Mental Health, generation Z

Abundance mentality

on part-time salary

In-N-Out for twelve days straight.

Fuck yourself. Don’t masterbate.

Attract the life your algorithm sold:

No drama. No drama. Never get old.

Fill the cracks in face and soul.

Lip injections pouting bold.

Pill erection. Addy dick.

Full moon ritual. Co-Star sick.

Botox mind, gaslit and plump.

Friends who slurp your photo dumps,

dunks and drunk Tuesday night slumps,

And Japanese plush pillows to hump.

Only fans and lonely friends.

Micro aggressions. Brotherhood sends.

Turning up, altitude bends.

Tik Tok blur prescription lens.

afraid for no reason with a capital A.

ADHD and covid brained.

I’m not crazy, I’m iNsAnE.

Stay in your silent white bread lane.

Jenny ate and left no crumbs

E.I. means she isn’t dumb.

She slayed. Her outfits giving Dahmer.

The math ain’t mathing. Who’s Osama?

Clickbate confused. Make it makes sense.

Biden’s lap top. Hillary’s sents.

Trump rhetoric: 1945.

But their side’s fake news. Only their side lies.

“You’re facts are wrong, opinion-wise.”

What a progressive time to be alive.

Hear my words and shoot them deep.

Adopt my blood. It’s yours to keep.

Just think of me. Just think of me.

Live my best life and then you’ll see.

Walk a mile in my thumbs

and stick your head high up my bum.

Lick my thirst trap. Drool my OCD.

I’m walking chaos, sooo crazy.

Silence is violence. Heed my feed.

Behead the statues. Concrete will bleed.

God is dead and history.

Ritual candles. The moon loves me.

Ass man. Eat ass. We’re all licking poo.

His vote was ick. His thoughts are ew.

“Daddy kink. Keep on swiping through

if you’re not Marvel ripped, and 6’4” too/

if you’re not bikini fit, 90 lbs, huge boobs.

I’m not that, but I’ve got attitude.”

3 day fast then cupcake treats

then deposit into toilet seats.

My body goal’s a tender twig

so I load my barrel then pull trig.

All I ask is some respect

and brand deal gifts and a blue check,

true love to make my heart erect

and polygamous disaffected.

I want it all, in shortest form.

I think i earned it. I was born!

400 trillion to one,

says I’m better than everyone.

Your feelings are valid, my opinions are right.

“Friend” is my favorite show. oscars so white.

I’m a walking contradiction.

Pronounce my flaws with perfect diction.

Addicted to my pocket screen.

I need it, can’t leave them on seen.

Hack my mind mysterious Mr Beast.

Take my money. Dopamine feast.

I don’t know a single thing for sure.

Is death really coming? Are we overboard?

Are the caps melting? Have we killed the world?

Are the birds extinct? Do I need hammer curls?

Does coffee give you cancer or not?

Should I skip breakfast? Will i get shot?

Is there a safe place, does it exist?

Will i get aids from a club kiss?

Am I a cuck ‘cause I miss my ex?

Is incest porn as normal as the rest?

Do I want kids? Is marriage a lie?

I see the flag. Am I a real ally?

Are corporations out of control?

Has politics taken a fatal toll?

Are 50% evil oppressors?

Are 50% snowflake passive aggressors?

Imposter stomping my loud feet

so you might look away from me.

The problems there, I see it clear.

Look, I’m pointing away from here.

Change the world, don’t change myself.

Offence is progress, do you need it spelt?

I need some love. Share the wealth with me.

Mental health, generation Z

London, 2023

Rat Pancake

This house is made of beans and jeans

and cheese that melted on my knees.

My knees were skinned from bad mistakes

and every time I masturbate.

And yesterday, it came too soon

and ‘booed’ my flesh that it consumed

and bled, did I, from Christmas crackers

the thoughts I bought from homeless wackers.

A sad car jacker I came to know

who ate his snot in search of blow

and lived in boxes under there,

under the bridge in underwear.

And Death shivers too in his cold boots

and sucks on gay tobacco shoots;

Camel regret and the sex we pluck,

deflower ourselves till God’s had enough.

Then he sends a flood of warm piss regret

that I drink like milk from the teet of dread

and Sanity’s an unwoven sweater

that spells, in its own blood, “it will get better.”

A smile’s toothless as it calls home.

They recognize its wheezing breath alone.

You’ve slept through life too dumb to dream,

too drunk to cum in your too young jeans.

