Sacred Blades -- Part 2
Years of living w/ an alcoholic
The sun floats shrouded in fumes,
Alone on a cool beach,
The aureate sensation
Enter here, like a cloud,
Intellectuals are the shoe-shine boys
A perfect day;
Lick the mad ellipse
I just let time pour through me
Its been said
Keats swaps his Harley
Oneiromancy:
I need the pearls of indifference
The punctuated knowledge
My mimetic routine
w/ open breast
Spent the morning inhaling Zoloft
Perhaps I have reconciled
Risen like reality,
To share something
Alone on a frozen beach
It took me 2 hours
Its all about this moment
I need a fix
It still annoys me
A shoal of somnolence
Ever since recovery
Argument in Favor of Gods
I sometimes find
Epitaph of a Romantic
Joseph Allan. 9 lbs. 4 oz.
It has been remarked
I despise my conscience
The preternatural nothingness
All of this God sees
I ordered myself
I've deliberately been reading
Melting into pink wings
LChayim
Suicidal eye

I move on
I showed a friend
Even if God does exist
We walked the luxurious stretch






<SACRED BLADES>

Daggers of perception drown around me.

You see, the problem is that we all want to dream and are unable. Not that we lack some innate ability, but the dream becomes clouded, lost in a haze of unconsciousness under dry stars. Perhaps we try to reach sleep with the conscious desire to ruminate upon some cherished memory, fragment or half-thought, only to slip into the mind's routine mechanisms before our heads hit the pillow.

The moment is lost.

We are all dreamers. I, for one, have found only one way to truly dream-- to live, and relive again-- immortal in some perfect moment reborn. Injecting the spirit with some soul-slowing agent is the only means by whichI've been able to fully engage myself in the dream and be conscious enough to actually live in its moment. Eyes open, the patina of valium sweat radiating from my open pores, I am truly able to escape and dream. In such instances, the horrors of rehab, for example, are reduced to a three hour orgy of purest recollection-- the way a stray wisp of hair is draped over some trusted angels eye, or the way her lashes catch the late afternoon sunlight. To die for: dandelions and endless fields of green. These things, of course, exist fully in the poets soul the moment theyre apprehended, though I only seem capable of retrieving these revelations when completely removed from any memory of its accompanying pain, past or present. That seems to be why those who are most attuned to beauty (poets, painters-- all the creators) and the pleasures of the senses, fall prey to some drugs mirrored blade of betrayal. Beauty, death and all the rest.

This is what I miss most from my days in heaven's abyss. I still catch all the glorious notes in life's sweet symphony, but am sadly unable to rewind the tape, examine its melody, meaning (every majestic note in supreme detail) in order to find a place for myself in its necessary beauty.

Alas, to smell the autumn leaves once more...

I now pronounce you not alive.

Life is simply the protracted process of dying-- like a slow flame burning certain to the wick. I find the need to be self-destructive a prerequisite in order to make it seem like Im really alive. This is perhaps a myth thatI've bought into, or have been conditioned to accept. Nevertheless, the dying process never truly seems real unless I have an active hand in it.

I shut the window. My head is swimming in Robitussin, its inflections cloaked in the notion of shadow, smoked death and schizophrenia.

The trees are raining and the leaves are like flavored memories. I shrink into the wind along with them.

=

Years of living w/ an alcoholic is almost sure to make any wife or child neurotic.

Our entire family is ill. Dispersion was not a cure.

Blue remains.

=

The sun floats shrouded in fumes,

glassed in an artificial rib

like a jigger of brandy...

That which is beyond our ability to reach, grasp or comprehend constitutes God.

The process of discovery ultimately results in some loss of divinity.

To use one's imagination is the only Holy Communion.

=

Alone on a cool beach, empty and fresh as the waning sun rusts to a fine gold upon the seas eternal struggle. Beyond the blue existence, faint stars return from embedded memory mitigating all concerns of the moment, each slow appearing iridescent zero a new dead soul in heaven; the wind claps the static vastness in contingencies of will apparent only upon a distant crimson flag glittering skyward, licking the winsome clouds in circinate rhythms.

I am prepared to settle upon some ultimate conclusion which has been conjured to ease the mourning of my dying self-obsession-- a necessary armament that is brought to bear when one has lived life as an object: the object of scorn, anger, hatred, disappointment, violence and disease-- though not yet dead, as evidenced by my compulsive need to record such hazy impressions in a naive effort to understand this impending concession to night. And now, at the end of it all, I find myself in no position to battle those whove not been systematically attenuated with unhealthy affections and insufficient parenting. Im finished with no fight left in me.

I work to be afforded the right to exist-- as is, the process of becoming having long ago been arrested upon the convulsive thrusts of my fathers bruised and futile fists hurling into my crippled gestures, humming dumbly before sinking into a simple liquid innocence.

Whatever I do have left is reserved for the few I love. I wish I had more.

To truly know love, is to see its pure reflection in the eyes of your child.

=

The aureate sensation of mildly allergenic atmosphere darkens to a sleep above aortic waters that encapsulate the dull undertow of emotion; slivers of light shift, exist and grow in the marbled onyx halo of irradiating consciousness.

An awareness with a mission:

to make any and all excuses

for the perceived inadequacies

of self.

=

Enter here, like a cloud, the thin cool membrane that breaks upon the glass, in sun's skin w/ the opacities of a lens, like some rare jeweled humility cloaked by a dopey something within. Breathing, a carbureted haling that dissolves the moment my bated breath reaches its unheard syllable-- precious gem, blood-spunk bursting forth with rain joys and bloods excessive twine

articulating the air that peals from my golden eye

into solemn heartbeats.

The mirror is before me.

=

Intellectuals are the shoe-shine boys of the ruling elite.

--KILLDOZER

The substance of shadow, not flame nor light, but an illusory smoke that crawls

along the walls looking for a way out.

Where does the man begin and the addict end?

M: The man becomes a man when he ceases his addiction.

L: The man is always an addict, the rest is simply smoke.

M: What... smoke?

She hides the truth out of love for him.

=

A perfect day; the laggard drag of a nagging addiction having heaved its final convulsion more than one thousand days ago. The clarity of the sky is composed less of light than of a watered shine, the blurred curve of the horizon scooping the sea.

I proceed upon ivory knees,

beneath the divine vengeance

of the sun...

Theres nowhere to go, and nothing worth wishing for.

I remember getting lost out here when I was seven.

I thought of thorns, the gorgeous torsion of roots hunched in elaborate prisms of childhood time, momentarily holding the world in some grand way before curling back into the mystery of existence; the leaves falling like amulets in the clearing, a vortex of absolute light perched at the mouth of the river.

The whole sky is consumed by a subtle absorption that inhales this recollection from my forehead and spits out its images before the entire sky-- October red at low tide, here amid the sweetgrass.

I extinguish the remainder of a Padron maduro, and follow the smoke out of the wood.

=

Lick the mad ellipse

artificial and infinite,

cold crowns

& old assassins

muddled studies

miraculous and unforeseen

intoxicated landscapes

of divine origin,

a purer mirror

a darkness

over my eyes,

agile ballerinas

thirsting for light;

transparent divinities

v-x.

Oct. 13

I just let time pour through me like blood through a hollow artery. None of it means anything, the heartbeat just a stale rhythm that clicks with insane precision as these mile markers bruise my eye upon a frost bitten stretch of concrete byway, the bland grey nothing of its substance interrupted only for spiny lime shanks of ragweed or perhaps the errant roadkill. The blood of the poet. Ha! If words were to flow as easy as my bleeding, I'd be able to get some relief...

The engine of my ART is a dead machine.

=

Its been said that years of excessive drinking destroys brain cells, but I can also lay claim to extreme nerve damage. It seems fetal sleep has left desolate some true gods dreaming violent visions and annihilated love-- a void of razor blades in the attic vastness of my awareness. Things pass through me like smoke and I feel nothing except for a faint sort of residue, the bodied detox of my imaginary arsenal, starved to death, my flowered skin ascending on silver wings, my bleached skeleton staggering in silent isolation.

