Those Lights, Those Pipes.

Top floor of Vita, as the day transitions from natural to artificial light, and the destinations of commuter buses shine. Mukilteo. Lakewood. Ash Way Park and Ride. Detroit minimalism in the headphones, where you see the inorganic turning grass again. Flowers. Never been to Detroit, so it remains unsafe from romantic narratives. After a full press of e-mails, clicks and drags, work that doesn't feel like work, but feels so much heavier than

work.

If I have to see another friend in the hospital I swear I'm going to

just go see them, what else can you do? Again again again. Everett. Federal Way. Mountlake Terrace. Atlanta bounces and bangs through the coffeeshop speakers. They've transitioned from day to night music, from coffee for business to coffee for necessity. Americanos are an all hour drink, eyes sleepy or engorged. Mouths dry from telling stories. In telling stories, in

sharing

concern I'm trying not to be a gossip. Trading others' troubles across platforms like handshake bribes at a party. Ways to make it to the invitation. Staying here with the mottled wood and metal pipes and architecture's dance between warmth and starkness. Outsidde keeps dimming. Fully artificial. The sky is so dark and these lights are so bright and the sky is so dark and these lights are so bright and the sky is so bright with: Tacoma Dome. Bothell. North Lynnwood.

Candles (rough)

A circle of cops

Point guns at

A baby.

                                    This room, shadows.
                                    So many
                                    Unlit
                                    Lamps.


Daylight not worth saving.

16/30! Threshing Through The Timescale In a Mere Ten Minutes!

Buddy, let's be Dinosaurs, on the condition that you stop picking "chicken" or the types that never existed. The price we pay for laser eyes. Fine then, knights in a kingdom, in awesome tin helmets-- steel helmets-- produce carts were made for our knocking over, damsels, damsels everywhere! for saving! Okay fine, I'll see you your knight and raise you a Caveman, who's got the heavier club, who's got a knack for fire. Stop with the cave paintings already-- no one has the time for that. Good. Now we're spacement farrrr into the future and all these robots may know how to fly a space ship, but it'll take real flesh and blood to teach them about --- two minutes as rugged explorers and we're already sick of eating squirrel. cowboys? We can do that. Ropes and ropes and steers and guns and lots and lots of blood in the dirt. Did anyone ever walk into a saloon without a record skipping? Were the barmaids always so world weary and could you get a 9 gallon hat for che-- Jazz listening private eye guys! I love calling chicks dames! There are so many tall buildings, you can be the informant that-- Buddy, what's that disco? All there is to do here is dance, man, not even a dance off. And all these shining lights, getting so close to the things I muscle away from.

Still. I guess I could keep the suit.

2/30! The Knives Are So Sharp Because the Stakes Are So Low!

The Knives Are So Sharp Because the Stakes Are So Low

Terra cotta attack dogs/bomb(s in) every library.
the only thing we (have to) say regards legitimacy,
but you're carving down/(c/should
be) punching up.

brutalist watchtower/gatekeeper.
naturalist's flowering rebuttals.

I had a friend once, the novelist said, and we were surprised
enough at that to miss the rest of the anecdote.
I had an enemy once, the poet replied, and we gathered
by the campfire, sharpening up our tongs.

this is integral, the cannon's fire,
the statues raised/toppled/razed.

modernism and feral cats/atomic slushpiles.

This is no laughing matter. This is no simple grudge.
This is (g)war. You hear me?
Literally dozens of mid-level careers have potential
to be nominally effected by what we find in this rubble.

Georgian arches burnt crisp. A flag we wave,
passing (up/in/over) the halls of
crunched paper.

all things return to the all things return to the poememe.

Lately in my new scratches, I find myself returning to the "all things return to the. . ." titling system that made up the second half of "Filthy Jerry's Guide to Parking Lots."  This is partly because it's a funny way to title pieces, and also because it's an effective way to title pieces. It might seem like a cheap hack to re-use a literary device ad-nausea but tell that to Marvin Bell or Shakespeare. Plus, if it gets me writing.

