There is no poem
There is no page
Nor line
Nor word
No poet
Nor reader to read
Nor thinker the think
There is
no reader to read
tired wood desks
numb hands
empty tile
is blissful scapes
of driven stone
buried
sunshine ladled
to the face of the sky
staring into one
looking back at
two snakes
eating each other
at opposite ends
for the sake of the grass
on the lawn
and the shine on your shoes
A woman is the worst thing for a writer.
She will make your coffee,
She will cook your eggs,
She pours your beer into a glass
When all you want is the goddamn bottle.
She keeps you from your poems.
She keeps you out of trouble.
The bed is crowded
With “love yous” and unbearable stares.
The bed breaks your legs
And she feeds you from between her thighs.
The grass outside the window
Beats against the glass,
Stunted an shrunken,
As it tries, so desperate to set you free.
You love so wholeheartedly
The light behind the door,
The music coming through the floor.
You yearn so greatly
To hear the voices from the other room
More clearly,
To see the smiling faces of old forgotten friends,
Forgotten in the haze of infatuation,
The lucid fixtures of lust.
A woman will warn you of the cold wind outside.
She will make her room seem so warm
Until you sweat out like a stuck pig,
Like a bleeding peach,
Until you are dried as a leaf.
And she holds you in her hand
So affectionately enduring,
She puts you in the wardrobe
And wears you like a suit,
In front of friends, in front of family,
Walking down the sidewalk,
Sitting at a show.
She will love you so much,
And all you want to do
Is drink a good beer out of the bottle,
And write a page.
In a belly full of smoke perception falls like rain,
Like pedants to pavement.
Crawling carpet exhales iris like
The sun puts forth sincerity
Laid against floating clay, dancing into carved streams,
Perspiring a dog’s dream.
Consuming genius faces
That rises to the night like wooden elevators,
To keen absolution,
To hopeful absolve.
The people are happy, the people are pleased.
They parade in color and masks
Championed by nude revelry,
And touch the black pavement with
Zeal bound like rabbits’ legs.
Red bricks stain the indulging clay,
Steel bends to wind and swells.
The people are happy, the people are pleased,
Next to fire, next to heat
Beneath a lions paw
As they jaunt to the paintings on the wall,
Healing wounds in thyme
And olive,
Burning roots breathing in,
Tasting dirt so beseeched,
Holding trees in hand,
Drinking amber swigs.
Oh how happy the people are,
Oh how pleased.
To lay blanket-earth
From crown to sole
Content at morning,
Content at aversion designed towards dilution.
Oh how happy
With a belly full of smoke,
And grins that seldom
Cease.
A taste like mint winter,
Troubled always and everywhere,
Such sweet handsome sin.
A blanket of dark grapes
In skin like juniper. I do miss you
Like the paneling misses the wall. I do love you
Like a knob loves brass.
The bristles of sun crack through the
Basement window to a bare mattress,
Two bodies,
Four hands.
“Lets have a beer.”
“Yes, we should,” she says
Still worn out from the night before,
Leaning forward up the stairs, falling upward
To the immanent ice box
With a rush of cold like a frozen wave,
And a beer so cold she loves me even more,
A couch so warm baked in morning light
From the side-yard window.
“Lets have a smoke.”
“Yes, we should,” she says
Rolling her cigarette,
Tracing her tongue with the tip of the paper,
Rolling it so delicately between her fingers
The way a good woman should.
The paper pressed between her lips
And lit,
The wafts of tobacco and that same winter mint
Knocks you on your ass,
And the concrete could not be a better bed
To stare up into a pale face
And silent freckles
Pooling in dimples like marbles
Rolled down the chipped wood banister,
Tapestried by falling autumn,
Caught by quiet ground.
War is a drum,
It is a bottle paved with glass
Burnt at the heel turned strawberry red
With mirrors placed through the skies.
As wild as a tree,
As violent as a road,
Draped in green sheets and copulation.
