For Whom the Bell Tolls...

My bills are late,
the rain won't stop;
my back aches, the earth quakes...

I've a dozen eggs and one life,
two pounds of bullshit and this:

We are not immortal, 
nor very bright, thus I
wish I were Macbeth...

Damn the laundry.
Damn the cheese.
Damn everything...

...and everyone.

I've an inclination
They were thirsty
and couldn't be bothered
with a poem
as silly as this one.

~for Marlys Bonnetti

Slow moving...
Caught unawares by the sudden chill
of November...

~born too late

No buzzing around, no chatter
flitting from place to place...

The glorious sunshine of a late
summer evening: August or even September
that Byzantine month when
the Roman Empire of another year

hasn't fallen.

The barbarians disguised as seasons:
late October's subtle slip of the tongue,
November's garish assault on the senses...

The quiet, deathly pallor of December
masquerading as our hopes and fears.

A solitary fly born too late,
forgotten in the rush towards
Fall and Winter,
Caesar's warning,

the spam filter.

Here we are: small spectators
in the fleeting cycles of Time;
slow motion tragedies,
subtle movements of History.

...

Staring at the wall,
wondering what happened
to Emily Dickinson and that fly
in November.

A new word...

I will make a new word. It will happen in the future (as opposed to those things that happen after we have noticed them). It will be a verb, capable of geranding, fine as the fettle and useless as the white sheets on a honky at a KKK rally. The name of my new word shall be "future".

I shall future that away. I've futured that; don't worry.

What does it mean? In the future I will tell you.

A manifesto for personal sanity

There is no easy out. There is not a magic bullet. The span of time it takes to realize what you already know is infinite depending on how much time you spend trying not to understand what you all ready know.

These few truths will allow you to understand yourself and no one else. Life is short. Enjoy the ride.

Drunken Poetry

The worst of us were the best of us.

Lost Poem from 2007

Going through the archives I found this draft of a poem to someone. It's funny how time changes the words into something else, the meaning into things we couldn't possibly see in the future. How funny it is the things we write, the things we feel and their relation to the present. Thus...a poem lost is found and what was once true is true again...

Waiting around.
Eyes closed,
just waiting
for some sound,
church bells
or cicadas
or the hiss you make
while smoking a cigarette;

I lost the poem I wrote for you.

We always lose the things
we love.

Random Poem for May

The future is unfolding before my eyes
while pages of the past dance
on the wind through alleyways:
so much flotsam.

Books made out of electrons spiral away
into the starry dynamo of night while
I toil with Gutenberg carving words out of dead trees
and the blood of dragons.

What is the future?
The future is bright and shining.
It gives off it's own light.

It is not a question of the past, or the future.
It is a question of whether it shall be the past,
or what has not yet been written.

"By any means necessary" becomes
the modus operandi by which we strive
and thrive and ultimately what we make of our lives.

Remember the words of the preacher in Ecclesiastes:
There is nothing new under the sun.

These Things We Call Names...

Whether the bullet's path or the arrow's arc...

Or why we have so many silent moments
between conversations: you give an inch and I drink a fifth.

Another insult makes the whole thing make sense
for just a moment and then we forget the things
we always wanted to say about nothing.

You can have all your wars if I can win just this one battle;
I suppose it says more about me than you.

Spring Poem #1

The void stares back
the thin space between lines and letters
a closer edged knife,
the arc of infinity

numbers belie a truth
behind words without
corresponding reality.

The void stares back at us
tells us we've fucked up,
that the future is now,
we've been waiting for
something that never existed.

the haggard reflection
that greets us in the morning,
the tired visage of afternoon
and the lonely survivor of
another day all point
towards the future.

welcome to the rest of your life...

The Era of Hope is Dead

It has come down to this. Our political system has failed us repeatedly, given us error upon error of common sense. Corporations are considered worthy of the rights of Man, given the keys to the kingdom and the hen house. Without conscience, or remorse (unless monetary) these eyeless, soulless creatures (or cretins) devour everything in sight. K-Mart fucks Martha Stewart Living and produces a new wardrobe. Wal-Mart and Sony Records have a love tyrst, though no surviving albums reach the Billboard Charts. Ronald McDonald has pedophilic urges for the boys and girls desirous of his throbbing Happy Meals, while Burger King gives blow-jobs to migrant workers in the fields.