So, this is a draft of a newbie that may end up completely different, set somewhere else, but for now it's called All Things Return to the Chinatown Library Ten Minutes Before Close on a Weekday.

all the coughing in this library.

all the threadbare gloves.

every sniffle. as the sky goes purple
over the firs, the lights in here feel so bright.

a globe in the children's area.

a lego map of returning.

computers and computers and
"thank you for respecting others"

also means "please no obvious porn."

a woman with a face like a free paper
bag in a pikachu hat. cartoon merch
from a free bin.

all the standing, waiting for computers,

pretending to browse CDs, magazines,

hoping to check e-mail before 8pm.

after 8, there is no where to be for
free, no room connected, nowhere

to go where it's your public right to cough.

I don't know these things or need these

things for nothing, not as much, maybe, as
the man with the giant backpack full of knives

or something. I hesitate to guess what,

knowing I might be right, knowing I 

may know this room too well already.

Last in the Wake of the First (January)

A month goes by like apartment tornadoes. A month goes by like runner's high fives. A month
gets drawn like mountaintop selfies. A month gets told like childhood trophies. A
month regroups like a half-finished painter. A month relents like gnawing hyena.
A month goes by like the Kalakala. A month gets told like ferry efficiency in
bygone. A month goes by like cave bats. A month gets on in years by
the minute. A month gets on in piers by the sound. A month
gets told like final evictions. A month goes by like a
server with benedict. A month gets sold like
books of affirmations. A month goes by
like the last church chorus, shuffles its
books and starts again.

County Werewolf (draft)

What do we do with the county werewolf? The rows and rows of potleafs bristling in the draft of the tattered greenhouse, the cash crop that cuts to/
                                                                                                fleeing brides in torn veils collapsing under drooling fangs, moonlight just cracking through the hydroponic lights.
Also, the odd fleeing groom, his tuxedo catching fire as he smokes a joint he knows will be his last,
but as the claws descend, he just wants something for the pain, man.

Some days its medical, some days it’s a fucking feast. Hairs in the meat. We held a vigil at full moon, but no one went wolf. We watched the mountains for howlers, but only a fleeing elk. We use our phones to find the way back, on roads that’ve been here for fifty years.

This towns not that small, that’s the problem. There could be any number of college kids turning
to beasts and tearing the throats out of chickens. Any number of crucified ghosts getting ground on in ritual/

Ground up by ritual.
What do we do with the scratching, screaming women? What do we do with the teeth-red wine?

The sherriff proposed an execution, and a would be mayor suggested treatment, but the pastors said that’s witchcraft, witchcraft, as no one is sure who’s really turning, getting hairy, bearded

What do we do with the hairy, bearded howling men at  midnight, throwing their glasses and pawing at bodies? What do we do with the pastors who say this is never a thing, except for satan, that this is never the cold joke told in the morning, the scattered bones from a chicken dinner, then a scattering of other things, more horrible, between the plants. Bones.

Unabandoning

Even as it stays hotter longer, theres more leaves skittering under bike tires here in the Central District, at a corner of a playground, hair salon and coffeehall. i tap my device. rachel sits across from me with two fingers pushing up her left cheek into her glasses. the little green man appears and disappears. the glowing red hand sometimes takes its place. i was going to change the world again, but need to catch a bus to a job where people look up from their devices long enough to tell me whether I should shake or stir.

But wait--

There’s more.

Jerk eyes open
Verizon wireless theme song in
digital slap

base operations across from
Zeek’s pizza glowering billboard
skating by on borrowed

internet, a sarlac pit
of creased envelopes,
a deletery of e-mails.

That is not all;

Past the white windowless van with the electrician’s name on it, past the backward baseball caps and scarred arms leaning over the freight trains, past the giant clock by the lamp store, past the testicles all bouncing in green, and the ghosts of brewers, all coming back with hooks for hands, there is another smoking hole in a wall, or the asphalt, cigarettes or asteroids.