“I’m mean and nasty” said the frog

to the large tire approaching from out the fog

and then “splat” said its wetness innards

to the vampire ground that found its dinner.

Eat the day and eat your brain

and pick you nose and choose refrain.

Restrain your drool and loose your tongue

and you can French kiss everyone.

Los Angeles, 2022

Ecstasy Candle monday

I’m swimming through a dream.

My face hurts and there’s a spider on my bed and I didn’t even scream.

I just shoved it. The drug seizes and seethes

at the mouth. You white-knuckle clutch and breathe

and strangle that wish that it’s true.

You pray for white in the blue.

The electric chair morning in electric chair monday

sits in the pews and bleeds out its Sundays.

Bedlam choirs sing as we drown in the milk

of silent release that spills out the cut as quick silk.

Silky smooth lies, double breasted perfection.

Perfect breast. Ass ass ass. Sit down on erection.

Laughs that we choke on and roll up and smoke.

The amount we forget and geyser spout up’s no joke,

for it all comes and goes like rain drowning itself

landing and dragging itself down sewer hell

and the days fall thick and quick and they swallow the sun

and the future is blind wet with nowhere to run.

Rub on my back and my back so I moan.

I gasp electric in black, I’m just one week from home.

But for now I romp, roll and riot and rage,

burn sage and stick my dick in the socket to shock out my haze.

Laze in the dream, lick wet every wish,

as the days fall like giggles that rise from a kiss.

Los Angeles, 2022

A bird heart is small

I feel the guilt on my feet like a blanket of piss

staining my skin tops

and the clouds have come all the way down and through my eyes and are licking away the thoughts bleeding from the swiss holes in my brain

and it rains.

A small heart is soft and it’s hard just a well.

The one side ignites while the other side melts.

One says it’s heaven, the other’s in hell

and my eardrums are haunted by last night’s dinner bell.

Midnight, it’s slipped, and broke its aged hip

and it lies on my lies and it black stains my lips.

The birds, they all fall one by one from the sky

and Death shivers his bones afraid he too will die.

The sparks from the fuse burning proud into my brain

sear into my soul shallow praise for fake puddled pain

and ignite all their hearts, melting wings into the rain,

and so the birds tumble and bee buzz down in love and insane.

Los Angeles, 2022

crazy crazy stupid virgin

I am praying to God that you are my One,

and gently insisting in manic gestures of negligence and desperate romanticism.

Under the will and weight of my insistence, my refusal to concede, my desperate midnight whispers,

the word of fate shall bend, not break, and spell your name in bleeding scratches on the virgin skin of my heart.

Or

the hyenas will laugh at me through morrow’s night

because I am stubborn, stupid, and crazy crazy.

Toronto, 2022

All the things I wish I could say to you,

I’ll bleed them onto the page

in secret ink

and hope they may light you on fire too

and that in the heat of it

the ink will emerge and you will know my soul.

Toronto, 2022

The Lobster

I am in the warm soup

turning a gentle red

and my heart is turning slower in the golden oooze

and all of it sllowwws as your skin becomes air.

And suddenly, very suddenly

death feels like a warm milky night kiss with cinnamon and nothing to wake up early for.

This is love.

And it isn’t cruel

after all.

It is now.

Like green cold,

and gold and morning blue,

all wrapped around you tight and warm.

In the warm soup.

Toronto, 2022

Bloody ghost from tomorrow

When I look at the ghost,

decapitated and bleeding

infatuated and breathing,

in the place you used to sit,

where the rain was once wet

and came down like it needn’t its reserves for the next night,

belting love rambling war cries in the presence of something we missed…

when I look at the bleeding ghost I see my future,

not in the death, not in the gone

nor the oath of the breath of that prodigal one.

I see it in the blood shooting out of the top

every second on a new a pulse and then the gush drops.

It’s red firework wet in the dark sky of not,

cause the ghost’s heart is still beating, something death couldn’t stop.

So I see my future in the beat of my heart,

it beat the first time with you, still beats now we’re apart,

but when I see you again, in the days crouching out there

lying in quiet wait for the future rear

they will leap down, wild men out the trees

and land laughing on you and eternal on me

and then my heart beats, they are off to the races

and my veins they will surge as my blood fills my dead spaces

and alive I will be, so filled by life I might pop

and my love eternal for you, will spill out the top.

