Poems in the key of KABLAM

[flaggwalkstheline]

They just kept jumping

I was traumatized as a child,

When I saw on the discovery-channel

Antelopes and zebras at a watering hole

Trying to jump it

All being taken by crocodiles

Who lunged out and dragged them under from mid leap

They kept jumping and the reptiles kept feasting



And this is when I realized that this is how

The world

Works



I want to be the deer who soars to the other side

It has to be me, just has to

Be me

But I see their eyes

Waiting

And can’t do anything but back up and stay thirsty

[Jon]

*gets Nate a water cooler*

[flaggwalkstheline]

crocodiles in the water cooler

crocodiles IN THE WATER COOLER
!!!

[Jon]

Sounds like a new band eh?

"Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the stage ...crocodiles in the water cooler!!!!"

[flaggwalkstheline]

For Journeys That May or May Not Happen

If the transplant goes smoothly


You’ll wake up hearing wheels



If the moment

Crystallizes on the roof of my mouth

I’ll get rid of my last pocket-watch

Even though it was a gift

So we come to silver pointed crossroads like Faberge nooses for extravagant executions

If the moment

If the lady

If the bull

Wishes it

The orange light on the machine mistaken for divinity but I don’t blame them

Before my night-vision kicks in everything turns to static

Waves of television white noise procrastinated hum

I’ve been carrying this surfboard for a while though no shoreline has yet appeared

Not for another 800 miles and my arms are starting to hurt

Till I can take off into the sea even though I don’t really know how to swim

Deflated life jackets stuck to cacti

I hear it calling me

Like the ducks in the park when I was a child, small enough not to scare them when I walked through their flock in the grass

Whether or not I am a good kisser is between me and my past lives

They always run from me now

Unless I have the hypothetical device in my mouth that keeps me from speaking, eating

Keeps me from spitting

These crude acts will soon be taken care of, swaddled and bathed

I have said for years now that we need to have a million-drunk-drive on Washington

And oh the swoon, oh the icecream as I put my hand above my head and intuit

A melodramatic hah ha ha ha into the etherized bathtub

Cleaner eyes in the middle of his face just where they should be

And I couldn’t stop looking even though it was your knee I wanted my hand on

This is the place and these are the stones

I hope I’m not drowned out but these nursery rhymes float around me like dolphins

Sitting on a curb staring swampwater into a pot hole

A hand lifts into a butterfly shadowpuppet dogcatcher

I wore a cape but nobody mistook me for a superhero

Adulthood is a trap we all fall into

And there is a voided rage before the mechanism releases

I don’t like sleeping because that’s when they gather around me talking and each of them thinks he or she is the real me

Oh that moment when nightvision turns on when I think about lying next to you, finally unafraid

And the ways I’ve planned to go about superseding my consciousness

Each more absurd than the last

Cockroaches and roses

The sound behind me will wreck everything in front of me

Why can’t we just

Erase the desire for power

Sleep?

I don’t mean

The lusts of the strong

Or any of that

I really don’t care about those things

My tainted motion is obvious in a bad part of town

I just want to swap patterns of breath with you as we drift away

Then I could put down this surfboard, the wax is all worn and it’s splintering but at least it creates shade

The old man in the motel room looked at me funny when he said, “there are no

Restaurants here”

I paced that room back and forth in a panic because I was weak

Because I was realizing my weakness

Too weak to come up with another word

Too weak to swallow the poison necessary to live in this capillary judicial systemic failure of curiosity

Fingers going numb as they correct the block of ice I imagine as your sides

Earth turns and I try to turn backwards

But I don’t have the kind of gravity to do that, I’ m no mustachioed superman

Look up in the sky! It’s a bird it’s a plane, it’s Christopher Reeves’ corpse in a wheelchair

Strapped to a thousand helium balloons that the birds are starting to peck at and he’s getting lower and lower in his stench

I hear them and I hope that they don’t hear me

Do you hear me?

