When I'm not working, I'm working: Three New Roughs.

these are all recent musings I may work with more in the future. The second is from a prompt by Lindsey Walker, the third from a prompt by Ryan Johnson.

daily mundane #425

in a bleachstained black shirt
i work in due to unseasonable
february sun, the snapdown impractical.

bills go out, bills come in.
the smiles and swinging arms
down fourth avenue come
earlier every year, turn
to dust. I should buy

new clothes for work for money
to buy new clothes to work in so I can
get money that I use to pay for clothes
that are appropriate for--

you get the picture. the barista
dances to the Beatles in his
fedora and somehow I am not
annoyed.

_____________________

Transiberian Express

(the prompt was to write about a place I'd never been) 

Frozen in place and loaded onto a train
leaving from the last city at the edge of the
world, a whole greyscale cliffscape of others

frozen in place, and you begin the thaw.
The next nine days, split between the soup

and the shiver, the ice crawls up your
legs at the moment of sleep, the snow
rushing past years of punishment-wilderness,
a place whose name itself evoked terror,

starvation, disappearance. By the time you
get to Moscow, you'e frozen and thawed
and frozen again, a lifetime of gruel in
your veins. Step out into the first city
at the edge of two worlds and hold cap
but don't lose it. You'll need it. You'll need it.

_____________________________

Trump Plaza

At the end of Napoleon, there was a drawn out sigh. This much I know from genghis khan international airport. The longer it goes, atrocities are forgotten, only glory remains. I'm eating an eclair. Watching one building fall to be danced on by another. The glass warbles and so many coiffed handbags. Despite my classy pastry, I am especially ugly today, as Stalin must have looked to those he was sentencing. I have done all my sentencing already, just waiting for the execution. Frosting gets on my cheek.

Do buildings fantasize about power? The power wielded in them? Stay up late thinking about orders given? Of course not, don't be silly. They just wish they were fields or vineyards. The crowd becomes too much. I leave, the frosting on my cheek.

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.

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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.

Silver Firs, Washington

You can see the cougars looming in the trees;
Every single building here in Silver Firs
looks like the last one on a long road into the wilderness
a classic case of named-after-what-used-to-be-there

Yes, this now-suburban community hasn’t
Been the same since the applebees (with their tasty happy hours)
And the safeway (with their deals on flowers)
And the house after house set three trees in,
just enough green to obscure sattelite dishes,
Everyone here with their trucks and SUVs

Feeling cheated that they’ll never have to kill an Indian.
Or fight a sharecropper. Or make their own moonshine.
Which is why the stares are still hard and mean, even
On the way to Jr.’s soccer practice, suspicious glares
At those who smoke in front yards—it’ll set off the kerosene!
Best not talk too loud after dark, it’ll attract the bears
Just waiting there beyond the next condo,
They weren’t messing around
When they put the sign up
That said Dead End.

It's like the Awesome Nameless Summer Poetry Project, but will probably get a title soon. Part 1.

Today I got an e-mail from GPS with a contract and everything. Something about invoicing them. I've never "invoiced" anyone before; largely because I'm usually on the other end of that equation and because most of my dealings are with friends. This, however, is with a large, poetry-based corporation.

More on that later. With regards to the Other End of my cash-acquisition, I'm currently working on a new Chapbook to complete in time for a top-secret lock-in fundraiser at Lewis' band's practice space beginning of April.
Yeah, I know.
Something about a "top-secret fundraiser" sounds eight ways to dodgy, but still. . . I like reading in cramped, poorly lit spaces. If my words don't hit people, specks of saliva will.

So I'm currently going through a list of potential poems for this book. I want it to largely consist of pieces I've written (or heavily edited and completed) here in Swansea, I want it to have a strong Sense of Place, but I don't want it to read like a poetry-based laundry list of images and places; I find that heavily themed works get real stale real fast.
So. I've got a list of titles here, some with links to them, others you can easily find on this blog, others are yet unseen in online form and we'll let that stay the case.



First off, the Poems I Wrote Pre-Wales, that for whatever reason I Feel Strongly Enough About to consider including
Story Problem
Zombies and Paint Thinner
Dinner For One
Watching Films About Death
Little Red Corvette
Cavities
Caleb Barber Loses His Teeth to Meth
Everyone Has Something
Murder Ballads

Poems I've Written in Swansea, More or Less About Swansea or Places in It or about General 'Welshness'-->(*Marks one that needs a good bit of work)
Beneath the Cathedral
Paintings of Famous Satanists
Rugby '08
Rugby '09*
Rucksacks*
The Cafe Across From the Train Station
Glasgow Weather and Inappropriate Footwear
Carmarthen Train #1
Its What We Writers Do (For Jen)
Christmas Light Gallows*
Tall Drink of Water
Black Pudding*
Isolation Therapy
At the Chip Shop
Beck House D 3.1*
Ambition is Critical*
Swansea-Cardiff Blues (Bellngham Edition)*
Earl Grey
All My Friend Back Home (Start a band about this one)*
Tired Eyes


