closer to mercy

an eye

all poems starve in

the desert
of your mind

all wars begin with

the idea of god or the
concept of greed

this need to kill

the enemy
which
leads to the need to
create enemies

to become one

 

some stranger in a

windowless room
smiling in antici
pation of the
day i die

giacometti, softly

 

 

you can't talk about christ

at four in the morning

and you can't talk about love

 

you can talk about light despite

the absence of it and so you do

 

you walk from room to room

watching your family sleep

and you try to remember their names

 

you look at the phone

 

at the front door

 

and at some point you realize

that money tastes like rust and that

all you can do is choke

 

at some point the sky fades from

black to grey and the baby wakes up

 

begins to cry

 

believes in you only because

he has yet to learn
anything else

 

abandon

the faint illumination of yr heart

the sky at
this late date
huge and raw above these
snow-covered roofs

and what is space but
some simple thing
between us?

i know your name
your skin
your lips
and would gladly place
any part of you on the tip
of my tongue even as our
secrets all dissolve
into smoke and
ash

i would trace my way
through dark rooms just to
watch the faint illumination
of your heart

and you call this love
and the taste it leaves is
thick

bitter
but addictive
and the doors refuse to
close completely

the phone rings
at awkward moments
or the baby falls and
draws blood

and if i take this
one last step towards you
what am i forcing aside?

does it have or even
need a name?

and when we touch
i finally understand
the futility of
language

an interview

 

 

PENMEN REVIEW

 

 

 

 

expressionist landscape 1

save us all from love and hope

was breathing in the tarnished weight of silver skies,

was trapped there between forgetting and forgotten,
21 years of pointless starvation,
air thick with the approach of rain,
distant pulse of passing trains,
and the child in the back seat made no sound

had no hands

looked a little like me, but i no longer took

responsibility for any of the pain in the world
 

i no longer walked

when it was easier to crawl

had finally become my father

 

 

 

Sisyphus, Further Upstate

Nothing new, nothing you haven't discovered

yet, only America, only I will make you sing
it louder, will make you scream it, scream
AMERICA!! like it's the answer to a question
you can't imagine, like you're hanging from a
rope of used needles, hanging from a rope of
spent time, and it's a man in the back of the
room who asks the question, and it's a man
jumping from a bridge and onto the freeway
who answers it, only not with words because
words are too easy to misinterpret. Words are
too human. Humans are too careless. Just ask
the man his fucking name already, before it's
too late.

the brilliant light of godless hearts

kingdom of heaven

had hands of rage, had the

soft glow of a martyr

debated god with the

sick and the crippled

everything is within your reach,

you see, and
then you piss it all away

you stay fucked up for so long

that the idea of getting clean
scares the hell out of you

look in the mirror and

the poem is about me

stare at the sun long enough

and the infinite becomes visible

don’t trust in words

don’t put your faith

in the intangible

not all absence is an

emptiness waiting to be filled

if and only

the city without hesitation

where the forest ends and if
god can only exist in empty
spaces, then what?

ask kay in her final

moment of blindness

ask her again after

her suicide

understand that nothing
you and i do can ever
be defined as love
 

let autumn leaves spin

gently down into your
river of poisoned blood

let the children you’ve

lost crawl through your
back yard gnawing on
whatever bones they
can find

salvation is nothing any

of us ever approaches
with open eyes

days of hopeless wonder

ernst, lost in the forest

fistful of light

and we are all friends

here except for the ones
who would do you harm, who
would turn you in or fuck
your husband your wife your
lover son daughter and we are
all mindless joy and we are
all dust in the eyes of
someone else’s god

we are all the moment of

obvious glory before
the instant of inevitable truth

come in, then,

and have one last drink

twittering machine

red velvet hammer

these animals that have starved to

death with their stomachs full of
plastic and technology

these beaches black with blood

did you want to be loved?

have you swam through the

filth of 200 years?

listen

 

ask for lorca and i’ll give you himmler

i'll give you the shovel

                    the rifle
the bones of his children and
what would you build from them?

who would you nail them to?

hold history up to any mirror

and what you have is the future

throw the people you no longer need

into the street and wait for them
to come crawling back

kiss the pain from

their silent faces

a HUMAN CATHEDRALS review

 

 

 

 

 

love song

eight years spent building

this wall of silence and
no one on either side and
eight years spent dreaming
about violent death

radio static and violin music

down some sunflooded
november interstate

says she wants to be in love

                            like
it’s all she’ll ever say

says the drugs are better

                         than sex
              better than god

doesn’t ask where we’re

going because she
knows my eyes are closed

words about words

 

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