I. To be brothers in arms

Too many stars fall quietly,
lurching in sudden-impact with the ground.
I figure gatekeepers to be
leaning heavily on market trade value.
So much for galvanizing lectures on racism--
My defunct upbringing goes quiet.

The figures astound. Help checks in.
Two shades. A secret red and blue.
Better without. Better inside. Better and better.
The last tickets blowin’ in the wind. Oh so far.

Like luke-warm chocolate piss, idiocy’s crowned.
And beneath an invention of tarps,
the hot air rises and drifts off,
awash as dust becomes in distance.
An off-key song? An unsung tune?
Drifting weightlessly through a forlorn blanket?
The crab traps build up. The hot water left on.
The soap bars dry, dry, dry, while muddy shoes sit outside.

A drinking glass sits atop a barbeque.
It is brimming with dried liquid.
It's empty as a ghost.
Hollow, but with use.

It sits as a square reminder
of the de-generation of a factualized world
and actualized diplomacy.
The once-wet ring evaporates dryly, leaving
dust which carries too much of the spark of creation.
Dust that lifts and brings melodies in from off shore.
Dust that drifts like Angels plucking harmonies over disco-lit floors
pushing empty energy up through a vanquished sky.
A big block of yellow, once needed but silent,
now noisy and empty and faceless.

Oh happy little boy and his fulcrum of matchbox cars!
He develops a tune appropriately out of pitch.
Waiting to blow? Or waiting to forgo?
Accepted. It every shuts/never erupts.
Only detracts. Only belies.
You shouldn’t be sad.
It’s the rhythm of thighs
How they speak to my mind.
How I hear-- How I feel--
       what you could be.

How I know how to grow with you,
Grow with you, up. Up.
Away from here. Fluid and redeemed.

Oh how I wish to speak with you,
and let you wonder at my... oh at my,

How it hurts. And drives me to start
the only way that always takes me down.

The trust that's built itself up in my hair,
and the way it effectively minimizes your glare.

I’m holy! I’m holy! And so,



I burn.


II. Lost on the playground


Yuletide eggnog
Canopy of reflection.
Better and better.
Satin red ribbon.
Veneer on white wood.
Her half hardened grip grabs
leaving thought to be decided.
A drift of carpet fiber dips
and, with it, lifts
a darkened, liquid drop,

“I must,
I must …
increase my bust.”


III. What is termed a landslide.

Uh oh. Must have stepped on toes. Who knows? I let myself get in this mess. It's awfully messy. Look at me, shoulders so broad. I am a blanket that's been chewed on too long. Or maybe a kite that can no longer fly. A boy who cried wolf, and I'm doing it again. But I can be free; free to be me, says she. I can be big and bad if I wanna' be. I can gobble her up and play to her weakness and hang around until she's too strung out to care. I can make her break my stare. This is a Beginning. And this, this is the End. I'll fasten my necklace around your naked neck. You'll never need anyone else again.

I can be free. Be free. Be free! I can expect that you'll like me. It's all a part of my plan. That way, this way. Up here. Down here. I'll earn your trust and then let you flop. You'll never know what hit you. Dress alone. Undress by the phone. This is a Beginning. And this, this is the End. I'll fasten my necklace around your naked neck. You'll never need anyone else again.

But I am so free! So free! So free! Let me show you the paint on my nails. I earned a buck o' nine just by painting those rails. This is a Beginning. And this is the End. I'll fasten my necklace around your naked neck. You'll never need anyone else again.

Did she smile? Does she write nicely? Does she put me to bed?

I'm going to love you all, and then strangle our love with the tip of my pen.

...Huh? Sshh. I love... her.


IV. Rode to Paris in twelve days.

Meanwhile, back on that farm…
“My God!!! That sunny disposition!!!"
Where does it come from? come from!?"

The loosely slipped on,
and off
and on
and off
then loosely slipped on
and off
and on--
and off,

the Baaaah’s and Moooo’s’ stand there, feet in
wet grass, looking none too dumb like
patches on a quilt of green,
their brains buffering oxygen as
they bend to scoop the grass
that they eat with out their hands.

