zoo cage glamour

2008-06-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

Rising early with the breath of day,
shoes still soaked with yesterday's rain,
socks sopping it up.
I like to take my bicycle rides early,
to be among the first arrivals on the levee,
the sunlight just beginning to lean against the trees.
My company includes a bunch of swamp rabbits,
grazing in the sparkling grass, taking no notice of me,
other than to turn one ear my way.
Farther down, a mating pair of red-shouldered hawks,
perched atop a navigational marker as it were a citadel,
keeping vigilantly their river kingdom.
Among the bright array of detergent jugs and Coke bottles
washed up by the recent high water,
even brighter still a flock of wood ducks,
the red-eyed drake and the moon-eyed mama duck,
her ducklings lagging behind, still lacking their full plumage.
Stalking through the tall grass, a great blue
heron heaves a snapping crawfish from its mudhole.
He shakes his slender neck and the crawfish
reduces into segments, which the heron quickly snatches.
Here and there beside the path, explosions of cowbirds,
the last few drops of night evaporating in the daylight.
Yes, I like to take my bicycle rides early,
to see and know how many other lives are going on without me.

Tender Kindling, Little Fire

2008-05-09T21:01:00.000-07:00

Preface: The next thought is completely unoriginal. Don't be turned off by the cliché.

Life is change.

It's a Buddhist concept, that life is change, growth, death, rebirth, and the whole point of it is that trying to hold onto the past is exactly what causes suffering.

Today I told Jonathan that, so long as he continues to hang around Lauren, he shouldn't bother calling me.

I received a, "Fuck you," in response.

A quick flashback: Jonathan and Lauren dated for eight years and were engaged for nearly two. He proposed to her in the Superdome during Katrina. Last spring, he broke it off with her because her behavior had become completely erratic, she was (likely) cheating on him, and her life was generally a shambles. Last fall, they started seeing each other, occasionally at first, just to have sex and maybe fight a little. Since then, he's begun sleeping at her house regularly and (for all intents and purposes) dating her again. Though they do still fuck other people.

For the most part, I don't care what my friends do with their dicks. I'm usually happy for them if they're having sex.

The problem for me has been that Lauren has not changed her habits a bit since they broke up and, in fact, has only gotten worse. More drugs, more fights, now physical, more lying and underhandedness, more manipulation and selfishness. I don't judge her -- God knows I've done my share of bad things -- they are simply not good for each other. They enable each other in the worst ways. Jonathan knows this, he's told me himself, but he continues to see her and continues to come to me to bitch about it. I just can't hear it anymore.

The reason I mentioned the concept that life is change is because I see that in life there are two types of people: those who embrace change and those who are stagnant. If you're not growing, experiencing new things, learning, than you are stagnant, a waste of potential. Like fish, we swim or sink.

Jonathan is a person stuck in the past. In high school, we would of course discuss our dreams and wishes and create capers and plot ploys. That's what boys in high school do. We were green then, and the world was ahead. But now we've reached an age at which we can truly pursue dreams and create the lives we always wanted to live. Life is change and we should embrace that change and grow.

Now, Jonathan has dreams and schemes and grand plans for the future, but he never acts on any of them. He is all talk. In high school, it was cute and funny. Now it's just sad to see a man whose life peaked in high school and who has no hope for his future.

It's gotten to the point where I'm embarrassed to bring him around my other friends because of his braggadocio, and the lack of anything to back it up.

The thing about people like Jonathan isn't that they're bad or immoral or terrible people. They're just terribly boring.

Other people don't want to hear about our high school glory days any more than we want to hear about theirs, yet that's all he has to talk about, really.

He drinks all day everyday to keep himself sedated. He thinks one day he'll be able to simply stop, but he won't be able.

He has ceased to change, drinking away all of his braincells and stunting the growth of a mind in its prime. He has ceased to change and so has become stagnant, boring, insufferable.

I didn't say what I said to him out of anger or to cause tension between us. I didn't respond to the, "Fuck you," and I don't plan to. I said what I said for my own happiness and mental health. I can't watch someone I care about slowly self-destruct. I feel like I've done everything in my power, and now I have to distance myself.

I used to be annoyed when my mom would tell me, "It's easier to pull someone down than it is to raise someone up." As I've grown, I have come to understand the wisdom in that saying.

My sincere hope is that Jonathan wakes up and changes his life for the better. I see in him such tender kindling and so little fire.

We Grow Up Kissing

2008-04-24T22:12:00.000-07:00

I just remembered a girl I kissed that I had forgotten completely. It was by a pool at a motel off the interstate in the summer. I was in high school and I was cheating on my girlfriend.

Back then, a kiss could still make my stomach quake.

I can't recall exactly when kisses ceased to stop time for me, but it is a feeling I regret losing.

When you're a kid, a kiss is so important, a precious object to stow beneath your pillow. The funny bit is, you're terrible at it. I've never really cared for the phrase "sucking face," but to describe middle school make-out sessions, there isn't a better one.

Yeah, my first real kiss was in middle school. Sure, I'd stolen pecks from pretty girls on the playground, but by real kiss I mean a kiss accompanied by a discernible sexual feeling. Not just a peck, but a kiss to make your pecker erect. Maybe other people's came sooner, and to them I tip my hat.

That kiss was with Laura Fincher in the campers' lounge at summer camp during one of the dances. I was in seventh grade. I even remember the awful song that was playing. I don't know the name or the singer, but the lyrics are "Come baby, come baby, baby, come, come." I felt like I could at the time.

There in the middle of the dance floor we licked each others' faces. Luckily, no one slipped on our mingled saliva. My knees were so weak I'm lucky they didn't give out on me.

Like I said, I don't remember exactly when a kiss stopped feeling that way for me, but it took a while. Eventually, you start to lose count of your kisses, though. They turn into headsup pennies, once rare and fortunate, now a novelty.

2008-04-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

I miss everyone from my old universe, the one
that collapsed and shrunk beyond the beyond.

I am terrible at keeping in touch.
First friends disappear, then their faces follow.

Large parts of my past I cannot even remember. I have never
had a good memory. Makes it hard to be a poet of any merit.

All I recall is a forked tree, a lofty home,
and Jesus whispering, "Talk softly,
but carry a big stick."

To Fight My Father

2008-03-24T16:28:00.000-07:00

All your red eyes can scream is, “I never
want you to be like me!”
My fist is swollen, my fingers
purple and plump as sausages.
There is a goose egg growing above your eye.

For four years you have not let me forget
how you bailed me out in my time of need.
How you sold your boat, bailed me out.
Told me, “Take a different dusty road. I did.”
But your black eyes were lying then.

My right ear is still crusted with blood
where your thumbnail took a hunk.
You told me that after you shaved,
a shiner shone through beneath your left eye.
We are such a pretty pair.

The list is long of traits I inherited from you:
your love of home, your looking back,
your swarthy skin, your curly hair,
your cauldron eyes, your flashing temper.
Your high school buddies still call you “Snappy.”

You told me that my boot in your gut
woke you up once and for all.
You said you were aware I am now a man and
you must greet me as a man.
Your nickname for me was “Man-o.”

I reckon my wrist will not be sore in a week,
and your face will reform its shape.
When our injuries heal, so will our bond.
Our differences will be as distant
as the hot blood pulsing now beneath our swollen skins.

Steak Line

2007-11-07T15:40:00.000-08:00

Someone once told me a story about Maria Shriver screaming,
trying to cut the line at a restaurant in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Screaming so hard her face fell into her purse.
Rich people just can’t wait for steaks in the West.

Hall Closet History Lesson

2007-10-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

What should I find while rummaging through the hall
closet in the quiet late afternoon?
A dusty old confirmation Bible and a box full of forgotten poems.
“So there you are,” I grunted, hefting the box from the back of the closet.
I banged the Bible on the side of the bed and it came alive,
turning pages and talking Gospel:
“Be transformed by your renewed mind.”
Then the poems woke up and started sighing,
I was on the bed, listening and laughing.
I remembered an earnest boy, driving and crying
tears in the tearing wind and rending rain.
The poems cut, folded, and pasted themselves into amazing shapes and figures:
first cars, secret mountains, paperback books, a sack full of love letters,
a shaking hand on a milky thigh, ten toes curled in delight,
a young heart, happy and heaving.

2007-06-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

At night in my bedroom, I think of you when I listen to Al Green,
and the way the lamplight would soak into the dark, white walls.

2007-06-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

Hot nights in the City now,
the bugs are out, the shades are down.
We'll end our days chasing our dreams away.

2007-05-31T19:52:00.000-07:00

I never met my grandpas,
but they'd be glad of where I stand,
barefoot and dirty in the Holy Land.

Rinse my feet for me, please,
your white knees in the sand,
crying and smiling and water in your hand.

Eulogy for Fidel Castro

2007-02-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

Gracias Fidel Castro, and to your evil regime
a round of applause and good cheer.
We're all in the street tryin' to beat out the heat,
we're all drinkin' Mexican beer.

We're all in our cars to and from with the bars
we're all in charge to drive home.
We were all in a trance, we just wanted to dance
but now we're all as straight as a comb.

