15/30: Bartending Poem 538 or Eight O'Clock O'Neill Shutdown

You won’t win an argument with Kelly.

Damn your intentions,

Hang your execution,

Garrot your rhetoric,

Flay your dialogue.

She’ll take your drink offer,

One for her husband too,

And you’ll wave your point

About like a broken finger

As she, right, wrong,

Or just stubborn,

Shake-heads you out of the room.

You came to the bar ready for some

Hot-tongued neighborhood mingle,

Some bar-slapping laughs

And throat clearing gesticulations

As the lights dim, and the shots

Get stiffer, and the families get

Self conscious, and the music's

all songs of fucking or fighting,

You do not have to leave

With anyone, but at least

Would like to prove yourself right.

But you

Won’t

Win

An argument

With Kelly.

David, maybe, but not Kelly,

She has defeated crosswords smarter

Than you and riven sudoku more complex.

Pick your dialogues wisely, and know that

Once she’s gone, the new set takes their place
And you should probably be going too.

Geo Concerns

They're building a crater
in the lot behind the bank
concrete gives way to clay,

unexpected tidepools.
someday, hundreds of people
will stack on this pit,

shopping and eating new ripe fruit.
jagged edges waiting
under below grade parking

for the big one.

Postcard View Dailies (draft)

This is what I read last night at Da'Daedal X in Everett. This is an initial stage, a bunch will change. Feel free to pop off with suggestions, love, or haterade.
__________________________________________________________________

to work. To walk. To work. To walk to work.
Seventeen if I saunter, five if I run.
on the way, deconstructions:
neighborhood, city, country,

as if my pen would floatme above, ride a crane into new calamitous conclusions,
let me become the judgement I sit in, the crash I swing toward..

But better writers have tried to strike out against the gentrification that their
own romanticizing kicked into gear; spur, stronger activists, more upstanding pastors, etcetera.

I take streets that get me there quickest
and undetected, unreconstructed, unspied,
so I can grab the shakers slap my face into public form.

Kris tells me I have more Face than any other bartender he knows personally. The thick mask of unflappability. The workface.  Is this is a fakeness?  If I were a hunter, I’d become the bear. If I were a fisherman, I’d become the plankton. If I were an excorcist, I’d become the little girl.  If I walk too much, or not enough, my legs become
spokes. Shaking drinks and staring buildings and marking time, I become the salt on the rim,
the laugh at the jokes. My face sags and limbs crawl to a warning spot. Kris tells me that I didn’t recognize him when he showed up, that I and all my returns came back in manila envelopes, unmarked.

To past work. To memorial.
The postcards take three weeks,
two days on express,

Over the oceans where I became the Shark. Through the tubes where I became the
cracks, not recognizing the water leaking, the water, the water,
the darling struck soaked like standing by puddles meeting bikewheels.

To home, from work. To home. To back,
lets say we can’t call it a home, lets say
it’s a place where I sleep and cook eggs
and masturbate with the door closed
and window open because it doesn’t face anything.

Takes longer, to get there, get home
after work, after the face, after betraying
endless friends with professional nods,
 through the collapsing buildings and the deep built
pits, where the dog care was.

Now all the dogs are filthy and barking up park trees.
Now I no longer cut through the park,
Now I no longer think about meanings
Of signs with cartoon bycicles.

Every  3 a.m. couchflop a victory and surrender.

On leaving, Greg decided it was important we eat hilarious chips, almost blow ourselves up, hear some old Nick Cave songs. It was important. We talked about buildings in cities we will never live again and the holding belief people have that their friends will all one day live on the same block as them.,, and we didn’t dwell on leaving at all, as he walked back through a neighborhood, the same one, but through different eyes, when was the last time I made it to boston, street-statue performers and all, and I gravitate myself away from thinking too hard about the number of things that are ending in a promise of postcards.

Two weeks, three, a pit of faces. I become the mailman’s papercuts.

#5 A Tool Breaks Its Promise

You tricked me, leafblower, out amongst
the lawns, admiring my own arms for

their usefulness, peeled bark, owned houses,
guidelines toward mulch. I wanted you

to be the wind, harnessed, finally, I wanted
you to make me God. But like the firehose

or blender or hangglider before you, this is a
clumsy toy, a dignity steal for men in buttoned

shirts even on their day off. Listen: my home
is my castle and the lawn is my moat and the

leaves, they are alligators, even in the fall.
You've punchlined me, set me to the neighborhood

council in apology rags, contrition tie, shame loafers.
I drive back, my savnat malfunctioning, Joe,

over there, on his riding mower, grinning,
near asleep in his beer.

The next Claustrophobia

. . . happens shortly after christmas. check Bem's filmmaking prowess and my poetic-improvisational chops as well in the promo video below.

The Fuzz of a Nightend in Columbia City

at a new job, at an old place, with the same goals, same questions, etcetera. . .

August Kills With Wandering Thoughts

The sun through Rachel's doorway, the heat.
The stairs that live here, the plants either side the stairs.
The days of half-open curtains, thankful for sun, praying for shade.
This almost became a piece about photosynthesis,
almost became a poem about homes away from home,
a poem about the inertia of comfort, like 9 years old,
notching yourself into the corner between arm-rung
and seat on a merri-go-round, feeling the spin
paste you to your spot as you watch the swings become a blur,
but the keyboard on top of the amp, sitting by the door,
the growing pile of my own books, the knowledge of coming rain,
the good nights with bad tv shows, beamed directly here,
this almost became a poem about a relationship, gorgeous
with stir fry breakfasts, adventures to suburbs and accommodations,
but poems about relationships without the benefit of hindsight
or confirmation of jewelry. . . well, there is iced coffee coming
and this weather makes hard thinking into exhaustion.