It does not go "crunch, crunch, crunch,"
but slips and slides like a water chute.
And inside are caves. And inside the caves,
the grass, that does not go "crunch, crunch, crunch,"
squirms inside the heifer’s side,
as loosely off as on, and splits like
atoms, separating nutrients from nebulae,
a part of this creation now; a part of this Cow.

And on the walls:
old, hollow milk.
The shit, a crumpled scrap,
is cast effortlessly outside
where it yearns to be
more than just shit.

Perhaps, one day to be grass.

All hollow. All lustful.
All dusty. All-powerful.


V. I’ve been watching the moon as it grows

Breathe the surface of human destiny.
Trail in the vast vapor of kin.
From medicine of animals, to vehicles of science,
to energy of star.
Breathe,
Grow.

Tall trees: grow one-hundred years.
Hold the place where the Sun yearns to reach
and alight with magic on a Wednesday
in a prairie under flute-colored skies.

Cross-Legged Weaver,
furnisher of fine silks from mud and clay,
land on foggy nights with feet on
streets of silver glass.

Travel the serpentine meadow
littering glints and glimpses giving.
View hurried muscles gleaming forth
in honest pursuit.

Oh Great, Gray One,
who carries our static sins
inside Her saintly flesh,
seeker of wilder, bustier, turnip patches,
let our musical muscles match your hymnal frequency
and meet our purged psyches
in the world of muddy memories
where we shall light a fire
that signifies your arrival.

Blessed Giant of Frosty, Northern Worlds,
your liner lies, lessened, leagues beneath our creator.


VI. It fits in well with the chords I'm playin'

Back to the wall, I look at my friends. All dancing with mock-girlfriends and boyfriends. My friends are, for the most part, all pretty regular people. By 7th grade, they’ve all managed to become fairly regular people. Who would have imagined?

Outside, a listless night awaits our last dance. It’s the middle of my seventh grade school year, and I have no one to dance with, but the melody alone is calming to my nerves. I have been a horrible student this year. This is causing drama within my family. Fights are a regular routine now. Always about the homework. My perfect world has no homework anywhere near it. And I just banged my head on the concrete wall. Ow! That really hurt! It’s so dark in this gym…

I’ve been outside in the hall, and I’ve eaten my fair share of cookies and punch. It’s so weird seeing all the mothers of my classmates and the school’s faculty so dressed up just to stand there and watch us walk in, drunk, and rub up on each other to a kind of music that they can’t understand why we like in the first place.

I resist the temptation to run in circles around the couples dancing- like some of my friends obviously feel like doing. I know that, when I finally do find someone to dance with, I’ll hate it when someone comes running up like they want to have a conversation with you right there.

Just then, I slink into a crouch and pull my knees into my chest.

It feels good to get away from the house and the fights. They are so draining of my energy. I have a feeling I won’t make it to 8th grade, but I'm scared that a new school would be too hard for me to deal with. I have known my classmates for too long.

My classmates think well of me. They know I’m smart. I goof off to please them. I want them to like me. But I am an attention magnet. Oh, I love this song! They tell me nice things about myself. “So smart.” I think my middle name is “so smart.” Brett. You’re so smart. What are you doing with yourself? Why are you fucking up your future? Why don’t you do what the parents tell you to do? They will put you in the right place at the right time, and, after all, isn’t that what life’s all about? Getting the upper hand on everyone else? It’s golden and dangling right in front of you. Why don’t you give enough of a damn to grab it?

But my feelings can’t just be greased and shoved out of a quarter sized hole no matter how articulately attempted. For some reason, I have always had the notion that I will grow up to be dissatisfied with the way I’ve lived my life. I would somehow be displeased with myself. And I had it easy. I won’t lie. I am damn smart, and I come from a well-to-do family. So where was my head? What was I doing?

