mclxxiv

Soft Blabs

Speeding barfly across the shore.
Inhaling deep, self-portrait gulps.
The birds and bones atwitter.   A
mocking sunrise interrupts.   It
was there all along.   Something,
anything, moves.   Or keeps

drowning.   But the point is.
The party coincides with
panic.   Roils and quells.
And the roar of the fish on
the beach.   But I am a goddam
bamboo, squawk-a-lot, and

think underneath thumbnails.
It’s a woodpecker’s lot.   I got
the sense.   It just froze at the
coffee store.   The barque speeds
barfly across the.   Surprise.
Sunset on Mt. Hula Hoop.

mclxxiii

Sentimental

What of my lovely friends?   Now
there’s a sentence!   And who advocates
argument?   “I do!   I do!”

Nothing tastes right.   Everything is
soggy and dull.   But the iced tea
is pretty good.   I’m trying to

drown myself in it.   And then,
thirty-six pages into it, absolute
shivers.   Up and down and all around!

We have a concept of justice
Despite the fact that assymetry is ubiquitous
And constantly throws things off-balance.   But then

We are a tilted species.... (Lyn Hejinian)
I sit comfortably in a bed on the side of a mountain.
The bed is horizontal to what?   Which lies in

a thicker reality: the mountain, the bed, or me?
Obviously, I’ve mis-stated everything.
Two people are giggling where

giggling isn’t allowed.   With lips tersely pursed,
onlookers, those respecting The Golden Rule
of Silence, hone in on the gigglers.

No man is an island?   I am the very template
of narcissist: I am suffering from the loss
of what it means to really know someone.

Meanwhile the fawns graze and the
turkeys gobble.   And I recline
into the comfortability of

horizontal giving lectures to my
friends in my head.   Imaginary friends.
Imaginary head.   Imaginary horizontal.

mclxxii

The only immortality is absence.
—Lyn Hejinian

Pinch my kiss into a flame and let it
swell and sway under the oblong moon.
Find my woozy in your woozy, and be
deliberate about it.   Then let’s just sort of
float along, lost halves looking for drama.

How did it happen?   In your car, of course,
at 4:30am after dancing abrasively for about
two hours.   On the deck of the Walnut after
soaking for about thirty minutes with the
naked hippies.   It’s always happening.

It’s always.   And we live only in homage.
We live only with one hope:   I WILL
become that with which some other that
can collaborate.   It’s a pie in the sky
kind of wish, and in the end are we

ever really anything except nothing?
Are we ever really something else?
So.   Back to the woozy and to the
fellow I chatted with beforehand.
The one who pointed me in the

direction of the patina that is
this hallucinated night.   Were
you pointing indirectly?   Are
you satisfied now?   Now that
I’m stone, can you carve me

out of this place, set me atop
the least imaginary bluff
you can envision and let me
bake upon it until you decide
what we do in the next chapter?

mclxxi

I thought the noise was squirrels
but it was birds.   I shook the tree
(made of bamboo?) and they flew
away, perhaps all of them.   Someone
walking up the stairs looked at me with
what seemed like disdain.   Maybe she a-
dored the birds up there in the tree which
was perhaps bamboo.   Or she was afraid
that one of the birds flying away from the
tree—and the foreign and meddling beast
who’d so unexpectedly disturbed the tree
and its otherwise contained, recognizable,
and noisy community—perhaps she was
afraid that one of the birds might shit
right on her.   Or maybe, quite simply,
she had a little bit of indigestion.   It
was just around dinnertime, after
all, and she was, undoubtedly,
returning from the dining hall.
Whatever the case, I looked
down at her with a quick
smile—and then—fixed
sight upon the birds (or
whatever they were)
as they flew gently
and (now) noise-
lessly down in-
to the beauti-
ful ravine.

mclxx

Raw Trills

Toss a kid a champagne.   Tiny
buds duel in our hearts.   I find you
two hundred miles away, no longer
taken.   Available?   I suppose.   At least
as the mind wanders.   And S-L-O-W,
which is the opposite of oddly.   For now,
drink it.   Find me some urchin of truth
and bring a few napkins.   I know.   Miles
is miles.   But we’re speaking franchise
here, something that might last decades
and forever come between us.   That’s
really okay.   It’s like
we’re being looked
after by the clouds
what stung us.   Wait.
That’s not exactly right.

mclxix

I’m reading a book of poetry
by a major prize winner.   I’ve
never wanted to puke more than
I do at this very moment.   It is
a very moment.   How did I get
here?   And shouldn’t I simply
(and humbly) switch books?

mclxviii

sinking be the ship
      —Anselm Berrigan

Did I just do that?   Overcompensating due to
undesirable location?   Redundancy, they say,
is orgasmic (if handled appropriately).   But

don’t handle me like that.   I read this entire
book in ten minutes flat.   Which is more than I
can say of your palatial underwear soundtrack.

