MacSubhine's

Should Have Done This Months Ago

2011-03-23T21:53:00.001-07:00

We have moved:

http://discountsubmarines.wordpress.com

If you wish to reach me, my e-mail is mpmcsweeney@gmail.com

If you're actually reading this: you rock.

-MPM

Chirping

2010-04-17T22:51:00.001-07:00

Through the window

of my country apartment

I see birds gathering:

a bluejay tweets to a cardinal,

who trumpets back in unison.

It's amazing

how a raven's call can scrap a roof.

I wonder why robins dance as they do,

perhaps chirping out of sexual desperation

or lamenting the lack of food or perhaps

it's something thinking creatures living

in houses can't understand:

the use of music as a mode of expression,

casting those single tweets

into a chorus of feathers and claws.

A Little Night Music

2010-04-14T23:32:00.001-07:00

We drink because we must

imbibe the nectar of attraction,

the silky syrup that moistens

the lips of every man and woman

seeking the closeness

of sweat-cemented shirts

a flooded inner thigh

uncertain kisses that never say

goodbye.

Impacts

2010-03-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

Dozing in bed by the window I see

the sky thrust its lip upon the earth,

carving a crater like a cat's tongue

with a strike across the horizon;

before I can react I am frozen

and all is light, death.

II.

Dozing in bed terrified of the heavy breaths

that grow more hoarse by the moment

against the frail glass window,

the low ceiling and its peeling paint, the coarse sheets--

I'm running downstairs, drowning in the calls

of the names of my family,

my legs entangled as if in water

struggling to swim against the front door,

trying to get out, to taste the living air--

the hard pavement speaks through the cracked wood

I'm lying on top of; the wind whimpers.

A red star in the sky pulsates

like a tumor in my chest. I clutch

my face, run down the street for hours

to wherever the hell the road goes,

past pick-up trucks limping on axles

to the center of town

until a firm hand grasps our throats,

we have no air to scream.

III.

No longer dozing within the sheets,

aware of the growing light on the horizon,

aware the darkened heart that twists beyond

any possibility of personal salvation,

I wrap myself in a blanket of warm cloth,

slouch, breathing slowly, slowly,

my chest crackling like a melting ice cap,

unable to stop, unable to will myself

to stop. Crying to bring the sunrise,

to have to get up again, to have to run

or just do something before the next

asteroid, the unthinkable impact

against the window,

the shattering of continents

whose vibrations echo through my chest.

FWD: San Diego

2010-03-19T04:22:00.001-07:00

Of course it's on St. Patrick's Day that I wrote more haiku in one hour than I have in my entire life...a, c'est la vie. Big news coming, hopefully soon...

Dead Word Sitcom

Alack writing poems in a black notebook.

Fain sifting through the mail.

Upon babbling shit-faced on the floor.

Envision waiting.

Morrow doesn't talk and flips channels for the next one.

Wherefore on the couch chewing his cell phone.

Methinks wants to say something

but the door knocks and screams about rent.

Cuckold at the keyhole: "It's Mr. Webster!

And those Oxford guys are with him!"

Bruit starts to shriek.

Prithee and Fie trip over themselves,

Rheum sobbing madly;

Forsooth is at the window.

In the upstairs apartment Cool and Sweet,

grateful for the occasional paycheck,

read quietly and drink wine.

Asked to Leave for Staring at the Wrapping Paper Too Long

2010-03-10T00:01:00.001-08:00

You are told to perfect the outside because

that's where it starts like a fresh layer of dirt,

fertile to sing morning's glisten

so something profound sprouts.

It's the grabber--you must

or your gift is useless,

vague,

misleading

or worse: "Okay Mike, sure, sure--";

they sound like an empty mailbox.

Fine--just drink up, hello to friends,

breathe tobacco, moon watch

leave the party early

and keep sending those e-mails.

It's pathetic to stay in a gift store too long.

You hold that tiny glass bauble in your hand

wonder how to wrap and forget

that the truth is right there.

Pace the aisles, sweat but put it back

grab it again! No...

back on the shelf--they might not like it.

You finger the premium soils for hours.

Eventually, the clerk comes over, gently

touches your shoulder--he has to lock the door soon.

"Tomorrow? No, sir, we're closed on Sundays."

This is Not a Post Consisting of Just a Poem

2010-02-18T22:46:00.001-08:00

Re-reading Gatsby the Great. Will muse/extrapolate at some point. Blog, I am so sorry. I do not deserve your unconditional love.

And now, the poem!

Beautiful

I am beauty full from this youth of mine.

Date for lunch, then I pass through the quad,

its grass, to watch wind tempt the tips of trees

while the sun refuses to kiss the grass.

Sets of corduroy jackets and beards smoke a hookah,

and the prettiest girl shares a puff with me

because September is a generous month.

I leave as the stars strut the sky

in the early morning. I become hyperaware:

my collared shirt is as smooth as a whetstone.

Then we pass, she asks for a light,

we turn off the lights...experience the beautiful

blindness, the steaming rivers of chemistry

until next day conversations,

questions (1, 2, 3...) arrive like an awkward breakfast

until I'm alone and numberless again

stomping hours later on a giant sundial tucked

somewhere between my dormitory

and the interstate, I look up.

The sun lifts her hands from the stone's shoulder,

oh there is ease before the twilight;

she winks as her beauty falls.

My Best Friend Poetry is An Awful Cook

2010-02-03T20:59:00.000-08:00

Several of my early poems are to appear in Strong Verse! Updates on that in the future. Best of thanks to them! I shall link as well.

My best friend Poetry knows how to turn the dials,

to invigorate the electric oven,

but when I tried

to teach him the art of boiled water

he burned his hands and cowered

against the counter, clutching

his raw, twitching digits.

To be honest, Poetry

is the sort of person who prefers watching others

cook ribs on a sooty grill,

because the process takes five hours

and he can drink the whole time.

I remember one night, when trying to cook

shrimp scampi for two: Poetry

told me he would decrust the crustaceans

while I used the bathroom.

When I returned I found the poor prawns

mashed into an incomprehensible pile.

Poetry cackled, clapped his hands,

and spread shellfish around like the cold.

At the sight of me he fled, leaving the door open

so it would catch the wind outside, slam shut.

I spent twenty minutes

alone at the dinner table,

balancing the fork on my index finger

and using the steak knife to carve my initials,

but it was useless: I went to bed hungry that night.

Seek

2010-01-15T15:54:00.001-08:00

A lonely man admired for his quiet temperament

lashes out at the keyboard, aggressively

ignoring what he knows to be early morning,

hopeful even when blue sky-flowers bloom

while he scratches purpling eyelids

and journeys through Internet forums,

advice blogs, waiting for replies to echo

like calls across a harbor,

like tired people walking down

long, creaky hallways, their essences,

their hopes reverberating

within other dark apartments,

against other gray faces, against screens.

Finding only empty pages, he sweats,

kicks his heart into a blind run

and posts his face across dating websites,

adjusting his personal truths, and forcing

a smile to behold a camera flash.

Deftly he Photoshops

pudgy cheeks, the hair inside his nose

and the sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

Waits, the mouse clutched meekly,

clicking "reload" again and again.

Sunrise: a modem winks like a distant ship.

He is asleep at the desk, forgetful

of an e-mail address with curly brown hair

and large hips longing for the perfect companion,

his struggle to speak to her through an endless poem

of "I will love you" and "I could love you"

and a few mistakenly misleading images

that died blank-faced, a white room

abandoned in the frames of his glasses.

Lifesteam For Sale

2010-01-03T02:13:00.000-08:00

My friend, I am a salesman of unimaginable power:

a mirror with a transluscent face

a pool of water filled with wondrous chemicals

from a world you cannot truly see.

My friend, the knowedge of the world lies in your hand.

Not just the words of your favorite people

--those are thrown to the late-night willing--

but also what's happening, what you're doing,

what you can.

You need not step

past the front door whose paint peels, faded,

but you silently admire the green's shine

in the entry-way mirror -- no, the smart phone

is a lifestream: everything you need

from when you push the sheets away

until your eyes close like a burning piece of paper.

You need not go outside!

Trust me: with this phone the world is a cup of fresh water

inside your pocket, to save your mouth

from dryness, a lisp, confusing sentences...

the taste of salt and old kisses.

If you must, this phone has a camera

and inside is a picture of an autumn tree.

I just took it; can you see its brightness?

You need not speak

to the friend to whom you whispered beneath the blankets

"You are my best friend" but haven't seen

since you laughed about compact discs

and how everything was new and expensive

and the phones you gave your children.

Your twentieth high school reunion was months ago

and you will never have to day dream

while staring into a face or an inconvenience again.

You can write her novels for hours.

You will never have to say goodbye.

The Lives of Trees

2009-11-09T23:51:00.000-08:00

Go behind your house

and see the spring twilight's march:

parade of young birches and pines

and tall hawthorns, oaks that rend

the newly-plowed soil with their roots,

and at night the branches are alive

with sounds that deepen, rumble...

--I wish to show you the sense of it.

Man, born within the leafy canopy,

still shrieks and howls in glory

or terror or sorrow,

worships his existence and the night,

digs graves and visits the dead flowers

in the shadowy glen he holds sacred.

His soft movement, syllabic whispers

grow under the deep green awning,

yet one autumn morning I find it all

bare, cut down, used.

An old man walks by

holding a rusty spade,

coughs into his sleeve,

and leading a horse he tips his hat

to the sun, and whistles

to the new fence along a road.

Waiting for Mel

2009-11-04T17:02:00.001-08:00

Classmate's apartment:

a pair of factories pollute the plush brown couch,

Josh grinds knuckles into powdered lines

periodically checks his cell phone,

and we shift and sip water,

watch the endless days of a dusty fan.

phone buzzes angrily I struggle to contain

its raw energy like it's escaping a locked window,

peel open a newly-formed honeycomb:

It's Mel: "Sorry bro cant make it tonight "

Everyone looks over my shoulders

the words hang between us like chunky dust

watches Josh question a bruised mirror

hooked to the thin pink wall,

crushed pills scraped across its soft,

face Josh punches it falls, the pieces sparking

stoops to stroke and drink the mirror's still-fresh nectar.

He turns to me, mad crazy

and everything else feels muffled

like I'm waiting for someone to answer their phone

until reality hums like a hive, the bee quivers

about a boy across town who has the best shit around

and we run out and emotionless sobs from the sky

drench our backs, slow us down.

Elegiac

2009-09-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

I write this poem to buy myself time,

like when I breathe or mourn. The days

pass; not sure how many are left

before I must go outside,

bury words in my garden

and move on. My poems

walk, like loved or neglected children

past the stone walls every day,

on their way to church.

I often wonder about them,

leaning on my spade,

trying to divine the strengths

hidden in thick sheets of denim, lost to me

because when digging in the garden

I'm blind with soil, birthing new life.

Neglect will lead to death, starvation,

yet...doubt--will these plants grow?

Will reddened trees smile,

my pitchfork's mouth filled with bits of hay

clinging to its steely smile?

Or will they be like the woman,

despite braindeath,

whose organs still wrote commas

in the run-on sentence

we had to stop reading to correct.

The Words Played Violin Beside Me

2009-06-15T00:26:00.001-07:00

I played cello soft and slept walking

until the cold bucket crash of conscious from a quick-passing car.

My face sandpapered, my skin red

I stand on G string, a street of breathing intervals

that burn like crimson fireworks and you're six years old

and nothing is going to change.

My words are gone

and I see pages between classes,

ideas moving like distressed couples or the pink of sunrise,

ideas lost like a notebook or a romance.

At night lonely poets strike keyboards,

rub their faces and look down into my eyes

and shuffle paper, a pillow.

They live in every brick window

and below I ride the endless concertos

and everyone gets the notes. I catch some.

They move in endless, unfathomable rhythms

that bang the wall of my dorm room

but I can't imagine falling asleep without

them; tonight, I dream without words

and wait for a night of lyrics like Greek fire,

when even from outside the strings sound beautiful.

Each Stanza is an Aerial Photograph of Mullivaikal

2009-05-27T23:41:00.001-07:00

There were many; white sugar cubes

glowing breathing in the Sri Lankan sunlight

and the road was dark with moisture. Then

black, patchy silences. Nothing

crosses the dry street and my mind

speaks such still I'm screaming to fill it now.

