mmdcclxiii

What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.
                                                                            –Jack Spicer

You have created with-
in me a hole. Well, an
open eye (with no leaks),
and it is a very cold hole.

I did not know what to
say to you who had such
a bountiful half-barrel
of the sweetest apples

as you placed them on
the dock of your choice
for the world’s apple
junkies to gather

around and to adore.
Not until it was almost
a minute too late did
you take the most

beautiful one in your
precious hand with
its elegant spindly
fingers and offer

one boldly to the
threshold of my
younger lips.
“Here,” you said,

as I took a bite.
“There,” you said
as I swallowed it.
Where I am now

is anyone’s guess.
Even my open eye,
which is con-
stantly leaking

(liquid which
is obviously
from some-
where in my

head), hasn’t
the where-
withal to en-
vision a map

to provide
me with gui-
dance, nor
offer a single

token of advice
regarding which
direction my next
step should go.

mmdcclxii

Alice, I wish you a factory.

                               ♥ Lucas

I wish you a

factory for all

of the same

reasons I

wish the ex

who stole all

of the rest of

my clothes (ex-

cept what I am

presently wearing)

peace.  The news-

paper clippings my

grandmother col-

lected and carefully

arranged into a sort

of funerary scrap-

book had no sticker

price, of course. 

Upon the clippings

were photos of men

who were killed

during the second

world war.  The

whole set was

enclosed nearly

airtight in a large

ziplock bag.  By

now, perhaps,

the fragile yel-

low clippings

which hung

onto the fragile

black pages of

the antique note-

book have been

blown into hun-

dreds of pieces

and flutter like

autumn leaves

over the crooked

streets of my city –

a city that knows

neither autumn

nor winter.

mmdcclxi

Two Good Years

As for my perplexed reaction,

I need a good playing field.

You giving me good playing

has a certain come-uppance,

the silence of which was the

silence of the Nevermind,

the area we both penetrate.

Never mind the era in which

we both penetrated the

Netherlands.  Purportedly.

Hold off!  Be silent!  Catch

your breath, Bill!  The

suspension (which was

the truth that was killing

us) had never spoken so

softly, swaying, as it were,

in the hillbilly breeze,

which was full of the

distinctly indecipherable

whispers of that voice.

Said perp (the sotto voce

perp), who hasn’t been

seen (nor heard from)

since either before

or after.  During which,

the march.  The long march.

mmdcclx

     What a beautiful and violent day today is!
                                       —Joe Brainard

The city slowly
exhales.  It ex-
hales forever.
I know this be-
cause I hear it
out my new win-
dow all night.  No-
thing going in.  It
is not a direction
tonight.  I’m a
slave to the
clouds that
carry away
this incessant
breath.  Gulp-
ing everything
I can from this
vacuum, I scream
Come back to the
ground, you mon-
grel clouds!!  Come
back.  Be fog.  Be
like I am.  Square
in the face.  Hazy.
Pinwheel of in-
determinate
temperance.
At a loss.  Death,
that last gasp for
breath, is but
the clean sweep
of this infernal
breeze.

mmdcclix

2018

    1970

     is a good year

     if for no other reason

     than just because

     I’m tired of complaining.

                  —Joe Brainard’s poem “1970”

                     in its entirety

2018

is a good year

if for no other reason

than just because

I’m tired of complaining.

mmdcclviii

The Happiness

          I lack the courage to talk words very much
          because they are terribly finite and
          final and I don’t enjoy the risk.
                                                        —Joe Brainard

Memory of a late May
tarot card reading
on a pile of rubble.
Don’t multitask be
cause it’s literally
impossible to multi
task.  Give each step
your complete atten
tion (totality).  The in
ternal attention that I
am unable to see: pro
jection. The outer influ
ence that I already know
(all too well): playfulness.
In retrospect, all too well
turns out to be not nearly
well enough.  So what do I
need in order to resolve this
playfulness problem? Well,
it says here “a ticker-tape
parade.” And “I should ride
on the tiger of success” and
“squeeze every drop of juice
out of the happiness.” The
memory, a few lines written
on frayed and yellowing note
book paper, ends obliquely:
first, with an “AMEN!” and,
all by itself near the bottom 

of the page, “The Monster.”

mmdcclvii

Chocolate Grape of the Day

What’s un-
settling isn’t
just the shout-
ing/shoving
match in
the “Quiet
Room” on
Christmas
Eve.  It’s
simple
math;
it is you
and me.
“What the
future holds,”
you say, “isn’t
pretty.”  You
don’t actually
say that.  To
be honest, I
summon that up 

on my own.

