Atlantic Avenue

Shattered shards of sunlight
off the greyish noontime clouds:
"I am not tied down to the day."

Moisture still penetrates the air,
the day is right, and I lace up my shoes,
music in my hand; a one-strap
backpack with cloth patches of bands
I haven't listened to for years:

"Feet, don't fail me now."

The inches of green that flutter and wave
goodbye: I'm led somewhere alive.
It buzzes and honks,
creates and destroys,
pollutes me with noise
but it's alive.

My headphones drown
out the passing sounds,
suggesting the soundtrack
to the final scene of
another pretentious art house
film we should have never even written.

Still, content, I march
towards the harbor
towards the sunset
of cliches, of every beautiful metaphor
that she's already fallen for, but still
I'm stepping out:

"Feet, don't fail me now."

She offers me a penny for my thoughts.
"This is it," I say, as I smile, laugh,
and make a wish.

Sep. '05

Scenes from a Reflecting Pool

I've prayed that I could find the kind of place
that separates the church and hate, but
stained glass symptoms tell the same
old stories that I've known since I was four--
Will he still bear this cross alone?

(Someone turned the fountain off;
the youth have all gone home)

I drink a draft of cleaner air than I have
tasted in two weeks, and you're not here
to share a sip with me. At least I've got
my pen and paper, drinking in the night with me;
At least I don't imbibe the air alone.

(Is this medicine,
or is this me?
Sometimes I
forget to breathe.)

Molecules meticulously marching in cohesion
as they slide across her marble curves
to do it all again; Sad to say, the water
can't escape; at least the crickets still sing me to sleep.

Cobblestones, she walks alone
Determined not to fall into the fountain;
Where's she been? Will I see her again?

July '07

(Manifest Destiny) Easter, 1988

I threw myself from churchyard steps
about eight hundred forty seven days
into my life; though I tried, I could
not hear my mother cry above the sound
of cracking bones colliding with the concrete.

I never meant to martyr, I just thought it was
my time, or I just thought that I could manifest
a set of feathered wings (its not a halo, its a sign)
but it turns out man was never meant to fly.

Now I'm starting a support group that I'm calling Killing
Darwin, because I think it's time that we evolved ourselves

Oct. '07

Roxie

I press my fingers delicately
against your auburn skin;
Oh, to taste the steel,
mahogany, and sweat:

Ivory and ebony inhabiting her ears,
where the stabbing sharps and numbing flats
are natural as far I can hear

and she is ever ringing
with a certain stunning dissonance
that fingers finer harmonies
than I could wish to breathe.

Hers hips that curve in brilliant reds
press hard against my thighs each night,
and her dog-eared lips always
scream at every wall like Seraphim.

My fingers feel the action
As they curl, and as I sweat;
I clench my eyelids tighter
and allow my hands to guide me home

But I only stroke your neck to hear you sing
and I only pull your strings to make you scream

March '07

Lovers' Walk

I've turned my back on the world
and now I'll try to keep you safe
from the tryant rain of Independence day;
We'll watch the sky explode above the hospital,
and I'll think of all the things that I can say
to you to make this moment perfect, make it
worth it, make it better than it is. But instead, I'll whisper
something dumb, like "I'm just happy here,"
or maybe "I could wrap my arms around you,
stay forever, and I think it'd be alright.

I'll quickly realize that I sound so lame,
so I'll just laugh and look at you as the sounds
sneak past my lips and through the rain. I'll try
to play it off, but then you'll smirk and shake
your head; I hope your windswept hair slides softer
than your planted septum kisses and your girlish
scent consumes the sulfur silhouettes tonight.
And then you'll turn your head to watch
the burning sky above us fall again
(I love the way it sparkles and it fades),
I'll shudder when I feel your olive neck
lean against my chest, and for maybe just a moment
I'll forget about the irony, drip-dripping from my shoulders.

If the sky will split again, then
I'll quick-nibble at your ear--
there's a word for that, I think;
I'm sure I've used it once before,
but you'd still let me repeat it, like
the Angels, Brits, and Willow trees
of which you never bore, or the sweetened
factories with temple guards and green
monkeys you seem to know so well.
At least we'll have your ceiling stars
to wish upon if nothing else goes right.

I know that you get scared of heights,
but baby, this is just how lovers walk.

July '07

An Ode to Alfred Packer

We always eat our young
We always eat our young
We've found a way to sharpen fangs
On our own flesh and blood

We always eat our love
We always eat our love
Swallow heads to (h)our glassy
stomaches when they come

We always eat our God
We always eat our God
We beg, deny, and crucify
and never get enough

We still eat our young
We still eat our young
We chew them up and grind them down
to something that we want

We still eat the ones we love
We still eat the ones we love
Food and sex are all we need,
Survival's all we want

We still eat all our Gods
We still eat all our Gods
Whose bloody chalice posthumously
tells us what we want

Oh, Packer, maybe you were right

June '07

(number nine)

Click. Armed. Or was it his arm? He isn't sure
but swears he feels the impact. Somehow,
he knows just how it feels to be the hammer,
with just one chance to pound the metal casing
and send a bullet to wherever bullets go.

