barking
barking
irritation dog in my head–
go stand in the road —
go die
you make my throat hurt
i don’t even like talking
so stop stealing my voice
go die and let me be
silent
unless I can be sweet-toned
and no dog
yelping unimportant excitement
at the smallest thing
worrying every bone
shut up
i won’t feed you
get out
i won’t house you
i’m not going to say it again
The left-handed woman
makes love to a right handed man.
Another man, more ambidextrous
than the first, steps forward.
He says, I can offer you more!
And he does — for a while.
But eventually, the woman grows tired of the men
entirely, and while they sleep,
cuts off all four of their hands.
What can you offer me now, she asks?
When no reply is forthcoming,
she goes to the beach and swims alone —
content to simply kick, her arms resting at her sides.
Look, she says to them, coming up out of the tide
to where they sit wailing on the sand.
Immersion, progression, emergence.
It can be done.
And I don’t need you to do it.
Grow excited by the possibility
of pure belief — belief being
the state of not knowing something empirically —
the possibility of never having to “know” anything
ever again!
Imagine waking to a day without
having to be smart
about the things you’ve always known.
Imagine taking a baby’s delight and terror
as your only guide for how to live.
There in the trees — don’t call it a robin —
you don’t know a thing
about mating calls, territorial marking,
communication among others of the same species.
Call it a song, a ghost, and perhaps
a deity speaking only to you: oh, for
the chance of a personal, naive experience
with the universe!
Treasure it, the baby’s mind,
it will not last long enough to matter
for a moment past this one —
you’ll translate, ask questions, frame it
immediately, become smart again. But imagine this moment,
this innocence — imagine that
it could last. That emotion by itself
may carry you over the hump
of becoming human
right into a new being.
I lift the blind one last time before bed
and look out.
Nothing’s moving as far as I can see,
but I know
there’s a teeming,
an orgy, a war raging
among the microorganisms
in the yard.
Life doesn’t stop
because I imagine
nothing
when I sleep,
no matter how hard I pretend
that sleep is like death.
Nothing is like death except death,
and I’m not even sure of that,
which makes me smile as I turn off the lights.
“Fight and fuck,
divide and conquer,
my friends,” I say before I go,
realizing that right now
I’m as unnecessary to them
as my God is to me
whenever I am doing the same.
,
My chapbooks arrived today!
The new book, “Flood,” is now available.
I only have 20 to start, so if you want one and you’re not nearby, I’d suggest you get it from Pudding House Publications.
The Website is a little hard to navigate…so here is a link to the order form. The chap is ten dollars US, plus shipping and handling.
Thanks in advance, if you decide to order…I’m excited.
Highlight, select, cut and paste,
delete, drop and drag, and all before
I ever turn on the computer.
Decisions upon decisions —
what shall I attend to, discard,
move up in my queue?
Was it always like this, and now
we just have the proper metaphor
for how it works, or has it changed?
Was it ever a longhand world
with carefully considered strategies
and long pauses before scratching out
what was written in favor of the new,
and even longer ones before we tossed
the whole page and started over?
I don’t do pretty.
I do real, which is not to say
that pretty is unreal: instead I mean to say
that pretty is as pretty is
and so is ugly, and so is
nondescript, which is what
I most like to describe
and what most catches my eye:
the random and completely
featureless (to our esthetic)
nature of All Nature, including
the artificial one we have made
while preferring to forget that a skyscraper
and a road scraper are as much natural phenomena
as any beaver dam or ant hill:
unimaginable to the blissful photographer
who maneuvers that camera of hers
so carefully to avoid
the wrapper in the foreground,
the rapper in the background:
all that is as meaningful
as any bloom, and negation of the whole
is ugly, which I see is real,
which I see is not pretty by definition
but which must be told.
I can’t
knock it off
or cut it out
It’s not perched
anywhere
I can strike it
and
if there’s a tumor or organ
where it’s staying
I can’t find it in order
to excise it
though I have tried
these violent means
before
they have not led
to a justifiable end
I must assume it lies
like a third dermis
under all of my skin
and removing it would require
a complete flaying
done slowly
leaving me in excruciating pain
unless I removed all my nerves too
pulling them out one by one
and then
how would I feel? and
would I still care
to try and live a new life
that way?
There’s nothing to say —
they don’t speak much,
at least not to me.
There are no Italian whispers
or Mescalero shouts
in my ears.
But I imagine
they talk a lot
to each other
behind my back,
gossiping at my indiscretions,
my betrayals
of their own long-vanished worlds
that are usually based in trying
to live up to one set of expectations
at the expense of the other.
I imagine grumpy men
with dark faces
staring at each other
and passing
tiswin and good red wine
back and forth.
Bunch of drunks!
The best thing to do with gossip
is ignore it
and get on with your own life:
one proverb everyone shares
and no one follows.
To hell with that!
I swapped out a few of the pieces on the Reverbnation site to make room for what I call the “Parental Issues Suite” from the last CD, “americanized.” That would be the two(actually three) tracks “Sing Before Seven” and “Notes From A Reptile Son/Peppermint Schnapps.” A little bit of Faro on guitar.
New Stuff –real, new stuff– coming very soon. Promise….