Doesn't Snuggle

2009-05-25T15:24:00.001-07:00

She cups the soaked satin sheets,

watches the light of a closing door

slam black, now a long line of water

sings from behind the wood. She thinks

about what was before: darkness

blessed by silence, wanderings,

cries into an empty auditorium

occupied by a flung dress and a tipped chair.

She feels empty, twice.

Held still like a threatened spine

watching his form move across the stage,

mumble at the bulbous doorknob

and disappear into a cloud of lanterns

that confuse and scare her. Blankets

warmth envelop her in a velvet twilight;

she sighs--

wrapping the rich lifeless folds

into brawny arms and fingers,

a deep cloth voice

images of soft force, weighty mountains

words...just...words--

soft touching breaths that speak unheard.

Baroque Resolution

2009-05-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

I need peace when I drive long-distance; Bach's organ bellowing in the concert hall only to end with willful flourish. The radio gives me nothing but fundamentalism, so I turn to my imagination to provide music, create romantic orchestral flourishes loosely based on Tchaikovsky symphonies. Background music for my biopic: a man driving, the black sky screaming, caving in, gravity gone, his car tripping forward, over itself, vaulting, eyes slamming shut, wooing comfort from a hard cushion. Opens to see a mini-van, containing a face like his though distinctly different. The two hover, awkward couple, in this night for some time. She mouths: "We're too young." He places a hand to the windshield, feels skin cells growing senile, disillusioned. "It's a good thing." Headlight smiles but no words, only lips and virtuosity. Their bumpers kiss, and shatter all: glass, circulatory system, the engine of life, license plates, the credits, light. A rolling C-major dust cloud resolves through the movie theater.

I like parties

2009-04-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

because poetry happens:

Against the Wall

She sees wet glare in their faces,

the clinks of glass, words

the laughter, the fact that they leave

-- they don't belong to her,

strangers

like the black-sleeved man

breathing noxious fire

into her mouth, below her eyes,

who touches his leg to hers

insists its time for time to stand still

when the flash goes off,

her face will be against his.

Haiku?

2009-04-26T00:14:00.001-07:00

Hai-for you!:

"Whoosh: Life"

Whirls of the desert

loft lost seeds into the air

beyond the dried lakes.

Woah!

2009-04-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

Check out the latest issue of Ophelia Street on the streets of Pittsburgh, 'cause I's in it!!

(PS it can be found by way of the link on the right.)

http://www.monkeycorner.net/Ophelia_Street_V1_I2.pdf

-Mike

Hello Everyone Again Hello

2009-04-18T00:42:00.000-07:00

So, it's been a while

And, well, it's awkward. Look, blog...I love you. Really. But...you must understand that you compete with Facebook and GMail for my e-affections, and frankly, well, my link to is slightly harder to access than these aforementioned websites. So. Hrm.

Anyway! To you, my loyal reader (I love you btw), I return to offer some recent (within the past month) nuggets:

Slender

A cry in the night; a stumbled man
drinks pairs of hips and legs
and sips slender girls dry.
(They always love him back.)
Glass legs that grow to glass crowds;
shadows by the back door.
He promises the world, to everyone,
clutches hazy, fleshy curvatures
that slip like waves through fingers
and watches the movement of strangers,
drumming his thumb on her thigh
with the beat. The crowd
dies, he slips into his bedroom
and does not feel her fall;
she rolls under the bed
and sobs the carpet brown.

(And another (Wait, hold on -- I actually lied before when I said that these were both quote recent nuggets endquote. In reality, "Slender" was part of a rather bad series of poems I wrote at my family's lakehouse one night lounging about on their dock, but heavily modified (De-suckified, really.). So, well, yeah. Sorry to deceive you, sweet, loving reader.) poem for you!)

While We Can

Go-quick-go-quick!--the bottle is a spur
clutching my hand like a stumbling boot,
and she kisses me within the stair
that wraps a white wall in the secrecy
we demand of each other
because tomorrow we will forget,
pass each other, feel nothing
(something
ponders behind your lips?)
and drift like low-lying clouds
through pavement-crushing crowds
over Friday night ventures
where it's wise to run like you're standing.

I wish I had more, but to be honest (TBH) I haven't been writing as much lately. Certainly I've been thinking about writing, but in a more theoretical sense. I consider it mental preparation for a possible book project that I might begin this summer (the term "literary opera" sounds nice in my mind) and given my productivity over the past year and a half I really cannot complain.

Bah, listen to me banter...get out of here and go to bed!

Work work work!

2009-04-02T20:02:00.000-07:00

Oh, rap, you are my best friend.

Another "Blast" From the "Past": Episode (pi)

2009-03-29T03:33:00.000-07:00

Nothing new to report. I haven't written anything in about a week, not since my last over-night where I wrote several good poems. Gotta be honest -- I'm not too concerned with it. I've discovered its much better to trust my writing instincts and not force it. That way, it saves me precious typing time. Rather than writing garbage for five-to-ten lines, I can just...not write it. Let that stuff gestate, you know? In other news, I've sent out some more submissions (hoping for payment(s)!), have had another poem published (check out Down Dirty Word's current issue, it contains some great stuff!), and I have a girlfriend. Life is, well, more swell than the Red River.

Now then, to business:

When I was about twelve years old, I came down with a nasty flu. Perhaps the worst I have ever had. My mother, concerned with my health, and against a poor defense of studentship as I was able to muster, kept me home from school for several days. Oh, how I watched my friends and siblings leap amongst the snowbanks outside my window. Four days into my invalidity, a snow-day. Being the invincible child I was/am, I contrived to convince my mother that I was well enough to frolic about in the snow. I can still remember how joyful I was, sliding the flashy black snow-pants over my generous bottom, tucking the gloves inside my sleeves, applying the correct hat-adjustments and lace-ties.

Oh, cruel irony.

Turning away from more Romantic writing -- this summer, in the midst of my bout with mono, I remembered my hilarious episode involving the flu and a snow-day. Not my best work from summer, but I think it contains a decent amount of steps in the right direction.

Enjoy!:

Snow Day

My mother tells me I am too sick
But the windows are lifeless but blushing white
while ivory oblivion clings to trees and homes
School is cancelled
but I haven't been in days
Beneath my pajamas my sweat sticks and stinks
but with my face against the pane
I can almost see my breath
Behind me I hear my siblings' gloves and boots

I could die out here
My hand slides over the parapet of snow next to my home
as I make my way into my lonely street
The white snow clutches the road and my boots and my face

It's cold and I love it

The sky is white-gray cream
while my neighborhood is a collection of delicate mountains
I stop amidst a tundra
It is silent
So silent
you can hear snow wishing it could weep

My brother was trudging ahead of me
with a sled beneath his arm
and a camouflage crack on his face
I couldn't find my sled this morning
He's gone
My boots are moving slower
against the relentless syllable of a new wind

Even with the sky falling
I don't feel well

I'm retching sulphur into the snow
It's beautiful
almost
how the thin strands of bile knife through the powder
and form modern art
The only sounds are me and the wind
and the slow crunching of snow inside
my black gloves
My fists feel raw and red

Cold still
I see my house ahead
My head is doing laps
There is a plow nearby
I feel the wind ooh and aah

I won't remember this
My feet are cold underneath the blankets
Felix is purring between my legs
The wind is asking so many questions by my window
but I am as silent as the snow
who can only give answers.

PS -- I'm looking for a photographer who likes taking candid photos. If anyone is out there who likes doing this/has a stash of party photos, let me know. Thanks!

For the children:

2009-03-19T23:26:00.000-07:00

If you're a kid, and you like this, high-fives.

I was thinking of Jussi Bjorling while brushing my teeth. Hrm.

"Opera Seria"

Studying dots on a page
reading the story we all know
under the weakened gas lamps
the dressing room's an old man
wheezing at me through a vent
above the clock ticking; opening
night looms outside the window
more lights. More eyes

walking up the steps
wearing suits, dresses
both with hands deep
holding onto legs
holding the straight course
until they can sit
down

while the prima donna
sprints from the side-door
fucks in the back of Silvio's truck.
His rusty nocturnes echo across
the dimly-lit parking lot
her eyes distant cars
roaming highways
gone by the morning

brush her powder from my
eyes laughing hysterically--
stop crying.

I put on my make-up.

I'm A Bad Parent

2009-03-19T22:55:00.000-07:00

For this blog, I mean.

And I have nothing for you. Read some Goth Chicka poems at a coffeehouse, people really enjoyed them. I might do it again in the future.

"Trying to right. Trying to
write. Having a hard
time. Throat hurts
woe is
me."

-M

Huzzah!

2009-02-28T10:15:00.001-08:00

Huzzah!

http://www.wordcatalystmagazine.com/pages93/poetry93.html

Sweet Dreams

2009-02-28T01:24:00.000-08:00

"Slender"

A cry in the night;
a stumbling man
watching pairs of hips and legs
sloshes slender girls between his fingers.
They'll always love him back,
but by morning they will stare dryly,
suffocating in a plastic night,
blind to the kisses on their lips.

Thu 3:46 AM EST

2009-02-26T00:37:00.000-08:00

Hello, friends.

It's late, and I feel like sharing something with you, my loyal reader(s). Namely, a poem.

This poem summed up, for me, a lot of what I was feeling over the last summer. A disillusionment, a feeling of waywardness mixed with homesickness. It's based on a dream I had some time ago. To be honest, it represents a style I feel I've moved away from -- significantly related to an insistence on definite articles and pronouns, which (looking back) I can see took away from the flow of the piece. The static-ness of the poem also poses potential problems for a reader; nothing really happens in the piece apart from entering a house, and the speaker takes a long time getting into this house. Yet, despite a certain literary journal's almost immediate disdain for the piece, I still like it.

Well, you (if you exist) be the judge:

"Going Home"

A white snow fell as he awoke

He was lying in a road
who like him lacked a name
Here the seeds grew maples
that wore birds who twitched like jewels
and smiled on his face
His ankles chafed as he stood

Houses rose like cliffs on either side
A thousand glass eyes who could not blink
bore silent witness to his passage
Their pathways were cracked and gray
Black moss hugged the stones in fear
while vines crawled up chimneys
like fingers wiping tears that were not there

The ivory flakes kissed his cheeks

He knew it when he saw it
Though the grass had grown green and fresh
but now rose like obsidian nails
Though the garden always sang tacit hymns to a sun
who now favored other skies
Though the air that once smelled like a warm bed
was now bearing lifeless snow
Though the walls had shone alabaster
yet now were gray and chipped
under a roof of rough brown scales

This was home

The floorboards looked up to him
recognized his face
and said hello
His fingers traced paths blazed by a child
who grew to wander a sphere of water and stone
They were smaller then
His boots made angels in the dust

For the last time he twisted the knob
that guarded his secrets
The odor of years hid in the corners
and hung the drapes
Book-bindings lay hap-dash in the shelves
Their knowledge eaten by time and eyes

He saw himself in mirrors
in frames in memories
that were once made of flesh but now were faded
and shielded by dusty panes

It began to snow in his bedroom

The linen felt familiar against his neck
The pillow felt soft beneath his neck
His bed hummed despite the weather
His feet were warm underneath the sheets

"Come with me" said Sleep
"We'll go home forever"

He raised a hand to the sky
who stood red above his home
and showered his bed with frozen light

He slept for the rest of his life.

--

Good night.

Ugh

2009-02-23T03:35:00.000-08:00

Things are going.

Bad cold, but I'm in a musical. No time for such things.

Sent out more poem submissions tonight, well, just one, to a place looking to fill a collection. Hoping to make $50 bucks.

My cold is bad.

Here:

"Lake Champlain: A History"

Michael McSweeney was once a great lake.
He is less impressive up close.
He likes boats, but only those
made with real all-American plastic.
Sometimes he is brown, and confused.
Sometimes he gets the captains drunk.

He enjoys metaphors of himself;
how they contrast the tributaries
in sporadic deluges.
He flooded once;
it took three months
and young mosquitoes
drove him into town.

ku

2009-02-22T14:15:00.000-08:00

"meteroids"

for the lad and love,
on a newly cloudless night,
crossing stars may fall.

