Kansas City (1999)

*An oldy but goody written in Sackville, New Brunswick Canada - an ode to my canadian jaunt and an ode to the notion of Kansas City from last night*
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curling limbs like a powder dry child
grouches mildew shopping list
sun curiously mild

narcotics bellow
beast of yellow-stained grace
crackling pavement
liquid petals medicine betrayed
circling town from walls misguided

inspiration fails
violence never will
curves promising
greed yielding
strums its mindful way
to hamlets trees old family ways

dull knife butters day old bread crumbs
cuts inside childrens sleep to pieces
never returning school days

before creaking bed
wicked wills
whining temples
toward little isolating room

touch of mother’s love
destroys clustering completely
nearly noon a spiraling tune
slips over and beneath conscious play
just as mistress of the house
fains ravaged claims victim
in the false blood

Kansas City back bedroom

Logic is Yellow 5.7.08

(*Disclaimer: cannot indent certains lines so it doesn't read as well as it should since the form adds to the sounds I think.)

At water’s edge the muck sinks hard from factory bombs
the memory of language dripping on
its spit
once standing stone now gave way to collapsing;

Falls into puzzle place, steadily
and with the joy of new life
backwards.
beyond its disappointment
the well paved sky ahead
clouds moving as family dreaming forward
the early sun too afraid
to mix
and mingle with the primary colours
the collapse of reason
the ritualizing of a vigorous sexual night.

Superstitious golden shards
breaking time into the meaning of collective fire
forgetting that Their story isn’t
worth shit
not to be trodden down by the pick-a-penny passengers
dancing in the grease of their very own lie –

Why does your ego think itself a master of reason;
cannot control whether to take a piss lively,
in the night.

my anger subsides………
into gentle, debaucherous bounding sky.

Alone, trying to pry sense from it all,
into the desperate feel of thighs –
the smell of a wooden plank, salty sound of scales
biting down
a meal to a worm, finally advancing the line.

Springtime

Slipsliding down the neon dream of days
into a falling tree’s bum knee, to ship
hideaway.

Messing tidbits ironed doors---my city’s nightshade;
sunny into bed
under covers of light to rushes for tomorrow:
hatching plans of near laughing cord----
umbilical God.

O tell me all about anna livia! I want to hear all about anna livia! Well, you know anna livia?...Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear.

**That is for EJ's rap of ALP. Dedicated to the FWBC (also coined by EJ). Tshirts and tattoos to come. This was written in 1999. Bear that in mind by a 23 yr old**

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“The Midnight Swim”

dizzying flowers in her dampened hair,
anna livia’s gone swimming before her man returns,
the moon breaking into her minimized sky –

regretful of her purchases.
the names that the customers offered her;
when she let a pack of cigs their way for free:
hand still, clutching the pack, waiting-

a wink and a misused grin
ushers them far from her burning stars;
chased between the backwood waters,
her soul robbed of her . . .

drowning in the swagger of a rare, real man
who’s off to play cop for the swimming ladies
after running away with their swollen fireflies;
pilots his rustling chariot, roars off in dust
to wear the saving grace, crown of the undressed gaze-

touch them and they quiver beneath
barefoot glow encircling at his feet,
touch anna livia underwater and she drowns,
stung by the tangles in her foolhearty hair.

on the waterfront 02.08

The trains left her behind.

Not sure what city or town she lived in now. The smell of the murky waters, the imagined sound of their lapping in and around the outer shores. Strippers danced in peacock dresses upon clouds in the might of the sky. The surrounding birds ran a hunting party over to the sailor’s lofts and the street vermin, nestled in after a long run, inside their newspaper feather beds, wishing on reduction.

We are not the realization of ourselves, and no one wants to do the mathematics to build the final equation - bruised, dirty, full of might and cowardice, turning round and round in a firepit of ego and need, while the tribe encircle us, dancing and praying and breathing through the storm in our paper cuts.