He lightly sighs and feels the gun become
an extension of his arm: Fire-Arm.
The cold steel texture of what was
once a handle has gone numb,
warmed and smoothed by the flesh
and blood that is pumping through veins
and past the grip before it pours into
the chamber. His heart is swelling steadily,
screaming perseverance (or at least it tries);
but our blood is built to spill before its time.

Ideas are bulletproof, he reminds himself.
A single bullet starts a revolution. Forty-five
revolutions every minute sing a song in
seven inches. If one hundred bullets start
one hundred revolutions, doesn't every
bullet have a tune? He needs to find a harmony.

He counts the bullets in the chamber as
a single bead of sweat falls from where
his hand became the gun, landing on his toe
that he had shot an hour earlier; irony. Only he
could ever salt these wounds. He breathes
in deep, and checks his watch: it's 9:43.

Good time for a revolution.

Feb. '07

(quis cutodiet ipsos custod)

he softly watches her walk
away, her nimble toes and
stunted heels directing her
across the interstate.

she's headed north with no
delay, and he just waits and
watches as she walks away.

he knows at least a thousand
words, a thousand things to
say to keep to her near, but he
could not speak the syllables
that she had hoped to hear,

so he stumbles home, confident
and cool and well aware that
he will sleep alone, and he turns
around once more to watch her
walk away, but finds her gone.

May '07

Sibilance and Sustenance

Pressing plastic grips against my fingertips, I watch
my right hand twitch as thoughts and lines and
words and signs, like shrapnel, scatter through my skull
until this pulpy flesh is covered black and blue. I
twist the plosives, fuck the adjectives, and maim
the nouns until they come alive:

and then I have a beer.

May '07

Mal means 'Bad' (in the Latin)

How heavy, thine heart?
I'll weigh it on a grey scale
and then I guess we'll talk.

I still speak in tongues and lips and fingertips,
and I keep stuttering semantics, and I always
let you fall for it, making meaning out
of every fated kiss; and I hoped that it
would never come to this (but it always does).

As always, art is open
to the interpretation
of the patron, and while I may
have lost you in translation,
I was found sleeping soundly
in a sea of constellations where
I drowned beneath the comfortable
blankets of abyss, its never-ending
nothingness reminding me
of all that I had missed.

Though I'm hardly a scientist, it seems
to be my density, and not my mass,
that helps me stay afloat; I guess that I've
been lying to myself all along. My heart
has only half the hallowed substance of
the ocean that it swallows (albeit eloquently),
but like drinking too much water, you
can drown your cells and suffocate yourself
until you choke (metaphorically speaking).

My betrayal knows no tragedy, and so
my greatest stories have all spilled
from my own pen, and my authenticity
is never called to question, like the
greatest of the dead white men; it seems
I will not go down in history as the
soft romantic man that I believe myself
to be. Instead, I leave my Juliets' for
dead and carry on, never stopping
long enough to wonder if I'm wrong.

May '07

Dad's Diaries

Dad's diaries are waiting in the top drawer of
a bed stand in the places that we go when we
get lonely for an hour. The paper-thin parchment
crunches when I turn the page, like autumn leaves
that fell from burning trees too soon;
translucent and impermanent, the noises
keep me company in every bawdy tomb.

I read my favorite stories to a girl that I
won't Mary from the time when you were
thirty-two, and think of all the shit you carried
with you on your back (you never let it weigh
you down) and I am hoping to remember all
the things you taught me back when you were still around.

Dad, I see your diary was written down by
someone else's hand, but I still remember
everything you taught me about how to be
a man. You'll be glad to know your grand
daughter is working overseas where she is
farming in a fertile land and does it all for
free, and how I almost tied your grandson to
a fence the other day, but I just pelted him
with rocks until he bled out all the gay.

See, I'm trying hard to live my life
just the way you told me, or at least
the way I read it in this dusty little
story book where your friends had all
your best intentions written down.
But Father, I have got to ask how you
drank from that bloody glass and split
the fish while we were killing kingdoms
in your name, and how you loved the lonely
lepers and you knew your mother's whore,
when you told me that the wicked
would not be let in your doors. But you're
not around to give me all the answers
I might need, so I am forced to watch
as Mary takes my sixty bucks and leaves.

Feb. '07

Electric Lights

The selfish unawareness of
a window painted blue, and
electric lights that won't reflect
but sound so clearly overdue.
It permeates the smell of sanitation and
of jaundice under skin

that has been peeled away by saline soldiers,
crawling on their knees
across a bridge of gathered lives.
Maybe this time-
she'll sound so much better
in a sweater, than this dress
that leaves her back exposed
so all the coldest
air can make a nest.

All the stabbing, all the dripping,
all the fevers and the cries,
and poorly picked out tiles
on the wall have watched
a million maidens die
(underneath electric lights).

