Magic Marker Jesus

I’ve got some false confidence bundled in a bottle

Knock it back and swallow all of that

Which makes you swell up inside to know everything is going to be all right

Tell you before you go to bed, let those dreams winter in your head

Government blanket parental arrangement

Marching in a voice of assumed production

Where is the purpose of consumption?

Give you a dead man’s name, chant the refrain

He’ll fix everything, because he’s got the magic name

Say it in consensus, wave your hands and pretend to bless

Your magic marker Jesus, speaking in permanent ink

No need to question as we’re on the brink

We’ve go magic marker Jesus, He’ll fix everything.

I’ve got some false confidence bundled in a bottle

Knock it back and swallow all of that

Which makes you swell up inside to know everything is going to be all right

Tell you before you go to bed, let those dreams winter in your head

Let the lemmings herd and roll, just tell me you’ve got it under control

Too many kids and too many bills, taxing out thoughts to quit assuming the will

Is there to overcome that collective blank stare

No body answers and no body asks

Magic marker Jesus tell me about your magical plans

In my own voice

Gorgan Mask

Convince me of an apparition

Squish my heart between your toes

With the permission of a jester in mage’s armor

Stomping off for a crusade for your father’s honor

Retaliate as if I were to commiserate the sentiment

Of your exit from pasture to battlefield

Light the fires of briars grown around your aortas

Ventricles pumping sewerage of blackened quotas

Measuring up equations of a vengeance exhorted

Upon our home, upon my name,

Paralyze my arms and put a sword in my hand

I will lay it down and pray for a divergent stand

To speak my voice and pray my task

That is not blood thirst but a broken heart

That raises my mast, on a mission of bloodied cheeks

I see your barrage.  I close my eyes and breathe

A charred smoke into my lungs, a shattered portal

For a man who has been stung by your lancing blows

Remembering who he keeps repeating he use to know

Out there on a blazing specter barreling down the bolts

To my open chest absorb it all, because I have nothing left

Martyr or pariah for my own nation, abandoned yet standing

And yet you question, if you really did hurt me

Even with the Gorgan mask, unfeeling bastion of certainty

That you are right and I am wrong

That because you could not open up, that my feelings were throngs

Of non-belief pent up in a box, false mistakes you could crush

Upon the rocks you would stone my name and face me with scribe

That you could re-write the years of our lives

With cannon balls and moon shots of fired-up charges

That my knees would buckle to your endless barrages

Of passive aggression with poisonous spines

Urchins buried in the dark corners of our life

Hoping to prick my temper abrupt to show the world

A monster corrupt, lashing out at an invented truth

I trust my patience and you will lose

Implant

Treading on liquid and looking back over the lake

I know I got here but did I walk across or have I sank

To the bottom in a hallucinogenic haze

Puzzling a past in fragments of days

I know I lived them but were they all misplaced

Until now looking in a mirror’s reflection of time on a beach

Sand and the grit of all these broken teeth

Lost ago and replaced implants

False bights too insensitive to detect what might

Be artificial sweeteners and a fractured life

Out there on the water like ice cubes bobbing

Has the solar effect melted the footing?

Lying here broken and wondering

Was there ever there something she could not live without?

Or was I always an accruement to an appendage

Dangling like a bracelet, optional for wardrobe changes?

Was there a space built forever to place a foundation

Insider her caverns of her life’s manifestation

Of a future, a home, a reliable partner to share like a bone

Of her body without which she crumbles

An organic machine grown out instead of constructed

Yet I feel like a jettisoned mechanic’s component

Replaced from a box, pumping on pistons while my

Old self continues to rot, out here on this shoreline

Without knowing the plot.