Toronto, 2022

My Father

The sins of the father,

like the burning beaten Sun

and the greatest gift he tries to give

is cutting you free from the umbilical

chord he imagines around your neck

with his teeth,

and sucking the snot out of your suffocating nose,

and his blood out of you,

and the sins that broke free from him

he wants to bear like a cross,

scalding on his bare flesh

and across his breaking shoulders

so you can escape from the crushing weight of pain and fear

that runs like oil through the water

thicker than blood.

And they crucify him for the merciless parables you have told,

and understandably so,

only care and rational in their quivers,

so they sling arrows like hellfire and condemnation,

and they say you are connected to him through coincidence only.

But they are wrong.

He is my father

and he loves me relentless

and I will carry his broken body in my mind and my heart

and stand in the firing line of that flaming reproach

for as long as I am here

because I love him.

Unknown, 2021

it’s a funny day today

It’s starting to smell of formaldehyde and lipstick stains,

for nothing can be preserved that is alive.

The greatest act of love,

the final act,

the ultimate one,

is to go gentle into that darkened embrace

and stay.

London, 2022

London cheeks

You can come into my heartbeats,

shelter from the storm,

and though my heart rages

you are safe

in every memory,

at every window in every rainfall,

in the stains from every wet kiss and ocean cheek,

in the bruises from the bites,

and giggling scratches from the fire nights,

etched into the walls of my heart

and as perfume on every word echoing from beyond my cracking teeth

like rotting rose petals and sagging promises…

always safe

in eye of the love you birthed

that was borne into my blood and blossomed into the backbeat of my life.

The hours are moving faster now

like falling minutes.

London is never quiet

but today it is quiet for us.

Alas here come the sirens crying out for tomorrow,

inevitable tomorrow,

but you are in my heartbeat always.

London, 2022

Powdered death Nod

You’re my lowest hanging moral guide, a bruised and battered peach,

and when I want to taste the dark, it’s to you that I beseech.

Oh devil on my broken back who bit and sucked the angel

free of blood, bone dry and good, and now prophesizes danger --

that angel whose wings came unclipped, she dropped down off my back,

slid down my spine, chilled my loins, then fell into my crack --

But you, oh sweet one, with bitter tongue, tell me true and clear,

can I bite and embrace the ghost, maybe slip my tongue under her ear,

who has been following my every step, whispering dissent,

but I’m smelling sweet sickly flower death, so her lust I think she meant?

Is it too soon to come in bloom and get drunk off the sun,

and does it make me a reproachful mess to reproach everyone?

Oh devil on my broken back just tell me I’m ok,

or I’ll suck your blood till you’re dry too, and be my own words I need you to say.

London, 2022

(No one believes in death)

Tonight is coming fast like a train that I prayed for and didn’t believe in.

The day is rattling

under me.

London, 2022

Poem

I’m still sleeping in her bed,

and more mercilessly, waking there,

but she’s falling asleep inside me

asking me not to let her go dark

and it hurts to turn a blind ear and a blind hand,

it hurts to let someone die,

so I eat myself every night and drink myself,

consume all I can,

all the prayers for transcendence

or at least ascendence;

For farther to fall

and deeper to crash

because it will be in her bed, in her sheets, in her four walls decorated by the whims and whimsy of her yesterdays.

Tomorrow is an elusive bug hiding somewhere under the furniture of anywhere but here.

London, 2022

Going bad

I wake up gnawing on my arms

and something much much deeper

for yesterday is a skin I can’t shed -- burrowed under this new morning, a predator in wait, stalking new moments like fresh meat, bleeding pure, always virginal now -- that I can’t scrape off on the sharp rocks or the sagging evenings,

bowing to the weight of the night falling,

blessed by Divine Close, abyss like a giggling sip that tastes like stale forever,

a kiss in the dark by the phantom, a warm kiss by the lips you’ve looked at, the soft kiss at last…

And in the late nights it is worse,

bubbling up itchy, bug bite deformed, demented as promised by the mosquito sips when we slurped each-other’s candied blood,

greedy, slutty gluttons,

lusting for the saline codeine like breadcrumbs to each-other’s heart.

It veils my eyes so I wake up and can only see the old, bruised moment of impact still,

the moment they purport is consecrated by divine concussion,

the moment right after you fall

when you’re bleeding so profusely and deeply inside of you that Death is pushed out of your head by the flood,

out of your eyes on the waves of saline codeine

rushing now

and you’re starry eyed

and can see the stars, the vast universe, the tiny pointillistic figurine that looks like your soul at long last so now you know what it looks like,

in the blacks of their eyes.