She's so mixed up like metaphors, it's
better for her, but
when all the shallow echoes fall
and settle in her cheeks
she's still demanding all that I can V.

Jan. '07

Your Last Fall

The harsh winds of late October
howl as they tear across his face
like sandpaper. The open front of
the glass bus stop walls frame his view
like a diorama, but face straight
into the gusts of unrelenting autumn air.

The screech and squall of downtown rush
hour traffic is quickly overcome by the
abrasive crunching sound of deadened leaves,
crumbling to brownish dust beneath his feet
and tires. He sits in silence, waiting, breathing
slowly, as the repugnant subway steam from down below
billows up through the sewer grates to fill his nose
and consumes the crisp aromas of the fall.

The setting sun casts a brownish-yellow shadow
over everything, covering the world in sepia tone;
even fallen leaves, once glowing with
immediate transcendence, have turned
a grayish-brown and lost all warmth (have lost all life).

and this was your last fall with him (if it ever were at all).
you said you're scared of the colors and the wind,
afraid their whispers may remind you still of him.

Oct. '06/April '07

Idiosyncratic Routine

I think it's the start
of a beautiful day
when the robots have all gone home
and away,
and the sunlight sneaks in
through the blinds and cracks; your eyelids part to find the calm of her back.
You lick your lips, they split to press against her skin,
as you watch her warm chest
rise and fall.
Rise And Fall
to the side and you can't help but smile and sigh.
And you can feel her goosebumps rise.
Your fingertips draw lines
and pictures on her skin;
you wrap your arms around her
where the hourglass grows thin,
and it fits just like a key
as you fall into her smooth and naked body.
You kiss her neck to taste the sweat
as you watch her warm chest
rise and fall.
Rise and Fall
to the side
And you can't help but smile and sigh,
and every thing's alright.
Her faint lips part to breath your breathe
and you watch her, watch her
Watch her smile.

July/Nov. '06

Squatter Song (I Came Here to Die)

I've got a dead mattress
thrown on the floor
where I pass out every night.
And the polyurethane
that coats the floor
reflects the light from the street.

There's never been a fire
in the fireplace
ever since they came and sealed it up,
and every time I open the door
I've got to give it a kick
'cause it gets stuck.

I hear the thudding pitter-patter
of the kid upstairs;
I've never seen him, but he wakes me up.
And that's the funny thing
about the cross I bear:
I only need it to get me going.

And it's quiet, sometimes
quiet when I'm singing
in the shower all alone;
it's not my home,
but it's a place to rest my head.
I'm never home,
I'm told I'll rest when I am dead

(Sing to me, Jeff Tweedy,
am I listening to you?
Is this how I fight loneliness,
by running somewhere new?
I'm sorry that I'm leaving
but it's something I must do)

July '06

Homecoming King

Oh, please pass the whiskey;
as we're passing Rye
it reeks of piss and bleach
on this four hour drive.
I hear they've got some real
nice beaches in Kingston.
I'll stand on the shore
with the sand between my toes
as the ocean waves roll:
Oh, I've really been dying to drown,

but every time I think I've settled down
I find it's time to go.
What is a home
when all you own is in a backpack
and you sleep with your guitar
after countless nights of passing out alone.
Where do you go
when you're always told that there's no place like home?

Please state your name and destination:
My name is Jonas and I have none
Call me Ishmael, and I am for the sea.
You can call me Holden Caulfield,
but I'm still not holding on
to any person, place, or thing where I belong.

This martyr needs a party;
this lover needs a quest.

A thousand times I've heard it said
that home is where the heart is kept,
and all the yellow lines I count like bricks
while staring at the sun
just remind me that I'm always on my way, that
I am on my own.
They point and laugh and tell me where to go
but I am always told that there's no place like home.

I will never be your homecoming king.

Nov. '05

Face It, Tiger

(You just hit the jackpot)

Calm and collected,
this city never looks quite as relaxed as it does
from fourteen stories above
and tonight, the night has just begun.
Now it's 12:35 and the night's so alive:
Are those ants down below
or just people I've known?
And that war thoughts have left me,
I step off the ledge
as delicate thoughts take their place in my head.
But those sticky white strands would soon fly from my
Hands,
and I will swing across rooftops
to find someplace to land.
Perhaps your apartment
with the lights turned down low.
I'll quietly creep in through your bedroom window;
You sleep like a beauty,
and I kiss your head
as I take off my mask, and I take my place in your bed.

And you said, "Isn't it time someone saved your life?"

You know that I'd rescue you
if you'll rescue me, too,
and if you call me your "Tiger"
I will always be true.
There will be nights
that I come home real late,
but you know that it's hard
when there's a world to save.
I'm super lame, a super hero
who fell in love with a super model.
I'm dangerous to know
and you'll be threatened by my foes,
but I promise that I'll never let you feel harm
if you promise that I'll have a place in your arms.

I will crawl to you
Up the wall to you
I will swing to you
As I sing
Be my Mary Jane.

March '05