hardly art, hardly garbage

19th May 2013

Post with 1 note

minor stuff

I’ve been getting a lot of good lines out lately, but nothing that’s stuck with me long enough to turn into much of a poem. This came out of me the other day though, and it’s interesting, even if I’m not quite sure if I like it or not. It gets a little Galway Kinnell towards the end, but at least I didn’t hyphenate everything and pretend to invent words.

Erratic

It’s a claw mark,
a sock print, a dead bike
a green shoe,

a brick box
with glass
for the moths to see through.

It’s soft fuck, cracked flames,
red palms,
small light,

fingers
too tiny
stacked up
and tied tight.

Give me
your nail dust,
your tooth seeds
your hand dew;

dig up
the palm cracks,
bury
your shoes.

Take me,
my rust lines,
my death mark,
my mud sight

carve me
a moth box
put out
the light

()

29th April 2013

Post

Fantastic Newness

Minor Strains

At dawn I watch a boy pick fruit
from his blueberry muffin
and plant each furry glob
in a pile of chalk.

I sip a glass of pulp
while we talk about how old is too old,

and if monsters eat the same fruit
we do,
if their tongues are all wax,
what mothers are made of

and how white thighs

are different from brown thighs

are different from red thighs

are different from blue thighs.

It’s so quiet in the world.

Above us, a chandelier
of razored cans and twine
refuses to twirl in the breeze, and we are happier
for it.

His bells sleep without wind, they deliver no prayers:
their thoughts live on in the vaporous skulls of ghosts.

His face is tainted by the tiny dead things
that float ‘round my iris

dots which follow the eye,
unstoppable static.

He’s getting older.
It’s sad, some say,
the way he never stops screaming.

()

22nd April 2013

Post with 1 note

Radio On!

This here’s an anthem for these summers in texas that never actually happened, but that I always think about when it is actually summer in texas. It is also pretty long, but I still don’t know how to use that thing that hides it behind a “read more” link, so I apologize in advance for invading your dashboard.

Roadrunner meets a painted tunnel

This mountain of gravel precedes me. In the middle
of May, when you can turn on the radio,
hear Jonathan Richman sing “It’s cold we’re all gonna die”
and believe him, all smiles,
flop sweating through a seafoam bathrobe,

in the middle of a burnt month,
I hear the pavement bubble through my feet.

I shake the iron oxide from my hair and hold my ears
‘til the 3^rd block café where a girl kills time undressing,
with her eyes, the ring fingers of the elderly.

Her own are so deliciously bare, not even a tooth-sharpened nail
to shred my gums.
But her knuckles are lacquered with sweat
and shine with an evil light.

She and me’s hobby is declaring distaste, like
“I don’t know where I am but I know I don’t like it.”

Sometimes we’ll gag on the air, or glance askew
at eachother’s ridiculous show.
We’ve gotten quite good at it, to the point
where most passersby forget we’re honest.

We were in the same place once:
A half-house with all the doors and windows
permanently opened, a hallway for insects,
where we lived slumped in unison, ruining our nice
white tank tops.

I drank whiskey by the pound
while her thighs kept our cigarettes warm

These days
we kill time lounging on deck chairs
mere inches from the mirrored windows,
pretending it’s 1993 just like the movies,
and just like the movies we burn our tongues
on ancient, boiling cokes
and fool no one.

I know she’s been losing stuff lately. I scratch my back
on a telephone pole
that’s more staple than wood
and find her address stuck to one of the gashes.

I can’t begin to judge her. I’ve Xeroxed my beliefs so many times
all that remains is static and a long black line
that represents and actually is my hair.

So. How far can you make it
from your front porch
wearing only a formerly seafoam bathrobe?
What about a stranger’s?

Cuz from my door
you can’t even reach the road
before breaking your neck on a Mojave cliffside.

()

18th April 2013

Post with 6 notes

Grief is Weird

A very good friend of mine died yesterday. Since poets are impotent in all things, except for those where grief is involved, I wrote a poem for him. It is very sentimental; I may come back to it another time and edit it, I don’t know. For now, I guess, I just needed to write something.

Edit: I’ve been revising this poem every day since I posted it. Today is his funeral. I won’t be going; I have problems with funerals. But I think I’ve finally, at least, finished this, and again, this is basically how i mourn.

Elegy for Brady

“this is something everyone feels at least once”-Peter Gizzi

Because music for you was a spiral that rises
and angels were drunks who never got caught,

to see you leave dancing makes much more sense
than anyone left here will ever admit.

*

In a half built house, in an ocean of ashes
in the infinite space between amps and old liquor,

you would talk of escape, of a door in the woods
that could take you back home,

of the beards
and the no-beards out singing your songs,

of candle-lit basements still calling your name.

Now the pictures we share form a pagan mosaic:
alcohol blush tattooed to your cheeks, your joyous beliefs
painted red to your head, moderate voice blown out to a yell:

“Ridiculous gestures are meant to be treasured!” 

desperately smiling
like your face couldn’t help it.

*

When you left
I would comfort myself
by thinking you could never be alone,
no matter how empty the world you entered;

that life would gather and sprout around you.

When I found you again,
miles and miles down empty roads,
shaken with the feeling
of being lost, stiff at the wheel
and fearing the worst— 

When I found you again,
hanging loose in the doorway
reeking of tar,
tired and fading and frayed at the edges—

When I found you again,
you were smiling still.

*

Because life is a stage built for one petty player,
and living for you was a dance through the mud,

to fall to the ground on the day of your death
feels so much better than I’ll ever admit.

()

11th February 2013

Question with 3 notes

videoarmageddon asked: wasn't there an article on vice where the author was talking shit about minor alt lit internet authors but defending tao lin in the same breath? vice is mostly garbage (sorry to say). my name on fbook is gomen nasai. you may have seen me like/comment on every single one of reid's posts because I'm a creepy idiot. I also hardly do work at my job.

I completely agree: Vice is garbage, and I’m glad that this agreement marks the beginning of a beautiful e-friendship.

()

28th December 2012

Post

The mangled corpse of the last tycoon

Aha! Now we’re talking: a rough draft, composed over two weeks of scraps, hastily strung together and posted in the heat of post-creation excitement. Just like old times! God, remember the old times?

The world from an airplane I knew

I blow bubbles
in glass bottles, they bloom
like cancer. My head shifts
out of sync with the air
and I pop.

The thin straw I asked for
stretches far past the brim
of the bottle it’s in. A loud man
in a close chair wonders aloud
when the tower will fall.

*

For an hour
my forceful friend extols
the value of seaside living.

He says, “Sand is the great equalizer.”

“Out on the beach, it doesn’t matter who you are,
you’re all soaking in synthetic shorts.”

*

Down escapes from the slits in my jacket
pillow and floats to itself
as the rest of us scream through the air.

It crashes soft,
a bit of white splayed out
on my corduroy knee,
looking for all the world like something that died,
like the pliable bones of a fly that bites.

In a voice that drips and sticks
it whispers:
“I wish to claim responsibility
for that which wrecked me.”

*

Silence, to my neighbor, means getting on well,
just like old friends, he and I.

The liquor bottles we drank as children
seem tiny now
that we’ve grown.

We descend at night. My eyes trace
trails through stiff city gutters.
My tongue licks bee teeth,
all dry stings and noise.
I am learning to forget.

All friends are old friends, for me:
not so much a shoulder to lean on
as a preamble to anecdotes
I am too drunk to finish.

()