Drinking at the Surface

Drinking at the Surface 

All I can think to do is write,

To keep wading through the time planting here

Like an incremental tide risen forever days ago

Undulating in the space above and below my lips  

Taking breaths when I can

Uncertain if the liquid will swell

Aware of the mud clumped higher than my ankles

Below the black fluid, struggling only makes the mass stickier  

Solidified in the diatribe of too many factoids logging about

Beneath the surface, old tires, chain saws, six-pack plastic wrappers

Smudged-ink contracts, fire-proof boxes, VHS cassettes, Bibles

Laundry chutes, minivans, lace cookies and Christmas trees  

Anchors of career in oxidized apathy rust, oil-slick concern

Wipe the surface, disperse the benzene from the hose

Press the keyboard, organize the digits, characters, places the aces under the twos

Four-suit spider solitaire victories the notable successes of the day 

Random access memories disempowering the urge to complain

Trash can build up of un-recycled prints jobs, screens of blah

Kamikaze battle plans at least their deaths occurred with a faith to at least one purpose

United for nothing, oblivion of dates, passing, merged into one unending  

Present day, sunrise is a meaningless demarcation noting

The absence of a border where astronomers would like to note the point at which

A revolution based on a polarity and the shifting of season on one orb around another

Preposterous, the grid, the slab, the blackness encompasses all  

This tipping, this turning is that of one ant in a hill drooling in a rotating direction

Under the command of pheromones amongst trillions of others

Babbling the idea that any idea was unilaterally conceived and consummated

End the dirt, the mirage, the practice that these tattoos  

Bubbling on my calves, torso, and biceps are scars that I would rather not view

The water is serving a purpose shielding me from facing intimate disgust

I have prayed for the pheromones to raid my brain, guide me God

I give my subservient submission to a tasteless, odorless, colorless path   

Trying has gotten me nowhere but the fringe of Satan’s needle

Rollicking laughter that the devil could be anyone, but my own hand

First Date Conversation Topics

First Date Conversation Topics  

I was contemplating first date conversation topics

Taboos, bear traps, careful tread, upheavals,

Sanctuaries, pleasantries, common courtesies, meals

Shared over sweet breads that are not bread at all  

Glandular reactions, guttural permissions or denials

Cascading in the innate reaction to the first look upon a face, a body

An opportunity burgeoning or imploding within the possibility

Explained by ones penis or vagina reacting with the applause of blood flow 

Words, encyclopedic meandering sentences appearing out of crannies

Of pasts to volleyball conversations aloft to avoid the shattering dangers of silence

Exploding upon the table top into glances towards wallpaper or paint

On a ceiling to avoid the prolonged eye contact that lovers use  

Like Gatling gun ammunition barreling at each other for salvos of want

Burning each other alive with the desire of new found land

Staking claim for the evening like salivating canines ready

To have werewolf intercourse growling and furious

In Egyptian cotton high thread count sheets some hours from now  

Happiness momentary or life-long wrapping at the city

Like a broken levee prepared to enrapture the first story of every building

Hold back the water with such tiny turns of speech, realism, truisms, facts

 

Parrying fencing swords of attention to details overlooked in the pheromones

Of odor wandering off collars slipping into the octaves to earlobes

Tongues pressing over lips raunchy and mischievous

 

Like a sixth grade class watching the clock for recess  

Play time is different now, at this hour flinching in red rover

Broken by yard signs put out in history breaking the lines of defense

Like German planes blitzing London peppering metal  

Divorced, an eight year old daughter, fought like hell to be able to see here

Damned that to try to leave a town I have not been able to escape

Trying to deceive myself into believing in hope like thinking the wasps will not sting

If the chemicals concluded I was only passing through 

Depressed for more years than I can count, no pills, wavering doubts

Vagabond conscious I will always have myself, home is the breath in my mouth

Craving the occasional oblivion, wary of my own complications when staring beauty in the face, running away knowing the pace  

Has never set in sequence too fast, too slow, always off, always cold

To the summer, hot to the winter, sweating and shivering, stammering and inhibiting

Any measure of certainty, want to move on to what, to live where, to do what, to care

About whom, for how long, does it matter, is there a ledge to grab, a way to prepare  

