Saturday, January 26, 2008

The Young Mother

Mommy is barely 19 and daughter is 2

On Tuesday Brinlee fell off the bed
and cracked her collar

Her absentee deadbeat father comes to claim her.

Brinlee has never met grandpa.

On Wednesday in her fathers parents
backyard, a Sharpe rips half of
Brinlee’s face off

Grandpa didn’t blame the dog.

and Brinlee will never see daddy again

On Thursday Brinlee falls and
splits her head on cement

“Injuries come in threes” says the fellow at Child Services
to the embarrassed day care lady

once a rare beauty

her

flawed beauty brings flawed sympathy

Brinlee is a shattered porcelain doll at day care

While her mom and I get loaded all day
with government money.

TWO Party politic

The problem
with friendship & marriage
is democracy
is impossible with
just two.

a fragile benevolence
of unanimous decisions

and

sometime
dictators

Ode to Things

We are wonderful Nobodies

with the gimmick of logic

and the gift of nonsense

slaves to duty & love

and freed by the things\

that enslave us

sharing pain & pleasure

and alone

sorting thru names

in an unnamed universe

and proud

collecting objects
we no more own
or understand
than
air in our lungs
or stars we buy

collecting dust

waiting to become dust

floating around that star on dust

slowly becoming what
we love and loathe

The Striped Sock

That unmatched sock,

fresh after the wash,

refuse of the laundry mat,

after the dry--an hour in the waiting--of a color, a kind, a way all to its own,

and there is no joy in the surplus, we wish it out of existence

I am that sock

George Bush & Jesus Christ

at least

it wouldn't

be a waste of time

crucifying Bush

Time Lines

Time Lines


I woke up

on the wrong side

of the spinal column.

...zero hour...

My brain is out on errands.

I am lightheaded, groggy, oblivion-fated,


but my body is immortal…

Passion & Mediocrity

It takes balls
to know you don't have
it
And madness
to never give in.

Mediocrity & Passion

I

Awareness

What is it in us
that sees our inferiority?

Surely it is something greater.

Madness

like the blind inertia of light,

massless

unstoppable,

bullrushes on with its own mind and space.

II

lowness.

is only Aware

greatness.

is only Mad

mediocrity.

is both

III

To be Mad without being Aware

is bold

To be Aware without being Mad

is lame

Mediocrity is bold and lame

IV

The lesser man
would just quit
without the obsession to improve;

a greater one doesn’t care enough about
what anyone thinks
to stop himself from doing.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Glare Song

At the capitol they looked at me with

sadness

or

suspicion

or

contempt.

Inside their cars, as the hard sun beat a reflection into the windshields, I could see faces occasionally eclipsed by the sun.

Contempt will turn her head around to leer at you.

Sadness is at a glance, quickly slipping away.

Suspicion, oh sweet suspicion, mother of wonder, science, and sometimes torture
she just stares.

I could smell car fumes through cold air
and all my lungs knew were a long walk.

I was tired and now I am a ridiculous man in paradise.

Maybe today I will pack my boxes to move north and away altogether.

For I too am a selfmade man

poverty in america

one third of the world does not have electricity

we live better than kings of antiquity

yet the middle class shrinks.

people feel poor because they are called poor
and they are poor because they can only see down the street.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Surrealism

I

I didn’t talk
until I was nearly 4

my patents thought I was
deaf b/c I never responded

I talked, though,
my own language

my own jabber
only my bro knew

plus I have levels
most sleep and wake

but I trance out
a good part of the day

twisting my fingers
staring off into nowhere

II

the rebellion against surrealism
began before surrealism

80 years afterwards
it’s not experimental anymore

inspired as the a Pentecostal

I was born into
the séance, the hypergraphia, the missense syllables

at least I imitate shit from
50 years ago

at least I imitate Bukowski
and sick of myself

III

you are trying to
not make sense

and my nonsense
is what’s leftover

after I tried to
be understood

who is
insane
here?

Believers

as dogmatic as any religious
or scientific fundamentalist

unwilling to change worldviews
after contradiction.

You will notice that both types
are as right as they are dismissive
when new facts lie outside of their orthodoxies.

Science is the new religion,
with its own articles of faith and heretics.

What a state of mind I was in when I believed Jesus was God and Man
and an electron was a particle and a wave.

I read this in a book!

