My Sunset Year

I want to forget you so bad; I want to have never met you

When I look in the mirror of the ending of this year I know

Hopefulness for me has been like drinking gasoline

Meeting you felt like I could fuel two thousand miles 

If I could get just one tear out of you 

Before you got one out of me

The hope split the tank for a parallel parked fireball

I am just not a body meant for hope

Hope is old slow food from a disintegrated scroll recipe; 

It’s like a man out of A.A. having god hand him a drink at the track

All your horses won today; just listen to Billie sing “All of Me”

Take my lips I want to lose them, take my arms I’ll never use them

Pick up the Scotch, slip the ice cube and savor the sunset 

They’ll be more

Thinking he saw god surface 

Like a blue whale for five minutes during the year 

And it was the most beautiful damn sight he’s seen in his life 

And he can’t forget it, just won’t shake him like a flower garden on a back 

But she never turns, and her face, and her chest and her heart fade 

Because she makes him feel like time just stopped and the year from that moment 

Just sank like she took the heavens with her, just breathed it all in and rooms went flat 

No clouds, soil just plateaued three sixty nothing to see 

Irony in the path of St. Claude in the Marigny of not wanting loud 

She has history and he is making his in bar theaters behind a microphone

On the same stages she spoke of dancing and he feels her spirit 

In the Shadowbox, the Allways, Istanbul, and Siberia when Dan P came back 

I want the ghost of you to fuck up and be plain

Obliterate illusions with something trite, common, and obnoxiously plastic 

To zap the art like a mosquito drawn to the light like one of millions floating 

Annoying for skin not so soft and would cease to bring comfortable in a bottle 

No spray, no alcohol, no ice chest, no cucumber, no Italian folktales 

No effort to offer comfort, just Scotch and a sunset of forget 

Washing me in like an old fashioned orange spit out before it hits the horizon 

Because hope is the elixir of madmen seeing things that are not there 

Acting like all people do

Wanting that which we think is that just bit better than we deserve, just out of reach 

Leaves the whole world grasping, empty handed and heartbroken

Staring at the sky for fireworks 

Thinking that sizzling flash just might jump in my eye and set me ablaze 

I might be on fire tonight 

I might explode; this, this feeling right here 

That’s a decade of detours explained sipping soul music on a freshly painted porch 

And the mosquitoes are not out in New Orleans

No machines, no lotions, no chemicals, just natural 

And the breath is just 

Sheer gravity of thought smoked eons out skin

Is just whoosh

Into the scratching film around a body 

Motioning through a cinematic divide of iterated respiration 

Is just 

Individualistic devils occupying and exiting upon in and exhalation 

The world seems to want men to be so hopeful 

All it takes is the courage to breathe

And this year I did, I sucked up a courage I never thought I had 

Hopefulness that hard when the world tells a man

The fireworks are already gone by the time you see them

The mosquito is just biding time before draining blood

The tank will run out before you find a station to refuel

You’ll just get yourself lost with all that poetic nonsense 

Like a labyrinth until forgetfulness becomes the fleece you’re searching 

And intimacy dies in a shadow of a corner of a man talking himself to sleep 

Pen Hole Lungs

There is a tension like a film that builds up on my lungs

In a fire to express crevices of being to burn on the page

Speaking rarely accessible writing-substitutes unavailable skin to touch, to get it out

Want smashed into ink smeared like a tongue bedding in a masochistic love

Bartering for the punishment of pushing the hollow clear

For the dog pile to refill with limbs and noses sniffing assholes

Wandering for hopefulness

And this dead thing hacks in the bronchi for a wizened man

To be looked at straight in his eyes for permission to blow his head away

Like an exploded mosquito thinking of the labyrinths he cannot escape

The visions of flower beds and birds pecking away for fallow seeds

The dead winter of the wanting, the gray solstice of hope fizzling

The horizon of a hunchback and church bells, ropes and curved necks

A gypsy dancer and whiskey feels like excuses filling up air bags with pneumonia

To breathe possibility in a fool’s errand awarded with a pork pie hat to skank alone

In the squares of St. Claude Avenue

Oxygen is overdue and the flood is inculcating coverts

To just give up in how high the grass is overgrown

The series of ignominious transitions of feeling so un-mourned

To have no debate, no second thought on the other end of the see saw

Just slumps of naught piled in this end of the pendulum weighty and clogged

Wanting ventilation stabling my chest for a subway tunnel to the surface

Using an ink pen and a yogi palm gone native

Knowing going into it this is just how it will end in the ache

That the steps one takes to substantiate destroy the foundation

Because every effort a man makes communicates weakness

If one cares the other should not because better is possible as the unattainable is sacrosanct

Just the human way, to want what does not want us like a child sniffing for god  

Daddy-Daughter Dance – fifth grade

Do you have any idea how much you have made it hurt

To be her father;

