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Friday, September 28, 2018
The Obvious
I have been waiting my whole goddamned life for you to show up
Ok
So you get it now
Somethings are obvious
They hit you like shattered bar lights out of nowhere
The sky falls, rains glass, sparks fly
Electrify a dormant longing
That you've sat with in long discourse
As the specter on the pillow on the other side of the bed
The soft foolishness of recognition
How could I not know?
All this gesturing on dance floors
Swearing at satellites to false moon goddesses
Searching for nature's complement
Flush in gorgeous blood and skin passionately ready
The scars and madness
The torment of longing for a set of eyes
To stare into across a table enraptured in memory
Like medicine for the peril of dying without drinking
From the well we all hope to find in our own time
This is music appearing to begin to play
Realizing this is the melody always in the background
Of everything one has ever known
Surfacing into the foreground
Found in a pair of eyes and skin and yes
At stake in a present moment to declare
I want to try
I will take on the terribleness of the shitshow with you
A tribe life mate, face to face, humble and exalted
Healing and growing in the madness of declaring love
This is the audacity of knowing what one wants
And who one is with another human complement
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
hard space
I never seen a feeling from a woman
That in retrospect had vulnerability in it
That if you go
I will feel loss
There is a manner of exchange
A price for presence
To know to be
Accrues a personal debt
That if this is not to be
One surrenders to feel
A space is created to fit
The act of holding
This is where feeling nests
In the thatch of broken aliveness
The egg yolk messiness
The stared heart invests
There is a look
I have seen feeling from a woman
In the way viewing other men
The look exists in this space
Wanting
And when I think of these eyes
I think of hope but most so
What the lack of this space appears
In hard indifference
That in retrospect had vulnerability in it
That if you go
I will feel loss
There is a manner of exchange
A price for presence
To know to be
Accrues a personal debt
That if this is not to be
One surrenders to feel
A space is created to fit
The act of holding
This is where feeling nests
In the thatch of broken aliveness
The egg yolk messiness
The stared heart invests
There is a look
I have seen feeling from a woman
In the way viewing other men
The look exists in this space
Wanting
And when I think of these eyes
I think of hope but most so
What the lack of this space appears
In hard indifference
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Three minutes past
One held breath, staring a clock past midnight, with a pinch of warm ache behind eyelids, remembering the nauseating flavor of hope swishing in aged spit. Two crumpled missives pasted into internet slurry dangling in retort to contradictory responses. Three resignations cumulatively folded into the self, knowing the odds of the bug crawling all the way across the desk before thumb and index fingers smear its exposed body are nil. Somehow the insect does! Applauded by soundlessness recognizing the spectators have all become preoccupied. For today I was a man and will become a boy again, into the sexless invisibility, praying to wallpaper and watching fan blades with a dry tongue.
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Hope is
Hope
is the most sinister of addictions.
Taste
the elixir of safety on the tongue
Bubbles
of might populate space taken
To
be outside the normalized confines
A
man rests child pose on beige carpet
Head
to floor facing away from the computer screen
As
his American god
No
answers in the digital scrolls
The
patient agony of expectation
For
letters to materialize form the ethereal witchcraft
Of
a specified other human’s choice to type
And
alter the dreams of another human being
There
is a parceled swallow of routine
Disrupted
by the hope fuming its way into the parlors of thought
Rumbling
down potholed streets like a Sewerage and Water Board truck
Finally
coming to fix the leaks
The
dare not speaks
The
iced over roots of stumped trees
The
warnings of best be this way as not to arouse suspicions
Of
what it means to be a human wary of hope
The
ecstasy and the foul bilateral pinch of the abdomen
Clenching
the human form inward to recognize
The
silence will remain unbroken
The
stasis of this predicament ossifies
Tongue
glides across implanted teeth
Stung
anxious blood burns in forearms of matted hair
The
urge for an adult to rationalize verbal release or tears
Or
some representation of the disappointment exceeds the outer expression
For
the addiction of a cumulative deficit
The
pull toward hope is commensurate with hope’s unclimactic compensation
The
musicality is an opera of indifference
Hummed
between coronary beats, the pause in the lub dub
The
stare outward into the nothing to explain
The
did not start, the horror of might, the hope in the getting hopes up
The
cliched acrobatics of peppered positive reinforcement
Into
the ears of a human trained to second guess every decision
As
no path in the labyrinth begets blood flow
The
same pale moon and cold hard ground
The
torn sheet and numb gaze across the horizon
The
seafarer’s mirage hazy hope and full of terrors
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
In the Stack
You tell yourself, “Today was just a bad day.”