The streetlamps fade as I pass by.

=

Keats swaps his Harley for a mini-van

and the family saga rolls on....

I am entirely incapable of being inspired by anything in life anymore.

I have no need for people. Unless Im shutting off your fucking heat, dont look at me.

I have nothing for you.

I want to die alone in bed, adorned only in a quilt of virgin hair, sucked off, with an arm full of drugs, perhaps an undressed (except for the silver angels wings) nurse or two on hand to fix my drip. I aspire to nothing beyond this. Apart from the vast amounts of pleasure continually coursing through my body, thered be little else to convince me I was alive.

Im a slave of my body and its base cravings.

Im a pig and should be exterminated.

Consumed by an unceasing dis.ease, the only reprieve from this persistent virago has led to my unhealthy tryst with addiction-- one temperamental bitch with a death-threat that delivers day by day on its promise.

=

Oneiromancy:

Innocent nursemaid

Swims niveous sins

Bitten by Dipsades

In cyanic limbs,

A toxic slipper

That seldom fits

My Cinderella

Fix.

It seems I've tried to take my fathers every vice, whether it was drinking, smoking or fucking, and turn it into high art. As a child, I surely worshipped at the alter of this fiend; his hated of people was like an aphrodisiac-- intoxicating. Somehow, I managed to live it through, having now seen all of my heroes fall to the soil, one by one, like so many dead roses. Its a strange sickness when one gathers strength when the strong falter, but I've never found a measure from within. Cowering and gutless, Im always on the ground looking up.

=

I need the pearls of indifference

perhaps six pits

a waiting room with no light

and then you bless me.

I dont have time to bleed

as I eat the yellow pill

an antidote that summons

Gods face from the swill

my time to let it all die,

eyes polished to a cross

in the temple

of forgotten men

when, with explicit will,

Im unstrung &

h

u

n

g

Lying on my back receiving a blow-job as she hummed Beethoven's ninth symphony was as close to religion as I'd gotten this autumn. The room itself swirled in particulate light, the walls folding over into the shadow, my rose-petaled darkness.

=

The punctuated knowledge of my hearts own thin collapse wounds to a stained finish the silent embrace of your champagne veins, stitched to nothing; my eyes are closed for good. The dust seldom fades, but conceals a seemingly invisible shame from w/in the toxic junkyard of my spirit.

This baptism is done in blood; youre a part of the soul of my living church now. Here we will hover bodiless in suffering disuse, white corpses held helplessly numb by a world hungover in black god monopolies and infant masks to hide the tears.

Attired in scars,

I've been emptied of all song....

=

My mimetic routine keeps me from falling into walls.

Im unable to abandon myself to all sins

as I have abandoned these vain imaginings....

=

w/ open breast

my disconsolate spirit has fled

to aeolian shades below.

Father, forgive me

this touch-fucked

blood sunk

black hearted harvest:

I strum in sunlight

eyes toward hidden

acorns of light,

flung to dust

& emptied white

vested dead essences

Closing leaves

bound to stone

and thin skin

mouthing the air

in round function

some helpless monument

that falls into

a partial exterior

of human circulation

grounded to grace

dissolving on a tongue

to numb for cutting...

But heather my tomb

with a sunset.

=

Spent the morning inhaling Zoloft til the stars came out at noon.

What is ART?

A painting of the Virgin Mary caked in cow shit.

I can think of no more accurate self-portrait

of the human soul.

=

Perhaps I have reconciled my hearts insistent momentum,

in the violet sunrise its embryo rose thrown

pulse is alive, gathering sight from the shadows

crowded in the dull residue of a vast grey interior

space seldom revealed, never touched

like a feeling just out of reach

or a mortal stone flung from a childs hand

into the immense possibilities of an unfolding dawn.

=

Risen like reality, an amber column of solemn permanence,

my snifter of Hennessey VSOP rises against the blackwash

of a dimly lit existence, my persistent ignition.

The soul both lives and perishes like a sacred moment,

intransigent, reborn only in the mirror of a memory or some one soul so touched,

the feeling or heart once remembered:

once in an eternity.

10.31

A boring night. The wind slaps cold into the side of the house, and I stare at a few huge leaves that hover like apparitions before sticking into the pane glass of the bedroom window. I turn to my wife and offer to insert the remainder of the Smarties

Ive been eating into her vagina so that I might rescue the rainbow on my tongue.

Nine months pregnant, she thinks its a bad idea and might cause embarrassment should my mission fail and they start coming out a week later in the delivery room. Theyd probably dissolve, I tell her before asking her to recall a time when my tongue had ever left any stone unturned. Silence.

Lights out.

=

To share something of one's past life or former self with their soul-mate should surely count in most cases as an exchange of the highest and best. However, we went back to my childhood home to visit my mother who is fifty-eight this day. The house is packed with artifacts and oddities that fail in their attempt to create an atmosphere of warmth and charm. The soul is hollow amidst the clutter of junk. A stale aftermath awareness hovers everywhere. The old liquor cabinet is now packed with prescription drugs-- anti-depressants, heart meds, muscle-relaxers, bronchodilators, tranx, blood pressure pills, Nicorette and a loving brown bottle of cherry codeine cough suppressant.

Momentarily alone together, my wife asked if she could see the wall or closet door upon which my parents had dutifully charted the rising inches I'd gained during the course of my childhood years. Since no such proud remnant of my former growth exists, I instead took her on a room by room tour, pointing out the fist holes punched in by my father on nights when hed killed more than a quart of gin. The holes are now covered over by tacky wall quilts and yellowed scrimshaw cameos, invisible and hidden like nothing ever happened.

Sometimes I get the feeling she must look at me and wonder what the hell she married.

O Lord when you write, if you must do so at all,

write in the language of your own day for Christs sake...

=

Alone on a frozen beach at midnight. The sea looks as though its made of liquid ice, frozen in animated rapture. Im half out of my mind on Seagrams as I resolve to render the world a reflection of my own sacred space: to achieve astonishing poetry

set fire to all the forests of darkness,

abdicate the fates consigned for my slaughter

upon red nasturtium blades

for some destiny chosen, more worthy of each moment bestowed.

O such amorous shapes, the agonizing of mirrors!

Sparks from the sky in borealis ministrations,

and the whole world is cast in gold

from within the moonlit affect of this pearly shell I hold....

For the moment though

it has become too cold,

my hand unable to pull

the trigger.

=

It took me 2 hours to find this place.

I believe it is primarily the repression of guilt

that has led to my compulsive tendency

toward self-destruction.

=

Its all about this moment, here at the edge of the lake. All struggle, pain, nagging & craving-- the inhuman conflict in my head; all effort is extended to deliver me here, where nothing matters and everything seems clear. The lake gently decants in silver crescents of light, white loops spilling into emptiness. I lie here, close to the earth, buried among the decomposing foliage, as above me the leaves soar in yellow and red pendants, lighting the vast dome of this grand cathedral like hovering candelabrum.

The leaves drop upon me like acid.

This hour of solitude along the purlieu of a simple lake is the only remedy left for me. The late sun bleeds oleaginously into shallow pools of translucent light that quaver like glazed marbles within the silted purple rim that faintly sweeps waters edge.

The air is resolute. Austere clouds, thin as a veil, move over me in gestures sublime and absurd.

It is all right here....

Out here there is no memory,

no hidden dispositions.

=

I need a fix to un-fuck myself

my darling.

D

O

iA M G O D

M

A

=

It still annoys me when the puritans make idle gossip

of someone severing her head on the railroad tracks.

Nonetheless, this endless shit persists.

=

A shoal of somnolence covers my eyes. My temples cool to a placid heave and everything sinks into my once abrading heart. Beyond, the day endures. Grasses tremble and the trees finish their story in the seductive lightness of sunlights same abandonment. Into nothing, I exhale immaculately. I throw myself upon the moment, unfold my possessions into prayer as the patterns of the imperfect day recede into idleness... Water lilies loiter through me, into the warm tightly folded sovereignty of a dream. My entire body shuts like a rose; a procession of silence is buried in the past. Awareness perishes, passing beneath me in epigene ornaments of solemn repose.

