"A NATION OF ASSHOLES W/ GUNS" now available in book form!!!!!!

NEW WORK AT MONTUCKY REVIEW

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

NEW FREAKIN' WORK AT THE NEGLECTED RATIO

RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW RAW

CLICK ON THE RAW

BURNING WORD, JANUARY 2015

STILL A PERENNIAL FAVORITE....

http://ravennapress.com/books/human-cathedrals/

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

PICTURES AND WORDS!!!!

Copies of this one still available from me

what i thought i needed to say 2 1/2 years ago...

NEW FOR YOU AT RUSTY TRUCK

NEW WORK AT DEAD SNAKES

NEW WORK AT BLUEPEPPER

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

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

NEW ELECTRONIC CHAPBOOK AT SCARS.TV

NEW WORK AT BLUEPEPPER

STILL ONLINE AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

OLDER COLLECTION, STILL AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING:

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

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?

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

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

stereoscopic distortions

some experimentalish work, poetry for multiple voices:

LOOK HERE

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

Toyen

Bridget Bate Tichenor

remedios varo

THE ANGEL URIEL

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

untitled

 

ROBERT F ALLEN #2

ROBERT F ALLEN

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

LOVE OF LIFE

WHITE LIGHT

gethsemane

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

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

abstract excavation

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

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.

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

1987 ford mustang with a FOR SALE sign in the rear window

and the skinny girl who
gets out of it


the price of a pack of cigarettes
(or the name of a baby
who will never know her father


who will be dead before
his fifth birthday)
and what she does is smile and ask
if you're interested


says she needs twenty bucks


says the kid probably
won't even wake up


and the only thing you
know how to be is human

NEW BROADSIDES FROM 48TH STREET PRESS

deeper into joy and sorrow

you know you want it.....

BE THERE OR DIE LIKE THE DIRTY DOG THAT YOU ARE

halcyon

so tell it straight
then,
without the false romance of
distance and loss



you were in love
and then you weren’t



you lost each other
found each other again maybe
then waited to see what
would happen



got by for a while on
sex and fear and memories
and then it wasn’t enough



closed your eyes and
when the morning light forced
them open again
ten years had passed



you were both
married to strangers



you were both lost in
the forest



the edges had already
begun to burn




a statement of sorts

the girl on fire tells you what she knows about love

which isn’t much


which
when written down
looks like a blank sheet of paper


like a prayer offered up to
a god who isn’t there


the ideas
of religion and brutality
suddenly shown to be
inseparable

the collapse

believe in a sky both

silver and bruised, in the

dizzy spin of the sun, and believe not

in true love but in the possibility

of it, and then wait for the
rain to arrive

fall between the bodies

of christ and pilate
 

breathe in the smell of

new-mown grass
 

breathe in the smell of corpses
burned with gasoline
 

the walls you build are temporary

at best, and your hatreds are all cliché
 

ask this woman next to you

in bed for her name
 

tell her something

both small and meaningless
 

and what those of us born with the

knowledge of space and of distance,

and what about the ones who

learn it by force?
 

do you ever get sick of being

defined only by what you’ve lost?

 

pick the point in your life

where you think everything

began to fall apart
 

tell your wife exactly when it

was you stopped loving her

 

wallow in the pain you cause

just like it was your

last day on earth

premonition of a rock through my front window

my son asleep in
the afternoon of cold rain
and a strange van driving up and down
my street

what i’ve lost
is my list of enemies

wherever i am
is always too close to the place
i’ve escaped from

a pale blue room in a collapsing house
maybe
and my hands numb beneath then
weight of flat grey light

the taste of metal or
of burning

of the flesh of ghosts and
what it’s taken me twenty years
to learn is that nothing is
ever completely safe

and what this makes me
want to
do is destroy

poem in a single breath

think of something
bigger than god

think of famine

think of war

walk into this house where
someone’s sister has
just lost her unborn child

what she wants is
to describe it to you

what she wants is the
warmth of a living body

how human are you
willing to be?

holy heathen days

one for you, already dead

the gift

a history of burning

books and burning paintings,
of shooting artists and teachers,

doctors who perform abortions, and

always the iron fist of ignorance and

always the party line of fear
 

these cowardly fucks ashamed of

their own pathetic lives

afraid of the future and

destined to be devoured by it

no other fate for them than to

starve on the sound of my laughter

empire

here finally in the
pure white light of late september
i am the bleeding horse

i am america in decay

the cities at the exact moment they
fall in on themselves
and the children as they're
torn open like presents and
all of us breathing in the sweet gasoline air

all of us crucifying or crucified

the sounds we make
and the silences that define them
and listen

the constant hum of electricity

the blood-red drone of the television

this new century that feels
no different than
the one that came before it

this idea that
we are running out of days

that the war cannot be won

and why would you ever vote for someone
who wanted to be elected?

why would you give a man a trial
after he'd murdered his
own daughter?

and when the last sioux is buried
the medals are handed out

when the long march
finally comes to an end
the fences are built

freedom needs to have limits

needs to have a price

this is what i've learned from the speeches
and what i learned from the
whores who made them is that
anyone can be bought

and the land in this town has been poisoned
and the water
and i've been told that no one
will be held responsible

i've been told
that deals were made and gifts given and
what we call sixteen year-old girls
dying of cancer in this
part of the world are unfortunate
statistics

what i teach my children is that
violence is never a solution

what i hope for
is their forgiveness

tuesday evening, route 26 south, the weight of dust

all of these days spent
driving
through the smell of burning

a house or
a child or the beginning of
a hopeless century

skin
is what i mean

kennedy and the fragility
of the human skull

the simple beauty of the calla lily

and what happens is that
i am always somewhere between
lost and found

there are always hills and
the shadows they cast

sunlight and the sounds
of children in the seconds
before they disappear

the last screams of a
young girl in california

the relentless weight
of stories without endings

we tell them over and over
until every word begins
to sound like a confession

magritte

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

unfinished film about prison

standing there on the rim of the valley
at the edge of the highway
and silent



emptiness and fear and
in the distance (in any direction)
a city



buildings where they sway and collapse
and huts made of straw and
the promise of burning witches



the smell of it
and the heat



like hope but
safer