Haiku

2009-02-18T14:21:00.000-08:00

I don't delve into this genre too often.

While as a writer I enjoy the strange freedom of restriction, I don't do too well when it comes to precise line lengths. Sometimes I come up with something kind of clever or meaningful, or at least something that sounds (at least to me) good, but most of the time it falls flat on its face. Secondly, I suck at nature poetry. Too easily I give into the urge to describe it as it is (because it is what it is!), and this battles my urge to come up with something fresh.

That said, lately I've tried to write haiku whenever I feel inspired, and in continuing the idea/hope/prayer that people are actually looking at this page right now, here are some poems for you:

"Justin's Basement"

beer-covered table
reflecting like a mirror
on lonely faces.

"small leaf waiting"

the last leaf to fall
finally learns of regret
lying by the dead.

"The Child Leaf"

the child leaf falls
into the pond before he
learns who could be right.

"impressions in drifts"

walking away to
snow in the microvalleys
falling from the sky.

Whew. Calm Down.

2009-02-16T22:34:00.001-08:00

...still pretty euphoric, though. Five poems in three magazines!!!!

Anyway: I've been writing raps for the past few months. Here is one I am particularly fond of.

"Library Rap"

'cause those
Pages are turnin' and the children are learnin':
it's Friday afternoon and their minds are burnin'

with the potential of a destiny
that tonight might hold.
Girls applying lipstick,
men's cologne makes them bold

about the prospect of relations
with the opposite sex,
but the problems are eternal
oh, the young minds they vex

like a fat-ass blunt
or a fresh 40-z.
The human mind walks blindly
towards truths it can't see

sitting on the bookshelf
like a Friday night;
it contains some useful knowledge
if you read it just right

until the evening comes
like a false realization,
kids putting books in their bags
all across the nation.

There's one couple though,
reading books in the night.
his hand is in hers,
everything thing is alright

until their back at their dorm
turning lights down low,
Janie's mouth is a blunt,
Joey's mind is a-glow

with ideas of the future
that could never come true.
He looks in Janie's eyes:
"Baby I think I love you"

she turns bright red,
pulls out a fresh 40z,
takes a swig from sweet bounty
"Are you sure that you love me?"

she coos sexually,
placing bottle to lips.
"Can you promise me the world
if I give just one kiss?"

Soon theres clothing on the floor
she's screaming "I'm a whore"
Yelling shouting screwing
up against the door

until the sun is rising
he wakes up first,
grabs the nearest cell phone
while he's dying of thirst.

He opens up the cell phone
just to check the time,
a text message is waiting:
"Baby you looked fine

in that skirt last night,
stuck behind the bookshelf
with that nerdy little faggot
looking pleased with himself."

Joey closes the phone,
and turns to look at his love,
sleeping in the sheets
arms spread like a dove's

soon he's stumbling down the staircause
because he can't accept the truth,
the phone still in his hand,
which is burning with proof

that life is a bitch
when you sleep with a bitch.

Well....

2009-02-16T12:58:00.000-08:00

I'VE BEEN PUBLISHED.

...sry. Just excited s'all.

2009-02-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

Should Be A Good Weekend

2009-02-06T12:43:00.000-08:00

"Storms Are Drunk Wave Patterns"

Pushing through Hurriance Frathouse,
two red clams crushed between boiling faces, now
the bar but the kegs are empty,
again the ship setting sail across the social sea.

I watch more screaming breasts
and harpooned bellybuttons
sinking into the basement
to rock back and forth
in rickety boats of oaken self-esteem,
hoping to hook compassion beneath the water.
My cell phone hums like an astrolabe,
out of sync with the deafening bass
like an eye in a storm.

EDIT: Groundhog Day

2009-02-02T00:59:00.000-08:00

I'm at the library, working the overnight.

I had a good Sunday. Loafing about, rehearsal, eating fine soup, Super Bowl (hats off to the Cardinals, they played excellently), some beiruit with friends that I unfortunately don't see as much, some other things, topped off with a delightful eight-hour shift at the library.

One fun moment: about two hours ago, a few gentlemen and I were engaging in some gentlemanly activities when we happed upon a large group of ducks. Now, for an UMass readers out there, I am sure you know the ducks that inhabit the pond. For any non-UMass readers, a small digression from the story is in order: as many of you know, most waterfowl migrate for the winter season. They do this because the water is understandably cold, given the atmospheric circumstances of this region (i.e., snow). The ducks at UMass, however...don't...migrate. They stay. In the cold water. In the snow. Every year. Many die in droves to be sure, but UMass must keep a watchful eye upon these birds, making sure that the tax/tuition-paying public does not see the barbarism that takes place.

Not to mention the spring-time duck raping.

Anywho, these particular ducks were ducking about when we (I) decided to toss some spare muffin to them. Naturally, starving as they are, the ducks performed a minor swarm. I tossed many pieces, both to this group and, as hard as I could, to the ducks sleeping. One duck in particular I was able to, with much persuasion, get him to eat some muffin off my boot. It was quite entertaining and rewarding. He was a fine-looking mallard with a strong green headcoat, and definitely ate the lion's share of muffin.

Oh...and there might be something big on the horizon. If everything goes like I want it to...

...this could be huge.

More later.

Yours,
M

First Day Report:

2009-01-28T01:36:00.001-08:00

No pencil sharpeners. Anywhere.

I tried sleeping after writing all night

2009-01-27T02:49:00.000-08:00

but, as I was getting slightly less uncomfortable, a car horn starts going off. I waited, and it stopped -- for a second, only to continue blaring once more. So I got dressed, boots and jacketed, went outside with my roommate (he was sprung from a manic dream, so there is a plus) to discover that there was nobody in the car.

Anywho, here you go.

"Does Anyone Mortgage Their House to Buy Books?"

A man
with his television, living room.
His wife
with her television, bedroom.
Children and techno

asleep upstairs.

Every room has a ceiling fan.
Pages on the coffee table

flicker.

School today. Damnit.

2009-01-26T22:31:00.001-08:00

"Pre-Momentum"

The future sits in the textbooks on my desk,
containing ample isms and acronyms.
I want someone to do it for me,
buy some college and Walt's grass,

but I can't trust someone
who only just treads water.
Outside my shoes abreast the broom
manically waiting to be

worn, led back to a maker. Verdian trills,
learned notes from the radio while young trees
sleep in the fish tank where my window was.
I want to give it to them, everyone.

January clouds swim by,
don't stop.

Post Script

2009-01-26T02:38:00.000-08:00

Even if you've stumbled here, thank you. :)

It has been a while

2009-01-25T21:42:00.000-08:00

since I've posted any recent poetic work, mostly out of my hope that any of them be published in the near future.

So I've decided to share this. While I think there are parts of the poem that are strong, it (I think) lends itself better to a vocalization than a reading. This rationale doesn't really apply to this (you, the reader's) situation, by way of putting it on the blog in the first place, but I don't intend to ever see it published, though incidentally it is awaiting publication in it's present form. It's subject is part of a larger exploration of the collegiate world I dwell in. I'm fascinating by it's ins and outs, and the hope is (perhaps) fashion some kind of collection of these college-life poems. But we shall see!

SO if you are the publisher of PANK magazine, I will promptly remove this and all memory of its bloggy existence upon your request. :)

If you are not the publisher of PANK, please enjoy (and if you are, enjoy as well :D)!

"Pulse"

Five dollars a cup,
unless you're
a girl.

"Hey -- don't touch the beer in the fridge."

I follow a girl from my science class
down to the basement,
wondering how she did on the
last lab assignment.
She's wearing clay necklaces
with lions and sea lions
that stand out against her
strapless green-blue safari.

Boom boom boom --
Kayne West is
giving a recital.
Dr. Dre sits in the back and
reads the program.

Boom--
everyone here has red hearts only.
Boom,
Boom,
Boom--
I'm bleeding Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Boom--
I watch my friend swallow
a tongue.
Boom--
I sip,
palpitate.
Boom.

Boom boom boom...

crowds calling their friends,
thinking of text messages.

BOOM:
now there's beer on the floor;
napkins
are behind the keg.
Five dollars for those
too.

Boom--
everyone is an electron.
Boom,
Boom,
Boom--
nobody wants to be the nucleus.
Boom--
in case the cops
show up.
Boom--
they hold beer in their backs
while they kiss in the dark.
Boom boom:
stay in orbit.

Boom boom boom...

--slap on my hip;
it's my classmate. She has
bottle-cap eyes.
I fish an opener from my pocket:
"Hey you've got real nice jewelry"
Oh, she's already sucking the
mustache off the business major.
I flirt with the back door,
not caring much for music.

Dull explosions
under the foundations.

I don't smoke cigarettes
but I borrow some cancer
from a red-headed bro,
groove down the street.
I don't think about anything.
Just veins in the asphalt--
wait! Ears to the ground,
feeling the pulse. I
listen for elephants,
the stone.

Cleaning my Room with Bro-Fresh

2009-01-25T12:11:00.001-08:00

Hey everyone!

Been busy as a comatose beaver, shuffling mindlessly from one end of my house or the state to the next. Just moved back to Amherst, having a lovely time per usual already, and I am looking forward to tearing into a nice steak of academia on Tuesday. Nothing much to report, received a poetry rejection from one of the recent submissions (one down, five birds still flying!) the other day, but morale is still quite high.

Also, I am addicted to canned soup.

More bro-fiction!

"Medics are Mad Chill"

Dr. Richard Jacobson raised a gloved hand to cover his eyes. A cloud of dust, whipped up by a nearby helicopter, tore through the low, open-sided hospital tent. Nurses and patients shielded themselves, coughing and hacking the following haze of dirt that seemed to settle on the electric equipment and precious medical supplies. The roar of the helicopter rotors had given way to frantic shouting, as a small group of soldiers emerged out of the swirling brown haze, pushing a stretcher between them. Dr. Jacobson lowered his hand and watched this group move past. A soldier lay in the middle of the stretcher, blood pouring out of his gut and jaw. For a moment, the two made eye contact, the pale green eyes of the wounded man piercing into Dr. Jacobson. Yet there was a glassiness to his gaze. He knew the poor soldier wouldn't last long.

"Shit, bro, this place is mad shitty dude," grunted a voice from behind Dr. Jacobson. Dr. Bruce Dagless, a portly man with squinty eyes that were shielded by a tiny pair of glasses, stripped a pair of bloody latex gloves off his hands and allowed them to fall to the dirt floor beneath them. He placed these on his generous hips and smirked at this medical companion. "Seriously, dude, this place is not chill."

Dr. Jacobson stared out over the horizon of the desert. It was bleak, lifeless beyond their remote hospital outpost. Mountains, rocks and daggers, formed a wall around the base that seemed to keep them in more than keep invaders out. They rarely saw combat, but they were not f ar from the intense fighting: many of their charges were mortally wounded soldiers, all of whom had dim hopes of survival upon arrival.

"Bro can't get decent nug or a Jagerbomb out here," Dr. Jacobson whispered. "No way for a bro to live."

Dr. Dagless stepped up next to him and placed a fat hand upon his shoulder. "Dude, it's time to like, move on from the bad shit, and like, um, you know, move on to the good shit, bro.." These comments dug into Dr. Jacobson worse than the only wound he had ever received in the military. Before being stationed at Camp Delta Bravo Sixer, he had been a combat medic on the front lines. As the fighting raged through the centers of population, the horrors that were inflicted on the battlefield, the decencies of wars abandoned, the wanton destruction of civilian refugee camps, the disease, the fear that you wouldn't wake up the next day, had taken their toll on the doctor. In one of these camps, his platoon had made a stopover. It was there that an angry refugee, upset over the loss of his family to military bombing campaigns, shot him in the back. The man was quickly gunned down by Dr. Jacobson's comrades. Since then, Dr. Jacobson hadn't seen the front line. He was the resident surgeon at this camp and walked stiffly, with the help of a cane.

"Bro, shut the fuck up," Dr. Jacoboson said to the doctor.

"Dude, what up? I'm tryin' to like, help you dude," Dr. Dagless replied angrily.

