Four a.m. Chiller

Cannot do this; nah not tonight

The cold haze of winter has gripped

Testicles are huddled to thighs

Bladder flush ready to spill chilled

Hoping to fall asleep before thrashing the blankets

To flow to the commode and feel it all spiral

Undone at four a.m. after the steam shower

Of a house too large to bother heating for just one body

Knit pants and sweater, head fleece and smothered

Talking to God under blankets and a pillow tucked

Between legs crouched horizontally

Praying that the moon could talk back

Browsing the internet earlier for any life left

After coming home from a distraction to not be home

As if there was someplace else to keep from staring

Straight into the eye of this sleepless-thing breathing long in the shell

Driving too fast and pushing through stop signs

Curving around steel that wants to not signal or conduct slow turns

Fuck it press the gas pedal and play chicken with the blood  

For a moment, a sip at the bar to feel like there was a reason to rush

The make-believe of skin to come home to, go out with, think of

In the times of typing numbers and syllables into a work day screen

As if Thanksgiving was not around the corner to know

There was that one year with a woman, her dog in the tent cuddled

The rain came in the middle of the night flooded the leaves

Swaying the dome-canopy picking up supplies and a hound

Rushing to structure drenched guided by draining batteries

The moon laughing

Family has a blood family seeing what brothers look like

With non-blood wanting to make blood

Fingers of nieces and nephews gripping lifting a seven month old

Above his head next to a speaker of Nina Simone singing

Watching a baby’s eyes dilate thinking of his dead with the tent

The winter and a thermostat that ain’t worth a damn to use 

JTE 11/13/14

Americana night in the French Quarter

Pacing past the movie trailers and the t-shirt shops advertising drunk

Stench of garbage like a bison carcass housing a family of opossums

Brewing marsupial pouch afterbirth wafting from a tail wind

Forty degrees in November drizzle rain and the Shim Sham is now One Eyed Jacks

The entry way shifted and he orders an Old Fashioned from the tender

Ten dollars down and a gratuity to a woman in faux cat ears

Wandering a circle of punk shows from his youth, he sips in the bitters

Guitar players strumming about the allures of whiskey

Nights of conversations that tilt the neck of the world

To give it all up just for the gasoline words

To fuel a man’s madness when everything burns

He stares up at the framed portraits of nude women above the elevated stairs

Like a hallway of curved bodies wrapping hair around fingers

The way she did and he remembers she told him she dances here

She once wanted to be a Shim-Shamette and prance on stage

So that when he looks at the Nashville skyline strumming

About One More Night in Brooklynn or Rogers Park

The image of the winking one-eyed Jack in red with all the suits but diamonds

All he sees is her

The balladeer plays Learning How to Cry

He feels his brother’s hand on his shoulder

Knowing his sibling thinks he is thinking of three broken hearts ago

Like stuck pig layers built on each other in a tower-house of cards

He guesses they are all the same this last one just happened to be a dancer

So he has yet to picture her image still

Always drifting through and he thinks,

“If you have no place for me, I have no mental canvas for you.”

Lying to himself swerves a fender into an oak to not paint her in

Until he can spill black acrylic all over the floor, just coat it in whiskey

Or the lies of a pretty face to pretend for a few hours before he ruins it with honesty

Better a conspiracy of good nights back to back stitched like a body

Beyond the French Quarter fit for living rooms and sofas, stories and kind monsters

Wishing she was one of those and his pages would have meant a damn  

Glazed Gaze

She looks at him with an indelible apathy

Something about the way a woman’s eyes peer through a man

The imprint of visualizing the indifference

Of knowing there was not a god damn thing he could have said

She makes up her mind and the silence

Of retraction supplants every word in his kudzu

To try to speak, write, befriend a ghost

Because that look never rubs out; always grows back

In stares like he was stranger, a nothing passer in a jar

A split dog, guts in the street tires whirling on

Rider listening to bubble-gum Taylor Swift obnoxiousness

As if she doesn’t know either party

There are bars in Nashville, New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans

And not much anywhere else in America; Pop is forcing the outskirts

To where the cosmetic surgery gawkers are outdoing the dirty guitar players

Drinking craft cocktails over whiskey straight in the pit

No chaser, no stray look just dead-eye forward

Aware that when belted-string eyes meet hers

They’re riding into nothing, just nothing but a side glance

To dismiss a body in a crowd

Changing him to where every woman that looks

Feels like her

Like why speak because the pretext is caked on

That after a while the water runs and back to nothing

Possibility exists like a cataract needed a surgery or a drug

Even Pfizer can’t sell

So all the women appear like tall glasses of haze

Sturdy that if tipped would not even anger, just evaporate

Phase off into air bubbles of haughty mindlessness

Aggregating so that he is never alone

The conversation never takes place and the residue

Of what he wanted to say films on his tongue

Painting a motion picture like a tornado through his skull

Why’s and black and white chaos

So that the only words he ever has churn incestuous

Writing a story like a mirror where either no one else exists or he doesn’t

In and outside his vision compensating for the indelible 

Notes From Chapter 113

Monte Cristo

Having reached the summit of his vengeance by a long and tortuous path,

He saw an abyss of doubt yawning before him

More than this,

The conversation which had just taken place between Mercedes and himself

Had awakened so many recollections in his heart that

He felt it necessary to combat them.