Admitting they’d turned into whores, the strippers continued to their sleep in the clouds, smoke in their curls, stink from their knees, love somewhere deep inside their broken hearts. So much love buried in the black hole found at the tip of a needle. Out of it flies their first blood, their empty rooms, the can-can they did at the age of 5. If only it was as it used to be. A couple, broken in sacrifice, going to their communal death for the good of all, Fucking into eternity, burnt into the wood’s natural etchings, as the town ate and drank. Lift up your faces, look skyward - kick up your heels and spread your legs. The colours will bleed through the cracks in your eyes whether you want them to or not.

People see your insides, they just don’t bother to try. They can rip you to shreds, dress up in your entrails, play dice with your fears and arouse your sunshine to see-saw time. After the couple gets back up again, putting their strewn limbs back on, reacquainting themselves with the spaces beneath their experimental skin. The whores in the clouds will tell them that strippers never keep anything on, that rituals the very first time bear a different name, that a home becomes a house once the windows are clear. That it wasn’t what they thought it would be. Not even close.

The payout is shroudy, lost in the shadows of a gun barrel. It’s more than you can imagine. Piles of invisible cash in empty briefcases, littering a dry, straight highway. Always just waiting for the sun to break free from behind a cirrus cloud. He’s too busy making time with those dancing ladies. Seahorses sewn onto their fast moving dresses. They enact their superstition, leaving your belly wrapped tight around childhood.

Sweet leaves blown through trees, you were so young and could do anything.

He is the reason I believe in the might of gods, in the morality of the wise man, in the faith for the hero.

The sun shone differently then. It always broke through clouds of painted ladies. Their feathers shone fresh and bright, their feet quick and fancy-free; no one ever knew about their cuts and pregnancies, their ineffectual starry eyes, wanting to borrow some gold of sunshine before the next go around. They’d let you have it back, they can’t manage two things at once at that distance.

You return from the ritual embers, thinking that the humblest hearts make the largest, near silent sacrifice. Passed out, with sideways tears that glide down your neck with each crisp, clean feeling of memory. It serves to reinforce the constant void, lapping and retreating as the waves of this mystery border town outside the window - filling with appreciation, Christmas dinners, silent car rides and warm, amber stories, falling away to the worst road, the future one.

To the girls, touched, who wipe a tear with their grandmother’s embroidered handkerchief, take their pills and wash their underwear in the sink. Lastly, they fill up their wet eyes with the black dirt shadows of everyone else’s family secrets. One sip of waterfall whiskey rising in the smoke of the dance hall of jousting erections, life plans demarcating napkins and the glimpse of a way back home, through the eyes of a girl whose head is forever soaring above the clouds in the colours of the mythology that stands beside, watching and wondering how the story will end, what side of the coin will the gypsies win and steal at and what strangers will be stretched out on the fire escape when the hangover passes, and your realize you missed the daylight again. When the light hits your face and I finally don’t feel like I am floating anymore. You put my head and my heart in the dirt here on earth. Thank you. The sands will stay white, your homeland truer than you remember it. And I promise to breathe, to walk, to give, to taste and to love of everything you gave me, of everything I am.

The terror of stillness, the romance of a mighty squall.

The girls, still small, innocent and dreaming manage to gawk, shake off their ashes and smile. He’s telling them a story. He’ll be off to tell you one next time you sleep, or smell firewood or think of home without a place. The littlest girl, with her oversized stockinged legs, whispers that there must be gods up there in the clouds too. The taller, motherly one with the strong, brown curls and false eyelashes shakes a half-grin and bumps her shoulder, remarking that it’s only them up there. “Well then”, the little one squeals. And the waves continue, leaving an old faded photograph on the shore.

The trains blew noise in the distance.

Stripper Poetry 9.15.07

*Written on a napkin at the ACE OF CLUBS, Cairo, NY*

Dedicated to Jack, AC/DC & "Victoria"

crinkled memory
bustle on a dim, dirty
wedding day;
plastic jewelry cradling
stretchmarks
of a mother's love,
completely.