Yet I know as I stare into the impending show

Of dust and past of grains gone in miniature cyclones of sounds

Waiting on the breeze that one day with my gray hair

And one day where you are not there, but buried deep

I know my tears will not halt to weep for a part of you breathes in me

Even if it’s a place I would rather seethe in anger, bubble out and expel the stranger

Folded up inside my being interlaced with all I’ve seen

My child, my wife, the broken wings of my life

Crippled in a corner, longing for a former shoulder

To cry upon in tandem to have my words have a landing

As if there was some pebble of compassion still left in you

Of hardened love, of elemental proof that one day at one time

You loved me some place outside of mine

So in retrospect I move in sloth

To scavenge the ground for that pebble that I pretend is lost

And as my feet get rooted into this shore, I must implore

It is just another grain of sand, gone slipping through a water gloved hand

Incapable to hold because it has never known a place in real life

Our balance was imbalanced from the beginning

One girl taking and one man giving

Appreciation mystified and where was I to bellow the smoke

And hope the waves of you would wash upon my face

Refresh my faith in all the days I felt taken for granted

For a stepping stone never demands his

Day on top, and so I thought I knew you, love excused you

And know it is melted and I have felt it, your dribbled soul

That there was never much to you when I step away 

Pebbles in your pocket

Pray upon my words like breadcrumbs

That you were out there scavenging for sentiments unfolded

On hinges like a doorway properly oiled with an elixir of movement

Not contingent upon a stranger’s arrival but free

To welcome or to exit or to bolt again on whim

The lessons of yesterdays like pebbles in a pocket

Shiny, blunt or scabbed with rusty crusts of stone

Tendrils of differences wrapped like blankets of memory

Slow and polished with inexact chemistry

Potions and motions explaining purpose in movement

Unfurled like a daily desktop calendar with inked notations

Denoted expected actions and meetings

That may or may not have ever come to fruition

But there was hope, acceptance, and growth spread upon the pages

In candor and in time based in a life expounded in flesh and blood

I wish that my smile or scent had merged in a second gripped

Like magnetized inertia to capture the momentum of sane placement

Of kindness to split the silence between my knowledge of

The pebbles in your pocket like fresh marble wrappers unsheathed

In juxtaposed inquiry like napkins dried unfolded and used

To trade secrets and wipe away the fog of normal passers by

I will give you my name, my second grade year running out to recess,

My eight year old bike ride and eleventh grade prom night,

My studies and professions of lost faith and newfound solace in inner strength

With circles of glass and carnival dances unmasked

Knowing you are ready to listen with life’s discriminating balance

Assumption Combustion

Circling in supposition, hovering for a landing place

A runway amongst the traffic of honking goose-down accords

Soft in sight and commonly distant and taken

Fresh lips stuck to other moving men

An arm, a ring finger, a glance while standing alone

For a motion to the counterpart approaching

In my deaf silence with mouths undulating messages

Into smiles and welcoming kisses drenched in censure

To my approach of another shaken thought clenched

Under foot to stamp out projection into an open countryside

With a roadway and a passenger seat occupied

With the shoulder belt abreast in line to the curvature of

A sentiment expressed without sound belonging to another

But a sound heard inside my own eardrums

Bursting in connection that the radio had competition

But delayed landings continue as the weather dries out the winter’s grip

Fog shrouds the chatter hoping for a soap box

To stand before the spectators as applicants

To rip open the words inside rib cages

Like stretched plastic bags of frozen vegetables

Of concealed greens, yellows, and oranges pent beneath

The frames of commercial marketing and dietary factoids

To unleash the content of a soul’s story read out in the light of the sun’s caress

And a sorted placement could be arranged between

Strangers standing in silence to bask in such new-found nutritional content

To fulfill the famished with human knowledge of substance

Not bathed in glamour or candy-coated congealed fabricated frocks

But raw individualism stampeding outward with the tone of an open ended question

Perusing the concert halls of a previous alien’s identity

To channel Puccini and expand the embrace of a glance to entwine

The fingers of lips upon a shoulder to turn in correspondence

And welcome someone new into a life exposed

Three Days

Three Days in August and the sun melted the sky and so did I

Burst into droplets of a squished time frame

The weather dropped like an expired alarm clock

Ringing the tone of the debtor’s knell across skin and tax returns

Filings blurred across state lines, life altered in absolute collusion

Between water-logged suburban nightmares with grandmothers campaigning on rooftops