Then remember one does not count, but there is
still a stack of bad days.
You open up your Facebook feed to friends’ posts “Remember
to be kind to yourself.”
A poet advertises a lyric t-shirt “I love you. I’ll
miss you. Be careful.”
In a realm where no one talks ear to mouth.
Not alone feeling alone in the stack.
Play Pen
There is a fundamental question,
do I want to be? I try hard to want to say yes, knowing the parts of me that
deem it so logical to say no. These parties hold a pathetic argument. Neither
wants to speak too loudly into the microphone. So I go through my days neither
being or not being hazed in depression seeing little point to life, seeing my
being as an anchor for others and self-isolating to minimize the collateral damage.
Occasionally I can invent an illusion in digital correspondence until I say too
much or too little or utter what feels like the truth at the time. I laugh at
how simple a question like an infant that refuses to eat his food. Plop dumb
and squalid in a stink playpen. Shit in diapers. Refuse to develop the muscles
to stand and climb out.
Reruns on channel one
It is difficult to take yourself seriously
when a vision of your hand holding a gun to your head and watching chunks of
skull and blood fly out onto the door of the room you are sitting in replays
over and over all day long no matter how you try to occupy your time. The humor
of the repetition flops in every so often that this scene is always impossible
for the human choosing the act to ever see. So it is suicide remains in this fantastical
quality of unrealness. That is unless you survive, but even then the failure in
the incomplete act stalks the actor as the goal was not to see the film, but to
finally un-see it.
A note to my yoga teachers
A note to my yoga teachers, know
on the days you see me, more often than not I am present for basic survival
reasons. I come to yoga because at least I know I can do this. I can go to a
room with other human beings, hear a real human voice, be at least peripherally
observed that I still am alive by human eyes and move my body to accomplish something
small. At least today I can do this.
I can be in yoga near other human beings and not feel like I
am violating other people’s space to succumb to either rejection or complete
invisibility. I can smell the scent of visibility even if no one directly
speaks to me in the entire before, during, or after process or I to them.
One of you, my teachers, may be
the only human I speak with face to face all day, and cumulatively you may be
the only group all week in whatever perfunctory politeness or genuine exchange
occurs. You are the modern American therapy for the bargain price of less than
a hundred dollars a month.
The radio reminds me physical
isolation and lack of relationships is a greater risk to shorten my lifespan
than lack of exercise or an unhealthy diet.
Robin's Eggs
The irony of emotional availability is that it smells like desperation to the other person’s instinct to hunt what does not wish to be hunted. The animal within senses both the lack of external labor as off-putting and the presence of internal self-reflection to be present intimidating. It is in this dichotomy we teach ourselves to wear masks and go through the world so largely unloved.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Blasphemous Questions
Somewhere in navigating the guts of the machine the labyrinth's darkness became its beauty. The realization the objective was not escape, but that we are the maze itself canoodling in crevices of mustard gas clouds and pear orchards. Bodies die without fanfare and live with contorted enthusiasm. Angelic eyelashes flutter in the fireworks. We sip joy our body feels not so missing in this turn left compared to our last attempt at a due north. The contraption flashes flimflam epileptic seizure screen cellphone gluttony. We stare down the glitter impossible to eradicate like herpes in our delusions. Odysseus munches lotuses. There is a constant hum in the background of everything. The murmur of Thanatos whispering, "Do it."
