a piece i just wrote last night...

(and, yay! i finally have the internet again!)

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inland shoreline blues

3/30/05

around in loops and squiggles I wiggle and twirl
with my nerves aflame, on the tips of icesickles –
I still smell you on my skin!
and like snowflakes that plunge below
streetlamps amber in the depth of winter’s last
springtime grasp you’re distant,
calming, soothing and nearly here
like a phantom fuck,
that ethereal you riding me like
a perfumed wind, smell I can’t quite shake
the one I wouldn’t should I could
but I cannot
so I’ll just plead ignorance and keep cruising
down this deadpan desert road, single dirty hand
on a single dusty wheel
where the sun slides into the earth as
smooth legs into a dusky pool
and electric sunset canvases bleed into black
when the stars get restless,
wrapping my hallucinatory journey
in cooling air perfectly poisoned
by a
moment
just beyond the vanishing point of
this circular foxhunt
endless

alaska

3/17/05

I can’t help but wonder
if under brightmoon starcover
I’d stolen myself away last night
if I’d rolled north to the mountains
on a ribbon of black
and told everyone I faded off, faking my death

amongst the caribou and auroras –
living like a god of the world

perhaps the pines would have pointed me to nirvana
and the slow rivers borne me to bliss
all the while with the wind the one who’d hold me
whenever I’d get lost for a moment

guess I’ll stay

3/17/05

I’m back in that bar again
the smoky one, corner-pub down in the
dimlit downtown
where olympian swimmers are the losers and
the runners, well, they’re
the day’s grand heroes, men of myth
whose rough cotton skins burst at the seams from
endless courage
as they spin their tales and
raise their sails
for a destination anywhere but here
to a place anytime
from now
but the funny thing is
drink after drink, time after time
I look up and notice I’m
the only patron here
a sad old man whose heroes
ran away in the night
and left me swimming towards

something

tsunami of Nevada sun and Mexican wind
coats me like batter and i'm lost beneath the pain
of carefree summertime whimsy
and
day-glo
           horizonsmiles
in the west
if they'd told me it would be this way
i would have just sipped a little more

but here i find myself sitting and lamenting about things i'd rather not divugle unless i speak in the muted tones of a geriatric fool, wheelchair bound on the fast track to a life void of smiles, peanuts, and dewey grass on the bottom of barefoot mornings. i'm so afraid, deathly fucking afraid, of something i know i have to someday do, but i'm stuck again... like a rabbit under the steel wheels of a coal-fired iron horse of long, long ago, that never seems to quite go away, but just lingers a few feet behind you, shining its weak lanternlight on the back of your mind like some idiot weilding a candle ready to expire, wax melting and running down his hands like white blood, the stuff of ambition and confidence.

why can't i do this?

the bottle isn't the answer
but oh how i wish it was
sometimes
like now
as this hurricane screams
its heavy fright-train avalanche mockings

no idea where this one came from ... at all. just one'a them thar poetic blasts from the great beyond, ah reckon.

i hope all is completely pleasant in your world, reader, and have the sweetest of nights.

---------------------------------

done, just like the other one

3/10/05

her dreams collapsed in on themselves
like a pumpkin on the porch
solidified and liquefied
in Halloween’s freeze
but oh how those dreams used to cling tight
her little fingers clutching handfuls of quilt
in the dark –

now
they glide away like cars on ice
careening lazily crazily towards lord knows what
and all she knows
is that
he’s the only one
who’d care
the only one who’d ever notice
her sunken autumn smile and
yellowsquash eyes

i'm soooo tired, reader! I've been stuck bobbing up and down in a sea of drama today, clinging to nothing but the seat of a shitty airplane that crashed and threw me here; the stewardess told me it would function as a floatation device, but she's starting to lose her credibility.

perhaps some beauty rest is in order for the Goat tonight.

Alas, i wrote, finally! This last trip to SLC has really fired up the poetry engines, so hopefully those don't run out, and i can crank out some more work. This one i'm posting tonight originally formed about a week and a half ago, drawing off the guatemala experience (mostly the nighttime mediatation in Tikal), but now merged with some of the inspiration i received and felt in Utah this past weekend. For what it's worth, here it is. (I've written better, and this is a bit of a departure from my most recent works, but shit, i'll post it anyways, since it feels like it's finished.)

Sleep well, reader, and dream of sweet stuff.

