Monologue #3: Educated Tramp

She got a little lie on her face, a little lipstick that doesn't fit in, that says, "Hey Jack, 'how bout you come over and we play a little find the pickle."  Her jar is open, 'cept it ain't anythin' but.  She brings 'em over, steals their wallets, chains 'em to a bed and beats 'em to death, so she got a little lie on her face, that creeps at ya, cuz you know what she's about.  She leaves 'em wanting more.  She leaves 'em chained up dead in a different room each night, and ain't nobody found her yet cuz they all junkies or whores, or some shithouse racket that don't care about anyone or anything so nobody cares about them, how 'bout that?  How 'bout you leave this place before I tell ya more?  How 'bout I tell you that the President ain't got no balls, or the balls he got ain't big enough cause I seen 'em swingin' and nobody pays attention to it. How 'bout that guy that blows the whistle on every major government just got the rape whistle treatment blown on him?  How 'bout that?  How 'bout life makes us all losers, and all of us dream to be somethin' better, but we ain't actually anythin' better than what we were born with.  You still believe that nature over nurture shit?  Cause I believe that I'm a votin' American that don't give a damn what the fuck Congress does, I just bend over and take that shit all night.  How long's the night gonna be?  Huh?  Huh?  So we got a murderin' whore, a President with no balls and me takin' the splintered of a broomstick up my rectum each night so we can all sleep better.  Welcome to America, where as long as you're asleep, you're better.

Silent Night Snow

In the golden candlelight of melancholy,
I visit memory
and find snow.

Besotted by snow!
Nights rapt by the windows
watching flakes fall
delicate through the soft glow
of incandescent street lamps;
muted gray pervading the air,
sifting silent gentle ice crystals
one on top of the other.
The world is a lily-white dreaming.

There is never a quiet
like the quiet of snow.

The birds flit between it,
fairies in the dim-light,
silent as time, invisible
as breath.

There is a quiet between us.
A silence.  Runny noses
and bright red cheeks
from a scraping heavy
on the gravel driveway.

Does the damask air
inspire you too?

Whoosh, deep breaths!

Limitless ecstasy,
silent night snow.

Progress

I equate it to listening
to your mother's last heartbeat -
the inexorable pound
that eventually will stop
while you sit helpless
next to her hospital bed

and watch the stereophonic
heart monitor fade.
There is a tightness
in the chest, a tightness
in the back, a tightness
around the eyes

and through the mind,
no peace while days
drift away and the slow,
inexorable pound
builds and builds
till nothing is done

and nothing accomplished
and another year
ends how it very much
began, in a black suit
catered affair, except
you're the one catering it.

20 Different Words for Snow

As snowfall goes, I love Burble,

big blops of snow to trouble mittens.

Teezer and Snikwit, small stinging razors,

come out like claws of kittens.

Kummf drops slowly from a shovel,

weighing thousands of pounds,

Liminy, Shiminy, and Pizwee

lightly flurry, never touching ground.

Baekiss snow just comes and goes,

and crotchett snow is crunchy.

Sempine snow is best for snowballs,

and sheany's snow for jumping.

Quelto is for birds on the feeder,

Dristop for when they cannot fly,

Shupair snow comes all at once,

and Skimty drifts slowly on by.

Gramdair is the majestic snow,

and deskawn brings icy death.

Lijen cancels school for days,

and timple tastes the best.

But for all the snow

that snows these ways, 

my favorite snow is Whishram.

Whishram comes as a fire roars,
with cocoa for all the children.

Come Whishram, Burble,

Teezer, Snikwit,

Baekiss, Kummf, and Shiminy!

Come Sempine, Sheany,

Dristop and Shupair,

Lijen, Timple and Liminy!

Throw yourself around this city,

clothe us all in white,

and leave us feeling warm and full

on a snowy Christmas night!

Imagine

All it took was one

simple song 

and moving my body

to a beat no one else

could hear

to change

the linen white of my ceiling

to the night sky.