Only flesh to stab with the questions of new nights exposing

First sights for a new face, the young victims of war games

I will always be weird inside, I will always be off

Love will never nest, broken eggs and smiles crest  

At angles compromised, weighted down by former lives

Assumption combustion by the date of demarcation

Then and after, craft the front of synthetic laughter

Courage for a daughter, to show her a well-adjusted father  

Another lie, another time, hearts are not muscle

Repair on its own, whatever happened, nothing but acting

Rise in the morning, commute, work, paycheck, storing

House in a town that killed me years ago  

Faces in a swimming pool drowned in the things I wish I never got to know

Friends are jesters with cattle prods shocking the water standing on logs

Giggling at my limp limbs floating in the deep end

No where to go just drinking the urine of the children staying afloat  

Pissing in fountains, wishing in cauldrons, deals with hags

Alcohol on porches and standing on double slabs

Metal, wood, concrete, insulation, glass, paint, epoxy, castration

Scrambled organ donor cardiac scooped and chucked  

Over a fence and eaten by none, not even the bacteria

The unknown microbes, the stomping of harsh times

Forget it all, never talk, never say, conversations immature for first dates

Peppering behind fences, cowardice cures, accusations  

Haunted mystery tours, no apologies, no explanations

No connection to the man that I was, to the man that I am

I am no one now, just a shell with a smile that is not a smile

Inches pretending to be miles, the hurt is right there a millimeter away  

I can stick, pivot, dance and deliver a placebo of man

A time and a promise of sculpture and delivering plans

None of it is real, the monster ate me and what you see is only her meal

Slumped in a pressed suit, wing tips and bright eyes  

A goddamn lie, tired of recycled well wish conversations as if facts will ever matter again

Karma Redux

Karma Redux 

I must have been such an asshole in a past life

Call this morning, “Did you send us your resume?”

A former employer, the one that audited the fraud empire

No, not the publically traded one, the nonprofit one

With the left wing political scandal instead of the right  

Me, “No my aunt must have sent it based on a contact.”

Old secretary lady, who is apparently in charge of human resources

“So, are you interested in coming in for an interview?”

Me, “No”, Her, “If, you change your mind let us know.” 

Know, know, I know you pay shit, treat humans like cattle in a CAFO lot

And have no problem concealing federal crimes for a pay day

The evidence is overwhelming the mocking caws of crows

Want to return to your New Orleans, son  

Come back for the monsters of your past

Let them have another turn, the zombies of the present need rotation

Rural, urban, loneliness, the perversion of a semblance of hope

Cackle cough neutron bombs with a one liver blast radius  

Drown in bourbon that retread choice would bring you

No one else is listening only plump divorcees

Too tall or too fat, breasts hanging out with self discipline

Buried like a dog bone, generating the confidence of a rock  

Kicked from the skirt of a tire soccer-style to the buffer zone of an interstate

Stranded amongst grass blades and beer cans,

Half-smoked cigarettes and drive-through lane straw-wrapper flotsam

Misfits and polka-dot painted bed rooms in a house that will not sell  

The dog grooming van was too tall, I am sorry sir but it was too fucking tall

And that day that you laughed about how it was all too easy

Working out, coming together, did it blow up into maggot confetti

Because of the pessimism or pragmatic realism?  Which?  

If it keeps happening like a record is it resigned contemplation or

A fear of hoping rebounding like a railroad spike impaling a cranium like a piton

Slammed through a mountain skull fifty-thousand feet high

As if one more iteration elevates the climber a meaningful measure of progression  

As if each hammer thrust is an increment of upward

There is a summit, recognition of what was an inevitable and necessary climb

The valley on the opposing descent is joyous like overcoming the fear of a sky dive

 

That others reverse into joy in what it means to let go control to chance

To hope to rallying in the ninth inning and swinging for the fences

To know that beyond all historical context of logic, there was an opportunity offered

And the counterparty was eager to listen beyond the gutter population  

Of scavenger types, haggard brain-eaters, munching with dilated pupils

Zoning in on my dreams like ripe apples of blood drunk through vampire straws

Siphoning fuel from a renegade gas tank with the gall to conduct respiration

Like a living sack of flesh oozing a yearning to gaze back into the sun  

With middle finger up daring the world to try to make him blind

This skin will not sizzle, this speech will not stutter

These hands will not quiver into resignation, until ever bubble of air

In these veins reaches the pump house and topples the levees  

Or so I tell myself when I am feeling brave

Because that phone call was the first glass bottle to float upon this island in years

