O Beautiful, For City Streets

I am interested in all of this shouting
because when has this happened
in the last hundred years?

When has America danced?
When have we poured
into the streets, over the barricades--
and not for AIDS protests, or national debt--
but national pride?

Honestly I'm happy to
see the city-slicker turn-coat commie-pinkos
dance and shout and cry
"this is America giving a shit!"

Think of the art: all the
joyous, beautiful art which will pour
perhaps a bit too percipitously--
a little too like pent up streams and dams burst forth--
but at least not bitter wounds and bile ducts bursting.

The red midwest has always been
limpid, devoid of expression, growing
grain and old as the years pass. Give me
blue Chicago in the night, wailing it's love

to the reverberate Hilton's. Think of it
like sex, a massage, the Cubs winning the World-Series,
releasing the toxins of the pent up Northeast
into the air, dispersing hatred, breeding love.

Let the farms and the countryside sulk,
for tonight I indulge the City's rejoicing
--and pray--
only that we touch not the other extreme
but that magnanimity may overtake us all.

Break

Break
a dollar into four
pennies, five
nickles, six
dimes and the interest
owed.

Break
a silence into yes
or no, or i don't
know! Cast a stone
into a chasm
hear the echo
break and shatter.

Break
a habit like a stick
of sycamore wood dried
five years in your
neighbor's yard
waiting for your hands
to come and sever
without remorse.

Break
a promise into a distrust
that lingers in the hallways
rattles in the teacups,
settles in the corners
and seeps into the bedsheets.

Break
a finger playing ice hockey
with your neighbor of ten
years, the first time knowing
anything of him or what he
loved. Say something
besides "Shit!"; you know him
not well enough to swear.

Break
a heart into the answer
that it never wanted you
to hear: the season's changing
color; I have to move be-
fore winter's here.

Can't change human nature

Look, when you talk
about the sub-prime
petticoat crisis like
it's real, you scare the neighbors.

I know you're losing
thousands a month and that
Burlington Coat Factory
just filed for
government bailout
but try to keep your voice
down, ok?

And really, how could
the fashionistas be so foolish
as to think that they could change
immutable human thresholds
of preference and opinion?
You can't force fashion trends
on the masses,
dearie.

Beat.

...Especially not 18th century
Paddington Bear type relics, really.

Now where did I put my Crocs?
I'm going out for a latte.

In a tight dress loosely fit

A girl in a tight dress
passed me swiftly in the hallway
underneath my office building.

Her dress was taught, lithe yet
loose; loose enough that I could've
torn it from her with a flick--
and made me want to.

?

Some things communicate with swifturgentsilentmotionthings--
and I wish we all heard such language
daily.

Which begs the questions:
Am I the only one
who picks up radio signals from your heart?
Who detects the faintest wiff of your distress...
...
Am I?

?

Back to the dress,
which I'd like to tear from you with a flick:
can you hear it snatching, falling,

cascading; and you: gasping, your breath
catching, and then relieved? can you feel the air chill
and then, my arms, warm?

?

Can the world dissolve with a harsh action?
Can a rough twist to make it crack and break?
Can we drop all work, and, please(?), proceed to play?

I am full of memories
of the recent hallway
I wish I knew your name.

Apology

'Many hate God having only seen his backside,
Caught him on the off day, sunglasses on, riding the train to work in a haze,
rain outside, him powerless to affect.'

--for a girl, disaffected.

I owe you an apology,
one big fat stinking reeking apology,
a pile of rubbish I pulled from my old house
to show you that I’d torn down my walls.

I want you to see me sitting here
perched atop that landfill of my old life
picking refuse from the dirty heap, smiling deeply,
banana peels for crowns and bracelets.

I want you to take a deep breath,
and know that I am well, cascading against my own past,
like a waterfall over rocks it once was,
and when you hear the sound, rejoice,

for I am found.

Weather Forcast

Prologue:

Pretty girls flock together
For protection from the slightest weather
And act as if its common sense
That everyone worries about bad men

Like fingernails or body hair
Pedicures and petty things
Every little detail counts
Every inch and every ounce

Act 1.

I’ve seen pretty girls come and go
And know one thing

  They never stay.

Like the weather of a summer day
They storm from thunder straight to rain
Then hurricane on back again, and sand storm
into every drain.

Whirlwind and dust cloud commeth,
Quiet days and haze that buzzeth.
Many different types of weather
pass for sane and sand us to a hue

so strange and rough we oft do think
it normal, but horrible is the color
and the taste, of hesitating, and of waste.
Like the changing of the temperature

  The view is sure to fluctuate.

Act 2.

Don’t stand, don’t follow,
Don’t move with the changing seasons
Don’t leave your padded seat to chase the view on the veranda

Take up your cross and walk
Not towards the setting sun or rain
But stand instead and talk
Of the weather and of coming pain.

Epilogue:

All storms will deviate, dissipate and clear to nothing
All suns will sublimate, dissolve and disconstrue their wanting.

To my new love, long delayed, still at bay

You are all too real to be my love:
made of skin and bones, covered in flaws.
You are physical, feelable, all things I desired
without substance.

For I wish to love
more brightly than the stars that are burning up
and you are real
like anything made of anything that isn't love.

I am a headspace suspended in skin,
covered with nostalgia, nervous and thin,
shod with painful shoes of thought,
walking these long halls of memories and cots.

For I wish to love
more brightly than the stars that are burning up
and you are too real
to be anything that is anything that really isn't love.

We are both in love with dying, we are drinking from That Fountain,
that is pouring like an avalanche, coming down the mountain.

Hello, Word

Words are like the fat fingers of children
reaching for things they don't understand.