That could be all,
but holiday specials forbid it. Towerless searses forbid it. Postal delivery drivers, presumably werewolves, forbid it with pork between their fangs. ALSO! Veteran vetrinarians, presumably evil mermaids, for-fucking-bid it. So there is more—

--a swift mop up
before leaving work,
a death threat bus 

stop, running on borrowed

fares, a deathstar
with its lights on,

but wait--

The Day After Christmas

the bus driver swerved
tailgated a truck with political
stickers all the way
from Everett

to somewhere called Newberry Court,
a small city nearly lease ready

while a Russian woman laughed
loudly at the girl who asked if she was German.
"Oh, svweethhchaart, I vish."

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.

January 8th, half finished, in eight lines.

you will live and die in front of a computer, by choice or pay.
time spent summoning the angels will outlast the help they give.

mongolian names are harder than ethiopian, welsh, or chinese.
working girls/smirking churls/lurking hurls.

the habit of putting off hard decisions just long enough for someone else to make them.
have a good time at the funeral; you know what I mean.

you will live and die and this mist will feel the same either way.
you know what I mean. obviously, I'm being dramatic.

There's a Limit

There's a limit,
                            to how cretinous
There's a limit,
                            to how functional
There's a limit,
                            to dancing skills
There's a limit,
                            to the efficacy of pirate costumes
There's a limit,
                            to brave new acquaintances
There's a limit,
                            to practicality of:
                                                           a feather duster,
                                                           a 401K,
                                                           Allen's patience,
                                                           your Hulu queue,
                                                           how long a glance is just-
                                                           how brief a glance can be, before:
                                                                                                                         a slight,
                                                                                                                         an aloofery,
                                                                                                                         a pridewound,
                                                                                                                         a paper mache cat.

How directionless would we be if we all knew how to dance,
but no one had that sticky blue tape to designate the floor?
There are leaves everywhere and people with scarves and that one guy
is too close to all the girls and that one girl has crazy eyes and no clothes
and where, goddammit, is the janitor, someone has to set these things up,
jenga them to death.

Civic Duty

1. as much as it pains him to say, after a long history of confidence, he does not know who to vote for in the next election. every single speech sounds like a commercial. 2. she knows a lot, has always, knows whom she'll support, supports who she knows, has always known, will always know, is happy to tell you. 3. It doesn't matter much, the peanut butter sandwiches will taste the same as he drips blackberry jelly on his snap-down shirt and wonders why no one takes him seriously. 4. with face scrunched, head shaking, he punches out a ballot, fills in a card, hits the screen. all at once, because no one's sure how this works any more. 5. So now this reporter wants to know will you vote? With hindsight, with hindsight, with hindsight.

Steampunk Cartoons

after hours of reading Ryan Johnson's writings I grew huge bat wings and crawled into the hollowed steeple of a disused church, where I thought about the differing types of adjectives that I and my girlfriend would use to describe me. The church turned out to be an airship run by gears and cogs and a man with a tophat and monocle, who refused to address me unless I bowed properly.
we are going to France, he said, but not Paris, they are all persnickety cheese eaters, we are going to Real France, where no one has a sense of fashion or good taste in music. These are the real parts of countries, he said, spinning a globe and poking at it with a disingenuous cane. Can you do anything about these wings, I asked, because there was no one else to ask, and he looked educated.
No, actually, you are our backup plan in case these gears fail. This will be your one service from now on, he said, little knowing that I'd long since gouged my eyes out in a ritual that did little to aleviate an inborn sense of guilt.

fj sketch #6

the men at the dogfights abhor good lighting. all they care about is sound and silhouette. the men at the cockfights, they want to see the feathers casting shadows, angle of each peck. blood on the beaks. at the dogfights, it’s all about barks and growls, yips and howls, the chanting, the cheering. big doug is the onhand vet. the city department of controlled activities turns a blind eye as long as there is a vet onhand. big doug is very good, has saved at least three chickens, four dogs lived to yelp another day by the spiked fences beneath the dental repair school, he is also a bouncer, keeping those like filthy jerry, or phillipe the sexy, from entering and scaring away the respectable types. rumors had it that jerry had spent a year filing and stapling for an architectural firm, paid in vanilla wafers and poker chips, and these are the types of people who give underground animal death rings a bad name. big doug knew the men who came in, whose hair gel doubled as cologne, whose swagger turned to a stomp, whose girlfriends lingered in the back and pretended it was a movie, except for loose mary, who shouted herself hoarse at the scenes unfolding. they all knew—big doug, harold the handshake—who was and wasn’t wanted here, loss of animal control like greek tragedy in another language.