Life takes Visa now, but still dabbles in cold, hard cash and overdraft fees. We are little more than grist for the mill, being slowly devoured by creatures with little more than a board of directors for a brain. These heartless beings deploy marketing campaigns to convince us of their benign intentions, masking their lascivious smiles and leering eyes with warmth and compassion. Nothing is safe. All is lost. All is vanity and the presumption of fairness is a ruse used to offer us a chance at salvation and a house with the white picket fence and two and a half kids, when in reality we are bought and sold on the NYSE like so many products and commodities. Our futures, the meaningful lives we were meant to be living, are traded along with petroleum reserves and oranges.

But don't worry: Hope is on the way. A new shining face, another rising star in the political realm will save us all from the demons of the night. But lo, he is fated to go supernova, his message of change splurted out on the sheets like so many drunken revelers at an orgy. Brand D and Brand R scramble for control of the reins of power, while the tired, the poor, the downtrodden become ever more so. Little changes, but the faces and the names. The rules stay the same and that old refrain from the Who wafts over the air: "Meet the new boss; same as the old boss."

And still, we make up new myths by which to live, giving undue influence to charlatans and hacks from Alaska, real Americans in pickups driving around the back country roads of the real America. And each night we tune in for more of the same from the big three corporate news agencies telling us what to think, what to believe. There is no hope for us, the damned. Nothing and no one can save us from ourselves. We are lost.

2010...

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times...
barely had one year ended,
than another began.

We smoked cigarets (sic),
coughing up phlegm, quit smoking
in order to see the sun rise fifty years hence,
and died of colon cancer in the evening.

We rose up against our oppressors,
only to find that we were both
the oppressor and the oppressed.
Small nips off the bottle gave us
warmth and chilled our souls,
waved away the fear of tomorrow
and ushered in the enemy while we lay sleeping.

We dreamt dreams of the past and the future,
while forgetting ourselves in the present.
We left secret messages to our future selves
and drunken screeds on the answering machines
of former lovers begging forgiveness
for our past lives, and in the end
we had only ourselves to blame,
to hold in contempt.

There were two paths before us:
the lonely road ahead
and the lonely road behind.
Each seemed lonely.

And in the middle of the night,
while so many lay sick or dying,
while so many found salvation
at the end of a rope, or a gun,
or a tailpipe, or the bottom of a bottle of pills,
or just the bottom of a bottle,
I awoke and realized all was vanity.

All the tyrsts, the drunken fumbling for genitalia,
the one-night stands, the wet pavement
in the morning of the day after,
the little arguments over scrambled eggs and toast,
the minor heartaches and hangovers
of some three hundred odd days
were really nothing more than childish tantrums
and a yearning to be young again.

All the petty disputes, the minor catastrophes,
even the weather formed only fading memories
of a year in passing: little more than grains of sand
in the hourglass of Time.

Only our laughter and mirth kept us alive
while the sun returned and Orion
crawled slowly across the sky
hunting the Future.

So we wake up to another decade
and decide to live more and fuller lives,
regardless of terrorists intent on blowing us up
and sending us to Allah,
or the intelligentsia who tell us how the world
is and what stocks to invest in.

We wake up to the first day of our lives
nearly ten years separated from 9/11,
from the rampant fear and loathing
of a xenophobic culture bent on repeating the past
and all of its mistakes and missteps,
stumbling towards the dustbin of Time.

Dinosaurs, anyone?

Winter Thoughts

The rain is falling again today. Brief spells of quiet broken by a thousand drops of rain falling on the ground outside my window. Maybe it will rain again tomorrow. And the day after. Who knows? The light outside my window reminds me of something. I can't remember; the past, maybe, or the future, or something slowly taking shape in my thoughts. I am not privy to it, whatever it is. Only the rain falling outside my window offers me any comfort. And what comfort does the rain offer? Little, I think; less than a cup of water to one in the desert. Still less than fresh air to one swallowed up by the earth. Maybe it offers us the comfort of washing away the past, gently eroding the lines of our fates tangled and woven together in knots.

Just as I decide there may be some comfort to the rain, it stops, dispelling me of the notion that the earth cares about us, the way dogs care about fleas. Deep inside my shallow skull a thought stirs, stretches its limbs and returns to sleep.