My room is charged with the light of youth. There is an eternal joy here. My childhood fingers are addicted to drifting filaments, the mists of this ancient place enfolding. Purest exultation! All vagrant and distracting voices are dispatched to a nil stillness.

The silence opens her wings for my ritual removal.

The bareheaded trees impose upon me-- in all the suffering angles of a crucifix, hard accretions beseeching helplessly into the immitigable face of the sun-- a will to recover and repair the past; these trees and my spirit below are rooted to a perpetual crimson spine that writhes to a clot under psilocybin skies. My incised obliquities catch their lucky resonance in these daggered lights, and whatever desolate meaning they may call to you, bringing dead petaled laughter from the absences that compose the feeble hold we have on any given moment. Perhaps, my sainted phrases rise into the curious air and our hearts are silently gorged to a stitch.

Come closer.

=

Ever since recovery a few years back, I've had a pervasive feeling of detachment more than anything else. My son is the only thing that wrests me from a world of blankness, where nothing matters terribly much and it seems as though Im simply going through the motions. I think it may because I've faced those moments where everything seemed lost, and all the things I ever feared losing had been stripped away until I was left with nothing other than lifes bare essence-- standing naked before the eye of God, so to speak. Once everything you once fought to hold on to has finally been lost; removed because of your own failings, its nearly impossible to summon the will to recapture that which at one time seemed worth dying for. Suicide is paradoxically brought on by too pure a desire to live, and a fragile incapacity to hold on to the things that once were held closest to the soul. Once the suicidal drive ceases, the will to live never fully recovers and life itself settles into the merest habitations borne of necessity and an acceptance of things as they are (all past-tense passions abandoned). Every day, we relearn how to miss the things that once fueled our passions and kicked our hearts into high gear. Perhaps now, it is time to settle for those unexpected moments that fall upon us, without warning, like a cool drop of ocean rain on a day that has nothing else going for it.

Exilium

My bedsheets are soaked in sweat.

I drink Bourbon numbly till dawn

learning to hold all the filth down

until the raw morning light pukes.

Outside, the visibly cold winds

hurl a rusty branch into my cage,

the scattered thorns ringing ruin

around this mess I have made.

My stomach erupts hollowly,

though nothing can break loose.

I am noosed to a slow disease

thats buried deep, dead center.

Nothing can break loose,

my heart blotched to a terror

of unholy rot and acetic disuse.

My dry eye shines to the sky.

There is nothing left for me

as I finish the last of my pint;

too tired to sleep, this death

of mine is too far gone to die.

=

Argument in Favor of Gods Existence: Everything exists without a purpose, though not necessarily without a reason.

I hate the idea that I resort to prose as some sort of Monarch Notes for the poetry I love. My crooked words that no one understands.

=

I sometimes find that being a husband is much like being a son. At least for me.

This is no doubt due to the way I handle myself in these roles, relationships that seem to come pre-packaged with a specific set of demands and expectations.

It seems as though Im always falling critically short in the eyes of others, though Ill concede that these shortcomings may or may not be perceived as either deficiencies or failings by the significant others I've sought to please (in the role of son, my perceptions were likely dead on-- my father called me shit, and I believed him. As a husband, I think Im certainly operating off some earlier learned behavior patterns, debilitating habits that were cultivated growing up in my fathers unfortunate home. I cant really bring myself to believe that my wife sees the horrid creature that I often see her seeing when I look in her adoring eyes). Be that as it may, its hard to shake the feeling that I always seem to come up dry, whether it be an insufficient report card or inadequate paycheck-- uninspired sex or being a kid too lazy to mow the lawn. Whatever.

Im starting to pick through the damage of myself. The shit-ass guilt and self-loathing that was heaped on me as a child is starting to flake off.

I want to give more to my family.

=

Epitaph of a Romantic:

Poetry For Pussy. If it doesn't get you laid, it aint worth a fuck.

Spent the evening trying to induce my wifes labor by licking pussy and fucking her doggy-style, driving deep and hard trying to pop that water bag.

We went to a specialist this weekend due to a fetal arrhythmia that the obstetrician had picked up on the monitor. In his opinion, our doctors shouldve induced labor at once to alleviate any concerns of a possible heart condition. He was clearly also taking Marysas severe discomfort into account. Unfortunately, none of the Cuntologists on call is willing to disrupt his weekend to deliver our baby.

Tuesday.... Well have to wait until Tuesday..... Well, we need to have a Cardiac Specialist on hand.... No, wed have to bring him in, were only partially staffed on the weekends...

Certainly, the fuck method of lordly labor inducement met with little result. A few strong and well appreciated orgasms only initiated some minor cramps and contractions.

So be it. Tuesday morning Marysa and I will have our second child. My skin tingles and I cant sleep thinking about the first time Ill see his face. A Beautiful sleeping angel resting in my arms.

I walk upstairs into the half-light of the hallway and peak into our bedroom. My wife looks like a little girl herself, resting with a look of serenity that only comes to an expectant mother during sleep.

I kiss her on the forehead and lightly brush the hair from her cheek.

=

Joseph Allan. 9 lbs. 4 oz. Born 11.16.99, 2:13 p.m.

My heart beats thin, like light rain on a dead

metal, puddles of waste growing to larger zeros

under the gasping whiteness of the noon skys

galvanizing blankness, festering in grey junkets

of lactic corrosion and foundering indecision.

The sky sparks, and my veiled heart flutters,

lifting in the breeze like a fluent jig, past all

remorse like a childish afterthought, cold eyes

stepping out into the unstable woolen creel

that pouches the tilestones below with lead.

This slow colloquy hurls in stunned devotion;

the hunching wings bathed in blood recede

into a drowning fallen husk from which I fed,

pitching stone harrowed songs from the brine,

laying a sheet of roses on my marbled head.

The untimely strokes of heavy expression

need not to search the centuries for memory,

shards of suspended absence cast up in time

raging for the day against all creation, as I

walk anew through the stretches of the dead.

=

It has been remarked upon but perhaps more often simply considered, mostly in my own semi-cognitive aft chamber of reflective self-doubt, that my downfall as a writer has much to do with the fact that all my renderings reek of a gaudy self-importance, an attention to that which affects me dearly and borders on artistic arrogance. In this age of elliptical solipsism and detached street hip, it seems that those of us who are chronically self-obsessed are derided if lucky, but most often find themselves hung in some unlit catacomb with the other dead relics, any past shine or intended resonant glow snuffed into the dust; Mona Lisa fingering herself with a dry smile.

To those of you, and you damn well know who you are, I'd just like to take this opportunity to say FUCK YOU!

Nothing says it better, and I may never get another chance like this.

=

I despise my conscience (my inner self) because it allows me to hide the truth

from within.

=

All of this God sees, and leaves my heart appeased

in an unchosen cohesion that muddles my senses in the soft mist.

The world before me must doubt I exist, its face slithering away

in a haze that masquerades as transcendence,

and theres the black void, the untold ruminations in old age,

defiling the miracles of birth, expunging all human aspect.

My old inflections arrow up in the unbegotten winds of some otherness,

as the cool air outside my window stays a virgin before me.

=

The preternatural nothingness of the sunborne light applies its weariness to my brow... like bales of wet straw sewn down upon the back of a cripple.

I shiver in the distance and forgive the leaves that bruise the ashen fields.

I wince away a blister and trod on weakened heels.

I feel as though I've reached some sort of sense of contentment in my life. I must be careful not to confuse the idea (feeling) of contentment with that of fulfillment.

However, enough of my needs are met in order that Im somewhat content though

my desires are far from reaching fruition. Contentment often seems possible to achieve through the presence of others. Fulfillment comes from within.

Theres an immediate danger for any alcoholic/addict who reaches a stage

where they feel comfortable. Comfort is not what were used to.

We love a sort of controlled strangeness-- the aura of achievement without effort,

the sense of peace amid turmoil. We only feel balanced while teetering on the edge

of some unhealthy obsession or other.