Dreaming

Remember how we used to be young 

and stay up all night and dream of things to come

like a once-remembered song

in the moonlight a lalalong time ago

and how we were dreaming just now

dreaming like mannequins 

dream in a store window

breathless and timed out

as if they were in the middle

of something very important 

but too important to be ignored 

by those of us walking by

and we could be drawn into that world

that raging world of sand-blasted skin

colors and dervish thought, like a dream

we almost forgot out of the windows

and into the mire of thought

and thought and thought and a thought

I thought when I dream of you

is that I hope we get one night

to spend inspiring each other once again

and I hope that 4 AM comes way too soon

and I hope you leave on that plane

missing me and those nights we used to have

that happened again

because sometimes at 2 AM all I think about 

is the world in dreams, sometimes I dream awake

sometimes I leave all this world for a fake one

and I digest my food in a delirious state

and I track my romance like fresh-baked bread

warm and cuddly and soft

and good with something to spread on it

good with a little addition, a spiced gooseberry jam

or some kind of cheese made from goats or lambs

and how I dream those things into being

on nights when I can't be anything 

anymore but a dream of someone else

dreaming of you turning over

and telling me, "Wait, there's more."

Ginsberg

Sometimes beauty is in the eye
of the beholder.  My scratched arms
tell a story of conflict:

the cat and myself

squaring off in a test of manhood

brought about by day-old food

and pent-up loneliness,

from both sides.  He actually

went for my neck at one point

and I know I caught

him between the eyes

and then 

an uneasy truce pervaded

the apartment.  I gave him

new food, he came

and sat on my lap 

for a time.  I apologized.

He splayed out belly-up

and tried to play 

with my shoelaces

as they were tied to go.

I suppose the most 

beautiful part of the day 

was the entrance before he and I fought;

coming from the cold 

into a warm hallway 

that always smells like cinnamon

and opening the door

knowing I would have something

to talk to at the end of the day.  

My scratched arms

tell a story of conflict,

and we probably both needed it. 

Drowning in Autumn

The generous
are bar patrons willing to pay
friend's tabs.  They want a chance

to show that breaking bread
and sharing mead is tradition.
Most deals are inked in wine or beer
or clear snowy cocktails.

You could say we met
with the pouring of a beer
on my pants.  We left
with a beer in our stomachs

and salt-red cheeks,
like pretzels baking,
to keep us drinking.

A Self-Pitying Epilogue to a Long Day

Sometimes I think it might be easier

to give up and move to India.

At least my one hundred thirty dollars

would go somewhere there,

at least I might find something else to do

beside slave away in this 

insufferable city.  I feel like New York

is an experiment gone wrong,

and we artists come here

to try to turn this broken place

into a beautiful dream

of utopian art, but instead we struggle

and live heedless, headless lives

that end up tearing us apart.

So let’s move away to London,

to Paris, to Rome, find a home

in the simplest of places 

and live quietly out of suitcases

full of dirt, growing vegetables

that travel around with us

and keep the tags on our skirts

to return them when we get back,

with all the dust of the world

enveloped in their wrinkles and cracks,

making travelogues of our clothes

and a worn covered knapsack.

Let’s engage in political discourse,

in native rock’n’roll, lift vintage 

ideas out of our wounded souls

and disburse them amongst the locals,

leaving them with questions about who they are

and what they eat, and why they live

in the place they do, except

these are all questions 

we ask ourselves without exception

and can’t find the answer,

so we’re sampling everybody else’s

way of living and finding happiness

because New York can’t give you that,

it can’t give you happiness 

it can work you to the bone,

leave you feeling cold and alone

at the end of a long day,

when you have nothing to go back to

but your windowless, airtight room

and all of your dreams are an ocean away

living life the way you wish she would

when she was with you, 

but couldn’t, because you couldn’t

make her happy as she is when she plays.

So you write.

And your dreams exposit reality

in simplest words, turns of phrases

that conjure banality

and lost potentiality.

And you don’t write for the masses,

you write for yourself

and maybe that’s why you can’t find 

a market to dwell in, can’t find the courage

to share all this beauty

your head conjures from nothing,

can’t believe your thoughts

could be worth hearing

much less reading,

but maybe they are 

and maybe you should try

and learn why you love

putting words down

on paper so much.

