Poems in the key of KABLAM

[flaggwalkstheline]

Circles version 2.0: Relapsing on your far away sadness in a motel room equally distant

do note that this is the final version of the earlier "circles" poem, this one is fleshed out considerably

There is so much

I wish I could conjure for you

Unchained from the wandering salesman’s bathysphere

My desire for transformatory hypnotism and a matchbox full of secrets

Other than that square of toilet paper with the words my dignity scribbled on it in magic marker

I drift through thinly named places: Belen, Magdalena

On a large enough scale most objects are circular, even towns

And even though I can’t see my orbit

I know I’m spinning a little nearer each time

Unsure if there’s enough hyperventilation in the curve to make a collision

With survival as a moot point, impact becomes the goal

I’m always reprocessing the same moment

To try and make it glow like it did before we exsanguinated the engine

There was a time when hunger was de-facto

So much

The hills we spoke of rolling down once we’d quit smoking

And holding open ice cream parlor doors for long lines of senior citizens

A laughter like this can mend the smoothest bruises

But once it’s gone there’s just the same road-dust and a feeling that you’ve seen this film before

The shimmer of Tuesday afternoon concrete

Second degree clowns and vengeful clockwatchers vie for ambrosia in the gears

Movie theater shifts into a railway station

Joan of Arc on ecstasy for that thousandth quiet open casket viewing

And all the ethereality of forward liquid motion

Drunk down in a hot-shot of Jonestown koolaid mustache nostalgia

I was worried that this might be when we wake up, give up, throw up

Our hands in the air, plastic rabbits fall out the sleeves

And there’s still so many stones left undanced upon

Moonpools of cool river flesh not yet splashed in

So much to know and try not to forget

Tricks for a new kind of deceit

A fresh way to disappear though it only treats the symptoms

The electronically infected hum of wind over sand that was green fields at dusk

Will you be my thief?

The wheels of night-grinding insomnia

Waiting for a promised ratcatcher spark

Sparrows gather nests in old cracked open vending machines

I want to hiss down to the nerve

A Kalahari bone wire if I had enough to start

So much

The Ladybug on the curtain

And the moist filaments of your hair that brush my face when we’re close

Things I shouldn’t notice except in bubblegum subconscious details

I’ll be the Spongebob to your Patrick or vice versa depending on current moodswings

The joke is told, the candles blown

Be my thief

Darkroom birthday-cake technicians lick their fingertips

And I can’t seem to smell anything other than rain on exposed roots

Plans seeded lifetimes ago might still bloom but will have no pollen if they do

High enough up one comes to a place where skinny cows shuffle between lost cars and sunken eyed barbwire

The motel room was furnished for endings

For something postponed and clumped into migraines

A plea for summer

Please don’t scoff at my honesty

I want you to believe it the way it believes in you

We talked all night and never repeated a sound

So much

The multitude of deserts I have failed to cross

[flaggwalkstheline]

Our Arrangement
I write poems for you about how I’ll never have you

And you write poems for your man from Sweden

He writes hesitant emails back to you that somehow push all the right buttons

You cry to me about him and I nod sympathetically

While his wife taps her fat fingers on their kitchen table, penless

[flaggwalkstheline]

Poppies
Dull pink earlike poppy flower
Why can’t you ditch the symbolism and just be a flower?
We associate poppies with opium
Yet most poppies secrete no such poison
Tainted by their name

[flaggwalkstheline]

Dream Sketch 1

We were sleepwalkers
My friend and I
Trembled on top of the monkey bars at a playground
Their red paint
Seemed to breathe as the sky sank
Dogs moved in the dark below us
And we perched very very still
My friend slipped
And they ate him
POWER SURGE
A seizure through my chocolate milk
The bubble pops
Snatched him when he sneezed
Even though I didn’t see it
I crouched there until dawn
My special-sauce lunatic smile intact like a mask
Never looking down
Only listening

[flaggwalkstheline]

Dream Sketch 2
I climbed the junkyard in my best silk shirt
Ragged tires and refrigerator doors
Bones of nameless machinery
A bowl of cherries with only pits
This was what I wanted
The oil and scrapes
Irradiated, lover of my pasts
Beauty kills the future
She waits for me in a curl of chimney gasp
Razor black hair and iced over smirk
Mango sweet fingertips once pulled out of the fire
In a shimmering headdress like a 1950s TV-Indian
White whales and lone rangers in her back pocket
Not for me, I’ve never been one who wanted to possess
Eating a fortune cookie without breaking it open
She says as I regain my breath on my knees, “I hear you’re a child of great passion and greater restraint.”
I consider this watching an inexplicable dragonfly and intone, “That could be true.”
She bops me on the nose with one finger and says, “so stop.”

