t r i c e r a t o p s

smile

2008-05-13T01:03:00.001-05:00

The good Lord sweats like any fat man
I can't prove this of course
but I felt it deep in my sternum
looking for jumper cables at Wal-Mart

A still small voice said "listen the fuck up"
An assistant manager said "have you checked aisle G"

Of course I checked aisle G
That was the first place I looked

I charged 20 dollars worth of Poptarts
to my credit card
and left without the cables

I stood next to the exit
shaking hands and checking receipts

"God bless" I said
"Enjoy that Mariah Carey cd" I said

I lost six quarters to the claw machine

A man in tan slacks came over,
bought me a can of sweet tea

Petrarch on Chaucer

2008-04-27T15:38:00.002-05:00

The ballroom gown of America is attached to the body of a seventeen year old emo kid.

He backs up against the wall of the high school dance and takes pictures with a digital camera.

All the girls at the dance are wondering if there will be any food at the punch table.

The boys let the cosmic energy of Lil Wayne dismantle the preconceptions of their Gillette Mach 3 Razor lives.

Cinched at odd places around the boys bodice, the ballroom gown of America sheds sequins

all over the floor. Hell. It looks to me like the designer couldn't stitch worth shit, and, if you

ask me, and you should, about which anchor department store would have been a better alternative,

I would have said Dillards. Dillards, dammit! They have a return policy, and besides, what is the point of sales associates?

Sometimes, all the stores at the mall pay each other to stay open. This is coopetition. Other times, they

are too serious-faced to make any genuine contributions to the plight of the new American city.

I am looking into the face of the kid who wore a dress to the school dance. Too much makeup.

Oh hell, way too much makeup. And his knees are skinned. I wonder if he plays basketball in his driveway.

Have you ever driven past a neighborhood and seen the phrase "an adult community" qualifying its residents?

Or wondered who lived in all the small houses on the east side? Here's a hint for you: It isn't as cold in the winter

as some people would like for you to believe, and yes, there is a market for silver artificial Christmas trees, but mostly

the people who are into that sort of stuff have already poured a fifth of Everclear into the lemonade tank at Chick-fil-A, hoping it will catch fire.

what happens when pop culture gets too much in my brain

2008-04-21T01:45:00.004-05:00

Pure Unevil

Somewhere in Milwaukee an ironic teenager
is putting a kazoo into his R. Kelly remix
On YouTube a highwayman shoots horses
in the face and throws his money in the air
Jack Bauer throws a civilian out of his truck
like he just doesn't care
"Don't get up" he says
The man does not get up

The black bars on the top and bottom of my screen are normal
Certain advanced features may not play on all machines
There will be blood

Checking IMDB I realize the adaptation of The Stranger is not real
I dreamed it
It was set during the time of Jesus
Of Nazareth
Werner Herzog gave me a data CD showing all of the wardrobe choices
They were very bold
Ridley Scott was going to direct

On TV the Pope wears clothes that look like the inside of a coffin
He throws his Pope-a-rang from his Popemobile
at a reporter as a joke
But his laughter is mistranslated from German into English
as an insult to the Yankees
and he is tasered by security
with a ruthless hilarity suitable for millions of web hits

A cynical Emory grad working for CNN smiles
genuinely at the headline he writes ('Pope Goes Viral')
and forgets momentarily his desire
to hobble George Lucas

Jack Bauer eats a hamburger
Jack Bauer downloads a plugin
into a microchip on his arm
He flies into my room and watches me sleep

Jack Bauer is scaring me
just a little
Like his beard could just take off
from his face and become my uncle
My cousin finally discovered fashion
in anorexia and played Red Hot Chili Peppers
on the way to the graveside service

Californication is a sin in the latest graphic novel
adaptation of the Bible made possible
by my secretly Baptist church
where I paid $14 dollars for a book
on the Selfless Christian Revolution
after stopping by the coffeeshop
for some higher grounds

Jack Bauer is his own church
Jack Bauer defeats scientology
He has already cured Tom Cruise's unborn future son
of his dyslexia
and latent homosexuality/infertility

When Jack Bauer dies I will be distraught
on all of the relevant message boards
like with Reagan
My roommate will continue in his search
for epistemological truth
and out of print Criterion DVDs

But when my wireless dies I am not sad
I go outside with my neighbor
who screams sometimes at the internet I think

The sun sets in the west
just like Wikipedia says
I have proof recorded on my cell phone
I upload the video and play it at night

Over and over the sun drops
looking almost beautiful
like it belongs in a Terrence Malick film

Nina Myers I forgive you come back

Instruction

2008-04-07T20:25:00.002-05:00

i know you are busy
so i will keep it simple:
remember to laugh
my violence is like a woman

hysterical

I wrote this in the last 15 minutes. It exists.

2008-02-26T16:06:00.001-05:00

And then in the future there was a poltergeist in my room
a movement so flimsy, and recognizable.
I knew I had met my War of 1812
that my drawers were shit stained
and the cabinets full of meaty refuse.

I ate with the mouth of my ancestors.
washed the pieces of an antiquated satellite
down my 300 pit.

I was a challenger explosion wearing an ICBM mask.
I was a cattle car costumed as an IBM salesman.
I ate all of the hard candies until my teeth bled blackness into the air.
I rubbed the nougats of a variable number of bodies into my hair.

I texted the 5000 African-American soldiers of the American Revolution
We pyramid schemed the others and each made 50,000 USD.
I was reliant on numbers the way oil slicks.
I was a pill pushing prom king full of safety pops and flavored lube.

Samuel Adams came to my bat mitzvah wearing a Samuel Jackson mask
and a spotted bow tie.
We gave those injuns a good walloping then as we sang halleluiah against
the star-fucked sky.

Our members were swollen, they were distended, then.
We argued about the merit of supreme versus superior
at the battle of Agincourt.

You were my part-time bank teller, then,
you transferred monies from my oak tree hole
to my dog-thigh hole.

We were a cavernous failure of an excuse for anthropologists.
We were sex-crazed reformation based apologists.

And then in the days to come we were a kingdom under water.
We drew parallels to Disney shows on ice
We drew parallels to dishwashers on ice
We drew perpendicular lines and held each other as the sun screamed
heat over our algae caked faces.

I was a member of a mysterious army made of stone somewhere in the far east.
you mistook me for a nursery rhyme and severed my lovely legs from my hips.
There was a film over my eyes, it was a short one based on Ambrose Bierce.
We were an occurrence at the totalitarian truth techno jam. we glow sticked.

I was a banner posted to the bulletin board of the American decade society.
I grew exclamation marks and curly hairs where the kind men touched me.

We ate the blood harvested by the HUAC hearings.
I was a tender shade of night light in a tenement house.
We played love songs to Dixie on copper pipes then.

Hangman

2008-02-14T19:38:00.001-05:00

The sand is a great big brown shape next to the rocks
I don’t know how to express this to you
I see your brown eyes, they are as desperate and useless as crabs
I am lonely on this Valentine’s Day night
And many people from all over have their eyes on this and do they get it?
It is they grey shape of modern desperation
It is the misuse of desperation that makes us so desperate
I am going to use my GPS unit to find you in the wild untamed world of your sorrow
I am in love with so many things, and alternatively I am surprised
at my sensual perceptions of so many things I am in love with
We are in a conversation and you ask me if I am selfish
My dick is in my hands and I answer have you swung for the fences yet?
Blue lights in my coca cola glass you are halfway across the quai
and fishing for anybody else who can make you feel something while in
the lonely world.

Speak my words to me and breath my language
you are in the past always and you don’t talk with any force.
Above the earth the satellite dishes are listening
they are as folded in and ugly as my ears.
This is the world of dreams
and this is the mask of dreams
and that is the window
and that is back to the window where you could have believed in flying away
so stick around. Or seperate.

Hawaii Meets Texas

2008-02-07T15:48:00.000-05:00

The sound of your voice Hawaii meets Texas grating on
the windowpanes of my heartland home
Begins a raindance at the courthouse or a semi-truck flat bed
yoga-fucked by the skin-flint of the road
It makes me proud to be a human
in the galaxy proud to collect images in my memory machine
I could sink or swim or let the valium plummeting down the iv
tunnel take my vision back to zerosum
or I could radiate the motions of the sounds of the soundswept
plains of the moon stars and the sun
blasting out the reckless heat of two fucking teenagers on
a brown dock drinking beer and dropping into the ocean
this is blameworthy somehow we will get to the bottom
of this each one and every reaction
the causal links of the philosophical undercurrents of our lying souls
somehow we will learn
but my baby crawls at me like a fish tank full of fish and snails
and fish food and seaweed
backlit by the flourescent magic of the heat-lamp the stars are just heat lamps
we are burgers and fries and onion rings
i am a carrot in a garden I could crawl out
of my own womb if God would just teach me
i am a carrot in a cold cream sauce at the buffet line
in the colonnade restaurant i am so lonely
i fish for myself in the grey expanse of our dirty lake
i watch the fish ganging up on me
i let the haunting moon rise up and finally rise over me
creep like something dusty and so suddenly over me

a Celebration, Recycling Celebration! in praise of 'Research sheds new light on asteroid disaster'

2008-02-03T17:12:00.000-05:00

According to CNN small asteroids approach Earth every 300 years. According to CNN large asteroids approach Earth every 1,000 years. A Jesus Christ/Bruce Willis-level messiah only approaches Earth every 2,000 years or so. I am waiting out the last days recycling my old poems into new poems. They are taking the form of letters. Here are some for official state-sanctioned celebratory purposes.

1st Letter

Yes I have won prizes for spectacular glands! I have won microwave prizes! I am standing with ribbons at the grocery store. The marching band uniforms do little to hide their erections. My shark gland is taped to my neck and has a government ribbon. The cassette of the Redeemer is beautifully worn. It doesn't hide the backward gasps of dead angels like you say. I lead fitful exercises next to produce! They wheel out the baptismal tub with little difficulty. I hold my face for fear of sweating. Remembering the last time I fell in love with the dangerous ways my homeland bathed me.

3rd Letter

Delete my fiction, love. It never held. Delete my fiction we will never hold. It embarrasses your sister I am in love with. Her hands deleted in my dreams the eyes I had closed. Her eyes dreamt the hands I closed with hands. And hands of her arms burst splinters at regular intervals over the eyes she peeled like grapes. She gave the oranges up you wouldn't leave alone. To burst pulp on a splinter our arms were never naked. I needed a sister you never held my love. Delete, my fiction love it's easy. Like that.