How convinced I am that the universe was purposeless because they say so!
Because if I don’t believe it I am an empty fool.

And yes, the universe is devoid of purpose and consciousness,
thus there can be no man or god.

Man does not exist, do you hear me?

the man that was created in god’s image is the god that was created in man’s

He eats and shits as surely as the black hole.

He is a unique recipe called a sun.

leavened with patience and chance

Meanwhile
heat and electricity have the purpose--the manifest destiny
--of going bravely into the new emptiness.

The purpose of man is to dream he can have purpose.

He cannot.

He is another piece of furniture in a universe without shape or direction.
Yes this what I purpose.

Also the universe must be as simple as possible--this is law--it will
be not only comprehensible but simple to the intellect of man,

who under certain experimental conditions seems to behave as a monkey, but when he is observed, like a man.

There is only one reality simply because
there are only one worlds.

Thus neither do I believe in the multiplication of entities.

The disbelievers are believers too.

All is one, yes

Monday, January 21, 2008

Everyone's given up on me

Every one has given up on me
because I write bad poems
but I’ve written more bad poems
than they’ve written poems

and more good ones too

searching for light
in a life of blind alleys

Plus my wife says she’ll divorce me
if I don’t make nice.

This only means my poems
are going to get uglier

Cuttin Grass, an anti-Ode

I mowed the grass in the rain, furiously.

I mowed backwards,
in circles,
in lines every which way.

I mowed one row a day for weeks, sinusoidally.

I burnt gas, killed grass, and had a hootin' of a noise.

I breathed gas and grass, killed a mock forest, generations of crusty beasts, and went deaf, logarithmically.

I filled landfills and stopped short the breath of plants, asthmatically.

A romantic union of thymine kissing wildly under ultraviolet skies; scleroderma, discretely, bit by bit, in time, me

I will've bought the cleanest, meanest cutting machine, before long.

And've evaporated hidden dew under the thicket, to water noon and night, automatically. .

I’ll piss away our grandchildren’s drinking water on a lawn I’ll kill next week.

Icebergs the size off Jamaica are lobbed off Antarctica and the dumpster is full of dead leaves.

I’ll kill the plants and poison the water.

I’ll spray carcinogens on dandelions--the highest known land source of Vitamin A

Let there be more CO2 and less oxygen

Environmental terrorism in the name of euclidean geometry.

I’ll be about to take pride in myself, because a man is as clean as his yard and his haircut, no stray blades, with a heavy foot on Nature and disdain for the common weed.

Because, people, we ought to pick our battles with Nature, and this, is a losing battle, a song to self destruction.

You baby boomers are fat and stupid.
Yall just need to die and get off my earth,
and stop trying to kill my children

Do what?

we see
our OBGYN at church
he has a black eye
“our baby is going to be born with cauliflower ears and handfuls of shattered knuckles like me, right doc?”
the hole in his temple radiates into a nebula of pain and blood clot rivulet

If he is not listening he is despairing

the congregation lets…
we are..
in the parking lot he on and on’s about Gate Theory;
on how nerves filter
silent train tracks next to busy homes
and trashing babies mothers never feel
I ignore him while he delineates blocking things out

Problems

I used to moonwalk
until I got so fat I can barely walk.

Puberty doubled my mass
in the short jaunt of a sophomore year
and my arches dropped then as my IQ is dropping now, the intellectual flatfoot that I am.

That means I've taken to water:
dancing is easier under buoyancy,
only lateral motion is a bitch.

The soft swirlee's I pull off with my toes are at the expense of tendons in my knees and 360 degrees is the new 90 if it was a day.

And no, spinning in the other direction will not undo dizziness,
it enhances the queasy sense of invulnerability
that has become my stick-to-itiveness.

Is it possible to have given up
while at the same time having refused to quit?

Argument; or….

I have my mother’s right brain
and the left of my father.

they argue and I have to translate to my father what my mother means in light of what he thinks she means.

I then turn and do the same for his response to her.

they are two people who have lived together long enough to understand each other
but don’t.