[flaggwalkstheline]

A burst of want
The limits won’t shatter horizontal smokestacks dulled in their stomping
And I want to sleep near you in an orchard
With my head lilted on your blossom inhaled breast
Dreaming thick through slowly browning apple cores
There are heaped miles of nothing but limbless fields between us
My chlorophyll desires burn hot as flares
Rising high and wishing they were stars

[flaggwalkstheline]

as part of expanding my operations i have recently created a tumblr blog on which to post my writings, it functions much like this thread actually but allows me to do something i can't do here: recitations
i have only done one so far (mayakovsky) but there's room for much more in the future http://www.tumblr.com/tumblelog/murgatroidwillriseagain

[flaggwalkstheline]

Trending critical mass like I’ll never eat again
Stand back all you blast radius disco peacocks

I got a shiny new dance called the icecream headache clocksmasher

Quickening dealers in skunk fluid cleanup on aisle seventeen

Reality seems to be measured in moodswings per hour round here


The jobless truth

“It’s not real! It’s not real!” shouts the old beardy guy on a bench outside the laundromat

This is gonna take a lot of soap

None of the letters on the no-loitering and no skateboards sign appear worn at all


I’m lapsing into a summer coma

The kind that could stretch over a gulf of lifetimes

Rabbit rabbit cloud

Casino whirl
If I had coal, if I had steel, if I stole you

We can speak without sound, lips obfuscated

And be baffled when nobody eavesdrops

Being split into an odd number of pieces sounds far more appealing than the typical jagged duality


I would like to petition the jailer for friendlier atmospheric dining pressure

Eardrums full of rain, undrinkable

Be the anarchist on my shoulder

The pyromaniac who warms your toes

I don’t claim to understand much

But I know a few important moments

I’ll say hello for you

Spraying Raid on the carpet to get rid of the sugar ants and shouting, “die motherfuckers!” as they wither and the insecticide smells similar to deliciously cheap pudding in plastic cups

And on a night journey sobbed on a swingset at the park, 11 at night nobody around except for their lights

The trees sway as black monoliths on an island and I’m suddenly sure that if I go walk slowly under them then I will die or break a barrier so I go towards them and nothing happens

Days later wondering if any doors were opened swathed in a heat that surely wasn’t built for me

Wind in pine trees but I don’t hear it because of the air conditioner

Mother-hawk sits on her eggs

They could hatch into empires

The prevalence of birds in my brain is dizzying

Ah my futures, I apologize

And only you know if I really mean it

I sink down luxuriously, queen-sized suicide

I know the face of déjà vu plane rides

The voice slithers penicillin tumbling out imaginary windows looooook

These clichés hurt but they’re a necessary kindness

Come away with me once we’ve been stamped out

If anyone heard that they would laugh and laugh and laugh and eye the aspirin bottle


Couldn’t hop a train since I lack the proper hobo documentation

Everybody’s got a pedigree these days

And I won’t bite if they open my mouth to inspect

These same drag-popes who would interrogate the entire 19th century to isolate my mischief

And here’s the fulcrum my whole headrush rests upon:

I want to be cremated publicly in a white suit


Snow blinded from the far south

Birthday gun ranges ruin the cake

No more bubblebaths, too big to climb in now

If it looks like the asylum for sure

Make it loud

Make them regret their piece of midas touch

Bright lamp, good cop bad man

Bad cop, leg of lamb

Salivate

When I was small I remember sprinting down green hallways

Possessed by infinite whoosh

Your city got where it is now when it got too old to continue running

California is a promise I’ve never been to

It just hit the coast and couldn’t swim

No barbecues this year, dry season hurts my teeth from too much honest beavering


Pick a champion to namedrop and we’ll see how he does

My lungs know the language of computer screens projecting extinct predators in high definition

How did Picasso know?