The greatest temptation is to throw some huge stone into the placidity of the waters

that surround us. The fear of losing everything overcomes the actuality (reality)

of having that which we fear losing. Sometimes it seems easier to chuck diamonds

to the dust-- enjoying the intense light that is splayed from within the ideality

of our own vision, as sparks hurl like ecstatic ice chips from heaven, tenderly descending-- than to cleave from the ground to these simple trinkets

one day at a time.

=

I ordered myself up some darkness from the sky at noon.

An angel threw a tear on my shoulder.

The unstudied ascension of this moments melancholy

beats wild flowers from the earths ecstatic womb;

a sharp pulse in my blood sets heart against the briar,

the soul dissipating under hardened stars.

Theres no need to struggle.

There is no more desire.

FASCES

The white light flowing from the TV

set cannot quell this serpent crouched in my head.

The lictor stuffs a sabre into my coat pocket

as I dance with sworded breast

to my ageless muse; gone dead.

=

I've deliberately been reading a lot of boring poetry lately-- the work of guys who couch their souls own ultimate blandness in the magnificent drama of human history

in order to escape any examination of their own consciousness, and perhaps to pass the time as well. These poets are very well-read, and Im learning a lot of things that I didnt pick up in college having obtained a Business degree. I find many of these Pulitzer Prize winning types rather formulaic-- their metaphors a series of learned literary tricks rather than the result of any trifling inspiration that may happen to bemuse some of us unknowns. I seem to understand poetry as well as any at this point, which makes it quite easy for me to detect the method of these writers. I admit that Im still rather entertained by much of it, like a well-produced TV show that tugs at the heart strings or endeavors to inform the viewer in a unique way about some particular crisis of the human condition, past or present. However, just once, I'd like to read a piece from one of these academes that upon composition mustve set his face aglow, the poets little round glasses fogging up in the recognition that he has unloaded, with an astute emotional accuracy, one truly felt moment from his souls quiver of arrows.

=

Melting into pink wings,

the eye is astonished

and the sun tastes like marmalade,

a skull of warm ice cream.

Moon-blind, my chest feels

as though I've been pinked with a rapier;

I exhale with remote... desolate breath

and pour myself this cup of love

from a dialectic hemorrhage.

=

LChayim

I sent my father a Hanukkah card this year, remembering so fondly his love for the Jews. I remember countless evenings, my father discussing loudly over bottles of vanishing Scotch, the Kykes love of money, and how their capable management of it warrants an efficient police states extermination of them all.

I grew up with such a warm feeling in my home. Everything glowed in the post-haze of liquor which removed any tarnish from souls caked in defeat.

Holidays always bring me back to that place.

=

Suicidal eye

hearts pumped dry

mouthing the air

a throated spar,

sucked under

& fused to a lie--

the final gift resists.

Paralyzed.

Asphyxiation,

Ligatures hung low,

My life-line divides

Lidless and umbilical

Box turtles.

=

I move on with forgotten will.

Everything seems so predestined-- ordered up beforehand.

I've tried to live a life that's true. Indeed, I have fallen short.

Theres a sea of garbage out there.

Bland waste paper.

Somehow, I cant help but feel that at least theyre not faking it.

Everyday I lie to myself. Most of the time it works.

The lie, like any drug, removes reality from the situation

and grants us our freedom to wallow in shit.

My fingers lie and your eyes deny it because I am lovable.

I want to crawl up into the cunt, suck my thumb and start over.

This is the only true thing I've told you.

=

I showed a friend of mine a poem I'd written because she always seems intensely

curious about anything having to do with me. I dont know why, this is just

something I've noticed. After reading it, she said, What the hell is wrong with you? and laughed. I really didnt have an answer to her question.

Then I realized that if there were such an answer, the poem-- no matter what it was--

would be completely irrelevant for me to have written.

Then I thought the poem to be irrelevant regardless.

My father always had an answer.

Old habits die hard, and yet to my amazement, I still put pen to paper in the hope that some miracle will spontaneously combust upon the page, rip the veils and satisfy some craving I must have for attention. Its true. Writing in an age and time when people do not read is futile. Art has come down to a kind of group-bred fascism, tweaking the needs of the in-crowd. Where is the peoples poet?

Tell me its the Poet Laureate and Ill kill you.

Anyway, I thought when the booze dried up, the ink would too. I think Im beginning to turn over the same themes here. Perhaps this is getting more pointless than it already otherwise was. Im tired of word games.

=

Even if God does exist, (and I've somehow come to believe that he does) religion remains an anathema to everything holy and divine; the original political regime capitulating to everything that is depraved, vulgar and absolutely human. ppp

=

We walked the luxurious stretch to the altar,

Painted red in Roman history and mortuary calm...

The slow epistles were made of expert suffering,

Old folks longing for the obits in the Sunday Times.

The dull splatter of gossip shrouded in cologne

Sinks like a stone beneath hash clots of incense

Rising like angels absolved in white solitude...

The injudicious lemon silent pews, baby knees

Shaking in the inescapable hold given existence.

A sallow house of scars expiring saliferous woe,

The wizened lilies soothing the bladed cross;

A lord with his salty sword forged from within.

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned...

Excalibre No. VII

I left your old house last week

and could still feel your sick breath

singe my skin, yellow the walls.

I couldnt help but to wonder

who your brother mightve been,

jaundiced and lost not too long

after birth-- what place wouldve

been for him within your madness?

Your eyes made of obsidian wasps

hawing me to pieces between insults;

I watched from inside, this world

with few words pour away, isles

of mothers applause surrounding

and only the sky itself to catch me.

And you took me to see the priest,

a belly of infant cancers confessed

with nothing other than fear to tell.

O how you loved it, the soft singing

that was used to strangle and chew,

the weighted lyres tied at both ends

by the phalanges of your bruised hue.

I close the lid to the tomb, inhaling

the asbestos, the resinous tar; sins

of the juniper berry hold in bloom

against my crossed wrists, klaverns

of your voice following me out of

the house, settling into windless nights

like supernatural art upon the sumac.

People are quite perceptive when they want to be. Theyll wait for when youre at your weakest moment to sever you at the knees. I always wait for this moment. That's why Ill never let myself get to close (or weak, for that matter). I guess this is what it means when people tell me I have intimacy issues.

=

Death will only be possible for me if Im drugged into a preliminary non-existence.

Philosophy is a guessing game in which I want no part.

Im barely left with a long-tern memory. This allows me to face the mirror another day.

Memory is a function of energy-- a product of the spirit. It cannot be cloned.

Potential resides in the spirit, and nothing besides.

The mind overcomes its essential inertia through the movement of image.

Anything capable of being willed, is divine.

=

I hate your guts

every spineless drop

of your plethoric suint,

sucked wine dry

sloshing in empty skin

& vinegrated tumors,

pickeled grey

in skullduggery.

I raise my stained lance

and slice the sky.

Time consists of fragrance; winds

Inhaled in mind and exhaled in memory.

It adores and endures, transporting wings

That rescue God from my childhood.

=

An acclamation of stars imposed upon my senses...

the Centaur gallops into the flame;

severed heads disunite under the embedded

char, leaping from the ground like sparks tempering metal,

martyrs of pleasure masquerading for you, my brother,

under the indigo skyline that carves its heart w/ infinite passion,

along the horizon--

feeding the fires, and the pensive propensities of light

that have laurelled my despair

and hallowed the scene of my crimes...

=

The a.m. light cracks the bedroom shade like yellow capillaries bleeding through

thin skin. Marysas already downstairs, infant lip to jug, sating the cravings of our

week old lactic junkie. I consider unloading a lap full of healthy male swimmers, but decide instead to stumble to the medicine cabinet for a Tylenol. I consider the possibility of getting really high as I stare into the mirror, as though it could be something entirely new and profoundly moving. I notice my cock starting to get hard at the thought of it, so I change my channel and think about the workday ahead.

My stomachs empty, and realize vomiting is out of the question.

*(Re)constructing Hades*

Tuesday afternoon, 2:17 p.m., Novembers late salvo

as hollows grow to a hole...

