online literature since 2007

Friday, April 30, 2010

Neon, Fish Tank Rocks


I’ve seen the men, alike, ragged breasts on a beautiful rib cage
I’ve seen the women, like broken camel knees

I’ve seen these bent backs of these creatures
shave sheets of grass from the city parks
and wear the worms as their veins,
the sheets as their skin

These creatures cross their arms and hold bouquets
of bottles with aluminum can tabs over their eyes,
some with parched tongues still
prairie dogging for milk from the sky

I don’t know death the way these lives know
the dirty hell of this heaven—
not a child’s mind where all the chutes
and ladders end when we are done

If, and these creatures know, heaven is the
return to a child’s mind, (head nod)
then I’ll join the ranks of them
wearing the filthy earth like hell

I’ll dig all of their graves when
I’m tired of talk about death,
wombs in the soil and blankets of flesh,
every hole I’ll fill with the neon fish tank rocks

because their coals in this heaven
are hot as fuck. 

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

I don't want to write of the stars no more

i don't want to write of the stars no more
they don't crave the stars
the howls are tied to lead

i've made too many cry in the night

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Machine Gun Moments


He said over a few beers:
‘My name is Malakai Vacey
I have never been myself
for more than four minutes.’

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘he feared
his self out of Easter dress
Out of relationships with dying women
Out of books and the boots of
Bukowski’s Eliot’s Ellison’s
Characters. Out of the faces
and skins of those who died
and left their drabby suits
under the Christmas trees

Out of the living moments
Out of the slow rides in
autos full of white niggers
chinks fags and spicks
across the states and frontiers
and hills that whistle right up under the clouds.’

‘Out of innocence too much like a cherry
Out of a pruned boy only at 22,’
when he did say he could be his self,

‘A dick, with a liver full of spit—
ungrateful pair of eyes hyper juiced
on dull spirits and soiled lungs,
sucking pollen from the lips of angels.’

‘A lip, plugged with black tobacco slugs—
a smile that makes heroes kneel in
cracked dirt and cry;

an ugly dick, so full of distorted love
the only way to live is to burn and fight.’

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

the tugboat

guilt
the cargo weighing down the boat

hate
hawks flying in circles above, lurking, waiting to eat their prey

hope
the crack in wood, water seeking in

fear
land is far away

desolation
the oars cannot defeat the waves

anxiety
sinking ship, fish jumping in the boat

suffering
the fish weighing down the boat (along with the cargo)

despair
the boat is sinking

opportunity
letting go of the cargo and learning how to swim

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Moments of Salt


Here we go:
What will they accept when the mail is dead?
How will my fingerless hands communicate to them?
Why will I continue to eat?
If I am three quarters full of shit
that means I at one point had three quarters worth
of fine wine, food, and swallowed time.

There is no depression that tastes like
t. will’s ice cream
all the girls I meet talk much of ice cream
they talk of their travels and the small parlors
that served them and told them how cute they looked
and added to the baby fat around the bone of the hip
which fingers
melt like ice cream on the nyc july sidewalk
leaves the hands sticky and sweet

I wonder why they don’t crave corn on the cob instead
By the winter fires when their hips deflate
When im at their side wishing I was naked
a puddle of colored milk spreading in front
of the fireplace like it was july
smell the buttered corn trying to understand
and think of ice cream

so the girls think when their confidence falls
the worry creeps and the desire for ice cream
the small parlors and memories in past suns
line up behind the eyes

flutter, dip their chins and hide their faces in hands
mouths circled in superman blue
moose tracks, mint chocolate chip
sheepish little girls with full breasts
hips at a V
thinking a good fuck will cure the flask
of gender kept distilled and away
come that dip in strength when memories
of ice cream take the place of sons and lovers
taste tests and sugar fantasies

The most fashionable lesbian couple of Gramercy Park

They started off as roommates, and one said,
“Oh yeah my girlfriend is really like, weird,”
A police car sped vrooming down the block,
“I wanted to talk to her but I got fucked up.”
Brain so up and down, options like windows,
The scarf looked like baby, or animal.
I wanted to say, “C’mon, petite abeille,
feel confident and confidential,” you do not
have to give your name, but rattle your chains.
Say, “oh-kay, this is, over.” Sirens grow
closer. “This moment is washed, blowdryed,
but as long as I can take it I’ll survive.”