The choice to eat fruit in the abyss of a Friday night or clack an animal survival instinct dancing to the Trinidadian drum beats. We paint ourselves in tribal consanguinity. I could remember that once, but now all I remember is the machine, the beautiful shadows of it, that I am the atomic shifts. I want most to have the illusion back. The colossus of boredom stares echoing the hum. I rub the backs of my upper ears with thumbs in tiny circles with my eyes closed pretending these are not my thumbs. In the darkness there is an openness, like an open field away from the machine's walls like somewhere my mother told me god lived. I do my best not to believe her as I savor the realness of a tactile moment.
I live with the a constant tightness below each set of ribs, pinching an anxious vice of "I do not want to be here." The notion repeats in annihilation piano keys. I missed my 401k payments the past two years. The accountant is negligent on the tax advantages of retirement planning. The thought of ending it sits like a constant bird inside the room. I rummage through the fecklessness of talking to other humans about the bird. I decline. There is little or any aid but to regain the illusion. Pluck into the change purse for the magic bean of sex or love or a suppository of human connection. Twist the wonder capsule up into the hole. Fill the void with high school intelligence and television sparkles. Weigh the first blasphemous question. Am I more frightened of dying or living?
Depression is under each glitter fleck in a permanent readiness to return. Any flicker of hope is a dual hook sharpened in the pang. We know its potential yet hope anyway watching ourselves fall back into the pit, a new face to mourn in the rotating masks we call savior of the solar and lunar cycles. The heaviness in the lie that we say we know there is no savior. There is only the second blasphemous question, what makes me happy? An honest answer is the sphinx's requirement for exit.
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
I miss the sunlight. 20180626
I told my family I
think about killing myself sometimes eight months ago. It is always in there
like looking at my own nose. There was a perfunctory we would rather you not,
but a summarily understood exhalation that there is little any of us can or
will do. So it is, as before, and for these decades, I am on my own. Fart. To
be or not to be. I think about work, unemployment, America, personal
relationships, art…I figure write a few books and when the gas sputters out of
the bank tank say goodbyes. I don't want to say goodbyes. I never have.
I manufacture a story that the kid wants something to do with me, but that’s mostly bullshit. Occasionally I get to text. We have a call. Laugh. it's god damn beautiful, but compartmentalized.
I manufacture a story that the kid wants something to do with me, but that’s mostly bullshit. Occasionally I get to text. We have a call. Laugh. it's god damn beautiful, but compartmentalized.
There is this radiant
numb sort of perpetual weight. I cannot afford
to get a diagnosis or drugs or a person to talk to about it because why bother.
I tried the shrink. It didn’t shrink. The irony in America is if you seek professional help and get diagnosed the check boxes on forms change, employers or reports or people who want to extricate you from the subways or court proceedings get notified and the gyro of the world starts the pariah stigma of labeling the crazy one.
This is my fight with the voice that is gleeful that this could all end. In all the meditation and trying there is a voice in the subtext of everything that just says it is all illusion. None of this is real and every waking day requires theatrical performance to conjure the self-deceit about why anyone would want to be alive. I have my reasons. I choose to stay.
This is my fight with the voice that is gleeful that this could all end. In all the meditation and trying there is a voice in the subtext of everything that just says it is all illusion. None of this is real and every waking day requires theatrical performance to conjure the self-deceit about why anyone would want to be alive. I have my reasons. I choose to stay.
I stare into the ledger
of joy. I look out across the world. I feel the awfulness people do to each
other. The ooze baby of our self-hatred elected to the throne in D.C. I taste
the steel in my mouth of the dehumanized corporate mechanics. The lack of
kindness feels lethal like a big fucking snuff film with an orgy scene before
the grand finale for the march of the pigs.
I do not want to be
here for this. Imagining faking it for another person feels Sisyphean. Then I
think about the child in me, the one who cannot imagine anyone wanting to stay around.