But the black follows you still for Death is unconcerned with what you see.

This morning I see nothing but the waves as I wake, the waves of yesterday still falling like mean rain

and I’m gnawing my skin but Yesterday’s not coming off

and it’s starting to smell

gone bad.

London, 2022

Poem

Maybe Heaven

when you get up close

isn’t golden at all.

It’s piss stained.

But the rivers down below look nice.

So where is Heaven if not the gold in your eye?

But sometimes it is mammoth Gods up here.

Fathers.

A prickly embrace in cold air.

Fathers.

And sometimes the gold is the womb that surrounds you

and drips into your ear.

And sometimes

your blue is light and bright and that is good enough to pass for a sweet afternoon at least in the brisk nakedness of youth.

And then

for That moment at last

it’s everywhere you look.

And the train is coming.

She was a moment out of the galloping wee hours of time.

How Lucky can one man get?

And then it is in the distance

gold

so bright it’s almost now,

and here you are again

over here

born.

Mid-air, London, 2022

Poem

Look forth, for what might you miss if you’re looking back…

perhaps the stick under your feet

or God.

San Giuliano Terme, 2022

N.

We consumed each other

like moons colliding,

like flames licking each other’s wicks,

and we were becoming run off, a beautiful mess of matter spraying into the void.

Our matter wasn’t decaying.

It was sparking off

and we were becoming wan,

our spirits thin under the weightlessness of what we lost,

but we were hungry and so we ate each other and couldn’t stop

for we would drown in the tears bubbling up from the cracks we made.

What would be left when our matter was gone?

A single true whisper of love

or death?

To be buried together must you have something left to bury?

San Giuliano Terme, 2022

Coup de grâce

Some people are on their way out from the beginning

and this is all a dance before the black curtain falls

and each spin and each frolic and each beautiful burning word and every tear and every bloody palm they just can’t let go of but always do and every toothless smile

is just a curtsy on the way out,

and they know it,

and so do we.

Death by a thousand bows.

San Giuliano Terme, 2022

Hyena relief

What a gift from the Gods of yesterday’s mistakes

and hyena relief

on the refried rug with unlikely potato bug companions,

Rolley Poley Respite in the blind of the hang-dried afternoon

and everything is as it was in your dullest desert fantasy that has been rusting in the cool water of unrequited, unwelcome, inevitable truth.

And have you recovered or reverted

to the time before your heart was open and you remembered how a shallow smile felt, Simple happiness spitting on your shins and the tops of your shoulders

like bird shit

and feathers never fell;

they flew and wings didn’t exist.

My breath hasn’t fallen below the shadow of the halo I imagined in a few hours and my toes are starting to tingle and turn blue.

A shadow has followed me for years, quiet, and on this dark day it has disappeared into all the other rambling shadows from

the gaps between the teeth of those false grins and giggles,

like a wedding veil over the one mortal truth; it’s getting late.

I’m so grateful for every moment that came in the crashing waves and cleansed me in shallow bruises and beats of my reanimated heart.

So grateful still

in the damp shadow of yesterday.

London, 2022

Roadkill death-rattle

She walked down the side of a highway.

That is all.

Oh but how she walked, oh...

Down the sunny biway side,

each step dancing the highway tides.

each step quickly then next quickly step gone,

like a fugitive giggle -- any giggle -- as she giggles along,

prowling the beat; this sunny street-side second,

twinkle toe tapping, stomping stars through the heavens.

I’m catching the wind from behind her beating wings.

It’s drying my lips out and eyes and scissor plucking my strings.

I can’t breath in her wake. I am gasping her in

for today’s a final goodbye in stolen graft two AM skin

from the dead corpse of memories, road killed and left strewn

that stink to high Heaven of Heaven come and gone a little too soon

and litter the side of this highway graveyard of bones

that her bare legs dance over, dead erect and alone.

“this is the last time” screeches and black rubber paints the way home,

stampedes through the veins of Today, but I put it down and set myself bullet free lone to roam.

Then it all comes back like salty onion snot on the breath

and puke piss in my mouth and laughing sugar regret

and another shot to the wind then collapse in the hall,

low hanging rotten kiss on the table with still a long way to fall.

