The Scene: A Darkened Living Room

Two lovers confront each other slowly, and not wanting to bring up the situation at hand play with their fingers, crack the joints, look around vaguely then say “It’s raining pretty hard, isn’t it?” The third person in the room, whom neither of them can see nor hear, replies, “Yes, it is.” He exits the room through a gaping hole in the wall into an alley suspended fifteen feet in the air above the neighbor’s yard, and asks unanswerable questions from all the mosquitoes that venture near him only to be stymied by his black aura. Below him an alcoholic, wet and shivering mutely pleads to be shocked out of the life he is living and to be taken back to when he was seventeen and just starting to fuck up his life. If he got to go back, he said, he would do it all differently. He wouldn’t have gone to those parties, he would’ve made curfew, he wouldn’t have started stealing those beers. He forgot to take off his watch when the rain started, and it is soaked through, black shivering emptiness where a sense of punctuality used to be long ago. The golden hands deftly twirl light from the streetlamp into needles and pins of glimmers. A deer starts running, is on some level hit by a car, but never stops. A great animal, the size of a military tank, wanders the monsooning city streets. I look out with a sensation of do-goodiness, and the feeling of luminescent ants covering my hands and genitals. I take another pill and sit down to read a book about about D.H. Lawrence’s life. I read a sentence, look up, and it is now DAYTIME. Light streams in around me, and a small child runs through my front door, wielding a hatchet and wearing a backpack inside which I can tell lies a pristine waffle-maker. Inside the walls of my house run streams of blackened hypersensitivity. We have questions, yes we have questions, but in our ear canals there are oceans, and if we turn our heads too quickly they will spill out and drown the world.

grappling with-

For Someone Named Anna, Since I Don't Have A Friend Anna To Dedicate This To

what'd I'd like to say is good job on that thing you did
because nobody could have done it
or would have even thought of it
at least nobody I know

who besides you would've taken the sun
and stretched into a halo
to keep your ears warm in the winter?

only you, only you

which is to say, I love you for who you are, not just your celestial earmuffs

if I don't blow off some steam
I won't be able to sleep
with a billion degrees piling up inside my veins

my dear world, there are things about you
I just don't know, so I close my eyes

if I got everything I want (I want so little nowadays)
it'd be three days for sleeping, two for running, and seventy seven for lying next to you
and eighty-nine for watching the sun come in through the window in the living room

love is a question

in the road I stepped with
no intention of anything beyond
total love

like a stream of water that wears down an impossible rock

and a bird that flies through the greatest storm that can twist the heavens

if I am changed beyond recognition, it is only because I have changed along with you
every scar you've gained all these years, I've mimicked accidentally with a falling vase or misplaced knife
every infirmity that shakes your grip on life installed a matching crack in my house
but my foundations are firm, I have built on our love

out in the road, I looked up
had my gaze caught by the windy sky and felt grabbed
hooked around
and I realized this: that all love is a question, and death is the answer
now peace reigns, and I am your husband

poem abt. writing poetry

oh my god
I didn't write a poem for class today
I didn't even remember what it was until I read the prompt at the top of the page

What's my problem that I can't take ten minutes to crap out some verse? or jot down a rhyme like this one, scribbled in class while Kort speaks and reads her poetry

ex-swimmer

you're so mean when you want to die
you say you're ready but you don't know why
don't you hide your pain from the whole wide world

Don't you miss the days when you used to swim?
with she and her, and him and him.
but the water has no beauty now, no faceted diamond glints

just a dirty pond of H2O, with a surface that reflects your sins

autocannibalism

you don't think of anyone but yourself,
you're a bully and a **** and a beautiful person
when you're out in the light

It's a little sick the way you're so weak
and your weakness has everyone wrapped around your finger
even you

you let a black hole grow inside your chest,
if you don't block it out it'll eat your air
you will choke and die

like butterflies pinned open
or lit from within

I grasp at straws while pigeons crap all over the rooftops
this is a cafe scene
I have holes in my shoes, and 7 bucks fewer in my wallet

you've got a dirty look on as you answer yet another text
it's not much of a date, I'm certain

but like butterflies, we are perched here for the world to see
snipped out of our meadows, car exhaust preserving us

the night comes all the time,
but we don't die when the sunlight drags itself down the wall with a heavy touch
and the radio sits, waiting to sing

and the kettle burns, all the time
but it doesn't scream out without reason
while the trains pass not a hundred yards away shaking the walls of the house and kicking dust up into the sun

glass bottles sit all the time
flavoring my food, dreaming like an animal
I grow twisted when my body grows larger

there are very little promises that I will promise not to make when you break
touching hard on your soft skin
grabbing breaths that rip your lungs with smiles at the huge sky
you are an individual and wild and so am I but somehow we were cast in love

you can do brave things
in an attempt to make a bigger ripple when you die
but to be sure, you are going to shake me either way
you are going to take a hell of a heart to love