The additional weight stuffed in the school bag

Father Daughter dance in January

Everything back in that town like walking into the mouth

Of the Dog from Hell saliva like ashen paste

To supplicate progression in the retention of the bar stool

To sit back and slop suds imbibing the lunacy of a country harvest

I have had to let it go; the idea that I will ever function

With love itself, not because the dearness of her

Feels like the putrid distance I feel sorry you retain

But just the hurt of being dunked on a two week cycle

Back in that drunk-tank of strawberries and Nashville-pop candy-butter

Slathered on in hay rides, Jesus, and razor blade pecan-barbed wire crusted pies

Milked from your sagging tits from the kid you had with him and not me

The house we built I drive up to alone six years later

Wanting a damn passenger for my seat like I was not such a god-damn loser

Outnumbered four to one at minimum picking up our progeny

Reminding me how much I try to convince myself I am built for something more

Than being a husband, a father, surely that hum-fuck town

But not her as children lie dead, she’s the one kept to breathe soccer and tween-dom

Bordering on the knowledge of what testes, ovaries and adultery do

I am embarrassed by the idea that I am still stuck in the existential

This forward is always a reverse out that acre sized drive way

Avoiding the diaper boxes by the curb you leave out on Sunday nights

As I return the fifth grader to drive an hour south to New Orleans sleeping in music

Too loud and artistic to fit in with the Clear Channel Country you suck-up

Sycophant-industrialist go down on Ayn Rand and slurp you a wet one!

I just want to run some nights after all these years and pretend I am not a dad

Because she has your husband like you always made her call him at six year old t-ball

I guess I forgive, get over, some days when the fog clears I remember

Anger still thunders not because of what you did or do, but at myself

Because some days I don’t want to

Some days I don’t want to be her dad

I am disappointed in myself for that, just dying, just god damn dying

Waiting, hoping for something in the tangible to change it all

My miracle, like I deserve one

And I see your life, that giant porch mansion monster we built

The husband the son to pair with our daughter, a new penis to bend

An upper tax bracket and vacations like rain and I see how empty you are

Because you know I know

And that makes me the greatest threat in the world

So all of it, all of it, the lies, the lawyers, the theater

I am like nuclear waste to you;

I have moved seven times since the hurricane and I am tired

I have another realtor and sign out front

These hermetic tendencies piling into a writer’s alcove in the Marigny

Wanting different, thinking so, feeling a drought

Praying to who, praying for what, just faith one day

Something will grow

Peace     

Childishness in Three Parts

Part One:

There is a look a child gives a parent

Knowing disappointment wafts from the sweat in his armpits

Pungent in the room from the effort dedicated to his deeds

The child is old enough to know better, yet doesn’t

He stares at his feet, looks at the wall

Knowing the damage done implodes into the self

A boy takes what is not his

Commands who is not in his employ

Breathes the haughty draught of conceit

Believing he is entitled the accredited bits of power

Accumulated in his meager pathetic years

To act like an adult chaining, whipping, enslaving

Like a cumulative error rippling the maturity of mankind

The soul of the world remains a child

Embarrassed taunting rage

The way a child wants to be reprimanded by his father

For the wrongs he knows he should have known better

Thirsting for the censure, the switch, crestfallen gaze

Part Two:

Any civilization that assumes the pride

To demote another as inhuman commercial stock

Pays in the spiritual loss of its divinity

One may say no living remain who were there

Blasphemy’s echo cascades through the privileges and detriments ancestrally conferred

Blues, jazz, hip hop, Soul, Bamboula rhythm cascading

From the Ivory Coast to Congo Square spirited in Houma Nation and Refugee African

That hijacked rhythm is why Elvis is a king of nothing

A pauper to Big Mama Thornton’s perspiration

Dribbling into a fraudulent pool on his Mississippi brow

Like the busted lip of an arrogant boy

Shooting the angel he beats who bites him

Blaming the fire in the bark on something other than the leash he assumes to apply

With righteousness as if he is above the court of God

Sniveling behind batons and gavels to extend harsher judgment into generations

To mask the guilt for doing so

Planted in a cotton-row mind of lies

The lessons of our existential divinity root in the darkest hues of our depravity

To see why a man can be so simple as to use his eyes to measure character

We witness our bestial futility flowering in the failures of our evolution

A badge calling the power-hungry from shadows to tremble fear

That the angels should be angry; the angels should want to smote the childish

With a righteous fist, the angels have chosen to sing, to dance, to make poetry

Yet nothing will change until the pride of privilege evokes the responsibility

Of drinking from humility’s cup in the interconnection of water and blood

Of what makes a man sweat on a summer’s day shingling a roof

Trying to protect his family from a hurricane ripping the Southland

Picking up a hammer and a nail knowing the system

That manufactures those tools, the truck and the fuel to the store

Is disparately shaded to teach humanity a lesson of the self

Maybe one day we will be humble enough

Part Three:

Seeing the military-industrial-prison complex for what it is

KRS-One echoes “the sound of the beast officer, overseer

Overseer, Overseer, Officer, officer, officer, over

You need a little clarity, check the similarity” to the new Jim Crow

The money picked out the corn rows is disparate arrest and conviction rates

For not only the same offense, but the idea that someone was offended

For the politics of pocket contents of where hands go and baggies get stoned

Like a reason that Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate on the planet