“I’ll never forget”, neither one of us said,

and maybe neither one meant as we flew over each other’s heads.

I fart and I’m farting and all the crude things she said,

we’re rude to the quiet, we shriek it cold-night-blooded dead.

And then all gone to the black like a cold heart attack moan

served cold as hors d’oeuvres on a tray of cracked bones

spelling ‘here lay the thing which will soon be forgotten

but now blossom and flirt in her secret shivering garden.’

‘Goodbye’ is what today is, but I won’t gasp her, will I?

I’ll suffocate in the quiet, polite as a killed fly

in the comfort of a shadow that’s been following me for some time,

and so I’ll drown in the rumble of her wing beating drum lines

and hope she stains me. Oh, stain me. Oh, I’ll never tell.

Another one that I’ll never tell but ain’t that just as well,

for I want that this moment dies hot in my veins

and rasp rattle cold in my nose where the memories may remain.

“Stay on the wind that peels off my skin.

Goodbye is too good a word, so ‘a good time it’s been.”

And just like that -- always just like that --

it is done, the dragon says goodbye to the rat,

with a prayer in the breath for the last time in the cold

that a stain’s never gone and a scar never gets old.

She walked down the side of the highway toward a car that I hid inside of.

And that is all.

Schenectady, 2022

love is a jungle sucking wound

She’s taken the guts right out of my belly.

Laid them on toast with marmite and jelly.

Done eaten my innards with a lick of the lips

as my shaky bones tremble a prayer for their kiss.

A butterfly landed near twelve month ago

but her sharp fangs got lodged, an indelible blow,

into my neck, now I can no longer crane

pivot or twist to see who else remains.

Alas I’m standing alone, cold, in rubble and mess,

a deflated graveyard of hearts, snake-shed and distressed, and only an echo of blithe children in rain

threatens to denature my poisonous veins.

But the butterfly landed with legs on sharp stone,

took all the sharp words that burn through to bone,

sat still in the storm that chases the wake of my steps

and still she remained ‘til it had not a blow left,

and then in the glittering, star-scored morning dew

she tapped light on my heart ‘til it beat gentle anew.

She managed to love me while I thrashed, rash and young, and she’s pretty with wings that taste sweet on my tongue. She

frolics and flies divinely erratic

but when she falls, leaves the air burning plastic, dead static. I can’t breath. I can’t see. I’ll drown in the swell, claustrophobic in

prayers to be saved or be quelled.

The other is mist drifting in over the bay

and gentle rain following you out to dreamy Sunday

to hold you warm in her clouds when you’re stark raving mad. She’s got velvet hands too ‘cause she’s dark just as bad.

I’ve flipped and I’ve flopped. I’m like a quick-dying fish. I have quick-drying blood and blue quick-draining lips. I’m concussing my

heart on two beautiful walls

’til I’m walking too straight and drunk praying for falls. The cracks and midnight crevices open wide

and the space between thoughts become places to hide,

and then like an Angel descending to land,

the light streams down from another hummingbird on my hand.

She is sun and all smiles and tenderest light

streaming stark naked: tickle-teasing respite.

And now I’m smiling true but just as dumb blind

for when light hits my fog, it’s blind white in my mind.

And yet the hummingbird hums down her vagabond path

for she knows the music that’s to come, to play and to pass;

life’s deep pretty strokes, dancing ephemeral fast

and can ride them like a feather pirouette in updraft.

She shines like a star, sweet soft considerate glow

that inflates you like raging love, rampant, raring to grow.

But in downbeats I fear that she too is like mist,

though the kind that leaves you bone-chilled at toes’ edge of the cliff.

And once in a while a skeleton comes with goldfish,

to sit on my lap and to rub just a bit.

when I’m half way to heaven and falling too fast

that’s when she stops me dead still, like the moment after the last. We drink till we’re out like a light in a storm

but deep in her eyes she threatens stillness even more.

Stillness is good, it can feel nice and feel fine

but it lies in wait already in darkened infinite time.

So just wait, we’ll have enough of that cool shadowy fix,

we don’t have to bear our today teeth and shoot it into plump lips.

But alas I loose my love like a stray dog of war

to rampage and frolic, chase butterfly birds evermore.

Oh, the things that could be and are gnawing at me

‘til my wet eyes have crossed and my heart’s drowning free.