I confront the paradox doom loop of depression repellent, the contagion,
the way the kid talked to me, the way her mother did, the way my family looked
at me so bored when I told them I think about killing myself. Hard
to convince me inside they do not feel the same. All faking it,
struggling, stirring the roux that this world is worth staying in if we can
just lie to each other well enough.
Maybe we each find
different drugs. I wonder if I ever had the capability to love, like really be
in love, if I could get there. I feel like my ankle is roped to a hole and it’s
just a matter of time. So meeting new people or talking about it is just a
disservice to others. Whatever illusion other people can muster, I hope other
people can keep it, because the rawness of all of this is just too much. Then I think that's all bullshit of course I could, I just need the right season.
I have not felt safe in
years. I think about if there were suicide stores where we could just go get an
injection or a breathe helium and off ourselves, millions would do it. It would
be the only thing to get the Orange Slut off the news. All the world would need
is a tipping point and the bodies would just be leaping into pits to end this
farce. Fuck it humanity, if you don’t want to be here…if you are this cruel, I
am exhausted and an asshole. I am no hero, no voice, a shitty writer whose best
talent of saying no to his demons is quavering.
I miss the sunlight. But I know it exists. I stay for the sunlight behind the clouds, knowing as Eric Draven taught high school me, it can't rain all the time.
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
We need a Disney Princess who has had an Abortion
Reality Show cartoon thoughts edition: I saw this stream of troll bait articles on conservative websites about Planned Parenthood tweeting, We need a Disney Princess who has had an abortion.
Disney princes…Hercules fights gods and uses weapons. Aladdin steals and uses a sword. Peter Pan has a knife and refuses to grow up. John Smith kidnaps and is a soldier. The Beast kidnaps and fights a guy who plummets to his death. Prince Eric, Charming...nondescript fill in pretty rich boys all seem to be highly correlated with kingdoms that would have armies doing some killing. These movies conveniently crescendo with betrothals which imply sex and happily ever after, well what if maybe we rushed into this, maybe Disney Princesses tend to rush into relationships with powerful enchanting violent men and Disney Princes tend to get immediately enamored for no logical reason with a certain ingĂ©nue.
What if, let’s just imagine, call me crazy I know, after the ever after those relationships aren’t working out or are not ready for progeny or father-in-king or mother-in-queen wants to keep you trapped in a tower or be somebody who isn’t quite you? What if you just want take off this bra and gown and put on some god damn yoga pants or your old fish tail? What if you might want to say this family and castle life is not for me? But you had sex and are debating should I stay in this castle or invoke volition to reverse this hastily conjoined arrangement full of my husband killing dragons, sea witches, dark queens, arrogant Gaston’s, Oriental Jaffar’s, my entire indigenous nation, or pirates after he clearly was fooling around with other mermaids?
Maybe that is the kind of man a Disney Princess might get all goo-goo eyed for and realize huh this guy has a dark side and after he got his dick in me he is not all Genie wishes and taking me dancing at balls anymore? Just making jokes about rubbing other balls. Maybe I was distracted because Disney decided to kill off or rip away my father or mother for some sadistic reason and I have daddy issues and take guidance from birds, mice, dwarfs, crustaceans, small dragons, or teapots. Maybe I didn’t see the dark side of my chosen suitor before like a reverse Stockholm syndrome Belle and the Beast moment. Now we’re pregnant.
The Disney Prince would surely want his heir who his princess would be dutifully taking care of while he is off crusading and warring for kingdom on his trusty talking horse or slave ship or magic carpet while Disney Princess is expected to sit in a fancy room being obedient. Maybe the abortion here for the cartoon is to say the Disney Princess life is unrealistic on more levels than just maestro sea orchestra conducting crabs, pixie dust, and sleep spells broken by a kiss. Maybe sheltering kids with horrific examples of adult relationships ignoring equitable emotional labor, relationship building, and self-actualization might lead to ta dah a Disney Princess choosing an abortion or egad the Prince agreeing because parenting just isn't meant to be.
