Arm around an Ankle on a Sofa

All I really want

Is someone to read next to

Where we can

Each be in a book

And

Present in each other

Without saying a word

Sharing like a nucleus of smashed amalgamation

Electrons whirling capable of trade

The neutrons and protons hold for equilibrium

Choosing in each instant to balance

The exchange is constant, foundational with the force

That could detonate cities perilous and marvelous

The fire and the fusion gambling where gravity cannot touch

Words are inapplicable in this understanding like a bond

All I really want

Is to share this calling

Where we can

Each be in a universe

And

Present in each other

Known on a level beyond 

Katrina IX

Ravens still pecking at the Saints after nine years

Eve of August 29^th 2014

Noon and the sky darkens across the mast

A city of garbage mountains

Fit to cry today seen the family bibles soaked

Some wounds do not close

The sheetrock and shingles folded hands

Here are the people

Much better, much better

Time, time, time

Clouded break voice parade

Love was, love was a flood

Rain dogs and souvenirs

Ignatius carts and slum shards

Projects ain’t der no more

Shiny apartments and flotsam fire arms

Economic stimulus to get through 2008

Better off so many say-so rats in the maze

Begging pellets and hearts

Soaked up too much water from the street

Might never dry out

Insurance made whole

The cashed check lectures

Gentrification and street car serenades

Hill Billy hipsters and dread-locked cranks

Parties and beads kazoos and burlesque

Should be smiling more, but today

Today it still smells a bit of death  

Water in the air, rain getting ready to come 

Contemplating September First 2014

Another fucking holiday three-day weekend

The code of make plans, make plans, got plans;

What are you going to do with this freedom?

Like a god-damn mirror

Too bright, too bright

Reflections of other times

Look how young we were

Skinny in the picture

Crawfish boil right before the hurricane

Rabbit hole descend with the roots and pretend

The turnips and the onions still grow down there

Gnarled in the fallow dirt

Glorious spiraling into the maw of self

Teeth chew obsessive compulsive focus

Blocking the world and exacerbating madness

Mayhem of depressive lust for the numb oblivion

Seeing what is wanted a galactic distance away

Not graspable in this life, this body

Succumbed to acceptance that this face is not meant

For an atmosphere of oxygen

Alien on the wrong planet

Of ants urinating on calendars of feces pile Labor Days

Christmas and Independence fireworks

The glare is sheening vomit

Too much agreement that the alcohol helps

Give me some more maybe I can’t tell yet

Universe help me, I just thought about waking up again tomorrow

I need some nice for a while, just some nice

Give me a ride if you might; these two dollar shoes hurt my feet

Praying on this dusty road 

Appetizer for a Siren

I got nothing left

This fight was over six rounds ago

Frump blood cough

Let me wheeze

Dumpster lunch; sounds enough

The heaven oozed out lurched in parking lot

Like a dried slug traversing midday concrete

See the fucker fry

I want to be like Angus and the bacteria

Adapt multiply get up again, again, and again

This time like the so many, hope got me with that left hook

Chin slid sideways, cranium back, kidney seized

Cut, extract in warm bath words floating in red rose water

Swirling hemoglobin candy floss like no-wave goodbyes

Staring at toilet paper or recycle bins empty by curbs

Windows smudged in pollen summer’s bake

I do not even notice the seasons anymore

Time is one day, just blinks, flickering scenes in spasms

Of celluloid flapping the motion picture lens like masturbation

A man stands, a man falls, a man stands, a man falls

No Popeye spinach just rat hides and cockroach ass cheeks

Squished and frolicking in matted hair and crusted feces

Rotting like a Halloween pumpkin, watching limes and cucumbers

For her Pimm’s cup fester into blackened spores on the counter

One night of choices and sliced that vegetable into rounds

Thinking lengthwise was just a suggestion for the cocktail recipe

Split faith like this simple syrup was wanted approaching need

A space in a life appreciating gestures of forethought

Stable boy go back to sleep in the straw

Even the sheep want to be left alone

Moonlight is too bright just a phase

The fullness swallows, chokes on the black locks

The siren gnaws on his ingratiated grin bedazzled in the moonlight

Comatose glazed eyes like double hard-ons stuck paralyzed like a spider’s delight

