Prose poem a la ryan downy

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

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

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

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

...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

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

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

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

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

I.

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.

V.

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

ann coulter sex doll

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

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)

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.

.

Dead?

Death Metal Poetry

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

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"

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

things i did today

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