Shaking off your
poverty
into the clear glass slipper
of a poison
cigarette stick, teaching
you to come
into circumstance.

Firmly, like a damp
fine-toothed comb.

Selling their hair,
wares
to the drugstore population
too trembling as they
sweat
their nerves, and families
away.

Heavenly hosts in clear
plastic heels;
deciphering holy scripture,
crumbling limestone and ink
through the insides of
her thighs.

Won't be around tomorrow
when she's lying to the soft-
ball coach about her
streetfights,
nights out
and overnight flights--

to the grime marble floors,
tongue-licked clean
in a see through nightie from
another lip-stained,
sunny day.

Goodbye, Hello (ides of march)

*The truest moment of my life*

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The ides of March, they got me. They made pictures, relics and memories come alive, a broken guitar string ripping through my throat and tearing up my full heart as it left my mouth in a cough filled with spit and mucus. I saw the birth canal on Friday night.

A few hours earlier that Friday, I was hastily driving up the highway in a rental car, nails on fingers gripping the wheel as I hadn't even time to think about how much I hated driving busy highways. Kept looking for sunshine, but it only just barely promised over the far off mountains in the distance, promise never coming. J, the perfect driving companion, falling asleep and smoking, singing along and drumming to Cat Scratch Fever, as I remembered the comfort of him on top of me the day before. I didn't feel bad about that. I think my body would have collapsed internally without that fulfillment. An hour later, sitting in the hospital room, as I walked down the awful, sterile hallway, I knew my father could not, nor would want to walk out of this place. Either you were in full recovery or on some manner of your way out.

Shock and denial stretched across my face as I saw him, propped up so high no one could ever sleep that way. It smelled like shit and I was told he had just taken one, but though the rest of us knew it, he never could. He had died the day before last, after going downstairs to the basement in the unfinished house of his soul, the one that did him in and the final act inside his Coliseum, building and stopping, while my mother was out, moving from one to the next (he had told my mother to tell me over the phone about a week before that he was thinking about me all the time and loved me), not knowing what project to finish so starting as many as he could manage, to confuse the black cat that searched him out, on his way. My black cat died a few weeks earlier - he should have known it would be ok. The cat was probably only looking for a little attention, seeking out my father's world traveled hands.

I couldn't stop staring at my father's hands. They had thick needles protruding from the skin, but that was nothing compared to the tubes in his head and face. Other than being swollen, the hands were still my father's. Every mark, bruise and scar across them on display. Just like M's hands. Strange parallel these two men were on, like adjoining highways. I began to worship his hands, as my mother and I spoke, calmly. We didn't clutch ourselves together or wail. We even talked about channeling that into something better for him. Two days before, in the midst of his drilling and working on a countertop, he ate lunch: pasta fagioli, prosciuto, red wine...something in my mother's hands knew too. They talked- about the homeland, about the mountains. At one point soon after, he grabbed his head and uttered "I'm sick" (this was the first moment he let his body register with the oncoming and the last words he said) and fell back into the soft chair (which I've been sitting in ever since I came back to the house). Asleep. Of all the thoughts surrounding the reasons that could have kept him with us, I know that none of the answers could have kept the strength of him, the whole of him. He was no rotted apple, no yellowed page.
As I sat there with my mother, worshiping his hands and all they made, right down to the thumbnail, the nails trimmed by pliers and the black marks from the foundation of a house, the ground opened up in the quiet, curtained, sterile room, through the fibers in my mother's curly hair, which I did not inherit. In the empty spaces in between the machine's beeping its cheap grandfather clock ticking, I was partial to the worlds between. It was as if the walls in the cramped room had disappeared. We were waiting for the slow, learned, tedious process that occurred when ready to let go, or say hello. I was having an internal conversation with him the whole time. We held his cold, puffy hands a few times in between, but as we sat there, we were joined. Even my scared mother whose nature was to distrust her instincts her whole life, felt the calm. Like everything moving in distinct slow motion; a dance, during which he hadn't really seemed to be there with us until around that time.