For a reallocation of governmentally dispersed orbital jetpacks

To fly right out of here with the haste of a buried assured future

Pummeled into the crater below heaped under mangled family wreckage

Of photo albums, roof shingles, and swollen purple appendages

Tied up by shoestrings to stops signs to keep the wake

From blurring the lines for gasoline and stability dribbling certainties

Over the sidewalk mapped out on Poseidon’s concrete

A trident breaching three-headed directions of family, funds and fear

In mangled nets of where to go from here

Fighting for justice from an indiscriminate enemy masked in

Insurance contract armor with molded speckled handshakes

Loneliness howls on like a Catahoula cur wandering

Beyond thunder or superdome scratching for shards of rotten

Freezer-discard under a felled magnolia with white petals floating

In drainage canals like a lotus primed for a harvest of hallucinogenic

Transportation into a Michalopoulos’ haze away from post-K

World into a second line of yesterdays marching on trumpet and snare drum swells

Of this mediocrity never fathoming the hell

Converging electrostatic storm fronts could twister

A city of families swirling down a sewer of mysterious pictures

Of our America out on display of flesh forgotten and human mistakes

Merging on a Friday evening after the fervor of the Ravens pecking the Saints

Many heard the first call to evacuate, some listened, some ignored

Waiting for morning and the call of the storm

Spread out like Armageddon riding the wind

Cramming and jamming a lifetime into truck-beds on highways

Contra-flowing into exile, a diaspora of sideways

Out into Omaha, Houston, and Camp Williams

A trailer, a prayer, and a catapult pulling decision

Flinging brothers from mothers and daughters from waters

Saturday’s gone sliding and Sunday’s done grinding

The coast of the gulf into a maelstrom of munching

Man’s housing crumbs on the Earth like crackers and fried chicken

Wood beams like toothpicks and roof shingles like napkins

To scrape the Chevrolets out her gum-lines and wipe the oil slick off her cheeks

Gulfport’s gone missing and Long Beach is long gone and

Sunday night has grown far too dark, but the City of New Orleans is still humming along

Despite the sway, the levees they stayed and in came Monday morning

A crack severed the bane of thousands of stranded in an out of the ring

Man’s failed attempts could not hold back this mosquito’s sting

And swell-up she did like a witch’s cauldron’s crab boil

The sheetrock, the groceries, and wedding albums started to spoil

Mixed in the dirty water the trees they all died

As Lakeview was renamed Oceanside

Complete with a garbage mountain five stories high

The helicopters plunked concrete back in the hole

As man tied to pump out the waters without extracting the soul

My city she lived in a million hearts

Dispersed on a cut close line in ten million parts,

Puzzles of pieces mildewed on a table

How will we reconnect a distorted face? How are we able?

To see a new future, to feel a fresh Brees

Without twinge of fear to take it with ease

That life could rebuild, with out recurrence

Of Kiltz-ing and Clorox and hammer to nail

What if the winds re-blast the sails?

What if my heart can’t make this bail

Again to expunge out the water and wait out the flood

What if my family just wants to run?

Abandon my home, my neighbors and friends

What if Dorothy has no place to come home again?

Living a lie out there in Texas

Our Lady of Prompt Succor please protect us

I pray to you now alone and a part

That reason can crawl out from under this wreckage

To shoot like a bean sprout with tendrils bearing a message

Of charity of man and trust in the stance

That the audacity of hope may map out a plan

To see human beings raw and exposed

Flaws and strengths in scars juxtaposed

White unto black and night into day

Comrade po-boys united for a collective innocent’s debt to pay

No body meant this or did this to us, but we are the owners of a heart and a love

Beaten and bruised barely conscious flopped on the ground

Gurgling the rising waters hearing the sound

Of Mahalia like a beacon marching the saints into heaven

But we have work to do before we can join them and share in

The joys of re-joining that holy choir

Now is the time to replant the flowers

My letter to Katrina

Sometimes I blame you

You inanimate twisted fcuk

Logic tells me there is no reason to use reason

To even consider the ramifications of your arrival

In the time frame of my existence as a personal vendetta

Or even a minor inconvenience compared to the massive

Level of clustered tribulations and overall bad ass cock-sucking rampage

You have besieged all the homeless, dead, and vagabonds

Left in your wake, however as a personal matter of selfish retribution

I would like to inform you that you suck.

You suck a sewerage pipe full of donkey shit intermixed with

Strands of discarded Aids’ patient syringes and clumps of home made

Child pornography video cassettes pumping out into Puget Sound

Choking orca and baby sea lions while spawning salmon give up

There kamikaze reproduction quests at the repugnance of your rancid stench

You are the chill on the skin of goose bumps rising in unison

On a mother clutching her infant child lost in the wilderness

As she is surrounded by a pack of starving wolves

Growling and circling a step before pouncing on her jugular

And the limbs of her newborn being torn apart like a rag doll.

