The Dozen For C.

You smile and
I see--peering through the window
From my POV, you’re inside, without me.

Our secrets are few, and If
I were less vain, I would conclude
you smile, alone at some phantom tap
at the corner of your brain
producing incoherent yet
consistent warmth.
that you are tickled by
such a simple fact of your life,
abstract as it may be;
that with your worry
ambition and
heartache,
I spy with my own two eyes,
from the vantage point of our back porch,
a private smile that detects
the threat of capture.

what you truly see
I can only guess, for our POV's
meet uncertainly.  though we
are at times so similar as to
induce a shudder
that is crushed by your skin,
when you hook our legs and mount me like I’m
some pious, reasonable, hard working,
farmer.

peering through my own window
enjoying your private moment,
in which, I daydream,
I am the principle actor.
I am witnessing a reverie:
that husband of mine, you think,
and smile, teeth bared, alone,
in that moment as you can never be when I’m within your POV

You are perfect alone
in the forest I cannot see
the bears,
or the sun
coursing through the canopy

strange town, familiar smell

the sign on the door says
Believe in Jesus
Christ Be Saved.
By God, 
I knock and score

enough for me 

and my friend Ben, 

the suicidal Chihuahua,

to get tranquilized
alley-wise over by the Walgreens.
between dumpsters
lie wicked dreams:

deposit me in the passenger seat

of didion's yellow corvette 

screaming down

early sunday morning streets,

one of flannery's peacocks

winging the wheel.

intimacy gone stale 

as a half box of cracker jacks

in an Aztec time machine. 

piss on that smell.

George Carlin said 

we should die first

spend our last nine months on earth 

in a womb and

finish as an

orgasm.
I guess that'll be the safe word,
I says,
to a rat wearing a leather mask

who 

is rumored to infect 

his sexual partners
with a nasty strain of optimism

Notes From Ben, The Suicidal Chihuahua

Stalking the white kitten

through Longhorn cattle pens

road side sign says

Believe in Jesus

Christ Be Saved

By God

I rustle up enough chocolate

to choke a greyhound

AutoZone dude helps me track a lead

for old school antifreeze

huffin’ the sweet stuff

alley-wise behind the Walgreens

between dumpsters

tranquilized

wicked dreams

treed by a peck of pigeon-toed

cat-hounds

Didion screaming at the peacocks to shut Flannery down

Sunday morning pavement

cloudy  thousand yard stare

a  mutt I used to run with.

sniffin' that ass

well

piss on that smell

no safe-word today

I say

to Madam Bull Shark in her lovely

studded mohair wrap

Concrete

In the kitchen
expiration dates present
olfactory opportunities
sounds of soffritto and mirepoix linger
clamoring to dignify
our wilting intentions

At the sink
she stink-eyed the wet plate, dripping dirty dish water
indicating a spot on the rim where I missed these toughened little clutches of melted cheddar.
I left her hanging
plate in suspension
refusing the offer,
formulating events I could immediately identify as worse,
far worse,
than a nearly spotless dish

that slipped from her grip
and crashed at our feet
Fuck, what the fuck?
watch it, wait.
Damn you, we thought,
as I sucked my bloody finger.

In the dresser
the diminishing significance of her undergarments

In the bathroom
pain and pills

From here to eternity
kids and bills

conclusions based on highly connotative words.
absent atmosphere, pretext and subtext will fall the same rate
but I need  a bowling ball
dropped on my foot
a claw hammer straight to the knee
my pledge of allegiance to abstract ideas
betrays the concrete she.