Give a listen if you haven’t yet. Never had them all up at one time before…
Check out the “Show Schedule, Tracks, and More” page up there to find the link.
The bluntest thing I ever did
was spit you out.
To pop you from my still-unsated mouth
and let you fall and crust with dirt
was no proper farewell.
There should have been
some gentler acknowledgment
of how we had burned together
in friction and in revelry,
of how the scent that lingered over us
was not solely stench,
but incense too.
To put it more bluntly still,
what I have said to myself since was a lie.
To make it even more plain: yes, I loved you.
You tasted of constant and true
and you lay upon my tongue
more readily than my own flavor did.
You asked for something simple from me
and what I did in response was find
a single knot of distaste,
one thing I could talk myself into despising
on the nights when uncertainty crept up
and stole my sleep,
one thing I groomed and stretched
and poked until it soured
and all went flat,
and then
I spit you out. I let you fall
from me and looked at you
discarded upon the ground
covered in specks and flecks
of filth that were not you,
which I could use to justify
never picking you up
and lifting you back to my mouth
ever again.
And then, I blamed you
for the soil where you’d landed.
There is no apology I can make
that will make that go away,
but if it matters to you, I can say
that how you made me feel
cannot happen
in this life again.
Every time I am offered
something new,
something recommended,
something tempting, pure
in its wrapper just seconds ago.
I lick my lips
and think of you,
a smear in the sand
where I discarded you,
I recall the way ashes taste and
while I may partake,
I will never enjoy
anything as fully as I did
the first time
I laid you
upon my tongue.
— for bell hooks
They do not talk
amongst themselves
when we are not looking at them.
When they talk,
it is never about
who owns them now.
We hear them reminding us
of the past. We listen as much
for our own voices in response
as to what they say. Sometimes
we drown them out with loud shame
at their shabby appearance. Sometimes
we make them too heavy to carry
from this place to the next. When they
remain behind, we call the place where they stay
“home.” We call the place
to which we carry the others
“upward mobility.”
Occasionally, we gather
to speak of them, to recall
where we came from. We don’t listen
to what they tell us then,
preferring our own stories.
Eventually they become mute
and are sold to someone, or tossed
aside. We forget what we’ve been told,
and slip into our own silence.
NOTE: This is part of something larger I’m working on. That’s the working title. Not sure yet where it’s all going…but wanted to get some part of it out there for a sense of progress, if nothing else.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
if you want
to be happy,
you have to
believe in something.
Why?
Is it not possible to be happy
simply by knowing what you don’t believe?
For instance,
I don’t believe in you, and I
feel fine.
how can you not believe in me?
I’m of the opinion that
I’m really just listening to myself.
And while I’m not happy,
I’m also not unhappy.
While that may be a poor substitute
in some people’s eyes,
it’s better than the negation of despair
and better, also, than the credulity
of bliss.
oh, come on.
you’ve got to believe in something.
the world is controlled by unseen forces
out for your soul.
you have a duty
to fight.
to believe in the struggle,
if nothing else.
Not buying it.
Stuff happens, sometimes for a reason,
sometimes not. The powerful
have too much greed to coordinate
their efforts so consistently
over such long spells, and anyway,
to buy it would mean
I’ve got to fight you as well,
and I’m having too much fun right now.
what about ghosts?
the spirits of the dead
returning to seek answers
or stuck here thinking
they are still alive?
Nope, can’t believe in ghosts,
at least not that way. I believe
we see stuff, or at least I have,
but I’m not in any position to judge
causes, only effects. I know they happened,
know what I’ve gained and lost from those visions,
but don’t care to know
why they happened.
you’re pretty messed up
if you don’t know why things happen
and don’t care to know.
I don’t believe that either.
I think “why” is too often a jumble of trees
that keeps the forest hidden, too often
a muddying of the ocean that keeps you
looking at the bottom for treasure when
there’s so much gold in the horizon.
I like forests.
I like my oceans full of shipwrecks I can’t find.
I don’t need to believe in forests:
I can see them.
I don’t need to believe in the ocean:
it’s spread out before me.
you rootless tree,
you rudderless ship…
Perhaps…but,
I choose my best self from each moment of self.
I move.
I can slip my bonds at will.
I am free.
you believe that?
there is a fire ready to go here
where the sign reads
“building for lease, business zoned,
great location.”
here’s the tinder:
a manager’s Audi TT
in a parking lot full
of old pickups and beat vans.
the receiving dock empty.
the shipping dock empty.
fifteen minutes between phone calls.
and the sparks:
the few who are left
are still unpacking, testing,
repacking.
a time clock
marks the quiet.
when the last workbench is clear,
here comes the smolder
as they lock the doors
behind them when they leave,
looking around at each other.
later, the blaze:
at night,
in bars and homes,
bursting forth
full force:
danger
and hot fear.
the building is intact;
the people, embers.
When the hard work
of putting one word
after another
becomes a trudge
through mud
while being whipped
by the thin branches
you’ve pushed aside
and then released
which then snap back into
your face,
it is best
to find a perch on
one of those
cutting twigs,
let yourself dry
and rest
until the words
fall from you
as song,
doing for themselves
what you have been trying
to make them do.
Dark Matter 