You’re a meteorite from my center even though you won’t pull the trigger

Give me the figures, give me the numbers that I can crunch between my teeth

Ignoring the calories and gunpowder

Spiders across the back of my hand that I tried to slap but they stuck there

We’re almost clear

Creatures almost all gone from the field of blasted progress

Except for you and me at this crossroads

Guitar strings digging into our bellies, wind in the hair like a hidden name

Like seagull feathers we squawk striding along the trashlines dreaming clean blue

800 miles

801

802



I just wanted to get out of the city

So I started walking

And the permanent grabblers in the grinning sewerhole openings

Laughed and pointed with their singed gloves


I am so tired of western christ-myths

They inform our every moral, infiltrate every journey

Not circular enough

So who do I rant at to get new ones?

I think that we don’t have to be gods or adults

It is possible to catch the moonlight and drink deeply enough that the streetlamps seem like safety goggles

We can stay here and eat peaches till the juice stains our fingertips

It just takes the right push on the right symbol in the right place and doors will open



Cities are always afraid, of themselves and of their wild titan uncles

Tramping through the brushes quietly and chuckling like hunters

There don’t need to be heroes , that implies a conflict

And no president ever makes a promise for no war, that’s passé

The mayors pay for their steaks by declaring wars on crime

So, the choice is easy

The voice comes through me but it is not me, only a hitchhiker

Spit out the smog-cookies and push along the cycle from rubble to dirt to skyscraper to rubble


I remember when you said the same thing

My friend with a backpack of original vision and apples

Put on your boots, kissed me on the cheek

And followed the mud filmed river out and into

The places that people hunted before they built their own dragonfly prisons


Morning now and nobody takes the train anymore, the tracks are overgrown

No boats or alligators basking

The dirt below my sandals is still the same post-asphalt cough as it ever was

I can see the tree line shimmering ahead of me with your invitation to follow

The pill taken too late to do anything but delay the headache

Just ahead with the sweetest fruit on the branches, almost reachable

I want to go back to old ways, really old ways

Ways of the Dionysian sputter

Never the trickster I wish I was

Morning glories stretched purple to the sky

Browned by the time I get there

Each step reinforcing dual illusions

[flaggwalkstheline]

There was something arterially important
That the sunlight made me forget
Heavy afternoon rose-cranium drooped in this waterless July
Something distant and gleamed with nectar
What I would trade all my breaths but the next for
It was there, hanging in front of my like a yawn
But in the viscous sunlight I forgot
All my exhalations intact but the one that mattered

[flaggwalkstheline]

my response to the frenzy over the last harry potter movie

As a child and as a young man I did indeed read Harry Potter

Read all seven of them

But I discovered other things as well

A different 7 book series, that is the source of my most secret smile

Books about a bad man’s terrible quest

Books about a mystical place in the center of things and a magic horn that means everything

Books that have given me rose-singing gun-slinging mystical visions beyond any game of quidditch

My dark lord wears red, and my boy who lived, well he only did so because he shot first and fastest

So while all you muggles jump around giddy waiting for the last movie to come into theaters

I sit serenely, knowing as surely as Ka is a wheel

Next april the first dark tower movie comes out

[flaggwalkstheline]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Jiy72fMvo

[flaggwalkstheline]

The most awkward conversation in history
“So this isn’t easy for me to say”, Mary twirls a lock of her hair between two fingers

Her father, white robes looking clean, yarmulke freshly pressed says,” we’re your parents sweetie you can tell us anything.”

Mom chimes in from her bench by the window that opens above the bazaar, “that’s right, now tell us what’s eating at you, best to get it off your chest before the wedding, one month isn’t as long as it might seem you know. And you wanna start your new life with a clean slate.”

From somewhere outside a goat baaahs

“I’m pregnant.”

Dad’s face widens, “Whaaat?!”

Ma says very low and worried, “who was it? Was it Joe? The two of you only had a month to wait!” tears start to form and fall down her face.

Mary takes a deep breath,” It…”

She imagines what could well be her future

A very soon future where heavy rocks pelt her dead

She wonders what they will sound like as they hit her and how long she’ll be able to hear them

She makes a decision, hairbrained but it could work

She just can’t bear to face the villagers with rocks in their hands

Can’t tell them how kind Joe was

Holding her hand as they snuck out of the city gates past the Roman night guard

How gentle he was in the olive grove

How he’d lay with her and they’d watched the dawn from a blanket, her chin on his tan shoulder

No, stoning or not, that is her special moment and it cannot be shared

“It was God”

Silence

“God himself came down in a beam of light and told me that I would bear him a son”

She winces inside as she says this wondering what would happen if it weren’t a boy

Mom jumps up from her seat and embraces her husband who looks puzzled,” Oh Jesus, our family is so blessed to have this miracle!”