Dr. Jacobson grabbed his fellow doctor's hand and pushed it roughly off his shoulder. Stumbling away from his crude workstation, Dr. Jacobson staggered out of the tent. The hot desert sun struck his skin like an iron. Shouting angrily, he flailed his arms into the air and fell to his knees sobbing. The burning tears fell from his eyelids and evaporated with infinitesimal sizzles on the rocky desert surface. He felt a large presence standing on all sides of him, but he ignored them and continued crying. The doctor felt himself going mad as childish thoughts of wanting to go home and being safe plagued his wits and paralyzed his body. Rough arms seized him by the limbs and lifted him back into the shadow of the hospital tent. Dr. Jacobson felt himself lowered onto a hospital bed. A relaxing chill settled over him, as he enjoyed the cloth sheets that cushioned his thin frame. It felt good to be off his feet. The doctor felt a sting as a syringe made its way into the veins of his left arm. Edges blurred and pinpoint details faded away. He heard a faint yet familiar voice floating on the horizon of his increasingly tired consciousness.

"Shit, fuckin', war is hell, bros. War is hell."

[title]

2009-01-21T21:45:00.001-08:00

I can't decide what to name this blog.

Vacation is nearing the end of it's run...

2009-01-21T00:07:00.000-08:00

...so a reflection is in order. Have I done anything productive? Perhaps. Six (count 'em!) submission sent out in the span of one month, ten-odd new poems written, several old ones polished and brought back to life from creative ruin, and the beginnings of a choose-your-adventure novel set in plastic (more on that later).

A funny thing happened today -- a poem of mine was rejected from a journal. It's funny because, when reading this poem now, I can find many faults in it, from its structure to the imagery. I still like the poem, having modeled it after a particularly fine dream I had one night a few years ago, but it no longer seems relevant. It is possible that I will revisit the plot, rework the language -- some of it I think is good, but it's caked in, well, poor writing. We shall see.

Other than that, I have slept (God have I), seen friends, had several brain-numbing adventures...all of this following my best semester yet (3.5 motherf*boink*ers!)

It's going to be a good spring.

P.S.; Here's an old work that I still love. For all you bro-dudes out there:

"Goodbye, Bro"

Phillip Davidsboro lifted his father's wrinkled, veined hand and squeezed it gently. Around him, several near-clones stood in a semi-circle around the large bed in the dimly lit room. A pair of children stood at the end of their grandfather's bed and watched him with large, quiet eyes. The old man in the bed breathed shallowly and looked at them.

"Dude, where the 'ruit at?" he whispered, his eyes closing and his breath silencing. A gentle wind waltzed through an open window, and whisked the old man's life away.

Wow.

2009-01-20T00:16:00.001-08:00

A plane full of people crashes in the Hudson...

...George Bush says farewell...

...everyone miraculously survives...

...everyone tunes back to Seinfeld...

..."We made it."

Hey Kids!

2009-01-15T01:54:00.000-08:00

I should be in bed, but...

"Another Funeral Poem"

An organ blesses the man
who pall-bears my name.
A little girl with leopard legs
bounces in place and wonders
why her mother cries so.
I contemplate sacred water,
kicks of the knee rest,
oblivion.

"Hanging Out with Kids Tripping Over Themselves"

(You know, using drugs.)
The red petals had pretensions.
The blue couch was blue,
but blue enough where it wasn't
abrasive or intimidating. Giggling
for the sake of itself, and nothing more.
The wicker reacted to itself.
Apparently.

And Now We Wait

2009-01-08T02:40:00.000-08:00

Four submissions sent out in the past two weeks...

Still looking for places that allow simultaneous submissions to continue sending this week's batch of edits to. The first four poems I sent out at the beginning of the break were sent to a magazine that does not accept them, regrettably. While I feel alright about those works, I only feel like one of them is strong enough to last out there in the big world. Hrm.

Here's to hopin', kids!

A Razor Blade

2009-01-05T04:09:00.001-08:00

Blade sitting in a bar. Around him, human buzzing, nonsense. He follows a tug, the pull, the one he wished he didn't notice, making him feel like a mosquito. Blood...

Door. Cold, crisp air. Interstate. He keeps walking, taking in the gasoline, the exhaust, the burnt rubber, the wind carrying sewage and ash and dregs around him, masking the smell in his heart.

He hungers in the night.

I should probably sleep.

2009-01-03T03:05:00.000-08:00

"Living under the weight of English Literary History"

because books feel real heavy on
snow-filled buses. Night.
Gnashing wheels, so too the engine.
Glass panes, chimes against my forehead,
clash with Debussy
beautifully.

An idea, turning in my head,
rubs the pages of Paradise Lost
and forgets
the absence of words
waiting for us at home.

2008: "Well, it was no 1998."

Good Morning Tedrow v.2

2008-12-28T23:56:00.001-08:00

Because it should be here:

"Good Morning Tedrow"

CHARACTERS:

TEDROW
DALY/HOBO 2
PRIEST
WOMAN
Crowd

SCENE I:

(Lights up on a bare stage save for a bed. TEDROW is lying on top of the sheets, in a suit. His eyes are open.)

TEDROW: I suppose I shall get up and go to work today.

(Lights.)

SCENE II:

(Lights up. The set is a table, with two chairs. DALY is sitting at the table, eating a bowl of cereal very slowly. TEDROW enters, still in his outfit, and stops after two steps. He stares at his feet, as if seeing them for the first time. Hesitation. Abruptly he starts to walk forward, but lurches and falls forward, landing next to the chair.)

DALY: You should watch how you walk. Notice your own gait. It's like staring into a mirror that always hovers, invisibly, waiting for your inspection. It can reveal a lot about your personality. (He takes a few large bites of cereal, talking with it in his mouth.) A pensive person takes pensive steps; an aggressive person takes aggressive steps. But what about a person who does nothing? (He spits out what is left, angrily shoves the bowl of cereal off the table; it shatters, sits.) Can you take no steps in life? (He stares at TEDROW.) Can you cease to grow?

TEDROW: I can only offer conclusions.

DALY: Such as? (DALY begins to cackle madly. TEDROW stares. Cut to black.)

SCENE III:

(TEDROW standing center-stage, an easel facing him, the back of it to the audience. TEDROW is painting in broad strokes, a smile. He stops, becomes frustrated, paints frantically. Throwing the brush down, he collapses to his knees, weeping quietly. DALY enters, staring.)

DALY: I don't like this.

TEDROW: What?

DALY: (Noticing himself.) Nothing. (He walks over to TEDROW, examines the painting.) Not bad.

TEDROW: I know, right? I tried to go with something subtle, with a hint of turgidity.

DALY: Seems like you've hit the screw on the head.

TEDROW: The...what?

DALY: The screw, on the head. With the hammer. It's an expression. (He says this last word with force.)

TEDROW: That's...that's not how it--(DALY grabs him by the throat.)

DALY: (His face inches from TEDROW's) It's expression. Words. Music through broken rhythm, declamation. But you, you don't have words...your expression is something, something else! You can't smell it, taste it. You can taste the paint, sure, you can smell it, sure, sure, lap it up, grab a large chunk of it and rub into your gums, between your teeth, so roughly and thickly that all the floss in the world won't get it out! (He cackles, stops, and pants heavily, staring into TEDROW's eyes. He relaxes, lets go.) But what do I know? It's your mind. It's your picture. (He exits. TEDROW stares at the easel for a while. He pulls it off, examining it closely. He walks off stage. He returns with a mirror, holding it up to the side facing him. We see that the canvas is blank.)

TEDROW: Do you see yourself?

(Cut to black.)

SCENE IV:

(A chair. TEDROW sits in it.)

TEDROW: I don't know who I am. I don't know where I'm from. I think I'm from a home; I remember walls with paint, posters -- things my parents picked out because they believed, through my interactions with them, that I enjoyed Insane Clown Posse and Nirvana. I've never heard of these bands. When they ask me, "Tedrow, what kind of music do you like?", I respond with a shrug. "I don't know" is the most they'll get out of me. So they turn to their friends, who have their own children, who perform their own waltzes with their children in the attempt to gain understanding in a time when the understandee is still coming to grips with hormonal maelstroms. It's trying. (He stands up.) I don't know who I am. I don't think I'm anyone. I see men and women on the trains, and I think...I could be them. I could be going to my nine-to-five desk job at a tax claims company. (He pauses.) I could be digging graves.

(Cut to black.)

SCENE V:

(Lights up. There is a barrel fire, with two homeless men standing around it. They are dressed like hobos.)

HOBO 1: The moon is bright.

HOBO 2: Agreed. Has it ever been this bright?

HOBO 1: You've never noticed it?

HOBO 2: I don't notice much these days. I notice newspapers, I notice litter. I notice that the trains screech a little louder when they get near people. I notice the not-quite-a-sound the television makes when it's on but no picture. Y'know, the one that burrows into your eardrum and starts gnawing, gnawing...(He looks up.) Not that though. Maybe it's a measure of our times.

HOBO 1: Nobody watches moonsets anymore.

(TEDROW enters, wearing normal clothing. The hobos turn.)

HOBO 2: Hello...son.

(Lights out.)

SCENE VI:

(Lights up. Two rows of chairs, with figures wearing funeral dress. Small door in the back. A woman plays at a small organ in the back. She is old, moving slowly -- the notes are languished, dissonant, and unlike any dirge played before. What notes are played is inconsequential -- the feel of the notes must be established; blending into one another, cyclical, and unending. But not too loud. TEDROW, sitting in the front row. A PRIEST stands up, faces the congregation with his back to the audience.)

PRIEST: We all gather to mourn. It is human nature, to mourn. Some animals even mourn. Elephants are known to place their dead in special places -- "elephant graveyard" is the term used. But if mourning is capable at such a low level of intelligence, then it begs the question -- what is mourning? Are we mourning our lost loved ones? Or are we mourning the loss of their physical presence, their participation in the flow of our lives that we take for granted, that we assume will always be there. Perhaps we are mourning change. Mourning, then, is the celebration of stagnation, the continuance of life. "We're still here -- let's keep clinging." (He bows, takes a seat. TEDROW rises, coughs, vomits into his hands. He walks through the congregation and out the small door, spilling vomit everywhere. Lights out.)

SCENE VII:

(The bed again. TEDROW lying in it, with his nineteenth century clothing on. A WOMAN lies next to him.)

WOMAN: (Looking at TEDROW.) You know, we could talk about politics. Democracy. Choice.

TEDROW: I know. (There is a pause.)

WOMAN: We could talk about me. What I like to do, my interests, my fears, my regrets, my plans...how...(She smiles, giggling.)...to get into my pants.

TEDROW: I know. (There is another pause.)

WOMAN: (She rises, standing over the bed. A bit more hurried now.) We could have sex.

TEDROW: I know. (There is another, longer pause.)

WOMAN: (Genuinely nervous. She grabs TEDROW by the collar, who for the first time seems aware of everything.) We could reproduce, make another. Like us. (She takes a deep breath.) We could leave something behind. (She kisses him deeply.) Get ready. We're going to have a son.

TEDROW: (He starts to cry.) I know.

WOMAN: (She lies back down next to him, pulling the blankets over them both.) Do you want me to sing to you?

TEDROW: Sure. (WOMAN begins to sing "The Final Countdown", but softly, slowly, jazzily. Embellishment of notes. TEDROW speaks over the song.) I love this song. We're heading to Venus then. No...no, we're heading to Mercury. (He points up.) That one, there. The tiny dot. You know, you can see it, just barely, for a few moments just before sunrise. Watch as it plies across the sky, searching for freedom. You see, he's locked in gravitational struggle. Trapped. (He smiles, crying.) Good morning, Tedrow.

(Cut to black. End.)

Pixels of Larry

2008-12-28T23:31:00.000-08:00

has been removed due to potential publication. If you wish to read it, please contact me! :D

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-26T00:12:00.001-08:00

Edit: Happy Boxing Day!

