speed, speeding, sped

Pedal to the floor,
driving fast as hell,
sometimes the only chances
are the ones you take.
Lost highways, American horizons,
road maps used for beer spills,
the feeling of a gun
pointed at my head.

Those were
the old days,
the road days.

Now I'm middle-aged,
settled, pacific.

Not sure what's coming next
but I hope you're there
to see it.

naked stars

In the
Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
there's a great scene where
a boy repents his Wicked ways
and embraces the Good life.

His wickedness is in fact so wicked
that it changed him into a dragon,
not that bad a fate until you realize
that in the West, unlike the East,
men kill dragons for sport and treasure.

Well, in any case, the boy repented
and his scales began to fall off.
Aslan helped, his big furry paws
peeling off the scales to reveal
the human underneath.

It's a beautiful scene,
noble lion and naked boy
beneath the Christian stars.

**

(postscript)

"And immediately there fell from his eyes
as it had been scales:
and he received sight
forthwith, and arose,
and was baptized."

Acts 9:18
King James Edition

way of the samurai

Note posted on the 'fridge
this morning:
need party food.

But the messiah hasn't arrived
yet.

Underneath the kitchen chair,
the kitten sleeps,
curled up on her blanket.
Her whiskers twitch.

She knows.

exile and the kingdom

No confessions were offered up today
in the church of the Ascension.
No prayers were heard.
No hosannas were sung, no wafers
were consumed, and no wine was spilled
on the cassocks of the altar boys.

Instead everyone gathered
in the plazas and the markets
where the news spread
like evangelical fire.
Merchants closed their shops
and all along the watchtower
soldiers kept a steady vigil.

God's voice spoke in dreams
to pilgrims on their way
to Santiago de Compostela,
final resting place
of Saint James the apostle.

Riders were approaching
from the south.

la ciudad

Beautiful island of second chances,
wet leaves on sidewalks and
sepia-toned storefronts.

You were discovered by the poets,
colonized by the merchants
and invaded by the priests who
came looking for the hand of God.

When you were young men fought for you,
for their right to conquer and own you.
With their long phallic swords and their blood
they came and they fought and they stole.

Beautiful island
I first read your books
in the summer of my crossing.

In glimpses, now and again,
a vision of your one true language.

morning commute

The whole thing is fraught with peril!
Distant with my book, leaning alone
against a door of the L train,
sometimes distracted by cute boys,
sometimes never noticing the mad
preachers with the hidden hands,
this is no land for the lost.
Bumping along, the car fills with humanity,
all of us perhaps busy with our busyness,
eye contact at a minimum,
the train is like a waiting room.
But then the stop, then detraining,
and the platform and the stairs.
The whole enterprise is fraught with peril!
Misjudge the flow of the crowd,
get shoved trackwards, backwards,
misjudge the stairs and get trampled
by ever-marching shoes and the rat-a-tat
of soaking wet umbrellas.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid!

When my ancient, crumbling regime
finally gets tumbled down,
brought down low by the boredom
and general fed-up-ness
of everyone around me,

it'd be nice to hope for
a warm, soft bed
and a forced exile
somewhere

but no, there's a fence post
planted by itself near the city gate
and there's a man out there
in the noonday sun
busy sharpening the point.

I know just where my head will be
someday.

Post it note (A Dream)

Criminal pop tunes, rushed
seatbelt paranoia. Midwest congestion.
I can't find the moonlight, too many highways
not enough stars.

Peach tree advocates, November
apologist. I've eaten days with nothing
but slumber and apathetic hangovers.

Autumn.

ohhhhfuck

Break glass in case of
emergency,

well, that's what it said

but of course there have been
false signs, false omens, before
and more might be on the way.

In any case it wasn't
the apocalypse
just a small uprising, a minor coup,
sweeping down the coastal valleys
and up the solid mountains

and what's called for now
is a broom for broken glass
and a redrawing of the maps.

and I slept through it all

Last night,

Millions of madmen died for love & were given
nothing but shallow graves. The women of my village burned
a man for obscene thoughts & no one thought anything of it. I
Wore a mask to sleep & only when i woke up did i realize I
had always been wearing a mask. My father rose &
it was deemed a miracle. A new deity was born, while another
one was massacred. The cycle continued & I wrote out the last
line of the longest poem ever written on a window that looked
out to a wall. My neighbor finally perfected his song but knows
that no one will hear it, suicide seems like routine. With my left hand
I lifted the ocean, with my right the desert. I waited & waited, divine miracles
cascaded off of the rooftops, in every apartment a rose. A father
slept in his empty child's bed in hopes of holding onto what little was left.
I wept & it went unnoticed.

at the temple of the underpaid prostitutes

We unpack each heart with care,
using words composed of honey
to pry open the chest cavities.
We gently press our fingerprints
into the tender ventricles
(so malleable, so vulnerable)
in order to ensure
a true connection
and then
we test the heart strings
for any weaknesses,
we really make them sing.

