Saturday, February 26, 2011

At my very worst I am

Everyone I meet today will be a genius
and a complete dick. They will
probably feel the same way.
At my very worst I am
a pervert with a heart of bronze,
an oral fixation, and swollen
fingers in the morning.

This city was appealing because
everyone is as self-absorbed as me.
This makes for bad parties and great art.
The self-perpetuating “weirdness”
gives our families an excuse
to never visit us.

The more you focus on the worst parts
of me, the more pathetic those parts
become: the last vestiges
of body fat all hanging limp
over my belt buckle. My stepmother
assured me, "it will never go away."

I think up demons, I don’t believe
in magic, I’m so unsatisfied,
I’m not an artist, I’m an asshole...

The older I get, the less I idolize
cult leaders and the more I relate
to misanthropes and exemplars
of promise squandered.
I understand the difference
a little more every day.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Reality is Subjective

Holding doors for women at corner stores.
Watching children watch an ostrich at a zoo,
I could have been different somehow
if I would have stuck with sports in high school.
I admit I like Jagemeister.
If provided, I would take all the Jagbombs in the world.

The black light makes your drink look alright:
Vibrant-white and breathing like dry-ice
on the set of a science fiction movie.
Intrigued, I say your name
(a gesture) as you remember me
long enough for a hug
while I forget what to say.

One can never read the same thing twice.
One week in New Orleans
cannot be replayed
as it were a tourist
experiencing grand new things.

Album, film, and short-story collections
span entire continents.
The you I was then is the me you are now.
I’ve thought about beats happening,
I slipped on my way here.
A national disaster of memories
colliding
where we were the first time hands were held.
The kiss before the Tower fell.

Yeah, I've been catching up on the last ten years of hip-hop.
The pop-variety, not the hard stuff.
Something to say for number of albums sold.
Accessibility transcends art form.
Intelligence boiled down
to an experience shared.

I’m the pervert I’ve read about
in the southern gothic pulp.
The rag with the cross burning,
fate just as questionable,
notoriously ill-suited
to be read but ogled
beside a New Yorker water color.
Lifeless in the sense of imitating narrative struggle.
Ebonics as metaphor
for the gin
and the juice
as the body of Christ now.
A veritable masque of bad decisions
made light by all the young people
worshipping them.

Life should be so reckless!
Smoke a cigarette at a gas station,
roller blade a bridge on ice skates,
the direction of a bullet moving
toward a Midwest deer opener.

I’m the Stephan King of literacy
walking on water-tight profits.
Knowledge: my income.
Engorging the heads of young men
becoming twenty-something adult types
gentrifying off the train stops
near the Urban Outfitters of their mind.

I should have left the memory of Pacific Northwest rose bushes,
contemporary museums,
that river walk with an old acquaintance,
and bicycle rides through unfamiliar streets
next to the Pynchon on the shelf
and the religious texts I’ll never read.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Process

FYI: This is what an average text document of mine looks like before I break it down/edit it into a poem. Hence why it is ridiculous and annoying.


Horizontal City

“A City Cannot be a Work of Art”
-Jane Jacobs

Buildings.

Decorated thin trim;
A miasma of wood smoothed to what should be bone
But looks camp-fire stiff:
Faces moonlit until tossed by flashlight.

I’m dreaming parks in pools,
Islands in a city radiating.
Dubai is Fifty years old
And should have a happy birthday;
Sand never looks so well
Amongst tax hikes and voter peril.
I’d love a new spirit
I’m mitigating through.

Front-page news and I’m channel whatever ‘E!” means lately
Sun setting Alaska
I went for lunch
Until dessert was served
Then it was dinner.

Conversations
Gotta stop writing when I’m gone again
Cause this happens
And I’d like to talk to you
And the smell of man soap reminds me of somewhere
Long showers with a seat and hair jell I never used
Nor paid for
So it was yesterday earlier
Again
And I was about something
About something well and if
Tell the truth about Sacramento
It’s south east
Warm, probably
The people there are varied latino/Hispanic (depending on the man who drove you home)
Meant to connect you to somewhere they haven’t seen
A bridge connects something to something.
China Meiville.
Gosh this pastry taste like bacon.

Walked on gravestones buried there-haps
Betwixt literature sown into steel spires
Undeveloped blue prints begotten through fund-negligence.
I looked before bespeaking
A hailed cab to infinity.
Nah, I’m not drunk.
Me?
Nah I’m leder sunk (look up term for weight on line)
Billowing text messages
I’ll catch an old one
To fall asleep
Pleasant dreams akin a person you grew old with rather quickly
It was the hair it was the face it was the bush it was the scene
Forgotten rather poorly
I’ve met a couple beggers
Asking for change

Oh yes, Architecture in motion….

A mess of unconnected organs
severed with gunk built up
at arteries allotting congestion.
Febuary-bored women
cross-guard spring fashion.
A severed tumor doesn’t fall
it is unhinged by surgeons
coddling nostalgia:
A newborn slapped
then set down.

A wound pocket watch responds
to a determined faucet
questioning whether the pipes have frozen.
A leak swims on

moon mist fogs from below the bridge.
Central park and the river;
A fox runs along the bank
to understand if the river has courage
or is just runs on instinct -

Vapor tunicate
Sounds like a Mars Volta lyric
Eyes wound wide around a thesaurus
Speaks a river banked on instinct
The courage to provide
A self-help-book of movement

Yeah, redundant
I could have this conversation with myself and it could be something else
But lets push it.

See what we bring to it.
I’ve moved again.
I’m about to smoke a cigarette
Move a wet leaf and move and move and move and move.
Sounds like confusing thunder
Lightning in a snow storm
Sidewalks dipped into snow pavement
A considerable amount of thought
Some god somewhere put into a cataclysmic event.

"A city cannot be a work of art"
-Jane Jacobs

Decorated thin.
Trimmed miasma of wood
smoothed to what bone could say
to a camp-fire stiff face
tossed by flashlight.
I'm dreaming the city beautiful:
parks in pools in a post-Dubai world.
Sand never looks so well
amongst tax hikes and voter peril.
I'd love a new spirit
to mitigate
whatever the television
channel "E!" means lately.

Blow text messages to mend
bridges built on bridges that happen where you'll be
cause I have built them
and contractions are an idea
best suited for the late twentieth-century.

Gravestones buried therehaps
undeveloped blue prints begotten through negligent
drunk infinities.

Cities and the cities they’ll blend behind
a city being a city
scared of heights.