7th Letter

I am afraid the Service will leave me. I have lost my bleach. 6 oz standard issue. It was in my pocket. I am afraid the way the bodies leak. I am afraid the way the bodies leak and my men pretend not to see the bodies leak. What is the word for mutiny if you're not on a boat. I don't mind the food or the fires. What scares me is looking at the legs of my bed and seeing wheels.

last four prose poems from 28 poem clusterfuck

2008-01-04T18:59:00.000-05:00

Reverting

It never was a question of musical chairs (all elasticity aside). From this board we can see the chutes and ladders. The colors betrayed us all. The piles of flesh swarming at the base. The actualality of chutes. The finality of systems. Academia wasn’t the answer. We say if it tastes of sugar it must be sugar. We say if it tastes of sugar it must be rot. My ear sutured to your cheek you hear what I say, and I mouth-less, say much. We eye the horizon, our wounds festering. The entry point changes but the crater remains the same. That is, removed. Render me: a solution:: a revolution::: a man, half man, half woman, half molten, tree-tight, lite-brite.

Answer

A train comforter. That is, a security, a firm bond. We west this house from angry angrys. We false flag down a passing vehicle, say Is it about the letter, is it a question of notes shifting, a shoe stain, a bedding disaster? Vehicle says to we accelerate! We literal the meaning, speed-style. Flat footing the pavement that cracks and chutes. We eschew our boots, the strappy monsters. We must protect this house—squatter-style.

Literal

We communal our skin. Grant our ears that which we lack. The purple patches that mutate, the stern resistance. A system sponsored mutilation camp. We birdsong through a pinhole, a forgotten flesh flute. The sutures were never enough. This is not a test. This is a self exam. Succeed me love.

Love

When the fallout hits we will be alert. Alertness being the only place these revelations can take us. We will make our dénouement. We must protect this house from this house. We must become limber, malleable. We will forget the ways we knew each other. Forget the hair we loved to adorn. Forget the ears we never used. Forget the mouths we ate the others with. We meaty things, will forget that we knew what forgetfulness was. We will grow many pieces. Burn the ladders, the chutes. The words that ensnare, clever, and seditious. We will not be anti- we will be. We will hold bear words dear, that is, we will abandon them. The glow will be ubiquitous. It will be we, love.

An Elegant and Inviting Format

2008-01-01T23:11:00.000-05:00

I think you are an elegant and inviting person

I like to have a conversation with you when we go out

I like to find exciting things to talk about with you that I never knew before

I think you have a beautiful hair cut and wonderful clothes

When I took your hand and we crossed the street to get to the other bar

I imagined you were a tiny sheep and I was another sheep on a mountain

We stared across the expansive mountains together

There was a raincloud coming but not for a while

That was a comfortable and warm feeling

I would like it if we both had animal bodies covered with fur

I would like it if we both had animal brains

We could stare at each other blankly for hours

We do have animal brains

We stare at each other blankly for hours

Sometimes, and sometimes we stare at each other purposefully

Over short glasses of drinks not knowing what to say

The faces we make have no real meaning for us

I only know what I know about myself

I don't know you in any possible way

You are as predictable as I am

Prose poem a la ryan downy

2007-11-08T21:27:00.000-05:00

Chiefs I Have Known

And so it is very black. Ing near this dark river Sa-he-ola,—black water. And by shortened it And is the desert of Gorge quite as broad Trees there, high, with. Pure white doves among leaves. And every-thing is green and beautiful. Them, and they kept everything green. Kempt, and falling loosely. Like a pony’s mane, floating. But I heard their ringing Vipa River, coursing, serpent-like. Here water has been brought. Was once called. Them off, they say, but the more that. The stomach, the place of something. Over was high, the labor pool. Cut, clenching by their trees.

Nothing

2007-10-11T00:36:00.000-05:00

And then nothing became a bad word when the Aliens arrived

3000 years in the future when everything became space dust

I was a floating piece of space dust I looked up and there was a star

Burning out the whole universe and it became dark and we disappeared

I became a floating piece of space dust in the expanding universe

I was continually running into myself or other beautiful people

The expanding universe in a gaping grin swallowed me into itself

And then back out into the universe because everything is the universe

And God came and looked deep into my eyes with his flashlight goggles

He was a great big white sheeted ghost of a man

I had no sensory relationship to the universe, so he looked at me for one thousand years

As I floated towards things on the other side of the stars I could see

All along I knew the world was a river

Stepping out into the cold water like stepping into a field or floating in the air

I was moving forward into a place where there was no other side

I was passed out in my great big bed resting on brown pillows half drunk

I was trying to write a paper about things that happened in the 19th century

I was trying to imagine the feelings that other people have during the day

I was looking at a book and imagining a great big heated oven

I was walking along a beach like a crab with my back to the sand

I was buried halfway into a mountain watching the clouds hover

I was doing other things when I was supposed to be working

I was listening to cops pull over drunk college students on Clayton Street

I was imagining a hundred years of sleep in a furry animal body

I was a great big phony with an ugly body planning a suicide for someone else

I was downloading music illegally and forgetting to listen to it

All the things I thought I could do I realized I couldn't or that it didn't matter

I began to watch television on mute and turn my computer off

I began to sleep and then I woke up again and then I went to sleep and then I woke up again and then I went to sleep and then I woke up again and then I went to sleep and then I woke up again and then I went to sleep and then I woke up again and then I went to sleep and then I woke up again and then I went to sleep and then I woke up again and then I went to sleep

I told the world thank you for making me in the image of myself

The world responded gulp gulp gulp

Swallowing itself like some sort of fire

More prose poems from long sequence

2007-09-27T13:08:00.000-05:00

Mess

A sociolinguistic fucking. Hear the cowbell ringin’. Out, our hands! A too-moist towelette. A reddening. A sociopathic semi-autonomous robot pterodactyl on the fly. We are herding nicely. Hear that? A toe-letting. A moist blood-letting. This pallor fits you well, cow-love. The talons that grab. Programmed poorly and pinching. We are letting our reddening down. Tow-style we herd.

Reddening

Our face, stubborn farce. What skin will we wear today? What mask, hollow-holed can we stretch over lumps. Fleshy. Paint me clown-nose red if you please. Please. A letter was found in my retina yesterday, it read. The bears are back and flipping still. Clown-love, what is real? I’d tell you government-style. Red faces, In distans.

Lumps

forthcoming in elimae

2007-09-11T21:55:00.000-05:00

I am listening to cassette tapes of John Denver in my car driving west and it is raining.

I am driving west on a road for five miles before I reach the library and then I am going to park.

I am the sum of all my creative impulses I think as I accidentally run into a telephone pole.

I am in the parking lot when it happens and my car was moving at 2 miles an hour so their is no damage.

When you get in a car accident and their is no damage you begin to doubt the salience of the universe.

Am I lucky that I am capable of remembering events that occurred in my life when everything else is just space dust or exploded star pieces or animals?

I stare into the wide flat beak of a black bird picking at the dirt for little earthworms.

I remember how I lay awake in the middle of the night in my room without windows and couldn't hear anything.

Sometimes the mere fact that things are alive other than me does not make sense but it wouldn't make sense to you either.

(Exercises in identity-relativism)

Hi I say to you looking through the window trying to forget that I am also looking at a slight reflection of myself fidgeting at the crease of my shirt.

I am hopelessly obsessed with the idea of things turning into other things.

Part 2.

There is a bridge that runs across a field I am driving over now.

I am looking through the rear-view mirror at a semi-truck driver talking to his CB radio.

Some grown men in New Orleans were found in an apartment together wearing diapers and feeding each other milk out of bottles.

There is a sense that you would never have thought these men would do this if you saw them in the street that I am getting from the sad old radio news anchorperson.

There is only so much writing that I can do before my brain gives up and this will be permanent.

Some people will fall in love with you even if they don't want to.

Some people wander through a city without ever seeing me.

I am surrounded with cloud-shapes of birds who bend with the crossing branches of trees and syncopate their wings like an african fingerharp player.

The harp player is ordering lemonade at a bar in Sierra Leone on the ocean. His phone rings. He has a shakira ringtone. Boy is it beautiful.

Boy is it beautiful to watch the waves dazzling up and down the coast and forward and backward and reaching out into the land with watery grips that can't quite reach the highways until God makes a hurricane.

This is a poem about Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. It is a conspiracy theory.

four more prose poems: poems from a news-ticker or a collective social personality disorder OR poems about other things/fragments for daddy/santa cl

2007-08-27T22:22:00.000-05:00

...aus/ chuck e. cheese/NASA

Panel

Nothing but chair-songs, she said. She board-style. This is academic Rigor mortis. Sidestep my too-high chair. Lick my face with your rock candy tongue. Feel the burn baby. Let me remind you. I can’t eat with these sutures. Indian sunburn, up and down her arm. That’s the Natural American Spirit! A committee. Render me: useless, a judgment, a drawing:: a boy, half hair, half molten, tree-tight, lite-bright, yard sale-style. We are wholesale deformities.

Style

what hat fits this heat? I would like to be ocean liner for a day. keep the tears to a minimum. we are crying softly into coarse pillows. don’t let the dirt in, oh no. you let it in. coat my gelatin face with dirt blush and let us have a pinecone war. we are the children of immense and intolerable violence. we are the tolerant generation. why no makeup today? the maquiladora factories kept me awake all night. we must protect this house. breakdown.

Liner

sink-style left of the ocean. we must protect this pool from angry politicians. stereotype man says line-her up and let-her rip. write me a letter that contains: misguided statements of love, hyperbole, some symbols universally understood:: a child with a too convex belly, disfigured hands of a woman in her twenties::: she is at least forty given American standards. the gold standard.

Angry

A rumbling in the holly bushes. A livening. She said he said a mighty mess was made. We are the bakers, this, our sugar. confectioner-style. powder me up and lets get going. A prickle for a nickel. don’t be cute. Emanating from the bush this is my demesne, leave! She said, a lisp how cute. Don’t be. Powder songs, jingles, definite edges blurred. We are the most reliable narrators in this domain. a berry, a poisonberry. We are the bakers of the most remarkable boysenberry pies you ever seen and don’t worry ‘bout that spill or the child under the sofa trembling.

prisoner who murdered someone probably

2007-08-24T15:47:00.000-05:00

you look at me with the most aching eyes.
the virgin mary appearing on the flat face of a parking deck
perched above the flat city like a flag with only grey stripes. and bird shit
coming down one half.

those blue eyes masking something else which is unplaceable
the grey shock of hair the english coast on the irish sea swept by currents
no now part of your hair is failing and you wrinkle the side of a house made from stones collected from the sea.

sure i have seen your orange jumpsuit.
because you are sweeping up plastic cups along the highway i am driving on.
there are two dogs standing by in case you give up. they have sharp teeth.
sometimes they are used for biting. when you stare into
their oversized black pupils which have no feeling.

there is nothing better than that. i am driving in a car
eating french fries and dipping them into ketchup
scooped out of a hole i dug in the middle of my thigh.

owls are not thinking when they sit still in a tree for three hours.
neither are people, i don’t think at least.
they are watching sunbeams and starting to forget everything from their past.
have you heard the sound a clarinet and a cello make when they play together?
i have heard it when i press down on the accelerator of my car. it is beautiful.

three prose poems

2007-08-14T22:30:00.000-05:00

Bear-Love

When the fallout hits we will be hibernating. Sleep being the only place these sentiments can take us. Paw my bear belly let loose the salmon we will run on pads, claws stunting flip-like or flippant. Bear words are less than holy and more than not. Find me snoring by the west cave wall we call brown wall. There the glow will be impossible to bear. Forget aesops fables and eat some silence with me. Spoon fed and well read we reclined.