mmdcclvi

Diary of a Landmine

This year’s word of
the day is calm down.
I know this because I
hear it regularly all
year long; more
than I hear any
other word.
This strikes me
as humorous,
out of the ordin-
ary, puzzling, frust-
trating, defense mech-
anism and hopeless.
In that order.
Chronologically.
Because it is a year.
And, true, it is not a
logical year at all, but
it is humorous, puzzling,
frustrating, defense mech-
anism, throwing up (yes,
a whole lot of that), surreal-
ism (which numbs rather than
stings, because it is not reality),
dread, fits of dead end, which,
when you find yourself there,
are pretty hopeless (nowhere
to go but backwards and all),
etc. Every day there’s another
obstacle. Until you find that,
pausing for a breath, you
have rested your foot
upon a landmine
(which, you have
to admit, is a pretty
solid example of
“dead end”).
At this point,
you look back
(as I did) and
question where
that path you were
on to begin with must
have led. And where it
it all went wrong. Where
you somehow deviated, and
wound up at the end of this road,
instead of another one. Instead
of any other one. Instead of
each and every end of each
and every alternate road. So
it’s safe to say, I do believe,
that calm down land mine
is the word of this year
(thus far).

mmdcclv

The Great Unrealistic Ache

It was the summer of
I hate this one. In which
the foggy details
became all too clear.

For the obscure
clarity = obscenity.
To the foggy, it was
never really that vague.

I looked out, did a
quick survey of the
landscape of
simmering wet

toilets that
pulsate (due to
my eyes’ over-
loaded blood-

veins) and
I thought,
“How cine-
matic!”

So caught
up in this
was I (I was!)
that .. long pause .. .. ..

Oh, what a blustery
day it is (Is it?). It’s so
wound up that the
groundbreaking

ceremony for the
hardware store
that the neighbors
are building (the

ones who live in
the tiny room
that abuts our
garage) was

postponed
indefinitely.

mmdccliv

…I don’t really think in words, but impressions.
Saying something in words is so harsh; too
general. It’s never enough.
                                                 —Joe Brainard

He has me giddy
searching for that
pot of gold. What
a rainbow he is!
I am so in love
with not knowing
where I’m going.
Quick, what comes
immediately to mind
when you see the
words SHATTERED
GLASS? I’m always
moving around with
some: in my pockets,
in my socks, under
my feet, in my hair,
stuck between my
teeth, etc. Today,
I went shopping
for some that’s
as of yet un-
shattered.
It’s expensive,
though. And
who needs it
anyway? I’ll
stick with the
ruby-studded
diamonds in
my pants
pockets, in
my tube socks.
So I buy a
stick of lipstick
instead. It looks
like a battery
that when
opened is
a tube of
butter.
Earlier this
week I lost
my lock that
keeps my few
belongings tucked
away safe. I forgot
to pick one up
while I was
shopping. I
was too keyed
in to cheap
bleeding
jewels and
lip-tickling
batteries
filled with
butter.
Knock,
knock. I’m
going to use
the rest of
October
(my least
favorite
month)
to buy
a new
lock.
Stay
tuned
next week
for The Case
of the Lonely
Pneumonia.

mmdccliii

Fresh Kill
   @the
Pink Palace

Is it that
this day,
like any
other, is
rife with

possibility?

What did
we do on
those
other
days?

mmdcclii

Vine’s Rhinoceros
(an achizm that’s almost awakizm)

           I felt good that I had eyes.
                           —Joe Brainard

In the quiet room: “I asked you
I asked you I asked you a
specific question. You didn’t
answer the question you just went
AROUND the question.” Then “YOU
think I’M flirtatious?!” Then “What
if I WAS flirtatious with the professor
who was flirting with me?”
…    …    Long Pause      …
I guess she hung up.

So let’s clunk…
“How behavior light” (folly)     …
“(How behavior light!”)

…    …    “Hello? Hello.”  …
…    …    OK                  …

Suspicious of the vines, she
broke the rhinoceros. The
vines that broke the clouds
with the eyes.

I sat up late at night (top bunk #13).
I shot up in bed.
I woke up to shooting up.

If you spit on a toilet
You get nothing but
…       a spitty toilet.

The toilet, the vine, the specific question and the eyes
… … all went right back to the ache.