"This is What It's Like to Work in the Fast Food Industry"
The grill
can cook thirty-six burgers
in thirty-four seconds.
That's a pretty good average
if you look at it

but if you look at it
fat hangs in spider-webs
over the stinging hot-plate,
which sobs grease-tears into your eyes.
You always wear gloves. They always say that.
"Look at these," my swing manager says,
showing me ten stubs,
fleshy glassed stems.
He dares me to touch them, but I don't.
He never talks about the scars he can't show me.
The ones that hide behinds the PS3 and the plasma TV.
He says I'll get those too.

It's endless, endless, endless.
The burgers, deserts of creativity
shine in the light, calorie grins.
Pattie, cheese, pickle, cheese, pattie,
repeat. Meanwhile, Ron is grinning.
So are we
because you're lovin' it
and that's cool because we love it too
until we get the paycheck.
Grab it on the way home.
"Thanks," I say, but they match eyes.
They want my rear-view mirrors
to see the look on my face,
waiting at a red light.
They sit in boardrooms
wearing clown costumes,
making millions for existing.
I sling patties then drive home.

3:40 AM!!!!!1one

2008-12-19T00:40:00.001-08:00

Here:

"we used to do this"

I.

the road passes between us like this cigar.
you look at me but I'm listening to radio traffic reports
from a thirteen-year old.
puff.
my cousin owned this car
but sold it to send his kid
to cheerleading. pom poms
bought with a v6.
puff.
it's getting late.

II.

we kiss goodnight,
mummify ourselves in each other
and pretend we can afford silk.
the clock's sanguine stare,
3:12 in her eyes.
meanwhile, my bedroom hums.

III.

awake now. staggering thirst but it's
hard to move a linen mountain
that breathes like you do.
outside:
the night walks away, crying.

Second Drafts All Around

2008-12-18T13:46:00.001-08:00

Still polishing, but if anyone actually reads this thing, enjoy:

"ten thousand years/Bright shining"

"amazing grace" is a great song.
it's that soaring melody,
like rolling sand.
I’ve sung it twice.
once in a choir
when I was a soprano.

once at a funeral.
the sheet music was stale.
my fingertips stagnated.
I looked over at the organ.
it played a balding reverend
who squinted, shuffling pages.
later he would tell my parents I had a good voice.
he pulled twice at his collar.
I thought of the holy water in the hallway,
imagined it reflecting the bulbs.
I wondered if life began in G major.
thirst.

notes.
I start singing
words.
when I sing this song
its like a movie in my mind.
usually it takes place in the wild west
with prairie men fondling rifles
and buffalo pondering rifles,
but this time
I saw clay wedges.
brown dinner-plates smashed, gathered.
someone had left the sun on.
I was walking.
somewhere.
striding like a silk tie with black straps
over a bar of silver.
I could see but I was still lost.

I thought about the drive here.
the leather seat.
grass in the window.
the warmth of the belt.
it was short.

I thought about being outside.
the tightness of my suit.
socks, ankles.
the street-lamps weren't on.
a man held coffee; his wife was thirsty too.
I was trying to cry
so I wouldn't have to later.

I thought about the funeral parlor.
its pinkness.
doors of burly lumber.
I pulled one, let go.
lifeless.

I thought about being born in a dry dock.
bottles of champagne.
“good luck" they said
and smashed me over the face.
“stop crying” they said.
“when you die you fish with the gods”.
actually the navy handles it.
c-4 in the boiler rooms.
your family watches from the destroyer.
watch the aldis lamps flicker.
darkness. booms.

I thought about elephants.

after ten thousand years the song ended.
the paper had weight.
there were words, but only words.
I looked at the microphone.
I looked at the coffin.
it made me think of egyptians
placing their dead in ships.

I stepped down from the altar.
cleared my throat.
a water fountain hummed in the entrance hall.
I don't remember the color of the coffin
it might have been light brown.
orchid sails tucked in, gold trimmed jibs.
I struck the starboard side
and walked away.
sat next to my brother.
"aye" I thought
as the church sank in the sea.

"because sometimes when you're drunk you gotta whale watch"

outside the bar, I'm picking a fight with the brick.
puke on my shoes; stomach bile mating rituals.
the females react by sending text messages.
'joseph stop' says the bar, or my conscience;
whoever has the most say in my life.
I try not to think about whale-watching.
humpback noses touching the bow. they're
a lot smaller in person
like hallways in your childhood home.
having to bend down to find your fingerprints.
it's what we all want, right?
to hang yellow-green splats in the galleries,
have people admire digestive self-portraits
in adobe.

I'm Having A Hard Time Sleeping

2008-12-18T02:54:00.000-08:00

"arctic yolks at sunrise"

I'm always shocked when morning comes
but I go into the kitchen anyway.
crack eggs on the floor
and cook toast right-side up.
habitually, in that order.

Not So New Poems

2008-12-18T01:08:00.000-08:00

So, flashback five years.

I took a shine to writing fictional angsty poetry under the pseudonym "GothChicka". Written, for the most part, during my lunch breaks in school, I posted the majority of them on the FictionPress writing community and had some success with them. Flash forward four and three-quarters years -- I start writing them again. Here are a few, I hope you enjoy them.

(NOTE: In case you missed it, GothChicka is an angsty girl.)

MY COFFIN HAS TWO WINDOWS
My coffin has two windows
The one you watch me through with that smile
that tells me you don't think about my heart
It's still behind you, you know.
The other has smudges that look like my parents
Foreign, brown with the stink of arguments
I purposely ignored. I purposely bled
for you and for my sisters
in the abortion clinics. It's cold in this coffin.
The dirt is too thin, like the blankets of my youth,
and it doesn't get any warmer six feet under.

MY BREASTS BLEED WITH ENVY
I'm looking through the pane
You are in the hallway, not alone
I can smell her perfume from here
Are you drunk on it?
Have you driven on it?
There are laws for a reason
I see the law like a book on fire
Its words mean nothing but their heat lives on
until you pour a bucket of tears on it.
My tears.
My breasts are bleeding with envy
but you don't care. I tried telling you this
but my texts are always deleted,
purged and censored and given a shine
I should always smile for you.

THE PUDDLES ARE ALMOST ALWAYS BLACK
This bus stop was cold yesterday
but now I can barely breathe
My chest heaves and lurches as the blood flow stops
like that time when I saw you for the first. Time, apparently,
does not forgive. Neither do hearts that slide down
wet concrete drains to the surging rush of filth
while these here puddles are almost always black.
Black like nights where I can't bring myself
to weep your name, and black like my soul
that can no longer think of things in shades of gray.

DAGGERS AREN'T THE SHARPEST WEAPON
You always liked to show me your collection.
They would glint in my hands while you tried to
get in what lay below. I was easy enough
but you always tried to win me over
when I was already won. I'm still won,
but now you're in contests where even daggers
aren't the sharpest weapon. Can I be that contest?
Can I be the dagger? No, you see, I can't
How can I make someone else bleed as much as I have?

I CUT MY WRISTS WITH HURRICANES
I cut my wrists with hurricanes
They are sharp, you see, with waves of steel
Daggers can't do the job
that you failed to finish on the phone last night
My blood will fill the sink
but I won't drain it.
No.
I want to watch it, like I have been
these past two weeks
while we sat in fields of yellow and youth
Both are dead now.
Dead like a storm already lost over land.
I'm a weatherwoman of pure indecency.
You won't notice, I assume
because you've already changed the channel
Nobody ever watches the Weather Channel anymore.

New Poem

2008-12-18T00:18:00.001-08:00

Ah:

"because sometimes when you're drunk you gotta whale watch"

outside the bar, I'm picking a fight with the brick.
puke on my shoes; stomach bile mating rituals.
the females react by sending text messages.
'joseph stop' says the bar, or my conscience;
whoever has the most say in my life.
I try not to think about whale-watching.
humpback noses touching the bow. they're
a lot smaller in person, like standing in the
hallway of your childhood home and
having to bend down to find your fingerprints.
it's what we all want. yellow-green pancakes
demonstrating. people staring,
admiring digestive self-portraits
in the adobe.

Good Morning Tedrow

2008-12-17T20:34:00.000-08:00

My friend Paul wrote/directed a play called "Good Morning Ted". I was inspired to write a theatrical piece in response, dedicated to my roommate, Tedrow. Hope ya like.

--

"Good Morning Tedrow"

CHARACTERS:

TEDROW
DALY
HOBO 1
HOBO 2
PRIEST
WOMAN
People at the Funeral

SCENE I:

(Lights up on a bare stage save for a bed. TEDROW is lying on top of the sheets, wearing antiquated clothing from the nineteenth century. His eyes are open.)

TEDROW: I suppose I shall get up and go to work today.

(Lights.)

SCENE II:

(Lights up. The set is a table, with two chairs. DALY is sitting at the table, eating a bowl of cereal very slowly. TEDROW enters, still in his outfit, and stops after two steps. He stares at his feet, as if seeing them for the first time. Hesitation. Abruptly he starts to walk forward, but lurches and falls forward, landing next to the chair.)

DALY: You should watch how you walk. Notice your own gait. It's like staring into a mirror that always hovers, invisibly, waiting for your inspection. It can reveal a lot about your personality. (He takes a few large bites of cereal, talking with it in his mouth.) A pensive person takes pensive steps; an aggressive person takes aggressive steps. But what about a person who does nothing? (He spits out what is left, angrily shoves the bowl of cereal off the table; it shatters, sits.) Can you take no steps in life? (He stares at TEDROW.) Can you cease to grow?

TEDROW: I can only offer conclusions.

DALY: Such as?

(TEDROW stares. Cut to black.)

SCENE III:

(A chair. TEDROW sits in it.)

TEDROW: I don't know who I am. I don't know where I'm from. I think I'm from a home; I remember walls with paint, posters -- things my parents picked out because they believed, through my interactions with them, that I enjoyed Insane Clown Posse and Nirvana. I've never heard of these bands. When they ask me, "Tedrow, what kind of music do you like?", I respond with a shrug. "I don't know" is the most they'll get out of me. So they turn to their friends, who have their own children, who perform their own waltzes with their children in the attempt to gain understanding in a time when the understandee is still coming to grips with hormonal maelstroms. It's trying. (He stands up.) I don't know who I am. I don't think I'm anyone. I see men and women on the trains, and I think...I could be them. I could be going to my nine-to-five desk job at a tax claims company. (He pauses.) I could be digging graves.

(Cut to black.)

SCENE IV:

(Lights up. There is a barrel fire, with two homeless men standing around it. They are dressed like hobos.)

HOBO 1: The moon is bright.

HOBO 2: Agreed. Has it ever been this bright?

HOBO 1: You've never noticed it?

HOBO 2: I don't notice much these days. I notice newspapers, I notice litter. I notice that the trains screech a little louder when they get near people. I notice the not-quite-a-sound the television makes when it's on but no picture. (He looks up.) Not that though. Maybe it's a measure of our times.

HOBO 1: Nobody watches moonsets anymore.

(TEDROW enters, wearing normal clothing. The hobos turn.)

HOBO 2: Hello...son.

(Lights out.)

SCENE V:

(Lights up. Two rows of chairs, with figures wearing funeral dress. Small door in the back. A woman plays at a small organ in the back. She is old, moving slowly -- the notes are languished, dissonant, and unlike any dirge played before. What notes are played is inconsequential -- the feel of the notes must be established; blending into one another, cyclical, and unending. But not too loud. TEDROW, sitting in the front row. A PRIEST stands up, faces the congregation with his back to the audience.)

PRIEST: We all gather to mourn. It is human nature, to mourn. Some animals even mourn. Elephants are known to place their dead in special places -- "elephant graveyard" is the term used. But if mourning is capable at such a low level of intelligence, then it begs the question -- what is mourning? Are we mourning our lost loved ones? Or are we mourning the loss of their physical presence, their participation in the flow of our lives that we take for granted, that we assume will always be there. Perhaps we are mourning change. Mourning, then, is the celebration of stagnation, the continuance of life. "We're still here -- let's keep clinging." (He bows, takes a seat. TEDROW rises, coughs, vomits into his hands. He walks through the congregation and out the small door, spilling vomit everywhere. Lights out.)

SCENE VI:

(The bed again. TEDROW lying in it, with his nineteenth century clothing on. A WOMAN lies next to him.)