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are both based on women wanting to kill or curse little girls. Belle was kidnapped by a beast, Tangled princess was trapped in a tower by her mother. Cinderella was trapped in a tower by her stepmother. Ariel had her voice taken away by a fat-shamed sea witch in the cartoon version. She dies in the real version becoming sea foam. Maybe the real story is the misogyny of showing evil women and evil done to girls. Maybe an abortion is an artistic device to say women have a choice to say no. Maybe Ariel gets her god damn voice and fish vagina back.
ttp://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/27/backlash-after-planned-parenthood-branch-tweets-need-disney-princess-whos-had-abortion.html
Disney princes…Hercules fights gods and uses weapons. Aladdin steals and uses a sword. Peter Pan has a knife and refuses to grow up. John Smith kidnaps and is a soldier. The Beast kidnaps and fights a guy who plummets to his death. Prince Eric, Charming...nondescript fill in pretty rich boys all seem to be highly correlated with kingdoms that would have armies doing some killing. These movies conveniently crescendo with betrothals which imply sex and happily ever after, well what if maybe we rushed into this, maybe Disney Princesses tend to rush into relationships with powerful enchanting violent men and Disney Princes tend to get immediately enamored for no logical reason with a certain ingĂ©nue.
What if, let’s just imagine, call me crazy I know, after the ever after those relationships aren’t working out or are not ready for progeny or father-in-king or mother-in-queen wants to keep you trapped in a tower or be somebody who isn’t quite you? What if you just want take off this bra and gown and put on some god damn yoga pants or your old fish tail? What if you might want to say this family and castle life is not for me? But you had sex and are debating should I stay in this castle or invoke volition to reverse this hastily conjoined arrangement full of my husband killing dragons, sea witches, dark queens, arrogant Gaston’s, Oriental Jaffar’s, my entire indigenous nation, or pirates after he clearly was fooling around with other mermaids?
Maybe that is the kind of man a Disney Princess might get all goo-goo eyed for and realize huh this guy has a dark side and after he got his dick in me he is not all Genie wishes and taking me dancing at balls anymore? Just making jokes about rubbing other balls. Maybe I was distracted because Disney decided to kill off or rip away my father or mother for some sadistic reason and I have daddy issues and take guidance from birds, mice, dwarfs, crustaceans, small dragons, or teapots. Maybe I didn’t see the dark side of my chosen suitor before like a reverse Stockholm syndrome Belle and the Beast moment. Now we’re pregnant.
The Disney Prince would surely want his heir who his princess would be dutifully taking care of while he is off crusading and warring for kingdom on his trusty talking horse or slave ship or magic carpet while Disney Princess is expected to sit in a fancy room being obedient. Maybe the abortion here for the cartoon is to say the Disney Princess life is unrealistic on more levels than just maestro sea orchestra conducting crabs, pixie dust, and sleep spells broken by a kiss. Maybe sheltering kids with horrific examples of adult relationships ignoring equitable emotional labor, relationship building, and self-actualization might lead to ta dah a Disney Princess choosing an abortion or egad the Prince agreeing because parenting just isn't meant to be.
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are both based on women wanting to kill or curse little girls. Belle was kidnapped by a beast, Tangled princess was trapped in a tower by her mother. Cinderella was trapped in a tower by her stepmother. Ariel had her voice taken away by a fat-shamed sea witch in the cartoon version. She dies in the real version becoming sea foam. Maybe the real story is the misogyny of showing evil women and evil done to girls. Maybe an abortion is an artistic device to say women have a choice to say no. Maybe Ariel gets her god damn voice and fish vagina back.
