places: my dubstep adventure/this is my confession

thinking about it and realizing how stupid
the way i think about my aloneness usually is.

a waste of a perfectly good pair of green eyes--
their color deep, saturate, and intricately transient--
a pair of fine lips,
and a functioning bodily mechanism.

besides which, i am
a nice person.
someone somewhere might be
lucky to have me
maybe.

idiotic, all of it, because i am
none of these things--i am
a series of caverns of
a velvet blackness; i am
a veiled set of tastes.

heat and unfathomabilities--
i am lined with secret aspects
and none of them are nice,
no one would do anything so simple
as be lucky to have
any of them...

i am not misunderstood--
i am not undervalued--
i am
simply
not available.


but i do wish things were different.
and that longing makes me stupid.

places: wind against the window/"deep beetle" (?)

it's not a question of what i have to say

just that it gets said

in some form or another

god, it doesn't matter,
doesn't matter what the name was
or where the discoloration lay--

within what silent vise
the heart beat
the rolling blood
through the vein

whether the window smashed
or just
disintegrated
into a
jagged fulfillment
of some inner form

and the color of the rhodedendron
pressed
against the glass
green leaves, brown,
both were so vivid


whether icarus fell
or dived through the rushing light-filled sky
he hit

speculation means
so little
in the aftermath
of that impact

that is why i left.

places: cragga "escape the fate--gorgeous nightmare" remix

somewhere within this my 6000th plea to be discovered
is probably some sliver of a new truth

but i don't know where the newness would reside.


for i have been always asking, and that blankly,
to be found out.

couched it in terms of purple and red
the lush colors of static wet privacy.

or in the gold of a god's sweating palm.

the bruised brown fold on the magnolia petal.

i've torn the plea fresh red from skin, the medium of all my pale parts
asking for it and asking, asking.


but without ever
saying
shit.


desire in every color--
dawn-pale, sunrise sinuous against its landscape,
too blind in the blue sky to see but white
or hidden weeping behind silver and sable--
thick gold splayed against late objects
and then spread red strung on the skyline
limp in black and navy night.

but this means nothing, or
at least nothing new--
just that
i want
to be discovered:

a wet horizon
craves any light.

places: cragga "mr. postman dubstep remix original"

desperation is only a flavor
because i am so subconscious--

an odor that tincts up
from the hard palate.

as if i could be indifferent

as if i weren't a liar

as if you weren't reshaping
the pale contour of my vision

as if nothing were the matter ever.

places: shop window, night time, new haven

clean private line--light
falling on the bosom of the cream-colored shirt
and the silk below
a golden shadow
something sacred and proud
the shirt alone
folded against the mannequin
in the bosom of the store window.

places: not sleepy, part 6 or 7000/michael jackson "human nature"

the event was
subversion
at its tightest point.
so that submission
to a version of light
would happen.

i was loved, baby.
like the inside of a window pane
i was something to be looked out of;
i let in the light.
and i was loved
to overflowing.

i clenched my teeth
against even
one drop of love
escaping.

places: and yet more dave matthews

witness is not an act of art, and i think i know why: because everyone is the center of his or her own world.

trying to resist that centrality is about as smart as i am in general.  we can't live for anyone else as we can't see for anyone else.

so what's left is something like feeling, or empathy, the thingee of the scapegoat.  the identification of coming into some work's world, being invited in, and then finding, like magic, that foothold provided...

but witness itself is not an act of art.


i want to get out of this blah blah shadows.
memory so excitingly laced with fantasy.  it's impossible to escape one's own body
and still remain in time (aka alive)

so acceptance
being the only path

owning the bath of lard and shit
that is my experience
and sowing seeds within it

so that when that bath-full ballsack of bad composts itself
i can finally be a poet
and pluck some fucking roses.

places: zombie/dave matthews "just let me always"

it's one of those questions that has become a staple of
a certain flavor of consciousness--by "consciousness" i mean "being awake," not anything more
esoteric:

is that you in the corner?

or is it the trash can, or just not even there,
just some kind of floater across the irid?

or is my quite basic uncertainty
about what the fuck is in that corner
the symbol of this
my sweet dead reality
unpeeling from itself
like a used-up decal--


and by the way
where did it go, the narrowness of that sweet sweet reality
in which i was clean in my deadness?
every nerve would gloriously misfire
like tangled skeins of embroidery floss
from a messed-up prepacked cross-stitch kit

found in some kind of craft store
on a trip cross-county.

straight from san bernardino
to riverside.

but it was clean when i was there.
i was in a fairyland of deadness, of compression
where the man got the girl
under him
but that didn't happen
but it hurt beyond the capacity of the soul.


every dead thing carries some kind of life in it--matter carries its own memory--
so you didn't succeed in making me
dead, hence
i ask again, i ask you, or me, or whatever the fuck,

IS THAT YOU IN THE CORNER?



questions i've never thought to ask before except in some sort of arnold-palmer half-and-half fantasy version:
which fucking one of us is the real thing?  which of us robbed which?  that murder you committed on me, how much of yourself did it lay waste when you did it?