We're all alive like bees in a basement
we chatter and clatter and sing.
We're soakin' up ads on the teevee,
we're eatin' Chinese from Peking.

The Soviets had a run and they chanced it,
I remember the Wall when it fell.
And we all felt a little that this must be like
the spaces and places where heaven meets hell.

Back then we bought the Japanese and they dug it,
we all got a piece of the pie.
With no villain to hate we all hated to wait,
we shrugged saying, "He looks like the guy."

With yer beard and yer cap and yer shining cigar,
and a grin and a wave and a nod,
you resembled a goat in a soldier's clothes,
and yer were even known to hate God.

So thank yous and kisses from girls in short skirts
for all that you've done for us here.
You've given a reason to keep killing for treason
and suspecting the people we hold most dear.

He was twenty, she was twenty-one

2007-01-06T19:17:00.001-08:00

He was twenty, she was twenty-one
when they met on the old street with the red house.
He lived a life on the road, seeing the South,
drinking beer, and butchering wild hogs in motel bathtubs.
She was leaving a life spent on the road since birth,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and down to Louisiana.

He was playing football in the street with Jerry
when she drove by with her friend in the van.
"He's cute," she said, and pointed at the one with dark hair.
"I know them," her friend answered, "Do you want me to introduce you?"
Less than a year later, she was pregnant without knowing it.
On her way back to Florida, something said turn around.

I often wonder what they would be had they not met then,
if they had stayed single, if I were just another seeing spirit in the cedar house.
If he would be a drunk redneck or a broke cokehead
or a faithful family man, devoted to God and to his wife and kids.
If she would be a bitter old woman like her mother or a wild party woman
or a nurturing pelican, a nurse, a martyr.

I hope neither outlives the other, at least not by many later years.
I don't reckon they'd know what to do without each other.
He would spend his days pruning shrubs and squinting in the sun,
she would likely read about religion in bed and cry before sleeping.

2006-10-19T02:04:00.000-07:00

I have been smiling and sniffing my forearm ever since you left.
It still smells like your perfume. I guess it rubbed off
at the gate, when my arms were wrapped around your shoulders.

I have never smiled so long on account of smelling my own arm.

Many hungry months I have hidden behind the drawn curtains,
waiting for soft and careful footsteps to find me out.
You startled me when you pulled back the drapes so swiftly.

But even so, better that you found me than some pride of stray calicos.

Look, what I am trying to tell you each time I wobble my tongue
is that your wide, blue eyes are two brimming buckets
and I will try my damnedest to not spill a drop.

And a tree falls on your head

2006-10-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

The ram in the desert runs from the lioness,
prays with all four legs for his neck and breath,
galloping and sucking the hot dust.
The ram rips the air with his curled horns,
snorting, chomping and clacking his teeth.
The lioness, sleek golden death with fangs
and paws the size of the ram's haunches, and claws!
The ram is no match and deep in his muscles he knows it.
Death is coming faster than he can run, and faster
every second. Who lives? Who eats? Time is the decider,
time and a twist of the ankle and a speck of dust in the eye.

And in our barren streets we scurry,
praying to calm our worries about elevators,
tap-dancing on the pavement for a quarter.
What is this air that we suck, this carbon air,
this plague of sand and locusts?
In our cars and on park benches we sit and moan,
"Black out our eyes," we cry and our throats mean it.
"Stop staring at the clock," we say to ourselves
in our secret hearts, "Time will never pass."
But the clock ticks and it clicks out our fortunes
sure as sunrise, the second hand and a broken hip and a tree falls on your head.

A Cloud Evaporating Inside the Sea

2006-10-06T18:48:00.000-07:00

Her hair is always piled on her head in wild tangles
like the crow’s nest of a schooner out on the windy high seas
while waves crash and slap the sides of the ship.
And just like the windy high seas, I breathe her,
timeless and salty, into the bottom of my broadened chest.
When I am inside of her I disappear, a sack of salt spilt
in the warmth of the water all around, a cloud evaporating inside the sea.

"His goal in life was to be an echo . . ."

2006-09-30T01:08:00.000-07:00

Whiskey hiding (Or Liquid Fever Dreams)

A fifth of whiskey is hiding where you hid it
on the shelf in the cabinet above my refrigerator.
Only about a fifth of the bottle is full,
"Drink the rest when you need it," you said before you left for the East Coast.
I sometimes unscrew the cap and take a whiff when the mood strikes,
but until tonight could never bring myself to drink it.
A fifth of a fifth that never saw the light of day,
like a bat hanging in the darkness of a cave
or the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ
resting, sacred and silent, in a tabernacle.
I remember the night you came over,
whiskey-stunk, glassy-eyed, and stumbling drunk.
I was already in bed when you knocked,
so we kissed hello and fucked each other to sleep.
I took a shot of that whiskey when I thought of you tonight.
You are hiding just like that bottle in the back of my memory,
your white, broken body holy and still.
Our friend bought me a shot glass from Hawaii,
and it has sat frozen in my freezer, dry and thirsty for months.
A shivering, Hawaiian, virgin shot glass, aching for the dark warmth of your whiskey.
Just like I remember, you burn my throat as you go down.
I even made a toast to you standing there alone in the kitchen,
"Here's to all the good things in life
and to burning bridges before you cross them."

Kate and Edith drinking doubles (Ugly women lookin' better)

2006-09-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

Kate and Edith,
ugly women.
Drinkin' doubles.
Lookin' better.

2006-09-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

I would never stab you in the guts with a knife I stole.

En route, New Orleans to Paris (Planets Crossing Paths)

2006-09-18T00:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Breton left today,
en route, New Orleans to Paris, riding
in the belly of a silver bullfrog hopping across a salty pond
(I prefer delayed destinies and the bellies of fishes).
We have been friends now, what,
going on five years long? Years full
of returned books, emptied bottles, hurried dreams.
Joey just left for Seattle, maybe two or three weeks
before Breton left. We have been friends since we were five.
He left for Seattle, all his things in his truck,
staking a claim (his “Manifest Destiny,” he calls it), to draw homes
for the humans of Washington state.
I am glad that I am happy for both of them.
My friends, we are a solar system of colorful planets,
racing through this blackest of spaces, weaving
in between stars and comets, scattered like marbles.
We are all standing firmly on this planet Earth, breathing
the air that has been breathed by billions and billions of beings
for millions of billions of years. We were all born in a decade
of decadence, disease, and drugs, all driven by Democracy.
Why else on Earth would we roam, straying far from the familiar hum of home?
A couple of years ago, around this time of year, I remember Breton leaving,
en route, New Orleans to Paris, and I was driving
on the interstate feeling like I had been mixed with the concrete
and poured there to dry. Yes, we are planets, coalescing
from the cold dust of space into warm and vibrant worlds.
Some of us take a thousand years to revolve around the Sun,
some of use take only a couple hundred days,
but each can see the twinkle of the other from across the galaxy.
And when our orbits cross paths while sailing through the stars
there is gravity and there is grace.

A Prayer for Sarah

2006-09-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

On Sundays, Sarah, you pack up your suitcase
with stacks of thick books. You grasp
the handle, hold it at your side before the mirror,
wearing a bonnet and a tough pair of boots.
You say you love to feel the weight of leaving.
But your books are only bricks, and your feet
are fixed and flattened like floorboard slats.
Sarah, your brass clock rings in the morning,
but you awoke before the golden dawn,
lying tangled in your sheets, staring at the cat in the corner.
Sarah, a world of war is begging outside your skin.
You have a thousand stories stirring inside your bones,
lay them out like fossils to tell your history in silence.
Sarah, you are a candle concealed beneath a bushel, burning.
Ancient infant, milk mother, your eyes are two springs
swelling secretly from the center of the earth, converging in a roaring face.

2006-09-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

In the kitchen by the 'fridge, our lips just touched, just brushed, just gently and quickly. You know I kiss you 'cause I can, with my one arm around your wonderful waist. Boy, are you an apple, dangerous red and dangling.
Footsteps on the floorboards, he is coming. I am not scared but you scurry back, we turn our backs to each other. I am pouring a glass of water, you are looking in the 'fridge. But he is no one to me, he is no one to you, and right now, Baby, you're it.

**************************************
**************************************

When a woman wants you to kiss her, you can feel, it is magnetic, it is like your mouths are magnets with opposite polarities, if they pass closely enough they will touch, they quiver and jump if you hold them closely together and then they have to touch.

2006-09-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

Trying to love you is like dropping
a candy dish on a hummingbird.

You are floating while I shatter on the ground.

A Happy Funeral

2006-08-30T11:21:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, 29 August 2006, Finn McCool's on Banks Street. Jonathan, Lauren, Emma, Keith, Marina, Marie, and I'm in there somewhere, at our usual table by the wall under the Killian's mirror, next to the cigarette machine. A time capsule is circulating the bar, a three-foot length of PVC pipe, everyone signs their name in blue Sharpie and writes down their toxic thoughts of the past year on little scraps of paper to be sealed inside forever.

I am still reacting to the past year every single morning.