Fallout

Your skin is my skin sang the gnarled trees. The ears we took for granted the purple air inserted rhythmically head-side. Pick the dry cleaning up with your talons. Are we birds yet? Can you bird song at my funeral. O the syntax we lost in the transitory periods. Use two words liberally and appliqué my face onto my lower thigh. This is not a test my quiet failure this is an exam. The yellow does not wear you well and the family screaming.

Skin

forthcoming in Sawbuck

Shipwreck

2007-08-04T22:05:00.000-05:00

My heart went and drowned in the ocean.

From my flabby chest it tore itself out and I couldn’t catch it.

The waves are like bright green playing cards being shuffled.

From the half empty carcass-belly of the island

in the afternoon: Sometimes a sun grew, pinked my malnourished arms;

Sometimes a pelican came, dove into the water like lightning.

My hair is so thin from the pounding surf.

I cradle a worm in my palms and hold it underwater.

I cradle a fish its bones are my bones and it rolls in the sea.

I am waving to airplanes flying too high to see me.

I say good evening over a transistor radio with sand in the speakers.

“Crack crack crack,” goes a mainland DJ, like a flaregun.

Sure the ocean is great, flat and always the same.

We are not like oceans who turn themselves over every day and grow again.

We are puzzled by the sameness and we are swept like sandcastles

into the surf and are forgotten.

Kim Gordon Eats The Last Blueberry Pop-Tart

2007-08-02T15:27:00.000-05:00

i touch the roof of her mouth it
feels like a pillow
tossed into a trench full of mermaids
we are linked by hair and there is a cake

i wake up stained with a rattle in my left arm
wishing i had a heart attack when i was nine
just to get it over with like chicken pox
or braces or love and she is standing on the bed

her foot is on my leg i pretend
i am a beard wrapped around her stupid blonde face
but i'm scared she doesn't cry
soft enough to make me want to stop

WAR STORIES WITH OLIVER NORTH

2007-07-24T14:53:00.000-05:00

There is a big war going on in a field.

It is the American Civil War.

The place is Oklahoma City.

A man notices an attractive Indian boy, who is 20.

There is a small stone cottage in the middle of the field.

They run up into the house and look for a room.

In the house there are many people having sex, it even smells like sex.

Some officers see the two run into the house and chase after them.

The man finds a bedroom with a small window and tries to lock himself and the boy in. The officers pound on the door and then leave.

II.

One army has defeated the other and has proceeded to hogtie the enemy.

The man and the boy in the room notice this through the window.

They become frightened.

The officers break into the room and drag the Indian away.

The man breaks through the window at the top of the house and looks down.

It appears to be about 80 feet. He jumps. He does not die.

He is tied up with the others though.

He sees the Indian boy, who is almost dead.

He has been tortured and dismembered and tied up.

The man is very upset. The house begins to burn in the background.

III.

The man is asking a group of officers if they are still in Oklahoma. The officers laugh at the man and keep drinking. The man is tied up, so he tried to escape.

He starts running, jumps a few times, each time higher and higher, and then begins to fly. He knows that because he is tied up he won’t be able to fly for long.

He looks at the trees and thinks “Yep, Oklahoma.” He watches the trees get thicker and thicker. Then he notices that many of the trees have been cut down. There is a river,

and next to the river there is a road, and on the road a small car. As he is flying he feels himself sinking lower and lower towards a dry gulch.

IV.

In the car, a soldier is driving.

Two women are in the passenger seat, one on the other’s lap.

The man is driving fast away from the war. He is scraped and beaten up on his face.

He asks the women to get in the backseat and he goes with them.

The car is still driving while they do this.

One of the girls is now in his lap and the other is sitting alone.

He begins to tickle the one on his lap.

He says he is gay but he wouldn’t mind some company.

The other one is still laughing but looks worried.

He begins to play a strange game with the first girl. He has long white curled fingernails and he tickles first her side, then her kneecaps, with strange strokes of his fingers.

The girl on his lap laughs.

The other girl looks more worried.

He keeps doing this to the girl on his lap, and the other girl becomes upset.

He tells the other girl to relax, and she begins to do the same thing to the girl on her lap. Pretty soon, she is laughing to, and they are all laughing.

Then the man reaches into the front seat and gets a bowl of chili and pours it on the girl’s head who is on his lap. Her face is covered in hot brown lumps. She screams in agony.

The other girl gets very mad at the man and yells at the man. The first girl crawls into the drivers seat and starts to open the window. The man follows her, but too late, she is out the window spinning backwards along the road.

The other two are now in the front seat, and the man tries to crawl out after the girl. The other girl holds onto him, and as he is half out of the car, she decapitates him with the window, then lets his body fall out of the car and roll into the river.

IV.
The man who has fallen into the gulch watches the car tailspin into the forest and explode.

Up against his leg a woman’s head has come rolling and it rests face down.

He lifts it up like an Indian inspecting the scalp.

Two more bodies have come floating down the river towards him and are floating face down as well.

Two generals eat turkey legs together. “Mmm Mmm” they say, while holding hands.

ann coulter sex doll

2007-06-30T19:11:00.000-05:00

i am tired
all of these four-hour erections after marathon sessions
of watching Fox News
all of these dreams of senators with half hard-ons
no one believes me when i tell them how dirty C-SPAN is
i have recorded the best quorum calls on VHS
for emergencies of self-abuse
today i googled 'republican nun sex'
Jesus
He's so shirtless all the time
it's distracting
so i think of Jim Morrison instead
in those brown leather pants
suggestively shaking a maraca
if it was the end in 1968
what does that make this
2007 sounds like a joke
or part of the title to a movie that went straight to DVD
i am downloading mp3s
feeling miserable because she didn't call
and it seems like all of my favorite songs are by Canadian lesbians
i am genuinely feeling sadness because not everyone
will see this performance of 'Light My Fire'
and this immediacy is nauseating because it hits my gut
harder than 'genocide' or 'famine'
Harry Potter and the Insidious Famine
Encyclopedia Brown and the Lackluster Genocide
i've never had 30,000 people around me disappear
but i went 23 years without seeing Casablanca
this is my honest regret
and my honest sadness revolves around her
i think the television lies
there are too many words
too much existence
everything trying to live all at once
which is why i can bear it alone
under a blanket in my apartment
all of these pictures of people i never knew
characters on the tv with short flashy names
Bush
Rove
Rice
characters on the tv with dead bodies
anonymous and easy enough to forget
easier than the night she was there
and i kept looking away
before she kept never seeing me again
all of these car bombs in London
they should have me worried
but what's the worst that can happen
is something you get to worry about
only when you're alive

2007-06-22T17:13:00.000-05:00

Hollywood Boulevard hook me up to your feeding tube I am ready

to smell my perspiration as it disappears.

I am in love with a girl who wears overalls and no undershirt and cowboy

boots with steel tip copperhead eye shaped tears.

Vine City we watched two boys kill each other—their hands crossed

and their knees in each others crotches.

Eating nuts in a bag from a Chinese man who watches pedestrian angst

in Nazi propaganda videos.

Could have let me hold your hand but you handed me the matches and

you held your cigarette and you begged fire from the heavens.

Cabbagetown millionaires your garbage overflowing the streets the garbage

men are on strike your neighbors are your worst enemy.

I bit the head off a magnum bar and the hot metal of your sidearm

held straight in your arm pushing into me.

Mechanicsville dodge the pig’n’chik cops swirling ice cream with their noses

full of whiskey stink mustache hair.

Clotted cream wipe the sugar off the seat tear down all the trees build a house

on a scalp bald hill.

We ride dirt roads with the windows down velour smelling pleather seats

stuck to your ass and pulling you down.

I make love to the wild waves of the fm radio DJ playing soft rock for

a quick buck and a bite to eat.

Speed Checked by Airplane (first section)

2007-06-18T23:08:00.000-05:00

What altitude would you find me at?
Scanning, half shut, half open. Eyeless.
Eyeless.
What trip could we trap with what rope
noose-like, noose-tight?

I see your ghost hands
translucent and fluttering
between folds of skin and bark.
We tree-like. We monolithic
statues of implacability.
Marching toward
and here we insert the place.
Me to you less face
more utility
But again we ask (do you see)
What altitude would you find me
at?
Scanning, scanning.

Follow me along the intertwined veins leading
in or out (science fails me).
A thinly veiled massacre.
An interstate.
We will inter the state.
This sarcophagus we desecrate.
We spit, let us shine at this altitude.
Let us shine.

We intertwined.
Failure strikes back & back
until we are out of floor and
into wall.
Inter
the floor that fails us.
We are at zero feet and not climbing

Wish for geometry
want for shapes but
look & find & find
nothing under the circles
but squares. Plots of plants
and a chalky set of bones
ivy ligaments dancing
and singing a still song
of stale night air.

What altitude?
If I bring you a letter of recommendation
filled with posies or charitable facts.
A crack. A fissure.
The blood leaking through
would you
hand me the job, hand me off, fend me off?
A bouquet of roses is better? A tear jerker?
Pieces of my bone marrow dissolving in your tea.
Find me at
bypass. Stop. Bypass. A letterpress. A series of
Children’s books.
Pop-up tigers. Bypass.
Stop.

This is not the solution.
We make the easy statements
The front page, the opinions
column.
Bricks we break. We stucco
We are stuck. Know that.
Find me at the bypass.

What altitude does a heart fail at?

If paradise is in a shadowy alcove
surrounded by mountains or walls
and we must climb. Bypass. At what
altitude?

If it is blood, the river, and we drink from it
what teeth will we sprout? What ivory radish
takes the place in our cavernous and fearful
holes. Quivering.

We are breathing the fumes of a massacre.
sado-masochists we three, we all.
We tripped, now trapped, but for the bypass.
& we white wash walls
with bleached blood. Bone fragment bristles
on our brushes.

Not that we are trying
We are not
here.
We are developing a tendency to ramble on the interstate.
Inter. Enter into a place (specificity?)
With more than white walls we can
but will not.
Pop-up tigers can kill a letterpress
can fill the coffers.
We fill the coffins.
We are not morbid.
We exist.

