April 2013
2 posts
in the wake
the ardor and iron-strong the placement reads, immaterial, as those irregular waves that sometime swim in the physical realm at a finger’s touch, a monumental transport through generations set sail upon a paper sea of letters, of words ours could but flounder in rafts aground against self-made puddles and i can only remember the omnipotence of a tick-tock antique, and dusty shelves of...
never that close
the milestones read as though from a plaque: degrees, securities, ruby bands, jumbled up and ground to a finite dust to spread with your finger in the moment, (if you’re lucky), you’re never aware of where you really are as you tell the cabbie to take another pass watching the streetlamps flicker and the meter climb in a haze, it’s all quiet on the western front until a shot...
December 2012
1 post
assent
low blue breaches the misshapen shapes herein, sifting its midnight strokes like grains of sand washed out, blinded in a sunken valley boxes and strewn cloth and the frames of pictures held melded together, amorphous in the eyes of a figure familiar silver-glassed; your local monolith unspeaking, standing humbly amid waist-deep shade your torso flat, broad in the deep is shrunken, bent beggarly...
November 2012
1 post
don't engage the talent
are you new here
ask it staring, waiting
your words sink, shrinking
flaccid
their bite sags limply
as you’re covered in a
spray of warm red
teeth tearing to a fresh kill
splayed on the coarse savannah floor
September 2012
5 posts
corner street
millions of people
get up, get ready
for work with views
overlooking the vistas
or burrowed deep in
the sheen
of world capitals
it’s amazing, we think,
how could anyone live right there
right in the throbbing vein
of industry, finance, culture
exoticism so potent it’s practically
fetish
it’s life and death to be a part of this
somewhere
and there
faded like an...
book burning
i sat up vaguely aware of the pressing heat coming off nearby flames
and remembered as though coming to from a long forgotten dream the kindling, and liquid fire snarling underneath greedy edges black teeth curling up through pungent air the night before
that ramshackle patio promised with the warmth of a hundred bodies, one said to me “it’s making a statement by doing it,” and picked up some...
shell
i touch a hand to my face (later, in naiveté), pondering through a slitted viewpoint in streets of old world beaten stone a flat mendaciousness like a scene from an old japanese film, cruel as a stalking voyeur, their prey urged to rupture, violate its plaster surface cool, feeling neoprene gliding down my fingertips i think with some misplaced arrogance maybe i’ve left an impression and in...
satellites
this could be a personal crutch: that arterial spray of words forms spatial wards craggy, half-submerged on a pacific sea, islands that illuminate at a touch— a luminous multi-ring network that pared down from macro sends the pulse of community quivering down our collective spine like the parable protagonist and the forum of great figures we remember as friends recounting their respective...
imprint
i feel that i’ve met a celebrity i loved as a child like i’ve seen that one film, you know which one i mean, with the director maybe i was implicated with in worlds that nerve is there, shuddering, like a twisted thread floating in milky, electric darkness impregnable, we tell ourselves (sometimes to great anger) its physics in degrees harder to flip over than a wriggling spider— each...
August 2012
2 posts
easier
i’ll bet in the nineties we would laugh at all the cues for tropes, as though the actors were serious as the grave over the subject matter in a passing gag for, what, continuity it wasn’t prescience— effort and synthetics: not a recent trend
apothegmatic
in the burned out building hollow visible from across highway wreckage is it possible, that ascent, hoarding supplies and water blindly selfish to the effects of touch in its most vital stages in that time desperate love settles over blackened camps, the progressive highrise looming as urges collide and illness’ possessives (inept, fearing curios) broach lustful indifference
July 2012
6 posts
impossible future
we lived in a time without photoshop and cracked our heads against slates that were video screens, hauling stones in heavy woven rope nets we’d brush the sweat and grime from our damp arms to build and find nourishment in each other when we tore our clothes, savagely beating old steering wheel columns, fucking like animals
face of another
as we talk i’ve realized the contours of your face entirely work on this stream of words splashing, breaking against that outer perimeter blooming as i exhale in a steady listing of letters maybe mildly stricken by mingled minutiae, the glow a radiant incandescence i can’t quite trust step back and maybe you’ll have painted another picture
follow the world with your eyes
my headlights passing, the once over and vacant construction signs, packed away till the next i recognized in a loft’s windows overhead the presence of when i had stood there once; i was sure of it. it went as quickly as it had come, a sliver vanished up its white-faced side, panes lining up in a singular existence betraying an inner openness vaulted free to its rafters that might’ve...
