Egos Eating

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

Chase me like prescriptions into a fuzzy blond unknown

From the mercury periphery of uplifting jubilant trite

I watch a silver city engulf the shadows of midnight

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

Eating shades of sarcasm in the house of the alone

Listing the prophecies and the troubles that they cause

Radical polluters counting the heads of golden flock

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

Sing to me incessantly in this cosmic rodeo

Eclipse the sun and stab the moon confront the karmic bang

Wring your eyes and roll your hands from your freezing frying pan

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

Morning pills and daffodils, a stage that’s set too low

Line the fence and beat the chest may we never stand apart

Kill you friend who’s on the mend so he’ll never starve

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

A symphony of sophistry a wave that never lulls

Gawk the freaks and bag the cheats fund the poverty loon

Walk another lullaby for the soul who left too soon

Ghost Writing

I wrote a letter for a ghost

Left it somewhere no one knows

Hide it deep in the seams

Of a silhouette tapestry dream

I left it there and went away

Years had passed

Relationships changed

Seasons grew and rearranged

And I didn’t come back until today

And there it was like before

Folded neatly hidden and stored

In a place no one could claim

In a state exactly the same

But down below on the ground

Was a note for me that I found

Was it from someone that I knew?

All it said was “thank you”

For Every Dictator

All the Nations

Wallowing in the decay of death

Trying to erase

Deeds by countrymen

To ascend to a Golden Age

By stringing up the past

By its heels

But in this act

Regurgitate

Ethnocentric Karma

Keenly instilling

The Nature of Man

Union City Convention Center 1946

At the start of the workshop, all the dudes were a bunch of fucking peaches and underground rippers playing prison riot. His wife was leather soaked dispositionally and looming to get on with those dudes and was actually the inspiration for implementing blue and purple skin to undermine the very tenterhooks of all recorded philosophy. She waded and waddled pointing a plump donut finger with a sharpened nail in a slow alluring manner like a debutante picking furs and minks. Later, beat denizens like vultures swooned taking pictures of uptight audience members gawking at the pit of flesh as the cascade was laid on top of the facade of norms and means, and the inflated morality of the lazy and fearful. Getting kicks and getting kicked, the subjugation of temperance was in full ricocheted effect with no thought of the dying sun or the far off coming of winter as the last stand of the ego was to make the private public… all in the name of creating the urinal of truth.

At the End of a Perennial Career

His father was tied gray, brown, dirty white among the last bucolic fantasies of business skills, tightly checked morality, and subdued cultural taste during the infancy of capitalistic self-awareness.  A victim of social Darwinism, he strode on worn out shoes of conversation. His cleaver thoughts dragged the body of work as a form of self-expression, of gentle humility, of soft pride, and it stained the heavy steps, the Masonic halls, the leering file cabinets, and the office door of his theosophist boss. He was trailed and haunted by rusty old memories of things he never actually experienced that had turned into blood desires of pain and hope, feverish sting rays of anxiety and interdependence. He knew reality was out there, but he could not describe it. He could only feel it… as his hands shook. 

In Our Little Time

I remember the fog being soup
But comfy like that blanket we share on my couch
It made everything still and contemplative
Buildings and houses like solemn faces
Lining our parade through the town
Watching stoic and gray
You an Atheist and me a nonpracticing Catholic
Driving on God's blessed day of rest an hour before dawn
Yellow orange red green dots blurred in the soup
Everywhere hazy yet flickering like eyes
Like stars, like Christmas lights dropped and draped
Lazy and sleepy like our waking minds
The city quiet frozen dead except for the train
That halted us and made us a photograph
So we could look upon ourselves for a moment
And as the cars passed like an echo
I found your hand lighted by the dashboard
Blue and green and soft and timid
Our cigarette racing heartbeat masking
The heartbeat shadowy familiar
That brought to me Aristotle and his cave
Contemplative asking, "is this real?"
The sun will come and it will be a new day
A moment of hope on a Sunday
The worst of all days because it symbolizes end
I tell you how I hate goodbyes
But you are not a farewell
We have the reverberating day ahead
We have the promise felt and solidified
In the fog and quiet and the peace
Like so many echoes of the passing train
I'll see you again tomorrow
And tomorrow