Now he was mingling in and out, as the waters were lapping, retreating. We talked about how he worked harder his whole life than any man, and not for any man, but for himself, and for us. And, despite my mother's self proclaimed "bitching", she admitted to those houses he built bringing her a lot of fun, how it was all such an amazing adventure which he gave to her. Just us four - my father, mother, brother John and I - no others were ever truly HOME, like we were. To live nearly all of your childhood and coming adulthood in a house your father built (more like 5), it does things to you. It expands your mind, convinces your hands, and expedites your heart's dreaming early on. You see that sifting through blueprints and pencil sketching with his bold European hands, grows to carving out a naked piece of land and seeing, piece by piece, your home being born out of the patience of your mother and the strength and vision of your father, the same that spent Christmas hungry on the streets in Zagreb when he left home, the black sheep not wanting to be ruled by anyone, including his father, knowing that it was Christmas only by hearsay. That kind of love supporting your insecure child's feet from the floorboards beneath, constructed with you in mind, that is irreplaceable.

And so calm grew to appreciation, and at those moments, we did not need to cry. The term choking back tears is true; I never experienced that closing of the throat as your whole body is being made by your invisibles to hold itself up, rightly. My mother's legs were shaking "from the inside", as she put it, and she was overdressed for the weather (my father collapsed on the first day of Spring). Her face was flushed and red. I've never seen her try so hard in all my life. We knew my brother was having his own discussion with my father from inside His home, his head. I had begun thinking 'I will not waste time, will not fail', more importantly will not cease trying, will give the fullness of energy and love to this life and to those particular ones I had a feeling for. Something seemed so loud and clear...when I had a son, his name would be Ivan, the name of my father as a child. Without an inch of vanity, I felt beautiful. Clear and deep seated in my mother's almond shaped sockets were my father's big brown eyes of truth. Looking back at me and the world. I was a little fearful. Amidst all this otherworldly design, I thought about what A had told me. About her father recognizing her before he died. I knew the lack of oxygen left my father's brain near gone, and they told my mother from the moment he arrived in the hospital that there was no chance the massive heart attack would leave him with any ability to wake up. This man who had spent the freezing night in a sleeping bag in the woods with his grandfather and a bunch of found grenades during WWII in Croatia (and got a beating for it), who had stood atop his house's Spanish tile roof on the Gulf of Mexico at 50 years old, with a farmer's tan and hammer in hand, who kept building the foundation to this last house in the winter woods after he was told all of that was behind him, he wouldn't stand for much more of this tubes and needles business.

We thought Last Rites would be good, since he was raised Catholic (and mainly associated the traditions of it with the happiness of his youth and village more than anything else. He didn't need all that to speak to God). The priest had been at the hospital and couldn't come back out until later that night. Our natures looked between my mother and I and we knew he'd prefer it as being just us- his priests, his relics, his church, his stained glass windows, his evening sky. We talked about being awash with appreciation, thinking of the old men of the villages in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, who were massacred like pigs and left strung up in the trees outside their homes for their families to find, and of so many young, vibrant people without fathers or a chance, who had to endure this end alone.

My father had been given morphine. We had our own, coarsing through our veins, like stars mining for the gold of its onlookers. They began to take out the tubes and vessels from his face. He had no teeth. We would have laughed at him had it been a normal Friday night. His gums flapped and his body grew warmer. We each held a hand. I was on the left side. His face looked so clean, more perfectly shaven than he ever managed. We started talking to him- my mother lost her embarrassment and spoke to him in Croatian, telling him to go home, that mamma (his) was waiting. I thought I felt something from his hands, but disregarded it. His face began to have a natural color and he looked alive again, in charge. His brow was sweaty and his hands clammy. It felt so good to feel the warmth of his hands. My mother had called my father 'daddy' throughout their lives; the old-fashioned style, and somehow I adopted the sense of not calling him daddy too often. I was sad to know this was going to be the big reveal, but proud to know I wasn't afraid anymore.