A man of the count’s temperament could not long indulge

In that melancholy which can exist in common minds,

But which destroys superior ones.

He thought he must have made an error in his calculations,

If he now found cause to blame himself.

Great truth, fire cannot burn, nor water drown it!

Thus the poor sailor lives in the recollection of those who narrate his history;

His terrible story is recited in the chimney-corner, and a shudder is felt at the description

Of his transit through the air to be swallowed by the deep.

Was his name ever known?

Oh, yes; but only as 34.

(the poor Abbe – ah, no. 27)

On the other side of the dungeon he perceived an inscription, the white letters of which were still visible on the green wall. “O God preserve my memory!”

That was my only prayer at last; I no longer begged for liberty, but memory;

I dreaded to become mad and forgetful.

O God, thou has preserved my memory; I thank thee, I thank thee!

But I have something left, a sort of book, written upon strips of cloth

Upon which the Abbe Faria had spread the riches of his mind

Darling has not the count just told us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words? – ‘Wait and hope.”

No Place

If you decide you have no place for me in your life

I have no place for you in my thoughts

The writing, the ten minute cycles of ponder

The creep of what I might have done, said

To change the outcome

Burn into a vault of prohibited food

For one does not feed the dead

To do so diverts nutrients  

Anger from the trick to make me care for you

To approach and tell me of your affinity and fear

Each intimate as either is behind the barrier of the casual

Caring and inviting

So that in your exit I find my nascent faith departed

My poetry, words, images inspired offered worse than losing love

This was hope scalding in my guts bubbling aspiration

To taunt me with the ideas of what could be

As if a man dreaming was to make him a thief

Attempting to traverse in lands only he saw

As if you did not expend the mental energy

To imagine the folds of my being

I reached to you in humble supplication in efforts to bond empathetically

To offer space for deliberation and in this the haughty rise of every word

On my page shrinks me child-like to the maturity of your silence

As if not wanting is the throne of God immune to the human soul-ache

Pulsating in the universe to notice, to give a damn

That these moments pass never to be regained in such swift succession

Towards an ever impending termination of the vessel of our bodies

So it is you mock the pinnacle of a soul’s exaltation in a man’s whisper of connection

Running in silence to cast him as impertinent to the masquerade

I want my want back and so I take it into my dominion

To not wonder your habitation, your constant photographs to fans

Assuming a persona compensating for what you chose not to offer

As you live behind your ruled-locks and feather keys flying into the darkness

I prayed to you with rain of kindness, empathized the possibilities of grief

And received the arrogant blockade as if I was the dust of shoes shook 

You have no place for me in your life

I have no place for you in my thoughts

My place it’s the no place

My image is without face

I leave into the divinity of breathing

Exhaling the ego of attempting to change you

Though wishing you thought differently

I wipe this face into the universe

Whole in thought to be in the present

Of direction casting past as shed skin

Living in the fires of the no place

The image of the no face

In love with everything in the present

But not you as a severed parcel

For to see you as an individual as of now

Flushes pains I must cast aside

So in you must reform into the whole

Knowing you have no place for me and I must un-choose

The image of your words and body must fade

Into the no place 

The Lovely Runners

I hold fears that if I ever sustained any dynamic that felt like love

The arrangement may forever feel tenable

In the throe of the predecessor uncertainty of feeling safe

The house falling to cinders in a turn of a conversation

An evening bending into nothing how quickly

To ever be that dependent again to prefer the alone

Of never trying to fly

I thought bird girl might understand

I thought this was the changing of the guard, the fork, the pivot

To be here has left me questioning my totality

Feeling like she is feeling-less

I am nothing and as easily forgettable as every other woman has made me feel

I am drawn to question how patient I need to be

With her, with me, if it matters

If there is anything pleasant to hope

If the silence will ever crack into anything but damned anger

I want to believe in an interconnection in something greater

That was bringing us together and not scoff, not jest

But feel what I felt as if I mattered in this universe to grow

To know the goodness I wished to share with her as if that was worthy of these lives

I know the pain of digesting the indifference at my offerings

Spurns me into the atheist’s pit

Hoping the way out is that I already wrote whatever it is I needed to find my heaven

I pray it is her like my angel, but if it is another, then I pray to be whole enough to try

My worst perdition is the nothingness

Hell has always been the absence of an interconnected God to me

And so in this sequencing I feel in the crucible of my life

Love and fear wrestle in my belly

I am not sure which compels me to write each time I raise the pen

I want to believe there is a duality to these thoughts as if struggles will break