ttp://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/27/backlash-after-planned-parenthood-branch-tweets-need-disney-princess-whos-had-abortion.html
Friday, March 23, 2018
Gifted
I watched this movie
tonight… Some sentences in art resonate empathy in horrific ways, some scenes,
you don’t want to be able to relate, fiction into non-fiction. You live underneath
the limen where faith used to be. You hope spacetime’s passkey arrives in one coordinated
moment in the future where the other sees you. No requirement to explain the
why behind the path to now, the other just gets it. That recognition is like a forgiveness
in a gust, filling you with validation of just how much you can love a person trying
to do what is best for them never knowing if you were doing the right thing,
but you buried into the deepest parts of you in moments that keep repeating to do
the hardest thing you can imagine. Maybe that breaks you in a way you can’t
explain to people. Few know where it comes from, but you do it, because it is
not always about you. It’s not like a movie with clean lines and succinct felicity,
you know you might not make it out of this alive or functional, but you did your best.
You took the slap in the face. You were the bowing trunk staring up at that
sun, bending in wind, meditating on what bounties the rain may one morn bring.
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
An Image of the Male Body
The untouched male body
I live in
Walks into a dark house at eight
p.m.
And talks to himself
With simulated sitcom conversations
Of how was and guess what
Dinner is always in the
refrigerated plastic
Cooked ahead for the week
Consumed in totality by this
stomach and these lips
Subsisting in a deficit of tactile
contact
Recycled folly exercises honed in
the realization of the way
A woman texts “I don’t feel
romantic potential between us.”
The awful politeness of coded
honesties
To be a man who was engrained so
young to know
I am one of the ugly ones
I think women look at me the way I
look at the ugly women
So it is one big animal pit of
fleshed judgment
I am almost forty
The sexlessness is the only Catholic
thing left in me
I can no longer blame god for the celibacy
This is just dry runs bathed in
PTSD and the mirror
The ghosted unreturned phone calls
and the never given chances
This time I gave her a ride home mid-date
After she left to move lumber from incoming
rainfall
My penis finds this humorous
The curtesy, the indifference
Never long enough to receive hatred or
anger this decade
Just terminal expedient assessment of
no thank you
A divorced man with an executive salary
A yoga body with muscled abdomen
A full head of hair
Re-transplanted top-dollar smile
And this face of lonely blue eyes
Questioning his entire life how to
talk to females
As anything other than friends
The sexlessness exudes my pores so
much
I was once kicked out of an erotic
writers group
By email because my demisexuality
was not up to snuff
No retort just go, please stop, another
no thank you for your service
We just do not see how you fit in
here
I remember the week before my wife
left
After ten years the last time we
had sex
Was at her company Christmas Party
At a hotel on Bourbon Street
The image of her body on top of me
rattles in my brain like rape
I remember how she insisted on the
condom
I remember her anger at showing me
in public
When we went downstairs for the
dinner
I remember how clueless I was of what she was about to announce
The unreadable beast was soon to devour me in courtrooms
The unreadable beast was soon to devour me in courtrooms
I think of this decade since
This so long untouched skin
I want to feel safe
Like there ever was a place
Timid for coquetry in this Me-Too
era
I want to play
Patience from the other seems so
short
To get to know these cheeks
Like rusted bicycle spokes unridden
left out in the rain
Sometimes I put my fingers to
brushing up from the neck
Washing up to forehead, closing my eyes
Washing up to forehead, closing my eyes
Dreaming that this is not my limb
That the whole universe is one big
thing
So it is like even in this dark
house at eight p.m.
I am not alone.