Words are stubby, clumsy, fat-covered bones;
chicken wings when we require surgeons hands.

Words are sawed off shot-guns
when we require sniper rifles.

Words are thoughts too vague
to not be expressed, desiring response.

Words are rough drafts of emotions
seeking revision by exposition, hatred.

Words are hammers for sledging
intellectual walls, testing depths, sounding barriers.

Words are concussion charges
for throwing off the enemy, falsifying your current location.

Words are always past tense,
as soon spoken, antiquated.

Words are broken wagon wheels
on the trail to happiness.

Words are faulty cell phone connections
between human souls, weak networks, signals.

Amen.

I Am Not In Love

I am not in love
with her
not in love with her
freckles, or her dimpled smile
or her rusty red hair,
her lisp for the gospel or
love for the harmonica.
I am not in love
with her;
I am a stranger passing through.

I am a stranger passing through
various states of emotion
and I've been them all before
I've been them all.
The truck stops are all familiar
and the bathrooms bear my graffiti.
I am buying .60 cent candy from machines
in vending sheds I've been to before.

I've been too optimistic
before, throwing hooks lightly and expecting
fish bites, tugs on the line, bobbers down
under the surface and then up, out,
into my lap! I've expected gold
glistening fish in breathless dawn
and gotten only flies, sunburn, and lazy beer cans all upright.
This time, I bait my line.

No, actually, this time I do not
bait my line. I do not fish. I stand
asking questions with an open hand
feet firmly standing on solid sand,
sinking quickly to knee-deep prayer
and a smile which reassures like summer wind.

Like summer wind, I am driving
home again, open air and open eyes.
dashboard skipped, sowing season
to match her quote, (yeah). I am not
in love with her, but this midnight peace
will suffice for now,
to speed towards...

what?

Strong Start, Short Finish

Dollar store poets fill the streets
with their dime bag prophesies
and post card revelations, seeping
into public water supply systems
via trechery, with intent to assault
good sense and common-minded friends
who hold loosely to their penny-change
ideas in the alleyway of truth.

We dispose of accents, bridle our
feather-brained hearts with
consumption-based policies
and beg for small mercies:
the avoidance of a hollocaust,
lower mortgage rates this year.

Carnival rides, like sedatives, cost money,
and the cash register gladly takes it
like the ferryman takes your dimes.
Pennies for the eyes! Pennies for the eyes!
This ride is called Pennies for the Eyes.

I haluscenate marmalaid fairytales and
hand-weeved basket dreams our of
souvenier threaded dreams in two-star
CHEAP hotels.

Bedsheets make breakfast table clothes
in our new home.

Maybe after today I'll finally find my way home.

Fragment, Unfinished, In Process

In the Liberty Valance afternoon
I shot myself
a glace
and painted Masserati dreams
with a stick shift and gloves for hands.

Separate from the sun but covalent
I wealth myself with gasoline and hopelessness
two pennies for the daily dreams
speaking tunes of drama-ship songs
and catch-dog foreheads.

Unbalanced
Brocade
Advanced
Unanimously
and I saw them all clearly.

White walls, Asylum by any other name
would be as corporate, and headquartered,
headmastered by a man named Senior Management
and look... can I really survive without these
400,000.00 copperheads?

//FRAGMENT.

I will be a walking talking poet

- we're all afraid, and everybody knows it

but we don't have to be afraid anymore

-mewithoutYou, Torches Together

We needs poems like beatdowns, like
beatnik streets: Dylan street,
and Dean street,
and even Kerouac street, too.
I am afraid.

On Dylan street
the smell of tuna-fish wafts past the hobos playing checkers
into the jellyfish corporate hazy afternoons of dawn.
I parade vehemently sideways, left of the bullshit, right of the
simultaneous corporate factories,
controlled in a Frankensteinian way,
headed towards nowhere.

In stacks of brick and concrete,
my name shines rapier sharp and
diamond quick through the hearts
of corporate theives waving moneylikesticks
aimlessly oblivious of the things they hit,
hiring up another man just to see him quit,
waiting
for the four-o-clock train and a heavy lunch.

I will be a walking, talking poet, and
I will see my verse in the way people stare
Open-eyed, closed mouthed, head's turned
everywhere I go, blinkers in the alley and afternoon breakfasts
in the afternoons.

I bite mayonnaise teeth into liquorish gums
waiting for my nine-to-five princess to come.
A man in a suit picks delicatessen trash bags
from the sick-mouthed end of a golden trash compactor.
Behind a Hilton a goldfished guest stays,
next to an oppressed freeway,
You are afraid.

We spread our deceit ever-forest green
and our lies as red as blood cells on the floor.
I put on sunglasses for dawn, and stretch
playlisted hands into dead-mouth pockets.
Can you speak, teeth? Breathe deep of this
only-free-once air.

In the city streets trees bloom expectantly,
Stretching towards their brothers in the country
But the leaves fall and die, just past second street
and we are left in the center with a question,
"Why?"

Find meaning like quarters and dimes in the sidewalk grates,
put them together and what do you have? Not enough.

I will be a walking talking poet.

I bite, sympathetically, into my orchestra
toned McSymphony of sandwiches, and check
my reputation in the mirror next to last days lunch.

We need poems like orange juice poured

into wounds and acid rain on the roofs
of houses owned by fair weather friends.
We need poems like the blood of demons
poured onto sacrificial alters for the daily news,
photographed and video-taped victoriously,
disseminated via brochure, and cable anchor,
and gossip over the back fence, too.
We are afraid.

As usual

In my desire for some sort of idealistic perfection, I deleted my first post. Blah.