How old we grow during the long, rainy seasons. How like the dead we become upon waking and again upon our descent into sleep. How tired and sullen our eyes shine out of our skulls as the grim morning meets our gaze. Each morning and night is the same struggle to live, to embrace the cold certainty of our fading dreams and shattered hopes. Each morning brings us closer to something, to death, to life, to that ineffable frontier beyond the simple acts of living and dying. With each passing day and night, the cycle of the Earth's orbital dance along the trajectory of its fate, we become hardened to the mysteries of simplicity. We grow from infants to adulthood in the flash of an eye, barely registering the passage of individual thoughts and the span of years separating one moment from the last.

Legion are those who suffer under the oppressions of their own making, finding solace in the dregs of wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays, in that silent, drunken sleep without dreams from which they emerge more exhausted, closer to the despair hanging palpably around their hearts. They can neither run nor turn to face their fears. They look to the ground for signs of dawn and tread carefully across the wreckage their lives have become only to find a wall of mythical proportions stretching out in either direction. There, they finally turn and face their fear, smiling gently and cruelly at them out of their own reflections.

The rain has stopped. It will start falling again, but for now it has stopped and the world glistens with the same possibilities it had while the sun shone down upon us before this interminable winter of our dissolution settled into our thoughts.

And this too shall pass. As the sun riseth, so does it set...

(insert sinister, evil laughter here...)

At the dawn of a new day, while the record skips, and the moods attack us (here being the royal "We"), we stave off another defeat, another chance to allow history to continue on without us. Have you seen tomorrow? Have you seen what will come?

I have a guess...simple, really: Time marches on without no man.

What is new? What is old? What will be? Easy questions with hard answers. There is a place...somewhere between North and No North, in between the moment and the future...

Somewhere...

R3

That's Funny

It's funny how the feeling comes and goes, the heat of its fires and the fierceness of a cold akin to death; the mind subtely stumbling along composing verses to the wind and no one. It is similar to the allegory of footprints in the sand and a limirick about a man from Nantucket, something about going for a walk and falling flat on your face because your legs have been cut off. Probably drunk. While else does a man with no legs try to walk? And a writer with no thumbs? That's also funny.

What's even funnier is my lack of concern. There are words, some dark and evil, and others ancient and true written into the very fabric of reality. These words have a certain amount of power to describe what is written for all to see. The slow churning of the universe does not concern itself with us. As a friend so aptly scrawled across my bathroom walls recently in spray paint: "The Universe is old. Time stands still. Fear will always exist. Enjoy the ride." HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA...

The joke continues!

Two Pints of Gin

"...I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid."

Forty-eight hours and two pints of gin later, this bitter taste fills my mouth. Americans are bitter and according to some the earth is slowly sinking into its own shit. Traces of this bitterness can be found everywhere, no less so than the mirror. Spring is upon us, has sprung, so to speak. The good General Peaches went to Washington with a chest full of medals and a bloviated, bovine tongue telling us to hold our breath a while longer, perhaps long enough for the lack of oxygen to make us hallucinate Victory. The bitter dispute between the first Firsts drags on towards August and the Denver convention, two embittered, battling siblings trying to court the votes of Americans too bitter after eight years of lying, smug condescension to notice the rug has been pulled out from under them and the lights are quickly going dim on the new, American Century.

Are we really so bitter that we can't even accept criticism for the things we have become? Those two pints of gin came in handy when the shit started raining down from the skies, along with credit lines and the burgeoning disparity between real and imagined truths. Paris might as well be burning down and the Visigoths sacking Rome all over again. Nothing matters anymore, not the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, not to mention the untold number of Iraqis (a hundred thousand? two hundred? a million?) while we casually look on surrounded by the glow of our flat screen televisions, not even Mom's home-made, store-bought apple pie. No one cares about the outcome of the next twenty minutes, much less elections in November. They only want to keep their houses and for traffic not to stall on the freeways as they drive their SUVs a hundred and eighty miles an hour towards Prosperity City and the Good Life. All the while, the mine shaft is filling up with exhaust and the canary is dying. The mine shaft, by the way, happens to be the country we're living in. Can you guess who the canary is? Nobody cares about the fucking canary anymore, or their souls. You can buy Abe Lincoln's on eBay for a pretty penny these days, but don't think about buying yours back unless you've got a lick of sense and two pints of gin.

