All right FRIENDS!
Your attention spans did great w/ those 3 epic poems from 2011. But now prepare for the REAL challenge:
Here is the first half of an epic poem I began writing early this year & am still writing. It is way longer than 'Howl' and just as husky. It could be as long as The Canterbury Tales… so, good luck getting through it. I'll be rooting for you!
Anyways, I'd just like to reiterate something that I iterate often-- IF I WAS THE BOSS OF THIS WORLD I'D TAKE AWAY ALL YOUR GUNS! I'D TAKE AWAY ALL YOUR CARS! AND I WOULD CANCEL XMAS FOREVER! AMEN!
Now here is long, husky free verse nonsense:
*****************************************************
JAN--MAR
I took 68 showers in 2015. Don't be repulsed by the math. I kept clean w/ 292 soldier baths. Water is a resource worth fighting for, an element worth dying for. Grey film sitting still upon the steady gaze of black-eyed peas. Zen cop drama hadn't begun to disappoint. I caught sight of a meteor and instead of joy felt instant paranoia. Took the tinsel off the wreath.
I fill my days w/ prescription ambition. Take away one melancholia tablet, equalling 100 milligrams. I missed the opportunity to educate the Jesus-fearing wino who runs the fruit stand. "I think he wants to be a giirrrlll," she giggled as the customized customer glided away in her bell bottoms and sparkly vest.
My brilliant reply, "Maybe he's a comedian." And a sickeningly hard facepalm from inside skully interrogation center. Tell me again how you're ready to take this journey?
Mercury in retrograde resembles watercolor blood in orbit. Clamped in capillaries meant for ink. Losing lifeforce like Pluto, losing planetary status. I met w/ loved ones & the loveliest one sat alone. I broke the ice & not the bone I threw at Facebook. The book I threw at the dead professor's face. If not my loved one, please be friend #101.
Forgot to take my meds but mid morning reminded me. You're not ready to shave any more milligrams. Look in the mailbox for discarded friends. The awkward knock. Do I answer? I take too long to decide and they are gone. Car trouble on a day you can't afford to open the door. I spend much of winter crying next to the tub. It holds exactly 4 hours worth of tears. No minutes.
Psychologically isolate alter egos. Radioactive decay from pixie dust. Who can tell what's what these days? I saw your brown eye contact in front of the Blue Owl and no one died. I saw your casual use of black magic and thought, 'Good luck sewing that exit wound shut.' You lived to watch TV another day.
My cat is an aerialist. A daredevil! And I am a washed up rock a dead cartoon star. I need a new prescription, this cockblocking tournaquet around my seratonin reuptake areas will kill anything resembling pleasure. Pleasure, not happiness, is something I can't sacrifice to Big Pharmacies right now.
This is not real writing. This is code for Verbs Are The Scariest Particles of Speech. This is not a Tarot opportunity, it's a neurosurgeon's job. My voice is as cooperative as a cat. Success is being mistaken for a son at Fantastic Sam's. Success is a headache with a good haircut.
Ssssss…..Sssssssss….I am a snake today
In the grass
In the bath
In boxers
In loving synthesis w/ electric shock….ssszzzzz
Jury Summons #4 arrives. I won't go. You are an asshole until proven innocent.
My favorite new coffee shop. Except I've never been back there. Guilty as grey on groundhog day but I haven't been back. Can something be your favorite if it only happens once? God says yes. So do yesterday and the popular kids. Depression passes for Tuesday. Shopping for joydom. Freedom to lie about sniffling & coughing. PJ day. My calendar marked w/ sonnets. Brazen pencil, disoriented ink.
I just draw cartoony stuff 'cause I'm a privileged white queer on the up escalator who doesn't have to try walking in anyone's untied shoes. My sonnets droop on the keyboard. I survive til I get my sex drive back. When I get out, when I volunteer to leave the house, I invite tragedy to aim its weapons at my vacancy. I've got the universe figured out like Level 4 of that one game where you only lose if good stuff happens to you. I never got to meet my 3rd step father. I guess he died today.
Raincheck. Asteroid credit. Acts (or excuses) of God?
I'm going to a place where lots of cool cats stay. Being excited was a mistake. Cats so cool and aloof you could cry & I sure did. It took 45 minutes to finish a 30-minute run. Being curious was a mistake. Short of breath I see no reason to fix my leaky watercolor valve. Yinsulation. Yangxiety. Even cool cats can be awkward. Especially on social media. I've waited 40 years to talk about this and being understood was a risk. I'll pass for one more month.
HAPPY VALENTINES MISTAKE!!!
The phone says chirp
chirp
chirp
And I do too. I am up early to be a student of the hive mind.