WOMAN: (Looking at TEDROW.) You know, we could talk about politics. Democracy. Choice.

TEDROW: I know. (There is a pause.)

WOMAN: We could talk about me. What I like to do, my interests, my fears, my regrets, my plans...how...(She smiles, giggling.)...to get into my pants.

TEDROW: I know. (There is another pause.)

WOMAN: (She rises, standing over the bed. A bit more hurried now.) We could have sex.

TEDROW: I know. (There is another, longer pause.)

WOMAN: (Genuinely nervous. She grabs TEDROW by the collar, who for the first time seems aware of everything.) We could reproduce, make another. Like us. (She takes a deep breath.) We could leave something behind. (She kisses him deeply.) Get ready. We're going to have a son.

TEDROW: (He starts to cry.) I know.

(Lights. End.)

Quick Thought

2008-12-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

You know, "The Matrix" was a great movie because there was so much mystery about it. We had no idea what this "robot" war was all about, and we were forced to draw conclusions from the battle going on in the movie. The possibility of there being many battles like this was exciting, intriguing, and worthy of six dollars.

But once we found out what was actually happening, it went down-hill from there. We had to make excused for Keanu that, deep down, none of us actually wanted to make. Carrie-Anne Moss's back was made infinitely less hot by the plug-holes bored into her spine. The Asian man in the robot suit was not badass enough to make up for Morpheus' complete turnaround from badass to sucker. Admittedly the scene on the free-way was cool, but Morpheus couldn't save The Matrix Reloaded even if he punched a nuclear warhead into the Architect's face.

Thought(s).

Aha!

2008-12-15T20:47:00.000-08:00

Today was a fairly productive day. Two finals, both English classes so I got to analyze for a total of four hours today. It felt good putting my brain through its paces in a non-paper environment, though admittedly my preparation was a bit lax. Also turned in my Milton final, which came in the form of a short one-scene dramatic work and analysis. I was fairly pleased with what I produced, but I want to expand it and incorporate more scenes. Examples of it shall be thrown on the blog, of course, in the future.

And I really want to share this:

This is a Poem Where I Talk About Drugs

2008-12-11T06:57:00.000-08:00

...ha:

"This is a Poem Where I Talk About Drugs"

There's a poster of Jimi Hendrix in my bathroom.
It's help up by four thumbtacks, two green.
Jimi hangs by the door because he likes
to show off his sweet guitar skills
while you're drying your hair
on the way out the door
because the best time to appreciate music
is with warm ears. What I like most about
the poster is that its completely tie-dye;
Jimi's face, Jimi's beard, Jimi's guitar, Jimi.
It makes me wish that we were all every color
as it would be a lot easier to pick outfits
because you would always look ridiculous.
The poster says: "HendriX" with a big X
and I could see old Jimi
struggling with the marker tip while
a fan drooled on his headband
and saying "Hen-Drix!" with a flourish
and thanking the fan with a wave
and the fan smiling up at him
and Jimi thinking the fan looked like
an octopus with five faces.
Drugs will do that.
I did drugs once.
Now I don't remember much nor do I recommend them
but I do recall that
the new "Curious George" movie is phenomenal.
I think we all need to be taken to a tree by a monkey
while we wear the yellow hats of our fathers
and take the firefly from our ancestral cousin,
who knows best because he came first,
and while we may have a terrible time,
and walls may melt into couches,
and grown men may communicate with busses,
and trees may appear miles wide and ages wise,
and police may loom, scourge-like, black,
and pupils may rise to the occasion,
eventually you'll wake by on the big X
that marks the bathroom wall.

Climate Change

2008-12-09T17:36:00.000-08:00

Older work, re-invigorated with lessons learned over the past month. Again, this may be prone to updates (actually I can guarantee it.)

"Climate Change”

I wake up at 7:15.
Ante meridiem.
"I'm already ahead of schedule" I think.
I sleep.
I wake up at 7:43.
"I'm already behind schedule" I think,
because usually I give myself ten minutes to wash
and two minutes to stand under the warm water
and two seconds to fetch a bowl from the cabinet
and seven-point-five seconds to pour my Cracklin’ Oat Bran
and three minutes to eat it.
But now I'm at least seven minutes behind schedule.

The bus stop is empty.
That means I missed the bus.
There are usually four of five people
here that I make eye contact with at 8:07.
At 8:07:56 two girls arrive.
At 8:08:04 I wipe my glasses on my shirt.

It's cold and I'm happy in my corduroy jacket.
"I'm happy with you" I tell it.
“It’s pretty damn cold” I continue happily, but inside
I’m pissed off because the weatherman
told me it was going to be eighty degrees today.
The shivering moisture on my glasses
and the frost on the grass betray themselves to me,
so I tell myself to never again trust a man
who claims expertise in something he can't see.

I'm late for my writing class.
While I wait for the
red bricks of the library speak
I realize that I have nothing
to turn in. So I sweat.

I walk into class. When I sit down
my professor asks for my assignment, so I say
"I don't know, but I have these
napkins that have cool sentences written on them" but
I realize I wrote them in grease because
I like fatty foods, so she looks at them and declares
"This is a classroom not a cafeteria" and
with black handbags under my eyes I say
“Yeah I noticed”

and then I'm outside walking with my napkins
while the campus stays silent
because everyone else is trying to learn.
It's 9:00.

At 9:21 I check my watch
for the twenty-second time this hour.
Meanwhile I'm cursing Daniel Fahrenheit, myself,
and my corduroy jacket, and yet by
strange twists of fate I learn, within
the waltz of twelve numbers,
that I am not competent enough to
make decisions for myself
so I decide to turn over some leaves.

9:22. I see a pretty girl.
I wonder what she would say if she saw me
pulling wounded sons and daughters out of
a flaming plane wreck while bleeding profusely
from wounds inflicted during my battle with indignant metal.
I bet I would say something real badass like
"I quit my day job”.
She would draw close to me,
with warmth and worry,
and I would say something very reassuring like
"This will never happen to you".

But now it's 9:28 and we're passing one another,
and while I watch the orange and red trees pass me by
I blatantly ignore her existence.

I cope with a stuffy nose as I continue walking,
even though I don't have anywhere in particular to go
because I’m broke, so I keep walking
until I pass this girl whose contours slow me down.
I think I see recognition in her face
so I turn to find that she possesses the
back of someone I don't know.
I quietly acknowledge that sometimes I have problems
differentiating between complete strangers
and close friends.

2 PM finds me in my bed at home.
I stare at my white walls, revealing my teeth to them,
because they are good walls, and when people ask me
why I don’t put posters up and I shrug it off and say
“I haven’t bought any yet”
but in reality
I simply love the color white

and because tonight I am going to a party
with my friends, and because I like making
constructive use of my time, I smoke some pot
and pass out.

I ignore things until I discover myself walking.
I'm being mugged by the temperature.
My jacket is soaked, but I'm more concerned with
the buttons on my striped shirt,
and once I double-check their status
I begin to feel confidence.

But it's starting to rain and
my jacket is burning with jealousy,
because his girlfriend Umbrella is
in my closet with his brother.
My hair must look like hell.
"God, I could really benefit from meeting a girl tonight,
because my schedule really sucks"
I say to myself,
but the rain starts to clear its throat,
and suddenly doesn't seem so bad anymore,
because it's the hot kind that melts into your scalp
like a 6:30 shower
and it makes me want to stop and stand under it.
But now is not the time to get lost in my thoughts.

I walk by a police cruiser and feel the
two beer bottles hidden within my outfit.
I smile to myself like a good citizen,
and put my shoes in front of each other more lawfully.
I wonder if he knows about the time I bought drugs
or the time I transported alcohol for
my underage friends.

At 10:10 I hear people roar.
The party-house: a two-story jumble of cubes
that look like hostile second-cousins
rumbling like rap songs.
Once the chorus starts I begin sweating
and imagine myself spitting on a girl’s face
while trying to embellish the only story
I could think of after puking
in her parent’s bedroom
because I can’t grasp the concept of moderation.
I also worry about my hair, which I check again,
because anytime you have an
imperfection nobody says anything
but in reality everyone is thinking.

I'm in the kitchen at 10:57 and I see a girl.
I imagine myself walking over to her and
striking up a conversation with a great opener like
"You look fantastic in that dress".
She'll say something like
"You don't look too bad yourself"
and we'll dance together,
silently,
because the best way to dance with someone
is to just shut up and enjoy some notes together.
At the end of the song we'll look at one another,
and while everyone is jabbering away
we'll realize at the exact same time
that it's okay to be impulsive when you're twenty.
But instead I wipe my glasses on my shirt and
drink from my red cup

until fate sends a girl to ask me
“Do you like living here?”
to which I respond:
"No but I would certainly enjoy dying here".
She smiles perfect teeth
like she doesn’t think it’s very funny
and asks me what I like to do for fun,
to which I respond:
"I like to write cool sentences".
I watch her pink skirt walk to the beer pong table.

I obtain a ride home at 11:37
with a 1993 Honda Civic
and because I like talking to people
I sit in the front passenger seat and
ask the driver if she had a good time.
She asks me which turn is mine.

I'm sitting in my room and it is midnight.
I reach for my bag of pot, but instead
I watch a ball python sleep and wonder if he is cold.
I debate writing a poem about my day, because honestly
I think it was a solid day
as far as days are concerned,
so I think about writing something grounded in reality

but then I realize that readers want
fabrications, not truth,
to make them forget that
people are causing global warming.
So I think about writing something that really
stretches the truth to extreme lengths,
with several gun fights and car chases
thrown in for good measure,
and maybe it will have one part where
five hot babes drive a tour bus that
can't slow down because Detroit will become the
victim of spontaneous catastrophic climate change
unless Bruce Willis has something to say about it.
I try to come up with a few one-liners, because
everyone loves a catch phrase, not to mention
the fact that I can't rule out cinematic adaptation.

But then I realize that people don't like being lied to

and then I realize
I'm pandering to a non-existent audience, so I decide
to go to bed and just forget about
the whole day
altogether.

ten thousand years/Bright shining

2008-12-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

New poem, hope you like (I'm still doing edits, updates may/may not be made.):

"ten thousand years/Bright shining"

"amazing grace" is a great song.
its that soaring melody,
like rolling sand.
seamless.
i sang it at a funeral once.
the sheet music was stale.
my fingertips stagnated.
i looked over at the organ.
it played a balding reverend
who squinted, shuffling pages.
later he would tell my parents i had a good voice.
he pulled twice at his collar.
i thought of the holy water in the hallway,
imagined it reflecting the bulbs.
i wondered if life began in G major.
thirst.

notes.
i start singing
words.
when i sing this song
its like a movie in my mind.
there's a field, flowers,
a place where celebration is possible
(they tell you not to mourn, but to celebrate)
with the right combination of scents.
like pushing over the cologne display at the mall
and plucking out the choice molecules,
arranging them in a cloud over your face
and kissing everyone.
but this time
i saw clay wedges.
brown dinner-plates smashed, gathered
with the mountains watching something,
their hairy backs turned.
i was walking.
somewhere.
strangely my black suit remained impeccable.
i strode like a silk tie with interlacing black
over an argent dawn.
i could see but i was still lost.

i thought about the drive here.
the leather seat.
grass in the window.
the warmth of the belt.
it was short.

i thought about the funeral parlor.
its pinkness.
the smoothness of the wood.
burly paneling by the windows.
i pulled one, let go.
lifeless.

i thought about being outside.
desiccated pavement.
the tightness around my toes.
socks, ankles.
the street-lamps weren't on.
a man held coffee; his wife was thirsty too.
i was trying to cry
so i wouldn't have to later.

i thought about elephants.

i thought about my eyelids.
i imagined blinking a lot.
i blinked a lot.

i thought about being in the back alley.
bread decaying in the bakery next door.
garbage bags mourning in cans.
rising to the occasion and slamming the lids shut.
the wry wind.

i thought about music.
i thought about atonal arias.

after ten thousand years the song ended.
the paper had weight.
there were words, but only words.
i looked at the microphone.
i looked at the coffin.
coffins make me think of egyptians
placing their dead in ships.

at birth you're in the dry dock
waiting for the bottle of champagne.
good luck they say
and smash you over the face.
stop crying they say.
when you died in the past you got to fish with the gods.
nowadays the navy handles it.
c-4 in the boiler rooms.
your family watches from the destroyer.
shit, someone left the aldis lamps on.
its easy to just press a button
because eventually we all sink.

i stepped down from the altar.
cleared my throat.
a water fountain hummed in the entrance hall.
i don't remember the color of the coffin
it might have been light brown.
a purple blanket.
gold trim.
species of flowers, raised from birth.
i touched the starboard side
and walked away
and sat next to my brother.
"aye" i thought,
tears bubbling into his shoulder,
the starched seams.