I was reversing something. Eons of oppression? Maybe. Maybe I felt wrong taking so easy a route. I wanted to carve my path myself. I couldn’t bear the sight of any paved roads. Mine would have to be through the underbrush and under the chain-link fence. I guess that’s why I have so many skin prickles. They lift me up, you know? When no one around me knows how to lift a finger. They lift me to a train-station hovering six inches off the ground. At the train station, no one manages to get on the right train. It’s mass-confusion, everywhere. There’s not one of us who’s willing to live just six inches off the ground. We seldom make it the full six. Four inches and we start seeing the world like a child again. Five inches and we just about pop our top. Man, sometimes that six inches just has to sneak up on you, like you don’t know where it’ll come from. It grips you from inside your own muscles and forces out the majestic sight of cascading visions up and down a teary-eyed, boyish spine in one gigantic shiver. Then it shrinks away and slips on to the next person. Who knows where it goes. Maybe it follows a source like the moon and tides seem to do. But it always seems to be there again, whenever you witness something beautiful, ready and willing to give you that extra lift. Maybe that’s how you even know what ‘beautiful’ is.

I grow sick and tired of watching people reach the platform, only to get off and hustle on to the next train, as if it’s the only command they can conceive of following. The spotters of train patterns. As if necessity made our decisions for us. Momentarily, I see why I don't fit in. All I ever want to do is make it on the platform.


VII. A good look at my face

The rest fade away.
Letters, but no significant
image here' to dissect
and declare denizen.
It will take a few readings to understand how
this new way of writing releases
the Hammerstein-tonic in us all.

Maybe not your emphatic left hand,
lurching to complete a symphonic ritual.
Maybe just the dust-mote
floating in the sleepless composer’s eyes.

Maybe your initials scratched into the principal's bench,
penned during a lunch-hour that a sorry student
half-missed. Sorry for throwing food after all?
Waiting with lackeys on the possibility of suspension.
But brave enough to keep that chin up for the possibility
of just a detention. Maybe just the hinge, holding.

Maybe off I-95 somewhere in South Carolina.

The exotic cough
of an exhausted pipe, or
perhaps the oil slick
that's left behind.

This new subject will no doubt confuse librarians.
But doubt was never meant to be a poem anyway.
Perhaps, in this way it has achieved being a non-poem.

"Whatever that is."


VIII. Shining down like water

How far? How much?!
How much longer can you
hide the truth?

This world, so apocalyptic and
gray. These times, so unwilled
to fit inside the palms of our elder spirits.

For how long will you let your empty,
dreamless slumber occupy your cloudy memory?

The child lags on to
the pantleg of Mother,
passing by the final chest of treasures
at the end of a long, long grocery trip.

So with what spirits will we awaken you?
Is this the question without possibility of surmise?
For it is, afterall, with these very things that we've
fashioned and evolved from mud.

And it's with these tools that we've fashioned life
inside the image of the Earthen grape.

And they are but ten pins in your bowling frame.

What worries us today,
implicit,
the cordial traffic;
Imminent as Manny, Wilfredo were.

Hollow magic!
Hourglass magnet!

Enough of your father’s impersonations
of asphalt-ridden-villages,
draped along the shores
of Tom's River’s and the messages
that are sprinkled throughout,

Look! Here's one now.
"The Great Flood
<3'd me for my mind."


IX. She whispered words

Of course!
Oh that makes
perfect sense!!
The kind that sleeps with obscurity.

But will her sly
game
of waiting
be
worth
the price
of coming up
two minutes too late?


X. Suburban Blues

You know? What I'm sayin'?
I ain't one of th'm.

One of them falling under.
Falling underneath.

You know? What I am saying?
I ain't one of th'm.

Not one of the invisible, unheard of,
undressed, "must-have" issues-of-the-year.

Not one of them 'stands-on-three-legs
providing seats to patrons at odd hours for tips.'

Not one of them ‘unruly bells,’
scouraging for sound in a festering time.

No, not no three-shades-of-magenta, alive and spinning
inside a deeper forest than walking alone can one bring.

Simply put, I am not invisible anymore.
My creeping song surfaces along the sides of Spanish shores.
My fabric is worn out in streets by many
leafing their way along a routine of grace.

You know? What I'm saying?
I am not alone.