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maslow

3/8/05

fade into the twilight

forget not these lonely cries and scattered
dead-resonant driftwood thoughts
that slither about
in a bit of grass before me –
         serpentine sharp slivers of
         yesterday’s smiles and the blackened laughs of ages
         seduced by whimsy in the occasional
but before you sublimate into the peppered night
remember how I’d climb
to the top of it all and sing a
silent tune
around
the
stones
twirling on a whim
while trees and leaves blacken your silence
and explode from the pressure of frozen elation
I found in the ascent to those
forbidden
expiring
distances
between you and I, the ones that
still make me sigh slow spring tears
in the night like midnight mist

so one last time
before you go
rise to the moon and dance with me! come see
this world in that muted chime
as the lord of all and saint of none
pivoting across the branched leaves
of trees twittered and scaled
skidding
like a weary warrior child
bellowing as her father fell, bastard sun
roasting skins of the thousands who wept
for us

and at last
after all this fade

i want to drink more... kris and i broke up.

exorcise.

be the one who always dreams; who never stops to see the greens but lives to fly during the great divides. but why stop there? greatness comes not from rebound headshots but from redesigned apescapes; drunken topographies overlayed with sexual overtones never ignored but always pushed aside, like kittens in the mud. it's a nasty place to be, but we love it... so we cherish our times together, like a warden and his prisoner on the way to the chair.

we revel in these fancies like children basking in moonlight, drunk on popscicles and marshmallows. we'd choose to ignore them, but to ignore them would be bliss, and we hate that - we despise the thought of living in a state of endless contentment, so we press on, spraying molten plastic everywhere we look, casting our fury over anyone that dare tell us it's okay - that what we're in for, what we're in, is, in reality, what we've always hoped and dreamed for. That this grand mess we've fallen into is indeed the cat's flaxen hat; it's a fucking gas! And i'm the grease monkey, making it all happen.

You and I don't want that. Like magnets, we'll try until we rupture our minds to negate what we know holds true... even if it means falling down an dark and endless cravasse into the mirror we see before our very eyes.

I hope you've had a fucking awesome Saturday night, reader, and sleep beautifully tonight.

but... in some bizarre twist of the flow, i still feel like writing, and not meandering back downstairs to veg in front of the TV or to go take a shower or something similar. Part of me would like to get out and shoot some photos, but i'm still recuperating a bit from my last round of creeping death, so my body isn't really as excited about those plans as I'd wish it was. Alas.

problem is, i have no clue what to write about.

generally, i can hop on the computer and write away till my little heart's content, should i choose to begin writing in the first place. but lately, especially after sometime in december i think, i can't seem to blast my thoughts out quite the way i used to. hell, even formulating those thoughts has been a struggle that comes and goes with an apparant lack of reason.

don't get me wrong - Goats love to travel. sometimes, though, all that roaming can burn a person out, and that's what i really feel like; just burned out.

maybe i'll go take a shower after all.

blogger fucking sucks!

i just lost another post!

damn you... damn you to hell!

i guess it's not even worth rewriting. just a recap of today, anyways (made soup, lifted, talked with meri and brad and zanny which rocked, watched a bit of Two Towers, and packed some of my stuff in the basement for the move. and hopefully i'll be going out to drink tonight.)

blogger... psh. i don't know about you sometimes. you're like... a zucchini to me.

if you could push my buttons, which one would you push?

Would you turn me on? would you look at me the way you used to, setting me on edge, awakening satan within?

or would you turn me off? cast rhetoric my way and drench my body in crystals of the purest snow?

or would you push that little blue button way down there? i'd buzz and squeak and squak like the box you only wished i was! but that wouldn't be enough.

you'd have to find the green button...

but of even that i know not where 'tis.

it's another friday night in bismarck, looped-out from my sickness and coming down from a mean happy-hour buzz... and all this seems so fucking inconsequential. when you're thirty-five thousand feet in the air or lost in the tears of a steel guitar you look down on the world and realise sometimes that this is all just a fucking confused and jumbled mess of trivialities that everyone is having heart attacks over; and that none of it really matters. the kicker is that all of us know what matters, and i'd share it with you if you didn't consciously know this, reader, but i'm simply too tired, too zonked, too looped to do so ... and it would ruin the suprise.

i guess what i'm a-sayin' is that people just need to slow the fuck down and chill out and realise that life never fucking ends and that maybe doing nothing is doing something and doing something might mean you're doing nothing. let it all go and go to sleep... it's okay.

and i'd go to sleep, but my head won't let me - it races around like a cat whose ass is shooting forth the flames of hell itself. My ears are plugged and i can't think but oh my head sure likes to chatter, like a television in a crack-binge deathgrip. The fucker won't shut up for the life of me, and i might as well be a man sentenced to a life in the desert with nothing to keep me company save for the noise of the wind blowing 'cross the sand, and nothing to keep me warm at night save for the stars.

the small things in life, though, do offer some comfort. hot showers aim to please and often succeed. So do warm blankets and tiny shining offerings of fine sounds, such as Calexico, Loreena McKennitt, or Slayer. They'll show you a bit of the light that can be so hard to find sometimes, but when you hit stop, oh, the light fades... and you're left in the cold dark again. With a brain that's engaged for the long haul, the trek over the mountains that you can only wish never existed.

