Sunday, December 5, 2010

He makes the night come and whisper

He makes the night
come and whisper in our ears
I'd been naughty
I'd made mother cry
I'd made her
run round the table.

I often had the same dream
I had the idea that
I'd been eaten up by the cats.

There are never two dreams.

They come up to the children
They come at night.
Grown-ups, they never dream.

We dream with nothing
In my bed
Under the blanket
Yes
It is in my bed beside me
Were it in my stomach
it would be
blocked by the bones.

And if I dream
it is only of you
your face
on every small neck
and you are in
my stomach I have
swallowed you in pieces
and reassembled you like
a shipwreck in a bottle.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

how i've tried
to build you something beautiful
floating down la brea
on a silk paper crane
all tarred brackish water
and no sunlit oceans
overgrown with gletchy glabes
it's horrible horrible
it's the only way
I can ensure
only I will ever see it
where are you
Old Bull Lee
where might you be?

gauching somewhere down
on the bayou?
obstreperous stripping
those strapping boys

you are the archetype
of the father himself
your diaphanous bubbling veins
heart pumping formaldehyde
you dyslexic bloodsucker you

you haunt my dreams
babbling like the everyman
you are the bellows
to my slinking negation
oh yeah

fuck Stephen Morrissey
geisha geisha
face all sooty
from stroking your loom
in the shadow
of that eroding hillside
i can write messages
on your alabaster cheeks

take it down
will you
i'd like a large pie
i'd like it cold
so don't bother
with the time

i could float
down the Yangtze
on your two seater hips
and you would smile
up at me with
lopsided professionalism

this is where it devolves
and the pirhanas come
but there are no pirhanas
only me and you
weeping and gnashing
teeth but god
it gets me hard

this film will end
with a tragic accident
because he roils ecstatic
breaking our heartspun agreements

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

so you like to be
a watcher do you
think that its polite
to stand between the lampposts
in the garden
just watching
through the window?

don't you have your
own violence to tend
to sow and to gouge hollow
like a ruby red
grapefruit in the morning?

because I have my own
young shoots of untenable
madness and they'll reach
for you too
what you think is an embrace
is not an embrace

your orchid leers at me
with its back crooked
from all its vigilance
as an envoy to your
declaration of watching

when the eyes turn
like lovelamps why is it
that we can't look away?
those mossy green watchers
have a black center
with the density of
a thousand dead stars

Thursday, July 29, 2010

I've never feared anything but becoming a cliche, which is of course in and of itself the grandest of all cliches. My life has become a series of sanguine non sequiturs, like the perfect dream. And dreams are indeed the perfect things: not constrained by logic or physics or fidelities, we are Gods disconnected from consequence. And how does one write the next sentence, being occupied at every juncture by the inevitability of cause, a predestination, a preterition, an infinity of quantum couldofbeens that I will snuff out by not writing into existence. It seems unimportant yes but so is everything unimportant and so why not lend importance to these mysteries that consume lives and drive a man mad. The ones that keep him sane has led him to kill his fellow man for centuries and there is a peacefulness, or at least a self-containedness in madness, where one does only violence to his own psyche.

On madness, on madness! I cannot keep you from it. It is a poison and it dies with me and I am afraid to die. So taste it because you after all were the one who chose it not me we choose the hearts we love not the ones that pump us full of poison. So it is a different poison you are looking for? I think it is a good choice. This one works slowly. It's a chemotherapeutic salve; I see you happy and I see you dying and I can't stand it don't you see I'm not trying to drag you down I'm only trying to save you by showing you there is a different way. One madness trumps the other it kills it it replaces it. I want you I want you

I want you to be like me

Sunday, May 2, 2010

The center of the real world

for/from isaiah zagar

somehow a fragment
of mirror is a fragment of energy
I inadvertently
hooked onto the future
by hooking onto the mirror
faces will look
for ever
thank
ever
one

I desire to change
what our world looks
like feels
like dreams
like
I'm on art

some people love the wine
some people love the honey
but I love art
some people love the flash
some people love the hash
but I love art
and I make it

out of trash I'll
teach you everything
I know in three days

have I got a building for
you filled with gold
art is the center
of the real world
as I grow older
mood swings emergence
of a quality of luminous consciousness

director of special projects
for the state of eternity
one would like
to have a life
that caused no confusion
said Jasper Johns

it has been necessary
to resort to a new medium
in a new path
investigative journalists
we cry for
them we herald
them we need
them desperately

precise intention
the work
of the insane the
flying monocle the
automatic impulse
a brief
history of
the future the
neighborhood comes
the very essence
of existence

south street is
a garden remember
walking around this
piece of fiction develops
in an intense
spatial dimension the
complex task
of describing an
artist's work yet
also rigorous and
exacting with
a sound academic grounding

i love
you and i don't
care if you know
and with the
fragments you can't
touch me here