Teach me Plathy pathology. Equal pay for surrealists. Teach a brain to silence itself and you will sleep in its lap like a cat. A cantankerous cat named Sidney w/ 99 lives and kidney problems.
Is your last name Love? Can I marry you & be true only to your name as it's worn around me like a ringing bell? Is your middle name a place I'd like to be?
We'll see…melancholia, megalomania. Missing mail. What up, boxmaster? Turned into a cockmaster.
Wish I could be the chirping Asperger bird, no vocal boundaries when she asks me about all episodes of Brady Bunch I can't remember watching, or never saw at all. Who censored me so seriously? The narcissists or the no ones? I will cry for 48 hours while I ponder the answer.
A slap in the iris. A POV I cannot see. A good bye I can't speak to Spock.
I stare at enemy territory before entering, before using up the last few words in my vocabble-babble-bubble-sublet-rumor-tumormonger-fishy-horsey-constabulary. Words I've never used before--Yes. Hi. I am fine.
[magnified nerve cells look like hairy eyes]
Green w/ jealousy, amethyst w/ relief. I'll decompress in purple twilight, I'll remain deflated until the leaves blow past my job. Where are my verdant verbs? I'm still searching (foraging, seeking).
Hairy eyes
Signify a lack of confidence
And resentment for those who have confidence hanging
In their closets w/ price tags
Still attached
I wear my favorite Tshirt which I've had for 30 years now. Occupy the amethyst evening, elastic vocal cords yodel in a suburban garage to mute the jackhammer. Concrete grave goes quiet like a dead baby's rattle.
Stretch your mind around that insult. It won't reach the conclusion that all 4-inch slabs of meat belong to men and a woman's profile states Salad for life! This little pig went to great lengths not to get all sarcastic & shitty.
Slo-mower. Lawnmower. The farmer in the you're getting a Dell commercial. The laundry in the Westinghouse hellmouth scrubbed of all its liability. The phantom DNA in the arcade of textiles lost forever. These weeks need a rewrite. But they'll sit in the slush pile for decades like you sat on your Kotex pads.
Nothing makes me happier than new socks and that's all I want to share right now.
I've waited 40 years to shut the fuck up. You have the right to remain mysterious. I sweat when I speak up. Even when my mouth is dry my armpits sob into my sleeves til everyone around me grows uncomfortable & must laugh or risk leaking fluids themselves. My skin, I believe, is made of Kleenex.
Poetry + tea = my 19th century past lover and I say Dear Mr. Moneybags, Please be reasonable and give me a hand-out. Since then
I have changed my name 8x.
Since then
I quit swallowing 200 more milligrams of unnatural response
Since then I've had
317 favorite songs…wait…
318
I don't want no jive!
Fridays are always sharp as porcupines. Scalpels at the end of the week. Occupy Porcupine Street. Use scalpels to dig the rest of your tears out so you don't have to push from the inside. Like giving birth to sadness. Like taking a dump on a single Kleenex ply. Preparing me for 2 days off the blade, away from the spoon, forked and serrated into variables so untravelled I'll write a separate poem about it later.
I choose all noise in life drowned in music. I make all choices based on the ratio of amethyst to jade. How sad will I be if I don't try, how jealous and bitter will I grow?I page through my arcade of memories, my brain stacked in slices, little invoices of all the shit I've bought on this planet.
Majestic straitjacket! I grew outta you! Try to fit in my closet now--it's as big as a broken social construct! The straitjackets of self-loathing are exposed to the nosy eye.
I wonder how this Thursday differs from last & find that all my inner Thursdays are retracted. No looking back, these dates will not be referenced for any reason. Never a Friday that didn't begin w/ the acute jab of Thursday, but never any penetration between days.
Let's go to the cafe where writers can be seen being writers. It may be enemy territory But I don't expect the joint to be terrorized. It may be traumatic to transition socially. A potential hello quickly reshaped into fuck you, but this is no place for the jihad of deep non-thinkers.
Emotional magazine content bursting at spines, killing spree with deft buttery knives. Final score: 100s to dozens. Troops to eggs. Break Benjamins to buy donuts.
I thought my effortless genius was a gift from a god even diviner than God. But it was a trick played by Allah on my ego. My ego full of swiss cheese loopholes. I cannot deploy this tactic any longer. My ego has died of heart cancer. It died reading aloud, subversive literature to an unprepared crowd. In front of boat owners and golden uteri chasing after poopy changelings. Disapproving stares firing 400 rounds per iamb.
I chased my mind down for perfect words, notes from beautiful throats. I chose to abandon my clothes. Soft-spoken mystery gone streaking across a blank canvas. Streaking across the master keyboard.