mmdccli

“Here,” I said, hand-
ing over her lunch,
“I wrote you a sandwich.”
“Arkansas thunderstorms are
close to my own words,” she re-
sponded, surely meaning something
like “What a neat trick!” That, however,
was then. Today, I learn of a good friend’s
passing, and my current favorite person in
the universe will not even speak to me, de-
spite my trying in most every language (in
the same universe) to explain to him that
pretty much the only thing that he could
possibly do to actually halt progress (which,
as it turns out, is a difficult word to define,
in any language!) is to cut off all means of
communication. What a lazy way to go, this
death by incommunicado. Perhaps, then, the
San Francisco fog colludes with that of my own.
Feeling my way through it, this fog and that fog,
I happen upon the zing of a word that once meant
something. “To whom?” asks my favorite person in
the universe. Thus we arrive, the both of us, in color-
ful bow ties, at the Awk Ward, where for many years I
live, taking lots of pictures of myself just to while away
the time. Much later, when I finally escape, I find myself
at every MUNI stop swimming in a curiosity that is almost
always followed by an uncontrollable laughter. I’m not
laughing (of course) at all of the people from other more
distant terrains who stand in the subway or sit in a bus
with long wands which are called Stick Selfie. “You idiots,
you lost another month!” says the person sitting directly
under the ad for Stick Selfie. Or is it that the voices in-
side of my head dare instead to remain silent? Will they
always be this deceptive, this quiet, this deceptively
quiet, like an intricate stealthy drone driven from
five thousand miles away by an even smaller drone?

mmdccl

The Sequel

What I really remember is the snow
that crunched loudly white while two
by two we emptied milk cartons all over
the carpet where we’d light a blunt auburn
candle each time we’d place a large chicken
clean into the oven and then we’d find ways
to warm ourselves up without speech until the
cold was floating around us and not on top of us

“like reindeer” amid the pink canvases filled
with runny noses we always arrived into the
same dusk-colored place – we’d be circling a
Christmas tree (“Teddy’s got mine!”) with
none other than our dusty favorite, Frosty
the Sasquatch. Thus would begin the alt-
holidays through which we’d droopily
happily endure . . . and now the sun –

shining its headlamp out toward every
slice of existence that isn’t already
pink (concocting brown and also
blueberry and ashen gray but
banana, too!) . . . and the trains

whistling arguments with one
another; non-stop red-faced
outbursts over and under
snow-capped mountains,
beside the exhausted
stumps that stubble
the inclines between
the tunnels;

these parched
remains of an
erstwhile lush
austerity sec-
retly seek –
desperately
seek – a simple
spot in the shade.

Sadly, being but stumps
(and therefore never quite
capable of grasping the fate-
altering tricks known particular-
ly by their neighbors, the rocks),
each, despite a blaze-quenching
desire, meets destiny by coming
to rest beneath a canopy of no-
thing but emboldened stars;
each desiccated stub next
to its very own frozen 

pile of decaying hay.

mmdccxlix

The Rambler

Promise me, son, not to do the things I’ve done.
                                   —Kenny Rogers

Repetition is the highest
form of slavery. Never-

mind that it doesn’t
matter what I say.

Values are less
valuable as

the high ground
gets high. It’s

our job to separate
the wheat from the

chaff, amorally
speaking. “Turning

the other cheek is a
sin,” says Mixed-Up

God, who’s always
walking away from

trouble (when he
can). I spit up

an egg sandwich
onto every offender.

Each is an officer
who bears a key

as host to this 

year’s city-state

nirvana.
Nirvana

is made of
regurgitated

gold. And
molded bread

my dears.
Good old bread.

mmdccxlviii

This Has Probably Been Said Before

Looking down onto the desert
I am reminded of the dollops
in his throat – it could just be
the clouds or how the currency
of his voice was always paid in
whiskey clinks (Were aces wild
or bases loaded? There’s only so
much one remembers); it could be
too a resistantly lingering vapor, but
a whiff of that surly misdemeanor, now
gone all but non-existent – a stinking ex-
tinction the whole of which I’d welcome
for an instant – or two – and not in a regret-
ful nor a spiteful way, either (Oh, how very
skewed becomes each glanced perspective!)….
Would that I could pay my way clear through
the pink rock-like layers that compose such
beautiful buttes as those that I have yet to
completely imagine. But come now would I,
could I (?), if but to ascertain precisely my
particular description; how each (to a man)
whose clipped talk was such a dreamy golden
voice gone voiceless – (ah, but whose now
hasn’t?) – was everything that’s me and mine
in just one singular cloud that drops by, stays
a little while, then drops a little rain upon
the desert and (poof!) was just a cloud all
by itself (like me, like I am now, an isolated
puff)? How distant are the layers of that cake!
And to the prick how each (a he) he must have
convulsed from such repulsion, and with urgency
and in direct polarity with apparently misleading
charm, that with a similar conviction and speed
a quick storm exhibits as it hops across the sage-
brush of a summer afternoon – or how a bit
further into the frontier a casino’s change
leaks softly-swiftly into pocket – with a whoosh! –
it’s vanished irrevocably, leaving for jilted memory
all sorts of bruises and cuts that in turn will leave
scars, the very templates of bitter remembrance,
and hands that remember being full with what’s
gone – as with a ghost town’s erstwhile panhandlers’….
This story of a couple of men once disguised as side-
burns walking through an arboretum, and how they
were at once two books that being stolen from a
leisure van parked on a little rock in Little Rock….
How that little black pocket rock once conveyed
a made-up mood, a few feelings, for example,
like the ones given out by whistling sagebrush –
those same clumps disintegrated by the dis-
appearance – now gone so damp as to give
a vertigo, a berserk and unconventional
spin. And do they ever spin! They spin
until all of my arms and teeth are lost,
until a single blunt post of saguaro gets
stuck somewhere in the rainforest of a
distant hemisphere as the vague scent of
whiskey as it clicks or as it clinks through
the bone-chill night after night after night
toward the rocks that are uplifted and carried
by the dreaming wind until dropped as a stack
like silver dollar pancakes into blood-colored
buttes. And nearby, where burial grounds
grow paler pink under the scorch – “We’re
going to Illinois…aren’t we?” –I thought I
heard him say. “If just to perk things up
a little bit” – (But where did we ever go?
And will it ever be remembered?)….
The once and all familiar….
And then we….
At last… And
since…. (a dis-
continuance)