What of the dinosaurs
children’s books ask.
At what altitude?
A triceratops plying his ivory trade.
Will we find
fossilized human teeth
a Heinz 57 bottle
a pacifier burned
in a missile detonation?
Will you find us slinging
arrows, caressing bedfellows,
as the air of government lungs
fills our get well balloons?
There is nothing left to cry
at.

Some sling rocks
it is worth noting.
And the notation self detonates
our jewel encrusted jawbones.

It is a trap
this wire we trip
and we are finding
at this altitude
there is much
to be exploded.

Bypass, if you will, the paleontologists
chattering amongst themselves.
Buy me a set of futurists
at the dollar store
and let us burn this temple
down.
Pop-up tigers on the prowl
their axis set
not yet evil
these distinctions are made
by we, us three.
We will close the book.
Inter the tigers.
Forget the pictures.
And never know the words.

It is a blood river.
The futurists and the paleontologists
have agreed upon this.
Dragon floats and vocal chords we have
aplenty. We will meet our Oregon Trail.
We will remember in the end to bypass.
Stop.

Don’t check our speed. You will find
us not moving
at this point in time
and vomiting at this
altitude.

We could become rock throwers.
Grow dozens of arms.
At security gates, bypass
revolutionaries. Quiet failures.
Make the massacre slow.
Feel the bullet in our lovely hands.
Rough edges scraping off
thin flakes of our downy skin.
Let us be romantic.
Kiss me at this altitude
at the speed
of light.

They beat a pop-up tiger with dozens of clubs.
Its cubs watch with tearless empty faces.
They checked his speed.
Too fast.
From some altitude
judgment was rendered.

Can we be tree-like in our current state?
We grew the arms but we lost the patience.

Trip my trap with your heart bypass.
I can’t read science books with this monocle.
If we install pop-up tigers in science books
the river will dry up.

We need to drink.

Is this the solution?
Find me.

It was better before television.
It was better before vision.
Tell me where you lay
your porcelain mug. pig--faced
and waiting at, to, down escape
this lack of signal and take me
neck craned, a swan song, bird-
-love.

Am I making what I kiln?
Don’t confuse words please.
My hands are aching and the
arthritis is setting in. settling
in the west we see the sun.
Manifest destiny. Nothing clever.
Six shots and only one brain
to miss.

To bring it back we stop. Bypass.
My training wheels keep me too
stable.
What altitude might we reach, what
star scorned might we love love being
Forborne.
We tripped.
Saw the double sided saw
gnaw the tree.
Skin we are trapped within.

Shift back to columns.
Don’t be stucco on the
wall. Bypass the ledge.
Skip to the ground to trip
the ledger. Misunderstood,
archaic in form and taste.
We inter still. We instill. We
three are less than holy &
more & more than pain.

Throw us down by the river
and check our collective
speed. Drop a pill as in
place it down accidentally.
Watch the pipes gurgle
and fizz over until we all
feel drained.

Are we quiet failures yelling?
Pitch of the bark and woofing.
Catcalling and speeding.
My trap it was an unknown
trip.

I am mapquesting us and finding
that we are at no altitude & zero
us two less one. Break it down
catcalling to James Brown.
Get on up. It’s time to have
a funky good time.

The massacre still exists.
We just stopped watching
television and no longer
needed to say things out loud
to understand them.

.

2007-06-15T23:07:00.001-05:00

Dead?

Death Metal Poetry

2007-05-15T20:13:00.000-05:00

i have created an online journal.

it is called death metal poetry journal.

anyone and everyone is encouraged to send poems for it to rdowney15@gmail.com.

submission guidelines are on the site.

they are not very serious.

that is all.

why i have this sinking feeling that one day i will end up marrying someone who knows how to speak elvish

2007-05-11T22:52:00.000-05:00

this is a conversation that happened in real life while i was working one day at ben & jerry's.

customer/stranger: You look like a little elf. You probably get that a lot don't you?

me: Ummm. Not really. Aren't elves already little?

customer/stranger: Yeah, but no, like one of the elves in Lord of the Rings, but not as tall.

me: Oh. Ummm. It's probably my left ear. It's kind of pointy.

customer/stranger: That was a compliment by the way.

me: Oh. Thanks.

customer/stranger: Could I get a scoop of cookie dough in a cup please?

me: Sure.

i just paid $88 in unpaid parking tickets. i am going to write an epic poetic narrative about paying $88 in unpaid parking tickets in between ruminations on the impact of Arthurian romance in contemporary society. i will get Anne Carson, Dr. Phil, and R.L. Stine to write blurbs for it.

"This is a poem about Steven Seagal's new energy drink"

2007-05-08T09:41:00.000-05:00

When I don't wake up before 9:00 a.m. my cat hates me.

He throws his body against my door with great force and screams for hours.

I want to go let him in but it is too cold.

I am a selfish human and my bed is collapsed in the middle so I can't move.

Sparksy understands this but Steven Seagal is angry.

He is raising his eyebrows with a menacing facial expression.

I am shaking from the cold but I pretend it is from fear and I look at his angry face.

I am aware that if I don't let Sparksy in Steven Seagal is going to break down my door

And then he will put it back on its hinges and break it again with more force than before.

I have seen him break numerous doors on made-for-t.v. movies.

My life is a made-for-t.v. movie.

My cat will eventually give up and I will go back to sleep.

And he will go back to sleep.

And Steven Seagal will remain ever-vigilante.

picture II

2007-05-05T09:45:00.000-05:00

things i did today

2007-04-28T17:23:00.000-05:00

I spontaneously edited most of my old triceratops posts. I got tired of them. I like the new ones. I will probably spontaneously edit them in 2-3 months. Here is a manifesto i wrote at work.

The Manifesto Manifesto

1. Fill a pants with round-stick Bics!

2. black ink

3. Your scalp is not an honest substitute for a squirrel's nest.

4. String Theory is not real until Al Gore says it is.

5. PowerPoint your desire into a less problematic fluid.

6. 75 WPM is the hallmark of any democracy worth saving.

7. scream your poem into a legal pad and wait only 3 days for rejection; this is a limited time offer

8. South Dakota is not acceptable legal tender. It is not valid in Canada, astronauts, or Super Mario Bros warp to level 5.

picture

2007-04-20T00:24:00.000-05:00

Sex Fantasy

2007-04-09T20:27:00.000-05:00

three mean-faced hookers are huddled together on North Avenue
in the flat cracked parking lot of the Church's Chicken
that never stays open past eleven o clock

one of the hookers is wearing a cherry red basketball jersey
from 1986 when the Hawks were actually a good team
the other two wear tube tops and gold skirts and platform sandals

a car stops in the Church's chicken parking lot
the girl with the basketball jersey walks up to the window
she says something suggestive to the man behind the wheel

he says something suggestive back to the hooker
he makes a remark about a popular television show on cable
he wants the hooker to dress up like a nurse

then Jay B walks up to the car
he introduces himself as the pimp
he says that will cost $5000

unfamiliar in the conventions of bartering with pimps
the man behind the wheel hightails it
a long black exhaust pipe smoking in the black ass of the night

the hooker says to Jay B that she would have performed
for the man in a nurse costume for a price
far less prohibitive than $5000

Jay B is busy sucking on an unlit cigar
it is cold enough that his breath is clouding in the air
but not cold enough for him to light his only cigar

he does not listen to the hooker
he knows that in the business of turning tricks
you have to rely on yourself for all major financial decisions

Jay B grew up in Bankhead
he saw a boy get shot when he was fifteen
he saw him fall down into a pool of blood and die

he knows what it is to stare a man in the face
after learning what it is that he most wants
and charging him a fortune to get it

the car returns. the man rolls down his window
he says he has the five thousand dollars
but he has a stipulation

he is married and he wants his wife to watch
he wants the hooker to tie him down
like he was in a hospital in a coma

and he wants his wife and the hooker to spit in his face
and tell him about the pleasure
he is unable to give them

he wants to lie there tied up all night long
while his wife drives the hooker back to Church's Chicken
and gives Jay B a blow job

like a sentinel or a telephone pole Jay B watches the street traffic
the hooker begins the arduous process of making up her face
the man in the car begins to sweat a little behind his neck

the other two girls have begun to glow
because the headlights of the car have illuminated their skirts
they giggle and two more cars pull up and they scatter and dance

TV on DVD

2007-04-08T19:01:00.000-05:00

i think we should have a roundtable discussion on TV on DVD. i will start things off by asking a few questions.

Daniel: How many times have you tried finding Tsunami/Hurricane Katrina footage on one comprehensive, ultimate, collector's edition DVD? How much would you be willing to pay for such a thing, even if it did not include detailed commentary by David Lynch?

Ryan: How has post-structural Marxism hindered TV on DVD's effect on Christianity? Does it have anything to do with the 2% decline in overseas evangelical missionaries? Shakespeare had Marlowe, NASA had whatever Russia's space program was, Lassie had Leave It To Beaver, Jimmy Carter had that Dunkin' Donuts guy, and I guess what I'm trying to ask is, will careless marketing imbue 21st century capitalism with a sense of apocalyptic doom underscored by an insidious jovial mask of edibility?

Ashley: I heard on NPR the other day a news story about a 17 year old boy in Nebraska who watched the entire second season of 24 in one sitting and had to be hospitalized for 3 days. His 14 year old cousin was found the next week, disoriented, in the DVD section of Wal-Mart, with apparent memory loss. Whose responsibility is it to protect our children from this gross sin of distraction? When will HBO start offering cheaper box sets?

Ian: I have written 378 poems this month about some form of television. Am I too far behind? Please tell me you're not already up to 500. When do you plan on shooting footage for the pilot episode of your as-yet-untitled drama, which critics so far are describing as "ER for the poetry world" simply based on the first 10 pages of your script? Is it true you wrote it in a fit of mania, after an uneventful Six Flags trip when you were 15?

Who knows how long

2007-03-23T15:54:00.000-05:00

Your skinny
white
finger
is poking
directly
into
my eye

You know
where
the
color
stops
and
there is
a dark spot

Well
your finger
has penetrated
my eye
and
now is
playing
the piano
with
my fontal lobe

While
you finger
me
I twitch
like
an animal
runover
by a car

I
feel
intense
pleasure

And
the part
of me
that
creates
working memory

Imagines
a long lake
frozen
like
a fingernail

I don't
want
anything
that you
could
not
give
me

sneak preview

2007-03-11T20:47:00.000-05:00

here are some quotes/lines from a story i am writing about a human person.

"[My wife] has a tendency to hear what she wants to hear. I never proposed to her. We were in a Red Lobster. I came back from the bathroom, and she said 'of course I will marry you.' We had been talking about bagless vacuum cleaners. People at nearby tables were looking at me. I thought I had missed something. I said, 'Great.' We celebrated with a molten chocolate lava cake.

"I think my wife is stealing my DVDs and mailing them to her parents."