All of a sudden, we felt his hands clutching us; my mother teared up for a moment, exclaiming "I can feel him gripping my hand". And we kept talking and clutching. She told him that I was "here", that my brother John loved him, I said that my best friend CD and the boy M loved him too, and she made mention of my cousin who recently got to spend time with them. My father picked up my hand and pulled it up and across his chest to my mother's, with so much strength that I could see the bones and muscles in his arms light up like olive branches growing in the Mediterranean summer sun. I leaned into my father and said "I love you Daddy" and kissed him on the cheek. He sat up about a half a foot in his bed, turned to me, saw me with the black star eyes that hid beneath the clouded, sickly glow of his failing eye sockets, while I gave him one more kiss on the cheek and said "Goodbye, Daddy". And as if arms were easing him back down into the pillowed ground, the door was wide open. The grip held tight, my mother told him to go home, I told him to go get the homeland, and my father slowly went unconscious, with his eyes caught towards me, before sliding back like a snake's, half-closed, looking at me, with a bright, new tear surfacing in the wrinkled pool around his left eye. His breathing slowly lowered, quieted. His grip gently became looser. His color faded and his warmth lessened. My mother kissed his forehead and I kissed his hand, before we sat back down, in the calm. The breathing was barely audible. I listened to his chest but just heard one or two heart beats. After a few more minutes, a beautiful doctor came in and told us that she thought he may have passed. She examined him and I chuckled to myself, thinking that in his last official breaths, he got a feel from a beautiful lady. She looked over at us sweetly and nodded. And we saw him walk off, and our hands smelled like the last of his energy that came back to us to say goodbye, and the last of his structures stood.

The door closed. The noises returned. We said our less intimate goodbyes to his body, and walked off together to find J, with a faraway message of a few frustrated but pure words of love from M, who I wanted to hug so desperately then, and later that night a jug of wine that would have made my old man proud. As we exited the hospital, the sun had come out. It was swirling through the glass doors down the distance at us like a passage to rebirth, welcoming me to a place completely free of childhood. My father was light as a feather, sketching and blueprinting the clouds. I knew he'd have a lot of work to do, but I knew he had been ready, and I was ready to help him. He would soon be working from within me, and I felt like the luckiest little girl in the world.

Mother's Little Helper 3.07

*Wrote this in a calm before the storm....*

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I hate the smell of hospitals. I've never met anyone who didn't feel less than repulsion, fear and sometimes utter nausea at the scent of one. Even if clinically clean, with happy attendants dressed in crisp white, the sort of white only those of sound mind wear, it just feels dirty. Like the ailments of those surrounding you will somehow creep into your body, into your thoughts and limbs. That you will step out of there with the liquid stench of sick and death on your footsteps. At the very least, it's not a fun place to spend a day.

A friend of a friend of mine apparently overdosed on pain pills last week. My friend was caught in the emergency room, waiting to hear. There apparently weren't hard drugs involved so no rock n roll suicide in this situation. Only the daily grind of maintaining a stable mood and a disappearing stomach lining to wallpaper the situation. She got out of there once it was apparent that all was relatively ok. And the patient? All he got was a free ride to the hospital and some overdramtics that he thankfully, slept through. You know the sort. When people suck out the trauma nectar from other people and make it their own. Like a mentally ill transubstantiation, without the wine.

Back to the idea of pain pills. I will only ever call them pain pills, and not medication, treatment, therapy, anything else that cushions the situation. This world is rough, and for some it can be absolutely fucking brutal, so who am I to comment on what people need to get though their day. Some like cold turkey, some like warm Prozac. A side of denial and a generous helping of over-analyzing? Maybe. It's really not the idea of taking a pill for a mental condition or situation that arose out of the life lived of the person surrounding the brain that irks me. It's the recent development of the Norm of all this- not for the abused, not for those who survived hellish families, or were abandoned by them when tanks came rolling in, it's the idea that when you don't feel happy, you must now take a pill so you will. The replacement system. People are running, bolting, streaking practically to the drive through drug store to get their medications. They cough when you smoke near them, they worry about those who drink too much but they, in return, step up to the barstool in their bathroom and watch themselves silently get drunk. The sort where there is no imagination, no jovial undertaking, just them – their own bartender for free looking back at them. Like drinking alone.