It Don't Rain In Phoenix

Rains again like every day the day before

10 different ways

streets as slick as glass

and the green light glows

dusk gives up the ghost for now

my bones stay cold and I'm feeling how

the desert sun is calling out my name

I tell them where I met you

underneath the Coal Creek Bridge

they look  at me with sympathy

when you whisper

the way you enunciate

polyvinyl acetate

makes me think you are more agile than you appear

operatic in her grandeur,

plumpuscular, muscular, absolutely glistening

 with slime

 one misty Sunday morning,

 coal creek running after rain

 I saw the biggest, blackest, coldest, slickest, slowest, slug there ever was

she said hello

clap clap

She said I’m Black

clap clap

I’m sure you never ever met a gal like me

clap clap

I take my time

clap clap

don’t cost a dime

clap clap

I am divine

clap clap

I’ll make a squeamish weeping willow sapling scream

She eased me down from off the ledge

didn’t need as much whiskey to get right in the head,

 she sorted out my day with something good

then one night the phone call came, she could tell when I walked way

leaving her to fret alone in our tiny livingroom

broke it to her like poetry,

the dusk gives up the ghost for now

my bones stay cold and I’m feeling how

that Greyhound bus is calling out my name

she said, but it don’t rain in Phoenix

and when you get to sweating it burns a like hell

we’ve had a good time baby

didn’t expect I’d ever have this much to tell

It don’t rain in Phoenix

I might melt in the sun

there ain’t no slugs in the canyon

there ain’t no “us” on the run.

so I put her on my shoulder,

hiked back up to Coal Creek Bridge

lifted up a rotten log set her down

in the patchy fog, slime trails

starlight bouncing off bubble frogs

balls strung so tight I couldn’t see no way around it

hitch up my grocery sack

cans and clothes and a folded map

grab me  a seat all the way in the back,

diesel fumes make me hungry for some eggs

I wonder about my hermaphrodite,

she made me feel half way allright,

scorpions can’t do it near as like she did.

Repairs

fence posts were rotten
with slobber and mud,
rain and grubs
so they snapped, but
reinforcements are en route.
until then, while de fence is down,
neighbor,
let us lick
away
the infection

Lunch With Uncle Barry

Lunch.
Stoned. Early, waiting
 sweet tea looking
NHL finals (chicago and boston) on a
volkswagon TV.
motherboard
birthed others of its kind, each
beaming sport.
Spurs and The Heat
battle on to game 7.
Damnations.  Dude shows.
family.
guys like this tick faintly til thier tiny hearts barely explode.
questions, reveal
mine.
desperation, guessing who has the juice.  But I sit
in judgement. secure
simple lunch date, repeated
unreturned calls,
once from a different
number to throw
me off.
Uncle Barry. Ahhhh, s'ben a long time kid (Me: '72, He: '69)
reunion, wife number
9 in tow, cow-eyed, still
 ignoring the
notion that this whole thing was a huge load of
shit, it was.
Not two weeks already he’s walking
ten steps in front of her.
stopping, waiting. turning. eyebrows, open mouth

Speech for graduating NHS members

It is an honor to be here today, through the democratic process even, as I understand you guys voted. Thank you.  I will keep this mercifully brief as I bear in mind the constructive criticism I receive from my students each year: Sir, they say, you talk too much.

So I thought of talking about how LIFE IS SHORT. How we take for granted this amazing gift of consciousness, this unprecedented wealth of freedom. How it is our obligation to greet each new day with an ear splitting yelp of hallelujah.  But it would be exhausting to invest our daily routines with the gratitude reserved for surviving tragedy.
Fate is unpredictable, that much is true. But to live in fear of the unknown is crippling both physically and spiritually. So, even as we struggle to understand our purpose in this world, as we ask ourselves how to gain access to that elusive place between the past and the future, I find no easy answer. At least if I’m honest, no answer that I would have accepted when I walked in your shoes. So, I propose that to supplement living in the moment,  we keep in mind that if we are lucky, life is not short. LIFE IS LONG. Which opens up this terrifying and exhilarating prospect of living with the consequence of our choices.  Because the quality of your life depends greatly upon whom you choose to spend it with.
So choose your influences wisely. Surround yourself with people who laugh at the petty judgments of small minds. Who do not cower in the shadow of unmerited authority. Run with individuals who do not sap your energy with assumptions and fear. Be a companion to those who are struggling, help them to endure and lift them with you into prosperity. Find those who have never had the good fortune of knowing love. Find anything to love in them.
These acts of gratitude penetrates the surface of things. In these acts of courage and kindness you unearth the staggering potential of what we can do for one another by offering a simple smile or extending our patience through empathy.  You unleash the potential of our humanity, discovering in the process a love that is not vain, inside of you, and that love attracts others who are unconsciously plugged in to this complex circuitry.
Be nice. Take chances. MAKE some noise. Start at the center of everything, which is where we are bound to the rest of the world. Open  your arms wide to catch it all: the hardship and the blessings. Embrace this big sweet life.  

