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.