I slip inside. A gaping sky grows darkish

but doesn't matter much.

Theres nothing in a cloud that will do it for me.

Damn, I hate these headaches!

The air inside spells trouble.

Nothing really hurts a dream,

som/other sending

in a cream full of

lightness in warm light,

hardened sorrow

the tightness of intending dram-

a mounting oceans of tender

though only for the moment.

So Im here now

under the covers

and realize that for every possible choice (the stitch of which, when so occupied)

an infinite limit of possibilities is denied

unlived in & neglected,

deprived like the dead sweater

whole hanging on a hook

somewhere, loosely forgotten

since having engaged myself in this,

my small human part...

a tell-all starless nun such.

Its been said before, but bears repeating: Removal is my obdurate rose....

=

It is true. I feel redeemed; enlivened each morning as I watch the world light up in

the eyes of my sons. I feel as complete as I ever could have imagined,

thirty-five years hence.... To never betray their trust, O Lord.

This open book is shining down upon me like stars. And Troy.... his facetious twinkle, dimpled in bluebells; he breathes only of joy, innocence. His hands are consumed

with laughter, and have constructed a cathedral in my heart.

He lives w/out fear.

Life is sweet, the womb-fed floes are sugared;

there are no tears. The sunrise and the sea.

The new winter has warmed my cooling faith. I must allow the past to slip into the inarticulate mists, the shockless dust. Scotch the ancestral home on Sycamore St.,

and split the rock of our common gravestone,

mortal and glazed,

hideously eternal...

The fiery flowers tremble like tiny bibelots along the red velvet curve of the sky, the trees subtle paramenta adorning the horizon.

It is time to affirm:

a promise.

Resurrexit, amare validus

When my father dies, he will not even have the decency to leave here in shame.

=

What is the substance of shadow? It is when we find ourselves in that rare light...

Candies, medications-- that moment when we are reduced to bare bone, nothing left of the spirit for us to take up to God in heaven. It is a perfect clarity borne of overwhelming loss; thirsty light, a hungry touch-- a gentle spectacle that sees through us. It is that moment when our body releases itself from bondage, or more accurately, the souls required release from bodied slavery upon one's spiritual death. From within this hollow shell, the heart still finds time... The mind deciphers strange clarity emerging from a heap of rubble that swirls viciously within the senses: this is the only divinity I've owned.... transparent, the substance of shadow; that which lends

the blind man a sacred torch in his unbearable season of frozen darkness.

=

Poetry is the visible afterburn of a souls craving.

The soul craves to escape the limitations placed upon it by the body.

Proper meditation yields a perfect drug, granting us release from w/in.

A M E N

=

Most people, upon sustained eye contact with a complete stranger, will feel some

sort of bond or human connection; worst case, a healthy person might simply look

away in benign indifference. The only thing that floods into me is an intense hostility;

like a mirror, I project back an image of what it seems I am perceiving.

I woke up today dreaming of a woman. Her face was before me, as though she were staring into my eyes. It was as though I'd known her from some past world, another life. I was aware, though, that it was a face I had never truly encountered before.

It couldve been anybody, but it wasnt.

I could smell her skin, her hair spilling over her bare shoulders in intoxicating waves. She was wearing a loose fitting red strapless dress. Her face, while not unusually glamorous, was glowingly warm and her light green eyes held a familiar kindness.

As I slowly watched her dissolve in the unsteady light before me, I realized how strange it seemed that the vision in my head might actually be some real person-- somewhere, out in my future world. And then it struck me.... How much more miraculous is the probable reality: that I had imagined a living, breathing image-- an angel set free from the depths of my soul-- as real as any living person I'd ever met before her.

MAN=UNIVERSE

=

Wake up late,

11:30 a.m., or perhaps even noon

and drain the remainder of yr Tylenol nite liquid.

Forgive Thyself, the drape curling inward

to throw you

a kiss...

The handwriting is on the wall.

No love there.

Fear you will be unable?

I wonder what ever became of Richard's shoes?

You know, that scuffed black, pointy-toed pair

hes wearing in nearly every photo shot between

1975 and 82. (a Susan Seidelman movie too)

Did he chuck them when his soles fell through

or perhaps they are hanging themselves, alone

above an unlit corner table at the Hard Rock ?

=

Somewhere, deep within me, I know I believe in the immortality of my human soul.

If not, the coiled lasso of oblivion upon us all (the unthinkable idea of dying itself) would so closely be knotted to every thought, emotion and action, that one would be completely unable to function. But, the heavy spectre of eternity weighs down hard upon us also. Eternal life or death? Seems like either is an impossible outcome.

Life without death seems futile to us-- like not really living-- world without end, all human action held static in a measureless vacuum of non-value.

But perhaps the idea of eternity asserts new senses, new realities that come into existence upon the transmutation of one's spirit at the time of physical death.

But then again, maybe there is no eternity after death, but infinite possible realities, time itself being but one fleeting characteristic of this, the only known human realm.

Immortality begins to seem less ridiculous than one might think...

See, as for the human realm, and reality as we know it, people have the need to live as though there is some sort of point of arrival other than absolute unconsciousness.

Here, in this place, man's unyielding need seems to be the consummate result of times

reliable disposition upon the conclusive form of our immortal soul.

Heart & Soul:

each wanting what the other

cannot have.

=

Im sick of the morality play. I see too damn many good souls minimized

in the feeble hold of infidels, the weak of heart.

Our mortal lease.

Resisting temptation involves the rare ability to delay gratification.

This seldom involves a craving for that which we do not already possess.

In my case, seduction assumes the templets of both cocktail and the other.

As far as drink is concerned, I resist the urge through the invocation of memory. The past really works for me in this one regard. It buys me time until I can get home and pick up one of my sons, whereupon his smile reduces all cravings to an anodyne glow. With women, like liquor, the offering is on every corner. Sometimes its quite tempting. However, the lack of permanence and inner peace it would cause dispels any momentary notions of insane pleasure. But, like any animal I run home to my wife, strip her down to the gifts that God had lovingly bestowed, and dispense with all urges.

She is free to use me this way too; and in fact, I encourage it as often as possible.

=

Cold as a pearl, frozen bones

Martyred in the frost of lost nerve,

whose course of choice, long and hollow

As barren winds grasping for entry

Within our minds mean or make;

The essence is real, deceptively simple...

Closing us out for daring to feel.

All is motion, and

Everything in human light:

Irreducible.

=

M: The babys learning how to stay awake without being miserable....

L: That's an important skill to develop. Im still having trouble with that one.

=

Spell out Eternity in golden mouthed measure,

A pendulant lip once raised to the brazen skies,

Our hearts are washed clean in the sun and sea:

To perceive one heart more precious than anything.

No advent brandishes such unexpected tenderness,

My blood running full in unglassed liqueur, and you

Who have watered my centuries with elegant tears;

You who glisten as the sun shudders upon my skin.

=

Just finished reading Story of the Eye by Lord Auch, and was inspired to comment here

simply because its the only artistically satisfying pornography I've ever read.

=

Stubbed mi trochee

hypno/tizing chickens.

A conflict beyond God.

I N L A W M

O O

M T

A H

N E

W O M A N H I T L E R

H I

O T

R L

E E

R E I C H

=

Blood is thicker than shit. Its loads of fun to watch the brown stuff coagulate in the codependency and sickness of childhood need; the emotional insufficiencies that didnt mature into feelings of adult independence and self-respect. The child inside wants to hide and deny. It still makes me ill to no end watching some perennial slob waltz in whenever the mood strikes her, and endeavor to sabotage every happiness I've ever known with nothing other than a vicious swipe of her ugly tongue.

Blood is thicker than love too, and Ill only believe otherwise when I see husbands who, after years of committing ritual abuse against their wives, are still given the time of day by their victimized mates. The fact that I summoned the strength to dispose of my father, along with the reality that my mother had remained with him for over thirty years, may lead one to believe that my premise is ungrounded. But make no mistake, these examples are the rare exception, not the rule.... One thing I know is true, accident of birth or not; if your aim is to violate, you are extruded from my heart like a cancer, a fomenting tumor that may reek its anti-life elsewhere.