Los Angeles, 2022

in central park

It smells like Elmers glue and I’ve got gut rot
‘cause I drank a little, then I drank a lot.
My blood’s hardened, I’m hitting my head on a rock,
plucking pennies, petal praying that she loves me not.
Horse carriages sit ass sweat damp red.
The horse watches his feed that the birds eat instead.
I’m holding my breaths, saving them ’til I’m dead.
Whoops, now I’m bleeding my pennies from the rock split in my head. The carriage man threw his bowler hat in the air
twenty feet up to Heaven and it just stayed hanging there,
but I can’t find Heaven in this park or the light
or the dark in my heart or blue lip from last night
or the wind on my face or the green bus bombing down
or the man behind who was hit so I stayed safe and sound.
Bowler hat retribution came fast for the horse
for it came down on the pigeons who gunpowder burst
up up and all ways that lead to the sky
and as I sat pretty watching the feathered shrapnel fly
I was hit by the fluttering thought that I might just puke and then die. My sidewalk brain is dirty dirt gum
and sweetness no longer drips from the cut on my tongue.
My skin has been stripped and I stand naked dumb beast
who’s sharpened his teeth for the carnalest feast,
and not a thought comes... well none accept one
which is how I know when we die we miss only sex, hun.
Lo! A feather flew between my legs and grazed my blue jeans
and I looked to God, shivering bliss, and asked her what it means.
She took my hand, sucked my thumb, and placed it on the glass around her heart then took it off and stuck it straight up my ass.
Her body’s deliverance but it’s just light off the moon,
so I’m feeling nothing at all and it comes in monsoons.
I then stood long in a line they drew rash in the park,
that smelled only a little of rat shit and roach farts.
I ordered absolution with ketchup but it never came,
just egg on a croissant and side of melted refrain.
“I have no use for refrain!” I proved to myself late last night
when I used my black out and I blew up my life,
so I tossed it like cheese but took a bite of the egg.
It didn’t help a bit, spewed it with my guts out my head.

But alas absolution works in mysterious ways.
It bites the sunlight and from it’s bones it sucks out the day and it too spews that out like guts and last night
and it comes raining down, your special sunny respite,
for I looked up on the train and alas beheld Heaven as sun that sat gentle on wheat fields and wild places to run.
In the upstate fresh air I remembered the kiss of wet love and a tender heart beat came back down from above

New York, 2022

Not a cunty love poem

This is not a love poem, because it’s not allowed.

My heart, the sappy cunt, I’ve been made to disavow.

My word is bond and by God, I’ll make my Momma proud,

so this is just a poem of things that I won’t say out loud:

I remember Belfast nights, Forever dancing in their teeth

and I wasn’t scared of death for once, you pressed it out of me,

and bloody sheets and rooftop blues and tears were running free,

and only once you knew better, where the store would be.

And downtown Cardiff tuesday stones drew me to your laugh,

and drinks we shot and smokes we smoked, locked in with the cast,

and then the night swallowed the rest, and we remained the last.

You kissed my cheek and I took flight, never landing since that day past.

(Now I should say, the next fateful day, we cued up thrice aghast.

You stood with me, we prayed Plan B, and they didn’t even ask for cash.)

And invitations crossed the moat for you to come and save my soul.

I said two days and you said eight. I’m cold-feet shivering but sold.

My mind had gone, my heart had stopped, buried deep in days of old,

but a forgotten angel closed my eyes and raised it from the soil.

And summer nights burned, rolled, and smoked, a face shone down from the clouds.

The LA sky was sharing time with the rains of Dublin town,

for that Irish girl might really save my soul, so Beaty take a bow.

You showed me in your blazing smile, what wasn’t real I’d sweared and vowed.

And Cardiff nights and life bouncing off the darkened street with rain,

our window open, sounds floating in, but paradise remained unstained.

All day and night you were in my sight, then in my dreams I’d see you again.

Hockey rants and ‘Low it chants. Cardiff: Heaven’s closest Earthly friend.

You shook my face and swallowed my tears as I wept a fond farewell

to friends and foes, I’d see when, I didn’t know, but alas ringing was the bell…

A dream, a dream my work had been, but with you I couldn’t dwell.

‘Goodbye to Wales. Goodbye my friends.’ You helped me bade them well.

Christmas came and New York rains welcomed you to start anew.

We slept on the floor, dead covid sore, gulping espresso martini or two.

You puked up songs, karaoke bonds, and on bicycles we flew,

like sesame seagulls uptown and down, hot dogs, dollar pizza chewed.

