24 January 2010

ceramic, erratic bleats

making love to the noise
half-so-sharp, what yr allowed to hear
but the secret is soft, personal edges
& quick-legged, leggy, we study
because we must our histories made & our
culture, our quick-histories making
the sounds repeating, mostly metallic ghosts
ceramic, erratic bleats, patternless repeating
puddled cups of light over the racing pigs
burn and hiss and sizzle, blip, nothing big
patternless, bang & hapless slide, stripes of red.

Oh

What am i running for? Where to?
Yes, to catch the bus and all, but
Why? I can't get drunk anymore
These ferrets munch my bed, my
Oh, my mailman's a piss less than dead.

What's the point, and where's there to learn?
So, I've resolved to sing-a-long to the street
Give up the fight, bound to pick up its rhymes
The cold allows me certain private rights.

Who's worth deceiving? Not much for a question
Even less of an answer. Pedestrian-eyes alight,
The night no longer gives coin for believing.

crazy girl

turns away, smiling and afraid? how strong
are those skinny legs, pogoing mossy hills
such pure cane sugar and round classical wale

can you see her now?

dimpled aspect & exploited reflections dancing on
face so vivid, banking hermetic perfections off
the neon (choose, it makes you bigger) walls

erase concavity, release it, swept under
the rug & tectonic how you move
in the night a mercuric foil river
deep mouth split and pried, arrowheaded

unleash no-dreams of breath or sleepless
taste the nature of this colluding warmth pushing
silksure alternating metaphor from a distance

erasing concavity.

22 January 2010

Scene 1: Speeding atop commuter subway, backwards, uncompromisingly peaceful

The candy flowers fall from somewhere P cannot see
This image he has also stolen
Long ago, as well as the idea
He rides the speedy thing backwards
& in the mornings, everyone at angles jangling
For their morning seat, how he laughed
To himself, like there was someone within
Earshot to receive his hypothetically boisterous laughter
But he would ride them backward
Like, he imagined,
A hapless, bouncing cowboy pulling a 10-gallon hat over his ears
Like, he imagined,
Squeezing his fat head into a child's itchy, wool sweater
Like, he imagined,
An Indian, (he stole this image, too!) he sat
& not
Like, he imagined,
This Indian, smiled stoopidly & without wondering
Why they are called Indians
But, see this now, P doesn't have a hat nor a sweater, but
He sits without seeing much of anything in the mousy abovespace
And meditatively commutes, just like them but doesn't see
On this beautiful Fritz Lang-type thing
& he
Offers sage bits & wise buds & P's happy there, alone
But where'd all these slowly floating flowers come from?

--for adam

18 January 2010

Skylight

Too many tired cop cars filled with tired cops
Hands spread over buzz-cuts or grazing my
Papers, some other day's work, filthy little
Camera tricks cheapen real color
& the near-white screen, resolution so radical
So high now, for what? Black tire after black tire

On parade, irony manicured and concave
With privilege assuming their cult, a fraternal wall
Just. Just as. Just, as I am an addict
& these are my only hot, smiling addictions, plainly listed:
The bent grammar of observation & its distant

Propositions
Hung from Pyrrhic diaphragm
Where only slow, emboldened
Diagonal aggressions march over & over
& into the spectacular hanging & dead sun

Where one charter ends, another begins
At this intersection, a beautiful & hopeless word,
Of 34th & 9th; the sour aprons laughed cold
Passed by blank power, buzzed and blue
The listing and its sirens roll on & on
& victimless. Their various acids invert
March on the Real Capital, lose their shit
And abandon decorum, faith down the road
From goodwill and straightaway their partners
Full attention heretofore earned turns the barrel, blistering
toward the hanging & soon dead sun.

improv for the problems, the playoffs & the plumbing

He got hit, helmet to his blindside
And crumbled for some other purpose
Week-old Italian bread crushed over fresh greens

His mind, momentarily jellied, babied, puree
Projects a shushing squirt of hot butter, candied
Prophesying and rhythmic luster lock

Look up, from the pain and clapped passions
Lickable bright, Airbus A380 streaming through the sky
Cotton and confetti now, a graffiti of giving-up.

14 January 2010

improv for drawn sources

The river never waits
Cutting, though many other
Names exist, rock and bone
Pollute the pure, Season's
Unwashed hands deign piety
Every stoic stroke wears away
Each push a fresh argument
One hesitates suggesting fire
But Frost, these things moving
A child pressed to crawl
Will crawl upon your turning
Through ears, the river never
Waits and morals never makes.

improv for central nodes

The death toll
Is unknown, no man
Can lift such heaviness
Merely observing
One must become
His hyperthrobbing heart
One must become
Large and lift
And lift, how
High will you imagine
The death toll rises.

04 January 2010

George Plimpton Headache

I am sure I will die young
     hammerbang
          hammerbash
               hammCrack
What cruel carpenter makes love only near the reclined
And I know, George Plimpton was never kidnapped
In the packed back seat of a Bentley car
Thought having read his obituary I prefer
Philip and his pounding contrast, its striation

My dream would not film easily
Insecurities of proof regarding
Petty, pretty, well-dressed bourgeois

Crumbled bosses promptly impressed, remain soigné
And shuffle their feet. But the ending's neat: things just
Flicker, a painted on Ka-Poe!, colors Bang!
Fall off the screen, a car door Bang! shedding snow
The black matte inverts, awake.
               hammCrack
          hammerbash
      hammerbang
I am quite sure I will die young.

02 January 2010

Hyphen, Mustela

How that lip gloss returned
your step-down's thick honeyed haze
& i enter, cut-up
pictures in hand-built frames, hand-me-down
table & a glass bowl for keys:

It was here
you mentioned the needle
stuck in yr best friend's arm
his sad soundtrack persona
non grata; up at the podium
in yr house slippers, nude
an audience adorned:

At the stolen breakfast booth in
yr railroad kitchenette, baptized
& dying, cold beside our lit cigarette
& i remember your name for its ghost.

Pointed ears perched, pinked white pelt
frames a fitful, hungry mouth, his flat brown fur
midday blacktop snaked with frost
fleeing breath sneaks past a matted sun:

It is neither fair, nor right.