As for you, you filthy sour-tongued cunt! Im not your fucking child. Youre not going to play the sick games with me that youve used to tie your daughters head in knots over the years. But, I realize that she is forever your family, no matter what contagion you decide to vomit upon her codependent innocence; but until there is a betrayal or some breech on my behalf that shatters our fragile union (whereupon Im discarded like a bloodless afterthought) you have absolutely no place in my life Motherfucker.

OPUS C

Late at night

when the hush of the river drowns out

the mind-numbing rush of...

I wash my face in the frozen sink,

swig a Coke and rinse my teeth.

Who the fuck am I kidding?

Above all the blood, Im sort of reborn

thinking about you loving

the gods of autumn and all

but dont

pick up the phone

for flashbacks dressed in black

& the memory

of your eyes once the color of a fresh penny.

Truth is, I probably shouldve called (too caught up in my own commotion)

to let you know

the phone here is (dis)connected--

off the hook as is said.

This fluorescent bulb is sinister in here.

The only thing that comes to me is a feeling of relief

that the day is dead.

(lights out)

The mirror doesn't deserve this....

Ive learned to live without sleep... Sex remains my only drug. My cock is a vial loaded with heroin. It contains my only release. Fucking is the one thing that always feels pure-- the one activity that never gets ordinary. However, it seems impossible for me to write about, more difficult than revealing any of my past addictions and such. Its seems such a sacred portion of any person's identity, that to share it in any way (other than the act itself with one's chosen partner) seems a lessening or degradation of its venerable essence. Im not sure why, but this realization forces my attempt to pen fragments of its substance with a ritual honesty.

No walls, naked before the world...

=

Make love tonight for the second time since the babys birth. No penetration, but that doesn't matter to me. Its just incredible to be touched again, every nerve cell holds a newborn emotion in our naked embrace. The feeling of her long fingers floating slowly down the length of my body is hallucinogenic. She comments on how smooth my skin is to touch and her lips slowly work their way down, as she begins to...

Oh no.... not yet, I whisper helplessly, I dont want this to end.

She looks up playfully, eyes peering from beneath golden strands of unraveling silk, and playfully denies my plea. Suddenly, my cock is invisible within her lips and Im finished off in a minute.

Its raining outside the window here at work. I've only been daydreaming again and

sex again seems like some revelation from the past, one thats now been consigned to momentary recollection. Its been three weeks, though it seems like an eternity....

At least I was thinking of my wife,

and for that she owes me a new memory tonight.

Im more tired than when I went to bed. I look out over the frozen river, the morning light slicing my eyes with a rude intrusiveness. Everything looks abstracted, the trees a quiet chorus with but a few remaining leaves clinging to the detritus of my lapsing memory. The river merely indicates space. Its only desire is to be alone, static in the hold of forces beyond its control. Somehow, were all caught in the grip.

I walk into another room and open a rude email. People love to discuss issues as long as the recipient of their pearls of wisdom deigns to validate every misconception theyve smugly spewed. I write back, apologize for the rudeness of offering a dissenting view, drive home a point that I had originally made with the clarity of an exacting lapidary, and send it off into cyber-space where it will be received and misperceived as another personal attack.

People: if Im not being execrated by them, Im of absolutely no use.

=

Facere uv Deus & aeternus exilium,

its perilous expression is but a perfect living image of itself. Chamber heart, latched pocket pains opening up to the sky, beautiful bodies of bluest, impermeable, serene gusts of paradise: out of touch, but close to the pulse, and unspoken truths that whisper a fallen logic at the stroke of noon... Outside my window, everythings free-- time is in the eye, and each moment becomes what you need it to be. Stars fall from the ceiling. The sun hooks me up with a crooked smile. The days divinity is splitting hairs over at a corner table where an angel with two shot glasses saves the world for me. But this is not just about me.... it is about all of us; the themes are as old as the oceans, and similarly deep. You see, I've waited all day to tell you this.... My eyes are here to please you-- the volition of cold chrome railings glinting in the smeared sun, things that hold off on their meanings until we grow far enough away from them; nothing seems clear in this blue suspension, and I cannot settle upon a shape to sum it all up that would satisfy your absence.

O why, does this exquisite vision demand the sky of me?

People want it every which way till Sunday-- christianity representing the ultimate sacrifice of the ideal to the lowest common denominator.... I've always found it strange that capitalist conservatives are so heavily aligned with organizations in the religious right-- The Moral Majority & Christian Coalition etc. Actually, I understand God the creator, with he as the source of our inalienable rights. It makes sense as it relates to an epistemology grounded in moral absolutism and objectivist ethics (since in a godless world, we must rely entirely on our subjective experience, one that is entirely a product of the individual consciousness; hence, moral relativism). But how do conservatives maintain that this country was founded on any christian principles (other than laying claim to the fact that all the founding fathers were christian by default....

the teutonic cry of God is Dead over a century off in the horizon)?

Christianitys primary tenets (which aside from the ten commandments) are based almost entirely on the teachings of Jesus Christ, and if applied to global ethics, form the basis of a socialist society. Nevertheless conservatives, even more so than their liberal brethren, adhere to this dogma with an unyielding (though I assert-- inconsistent) grasp.

Everything from it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, to turn the other cheek, reeks of a philosophy that spurns self-reliance, moral justice, productive achievement & reason.

It is anti-human; pure socialism, and these christian conservatives are like the Roman army that hold the shiny nails of freedom glistening like gold in their capitalist fists.

Jesus was homeless (at least by the time he went on tour with the hippies). He preached vehemently against materialism, overturning the tables of bankers merely performing a desired societal function. He claimed that the whores, beggars and thieves were among societys most noble citizens, infinitely worthy of paradise.... I cannot reconcile my countrys time honored sabbatical daliance (adhered to by most conservatives as a cornerstone of all independent and free thinking societies) with what is loudly espoused on the other six days. It seems to me that any rational god would want us to live by reason: to seek meaning and fulfillment within our own existence, rather than subordinating this supreme human attribute to an irrational faith and the tortured songs that hold his empty praises. Anything less would be an abnegation of his creation.

Man-o-schevitz.... I wish this were a poetry scratch n sniff.....

=

Winter halts my perjured heart

and bleeds

red tears melting salt into rose petals,

silent in the anguish of Gods shadow.

Icarus eyes shot virgin stars

conjuring the shapes of angels

(a moment penetrating tender senses)

to give all that I own

to the blackening sky

save an ossuary of scars

I solemnly hold.

The day ends abruptly w/out my burial;

I am only nothing...

The sun hiccups silver

irrevocable kisses

in the wake of shadowless perfections that no longer exist.

Living hands and orderly eyes,

pimping my lyric lunge,

vent demented and slung

mid-air...

litanies and lamentations

composed of lies.

=

I have no change in my pockets cause Im banking on the afterlife...

I walk outside into a warm palace of air, my eyes the size of idols and clothed

only in rainbows, sea blossoms adorning in pink costumes that illuminate the naked

sands. I am a small child, jeweled and not yet impossible. A little girl, with Sunday

ribbons spinning from golden curls, loses her red dress as she smiles into the rose blush. The swarming heat buzzes in my ear and the shush of a distant steamroller settles into my feet, the fuming asphalt mingling with the tar of the sea.

Bathed in the wash of the sky, I walk with eternal eyes

past invisible churchyard tombs.

A visitation of memory; my spirit is a spent treasure.

adagio.... andante.... adagio, an dante-- my heart and the sea

My heart....

What do these exiled voices have now to teach me,

w/ all the invented descensions of heaven?

What will remain when these melodies grow to dust?

The sky grows red in revolutions of love and my chest is full of consecrated light.

A beloved image, dreaming itself eternal....

Mandala, ribbed polyparies

in the blue noon of youth, as I strode alone

daydreaming the roses I'd believed into being.

Light had pierced my alluvial limbs, displacing the insondable cithara of the sea.

Infinite world....

I was your child!

