Puffer-Fish Poisons and the Antidote for Hope

Puffer-Fish Poisons and the Antidote for Hope

Scrape these days off like calcified skin

In spectacle flecks of sprinkled evidence

That a man lived, a man attempted love

In a smoke haze affront to all of that which

Would appear natural, conceding the likelihood

Of a travesty over a pinnacle of exuberant triumph

Into the romping grounds of knighted troubadours

Serenading the pantheons of star-crossed neophytes

Believing in the power of tomorrows like American debt

Piled up like greased sludge lubricants to keep that blood pumping

On the exacerbated quandary witch of hope

Cackling on the doorsteps of another year

Another stack of invoiced revolutions

Without recognizing just how dizzy this planet has become

I don’t like the way she treats me when she is angry

I say good night to her and that year, and that brief grip on love

Like the dying parakeet in the mine, the harbinger of a season ago

Knowing the allure of not having to bite into the soap bar of loneliness

The alabaster anesthetic to misguided faith in that bastard hope

I sacrifice attending to your pulpit demands

Inebriate myself on the toxins of knowing I must drive myself

Home at some measure of time between two and five am  

And cocoon into nothing, to admix the serum of my genetic makeup

Into a concoction of stagnate bog and xanthium gum

I welcome nil this familiar pox

Wishing upon fantasies of my own normalcy

I can not bare your children.  I can not be your parent in tandem.

I can not fund this voyage and finance this foul resentment

Fuming through archways to stifle my respiration

The puffer-fish quills of your Fugu tongue poison me rouge

Yet expected in my sequestered honesties 

I beg of you a reprieve, a solar renaissance

The tetrodotoxin antidote to recover my faith in hope itself

Shore Bird

Shore Bird

Disseminate the tetrodotoxin through a foreign liver

Incapable of handling the potency of these hours

Parading in pungent practice that answers rest

In phantom conversations I will never have

The quills of these vagabond words prick

Yet never touch, pain, but fail to register as present

On the roll call of this conference bartering

Conversation for stares at a white ceiling

I am torn asunder in this disappointment

In the wake of reactions and actions belted out

Like floggings and boiler plates to substantiate

The bar bolts of what my neighborhood emotes

Hope a foul truffle, an abomination hunted and avoided

By the genus Sus, detected and

Subjected to every nervous inch of inspection

Yet, never actually read or seen, just perused in an approximate vicinity

Sniffed at with feral nostrils

Bleeding for a domesticated utopia

And the olfactory processes of St. Hubert’s hound

Are buried deep in the belly of a Dachshund

Grunting and snapping and never quite catching

On to the fact that all I ever wanted was right there on the fringe

Yet an eternity away in the nuance of compromise

Of the actual components that mattered to me

Not that structure of these surface tension ponds that I can not change

Move on in absolute and neither commend or condemn, but

Parcel a solace in the solidity of that which is by nature must

And focus on that which by its essence may

Or may not be, so that a pelican can finally land on solid shores

Without the shrill fetch of brine grating these nostrils

I prayed for you to find logs for this camp, and

My exhaustion in this stance is palpable as a medicinal opiate

To wallow again in the soap bath of bitter lonely

Fox Hole

Head down, head gray, why is this weight crumpled up

In the bin of these days straggling to escape this fox maze

Depressed over events drenched in old regrets

So rung dry the idea of drinking them for one last

Parch busting desert molecule of liquid refreshment

To satiate for an oasis of pity drowning in the sands of living

This vagabond life and gritty teeth fight with the spite

Of ten thousand men going to war for their god

In a blanket faced angry mob, to avenge and ascend

Into a higher calling over this hate, those days have burned

And singed on the pavement sands of what I use to believe in

That faith is gone and misted away and that love for self-hate

Is a fairy mirage, a trickster on a whim lost and gone

In the playground of a former lie and former life and former wife

Prancing in the muck swamps of torture and romp

On all on the foxes whimpering in the barrels

Instead of leaping and biting and nipping and crunching

Those bitch nymph wings like dragon fly munch things

To be disposed of and moved on from: this depression

Is not something to run from, but embraced with the fervor

Of a warrior’s grace and shed her blood in the race

To proclaim that those seasons of summer drinks in the Sahara of my everything

Are over that I don’t need that shot glass of pity to keep this valley from weeping

I can rest and rest and find the excess to take my peace like a sword from its sheath

