuminating that
forsaken memory like gold in a dark tunnel underneath the
storm cloud draped sky, a storm-ridden sky dropping
dirty drops of rain upon an impatient and frustrated crowd
of posh pedestrians. The phoenix rising is a perennial sign of
hope in this crowded world. The smile and the conversation
of that loud table in the bar or restaurant laughing with
great boisterous laughs is a spy for hope. A sentinel reminding
us that sunny sweaty days aren't the end of our burnt
lives. Rain is a cocktail for the soul and light cloud
streaked blue skies are sincere glimmers of the promise
our parents made when we were children damaged for the
first time. That promise of another chance at the rooftop kiss
clings to the back-plane of my memory like a faint magnetic
charge on the hard disk from a deleted file - waiting for the
right image to accost and rearrange it so it flames like the
Promethean Phoenix.


5.22.09

Monday, March 23, 2015

Journal 58.5 - Dismissed Lore

With limp eyes drooped in apathetic indecency
I stand on the brink of the roof
And yell at the moon with an arf and a woof
Wriggling out of my hairy skin
With yellow canines and a daemonic grin -

I stare at the light, green through the slats -
Green and white in the half moon light
Staring with blank black eyes
At the red petals of her faithful prize,
Pretending the damage done was damage slight -

I howl with a crack in my grape-dried voice
On top of the roof I howl with no choice
Armed with a map to yesterday -
A day yesterday when we were wrong but known,
Now right and unknown in a mildewed today

Soaked too long in the grey spinal matter
Thrown aside like slung paint splatter
To the truth in no truth and the action
In no action but ancient survival recipes,
Handed down from family and faction.

Not far removed from the deer-skin covered male
Or the bare-breasted food gathering female
We follow these modified recipes of antiquated life
Down streets teeming with passionless half-ways
Hearing the song on the street of bare-foot praise.

Lead us to these forsworn streets of dismissed lore,
Ever drawn like cattle with hoof and bit;-
We will not rise without the whip, without the whore;
We will not sing our freedom free from shit,
Though we will not win passed out on the floor. :)



5.26.09
(dated because it comes from my journal)