All Things Curved, Cartoonish

the saxophone's slow slope,

the drummer's snare taps, gathering gradually

the guitar player slides into place for a full fifty seconds

before a shift the players
just

nail, just

barely.

i do not know jazz enough to tell you

if this is good or bad, but can say there is something

(i'm sorry) phallic about the saxophone, if not literally, holistically

(what a weird looking dick) in pieces, mabye, like three or

four (quite large) dicks taped together,or less literally, 

just something SPIRITUALLY phallic

and I'm reminded of a carlos santana interview
where he stroked an acoustic guitar slowly, with two
fingers, back and forth, as he talked about the

sensuality of the music, the shape of the instrument

like a beautiful woman

without a head.

i do not know if the guitar player likes santana. that

is probably beside the point, what i do know is

it is too light

outside

and the shades

aren't drawn

and it will be three hours

until it feels like a jazz club

and sweet potato fries

dipped in ranch

and a laptop

belie the potential of this place

for nostalgic poetry, completely

displaced from the overdoses

of yesteryear's jazz

but I do know

that the servers are neither sexy 

nor grizzled enough, in their loose

buttondowns. They are, mind you, sexy and grizzled enough

for real life, or most bars, but they aren't SAXOPHONE SEXY,

where all the women become fluid cartoons, in 

teetering proportions and official classy sex uniforms

from a deliciously repressed era,

all the men, cowled and coiffed and quick with a line

and probably good at the saxophone

and there is no one in here like that

except for this one couple, at a table,

with ranch and potato chips

and with a diet like that,

you know they aren't here for the music.

Dude, Totally Move to Columbia City

Across the street from the clean, clean counter where
you dig elbows into glossed oak surfaces, there is a closed
dive, lamented, serenaded by neighborhood historians,
glasses raised, you loved it, you knew it, you say
after one-- maybe three- pitchers of high life, shrunk
into corners by snarling old black men proclaiming

that you're like one of the uglier beatles.
just. look at that hair.

across the way, up the hill and a bus or three away,
on the dilapidated sidewalk outside the bar where
an acquaintance from high school sells cocaine to part
time art-schoolers, you smoke and smoke and buy t-shirts
and hot dogs and smoke and smoke and eat more hot dogs
and do not realize the taxis stop running, do not realize
the limits within the city's limits.

there are so many boxes holding old copies of the Stranger.
two weeks, a day, four months. as if no one reads hear any more.

past the place you always meant to buy a cheesesteak, but
really, who could expect you to, when the bike paths meant so many
swerved tires and knocked-elderlies. across the way, sometimes
you watch the sunrise, or set, and wonder when they'll foreclose
on the ethiopian coffeeshop, the hispanic church and the
laundromat you assume is a drug front, get a bar in that
plays Sufjan Stevens.

but the row is full of food. there are so many ways
to eat a drink. to fill a counter.

your girlfriend chastises the server for a lack of gluten free options.
after all, sweeping back her hair, we're not savages.

Revolutions are real things,

but are poems about "revolution" about the real thing?

this afternoon, at the North Seattle Community College Espresso Lounge, myself, Lindsey Walker and John Newman read as part of the school's Year of Learning program; the theme for the year is, yup, "revolution."
So vague, but so specific; many of the students at North are international students, some are here directly due to displacement brought on by real, violent, terrifying revolutions. So, given my limited scope of experience with these things, I wasn't sure what to read; I support proactive and sometimes risky measures for change (my next post will probably be about Occupy______) but I am not an anarcho-socialist, by any strict measure, and my own experiences with violence involve seeing a few barfights and hitting someone over the head with a broom when I was 14. That said, the definition of "revolution" was intentionally left squishy-- Lindsey read about science, medicine, the pharoahs. John read about the Civil War, 1963 (in a piece about the '60s that didn't make me want to puke) and finding anonymous notes in library books. I read about Wales. More specifically: Culture Vs. Cause (or Enough with the Marley Already if Folks are Actually Dying)/ Neo Takes the Blue Pill/ Dongtan-Hwaesong-Suwon-Seoul/ Swansea-Cardiff Blues (bellingham edition)/ Ambition is Critcial (Swansea Edition)/ Quake Theories

First piece is perhaps an extraneously mean-spirited jab at collegiate hippie types (and bob fucking marley posters) which I wrote about six years ago, just after graduating the first time. The last poem is new, about earthquakes and what happens to Seattle. Things were well set-up and there were actually a lot of people there. (noon on a thursday? who knew.)Cousin Justin hit up the reading after a too-brief hangout beforehand, where we test-drove Ford Focuses and hey! Free coffee.

Tuesday night I had my first taste of facilitating at SPLAB Living Room a task I felt underprepared for. It's a hard working and dedicated group of writers that shows up, founded by Paul Nelson and running for over 10 years. (this is it's second in Columbia City, prior it was in Auburn.) Unforseen and unfortunate circumstances-- I don't feel like blogging grief right now-- prevented much prepwork, but things went well anyway. See above about the dedicated and talented writers.

Anyway. Lots of family is out, I'm working a lot and soon will start putting together a new book/chapbook/manuscript. Longwinded, I know.