And slay the vile horde amass in insect stores of abdomens

Puffed in the swell of my own blood, drinking their milkshake punctures

As if I was their whore putting out decency for the route

And I give you this nuclear fall out, the infection of pity in my stream

Is no longer deemed necessary for my daily confessionary constitution

To my evolutionary contributions to become this butterfly me

Fly up out of this dune dotted den and this gray fox has wings and will never

Submerge in that barrel again

Vision of What Will

Vision of What Will

I had big fish dreams once

Stories about what will be and would be done

Like gargantuan whale shark tails swishing liquid walls

To crumble in bubble granite devastation in their wake

My aspirations were mighty and irrefutably magnanimous

In the net of preparation and on the preface of expectation

To actually do anything about them

Time was full like a pitcher on a window sill high in iced tea

Lemon pinched and sugar swollen ready to be drunk

The rungs of the ladder enumerated in an escalating sequence to be counted

And desperation and disappointment were lurking like

Post apocalyptic scavengers in a desert wasteland

Waiting to spear me with their realism points

Brash and cock strong too numbed and pronged

On the tip like a bull frog on a swamp rouge trident

An imitation weapon of the troglodyte nonchalant

Yet deadly and grasping at this bastard hope of wanting

In a boomerang consideration that one day this yearn

Will come on back, yet flumped and trumped by indigestion

Flayed rungs splintered and torn with the complacent virus  

Of accepting that which is for what will inevitably be

A choice for all choices and lethargy towards mutability

Decision trees of barren fruit rotting and carved of options

Like ransacked post-war shanties, hope is a vagrant abandoned

Maybe there is more than this as I wait out these dozen more years

But the cloud of this brackish fog permeates my vision

Clogs my breathing and suffocates my will to pray honestly for greater than

I meditate on the grail of passive acceptance to let this weather pattern be

Rather than blow with these lips for it to lift or to curse its texture

As a subtext to every scent on my clothing, every backdrop to my home

Every point of reference for every neighbor I encounter

I ask you God to liberate me from this prison as if

Mandela could take my hand into this mythical justice and set it aside

For later years and live in the beauty of this Frankyl suffering now and own it

Like a champion medal, let me be for all that could be

will

I now despise the word will

You have taken the banal nature of a future tense

And mutated it with your despicable quasi-masculine nature

To intentionally demand the word to be lower case

As if capitalization would be like a compliment

Commending you as worthy for recognition in some way

And I fight not fighting you, for not wanting to despise

Or crush or blatantly put you in some irregular place

That I normally don’t care

Story Time for Thirty-Nine

Story Time for Thirty-Nine

I do not know how to tell my life’s story

Without taint of despair, drama, and stares

At all these road side asphyxiations, mosquito scars

Bloodied gums and spat out teeth scraped up from concrete

Lost in the lawn blades like lambs for the slaughter

Sounds crippled and maimed and jumbled into the same

Resigned stoic implant grin of pensive reflection of all that is left in

Is garbage pungent with self-destruction

Of a pain that I find in no way honorable or comparable

To the great war stories of human tragedy, more like a footnote

To a news feed on a random Monday media cycle to be glanced

Sipped, not savored for its sentient body of flavor

Mud slogged toes and ankles parched for parole

From these Sisyphus-style endeavors

I made and make my choice and in that I pray for a foreign voice

To find compensation in the duration of this camped up isolation

The mirage of my happiest moment all lost and incapable of remembrance

Without taint of the sentences carried out in blood drawn

Days beaten and what is there left in the keep, but a man arguing with himself

Alone in his sleep for a black out curtain and shudder speed prolonged

An aperture blanketed with some alien form of speech

To shut out these visions, to throw a comforter on this world

Like a shadow dome reality that could lighten this load from crushing

The paragraphs they keep coming reminding that all of the timing

Of these choices on love, on placating loneliness with the faith in her was enough

To slay my sanctuary and run back to that lovely step of alone

The gospel of none, praying for answers and believing in one

Man to stand here and take these sounds resides in my head

In this garden of vines overgrown waiting for Medusa’s stare

The peace of stone living out these twelve years, acting as if I want any change

In here, so weak, so feeble and incomplete, wanting for energy for drink for the plenty

Believing in nothing, wanting not to move, maybe it is better to wallow in this tomb

The solace of over exaggerating the doom of being abused

At least this bitterness is like a closet quilt friend, soft and familiar

And purple stitched to my skin, I can pretend, I have the smallest of answers

Buried in this solace like a totem for Thomas to squelch the fires of this doubting

And rise up in the columns of this realism mounting

I just wanted to reach our for a hand and not have to, but get to explain

And not have the names call out feel like Narcissus looking into those waters 

Obsessing over my own problems like golden child toys

Never relinquished for an attic or door to let them walk away

So growth for more was possible in the letting go of pains for a transient semblance

Of justice vagabond on a road strangled and mangled and never made it quite here

Those words of peace to appear like a hasenpfeffer meat from the haberdasher

To the butcher’s blade I could eat that feast and drink her milkshake

And garnish all the stolen wealth for my own sake and sip like a king

Over this emotional high ground estate I had built for myself in these

Self-centered fantasies of what I had earned in the misfortune accumulated

Let it go, let it go, let it pass, let it be for in the quest I have lost the grandest parts of me

Scattered like cogs in a watch to keep time for what was dropped in the fury

Flailed in the fervor, shocked out the stature that these seconds and minutes and hours