Into a request for the beauty of the self-worth I know I contain

As if my quest to feel it in my bones the whispers will seek me

These conundrums of the human spirit vex my mind in ten-minute side-swipes

Pressing slumber into helpless wake

As if for a man to ask for a sustained love in his life

 is just too much to ask

To have love without an Enron, a hurricane,

 a construction, an abortion, a pivot straight into a tree

would just be asking for too much

to just have a string of nights reading together on a sofa,

making love in a common bed without fear

she could just bolt at any moment

So lovely, too lovely to sustain

Bodies bound to run 

November 4, 2014 Red Herring Day

Second term president mid-term blood letting

Flood the program in Koch money crushing the canned

Mailer in the box daily about the executive in a race for a senator

Blue and red one-party pulling apathy

Through the streets with F150’s rallying for low turnout for a swap meet

Alternating turns at the wheel for the illusion of a middle pit against a lower

For an upper oligarchy consolidating resources in an exponential

Acceleration for human extinction

The numbers of unemployment lowest in years

Economy accelerating with stagnant wages

Increased minimums and affordable healthcare albatross sound-bite nooses

Facts secondary to sentiment because maintaining control

Is paramount to avoid revolutions in the streets

If the average cat understood the magnitude of a trillion dollars

Compared to a ten-ten wage or what work till you die means

Superfluous hamsters in Guatemala to Houston chained in desperation

To keep a border-line for Juarez, spook African Ebola behind a jungle specter

Distraction in the combat of allowing a Senate to flush crimson

What that means behind six years of obstruction and what a party would do

If it could propose what it means, got to be so careful with the veil removed

To be so public in the request to pass legislation beyond rhetoric

Force state-admitting privileges to block abortions

A vote in D.C. on what marijuana looks like on a resume rather than a budget

Appearances like who goes to services on Sunday and takes the bribe on Monday

The backline of a political action committee denial to “that is not my ad”

“I had nothing to do with that, I benefit from, but did not approve this message."

The hypocrisy of the grease pipe spewing midnights of a system intending

To maintain the standard as long as possible as if once-in all hope is lost

The ballot box meaningless as soon as the commercial cycle ceases to occupy the airwaves

The televisions do not advertise what good is, only the hurdles purported as an opponent

There is no opponent, no ass or pachyderm just money, power, a troth

Doing what we do, no us, no them, no will-not be televised revolution,

Just the byproduct of a truce

Between how little can I be involved before my nut is threatened?

Take his, hers, but not mine, who’s coming him? Them?

Staring around the room

In a global battle of empathy to move towards a feminist perspective

To value the whole over the ordained echelon piloting

Pfizer 10-K results and why you think you need a loaded barrel

Anarchy and misery brewing a food bank to slurp on the evening news

Distorting what is for what the one-party wants you to see

To never be an eight-lane Hong Kong highway occupied with a tent city

For the right to pick your own candidates, America has that; sure if you think so?

Funds to run, who has the right to tell you what you think is important.

Happy balance of powerful men sporting hand guns pointed at each other in a concrete room

Trembling fingers ready at the trigger keeping the world in balance

Food and water from a draining aqueduct in the center of the circle rotting

Oceans outside the building starving told not to grow a garden

Not to go solar, not to question the charge-master hospital bill  

Listen to clear channel radio and bob your head to anything but Dylan or Marley

Swipe your card through the drive-through and combust Christmas like it’s real

As if the champion of shed possessions would ever ask you to horde

By participating in a commercial binge of a fat man in a sleigh

Who has never actually brought anyone a damn fucking thing

Believe in the red herring wedding

That today something was ruined or accomplished rather than simply continued

Like an undulating mask-wave to disguise the magic trick is to keep society from imploding

Into asking how can we hold the powerful accountable to do the right thing

When no one is looking or forces mutual assurance inside industries and sectors

To create a verified proxy-voting system to effectually supplant Congress

For the richest country on the globe to be a flag-bearer for health rather than war

For democratic renewable energy rather than fossils owned like diamonds

Only valuable because there is a commercial telling the masses

You need this for your love to be valid, to wed unless you have similar gonads then no

But breeders go ahead and press the pedal while the Jurassic gel lasts

Because a bicycle is anarchy, death with dignity is anarchy

Diet before pharmacology is anarchy,

Free internet college courses for recognized national certifications is anarchy

Gardens over lawns is anarchy, canceling Christmas consumerism is anarchy

Drinking just water is anarchy, recognizing the danger of consolidated wealth is anarchy

Love for no reason but love is anarchy

Ideas were never on the ballot

All you see is non-white male vote staying home disenchanted with a Manchurian candidate

Tilting the demographics of a national electorate so that we never mention the turnout

Because the one-party does not want you to focus on the turnout

Only the idea of a fifty-one percent conclusion

As if once piercing the majority the totality is muted

No complaints; you voted; you chose this obstruction

To hold weight, to sit in these rotating chairs of tenure

To bark ideologies over ideas because the forty-nine percent

Is not the forty-nine percent

Voters tip between the lesser of two-clones

Based on a wedge-issue that never represents legislation

Just a sound bite; and the trillions get shifted in the background

Between the forty percent of the fifty-one that succumbed

The forty-nine percent that declined and the masses that stayed home

So that the approval of the sliver of citizens united that remain sleeps in a bank account

Dwarfing the remainder

To wonder where the line between chaos and control resides

Beating in the worries of a Kansas soccer mother and a Santa Fe factory worker

Visualizing resentment in an ad spot paid for to support the ideas in their own heads

That pull their strings   

Pumping an anthem in a red herring about things to come