Tuesday, December 22, 2015

the necessity of pain and fear


beautiful and high in the
pure white light of the sun and
never anything to eat but
broken glass

never anything to break
but promises
and then the small white flowers
that blossom where the
pieces fall

the filth that we
bathe our children in

the men of god who would
have us beg for more

who would have us lose
all sight of joy
        

Saturday, December 19, 2015

5 PIECES OF SOUL-SEARCHING FREAKTASTICNESS @ WHISPER


in the dark, considering
time as an abstract
you and i lost in the forest of meaningless symbols
the bleeding horse, lost in someone else's city
sunwashed and wasted

FIND THEM ALL HERE:




ur-online-shopping.com/poetry













Saturday, December 12, 2015

like fire



thought maybe the
blood would begin to
run backwards once the
war was over but
it didn’t
 
thought surrender would
earn us mercy
but no
 
the children were lined up and
shot beneath tattered white flags,
their bodies dumped in the river,
their mothers raped and then
butchered, and do you
remember the year?
 
was it before you were born?
 
after we died?
 
do you remember the priests
and their magic wands,
their answers that answered
nothing at all?
 
found you naked behind the trailer
with your wide open eyes
and quicksilver wrists
and I told you there that the
baby would never have my name
 
told you that the dogs would
say whatever they had to
to get in between your legs
 
let you find out for yourself
that being weak in the
civilized world would
never buy you any mercy

Wednesday, December 09, 2015

blood in the spaces between what we say and what we mean



crows in an empty field



not the idea
but the fact of it



the sky with a
beginning and an end



the earth moving
beneath your feet and thick with
the bones of indians and
slaves



anywhere


whatever day it is in
whatever year
and all of the unpaid bills that
keep you tied to this life



all of the people you've hurt
who'd like to see you dead



the names you've forgotten and
the lovers you've betrayed
and the trees all bare



the sound of the freeway



the smell of cold engines
going to rust



of the rivers filled
with oil and sludge



america at this exact moment



a woman beaten unconscious
and left in the closet of a burning house
and the simple fact that I've
outlived cobain



have outlived christ and
that I refuse to die like pilate

and what about this
eighteen year old girl naked
except for a string of pearls?



how many wars are you
willing to wage just to own her?



not action
but the act of demanding it
from others



all of these young men shot dead
for reasons that have more
to do with money than freedom



all of these songs with
words but no meaning



it was never enough
just knowing how to hate



Friday, December 04, 2015

marie

never
regretted
drinking yr
blood
but i’m sorry i
confused yr
smile w/ prayer


i’m sorry for
yr sister’s
crucifixion


for the baby
waiting to be
found in an
empty apartment


kept calling my
my name, but
i was already
gone



Saturday, November 21, 2015

WIPERS RULE, WHY ARGUE?









for carolyn, wearing the crown of pain



on the other side of the continent
in the wrong part of the year,
bleeding ice-cold sunlight and
thinking about st maria and last blurry
fucked up days of dennis Wilson


waiting for the children to run away


waiting for judas and his
latest girlfriend and when he finally arrives
he brings a copy of exile on main st
and a bottle of wine


smiles and says the
brightest days are behind us


knows in his heart that there is no
end in this world to the list of
things not worth dying for



Tuesday, November 17, 2015

100 years





were breathing crystal meth out in
the parking lot behind kmart and she was
                        laughing in the heat she was
                        sweating pure bliss said
                        i had to kiss her feet said
                        i had to lick her wounds
                                                        smiled
                         said god was truly dead and
                         on that much
                         we agreed









Wednesday, November 11, 2015

the child, cut in two



not the dying man
but his reasons

his hands
which are grabbing

which are empty and so
what would you
fill them with?


the bones of his children
is an obvious answer
so look past it

reinvent the circle
if you have to

build a better bomb

we have been in this desert
too long now and eating
nothing but the dreams
of the starving

we have been bleeding
for as long as we can
remember but
listen

every day brings us
closer to a darker age

every war is the one
that cannot be lost

this is what we tell the
widows as
we undress them





LATEST BOOK

         
CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LINK



dreaming_monsters_cover



Tuesday, November 10, 2015

poem for all of the editors who've written to tell me how much they hate poems about writing poetry



and i don't believe in god
and i have no use for poets


have no use for wars
or for any of the ways that
words fail us


think about silence


think about the idea of
rape camps


about the reality
the way the human mind
turns concepts
into butchered bodies


and even on days where
i breathe nothing but
pale blue sunlight
i refuse to let go
of my hatreds


i refuse to act on them


which of these
would you define as
cowardice?