1-7-16
****************************
APR -- JUN
Can't you see me feeling instead of thinking? It's a nice change--to feel good enough not to think. Obeying the stop sign, flipping off the green light. I run so the meat on my legs doesn't spoil. I run for hours but still decompose in the shower. My endorphin factory has shut down. Is this depression or onset dementia? Time will tell.
Now droplets of history congealing into fine art particles for someday's perspective. For someday's detectives.
Lovely to walk under the crucified bunny moon. Full on all haunches, dying on hind quarters, caught in night's pinhole camera forever,
or as long as any solar system lasts.
It's like the city turned upside down while I remained standing on a burial ground of eggshells. Fetal egos in my shaman's mind. I feel incapable but pull it off for a second, a treasured microsecond.
When day is so good night looks like bad blood, gangrene, jungle rot to a lawnmower's gaze. Hack, hack away at my overgrown jealousy for i am the long streak of garbage-gray between greens. Be above the pain you meet on this planet. Be front page news. Be the nerve that calls the tribune. Be the vagina that chronicles its journey from the infinite vaginas it glimpses in the hand mirror.
Death & taxes & burritos & broken water heaters & refunds all in the rearview mirror by nightfall. All in the suitcase in the car in the garage in Sarasota preparing to be elsewhere in the telescope by tomorrow. New noise, necessary noise. Drown out the kryptonite glare. I see you under a knife getting repaired. The traces of estrogen's footsteps removed from the topsoil.
The invisible fence of time and privacy. You have a well-constructed family. I live in a tent w/out a pole.
When I let strangers in they look around like they've just found all the missing child-messiahs in the world. It's a look of fear & amusement hooked together like rollercoaster tracks. I ride it like the bicycle I got in Kindergarten.
I'm paying someone to be my friend. It's embarrassing, but it's a choice I'm making. Choosing vanilla at the ice cream shoppe of 69 flavors. My delirium shakes, vanilla. But I know someday I'll be the single malt Scotch I was always meant to be. Paying for a friend is a step in that direction.
I'm still prone to leaking blood when the right chemicals seep through the membranes around my whale corpse. A bloated submarine hides below my Peter Pan surface. But I can still bleed, one forgotten sailor still aboard, long drowned in the wreckage but still hoarding those red cells in heart corners & bone pockets
My blood still likes to dance. It pumps my lungs for info. It strafes my unprotected areas with cancer rays. Finds, of all things, colorful water in my veins. My blood is with the Bolshoi Ballet.
This Just Out: Bicycle/helicopter leaps over the fence to the White House's green lawn endangering the black Prsident and pinkening the cheeks of Secret Service slackers (I try to respond how Allen Ginsberg would if this had happened in his day. His words will always eat mine right off the page.)
And I will keep on
Keep on typing
Trying tampering stamping
In ink, scrap-booking all
My gendered garments
Spaying & neutering a closet full of lies
And releasing them into the wild
When I add or subtract chemicals from the black tower of my spine, I can feel that shit! Anxiety maggots come crawling through my whole genome, getting into shoulder joints and weakening my knees. I want to make an entrance but my jaw is made of slime. Hello sounds like bad poetry. My dependance on chemicles--does it make me more human?
Feed my addiction to the pale yellow sun. Wait til the stars get a view of your chalk outline.
The spider smooshed on your doorstep. What's left of a werewolf howling at you--Brace yourself for the chip implant future you won't enjoy in the slightest. Here it comes.
Horniness is very life-affirming. It's the best reward for pushing through day-star withdrawal. Giving birth to spontaneous thoughts, reactive phrases with a fermented brain. i will drink the blood of grapes again someday.
On the day you came to me I thought the happiness bubble would only get bigger. Inflating my heart like blood-flavored gum. But I should've learned from exploding houses. If you keep blowing the walls will come down, the gum will return to its flaccid state.
Since you came the bubble has burst over & over. "Happy Anniversary" says the power outage says the lawnmower says the wasp nest says the automatic pesticide spray melting my shoes to the floor. I pay you to be my friend & you pretend to like my poetry.
I pay music to be my friend and it's not ashamed to be seen inside my head.
The road is: long
black
fast
asleep
dangerous
And I'm on it
I'm back on the pale yellow pill
And no one calls me "Miss, miss, Madam!" on this trip
The museum is: bright
white
Mexican
morbid
light
Crushed under a bus & thrown in a fountain. What's more goth, your will to resurrect a broken spine or the dead dj haunting the taqueria? You decide.
Am I talking like alphabet soup in a trash can? Throw a tomato if I've stopped making sense but don't throw shade on my memory yet. Road trips back toward home surprisingly full of song. Living dj haunts the dash, makes the wheel spin way back in space to your poopy little angels. Afraid to use the public litter box.