You are the sound of laughter of a renegade pack mentality third grade classroom

Generating the crescendo of twenty-one eight year olds detecting the

Discoloration of khaki to dampened brown in the groin area of a little boy

Ignored by his math teacher that relieved himself in his own pants

Out of imprisoned frustration, ineptitude and embarrassment of nobody

Coming to help or allowing him to help himself.

You are the texture of an ass zit on Godzilla spewing acid saliva

Foaming at the mouth to devour a bus full of school children and nuns

On a field trip to see a play about the life of Mahatma Gandhi

That explodes out puce pasty puss in dump truck loads

Leveling the rafters of an orphanage and suffocating the survivors

In a bath of steaming lizard pimple slime that

Will cover the town in Bhopal-mold for the next decade.

You are the taste of the inner spasm of a bifurcating bacteria spore

Straddling a scrap of molded appam crimped under the gutter of an open

Air human waste drain laid out in the belly of Mumbai

That six starving slum-dogs fight over to consume

You are the sound of a thousand lies to a dedicated spouse

To cover up sexual infidelities

With the fifteen year old next door neighbor and seventeen different random acquaintances across the stitch-work of a marriage

Including a waiter at T.G.I. Fridays

That has anonymously transmitted

The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

Across inundated impaled blood cells in a belated re-assurance encounter

During a Sunday morning church service to cover up the flood of prior transgressions.

You are the smell of the back of a 1982 Ford Fairmont of discarded

Burger King bags and mashed cigarette buts as a fourteen-year old

Girl from Kismet Kansas loses her virginity to the thirty-nine year old

Manger of the Dairy Queen name Raymond Blanco.

You are the movement of a needle injecting Mifepristone

Prompting a botched abortion attempt

On a third trimester child that is later strangled in a biohazard bag and

Hidden on a rooftop screaming to his own death in Hialeah Florida

You are the sound of a fourteen-year old boy named George

Who snagged his scrotum in his zipper,

Opening the door to the bathroom and calling his step-mother for assistance as the rest of his family walks in the front door from soccer practice.

You are the sound of finger nails scrapping bloodied concrete

Amongst a heap of intermixed soon to be deceased

Occupants of Dachau screaming out during the process of execution

Clamoring in stutters of broken Hebrew for God’s grace

Only to be drowned out by the laughter of indoctrinated Nazi bellows.

You are the sadistic grin on a lunatic named Dick tailgating an ice cream van

Patrolling a neighborhood, lurking and pouncing at the moment

A huddle of six-year olds lunge for their first bites into mutant ninja turtle popsicles

Only to push the midgets over to steal the frosty-stick reptile-replicas

Extracting a chomp from each frozen-head and smash them into the summer concrete

Just to see little faces cry thus scarring them from ever entering a

Baskin Robbins or a PETCO.

You are the smell of smoldering flesh in Hiroshima of melting newly-made orphans

That will grow up without parents and missing limbs and mandibles that will die of incurable cancer at the age of twenty-three absent of faith in humanity and always questioning why they couldn’t have just perished in the fallout

You are the sight of a wall of water barreling down a suburban thoroughfare

Chugging like a liquid juggernaut to leap up porch steps and pop windows like eggshells

To create blocks of pure humidity to turn photo albums into toilet paper

Prompting geriatric hold-outs to hike attic ladders with hammers to hold on rooftops hoping for a blind-eyed cavalry

You are the crest of a four-story wave arching with an engulfing claw

To drag everything but the slab into oblivion

Scattering random remnants of grocery bags and pajama pants to

Settle in the branches of two-story tree canopies as the tide subsides

You are the sight of a closing door in a thousand families broken apart

Because dreams were crushed under the pressure of your alterations

And tossed into a swirling toilet bowl of a future dammed to live on the cusp

Of Sisyphus style endeavors hoping upon hope that the boulder would just crush them.

I hate you for making us move and uprooting our little life.

For forcing no win decisions and promulgating suicides in drenched living rooms

And you are just water vapor moving in concert and speed without soul

Without remorse and in the cyclical silence you disappear

In a hit and run without exchanging insurance information

So yeah, you suck.