the well of knowledge

they kill the father
and then his eight year-old son
which makes sense
if you want to rule out the
possibility of vengeance



they kill the mother
but not before they rape her



they save the daughter for
another day

chroma

and on monday afternoon
the doctor says it might be cancer
and my words all run dry

the sky threatens rain or
possibly snow

the bodies keep piling up in
countries that mean nothing to me

for causes that
no one can ever remember

and when i get home
my oldest son laughs as he
jumps into my arms

tanguy

pollock

ephemera

copies left?  who knows....



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

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

gerhard richter

HUMAN CATHEDRALS FOR YOU & ME

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

2ND PRINTING

IN THE PALACE OF DYING LIGHT (2011)

5 NEW POEMS AT BOLD MONKEY

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

INTERVIEW & BOOK REVIEW @ BOLD MONKEY. MOST EXCELLENT.

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

Jo McCaig-Olthuis

interview from a few years ago

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

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

the need for words

this is
obsession

a man on fire
in the memory of
a house

poems
rising like smoke

and what is prayer
but the
need for words?

and what are words
but emptiness
temporarily avoided?

even now
soldiers are digging
into the bellies of
women who hold
these beliefs

even now
steam rises from
unborn children

and who's god will
the smallest bones
be hung from?

frankenthaler

pollock creates the universe: notes and theories

not the face of god but
something real

a trailer on fire in some
hopeless stretch of america and
this young girl sleeping inside

her mother driving away

such a simple act of hatred
and when i tell you i love you
all you hear are the
silences before and after

and this is unfair
of course
and probably untrue and so
i say it again

i consider the waitresses i've known
who were raped in truck stop parking lots
and the ones who took money

the ones who mistook me for
something more than a starving dog

and what i've never told you is that
my father was left-handed

that this was the fist
that passed judgment

and what i've never told anyone is
when our last fight took place
or what it was about
or how it ended

listen

i understand the need for victory
to be declared
after the last body has been thrown
into its shallow grave
i understand addiction

watched my mother
get on the plane after she got
the last phone call

stood next to her in a windowless room
at two in the morning
while she listened to the doctor
explain the possible futures

while she told him to
turn the machines off

and here i am almost ten years later
with this constant need
to dig up the corpse again and again

here i am with the knowledge that
all fears are magnified in january

the sun is a lie
and my hands feel nothing
and any truths that we claim to know
are best left unspoken

any silences that lie between us
are best left unexplored

now imagine
the canvas unrolled on this dirty floor
and the need to drink
disappeared

imagine the roads all coming
or going

the hills and
whoever we left beyond them
when we ran

imagine the veins filled with poison
and the prayers with anger and
do you see why we laugh
when nothing is funny?

do you know of
any patron saints for this
little girl tied up in a plastic bag
by her father?

tell me you wouldn't stick
a knife in the throat of
any bastard who did this

tell me that justice is
more precious than vengeance

close your eyes and
paint whatever it is you see

a poet with nothing to say

she has been here
before


a woman in a poem
who would rather be
anywhere else


a poet with
nothing to say


with the brutal weight
of early december in
upstate new york
pressed against every window
in his house


all colors reduced to
shades of grey
and the pills are what
she misses


the feel of warm light
across her face


a single hopeful thought
completed
without the walls
falling down to
crush her

absolute zero

1.

body found next to the body of her father,
her grandfather,
and if you close your eyes all
directions are the same

if you finally accept the idea
of death, all days can be numbered
backwards down to zero

all questions can be answered with the
suffocating weight of silence

2.

told him he was no
one’s son then left him hanging
there three feet above his
children’s useless
bones

kept laughing about the expression
he’d had long after the idea
of someone else’s despair had
stopped being funny

3.

afternoon of pale sunlight,
of ice melting by slow degrees, and
she said to me or i said to her
but despair is easy
and i remember that one of
us laughed

remember that the temperature
dropped while we slept

meaningless patters of frost
tattooed across our flesh
when we woke up the next morning

4.

it was rain on
top of rain on top of
melting snow

it was the season of
anonymous suicides

cars endlessly up and down
shiny grey streets, bodies
found in fields of mud and
there was faith in god and
there was faith in money and
i had no use for either

there was warmth where our
bodies touched before
we pulled away from
one another

never quite felt like
the end of something
but it always was

5.