This way, no fear, no failure,
and a good time will be had.

In the words of the prophet,
"Maximum pleasure is guaranteed."

Have you read our sacred writings?

"Please rest assured
that we consider
august and sacred
each & every heart."

So says our big brochure.

hooray for entropy!

Don't look for me at my desk,
not today.
Don't much feel like workin'.

Instead, depressed,
gravitating towards
Thanos

whom I find in his kitchen
whipping up both
black omelettes and
nihilistic plans.

whee!

Morning arrives with the "big dog" stiff and full,
pointing like a lightning rod.
Been happening a lot lately
but at my age
this frequent morning tumescence is not to be expected.

Could be because I'm drinking less?

Could be a cause for some celebration, I suppose,
could make me feel somewhat younger.
But then I move around
and the knees creak and the lower back gives up a twinge
and I know just where I am.

Post it

Post it note(Photograph)

Thank you, for your interest.
I am not here at the moment
but you can remember me in
the meantime, i shall surely
return at the appropriate moment.

Post it

Post it note(A)

She's from Buffalo, by the
way of Spain, Puerto Rico,
North Carolina, & Rhode Island.

All destinations performed a brief function.
She tends to get upset when Autumn
replaces Summer, not knowing
that Winter will soon arrive.

She doesn't travel lightly,
all baggage is thoroughly inspected.

Her ticket has been punched, stamped, &
duly noted by the conductor.

Post it

Post it note(bedroom door)

I've left all mental facilities at the entrance.
The general upkeep of my life is limited
to brief moments of lucidity.

I couldn't help but dip into insanity
even if it was just for a taste.

"le moyen age"

Red spaghetti stain
on her dress
near the waist.
He was
too eager,
rushed to embrace
too soon.
This upset the table,
and the cats,
and now just look
at the state of things.

Well.
It was an old dress,
she had resisted the urge
to buy something new
just for him.

She first wore this black
designer knock-off
the day her mother set out
her father’s remaining clothes
on the bed, preparing them
for their farewell.
Uncles, cousins, brothers, male friends
had already been through the closets,
had left, leaving behind
empty hangars and a few scattered
items. Shirts, coats, pairs of pants.

Now, looking down
at the stain,
it could almost be
someone else’s dress,
it has been
that many years.

bloom

America, You were my first love affair.

Do you not hear your infants,
crying? The voices, clamoring not for a single thing
but clamoring? Everywhere, flooding the streets with our
ideals, night lamps for midnight postman? Have you forgotten
your orphans? Chained in desolate row houses, still believing
in your dreams.

Brick by brick, history stands mystified by it's irrelevance. This rare place of flooding mounts, chained by your history. Our walls are fragile, does our house
lack a foundation? our ill fed thoughts, congesting the hallways, lingering cigarette smoke, the carcasses swept into drains at dawn unnoticed.

Where is your Buffalo now? The twisted steel of forgotten ports lingering where no ship docks, stolen promises collapsing in unused factories. Why did you discard us?

I read your discarded postcards, phantom images, what is left
other than our imagined selves. Do you hear us? weeping through your streets, phantoms lingering in your walls.
Are we ill advised foreigners? Is this our vigil? Have you laid a rosary over our stones, have we bent in the willows, flooded the cemetery, where is the night
watchman? Have your loco-motives halted, your mines collapsed, has the passage from east to west ceased? Where are your majestic ships? Do you hear the sweeping chorus of the strange fruit planted in your cotton fields? Your wind carried us, do you see? Have we yet to become the flesh of your soil? Does the odor still linger or did it dissipate? Have we really become ill advised foreigners?

after the Rubicon

This morning, stigmata,
somewhat a surprise.
Drank a few beers, bled,
watched the blood trickle down
pitter-patter to the floor,
Rorschach test patterns.
Or Chinese ideograms?

Wrapped my hands in gauze,
brushed the teeth in the tub because
the sink was again clogged --
constipated? A metaphor?
I squatted there, brushing,
like a mendicant praying,
imagining giving myself up
to a higher power, up to
something or someone higher.
Mind tends to wander,
while squatting, wandering far,
yet always coming back.
Thank goodness.

Biscuits in the oven,
I read Plath
until it was time for work.
Glorious work!
I sent a text message to a friend:
Middle aged man prepares for day,
stumbles over empty bottles.