Sunday, November 08, 2015

still








and the killer is caught,
and his girlfriend weeps


the baby has no chance,
of course,
and the apartment is cold,
the windows loose in their casings,
the grey light of january filling
the rooms like sleeping gas


smell of gasoline,
approach of trains and
               then the fade


an abandoned factory in the
center of town


a wreath of dead flowers
hanging on
the fence that surrounds it


something small for the
world to revolve around





Saturday, October 31, 2015

magdalena spinola, always and forever






like dogs in
the kingdom of rain , like the
disappeared or the dying,
we are lost here
 

we are weeping on the
bloodstained steps of the
catholic church
 

we are walking down
rust-streaked valleys of
corrugated steel, and do you believe
in the burial grounds that exist
beneath these abandoned parking lots?
 

have your children
begun to hate you as much as
you hated your own father?
 

picture a dead letter office
filled with their prayers
 

picture your heroes grown
old and irrelevant
 

accept christ all you want but
don’t think that fucker
will ever have time for you
 

it isn’t who you kill but
what you believe
 

it’s never what your reasons are
but how good you look on
the cover of a magazine
 

gotta smile up into the dying sun
 

gotta let all that pain
flow straight through you
 

won’t ever feel any better than you
do at the moment of release




Monday, October 26, 2015

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Toni Grote



May 26 Original Surreal Landscape 18x24 -- Toni Grote












lost



this sound you make
like breaking glass
 
these walls you
pull tight around you
 
that turn to dust or
burst into flames and
the fact that who you are is me
 
midnight and sitting
in a room i don't recognize
 
driving in the emptiness
between two towns i don't know
 
in bed at some point and
my wife next to me crying
 
my hands finding each other
in the dim glow of the streetlights
and this idea of oceans
 
of escape or drowning
 
the money gone but the
age of salvation approaching
 
the possibility of hope
almost
worth considering
 
this
and nothing more



Pilate in the age of oblivion



something obvious then
like the number of people who've
said they hate me
 
the speed at which a man
might fall
from the 98th floor
 
or maybe that you knew him
 
maybe that you slept with his wife
in a house
neither one of you called home
 
there are worse things
of course
but pain is pain
 
nothing grows in its shadow
and no one needs to breathe
 
no one tries to speak
 
it's enough to drive
the nails through the flesh
without hesitation


Saturday, July 25, 2015

the other enemy





or something as mindless as
allegiance to a flag in
a world bloated on genocide and starvation


something as fundamentally
fucking imbecilic as the idea of leaders,
elected or otherwise


always some asshole’s foot
coming down to grind your face into
the shit and the filth



Wednesday, July 08, 2015

Mockingbird Prayer



My father is lost in the desert. Is lost in the shadow of Christ. Is lying in a pool of his own piss on the men’s room floor in the bar at the bottom of the hill, and of course he blames me. Blames my sister, blames my mother, and the woman sits up next to me in bed, small breasts naked in the streetlight, says Holy shit – you’re thirty three years old! Your father is dead! Give it a rest, and I listen to the sound of traffic outside my second story window.


And I drive to my sister’s house on Easter Sunday, past the weeping of small children, through valleys of cold sunlight. A friend of mine has just been diagnosed with cancer. The lawns are just turning green, are already filling with weeds, and the hills are still grey, the fields all faded brown. I am not as hopeful for any of us as I used to be.


And I drive home later the same day, firm in my belief that there is no God. I pass the house of the starving dog, and the chain is still there, tied to the same tree in the front yard. The house itself is deserted, shrunken, windows broken and gravel driveway littered with stained mattresses and worn tires, old appliances, and I knew the kid who owned the dog. Knew his sister. Used to fuck her in an old cabin the woods way out behind the house, and then one day it burned down and that was the end of that. She got pregnant a few months later, moved into a trailer park out on Town Line Road, then just disappeared from my stories.