Meanwhile: Eat your vegetables, do your work.
Respect women, respect men, rock & roll.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

or naturally me

doctor i want to feel the angry bee
            scared and frantic in my summer dress
can i feel again and touch the new with my mind
            wax coat or oven with the finished apple pie?
may i be me and recognize my leg’s fleshy bulbous machine
            so i can stop writing like the woman with the water breasts
            who passed me on the sidewalk and washed her eyes over me
i’m afloat in my own skin and wish the chemical tablets i take at night
            would make me grow gills and fins and be caught      drown a body
                                                                                            or
of human delight

Monday, April 5, 2010

What I heard at the bar last night


“I’ll shoot that woman if I see him with her,” the short Puerto Rican said. 
“Si or no?” the drunk girl they brought said. They noticed how drunk she was and took sips of their own drinks. 
“Are you going to answer my question?” she asked.  No one answered and the barman walked away.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Consider April from My Balcony

I
The seagulls sound like
Doors opening over the sea

When I paint my chest
Like the Easter egg designed
In womb  I felt the pulse

Of church bells echo           
            In the sewers and bones
Of the city

II
My balcony overlooks
Jesuit house defaced walls

And lonely golden window
Lamps  I saw portals of priests
And sisters using tea with their
            Hands bleached and
Free from callous

I checked my sense of the
Order   the march   the pace 
The quantity of ants
            Filing into the sea—

The catalyst suicides of childish
Novas the depth of storage for
Indifferent ill memories

III
            I sketched for the tea party
The public sex I’ve seen in streets
The beards burned in fires of
Money and condoms the small
Mountains of pleasure and success
The carcasses of flattened gulls
            Fallen from the heavens
  
            My friends sleep inside,
A warm rat king of
College exhaustion dissolving at
Last  and I on the balcony
            listen to the church bells
ring and turn

The remaining gulls with keys—
Consider April from my balcony

IV
This evening I use the Bible as the
Instruction booklet of the chords
Of giants gritting teeth beats the
Booms of St. Ignatius kicking
His boot against empty air

            Tried to build this door—

This door I cursive for frame
I take the wind three sheets
Covering lovers drawn out on
Haight and Ashbury to you
Allen to you and the salt from
Your eyes that turned your beard
From brunette to blonde when you
Dreamed of hot air balloons
Deflating above
            Greenwich night skies

V
            Every nail and board
Into this door
Made with the bread of pain
And the codes behind my eyes
Coursing from my blueprint of
            Veins and bones these
Fingers drawing the sketches
Of a gate for all to walk naked
Thru

At the foot will scurry
white pelts of rabbits against
The bare balls of the ankles
I am unsure if they will think of
Allen Hardy Jesus or me

            If they think of me
The way of the cypress tree
Let one thousand fields of lilac
And poppy candy
            In which the mystics are buried
Spread like acid on film

The mystics in their sleep
Will hear my footsteps
They will smell my sweat
And they will feel the pressure
Of my word like the finger
Clenched

VI
The door
            To building the door
That will open to all—

            The pallid angels with cigarettes
Hanging from their lips and a
Cancer spreading their wings.
            The annals of children waiting
Awake for the toothfairy who is
Left hung on the cypress tree
In the field of infinity

I keep building this door
For all to pass under
To see the sunlight behind
To see ahead
the moon
            dropped
In the great star like an Irish car bomb
           
            The howls of the sinking
moon will be mistaken for the final
hissing of dying time

The dogs of romanticism chained
To fashionable pegs
Lurch and froth and choke
Trying to reach me before
I finish this door

VII
My death is not inscribed in the
Book of Instruction
So if I shall die
If I shall fall before this door is made—

            I take the wood from the cypress
            I make the nails from icicles of our blood
            I find the glass in the delicate filaments of poetry
            I read the blueprints found in the body
           
            I build in the wall of saving grace

Finish the door
If I can not
Finish the door
So all may walk
So all may use the key given at life

Head held high to the portal of ecstasy

Before the flesh deteriorates and

The hinges are taken away

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Exponential Decay

I am fitting into the crowd.
(or maybe i always was)
becoming more boring, more bourgeois.
every new possession only leads me
onto a child-like hunger
for another.

What can be done?
My pants are ripping and it makes me want to rip out my skull.
My computer is dying and it makes me want to take a pill and sleep for days.

Who is this person I am
now?
I couldn't name a favorite color
or a favorite song,
but I could name a favorite soda to buy at the vending machine
or station to turn to on the television.

I've lost my desire to write or think.
I just want to go to bed.

(sleep for four hours)

shower
breakfast
smoke cigarette
car

Driving towards the same thing everyday.
Driving towards nothing.

The world is filled with suffering
and such is my existence in it.

Do you hear me?

I would rather look at a picture of a cat
than understand a math equation.