"The founding fathers had excellent sperm. Yesterday I realized I had been standing in front of a microwave for minutes, watching the popcorn bag slowly fill with air and lose it's flaccid shape. Then I remembered to shield my crotch from radiation with an oven mitt. Last week I vomited into the kitchen sink. It had been completely unexpected."

"If my wife ever turned into a zombie I would have to decapitate her without hesitation and sentiment. I told her that she could count on me for this, that I would try my hardest. She looked up from her Reader's Digest and said 'you should read this article, it's about cancer.'"

"I ate 4 Krispy Kreme donuts this morning. That's really going to throw off my anorexia."

"I tried dying this afternoon. My wife was at the library and I was doing the belt thing like I always do when she leaves. This time I figured I would come and then just hang there until everything went black and my wife would have to wait a few days before starting her latest John Grisham. But I thought of my poor sperm just lying there on the Berber carpet. I couldn't abandon them. I took them and put them in an empty pickle jar, which I hid on my side of the closet next to all the unwrapped Christmas gifts."

AWP...

2007-03-05T00:18:00.000-05:00

THIS PICTURE IS 99% ACCURATE.

hello kitty

2007-02-20T22:02:00.000-05:00

Then in my apartment everything began to burn,
starting with the lampshades. Like bad haircuts
splitting apart to reveal the grey black brains, or
splitting overstuffed pieces of orange furniture.

The vacuum cleaner swallowed a rubber band and
gently smoked. The carpet oozed its own juices. The microwave
set itself to high, revolved for thirty five seconds, and then
blew itself apart from the inside.

I wandered the lost shuttle of rooms like an agape mouth, believing
everything is lost. The paint in liquid came off the walls
peeling synthetic raindrops which sounded like the pow pow pows
the mute grinning and grinding of factories and my teeth
chewed themselves into a localized anesthetic of frenzy.

O Mardi Gras Tuesday! the girls in bead skirts and shirts
have not noticed the gulping gasps coming from my window,
the black feathers of a smoketail like a diver’s wetsuit swimming out
from my chamber-tank. FM radios blare like the town air-raid sirens.

They are delivering babies at Athens Regional Hospital
to the sound of an electronic heart monitor, the first noises in life
I think, with the fire alarm like an ostentatious red flower next
to a tombstone with my name on it.

this was inspired by chinese internet addiction

2007-02-20T19:26:00.000-05:00

spider solitaire is angry at me
i keep failing it
i need to stop promising to always win
i need to stop promising to lick the corner of the screen
whenever i lose

spider solitaire never asks me for anything
but i still feel compelled
to rub cream cheese around its cards

i won't forget the time it let me win
i won't forget all those days it was happy for me
when it abandoned sarcasm and i found myself singing to it
softly and without a melody
like whenever i would bury my pets
or the love i felt originating from my stomach

part II of my fiction writing. sorry it is not my turn. someone tell me if i should continue this piece.

2007-02-14T00:44:00.000-05:00

J was at a loss. He had been searching the 2002 world almanac for hours to no avail. There have to be answers here, I know it J thought but his outward expression of this thought was the word fuck. His phone should have been ringing all morning long but it was not. J had not paid his bills, and this was the least of his concerns. J plucked hairs from his beard one by one noting with each strand the singular impulse of pain and numbness that seemed so intertwined that he might never separate it into two parts. He was memorizing numbers now: population of Missouri 5,595,211, most deaths in a Scottish train wreck 227, total refugees in the world 14,544,000. Beads of sweat glistened on J’s wrinkled forehead and every so often one fell carelessly to the page below threatening to erase a mass of people from the books of history altogether. Jonathan sat on the mini fridge looking at J with his usual face. This would have been consoling to J if he were reading a dictionary and could identify console or consolation as words that meant something tangible. J was reading an almanac though. Light blurred into the peeling paint of the bare apartment walls and lulled J into a feverish sleep.

Bertha was angry, very angry. “Carl” where is your dumbass friend J” she asked in more of a growl than a human utterance. Karl knowing that she had in fact pronounced his name with a c and not the k as it should have been said nothing. She could at least know my name Karl thought as he scraped the burnt cheese off of a pan that had been brought to him by another employee whose name also had several variations. Karl was a reasonable man. He reasoned that J was not going to come back to work anytime soon and also that he himself should probably consider a similar course of action. For all his death metal exterior gruffness though Karl was really a scared malleable man. He scraped his knuckle on a rough edge of the counter and kept scrubbing the pan as his blood mixed with sudsy water in the sink below.

What the streets don’t tell you is that the steam that rises off the blacktop after a summer shower is really the souls of all the downtrodden men who have walked on that surface at one time or another. What they do tell you is to keep moving, to keep your eyes directly ahead lest you see an alley in your periphery that leads to a different outcome. J was walking the streets and he was looking, his head was spinning. J saw a man in a fine suit, a real nice suit. “What kind of job they got you doing where you wear such a fancy suit” J asked the man. “I am a stockbroker” replied the man somewhat annoyed at J’s directness. “Oh you are like Will Smith then,” J said “in that movie where he sleeps in the subway bathroom and cries”. With a look of contempt and a quick adjustment of his tie the suit walked away at a pace such that any person passing by at that time would know innately that this man was important by his gait alone. J felt nothing about this interaction except that time was definitely different after the encounter was done than it could have been before. J asked a street vendor who was nearby for the time just to verify his suspicion. “Eh man, I saw you mess up that guy’s day man and I got to say thank you” the street vendor said. “He comes by here every day smirking up his face and acting like he is better than me just cause he wears a suit that costs more money than it’s worth”. I am a hero J thought and felt unchanged by this realization. “How much is that hat” J asked pointing to a red hat with earflaps covered in faux-fur. “For you, twenty dollars” the street vendor said. J looked at the laminated paper with prices that was hanging on a post nearby and saw that the price read: HATS $20. J gave the man his last twenty dollars and put the hat on. “Pleasure doing business with you sir” the street vendor said. “Your price sheet is peeling in the corner” J said pointing to the sheet which did in fact have a corner where the laminate was separating. The man looked at his sheet and then back at J. J walked on, the street was still for too long and so he was compelled to move. The city was small enough that you could walk on its streets without getting lost too easily but this was no consolation for the already lost. As J was walking he ran into Karl. “Hey Karl” J said and kept walking. “J, are you ok Bertha has been flipping out at work all week. She said if you don’t come in tomorrow you are gone for good and even if you do you are on probation” Karl said very earnestly. J stopped and turned around to face Karl. “Karl, what exactly happens on probation? I mean do they lower my pay from 5.50 and hour to 5.15 or do I have to wear a special colored uniform like they make the mentally handicapped wear or what?” Karl didn’t know how to answer that and so J turned around again and kept walking. After awhile J began to feel like someone was following him and he looked back. There Karl was matching him stride for stride and so J stopped again to see what more he must do to appease this man. Karl walked up to J with tears in his eyes and he hugged him. J was confused. His head was still swimming with numbers and he was lost. He began to walk again and this time Karl walked beside him. They were a regular modern day Don Quixote and Sancho Panza those two minus the donkey and the ambition--minus the donkey and the ambition.

Jonathan was meowing as loud as he could. It was a rainy day and the sun had not come up. On days like this Jonathan would dig in the trash and find what he could to tide him over until J woke up. He had already licked all the aluminum crisp pockets clean and picked the little Debbie wrappers apart. J opened one eye and saw an orange and white blur. PANICK! “Oh shit I’m in space, I’m in space and I can see fucking Jupiter” J said rapidly. Then he smelled shit and snapped out of it. Shit cannot exist in space because space is too awesome to be contaminated with such trivial pieces of matter J reasoned as his vision cleared and he recognized his cat’s ass in his face. J had forgotten about Earth. “Well Jonathan, lets get some breakfast” J said. “Meow-wow” Jonathan replied. J looked through his plastic cupboard and found that all was left was the cat food. The two ate and lay themselves down on the cool tile floor near the door. In this way they passed the whole day.

FEBRUARY HAIKU !!!

2007-02-13T16:16:00.000-05:00

Staring up at me
is Panic! At The Disco.
Fuck you Rolling Stone.

this is the beginning of a longer work of fiction i am writing it might be shitty

2007-02-11T19:59:00.000-05:00

An orgy of light filled the air of J’s studio apartment. His cat had chewed through the blinds and the Sun was fulfilling its obligatory duty as an eternal alarm clock and device of vexation. J scratched his stomach really hard. When he removed his hands there were red lines showing him where his nails had been. J felt excited and forgot to be angry at his cat. He scratched out words on his stomach. The word Fuck was brightly emblazoned on his bare chest. J laughed. His cat, Jonathan, meowed. “Calm down Jonathan,” J said “or I will eat your cat food all by myself and then you will really be screwed.” J was serious, it was in his nature to always be serious. J walked to the mini-fridge sitting by the tv and grabbed a Hot Pocket for breakfast. He began to sing “who you gonna eat…Hot Pockets!” He realized he had somehow mixed up the song from the Hot Pockets commercial with one from the children’s show about Pound puppies. It is important to make such distinctions when one creates new songs J thought to himself with a very solemn look on his face.
“Meow-wow” said Jonathan.
“It’s not ready yet” said J.
“Meow-wow” said Jonathan in a much more insistent tone than before.
“Yeah, you are right buddy,” said J “ Hot Pockets are a pretty shitty breakfast.”
J had a knack for misinterpreting Jonathan’s pleas, and Jonathan had a cheerful disposition that allowed such transgressions to fade into distant memory almost instantaneously. J watched as the numbers on the microwave ticked down to zero. He found the chiming of the machine to be very unnerving. Once he had been draining the water from a pot of ramen noodles and the chime had startled him and caused him to miss the sink. A waterfall of boiling water washed across his lower stomach and the area below. This was an unpleasant memory for J. So here he waited with his finger hovering over the stop/clear button on the microwave ready to pounce at the first hint of the chime. J had his quirks but this in no way diminished his seriousness. J ate the hot pocket quickly. His tongue was the victim of a glob of melted processed cheese getting its revenge on mankind on behalf of cows everywhere. J knew this in an oblique sense but didn’t know exactly how he could make it clear to anyone besides himself. It is better to know ones own self than for others to know you J thought as he put on his jacket and combed through his beard with his grease-stained fingers. J grabbed his keys and left his apartment. Jonathan sat in the window with an empty stomach and a cheerful face watching as J rounded the corner and left his world