(props to Jon D Graham for his "Big Sweet Life")

Dining Room Table Wipe Out

Elbows off the table. Move your plate. Use your fork. Can we not talk about poop tonight? We convene around the tables that deliver us from the dirt. Pinch fuzz from gashed vinyl chairs on curved chrome legs. Pick at fleshy cigarette scars. Two-seaters shoved against the wall. Petrified dinosaurs in dark parlors Pledged every second Sunday. We gather to just sit if we can, to eat with our intimate strangers.  

My memory is a faulty, cocky thing creating some  blissful narrative out of spit and tape. We were under the influence, mer-people, guided by whiskey effulgence to reproduce our genes, twice. pure lunacy carried on a stabalized flight; civilized, glacial grinding of marital silence. But we're laughing now as little C screams I gotta go to the dam bathroom! landing the punchline to a beaver joke right in our laps as she exits bolstered by such an innocent lapse. I am certain that our table has eyes and remains with us due to some architectural fiat embedded in its grain.
Erosion. Spills, eraser crumbs brushed and blown expose raw blonde wood wiped down to the layer of last year's glitter.
Meals born in the morning, nursed all afternoon. Meals prepared together, thrown together with joy, with expertise, as an afterthought to last night’s fight, still resonating, unresolved in minor D. The low hanging lamp over our table reveals a scene: Reaching, passing, pouring the water that keeps us alive. My family bathed in pool hall light, restores the faith I cripple over the day.

Plate the food; steam rising

8 feet and 250 pounds solid Mexican pine.
Time lapse, each hour a season of coffee cups, bills and backpacks. Dull pencils and papers to sign. Exhausted bottles of wine--bulldozed every night to make way for the main event.
My son curved over the cutting board, thack-thack-thack like a knocked up metronomic ritual. He'll soon be a head and a half taller than I am, extending his long arm over my shoulder to palm 4 heavy dinner plates with a pre-adolescent mitt. ‘Scuse me Dad, he’ll say.  One day he’ll gulp the thin air on which the tenuous contract between parent and child exists. He’ll never ask permission then, ever again.
Pentecostal jazz.
We thank the cook with trembling hands but the humble cook demurs, don’t thank me, I just applied the heat. So we thank the rain, the farmers and my son, once, learning to cuss, asks, What about the fucking truck drivers?
I'm impressed. But, I say, There are better ways.
He says, What about the fucking truck drivers, please?
And we unleash a litany of every natural phenomena even vaguely connected to the food on our table: Sub-atomic elemental mechanics of evolution; the reproductive zeal of our civilized ancestors; durable seeds and delicious animals so capably domesticated.

cut up

Soviet progress
measured by the ton
10 lb tampons
falling chandeliers

The girl and I make the corn bread. The lady made the beans. The four of us sit and eat and laugh at the boy’s awful jokes. I get to lay down with her, the lady, and wake up again, knowing that she loves me.

Whodunnit

11/8/14

I have a son. Who seems strange to me, a stranger even. I’m afraid I’m doing everything wrong. Or maybe not enough of anything as he disappears into his bedroom without saying goodnight. The boy doesn't ever ask for anything but I know he wants to go fishing.  On the surface our relationship, if a little awkward at times, seems relatively healthy. We talk and laugh and I pack his lunch in the morning. I’m interested in him, in what he has to say. I’m perplexed at how sharp he is, never fully comfortable or certain that he’s just a normal kid. I make sure he knows he is appreciated and as much as I can, that he is loved. And... here it goes. 

My father hauled miscellaneous dangerous goods from Columbus, Ohio to St. Louis, Missouri for Chief Freight Lines. His handle was "Short Ribs." Mine was "The Baseball Bandit."   The languorous threat of violence that pulsated from my Mom I could predict and avoid.  But it was a chore to solve for my Dad's random wrath. He split when I was in 5^th grade, a little younger than the boy is now.  I craved his attention and approval even more after he left and when he didn't deliver, I turned to the men that my mom began to date. It was a sickening lack of loyalty on my part, allowing strange young men to sit on the couch where my dad existed during his short stints at home, eating, snoring, catching up on General Hospital. 

Weekends I spent with step-mom. The aptly named Barb was a hard and loud woman who revealed to my mom, in our front  yard, her very special relationship to my father as he ducked into the passenger seat of her yellow Dodge Omni, the one with those bitchin' rear/side window louvers.  Dad and I watched her straddle behind her own son to commence the ritual brushing of his waist-length dark auburn hair, which would last through an entire Bugs Bunny/Road Runner show deep into the Saturday morning lineup. Butch ate cereal while being brushed,  disappearing now and then into the apartment complex to deliver tiny Ziploc cocaines.  

