Job

I think I was supposed to live a monastic life

But religion tastes like a tar ball

My parents thought I was going to be a Catholic priest

When I was in high school

Because I did not go on many dates

I could count them on my fingers

Maybe two girls in four years

Neither was any kind of relationship

My best friend was gay

Maybe that confused the matter for them

I didn't know, didn't matter

Either way I wrote

I filled notebooks, thought

Contemplated the whys

Still do

My only real relationship has been with the universe

I was married

Involved with another for four years after

But in my guts

It was always the universe

They, me, part of the same whole

Not puppets, but flow

Drawing me to meditate, dwell, see beyond

Low conversations, core, to the essence

Of what we are

The power of broken hearts and

Conversations in heads on pillows prior to slumber

Sexual release endorphins and tingling God

Asking me you have to be alone

To do what you need to do

Wondering how to accept

This is how I have to be

Like a monk, a priest, an imam, a rabbi

Without the storyline in an elaborating pamphlet

Maybe a bar room and urge to ponder

Wanting interconnection with a soul

Knowing all I got is this damn universe like an elephant

Whispering, you’re not done, you’re not done

Go get back to work

Smalltalk does not apply to your accessible assets

It’s forfeit; to go where you need to go

So grab a pen and scribble notes

Take a book for any gathering

Try to make sense of it; that’s your job

Not the one with the paycheck 

Kindness

Such a simple basic concept

Like a reciprocal to insecurity

The more a person feels the need to protect a wound

The less kind

Mathematics of why lovers distancing hearts

Can do what we do

Pulling into self like a superego alcove shielding

The leverage one could provide a cushion

But does not

Here is silence

Here is scorn

Here is a distorted image of the person known

The worst scaffold is truth

The way an ex-lover knows the stitching

The layers of construct that prompt the absence of kindness

The charade of punishing the secret keeper

For the intimacy is a portal like compass coordinates

In which our theater could be unmasked to the audience beyond

So kindness is poisoned into the vilest cruelties

Like a full circle slipping from the first degree to back to the three hundred and fifty-ninth

Distorting the balance in the shortest traversing passage

True healing requires the full circumference to be paced in contemplative iteration

As what was is released and who is becomes recognized

In the spectrum of the mind, body, and spirit

To be of all things quarrel-less in the flash of life breathing universe in kind  

Snuffed Matches

Do not ever want to be treated like that again

Look a man in the eye before flying off, running into the darkness

Reciprocate hope like a lit match, leave it on the sheets

For him to snuff out with tear drops

Blinking heat of fired beats

Poetry and metaphors pouring like a tongued-wall of flame

Posturing ankles gasping words from the tender

Returning to the polite distance of elbows at bus stops

Inking the casual in a smudge as if that was all that ever was

Like a ticket purchased for pocket change wheeling off

Do not ever want to be treated like that again

As if closure were contraband for the security screen to board

Impermissible tote to the confidence to see out from the window

Down to the street glazing over the pedestrians muddling the concrete

Pages written and read and retorted in silence like a spectacle

Crashing wheels of bones clanking tissue red and flung sinew

The cruelty in the power of affection repossessed

As if a body was something now nothing all in the whim of wind

Between hours of seeing future and then nothing parading in surrender

That between here and there the world died

People scoff and laugh and say move on because you have to

Because it is the only sane thing to do,

But the imagination breeds a fork of some dimension of what might have been

Of what one wished the other wished to attempt

And an entire world died,

A man saw happiness like a gust and he licked the air and felt alive

And what more is there to a world than feeling that

The rest is theater and waiting, waiting for that stick of time

To imprint and knock one’s life like the creator’s touch

To have the precipice of love singing in a god damn aria

To try, to just try to participate before the scythe slits the ladder rungs

And that’s it, that is all a man has were these chances

The last of which could be the last, never knowing and so everything falls

The whole damn show like an avalanche of supermarket canned goods

That might have lasted a zombie apocalypse

Or five New Orleans’ hurricane seasons

Who knows, but an entire world died,

To hope like that and see it fall

Without as much as a face to say goodbye to,

Nah never want to be treated like that again   

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.”