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