War is a bluff,
It is wax.
There is a car parked outside the house
Staring in through the window.
Its innards black leather seamed like skin,
Its steel pulsates like animal hide,
Its voice whispers through the walls,
Its breath peels off like rind.
I see the car
And I am in love.
I am in love
And cry against the glass.
It looks as delicate as a harp.
I want rub myself against the hood,
Strip naked and lick the drivers wheel.
I want the leather to swallow,
And the headlights glow like candles.
War is a radio,
It is a mattress.
Through which you hear muffled songs, while
Reason shouts from a dimpled beard.
Reason, reason, rejected.
A rejection of all rules has become necessary,
Do not miss your opportunities to rise up to the ceiling
Born a lusty babe drinking ambrosia
Happiness is a commodity,
Like emblematic booze that peppers glass,
Like a forced smile.
It flows spice in a codeine dream,
Drowning versettes
In an endearing brigade of self allusion,
In unending ascension
To solitude,
To peaks,
Of cannon fire
And glad marches.
Dancing on the water,
Dealing with the devil,
You must starve for the sake of principle.
By nighttime the morning will seem so far,
And the twilight will drown in the rues
Of the glad moon.
The movements of the rooftops
Will dance.
Singed-gorge air,
Flying skyward as a loose winged waltz
Holds tight to cadence and canter.
A canopial din
Glazed in lamp light,
Strong as breath
And routing root.
Happiness will leave us
In light of wisdom,
Our wise mind honest and disinterested,
Our wise heart loving and uncaring.
So much composure collects the night
To stretch it in the sky as shadow
Opening a door to unfathomable delight,
Delighted in Madonna and Claire de Lune.
The classicists have vanished
And the world has turned to the spoiled
And myself
Has turned to contempt.
All the friends back home are junkies,
Scoured and scorched by devils.
I am so sad.
They missed the point,
They missed the point of excess,
They missed the point of the sight of the void,
They missed the point of it all,
That sometimes when we cant sleep
We close our eyes
And pretend.
This life is not a collapsing breath,
It is a pyre
Of reverence,
Of contempt,
Of health,
Of future.
This is all an eclamation.
We were never supposed to die for the sake of dying;
Only for the sake of ourselves.
This was never meant to be the last exhalation,
But the first sight of honesty.
One by one
They all fall.
And I stand strong
On the strength of excess
For the sake of myself
And my ballast companions,
And the sights they will never know
As I travel solely
Through this holy pyre.
I feel sorry for the evergreens in autumn,
They will never know a beautiful death.
They will watch year after year,
Their neighbored arbor slain
By the cold.
Year after year they will grow tired,
Complacent,
Old and unmoving.
They know nothing of
Self-imposed loneliness,
Of admitted villainy,
Of sublime isolation
In the most honorable act
Of a lonesome death, indifferent to
The eyes of the world.
This death is so rare,
In such veracious color,
In such flattery.
Few will ever know what it is like
To find yourself at the apex of beauty
And the trough of being.
There is no better self-destruction.
There is no better purpose.
All of the evergreens
Will stand and stare with envy
As you walk further and further
Into the graceful sleep of winter,
With the colors they only find
In their sleep,
In their dreams,
In their prayers.
And you will die so happily
So satisfied and reborn.
And the evergreens
May only watch, year after year.
At the beginning
We will elate from black fiery storms
To golden beached grace.
We will awake from drowning
In abysmal revelry and watch the frontier expanse
Clad itself in vigilant ward.
At the sight of our first smile
The stone-faced gods will crumble in envy
And we will cross their backs in bare-foot trance
Toward heavenly sedation.
Our mothers and fathers will love each other.
Our mothers and fathers will love us.
The earth will shine green as glass
Ringing in the ears of our sleep
Halting dark mares at the door,
Hiding red eyes beneath snow-driven sheets
That house our selves in safety and gladness.