forgot to stand
motionless and so they
saw me without effort,
couldn’t shoot me enough
and i could only die once
but they kept trying,
just for fun

a silver sun smeared across the dull grey sky

   

perspective

these days like black & white
pictures and all of these
pictures blurred and inarticulate


creaking staircases
and cracked windows


dirty light


find the field where the body was
buried, the one where the indians were
massacred, and lay down
your flowers


all of history is detailed
in the slow collapse of barns


all dreams in the wilderness
are dreams of decay


this girl on the carpet, carpet
soaked with blood, mother on the
far side of the room
candles on the sidewalk,
meaningless but pretty


a small atrocity, yes
but still too much


still so goddamned huge

the blood factory, revisited

or maybe
the failure is mine
diane


maybe the words
are only words and
exist without blame and
maybe none of the battered wives
give a shit about poetry


this needs to be
considered

NEW WORK AT BURNING WORD

BURNING WORD

kurt schwitters

wilfredo lam

the theoretician

hand in the lion’s mouth and
mouth filled with broken glass

this is no way to live but
your options have begun to run out

the fire has
consumed everything it could

picture a long empty hall
leading to a small empty room

doesn’t need to be anywhere
you’ve ever been

picture sunlight

close your eyes

in this nation of thieves &
cowards you’re no one special

in this nation of great failure
you could be anyone at all

sunlight on chrome: an exercise in moments

or the distance
from one side of the bed
to the other
or the sound of music softly
from a different room

the times you've told me
you hate me

the children that have
never been found

all of the names left
on shelves in empty rooms and
all of the prayers floating
aimlessly through the
cold blue air

your hand where it finds mine

my voice
which offers nothing but
apologies or threats

which stumbles awkwardly
when i try to tell you
obvious truths
and so i fall back on
the comforting weight of silence

i walk to the field where
the burning girl was left but
can find no signs
of violence

can find no signs of god

refuse to accept the
possibility
that i'm blind

on the occasion of my four year-old son learning how to draw a peace sign

I am sitting here
thinking about sitting here



thinking about the photos of
all of those paintings of krasner's
that no longer exist



i am thinking
of course
about pollock


about myself and my past
and my children



the need for beauty
in the face of pain

and i'm reading a letter
sent to me by a woman i know,

something about a crack addict
beaten by her boyfriend



about the baby she gave birth to



i am reading the part where
she writes this story makes me
think of you
and what I feel is tired



what i refuse to believe in
is america



the strip malls
and the funeral homes
and the bloodthirsty smiles of
                               politicians



the carefully trimmed nails on
the hands of the priests who have
raped your sons and daughters,

and i am sitting here thinking
about all of the unpaid bills
on the kitchen counter and about
how the walls of this house
hold no heat



i am waiting
for one war to begin or for
another to begin



for the first soldiers
to be flown home in bags



the words
spoken over their graves,
which none of us will
remember

holy poem, after the death of god

snow all afternoon but
nothing is made beautiful


no one is considered holy


at some point
the last city is built
and then there is only slow decay


sons are shot and
daughters raped and all of
the missing are given names


and some of them come home
while others are martyred
and there is always the threat of
another religion


of the crippled
leading the blind and
of a war that everyone can
believe in


a way to kill only the
truly deserving


how much of your life are
you willing to waste
making these decisions?

into the screaming white light

that precise moment
when the clock is
torn in two

when the dogs
chew their way through
the room of bones
and escape into
the screaming white
light of day
 
free
only to be dragged
beneath the wheels of
passing trains and this old woman
in the corner
holds her
dead husband's picture
tight to her chest

turns slowly to dust
while songbirds
dissolve into blood
against every
window

and you notice that
she's not afraid
and you notice that
the flowers on
the mantel
have begun to burn


what you want to
know is why

NEW WORK

NEW WORK

trinity poem

january in the
room of empty chairs
and the poem is written slowly
on a light blue wall

the sun is forgotten and
none of the hills that
surround me are named

if i were inventing a religion here
i would call gorky the father

would call rothko the son and
cobain the holy ghost
but i am only staring out a
second-story window

i am only pretending to be a poet
in a mortgaged house

i am only listening to
my son sleep

cannot imagine watching
my own childhood replayed by
someone i love
and so i consider escape
without ever really believing in it

i watch the man next door
beat his wife to tears

listen to the bleeding woman's
baby scream until it's
pulled from the trash and
given a name

not everyone would call this
an act of mercy

artistic freedom

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motherfucker

imagine the cities you could build from
all the pieces of the one true cross
floating around in the world


imagine the heat they'd give off

the man who would drop his lit cigarette
in a garbage can in some shitty
apartment on the south side of town
and the child who would die in the fire

who would fall blind into the
wishing well

nothing saved but this pale grey sunlight
and these tiny dreams of smokestacks

di chirico

paalen

walking backwards

was seeing a married woman,
which was the same as being alone


could still remember my father's face,
twelve years after his death,
and his voice, and his
anger


got a letter from you on a
frozen saturday afternoon, and
you said come see me like it
was nothing