And These Are About Girls or Concepts or came from Ryan's prompts and aren't necessarily tied to Wales
Ellie
Donkey Kong Country
New Poem For Old Plasters
We Laughed at the Same Thing (M4W)
Clippers! Clippers! Clippers!
A Little Fear of Drowning
Flicking Ash
24th Ave, NE*
Cities that Exist in Movies*
Children Go Missing Every Day
Context and Subtext
Ways In Which Gloriana Flotsam McGrew Will Probably Die, Since It's Always So Fucking Glamourous With Her (addressed to the subject)
Pigeon Bait
Children Go Missing Every Day
Forward Thinking
Boyz*
Three Counts of Public Urination
Enough With the Cape Already*
Genus, Species and Flavour
I am the tired orphan*

yeah. So about 15-20 poems out of those. Plus a few that are very much in my head but not on paper yet. Some are shoe-ins, but it really depends what sort of thing I want to make and what purpose I want it to serve for me and how long. Which I'll talk about later. I've tagged a lot of places you can find some of the mentioned poems.

We Laughed at the Same Thing > M4W >(Thursday outside the Garage, after midnight)

the assignment was to write one in the style of a craigslist missed connection. this one is true, in a non-specific way.

Every time I get off work I think I’ve stopped with girls forever, I just notice the way the street is a sewer after 10pm in that bermuda triangle of chips and styrofoam where Sketty turns into Walter. I saw you by accident, a pleasant surprise in scene-profiling. There was the contrast between the twee scarf and the scuffed cons and you seemed vaguely capable of murder. Or charity work.

So. Definitely my type. . . and obviously you were smoking. You didn’t see me until the couple outside Mr. D’s started yelling at eachother, her an orange lizard in white mini-skirt, him a brick-built cliche, dropping his chips everywhere and never standing on both feet at once.

“Don’t ye fackin’ tells me that! Where was you! Where was you!?”

Outside the Garage where the rockers clustered you shook your head with a smirk. I was wearing the frame of a guy who would like to fall in love but couldn’t be bothered. And a wrinkled black shirt. You looked like every girl I’d ever kissed or wanted to fucked and made babies. And real good in a blue jacket. I’m the guy who laughed with you and tripped over the gum on the pavement on the way to somewhere else.

clippers! clippers! clippers!

she handled hair like it was a new thing to feel it,
snipping away at my shag and telling these stories
-- a knife fight with rogue diamond traders--
like it was supposed to give me an erection.

it might have.

I don’t think she meant to blow in my ear,
or if the way she described electric fences
was supposed to sound
so. . . sexual.

Everything else was tasteful; her dress,
her banter when I made the appointment.
She didn’t stroke my ears when smoothing the sides,
didn’t rub her breasts against my neck, even accidentally,
when cutting those awkward-to-reach bits.

maybe her stories were too intense to be bothered
—a stab wound dowry,
three-bucks an hour at the local porn theater
til that day she found a voucher for a week of free beauty school—
or maybe I just imagined it to quell my fear
of women with sharp things.

In the barbershop mirror, her scissors circled my face like sharks
and every bit of hair that fell seemed to splat on the clean
linoleum floor. the snipping of blades was the sound of machinery
and my legs were jelly.

when I left she gave a professional smirk and I’m sure
I saw her blow the hair out of her face.

, but I'm sure as hell not the walrus--

Lately I've not felt much like writing. I've been hanging out with Lailey and trying to figure out things like going to Ireland, when to visit family friends, how to pay for things when i don't work all the time and what to do with the stupid rest of my life.
Some asshole once said that "life is what happens when you're making other plans" so i'm trying to keep production rates rolling and keep casting my nets in moderately ambitious ways. No formal announcements but I am going to be downloading lots of goddamn paperwork in the near future.
I did write this one thing, though and why the hell not put it up here? I'm probably sending this to 3AM. If more people knew about this blog I wouldn't post poems I was going to submit up here any more, but they don't, so I still can.
____________________
Donkey Kong country

When they cut some poets open they find trees and rivers and mountains and whole cities of frozen warriors guarding aliens and rainbows. Others they find empty after empty of Jack Daniels and unfinished love letters drown in crusted over bile. When they cut this one-- and only one-- open all they found was an empty barrel marked “toxic waste” and a grand piano reading Kerouac. The Priest said a prayer but the Piano refused to close its eyes so he burst into flames. The Scientist adjusted her X-ray glasses and saw through the corpse to the bottom of the world and all her vision came back paralysed. The other poets wrote odes to the deceased, about pianos and anger and burning bright into the night sky like a million blazing rangers but before any could utter their last line the barrel rolled across the linoleum and into the hallway where it startled all the flirting interns and the Piano started playing Fats Domino at top volume.

Rucksacks

They left their bags in the ice cave when
they were too weak to carry
they stuffed remaining foods in pockets
tried to trace where the compass had failed
and eventually starved
or froze, the rescue teams
couldn’t tell which.