We will love the world, and
The world will love us for it.
We will find Possibility beneath the stones,
It will dance and hide and tease,
It will lure us to every edge of being,
And sing to us as sirens sing,
Holy, whorish, beautiful.
We will chase her heart with living breath,
Staggering and crying,
Loving her so much.
The gods will grant favor in our screams
They will grant us hope in the face
Of disillusionment.
And we will believe their tongues,
As we believe in spring and summer,
As we believe in day and night.
The hope they grant will poison our veins
With greed,
With canon,
With ever-longing sickness.
It will look so beautiful in the mirror
As we see our beautiful selves
Wrapped in beautiful faith,
Seeing blue skies
Too ignorant to see the gray horizon,
Rambling like a bull,
Roaring like a lion.
II. slouching towards the gods
At the center
Of this self
We will despise.
The blue skies will turn ceaseless cinder
And vomit cryptic rain.
The clouds will cry with methane
While the gas dunes outside the windows.
We will bury ourselves in sickness
In the dark corners of the room.
Trust will taste of mercury,
Love will turn to devil’s root
And will brace in resolved absolution of flesh and bone
In the wells of your chest
Laughing wild cackles of bleeding lust,
Of rejoicing apathy.
Hatred will break glass and
Blot out the sun in black-stone.
The streets will sneer in concrete sovereignty
Laced with needles,
Bathed in rust,
Harbored in the fog.
Lungs will suffer in billows of smoke and sand.
The old will wither alone,
Their eyes shrinking,
Their hearts beating slower and slower.
The marrow of the earth will dry and petrify
In fear.
Fear will sit atop seizured thrones
Built on the graves of children.
The soot of our skin will weigh heavy and blind our faces,
We will stumble wildly through the dark,
To find our parents that once loved us,
To find our parents that once loved each other.
The world will compromise itself,
It will rape itself in the hope for comfort,
Finding only comfort in the negation of freedom.
We will cry to ourselves at dusk,
Praying that the night will deliver some semblance of dawn in our sleep.
Our sleep will not die,
It will drive back dark tides,
It will flow in gilded virtue.
We will surely rise
In hampered hope.
III. unreal
At the end we will be happy,
The sun will rise as an obelisk
And sing through the skies,
Chanting “glory, glory earth,
Glory, glory light.”
Life will turn deaf
Death blind.
The seas will rescind to children’s laughter,
The trees will cheer at the sight of love,
All of the old will turn young and smile.
The ivory tusks of day will stretch forever
Swallowing the night in its wake.
Dark shallows will dry to bright quarries
Of blue-eyed shale.
We will awake beneath our dreams
Dancing in fire light on the shoulders of giants
Slaying darkness.
Dust will rise and disappear
From the panes of day,
Mothers will hold us close
And hum to our hearts,
Fathers will paint our face in wild herb.
The tin roofs will sway with cattail screams,
The world will rise with catskill stance.
Red-haired women will pour our drinks,
And the tables will be full with food.
The streets will sink into the breeze
The cars will burry in ash,
Their horns bellow a burial dirge
To hopes,
To prayers,
To needs.
You are reborn and you are beautiful,
Sadness swells with joy.
The shades of eyes will be lifted
And the frontiers will stand on guard.
Winters will end,
Summers will breathe barreled breaths
All the evils will purge in melting snow
And when the weight of the world is so soft on your shoulders
Seven sisters will shout out in harmony
“Hooray Hoorah, we need never be afraid again.”
I do not know
Who could stand to live
In such a place as this.
Who could stand to live around
Such ignorance?
Who could stand to live around
Such ugliness?
Who could stand to live around
Such a waste of time?
If I had my way
The world would be an empty diner,
With a fully stocked bar,
Endless ovens filled with rare steak,
And me with a beautiful girl
In a lonely booth
Away from the window.
Perhaps that is what one finds
On the other side of being.
