luck

lady luck is looking down upon us,
but unluckily we are not looking up.

i'm going

i'm going to learn to drive a motorcycle,
and i'll ride away with you into that bright orange orb
on the horizon. i'm going to learn to fly a plane,
and i'll be seeing you up there in the sandpaper
sky. i'm going to learn to breathe underwater, and i'll
meet you by the lobster traps.

i'll be a lion tamer. i'll be a stand-up comedian.
i'll be the conductor of the new york philharmonic.

you'll be the percussion section. you'll be the
ventriloquist's doll in my act. you'll be the biggest pussy
i've ever seen.

or if you want,
i'll be an atom and you can be the sun.
i'll be a neutron and you can be a supernova.

i'll move at the speed of light, and you can move
at the speed of sound, and we may not be going
in the same direction but we'll almost certainly
end up at the same place.

chinese children

oh all you little children,
be still now and listen:
a lullaby to lower your eyelids
at the end of a long day, something
to soothe you into sleep. let the
darkness of the day pray upon you
no longer, fading into the alabaster
of bleached sheets. oh you
taiwanese toddlers and indian
infants: hear the sterile, serene sound
of my voice, and let your heartbeat creep
stealthily into the simple, singular
blackness of the night. let the waters
wash you away to the four corners
of the earth; let the winds carry your soul
up high to the heavens. let the worries
of tomorrow pray not upon your
tired mind. oh you children in china,
in thailand, in eastern turkey:
feel the quick sting of the hypodermic,
and dream a little dream for all eternity.

#324

it's easy enough
to make someone tick;
what i want to do
is to make you tock.

newark

excerpt from dave pulls out all the stops

newark; graffiti: live for today.
river runs slow,
     towers touch sky.
bell on train, ringing. people:
getting off and getting on.

newark. a childish baby-scream.
river of the world, small sidestream.
garbage sodden by downpour.
rained today, rained hard.
enterprise: rent a car. rent a life.
man in seat, reading; man
in seat, writing. bookmark -
stop -
rest eyes a bit. rest eyes a bit in

newark; conrail. rained
hard today. leaving; train
whistle blow. goodbyes are
so difficult.

malformed heart

i eat a cookie my mother made,
which is shaped like a malformed
heart,

on valentine's day,
on valentine's day.

my father leaves me a note
saying that there are gloves
if i need them,

on valentine's day,
on valentine's day.

i scrape the ice off my car,
with cold bare hands
holding a cold metal can,

on valentine's day,
on valentine's day.

light years

they say that the light we see from certain stars
is 13 billion years old,
so i guess it shouldn't be surprising
that you still shine through into my dreams.

even if

if in Eden you were to offer me an apple,
even in the darkest night, even
at the end, even if you loved him,
even when I’m blue, even in
the ruins, or if you were ruined too,
or broken, or beaten (even in
these childhood hallways my
mind returns to you),
even were you watered down,
even if you walked away, even then,
even if,
even if in fiction,
if only for my love,
if only due to you,
I would take your apple and I
would eat it.

staying up late

one time, my cousin and i
stayed up all night in our
grandmother's house.

we came out at 8am,
having conquered the dark.
we'd brushed our teeth and washed
our faces in order to stay awake.
when we told her what we'd done,
our grandmother made us march
right upstairs to bed, putting an end to all the
fun. sometime later she made us breakfast,
which we ate eagerly, claiming it as
payment for the difficult undertaking we'd taken
upon ourselves. to this day i am hard pressed
to think of something i'm more impressed with
that i've done.

in darkness, with light

here we are, hearts wreathed in
twilight halos, our minds scattered
and fractured, having no north star
to guide them. here we are, sheep without
a shepherd, lost in the valley, in darkness,
with light. whose love will lead us each
is uncertain, and whose hand holds us is
almost entirely incomprehensible, yet
still we strive forwards, or sideways,
or backwards. still we flounder, still
we fall, still we heal and harken on.
we are covered in darkness, with only
the tiny shining lights of our souls
sparking out against the curtains of
the nighttime nether. here we are
in heaven, or in hell, or wherever we
imagine ourselves, from one thought
to the next. there is darkness, and in
that darkness life, and perhaps
even love, and sadly a strong
and senseless sorrow, along with
all the tools a hand would ever need
in order to build something better,
something like hope, or perhaps
even happiness.

friction

it’s that certain brand of bitterness that
lingers in the back of your throat
and makes you want to spit. it’s that
deceptive quiet, that clever cloak behind which
hides the cloying aftertaste, cumulative
and unrelenting. everything else
takes a back seat as blackness drips down into
your bowels...

it’s a dull, pounding realization; it’s a wet rag
dragged across a stone slab; it’s everything
inevitable; it’s skin on hide, hide
on skin; it’s friction.

we are god's pornography.

nuclear holocaust and decimation,
nations pleading for survival:
a mother’s children sold as slaves,
the salves upon a sick society:
we are god’s pornography.
(back and forth, back and forth.)

let the rain come down,
let the snows wash away
our memories of every
in and out which our inventive,
demented minds have
come up with. let them starve
us out until we remember
nothing at all, and let us play
our part, cracked pieces on a dirty
chessboard in some hidden
hallway up in heaven. let us pray

that god’s mom
doesn’t catch him yanking
himself (or herself) off
to another world war, or
another botched
moon landing, an alien
invasion, a peace accord
in israel, or some other such
silly fiction.

reverse commute

i take my meals in truck stops
along the highway, after-hours when
almost everyone is gone, when i can nearly
hear the echoes of the movements my jaws make
as i ingest. my head is empty, and i wear dark,
inconspicuous clothes. who i am in these
spaces is no one, and what i am doing is
going from nowhere to noplace,
as far as anyone knows. i imagine assassins
feel the same way at times, almost
lonesome but too uninterested to truly feel it.