And then came time to embrace your fate, return to your unknown mother-land.

You flew straight in to LAX, home of astrology and star fuck fans.

CoStar run rampant, smoothies for 12 dollars, weed, and tans.

Mountain top death felt too close, so across mountain tops I ran.

I couldn’t let you stay away, so back to LA to crash into my bed.

You starred in my play, and every spotlit night, I blushed when you kissed me red.

Bleeding bloody teary mess, but you quieted the rage I bred,

and kissed me gentle, brought me down, and cooled my burning head.

In Waltham arsehole Abby nowhere each morn we fed the ducks.

Not much to do but that was cool ‘cause ten times a day we’d fuck.

“What else to do in a place so blue, and look… I’ve already tied you up.”

You rolled an ankle, 15 houses, thank you, by the end of 90 days. Enough!

London town we’d bound around and fill elevators dank.

The lights would flash, the Hasidic saw your ass, not a single taxi stopped, THANKS.

Tears we shed on Landmark bed, and in that lovely bath we sank.

Warehouse blues and cocaine clues, but your love still pierced my chest point-blank.

I love you deeper than I even know and have since before I was born.

I love you whole, your whole soul shimmering gold, which explains my 24 years forlorn.

But at last I found you and if I see you again, my eternal love you’ll adorn.

You’re smoking hot, I like you a lot, you mean so much to me and more.

--

These are the things that I won’t say, the things that you won’t hear from me,

for I’d never wish you undying love on an un-anniversary.

So I’ll just say, have a nice day, I’ll talk to you Friday my friend.

But if you listen close, you might just hear a ghost who sounds like me whisper… “this isn’t the end.”

Los Angeles, 2022

Poem

Letters I’ll never send and scar tissue you’ll never see.

My skin’s no longer breathing and my teeth no longer free.

They chatter as I don’t shake, no movement here for me.

I’m embalmed and I’m preserved as a person I’ll never be.

When meaning loses meaning and life becomes a blink

and you pray for darkness coming as you puke into the sink

for darkness promises tomorrow, a sunrising slutty wink

but time stopped it’s beating yesterday, when your heart had stopped to think.

‘Nothing’ floats like ice, the only thing to cool your soul.

You can feel your insides turning to cement you’ve painted gold,

For the sparkle fell from your sky the day your future was sold

So now you’re frozen yesterday… but at least you won’t grow old.

Oh why? Oh why? Oh lord, oh lord, oh why, God damn.

Questions come like gunfire, only answered by backhands.

I stood my ground on hellfire, ‘cause charred and dead I’ll be a man,

and shook and cried till hell froze through, so frigid here I stand.

I prayed for freedom love sick, and love sick I went red

but blue is how I’m looking now, and pale beside the dead.

Life has gone I see now, the day It finally bled…

Future bled tomorrow, my mouth bled with what I said.

and what I said it haunts me in its callousness and truth.

I feel nothing, don’t worry, morals zombified and loose.

My heart found a darkened corner and drowned in cranberry juice.

It’s hogtied and it’s lassoed on the tracks. Quick! light the fuse…

The sun shines in so dark now and I’m shivering in sweat.

I bet I bet I forget your face, but I haven’t forgot it yet.

Los Angeles, 2022

Poem

It was all a thick swamp of death and sex
and sticky indifference
and we all drowned --
fat gluttons for punishment on our chilly gums --
and our bubbles were beautiful then and then were shot dead out of that gentle tint of romance

by a danger finally too close and just as real as it had always been.
And then we sat on the beach and pretended to breathe as the waves still crashed and we let the white flags fly and ourselves say die
under the cover of all the blind eyes
that we once poked
with our fingers not sticks.
Those finally blurry moments on the crumbling lazy highway:
all tired and flaccid near misses like soggy lighting,
chest clutching and seizing in the last second swerve,
pulling hard straws in dead time
with your finger asleep in the socket,
like limp noodle cocaine,
loose limbed electric heart attack,
tingles like all the others but creeping quiet,
death wish dreams and scratches on the wall,
something to loose but you can’t remember what and you’re seeing a ghost, skeleton death rattle and hand grenade salvation
as the blades chop
and you ascend,
again.

Angels fell
and men fell
and others swore they had grace to fall from in their Fighting days, but what’s a fallen angel but a liar
because we’ve all seen heaven in a way
and no one remembers it.

And the sun rises over the clouds gentle every God Damn day.