The confidence to dismiss it like another grain of sand is not a given

Ink blurs and towns shuffle, what I know, what I knew, what I could do  

I am afraid myself of the damage

The ship wrecks offshore under the water’s undulating surface

I know they are there, cackling in a cacophony of retribution

In voices of what I must have done to the ghosts of yesteryears

 

I must have been such an asshole in a past life

Comical explanations of free will and nature and merry go round

Because I do not want to be here and I do not want to be there

I want to have a purpose of this world and to matter to a beautiful soul  

I can find a mutual and re-feeding reciprocation of joy

None different and some how I suspect it will never be

I am meant to live this existence alone in perpetuity

Knowing what I am capable of, knowing I do not have the right  

To ask God for a damn thing, ever again

The Clench

The Clench 

The immutable clench of Monday morning

Wrapping python appendages in a throat collar

Of feckless words to utter to office wood paneling

Thirty years patterned in machine cohesion  

Phone rings ears to mouths, alternating faces

Toilet mirages taking turns on salutations, greetings

Mimicking small talk auditing respect and manners

Apathy eats away like orange juiced acid berating the armor  

Of ethic, of concern, of want to improve

The shackle of stasis has clamped

Dreams waft in plump cheeks and cracked rib radiators

Hustling for a fix job, a crimp fluid injection  

The dulcet sounds of oblivion beckon tongue waggles

To pulsate a response like cunilingus that was actually effective

Producing an honest reaction of happiness reverberating through the room

Like Mozart arrangements harmonic and the sort of confluence 

The world would seek to replicate if only any moment could be

Forever the left side of a brain pursues, yet is caught in an inescapable present

Perpetually taunted by a past and future out of reach like rainbows

Of when it was or what if this could be  

Oh, the light spectrum of my New Orleans

Katrina has bludgeoned you to a parade of plastic surgery

We are strangers, discussing what we might discuss

If we could ever find the time for coffee, as if I ever drink the beans  

Grounds spit out chalking and coarse invade a spasmodic larynx

Seizing the second of the now approaches and muted into ridiculous appearances

In the moment of requirement producing nothing but an unending river

Of analogies and similes, because the truth is a wrenching testament  

Void of empathy to a cancerous tale that only spreads to rot other potential hosts

There is no sanctuary when a man and woman entwine into one body

The blood cells are ingrates and jesters of melancholy and bitter Wednesdays

Like DNA markers of another septet of calendar numeric platelets vanquished  

There is no scab for there is no open wound only a sloop stack coat rack of skin on bones

Standing or sitting, sleeping or eating, motions of hampered respiration Mondays 

And Justice, the I's has it for All

And Justice, the I’s has it for All  

Nothing taunts me more than a macro level notion of justice

The hyperbole of the hive flocking to polarized figures

Judged to be on the perimeter of the spectrum as Hitler

A Sandusky, An Enron, A Bounty Program, An O.J.

A Bin Laden, A Mike Vick, A McVey, A James Holmes,

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, a monster!!! 

Granted the allowance of public opinion to extol

Unending criticism in the form of landslides of disdain

I’m against it, look here, I says it, I’m parts of the group

I downloaded the app. last week before the sentiment went viral 

A.C.L.U. lawyer factions represent the inarguable stance

Diatribes, sanctions, the vampire is staked

Blood thirst, lust, gorged and escaped

Streaking out the front door as naked as can be

Is an untouchable sense of justice shrouded in manufactured sympathy 

For Victims, We: glob feces, stick AIDS needles, scrape toenail beds

We berate drums with paddles of the veracity of horrors

Change, allocation, imprisonment, disfigurement,

Eyeballs popping out in some sort of Israeli exchange program 

Rhetorical interrogative conclusions wafting

In cotton candy parachutes securing our descent into safety during a hurricane

The wolf cried for and caught, the villagers pitchforks can return to the hay bales

Sunday services can commence with a resolute bell tower tone

Emanating the palisades and Parisian boutiques from le Notre Dame 

Institutional culpability

Priest’s penis in the boy’s sphincter, the Pope and Paterno knew

Burn the Vatican and Pennsylvania, think of the children something must be done

Grown up, kid is a ROTC Iraq veteran, PTSD, treatment bumming on the street

Neuroscience graduate gunning down Batman’s refugees, bunkering in corners 

Spoils of war, German fingerprints on Dr. Gachet’s portrait

Madonna of Bruges looking down at baby Jesus’ scrotum

Blasphemy of a Halliburton contract

Schwarzenegger Governator Gray-Out Davis Enron power downs  

Andersen was in eighty countries and the largest CPA firm in U.S. history

Bankrupted in the press, media bulimia, who was the killa?