Small town sheriff’s getting daily tariffs

For housing the overseer’s criminally-minded barracks

Of mandated sentences to ensure heads in the beds can’t build them fast enough

Except for the dead that die in the frenzy of what a turnstile-mentality

Spins for hands out of view or up, don’t shoot the patient

Can’t fund a single-payer healthcare system, no mental-health

Wouldn’t want humanity to think clearly about the way information on pain is dealt

Inked out and stamped to Corrections Corporation of America, for profit facilities

This is red-state trickle-down economics of five percent of global population and twenty five percent of prisoners;

The man on the horse is still herding

Growth rats in a stock price climbing like a 1984 head vice

Orwellian Big Brother shed civil rights

Because in the end of a prison riot the man stabbed never happened

The nightstick is a cash register extending back to the judge with the clicker

Taxing progressively like a reverse income tax on being poor and black or brown

Whipped in a frenzy by Roger Ailes to bank the frenzy of the Fox chasing the Hound

Getting a lily audience to believe immigrants are raiding the coffers and

Big Brother is not him threating to take away their guns for the inevitable revolution

Big Brother knows is coming; so the Fox tells the dogs, be ready for the cause

Only the NRA is Big Brother’s private army fearful and willful

To help the upper put the germ of the idea that the middle need to stockpile bullets

To be wary of the uprising of the bottom

So the Fox shows the same damn tape of a street riot burning

Or an airplane crashing into a building, waves a flag for makeshift patriots

Sage Francis echoes “if after it settles if we’ll find who provided power to radical rebels   

The melting pot seems to be calling the kettle black when it boils over”

Terror alerts and the function of torture becomes sanctified behind public lies

Crank that broom stick in the anus; feed a man through his rectum

Water-board the gullet to become that which you proclaim to decry

Breathe the violence Martin taught us would perpetuate war after war

Never listened to a damn word the man said, but have the arrogance to put a moment

Of the man at the capital

Pick, you can’t have both, aspiring to a moral standard that severs the soul of our divinity

By recognition there is no separation only a one

Beating, dying, trying to breath with a cage of rats strapped to our head

Bargaining for some out, saying anything for a chance for it just not to be us

Take him, strike up Guantanamo, beat Rodney King, shoot Michael Brown

Asphyxiate Eric Garner and strip the oxygen for the world  

Stand there and say nothing in an ivory tower

Until fear is like kerosene coating a nation of childishness

Burning all of its roots to the Earth

Like a selfish enigma of forgotten love 

Road meets Gut

I wrote until my guts bled

Split like a buck in the road way staring into head-lamps

The variations of gray scripted into failed panoply

What I felt I can no longer think of

Like 1984 and the newspeak Big Brother silence

Convinced me it was never real

A photograph manufactured images of poems unwritten

Falling out in dyslexic alphabets spelling the banality of the physical

As if that is all one has the ability to verify

The motions, the locations never to go, roped up like war zones

Kaboom! and no room, no quarter for a rejoinder

Only shush soak in the absent repartee

I am praying for someone better

That makes me feel hope the way you did

Before the hard-drive wipe in chloroform

That makes me want to stay indoors and lament

To put up permissions to seed for longer

When the clock was up and I was clueless

I wished I would have gotten to throw the meat on the fire

Before you combusted out the door, savored for a linger

The almost taste is such a bastard

It’s like it never leaves a man

As if the real thing would show its flaws so much more clearly

Rattle the tongue and allow progression

Nah this is the worst, like a dream-thing hovering

Spectral haunting of what could-be, the horror of what could-be

Hoping for a brush with cannon balls to obliterate the haze

The way reality is in cinders

The way the guts bled, the armor never existed beyond skin

Pushed and pulled injected with faith

And spilled, just spilled, pooling like a god damn run-over prayer

Sometimes those high-heeled tires weigh a ton 

Shake, shake, shake

Trying to shake this depression

Look at the walls differently as if they ever move

To figure out what is worth a damn to do in this world

The rollercoasters and the spots under oak trees

To sit, to watch, to dance

As if I could ever learn the steps

Move with the music in tandem

React to the melody of the moment

Not meditated simply done, to let it be

To exit the labyrinth of the contemplative mind

As if the motion, the step could be in sync

Not prospering umbrage, division, rancor

To send poxes upon the doing as if a man was drawn to try

To want to participate with the conundrum that is connection

These severed bones braving the will to stand and engage

In motion with another as if the elusiveness of the mutual

Could somehow cease and become like the impassioned plea

To swirl in agreement that what a man is

Could be that diamond shining not for the universe

So desperately large, but for her

Her alone in that twilight dawning eternity

Like a whispered word of wisdom

Coming down into the echoed hammer of the Lord

To let it unto the moment of love’s gambol

I am attempting to shake this coat of compression

As if I could only be this misshapen adventurer succumbed

To a narrative painted into the height of a body the wrinkles of a face

The wounds and kisses upon a soul soaked

Praying that all the dance steps could be correct on pure accidental confluence

To have that moment of grandeur for a once in a term of existence

Capable of a miracle, to feel god’s presence without the hysterical irony

Contradicting everything a heart hopes to be, knowing it is exactly as it is

 Dark, alone, pulsing, awaiting the stop