Mary can see Dad is still working it out but if Mom has been won over he will be too

She puts a hand on her not yet distended belly

She smiles, amazed that this worked

Problem solved

[Jon]

Nate. I find it most difficult to pick a favorite work of yours but For Journeys That May or May Not Happen Has such a... non rhythm yet a great flow like so many classic novels. Your absolute genius to accurately and smoothly invoke Dionysus ( the concept) is astounding...and all in the same work.

Please never lose contact with me. I would miss your work. To a degree, I have seen it evolve.

[flaggwalkstheline]

Nate. I find it most difficult to pick a favorite work of yours but For Journeys That May or May Not Happen Has such a... non rhythm yet a great flow like so many classic novels. Your absolute genius to accurately and smoothly invoke Dionysus ( the concept) is astounding...and all in the same work.

Please never lose contact with me. I would miss your work. To a degree, I have seen it evolve.

thanks, i appreciate the chance to share my works regularly with a few different people and i'm glad you like it, very validating. I've started uploading youtube videos too, as i only recently learned how to use my webcam

[Jean]

link?

[Jon]

here, here

[flaggwalkstheline]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqsivnU5_lE here's one, it's just me sitting here reading into the screen so it's not as good as an actual performance (still trying to work out the logistics of actually recording one of those)

[flaggwalkstheline]

An attempt to craft an outlaw blues that picks up after the myth fades

Mustard stains in the cancer-ward

Perhaps I should take up smoking

So that when I tell you these things, I can first stamp out my cigarette on the stage


I bet you’d like that

Twitch twitch but you don’t really care for music, do ya?

Fresh box of checks into the oven

Here’s what your yard-sticks mean to me

The standardized skinny-dip levy test, better run and tell somebody

The glacier was watching

And the lightning in my cortex better not be special effects

Or the barbers will have hell to pay

Kid this probably isn’t IT but it might be, so get ready

(I say that every time and he always brings me a sandwich)

Smell of cleaning fluids and nightgown rhythms

I hate to say it but I suspect the whole thing is a hospital

This is a room we have been in before

Polaroid anachronism, everybody remembers so it’s pointless to deny

All white halls projecting vaccinations like dust storm pricks on the arm

Nearly scorched my hand trying to lift it grunting crystalline highrise stairwells

The flesh becomes a film damaged in the sun gagging out flashes

Now made with real sugar

Line of saliva to the mattress

All going drainy down the river

Oil rigs replace black shoreline trees

Wasn’t that the goal though? To obscure direction and not know where the door is at?

Yes but not like this, not the polluted silent crane nor the helicopter-brain

Fe-fi-fo if I fuck her, it will rot me good

The want starts as a subtle tapeworm glow

Hanging ballet broken-winged flies from the rafters out of prerogatory glee

Gear twists in dimmed lung stampeding velvet

Their larva has boobytrapped the computer

This is no apology

Trends the witchless shoemaker

Green sign exit sign afterglow trying to get out with daylights extinguished

Cannot be released from the circle

It echoes real nice, gotta tell you that much

The moment, well hello there

Ghost-cat begged for string

She has a boyfriend, and that don’t mean a thing

Jury of chimps put me on trial for preaching that I evolved from them

There was no cat but the one that slept in the corner of my eye

Leash empty swaying half in a sewerdrain full of nickels

Creature or man? That depends on when

The choice mostly comes to what floatation device you use

I will choose the smirking monk, the upside down magician bangs on the side of the trick glass gone wrong

America refuses to crucify me but they will come hard if I dangle it

In front of sparkling sunglasses on the screen now say hello to the folks at home

Electric futures smug with too much cologne

Below the bridge you saw the subterranean kingdom that makes chastity-belts

(The special ones with hymns on the inside for quality)

So this is gonna start a crusade?