Clean shirt, jeans and sandals,
unsubmerged from the pile
heaped in faith on a chair
near the closet.

Outside, sky high,
seagulls wheeled,
alight in pentecostal grace.

The streets were full of young horses.

I want to wipe your tears.

we could shed our mask, could you imagine?
The touch of my flesh against yours at dawn, our silhouettes outlining
the last building before the end...
Am I etched into your flesh?

I dream of writing a post it note;
"Went to the store, be back soon."
Would you slowly drift away or
would you wait until i returned?

You could be the captain, I could be the captain,
maybe we could both be captains and finally...

I dream, absurd claims to justify myself.
All i know is my love.

the library at Alexandria is burning

Shit,
I said out loud
& then I wondered
again
just what it was I was doing
leaning on a "Village Voice" box,
the omen-like hour of midnight,
the weather jaded & slightly bored,
me dressed in my most faded jeans
& a new-grown goatee,
waiting for some college boy
who looked like a winner
seven beers ago
to hurry up and
finish already.

Well.
At least this earthy work
serves as a distraction
from the idea that
there is only so much
drinking, smoking,
& fucking around
a man can do.
That at some point
he has to realize
his potential & do something
or be something
or he has to accept the fact
that he's gone as far as
he can.
There is that.

I suppose.

Mentat

I wrote you in my past dream. The courtship ritual would take place in the lobby of the Citibank building.
Do you think you'll be able to remember who you were?

Our appointment has been scheduled, don't be late.
I've written many words.


Delicate tapestry is slowly unwound. CTR-ALT-DELETE

I am wordless at the wonder-wheel. Does she dream in the same mechanical way?
Auto-Didactic love affair. A mechanical representation of myself wanders into the room.

I am. Replicating automated ideas from past constructs of replicated ideas. Writer/Reader
interlope. I confuse the sound of the air hose for rain on sunday mornings, constantly repeating the same
mistake.

I remember;
Flooding the ant hill with asbestos, our lawn had been invaded by africans. Delicate red creatures.
Mobilized with vague notions of something or other, migration of inherited ideas.
Christ like bloom under august, our nausea was apparent. Thoughts began to leak towards our neighbors.

inheriting my memory loss.

Something is happening underneath my couch and I'm scared of knowledge. An apparent invasion, deluded plans
of moths and roaches, conquest of my dilapidated apartment and then, then nothing. I am apparent in my madness, silent
through my love affair. I am unknown to myself and to others. I exist outside of memory, therefore outside of reality.

Conquest, I have no knowledge of such word ever existing.

Then there was a paradigm shift.

Jose...Jose...wake up.

The
something
or
other
is
about
to
happen.

another country

I wake up as usual
to jazz and marble coffee,
to leftovers gone the very
stoniest of stony cold,
to the 24 hour news cycle,
to the sounds of the world.
The weather today, storm systems
swooping in like a murder of crows.

Today is the feast day of some
gone archaic saint who wandered in
the desert sunburnt and bearded
whilst performing miracles of healing.
In celebration of this devoted stoic,
hosannas fill the background
of a country once my own.

Finally spring,
but how much did I learn
from the winter just now passing?
How many geodes were extracted
from the ice
to be explicated and marveled at,
to be classified?
There was, mostly, the cold
seeping pervasive into
the forests of my bones.

It's been an age since the time
of saints and miracles and mysteries.
These days we need to choose
and elevate our own holy ones,
blessed and blessing ones,
who will touch us
and let us know.

Last night I dreamed of a mythic Russia,
a snow-swamped, impassable country.
The houses were frosted over, silent,
cluttered up with debris including
photos in cracked frames and
books that slid from frozen shelves.
Everywhere there were reminders
of a lost and better time,
a time before
the slippage started.

heroes

I’d been led to believe
that the world was finite,
containing no true surprises.
Yet following the very last eclipse
evolution shifted itself, it adapted.

The moon crossed the sun
and now they both hover
side by side in the sky.

The messengers arrived,
bringing with them new ideas.
Their most important task,
revolution,
or so they believed.
They held to their faith
and would not be turned
no matter the evidence,
no matter what distractions.

This world is a melange of
bright light, white noise,
distractions, daily minutia,
of mission statements and goals,
of paradigm shifts, mixed metaphors,
and inconclusive conclusions.
The world is the world is the world
and it just keeps on spinning around.

I’ve seen men vanish,
and I’ve seen men fly,
but I am not afraid.

This morning I felt surrounded
by a persistent energy field,
a calling, a push,
telling me that
I could do magic.