And this friend of mine, his name is Michael, and he lives on the other side of the country, and he says he’s not really sure how he feels about the cancer. Says he’s told his wife, but not his children. Says he’ll hear from the doctors later this week about how far along things have progressed. About treatments. About time lines. And he emails me and says Shit, at least it’ll give you something to write about, and I guess it will.


And he’s three thousand miles away on the day my father dies, and I don’t even know him at this point. I have no children and a job I don’t want. I have an apartment near the river, and the woman I’ve been seeing says we have to stop. Says she loves her husband, and then four years later she says it again. Sits up in bed, tells me she should go, and her breasts are small and pale in the afternoon sunlight. I pull her back down next to me, kiss her nipples, run my hand up between her legs, and she moans. Says Slower. Says nothing at all, and what it sounds like is the truth.

the bleeding horse, confronted



wanted to give you the beauty
of tower lights against a midnight sky,
and i wanted to give you
silence

wanted to explain why i’d hurt you,
but i had no words

just sat there fifteen years too late
with empty hands and
the darkness spread out around me

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

shaping the future with broken hands



quiet again in the
room of empty chairs
except for maybe
the sound of dust

maybe the absence of
your boyfriend
or the memory of his fists

the way that
drawing blood can be
called love

the names of
your children

their small
perfect mouths filled
with broken glass




Monday, June 29, 2015

sea of tears



reach yr empty hands up to
the surface

teach them to burn flags

to assassinate kings

all solutions create new problems,
and so the trick
is selective blindness

sat there in the back yard and
pointed out jupiter and
venus to my sons

spent most of my time
worrying that i was failing them

days got colder until we
ended up at zero

sick at christmas

sky of dirty glass

say to her i am not you and
then say you are not wakoski

say you are not atwood

it helps to be alone

it helps to believe in
redemption

we will all end up dead no
matter how many gods
clutter our rooms

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Parable



Sitting in a freshly painted room, thinking
that I should be leaving, thinking that it
smells like rain. I have left my son's globe
on the living room table. I have left too
many bills unpaid, too many windows open,
and the truck is almost out of gas. The
woman walking down the stairs knows my
name, smiles like we're old friends, says
she lost everything in the flood. Says her
husband left her for a younger woman,
but she can't be more than twenty-two,
twenty-three. She can't stop crying, and
I can't think of anything to say. I need to
get home in case there's a fire. In case the
phone rings. I am tired of waiting for
disaster.
  

mark tobey








an ephemeral silence





Thursday, June 18, 2015

a gunman opens fire



when all you want to do is sing,
or maybe
be told you’re beautiful,
a baby falls from the sunfilled sky,
a rain of weeping hawks, of
angels with broken wings,
and do you remember the
sound of me holding your hand?


were we actually ever in love w/
anything more
than the idea of escape?


i need to believe
that we were.



Monday, June 15, 2015

kirchner's suicide, and mine, and yours




yrself beautiful in this
grey october sunlight and
everything i say distorted by fear



every wall
hung with a cross



the windows broken
or thick with dust
or looking out over
a million tiny bones



this woman in
the bathroom crying



this baby found
floating in the tub



an old story and that i
tell you i'm sorry
fifteen years too late



that i dream about
the accident
then wake up whole



visit the house
of my father's ashes



can remember
nothing about him
but his anger


dreaming america



the streets all smeared white on
sunday morning
and the sunlight without end



the names of the dead
written down then forgotten



what they sound like is silence


like human bones falling
from the sky



the shadows they cast on
empty fields



bare trees rising up
out of black water on the
edges of all the worthless towns
i've ever lived in



all of the people i've left behind


the ones i've
been left behind by



and what our words
eventually form are maps
but none of the missing are found
and none of the beaten
comforted

and your sister finds
a new lover



forgets the
names of her children



their faces


mistakes desperation for love


nothing any of us haven't
done at some point


2nd wish