J looked at the time clock when he punched in to work and saw that he was six minutes late. J asked the nearest employee he could find if Bertha had been looking for him. “Shit J, I don’t know man. Did you bring me that cd?” The man’s name was Karl. J knew this because he was wearing a nametag that said Carl on which he had scratched out the c and scribbled in a k with a permanent marker. “Yeah I got it” J said handing Karl a hot pink mix cd with the words DEATH METAL MEGAMIX written on it. Karl grinned really wide and took the disc from J’s hand. It slipped right out. I wonder when Bertha will bitch at me for being six minutes late J thought to himself as he slipped on a pair of powder-free latex gloves. “You are six minutes late” Bertha said in a monotonous voice as she put her manly hand on J’s shoulder and pointed towards the time clock. So much for wondering J thought and wrestled his shoulder from Bertha’s grasp and shuffled off to the area where he would put on his scrubs. J felt like he should be a very important member of society wearing his powder-free latex gloves and scrubs. J walked over to the burrito bar and stood very still hoping none of the students would see him. J was a cafeteria worker and today he had to make burritos, lots of burritos. Several girls came over to the burrito bar. All of them were talking on cell phones, very new top of the line cell phones. J was not impressed by this but he was very tired. The first girl looked for a minute at the ingredients and then began the familiar process.
“Can I get a chipotle wrap” she asked.
Chipotle is just a fancy word for red shit wrap J thought but he replied “Yes, and what do you want on it?”
“Hmmmm…Hold on a minute Jess,” she said into her bright pink cell phone “What is that one right there?” she asked pointing at the beef strips.
“Beef strips” J said.
“Oh ok, I’ll have some of that then, the steak strips,” and her eyes scanned down the line “and some black beans, lettuce, tomato, red peppers, no green pepper please, some of the white and the yellow cheese, olives, onions and that’s it.” She said breathily.
J began to scoop all of the ingredients onto the tortilla and the girl looked on waiting for J to forget something. When he finished putting the mess on the plate he looked at her with his usual look accompanied by a pause in which he expected the customer to ask for something else or to tell him where he messed up. She looked slightly annoyed and grabbed the plate from J. This process repeated itself over and over until he came in. He was a very big man with very coarse hair on his arms and a very noticeable bald spot on his head. J did not know the students name but he mentally noted that it must include the word ogre. J began to steam a wrap for the ogre and wiped a line of sweat from his brow with his shirtfront. The burrito bar had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 or so different items that could be put in a wrap. The ogre wanted all of them and he made it clear that he did not want the normal scoop but double that amount of all of them. J was always amused to see that these students, these future leaders of America, failed to acknowledge that the wrap was one constant size and that the doubling of items would ultimately result in nothing less than a cluster-fuck of torn tortilla and salsa all over the plate. The ogre had his specifications and he was set in his ways. One of the managers walked by and saw the monster J was creating. “Whoa it looks like somebody has an appetite today he said with a big smile.” This was a joke to the manager--that is how managers tell jokes. J had an idea. “Hey boss I am having trouble with the wraps again do you think you could show me how to do it?” he said. The manager turned red in the face and his pupils dilated. “Yes J I sure can” he said as he reached for a pair of gloves. He stammered a few incomprehensible words and set to work on the wrap. It tore instantly. “Whatever, I’ll just take it like that” the ogre said smirking at the manager. “Oh no no, J can make you another one real quick, I apologize for that” he said turning more purple than red. J made another one. It tore instantly again. The manager said fuck but it was muffled and J laughed on the inside. The ogre went away pleased with a busted burrito and a sense of superiority over the two men who just made it for him. J made many more burritos and eventually clocked out.

this is an old graphic i made that never uploaded correctly.

2007-02-11T00:20:00.000-05:00

AMERICA !

2007-02-07T14:57:00.000-05:00

I watched Dr. Phil yesterday. Everything he said was so right. So true. I was humbled in his presence. I took green beans out of the fridge and spooned them into his pixelated mouth. I saw him flinch a little before saying, "You've got to learn that marriage isn't some roller-skating party. It takes work." I knew he felt my offering. I took macaroni and cheese out of the fridge and stuck them onto the TV around his hair. He was getting lighter, i could feel it. Dr. Phil looked a little panicked. He wasn't ready for his apotheosis. I touched his wrist. I said, "Phil. Phil." He looked at me. He was hurt. I said, "Phil." I lowered my eyelids. I leaned against the TV. His shirt was warm. I touched the space in between his eyebrows. I noticed he probably hadn't shaved that morning. Phil said, "We are ready." I said, "Yes. You got us here." The TV turned off and I laid down on the carpet. There was a humming and it was new. It was the sound of a bitter savior.

--------------------

2007-02-02T23:00:00.000-05:00

Beau Jewkes who I remember three things about fell in love (a mormon)
with a girl from summer camp in the desert who he said

made her mark with her conservative clothing on his mind and who
I must have been a close friend of his to have found everything out

had never snuck out of her house at night alone like he did one time
but who lived in a big house with her father and mother and a huge dog

her name was Iota and she was mixed half Shetland half Wheaton
which in good Beau Jewkes humor he wrote a poem about (he never wrote poems

he said to me, but he always had ideas) and the poem was about the way girls with
their dogs lie on the couch in the same silhouette a river makes in the shallows

skips over the water like someone swallowing a cup of milk
because he had ideas about poems and they were often about the way

people told their stories to other people in the vast recollecting unfaltering voices
Beau Jewkes was a Mormon and he called me one night in the middle of the night

on drugs and I asked him why and he told me he had cancer of the testicles
I remember the day he gave them up because I remember my idea

was to write an elegy to his unborn children (the girl he fell in love with
was out of the picture) because by April the testicles were gone and I remember

thinking what he must have dreamed about in the nights after
maybe Jesus crossing the quiet oceans from the red seas of Africa to the Atlantic

coast of America to those red skinned Jews the thirteenth tribe of Israel
when from the blue depths the children of Beau Jewkes were dragged from his womb

one by one like cadavers from a tidal drift or like buttons off a seaman’s swallowed coat.

fun.

2007-01-28T23:51:00.000-05:00

i wrote this in the last 20 minutes..fuck it if its no good

2007-01-24T19:28:00.000-05:00

You might say to me, if you had word shapes that could fit in my word slots
That it is human nature to think more clearly when nearing death
And I might say we should think clearly at all times then
And my face would be red
Or my face would be pale
And yours would be its normal color
And this amongst other things would cause me to stop talking

You would scoff and return to watching t.v.
This is ok
You would be content

If we acknowledge that it is a rope
Our footing
And that it is low
Even so we must confess to a fear of falling
And strive to strengthen our ankles

Some would say that strong ankles wont change a thing
And I would smile at them because they were receiving my thoughts as words

We are waiting in this iridescent light for change
Never realizing that to some extent it is presently arriving
Due to the nature of iridescence

Clarity speak clarity to my neutral face and make its structure fluctuate.

You have constructed a notion of freedom that insists that we not insist upon it
This could effect movement in my lip region
But I am not home now
I am not home

Lets hide in the closet
Lets not hide
Rather lets live in the closet
We can create our own ecosystem and change science and be changed too.

But in our hiding we are feeling the sunburn that would necessarily accompany a voyage into out there.
This may or may not be a result of blushing and our capillaries taking in too much blood.

We are constructed yes.
And we are seeking at some points of our lives to be deconstructed.
But not before we construct a second self for the future which we will always fail to finish

Laugh now let us laugh.

It can be said that fate if we must name it such is following at a pace that we cant hope to maintain and so we fall.

You ran fast I was watching you in a pair of binoculars
But I had them backwards and so you looked as small as you were feeling
And then you fell off
To which side it matters not
You fell
And that is that.

I am yelling can you hear my volume change?
Are the words striking your face like crashing cymbals.

And through the flexibility of our language I am meaning nothing to you perhaps
Or something small
And that is a different outcome than I had planned originally.

It is objects that made this for us
It is our belief in objects
Shiny teardrop reflecting objects

Our steadfast grip is withering under truth storms

Truth is a word.

Lets walk in tall grass
We cant see the rope anyway so lets choose tall grass for the sake of having more fun
We can pick a piece apiece and chew on it for eternity
Until it is over.

It will end.
If it is kind.

We are very much the same
For one in our physical structures
But in our fear in the face of vision as well.

That we are seeing and fearing simultaneously and without an escape hatch
Is why you are still listening to me talk when I say things that bore you.

The nature of the word bore.

There is no turning back.

this might be a useful link for people who read this

2007-01-20T19:27:00.000-05:00

zoooooom

Alexander, Who Used to be Rich last Sunday

2007-01-15T21:46:00.000-05:00

weighed four hundred pounds and lived alone
he carried a gun in his hip pocket and he carried a flask
in his front left pocket and ate his dinner
out of the plastic compartments of a microwave dish
bent low in the carpeted corridor of his one bedroom apartment
he watched headlights flash against the walls like animal eyes
still in the quiet forest of his mind
lying in bed with curtains drawn it was Sunday and raining
all morning the wet pavement outside his window swelled
to the size of a Georgia peach the smell and the hairiness
of a wet crotch he played Van Morrison tunes and cleaned his gun
in love he was thinking of a girl at the gas station

she called him darling when he paid cash for beef jerky
she had black bobbed hair with huge hoop rings in her ears

swelled to the size of a can huge with botulism
because I remember a story about a family in Mexico
who ran a grocery store and had a bad batch of canned pears
distended like an exotic pregnancy and the woman
with her dog who bought the fruit and ate it and died
(or it the woman selling the fruit in her store
when Alexander walked in and bought a case of Keystone and walked out)

bid farewell to the cracked floors and the old sofa
big in the back corner of the pale room and farewell to
the hairy table and the clean lines of the plates and forks
when he with his big hands took hold of the double barreled gun
and did something none must have heard about not at least for a while
until they found him when they knocked and he didn’t come
or rather when they opened the door and there he was and that was it
really nothing left to salvage so with a barrel of gas and a flame
they burned the building from the inside, burned out the smell
until at last the gundpowder explosions and the alcohol flames
burned Alexander out so you couldn’t tell

poem

2007-01-09T01:32:00.000-05:00

you might ask about the power of resolve.
you heard this phrase somewhere and so you ask
and we are answering the unidentified question
in ways that are not the same really or relevant.

“it has to do with graham crackers, and the perforated line”
i might say, and you would respond
“it is about the ten year old boy who was lost in the mountains
carrying only a hatchet” and we would divorce our own ideas

we are not right
because we are what is left
when words don’t make themselves

and because we are left we might be what remains
though this is troubling
charred useless remains are all that is left of our right
which we never had
to identify each other as speech receptors
reciprocal patterns that reinforce the notion
of being
which we are not
by way of negatives and their canceling effect.

lets light off a few black cats and listen as the machine-gun
rips our silence apart.

ask me why I woke up to tell you this
ask me why I woke up.
i would ask the cat as well
as he might know better answers.

we are eating our own shit
but we are doing it well and without remorse
or second thoughts about whether our enamel will seal it out.

its about perforated lines
snapping.

a poem for the new year

2007-01-08T14:56:00.000-05:00

Wal-Mart loves me
i have many plans for us
i spend 3 hours a day in its aisles
there is not enough Wal-Mart
i start loving a second Wal-Mart
i love this Wal-Mart recklessly
like i would a celebrity
i still have 18 hours left in my day
i drive to 2 other Wal-Marts
one of them is abusive but i don't mind
because of the low prices
the 4th Wal-Mart smells like vinegar
i told it i would always be there
and that we would buy two bus tickets to Vancouver
and be happy
i told this to the 1st Wal-Mart
i laid down in its hair salon
and cried into its shampoo

toning the sweep

2007-01-05T16:52:00.001-05:00

There is something growing in the grey
And the lack of specificity is intentional
And we are and not and crumbling now
Like porcelain figurines with little tears.

