Thursday, December 31, 2015
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
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
Sunday, December 20, 2015
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:
Friday, December 18, 2015
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Monday, December 14, 2015
Sunday, December 13, 2015
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
Thursday, December 10, 2015
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
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Monday, December 07, 2015
Sunday, December 06, 2015
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
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
Thursday, December 03, 2015
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
Monday, November 30, 2015
Saturday, November 21, 2015
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 waslaughing 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
Monday, November 16, 2015
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
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
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 andthen the fade
an abandoned factory in the
center of town
a wreath of dead flowers
hanging onthe fence that surrounds it
something small for the
world to revolve aroundSaturday, October 31, 2015
magdalena spinola, always and forever
like
dogs in
the kingdom of rain , like the
disappeared or the dying,
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
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
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
Monday, September 07, 2015
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Sunday, July 26, 2015
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
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Friday, July 10, 2015
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
Sunday, July 05, 2015
Thursday, July 02, 2015
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 28, 2015
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.
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)