Presidential Endorsement

2008-11-03T21:38:00.001-08:00

Theodore Roosevelt.

In these troubled times, we need the Bull Moose.

A "Moment" or Two

2008-10-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around with a new idea -- create a story out of small, seemingly unrelated moments. I have an idea for a large-scale work (more on it later), but now I've just been toying around. The "Razor Blades" led to this continued experimentation. So, I decided to write a few based on a poem I'm working on for a writing competition. I got the idea for this from bonus material provided in a copy of "His Dark Materials" by Philip Pullman. He writes about revisiting the places or characters of his novels, in a non-linear fashion, presenting each one as a "moment".

So:

I.

The clock at my bedside is brazenly declaring the seventh hour. I'm awake earlier than necessary, but something within me jolts my brain from its disjointed stumble each morning around 6:47. There is something about this time that moves me to look out my window. It's the sky; the way she blushes just right, if for only a few minutes. If you are early, you only glimpse a light pinkish rash, still mingling with the gray clouds from the evening cover, and if you are late the sky has put on her calculable blue pattern with white-gray stitching. The day's predictability annoys me. But in those precious moments,
the few minutes around the crux of 6:47, the sky raises her arms, opens her enormous mouth, and roars: "I am magenta, and pink, and purple, and gray, and black -- I am all of these things!!" Her vociferation startles both of us, and we abruptly make eye contact. She isn't prepared -- she panics, choking, falling to her knees with a flash. I watch, helpless, as she turns blue in the face.

II.

The library's red bricks gather on top of one another, communicating quietly amidst the morning wind. You can't hear their conversations, of course; bricks are notoriously xenophobic individuals who are known to hurl themselves into fits of kamikaze rage, becoming polygonal meteors. Strangers, one another, themselves -- blind to the larger world around them, bricks are barbaric, cold, impersonal. This is why I study at home.

More Blades

2008-10-28T00:25:00.000-07:00

VI.

Blade stares at a playground, wearing his sunglasses, wondering why children are screaming. Then, two shapes emerge from the red plastic slide. Blonde twins, four years old, both in striped dresses. Blade feels tense, his mind exploring this new silence.

VII.

A pair of radiator glasses with a black flat-top and black skin and tight lips stare at him through the tiny, dingy mirror attached to the convenience store glasses case. Blade raises his eyebrows.

VIII.

Blade exploring an alien beach at night, thirsty, with his sunglasses lost in salt and brine.

Razor Blades

2008-10-27T23:29:00.001-07:00

It's late, I'm watching anime, and I'm not tired.

I watched "Blade I" earlier. I had not seen the whole film before this (even now I cannot make this claim -- we joined the film half-way through and divided it between The Greatest 100 Sports Moments countdown) but I enjoyed what viewed. My friends and I joked about Wesley Snipes being in jail for tax evasion, wondering what he was doing (we decided he was probably sitting in a jail cell). Pete suggested a new Blade movie, composed of vignettes depicting smaller battles, minor moments in his life that the film, in its quest for depth, failed to capitalize on. I agreed that it was truly a grand thought.

So.

"Razor Blades"

(A note on the title: each piece is a slice, an edge, of Blade's multi-faceted, vampire-stomping lifestyle.)

I.

Blade standing on a roof. It is midday. He watches the streets, as some watch their veins think to themselves. He watches the people walk, or run, or speak; each breathing and exhaling and breathing again, all sharing the flow of air. Blade sits. His pants and jacket crack and stretch dryly against his muscular arms and legs, but he doesn't mind because he is too busy watching these vessels carry air. Because they entrance him. He wonders what they are thinking about. Human thoughts, he imagines. Becoming uncomfortable all of a sudden, he stands up, stretching black boots on the brown roof tiles, left one first, then the right, to carry himself to a ledge. Pulling himself atop a generator, he sits. The vibration calms him; calms his thoughts. He wonders if his thoughts are human. Breathing in, he pauses and looks up. Clouds. He sees no shapes, only white-grey spheroids of condensation. Blade cannot help but smile as he exhales, watching the clouds in their streets, carrying air over the horizon, beyond his vampire eyes.

II.

She looks about twenty-eight. Blood curls around her lips, like sloppily-applied lipstick, giving her the look of an expectant girlfriend. Blade looks into her eyes through his sunglasses and wonders if she is looking back. He wants to kiss her face. He wants to start with her lips, enjoying each bump, each imperfection, each flake of peeling dry skin before moving to the sides of her lips, letting his tongue pause and consider each growing pimple and missed hair. Blade wants to appreciate the simplicity of their humanity. Then he will move to her cheeks, imagining they are warm and pulsating. He will kiss each cell, each pore, and then he will look at each one afterwards, his vampire-eyes dead to all other stimulation. But he doesn't. Pushing himself up from his kneeling position, he looks down the gray building-lined street at a collection of burning lampposts. There is some fog loitering around their glare.

III.

A motel bathroom. Blade is washing his knives. Everyone so often he stops and uses his thumbnail to scrape guts off of the edge. Dried blood is hard to remove from steel, he has learned, but he likes to tell himself he is too busy slaying vampires to wipe any of it off between each jab and slice, and too bourgeois to ruin a perfectly-tailored leather jacket. He bites his thumbnail, and holds it to his lips for a few moments, trying not to enjoy the taste.

IV.

Blade is walking down a night-lit street. For the past fifteen seconds he has watched an SUV drive towards him, a flashlight staring at him out of the passenger-side window. Through the glare, he watches its eye and starts to think. He cannot help it -- he grins widely, allowing himself a spare moment to imagine an outcome.

V.

Blade in the sunshine, walking behind a particularly obese man, who is sweating and pushing his hairy legs in front of one another. The shirt he is wearing is markedly Hawaiian, black with yellow palm trees. Blade stares at the pit stains, the ketchup stain above the left breast, a cigarette burn to the left of the fourth button (from the bottom), the pieces of thread jutting out from each of these due to immense strain, the faded palm trees wilting underneath each armpit, and the man's eyes. These are the most distinctive, he thinks. They are like olives: green with red pits, pickled, and lifeless.

--

More to come.

Summer Poems

2008-10-14T03:29:00.000-07:00

What a great weekend.

I'm up late working on a paper, but I realized it has been a while since my last post, and without anything interesting to say, here are a few poems I wrote in the summer. I spent the majority of this time experimenting. I also spent the majority of this time hating commas.

Hope you enjoy.

"Driving on Route 202"

I'm chasing four lovers
Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa
down a windy road of shadows

Green trees are hanging like drunkards over me
drinking the white moonlight
and waiting for Dionysus

Jupiter
of course
is never tense and always bathes in sunlight.

"Going Home"

The trees were black against the red sky
He felt life within his shoes as he awoke
The air hung dead above his chest
It smelled of a smell he thought
was familiar

He rose like the day

The grass shivered to ash as he walked
across the common
The oaks were not smiling today
Each wore a hem of gray leaves
which weaved forgotten words
in her strange tongue beneath brown boots
But he stepped into living change
A smile flowered on his face
as the sky gave birth to wind

A white snow began to fall

He found a road who
like him
lacked a name
Here the seeds grew maples
that wore birds who twitched like jewels
and smiled on his face
His ankles were beginning to chafe

Houses rose like cliffs on either side
A thousand glass eyes who could not blink
bore silent witness to his passage
Their pathways were cracked and gray
Black moss hugged the stones in fear
while vines crawled up chimneys
like fingers wiping tears that were not there

The ivory flakes kissed his cheeks

He knew it when he saw it
Though the grass had grown green and fresh
but now rose like obsidian nails
Though the garden always sang tacit hymns to a sun
who now favored other skies
Though the air that once smelled like a warm bed
was now bearing lifeless snow
Though the walls had shone alabaster
yet now were gray and chipped
under a roof of rough brown scales

This was home

The floorboards looked up to him
recognized his face
and said hello
His fingers traced paths blazed by a child
who grew to wander a sphere of water and stone
They were smaller then
His boots made angels in the dust

For the last time he twisted the knob
that guarded his secrets
The odor of years hid in the corners
and hung the drapes
Book-bindings lay hap-dash in the shelves
Their knowledge eaten by time and eyes

He saw himself in mirrors
in frames
in memories
that were once made of flesh but now were faded
and shielded by dusty panes

It began to snow in his bedroom

The linen felt familiar against his neck
The pillow felt soft beneath his neck
His bed hummed despite the weather
His feet were warm underneath the sheets

"Come with me" said Sleep
"We'll go home and have dinner"

He raised a hand to the sky
who stood red above his home
and showered his bed with frozen light

He slept for the rest of his life.

"Lounge Singer"

She sang like an alibi
that slips by blushing cheeks
I was smoking a cigarette
The haze became a window
wherein I lived vicariously through her notes
I was never the musicologist my father wanted
yet her notes became my notes
They hung on the walls of the club like hearts
Their pulses made ripples in the dry martini
that sat untouched before me
Only her lies could quench my thirst.

The Music

2008-10-07T23:47:00.000-07:00

Life is good.

Here's what I wrote tonight:

"The Music"

Sometimes I drive on the highways at night. The engine of the car hums politely as I babble to myself (which I am given to flights of), occasionally stopping mid-conversation to rise in harmony with whatever baroque chamber piece the stereo system is emitting. My car radio, for reasons that I do not entirely understand, often acts very much like a drunk. The reception is hazy, occasionally incomprehensible. When seeking a station it meanders, incapable of coherent search. Sometimes I am treated to audio strongholds of the Christian right, other times I find troves of Spanish tunes that share a characteristic youthfulness that I do not find unpleasant. Most often local classical stations transmit a third-bowl-of-porridge kind of signal. Of course I do not complain -- classical music being my musical genre of preference -- but sometimes repeated flourishes of the harpsichord buttressed by the repeated one-two-three-fours of a symphonic ensemble drives me into realms of the mundane to the downright mind-numbing. Winding roads become journeys of sudden self-awareness and unnecessary wheel corrections when I get lost in archaic musical structures.

But sometimes the radio is off. On nights like these I listen to the road, and my diesel engine (which is remarkably loud, for an engine), and the wheels on the road (which are remarkably loud, for tires), and not all of a sudden I don't mind that the radio is off -- my reactions to this lax musical listening border on the clement. At times like these I wonder about the faces staring ahead around me, who is driving the trucks and cars that hum like mine, and look sort of like mine, and wear numbers like mine, but numbers different than mine, and I know then that we are all different, but I really want to know why we are all the same right now, or if they will get off at my exit, and if so, I wonder if they will drive to neighborhood, and then to my street, and then to my house, where they will pop out from under their roofs with strange looks that seem to say, "You almost look familiar." Or they'll exit the highway before I do, and when they do I watch the backs of their heads as they silently make wheel corrections to the right, but I don't say goodbye because I never said hello in the first place. When I think like this, I don't need the music.