He didn’t, just took a guess and jumped

We should all be astronauts so one two three STOMP

The 20th century was all about pretending to not want and eventually given in to the iron lusts digging their way out of the endless rubble of Wal-street’s imagination

Whoever’s kingdom claims the honk has lost my Buddhist lollypop

The lightbulb coughed out nicotine bloodstreamers of sophistication

Europe is a theoretical virus

And movement is a virtue reserved for lost sand sailors

1970 is year zero, beginning of memory

Formally I’m still from the future

In 1967 we were all killers, that’s what he said

The dog chased me and I fled for a quarter mile from a german shepherd jaws

Probably dead now, I would have done the same

Please Steve Jobs let me be a Halloween gremlin unhinged from the factories of this alleged new way, amen

Sunburn peels and I pull at it

Widening the unhealing scab

Consider the size of the bandaid you’re asking for

The future will at the very least be honest, it won’t fret and feel guilty for trying fill the nonlethal hole in it’s digital gut instinct

I will probably go years and years sloughing layers off in the sand, last time I got a drink of water was probably a fluke

Just a random chance at getting the blue, not the blues but the blue which is totally different

And everybody watches and waits from their hills and their safes to if I’ll come outside of my drinking straw cabin so they can chuck eggs at me and taunt that if I still had a hunger I would get down and lick their yolks off of the dirt

This is where peace with honor gets you, a constant squeezing and I can smell his cologne all the way at the other end of the room

Scarabs were kings once and Mantis won’t talk about it

Still too traumatized by world war one to ever eulogize it’s wily spawn

I don’t know the sound of bedsheets and ceiling fans, I am a factory and my clanks work deep into the crust of the morning

Rose leaf veins

You promised a furnace

A technology for every pimple and I miss the telephone-operators

So overcooked and harboring no wormfarms

Unready for the vaccine

Overtaken with coaxed confession

In my harmless smooth suburban nudity

A white suit

A white suit

On the veil of June night

Whispering consolations in poisoned flowerbeds

[Jon]

Our Arrangement
I write poems for you about how I’ll never have you

And you write poems for your man from Sweden

He writes hesitant emails back to you that somehow push all the right buttons

You cry to me about him and I nod sympathetically

While his wife taps her fat fingers on their kitchen table, penless

POWERFUL!!!

[flaggwalkstheline]

i hate writing poems about poetry, reminds me too much of billy collins and his academic circle-jerkers but that one just happens to be true

[Jon]

LOL

[flaggwalkstheline]

Not me
My bedroom smells like pesticide

I used it to gun down a line of sugar ants on the carpet

Then vacuumed up their dust speck corpses with a vacuum cleaner that’s almost older than me

I wonder what prolonged exposure to the chemical I used can do to a human being

Will I end up on my back frothing at the mouth flailing my arms and legs until someone mercifully squishes me?

No, people don’t typically snuff out their candles like that

People die of stomach cancer brought on by too many doughnuts and in fires they accidentally ignited

I eat a sandwich with ham, cheese and mustard on presliced bread that claims to be whole wheat

The masticated globs of it stick in my throat and I force them down, too lazy to get a drink and make it easier

Knowing that far away

And I mean FAR away

There are people

Dreaming, building, loving, raging, shopping and yes: dying

They all move towards a desert and probably don’t really know it except as a heatstroked instinct

Choking on their misbegotten joy instead of ham the way I do

I sit there in front of my computer which I have just turned off, an empty screen smudged

And I just know, slipping a hand down my pants

It’s never gonna be me

[flaggwalkstheline]

Hesitating a one way jump over Brian Wilson’s sharkpit I flopped on the bed and fell asleep to this

You’re a bolt of sunshine blammo


Distant telephone giggle


Keeping my forehead from escaping

And I’m an oxymoron flaunting arctic opinions

Melting to hang onto lightning rod feather mechanisms of catharsis

I’d torch all my clothing if I could just be as sudden as Minoan bull-leapers

Vaulting over the impact of semi-trucks and cowardly matadors

If I threw down all pretense of weaponry, let it drop childish in the dust

I could just face the goring steamroll debt-anticipator

But it moves so slow I’ll never see it coming, whistle an approach

Ah crash the waiting for such a seductive fishhook

In a year we’ll drown giddy in unsludgeable mountain puddles

[flaggwalkstheline]

Blaming the hunger
Armchair-surgeons of the world rejoice!