lair
strictly speaking it doesn’t matter how many hallways you construct or turns you make in the plans—the flat edge of the paper neutralizes everything back to zero. you’re living here. passing in revolutions with knickknacks and framed art to hang, after apartments you’ve visited. for a moment, you’re enjoying yourself take a load off, kid, you’ve earned it. the place...
new
what is it we’re all after it, so hard, whatever “it” is. and so take blind paths happily—adhering— with glittering pricetags printed on new old-fashioned paper in that style everyone likes so much. there is a typewriter that sits in my closet, a broken jaw it could still bleed if only its lips worked the dust on its hard shell worn-in, the dirt its own imprint of passing hands...
time immemorial
flipping from cels in a prismatic side profile the two things we don’t approve are “memory” and “the face you’ve become,” but like so many wrong turns in the bloodstream, its evolution too far gone.
June 2012
6 posts
out of a grove
i had a dream alexandria’s library burned in the distance; “is it true?” i asked an old man, seated on a perch overlooking the flames. he spoke, “it is only natural we forget,” looking absently at me. “it is never as right as memory bears.” i said nothing. the fire cut the night, its mark powerless.
too many ants
from the chopper circling you spy a black seething mass irritated, oft trembling or distended, an undulating, pulsing mound angrily formed of innumerable phalanx infantry without ideology or directive. how can it be a sea (but it is) earth’s crust bitten and worn threadbare from the friction of a horizon of panicked legs here at your safe distance the atmosphere— reality— shudder and break,...
celsius
heat rises, writhing, mingling, sinking its tangential mix flush after currents through the night air, airborne-bound for a golden city in clouds and i mayhap absorbing seize on a cloudy escape knocking free from its grasp a stench of warmth here, in the hallway standing, back to the sink pressure dissolving gently to rocked waves til i’m returned, this once summer home where the sky rises...
interior decorator
the weekend: you trace lines in to great plans, sussing expectations as you choose to knock down this wall, rip out foundation here and here for better light or wider windows or a feast of clouds, partner for your position the best laid plans, not even the best laid plans.
water wheel
sometimes it feels that there’s a quota on pop-culture to go around and we sit spinning in roundabout enclosures a half-submerged ferris, watching the sights go by pointing and smiling at whatever we’re sure we recognize, another revolution
boring
every day for the better part of a year you take a few steps forward sneakers bending forward you look at the edges where floor and wall meet, those horizon lines dwindling further down beyond reach—
you never seem to get anywhere do you when even thoughts aren’t new
May 2012
4 posts
awkward age
i don’t miss it that pit in your chest when it’s so obvious that things are going to work out, you’re having the hardest time trying to pry open your jaw even to ask, terrified for a good reaction clueless about approach, too new to hit a probable truth.
you can't come in
there’s a glass panel stretching from the center of a cold room predictably, it’s white— how we yearn, fall (prey) upon minimalism you’ll see eventually, those long years of others’ silence communiques on a one way trip you’re finally catching up fingertips on the pane catching on the view opposite.
your own fiction
sloshing around, crystal warms by the low lamp indistinct as the murmured touch on your arm, the light twist at the collar you gaze, a luminous abstract buoyantly, absently present a coolly held circumference stationed in the quiet past a long hall greeting where you clipped the dark.
train home
how can one stare intently with no recollection? 45 minutes, maybe more you can be whoever you want facing down those towering organic spires you’d love to be miserable, strangers blackened in dusty twilight, pure, white piercing eyes, scrolling, mechanical whoever you want.
April 2012
6 posts
circular table
sometimes all it takes is
a little twist, window panes
curling like ropes of smoke
everything is possible
in midday indoors
spying yourself across
the room, enjoying the playdate
as much as interest
in two new people over
espresso
good-bye
brick by brick we’ll seal up this wall until gazes may no longer meet, a quiet separate from beyond our means.
resurface
jagged barbs can only puncture, for that is how they’re made; wiping your sooty brow as you clamber from the wreckage around the scorched earth halo imprinted at impact, you wheeze a little gulping down oxygen, struggling to stand.
archival
as an old strain, one i’d forgotten i had once remembered rises from the settled stillness i’m grabbed by a pure velocity tumbling blind down a dusty shaft, blind from the streaked solar enfilade ghosting seared gold gathering at the vanishing point. scenes i know play back at a glimpse at a distance so close you can reach out and touch, models encased in hard crystalline— my hazard...