People live in the Midwest because there is a certain kind of beauty in watching things die. In the South, things die and grow all at once, in a kind of continuous cacophony of nature. In the middle states, things are born in the spring, grow in the summer, die in the fall, and all is a graveyard for the winter. Some people enjoy this; it is in their natures. Their genes resonate with the boom boom boom boom of the changing air, the cycle of scenes, the rich metaphor of weather patterns. For others, this chokes them; they need everlasting life. But the europeans, the folk in whose veins an understanding between them and death flows, they enjoy the battle. They feel in their bones that, while they might not live forever, they can live through death-of-the-land for many years, as a way to prove...something. I am not sure yet where I belong.

paper

I am going to try and put this down
I am going to be the scribe to do this shit
I am going to take a keyboard and a blog and pin down my emotions, the fear of the trap, my instinct to burn burn all the old away

I am going to make you understand the sickness I feel when I think of staying where I am for one second longer
I am going to do something drastic and beautiful that will blow the thoughts of the people that know me open for a second before they start to close again
I am about to thrash and kick in my computer chair and dash outside in a desperate attempt to escape, before I slip on some ice and freeze to death
I am going to do this all as soon as I can get myself together, I know it, I just know it

How I Spend My Days

I am waiting to stop waiting
Looking for the strength to proceed at full speed with eyes clenched shut
Trying to find my voice so I can sing the world into adoring silence
Figuring out the proof needed to convince my math teacher and everyone else in the world that I am unique and favored by God in my uniquicity
Struggling to see beauty despite the struggle that's always with me
Happy to be happy even though at night I'm sick with lonely
Taste-testing every girl I can get to agree, so I can find someone to take my virginity and hand in an eternalish vow of unnervingly strong love
Freaking out over stupid shit like a fear of falling from small heights.

Probability and Angles

“Oh hey what are you doing what is up with you tonight my friend”
“Not too much can’t really say I’m up to anything what are you up to?”
“O I am just not doing much of anything with a couple of my friends if you get what I mean”
“What”
“Not doing anything if you catch my drift”
“O okay I see”
“Yeah should be a good time”
“Where are you going”
“Pat’s house”
“Ahhh Pat”
“Haha, yes Pat”
“How is Pat lately I have not talked to him lately”
“Pat’s been good he is graduating early and he’s got a job at that record store and shit”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah he has a girlfriend too she is pretty hot and…”
“and…”
“And pretty good if you know what I mean”
“Oh you bastard”
“Haha”
“Heheh”
“I’m gonna head out, see ya later man”
“Hey, mind if I come with”
[an awkward moment. the momentum of the situation appears to be at a crossroads. 1st young man has an unreadable countenance. the potential of antagony hangs in the air. the café is full of people and the sound of their conversations flows like pebbles being washed down a steep rock slope. the warmth surrounds them, the heat turned up to balance the below-freezing temps outside. 2nd young man has flushed cheeks from the heat, 1st young man seemingly unaffected by the temperature.]
“How about another time buddy, I’ve really gotta go this time”
“Okay that’s cool that’s fine”
“Alright cool see ya man”
“See ya”

Tired [of)

I am about ready to give up
So tired I am leaning over, not quite capable of sitting up straight
And I am yearning for a love and a place to live and a life that's my own
And an eventual peace
A smooth brow at last
Before this too-old heart in this too-young body decides it doesn't want to beat any longer without the kind of reassurance I am waiting for

sex fantasy

it's pathetic and nasty, but
i can dedicate this poem to a couple different people
because i was going to write it to have the message of, "i want to be your lover"
which is the primary reason for art
but still
there are a few of you that make my legs weak
and my tired face pull into a smile
and i'll tell you what i want to happen
i want to move away to another city far away with you
and we can drink tea in a hidden café
walk back home along the docks and the warehouses
up into our attic apartment
all one room, so we're never alone when we're both home

and then we could lie down in bed, kiss, and make love
then talk, or just be quiet
read awhile in the afternoon light
then i could get up, and fix us a snack
some spanish rice or stir fry or such
then we could sit and eat and write
or do what the world says need be done
but way up in that small warm room, we're the happiest of anyone
you & me are the happiest of anyone

"Hello World, our President is white at the moment, but he'll be black later..."

Oh, Obama won, who guessed it.

But that is okay, if he shuts down a bunch of pro-life emergency care shelters or repeals the Hyde Amendment, I will take a rock and throw it through his window. And on the rock will be written, "You prick. You didn't have to do that."

And then this blog will be lacking on updates unless they have computers in federal prisons.

virtue-trap

if I had to choose I guess I'd say that my main problem is a lack of contentment
but I don't want to write about that, and I don't think anyone else wants to read about it
the emotional struggles of a middle class white boy in America

I don't know what else to cover, though, that isn't soaked in the oil of cliché
too many poems have been written on depression, or the love-pangs of adolescence
and not much of worth can be added there

on the other hand, I just wrote a poem about writer's block
which has been done too many times to count
this lack of new material, this is what it is about
the reason poets snap their pens, and authors divorce their muses