All the dude ever wanted was his immune system back.

I just wanted to make it visible to the world that I am getting so awfully sick of being sick! It seems like after the last big round of antibiotics, in the spring of last year (for something like 3 months), i've had absolutely no immune system to speak of. Coming back from Guatemala was evil; i brought back at least bronchitis, but perhaps a mild case of strep as well. This time... who knows. I think it's just your garden-variety ass-kicker of a cold, that i must have picked up during my trip to Palm Springs, California last week, but who knows. All i know is that i slept like utter shit last night (only about four hours, due to extreme coughing... sometimes to the point where i almost puked from the sheer intensity of the attacks), and that i feel like a 18-wheeler ran over me. This morning i was so weak i could barely towel myself off after showering, and i still feel just exhausted. In an effort to regain some strength i went to bed at 8 this evening, but didn't really fall asleep until just before ten or so - when my boss called me from Idaho to help him fix some of software he's demoing tomorrow. Then, i talked to Brianne, Becky, and Zanny, which was badass - but now i'm all energized and can't seem to fall asleep.

When one can't sleep, one shall blog.

Perhaps i'll meander off to bed in a little bit, though, and give it a second shot. I hope you're feeling wonderful, reader, and that life is nothing short of the cat's pyjamas. Sleep and dream well tonight.

i have no clue what this is about. Sometimes the gosh-derned things just done write themselves.

Hope you're having a pleasant Friday evening, reader, doing what you're doing, from raising hell on the town or pulling a Goat and just sitting around the house (not by choice, mind, but ... everyone else is off doing other shit apparently. alas.)

Sleep well tonight, and dream sweetly, punk.

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empire blastfuck #8

2/18/05

downcast solid eve with
a pinch of blue; steel guitar and
a blending of shadows
folding with the frontier driftwood
seaspray waltzes
beneath
tired grayfog western edges
beside
startossed blackened beaches –
fuzzy forced horizons
that aren’t the solid sisters
but the flaccid brothers
to each place and face
that swims out
amongst the sweet scents
to descend on my skin –

mosquitoes in the desert
parched and cocked with greed

(she’s been gone
          for years)

ready to drink, rejected
by my dry and resonant condition –
a booming drumstump
filled with fairy tones and airy drones
(her smile
          the sound
of snow)
and that fallow light
projecting from my eyes

tired... whispy-wandery world wassailing; travel-tittilation and nipple-vacationing... swirly-time in the desert! deprevation of sleep crawls over the Goat mind like ants at this hour, cutting wee bits of my mind and stealing them back to the cave... the hill ... to grow fungus to feed the millions.

but i'm no beast of burden, even though i'm shaggy and infested with the pestilence of a fourth-world country. poverty be damned; i am a missile ready to strike, and i hold your sullen words at bay! fear my nose, for it is grand. well, not so grand as a tasty man, who loves his monkey, but ... grand in sort of an extravagant manner... mere icing on the pop-tart.

and what, you say, is the pop-tart filled with on this night that reeks of desert hornblowing ass-ramblers? Cinderblocks and citrus popscicles! Trailercourts and sheet-metal holding pens for late-model Datsuns! And cacti; lots and lots of foolish little cacti, plotting a dream they'll never see, cause they can't fucking run.... cause they're CACTI - and cacti just don't have feet these days do they? no!

because of the pilgrims. see... they didn't really know what the fuck layed out west, of course, being fucking sailors and shit, but once they saw the evil, insidious cacti of the coast they were just fucked...

alas, i digress from my original intent tonight; gel of the hair. i retrieved said business from a certain store whose logo is a red bullseye sort of device, a company hideous in its drive and driven mad by its lust for one thing: ass. THey're based in the fine resort community of Minneapolis, MN, home to raw food enthusiasts and various other fare like catastrophic infusions of wild green mushrooms and cheesed-out bung-fucker-moments.