Heaven's breath,

the unfolding winds

preserved upon Endymion's lips, is escaping into infinite nights

w/out so much as a kiss.

The wind hymns in operatic measures beyond my living room walls. Darkness blots out the storm windows as I cradle Joseph in a blue velvet robe, a swaddle of loose stars that seems to unveil the celestial glow that spills over my tiny bundle of peace.

I walk over to the sliding glass door and shoot the moon burning through an early fog.

Such mortal splendors elude me in exquisite bouts of sleep. He blooms in my arms like a quiescent flower, rose bud lips opening slightly in angelic innocence that moves me through budding proclivities of ardor. This garden blossoms initially in heart, as morning glories spire as evanescently as a resurrected saint through all of my senses. Im content to watch him dream into coolness, the baby blue and silent beauty of my sons unsuspecting remedy.

The harmonic elevations of the morning sun dispel any remnant legend of retired sunsets and old surrenders, having now grown bedizened and dead in the chaste awakening of day. Who knew such light could heal? A perfect comfort secures my benevolent possession. His noble semblance, eyes arising to the rising sun-- vision to vision; it is only his day....

He falls back into faithful slumber in a nest of smoldering flame.

My soul is full of pillows.

O Lord, I should have the bottom of the world--

the caress of hell to show for my contemptible heart.

And you have only given me very heaven...

More love than this varlet should ever know

& more elation than one soul dare possess....

Into the moments hold, my older son Troy descends the stairs with a smile in his arms,

Hi daddy!

To be despised; hated when people cannot debunk another souls divine encryption.

Inherent in humanity: To hate what one cannot understand (any less would amount to a lessening of an already insufficient self). Hate the label & destroy the man, (robbing yourself of all worthwhile experience in the bargain) the only thing that is continually glorified in our fragile human ART. Save the Rainforest and burn the damn villages!

{excerpt from a reply to R. Goldstein, Exec. Ed., The Village Voice}

=

I rest in stillness w/ a passion gone void

wondering just why the hell I bother.

Pissing in the wind outside of the sacristy;

futile, as I stumble along in canonical slippers,

my breath humbled and head hung low.

What good is the psalmist who sings alone?

I now know how youve found yr religion;

Sanctus Christus, and all those words

around which a faithful meaning is assembled,

a thorn of soothing crowns...

Limbs outstretched in the sun's consecrated sneer,

impious as a child on a day with nothing to do.

The wind whispers softly in the key of E

obliging me this half-smile, however incomplete,

such fortune after an insufferable silence;

but I've been forever ruined by it all--

torpor lashings of vas devotionis;

I refuse any condescension to the ache w/in,

gesticulating madly in my ailing repose:

Who ever thought the muse divine?

My sex life is down to a handshake...

w/ myself.

=

What classical mask could ever hide

the hearts itinerant beating, the cynosure of sublime inhalations

reborn in corium exultation....

and the helpless wheel of all human weight rolling down

upon uncertain wings,

such words for a friend

could never be enough

to weather

the outrageous expression with which she exits the world,

born into languorous heavens,

the red knife cuts by no laughter or light, she says:

I fear there is an angel in my head.

Trod on to the shrine, blood of red bourbon

and the horizon the color of weak tea;

There is no way to open up the sky around you hating

(you)

drunk on an impossibility...

=

I seem to have reconciled the problem of my father: he wants nothing to do with me. The holidays have passed and nary a word from the bible belt. The autopsy is conclusive. My father resides within me as a dreaming corpse.

The liberal establishment exhibits, among other symptoms of its death throes,

the vice of the literary coterie.

(words originally written by Cesar Vallejo, though I have substituted the phrase liberal establishment for his original capitalist intelligensia to reflect a shift toward the new spiritual decadence facing our upcoming millennium).

=

The interior continent

empties like disheartened blood

discharging mass openings

of arterial movement, stained glass

images and instances spilling

forever memory,

forever gone

in the enclitic black lace

absinthe mirage of desperation

that passes for absolute nothing,

dreaming meaningless.

=

I walk into the family room high on a drug called domestic virtue. Im more at a loss now than on booze. I ask my wife what she wants of me, expecting a roll-call of mundane house chores that I've neglected of late. She tells me, love.

What do you mean, I inquire.

Step into my soul and look through my eyes, understanding all that you see and feel.

I smile slightly, wondering if such is possible.... wondering it about myself.

I am plagued,

the sickness along the left side of a page

that falls anonymously like the silver crumbs of an uneaten sunset.

Dont ask me to explain anything more about myself....

I see that I really fucked-

up on account of this, doing that, this annoying habit

of mine, ridiculous trusts and such that make no allowance

for unguarded neutrality,

afraid to kill in the whispers of vestigial resentment;

the inability to find something true

in all that I've said to you,

sympathetic apologies too dim to find a way in,

is crawling from under my tongue--

paper bouquets of solitude

burning down through my periotic incisors.

But Im glad you cant understand me....

Sorta leaves us both fucked, no?

A body of comas,

& compassionate prayers

thumbing the tumblers

of solemnity,

slapped senseless by a sense of its own magnificence

whereupon perception undresses

and regresses,

half-cracked upon a sprig of jewelweed

touch-me-nots.

Theres God in them there hills. Cuervo Gold-- six shots right through the heart....

I had to get off my bleeding knees in order to see, as the divine science of poetry has only returned me back to this world-- the world of my father and disease. In the days divinity, maintaining responsibility for my own salvation; a savior that is within me.

I realize the element of human arrogance (one to which a poet may become especially susceptible) to assign spiritual relevance to each essence sensed in our helpless search for eternal meaning & ultimate purpose. Its a fun house trek, a grand design that keeps us in the dark and guessing what's around each corner.

People always claim to have found God when they are at their weakest. In my estimation, they utilize the sickly human construct known as religion. Its a sucking crutch propping up false gods to substitute for any given lack of self. But its precisely when your senses are most sharp that spirituality is attained-- a perfect state of awareness-- a quality that's virtually imperceptible, evanescent

as morning dew that in a sunbeam dies (P.B. Shelley).

Contentment comes from the inalienable sense of self-sufficiency. Faith, in God or any other living thing, ultimately leads to diminishment (w/ one's inner needs surely going unsated). Nothing makes the soul more vulnerable. It is a frailty that manifests itself with a one-two punch, because the original weakness of need reinsinuates itself in the well augured feelings of sorrow and detachment when certain vulnerabilities of those to whom youve clung arise and are realized.

Expectation of self is the only realistic demand one should ever envision-- stripped

to the bare essence, naked before God, an irreducible state of existence. My perception affords me no comfort when it comes to death; only life, though I've prepared

myself to rest in Gods cool palm when he waves me on over.

Im now completed, with two beautiful boys to raise.

The sun is high as I head for the hills.

I despise the poets and their wares

as I do most mortal humanity,

O but for the few....

How Blake made words seem worth the spew.

A dead RAT in the twayblades.

Im solemnly prepared for the honesty of silence,

all self-fortifying deceits--

a lie having shouted itself into obsolescence.

Ah, the sanctified platitudes....

Spoken word:

Julias unctuous bucket lowered

on butterfly hill...

Id rather talk to the walls.

Childhood has died in my throat,

my tongue hung

tenuously on felled ears

felt tears ad-

nauseum, indifference

in an ineffectual effort

has failed my blood spit

back into my face

and the mirror cursed

affirming all that I had known

before (or worse).

Let it all settle....

so

let set,

soma eve

soul-mate.

All the words of earth are ours

We mend and mar them how we are.

-- Dr. Zeus

=

Sacrificed for the sins of the father,

May my sons know only salvation...

Light & LIGHTNESS ONLY

deus rosa bellus

=

Leaning against the shagged bark of Sir Sydney, the sturdy oak overlooking the river, my eyes are fixed as pins on the distant lights along the other shore, flooding me in liquid visages that burn into screams, unleashing intervening howls upon the cool night air. There is nothing in my heart other than contentment.