We all shuffle outside, this queer family. The owner of the pub, a heavy-set, raven-haired Irish woman, she delivers a little eulogy and a message of hope and courage and it has the potential to be sappier than pinebark but she keeps it short and it somehow resonates. She lays the capsule down inside the hole dug next to the pub beside the side door.

I ask Lauren and Jonathan, "When are they going to dig it up?"

"Never," Jonathan begins.

"That's the whole point, to just give it all up," Lauren continues.

"Oh, so it's not really a time capsule," I say, half-inquiringly, "It's a grave."

The Irish woman, who has a shining, gorgeous accent when she speaks, throws the first handful of dirt into the hole and, silently, with a wave of her hands, invites all of us to do likewise. The guy in the kilt starts up "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes, and the drone of the pipes and the buzz of the pints put me in a trance.

Flashback, also a year ago this week, my grandmother's funeral. Of course they played "Amazing Grace" and of course we all lost it. Funny about certain songs, no matter how many times you've heard them.

I watch eveyone throw in their handfuls. They each proceed solemnly to cover their fears and nightmares, encapsulated in a whitewashed, plastic sepulchre, with a mixture of topsoil and broken asphalt.

The old couple in blue jean shorts, the man in a Hawaiian shirt, his ponytail tumbling out of the back of his denim baseball cap, the woman's hair cut short, old-lady style. The corners of their mouths are quivering.

A girl in a pink tanktop, crying hard. I cynically assume she is being maudlin, but after really paying attention to her face, I perceive she is genuine. Then I am ashamed and wonder what she might have lived through, too.

Old, young, women, men, one infant, and a couple of mongrels.

When the burial is done, and "Amazing Grace" ended, the bagpipes break into "When the Saints Go Marching In" and a wide grin breaks across every face. All of these people begin to dance and sing and drink and toast outside the pub, a drunken, Irish, bagpipe, jazz funeral. One man toasts the pub.

"To Finn McCool's, which kept our heads above water and our minds in the air. Hip, hip, hooray!"

Mexican workmen walk by on the street with their cervezas in hand, puzzled looks on their faces.

We eventually wander back into the pub, and I light up a cigarette. I put a twenty in Jonathan's hand and say, "Go get us a couple pints. We need one after all that."

2006-08-25T17:46:00.000-07:00

I see new lines carved in her face
every time I open the kitchen door.
Her face is somber as the Grand Canyon.

I feel new pains every time I hug her,
her arms wrapped 'round my back like chains.
She is still a scared girl, alone on the sofa.

I hear new worries every time she breathes,
her breath slips and tumbles, thudding, down the stairway.
She holds the fallen dead inside of her lungs.

I was fed by her joy and blood,
cleansed by her tears and hair,
taught by her everloving tongue.

Black-haired Mary (in my mind)

2006-08-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

Stout-legged woman, you are the trunk of an eternal tree!
Teeth like brilliant race horses and shimmering skyscrapers for eyes!
Your lips confine me, they were twisted from barbed wire, blackberry vines.
Honeydew, skin pale white, soft sugar burns my tongue.

You dance like sheets on a clothesline in spring under the passing azalea.
You dance as I lie in the hammock reflecting the sky and the dirt.

I have drunk your shoulders often like cool milk.
I have recalled you in the dark blue bedroom.
Oh Mary, such a simple woman for my simple mind!
Oh Baby! You could drink me in a draft!

Black Gold, Slick Money

2006-08-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

This morning I read the news that BP has shut down the Alaskan Pipeline out of Prudhoe Bay, which supplies approximately 8% of U.S. oil -- 400,000 barrels a day. Of course oil and gas futures shot up and gasoline prices are expected to rise again. BP attributes the shutdown to unexpected corrosion in its 30-year-old pipeline. Thirty. This comes at a time when BP is already under scrutiny for lax safety and maintenance following a deadly explosion at a Texas City refinery last summer.
ExxonMobil recently reported second quarter profits of $10.4 billion, up 86% from second quarter profits last year. Last year, Exxon invested less than one third of one percent of its net profits in alternative fuel research. The oil titans are logging record profits while fuel prices are exploding like a geyser of oil. "We've struck black gold!"
If we traveled back in time a hundred years or so, back to when Teddy Roosevelt was president, would this have ever occurred? Never. One has then to ask, "What is the federal government doing to protect consumers and to ensure that oil companies aren't pulling the pitch-soaked wool over our eyes?" And the answer would be, "Absolutely nothing."
Sure, Bush has agreed to release some of the oil held in the federal petroleum reserve, a few drops in a leaky bucket. And Congress invites the oil company execs to testify on Capitol Hill that nothing is awry, taking them at their word. They watch as gas prices soar and they refuse to raise the minimum wage. They pat each other on the back and have a pleasant lunch.
A list of questions to consider:
1) Why should a decrease in crude oil production today affect gasoline prices at the pump when gasoline at the pumps was refined months ago at lower costs?
2) Why not appoint an independent counsel to seriously investigate price gouging at the major oil companies instead of holding a televised charade on C-SPAN?
3) Why not impose an excess profits tax on the majors, or better yet, place an emergency price cap on gasoline prices?
4) Why not enforce more stringent safety and maintenance regulations on refineries, and drop heavy penalties on those that lag behind.
5) Why not require the majors to invest more in alternative fuel research, or be taxed?
These are only questions, suggestions. The implementation of only a few of these tactics would save consumers a bundle and guarantee that oil companies aren't ripping us off. Of course, it's tough for senators to smell the foul odor in the air when they're coated in oil.

2006-08-04T16:17:00.000-07:00

Two things I remember clearly about you:
slow, sudden sex and roaring water.

2006-07-31T13:51:00.000-07:00

My days are wasted like wilted spinach.

Fireboy (I know you)

2006-07-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

Fireboy, in time please cool your hot flame,
you are liable to burn the house to cinders.
You rattle the walls when you slam the door,
but your love should be stronger than plaster and paint.

I remember, Fireboy, I was you years ago.
Hair hanging to cover my eyes, shielding
my heart that burned as hot as my head.
And your heart burns hot like your head.

Fireboy, you write in your journal to no one,
poems and memories of your youth. You ache
for the women you'd die for and for their sullen eyes.
Fireboy, you have to learn to let her cry.

Your mind is a stormcloud, your fingertips buzz
and flash like lightning. Fireboy, you fashion the weather.
You make the sky crumble like charcoal.
Fireboy, rain is bleeding from your arms.

You think that now you can never love again,
and Fireboy you are just so wrong.
Pick yourself a clover and a cloud to go along,
and rest your red eyes, Fireboy.

Oh! Black Jordan!

2006-07-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

Sullen identities shed easy as sweat or a brown water snake’s skin
in the cool whiskey waters of July. The moon rules as a queen,
fireworks blossom above the highest pines. They crackle
in the smoldering asphalt night, then wither into the ghosts
of garden spiders creeping across the sticky American South.
The spiders shed their skeletons, the snakes shed their skins,
the crabs are blue and the crabs are molting, too.
Every living being wants to burst the boundaries of its shell.
Sacred wadi, Jordan’s twin, ten miles more, seven times joy!
The water washes my feet like a woman’s brunette hair around my ankles,
I hold out my hands to touch her dark, rolling grace.
When the rains refuse to fall I’ll walk with you,
carry my leather sandals and I’ll carry your canvas shoes.
I’ll stretch myself to lend you a place to lie in the shade,
my skeleton an arbor, my hair a hyacinth vine for you to hide behind.
I’ll shield you from the sun if you’ll shield me from my sins.
I want to be under you, cool, and two times more.
I bought for us three bottles of sweet red wine, let’s sticky
our lips together. My tongue finds your tongue and it tastes
like watermelon, pink and cool, with no seeds to spit.
In the hammock between the pines, you, a mosquito and I.
Our naked blood to her is as sweet as the watermelon
or the strawberry wine, and she sips with the delicacy of a connoisseur.
Even in an Egyptian cloud of mosquitoes
I would count every star on my back with you.
When the last rains finally come I will count every single star with you.

2006-07-10T14:59:00.000-07:00

The bits of broken glass scattered under my feet
mirror the stars some noble hand has strewn across the night sky.
On my two legs I am standing, stuck
in the midst of a million points of light,
each one the window of a family home.

Slingshot

2006-07-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

A great deal of my life has been spent waving goodbye to women in airports. It seems they are always leaving something pretty good for something mighty distant. I try to chase after them, tell them don't board that airplane, but I only trip and fall like a fool to the floor of the terminal. I stare, bewildered, at my feet -- some rascal has tied my shoelaces together! A sideways brat tugs his mother's skirt, points and laughs with wicked glee. He is the culprit, I know it! But I should be the one laughing, and I tell him so, because here I am lounging while he's sliding off the side of the Earth.

Rust and Moths

2006-06-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

The train tracks of my childhood are rusted and bent,
the trees all chopped down, stumps ground.
The old roads are broken, busted into bits of gravel.
Underneath that bland tan paint, a vibrant yellow house
with breadbasket blue trim shines through like history
and its brilliant television broadcasts to our youthful grandparents.