Maybe that’s right

and New York is just a stop

on the way 

to make you realize

that life

is what you make it

and dreams are what you dream them

and the road is where you go,

not what you follow.

And ultimately,

all this suffering 

leads to learning

and leading a life 

that is worth something.

That is earned,

not conjured from nothing.

Confronting the Past

We think about love

in our mud-rusty blanket phase

and we come up with ultimatums:

Ultimately, for me to move on,

I had to cut off contact with you,

had to leave the sphere of life

you maintained and spread

my wings to fly away.  

I cannot imagine it happening

any other way, cannot imagine

life as it could have been,

but it could have been different

and I’m so happy it’s not.

I’d be somewhere, unhappy

because I was not an artist,

I was a lover with a chained wrist,

a writer without pens

mired in a bog of could-have-beens,

because now I’m in New York,

living life dreamily and writing

all these words to make up 

for any hurt you might have caused me.

Because I did hurt, 

and that is why I left,

I needed a change,

a nut in my brain tightened

and I stopped paying

attention to you, stepped

out of your world-sphere

and into dreams 

made of Katmandu

and Australian women

with pretty smiles

and blonde hair

and it was enough 

to distract me,

at least for a while.

I changed so much,

found out the world was bigger,

found out I was smaller

and found, upon coming back,

that my life needed more

and I needed to pay better attention

to all of it and use my dreams

as fuel to get somewhere

and I did.  I’m now somewhere,

doing something

and so are you,

but reading those old thoughts

brought me back to a time

when it all was as simple

as the next best line

I could give you 

to make you feel 

beautiful.  Life isn’t like that

anymore, it’s more complex,

and more rewarding,

but something about first love

leaves me wishing I could

always be back in that first moment,

that agony of pain in my chest

like rain on a sunflower,

dripping from me 

and lighting up my world

with summer and winter

all at the same time,

two juxtaposing limitless forces

combining to rhyme

themselves over and over again.

I’m embarrassed to be who I was

back then, but it taught me 

that I need to fight my battles

with my pen and dream up stories

that make people laugh and cry

and feel something close

to what it was I felt

when I first saw you

and my throat closed up,

my hands were sweating,

my heart was beating faster

than a mouse faced with a sleeping 

cat, and I saw your face

and said THAT is what I want.

And I never got it,

which is maybe why every 

relationship I’ve had has sprung

out of another ending,

maybe I’m just pretending

they are all you and that’s what

I want.  But I don’t think that’s true.

I wanted the picture of you

I kept in my head, because in the end

I never really got to know you

the way he did, and I’ve found out

since there is more to a relationship

than almost kissing on the lips

and talking in cold streetlights

well into the night. It takes 

more than that to make two people

one.  And I love my woman now,

she is radiant and golden

and has taught me about the world

in ways I never dreamed 

and complicated my ideals

and set me up to become

greater than I can imagine,

but I think part of me

will always be that small boy

inhaling love in a small high school

auditorium at fourteen years old.

I never want to lose that,

and that part of me will always be there,

always ready to find beauty

in the first morning hours

when she wakes up,

turns over and stretches

into a tea-cup, wearing

old big t-shirts and glasses,

laughing and yawning

as she sips english breakfast

and tries to tell me 

I’m ridiculous 

for bringing beauty 

out this early.  But

I’ve found it again,

this spark to write down

details of life,

feeling words the way

a warm fire feels 

on a frosty evening;

finding beauty 

in demagoguery 

and hegemony,

passing consonants

to and fro,

assonations

and alliterations 

rambling high and low.

But what I’m most grateful for

is a chance to re-visit

the pure passionate self

that created so much art

so fearlessly and with such wealth

of talent and courage

that I envy him his point-of-view.

There was only one way 

to see things and he saw it

clear as day, saw the world

change and move

around one stationary object:

Love.  

And a part of him

still does. 

The Third Time I Was in Love

I believed in you once

when we were younger,

when I could hear 

the sound of your laughter 

coming from across the way

and I’d speak to you tenderly,

quietly, unabashedly, as I might

if I were a lover.

I believed in you.  