mmdccxlvii

     1) An unvert is neither an invert or an outvert, a pervert
         or a convert, an introvert or a retrovert. An unvert
         chooses to have no place to turn.
                                                             —Jack Spicer

Toby Lee, guitarist and child
prodigy, stares out from the
computer and onto his bed
but momentarily, lost among
his various quirks and tradition-
al guitarist twitches. He is hard-
ly as historical as they are, these
traditional glitches.

Unleash, henceforth, the 9am
piece of misunderstanding (Oh,
do come back Mister Under-
standing…)…. Your promised
plans make fucked up moves,
make things like me hurt. That
tough love disguised as bitter pills
to toughen up or make one better?
I’ve never been an easy scam (much
as I tease so) but next to you I’m not
but had. Isn’t that historical? As if
the vapor of your fake death would
deign to respond.

Without a map, without a dollar, without
an aging couch, much less a familiar door
to open (close and deadbolt), I find my-
self (like I find Toby Lee). In this bubble
of misbehaving, misbegotten emotion, I
am left to face this farcical non-existence
you invented for yourself, an omnipresent
tension that turns out to be as real as
your fake pills for love.

“Witches’ brew?” offers the magician’s
assistant, as he lifts the gargantuan
magic eraser up to the summer sun.

mmdccxlvi

Kill the Star Student

The lousy way
you’re treating
me is only hurt-
ing myself. Mary
very easily makes
teacher’s pet breathe.
I watch lovestruck
just to further distance
myself until I am well
again. Enough of the
hell you say! It was
inevitably your choice
that I chose incorrectly.
I love you so much that
you broke a record I set
picking an ultimatum. In
other shadows moping a-
round inside your skull,
distance is directly pro-
portional to engagement.
I look down feeling less
heathen and negatively
affianced. “We both knew
this would happen,” says
the finances to the ugly pile
of material conquest. Ever
the victim, I text via SMS
knowing full well that to
square off with reality is
to disavow it. Like knock-
ing on the door to a place
you single-handedly just
emptied only to find the
table set like a midwinter
holiday. (It probably goes
without saying that you
have arrived, as always my
fairest delusion, for no other
reason than offer the only
tradition at which you’ve
always been best: con-
cocting the signature
cocktail, of course. And
this elixir? Well it is so
good it takes me out to the
ballgame and shoots you
all the way to the moon
where that fat ball of cheese
is still having its way with
you. Because, you see, it has
stolen your playbook by
playing the victim and
pointing its fingerless
blame right at me. And
the stars? Well, they each
have their turn with you,
too. But they’re only extras
scattered about in this rousing
conspiracy. And while I sit but
twiddling alone in a cavernous
ballpark, the moon turns its
cheese-riddled cheek to a
new favorite culprit as you
perform your final erasure,
dissolving traceless into the
Andromeda, a wasted and
infinite expansion of space.)

mmdccxlv

Tiny Goals for Larger Days

These people
are not morn-
ing people.  These
people are getting
in the way.  What
is the opposite of
two roads diverging?
A bridge over troubled
waters?  Would you like
to hang out today?  I’m
not certain I can do that.
For one thing, I have to
charge my cellphone (the
days are endless like this).
In my mind I’m thinking
I owe him a dollar.  In his
mind he’s thinking he
owes me an apology.

mmdccxliv

Waves are made of the same water rotating tirelessly.
                                                —Cassie Lewis

I used to love Hal-
loween. Today,
this one is somber,
at the end of a
near catastrophic
October. Some-
how I rise,
surely more
zombie than
human, in
search of
motivation,
inspiration,
happiness—
all the things
that lead to
cash rewards
on every pur-
chase. They
turned my only
remaining bank
into a café. It’s
still a bank, but
it’s wearing
a chainstore
coffeeshop
costume.
Adopting
a pet can
change its
world and
yours.

Grace here = cash.
               —Cassie Lewis