Grandfather milkman gambled away his heart and his bread,
left an angry older brother, a broken Grandmother,
and Hank Williams records to raise Father.
Grandfather soldier gambled away his heart and his head,
left nothing but a Grandmother soaked in Scotch, a starry axe,
and a hot iron on the head for Mother.

The wallpaper peeled more each winter, withered by the gas heater.
This is our Country and these are our Lives, and we are all Oldsmobiles
perpetually westward peering, wrapping our heads around the horizon.
From Dutch beginnings and first Jamestown to the Empty Empire of the Midwest,
the sweet tea dreams of the American South, to the toothy coasts of California,
to the deepest blue isolations of the icy Pacific!

Our hearts hammer like iron hooves, our eyes are vast and arid as deserts.
I was born in a sacred silver bathtub, schooled in the silent cathedrals of autumn.
Each year the old neighborhood ages, the neighbors turn gray as moss,
termites chew and the winds, O Boy, they hover and raze the air!
A cypress house stands forever, a cypress coffin floats like a bar of soap or the Biblical ark,
a cypress tree falls under a windy hand, lies dead and naked, stripped of its bark.

Slammin' Do' Blues

2006-06-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

I'm feelin' low down and angry, Baby
'Bout the way you been a-treatin' me lately
Jes' a-cryin' and a-moanin'
When it gets time fer me to get goin'

Now you know I never told you
That I'd stay or ever be true to you
And you knew when all dis started
You'd prolly wind up broken-hearted

But you slap my face when I get home late
You cuss me, Babe, won't unlock yo' gate
And you bitch at me and holla' an' scream
Like some kinda Goddamn scream machine

So go on, Baby, cry some mo'
I can't hear ya over the slamma yo' screen do'
I'll walk or maybe jes' catch da bus
Sho' is a-rainin' hard, and you in such a fuss

Ivonne, the Puerto Rican woman

2006-06-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

She is five feet tall and Puerto Rican. She sounds incredibly sexy when she speaks Spanish. She has a great smile which she wields well. She used to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, but didn't like Deep Space Nine. She has naturally burgundy hair. It was her idea to go see the new X-Men movie. She cooks killer empanadas and brings me beer randomly. She has a great sense of humor and loves to laugh. She is close to her family. She is spiritual but not religious. She has her shit together.

All this, and I am still hesitating.

I ask: what am I supposed to be looking for?

People say: you'll know it when you see it.

I say: that's bullshit.

Love is a myth. Love is a choice.

Memories of a Southern Boyhood

2006-06-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

Money was tight. Mama taught school
and Pop roamed the roads. He’d come home late,
tired and sore, rough cheek, rough hands, rough kiss and a sweaty hug.
After school, no shirt, no shoes, look under the garden,
roly polies, beetles, and earthworms. Dirt under my fingernails
and I was just as close to the ground.
Dinner ‘round the family table, honey wood and chipped blue,
grilled redfish, gumbo, red beans, rice and gravy, roast duck.
“Bless this food, Lord, and the hands that have prepared it.
Bless it to the nourishment of our bodies, our able bodies to your service.”
We were tied to the land, we were nailed to the bald tree.
Mass on Sunday, bread and blood, a faceless crucifix, a turned ear.
Got my first blowjob at church camp, but then I was innocent,
pine sap, humid heat, up late, skin on teeth.
Family gatherings, stealing swigs of warm beer,
stories of the Old Country, of mayonnaise sandwiches, peeling wallpaper.
Hiding with cousins in the closet, Christmas day.
On Easter, catching king snakes and crawfish in Contraband Bayou.
On the lake with Pop, redfish rodeo, up early for duck season,
asleep in the backseat, heavy camouflage coat and shotguns.
Feathers stuck to bloody hands, begging dog’s breath, life and death.
The heart is where the home is. The heart is where the home is.

Cha Cha and Changes

2006-05-31T13:34:00.000-07:00

"You sure are a fickle boy."

- My mama, addressing me on the phone. I responded with a light chuckle.

*********************************

One step toward me, then two, you can move,
you know how to do the cha cha.
Your butterfly hips were formed,
not from rigid bone, but rhythm.
Muy bonita! Cha cha chicita!

*********************************

Ennui.

My Take on Capote

2006-05-27T11:30:00.000-07:00

The other day I rented two movies, Brokeback Mountain and Capote. I thought they were both excellent, and Brokeback Mountain, predictably, generated more controversy than it deserved. But Capote. If you have not yet seen it, please do. Philip Seymour Hoffman is, of course, fantastic as Truman Capote. I mean, come on, we're talking about the man who brought Brandt to life ("I hope you're not avoiding this call because of the rug, which I assure you is not a problem."). But the true genius behind the movie lies in the story itself.
The movie chronicles the five year period during which Capote researched and wrote his classic crime novel In Cold Blood. During this period he comes to befriend, and ultimately betray, one of the killers involved in the murder at the heart of his book. Capote manipulates the man into revealing details of his childhood and personal life, and eventually elicits from the man a grisly recounting of the murder. What is arresting is how much of an influence Capote's constant presence had on the ultimate fate of the two killers. I won't go into too much detail, but essentially Capote keeps the men alive long enough to get his story and ultimately abandons them to be hanged so that he can secure the perfect ending for his novel.
The point of the movie, or at least a major one, is that the observer always has an effect on the observed, and in turn the observed affects the observer. In science, quite appropriately, this phenomenon is called "the Observer Effect." The famous example in quantum physics of Schrodinger's cat, in which a cat placed in a sealed box has a fifty-fifty chance of being killed by radioactive gas, illustrates this principle. In the example, at the time just before the box is opened, the cat is technically half-alive and half-dead. The cat is not either alive or dead, but an admixture of both realities. If you plot the probabilities on a sin curve it's supposed to show this. Don't ask me how to do that.
The point is, reality is so fluid and we tend to take it for granted that things exist as points in time rather than as waves, probabilities, possibilities, illusions. It is impossible to be objective about anything. So much of what we sense and experience is affected by factors we often fail to recognize, and our smallest actions often have huge impacts we may never suspect. Capote's work on the novel chilled him so deeply that he carried the sadness with him for the rest of his life; according to the movie, it played a major part in his drug- and alcohol-related death. He delved into the project seeking praise and wound up receiving a burden he could not shoulder. Think of all the minor actions, the breaths you take, glances cast, steps chosen, that may have impacted reality in meaningful ways. Enough to drive you mad. But I guess sometimes a good story has to end with two men hanging from a gallows.

Mountains

2006-05-26T15:14:00.000-07:00

In the morning in Tennessee the dark blue mountains
roll like waves in the fog against an ocean of sky even bluer still.
The mountains are the serpent’s spine, a walk through time,
a labyrinth indecipherable, as are all mysteries, from the outside.
Their truths twist through gray shadow, granite and sandstone.
They are giants lounging, languid in the cool March air,
drinking a thousand streams through their mouths.
The mountains they have no pity for human frailty,
they are not soft or easy on our brittle bones and deadened muscles.
The mountains demand respect and they demand discipline,
they will teach you all you need to know of them.
“Rise,” they command, “early as the sun over the hills,
sure as the tall, sturdy birches, their roots gripping the rock beneath.
Rise, your thighs locked tight, back rigid, teeth clenched.
Persist like rock, steady as stone.
Fall gracefully, like the water runs downhill after a night of hard rain,
light-footed and laughing, reflecting only the sky and its clouds.
The water does not need to ask where to go, it knows,
the mountain directs its path. The mountain will direct your own.
The mountains there in Tennessee are tough teachers, rough old bastards,
born long before your grandfather’s great grandfather was born,
and they will certainly outlive us all, standing firmly outside of time,
while all our lives fade like stars into the morning sun.

Teevee Dreams

2006-05-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

Lately television gives me nightmares. I don’t even watch it, but when I happen to pass a set, the advertisements, the news, the talk shows, they frighten me. They glow inside my mind like malevolent suicide angels and at night manifest themselves in images of unspeakable horror and atrocity. A sunken world, always red sky and black rain, inhabited by the dirty dregs of the earth. There’s me, dirty and destroyed, addicted to buying, addicted to thrills, a television set where my stomach should be. I eat money I eat radio keys and antennae. The advertisements are invading every empty site in your memory like cockroaches inside the walls of your house waiting to come out at night and scurry around your brain, cockroaches that look like dull jingles and bright, flashing colors, dollar signs, and pictures of living room sets that could look so cute in your cramped apartment. Even when you crush them they are all gross and gooey and stick to your shoe or umbrella.

(Working Title)

2006-05-20T17:20:00.000-07:00

I should not drive home when I am too drunk to see,
when sharp visions of your blurred face escape my mind.
I woke up in the morning tired and sore as hell,
drank a gallon of water from the jug in the fridge.
Spent all of Saturday inside, the weather was fine.
How many more drinks, Joe? How many more beers?
All I ever do is think, "Drink and drink and drink and drink."
But all the bottles, the bottomless beers, they rhyme
with "my long and lengthening litany of fears"
and "since your pale face I cry only frozen tears"
and "your hot teeth on my summertime ears"
and "all these fast, fading, fucked up years."
My eyelids squeak, all we are getting is older,
drunker, slower, fatter, and farther and farther apart.
The bottles will soon be too many to throw out, green and brown and clear and hollow.
Drink me like your favorite cocktail (I recall it was whiskey and Coke),
I will get you just as drunk.
Discard me like a bottle (a whiskey bottle shattered and sparkling on the pavement),
I am green, I am brown, I am clear, I am hollow.
There was a time on your bed in the quiet of night when you were scared
I was drunk, too drunk maybe, and now we sit on our separate beds.
I had a drink to remember you by on your birthday,
I hope you had a drink on mine.
A bottle of champagne on ice, please,
a freshly opened bottle of wine.