XI. Killer on the road.

Ambivalent. Of not. A flush.
The third repetition, of syllable, of sound,
Two words. Repeats like…

Ambivalence. And. Another.
Crawling from the sink in butchered-time.
And? Ice-scapades. Twirling. Twist- Spin.
Fluoride impressions of gummy graves.
We hail you! Wail you. Whale!
Further! Further! Tippie-toes! Flying now!
Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,eeeeee. Me.

Fortunes? Fortunate sun! You ain’t- We ain’t--
No fortunate one! Nothing. Heard of, in time

in pox marks, in indian headbands, in labido, Slake’s limbo,
in gorgeous crushes, in heavy hands and little whines.

Little wine, little cheese.
Some days to make me say, “PLEASE!”
Some days to count on the rush.
The all-encompassing fork in the road
where I let my message mix with masterful markups
meeting up with reconnaissance missions
ticking down before halftime. Mrs. Brown with handfuls
of grand belting, and being belt, and benefiting!
In your head! In your head! All in your head!
In your sense! Driving throng! A thought ahead! A head!
All to bed! Asphalt exists! All to bed!

Delaying the rush to thread.

Dancing a proven jingle. All jingle.
All red sash AND dialect:
Now it’s time TO collect.
“Please deposit...”
Thank you.

Into. Into. Into...

We meet again.
Into. Another day.
Into. A black hole?
Tied up in thread.
In bed! In bed!
All in bed! All in bed!

Have we met?


XII. Kashmir

You can not fall into the shit of a Pisces,
as their shit is so difficult to sort through,
that a return winds up being less likely than
100 polar bears lining up, arms round each other,
for a group shot right as a nature photographer
glances out of the window of her helicopter.

But if that photo does appear
in any of the nature magazines,
then mark my words, all things ARE possible.

And it makes sense, and so on and so forth.

"But one of one hundred is more
recognizable than 3 in 250, despite
being less likely by 1 in 50."

In three hundred, one hundred probabilities
are probably possible, while fifty are probably not,
while 10 percent, or 30 probabilities, are less-than-likely.
And roughly 60 get ear-marked for "plausible." But probability
rules out about one to two percent more than
half overall, according to mathematics, or approximately a field
of roughly 156 in 300.

So that leaves the grand total untouched
by the dry creases of aged-information
to be around 4 in 300.

But four can break the entire infrastructure down
and dance upon its ashes. That’s how the deal-wheeling
four earns its keep. By sitting, waiting, constantly
analyzing structural integrity, and feeding
from the intelligent data, while ignoring the rest.

Oh fire sign! I see a mistake, and am not “man” enough to fix it.
Oh bright, burning ball of ceaseless trade, I envy your motion,
earning yourself of the honorable sort. I grate wildly
against the unknowns and chafe against their anti-glow.

My entire body pushes for my return
to the Godless, where the ungodly
hover over top their natural shrines,
where, when I die, will I
once again be truly risen.


XIII. I see that she solely possesses the sky

His unavailable wish stood just on the brink of his deepest desires and his "more practical" wants.

XIV. Halfway through Erie and Pittsburgh

Banshee cries ominously introduce
strapped stars to a belting audience:

"Heave Ho! Heave Ho!"

The lugubrious staircase filters a parable
through the outspoken speakers, raised by a truss.
He guts a black-and-tan crowd of their holistic auras.
He swerves to gyrate just in time, with just his
liquor cabinet grinning now:

"Heave Ho! Heave Ho!"

A plum strum, and dandelion fields
are awakened in temples and by sides of streams alike,
littering a million washes for a baleful tomorrow.
Her name was never mentioned though it could have
been forgotten, but this is neither
guessing game, nor apple, rotten.

His corduroy jacket left an ample shine,
and he placed it back in the basket:

"Heave Ho! Heave Ho!"

XV. All my life, I've only been pretending

Words are not hard to come by.
And the seasons to our longing
ensure this. I return again to writing,
not because I have the heart to see it through this time,
but because I have not got the heart to die.

Seeing the words is enough a challenge.
Even when they're really there. There is such a sense
as "they are there, though really, they are not." Or else,
by the time you've found the words that you need,
you are no longer where you were, such to be
affected by them the way you --
should.

And you should. And you should because...

I just have not got the heart to die.