like there wasn't
a country between us


like i wasn't afraid

juri arrak

remedios varo

for dali, with regrets that it couldn't be more

rain on the
shortest day of the year
and then later
snow


my mouth thick with
the names of waitresses


my hands scarred but
my son whole and beautiful
between them and
this is finally what matters


belief
but only in the things
i can hold

dying light

these dreaming houses

early morning with
the sky hung like some
forgotten war
over these dreaming houses


pale light
and no shadows and
all of my old poems
seen clearly as
lies


and art is not her problem
but artists


not the woman
who dreams she's a nun but
the boyfriend tying her
to the corners
of the bed


her sister shaking and
dropping the baby
to the cold kitchen floor


all it does anymore is cry

max ernst, all is forgiven

 cold in the shadows down these side streets
and the flicker of sunlight through
bare trees

the names of people whose names
i will never know

the churches and the waves of desperation
that radiate from them

i've never asked for salvation

never wanted forgiveness

the world is full of children dying slowly
behind locked doors

is full of priests with their precious words
that taste like dust

and when i tell you that the storm has passed
it doesn't mean that any of us should
come out of hiding

when i tell you i love you
it's almost never out loud

what it feels like is safety

turning away from the bleeding horse

 in the end
we go nowhere

have i told you this before?

we hang onto the gift of speech
but we say nothing

we see nothing

the mother is beaten to death
and then her nine year old son is raped

and he is raped and then he is
raped again
and then he is raped again

he is beaten and he is raped
and he is nine years old and then
he is murdered
and this is a true story and
it is always happening

it has always happened

the wars no longer need names
and the air is sticky with
crystal meth

the cop is shot in the face
as he approaches the front door

has a wife and a child and
his body burns as easily
as anyone else's

his god has no arms

no legs and he is blind
like we are blind

he is hopeless like
we are without hope

it's what i've been
telling you all along

HIERONYMUS ROCKSTAR!!!!

Mike Davis

the myth, reconsidered

your words are not visions from god
and mine are only bad jokes
and this is where we stand

beauty caught in the tar of remorse
and that money is blood

that your pills are all dull knives
and every priest a rapist

ask your sons

step into the vague blue light of
any october afternoon
and consider how many days you've
wasted waiting to be forgiven

consider how many miles you drove
to reach the burning house

your father drunk
or maybe only dead
and whatever the last thing he
said to you was

the ticking of his watch as he
lay dying in a hospital bed

the first plane without warning
tearing the north tower
wide open

explaining the bleeding horse

man says
but this is just the
same poem written over and over

says america is more than
palaces of gold built on
the bones of indians

stops to take a drink and then
the door is kicked open

the cop shot dead

twenty miles south of
the town i grew up in with the
smell of meth and the
taste of ashes

the crosses on fire
and what i tell him is that
beauty needs ugliness to define it

let the dogs go too long
without food
and they'll eat your children

drag your enemy through
the streets of whatever place
you call home and he will
eventually be reduced to
memory and pale white light

show him mercy and
he'll rape your daughter

she'll tell you she
loves him

a truth that will bring
your house
crashing down around you

faith in nothing: a sermon in the age of confessions

the world is defined by
those who own the wars

holocaust they say
or rape camp
and the words grow flesh

i am given numbers
but not names

i am given vague descriptions
of massacres

blurred truths

what i want is to talk
to a man who has butchered
a pregnant sixteen year-old girl

who has pulled the fetus
from her belly with a  knife

what i want
is to watch him die

in the end
we could be brothers

faith in nothing: a reason

 early afternoon in
the land of murdered cheerleaders
and the hills without pity

the streets like rivers of dust and
filled with the shadows of whatever i hold
between myself and the sun

and i am not trying to define
a moment in time here
i am waging some misguided war of one
against impermanence

i'm giving the finger to anyone
who expected
even the smallest of revelations

listen

the man wore yellow gloves
while he butchered the bodies and
no one was sorry when he hung himself
and five years later i am still caught
between the ideas of growing up
and growing old

i am still receiving letters from
people offended by the use of the
lower case i
but at least the planes
have begun flying again

at least the children have turned
away from their own petty hatreds for
a minute to see how bleak the
future can really be

five thousand dead in the name of
someone's fucked-up god and then
nowhere to go but down

a review of said chapbook.......

w/ thanks to ralph hasselmann jr.

http://www.blacklistedjournalist.com/column62f.html

one of my chapbooks in university library small press collections

http://www.worldcat.org/title/free-kittens-for-dead-slaves/oclc/57129881

love song for the betrayed

all of us here in

this room without oxygen

waiting to be forgiven and it seems

like the safest place

 

feels like the fist of god

punching a million starving children in

the throat, and you know the

fucker’s laughing or else why would he

let them starve in the first place?