I was a whore. And it never paid off. My solicitations earned nothing. What a lost and ridiculous boy. I waited years before I unleashed the bitterness on my mom. When we were finally alone. When she had finally rid herself of one last disappointing man, I became the monster I should have been years before.

So I take the boy fishing.

The Baron

10/25/14

            Baron the barista thought he had won again. But you could forgive him this time. The girl had the persistent problem of losing track, of staring at objects not as they were traditionally, but differently, and intensely as impressions and shapes. Colors not animated by anything she would call human, but moving independently nonetheless.  She would obsess over these shapes: groups of things, patches of dead grass, building facades; but more often what caught her eye was the face. And so as she pays for her coffee, she looks at what is the upper right quadrant of the barista’s face, how it squinted like the squat penis of the chubby high school counselor she slept with in high school. And though her true senses fixate on the erotic patch of skin at the angle of his chin where there is no trace of stubble, her secondary senses, dulled by neglect; senses that compel us to  finally release the hand of the stranger we have just met—these senses quietly urged her to look away.  But she could not. And when the barista, who called himself The Baron, caught her stare, the electro-thump pumping through the cafe speakers became his  own personal soundtrack. It seeped into the foreground inspiring high pours and behind the back theatrics. He announced his drinks as if he were narrating a documentary.  The cashier placed change in her hand which reminded the girl vaguely of the world outside the world she existed in at this moment, which was populated explicitly by The Baron’s nose.  She dropped the change in her purse. Just one nose that provided enough canvas for an entirely new person, an additional face on The Baron’s face. Light struggled to escape the vacuum of its blown out pores. This was a living, breathing entity that deserved autonomy, independence, women’s suffrage. Revolutionary lines traced this appendage-creature like a Mexican mountain road.  The Baron pretended he was alone, a rebel working in the confines of a corporate structure, but her intense attention forced him to check his fly and thumb that nose like a feather weight boxer.  It moves, she said to herself, which broke the spell. The Baron called her latte.  The back of his neck tingled as he recited the exotic name that was written on the cup. He leaned toward and pointed to his ear.  “What’re you listening to?” She watched his two lips move underneath that nose and just a moment too late, nodded and said “Thanks.”     

Sir Sparky Kaspersky

10/24/14

            He stepped into the light. He stepped out into the light. He took another step. He stepped again. Counting his steps he began to walk. He chose a point in the distance, the tallest tree he could see, and walked toward the tree, hoping that when he arrived there would be some other concrete noun that would make sense as a new destination. Counting steps with the conversation looping in his head. When he arrived at the tree, nothing had changed. He looked around for another destination; the clouds ran over the sun, crushed Styrofoam pulsed like a beacon. It’s time to go back now she said, taking his hand, we’ll do it again tomorrow.

Belated Birthdays

10/19/14

perilous lives of uncles and aunts, 
glowing neon nostalgia, 
curvaceous and mean. 
they must go… 
good god, we all must, 
as the sno cone melts, 
Cornelio sputters
about there was a time,
and my narcoti-sized mind wades in the words and his breath.
We settle, 
nest 
within these tentacled sheets
where burglar bars threaten to burn us alive.
 my little girl struts in her mother’s shoes, 
and I pray she breaks every little heart that comes her way.  
mid-life with children. 
distance and death, 
promise of life,
fully baked 
angel food box cake, 
3 candles short
11 days late

Sounds Thinking

friction factors
interest rate translates commitment
Does your pain inflame nostalgia, confounded
nonproductive pump. stumbling self-consciousness,
when I begin to breed confidence I will sell it for a dollar
and the blue eyed dude, whose eyes are turning white, sends a picture that says 
wait. the refrigerator is leaking. the house is peeling
revealing 
your future. Look! 
a snail on a unicycle,
bats on big-wheels. innocent insects?  
at least a little of the life force underfoot,
(crunch, captain.)
honk bzz & beep real life; you go on without me.
Beyond my shoulder, I create anti-masterpieces. 

a simple challenge from C brings my fingers to keys,

makes my mind work again in the old fashion.
Sitting at my desk 90,000 dollars in debt 
wandering weather,
(it’s such a chocolate world)
wondering whether 
I will ever say oh,
that’s who I am.