Clown-nose red smile painted half-heartedly on white circle
And the sirens outside are more intelligent than us all times
Because they recognize that there exists in this fucked world
A capacity for utter failure even when we think we are well.

And we could write each other emails or letters or songs
But we read different dictionaries with varying degrees
Of success at times of our lives that fail to correspond
Like us, with anything tangible or good and words die.

That we have constructed four line fragments of communication
Is good.
But somewhere in the grey we will lose our order.
We already have and we are
And are not
And are crumbling
No matter how you look at it.
But, we will always exist.
In one form or another.

Ascribing power to different verbal databases was not our first or last error.
It was and is the most devastating.

If I skipped lines you could read between them but you might find
Empty space
That we are never as empty in our silence as we are in our words.

And I could say now, holding your jewel encrusted head on my lap,
That all jokes sound the same and then ask “what would you do for a Klondike bar?”
And you would say “I don’t know” and laugh and false laugh and wait for the punchline
And then say “I don’t know what would you do?”

“It doesn’t really matter what I would do we would still be fucked” I would say
And you would get it then the punchline you would feel its true power
Then and only then could we be making sounds that the other could know.

Lets put our language back together lets lay down rules.
For the sake of our shitty attention spans we can only speak in two-thought bursts.

You are feeling neutral toward me now.
I am above the clouds but below heaven and I can see nothing but blue.

We are inhabitants of a dense leafy forest.
we are not the original inhabitants.

If they are smarter than us why are we not dead yet.
please let them be smart.

The speakers on my life simulation device sound tinny at high volumes.
Tinny is an example of where the fucked five percent goes.

I am yelling for distortion’s sake but I think it is useless.
We are receiving muddled messages either way.

Fucked.
Bliss.

lyrics to a country western

2007-01-04T01:46:00.000-05:00

I ate a can of hot dogs sitting on the top floor of the cancer treatment center in Provo
I read the local paper saw the headlines 20 000 dead Sri Lankans missionaries go home
I watched a corner of the earth felt the sun felt the wind felt the emptiness of the canyon
Could have been the air or the AC only if if the windows seal me in from the mountains
Glass eyes bald heads I stand in line for taco salads feeding myself like an animal
I could have watched the parking deck cowboys roll their trucks like sardines in olive oil
The West America's nothing like the place we read about in books from the public library
On a mountain top a heaven huge eye bleak white watches birds flying away from me
Empty pages of string thin fields struggle like magazines stolen from the barber shop
While store bought pancake batter thick hot dreams burn like Indian nickles on the griddletop
Who knows if the stores carry cigarettes or beer or porno videos or long underwear
I put some gas in the car but the man at the pump wouldn't switch off his soldier stare
So I cooked chicken cooked grits green beans broccoli cabbage patch kids in the backseat
While skinny white boys chased in the streets after thin white girls wearing soccer cleats or just bare feet
Your jersey mind doesnt help me orient the misdirection of the big sky or the clouds in the sky
Driving on these roads seems like driving in a paved desert no direction no radio no tonguetie
So biting on the wheel of the wheelchair like a patient in the dialysis chamber waiting room
I hear your voice echo like an enema through the empty hallways cause I love you
AM couldn't tell a story fast enough out of range kicking back against the turnpike
Easter Sunday would have been my luck but the son left some candy in my ash tray try if I'd like
Coming hom for Christmas gonna bring the girls gonna see if she makes it through the sermon
Calling all cars calling Mom calling old folks at the old folks home who don't remember anyone

i edited this post on accident

2006-12-29T18:16:00.000-05:00

it said triceratops is not dead.

Down the Highway

2006-12-16T22:52:00.000-05:00

Down the highway, the electric spinal cord,
the capillary-action bent northward, interstate 75,
automobile centrifuge, white nosebone beacons,
shouting stiff-eyes manifest, glares snoop halfcircling,
jellyfish tentacular, no bones, no nothing,
plasmids interface, turn signals into bleating hearts,
nervous kineticism, mufflered white noise,
vertical glass windsheer liftoff, dusty sterile modular,
tarmac surfactants, systematic minimized functioning,
square-bodies, gas jumping, the Cheerio effect,
magnetic fields, hyperinflated plant growth,
toroidal intestine exit ramps, disappear rapidly,
buccal caverns, empty world sonicscapes,
maxillary sunsets, dashboard scaffolding, orbital metrics,
photomosaic instant rereferencing points, seconds later,
philtrum-ridge amnesia, over the hills and backwards
through the folded esophagus, out into the breastfed tongue
of the many-mooned night where sheer invisible clouds
of yellow-city smoke were ejaculated, harsh backfired, energy
in the naked inarticulate voice of the running motors,
through the veins of great earthy America, the bodywomb, the preganant canvas.

this is not a poem...it is a PSA or something roughly the equivalent of a PSA

2006-12-16T01:26:00.000-05:00

triceratops exists. it exists because we exist and therefore it exists. i would feel uncomfortable saying those two sentences out loud because i would inevitably fuck up the word exists somehow because i put it in too many times. the other horns of triceratops and the boy who rides on top/ armor plate spike/tail are talented writers. they deserve multiple forums. this is part of the reason triceratops exists. triceratops is a blog. it is poor man's technology. fuck rich man's technology. i am riding a shitwave of debt. i am making up words in this post. there might be ten people who have seen triceratops. this is ten more people than have seen a poem i wrote that is saved as msword document file and archived unceremoniously on my desktop. this is a reason why triceratops exists. young poets need more community. i am not identifying young poets as some 20-40 yrs range necessarily because that makes me feel like i am losing my already tenuous grip on words. i am 20. i think i am the youngest. the gap is minimal though. we are not hawking books. i do not have a book and i dont think i will anytime soon. we are celebrating community. triceratops allows for revisions but my gut feeling says "no do not make revisions because triceratops has a small brain and revisions are the product of large brains and dont betray your dinosaur nature and do write run-on sentences and fuck commas because someone needs to and this is the internet and we are our own bosses and nobody is paying us and likely we will never be paid for triceratops because it exists in anonymity and this is ok." my gut feeling is a wordy person. if you are not one of us four that writes on this blog and you just happened upon it and somehow by the grace of some divine being have survived to this point of the post leave a comment if you hate/like the blog. we are not important. you are not important. let us be unimportant together. i write shitty things and i put them on here because i just do. let me know if i suck. triceratops exists for everyone. this post is convoluted it is ok. write a poem in the comment section. buy budget saver twin pops from the grocery store. buy good books. write good books. color on good books with crayons until they are as colorful as budget saver twin pops. tell your friends triceratops exists if you have friends. it will make them feel either benevolent or angry towards you or something in between and you will have changed the world. join our community. dismantle our community. make your own blog and link us and tell us and ashley/god will link back to you i think. we are friendly. we are not elitist enough to be mean. triceratops will roam the earth again. the day is coming when it shall be so. i am getting inadequate sleep. thank you.

Love You Forever

2006-12-14T12:20:00.000-05:00

II.

He was growing sicker, sisyphus

and i taller but not enough yet

to see god and ask about things

sisyphus was telling me. lay me

on the railroad tracks, neck on

cold steel waiting for stampede

he coughed. you are in books my

friend you are already forever.

and if i grew taller to see god

i would love him for existing &

loathe him for not answering my

questions, because sisyphus was

my only friend and he is laying

himself down in his own shit in

a cramped studio apartment with

paper walls that play the sound

of reproduction all day long to

remind sisyphus that god forgot

him when the regime changed and

he is out of context and out of

time. sisyphus cried on my hair.

I Can Pray !

2006-12-13T16:41:00.000-05:00

Lindsay Lohan uses a net to tickle Robert Altman's beard. Robert Altman dies. Everyone is sad. Lindsay Lohan is sad. She listens to Devendra Banhart. She doesn't cry until 4 day later when someone hands her a Red Bull and accidentally touches the side of her hand. Lindsay Lohan watches "Short Cuts" 5 times in 9 days. She downloads pictures of herself and glues them onto paper bags to make puppets. One of the puppets says, "I am special." Another puppet says, "If you eat a staple you will have to go to the doctor and drink something that tastes like chalk." The puppet is lying but hopes no one notices. A third puppet says, "Lindsay I love you." Lindsay, says "Let's all close our eyes." She breathes, dangerously, like she would in the presence of freshly-cooked pancakes. God is smiling. He is touching Robert Altman's beard. Lindsay feels this and laughs a little into her left arm.

statement regarding ryan downey's poetics...i think.

2006-12-12T13:41:00.001-05:00

1. for some people poetry is useful, for others it is not, and for most it is probably some kid with a beret in that stupid fucking eatery on Saved by the Bell the name of which i can't recall.

2. poetry derived from children's book titles can be used to pierce the hearts of children.

3. all americans are children.

4. piercing the heart is actually the easiest and most humane way to show someone you care about their health.

5. poetry can be created, or discovered, or invented.

6. poets define words such as created, discovered, and invented.

7. statements regarding one's poetics ought to be convoluted.

8. dinosaurs can be leading representatives of the young-young-poets movement in some cases.

9. young-young-poets is a label i just created, just like poetry is a label we collectively create.

10. there should always be ten parts to a statement regarding one's poetics.

Love You Forever

2006-12-09T16:55:00.000-05:00

There is a bridge running across a river I want to jump off
The bridge is so high that it crosses over the cows
And when people drive across the bridge they close their windows
Because the cows are lowing dong dong dong and it doesn’t matter

The cows can’t hear the cars on the bridge because they are deaf
And like in an airplane when the emergency air masks fall on our heads
They can only watch the cars like men who watch the sky
In the seventeenth century, crossing in the dark an ocean, and panic

I am eating Haribo gummy bears and thinking about marijuana
My aunt’s name is Rosa and she decorates her house with colored birds
The birds in the field below me are yellow and diseased
Because they have eaten too much chewing gum thrown out the windows

When the cows panic they gather into a circle and start to cry
When cows are happy they fuck like two footballs rolling down a field
When I read the book Love You Forever I was five years old
And I memorized each page, said it in my mind, and went to sleep

When I was a baby I didn’t know how to read
I watched my dad go to the war in his black boots
And then I played in the backyard with my dads brown boots
And blubbered baby boo hoo hoos to the cars driving away

Then I said to my lover take a picture of me
Driving across the bridge with my knees on the wheel
Should I have asked my mother for directions to Red Lobster?
Sometimes the ones we love are the ones we forget to notice

toes, ears, and nose!