But let's be honest. Pills, when taken moderately don't make you "drunk". But maybe it's just my love of the double dog dare that asks the question: what would happen if there were no pills? Would they collapse? Would they have a breakdown? Would they commit suicide, hurt themselves or others, would they sleep for days or check out of life while sleepwalking in the same way as the rest of us? The answer is different for everyone I suppose. As I stare down with my high and mighty glare, I did not come here to judge. But only to say, people should start asking themselves why they NEED certain things. And in the tradition of the dare, and in the idea of stubbornness, try to let that black hole inside of you remain, untouched. The hissing will turn into sweet music, or into a good conversation or even if into screaming and yelling, it needs to be looked at and not drugged or put to sleep. The dormant stinking gases of what Hurts needs comforting, and as you wrap your arms around each one with a mother's sweet embrace, they could just happily burn in the fire and rise up from you, and be transformed. No one seems to believe in the idea of transformation anymore. That you can, in fact, BECOME something else. All the way to your core.

The bottom line – I don't think there is one. I tend to go the route of this: We, as human beings, have been around a LONG time. For eons, centuries, nights and days into millennium and endless mornings, we have been disappointed, enslaved, hit, raped, killed, disregarded, enraged, fucked over, unloved and abandoned. Some of us made it to something better, some of us didn't. We should put down the pills and turn to the right or left and not forget that we are here for each other. No pill can save us from ourselves, each other or this beating heart. Neither can a drink, a fix, a binge; neither can pushing away those we love, shutting ourselves down and banishing ourselves to our own private padded room, hurting and hurting so when the good disappears we won't feel it anymore. Saying yes instead of no, saying no instead of yes, tempting ourselves ands trusting that there is more to this breath than our own anxieties, doping ourselves up so we can sleep through life. It's not a hangover, it cannot be slept off. You wake up and it's all still there. Hard, razor sandpaper in your skull, sloughing off the cells of empty promises.

My father once told me that my mother would believe the first person who told her that she was crazy and needed to be put away in a mental hospital. That most people would believe, say, the third of fourth person. But that he and I were different. That the whole world could call us crazy and we'd simply say "na-uh". Perhaps this just makes me a crazy gypsy bitch who comes from a long line of crazy gypsy bitches, but, well, like a scar yours is yours until the end of time, and not belonging to anyone but you. Sipping side effects and glazed eyes poolside while your insides rot and your thoughts dull, dreams reduce into a stock of mushy thoughts, a porridge of average, a cauldron of acceptance. You can have it. I'll dive deep into that black hole, hear the hissing in all my broken places and bind them every morning, heal them and keep diving, curious to know what's to come and knowing that I am the captain gypsy bitch of this ship. And I'll take you with me too. I'll slap you into submission, set you free, love and heal you without losing myself, name every of your fears and let them fly off to a country where they belong, and we'll keep on sailing. I'm strong enough to take you all on. There is no bottom to my eyes, or my heart or the depths otherwise. I know what forever means and I live it every second. It's like living in a cluttered attic room when the house is empty, you don't owe any rent and you can have your run of it. Why stay cooped up in that room? You don't know what's out there, but pack a lunch, some good strong boots, and GO.

And, as long as my heart beats loud, my body wants what it wants, my intangibles keep on the journey and I know the fact that the mystery shouldn't be dissected on the street corner, operating table, therapist's chair, bar or in the rooms we hold inside our secret selves, you won't be seeing me in the Emergency Room anytime soon. That's a promise.