_____________________________________________________

this is part of an ongoing series that should be wrapped/booked pretty soon. not sure if this segment will go in the final product, partly because I'm not sure how well it stands on its own. thoughts?

in other news, Sounds of Youth I Haven't Re-Filed*:

*i still like this a lot. perhaps not with the monolithic "best _____ of ____" that I did, but such hyperbole is best left to youth and music writers.

Peter Falk, Where Are You Now? (post-midnight freewrite, 5/19(20)/12)

the zeros in the alleys. they zero in on alleys. cars parked, lights on. apartments on an incline. they must have been built in the sixties, because they look like something from an episode of columbo. in the parking lot men beat their chest. they zero in on corners. they corner zeros. seriously, from the font to the bad fake stucco to the faux-rockery, the whole building is hanna barbera. they err on the side of cologne. they err on the side of collars, and all the things you can do with them on a night that's poppin'. the zeros in the valleys. the heros in the alleys. the heros in the alleys and the heros who drag them there, by the collar, sucking or slapping. but really, who designs a building like that? can anyone imagine an actual person smoking anything outside it besides an oversized cigar? this is appropriate for talking dinosaurs, but dinosaurs would not survive out here.

after-noon haikunated thought mangle (3/7/12)

so many beware of dog fences with open gates.
so many puddles, beginning to ice.
so many uncrowned enemies, stumping through tubes and wires.
so many laughing hats.
a slink into a rolling chair, a roll into another room, a shut-door, a quick nap, a curtain, blinds, a next next, day full of shaking wires, expectant crows.

Starting With Intent to Finish

Start it with a poem about drinking. About a long, dark porter
and sly slow slurp. The real, hard, anger of salt.
Then go to your most detatched, your commentator newscast.
Don't get your hands dirty, wear clean gloves. Comment on the sun,
raying out over the hood of a dented buick. As you stand there with
a microphone in a suit your 17 year old self still protests, make
that buick glinting your goal.
aspire.
Talk it good so people forget all about the
drinking poem. Write the light so hard that you are
a tee-totaler, always were. Write yourself celibate
on forests that you camped under the day before
yesteryear, punctuate with a poem about acid rain.
Go righteous. Go fist pumping.
Then, write the sex poem-filthy and needed--
before writing the monsters out of the closet
and back under the bed where they belong.

_______________________________________________________

blogspot will probably wreak havoc with the format of this, but so goes. I wrote this on tuesday at the SPLAB meeting I facilitated on Writing Goals. This is as it was in the minute, and as a freewrite, I'm pretty happy with both how it feels and what I was "trying to say" about both the process and product of writing new poetry in the new year.

Go to Sleep With the Light On

the last day of my 20s I stood in a narrow room where they asked me questions about incarceration history and my sexual habits and stole blood from my right pointer finger and inspected my arms for veins and elbows for bruising. later, but not much later, I stared at the sheetrock ceiling as narrow tubes sucked fluids from my body and gaunt-eyed women with needles and tape walked slowly to their charges. My jeans are torn at the cuff and stringy at edges, as they've been since birth. This place is like a hospital, that gives you money. The ceiling is like a hospital's. The white coats are like doctor coats. The halogen lights are like, the beds are like, but they won't let you sleep. The nurses thump the side of the pillows. A man in a trucker hat and grey beard and freckled arm starts, almost pulling his needles out. This is like some other beds I've slept in, where the ceiling and lights and noises kept me from rest and I pulled blankets and arms off me before shuffling back into daylight, through tinted glass doors, in rudimentary bandages, no goodbyes. The man who unhooks me is tired but friendly, sees my novel and tells me if he could be anyone in literature he'd be in The Brothers Karimazov, and he'd be Aloyisha. The good one.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

This is the first thing I've written since turning 30 on tuesday. I will probably turn it into a Haibun. Thanks to Ryan for the prompt. I am bad at spelling Russian names.