Two Things

2006-05-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

I get cold now when before I would never get cold.

I would walk unshod in the dead of winter
and never notice the coldness of the concrete
beneath my calloused feet.

But now, oh yeah, I feel the cold in my bones,
like an axe splitting a timber.

************************************************************

Donald Brumby's wife eats pills.
She's a nurse at a nursing home,
in charge of administering the meds.
Suddenly she's developed a sore back,
a sore throat, shaky nerves, and acute depression.
She steals and eats pills of all shapes, colors, and sizes,
and she does not speak much to anyone.

Donald Brumby wants to make love to his wife,
but when he slowly unbuttons her blouse
it is like opening a medicine cabinet;
he can hear all the small pills
rattling around in her stomach. The sound
sickens him and he recoils in disgust.
And beside, she's much too tired for that.

Suddenly Everything Has Changed

2006-05-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

Audubon Park in the evening and the birds, the great blue herons the snowy egrets the ibises the mallards the wood ducks, birds of every class and creed come together to roost in the trees and to eat supper in the salmon and orange sky. They are squawking, it is a chorus, a funky birdsong, having family quarrels, racial strife, telling jokes, feeding the chicks teetering clumsily on the edges of the nests. An egret chick, wings like rubberbands, flapping, trying to fly like mother and father.
The sun sinks behind the last of the oaks and the cathedral is glowing in the twilight when it is time to go. Fuel light on, stop to get gas and sixteen pounds of bananas decorated yellow and funky. High in Potassium! High in Vitamins! Funky bananas, space bananas, alien funk bananas! Phallic or not, they're good for you! This girl, her eyes are drunk brown eyes and she will not take a banana! I AM A MISOGYNIST, I AM A BANANA RAPIST, A BANANA RACIST! I love the weird looks and I have an agenda to fill the whole world with bunches and bunches of the funkiest bananas, and fuck all! Free bananas for everyone, free bananas on the streets and in the bars and on the windshields of the cars, left for some lucky soul. Is there funk after death?
George Clinton is the conductor for the evening in his clothes made of light and sparkle and imagination. His hair in technicolor braids, sunglasses on tight in the dark and smoke. He screams like an animal and his hands tremble with a rage and a funk and an intensity that makes me think his fists will turn into beautiful bouquets of flame and hellfire. Trumpet turns red then blue then red then blue. Skin and abs and ass and legs and a sixty-year-old man in a diaper! I am tired but my legs are unwilling to rest like noodles in a boiling pot. Thirsty, heart thumping, thirsty, heart thumping, thirsty, heart thumping . . . This human organism, black and brown and white and blue and red and green, throbbing and pulsing, expanding and contracting, sweating and breathing fire and alcohol. Ass on my thigh, ass on my thigh, hand on her ass, hand on my face, feet in opposite directions, soul upside down, hanging from the rafters like a vampire bat! And Ed Bradley, SIXTY FUCKING MINUTES, dancing drunk with George Clinton, and George Clinton screams like a demon or an angel announcing the Coming of the Lamb, with his feet of bronze and his hair like sheep's wool, "ED BRADLEY! ED BRADLEY EVERYBODY! ED BRADLEY!"

Bells

2006-05-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

Young couples on the sidewalk talk of white paper and a first kiss,
while sheep hidden in the hills of Virginia are birthing lambs
amidst the millions of flies and the morning fog.

The fog pours down the hills, across the swamps and marshes,
and the fog finds its way through neighborhoods and cars,
in the summer when the river is full and the heat is high.
In the foggy backseat of her mother's Buick they are naked and damp,
a baby already growing in her belly and God smiling in the dark.

They go to the white church Sundays, the wine dark, the sermon stern.
Corruption in the crumbling schools! Corruption in the closed city hall!
Burning heart in Mary's breast! Burning tongue in Jesus' face!

If you're reading this your time is up!

2006-04-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

The mourning dove drinking from the cool mud puddle
knows well the sound of feathers fluttering and fighting
in the strong and sharp winter winds,
and the gentle lifting of the breeze in spring
above the rolling and tumbling earth, green and brown and blue.

I am walking under the cracked egg spring sky, half water, half air.
I know the burden of snow piled high on my shoulders, ears red,
trying to steal heat from the hearth in the dead of December.
And I also know the cool mud of May between my bare toes,
the sun soft on my shoulders, the air sweet as rain on my tongue.

Shards (Still Lifes and Landscapes)

2006-04-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

A light kiss on your bright forehead,
a soft kiss for your stout lips.
In your eyes I see a closet full
of broken lamps and tattered cotton dresses.
I open up my ears and hear your breath,
like rain falling on waves in the hot night.
Under the honeysweet April sun you are sleeping,
my hand on your stomach, my lips on your back.
Your eyes open, they are thick, gleaming nickels!
Your hands, they are dried bunches of Baby's Breath!
Your hair! Your hair! Your hair! Your hair!
I am the bluejay in the low shade of your oleander,
you are the bicycle that I ride to the cathedral.

SmokeghostS

2006-04-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

I smoke my crooked cigarette, and I don't care whatyousay.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and I look dead in his squareeye.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and you don't ask me noquestions.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and I could stare for hours at the whitewall.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and I turn off your lightswitch.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and you look like moonsilver.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and I don't reserve myjudgment.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and I wouldn't want to meetyou.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and you are a heatflame.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and I'll punch his necktie.
I smoke my crooked cigarette, and I would touch you betterthanever.

Cabbages

2006-04-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

She sat with her ass on the edge of the bed, and her back turned towards me. She had just realized she was going to be late for work and was rushing about the room, picking up black shirts from the floor, smelling them, throwing them into a pile, like the harvester of some strain of strange cabbage. She found the best-smelling cabbage and went into the closet.
When a woman begins to change her clothes in a closet, with the door open only a crack, or in the bathroom, or when she kicks you out of the room to change her clothes, when before she would change before you openly, plainly, without any thought to hiding the wonder of her nakedness, when she does that you know you’ve done something to change her thoughts of you.
When you’ve been lovers and it was the consummation of a longing that began the instant you really knew each other, two years back, that time you ran across her at the hobby store, you were looking for a picture frame and maybe her because you’d seen her car in the lot, and you left together and had drinks and got drunk together. And the two of you talked on your bed and would have kissed in another lifetime, maybe if she were Audrey Hepburn and you were, say, Carey Grant. When you’ve been lovers like that you know you’ve done something wrong.
She used to have the urge to display her body to you, to dance toward you, then away, to show you that what had been yours five minutes prior was not really yours, but was for everyone she loved. She would stand before you, her nipples like twin ruby medallions, her pubis, her ass, still visible through her underwear, and you would be happy sitting there on the bed and you would be happy knowing you could never have her. Back then she would purr like a cat being scratched when you’d brush your lips across the back of her neck.
But now you’ve been demoted, chopped down from your mighty tree, and now she changes in the closet. You’ve done something, all right! You maybe didn’t WOW! her in bed that day, or you said something in passing she thought insensitive about another woman’s ass, or you bored her, or frightened her, or maybe she just changed her mind while hidden in a closet. She went in still finding you intriguing and came out in her work shirt and a thick coat. Any which way, it’s your fault.
Hey, I’m not complaining! Please don’t think that about me – I don’t like to be thought of as a complainer. I’m just saying, for your benefit Bub, you had better get used to it. When a woman has no need of you anymore, that’s it for you, and you can’t go around getting all bent up about it. Just be glad you made it into the pile of cabbages.

2006-03-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

something amazing is how nervous i can be leading up to and during an exam, and how quickly i can forget about it when it's over.

my prayer for the evening is for it to be tomorrow at noon.

or better yet, friday at noon.

2006-03-27T08:53:00.000-08:00

I thank the gods daily for the gift of the fairer sex.

Dad and the Tree

2006-03-25T13:15:00.000-08:00

The bald cypress in the backyard was the tallest thing I’d ever known when I was four years old. I remember tripping over the knees while running through the thick grass. Eventually I learned where they all were and could dodge them with feline grace. I learned to defeat the tree on the ground, but I never would climb it. I was always a little scared of heights. The live oaks in the front yard I could climb the same way I could climb on my dad’s arms, there’s was a solid embrace; but the cypress scared me. It was just so tall!
One afternoon my dad, on a dare, decided to climb the cypress tree. I remember watching him climb branch to branch, the thrill in my stomach, nauseating but exciting. Witnessing his feat to me was like witnessing Hercules slaying a pride of six-headed lions. Dad was my mythical hero. He’d go away for the day and bring home dinner, a sling full of ducks or an ice chest full of speckled trout and redfish or a truck full of deer. He could fight, sing, cuss, laugh, run, and drink better than anyone you know, and he knew the words to every rock and roll song. He was a man’s man and I hoped then to be just like him. And now he’d gone and conquered the giant tree and climbed straight up into the sun! All I could do was stand there in awe, staring and squinting like it was the face of God.