Plastic bottles in the sink full of bugs

Uh huh amigo, sure will

Squirt gun in his underwear elastic

Walmart surgeons make the best pies

Gotta room full of them, blackmailing day and night for a slurp

Fingers hot in the water, gotta get em clean for the coronation

Ah the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd

I have never been there but the instructions suggest it is getting nearer

Criminals are by nature a cowardly and superstitious lot, ooo hoo they are now?

I promised I’d go one day without reopening the scab

My friend gets a touch of the fear when he hurls his beer bottle at the brick church wall

Telephone wire hums tightrope walkers from a previous deepfryer

Child had the look of a born con-man or perhaps a preacher

Out there in the sand, they are starving

And we cannot feed them iron, we cannot feed them hope, we cannot feed them free speech

Now let’s hop this train and hope it remembers how to find the rails

Over the wall, munching glass books

It was cheaper the last time, bankrobber gets laughed out of the lobby

We’ve ALL got ski-masks now son haw haw

Click the voice of your best friend who never told you she was god comes over the speakers

Could someone make a mess on aisle seven? I have a mop that needs to feel needed

Tight stomach, the whole thing IS the hospital, uh huh, you got a quarter?

This is how we hunt

The lock trembles baby spiders in the mechanism

We are floating down towards that city, the asshole of the metropolis because it’s where most folks leave from

Backup pipes fluting a hoot extinction

Smokey the bear sharpens his claws

Only you can prevent unwanted pregnancy

Promised a surprise but if that surprise isn’t a wallop of your heartbreak at the airport then I suggest packing up that suitcase and going home

But that is a place, never clear except for a single ear of corn

Wet green in the summer rain and somehow spared by the beetles that came yearly

The soil was black, like the night growing stalks of Artemis

My pa was never a farmer but I learned how to plant an idea festering

Hypnotic slow in your cranium

He could not stop laughing

By the time I contemplate the throwing of this blue stone (the story-page ripples)

It will be too late and the waters will be rising

Now you have a reason so go get that hammer

If you stood up in the correct Stonehenge choir where the streetlamps have finally given out

It could be possible to see that jet-roar umbilical cord taut from you to the powerplant

We have been at the space of endings all the while, stargazing

Iron gates clang open and my hidden Viet-Cong prays to Willie Wonka

Welcome to where technicians make technicians to make technicians, fancy shit alright

The academy only teaches a subservient way to defer the ground after a jump

Whether 1930 or 2012, the hourglasses seem to have less sand or at least have been punctured

In the old public service announcements it was always a kid in a leather jacket with slicked back hair (and Fonzie always seemed so nice) pushing a sweatered
elementary schooler against the lockers and offering him a joint

Hey kid, you wanna try THIS?

But in truth, it was an old man snapping fingers at the waitresses and transubstantiating blood from money who would be the one true pusher in little Bobby’s coming of age and neither of them ever really knew it

Well one did, but not by name

Years and the people and the grounds and the graveyards all whirl together towards a most likely disappointing flashpoint

Glaring at his kidney shaped swimming pool, it does not blink back

The difference between you and me finally removed, how’s it feel?

In terms of his own recollection, Stalin won

So this raindance, this ritual, this sweat, this motion

This is what we have been waiting for

And I told you, this was awfully familiar territory, especially the chemicals, IV bags dripping high fructose corn syrup

Congress cannot un-Macbeth their outhouse fueled holiday

And they are only an instrument in a device, the construction of which only sped up recently

I will openly question the deal once they are back asleep

Emaciated identities push red buttons puffing validation down their smokestack throats each one trying to tell the guy in the next bed over

Chuffing tin respirators stained cheeto orange

At last at last at last, oh sweet ambrosia of smug

I told you so

We back out slowly

Not knowing where the emergency exit has shifted to

Anemic-gangster bathrobes crisp in the air conditioning

Swishing on the very clean tile floor

[Seymour_Glass]

God damn.

[Sir_Boomme]

I so love these lines!

"Open the window for a rush of cool cricket silence
Midnight with its knees cut off
Approaches ticking down soft corridors "

I'm gonna save them and quote them in the future for sure.