I understand myself a little better than they understand each other.

but I do not understand myself

-----------------

therefore two people can never understand each other

the outsider

Outside

[by link]

“You are your only friend, you are your only enemy.”--The Mahabharata

outside it is cold
my skin boils

why you don’t like me
is my superiority
my inferiority

you ignore me
because I’m smarter

stronger

richer

my cock is bigger

that’s right

smaller

poorer

weaker

woman’ve always hated me

never really invited into the fold
of guys either

invite myself along

but they just laugh and go

rejected by the screeching tires of society

casually uninvited

room after room of people paired up gabbing and laughing without me without exception,

I enter, I leave

the bar, the club, the church, the coffee house

making’em uncomfortable by molting away

intimidated by reptile eyes

“Shut your neck!!!!!!” yelling at one of them on the corner smiling, leaking joy, sporting the unmolested cleavage of their hard-parted hair, spotless faces, perfectly symmetrical ears, isosceles noses, inviting eyes, flirting eyes, tensiled brows, lovely…

a slave to their acceptance

slowly cutting me out of their lives

the outcasts are the first to tap the keg of revolted by me, with their tattoos, fucking staple gun accidents, dread locks, faux-hawks, fuck spikes, dye jobs
they clump together like lard in a spittoon.
obeying disobedience

weird is the new old

too busy being fucked up to look weird your way son

to take in your everyday Halloween

your overcompensation

too dead to live anyother way than this

wearing what a stranger gave me and what’s dirty next to the bed

me, the only normal person left in the world

haunting green parks

having taught my follower that a rose is at the center of galaxies and cells and atoms--the same rose.

taught him that greed & gravity were just a special kind of glue.

he left me too

invented lust bright & early, me and the stars, because freedom is the only possibility of anonymity & amnesia

I, hero to solitude, emperor of the forgotten, wrote this so you would move your lips when you read, I wrote this because you hate poetry.

my poetry, I fucking hate it too

not decent enough

straight-laced and raping you with my eyes

isolation from you

nicer than you

crying more than you

harder than you

smelling like the sickness of mind

woven with shirt tails tucked in only in the ass

bathing every now and then

madness that began with religion

bad writing lobotomizing me

ending me

all the way back to death

again

ever since

you started ignoring me
being sickened by me
fucking dismissing me like silence

a

zero outside the circle

emptiness set amongst the possibility of things

your ridicule is high praise

your disapproval is dignity

the plaything because I make you feel strong

incomprehensible because you cannot understand

reviled like a fool and a mad god

I’ve been to lectures of the great Steven Weinberg attended by a handful of fools
and over heard the street corner drunk soap boxing in the cold

and they both claimed computers will cause a nuclear war

and were ignored

and you rejected me for not being good enough or for being too great

you are what you are, and I am what I am

but at least I’m not mediocre

at least I’m rejected

because…

all I’ve got going
for me
really
is
that
people think I’m shit
too

Friday, January 18, 2008

The Reader

Reader

[dedicated to the thirteen unread, stolen books by Genet on my shelf]

she doesn’t own any books
I ask what she reads
she says, all the time I read
read like cigarettes or sex
I read like fucking lunatics
at the public library coming
in to sip on some warm

I read like most need
she dabs sweat off her brow
dabs the sweat off her brow
she reads

I ask what again
but she cannot throw
me any names
she smiles:
‘I can’t remember them all’

she can only tell
me she reads,
a book a day
sometimes two
because reading
‘..is all I do.’

‘Since school, I read my way through the library
down the line,
one after another,
from one end to the other.”

Who!

Who do you read!

Whoever…

‘I’m a reader.’

Thursday, January 17, 2008

feeling dumb

…which makes me feel a little dumb.

like one of the only times the heart agrees mind.

sigh-COP-athee

sigh-COP-athee

a quarter of the penal system
but the successful ones
go on to business, politics, entertainment
mostly male, no surprise
a kunlangeta, says the Inuits, push you off the ice when no one’s looking,
repeatedly lies and cheats and steals…takes sexual advantage of many women--
someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who
is always being brought to the elders for punishment”
traits include:
impressionable, self-centered, dishonest, undependable, irresponsible, guiltless, loveless, apathy, callous, appear normal, reckless
blame others not learn from errs
for the fun of it
they are charming
not shy
even grandiose
master manipulators
impulsive, criminal
promiscuous thieves
“Nevertheless, most psychopaths are not violent, and most violent people are not psychopaths.”
“In contrast to people with psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, who often lose contact with reality, psychopaths are almost always rational.”
They have no real ties



Bibliography

The Antisocial Personalities. David T. Lykken. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths among Us. Robert D. Hare. Guilford Press, 1999
Unresolved Controversies concerning Psychopathy: Implications for Clinical and Forensic Decision Making. John F. Edens in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Vol 37, No. 1, pages 59-65; February 2006
Handbook of Psychopathy. Edited by Christopher J. Patrick Guilford Press

Asteroid

First they got Jupiter

Now, Mars

2 down

7 to go

Alien

your inverse
the chiral reflection
The mirror has stole you
Now let there be other beings

Angular Momentum; or, Ownership

I respect what other people commonly refer to as thieves.