You were a real being, 

of flesh and blood,

of secrets and scars, 

scary real-life secrets 

told only in cars at night

right before I dropped you off 

at your home, right before 

you broke up with your boyfriend 

and I slipped in.  

And we danced and sang, 

but I was angry

and I was young, 

and the only way

we could relate 

ended up being fighting 

and the only way I could love you 

was to slap you in the face

and laugh, thinking 

I was doing you a favor,

while in fact I was reinforcing 

every archetypal struggle

you put a face on and called lover:  

that you amounted to little more 

than a plaything to screw over

and over again, till this fantasy

drove you to other happy-inducing ends.  

Every boy has to grow up

and be a man eventually, 

and dabbling in dark lust

lets these candid emanations 

of our natures grow to dust gently,

and I’m sorry you were used by more of us 

than was never necessary.  

So teach me the girl

from across the way isn’t gone

with a smile and a kiss

like a high note at the end of a song

and maybe one day 

we’ll meet up and you’ll be ok.  

Till then, I’m sorry 

I helped you turn out this way.

Night Sky #1 (from Maine Poems)

There is a strange beauty
that creeps under the doorway
around these midnight hours.
Little tealight hours that sometimes
waste away like light on a page,
passing from east to west
like reading the Milky Way
across the night.  I remember


when we did that not a month ago,
when I, with my flashlight in hand,
led us down the stairs 
from our bed
on the porch 
to the shore of the lake
and flung the simple light into the sky
to find out constellations
and stay close in the cold
of Late August, Maine.  


Then we hopped up the porch
and slept peacefully, making love
almost as an afterthought,
an addendum
to an already beautiful night.
What more love could 
we show than 
sharing the clear night sky
and the crisp cold air 
with each other?  


If two bodies, clasped together,
craning their necks high into the dark,
fingers sharing knowledge 
of history's great secrets,
breathing each other's passion
for life into the art of the sky


is not making love


than what is?

Desperation

I've lost touch.

My muse is not forthcoming, even 

so close to midnight when nothing

else is supposed to come along

and distract me but the silent reverie

of a voice speaking pretty words 

through the back of my head.

Instead, I'm caught half-aware,

listening to logical sentences

that don't get me anywhere

but the delete button 

on an off-white page.  

I'm a product of my age,

a writer in the temporal flux

of nearly-manhood,

that can't find a story

quite good enough to tell

or the belief to tell his own story

that is good enough to tell.

So I sit here, at midnight,

a flute with no wind,

completely flat when it comes

to inspiring a need

to write a poem

that is decently read.  

Love

-originally written 3/17/09


You could smell the grass was growing today

like the night we first made love. And it's not

like you're thinking, cause we didn't make love.

We made - love. Like a bird makes love to a

song, like a wolf makes love to the moon, like

a starfish floating gently on the tide on a twilit

night makes love to the motion of Mother Earth -

we made love. It was love, like a song lyric

on a road trip day, where the sun gleams on

the hood of your car and a rabbit hops along

the width of the highway, a culmination

of your teenage angst; an amalgamation of

dust and pot and tears that rolled up

together meant - high school. But again,

that's not what you're thinking either

because I didn't really get high till college,

when I saw her, and I was transported by her

mossy eyes, that reminded me so much

of a memory I couldn't grasp at anymore,

like a leaf picked up by the wind and

thrown into a stream, to travel and become

sediment and dust feeding a mossy rock

on some wide river in the middle of

nothing and nowhere. Which is exactly

the beginning of love, a place of nothing,

like a lighthouse in the middle 

of a town square, that gets beat up 
by wave after wave after wave
of incessant tide-lines.  To be a rock
against the ocean is what love truly is - 
and it only gets smoother over time.

MTV Watching

There is something really off
about the MTV Movie Awards.
I could write more,
but I'm not sure
that devoting
time
to mediocrity
is a worthy way
to spend the evening.


But I continue my viewing.


It's like watching a clock ticking
backwards.  These people who
race against the magic of time,
who throw themselves fondly
into the arms of publicity -


seems to me a dangerous stunt.
I suppose the biggest might be
grappling their way out
of the limelight because I
watch them and feel nothing


but a slight sense of discomfort
that they know they are being
viewed by millions and judged
by millions and loved by millions


of people.  But they are people
and they are more than people.


