Thursday, October 20, 2011

I MISS NOT SEEING YOUR MONUMENTS




I got your note about the nightmare
that someone cut your mouth open
and that that was the future of America.
Having trouble deciphering and having
a nightmare that you were a blonde t-shirt.
Or was this the one where the ceiling
was the falling triangle of life?
Was it the one about the live pink dress
and the enormous Olde English D?
How they’d sneak into the ballpark after hours
pretending it was a police station
and “water” the morgue with Olde English
crop circles somebody sent in an attachment?
Attachments work because you need them to.
If you begin to feel attached to this message
or your vasovagal syncope returns stop, step
away, take a walk, lie down, die, get some water.
When the feeling passes resume the operation.
Operations work because you want them to.
A whole different thing than a dream. And
in practical terms impossible, so safe. Safe to relive
your personal Vietnam in a way that entertains
but similar enough to canoeing to make no dent
in the natural attention deficit. It’s like making
love in ways that only a point-n-shoot and some
rousing singalongs can. I saw, in my dream,
a man like a troll at the mouth of my bridge
to heaven. He was holding a pair of ball
bearings slightly out of round but no less
intimidating, no less the symbol of a nation
on the brink. I had my own water, crossed it
and went home to vomit a paisley sunset.
Sunsets work because you insist on making them
do the dirty work for you. You’re lazy and stupid.
Hope you're having prettier dreams tonight.
Have one for me. I’m currently riding a tiny
white man like as if he was Seabiscuit (the cereal)
and all around a landscape of oranges and orange
boneless people in the shapes of their initials.
My dad is definitely dying now. He kept saying so
for so long but we treated it like a poem.
He’d finish it some day then we’d stop
watching The Deadliest Catch.
Poems work because you fill them with gas
and pray that they’ll rise and carry your ID
past security. Those dudes are sometimes huge.
Nothing works like a huge dude works, I read
that on a TV once along with a picture
of someone contracting live pink cancer
marshmallows. In a crowd only the crowd
has a presence, a body, need of a bath.
A crown is almost identical only encrusted
in irreproducible gems of lowbrow “genius”.
You can make a crowd work for you, but a Crown
Victoria will run 200k miles without changing
the oil then explode and vomit out the remains
of its driver and any passengers in the shape
of a crowd collecting under a vomiting sun.
So if he’s serious about dying this time stop
treating this like it’s some poem or I’ll have
to kick you squarely in the canon.
Canons work because you want to blow off
as many dangerous limbs of a crowd as possible
at once and you don’t care how you have to spell it.
I bought a blue dog just to piss you off
cuz you said I reminded you of its childhood.
Dogs don’t work for shit against crowns.
That’s the whole point of being a dog, otherwise
why bother? That’s why you need a point-n-shoot
and some steel balls. Get in there, mix it up, show
‘em you’re made of chemicals, take pictures and email
them to your friends so they won’t have to see you
taking the pictures in person in your second best
pink skin party frock. Dodging cops at f11, happy
to be alive at such a pivotal moment in the history
of the controlled demolition of a building, a building
that left itself days before the crowd realized the car
had exploded taking them all across the bridge.
Buildings work because they fail to work eventually.
I dreamed I was a child labor felled tree toter out
in the country near mountains and a drowning king
in some country on a planet you made up at dinner
as a joke. Spinach stuck in your tooth ha-ha-funny,
not the my dad is dying weird-funny. The funny
that inevitably ends in a kind of three-way hell.
Hell works but not always, it’s a dice roll at best.
All hell's done broke loose here, or's about to.
As of tonight I'm officially at that point
we've always known would arrive, when I can
no longer hold my fingers together in that sign
of unspoken solidarity or back-the-fuck-off
or whatever it’s supposed to have meant.
I have no idea what you’ve been talking about
and I have RSI and I don’t think that’s working
for me anymore. The incommunicado approach
requires a much stronger hat. Intimacy and sharing
require more robust hats to last. And your glasses:
they’re corny. Like a non-geek pretending to be
pretending to be geeky. Or nerdy. Or whatever.
Words don’t work. They aren’t about secrets
anymore. Secrets were always the only things
that worked. Don’t ask me why, it just illustrates
your stupidity. But it’s a very intelligent question,
it isn't about secrets or no secrets, not even about trust...
it comes down to simply letting someone else order
the fish that will choke you in death, choke you in revenge
for supporting the fish killing industry and thinking
you can dodge those nearly invisible killer bones.
For watching The Deadliest Catch which, funny
irony, isn’t even about catching fish, per se.
Fish work because there is nothing there but scales.
Fish scales work because you need something
to weigh against the sunset you know is seizing up
inside the crowd, its colon swelling against a pink dusk.
It’s about speaking the same language, language
of the moment, language of the mouth, of the heart.
That had to have been intended to say “of the moth.”
but this is an all-smoking building.


Wednesday, October 19, 2011

SleetTankCommandant





My self-summary of someone else smearily similar to myself

So my life is a total bitch, and I can’t wait to meet her.
Like an awesome PBS show from the eighties when your set’s
set on autodimple. Does anyone awesome still say something
is on the blink? I do! Not that I’m ready to go Dolby Surgical
Labia Dongle shopping with you yet, but if you meet me it will be
just like we’re starting already at season 5. The one where
the premise is all played out and the writers have moved to a new
town where an identically awesome diamond stuffed Pelican or midlife
uglyfruit struggles with his ne’er do well brother in a neighboring
snowmobile universe. A haunted carnival instead of a hospital.
The crack-me-up sound of a book pile lighting itself afire instead
of a Cowper’s Gland by Cover Girl recital.