There cannot be thieves without owners

who are

weak enough to believe in ownership
a concept which has no basis in physical reality,

but

strong enough to destroy the entire world
in pursuit of copyrighteousness and borders
and fences.

This is nothing but the territoriality instinct elevated and
sanctified by 'laws' that monkey with Nature.

Ownership is the true religion of man

uniting us in self-destruction and justifying our murder.

More have died in this name than any other.

Fuck God.

……..

and I know what you’ll tell me, too.

money makes the world go round

……..

there’s no doubting it

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Morn

Dusk like halitosis
and the succubus stole away
forgetting the tokens
meanwhile I souvenir a rashy burn
on skin thick and thin
like the machines
that broke a long
ass
time ago
and stopped
taking questions
and answering sin with sin
She was my mad oracle
in a cave
dark
and
infinite
in her ten
inch abyss.

An Algorithm for Hate

when i want to be want to be
strong
i hate myself

and

when I want to be
strong
I love myself

no one strokes me better
or
hurts me worse

I give the best hand jobs
and
I can cut a little deeper than the rest

weakness is when
you need
to be loved
or
want
to be hated

but….I am weak

mostly weak

so the thought occurs

If someone loves you,
they have extended your power
in that all of your lover’s knowledge, well-being and opportunity are open to you;

but if someone dislikes you or does not love you,
unless they are very powerful or crazy,
they cannot hurt you with actions but only with words

Hence one has much to gain from being loved
and little if nothing to lose from not being loved.

It takes a lot of crazy powerful hate to meet necks with
even the distant love of an acquaintance.

Indifference

A flock of migrating birds
shat volumes
on the cars of nearly everybody,
a prunish molasses,
and we all whined,
the wicked and the righteous and me,
a few hours later rain poured from the near freezing sky.

Answering Machine

call. not before noon or after noon thirty.
occasionally there are critical transition phases associated with umpteen minutes after the midnight of day.

some calls selectively forwarded to my broker or hairdresser [same]. heed the need, son. love is a flammable gas. fat soluble and as exothermic as a fart.
she wears a warning label like a mini-skirt and dismisses you with a smile of corroded gingivitis face.

glory be.

this ain't no lab fire snuffed out like a rat on the mob don, or some wrestling match where you get stuck for an eternal three seconds in public bliss/shame,
this is for life, son, for at least more than the whisker of time.

my tears evaporate into the cloud of shit and piss on the dust of my rotting dead asshole.

fuck outta luck

actually, I've never been happier”

She was pretty after all

all day long she
was better than thou

this morning she
looked me
up and down
--all t-shirt and ripped sports jacket of me--
and made a sour smile

like phony gold wasting on an old idol

“Are you the temp for the stickering project?”

and of course she’s decked out
in designer earth tones
and dolled to
perfection
--all dyed hair and unblemished makeup of her--

so we worked all day
and finished a hour early
while she was at her desk
biding time

‘um…yes, when you’re done you can park the boxes over there between my desk and the cubicle wall…”

um…yes
and she never made eyes

not all day

in the end
her makeup and hair were
pristine
and free of the skin and hair
pocked and browned
as
the old dry
earth

we packed up
loaded the shit
crammed boxes snug
between the wall and the desk

and were just about to make out like bandits

when she glances up

from her desk almighty

poised

a queen

thin

round breasted

to the tee

she looks me dead in the eye socket

she speaks with gracious authority
but I cannot hear

all I can notice now is her lazy eye

I don’t know if to laugh or cry
commit love or suicide
face facts or pride

but all these cancel

and leave me without heart or mind

just where I like to be

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Temp

Temp

I skip food
all day.
“Feel free…”
says the boss lady
“…to anything unclaimed
in the frig
in the break room.”
except everything’s marked.