On The New Year

That mother city that bore me
Its thick rust air and salamander ghosts
The friendly abused and addicted
Black night frozen winter camaraderie
I carry it back to the Midwest
Away from the virginal lake to the landlocked mind of solitude
Still brushing golden brown love canal dust
From my shoulders and my heart

Feeble carrying a weight to mundane to understand
Back to her geometric smile and shiny sharp eyes like glass
Washed anew on a salty beach of permanence
Cleansing me with their youthful faith
Away from broken bones and misery pains
Away from trash heap nightmares to real and profound to be dreams
Away from dumb luck and heavenly disaster
To her and her punk scorn with a lash of hard love

Suddenly at ease with time to spare
My mind's eye a wall to lean against
No rush when the days no longer go by like there's no tomorrow
To abandon being caught between summer heat and winter disinterest
Ephemeral coughs of uncertainty south of the Badlands
To forgo gnashing my bleeding teeth on jagged thoughts
With a bent back swollen pink and oblong
To reside in a palace of peace and ubiquity

I must remember to thank her outside my baby steps
Passed the reprieve of forbearance
To live as one like the moon solemn yet free
Content to come another night
Because she is strength yet undefined
Hard and true and arrogant enough
To chase away all the blue Mondays
And crackerjack sideways I've ever knew

PARIS 1919?

I am ornery like Hemingway
On a dance floor
With young girls
Firm in
Form fitting dresses
And no rhythm
And sassy gestures
Intended to be cute
And vapid acts
Intended to be free
And know-it-all answers
Only youth and
Lawyers could have
And soft long legs
I only care to write about

PLANE JAYNE

Are you why I came out to this ghost town?
With your pelican neck
And breached face
Where your horrid stories
Of old men and pickup trucks
Out where the rust argues with the dust
Make me want you more
Because now I’m at ease
In your terrible wind
And you are so young
Let me mold you with philosophy
The death of God at the expense of the birth of self
Let me learn you
The anatomy of terror and drugs
Shaking hands with disease
The carnival at the gateway to the gods never ends
Let me kiss that scar on your elbow
Down to your wrist too weak for a hand
I will dig a hole never to be filled
You will sit draped in maniacal laughter
Allowing me to daydream the dream of a rotting corpse
Because you are clay
And I am nothing
And both of us will piss on love

MISSING YOURSELF

Looking at old photos
Saying
“There I am”
In the toughest times
Standing strong
A glare off a razor

But youth is a dry leaf
And the past a silkscreen
And the future not so uncertain
If you listen to the universe
With an ear level and humane

And everything is not a surprise
If you are electric
In the face of fear that is paper
That wills more than it can
A painted cardboard cell

So I close the book
And walk out the door
Reciting
“If you pull up the shades
You don’t sleep so long”

MADISON WIRE

In a burned factory yard
Where the gravel is dyed rust
A giant metal thimble
I would sit on the crimson curve
Under gray clouds puffy like a chest
With no thought of future
Not enough weight of past
Where days can hang on a clothesline
And the world is still

PRISM (of)

We are in a courtyard
Floral
Bright dancing colors
Like excited eyes
Surrounded by a virgin white fence
Smoking cigarettes
With a heavy gloom
Over our heads
You say
“She wants to see me again,
And after all these years.”
I nod
And dream
If I could be so lucky
To have a second chance
At distant scents
That retouch old photographs
We acknowledge
“People are boring”
We wonder
“Is this all there is?”
Then a sound
Tiny thunder
Outside our quiet paradise
Just over the virgin white fence
A shopping cart over beaten pavement
Two men
Hauling death black garbage bags
Full of aluminum cans
One yells to the other
“You think it’s free to live here?”

Jolt Jolt Jolt

Jolt jolt jolt
Up under the arm
Arrows between my tombstone ribs
Shouts and screams and
Rumbling sighs
That travel
Down my fizzling legs
And out my melancholy toes

I lose my breath
Off to wander
An empty playground
In the grayest autumn
Hard like a dial tone
Expansive like a distressed mind
In a circuit board of fear
Computing a way out

Jolt jolt jolt
Only to wake
Centripetally dizzy
Reaching to the nightstand
To find my mantra
That returns my breath
And pulls the rubber band back
To lay in an open hand