[flaggwalkstheline]

taking a stab at noir i don't have a title yet and the formatting messes up some of my spacings, nonetheless this is quite zippy



We are the hardest detectives on the island


I am thin, simpering and murderous with a word

My associate rages in her Theseun cadaver like a distant star

Someone’s sick idea of a joke, sending us here to sniff out our own butchering


Time is a moving canvas and we are projected slingshot forward on it


Spiral apartments and dead trees in the plaza

Atomic bluebirds take flight needling out of the haze, we aint scared

Only the suggestion of wind above summer

7th floor cigar miasma

We’re all friends here right?

Too much Disney programming means we will become the enemy

Blood gone amok, books thudding like doves

Someone’s been spitting in my porridge

Ink out the fountainous wrist, don’t push it

Investigation under way, rubber gloves smell of autopsical quickies

It would be easiest to consult the 21 fortune telling machines lined up for inspection, hit me!

Fossilized lightning rods serve no purpose unless you’re the phantom of the opera

You’re not, are you?

It’s not my organ, honest

Oh my aching nostalgia!

Paintings of guns that were on the walls crunch under boots

Authority was given to the meanest shriek

So we came through subway tunnels that lacked the Rorschach tumor

No purpose beyond the subliminal knife: burnt TV dinners

No refills so dig deeper

Hunger is always the primary motivation

Ashtray buckled beneath his smug

Choking on your own mythology is a bad way to go

Pale blue gurgle

Listen for it from under there

Flare signal from a swollen raft

Nothing is ever really split right down the middle

And the thing about poison is, it’s patient

Time to fill up the tank again

We came here to find out what we are going to do, got me? You will

Silver quake voice teasing Dillinger’s busy signal breakdown

Escalator slicked with obscenity

Crow gem theft

Yearly we pilgrim the iron elephant

East is not the answer, spit it up you wicked child



She said I am a man whose truths are bent

Spreads too little butter over too much toast

Her laugh is a bolt of UV radiation

Legs that cannot quicken the pavement

The romantics will get what they deserve

Just don’t hurt the X-ray machine

It’s going to come down

The feeling, the hammer, the rain

The sway to this subliminal crash



Staring at eachother over the gold-rush table, candles long snuffed

Maybe there was a religious dispute



Drug cartels are just corporate evolution

Always a progression but never a straight line

Rictuses bowtied in the Dutch-oven pig farm

Comes on like a flashbulb hot glass pop

Let’s fry up the tubes, we’re donating incomprehensible award-ceremonies to the very top and the funniest thing is they won’t admit it

Shoveling out starts by going down

Control method: zipper

Warden wouldn’t air-condition the occult honeypot

This is a war of western aggression

And we are the backwards sipping wanderers, now show me your hands

I put the love-note ticking in the anonymous fortune cookie

Machine moved (just a slab) when it wasn’t being watched

Sedimentary ice-age

And England always seemed so nice too

Those boys need more guns so they can settle scores one on one like us



With the gloaming need undefined

Cell walls snakely wrapping mama in with the priest

Cmon baby let’s do the coma



Not gonna wake up like that

I tell him: fire your soul-load into the sky real clever and they might letchya go



Ah interesting, sugar ants on the genius’ goggles

Hush now, if he blinks we could get repossessed

Old one eye drowning crows happily in the sink

Don’t you touch me, I’m no professional

This is the same way that one movie started

The one where the drunks commandeered a blimp

Everybody cheers for hills they’ll never climb



Cosmic cello in my skull

A raindrop as strong as a rose, exhaust the pretty

Blunt object caution: looks like a typical scramble

They flew in the window and left through these exit wounds

Aged him like a Mexican revolution



Oh boy, previews are done now pay attention to the vapor

Asthma inhaler and the bowl of cherries

I depitted them just for you

What did you say?

Oh nothing, just some of my sweat on the pillowcase

Made me look up realizing

And shot you swooned with a look of hollowpoint come-hither

[flaggwalkstheline]

Grendel alone

“The great sickness is upon me”

The laughter behind such a statement is implied, heavy and cold

“And I am willing to share”

Dive bar medievally full of dead men who don’t know it yet

The medicine prepared, sticky sap goop spread on coughing chests

They woke up like that and will go back to sleep in the same state

“Who among you unchains the rhythm in his skull?”