RE: Some Hates

2006-03-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

I-h-a-t-e-t-e-x-t-m-e-s-s-a-g-i-n-g-.
I hate cell phones, cold on my cheek, cold in my ear.
I hate reality teevee, I hate celebrity gossip entertainment, I hate zoo cage glamour.
I hate sex for money, money for drugs, and drugs for sex.
I hate email, instant chatting, webcam cocksucks.
I hate advertisements on the insides of my eyelids.
I hate iPod iSolation. I hate apples and windows.
I hate hackers and I hate antihackers.
I hate viruses, Trojan horses, and other more sinister plagues.
I hate surfing and I hate superhighways.
I hate self-service-self-check-out-at-home-internet-shopping.
I hate pop-ups, banners, and trumpet fanfares.
I hate the way my eyes ache after staring at my monitor,
I hate the ghastly glow of it in the lonesome dark.

freak the fuck!

2006-03-23T14:12:00.000-08:00

holy shit, exams are gonna suck.

someone come mellow my mind.

2006-03-20T21:02:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a little is a lot.
Like trying to drain the last shallow pool
of water from a pot of spaghetti without a colander.

**************************************************************

Sand and Salt

I remember on the beach with you under the stars
trying so hard not to be heard, wanting only to look like the sand.
Your younger cousins were there on the edge of the water,
flashlights scanning for crabs in the shallow surf.
But you and me, we hoped to be alone there on the sand,
and under those late summer stars we knew we were nothing but sand.
We had spent half the night looking for a place
to be with only each other, away from your family,
like fish packed in every room of the beach house.
We found a spot high on a dune, sea grass all around
and the sound of the gurgling ocean brought up on the breeze.
I loved the smell of salt on your dark brown hair
and on the fragile skin of your shoulders and back.
It was like breathing the beginning of the earth and all of life.
But sand crumbles, and like a sandcastle there at the edge of the water
where your cousins played and squealed for crabs,
my memories of you, of making love covered in sand,
and your sandy fingers caught like fish in the net of my sandy hair,
and our sandy lips gravelly, each pair against the other,
all those memories like sand are slowly eaten by the insatiable sea.
Still, when I walk the shoreline, the smell of salt
stings first my nostrils, and then my eyes, and then my mind.

2006-03-17T18:31:00.000-08:00

A broken window in every house on this street,
a broken tooth or two inside every head.

Fire and Water

2006-03-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

"When you step to centre-stage with Leo the Lion, it's a cosmic case of light and dark, day meets night. Sensual Cancer, a Water Sign, is governed by the changing Moon, ruler of the night, while dramatic Leo, a Fire Sign, is ruled by the steadfast Sun, the brilliant Day Star. The sexual energy burns hot, at least in the beginning, for Fire and Water make a steamy connection. Cancer is creative, yet deeply emotional and quite tender at heart, despite having a tough shell, while Leo is bold and generous, big-hearted yet ego-centric."

*************************

We all make our own beds.

Your own feet are your only freedom.

2006-03-15T10:33:00.000-08:00

fuck who you want love is a lie that don't mean much.

***********************

Thank you Jesus for rock and roll nights sweating under spotlights,
the smell of burning blood and your jeans on tight.
Ears banging, fingers drumming, tap-dancing in puddles
on tables. Whiskey warm, barroom air thick and dangerous.
Your throat is a knife and I’m cut and I’m bleeding.
Oh, with my rock song I’ll get to you. Oh, with my rock song I’ll get to you.
Pockets ringing, quarters and dimes, keeping a tempo, keeping the time.
Five dollars for the band, five dollars for a drink,
five dollars in my hand, five dollars down the sink.
Five dollars for your girl, five dollars for the bar,
five dollars for your world, five dollars you’re a star.
Oh, with my rock song I’ll get to you. Oh, with my rock song I’ll get to you.

Ships

2006-03-13T05:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in the tarry night, when the black is thick,
I wake up and cannot sleep. Still, in the dark,
a part of my heart knows she is awake as well.
I wonder, if we were both to look heavenward
at the same star, could a sextant triangulate
the distance between our hollow, wooden bedrooms?
We are both ships on the same sea, and the sky shows no moon.

2006-03-12T17:21:00.000-08:00

Her eyes, her eyes,
one filled with truth,
the other filled with lies.

What a chump.

2006-03-12T14:27:00.000-08:00

Nothing but a beggar and a fool.

2006-03-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

"She came along to turn on everyone . . ."

2006-03-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

This week I have the real potential to go on four dates with four different women. I have not had one (not insane) date since the beginning of the semester. Something strange is afoot.

So many questions are running through my head: would it be wrong of me to go on four dates in one week? Could my brain manage such an endeavor? What the hell do I want anyway?

And then there's that other one who is currently half-way across America.

What's a country boy to do in this age of computers and time machines?

*********************************

Also, happiness is an immensely attractive quality.

"I like the peace in the backseat . . ."

2006-03-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

My grandmother was a beautiful woman with a smile that would light your face on fire. I was just standing in my kitchen cooking beans with carrots and potatoes and rice, my supper for this evening. That's something she always used to cook for me, times when she'd invite my family over, or the whole family, or just me when I was on my lunch break. I was listening to "Rebellion (Lies)" off The Arcade Fire's Funeral. That album always makes me think of her, for obvious reasons. There I was, cooking and listening and thinking of her. I loved her and I hope she knew how much.

"Nowadays it seems everybody's havin' them dreams . . ."

2006-02-20T11:39:00.000-08:00

I've been listening to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan a lot lately.

That album about says it all.

"Americana! Nostalgiana!"

2006-02-09T20:30:00.000-08:00

The title is the chorus from a song that my neighbor's band plays.

My neighbor is a fifty-something-year-old man who may or may not be retired. If he isn't retired, he will be soon.

I am sitting in my living room on my sea foam green sofa, and my neighbor's band is rocking out the neighborhood on his back porch. His band is some sort of wedding reception Mardi Gras rhythm and blues outfit. They play New Orleans music with basslines that bounce all over and piano that's smokey and jumps and hollers like a black cat in a bathtub.

They sound all right, they're together and all, but their's is a different kind of feel. I feel like fixing myself a glass of punch and calling up one of my cousins to talk about what we think we'll get for Christmas this year.

My personal favorite is their warbly rendition of "Are You Sleeping, Brother John?" They sound like the band that your strange uncle is in, or your high school math teacher.

On Your Own Out There . . . "Sleeping is giving in"

2006-02-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

I haven't written anything of any real substance here lately. I've been speechless a lot recently.

My life continues to stretch itself, and widen, and I feel that I am absorbing more and more of the world around me.

I am also coming to rely on myself and only myself for the first time in a long time. I haven't felt this self-sufficient in about five years.

In some strange way, it's like law school is some really good drug I've taken which is showing me how to see things anew. Already I feel my brain twisting, and in a powerful and positive way.

I will say, though, that it is nice to have a companion with whom to share new experiences like this.

But then again, maybe I'll find me a girl in a Waylon Jennings t-shirt.

. . . but I doubt it.

2006-02-05T10:15:00.000-08:00

I hope it means the same to you that it means to me . . .

Regrets of a Man Overboard

2006-02-04T13:10:00.000-08:00

When I jumped in the black water, it seemed like a good idea to swim away in the middle of the night. But now I realize the water is cold, and the boat is out of earshot.

****************************************

I think I may have finally found something I'm good at.

****************************************

I am worried. Tell me you're okay.

A hand in the bush is better than two stoned birds.

2006-02-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I blew out the back innertube on my bike for the second time since I've been here.

What a bunch of bullshit.

***************************************

Waterfall

Lying next to you was standing and breathing in
the scent that wafts from a waterfall.
I was amazed that something so thunderous tasted
like honeysuckle on the back of my tongue.

What It's Like Here

2006-02-01T10:30:00.000-08:00

My morning starts at 7 a.m. I have class at 8, and I like to get there a little bit early so I have time to get my bearings before class begins. I dress and make my tea and grab my books, and I walk downstairs to my little dungeon/bike workshop. I walk my bike to the street, noticing always that both of my next door neighbors are living in FEMA trailers parked in their yards. It's an odd visual with which to start one's day, but I bike along. My street, Audubon, is beautiful, especially in the early morning when it is quiet and the light is green filtering in through the oaks, but there are still nails and chunks of dry-wall littering every few yards of sidewalk. Classes are easy enough. The readings are complex, but the concepts are simple to grasp. I sit in the back, as per usual, and mostly alone. It seems no one wants to sit by me, but I try to participate anyway. In the evenings, when class lets out, I bike to Audubon Park and huff out a few laps. I am up to six, and I am now doing six laps in the time it was taking me to do three laps when I first started. Talk about improvement! After I bike, I come home and shower and eat some fruit. Then I usually listen to music for a little while or drink a beer. After I unwind, I read cases for a couple of hours and then watch Sex and the City. Then I write for a while and pass out with my laptop on my lap.