I am hesitant during these sunny days of Spring. My hands are still shaking from the gin and the sky could be falling but I'm too afraid to look up lest I catch a piece of it in my eye. I hear the chorus of make-believers calling for me to come out and play, but I'm not buying into their promises of sunshine and good times. Just as the days start growing longer they grow short again and before you know it, Winter is upon us once more. Each one grows longer than the last, the summers shorter, the bones creaking more and more. Old age has teeth, contrary to popular opinion, and its bite can leave a nasty infection. The sky hasn't started clouding up yet, nor has the air grown colder. Winter is still a long ways off, but don't think it's gone. It's always lurking under a rock somewhere, which makes you wonder if it weren't better to leave the stones unturned and gathering moss, to not look back but keep on going. With each passing moment we grow older, but not wiser.

Hesitancy. Before crossing the street, before opening the door, or answering the phone. If the world started spinning a different direction would I even notice? If the sun rose in the west and not the east, if birds started barking and the seas boiling would it even matter? I can't say. The only thing I can say is that Americans are bitter, bitter the world didn't turn out the way it was supposed to, that their elected leaders are idiots, or worse, diabolical. They are bitter gas prices are too high for them to drive their SUVs, bitter that global warming sometimes makes things colder before it gets hotter, that the end may be just around the corner. But is it? Have we reached the end of a millennium only to find there is no bright, shining city on the hill, no coming Messiah to save us from the burning wreckage of ourselves? Of course Americans are bitter. No one likes us. They can't stand our loud conversations on our cell phones as we drive madly down the freeway in our monsters from the Stone Age. We have become a bitter people, too afraid of what might happen to us should we fall off the top of the dung heap, too afraid of the horrors of our own invention, too afraid our chickens might finally come home to roost. In short, we are afraid the eternal Footman will laugh his fucking head off at our vain-glorious, botoxed skin, our death's head mask we wear to fend off notions of our own mortality. We have become bitter because even we will not live forever. Not even the promise of everlasting salvation can save us from the fears and questions that come into our thoughts at three in the morning, no matter who is manning the gates or answering the phone.

I'm no more bitter than the rest of you, just hesitant about what to do, whether anything really matters. I haven't reached Nihilism yet, but I can see its shores in the distance. I can almost make out the skyline of a bitter city full of bitter people who can no longer tell right from wrong, who cannot see the future because they cannot make one for themselves. I am afraid of the same things, that my imagination will fail me at the crucial moment just before the deadline, or is this only the starting gate? It's hard to know which way to go when you've been spinning in circles for so long. "Stop that train, I want to get off." Who was that? Jimmy Cliff? I suppose it doesn't matter. It's the honest truth. This ride has gone on far too long and I want to get off. Not the sunny days, or the cute girls in their short skirts, not even the promise of tomorrow can change my mind.

Rarely does the world make sense these days, and when it does it's usually a disappointment, which is why you need two pints of gin, preferably the good stuff, but the cheap shit does the trick as well. Gin is good for what ails the soul in these bitter days precisely because it is bitter. The Russians have vodka and the French their wine, but here in America we need a bit of everything. Too vast a world, too vast a continent. We burned up our souls and all our credit marching East to West, and here at the end of the continent, staring off towards Asia you feel the emptiness setting in. So much ocean, so much empty space. Left alone with one's self, the mind becomes bitter at the prospect of nothing left to look forward to, nothing left to conquer, nothing left to steal but empty space. All we have left now is hope, hope the future is not as fucked up as the past, not another doorway to nowhere. I have to admit even I don't know what is driving us these days, probably the gin, but also a sense of hope tinged with bitterness at knowing how the world works and how the shit comes raining down.

Time to Go...

There are two distinct views on the meaning of Time.

One view is that Time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and Time itself is something that can be measured. This is the realist's view, to which Sir Isaac Newton subscribed, and hence is sometimes referred to as Newtonian Time.