Even the physician is silent, a fly lands on his allnight stethoscope

Fishbelly fingers rappatap on oak

There were trees here once, torn out thunderous in the name of a steel quest

Steamshovels prepare holes years in advance

And oh your white knight psycho candidate approaches

We will wait subconsciously boiling prunes to the future aborted godchild

Twelve years, that’s how long it will take

“If there is an us and them”, he says watching a woman in a red dress walk across the street

“Then you can guess which side I’m on, I will not be moved by any number of albino oxen”

But very late when the stolen fear hits him, someone not there knocks at the door

And all the local dogcatchers grip their nets tight with knuckles never tamed

[flaggwalkstheline]

Outlaws

She makes me want to be an outlaw

I want her to be the Bonnie to my sexually ambiguous Clyde


Together we could

Detonate world markets

Deface priceless paintings

Burn hallmark cards, business cards, report cards and undergarments

Flaunt our flagrant disregard for all degrees of control except our own passions

Then go rolling around in the grass


But even sitting near her on the sofa

I can’t even lean over and kiss her


Our heartbreaks pass like parallel train whistles

Going in opposite synchronicitous directions


And I can’t


It’s similar to what I expect would happen

If I walked into a bank with an automatic rifle

Yelling, “This is a stick up!”

The tellers would take one look and me

And start laughing

Knowing immediately

All the bullets in the world wouldn’t make me use them

I’d stumble out, crying into my ski-mask

Into a line of cop cars

Officers bent over laughing, “HIM?!”

Clutching their guts and banging fists on the hoods of their vehicles


So I’ll wait for her gently

Like a man on a horse

Intent on overtaking an armored truck

[flaggwalkstheline]

Welcome Back

I walk across the street

Feeling stupid and beautiful

The first day back in school

Rush hour, a crossing guard is there to help the college students cross the street

But I make my own handmotions and the cars let me pass

Crossing guard looks at me dumbfounded and says, “surprised you made I this far buddy”

I roll my eyes at him and pass along a sly grin to a group of Japanese exchange students whose language to eachother sounds like a
burbling stream

I can cross the street without a babysitter, thankyou

But don’t let anybody know it, he needs the money

A nearby radio blares Bill O’Reilly and the only words I here are “liberal agenda!”

The money, there’s the jagged puzzle piece

All agendas converge toward it

The liberal agenda: yoga for dogs and government funded tofu for everyone

The conservative agenda: that guy the other night on Central & 4th with a megaphone yelling, “nobody loves you more than Jesus
Christ”


The American agenda: shovel the college students full of one dollar cheeseburgers

So they forget everything but savings savings savings

And how surprisingly good, and shockingly right

That first sip of vodka at the age of 17 tasted



I saw a full page spread of Sunday-funnies turning seethrough in a puddle outside a bank

Does that mean anything?

I don’t know

It’s the reason behind everything, the forced order

That pushes me to lunacy

The monotonous rhythm of unemployment that would be no different if I had work

The stepladder of higher education

The endless planning for a future that’s always one step ahead of me and much more clever

I prefer the random

The kitchen lightbulb that neither I nor my roommates have replaced after it went out last week because we like eating in the dark


A sudden kiss like a crocodile

I never know from who or where it comes


The chalkmark graffiti of Faust quotes I leave under bridges

The carcrash where nobody gets hurt so you mute the news

Pens that run out of ink for no reason

Deserted operahouse corners where I can sleep raggedy

And dream of prison-escapes where I break the heart of the warden’s daughter first

Love letters in the mail delivered to the wrong address that I read anyway

The rare sensation that nobody is trying to sell me anything


Why should I pay for my own future?