Have not been tracked or kept, but spat out and bent under foot and trod

All for the sod grown in this other abode full of wonder and color

And potential, but sot with the inebriated façade of hurt like a shirt

To wear with every exertion of coercion to participate in this prolonged war

The pain of seeing these sights and not owning them for now

And not for what was once alive before

My Anchor

My Anchor

You are my anchor in every sense

And I can not shed myself of you

Without abandoning her

My brown-eyed-girls staring back at me

Those songs and times awash and gone

Disparaged love like a flotsam jettisoned for the journey requested

White bleached porch and all the curves of that mansion

Wander like a Shining hedge maze monster

Lurking to come alive and slash my jugular

In my sleep not so far enough from here

To come and re-impress me with all that was

Like the past of oppression on the laws of this land

Defined by why, I am here for her and not for you

But how is she not the string attached like a tangent

Tunnel my thoughts must run through

To see those brown eyes starring

The radio comes on blaring of 1999

Passing and a French Quarter sot and staging

A decade to be and Chicago airplane with a New York tragedy

Andersen falling and the head partner calling at 4:30 on a Monday

Packing my things and things are not ok

Government actions and learning the division of fractions

Rebuilding and kindling self-esteem in a trenching down

For the battles of hallways and crawfish red kitchens

Fixer-er-up living with concrete backyards trekked-out under the stars

With a flat roof slapped on and scars with the slosh of renovated tears

Falling and calling that life was at it again and who could I turn to

And it was all just pretend in a nuclear error with your hand on the button

So very assured that I had the tonnage to handle this fallout

The rocks on to a Lone Star life and all there was: was her and you and an I

Southwest plane trips and training in weeks and a starter-kit-over life

With our dreams getting rained on out in the street

I called to you to sell that shadow box river-ridged-up shack

And all of the stress of never being able to move on crept up my back

Like Gollum riding threatening the deed and what solace could you give me

But disdain in the refrains that it was my fault we were here in that state

And I saw that mythical white gate porch to your castle

Salvation in the rappel down from that sanitary Texas

Into this Indian town stasis, living and giving you all that was

Residing with your parental ogres and pretend this was worth the times

To get you your drink of the whitest of wines in that sip

To rock in that chair and end all of this for moments I could look back

And compare and contrast and weigh out the times to be worth it for all of the

Crimes I had seen the dirty hands the drowning in the streets

Of whatever I ever wanted was never for myself to just live to find a common joy

In the life of pleasing you, such a fallacy failed and it all rang true

In departure and relived barter to play out the hand of having

Any memory of love, flayed in your hands in that wrap around wounding

Anchored here in this town to her and to you entwined in a crime

Of what I must un-entomb to move out and on and up and gone

And to cut the chain of these links and just see her in these: my streets

My life and no longer you and to do that I can not fathom how

But I must fly on this motorcycle over ramp and all these spectators

To slalom this sky and jump like a eagle and fly beyond the comprehension

Of this strawberry pit, seeded in the spite of knowing I am better than

And relinquishing it, just might not matter to anyone anywhere and that is a care

I can let go of to submit to knowing God may or may not exist
I may never get it right, but there is each day to do my best
(It could always be worse)

Even if it is boring, maybe I can make my own life for exploring

To read to love in the best way I can find, whether she is all I ever have

And I have to carve out my memories with the numb blade of a staff

With discernment over surgery to have both patients survive

Maybe I , maybe I can cut the anchor

Effigy on the Bridge

Effigy on the Bridge

I am as frustrated as all fuck

A man on a bridge clubbed in the head and pushed off

White skin stained and scraped and red shed and raped

Out in the middle of the thoroughfare

I don’t even know the fuck where to begin?

Or to end this ransom for my pain

How much do I have to pay to have someone take this all away?

Maybe a drink or maybe a smoke or maybe some offshoot

However remote in a path I never imagined I could try

I will be hating you for Christmas every year

Until something changes, my wish for your unhappiness and for me

To get the fuck out of here

Like an anchor on my ankles and a break upon my deepest thoughts

I am in every way lost, I want to forgive you and forget this

Get in a car and never see this endless list

Of images that remind me of you the person I wish was on this bridge

Instead of me and I could hang the image of our memories in effigy

I don’t wish you hurt, I just wish one of us gone, I wish I owned my own life

And the location of my front and back lawns were approximate to a better taste

A better colored flavor to a more adaptable place

Because no where feels like home and everywhere feels like a palindrome

 Madam I’m Adam I’ve been gone for so long wandering in this fire swamp

Buttercup when are you going to show up?  This pirate is lost at sea

In this vagabond utopia for my nemesis in a counter-proposal to my consciousness

I don’t know where I would go in stead, but the bravery to barter for my soul

Bleed into my head like a rampant thought to survive on my own in this world

Knowing life is over here, none of this is worth it and you have pushed me to the brink

Of getting everything you ever wanted if only I were to leave

The only thing you can not control is how I suffer here and I will bear it in silence

And swell it well with a blues guitar man singing in a bar in my soul

Shrieking out prayers to a God I don’t believe in for a hope I have abandoned

Screaming in silence for a phantom savior hoping I can and at least break the numbness when I bleed