Caught with a crack rock in a baggy, doing more time than Ken Lay

Sentences stayed by suicide, Ponzi schemes made off with the billions
 

Of faces out there scrambling distracted, suddenly outraged by the tragic

Eclipse of the day, stare at the orb of gas exploding in the sky

The heat the melting, the sensation of the skin subsides

Into another tomorrow, another yesterday, another reference

Collective experience to circumvent direct contact or math

Which life, which rape, which body cavity infiltrated has priority?

Which child, which face, which famine, which bullet tells the story?

Which continent, which race, which God, which faith?

Which institutional injustice is worthy of the letters on today’s protest placard?  

Burn world burn, which classroom, who’s turn?

Scrambling to make sense, eat the cake and put a face

Here’s the victim, here’s the monster, here’s the reason, here’s the imposter

Allocate box to box, on why this happened and why it will not  

Happen to you tomorrow, feel good, go back to the line

There is an explanation and we resolved it

Ice Ice Baby, check out my hook while my D.J. revolves it

Clear Channel Playlist funding Bain Capital  

R-money not in charge to play the same three songs five times an hour

Replay the tape of two planes toppling two towers

Rocks at tanks on the West Bank, Drones extracting U.S. angst

Put a flag on that to decorate the other extreme  

Same polarity rationalized under similar means

Take one of ours, we’ll take one of yours

Shoulder rocket missile at a Soviet helicopter scored

Opium fields financing Pakistan hiding Osama  

Seal team six, bullet in the head, get it over with quick

Monster, monster out on the loose,…And justice is done

“Find it so grim, so true, so real,” West Memphis Three 

Explaining to a cacophony of labels of who’s Cain, who’s able 

Satan playing tricks financing mortgages,

Use to be usury laws now it is assurances

Placed on the backs of taxpayers,

Splitting loans into Harry Potter horocruxes  

A sixty-six piece investment traded on an exchange

AIG insured bailed out and the werewolf has turned

Into more overtime or unemployment, flog the back

Of hours away from a family struggling to harvest the basic means 

Of the dignity of a dinner plate

Paid for and leaving that tiny remainder that makes the end of this day

That slightly bit better than the end of my yesterday and

Suggests tomorrow may be a beneficial endeavor  

Nightmares, criminals, real problems, macro level

Super villains, Super heroes, Bruce Wayne and the Joker

Billionaire philanthropist donating to a sci-fi religion for a tax deduction

Mr. Smith is coming down from space, but first I need a dressage horse and a car elevator

Bat-mobile, kung-fu lessons with Ras Al Ghul, and a litter of sons to carry out my name  

Fireman can not afford to have a kid, more than one

And I am digging out the rubble of debt again, American Flag

Vasectomy breeding middle class eunuchs to contemplate retirement

Darwinism of the loins according to the Adam Smith scientists  

Two hundred murders in two hundred days, New Orleans is underwater

Which city official just got paid?  Fly to Jamaica to see a goat tied to a stick

Next to a slant of sheet metal jarred into the side of a mountain

To constitute a house, C-Ray’s gone vacationing and the city is out  

Frying in Houston, vagabond’s in fifty states, FEMA elevating houses

Cards rearranged, insurance paid for that, gots me a new one

Allstate paid for it, but I’m still using it, Other gutted houses can’t find a dime

Random chaos of broken levees and winds, who chooses the crosses for lines?  

Carried on backs, cancer or maps

Of where bullets land or I.U.D.’s explode in Iraq

Kentucky born was standing there, just staring for insurgents

Shrapnel cancelled out an operable larynx  

So who’s going to speak for that, who made sense?

I suggest we avoid the herd mentality of justice recompense

Roping up the neck, running to war, poster child for a disease

Lou Gehrig or Darfur, who’s got one, who needs one? 

Who do you care about and why?

Are you outraged, fed up, doing something, nothing subsides

Does it affect you, really, Somali famine, K’Naan, Are you hardcore really?  

