Wednesday, April 29, 2015

the weight of ambition



                     and if i give you all my
happy songs, and if christ spends his
free time praying for our deaths
 
if we learn to ignore the politicians
 
to defy the laws that are created
only to let all power stay in the hands
of those who already hold it, and
if we fuck like priests and whores
 
                 like dogs
 
nothing but the blood of hope
smeared across the walls in
this house we call home


Sunday, April 26, 2015

boy found dead in the river’s veins



february and
the baby is hungry


they are all stoned in
the other room
the sunlight pale and
without heat


cold
but brilliant
like the blind eye of god
and i have begun measuring
my life in failed
relationships


have been dreaming of california
and of the holiness that
radiates from the
pacific coast highway
and what i know is the smell
of fear


the golden haze of gasoline
and the name of the boy
found dead in the river’s veins


and no one asks
to be christ here but
the nails are still driven home


there are men who
smile with the sharpened teeth
of animals and
there are the daughters
they rape and i am tired of
hearing that these words
i choose to give you
cannot be poetry


i am tired of the baby’s screams


it was never enough
just believing we would all
become beautiful in some
unforeseeable future



Thursday, April 23, 2015

map of false desire




said the man is dead

says the river is frozen

all of us nothing more than
pointless stories w/
sad, obvious endings

a certain moment
and then the next

name the silence of
clean white hallways

find shadows in
abandoned parking lots

this is time measured by
decay, by isolation
and loss

sorrow is not despair,
but give it time

the future is a liar, just
like any good soldier

the past gets muddied w/
broken bones and
corruption

these small towns are
the opposite of
everything we should
ever believe in

these cities are worse

keep driving north to
the house of this woman
i’m not supposed to love

stay home and
pull all the shades

no one ever promised you
a war you could win



Tuesday, April 14, 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.
  



joseph cornell







Saturday, April 11, 2015

river of tears





this is your voice in
the silence between us


these are the ideas of god
and godlessness set
aside


my hands cold and
never holding you


your fears
which have come to define me


being sorry
which is one form of defeat
and what i wait for is
the day
you tell me you hate me


what i believe in are
acts of futility


the hands of saviors
nailed to church doors


anger that can be
directed outwards


and the question
isn't who you'll save but
who you'll let down


and the days are all weights
the truths i give you
look emaciated when placed
against what you've built
in your mind


this person i've become
has to be someone's fault


give me this much at least



review of FAMINE, copies still availbable from me





http://www.leafpress.ca/books/famine%20review.htm

Saturday, April 04, 2015

the failure you imagine is never as terrible as the one you become





but here in the season of the resurrection and
one hundred thousand miles away from
those rooms where diego was busy fucking
frida’s sister, we wake up to snow
 


we wake up to blood on the sheets and the
image of christ etched into the frost that films
the bedroom window, but what good are
miracles when the transmission is shot?

 


how far into the forest do we have to
walk until we’re truly free?
 


all of these circular goddamn questions
that i save for the drowning boy only to
realize too late that he was dead long
                           before i was ever born



Wednesday, April 01, 2015

the refusal



shoot the doctor in the
back as he walks away then
tell him he’s a coward while he
dies at your feet

it’s an addiction,
like humor

it’s a punchline

you capture the soldier, a
boy of fifteen or sixteen, and
then you torture that fucker
until he’s on the floor in a
pool of his own shit and blood

this is how wars are won

make your children
understand this

tell them how much you hated
your own father,
how much he hated you

show them the scars

explain how they can only
grow up to
repeat your mistakes

REVIEW OF LATEST COLLECTION







http://misfitmagazine.net/archive/No-13/scopa2.html