They are our golden idols
and we worship the millstone
of Hollywood with offerings
of corroded arteries
and sugar-driven nerve fires.


Oh to wake up one day
and see it all burn down
and watch a crossword
get put up in place
of the Hollywood sign.


But we would all probably
get bored by that really soon
and start making up words
to fill up weird spaces
and pretty soon the words
Hollyw and Ood
would end up together
and we'd start all over again.

Walking and Thinking

I believe in watching time pass
through the lighted window
of grace.  There was a moment


today when stained glass
mandalas made more sense
than any linear pattern,


so I went inside, out
of the straight-pouring rain,
to contemplate my loneliness


closer to God.  Today
was a day I wished I could paint;
pale trees through a mist


of snowflake rain, alighting
on face and hair and arms
with such goodness


that being sheltered from it
would be insulting a higher
power.  I walked.  Trees


like old Norse gods,
spreading out their strength
before the inevitable dying-time,


became my companions,
and I thought about sitting
underneath, till an old man


in a jazz reverie
sat too, and I left him
to his remembrance.


It was a fine day to walk,
explore, imagine, dream,
do all of those shapely


awkward calculations
of the future like we used
to when we were kids.


I thought about you, about
life, about London, about French,
about omelettes and crosswords


and finding trails where there
were no trails anymore.  I thought
about writing and recollection,


about stories, about disease,
about struggle, and money,
and children, and fireplaces.


I thought about Christmas,
and music, and laughter,
and I thought about Paris


and I thought about you.
The day was wet with these
thoughts, spattering


the ground around me.
Where the huge mulch lay,
thoughts coagulated


and rose in steam heat
back to their origins
in the clouds.  

New Boys and Old Boys

We ate and laughed
and drank and you were there,
in the little light room,

surrounded by your antipathy
in the form of friends.
I suggested a conversation;

it was lost in translation
of your anger to foam
to an ice cube
pressed against your lips,

a coddling of ice akin
to a hand against your hip

that I knew you missed so well.

He was older than you in a way,

because he was gone quicker than you

and you

still

love him.

In a quiet way,
perhaps,
you
still
love him.

I could tell you that a million times

and every time it would be true

but you won't grow any older

than a flower in the mud,
a perennial of metallic dissonance
that scrapes back against the boots
trying to wilt and depress it

to the wet ground.  I knew

that we could never convince you

of your importance to the world.

That would be an idea
discovered yourself,
maybe later and farther away.
All the men I know discover themselves

in their thirties, when they stop trying

to prove to everyone the importance

of love.  Deep down you want
peace and quiet

just as much everyone else.
So be content with that.

Now and Soon

I understand
that someday, if I work
hard enough, I will be able
to explain something simply
by having a white beard on
my chin.

I understand
that someday, if I work
hard enough, I will see my
child being born and that
will change the way I think
about the world forever.

I understand
that someday, if I work
hard enough, all of my
arrogance will dissolve
with the opening of a flower.

I understand
that someday, if I work
hard enough, I may be able
to end up in your arms every night,
no matter how far away
you are at the beginning of the day.

Moving On

I'm alone and awake in my room
that just vomited
three years of accumulated
stuff

into a U-Haul and drove away.
The fan is blowing on high.
I light a candle on the carpet
to dispel evil spirits

that now seem to have free rein
without the totemic pictures
of my family on the walls.
I take a Tylenol

and try to sleep.
My aero-bed is slightly
under-inflated
and I imagine it feels

something like what
sleeping on a cloud
might feel like.
But this room

is a poor substitute
for the night sky:
a lot of empty space
and no stars.

Flirting

"I'm electing to go into
mental gymnastics."

She thought that was silly
and laughed at him
in her head,
but all he saw
was a bright red spot
near her cheekbones.

He took it for an invitation.

Night

I'm a cannon in the wind,
wrote the blind poet,
though he could have said,
I'm a cannon of wind

and meant more with that
image than anything before.
Can you believe in me?