I am sometimes lonely, and there are those I miss, but life is mostly good.

*************************************************************************************

P.S. - I was never that strong.

"See the sky about to rain, broken clouds and rain"

2006-01-29T14:00:00.000-08:00

"I hear some people been talkin' me down
Bring up my name, pass it 'round
They don't mention happy times
They do their thing, I'll do mine

Ooh baby, that's hard to change
I can't tell them how to feel
Some get stoned, some get strange,
But sooner or later it all gets real

Walk on, walk on,
Walk on, walk on

I remember the good old days,
Stayed up all night gettin' crazed
Then the money was not so good,
But we still did the best we could

Ooh baby, that's hard to change
I can't tell them how to feel
Some get stoned, some get strange,
But sooner or later it all gets real

Walk on, walk on,
Walk on, walk on"

*********************************************

I have the foresight.

*********************************************

Baby, this is gonna be good.

*********************************************

Damn I feel great!

2006-01-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

Like having rocks in my guts, it makes me sad, knowing what you're up to.

Astrophysics

2006-01-25T07:55:00.000-08:00

For a man, sex is the theory of relativity,
and a vagina is like a black hole,
which consumes his rocket ship and bends
the fabric of time. Afterward, now inside out
on the opposite side of the universe, he says
to himself, “Where did the hour go?”

Time Machine

2006-01-23T12:19:00.000-08:00

I recall that your body is a time machine, when I sit
On my bed with the shades drawn, and it would transport me
To when I was younger, thin and green, like a tender sprig.
Your body was like the insides of my eyelids. I would explore
Your depths, like a child in a cave filled with butterflies
Of every color, and I would delight in your darkness.
Sometime around your breasts were my junior and senior proms,
and right about your vagina was the back seat of my first car.

Devil, angel

2006-01-21T14:55:00.000-08:00

A girl on my high school debate team once told me she thought I was literally the Devil. A woman I once loved and who, at that time, loved me back told me later that I was, in fact, an angel.

Does that make me a human?

*******************************************

God is a woman that I dream about.

*******************************************

"'Cause I know that the sound of your heart is a god I can trust like a man, not a boy."

Streams

2006-01-20T18:37:00.000-08:00

Every other day I fear that I am still in love with you.

****************************************

"Eat a lot, sleep a lot, brush 'em like crazy. Run a lot. Do a lot. Never be lazy, boy."

****************************************

"It's hard to remember to live before you die."

****************************************

"If you always get up late, you're never gonna be on time. And that's a shame. 'Cause I like you. I never see you."

****************************************

On the sea my legs are growing sturdier.

Woe (Scrawled while speeding)

2006-01-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

On beautiful blue
my way to see you,
a semi will not let me pass
on the throbbing interstate.

O, Commerce!
You are but a clot in the love artery
of the American highway.

2006-01-11T22:45:00.001-08:00

In the shabby shelter, it is dry but dark, and only the children’s teeth are clean.
The roof leaks rain, and the floors are slick with piss.

Teevee Stand Living Room

2006-01-10T15:20:00.000-08:00

I am sitting on the living room floor, home to millions of living organisms, me being the only one visible to the naked human eye. The living room is teeming with life, but as for furniture, it contains only a stereo set and an old, orange armchair. I am sitting on the living room floor, home to millions of living organisms, assembling a teevee stand from a box.
It is something like producing a rabbit from a top hat, and just as magically difficult!
The stereo speakers, all six, are standing in formation, staring at me, all singing the same lonesome country song. The subwoofer is a bearded baritone, then there’s a tenor, two beautiful altos, one knockout soprano and another one that’s just so-so. It is like a tragic Greek chorus of the American South, and I am the hero-king, a man in an empty house in New Orleans, his only flaw his feeling of being an outsider.
My neighbors, I can see right into their living room from my living room. They have a pretty Christmas tree, and they have not been home all day. It is Sunday, and they are Sunday people doing Sunday things like going to church, then to a light lunch, and maybe for a walk or a shopping trip.
I was going to be a Sunday person today, I even woke up to go to Mass on my own, a thing I have not done in a long while. I biked down St. Charles, and just as I could see the spire of Christ Church Cathedral pierce the treeline, I blew out my tire on a piece of jagged wood, or a roofing nail, or somesuch. God, I think, was telling me to have church at my house.
I walked my crippled bike back up St. Charles back to my house, carried her inside, and put her to bed. I put on some good gospel and started to assemble this teevee stand. The American tragedy chorus has now become the cast of an opera about a Benedictine monk who builds furniture as his service to God, just like Jesus did before he died. In Act III, Scene ii there is a particularly moving aria, just after the monk realizes he put the doors to the cabinet on backwards.

Nest

2005-12-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

When it is cold out, I will carve a hollow in my chest
where it is warm and you are shielded from the wind,
which whips against your fragile skin. I am an old, gray tree
and you, with your feathered hair and your wide, extravagant eyes,
can nest like an owl being sung to sleep by the rising sun.

The War on Privacy

2005-12-22T13:49:00.000-08:00

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order."

- George W. Bush
April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York

What a fucking farce.

What incenses me the most about all this bullshit is that more people aren't upset about it. We are being fucked, plain and simple. I hope you like it in the ass.

"The lens is everywhere."

- Milan Kundera
Immortality

j'aime les fleurs du mal

2005-12-20T14:30:00.000-08:00

L'Albatros

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

- C.B.

Business Secrets

2005-12-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

I eat lunch here about once a week, and I don't know why I do it. Or maybe it's because the falafel is pretty good and the waitresses are slow and unattractive. Maybe something about that is appealing to me.

The owner of this diner on the corner of Bilbo and Broad is a Lebanese man with a magnificent fluff of dark, wiry hair. He has come from a foreign land far away to shock and awe the downtown diners of this small city with his Business Secrets, like how to make creamy seafood bisque, or a pretty good falafel.

Though the man is from the Middle East, it is cold outside. Because the man is from the Middle East, the air outside smells like a block of frozen gasoline.

To my left is a couple, a woman with a tight blonde bun and menacing, pert blonde lips, and a man who looks like the sexual hybrid of a salamander and a beautiful woman from a nation near the equator. I keep waiting for him to burst into slimy, sexual flames. To their left sits another couple who appear to have been shaped from Pillsbury biscuit dough by the Great Baker Above, in all their flabby plainness.

All around me are the urgent whispers of groups of tiny men and smaller women, slyly trading their Business Secrets. I try not to look too long at them, it frightens them a little and they think I'm trying to listen in on their Business Secrets. For Chrissakes, they whisper for the sole purpose of protecting their precious Business Secrets. Why spoil their precise efforts?

In all of this I am reading. Oh my Gawd, reading of all things! "How can he read," the whispers say, "when there are so many Business Secrets to be had, just floating by for the taking, like an eternal tray of falafel?"

A group of nurses on my right have all ordered the same thing, and the waitress brings them all a plate of hummus. Some like the hummus, and some do not, and no matter how they feel about that hummus, each expresses her opinion.

A middle-aged woman at the back of the restaurant, whose Business Secrets I am not trying to steal, is talking about how she is old, and not a member of the MTV Generation. I think she might be implying that I am of the MTV Generation, but I know for certain I came from my own mother's vagina, and not MTV's. My father witnessed me coming out of my mother's vagina, and I don't think he'd lie about that!

By the time I was born, MTV's husband had beaten her too many times, and she'd left him for the West Coast, where the sun is so hot it can shrivel grapes into raisins and no one is beaten unless he's black.

By the time I finish my falafel, the nurses are still eating their hummus and either enjoying it or not. The blonde woman and the sexy salamander are still waiting for their food, discussing Business Secrets, hoping that the Pillsbury couple next to them are too absorbed in their seafood bisque to care. The ugly waitresses are moving in and out of the present time, and somewhere in California MTV is still on the air.

One Scotch Too Many.

2005-12-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

"On a Sunday morning sidewalk, I'm wishing, Lord, that I was stoned. 'Cause there's something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone. And there's nothing short a' dying that's half as lonesome as the sound of the sleeping city sidewalk and Sunday morning coming down."

(Yeah, I know it isn't Sunday.)

My African Dream

2005-12-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

When you lay on your side in the morning,
like the careless woman on the crimson couch
in Rousseau's succulent jungle,
you are my bright African dream.
When you lay there, on your side, in the morning,
there is a valley that runs vigorously
from the sides of your breasts, rolling playfully,
first down the hillocks of your ribs, then up your hips.
When you sit at the edge of your bed in the morning,
your slender back is a milky waterfall, cascading
over and down, pooling up at your round white ass,
streaming into soft white rivulets ending at your toes.
When I see you there, draped in azure flowers,
surrounded by the black beasts of this earth,
and looking into a distance beyond all borders,
I am eager to discover your dark forest.