It’s a spooky afternoon.   I drive down the
hillside for reception and a hamburger that
seems to have gotten lost.   Why are small

towns always brimming with despair?
“You’re projecting,” I hear someone say
over the whir of the fan.   “Please,” I say, and

he hush-hushes me, afraid I’ll blab about his
new nose.   Perhaps it’s just the heat but I’m
reading this all with the voice of Alan Shore,

shifting weight from one side of my jaw
to the other.   At first I think it’s funny,
then poignant, but as time goes on, spooky

and creepy.   It’s “nacho ordinary hot sauce.”
October’s fast approaching, though, and
while I’ll be happily single for something

like a month a half, true love is just around
the corner; untried estuaries into which
our Chronicles of Sardonica will sail.

Until then, my ripe and future fruits,
let’s tuck our tight lips into our fragile
asses.   A hearty bon voyage to us all!

mclxvii

Sarcastic Astral

I have to say that love is grand.
I don’t even have to say it.   Love.
Is grand.

mclxvi

Can & Drum

We flounder around and
enjoy our cliches.   As with
the duplicity of an umlaut
on American soil, we
flounder.   It’s genetic
and hegemonic.   We
love it as we love ourselves.

But is it, are we, defective?

Like running into an elephant
after a stressful week, it all ends
in an e-argument.   Maybe we
should be more in a hurry.

Or less.   I’m sitting on a bed
in a room that should be a
mountain.   A body on a
precipice.   An as if mountain.
The room is an oak tree.

I could be a squirrel or a
turkey.   I could be a free
man.   I could be all four.

It goes on like this.

Keep doing something
and you’ll get better at it.
Like being a husband.
With no benefits.

mclxv

We’re All Gemini

Here’s where enjambment goes wrong.
You’re in love with stupid and try to
confuse me with numbers.   That’s no
way out of your pickle.

My understanding about Language
poetry has been...that what we have
had in common...was the underlying
assumption that nothing was to be
taken for granted—about poetry
and about language.   (Steve Benson)

The extended anticipation of a
massage that will be two hours 

in duration.   Which two hours?

Closing the curtains to ‘do the needful’.
Taking somebody else’s voice ‘out of
context’.

Everyone is an artist.
Even police detectives.

mclxiv

A memory like a sieve
can be used to rinse vegetables
in the future
                          —Kit Robinson


The wholesale moment lags.

Give it up.

You ought to have your nose tightened.

Here, in the archetype of the Pueblo Renaissance.

Because it’s a book we look.

These trees are more like Rorschachs.

Hoopsters in paradise.

Horeseradish to the stars.

A short poem about parental ineptitude.

Pick a number between zero and alone.

I work at Broccoli Globule Inveterate.

It’s a big gene pool.

This is my best work.

mclxiii

Alternative Venus

Try to say one thing that comes out
another: your wages garnished for
a wry gin.   Take a word, toss it
around, feeling its delicate texture
on your tongue.   You’ve got sweaty
palms.   What are your problems in
the order of their priority?   The trio
of deer dining on the lush, pre-dawn
loam?   Running noplace while the
Bay Bridge brightens and the day
dissolves into the darkening waters

next to a buddy from way back,
never hanky-panky but always
flirting?   Don’t let go the sound of
his voice.   Is your heart swollen
or creepy?   Here’s a regifted day:
driving cross-country; a blurred,
gorgeous film that lingers on the
saguaros until they’ve all but
bled out into the toiling dusk.
Nevertheless.   You have to
keep driving, your destination
throbs with an overwhelming

potency.   You can all but taste
it, feel its delicate texture....

mclxii

Behind an able man there are always other vegetable men.
                                                                          —Kit Robinson

Only yesterday your beast seemed a construct.   Another
poem built with Facebook statuses.   But note to self:
who are you, really?   And do you like your dirty

money?   We joke about murder by blanket but the
widows in the shadows are all hush-hush.   We
joke about the widows in the shadows, call

them Shadow Widows and Widow Shadows.
All is good with morning.   And we’re good, too,
full of coffee and of pastries and of ourselves.   Each

of us ‘emerging’ in our own right – a word defined
differently depending on rude angels and the way
the world works.   It’s a combination of chamber

music, of low-brow taste, and of sticky buns.   And a
lot of repetition to wheedle the naïfs.   Yet why am I so
nostalgic all of a sudden?   Because I’m usually there this

time of year.   Feel real lost.   Who fuck am I?   And then I see.
Excellent!   I try to learn this book about how to pronounce
and have a good conversation.   But should I?   Work is

slimy and I just want to give everything up, sit back and
watch Beatport and Masterbeat fight to the death.   Which wasn’t
everything it was cracked up to be.   But there you have it nonetheless.

mclxi

Brutal Tranny

This room is a network of floaters and I’m reading how
cartography is possibly as melancholic as non-sequiturs.
Do I dare adjust myself?
No, don’t move.

Sometimes the gentlest breeze upon the lobe of my ear,
originating from my very own breath.   Neither rustle
nor whir, but yet: undeniable.
I breathe.   I perceive.

Ordinarily, being in love slackens my discipline.
And improper procedures invigorate to the max.
But nothing beats sitting stone still.   Move a muscle
and it’s easy to find the right pill.

