38 Tons Composition

Amphetamine man, how you told me truths.
How John whispered repetitive;
Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
“Later on,” I said.
Canada versus America
We strolled on, me on the curb
You on the street.

I like to ride bikes,
In the summer sun, dizzy and high.
No sleeping, no eating,
No letters left distinguished
In your tattoos, on my keypad.

Jovial girl, bristles like a lost cat
It’s been raining for three days,
And I wonder, what’s the weather like
Where I really would much rather be.

You’re going to score a touchdown,
And I’m going to make a save.
I have parking slips,
And you have train tickets,
Bottles of cheap wine,
And your stepfather’s coffin.

I’m tipsy with an inner ear infection,
I lie when I am desperate,
And I plead when I am drunk.
Can you hear me, can you read me?

The truth is, when you decided to grow a mustache
It was on all our lips,
Not just yours.
Now I am stuck in the stiff upper regions of the world,
Missing you, and drinking milk.

A HUSTLER'S EPIC

Which side of the bed
Does a gangster's heart sleep on?
Brass lids getting down
And soon enough the green's gone.

Green eyes, green bills, high girls
On green lakes
You with blue eyes, stuck roadside
Playing dice at high stakes.

The seduction of pale risk
I sit tight on the stand.
No witness to this bliss
And you're a gambling man.
My hips are battering rams -
I'd break blood oaths for pleasure
And one made by hand.

Sit beside me, and my patience will fail,
But no one tracks Macks who don't leave paper trails.

You can take what you want from my self-help mouth
Stop my lips with a tongue that wasn't meant to stick out.
Twist and shout,
In your kitchen, with bare feet and apple eyes
You laid your vengeance down,
With yer palms at yer sides

Black diamond ambitions, twin sins, one threat
Every hair stands on end when the lightening connects

Lips you bite like rare meat
Blood-lust
Soft sheets licked like lime
Cough once, lean back,
Tequila in due time.

Do time, this summer
Break bricks with chain-gang desire
Touch lips like a kiss
To raw telephone wires.

Cause strangers at first,
Get dangerous later
Bathed in the glow of suburban drug layers.

Some friends pretend romance in front-seat solidarity
Purple smoke parts just once
For a moment of clarity
No charity for made men,
Or for this man's maid
But a soft-core crush,
And a short-term hit parade.

For M.

A dark star touched the earth one night,
And somehow you were made.

It burdened you with fire and light,
While it went on to fade.

I've seen you on our sidewalks,
A one man cavalcade.

So pretty are your shadows,
So deadly is your shade.

Ghosts out after midnight,
Haunting Dairy Queen's parkade.

A union borne in shining eyes,
That nothing can degrade...

Alone in Doorless Igloo (Three Months and a Hundred Years are the Very Same Thing)

Making desperate love to space heaters
in yer lonely winters, smoking filters
you find on the street corners, and wandering
aimlessly for hours around your apartment
in search of half-finished sandwiches or
novellas, considering an opera career
as a respite from the overwhelming usefulness
of your daily tasks; the importance of hygiene,
the essentiality of consumption
in maintaining gdp. Growth;
there is growth in the plants and the power plants
and the swim trunks you left on the floor for too long.
What is the opposite of growth? Shrinkage?
Cold wet penis and a gym class group shower?
Repression? Memories of that gym class..
Like with dense, there's no appropriate antonym
as though even the diametrically opposed nature
of the English language
can't take itself seriously for all too long.
Death isn't the opposite of life, because your body
is there the whole time, and its always changing.
Sitting isn't the opposite of standing;
you do much of both, with no principalistic conflict.
Insanity isn't the opposite sanity,
just the logical progression of personality
as a consequence of the incessant scheduling
ten fifteen brush your teeth,
the development of what some people call a soul,
but they're idiots because it's no more than being a person
and you have to ask them what else they'd expect, an onslaught
of broader metaphysics- undoubtedly the creation of insanity,
a bipolar man making up things like good and evil-
as such entertaining and useless. To be human.
To cackle lustfully at the air conditioning unit come spring.
The brilliant undensity.

moving for history

paintings of buddha
drawings of god

i swore you did not believe
in departed angels
but i was wrong

so many more
could be like you
indifferent and moving

its understood
this distance
still growing

so you keep on turning
in any old direction

with each footprint
in time

substantial evidence
that
with nothing come something

so
i welcome history