narrowing points
funny, your choices of fashion accumulated over the years may have such an impact on perceived constructs of sensibility after so long a silence shirts and jackets and ties you loosen slightly when taking the train across town, nervous expectation underpinning yet not outweighing unmet shock in all that is new.
terminus
threading through iron strands of wild vapor, pearl-handled crags intoning their whispered glossy grit, a monochromatic savagery beheld ultima thule: pale-eyed solipsist, your blinding grasps beat a tinny ambulant in inch-blindness when, some mornings past, twisted blankets marred a torpid dull and, temporally, epochs passed since your salience lighted floral tones. doggedly here cultural nirvana...
March 2012
1 post
asphalt tide
i’ve come to rely on you, slowly like a sopping paintroller gliding over a liquid landscape, lulls washing through chamber-canals as cayman sedatives tied, hopelessly, to this janus consciousness.
January 2012
2 posts
underground well
you dreamt of a being its face a hollow, symmetrical void, an unstoppable newtonian force irradiant in the splendor and the anguish— a cubist’s nightmare— a rich archival vein. light cracking around a lithe landscape you felt aged staring: its face a slivered, threadbare passage, predictable apocrypha to waking before you can attempt to remember an answer.
i lived in fear
i saw the crust of our border country broken in large tracts of upturned earth and had notions before the raw, searing crust that these streaked starglints could take other forms, better
so this is the new year
death ain’t so bad, blowing ripples glittering on the amber surface of a turbulent shot, a hack director’s incandescent smudged faces smeared over the lens caked in bright, nostalgic vaseline— you dump your dead weight to fire the screenwriter and yes, it’s all been intentional.
November 2011
2 posts
bac passing for haiku
that house: may be foreign foods hannibal’s electricity
waiting for take-out
moonlight sonata is an oddly chosen
contrast to such brightly colored
walls, a model of
southeast asia
it tastes like rust
way back when, when you watched the smear of overhead streetlamps the towncar speeding— it’s just draconian it’s only blood money
October 2011
3 posts
ghosts
i caught a glimpse of myself tonight, another me from a separate timeline, if for a moment and i wanted to say son stay in school or something old and sanctimonious so that our paths might never erode or narrow unreasonably as he passed looking at his shoes through the puddling asphalt slicks i just met his gaze as a flicker, then reminded of buried corridors and what was fruitlessly ironclad,...
cloak
when you nod making small talk among a cachet cache it comes naturally to stand tall behind a glass carrying yourself as though your life depends on it.
September 2011
1 post
why bother
darla you’re going to fucking return that dress now and i’m cutting off the card the flurry of torn paper that hits the office air could be certain relief or bloodshed
myth of support
i would lick and nip at heels of period fetish would that wood and carbon not rot away, inevitable— misfit misgivings paled to a crutch; ours was written in stone, under broken back, at the end of things.
August 2011
4 posts
thine own
yes, I stole this, he shouts, torn clothes a fucking vagrant placating, entertaining no one clutching his foundling prize and it to me its touch is all that matters police bearing down megaphones at the ready, and fear-found chests.
knife in the back
we pray (and fear for) the day when discourtesy overrides social grace and one’s own birth is a well-wish from someone you’d purposely forgot.
imaginary friends
we were all stupid once, just as willing to serf hard stone slabs dragging simple material gain as acceptance of breaking and entering, or the presence of a personal letter.
July 2011
4 posts
a year
winter shook, trembled as its bony hand gripped the ground, forcing the elements to fill in earthen cracks with a snap of blue dust; we drew concentric circles in the ice, hypothermia and russian roulette just on our lips. a bench stood at the edge of the frost— hard science expanded its sturdy joints then, contracting at the thaw, paying little mind to the presence of any excess weight abruptly...
plot points
the distinction between night and day is key with little room for variation; and bright, open walls painted with the most beautiful words and phrases (some hack in hollywood probably once equated them with the rustic familiarity of homestead carpentry) tell plainly of your brilliance on their blood-sprayed surfaces.
checked out
you left your left heel under the bed in your room. the damask hid it and you didn’t want to clean so early in the morning. housekeeping will find it and think nothing of it. you will think nothing of it when you press the green-ringed G standing on the carpet inside the elevator door, descending down the long, set shaft, when you reach the front desk. one day this might mean something to...