Still running at the mouth and legs. Still frozen in the middle. Still hear spiders howl like human wolves. You empathize with scavenger's remorse. The spider is a cannibal. Out, out damn voice! Still soaked in sodium hydroxide, your uncertainty is just like your mother's. Pour detergent down your throat, nothing removes a voiceprint like Drano. Polite libel, sir, will not get you a more expedient character assassination.
A child's correct gender assignment ends a century old conflict. Is this just a phase? Goddammit, no!
I'm alone w/ my social media trying to piece the carefully curated snippets to the horrors that inspired them. I am a failure, unfriended.
It's time for my yearly evaluation.
Isn't it a little early?
Yes. At least wait til the Mad Men finale. Sure, I can wait til 1970 if you insist.
I'm ready to be on a solitary retreat, away from trans-societal restraints. Handcuffs would be more cozy than the cold stares and lack of "most important thing."
The most important things are: Quiet
Dates canceled by rain
Facts checked by doctors in white coats and cute peeptoe wedges.
She's a doctor who has time for nail polish. She doesn't have time for me.
I'm not on the list of important things
Quiet as i may be
Take a hike in the post-rainy July-like May
Listen to the moods of your guitar, high chord pressure, melancholia, busy being successful too busy to stop. No. Busy is no excuse. You make time for what's important to you. Hating on the left side of the brain the howling poets of modern-american Greece.
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Vicious.
Vicious who?
Vicious Aloysius.
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
The girl in the dragon costume w/out tattoos.
[Let's play this game for months!]
Runner's High v. Hormones that won't quit making you cry
Moon's Menacing Crescent v. Victoria's Lack of Self Respect
Hormones win 1st round. Moon wins next.
(Consult the crescent lunar zodiac in which one sign is an airplane & all the rest are living things)
Good mornin'
Good mornin'
Good mornin'
Did you dream of electric penises? No but maybe my phone did.
Black v. white on a blood-smeared rain-soaked chessboard. I gave you a scare with my lack of hand-eye coordination, but you won in the end. Because you don't have to dream of penises. You don't have to live with my mess.
I forgot how it felt to get caught in the rain's lightning cage. Middle age middle-class white privilege punk not afraid to get my hair wet, not afraid to get shocked out of my shoes. A binder full of women in binders pretending to be men. They'll never be "real men" (Mitt Romney's air quotes)
Data day robots. Info fertile
The cows come home
To abort
Microcephalic calves
And be damned to a hell that is a rocking boat
So unlike the meadow
I'm seeing the future & I'm not finding myself there. Have i been dropped like a cold genetically mutilated potato? Aquariuuuss! AAaaaaaahhhh-Quaaaaariiuuuuussssss!!!!!
All the truths I once knew are retiring to be w/ their families. What they didn't tell me was the real truth: They're dying. The rain promised but the cloud never shook. Skull broke into a headache instead. We live w/ choices of others but ignore our own robotic motions
Quoth Marilyn Monroe
"I'm bored
W/ platinum
& diamonds
But valium is
A girl's best friend"
In a fit of submissiveness she hoped to get published but banged her head against the bed instead.
Politics, you are correct!
I hear your motorcycles circling my paranoia. Your tiny smelly scrotums sticking to the seats. I couldn't be less impressed. My annoyance stuck in second gear.Get lost said the raven overhead.
My name is a poem
And yours is pornography to my ears
I was gendered correctly in the cat house & knew the happiness that brought
Would be quickly blown to bits
And it was… Like sands in the litter box
These are the moments we'd love to forget
But which burrow into our heads like septic drill bits.
Sick black kittens EVERYwhere. My magnificent privileged panther doesn't get it. Vibrating purr lord. He knows the vascular anatomy of my humanity & sinks his teeth in.
My name is whiny poetry and my hands flash fiction in sign language only Geminis understand. Free bleeding & the Future of Femininity. The hoax that drove the bus over a cliff and onto the camel's back. A single-hump highway that crumbles like original infrastructure There's no future for feminine tentacles. Here's where we slip into the kind of genetic engineering I've always dreamed of.
Asleep like a street. Awake like a saint. I wipe your blood out, not just away from the screen. A verbose & indiscreet genocide. Gendercide. Gumbocide.
Your babies will be made of carbon on a 3-D matrix & you'll love them like devices, hold them in the palm of your mind, bypassing the gore of maternity and Father's Day will be the loudest holiday of all!!
Juliet is dead, but long live she--Let her die by hormones that begin w/ T--Let her be memorized like a nursery rhyme--and please God let me stop crying…
1-22-16
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