Whatever the case, my attention goes elsewhere, as usual.
This time to the floaters in my living room (which make a
fetching wallpaper).   Dare I share?

For years I was the significant somebody I thought I was.
Then, out of nowhere, I suddenly realize I’m significantly
somebody else.   It’s a wonder confusion doesn’t linger, but
this goes on for quite some time until – BOOM! – what a
shame to wake up one bright morning to find that I was
wrong all along.   Then it’s November.

How long have I been saying this?   And how long,
you might ask, has my wallpaper been screaming
I wanna be a serious conversation at me?

Over and over and over, Rover!

But I stay still and silent, a cluster-fuck of complacent decades
(with a surplus of sterling medication).   I am as excellent in
tangent as I am in transit.   Movement always turns me on.   I’m
that sensitive.   Which is why I’ve been brutally intransigent for
years now, sitting here on this very couch,
astral projecting.

The body is a wasteland.   It’s never what you want it to be.
I say be done with it.   Donate it to those in need.*

Right now I’m floating over the Himalayas.   It’s stunning, really.
I’m as carnal as I’ve ever been and you can’t even be me.


*Sometimes Michelle Pfeiffer borrows mine.

mclx

I thought I was a footnote.

Time travel can be so rewarding.
I’m usually there this time of year.

Yesterday I spent four hours with a
semicolon.   Anything else to note?

Has the word ‘airbrushing’ become
synonymous with ‘photoshopping’?

I look funny skinny.   Am I sexy
when I’m funny?   What’s for

breakfast, honey, Pop Art?
Let’s have a moot couple of

years, why don’t we?   Yuri
arrives tonight and aluminum-

free odor protection just isn’t
cutting it.   Did I go all three years?

Looks like I’ll be in next week.
Which is great because I’ve been

out for an entire year.   September
is a good time to celebrate.   Sounds

like somebody’s winning at Tetris.

mclix

Everybody needs to have some kind of a help desk.
                                                                      —Kit Robinson

Outlook’s really slow today.   Is that happening to you, too?   Plus
I’m really bored.   If I wrote you a poem in the shape of Minnesota,
which described all of my symptoms, would you play along with me?

Nothing’s really interesting unless there’s a chance it might
all lead up to a game of naked Twister.   I’m too busy
trying to figure out whether, if we’ve slept together,
what is it, four times over the last two weeks, does
that mean we’re dating?   And what’s with this
purported ‘asexual movement’ anyway?

How does one go about compartmentalizing so?   I listen
to my friends’ lists: this one I only sleep with, and only on
Fridays, this one no kissing, this one only webcam, if we met
in person we’d spontaneously combust, this one whenever I’m in
New York, this one only at 3 in the morning after my husband’s
taken an Ambien, and this one I don’t dare hint around at any-
thing sexual or romantic because he’s a total keeper.   Huh?
Where's Dr. Phil when you really need him, right?

Anyway, I’ve never asked David out or anything.
But who’s horny and has a 4-day weekend?
I HATE HIM!

               Is this problem a ‘nice to have’?   I think I’d rather
wait til the sequel.   I hear it’s a poem in the shape of Alaska
starring Beau Bridges and Julianne Moore.   The icecaps have
melted (it’s futuristic!) and the general mood is very Mad Max
(Beyond Thunderdome), but our Julianne has a plan.   Something
that involves the entire cast in a desparate and highly competitive
race to what was once Juneau to locate a trash heap of old cellphones.

It’s got a killer soundtrack.   But what I’m really here to tell you is
IT WINS THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST COSTUMES!

OK, now I know why I’m suddenly nostalgic for New York.
So you can go back to your fretting over whether or not Iran
has the bomb.   Or whatever it was you were doing over there.

mclviii

A Self-deprecating Sense of Egotism

Is this tweaked enough?   If you’re not careful
a sense of white might happen.   Shove a batch of
apples up against the juicer and do you get lemonade?
Orange juice?   It’s applesauce plain and simple.   Am I
calm yet?   I was much better yesterday, not so gray.
Enough with the vivacious red!

Edna St. Vincent Millay is only 31 years old.   It’s
snowing in the winter factory and I have a nosebleed.
Dogs make more sense.   But I’m trying to balance this
skepticism with something a little more vertical.   Because
Freud always delivers.

So I’ve been feasting a little bit.   And after each dinner I
dissect each pratfall with cognac in a lame attempt to
heal my wounded armpits.   No slave to a labyrinth
of ludicrous constructs am I!

And it seems to be working.   Here at Tokyo Express.
With canned music.   Which, now that I think about it
is really a Turkish pop song that came with my
very first MP3 player, a touching gift
from a citizen of Neverland.

Oh how I secretly loved him.   But he had
eyes only for Tinkerbell (no matter
which way her wand pointed), so I
crushed that player with a waffle iron
and soon found myself in San Francisco.

Or was it the other way around?

Whatever the case, the music’s gone
and I’m super lousy at fatalism.   It’s not
really that I’m over here trying to find my-
self in you, but who are we to know ourselves
anyway?   I mean, really?
I do often wonder.