Answer: Because that’s probably still all I know

I want to discard the Pavlovian response to an A+

As a step towards razing the credit card companies to the ground

Because my agenda,

Is to make the Japanese schoolgirls stare at me with wonder

Like I was Moses parting a sea of plastic and iron

[flaggwalkstheline]

yowza i havent been posting on here as much lately... I'll post a couple of poems to try and catch up some

[flaggwalkstheline]

Trinkets from the summer we chose silence
In the green land where I come from

The best way to get someone’s attention is to say

I have a secret

However, as a first resort

Let these questions be the offering

My loudmouthed Artemis stretches out and laughs

A surprise desert raindrop lands on her cheek

Through theaters and highways

Exit signs just out of reach

I collect these gnarled roots and place them in circles around where I and the moonlight sleep

And even with the very harpoon plucked from your father’s eye

Not a twinge of escape

Silver chain around the wrist

Yes it binds and no I don’t want to remove it

Bald spots on the sun aren’t my horoscope

Before the melting started making promises

Glaciers had no nervous habits

Left arm digs in the ice and I’m flickering out

The hypothetical needle shines in sick-exposing blacklight hidden camera guffaws

No tall buildings in my town to climb and contemplate from on hight

Soundtrack to a broken control systematic fakeout

If all of us are secret Godzillas the perhaps it is our respective Tokyos which are at fault

For claiming paradise in the name of the penguin bombshell

Visions go slowly gray at the temple

Bathrobes ratty in the downpour

Musk of honeysuckles releasing nectar

Or was it a subliminal acid?

We even forget in circles

Looping cackles of sleep-dust

I’ll say the secret when I can speak from this bedful of batteries

It’s a black stone washing up on the shore

(one for the hungry and one for the greedy)

And being pocketed by an adolescent beachcomber

(one for the electric and one for the needy)

Who leaves it heavily in his swim-shorts

Until next summer’s briar patch rotates back

Even fruitflies take their bite of forever

Just a twitch

Blinking tropical mercury poisoned in the field of big clocks

Unchained my trickery is a spreading situational stain

When I know it

I’ll speak it

Until then

Hypnogogian sacrament reaching out to a near solid state

Shall sustain out catnip addictions

And another question to make old Tom Paine proud

To whom to do the gods pray?

Answer: to the real people, of course

Wherever they are

The ones who remove the spines from their cacti so nobody can get poked and sue

But lick their lips when they sharpen a pencil to a wicked point

Their heads like jumper-cables scowling repetitious breakfast specials for the plastic champion

And as for truths

Here’s one:

Your whole life, every birthday, every kiss and every spilled fluid in the gears or crabgrass

Happened in one day

One day with a multitude of clouds

And my bonnie corroborator with her mouthful of intangible bricks knows this

I understand it but she wades in it

You won’t know it’s an edge until you look down

You with the fit of embarrassed glitch will spit the dream out

Into the spooling hurricane and lose track of it odd sugaring invisible-ink whimsy

Your radio waves don’t sting my cracked masculinity as intended

But they sure offend me as a witch

I’m the one you couldn’t catch in Salem but wanted bad enough to unzipping my pants

Though I doubt my ways are so much better anymore

The romance of my head hitting the wall was all but extinguished after the thousandth wham

Stone fingers pointed towards the mountain

The tips are blue

That’s where the fogs are loomed out

Glowering heavy with mirrored noon afterbirths

Into corn spun in time and bone apologies

The gas tank may be clogged with eviction notices

But I was never any good with any tool other than the hammer

So I became a clown among tyrants

Responsible for applying lipstick to the crucified

How do I look for my last show daaarling?

Snitch his sneakers tiptoe down on the slumbering furnace

How now America?

With your steroid puffed 1948 pectorals

Your strength

In the hindsight of old magazine adds

Was an illusionary mugshot

But mine never claimed to be more than a cryptid smirking adios you deaf hunters

I’m not afraid of the ubiquitous trainwreck anachronism

As long as I don’t become one

And if you rub my lamp

I’ll be your mad scientist hocus fibbing loverboy with the faeirie-ringed eyeballs

Burning rooftop funtime gunfire precious to the scorekeepers

Well here it is

All the soil in the playground is flammable so eat up

The balance

Found through absurdity of rage breadcrumbs

Ooo she shivers collecting shards

Careful not to flirt with the virus

Yawns opening flowered wounds in the name of the flood

Clothes-lines calming white backyards

If not for the remaining fumes of the thrice removed carcass of the old world

We could guzzle all the solstices at once

And ever we forget

In circles

Crows attempting remembrance of what they took off after

What shined and clever crippled doubling frozen Yukon pyrite

(one for the sickle and one for the maze)

Nursery rhymes and stolen mantras

(one for the Minotaur and one for his gaze)

Passwords made public knowledge and all the vaults flung open and emptied

If I were to achieve all this, then what?

