A POEM

If outside on your back porch you reclined, smoking expensive cigarettes, but could not rest for the steady knocking from beyond the fence, surely you might cross the yard, climb and peer over to see an overgrown toy horse, made from wood and green-painted, knocking its snout against the wall. Did we used to stand gape-faced in wonder, you might ask, did we explore mountain-temples and slip back on thunderheads to terrorize suits and movie-goers? But it's grimace, which has always been a grimace will stay right where it has always been grimacing and knock against a fence-plank and you'll stand gape-faced with your expensive cigarette and wonder; conspicuous Persian-blue clouds hang as if from strings and avoid one another.

Peerless

Let us depart from wise-named Peerless, then, and spoil ourselves by the heals of our shoes. There was to be dancing in the pines! And GOD's wounds, that easy! It all had a great deal to do with women, I suppose. Flannel shirts in surprising shades of swamp and bruise. There were bone bracelets and a necklace of beaver-jaw. That easy. We pissed out our wisdom in the sand and dried up like salted snails. Oh, we could have been moist, certainly. Proper mud-men with sleak translucent membranes stretching across our armpits. But we weren't. We were troglodytes and lizard-folk. Gargoyles even, sunglasses shining in the bright. Naked, or mostly naked and breathing with the stones. There was no easy way in or out. That is regrettable, the blame of exiting. Yes, that is regrettable.

Come Autumn

September asks for a good fantasy novel, whatever that means. It asks to be hushed - brought low - and, oh so delicately - it's lips practically grazing your ear - to be paid attention to. These first few tumbling leaves, dry and rigid as the world is flat, scrape crumbling by and September scowls. Read Gardner's Grendel, Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun or even R. Scott Bakker. Read Harry Potter if you have to, or Simic's World Doesn't End. That last may be the best. September cocks it's dusky head and, smirking, agrees. "It is the epoch of the masters of levitation." You shiver, unable to resist the wind's nudging and think, oh, just die already. Turn to brown and slate gray, and cold so that I feel at home again.

Once I took mushrooms, for the second night in a row, at a friends house. The pixelated vines grew right out of Mario Brother's 2, right out of the T.V. and across the almost-smooth wall. Later I slunk threw the dark and snoring to the front door, down a couple flights of thick brown stairs and southwest. I slept in an old graveyard for a while, or I must have, because I had dreams there. Those tumbling leaves where as wide and solid as tectonic plates.

Old noise New

If you had hold of something that was worth a lot; not for its weight or sparkle but Shame-
-Could you justify not selling it out?
If no one's coming for revenge.

Please, thankful for my life and health. My energy and versatile; my hands.

That purple after-image like like cicatrice,
here I prefer the scab-pain to the scar.
A five piece Gospel Band strips breakbeats at the FCC.
And bend.
All knees prefer the Stun to Spin; bow deep. All weight bears shoulder.

Every mouth holds the things It don't have, so the Mouths all Sing.

Cash or

Man yelling about Gabriella. I gotta tell ya, he says. She replies crisply from an answering machine tape. Young, tasteless people spend money on band posters. The trees are green and evergreens stab at grays and browns and almost-blues. Things are - or at least seem - cleaner than usual.

Another draft of another too-long, too-meanderous poem. I listen to too much NPR.

The creation of shadow necessarily undermined the function of limitations.
-the power of deity.
-threaten the gods.
-process is everything.
Midnight believes she is saving people from themselves:


Something like a net of prohibitive energy,
as with any net, there are holes
more limited resources.
words may affect just about anything they can imagine,
only with very limited strength;
the hand ever at their neck.
Dead magic.
An acute and constant entropy;
a more remote and short lived affect every time;
an affect other than what was intended or assumed.
Really, these are just places damaged,
or breaking down in words.


As in a three-day festival,
There is the political discussion, though
it is important to consider who, and under what circumstances.
Silvered ravens.
Rather fucked off by the whole thing.
As one might predict,
ready to fight at a moments notice, which always creates tension, blah, blah.
Has a price.
caw, caw
deadly as all get out and
Dragged along by fond hates
sarcastic enough
a good enough actress
Who else?

It could be the architect
He has holed himself up in his ponder.

Is the presence of ravens a sign they are willing to discuss?
Expressing mostly concerns about trade.
Left needing.
There is a good deal of money to be made in weapons.
A good deal of nothing to be done.
About Boreal loam.



Nothing has changed on this front

A poem composed by blacking out words in a trashy romance/action novel

Filling her cup.
Not that I'm grateful
Should have offered his bed.
Sorry about that
A little drawn.
Why would someone want to skewer you?
What sort of shit
between her hands,
legs curling,
mouth went dry
between her thighs.
...Oh, she was talking again.
She feeds it,
tucks the fucking thing into bed at night.