It's fun to be me, PBS-like, I was oddly conceived out of
focus and naturally awesome. You might not think it very
awesome that I sell peeks at my steam-punk fuchsia mongoose
to Flipper (he has Melancholia) for nickels, but once you've gone lame
you’ll never reframe they say. The genius is in the indefensible, the shuttering
of the new-wave school for the blind just as that awesome U2 song was about
to be rereleased on department store salami.

I'm a native eating New Yorker so not much de-phases my head’s spine.
I don't let the littler things I step on get me down and the bigger things
that might step on me I just walk around, limping a touch in case. Last time
I forgot to be awesome I was left with only one left hand per compliment.

I am only slightly sinister (a Latin pun I learned on Telemundo), creative
but notched like a post on a bed, I’m a party I’m always awesomely throwing,
I have a very awesomely sexy voice and use it on my furniture almost hourly,
yet I can't sing Ghetto Dreams without a full chorus of pigs in shades.

But it's my humidity that makes me so awesome...I dream, moist, of things
that are bigger, then wake myself up and make my stomach dizzy with the
conspiracy. I practice self-hypnosis on my fashion sense, visualize my head
in outer space then make the moon happen again. It takes a lot of practice.
If you want I’ll teach you how to practice and you’ll never be able to do it
or anything ever. But wanting to do what we can’t is what makes us awesomer.
That’s some truth you can fly in the face of sans shame, sans signs.

I Shoot the hip and spray lead at the arts with my heart. Being quick on my feet
is a dangling idea, banded collars make me instantly Asian and when I’m a Negro
I don't miss a beat. I like to be. (and I am, just try stepping on my buzz and see
what the gypsies who bought up my option feed their plasma dogs tomorrow)

I can always be found being stabbed on a street, dashing off to show someone
my gashes, truthful until I speak at all or if not, thoughtful as in I think about how
awesome it is to be thinking about how awesome I must seem to you.

I tend to piles of leaves of elderly nuns outside a dilapidated inner city convent.
Some of them have been there since the original tree, the one Adam West ate
in that cartoon about a guy who comes to Earth to save everyone's stamps.

Questions? They’re a mark of weakness and I can sell anything that fits under
a dome. Don’t miss this shit, it won’t happen again for another fifteen microbeads.

I know you know I’m completely awesome and that means I’m complete
with floor mat and suggested positions but I still dream of finding someone
to be awesome with in a catalog. Preferably with exemptions built in.

I have a lot of friends, many are lifers. (the system is a deterrent to crime but
nothing like Purim dinner with no inhibitions, I’ve laid out my imaginary tools
in front of my imaginary family).

There are many sides to me. Seven if you count each foot. Many sides to my life.
Three if you count each exhalation. I spent my life learning to beat the house.
If you are my house, the home for my heart, I hope to find someone to beat you with.
That would have awesomosity I haven’t even unwrapped yet.

What I’m doing with my life keeps edging away a few more feet just as I’m about to get in
and it’s cheesing me off like I can’t even tell you


Travel is a bitch who travels. I travel for work. But I have some nice free time
when I’m in traction. Free time is a bitch with a watch. I like to spend time with friends
when I'm not working on projecting my image onto the side of the building next door.
The entire hospital can see me from any window on the North side plus all the traffic
that wrecks on the street. Supply and demand. New York had a lot of things to do
and I did them, places to go and I went there twice, and things to eat that I ate.
There is now a crippling shortage of All Stuff.

I also am in a cattle town talking to a western marshal about the state of the cattle
arts and I teach it to orphans as well. I’m building an awesome army for the future!

I’m really good at one line meanings

I am not good at one line meanings, worse at meeting your bipedal expectations
and I hope never to be in a room with a view that isn’t facing North. (I should never
be called before dinner, I’m busy in the boiler room carbon dating vagrants from the
other kind of depression, nothing that happens here is as good as the real world).

The first things people usually notice about me pass through one of two slits

I was told by a gypsy orphan once that I would grow up to be a gypsy and one day,
if I was lucky, I might be an orphan, too, or a pupa with no butterfly to press against
the dome above the capital J. Why is everyone’s middle initial J? Is there something
wrong in here and you’re keeping it from me because you’re afraid I might awesomely
fix it? Or take you down to the boiler room with your mom and the dormant killer bees?

I was told by a gypsy once that I had no eyes. That they’d been there when I left
for lunch but were gone when I arrived back five minutes late. They had just failed to reappear.
Then my smile. But even so I can also can various types of fruits. Tomatoes, beets, relishes.
Then I’ll pull out my key and start up a conversation with any one (this is more of a soup dish,
it comes in a powder, you just add water then wait for the pigs).
(but no Soylent Green or long form pig).

I…

…see thin things other people miss because of my super narrow vision.

…look at my self in the mirror as well as my self live with the thin things
I stuff and/or mount.

…would like to find love or sex but I have lived with out having some one
in my life for a while and don’t seem to be missing much. Except you of course.

…guess I will have to say I like my friends. They aren’t very hip.

…crave a mosque or mosquito tent or muskrat hutch or mausoleum or a quiet place.

…think it's nice waking up to irrationality, malaria, shit, eternity, less noise.

…don’t like clean things being “clean” and clean sheets “not” being sticky.
(Not that getting sticky can't be fun but staying sticky for long is a bit of a drag.
I hot tar my entire interior twice a year on both Xmases so I know)

…read poetry a lot and deny any growth on my abdomen and any change in my
sofa and any sofa in my life that doesn’t look like Rectimus the Wonder Divan
from the first season of The Complete Works of Raymond Orifice.

...spend a lot of time thinking about trying not to think about cake.