If I could find a way to believe.

among the nightingales

With the tectonic plates
more or less stabilized
and peace (more or less)
arrived at,
the focus shifted
to domesticity.
The building settled into itself,
becoming a home.

The mice made a hash
of the baseboards
but no matter.
Every foundation has its secrets.

At night the skyscrapers were like hills
that whispered peacefully in the wind
and we stretched out on the roof
with bottles of red wine.

Tell me, you said,
about the stars.

oooops

Brick by brick and stain by stain
I built the wall up and up and then
I tore that bastard down.
Whee! Blisters on
my fingers and scabs on
my knees, I worked and
sweated and
labored to be here.

I bedded down the concubines
in the Sultan's court, as well as
all the she-males and the eunuchs and
next I banged away at
all those royal princes.
Such peaches.

And now I am a poet.
Hah!
Still an alcoholic, too,
with blisters on my fingers
and scabs on my knees.

hello, please leave a message after the beep

Among the dead,
gone & remembered,
poets from the past
who smoked too much,
who talked, who nested in bars,
who found room inside for both
despair & hope, who fucked,
who loved, who chanted mantras,
who sat alone on park benches watching
the sun climb up & up until
it hovered above the city.

Poets who jumped from ships
or swallowed a bullet or tied themselves
to a swaying tree or opened a wrist
or took an overdose of pain relief
or gently laid a feverish head into
the waiting,
open oven.

We left behind words,
words jotted down in notebooks,
words quickly scribbled
on scraps of paper, napkins, envelopes,
words found printed
in published collections,
the pages yellowed & thumbed
into road-map creases.
We left behind words,
words we passed on
in conversations hoping
someone understood us.
The words were there
when we rose
& the words were there
when we fell.

existential geometry

Remorseful and mysterious,
sinners looking for salvation,
the messengers rode
easily toward the frontier town
at just the knife-edge of sunset.
The sky grew dark and
passed no judgment.
Leather saddles creaked, groaned,
the horses were misted
with sweat and alkaline dust.
Four men rode with purpose,
with pistols armed and ready,
and behind them an open road
curved and stretched for miles
into the distance.

At the gate,
one lone watchman.

what ya gonna do?

The blood-soaked coast after weeks of searching,
after I lost the map,
after my old shoes eroded.

One morning dawn appeared, glorious,
and we trudged up one side of a dune
then down the other, and there it was.
Red sand.
Low, low tide.
Carrion birds high above.

Bones of the martyrs, future relics,
bleaching in the morning sun.

Instead of shells, or jellyfish,
or sea-soaked driftwood,
a beach covered in relics.

End of the journey,
but has anything changed?
Forgiveness is never that easy.
Sins cannot be sloughed away
like dead skin gone to ashes.

**

Last night it rained.
I think I finally understand
Nietzsche's last descent,
too late of course.
There's a truth so hard
so shiny that the edges
cut me,
and I just know.

"Old men ought to be explorers"

Moving outside the lines,
a shirtless young man
with a shatterproof air
of casual indifference and
Caravaggio’s boy-angel wings
skateboards the steps
of Union Square park.
I watch,
contained
inside my solitude,
as he circumnavigates
the crowd without touching it.

Closing my eyes,
I think of sailing.

I think of deep water,
and drifting, and the waves,
and the ocean tides
pulling me down.

Opening my eyes, I look
in vain for cracks
in his casual facade.

Tuesday fatigue/Fighting off

1.

you suck the life out of me,
paper weight.

i refuse to fly.


2.

Anonymous compost delinquents.
I find this morning tarnished,
this last house on the left.

3.

Concourse,
we the finger paintings. Completely without understanding. Wire framed photographs,
wrapped through little fingers. Our bodies are swelling with imagined lives. Slight movements
reveal the ventriloquist. Intersect between ourselves.

4.

I've mapped out my body within your boundaries.
integration memoirs.

I ran from you. Theft had always left my heart
content. I loved you, as I loved myself. The longest line was always inescapable.

Epilogue.

Jubilation.
withdrawal.
Catharsis.
Introspection.

Well fed memories continue to consume beyond there believed ability. Punctuating ideas offset with random memories of what was, an inescapable love affair. Crowded rooms fill my mind, where have we left the love we so cherished as children.

snack time at the Heraclitean cafe

Approximately
40 inches from my bed
a mini-fridge stocked up
with 40 ounce bottles of beer.

This year I will devour,
more or less, 40 books
and I will write 40 blogs,
more or less.

40 black shirts in my closet,
40 pairs of shoes.

At least 40 things to think about
before I tumble into bed tonight.