The significance of this moment is held in the resonant glow of a realization that I've lived my whole life for this minute, railing against the unbidden wail of alienation and cruelty that was swiftly hurled upon the newness of my infant perception and sustained thereafter beneath the pendulous swipes of times trenchant hand.

The sky feels like newborn skin upon my cheek as I toss the remainder of a fat republican cigar into the mixed light. A few grey leaves still cling to the coral hue of the sun's late insistence, and I silently count myself lucky to be among them, swaying safely beyond the bruised images that rush past my distant memory, the shoals of a scattered wreckage from some trashed paradise.

I return warmly to my home and to the glowing image of my family which holds, within its embracing bounds of certitude, all the composure and necessary shape to sustain my life forever (a sustenance that moves throughout me in perfected gestures).

AMB-10

Lord's log, Star Date 99.12.22

2:23 p.m., Freakshop USA

....and the atmosphere assumes the sensate quality of premium gin,

*Bombs Away!*

As/olu/t ears have grown numb,

w/edges hung dumbly off a/head

pinking me in re/d apple-halves.

Its strange..... A deliverance in the winds of cold ethylated airs,

the nasal flavors or acute tinge of liquors brought on by earths

aureate disposition (or perhaps) my own moods reflected in the seasons

aging heart.

winter/gin 4LORD... chambered

fall-whiskey + spring-lager

summer/vodka Dont eat the blue daffodils.

Ah, my cup runneth over,

spilling over ice

on the rocks..... bleeding into taste,

pouring forth over that forgotten corpse

that's raining in a grave.

+ New Senses + I shudder.... elation (knowledge) begins in sin.

You just have to get to that moment when the whole world rinses away;

all skin slips from sodden bone, the hem of flesh--

and you just let it happen...

The singular soul-- Divine! Self-creation, all new Cosmos

spinning dizzily into new meanings, vast revelations & angelic elevations....

Cmon... theres more to do here before they close the lid.

Alone again. I step out on the deck into the laundered air and inhale the diaphanous mist that fumes off the river and kisses my dry yawns. Out here, my perceptions are rinsed of the useless filth that clogs the delicacy of consciousness. The ritual of unrewarding chores removes me from the elevated permanence that each day should offer-- the passions needed to sustain our deepest needs and most sacred actions.

To create with a noble simplicity or childlike ignorance will ultimately lead to something more lasting than the arcane rants of an aging intellectual who so often will choose to hide behind phrases like well-written, (you know, trained monkey stuff) rather than dare, with absolute conviction and accurate intensity, something that truly speaks of ourselves, and for all of us-- created for its own sake, and true just the same.

I look out at the lyrical moon, its pregnant white belly solstice heavy and poking through the fog. The suavity of evening light spreads its fertile substance over my tired eyes. Stars like glossal blossoms give speech to the sky, illuminating Gods countenance on a lonely night, void of imaginal bliss or some other divine purpose to which I'd otherwise apply my humble affections.

What more is there to say?

I lob a high and hearty one:

an intimate kiss-- it is I,

the one doomed man of all humanitys youth....

Each emotion is a new disease

& Im waist deep in the shit,

O but for the warm harbor of some piquant cunt hair,

I shall gladly endure the rubbish of my own soul...

Ah.... But you have an out though, dont you?

You may continue as you have.

Seamus Heaney is a limping Robert Frost, w/ a brogue. A poet intimately connected to his time and place. ....and we call for a new poetry, a poetry of place.

Keep on calling stupid...

Ted Berrigan, the big man of the lower east side, had taken Mayakovskys lust for life, which was eloquently bundled up in party politics, and lasciviously diminished it.

Berrigan's is now a private party (even in death) for a select coterie of iconoclastic beatniks, hob-knobbing slobs, hipster leftists & leftovers.

A funeral party to which I've no desire to go.

Frank OHara wrote about how grand (funny, I believe, was his exactly how he put it) it would be if the human body were designed to shit but once a sennight-- the immortal splash of his lyric turd crashing into the holy water while everyone else was in church.

Now thats resonance, though not exactly Ode to a Grecian Urn.

Allen Ginsburg wrote that the asshole was holy. Good for him!

Ezra Pound despised such movements and COLLECTIVES promoted by the perverters of language, and we saw fit to lock his ass up in the asylum.

In the name of holiness!

=

These are just a few of the poets I've been sampling of late. It is clearly no accident that people do not read these days (or if they do read, literature is the last thing slung into their Barnes & Noble bags). It really doesn't matter anymore. The Muse is dead,

save a few necros with nose rings fucking its corpse into the next millennium.

This is a form letter. It should go out to each and every publisher who has turned down my work. It should be clear that the rejection is mutual.

Better DEAD than READ.

Revenant CnH2n+1OH {fragment}

He would drink all night long

and point his minatory hooks

toward the empty host, death

and insensation turning his look

into an incomprehensible anger,

an afferent blood shot offering

cauled in the tar of purpled clots,

sheaving the disease w/in his heart.

He left me as I left him, gun-toting

& psychotic w/ a pint of gin under

the car seat & an olive on his head:

Still not making any sense of it all....

=

If Id had more of a handle on things in my early years, I wonder where Id have ended up. I think about this too much. There were a lot of mistakes made, many pitfalls on my path and I, having fallen into every one of them, think about how many lives I've affected and how they mightve found a truer happiness had they not wandered in my direction. You really are in this thing alone, but its amazing how you affect other people (as they in turn affect you) like electrons orbing in and out of their separate atomic shells, forever altering the experiential valences w/in our vast human construct. It is only with my sons that all questions of past judgment come to rest and I find simple peace in the certainty of their presence, such a sweet perfection to come from having done everything wrong...

The benefits of marriage (or): The best reasons I can find for giving up on freedom.

These would have to include, first and foremost, the access to a nude and willing female at all times. Willing is an important factor. I believe many marriages break up because one partner, for whatever reason, is averse to the sexual aspects of the relationship. Killing time is for you and your bowling partner-- marriage is for bodily union. I've also found that the presence of another adult (non-parent) in the house is of some comfort. It creates the illusion that youre not all alone in the world (makes the holidays seem eventful and such). Lastly, and this would apply perhaps only to me and others like me, is the fact that the structure and routine provided by a spousal relationship helps to keep us from going off the deep end. You sort of learn to be happy with the simple joys of family life rather than the fast lane highs of drug abuse, loose women, late night parties and godless amounts of alcohol. Marriage is a survival tool, a fur covered anchor, an endless tit for infants like myself...

=

Alcohol is the drug of the true loser. Had I not been such an outcast, I might have found myself in those certain cliques and high school social circles that routinely indulged in serious drugs. Always too far on the outer fringe for the cokeheads and dopers to take me seriously, I hung out with lame-os, art phags and other assorted stress magnets. It was simply too much effort to insert myself into the drug culture by adhering to its unwritten codes of conduct. In other words, I couldnt fake the enjoyment of a Grateful Dead record. My way was easy-- anti-social, all-American and virtually effortless. You see, there were these beautiful vessels of deliverance, vials of liberation contained in a cabinet above the refrigerator in my fathers house. It was within these bottles that the true me was inheld, long before Id actually become a helpless vassal to their power, glassed within a liquid mix of madness and dependency. The same is true of the prescription drugs Id convinced my mother I needed for my ulcer-- effortless ecstasy. Id save a weeks supply of valium and pop it down with a pint of gin on the weekend. Drugs were the last thing Id ever think about going out on the streets to cop. I was kind of like some Long Island yenta snug in the warm confines of suburbia-- high as a star, above any and all lonely growing pains-- until the walls came crashing in around me....

I

Was it a glacial chrisom

or something melt--

following the wintered hooks,

watered wounds?

Whose failure, I inquire,

is devoured in a shell.

To come to light,

releasing eyes

the newness of soft fire

over cool stones.

II

Strumming the burrs, aortic airs--

red holly cloying oaken wares,

I listen in a blue world

whinnied to a murmur.

O light, baptismal in infant flame...

III

Anointed in the after-light,

the cold flat blade

of night postulates

my healing--

thick and winded,

heart tapped till hire.

MM

 

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