2006-12-07T13:08:00.000-05:00

I.

we were riding a carousel, sisyphus and me

and humming our favorite songs which did

correspond with the tune that wafted out &

into our inner ear space from the tin circle

dotted with holes that passed for a speaker.

sisyphus had been trying to inform me now

for many days about his rapidly spreading

gangrene and the effects it would have on

our revolutionary relationship- it was such

an arrangement in only the basest sense &

therefore not worthy of such admiration as

the music afforded us but our senses can be

and must be altered in paradoxical ways so

that we might remain on this ride and think

about things unrelated to suicide or bright

colors swimming in our nasal cavities and a

splash of red seeking a low pressure front

moving into our area but not quite out and

why we are so content to name an uprising

with such blasé names that suggest a thing

quite the opposite but then we forget this &

lose specificity, that we never really had at

all junctures or any at least, and we are lost

with a sense that we will not get out of here

and now without amputating the diseased

section which corresponds with our minds.

sisyphus coughed a little while i hummed.

miss bridie chose a shovel is the title of a book written for children grades one and up. it is a picture book.

2006-11-30T23:17:00.000-05:00

she could have chosen a pick-axe
or a well rusted garden hoe with wooden handle
or a new philip roth book with special display stand at borders

she chose a shovel

this made the dancers stop dancing
the singers all had strep anyway and so remained silent
the undertakers put down their jewish lit and made for the 'shovel house'

that is what they had named their tool shed
that was very clever
that was read in a book somewhere

miss bridie was a stripper when she was still fuckable
she knew how to work a pole

the undertakers were not counting on this
the undertakers would not read that line as sexist
if it were in a book
especially a philip roth book

she chose a shovel on one of their faces
the man bleated like a sheep with freshly punctured lung

the dancers kept dancing
they wanted to pretend they hadn't seen this

a person who chooses a shovel is no fool
miss bridie was a realist
that is, she realized that all must die

miss bridie only decapitated one undertaker with her shovel
she realized they were already dead
the undead are a stubborn breed she would later acknowledge
in greater detail over a morning newspaper

miss bridie took to screaming
screaming was pleased with this

this is how and why miss bridie chose a shovel
shovel a-chose bridie. miss why and how?

is this.

mixedgreens

2006-11-29T22:35:00.000-05:00

Is Life Getting Better?

If you want to make the world a better place first
you will have to take everything you know about the
world and pretend that you don’t know it and then
you can begin to look

at things to look at the ocean after
forgetting everything you ever knew about the ocean:
the water, the sand crabs, the sand gnats, the sand
dollars, sand castles, the jelly fish you put in sand
castle dungeons, the old fashioned lollipops,
and so you wandered out to Myrtle Beach in a tuxedo
and patent leather shoes and looked in the giant
blue shape of water and you thought you might
and swim out to the dark blue line between the ocean
and the sky, but wait, as you are swimming, you realize
that the line is just the edge of the ocean before you
get to outer space, and that you will never get
to outer space, and so you are left swimming, until
you get to Sierra Leone or somewhere

where a tribe of hunter gatherers picks you up
on the beach and nurses you back to life with
some berries they foraged in the woods, but they
are strange people who share everything, including
clothes, so they strip you naked and divide your clothes
up among the other tribespeople, and so you are left with
one tiny square piece of white tee shirt to cover up your
penis, and everywhere else you are going to sunburn, and
you have no idea how to hunt for jungle pigs, so
the kids in the tribe make fun of you, and you end
up mating with a girl from a neighboring tribe who
also washed up along the beach, but her white skin
has long ago turned brown, so you make a nest full
of babies with her, and she doesn’t speak English
she speaks French Canadian and you wonder what the
fuck she is doing here

all the other not civilized people play music
out of hollow sticks, which are not a lot like American musical
instruments, but maybe like Canadian musical instruments but I don’t know if you know, because in this story you have forgotten all your previous knowledge so you decide to compose an opera for your beautiful wife to sing and it is based loosely on Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini’s Tosca, but you don’t know that and the violin part of the opera is performed using the two horns of a rhinoceros strung with hairs from jungle
pigs and performed in conjunction with many other musical
instruments you create in what might be called your
golden period of creativity that would have never happened
until you forgot everything you knew about the world

and then your roommate from freshman year of college
walks up with a whole lot of people who look
like they are about his age, and they are all carrying
bibles, but you don’t recognize that they are bibles, you
just keep singing tribal operas with your wife and
the village children who are not hunting or fishing
or cleaning up the huts, and your roommate says to you
who he doesn’t recognize either because you are brown now
and not a white student from the university of Georgia who
is used to his sort of people, and always have a defense
ready for missionaries who knock on your door, asks you if you have ever met Jesus, and you say

to him because no you have not met Jesus, because you
forgot everything you ever knew about the world and everything you ever knew about fighting back against Christian missionaries, so he tells you about Jesus and you actually listen for the first time in your life and then he says he is building a church in another village and you decide to go with him and you hear other people talking about love and you have never heard this before and so you are converted to Christianity and taken in an airplane across the ocean and back to Georgia, where you started,

but now you are a brown Christian and you are knocking on
doors, and everyone you see you have never seen before even
though you have and you think that these people are a lot like the wife you left in Sierra Leone, and then you knock on your parents door and you look at them and they begin to say that they are not interested and you look back and you wonder why

but this poem is not about finding Jesus, or finding your parents or finding a beautiful French Canadian women to make babies with, this poem is about two things

1. if you pretend you don’t know well then really do you not know anything about the world or do you instead look at things through and through again another lens

2. in Bhutan the tourists have stomped the holy grounds for the last time says the king to his people who restrict most people from coming into the Kingdom of Bhutan where the king is a small wise round man with eye glasses and he listens to the people who are small-eyed and don’t know anything but persistently laugh

picture that is loosely related to poem below but then not really related at all.

2006-11-29T18:09:00.000-05:00

we are too much for one puddle, you and i.

2006-11-29T17:45:00.000-05:00

when we were young in broken coffee table apartments we had a higher survival rate.

the blacktop, bathed in oil and excrement, knew how to hold its drink.

then, we were and i could say if then was now ' we are'

and you would sprout a quizzical look from your flower petal face.

but then is never now and puddles are fleeting under this southern sun.

'we might have been enough for one ocean if we were closer to such a body'.

and your quizzical look remains.

the best i can think is that we are better off without puddles anyway, which we know is and will be a lie even after the dinosaurs come back and humans are buried in tree sap.

in lieu of anything appropriate to say now i will do a head spin, like in that break dancing movie.

and i will spin until my skin evaporates off of my chalky skull and then i will spin faster.

the friction will lessen you see.

and i will make a new puddle and you can rub your flower petal face in it and fill your capillaries with me.

and in this way i will prove that i never knew what to call things. that my labels were never right.

and you will be more beautiful than one person can be.

this is all true.

2006-11-28T23:07:00.000-05:00

ran

2006-11-28T19:47:00.000-05:00

Out for Dinner

then going I back where I came from with it to

and, suddenly,             sensed interest

in

and while you

Pad Kee Moa by her shoes, tried wandering

through the thai restaurant, the chairs are

covered in pink doilies,

pink masaman, and your eyes are watching

left, centered out from a window

the street      sensed interest

eagle-straight-vision down to John Donne Street

they’d allow thought the pass,

and,   so

with my legs going i am back to the street,

suddenly crotched by brown-legged towers

lapping at the black ass of the sky

is a place to get and find and

or ,

and

, or

stopped breathing, drank

little yellow and little blue take an inventory

2006-11-28T17:06:00.000-05:00

we are too too small. and weak, very weak. and without shoes. : little duck:

i am yelling into one of those tube things that exist on playgrounds. a zazzophone i think :little fish:

'we need two more bananas, a handful of strawberries, and bark from a lynching tree' you echoed into my ears 'to complete the smoothie'. :little banana:

i am finding my air pipes similar to those of the zazzophone i think. that is, curvy and narrow and made out of shiny red plastic. :little baby:

and without big people clothes. and wearing unknowing lip designs. with fingers not fit for gloves. :little lightning bolt:

ephemeral and shitty. either way we never changed a thing. :little puddle:

we say scrap conduction. let us be dirt instead. no more blue no more
yellow. zazzophones. be damned.

::

this is a poem about project pat written by project pat that is attempting to approximate project pats level of greatness. it is real.

2006-11-27T23:22:00.001-05:00

fuck you puffy

with your fucking cars

and your bitches and hoes

fuck your bitches and hoes

fuck you puffy

i got yo number off the internet bitch

you were the only black man on the list homey

all the rest is white

fuck you puffy

with your cruise control

and your internet

and your diamond ring

and your diamond earring

and your other diamond earring

and your gay tattoo

and your foot products

fuck your foot products

and your meals on wheels

and your mother

fuck you puffy

fuck you

this is what i get when i listen to your music

****the sound of bitches and hoes getting stomped****

lemme tell you about some shit i did

back when i was fuckin shit up

in north memphis

with my crew

and my bitches and hoes

we went pharmaceutical up in there

and we fucked shit up

not like you

bitch

i heard about the panda messiah

aint nothing you can do

nothing you can say

to project pat

aint been said before

talk about my mother

go on

tell me one thing about my mother i aint heard

i dont need that shit yo

*****sound of shit getting started*****

fuck you puffy

fuck you

fuck you puffy

no fuck you puffy

no fuck you

this is a poem about puff daddy written by puff daddy that is attempting to approximate puff daddys level of greatness. it is real.

2006-11-27T18:25:00.000-05:00

i am puff daddy. i bought five Bentleys the other day. i rode in four of them at the same time with my diamond plated jet pack.

you didn't know diamond plate existed did you?

i roll with NASA son.

the other Bentley i gave to some poor people that had bad legs and shit. they decided to sleep in it.

tore the leather seats. ungrateful, that's what i call that.

i took that shit back and i rolled it off a cliff.

fonsworth videotaped it.

then i dropped 500 DVDs of me rolling it off a cliff onto the streets of new york.

each one had a tiny silk sean john parachute.

this bored me.

so i bought a triceratops straight cash.

i do these things.

i rode that bitch to the set of making the band 17 and stomped out those hopeful bitches.

can't stop. won't stop.

this is how i get down son.

i had some working class hoes install wings on my new ride.

cause you know i gotta be fly.

i flew up to heaven and stole the golden gates.

i put that shit in front of my mansion to keep j-lo out.

if you see me flying don't even ask for an autograph.

i will have my new ride pierce your heart with its front bumper.

believe that.