Laughter percolates in a tussle of permanent loneliness
Laughter percolates in a tussle of permanent loneliness
Naked honesty since thirteen that
this predictable
Early death, unattended cremation
outcome keeps materializing
The deadliness in sex, fear in
touch
The consequential atrocities of an
untouched human body Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Hungry Corpse
I find a vampiric hunger for the sacred
feminine
That is inside this masculinity
monstrous
Hedging passage into the suicidal,
For this untouched muscle is a
living death
To hold conversation expressing
feeling
Without the belief of perceived
transmogrification
Into the lot of stalker or internet
comment section hunchback
Smattered in either indifference or
ignominious castigation
Isolate into the self-talk, the
closet of silence
Knowing the ringing Tinnitus, the
vertigo illusions
Of wanting to feel greenery inside
The cobwebbed shadowed compartments
of post-divorce Me-Too America
The over-abundance of caution in
dating the nation of the once sexually abused
The reluctance to initiate coquetry
without this hedge maze of consent
Inside one’s psyche that says, “She
does not really even want to be here.”
Knowing I could be fooled for a
decade of a marriage and not know
There is an anchor in me, a carving
tool of metal plunked to the sea floor
Clawed in through hurricane and rig
explosion
A deep-well Louisiana oil muck
The Kraken that fled me into the
cavern of atheism
Safety in nonbelief
That there ever was a plan
Merely billiard ball mathematics
In the countless tears to the empty
side of the bedrock
Crying out as if there was a nest
of breasts to lay my cheek
These eyes at rest in fathomless
softness
So foreign to manhood that this
body shakes in caked on metal
Armored skin to breathe in and out
without fidget
My body becomes ever isolationist
Statuesque dehumanized in such
unipolar sensorial intake
An inner world of convalescence
tasting compassion like contraband whiskey
The slow sip of old fashioned
bitters in a gentleman’s agreement
Hope shall not enter here
I am not allowed to be an injured
thing
I am to be a hunter, confident in a
world of monsters
Daring to say I would like to get
to know you
Is the talk of flowered men stomped
and castrated
Be a devourer, comment on the
deliciousness of women
Boast of rapaciousness, bulge and
detach serpentine jaw
Slide maw, disclose nothing and ask,
“Do you want hear The Snake story?”
I know the terror in misplaced
hope.
The moved-away, the absent
invitations
The wanting to kill myself dogeared
pages
The prayers for any kind of
response
The rut of libraries and skipped
school lunches
The fear of the sitting in a large
space
Building up skin to learn how to go
everywhere alone
To accept this is how life was
likely always to be
I remember the anticipation in
knowing when the jig is up
When the other party you so wish to
believe
Will help break the pattern can
smell the desperation on you
Recycling the exquisite silence
The bubbled garbled speech
Wrinkled oddity
Hours that go by like descending
pillared prison bars from heaven’s cackle
Splintering perception through
which one perceives one more soul off limits
Choice of sequestered silence
absent explanation or interest
In how another is feeling to
interface with commensurate presence
The immensity of disproportionate valuation
registers
Like water to a desert or
rainforest dweller
So it is the nature of things
These mirages
Always so hungry mouthing phantasms
of hope
In dead bodies
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Note to the New Feminist Protocols - 2018
If men are expected to up our games
in the nuance of flirtation,
Knowing our entire reputations can
be destroyed for an incorrect calculation,
And yes this power exists and men
fear it whether you have no intention of misusing it.
We can trust your discretion all we
want, nevertheless this threat exists.
And yes we fear this whether you
want us to or not.
And yes we will not approach some
of you or
Not speak up in certain situations
where we may have in the past where you wish we would,
But we will be by nature more
selective in this paradigm,
Because yes some women do attempt
and accomplish ruining men’s lives with this power.
So in exchange for this respectful
caution,
Please consider applying a
reciprocal calculation
When you choose to break up with
men in the ghosting department.
When you ghost us,
On some level, whether you wish to
apply this or not,
It indicates an implicit indictment
or our incapability to handle a face to face declination
Or cessation of the dating
experience.
Aside from the normal discourtesy,
It is a measure of assignment that
a man is closer to the cannot be trusted
With not turning into an abusive
character
Or is somehow emotionless in
heartache to the end of the relationship in part because of his masculinity.
If women expect men to heighten
emotional intelligence,
Male responsibility must coincide
with female trust
For the masculine to carry
emotional weight including the witnessing by females of his pain.