For though you may split me open and scoop out the bittersweetened schizophonic childhoods

My alarmclock fireflies remain barely tethered

A pearl formed between paradoxes

Tickling above my head parallel to the runaway shimmer

Appliance molecules hum in judging panels of viscous feasting

Your scalpels may slice sternly into silver peaches

But they have never spat fuel back into the face of their gardener

So let’s weigh the anchor and escape into a visionary mission of conquistador hari-kari

There are locked doors in my head that I have opened before and will open again

Spears of sunlight crackle out the keyhole

I am sharpened and almost ready

Approaching the brew of earthquake kindled tea-leaves

And piling iron breakfasts high into the gut of noon

All claims to being the fastest blurred in pixilated mascara

With a hurly trepidation usually reserved for reptiles alone

Sometimes I suspect that I may in fact be a fish

Swimming and swimming in the belly of a bigger fish

Vastly more oceanic than I could ever be

He has swallowed the skyscraping desires of my hypothetical soil

[flaggwalkstheline]

Dream Sketch 1
We were sleepwalkers

My friend and I

Trembled on top of the monkey bars at a playground

Their red paint

Seemed to breathe as the sky sank

Dogs moved in the dark below us

And we perched very very still

My friend slipped

And they ate him

POWER SURGE

A seizure through my chocolate milk

The bubble pops

Snatched him when he sneezed

Even though I didn’t see it

I crouched there until dawn

My special-sauce lunatic smile intact like a mask

Never looking down

Only listening

[flaggwalkstheline]

Dream Sketch 2
I climbed the junkyard in my best silk shirt

Ragged tires and refrigerator doors

Bones of nameless machinery

A bowl of cherries with only pits

This was what I wanted

The oil and scrapes

Irradiated, lover of my pasts

Beauty kills the future

She waits for me in a curl of chimney gasp

Razor black hair and iced over smirk

Mango sweet fingertips once pulled out of the fire

In a shimmering headdress like a 1950s TV-Indian

White whales and lone rangers in her back pocket

Not for me, I’ve never been one who wanted to possess

Eating a fortune cookie without breaking it open

She says as I regain my breath on my knees, “I hear you’re a child of great passion and greater restraint.”

I consider this watching an inexplicable dragonfly and intone, “That could be true.”

She bops me on the nose with one finger and says, “so stop.”

[flaggwalkstheline]

A burst of want

The limits won’t shatter horizontal smokestacks dulled in their stomping

And I want to sleep near you in an orchard

With my head lilted on your blossom inhaled breast

Dreaming thick through slowly browning apple cores

There are heaped miles of nothing but limbless fields between us

My chlorophyll desires burn hot as flares

Rising high and wishing they were stars

[flaggwalkstheline]

Maybe

Arizona is on FIRE

Acres and acres flaring and galloping hot


And I’ve been good lately

The smoke rolls in nightly

Static sounds like waves

I’ve been extra good

Enough to warrant waiting behind a blue glass pane of cold window with the rain and the oil slicks outside



Maybe?

Maybe the leaf

Maybe the wreath

Maybe the vacation

Maybe the exterminator knows



An oak tree with a heart murmur

Snaking strained arteries towards the lion cub

Grumble of airplanes way above

Even the birds shake their fists

X-d out in iron

Permanent removal is impossible

I’ll never be an astronaut now

I don’t like to take off my pants when I’m alone

Even if it wasn’t malignant

With a mesmerizing heat-tremor like this one

It’s hard to believe there will ever be another winter

Though there will be, once I’m tired of playing

Mashing buttons on an old square arcade game in the back of the dollar-theater

I’ve never won but I’ve sunk an awful lot of quarters in this thing

And this is the ideal, the fingerworn joystick

Or maybe the ideal is something or someone I haven’t yet soiled with words

She’s a circle roaring down the atmosphere and beating my chest with an atomic fist

Smoothed beyond eels

We all wanna be round, that’s a universal constant, we probably are round and don’t know it

Flawed scenarios seem to poke out of my skin like dinosaurian football-player bone-spurs

Sudden intruders on my thievery

It’s been explained to me

That a very distant cousin of mine, who I only met once

When I was six and he was five

Who has the same name as me

And I resented that

How dare he have the same name as me

Is going to kill himself because he can’t get off drugs

According to my grandmother he said as much on “the facebook”

And I was asked if I could help

Someone who stole my name



We all wanted to grow up into Batman

How many pairs of rabbit ears counted down their twitching?

