Atmospheric Pressure

The cinema and the lights,
the arm around the waist
caught from a barroom midnight.
Shrugged off, “As if that’s what you say?”
quite ashamed like you’re seeing me naked
and I am and I say you name.
There are worse things than hormones raging.
I got in a car accident twice,
one of which was fatal nearly.

Waking up and you’re up
and my shoes are not my socks.
I forgot I’m wearing long underwear
and my other underwear is somewhere
and you’re making me coffee
set to drip as drops begin dissipating.
An impacted result tuned
to intimacy issues peeling.
A church bell announces bad news always.

Work your shoulder blades
(a galaxy of white giants exploding)
into constellations too close
to resemble the shapes
for which they are named.
And in the stratosphere of your car
(still driving us somewhere)
I’m not sure if this is that neighborhood,
I can’t remember names anymore,
I felt this but you looked different.
It was you in the dream
except it wasn’t.

These democratic notions,
my fingers on your spine,
imagine grains of grain
conjoining rock-particle wet
droplets heralded
by an early-spring rain.

The 'Me' You Want is Out

Beauty inspires beauty.
An architect begins with Palladio
returns to form to produce
a villa stucco akin to Swiss alp Tudor style.
Carved you out of stone I think
on exhibit in the green room
of collective unconsciousness.
You are the people you see
you feel you know
immediately.

We’ll get you published in a minute,
keep quiet though,
we don’t want the Hoovers downtown
to hear about this.
Make another reference to an architect
those journals really enjoy that shit.

Beauty inspiring beauty.
I wasn’t a poet until Baudelaire time-traveled
to two-thousand-and-nine
to tell me everything would be fine.
Form follows function always,
that everything would be like an a b a b rhyme scheme.
Comfortable in a syllabic bathrobe
with hair wet and socks off
online to suggest alternate personalities.
Form follows function always.
Writing inspires reading.
This book suggests you deconstruct that poem.
I read a book about rats once:
They’re really not all that bad.

One Gestures

for Austin Pruett

Cold snapped temperature
begging for more
bodies by the dozen
wrapped in front of your nearest church door.
I work the soup kitchen circuit
I can’t feel sorry for myself anymore.
If mangroves grew in my city
I’d tie a knot of plastic can holders
to each branch to be anchored with stone.
Artificial growth on organic compounds:
Collagen injected into the silicone tit of a mother.

A smokers car floor of memories
smashed to an ashen pulp
mitigating between coffee spills
and sockless toes when pedals are pushed.
The myriad you.
The gesture used to finalize what thought
is left of the lover left behind.

Cold-reading again
as an actor for escapism.
Easier to bleed in literature
than meet a future liaison
who turns out to be a bedsore.
Ha I’m talking about me again.
Ha I have been good this winter.
Ha I haven’t touched a woman for months
I feigned celibacy
last New Years
until Valentines Day.

Destructive loving digs
a miscalculated emotional atmosphere
giving too much to take a little
or another problem is
too much too tiresome!
O, a gesture of love!
I imagine romance perfected:
‘You’re much too much too soon’
on repeat on the stereo
in the bathroom.

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.

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.