Needle and Black Thread 2.07

*About a year old this one...It's nice to capture rage in such a way....*

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The spout of a bitch makes her way through the soft, fleshy lining of my stomach as I board the train. When you are porous, you feel the chatter, the slimy wake and the meaningless looks of your fellow commuters even more. Not a way to start the day. The train decides to enter the 4th circle. The Avaricious and Prodigals. No relevance found, just the wait. Opposites bumping, the excuse of a winter coat and bulky bag makes angry waves, pushing big rocks at each other's temperament, hoping that the other person takes their dirty glove off and smacks the shit from your eyes. Tripping over babies, yelling and knocking footsteps – the manic depressives, obsessive compulsives and passive aggressives stewed while the leftovers baked in their down coat incubators, safe from each other and themselves.

No sense, and no guardian. No one in this town ever wants to be the hero, or the leader. They all look at each other for orders; they all look at me. I look down at the glow of the ipod and shut my eyes as angrily as possible, remnants of Tourettes climbing up my blood stream, in my muscles. Twitchy shouts mingle with the Nick Cave in my ear of "Whore. Bitch. Fuckface". I think I actually wished for a woman to be savagely raped by a herd of angry cons. There's never any guilt following that. Just a calm, like muscle relaxants hitting the sweet spot. Then the ridiculous hypocrisy that I'm somehow different and that I am "above it all". But being above it all is easier when you're meditating and not as easy when you're trapped in a moving electric box that's hardly moving at all. I think the guy driving is stopping and starting for his own twisted, perverse pleasure. Getting his kicks before he has to see his nagging wife tonight.

Mornings cannot start this way. They certainly cannot continue well. It's not the nature of the subway. I've been here before- after meditation, yes, but all the lights seemed aglow, everyone's face forced my pull to anti-socialism to fail wildly, as I kept the light of an open door in my gaze. Not Sun Myung Moon gaze or anything quite that extreme. But, something even more far-reaching. I couldn't remember that moment on this morning if I pulled it out of an open wound. We were finally one stop away. I was later than usual. I'd be going in the side door. Then, it happened. The servant of God, or so he seemed, arrived.

I had an experience about 4 years ago going home on the subway- delayed, stuck, one of the worst. This man appeared then. I understand there are a lot of Jamaicans in and around here, talking about being born again and the fires of hell, but this was the Same guy. Back then, my walkman had lost battery power in an overly crowded car, forcing me to listen to his sermon. This time, it was morning, and he arrived on my car in a whip of silence. I knew his voice quicker than the voices I loved and knew to their core. In an instant, I knew it.

Obviously, this wasn't an awful experience. I knew it even now. I stare every day at the mismatched, salvation army threads and bad haircuts of the people who rode the train to jobs far worse than mine, of women with cheap dye jobs and silver roots showing through layering tones of denial, drug store style. Those things don't mean much in the end, but most people in the room will never ever know the feeling of wanting something better, and what's worse, they don't expect it nor feel themselves worthy of it. I think they should take a knife, a cheap one if need be, and plunge it headlong into the ravenous cavern of the guy keeping them from their family's health, good night's sleep and dream of tomorrow being better than today. The ace is always hidden, while the sharpened ends of the playing cards cut their throats with invisible flair. And, all of them...I could never truly be angry at them. All of them I loved and hoped for them to get what they couldn't have.

These thoughts were far from my empty, tired head on said morning. I knew he'd be talking for about 2 minutes tops but it was the kind of rageful transport moment where no logic was to be found - every second that the doors didn't close was another second I screamed at them from inside. Fire and Brimstone before 9am (well, 9:30)— this is not a requirement of society nor ever a good idea. I would love to be walking back down my street now, in the dark, going home to my brooklyn bullfighters and looking up at the rabbit in the moon, boxing some chump coming around the corner at him from the stars. Can't dream of the finish line when you haven't even started.

