pretty little girl

i lost.

i have visits. and phone calls.
you know what she says to me?

when are you coming home, daddy?
and that, i don’t know what you say to that.

every day.
sometimes it’s short. sometimes it’s long.
you know, she’s four.
she’s cute, too.

i'm nineteen.

jennifer.

yeah, she’s healthy.
she’s just a pretty little girl.

she would have a baby sister, too.
but she went and did it.
she really went and did it.

i don’t know how i didn’t do it.
just kill her.

you will feel like strangling her.

i'm going to have quick smoke.

i just need to save a little more.
then i’m going to convince her
to give me my girl and hopefully
i’ll take her to the states.
we’ll settle down.

twenty-six.

she’s due again in five months.
wants a DNA test for this one.

i’m going to go before i get too emotional.
you have a good night.

i will.

pissing and spitting

but this is not
a place for creative insight
get out of here
bar the gates
and burn the books
(while you're at it)
maybe we'll get something done
or maybe not but as long
as the machine keeps spinning
that rumbling hum will
drown us into sleep
and i am sorry howard roark
we will deny (even you!) your
martyrdom
by spitting
on the grave
on the page
where the last of knights
quivers and dies
under candlelight.

the insistence on the word

is what i think will do us in
or so i think no reason why
it just seems a bit too para
lyzing (not that such a book
is malicious or fallacious
fallacious in content but)
i think it’s locking up
the minds of we-free-
people clamoring with
our phds saying look
(at me) now see (what i’ve
done) now give me my
gold star (it’s mine, right)
because the word teaches
us little children that if
you try real real hard then
the light will conquer
this chaotic sphere (of
which we’re terrified)
but they take only bits
and pieces and they
insist on two or three
hand-picked orders
they feel like following
instead of the whole
shebang
so let me get this straight
i should cast my
rationality giddily aside
instead of thinking (for
once) and be at peace
but i’m exhausted from
hating and if this chaotic
sphere gives us one thing
it’s some common goddamnground
and these razor sharp
rocks are all my feet
have left to (goddamn) stand on
but then i guess
that’s your point (la
vérité brille) and
your excuse is as
inconsequential as mine.

ad nauseam

if i had known her better
i might not have immediately thought
SUICIDAL
when i beheld the old lady’s
decrepit shuffle to her sedan
in the grocery store parking lot
this bright thursday morning.
she shuffled on
as if void of purpose
and such purposelessness were
out of her control.
either age
or lack of use
had siphoned out the once-raging
blood from her weathered hands
from her fingertips now resignedly,
valiantly clasped
around her push cart,
and she reeked of it.
the stench of her uselessness.
the wood of her casket.

and i felt bad jumping to
SUICIDAL
i mean okayokayokay
who knows
she might have plenty
going on in her life
but
we both knew
that was society scolding me for thinking
just what everyone else was thinking:
SUICIDAL
we like to stamp it on everybody
with a sad song or a gloomy gaze
because we are important
we have
PURPOSE
we have a certificate signed dr. whohastimetocare
stuck up on the refrigerator
eight by eleven inch validation
a golden anachronism held high
above our heads
for our dried-out parents
now weary of investing in the future
of the future of the future of the future,

and as i watched
that faded, cloudy crown
crumbling through that woman’s fingers
in the grocery store parking lot
i realized why she hung on to her
cart so tightly
why she bothered to buy a specific
brand of peanut butter
and to remember her niece’s birthday
because who needs something so small
so geologically insignificant
so colossally and undeniably trifling
so evolutionarily inconsequential
just an old woman
breathing deeply
filling her nostrils with the smell
of atrophy to which they have long
grown accustomed.

so SUICIDAL or not
i watched her take the cart
back to the place where everybody
puts the cart
awry
and i watched her long hobble
back to the car and i watched her
get in the car and adjust her mirrors
and light a cigarette
and slowly
goddamnit
just so slowly
drive off to enjoy the rest
of her quite useless thursday morning.

and as she drove out of my sight
i swiveled back around
and felt the air conditioning pound
my face and i took off my seatbelt
and laid my forehead on the steering wheel,
and minutes later
i stepped out of my car,
shut the door,
and walked toward the grocery store
almost completely certain
that i had found some new,
heartening hope.

as if it were necessary to understand

if you knew what it meant to me
then you’d understand why i still
get the butterflies

but it’s tainted now
it’s gone away
or it’s convoluted or
it just means that much more to me
and i don’t know what it means to me
but i know that it means

absolutely everything
and all i can hope now is that
i could give it to you
and grant you this love
that i have in this perfect
sunlit dinner for two

in this quagmire of a starless room
where i sit waiting alone
for one more ray
one more moment that
i have yet to adequately
understand how to cherish.

drowning

when you are forgotten
drowning
when you are blind to everything
except your uselessness
when the absence of your self-worth
becomes all too unbearable
when paper cranes ignite no hope
and shame cripples you for
bothering with self-pity
when each ounce of oxygen
you suck down only adds to
this titanic and cringeworthy
embarrassment

and even though it seems unwise
your mind can’t stop circling
toying
with the idea of ending

remember: at this very moment
your pathetic squalid
and intensely arbitrary
existence
is the sole and entire reason
that your ancestors lived
at all.