Do not treat our hearts like
mechanic contraptions for we are not.
That is all.
Stagger Tongue - 20180107
Startle haze spyglass doorway
Coffee shop and I do not drink
coffee
Alcove on the left I see you motion
Invitation to approach
In staggered tongue I admit
sometimes
It takes me a minute, the stimulus
the buzz of it all
Gets to be too much
Two cups of jasmine tea and you ask
me
About being an introvert
I mutter about an amygdala
Comfort quilt brown eyes
In the corner of tea jars and a box
of lost umbrellas
I found you
In a New York sweater in my New
Orleans
There is an observant part of you
That flushed me with permission to
be
That is to say, a man who has been
taught to hide
Who has long talked to the empty
pillow
As if somewhere you were out there in
first acquaintance cliché
Nine years of mine and six years
and four months in age
Wondering why this flight south
Shaken snow feathered goose down
Shaken snow feathered goose down
For a one-bedroom apartment cheap
rent and fifteen houseplants
AmeriCorps let you decide where to
help
Memories of a father’s Jazz Fest
pilgrimage
With music in bold lungs
Zest for clarinet and piano and his
second daughter songbird
Here in black and white cloth,
blond curls
Tidy stature, bibliophile, brilliant
teeth
Help me remember my own in the
whispers
Cured spice bustle of background
mocha aficionado chatter
Middle of three sisters for the
middle of three brothers
Choir singer like my mother
Father held family round table
talks on Sundays
A man with four females
Daughters and fathers
Dating remembering the dead and the
abusive
A morsel in me appreciates you have
him
Knowing the injury of when a woman
no longer can look at a man
My thirteen-year-old daughter
Model for how a man should treat
her
Your father cried watching Cadillac
Records
Beyoncé playing Etta James singing
At Last
I think he must think of you at the
microphone
Younger sister Paul Simon shoes in Connecticut
Older sister pencil skirt big-job
married to the Dane in Chicago
Younger brother coffee-fiend /
record label marketer
Older brother tattoo artist married
to the Canadian in Ontario
Mother paints and you shyly
describing your father’s boating
Without saying the word yacht
As if the gilded tinge of something
to create distance and yet love
About who you are and how close and
sliver of trepidation
Mixed in how others have seen kin
intimacy
As threatening in the frivolity
catalyst quintet
Of those Sunday shared secrets of
where is privacy in bond
Ferried truths of Carnival’s beginning
The bone gang drumming around
America’s Jackson Square
A place of memory 1999 New Year’s
millennium
On the steps of St. Louis cathedral
Crows on a wire outside your
apartment
Recollect an epilogue unanswered of
a woman in a crowd
At the pinch of sunset, you exit
the door
Hair blown out, straightened, those
brown eyes in mascara
Effort offered
I struggle to find the unstartled
aperture to compliment you
Until candlelight at a table in the
Bywater
Admitting the overanalytical too
often bests the obvious
Jazz on the radio, lips moist in
delicious patter
Closed eyes welcoming, hum infused animal
exhalations
Palm on nape
Deliberate desire
Collusion of bodies in passionate
embankment
With a woman prone to buckle her
seatbelt
Knowing she is about to be kissed
I become chaos
Love is not an ordered being
Flood of the tempered
Under streetlights of my new
favorite restaurant for its spectacular parking lot
Remembering a mariner weary of
sirens promising to gnash
The steeple women, the burlesque
scorpions, the kundalini yoginis
A mermaid I have yet hear sing
Tale in a barstool of a
twelve-year-old boy waiting for his grandmother
Who you help find the confidence to
be heard as a person
Walk out of the bar of cat theater
and erotic poetry
Toward a school like the crow on
the wire
Spots we have passed so many times
before
Innocuous and yet we jolt
Henceforth those places bear gravity
inextricably infused in memory
Of how a person does not plan such
intersections
Life startles us stagger-tongued
Such beautiful collisions
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