By the time I saw the blackness outside the subway car window reflecting my angry, beating chest morph into the bleak colors of the 7th avenue station, I smiled and yelled to myself "I would suck the devil's cock just to shut your mouth you Fuck!" And I felt good. Like a lady. I let the tunneling rage flow from me slow as a snail and exited without missing a moment. I blame cardiology for this: the doctors told my mother just before I was born that my heartbeat had the pattern of a male. I'll look at the black shining sky tonight and find that bunny fighting in his silly big gloves. I felt the wind coming down from the street above on my face. I always knew I had a man's heart.

Old Poetry #1 12.2005

For someone I used to know.

“Driver”

Warm grain sand, fixate hands
looking back at you,
bumblebees leaping grass to weed,
plowing through trees,
intoxicated moon rising,
stumbling to take a leak;
that same second: atoms splitting,
in the arc of a god’s arrows-
angry teenage thumbs stuffing combat shells
embracing like a mother’s love
the bat dung, glistening gunpowder
in collective armory, filling
righteous ears and ten hearts
all scattered to the reaches
of the desert, as biblical text undeciphered
secret scripture coming up through crevices
where hides battle tactics and hippie schemes,
where no one tells him he’s wrong
or so right that his dream
should reach further than the world
in which he disbelieves.

Breezy wheatfield youth,
softest in secret,
clinging to you at night,
afraid to invite the silence
the science of Alone-
noises heard, not yet learned
the courage to possess,
made into an addictive nose bleed
sunrise, prizefight mind,
body moves hard, a suit of armor,
kidnapping you to every seaside
carnival you could ever crave--
to overdose on saddling the sky
a tragic carride accident,
comic ferris wheel junkies falling fist-first
like thoughts into waves, laughing them under,
begging for a smoke, a chance to save.

The broadest calm, a father sits to judge
his unborn children, from behind
selective, fluid and slipsliding eyes;
the truth pounds
wishing well-bound
refurbished garden shed door,
already reaching his dreams since the hour
before he was born-
conqueror of every shore,
to the root of the outer albatross,
the giant kept dragging blind to the side,
breeding new ideas that die,
then scream, laugh-like:
a horde of school children,
monkey fish with 10,000 voices,
soaring opera of strength and weakness,
feeding from this world,
then found alone and calling,
nestled in the leafy greens, high
above treetops, waiting and gone,
beaming mad with boredom
from the off ramp, dead end street of excess,
u-turning in a circle of fire water ritual.

Cult leader without a tribe
Come to take a drive
bleeding into the sun as it sets
on the shores-- one day promised to recalculation,
eavesdrop to its unspoken ground
the soul born free, beneath
grand confusion, collapsing star,
live to walk on top of carriage rides,
soar through verbal skies, believing
that the stars twinkle above, shining
even in the paleness of daytime, from within
broken bones, scattered- abandoned playground
shrouded in the deepest equation of blue.

Chieftain of foreign tours, sands of war, civilization
in every pore, peace in the valley in the soles of light shoes;
rainbows hailing colors like cabs in each second
of his eternity, the moment before it runs from itself –
always around the bend, just never close at hand,
trapping movement in the meadow pond, still conceiving
even sleeping, telling lies small and overblown,
unclaimed truth that’s lived and known;
Soul glides down the waterfall; cascading heart beats
filling with sounds, stories emptying from veins
like children and rules, surrounding his multitude
shooting at midnight starry skies---
The day is old, fades to a close, bold
that it will construct him forward,
forever on a roam, in search of haven,
boundless Home.

Drink up...

Pop the cork (or screw cap), strap your boots on, it's prose poetry time (never learned how to tell a story proper) on the gypsy ship. The waves are high, it smells like hops eating thunderstorms and sometimes desperate drunken silly rhymes. Here will be old & older, new and nearly new poetry, prose, blogs, writing, rambling, drunken scrawling (usually on arms), forgotten memories and fantasies from beneath a shot glass, bottom of the sea floor to searing up into desperate blue-gold quiet skies.

If you fall off the ship, I can't be held responsible.

Enjoy the ride.