The moments stay glued between silences

I can feel it coming too, the slow exhale

Maybe if I changed my name it couldn’t find me

No electric cities or fighter goggle caps

Listen to it occasionally wheeze

Whispers of caresses without rust

Like a breeze

A rabbit

Encroaching lucks

A scar with a forgotten origin

A lint covered bathrobe I never wore

Sitting in the closet

We all wanted to grow up and be Batman



I’m desperately trying to reach that hypnogogic shore

I think I deserve it,

To gaze down at the water of unmetaphorable blooming like before



I floated once, I really floated


The bubble still waits in my vastly empty munitionary-skull

But I’ve hardly been there again

There is a place with a red moon overhead and no ships in the harbor

My love plays an ocarina in the mango grove

(shut up shut up I know you’re laughing)

I cannot walk to see her because I would scatter like a daydream

You always wanted a fairy tale, well here it is

Capricious steaming processed epiphany

A scarecrow with his straw spilling out and a noose around his neck

The emeralds in his eyes when I heard your noise

It was like the gentle curve of a freckled back

Stretching over a family of daisies ripening in their mirror

If I look deep enough into them I will find a chariot

Waiting for me to give the horse a ben-hur-a-go-go command


So hop on and surf like you don’t know how to swim

I don’t

Ride down canyons of endless spaghetti

The iron in my neck buzzing the entire time

Bees gather nectar from my excuses

I’ve been good this whole time, so why don’t I get a sip?

[flaggwalkstheline]

All of us

I take an immense satisfaction

In riding my bicycle past police officers in their cars

Waiting at intersections to catch the speeding

It’s a known fact that they have a quota to fill

They NEED it, powers addicts everyone of them



And thinking about that I realize this:

Staring at the bottom of a teacup with drips of red water and honey

Though the word is typically associated with those who lust for chemical bliss

Every man is a junky for something

From the middle aged businessman with stocks invested responsibly

To the lowly seven eleven cashier living paycheck to paycheck

And the children trembling as they open report card envelopes

All the way up to the president of the United States kept awake at night by his sliding poll numbers



This is The Way we have created and go to college for


And me

Alone in this room with eyes tinted to the swimming future

Like a dream I want to remember but haven’t had yet

Feeding my habit in the dark

The moment you finish reading



This

[flaggwalkstheline]

Song and dance

I’m hypnotized by the mischief

That emanates from your mouth

And swirls around me like a shrewd fogbank

Over beers sitting at a patio downtown in the shade of a beach umbrella



When you said,
“I’m vacationing in Massachusetts in July, Martha’s Vineyard”
And I said

“I’ve never seen an ocean before”
You gasped
And told me I should visit you there, if I can get a plane ticket that is

And I mused that maybe I will

That cloud of playful flirtation enveloped me

When you said, “Of course you’ll have to sing and dance for your food”

We haven’t even so much as held hands yet

But here I am

Contemplating song and dance

[flaggwalkstheline]

Denying the sound barrier

It remains impossible

For me to shriek loud enough

That the whole night stops to listen

Especially as I am

Naked under a blue sheet

Wishing to catch an echo on my tongue

But afraid to be the instigator

The boy who bangs the gong


I light a candle

A deliberate anachronism

Open the window for a rush of cool cricket silence

Midnight with its knees cut off

Approaches ticking down soft corridors


These hours and the ones to come with increasing rarity

Are mine

To snack fridgelit with sour apples and cheddar cheese

[Jon]

"Open the window for a rush of cool cricket silence"

love THE IMAGERY.

[flaggwalkstheline]

Nothing-day

When I woke up

I could tell

This would be a nothing-day

I could lay drooling all Sunday on my sheetless mattress with the window closed and the room getting hotter and hotter


Everyone copes with nothing in their own ways


Yesterday at the fleamarket I bought a top-hat

Cheap felt from a guy who didn’t speak English, cinco dolares

When I put it on now

I feel like a child putting on last year’s Halloween costume in June

All the specialness sucked out and reprocessed as shame in my innocence


Last night I called my unrequited sweetheart on the telephone

To see if her recent bout with suicidal desires had abated

She was with friends, doing better so I went to sleep relieved she’s still alive but feeling unneeded just the same


For some people

Death comes roaring like a ford-mustang, inescapable beast of chrome gorgeousness

But for me

Death comes like an urge to piss at one in the morning and a fear that if I flush, it will wake everyone up

So now I’m sitting at the table drinking weak tea because I didn’t have the patience to let it steep

My stepmom is in the other room giving her one-eyed pomeranian a pill so he’ll stop bleeding from his crippled doggy asshole

The television is on, political sex scandals and golf games

It occurs to me that golf would be better if the 18th hole had a “release the tigers” sudden death caveat


Death for me is stagnation and it is a slow process

The scent of passing garbage trucks

The vapor trail from a plane high above

Sprinklers nursing lawns that shouldn’t have been planted in the desert in the first place

This is a nothing day

And I really have to piss

[Jon]

Nate.

If it's yellow, let it mellow.

If it's brown, flush it down.

If it's red,
call the physician.

If it burns,
inquire as to your competition.

[flaggwalkstheline]

heh heh