my domain is my car; i speed on highways,
breaking the law only enough to feel
that i am getting away with something. my
domain is in the air above: i will one day arise,
as smoke toward the sun. it is also in the ground,
which will entomb my ashes. my domain stretches
from shoulder to shoulder, right to left, and
between my ears. my domain is my armspan,
or the length of my cock. my domain stretches
into every crack and crevice, every inanimate object
and idea that my mind might ever make a difference
to, or which might ever enter into that arena. it is whatever
my heart will allow it to be, from one moment—

a poem about you (for every girl ever)

one day i will write a poem
about you. it will say stuff about
your hair, and your nose,
and your voice. it will have passages
that go something along the lines
of, "beauty resides in your eyes
like sirens" and go on to say how i'd like
to reside there too. it will say, "your
heroic heart pounds out seething
seastorms whose great waves slash
against the sides of my single, simple ship
and splash upon the deck." this will be
no simple lyric; it will be
an epic ballad to be sung by bards
in every barroom, and barked by beagles
in every barnyard. for, after all,
there is a beauty which resides in your eyes:
it's like sirens singing me in, ever deeper.
and i'm sure you've already heard how i feel
about your heart. i will write a poem about you
one day, but for now i'm just researching.

for our fathers

for our fathers, who start out being behind the count
by not being the ones
who bear us, having not had
the intricate internal intimacy of us.
our fathers, who must fight on two fronts,
against their own obsolete upbringing and against our
inborn childish obstinacy. for our fathers, who are strong
but must at times appear weak for our sake, who
are weak but at times must appear strong,
for our sake. this is for our fathers, who frequently fear
that they haven't finished their job, whose hearts
are often heavy, sometimes hard, but always full, and whose
heads are often half against the facts that they
engender. this one is for our fathers, this
is for our fathers. may we one day love them in turn
as much as they have loved us.

the grave robbers

everyone picks out their favorite corpse
and we all waltz around the room. angry Edward
has himself a drink of brackish swampwater and twirls
his late lover around three full spins, with his
arm extended. sad Frank sits in
a cold corner, complaining to his dead mother
of a mysterious woman he’d met, who’d kept him
up nights and never returned his phone calls.
an elderly gentleman holds a fragile, old-fashioned
granny in a grizzly death-grip, and it’s unsure
which is the one who is expired. and then
there’s Eleanor in her elegant dress,
Eleanor who I love, with a rip in her dirt-darkened
chest, a hole which partially exposes
her tender heart. and she’s always been a lady
who’d wait for you to open the door, with
an indulgent smile and a soft word of thanks,
and she waltzes so well.

and we don’t dance to forget, and we don’t dance
to remember. we simply dance to dance one last
time, as weak candles cast our strong shadows
against the cement walls and ceilings. we steal them back
for a single night, for the simple pleasure of extending
our hands one last time, in spite of
extenuating circumstances.

styrofoam electrons

trying to find the shortest way
to a house, flitting in between highways,
trying to get there in eleven minutes
or less. if able, attempting to keep
from running over anybody on the
way. worried but not overly
concerned. the atoms of the brain
are bigger than the dust which
fills the air, the atoms are something
you could eat, like cotton candy.
if you see a light, walk toward it, and keep
on going straight until one street becomes
another, then take the highway until
you're nearly there, and make sure
to get lost at least once per avenue,
or every time you see a yellow light. don't
slow down, you're almost there, you almost
have a home. you almost have a home.

darkest memory

in my dark, in my
most moist gelatinous membranes
i feel, what i feel for you, in the dark,
before a punch, before a drunken stupor,
even when we bleed. dark smiles,
shut eyes, dead minds, hearts, we feel.
we felt once, long ago, humans.
before the christ, before the fall
and the false redemption. in my,
in your death throes, the flailing, the
meaningless end of existence. moments
of pity and sympathy, felt outward-in,
upon every single surface a smudge.
left alone, a heart in the dark, smudged
with tiny pricks of life. simple patterns,
out of the darkness of pre-creation,
recreated randomly for the enjoyment
of all. each in blossom, in decay. the
flutter of lost souls creating a wind upon
the cheek as they softly leave the evening ether
into the unprotected darkness of the night.

shortest path between two points (a love poem)

my heart is locked
inside my chest, but if i could
i'd cut it out for you to see. it would be
a messy sort of maneuver, all blood
and bone and gristle. i might need
to take mental leave of the proceedings,
which would call for even more
hurried work of the hacksaw. but once
you're satisfied, once your fears are settled,
(or whenever it is that you feel that you are ready,)
you can stitch me back up, sew up the
holes, and together we'll try to sand
the stains from your hands.

if i am true

if i am true, will the universe
bend itself toward me? is life a fair
game? how are humans
any different from all the other
disgusting digestive systems which
simply happen to have sprouted legs?
where is the infinite you
located? is it anywhere near
the infinite i? do words make sense when
you shove them right up next to each other
like this? if i am true, do i get
a lollipop when i die? will you
make sure of that? if you are true
i will try to keep you
from collecting dust. and i
will try to hold you in my heart,
just so. if i am true, if you are true.
if the world is made of truth, if atoms
are trustworthy. if electrons, if ecstasy
and empathy and everything else. like a
stained glass window, if you could ever trust one.
what kind of a god
likes
stained glass windows? what kind of
god are you? or i? and yet
each time we sneeze, we create a million
billion universes. if i am true, maybe
they will be true too, and maybe
the entire spiral which is constructed
will not collapse
just yet.