But sometimes I do need the music, but the radio is giving me nothing but fundamentalists, so I turn to my imagination to provide music. For a while I create romantic orchestral flourishes loosely based on Tchaikovsky symphonies, which eventually become background music for the film that my life is becoming, with actors floating invisible beside and beyond the cars before me (its always a movie about flying) and dialogue provided by myself. The plot of the film(s) is generally the same, focused on the act of flying -- I can always fly in these films, how else can I save the day? -- with other characters who can fly. They almost always include events of horrendous calamity, such as the time when one night, while I was driving, though I had the option of flight, the black sky suddenly tore open and collapsed into itself, becoming a black night blacker than black, and gravity slipped, and my car fell forward and over itself, and I put my hands to that soft material on the inside of a car (I really don't know what material it is), and it was cold, uncharacteristically cold, because before then I had the heat on and you'd think that if you waste all that gas a heating system set to stun would keep a car warm, but you're wrong, and when I looked out the windows I saw that I was lost in this night. Yet there was a car floating beside me, a mini-van, and there were faces like mine but also unlike mine, and they were looking back at me. We hovered together in this night, in this this silent music, for some time. A day, at least. Finally our cars were close enough for me to get a good look inside theirs, but all had disappeared or worse, save one. She had eyes that weren't like mine, and hair that grew differently from mine, and a look in her face that said that we had thoughts unalike. But when I put my hand on the glass, and felt the skin cells inside growing old and dead, and looked into her eyes, and said "Yes" with them, she knew what I was really saying, for, finally, our two automobiles were together, and I was happy. We had no words for one another, only lip movements. Eye-contact broke for a moment -- I did not cry -- but went back when my side-view mirror touched her right-side passenger door. We broke, together, the glass, the wires, the engines, the metals, the plastics, the leathers, the tires, the lights, the smells, the wheels, the silences, the radios, the eyes, into one another, becoming one another, and for that moment, in our night as dark as it was before the first day, I experienced baroque resolution. There was no dissonance, no discords, no suspension, no atonality inherent in reality. It was perfection.

But sometimes I have to exit the highway too, and turn off the music.

Debates Tonight!

2008-09-26T15:52:00.001-07:00

Everyone should watch the debates tonight and over the next few weeks. No questions. They are going to be historic. Also, John McCain has failed America.

On that note:

I wrote this poem over the course of yesterday and today. Hope you enjoy!

"Love in 2008"

A young duo, walking --
I hear the words behind their words and
I see thinking faces behind moving mouths:
"Did you see the new episode last night?"
She did, she says,
even though she spent the night reading old books.
and she laughs at poor renditions,
re-runs of jokes she didn't know,
because she doesn't want him to notice
that she forgot to shower that morning.

The pond laps like a dog at her feet
as they converse, brokenly,
their faces bet heavenward. Shining!
but not as a result of puppy love, no.
They both fear the
endless questions of doubtful silence.

Two youths, living --
they bump into each other
for the third time -- through
ardent seasons
of slipping equilibrium.

Night Forest

2008-09-24T21:08:00.000-07:00

"Night Forest"

Slender legs of living marble, jagged fingers of
soft brown, green rings over gloves of night --
veins of a woman with as many secrets as seconds have twins.
She throws stones to mark her path while birds sleep in her hair,
waiting to wake and squint and shift at sunrise.

This is a petite forest.

I've grown cold
since I stumbled away from a loud house of my past.
I feel a lonely wind through my bones -- are eyes watching?
Can you hear the biting prayers of shadow-voices?
Their communion is as incomprehensible as their song.

My bones, now
feel as rough as the bark beneath my new fingerprints.
They know, as their ancestors knew
as I know
that I am different.

My fingers are nuzzling the supple moss clinging to the fence
while my eyes watch a night forest sway her shoulders.
I hear she's dating the wind.
They're laughing together, her beautiful obsidian lips
breathing jokes and kisses into the soft neck of the sky.

A Treatise on Laughter Online

2008-09-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

Call it boredom, call it bold insanity -- but I have the seeds of revolution within my brain.

What I am talking about is a fundamental shift in how we view, and interpret, online humor. Traditionally, going as far back as the early nineties when the emoticons were first born and we, as a generation, saw the birth of emotion and life within the cold confines of cold and what was then called that "dang-fangled electronic e-mail". What I am talking about is LOL.

LOL is the cornerstone of the Internet culture. Could you really apply figures to the sheer number of its usages and mutations? ROFL, LMAO, ROFLMAO, ROFLCOPTER, LOLCANO, LOLLERSKATES -- the list is literally and metaphorically endless. All of these variations on the original statement of "laughing out loud" points to the unrivaled success in terms of the creation of a seminal phrase of Internet language.

So why change?

The change I will soon propose is important and necessary for several reasons. Firstly, and foremost, we must recognize that the Internet is a changing phenomenon. The Internet of 1998 is vastly, fundamentally, almost terrifyingly different from the Internet of 2008. This change not only breeds the need for new things, but it, in ways both subtle and blunt, in ways solemn and absolutely ludicrous, demands it.

Consider yourself. Do you like humor? Do you laugh? Do you think things are funny, even if you can't find reason to lift the edges of your mouth or consider chemical changes within your brain that send signals vaguely resembling "be happy" to the various centers of feeling? If you answered no to those questions, then the rest of this blog post will have no bearing on your and I don't think you'll find much cause to stick around after these words. I suggest checking out an online news outlet for information-gathering more in-tune with your emotional state.

I propose a change in the way we establish that we acknowledge humor -- the basis of the use of LOL. This shift in what we can refer to as "humor policy" is necessary because, in a way, we sometimes lie when we say LOL. I myself have witnessed dozens, scores of people type in those three perennial letters with a change of expression from "remote" to "attentive".

I do not propose we drop LOL. I think LOL functions fine as a mode of expression. In its new form, it is a generalized acknowledgement of laughter -- we do not have to laugh out loud, you might say. I propose a simple shift to what I like to call "Obnoxious Laughing Outburst" -- OLO.

Simple, effective, easy to learn -- OLO will usher in a new age of emotional expression and expansion. Let's consider how one would use it in their online conversation:

JeffBro42: hey wutup
Sk8erBlackSabbath: yo nm u?
JeffBro42: nm i herd a joke today
Sk8erBlackSabbath: wut is it
JeffBro42: wut iz brown and sticky??
Sk8erBlackSabbath: wtf
JeffBro42: A STICK
Sk8erBlackSabbath: LOL datz funny dude ok i got 1: wut iz red n bucket shaped
JeffBro42: wut
Sk8erBlackSabbath: a red bucket!
JeffBro42: OLO
Sk8erBlackSabbath: wow you must have thought that was the funniest thing ever said

See? The evidence is irrefutible. OLO is going to sweep this nation like a bad credit crunch. OLO is going to bring humor to people who are genetically incapapble of both laughing and smiling. OLO is going to win the United States presidential election (and several gubernatorial elections that are up in the air because of partisan in-fighting).

OLO is going to change the world.

At Night I'm Walking

2008-09-22T18:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how much more new poetry I'll be able to post up here over the next few weeks. I started officially writing my play today (rough draft of Act II Scene iii is done) and the rest will soon follow. But here is a poem I started last week and put some touches on today.

"At Night I'm Walking"

I park a quarter-mile away from the radio station
but I have to walk twice as far because I thought
I remembered seeing my headlights on.
I remember being mocked once for having to walk too far.
The path looks like desert skin
or a tan snake with warm blood
under these orange lamps.
Two boys talk about cigarettes.
One debates whether to smoke mediums
or if he should totally commit.
I think about the lights in my pocket.

Home, at Night

2008-09-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem a few days ago. Some friends of mine and I, all of whom may or may not have been intoxicated, began to name things in my living room. It was so spontaneous, so free-flowing that I could not help but be inspired.

That is totally a true story. Enjoy:

"Home, At Night"

A red lamp I bought at a yard sale in Maine
rumbles like a subway, with the subway.
The blaze of tenements turns up the thermostat.
Windows squint from the lights of cities
but smoke butts while the booming mobs slip through the cracks.
Meanwhile, the septic bay is still burning.

The feel of dust and glass and nothing else.
The roar of trains and brains
but something more.

I can smell the glue behind the wallpaper. It's yellow and spongy
but I don't have to see it to know this.
I tug the blinds, but they howl rustily,
"Wrong way, old man..."

A frog who smiles at every joke.
A paperback of "Don Quixote" who forgets each year.
An ashtray with black grudges.
These are the things that I see:
silence within tumult.

Change In Content!

2008-09-21T12:26:00.001-07:00

I decided to remove "Song of Myself At Twenty" because it is undergoing enhancement. I will repost it later.

So, considering this is still technically the first post on my new blog, I feel I should begin by showing you some the work that led to what I believe is a creative rebirth for me. Almost everything I've written in the past nine months has been subject to, at the very least, partial editing and change. I have been unable to edit this poem.

"Beneath the Moon"

I. Black

I sat under a sycamore
Its celadon leaves were asleep
The moon was humming silently
The crickets were dreaming noisily
I closed my eyes
Beneath the moon

The wind whispered
The grass stirred to greet her
The tree stretched and moaned
I was motionless

I watched a firefly kiss the sky goodnight
I saw her blush
If but for a moment

There was an ant on my hand
I could feel its antennae quiver
I could sense the anxiety
I could smell the sweat
On the ant's back

I was on my feet
I was alone
I was abandoned by the moon
She had gone to find someone
I found the old country road
The dirt was old and coarse
The dirt wore a nightdress of footprints
I followed them

I watched light mate
In the distance
The wind held my hand
The wind struck my cold sweaty palms
The wind slid through the tall grass
Torches grimaced in my direction
They broke the black night

A skinny man grinned at me
His teeth were made of sulfur
Chewing tobacco clung like beetles
His T-shirt was torn and his feet shoeless
His companion was silent

We walked in silence
The sycamores swayed like a chorus
As the wind sang the melody

A bonfire invaded the horizon

We found three more men
A jug of sloshing amber liquid
Danced around the fire
She switched from partner to partner
She kissed and looked another way
The fire burned with purpose

At its feet sat a girl
She had hair like a night
Without the moon
Without a sound
She watched me
Her eyes pierced through the licking flames
And licked my eyes

The skinny man seized the liquor jug
His yellow teeth howled to their friends
Three sets of yellow laughed back
He splashed the rum down his throat
He choked and vomited
He sobbed before the fire

I watched the men sing songs
Melodies drunkenly punched the air
The crickets could not match pitch
The wind was offended
The girl looked into the fire and thought of something

The bottle was in my hands
Her innards sloshed like curvy hips

II. Friend

They led me to a stone table
It was asleep
It slept beneath the moss
The men ripped off its blanket
The stone table was angry
It brooded in the night

Some men were snickering
They held torches in their bony hands
Their flames twitched
Yet there was no wind

The girl arrived
Before the skinny man
And his companion
The skinny man flashed his sulfur smile
The skinny man flashed a thin blade
It would have shined
Beneath the moon

The girl was led to the stone table
They had cleared off the moss
Another fire was lit
The flames were agitated
Its twin sighed in the distance
I watched the wind sweep it away
But the wind came no closer

The men held the girl down
Her mouth was screaming
Her eyes were flooding
Her hair was like a spider
Spread on the stone table

The skinny man had hungry eyes
That quivered in their sockets
Red veins quaked anxiously

The blade waited patiently
Beneath the black sky

I saw him raise the knife
I heard the men holler
I felt my muscles tense
I tasted the cool night
I smelt the skinny man
His companion was silent
I was on the stone table
I had the knife
My fingers were covered with blood
The skinny man stared into my eyes
He died in my arms
His companion was silent

Men jabbered at me and the stone table
The girl clung to my legs
I felt her tears run down to my feet
The knife addressed the men
"Be gone" it said
They listened
Except for the skinny man's companion

His coal eyes watched mine
I could feel the night grow colder
The grass slid to a bow
As the wind entered
She sighed and kissed my cheek
The fire whimpered and was still
The wisps atop his head shivered

"Let's find the sea" he said
He smiled
The girl smiled
I smiled
I stabbed the girl

III. Sleep

We buried her by the sea
It took all night
We had no shovels
Our fingernails were choked with sand
But the moon was back
I smiled at her
She replied with a wink

My companion walked to the edge of the sea
He made a cup of his hands
And captured the water
And drank it

We made our beds by the grave
We marked it with a low stone
"Here Lies The Night" we wrote
The sky was a deep blue
The kind that begins purple
It wore loose chains of stars
The moon had made her bed
So too had the wind

I heard my companion dream

A line of white appeared on the horizon
Just a line

The line spoke to me
The line called me
The line made me cry

I was on my feet
My feet were in the water
The cold salt lit my senses
The rush of waves was a symphony
My hands were conducting off tempo
I had a smile on my face

I walked into the sea
Beneath the waking sun