Chewing his ear, sipping his cheek and cast casually into the sea

As flotsam, a quarter eaten nothing disinterest ranking below digestion 

Prisons Enveloped in Prisons

All the things I wish I felt permission to request, to admit

If you would try to love me back I would try to make it work

Try in the sidelines because I taste a familiar desperation

That coats every droplet of hope

I do not know if my tools of interpretation are distorted by a crimp brain

Or just a broken heart crumpled and blackened into charred tin foil

I saw your small acts of interest and wanted to bellow the fire

I wanted to believe that love could be achievable

Something could come easy or at least be an option for me to choose

Rather than another ghost teasing me in kiss-me go-away, no-silence

I thought there were feelings in there, the can was not empty

I had been valued above an exchangeable plastic nothing

I was a person that shown out to as unique

As all these words I saw in the quiet reader sipping cocktails conversing

Was real, like touching an inner part that transcending the expectation of years

I felt special and possible; I felt like time had purpose

Then I felt like a madman, a crank on a street corner bending nothings

Capability was rising as if the weight of these things I carry diluted

In the exit they hydrated into hippopotamus saddle bags

The songs, the shadowed corner, kissing in the foyer, the tempt

The want of possible haunts me in a cage of identified unwanted

I am dust in the hazy waft flustered into a retirement of nonsense

Pacing up those stairs like a lumberjack of depression

Hulking day after same day seeing a chorus of relative photographs in the hall

Thinking of the identity missing of cousins, uncles, parents, siblings

And nowhere in the mesh is any semblance of a partner

Waiting on trains, stations of benches and hammering rails

Feeling the clock like an albatross, caw, caw, caw

The epilepsy is dancing like plaque in a brain of shake

Prisons enveloped in prisons of mirage paroles taunting exits like sunrays

Sure you get to leave sir, but we will cut you in quadrants and one quarter

Will leave today with her and the rest get to stay, function here okay

Seeing distorted dreams parade like gingerbread houses flooded in milk

Made soggy for the sugar to swirl like crystal gum reds in the streets

Mush brown white icing clogged with cockroach eggs

Watching it all from prisons enveloped in prisons  

ASPIE

I have been this my whole life

Whether this had a name or has one

Is independent

Brain is an Asperger’s spectrum poet certified professional accountant

In other words a platypus

The drumroll symptoms of a syndrome:

Lack of eye contact, interpretation of body language, social cues

(I.E. the conundrum of flirting)

All feels fake, sycophantic, small talk, fuck not again

Bullshitting, colloquial banter; throw me in the wood chipper

Let me speak in poetry six leagues deep

Hide in plain sight, analogies and metaphors

Coping mechanisms to find a native current

Adherence to rules, principled like an extreme sport

Didn’t understand even after I got my faced bashed in

And refused to throw a punch; goodbye permanent teeth

Mouth is blockade flipper denture adolescence  

Felt my participation in the world outside my head

Always seemed entirely arbitrary to others

Ant in the hill, no home for me

I remember what I felt like almost any year of my life

Some ASPIE might take to rote memory of maps or factoids

I got ASPIE poet; I sculpt feelings like photographs printed on this paper heart

Sensitivity to environment

Mint, chocolate, bubblegum, never eat or smell, Yuk!

Rubbing alcohol causes Vasovagal reaction

Sleep in complete darkness

Low talker on the phone, “Thank you mam’s”

Please do not casually touch me

I could tell you about any NFL player from 1980 to 2000

Beat any Nintendo game for rent like a rodent in a maze

Every Magic the Gathering card or Simpson’s reference

Pedantic little professor goes off when on track

Silent most of the day

Peer to peer, ha!, at eleven give me an adult

At twenty-five give me dead writers

A lexicon to fill an ocean with notebooks

My favorite gift my mother every gave me was an electronic pocket dictionary

In sixth grade that I still tote daily to work

Alien on the wrong planet

Could not tie my shoes until third grade

Atrocious handwriting, could not manipulate fingers to play a guitar

If Dylan and Springsteen said, “Hey, want to learn?”