See, quaintoisity and beepin' buzzers freak me out at night, especially when they're not in minneapolis, land of the dead and specter of my netherosity... they're like boldface flashes of false-fronted homes splattered in a riotous orgasm of color on the walls... quite like nothing i've ever even imagined. or seen... much to my dismay.

so, i say fuck it all. let's just play with our collective selves tomorrow (it is sunday, i reckon, a fine day to wither away into nothing, a pile of sorrow, lamenting the lord and his failings in a false religion, so let's just get drunk tonight, pass out under the stars, and wish for seitan and Valerie, tofu and Charles, tempeh and Randy Lee, while we throw pennies at the moon! they'll never fall on us.)

tonight, peel. sleep and feel. drink a bit and become a tit and roll around some more! Russia won't care and China wants it; let it come! And tomorrow, wake up, roll off the bed and squarely place your feet on the floor... and remember nothing but your smile as you slipped into a cozy land of dreams you always knew was there... but was just out of reach.

Until now.

well i'll be a monkey's uncle. i just contacted brianne and she was asleep; she'd evidently crashed out last night and then took some naps later in the day, including the one i awoke her from. she's unsure if she wants to head out to open-mic night, but said she would call me later to inform me one way or another.

Either way, it's totally fine by me. I'm somewhat chilled out this evening, and even though i'd just love to go read some poetry, I would have no major qualms with simply kicking back tonight and writing or curling up on the loveseat downstairs with a hot, sexy book.

If I can harness the writing urge, however, i'd like most to be able to capitalize on it and get some stuff done. I've hardly been able to write a thing since i returned from Guatemala, and i'm finally just becoming able to do so. A lot of that may have been due to the bronchitis i came back with, which subsequently made me feel like utter shit and drove me to sleep for hours (that's all i seem to have accomplished last week). However, amongst the sleep, i've had to deal with reacclimating myself to the American lifestyle and world-view. This, more than anything, may have been preventing me from writing; my poor little Goat-mind was just in too great a state of shock to do anything but shut down and pass out, right along with my sickened body.

Thankfully that sickness and overall "what the fuck" feeling have both subsided, if not gone away entirely. The former i'm quite glad for; this latest round of creeping death was nothing short of fucking bunkass. The latter, however, is still bunkass; the fact that i've found it so easy to drop back into American society is disgusting. The experiences, stories, and sheer memories of Guatemala and my work with the Project down there are fading far too fast, and i fear that ultimately it's a defense mechanism i'm subconsciously employing to help me cope with being back here. The first two days were really odd, and i didn't care for America so much, so i think that might be my way of dealing with the inevitabilty that i live here; to simply push all those things I lived through (and for) in Guatemala back behind the daily trivialities of life.

But it shouldn't be that way! Life is not about day-to-day shit like ever-changing stock prices, celebrity courtroom battles, or the rat-race hunt for the best prices on frivolous consumer goods like Palm Pilots. Life is about the richness of human experience and the wholesome feeling of happiness one can bring others through simple acts of compassion. Life is about seizing the chances you are given to make a difference, and creating those chances for yourself and others. Life is about seeing everything and ignoring nothing. Life is not about settling for what you feel is the best you can get, or the best you can do. Instead, life is about constantly pushing the envelope and evolving to a place you never knew existed, and then doing it all over again. Wrap all of it up, shove it in a nice organic, vegan tortilla, and you've got one hell of a way to live.

Like i've said before, life is your burrito - stop messing around and eat the fucker!

Enjoy your night, reader, and if you've some salsa picante, break that shit out, too.

more Guatemala-inspired work!

Alas, it's almost time to get ready for open-mic night. I'm planning on giving Brianne a buzz and seeing if she's still game for going, and if so, i'll likely go pick her up and head over to Cafe Aroma for some Thursday-night artist-community hellraising! Hopefully it's actually going on and it's not just a rumour. Until I get off my ass and come back to post another entry, though, have the most fantastic of evenings, and when you find yourself heading to bed, dream sweetly.

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stuck

2/10/05

movement seems dire
in the forward regard
as an empty day stuffed
with washed-out scarecrows
colors on by
cause god, I need to let slip
the memory of that place
where I slid across the streets
in a feathery embrace, upon
clouds of smoke in an endless hope
for things I cannot mention
but I can’t forget, so here I’ll sit