everybody's free

i am open so sweetly open
open and my wings are ready
fluffed and feathered and raised to
soar beyond what i could never understand
and the butterflies are telling me that they’re
happy even though i never brushed up on butterfly
when i was in grade school
i didn’t know doors could have wings or fly regardless
but here comes a wind and i’m catching it by god. catch.
look there’s aladdin i think i’ll give him the bird when i go by
careful though i’m sure with such wild aplomb that motherfucker’s
got to have razor spikes on his carpet surely maybe i’ll tell him to go
put a fucking shirt on for once (chrissake) and then speed away quickly
looking to roll a thickass joint with a couple of friends i love that i’ve got
some time now some time then to just have it and look for some steak and
fries and some jesus in the sand damn i really am happy no shoes just to think
(oh yes) that yesterday i would have been worried about windburn on my toes and
the rocks when i land but not this day i’m feeling a trembling down there way way way
down so maybe i’ll just stay for a while kind of ruins the point of having the damn carpet
in the first place though maybe i’ll land i guess i’ll have to but when will will will becomes
am am am i will/be/am ready (yessir) waiting just because i can see and feel our wind our sky
but i will come off eventually shit there he is i’m gonna grease that punk yellow face chinaman

zero chance

i hate the past.
some people might look at it as
a learning experience or say
hey, you’ve had good times, or say
remember when you laughed so
hard that your ribcage hurt? or say
everything happens for a reason,
but i say fuck you, sure as i love
tight pussy, i hate the past.

so I beseech you
stretch into the light of the future until
your hips ache from stretching (stretch like you
stretch when you’re reflecting on how low you just
sank her ass into that bed and then realize you
aren’t keeping the flow circulated to your thighs
and lactic acid is a bigger cocksucker than conan).

and i think and think and think and think
about some fat greased-up balding twenty-something
(who gives a shit?) wife-beater-bearing smug, guilty
jock itch masturbating to his warehouse of internet porn,
face bleached pale and a sickly green from just one too
many months without any externally-performed fellatio,

and i laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh
because what that fucker forgot is that
cunnilingus is what counts
and that the smell of tired and rampant
pussy-soaked saliva sets you about as
psychologically fine as your first stroll
of admission through a white bourgeois
community garden.

sex is the best medicine,
and I feel physically sick
when I see these infants
parading around in their
shopping carts, eating and
eating and jamming their
fingers down their throats
to clear the canals to eat and
eat and eat again and eat until
the world erupts in nausea
and its chalk-thick
blood vessels burst
in a single saturated
ocean-sized
tear drop.

i wish i could convince the world that
love is always the best answer, every
time, and to never forget that
belief in loneliness
could help you find a higher purpose
if you have enough faith in faith to want to.

perhaps i’m looking at things the wrong
way. perhaps i think too much or i need
to be loved or i know where i’m going
or i hate to beg for sex (i mean, look at me),
but if there’s one thing good about the past,
is that it’s over.

apple core

“i have of late
but wherefore i know not”
ceased to resemble
a coherent human being
just a jar of good or evil
each thought scared
and scattering away at
earth’s fraying edge
burst and laid waste
in spite of its own gravity

trembling and rotted
the apple core
tightening its fibrous grip
(reckon i must)
reason with the
glorious animal (this most
breathtaking ape) hello
quintessential spawn there are
many questions you must
have for me

and i know they can be
(how can i say) frustrating
but be of good cheer
you can always
OVERCOME me
or
ESCAPE me
or
DENY (this
brave o’erhanging firmament)

so while you
RAPE me
and keep looking upward
as if “god” doesn’t see
your cock in me
i ask only
that you might
(LOVE) me
or
(HOLD) me

or
learn from me
drink from me
feed and grow from me
rise with me burn with me
sleep with me
and finally die
laughing
content

as muddy as
the rest of us.

gravestone

he who intended to get it together
and at the last aching minute bring
everything painful and inspiring
into coalescence our champion
the hero for himself stunningly
heliocentrically absorbed
who understood
the virtue of being selfish
which is on the tips of our
tongues all sweating in
anticipation of just maybe
one day not being
inescapably disappointed with
ourselves so we slink back
to our cold and cancerous cave
ostensible villains of humanity
bearers of the most dark and
unnecessary plague disgorging
this and that and the other
just because and for no
other reason
with nothing but
good intentions.

this

they’re all those people
they’re sure – you’re sure – that
they had the right idea

and yet you can’t quite shake the
feeling that somehow they missed out
missed out on all this

but what did they miss?

if this is putting some wear on a guitar neck
or being never-truly-worried about the girl
you’re positively crazy about

then maybe i have some ground
some black coffee grounds that i can
recycle into my rose garden

if i want them to return next spring
i’m willing to bet they’d return anyway
though just to spite me

claiming i’ve got to do a little jig and
write some more vague poetry if i want
to see them again

but what would i miss?

heartache

in an ongoing existential crisis
aching just to laugh
to once more
find things funny
and electrify my brain
with the buzzing chatter
of the bobble head dolls
rolling around in sweating noise
and flesh
vomiting on each other’s faces
and hands

in a perpetual state of self-disappointment
aching just to smile
to once more
speak my mind and
then be understood
by the illiterate
mud-soaked hornets
flinging bibles at the writhing hive
and cross
vomiting in college bathrooms
and sinks

in an endless self-sung elegy
aching just to stop the world
to once more
ask them what they are doing
why they are running
why my heart never
races as quickly as theirs
throbbing alone in rhythm
and discord
vomiting in my restless sleep
and empty arms

but maybe this is all right,
maybe this lightly-broiled cacophony and
nauseating toxic potage
is what it’s all about.
and it’s all going to be just fine,
aching and aching and okay.