 

seems like the laziest of wasting all

that time inventing religions

instead of looking for solutions

 

seems like a world full of inbred

assholes with shit

spilling from their open mouths

a lifetime

in the silvergrey afternoon in the

last year of freedom had a

reason to love you and my hands on

fire my teeth filed down to

points had a photograph of god

had his address his number and all of

those children starving in the

streets w/ their bright

shiny tears

all of those days spent waiting

for the phone to ring

digging holes to

bury the unwanted dead

inversion

young boy on fire and

singing beneath the colorless sky

all sweetness and regret and

where are the people who

said they loved him?

where is the future that was

supposed to grow from his 

                                ashes?

titles available directly from me

shoot me a message for pricing, all payments thru paypal

joy #1

all lines equal to the
heart of the matter and then
all acts justified
 

all deaths avenged
and then again
until every ocean is an
ocean of blood
 

are you so goddamn stupid
that you can’t see this?
 

do you really believe
power is the answer?
 

picture your corpse rotting
next to mine
and no one left to care

To the sky

Job like a gun to the head but the bills

need to be paid and the children fed.

Gotta heat the house through those

dead days of January where everything

tastes like ashes and blood.  Gotta

crawl when you’re told to crawl.  Grind

all that shit & filth deep down into

                                           yr soul.

redon

birthday song, for dorothea

with dreams of metal towers

and of static, dreams of silver skies

and then waking up
 

the here and now is a fist

and so the future can only be

whatever pain comes next
 

i have no other truths
 

have only one hand that holds and

the other that pushes away

 

have only scar tissue and

empty ideals and with the music

up loud enough the sun

makes no sound at all

the baby sleeps beneath

the shadows of passing clouds

 

wakes up crying softly

just as the air runs out

violence

chasing headlights down december

back roads, not yet 6:30 and
already full dark

half-moon and sleeping houses

this man with

a mouthful of poison

wants to show you how easy it is to

hurt you
then wants you to beg for more

absolute zero when the knife goes in

small wooden cross on the

living room wall
 

cop pulls the trigger and

the child is dead and how far do you
have to look to find someone
laughing?

for how much longer will we

allow ourselves to
be a nation of assholes?

been a long

fucking time already

NEW COLLECTION FROM LUMMOX PRESS

fine art collection

READ THIS NEXT

self portrait w/ nude, on fire

and then late afternoon shadows and

the stuttering scratch of

leaves down forgotten streets 

the shadows of lovers, of

unwanted children and forsaken saints 

god and then no

god and then

all of the days i waste waiting to

                              see you again 

an empty room filled with ordinary ghosts and

no one says we have to be here but

no one gives us permission to leave 

this is called the art of standing still 

this is pollock in the

seconds before his death 

not acceptance but panic and

not understanding, not

ever

not ever

and i keep telling you this but

you still aren’t there

tanning

tanguy

one for yr ex-husband

  

dead man sitting in the
back yard w/ his eyes closed,
face turned up to the
dull silver sky
 

just wants attention so
don’t give him any

new piece at RUSTY TRUCK

CLICK HERE

ernst

klee

miro

after the age of giants

And this is not nothing, this sky, these

clouds, these hills, and it’s not the
whole story because nothing ever is,
but listen.  Distance is an important thing.
Forty feet from the bridge to the tracks
below.  100 miles between the woman’s
body and her husband’s faith.  And have
you ever tried defining yourself by
something other than sorrow or fear?
Will you crawl from lover to lover with
nothing to offer but fading bruises
and the promise of more?
 

It’s okay to pause before you answer,

to consider, to weight your options. 
It’s okay to accept the fact that we’ve
never really meant anything to each other.
This is why the sunlight casts shadows.
Why time only moves in one direction.
The moment arrives one hundred
million times a day, and then it passes.
The song is forgotten.  I wanted to
sing it to you, but you were married.
You were crying.  It was a sound
just like any other.

one for neverending love

and i will be me and

you will be the song i
sing with a mouthful of
blood and who was it that
ever promised you happiness?

how is it my fault

you chose to believe him?

why should victory feel

any different than defeat?

because love and hate

even here in the clean, cold light of early april,

in the solemn emptiness between
berkshire and speedsville, between  somewhere and
somewhere else, nowhere and

nowhere, the shit of civilization

growing up through the weeds and dirt, the

cigarette butts, styrofoam cups, fast food wrappers,

the wounded and the dying
 

the trees and the hills
 

crisp blue sky
 

no sound of traffic or of industry, but two

empty beer cans and a shattered bottle
on the side of a rutted dirt road
 

taste of rust when I
turn to kiss you
 

birds
screaming