Something Bluesy

Throw it all away for me
Follow through this time
Throw it all away for me
Let me know you’re mine.

I have to keep on the road
You could always fallow
I have to keep down the road
We could live moving without a home.

Throw it all away for me
Love me into the night
Throw it all away for me
Love me through the spite.

I have to keep on the road
But you’re the best damn thing I have know
I have to keep down the road
We could live moving without a home.

Throw it all away for me
Give up them other boys
Throw it all away for me
They were all just toys

I have to keep on the road
I have to keep a clean nose
I have got to keep down the road
But around you, I am home.

Throw it all away for me
I know what you need
Throw it all away for me
I can heal your heart when it bleeds.

Summer

Summer
smells like gasoline
And
forgotten opportunities.
It’s full
of orangish dusks
And
burnt pink mornings,
Concrete cracking heat
And
cooler midnight mournings.
It drains and sours
Slowly
melting with rashes,
But
it lazily lunges
into Fall
With romance,
sweat,
and
passion.

Soft Ladies

The soft ladies refuse to learn
that animals and infants
don’t fucking speak English
and that prodding them actionlessly
will accomplish nothing.

The soft ladies,
somewhere inside of their meaning-well
but decaying minds know this,
and are only really talking
to passerbys hoping that they
will take action in the face
of their failures.

This is why they talk
to animals and infants,
uselessly trying
to force them into
some desired action.

Ledge

The man is ruined.
His wrinkled
brow cowers with undeserved life
in the rainfall of his waning years.
Like a stoic philosopher’s bust
he looks on listlessly
with a pupil-less pride
from a deep milky resolve
into the ghost pastures
where children could scream
youthfully with mouthfuls
of cornelian games alongside
rabbits and royalty.
But those children are coiled now,
swimming as pearls cast by St. Patrick,
and nothing is left to fold delicately
into the old man,
now left with only
the barbs of swollen memories,
sullied by their novel, inflated looming.

Vows

I will tie your corset,
I will bite your neck.
I will whisper in your ears
While I devour your regrets.

I will kiss your eyes,
I will hold your hand.
I will find a breeze to blow
While you wallow in the sands.

I will mix your drinks,
I will make you smile.
I will hold you in the night
While the days die to beguile.

Spaceship

Your mother is a spaceship,
With phoenix eyes and cattail wings,
Propelled by the love of level rocket fuel
That stutters her shyly forward
Into the whirling tadpole galaxy,
Into the infinity of Lake Universe,
And the nothing-waves in-between.

Three Small Pieces

I will watch you write
Insomnia-inspired love songs
And review your words
With wounded eyes,
Trying my best to
Disbelieve and judge you.

---

The choke-chalk of grinding teeth
Wakes me from panic-dreams
In pools of nightsweats,
Reminding me of my frantic pace
In this disturbing dependence
On all things ethereally,
Uncomfortably you.

---

A cornbread smile and overall bibs
Rim picture frames filled
With Friday afternoon memories
And summer evening breeze-breaths.
Your watermelon hair
And friend chicken cheeks
Glisten with youth-grease
And I charcoal sear you into me
In that glazed perfection,
Contained and remembered
As you are and were:
Never fully cosmic,
But rurally beautiful.

Showdown

I scraped my chapped fingernails
Along my tumbleweed stubble jaw
In the iron sun’s breathy haze.

Feeling for my ghost-guns,
I was waiting for Saul,
Trusting a switchblade
I shouldn’t know how to use.

The Texas sting-heat is a rattlesnake
And turns men into epics,
Drying their roots into dust
And clotting them, finally, into ash.

Violence

Snazzy shiner-nosed suits
Spray Thompson spray
Into bricked-eyed bullies
On Valentines Day.

Shinny baton machetes
Twirl glimmer-glare in the sun
Hacking scab frowning gashes
Not wasting single slugs.

Dog

I am a dog.
Head hung
With
Constant
Embarrassment.

I am a dog
Licking your
Hand meekly,
And you jerk
Away
Just to slap
My cold,
Wet nose
Again.

Fire

When the taco truck's tires were burning I had wanted to cry. Smothered in stacks of smoke they tell you to crawl on the floor AWAY from the heat. We couldn't deadpan after the yellow body suits because our tongues stuck to the ribs on the roofs of our mouths. I wanted to scream or eat. Black smoke plums up and billows from flaming roots. My brother gave my phoenix pendant to my father. There should have been something for my teeth. When babies are in danger they can sense their mothers shooting secret screeches into the sky and the babies know to chase the mother whimpers. The metal wrapped and burned around the diced beefsteak tomatoes. Preparation is a sort of incarceration. Sudden incineration. Protection. My gums itched dryly in the dust but I could not scratch them. Heat rises. Your palms sense the surface heat of potentially engulfed doors. I cradled my arms in my hands. Roswell happened. People die. Tuve hambre ese día pero yo no lloré.

