Monthly Archives: October 2005

grief

“hey, asshole —
don’t your feet hurt
from standing on that edge
for so long?”

although she thinks
she could have stopped him,
she lets him fall.

some people think it’s romantic
to love a suicide.
she knows better:
it’s hard work to watch one die,
and harder work
to watch one live.

at the funeral,
she plays harmonica
by the graveside
and horrifies the mourners.

she is no messiah.
she cannot raise anyone.

later,
when the crowd has gone,
she becomes so starved
that she eats dirt from the grave
and wipes her mouth
with flowers.


stolen from stefan11 because it’s so incredible…

“I want the president to look across the country and find the best man, woman or minority he can.”

(Sen. TRENT LOTT, (R), MS. gives George W. Bush some advice on finding a replacement for Sandra Day O’Conner on The Supreme Court)


love is a country highway

a man who believes he is in love
wakes up on the yellow line of a country highway.

he crawls to the side of the road just in time to avoid
a huge truck rolling past. he thinks that he might have died
if he had not been so fortunate as to awaken at that moment.

then he thinks that the truck was not that close to the center line
and he might not have died after all.

he crawls back into the road.

he lies there all afternoon while the traffic blows past him
as if he wasn’t there.

he leaves the road at dusk and tells himself
that it was possible that he was never there at all,
ever, at any time.

he decides that
if one feels no pain,
one has not been in love. perhaps if one can lie
on the yellow line and never be struck,
the road one was on was too safe. perhaps
one should stay out there as long as it takes
to be crushed by love, just to understand
that it is not a safe place to be.


up nice and early

well, early anyway.

come to think of it, being up this early when i don’t have to be is stupid.

i’m going back to sleep.


you had to be there

to hear this great idea for a new column:

“Regie Gibson’s advice to the lovelorn.”

The beers helped, I’m sure.


s/he keeps turning up like a bad penny

1
what makes a penny bad?

2
isn’t it true that some bad pennies are worth more than good ones?

3
how much trouble could it be to find a bad penny, anyway?

4
isn’t a pocketful of bad pennies still worth something?

5
if your bad penny has been beaten by time and trauma, it will pull your fingers to your pocket far faster than a good one will. if your bad penny is made of something other than copper it will be warmer to the touch.

either way, you will worry it and play with it. you will hold it longer than you would any good penny. you’ll keep it, show it off, dream of it, cry if you lose it, die with it on your mind.


poem for colin powell, 2005

i’m watching the news and it is evident
that this is you, no matter how
you deny it:

blank, though storm faced, able to leap
a premise at a word from on high,
willing to eat paste in public
if it helps the cause, willing to lick ass
and let your lips show the leftovers
if that’s what it takes to win.

man, i don’t want to know
how you sleep, or about what dreams a guy like you
must have. i recognize the shit
of the eagle on your pocket
and i think you know as well as i
what you gave in order to gain your gain.
i don’t entirely blame you.
you just do what you’ve been told to do —
but then again, that’s how we got here, isn’t it?

but let’s get back to your face that looks like rain,
soft rain but rain nonetheless; let’s get back to the fact
that you’ll be drying yourself over this one for a while.
let’s assume you’re a man at heart — let’s assume that a man
would know how not to mistake tears
for a reason to avoid sending other folks
out to kill or be killed.
what would it take to get you to cry in public
over everything you knew that got us here?
what would it take to get you to agree
to cry injustice where none is admitted?

it will take more than a moon or two
before we give up waiting for an answer.

EDIT: I DO NOT REMEMBER WRITING THIS POEM.


fuck it

it seems there’s a feeling among some folks that i haven’t been writing great poetry lately.

no fucking shit.

but y’know, i’m actively trying NOT to write what i always write. want to be lighter, and more willing to put SHIT out here in order to get better at what i do. need to expand my palette and that means mixing up some mud on occasion.

that means i’m gonna make some mistakes. but y’know…sorry gang. i’ll be better…but at heart, i say, fuck it. yeah, i may not be batting a thousand right now, but i’m out there SWINGING, y’know?

again, fuck it.


awake, a little drunk, and a little goofy

just for fun, based on a memory of a comment i heard once in a club.

hiphop and your stocking cap

i listen to hiphop
all night thinking about
your stocking cap.

raise your hands
in the air like you just don’t care.
it may be a cliche

but it makes it easier for me
to lift your shirt over your head
and pull it free.

the beat drills me
deep down, the way
i like it.

you’re a beat all by yourself.
we’re a track mixed at night
booming in the basement

until the neighbors grind with us
the way all lovers do
when they find their groove.

so i keep thinking about your stocking cap
and how your hair looks when i take it off.
you know i want to take it off.

you oughta be a rockstar, live large,
don’t believe the hype,
love by any means necessary,
and any other cliche that works

i’m gonna use because
it ain’t what you bite, it’s when you bite;
it’s who you bite

when you bite, and when all is said and done
i’ll bite you, cause it’s like that,
you’re all that

when the lights are out,
when the cap comes off
and the stereo’s off,

and the phone’s off the hook,
when we both figure it’s time
to put up and shut up.


KEXP, yet again, rules

because it is playing the weirdest Clash cover I’ve ever heard.

It’s by something called “The No-Smoking Orchestra” (I’d dig up a link but I’m lazy).

Picture a Serbian brass band with a slow ska backbeat playing “Lost in The Supermarket” and singing in a mix of Serbian and heavily accented English, with an occasional female voice doing spoken bits in Serbian.

I’m all lost indeed…


clean — very rough draft 1

Yet another friggin’ guitar poem. FB welcome (pun intended).

When I strap it on I tell myself

Roll back everything.
Dial back the volume knobs,
the gain on the amp,
set the tone to fair to middlin’
and set the switch in the middle
to pick up both pickups.
Clean is what you want here.
Make a play at playing clean.
Pretend you know something beyond fuzz
and act like you know what you’re doing
with something beyond a barre chord or two
and a half-assed hammer-on.
Let go of your cock in favor of a kiss,
and do something less than what everyone expects
because you know the above average rock guitarist
is less competent than the average jazz guitarist
who is less competent than the run of the mill session guitarist
who knows less about sound than children who cannot play at all
but who fall to their knees in the presence of one perfect note,

and you are none of the above.

Do not ask for a blaze every time you play. Make an ember instead
for the ear. Sit a while longer yet in the bedroom,
playing more and more quietly until the sound
is not present for anyone but you, you splendid failure,
you even keeled master of no drama.
You don’t need an instrument any more
than you need a word for God.
Keep moving your fingers. Keep playing, dialed back,
tone down, gain off, volume low,
look for the note that holds everything…

placeholder for the close — what i have sucks.

*This is one of those deals, by the way, where I had to write the first stanza to get to the second. I may salvage some stuff from there, but in general, I hate it.


off

to the Incredibly Long Day:

9-5 class

5:30-6:30 appointment

6:30 – ? errands/house stuff

At least I got a semi-decent amount of sleep.

Boring, I know…and yet, this is who I am when I’m not scintillating.


upon waking, this:

the troll said

“i am powerful because
i am ugly”

and tipped his hat cordially
to the shuddering passers-by


having to choose a direction sometimes bites rocks.


Know what i hate?

Coming into a day that looked quiet enough to actually accomplish something and having it turn into a day of time sucking energy wasting meetings.

Grr.