A contrasting view is that Time is part of the fundamental human intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them, and compare the motions of objects. In this second view, Time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows", that objects "move through", or that is a "container" for events, but that Time, rather than being an objective thing to be measured, is part of the measuring system used by humans. [1]

He needed the fuck out. Not out of this room, or this town, or even this state of mind, but out. Just fucking out. He could feel the urge to leave seeping into every pore of his being, not because he wanted to run away from something, but because he had for too long run away from himself.

He became a narrative voice dictating to my fingers, the one speaking for me. I stared at the words written out before me. He had only just written them, but I was barely able to remember their origin. The feeling of urgency he felt, the quick glances over his shoulder to make sure he wasn't being followed, the nervous twitch over his left eye, these things became my feelings of urgency at the lateness of the hour, my quick glances over the shoulder and into the dark corners of the room. I felt a twitch above my left eye that had only moments before been words. Was I being followed? Had I had this feeling of urgency moments before? Was I not now feeling the urge to flee from this self I had become, to flee away from this place that I, and in turn, he, had come to call home? Did I not shake with fear at familiar faces I could not recall, or hear the sounds of someone calling a name I might have once been known by?

I could not remember the day or the hour that this urge to flee had come upon me, or if it had been my own or someone else's. I could only recall something I had read, though could not remember, which only strengthened this resolve, made my decision seem sane, at least to my mind. I had to go, get the fuck out and not look back over my shoulder no matter how strong the urge to do so made me shudder as though cold, and made the spot above my left eye twitch uncontrollably. Suddenly, it felt as though Time had become an enemy I could no longer ignore. Time became something I must court into the small hours of the night, holding it close to me though I could feel my flesh rotting away, feel my teeth falling out, and all that I held dear turning to dust. Time told me to get on with My LIfe, away from this and you, away from all that I held dear to me...

and I had no choice but to listen...

The First Law of Thermodynamics (I Stole This Poem From A Drunk Guy)

Ah, this place or this
moment, or maybe
this self I've become-
who is always in love
and miserable...

Lonely, ecstatic, tired, so tired-
wired into that suicidal survival trip,
restless, relentless, unrepentant,
and sad, always sad...

Not about Fate, or the world,
or all the lovers who were more
than lovers, the friends
who were less than friends,
all those who wouldn't or couldn't
live up to my expectations.

(I can't even live up to my expectations)

...but sad! sad! because life is beautiful,
yes, but also horrible and tragic and stupid-
and it's a fucking mystery what the whole
goddamn point of it is-

Or if there is one,
or if, by asking the question,
you create the meaning,
or the lack there of...

The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Life feeds on Life) or (Why I Am Not a Vegetarian)

You can steal my work
call it your own, do whatever
the fuck you want to with it-
You can fuckin' have it.

But if you think I stole this or that,
"Go fuck yourself!"

Everything is stolen: this life,
the next one, the air you breathe,
the food you eat, the life you take,
the one you give, the one you receive-

Stolen, all of it stolen!!

But I wrote this and those other things,
whether you like them or not-

And don't tempt me 'cause
I'm liable to write some more,
which will probably be
even worse than this.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics (Ennui vs. Entropy)

There are laws for everything-
of sines, cosines, the jungle, averages,
particle pleasures (I mean partial pressure!);
a law of parsimony, which defeats poetry
only to be conquered by poetry and vice versa;
the law of means, a law of refraction,
reflection, of nations, motion and thought,
which states:

"Any of three basic laws of logic,
including the law of contradictions
(nothing can be both true and false),
the law of excluded middle
(everything can be both true and false),
and the law of identity,
which says any proposition implies itself.

Then this girl at the next table says
she was a stripper for one night,
had quit and never went back-
I think she's lying, but then again
that's my opinion, neither true or false.

Only moments before she'd condemned
a man who had never left this town,
which is a million miles away,
or seen the world or other cultures-

I had to tell her that even people
who have traveled the world sometimes
only see what they want to see
and never change, or grow or know
why it is you have to rail against
the stupidity that infects us all.

And she shut up for a while,
seemed slightly humbled-
but here she is again talking about
being a stripper and I still think she's lying,
either nervous about the moments
of silence between words, or too afraid
of letting anyone else sound as sure
and smart as she thinks she is.

No wonder I hate her, she's just like me-
God! What an Asshole I am;
oh well, fuck it. She's either terrified
of life or herself, or something else
and I shouldn't waste my time
or my words.