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

it's all fine
just wash it in reverb
run it through the pedals
hey man it's all fine
you are here
to hear my droning

benn let's make
horror films
i'll play the rat sister
you do make childhood
sound so lovely

i'll bet the scalpel
was your favorite
pulling back that deadskin
to see the organs
glisten under the fluorescent lamp

nothing gleams like
the red firepump
in the basement
as the one bulb swings
and swings above it

the glissandos make
all the notes bleed
and purr it brushes your cheek
like a summer mosquito
it barely permeates the
membrane it wants to

she was lying in the reeds
for days they said
all chewed to pieces
oh the violence we do
i move inside you you squirm
i think we're not dreaming

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

There he was
Old Bull Lee
played a game
of William Tell
shot his wife
through the skull

That day he
became a writer

Monday, April 12, 2010

Euphoria
who's to say what is good?
I know
that I know

because of the way
your softhands so
rise and fall
I am lost in between
the 2nd and 3rd knuckle
because you wear every
curve like a red
wedding dress

life's canyonings
make me whoop and holler
and kerraw
like I have been
falling since birth

it is a good thing
to fall so deeply
into the bowels of the earth
because the sky never changes
and clouds smokemasks
wispy liars
but the fires
of the twisted smythe
light up the reveries and
warm my dry bones

I hold with the bacchantes
I would rip off every limb
for your music
so so so i have found
a way closer to god
should i tell you?

this is a poetry of secrets

sing sandpaper songs
keep the folks awake
the iron's hot you know

your beauty is ascetic
like the rusty old warship in the harbor

i don't wanna go
to sleep i don't wanna

sing hymns until
your neck tips back exposes
your gullet and snakes
come out and confetti

jesus cristo
i said i would
take you right here on the doorstep
it sells news
papers doll

sing softly and gasp
i promise to look
you in the eyes always
don't choke

Sunday, April 11, 2010

To Our Posterity

To Posterity



trans. by H. R. Hays

1.

Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.

Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?

It is true: I earn my living
But, believe me, it is only an accident.
Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.
By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me
I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink
When my food is snatched from the hungry
And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would gladly be wise.
The old books tell us what wisdom is:
Avoid the strife of the world
Live out your little time
Fearing no one
Using no violence
Returning good for evil --
Not fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness
Passes for wisdom.
I can do none of this:
Indeed I live in the dark ages!

2.

I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger ruled.
I came among men in a time of uprising
And I revolted with them.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

I ate my food between massacres.
The shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.
And when I loved, I loved with indifference.
I looked upon nature with impatience.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

In my time streets led to the quicksand.
Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.
There was little I could do. But without me
The rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

3.

You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking,
Think --
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
That brought them forth.

For we went,changing our country more often than our shoes.
In the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no resistance.

For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when at last it comes to pass
That man can help his fellow man,
Do no judge us
Too harshly.

-Bertolt Brecht

Friday, April 9, 2010

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric furr, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh....And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

-ee cummings

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

ten cents
lift up your skirt
i'll make love to
you artlessly

nope
i don't believe
i do understand
i'm just popping off
roman candles ma
burn a hole
in your trousers
what's inside?

let's play word games
until there is an accident
someone puts out
an eye
putts it down
the astroturf

there's a pie in the oven
boys in
bury the hatchet
under the porch
my toothless friend

he comes with his
vacuum BEEP
he finds the first coin
buys a better
vacuum

micky don't you know
it's all nonsense anyway

love is just
small soft cookies in a plastic box
ten cents

Monday, April 5, 2010

make I statements as
you pass the talking stick
circles have been so important

charles' vroom vroom
manic cacophony
and kim's bashful
dalliance she dances
with the board shorts
spectres of the apocrypha

and for me is only
the hot breath of
the living
i do not touch
the hot plate at
the diner i was
told not to oh
and i'm such a good
boy don't you think?

I feel that you are not listening
I think there is something else you are trying to say
I want to gouge out your eyes
and ladle soup from their sockets
a nice lobster bisque