nobody ever asks these things of men like you, you in the corner,
because nobody wants to know.  there are things no man does

and when he does them he is a zombie.

he becomes my zombie.


or i become his.
FUCKING GODDAMNIT IS THAT YOU IN THE CORNER.

places: in the city of lost things

when did my world become so small--
or why did it not expand as i expanded?

where do i go to find a more infinite
space, somewhere where the form of me
has room to breathe, is less expected--

is less what i expect?

my fear is gigantic, is bigger even
than my catamaran of a body
sailing on its bed of rain

afraid of any random noise.


we were whirling in and out
of the figures of a dance
in which i was your silent partner.
the rhythm that drove me apart from you
as much held me to you--

it was as strong as fingers
against the lip--it was
like icicles on the inner thigh.

you were my cold thing,
golden icicle god.

i'm wandering things you planed
and am becoming the action
of reaching
to touch the scattered things.
the charred things i watch break in my fingerhold.
the feathered things have played dead
for some time now--their heads are huddled beneath their own cold wings.
there is dental work that must be done in this your stark temple, scars on the columns.

it's a city that was broken down by your wind and rain, o god, hey ho.
the wrath of your divine force.  nobody can touch the land no more.  nobody can touch the land.


i wandered the streets mocking its remains with my pity, the burned-out things,
mohammedan back-alley angels in silhouette became to me
silky objects in a night sky of terror that was the manifestation of the action of my own wandering.
against me the trickling moon shone, i felt its fingers on my face--cry out i cried to the unliving things
cry out o ye sinners of the plain
cry out upon the destruction of your god--see ye what your god hath wrought with his hands
plucking the dusk like grapes, plucking the liquor from out of the vine
by way of the heaviness of its muscat fruit pouring your half-light down his throat
like it were a golden wine.

o my lord for wherefore did you twine your vine about the faded building with its spire dead in the day and night
like the splintered branch of a tree in the day and night spearing the divide between dark and light
my lord wherefore did you sire this honey, this sweet golden honey, if not for your own mouth and throat
wax in the comb
my lord, my lord,
wax in the comb
chicken bone

hair like a beet root

and eyes so fine

they might as well
have been mine.


i can't do anything but turn rage into music--i don't know how
to sit immobile in my rage like a child
in bathwater gone cold--i don't know
how
to witness.

i just know how
to wander.
tethered to a singularity like a dog on a leash.

places: the lost thing soundtrack

thinking about your compromised body
i am seeing in the dark behind my eyelids
this seed of heat and light

not any part of me, for sure,
but
the only thing i think is yours right now
that i can do anything
like hold.

-jan. 19, 2013

places: how i met your mother, season 7

girl i never had,
almost always i am over you, the dream of you, the sweetness of that dream and the sorrow of being cleft like some lightning-struck tree by the occurrence of you within me.

but sometimes i get over you by tiny degrees--sometimes i remember so hard and fast, so far-flung, as if i were made of tiny pinpoints of your light, as if i were a constellation arced over a horizon defined by the gravity of you, bent around you, nothing but the atmosphere
of what drew toward you


you were the longed-for--you were the light
the light called the day
the death of that longing was the dark
the darkness called night

places: the 7 day theory

i am a work of my own art--
seeing this very clearly, the choices i make
in self-presenting, the choice made
inherent
in how to see what i do,
or how to see that which is done to me.

the desperate bravado
of a show of feeling--a feeling, i think,
too deep to be felt.

so it must be shown,
shoved through to the surface, spilled out
like coarse-grained salt on a dark wood table.


my mind never wanted to be in the same place as itself.
sepulchral hands, it thought, wandering a keyboard,
and blood metaphors
to thicken the words--
i was a child.  i am proud of that

and there is no saying i won't regress.



trying to tell the truth
when it is so easy
to make ritual
 
dropping science like galileo dropped the orange

places: underneath my clothes

locked out of my body, again, and looking for some way
to act, think, believe--some way to do something other
than twist and wait,

like food hanged up above
the reach of bear-paws.

it's almost worse than the agony
attendant upon remembrance and acknowledgment,
this present

which is just a plain gray door,
behind which lingers
the comfortable tortures
the exquisite emotional adventures--



looking back at the torturous past
as if through a photo album, saying "remember--
remember how i endured that, and that?
remember that?"

my brain
is an idiot.

places: new haven, ct--div school--outdoor staircases behind the library

double staircase leading out onto a set of parking spaces
a dumpster and a green hill--
the privatest way to enter an already private building.

visually it upholds the impression
created by the nearby grad apartments
that nobody lives here or goes here--
any passerby is accidental or lost,

and the rich red brick exists autonomously,
the pattern of its walls and stairs
a meaningless yet lovely accident

like stars which are set close enough
to be called constellations,
but each one, considered rightfully,

is vividly alone
and not responsible to any human story.

places: reno, nv, motel 6

reno corner of virginia and plum
off the strip but virginia used to be the highway, so it feels central
each intersection not simply a stop but a quantity

looking up over the gas station sign and the pitched mall roofs
at the trees in the save-mart parking lot

under the long-stem white lamps
those thin lacework branches look like
they've been doused
in light.