Drums

stick strike
count off

it's that
boomboom
rat-tat-tat
that I feel coming up.

the thick chunk
deep bass thump
snare sting crash.

rollingrollingrolling

stop

it's that
boom crash
boomboom crash
rat-tat-crash-rat-tat-tat
boom crash
boomboom crash
snare sting crash
bassbass
that keeps me here.

In My Brewster Chair

Sit and speak with me now
that I am bent and hobbled
in my Brewster chair,
swelling with the rot and bloat
of age and feting along with the time.

Talk to me about mothers and memories,
and count how long we spent in crystal gazes,
locked in the blistering sunlight of youth
without being burned at all.

Whisper into my ancient years
the folk stories we crafted
for our choirs, and remind me of
our animals and their nicknames,
and tell me which ones we became
in our dribbling dream-scapes.

Remind me of our green poetry,
craved into the soft saplings,
proclaiming our love like lucky spinsters
on the barely-born trees.

Forget me not the names of our children,
loved, lost, and never born,
who might have made a difference
and kept me away from this iron maiden,
there was hope for me
in the rouge they put into your cheeks,
but I have crumbled amidst my prayers.

Remind me slowly of the wounds
that we had given to one another,
now drinking honey from the scars
where there would have been blood.

Snap me back into my yesterdays,
life has decided to keep you
and I am bound to go away,
to stay away;
until you remember me again,
I will be gone away.

So keep me bitter on your breath,
stinging your lips
and ravaging your tongue;
I would have died in your position
at even the chance to keep you young.

Lady, Keep Walking

We trade glancing hellos
And she enblows with
Hickory breath
And a lemon juice smile.
She walks past with a
Pendulum rhythm
On whisper heels
And those lying, sleepy eyes
Of bruise-blue gravel.

Lady, keep walking.
You don’t know it,
But you’re ruining me.

Dance Tape

The winding-grind click
of an old video camera split
the silence in her eyes in two.

With perfect focus
and her seraphim face in full view,
I asked if she was ready to dance.

She jostled her head excitedly yes
and asked me to start the music.

And as she fluttered and twirled
I wondered, so unskilled,
what it must be like to be beautiful.

She moved with the music,
she moved in the music,
and I was happy to have filmed it.

She told me auditions need tapes,
we sent it in and she had to wait,
but I assume she'll make it anyway.

Writing "Rain"

I'm going to write a poem
and title it "Rain"
and describe the cherub puddles
that glimmer afterwards in the sun.

I'll described how rooftops well
with aqueducts' capacity
and how some send stickly streams
dribbling down toward shiny,
off-white linoleum floors.

I'll describe how the young people
dash through the drops
hoping to scatter past
their ensuing wetness,
and how the old people
grit down and lumber
through their sogginess;
stoically accepting.

I'll describe the humid air
fogging the inside of car windows
with such misty poltergeist
that the windshield wipers outside
can only push away the rain,
never reaching the polyping,
dreary clouds within.

You're All

You're all chapped lips and scrapped knees,
neurotic wanderings buzzing like summer bees
toward flowerbeds where small stink-weeds
attract all the flies.

You're all watermelon juice down a chubby chin
and smiles full of corn kernel skin,
an evening down home where the smell of a grill
deviously blends with the dusk-scape sky.

You're all the quiet and reclusion
of being hurt without tears
and running to no one with torn heart-string fears,
an isolated spasm of a steady will
but displayed, as if on a stage,
for any willing detractors.

You're all birthday cakes and tacos,
eccentric without irony,
with a defiantly high spirit
in the shadow of this hullabaloo.

April 2008: Style

I live and walk,
With the collegian haze,
In the soft spring irony
Of cigarette smoke
And workout clothes,

Of jogging shorts
And Eskimo boots,
Or tights as pants,
With blousey long-sleeved
T-shirts and baseball caps.

The Van Dieman Blues

Oh, didgeridoo brown man,
Moan me a prison-island tune,
Where I can trance and dance and scream
And fly my flag and kill and bleed.

Oh, black warring runners,
When will you learn,
That Flinders keepers
When that deep Bass is strummed?

The worth of a whale waivers,
But that throaty wale is worthless
Unless it speaks with soul,
So moan, so moan, so moan.

Oh, boomerang brown man,
Hunt me a hungry heart,
Where white powered wigs
Learn to hold their smokey shots.

I Am Languid

I am languid,
with all the energy
of a carpet sock

and dragging around
this routine moor of a room.
Repeating all my

mantras, mantras, mantras,
and walking into dawn
to sleep through noon;

even the sun has abandoned me.