“and May will give you
her leftovers…”
May sports a grease dabbed lab coat
with spindly gloved fingers growing
out the ends.
She jabs hot pockets
with thermometers
testing the evenness of
heat
only no one tests the
evenness of the microwave.

and all day damn long
she is doing this

and I am hungry

only they smell good
at first
then the puss of grease
sweats heavy
like
20 grams of saturated american

I am hungry and
nauseated at once

hungry and nauseated like
morning sickness

galvanized tin wraps
everything that isn’t
wrapped in
pastel
frosted pressed glass on sliding doors, open pristine ceilings and spotless guts for vent pipes, hanging paper light fixtures coughing up warm sensuous phlegmatic yellows, cubicle after meshwork cubicle, flatiron grills on the sunnyside portico with withdrawn umbrellas on unashamed lawn ware---everything was so perfect as to wax postmod and crisp and boring as masturbation with your happy hand

as boring as this poem

as sashaying into the
men’s room
and hammering out
a sneak session of my own

on lunch of course

squandering precious goods
I’d otherwise absorb

to kill the stress of hangnails
and swollen fingers arrived at
by hours of labeling
boxing

and to stave off hungry

and that’s sad,
sad sniffing boredom’s ass
like a six headed hell hound

give me your 9 to 5 workaday stiff
never late on bills or the mortgage
or late to work
and one day mingles into another like bar stall piss oder
A homeless man, a desolate man, on the edge of life---
he has a story to tell

Me, today I almost slipped
on wax paper

The guy next over, the guy working so fast
we don’t have to come back tomorrow,
beat me out of next week’s supper

He says: “If I had to do this every day I’d have to slow down, and fortunate for me I got temp work pulling 30 an hour before my real lab job begins.”
I ask him what he
reads, he doesn’t read
I tell him about my home experiments,
he doesn’t care

He complains about the job
and
for Christmas I give the wife my share of food

And...

And…

In
Probability theory
adding
details makes
things
less likely

The problem is,
details make
lies
more
believable

the opposite is true
of excuses

the old Jew who hangs
at the used bookstore claims
to be an artist,
an abstract impressionist
with a brother in NY
who doesn’t tell him which
of his paintings sell
because the old Jew is private
doesn’t show anyone his work
doesn’t sign his name to his work
just sends them off and never sees them again

all of this and the old fart doesn’t hold a job

jobs he says are for wives and wives are for people who can’t paint well

on another day he claims to
be a physicist
and knows his
pop physics
rather well

he also claims
his leather trench
is lined w/ Kevlar
and that
it only stops small
calibers

he knows from experience

he seems to be a walking search
engine--all the authors, topics,
and books,
all the Prigogines, French criticisms,
and…

if he knows everything
it’s because my everything
is small

he thinks foreign literature is shit
and that black conservatives by definition
are uncle toms

I for one
say he exists
and precisely
in the way he claims
to exist

because I would know:

some of us have to lie in order to be believed.

Snipped Butterfly Legs

Snipped Butterfly Legs

freedom is
when
you
can’t
fly
and
lie
flat
on
the
ground
and
smile

The Bone Factory

[interview the third]

safety is our first concern
he coughed
at me
on our tour of the lab

we make synthetic bone
2$ a gram
20,000 a bucket

sometimes acid gets in
the batch
and an extra calcium
hops the train and we
scrap the whole
confounded
outfit

[someone sneezes and all I smell
is enough ammonia to wake the dead]

we’ve upped production fourfold
but no one’s biting
the rooskies are using Cow mandible
HQ is shutting us down

18 years in the lab
and now every job I shoot fer’s got
a long line of phd’s

I turn on the
tube and listen to some asshole
polytician
harp about
science & engineering

and I’m square on my ass
in a few…

…sorry kid but I’ll hafta
pass you up.

you’ll need a Masters to wash
slurry thru
this here bucket
of
stink.

Radio Active Waste Farm

[interview the fourth]

So do you have any questions?

“yeah” But I don’t bother…

I walk a crow line out the door

We just went through a lab full
of samples of Radium, Uranium, Plutonium
etc. etc. etc.

And by the security exit there
was a machine
that scanned your feet
&
hands for contamination

It reads:
Sensor Malfunction
and she said it always
says that

Have you any exposures?

Not any we know of

not in at least 12 years

Prayer Song

Religion saved
me from
talking to myself

and

Writing saved
me from
talking to myself out loud