Castles

2005-12-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

I really don't know what manner of paradise this is,
which I have created. It seems it is only a kingdom
of trees snapped like twigs and cold fish kisses.
I stare out my window for a fair lady to ride by
in a coach with room for two. Instead I am left alone.
The court jester is a drunk, the cook a spy,
and the queen sleeps only with others. In my feather bed
I am sweating and the marble floors are freezing.

**************************

In my heart is a tired, yawning absence
shaped like a palace decorated with your pink cheeks
and I wait inside.

**************************

I can't respect a man who doesn't mow
his own Goddamn grass, or make love
to a woman in his bed when she asks.

Waiting for to Die

2005-12-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

I was eight-five when again came the big water.
Strapped to my bed, the water covered first my feet and legs,
then my belly, folding its liquid-linen corners 'round me
like a black and cool death shroud. Then it covered my chin
and I succumbed to the stench, like the black scent of ether.

Communication

2005-12-07T09:30:00.000-08:00

I needed a piece of glass cut into a trapezoid for a lantern that hangs like a one-eyed head from the wall of the office.

When I brought them the measurements the first time they cut it wrong, and gave me a piece of plastic instead of glass. The plastic melted from the heat of the flame.

So I returned with the melted plastic, twisted on itself like putty or taffy, and said I needed a new piece, preferably glass this time. The lady there, whose head was inflated like a parade balloon, looking like she'd just stuffed her face with cakes made of hydrogen gas and ass fat, told me she'd need measurements. So, I left and returned once more, this time with approximate measurements for the glass.

"We can't use an approximate measurement," she said smugly.

"Well," said I, annoyed, "the last time I came in I brought exact measurements and it came back wrong. Just get as close to this as you can."

She attempted to give me an impromptu geometry lesson and spoke to me like a teacher who caught a student running in the hall with a flaming pair of scissors.

So I cut open her skull, surgically, precisely, with the edge of the plastic-glass, deflating her head shaped like Snoopy or Garfield. I folded up my measurements into an airplane, shrunk myself to microscopic size and piloted the measurements straight into her frontal lobe.

Pressure

2005-12-05T14:40:00.000-08:00

I once knew a girl whose name sounded like music,
but also her name was music.
Her curvy body and curly hair
were shaped like a thousand treble clefs or bass clefs,
or music notes swirling into the air and into my ear.

And we danced to the tune of her name for a time,
but like all songs, her song ended,
or maybe the melody merely meandered away
and forgot where it was going, or I just stopped caring.

It is funny how a sound or a song or a name,
it's funny how they are just changes in pressure in the air,
detectable to the ear, and gone as soon as they strike
our eardrums. But in our brains they bounce
off of the insides of our skulls and echo for years.

ashes, dust

2005-12-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

a broken, dirty world,
a brown-skinned, flirty girl.
my heart burned so much for both
it turned into a pile of ash,
it turned into a pile of ash.

*************************************

When I am dead I'll want

to be burned up in winter, when
my bones will warm the air;

to be scattered in spring, when
my dust will feed the fresh buds;

to be forgotten in summer, when
my loves will live the life of the sun;

to be remembered in fall, when,
in clouds of lead, the living see the dead.

fall fades to winter.

2005-11-30T13:45:00.000-08:00

when from the west
the wind wildly blows
nobody, no nobody, not nobody knows
which way the crooked weather-
cock crows.

let's go home . . .

2005-11-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

i have been reading old emails from friends.

this is something i shouldn't do.

it makes me miss them, and regret that things could not be different, or similar.

the question that keeps arising is: where is everyone?

but i am still in love with each of you.

eat some turkey, drink some wine, sleep, and dream of us.

"god is neither hindu nor muslim, . . .

2005-11-16T16:45:00.000-08:00

. . . and the path i follow is god's."

happy birthday, guru nanak!

it's too late when you feel the flames . . .

2005-11-14T14:45:00.000-08:00

a man was burned up in his house while sleeping because he could not smell the smoke from the fire.

humanity was destroyed while the people slept in air-conditioned condos because they could not feel the air burning.

in a county in pennsylvania the people have accepted sound science.

beneath a white cupola in washington those who speak for the people have rejected the science of living.

happy veteran's day

2005-11-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

just before my morning walk to the post office, she asked me to pick up a copy of the local paper. her son, a friend of mine, and a member of the famous, fighting 101st, was being honored. it's veteran's day. on the second page, there he was. his countenance had the pallor of newsprint, the same dull gray as every other uniformed soldier pictured. the same uniforms, the same dull gray faces that hide the blood behind their cheeks and the wrinkles newly formed around their eyes from squinting in the desert sun, and from the stress of it all. i guess if they all look alike it makes it easier on our eyes when they come home in piles.

pray to end this madness and fight as if your prayers were wasted breath.

in all this time the bottom line's you don't know how much i feel . . .

2005-10-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

it is getting colder
i am getting older
the world is lifting
from off my shoulder

i hope you all know i still love you.
i hope you all still love me, too.

i miss each and every one of you.

someone call to see if i'm alive: 337-405-8271

is there anybody in there?

2005-08-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

i don't know if anyone checks this anymore.

oh well.

what i'm thinking right now:

i hope my grandmother dies peacefully.
i fucking hate pat robinson and i wish he would die. george bush, too.
i hate that i hate them so much. i probably shouldn't.
maybe i am hindu.
i wish i knew people here.
i miss her.

war wounds

2005-06-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

i think i'm losing this battle.

shout outs!

2005-05-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

sorry i haven't posted in a while. i've been drunk a lot lately.

here i am, on the verge of graduating, and i don't feel i have anything left to say.

so much has already been said.

but here are a few messages for people i love:

joey: you are something so special. i've seen it since we were kids. don't get mad when other people can't or won't understand you. i'm sorry. i love you.

clint: my constant companion, a vital third of the musketeers. you're my brother, my psychic, my coach. new orleans is a new chapter. congratulations, man, we made it. you are a true achiever. i love you.

lee: our brainwaves follow the same sin curve. thanks for all the long talks about politics, philosophy, and the general state of humanity. oh yeah, and for all the chronic ass bud and aqua teen. terror of the sea rocks my fucking face! i love you.

jason: i live through each breath you take in. wherever your feet wander, i can feel the earth beneath. whatever your eyes see, i see too. show up at my doorstep someday soon. i love you.

kelly: remember that four-eyed geek and that clown-haired nerd that had matching shirts in eighth grade algebra? hehe, dorks. always keep looking. always. keep. looking. i love you.

ann: i wasn't lying when i told you i loved you the first time i saw you, in comp civ first semester. i still love you very much, and a part of me, i think, will always be a little bit in love with you. i'm still one of your biggest fans and most avid readers. i know you won't, but keep in touch. congratulations. good luck. i love you.

meghan: you're knockout, girl, and i mean that like a punch to the face. thanks for all the winedrunk conversations on the nature of god and kissing. i think you're just what i needed. thanks, thanks, thanks. i love you.

breton: you. know. it. i love you.

more later. but now, i gots to go graduate.

things continue to happen . . .

2005-05-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

so i guess i'm moving to new orleans in august to study environmental law at tulane and help save the world from evil corporations and the dea?

never. thought. this. would. happen.

there are worse things, though, and it is something to do with my time.

and hey, when i graduate i'll have a law degree.

this is the "personal statement" i sent in when i applied to law school:

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote extensively on the topic of responsibility. For him, responsibility was the fundamental position of humanity – people were responsible for the creation and maintenance of the entire world. The blame for every war, every injustice, every needless death, fell squarely on the shoulders of each and every one of us. In other words, we are all responsible for what happens in the world.

In my short life, I have had the opportunity to witness injustice firsthand. At the age of fifteen, I was fortunate to visit Honduras as a part of a poverty relief effort there. Driving through the streets of Tegucigalpa, the capital city, I saw houses hidden behind fifteen foot concrete walls topped with shards of broken glass and snaky coils of razor wire. Fatigued policemen brandishing machine guns lined the city’s streets. While a certain few members of that society live in fairly modernized cities and enjoy amenities such as electricity and running water, others live in utter squalor, literally in houses made of mud. Even as a teenager I could see that these divisions represented some kind of inequality, a flaw in the order of things.

I quickly learned that these same types of divisions still exist in America today. Working at a summer day camp for underprivileged youth in my hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana for several summers, I was sometimes required to go and pick up children who otherwise would not have had a ride. Some of these children lived in conditions comparable even to those of a Third World country such as Honduras – houses with no doors, empty holes for windows, floors fallen through, vermin abundant. Far too many children are forced to live in such conditions, I thought. No child should ever be forced to live in such conditions.

In the course of one’s life, one discovers certain gifts, certain abilities unique to oneself. What if these gifts enable one to fight against the injustices that mar society? Isn’t one then obligated to act, to make right what one can? Doesn’t the use of those gifts then become a responsibility?

Every law, every contract, every business deal – all of these aspects of life present questions of ethics, questions of responsibility, to all involved. And they all involve lawyers who must make these ethical decisions. I believe I possess gifts, of thought and of speech, which make me a prime candidate for law school. There I believe I could learn skills that would allow me to take up my responsibility in the world, to make right what I can.

and who says philosophy isn't useful?