Some of us die like heroes, or so go
the news reports.
A list of essential wilderness survival materials
is something every American boy has memorized
by nine years old and forgotten by eleven,
a lingering sense of what-if-I-had-to--

Some of us “do what we must” to survive, or
so go the narratives to countless westerns,
the excuses made by anti-heroes of my favourite films.

The man who hitchhikes across America with
just a knapsack, his thumb and a bottle of something
is an image that doesn’t
quite transfer overseas.
But the idea of a well-packed
bag does.
So when I say I left my bag up Constitution Hill,
it goes without saying I’ll be back up to get it;
leg-ache be damned.
There’s important stuff in there.

A good rucksack has what you
need to survive anything short of an apocalypse,
if you know how to pack it right.
My daily bag has a couple books, an in-progress
letter to my sister and my ipod.
I fear the apocalypse less than boredom, apparently
and should I ever get trapped in an elevator
I’ll have to resort to cannibalism.
_______________________________________________________

this feels a few drafts away from completion, but I like what I've got so far.

Nightshopping

aisles like trenches
my hair fanning out
like a bulbous helmet

turning corners under halogen
every stranger an unmet enemy
carrying baskets of rusty steel

put bread in the bag
don’t look up
at the enemy general

price-checking milk grenades
that will go off
before I use them

step shaky-footed out of
the trenches
watch rats scatter

Earl Grey

Mounting the snowcapped summit, muscles aching
from cold and effort, he unwrapped his face of wool,
let the scarf drop, brushed icicles from his beard.
His companion pulled a thermos from the pack,
then teacups and saucers.
Soon steaming liquid, stirred by spoon
while overhead, a mountain goat scuffs
at a cliff edge.
The two sit cross-legged, pinkies aloft.

camera zoom out.
In a distinctly American British Accent, the voiceover:

"Earl Grey. Bold. Beautiful. British."

Ridiculous.

My friend Betsy considers herself a bit of a tea expert;
I used to accompany herself and her fiance to Capitol Hill
tea dens where they would always order for me,
at least after the time I scratched my head and asked:

"Do you have any rasberry?"

Ridiculous.

Over brit-side, you needn't be an expert to know good tea from bad,
the important thing is that there be tea, period.
The offer requires no occasion— rather, occasions require IT,
celebration or consolation, "pour you a cuppa?"
being the universal comforter;
healthier than
"want a cigarrette"

but perhaps more indulgent than
"What you need to do is go for a run."

Its new to me.
Coming from coffee-capitol where we run fast and refuel faster,
it can't be coincidence that I'm now finally learning the
importance of calm, sip by sip, each afternoon, the therapy
inherent to stirring sugar in the face of a crisis.

This may be the one thing I take with me, whether or not
I scale any mountains or ever become an expert.
The moments while you wait for the bag to steep.
The way the milk swirls in. I may never be an expert
but perhaps that, too is something I’ll take from this.

And at least now I know not to ask for rasberry.
_______________________________________________

So I finished a draft of a story today. The story's called "My Ugly Twin" and it rose out of a prompt Becca gave while her, Shane and I were writing at the St. George Pub (yes, I'm already nostalgic for their visit) and it's a first-person account of two brothers falling out.

The above poem/spoken word was originally written sometime late Spring and I'd intended to clean it up a bit and see how it flies. May still suffer some tweaking.
In the interest of catching up, I'll post more stuff on Friday or Saturday.

This would be a great Slam Piece---

if it didn't require a solid knowledge of both 1) the bible and 2) the smashing pumpkins. still, it was fun to write.
you can thank Ryan Johnson for the inspiration; the prompt he gave me was "if My Body Goes, to Hell With My Soul." And this is what I came up with.

enough with the cape already

billy corgan likes to think he knows,
but he doesn’t get jokes.
guitar-stance heroics pave over going bald early;
the severe pain of the electric razor,
figuring out how to throw your guts as far
as you can once you’re no longer pretty.
perhaps this is why he invokes Job;
another who had his flocks taken from
him by an act of God
or public favor.

poet types under thirty adjectivize.
words like “beautiful” or “dirty”
or “heartbroken” or “tragic”--

It’s a pre-emptive mustering of guts, saving it up
for when words alone will have to get us laid.

Then there's Job (in the desert or wherever)
his friends visiting him, even though he had
festering sores and all that. these were the types
who bought "Machina" at full price.

but
at some point, you just have to point
the finger and say "look; the shaved head was fine,
the eyeliner we could deal with, but enough with the
fucking cape already."
probably sounded something like Bildad the Shuhite's lectures
on sin and retribution, how Job had definitely Done
Something to Deserve It.

The lessons I take from both (besides
Don't Get the Devil's Attention)
run something like: "go ahead and whine.
but do it in style."

"beautiful, dirty, heartbroken, tragic."

Or could look at Job and reminisce on the model of endurance and
grace in the face of ridiculous suffering; I think I could have

taken the loss of my kids and my flocks but once the
blisters broke out I would have had a hard time with it;
my most depressing days are the ones on which I feel ugly.
in his shoes,

I probably would have listened to my wife
when she said “curse God and die,” because if my body’s
already gone I’ve lost my better half and my guess is
that she was under thirty
and a poet.