I’d mention those things
that I remember
a little here and a little there
but they’re all tiny slivers
just beneath the surface –
plucking one is to loathe them all
and it’s
beauty
in the sunlight that I’d remember
I’d take the pain and cast it away
only knowing the flowers
and the way they glued
themselves to the street
as
they
fell
plummeting into fresh cement
like the dying of fancies or wished-on stars
each of them
streaming and streaking and exploding towards
this masked and hidden way

but if I’d open the door
and let it come back
I’ll know the sorrow
was just a shadow weak and hoarse
barely heard and rarely spied
so instead I could take a stance
and paint the past
in washed-out blues, aged yellows,
and rusted rouges
each lime-based and recklessly applied
with the precision of watchmakers
to shadow-walls and saddened-halls –
like so much Spanish and birdsong,
just a few flowers
trapped and floating
on an ancient cobblestone road

It seems like my poetry has taken a graceful nosedive into a pile of shit these past few weeks; back in october and november i was cranking out what i thought was some pretty stellar stuff. For some reason, though, it's just not coming to me as well. Sometimes these things happen, though, and one can't explain them nor force the opposite - good writing - to happen. It more or less just blasts out of nowhere for me. However, to be true, I was writing more often than as well, whereas lately i've been pulled away in other directions, namely work and the trips to SLC and Guatemala. Perhaps i've just been out of practice. Alas, either way, this latest piece is an attempt to jump-start another run of writing, and with much luck i'll be able to start cranking pieces out on a more regular basis.

For now, though, a nice, long, steamy shower sounds awfully pleasant, so I think i'll take advantage of my water heater (a great thing to own, i've come to realise since Guatemala) and go shower like it's going out of style. Have a pleasant night, reader, and dream sweetly.

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easier done than said

2/1/05

there’s this blank material lust
filling me tonight
and, oh, it sounds like a ghost town
a hollow whistlenote of the simple folk
that speaks of their wholesome moments –
fried-chicken talk shows
and heartwarming malt-liquor rodeos –
white trash comfort foods
to take our minds
off the good
things in life
like ejaculating words hither and yon
in a lyrical blast
deprived
of
sleep
winding around the sky like a silken thread
and moon like the
smallest
of
smiles
lone keeper of the watch

realization is pain, the chainsaw carve
and evangelizing is worse
so let’s fuck it all and fire up the Weber
raise our cans and toast to the darkness
that comfortable shroud before our eyes
anchor to the past
‘cause in those dusky trailer courts
we spread the lies
white and hot as smoke
fresh from the grill

but I struggle to light the coals –
the closer the match gets, every time
I remember!
and it slows, fingers roasting
by a tiny fire
creeping ever higher up
the little wooden stick

in this empty village of hopes shattered
on the edge of ignorance I’m caught
with not a hint of bliss nor smoke to cloud
just the light I can’t forget

well shit. i'd planned on heading to the open mic night tonight at Cafe Aroma, but i found out after reading a few of my works beforehand, to warm up and try to figure out how best to deliver them, that i couldn't speak for shit tonight. My head is still a bit stuffed up, so my enunciation just kept going to shit. sometimes i suck at enunciating anyways, and tend to run my words together, so tonight was just an extension of that, and if i'm going to read, i'd like to give it my all. So i decided to just camp out at home instead and take a night off, and perhaps hit next week's open mic night before i take off for Guatemala on the 16th.

Instead of reading, then, i wrote! Here's my latest experiment in channeling the creative flow. I hope you're having a stellar night, reader, and that you're happy and feeling just fine. Dream sweetly tonight.

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the desert cave Antarctic

1/6/05

come desert land
fly toward me on wings
of blue corn sunsets, roll to me
over sand highways the color of coal
and flood over me
like a flow of white smiles
and the scent of unwashed hair
on a southerly gale

as your eastern torch rises I’ll scream out
in a muffled cry the names of the ones
let go
the little girls and great kings forsaken
and after my voice shatters, goes hoarse from a list
long and endless
I’ll grasp my hat and
wander off alone
as I do in times like these, this night, bitter and dark
down that coal-dust road
but don’t worry, it’s just sand
and dead tears beneath these old heels,
grains of nothing peppering a land
sucked dry of the verdant god I seek

and over this land that floats to me, the one I walk over
like a vagabond zombie
I feel you, taste you on the wind and hear you
in the clouds
and in the sky I see molten hate ejected from your
volcano eyes, engorged orbs that spill turpentine
and light the grass aflame
blessing this land in a death that screams
and curses your name
beneath the stars

but it’s a weak, comatose loathing
at its center, and stands little chance
against the antiseptic unforgiving sandpaper surface
of this desert reality drifting my way –
these little red stones littering my path
hold resilient to your white fury

here, I walk protected in the holiest of
shrines, impenetrable and
beyond you, at the cusp of myself –
just a windblown Johnny Appleseed
on a scenic byway,
the great divide