Please, he asked,
can you believe in me?

And people did, and they
got close to worship.

But little happened after that
and he remained a blind poet,
directing the wind
here and there
and all around.

Like a sad song, or a dream
unfulfilled, he spit words
into a fan, watched them
come back at him
and caught them
to turn them back again.

Would that he could create
a uniquity,
a dream of something else,
that meant something.

Nightmares

I'm the sound of a fan
in the middle of the night

when you wake up
to the small sounds
of your heart beating
and your fleeting desires

creeping by the bubble
of sleep that surrounds
the fragile psyche of you

in the dead of night.

I dreamed a dream
of me being put
into a full-body cast
for the sake of art

and those around me
promised me they would
do the same, but I never
saw it done.

So I was frozen into a cast
of myself and put on display
for three days while art
matured into something

worth being.  This scared
the living shit out of me.

And I awoke trembling.
And found I was still free
and went back to sleep,
a prisoner of my dreams.

Inspiration

She writes a little note on the back
of her hand.

"I'm a teacup in the wind."

And sets out to be the greatest,

the most simple,
the understated believability
of a generation.

"Will you dream me a genie?"
she asks to the night sky
and it does, a dragon,
to light her way in the black
cold night of exhalations
without inspirations.

I'm a dreamer in a wild world,
she writes to the dreamy star sky
and I'm not anything less or
anything more
than that.

"Will you believe in me?"
she asks her sad old man
of a boyfriend, who sits
and thinks
and sits
and thinks all the time

of the dreamy times of autumn
and the dreamy times of spring

in a silly small world
that used to exist

but never will again.
She writes and writes
and writes and writes
and it comes to very little

but it all means something
to her dreamy thoughts.

The sun went down on the world
and she ways always happy,
in a frightened
high-pitched
sort of way.

And dreaming of Saturn and Mars,
she watched the stars twinkle out
and the dragon lose its fire
and all the sudden, the quiet
lay awake the way quiet does
in the middle of the night.

And inspiration began again.

I was a schoolchild
in early autumn

waiting for the bus
with my mother.

In the early morning
light, it was there

yellow and hard
and terrifying,

a beast equipped
to rip
me from the womb.

I stood, my red
plastic lunchbox
in my hand,

a freshly made
bologna sandwich
with white bread
and mayonnaise

beginning its trek
to first grade.

I cried
when the doors
opened
to swallow me.

I forgot
when they
opened
to let me out.

Starting a Fire

When you brought me back from the hospital
I saw you in flashes:
sitting on a chair,
eating too buttery quinoa,
turning on the microwave.

You were busy.

I was an otter
in an oil spill.
I slept and woke,
found you were gone

and slept again.
You woke me up
again much later when
you told me I was grumpy
and I laughed the whole way
home from the train
and found I needed to create
something pretty.

So I put up a tent
in my room and changed
the sheets on my futon
and strung Christmas lights
above our heads because
I couldn't quite get the stars
to come out on my apartment
ceiling.  You were tired
but loved the thought

and we slept under the sky
of my room, folded over
and under like a matchbook,
and it felt,
for an orange moment,
like we were the last
two people
on the coast
as the sun went down
on the world

forever.

Wine

“He makes a Merlot,” she said

unconsciously running her eyes into his

and laughing there at the collision.

Awkwardness died.  He laughed.

“Merlot is a combination of two kinds

of grapes, but I can’t remember

the rest.”  He hoped a bottle 

was waiting for him 

at the end of the conversation.  

“You wanna take a walk on the beach?”

she asked, not really thinking

the question would be something

worth kissing over.  “Yes.”

He smiled

and wandered into her footsteps

laced his fingers with hers

and sewed them together

by brushing the sand 

from her knee.

“You don’t need to do that.”

He smiled

and laughed into her eyes

sparkling in the purple ocean

like two grapes just picked 

from the vine.  How he longed

to see them ripen with age,

pressed and emptied of tears

so that joy

made up the rest of it all.

“Two kinds of grapes,”

he said, leaning closer.

“Yes,” she breathed.

“One is never enough.”