Then the slow climb back down with no music but the tundra sighing on

Towards the directionless eye of the ritual

You are one and I am legion

So hush the smashings, they’re really not a necessary part of it

Besides we both know


And this is the fishhook I’ve been dancing around

Heartbreak exists in the absence of its own possibility

[flaggwalkstheline]

I never feel less like a real person


That when I go to the store to buy condoms

Not that I have much use for such things

But there is a certain young lady with whom they could come in handy in the near future, perhaps

So I went to the grocery store down the street

And marched over to the hygiene and health aisle

Expecting to find them there among the tampons, adult diapers and toothpaste tubes

But they weren’t

So I walked up and down a few more aisles

Stopping to pick up the jar of extra crunchy peanut butter that I wanted

And I almost gave up

Until I saw a woman pushing a cart filled with three squealing small children

Reaching their hands out at everything like zombies in a movie

That strengthened my resolve

But I couldn’t just go and ask one of the people who works at the store

I was carrying a jar of peanut butter, after all (no basket)

And it would have been decidedly strange to say, with the peanut butter jar in my left hand, “pardon me but where are the
prophylactics?”

After buying my jar I finally found them

In the glass case, with a separate cash register

Next to the cigarettes and the lottery tickets and chewing tobaccos

I looked at the packs, one variation came in a box of thirty

This depressed me because it was probably my entire future sex life all in one little box

I looked at the boxes that had ten each and thought the same thing

I stood there waiting for the clerk, a man in his fifties with a blue vest that meant he was some kind of manager or supervisor

He noticed me and said, “Hi, what can I get for you?”

I froze and mumble, “Well I…”

He said nothing and we looked at eachother

And if this had been a movie then he would have known, would have nodded at me knowingly and sold me the condoms without
another word

But he didn’t, we just looked at eachother until I said, “I’d like a pack of Marlboros, unfiltered please”

He asked to see my ID which I promptly showed to him

It was much easier to show my ID and prove my age

Than to justify buying condoms that I quite likely wouldn’t ever use

Condoms that the clerk would know, instinctively upon looking at me, that I would never need

Because people can tell, yes they can

They can tell

When another person is just wearing a mask of normalcy like I am

When someone is a fake, like me getting almost angry when I see couples kissing in the grass at the park

So I bought the cigarettes

Walked outside the store into the fading daylight

The concrete was wet like the skin of a black dog with mange

I don’t even smoke

How does that old joke go?

I don’t know I’ve never checked

I gave the whole pack, unopened to one of those homeless people who are everywhere asking for cigarettes or money

At least someone would feel lucky

Then I walked across the street, dodging cars honking at me

Some days I wonder what would happen if they got me, if I just stepped off the curb screaming into a billion tons
of metal on all sides


Not today, these thoughts of sex and death

The real joke would be if I really did find a way to live forever

And still couldn’t get laid

[flaggwalkstheline]

Grendel alone
“The great sickness is upon me”

The laughter behind such a statement is implied, heavy and cold

“And I am willing to share”

Dive bar medievally full of dead men who don’t know it yet

The medicine prepared, sticky sap goop spread on coughing chests

They woke up like that and will go back to sleep in the same state

“Who among you unchains the rhythm in his skull?”

Even the physician is silent, a fly lands on his allnight stethoscope

Fishbelly fingers rappatap on oak

There were trees here once, torn out thunderous in the name of a steel quest

Steamshovels prepare holes years in advance

And oh your white knight psycho candidate approaches

We will wait subconsciously boiling prunes to the future aborted godchild

Twelve years, that’s how long it will take

“If there is an us and them”, he says watching a woman in a red dress walk across the street

“Then you can guess which side I’m on, I will not be moved by any number of albino oxen”

But very late when the stolen fear hits him, someone not there knocks at the door

And all the local dogcatchers grip their nets tight with knuckles never tamed