ASPIE spectrum did not grab empathy though

I got Superman x-ray vision

I see past the surface see your heart in the depths

Beating at one with the universe

Analyze every piece of stimuli

Between life history, foot position, career choice, habits

Poems on what I am bound to misinterpret will be there in spades digging my grave

Because I’m bluffing like a sweaty champ

But I would rather be a living poem and make you a muse

Than attempt to participate in the normal game, because I am not built to compete on the surface

The emotions go hells deep wandering into a warehouse imagination

To turn the corner and the shelves appear from the darkness like crabs in an oceanic trench

Relationships, huh? In thirty-five years I don’t need two hands to count

Spent lunch in libraries from junior high to college

Reading passing every subject but schoolyard

Selective mutism (Them no, these few everything)

Pragmatism too much work to try

Obsess internal surf poem waves

Nothing feels real but the existential universe found through the self

How many pages?  Text me a note, I’ll send you thirty

Quid pro quo, you know, you know?

Not a disease, no pill, just me

No cure, no standardized test

Just an ASPIE spectrum poet accountant platypus

Saying hello

Taking the Easy Out

I will never settle for a human who treats me

As if I am not worthy of humanity

Of explanation of the kindness of words

There is an inferno level of segregation

From face to face, from telephone, to email or digital typeface

Doing the distance business of truncation

As if what we shared cannot be set out into the open

Throbbing raw and given a warrior’s death

Slay the beast in blood gushing in the street for watchers

No back alley sniper shot

No Ebola cough transfer latent malignancy

No denial of the glory

Give me the arching open of love’s courage

To crack ribs and trade spare parts

Leave that given to a refuse curb

No I want to return the goods in person

Tainted by the spirit of love’s celestial damnation

Of all born to die

I want the raw passionate pain

Of witnessing you witnessing the acts

This is the audacity of love’s barter

Without we are reptiles fornicating in the darkness

Souls alive in the fire of this market

Burning down; the easy hurts more than the out 

Bird Girl

Bird girl

I give freedom not to think

Dance upon the thermals

The spirit

That brought poetry

Soak the words upon thy roost

Metaphors

Be kite string and buttons in your nest

Refuge from sky

The want

Give to winds as none is mine

The faith that the spirit brought us to be

Is still flowing

Away

Convene

Into the winds

It shall rest 

A prayer before a hurricane 8/28/14

Peace, Love

We are all interconnected through God.

Help me remember life is not about me

When I hunger for happiness

Guide me to be where it is I am supposed to be

So that I may feed that path

Help me remember that depression

Does not exist but in the choice

To ignore that path elevating the self above the whole

Wallowing in insecurity

Help me remember time is an illusionary palette

For the physical to dab and swirl upon a spiritual canvas

Bodily circumstances are but waves to ride or abjure

Not to establish worthiness, but to paint in one mural

Help me remember there is no darkness

Only the absence of lightness

The colors of man mirror the colors of God

Reciprocal as a quark and the nuclear atomic force

Help me remember there is no cold

Only the absence of heat 

The fires of man blockade the warmth of God

We are home in the vacuum of space driving as a proton

Not to find happiness, but to cast our color to the brigade

In an interplay of empathy so that as I move

Countless others react so in I find the origin of my movement

Time fades into a singularity

As this has always been done, all at once

Like a standing instant of absence, creation, and portrait

We always have and will be each

Together 

Want to be a Pill Popper?

If you do exist, I’ll suspend, but if you do

Why?

What am I here to accomplish, perform, uncover?

I have run out of fuel, tank, kaput

I am embarrassed by my choices and

Lack the will to choose an alternative

Simple foundation to have a partner to be present

For the will to do

The energy required to search drains the preponderance

Of what I can produce

The anxiety of being on alert peeking behind eyebrows

For potential avenues of progression

The call up says try, try son because

Your mother wants you to be happy before she dies

So do I

The numb lake rolls a scrape tide

Central love yourself before others will

I tried, I give up; it has never worked in thirty-five years

That is more than what Jesus had

Have not used that word in a while

The nights and days feel like used toilet paper

Soiled before I get them

I pull from the roll and the feces is pre-smeared

I wipe anyway, mix the truth, own the iteration

Alarm clock, computer screens, accountancy

Commutes, dinner in one garbage bin

Read, shower, sleep, see the kid every other end of weeks

Send out the flares to the gawk; there is no answer

Mother knows and that is why she cries

Because the pill does not change a damn thing