I don’t see it, I don’t, Call me wrong

I see one humanity singing songs

Media companies turning the neck of the public

In violence, in politics, in economics, in faith,

In sounds berating our ears to the path of escape
 

As if there was blame, some see a monster

I see people making choices

Free will responsibility, moving targets 

Wrapping up in the starter kit to make a terrorist a cult-hero

White Broncos, Caylee Anthony a bigger Orlando attraction than mouse ears

Baby Jessica in a well, Macondo pluming bigger than Valdez

Fixation of the moment to bring us to our knees  

Hundreds, thousands, millions, tens, ones

Who’s mother, who’s brother, who’s cousin, who’s son

As if we focus enough on this particular story

We can find the numerology of our humanity in the singularity event  

Concentrated into the density of our consciousness like the universe

Into a name, a face, a story, a relatable nuance that allows our concern

To breath life into lung-sacks of justice that unfortunately

The billion other faces we do not have time to address have left riddled with holes 

No inflation, no rise, no sensation, not lies

Genuine manufactured concern for what we were awarded with the benefit

Of hearing about, fault is relative, most doing our best
 

Watching the mythical ghost of justice

Perpetually escape our reach like rainbows

Ha, Ha,

Ha, Ha, 

I do not keep a gun in the house

Because I do not trust that I will not load a bullet into the chamber

And funnel its propulsion through my own chest  

My therapist once asked me if I thought about suicide

We each broke out laughing

She then asked, “Why do you think that is funny?” 

The underlying understanding is constant

The alternative to continuation  

Logic is paramount; I know I have a dysfunctional heart

I can recall what I think might have been love

For a round up to a month in eighth grade

 

And for the month of April in 2010

And about three-quarters of the way there in October of 2011

Summed total the optimist estimates three months  

There was that lost decade, somewhere in there, probably

But the memories are all vampires, twisted alternate visions

Whatever I first saw or experienced them as

In reflection the mirror makes them each something else entirely  

The probability exists that some shard would qualify to pile

On top my quarter of a year bounty, but the dilemma perpetuates

In the quandary of which slice of time to decree as deserving of inclusion

So many seconds, hours, weeks, months accumulated  

The buffet has been slathered in the repugnant glaze of the ineffable conclusion

Of the counterpart’s disdain fused hatred of my being

The others have come to the same, so in these mathematics, the bulge feels as vapid

Nothings, remembrances poisoned by the bickering of fondness with abrogation 

Of the constitution to imply there were rules of engagement

Consideration, the yarn is tangled and soaked in gasoline  

I am confounded as to how others accomplish simple interaction

I have not met another human being outside the internet in two decades   

There have been the layoffs, job shifts, and professional conversations

As far as human talky-talks go, the electronic web has flecked a few kernels

But rare and even they were a mix of borax and vanilla

The world has never been smaller

At Least I have my Depression

The chalk board says dream

Dream big son for a declaration of who you are

To craft your own identity and existence

In the infinite options the blessing of continued successive breaths grants  

Money work, children, genetics, happiness

Endorphins, sports, chucking, conversations

The obliteration of boredom, depression

Modern man, fabulous times  

Vehicles, criminal tendencies, anarchism

Political rant vomit, indigestion, disagreement

Information, demonstration, propagation for a faith

In anything, to win an argument with an agnostic  

Debauchery burdened drunk that operates the buzzer

In my alarm clock independent of such mandates as time zones

And day light savings time, the sot bastard is cantankerous

His debate is clogged with mush speak that is a rain of cinder blocks  

You can not go outside in that shit, umbrellas are feckless

I tried to see my rainbow, but the cement in the cumulonimbus

Is pounding a Verdi anvil chorus pocket-book propaganda cacophony

Your biggest mistake son was wanting something  

Sit down, do not try, do not want, wanting is what started the rain

The flood, the hurricane it all comes in tandem with the wanting

Close your eyes, do not pray, do not wish,

Do not picture a face when you masturbate, only skin and parts  

The specific identification will lead to crushed toes

Under door frames attempting to wedge a suggestion before slam

Type, sort, do, button push, file, and trounce the bulging urge to want

Commute, switch to autopilot, re-commute to the idiot box  

Ingest microbes, power down, insomnia repeat

The aurora borealis is a laser light show of chicanery

Seventy-two hour work day, already had a lunch break

Drown in the al dente savoring bite of ethics  

Flavors twinge with the seasons and in all is a disdain

That none of this makes a God damn bit of sense alone

Streets on fire, burn me, I don’t give a fuck anymore

All the faces are meaningless, pointless, occupied