Mexico, 2022

A fly

goodbye my sweet
dumb stupid useless gentle
dead fly
I’m sorry I killed you
I remember when you kissed my lip like shit

Mexico, 2022

Priscilla

A sleek, slender spider with big fangs and smooth knees, Priscilla, visits my body when I slip into dreams.
In the cool shadow of night she lives under my bed,
but climbs into my sheets and haunts me instead,

and I wake sore and branded, my God nearly maimed, because she sucks me then leaves, only red bumps remain, tearing my skin up in clumps like cow shit,
leaving poison behind, a reminder to itch.
And when the sun’s up she climbs into my pocket,
and rides me all day, I can’t get her to stop it,
and climbs down my shorts when I forget to expect,
and biting me faithful, demands my respect.
I try to swat and slap her small cheek,
but she keeps coming and coming and will never leave, into my pants and right up my sleeve
she suck me and bites me and demands I believe:
“a spider is strong, and spider is free,
a spider’s a spider, all it can be.”
I can’t escape Priscilla, not even in dreams,
I’m caught in a web and lost in the seams.
I’m coming apart, sticky, sweaty, and wet.
Will she haunt me forever? Well she hasn’t stopped yet.
I wobble, I shake, my legs become weak,
I moan from the pain, I gasp and I squeak.
‘Please’ I say as she’s licking my toes,
she climbs up my neck and bites on my nose.
Climbs into my mouth and makes my tongue sweet
with her warm little fangs, which knocks me to my seat. She sits on my lap, wraps her legs around me.
Her web is so tight I don’t think I can breath.
Bites till I gush blood, hot, hard and red.
I’m trapped by Priscilla, I’m tied to the bed.
She’s relentless that thing. She will never stop.
It’s all too much to take. I’m ready to pop.
Explode in my jeans and my dirty white shirt.
She’ll keep riding me even when I’m stiff in the hearse. And then she will leave and suck the next man she sees, because a spider’s a spider, all it can be.
But at least I’m not alone.

Los Angeles, 2022

Poem

A cool breeze on my arm like Death blowing kisses as the trees burn outside
and my ribs turn inside out,
Love and Life and hate and tactical antacids,

the Pepto-Bismol psyche,
has all been translated.
It’s hereditary as I wonder if our plane will crash into the trees too. The breeze is nice.

“Taxi taxi taxi taxi” like machine gun fire and rat-a-tat-tat-tequila because the Americans have a sombrero and want to fuck.

It’s so hot you can’t close your mouth.
The Americans have tequila.
And so much sweat your clothes slide off and you’re a nude seal boiling like a lobster but you know it.
Because the Americans have a sombrero and want to fuck.

‘Will the police pull you over and shoot you?’ she says in the back
but she is you too
because you are American

and you want to fuck.

‘Xavage’, the roadside sign croaks
and she vomits in the back
on your new shoe laces.
Savage. Savage jungle and savage loins on fire for wet water release. Liquid savage past boiling point.

Here for the weekend. What weekend?
No one knows
you.

What Weekend that you can’t remember. What Wet Weekend.

She wants to blow you in the taxi, she who blew chunks nasty
on your new shoe laces
and some splats on her face lift.

“Ok.”

Volcano collisions we’ll never remember
blown dimes and time and me in the back of a taxi cab and chunks,
up chuck freedom,
vomit bliss
comet precision
in these far-miss derisions.
Cool sex in hot sun
only a promise of beach is enough
because sand comes back only in pockets and socks.

The AC is cold just about
and the hair on the back of her neck stands erect as you pull her pony tail.
Wet warm cool air
temperature overload
sensory overcome
visceral cacophony
a symphony of hollow temptation
ringing out with every dropped lucky penny. Let me in,
let me in, let me in.

All I had were crackers and cheese dip
and now I’m full on inflatable fantasies tickling my nose and dancing on my toes and calling me daddy into my eyes. Go away and let me in,
it’s all flatulence in the end
says the dead man shitting out his mistakes
“but the regrets live in your bones”
she says in the back
because she has a sombrero and wants to fuck.

Mid-air and Mexico, 2022

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS, Jesus is your brother and God is your dad

Spoilers spoilers spoilers!
The end is as follows the middle
and this behind the scenes look with hidden details:
loose tongues sink lips
and guess who dies...
everyone.
What don’t we know will be known in time
or not, because we’re dead.
What a spoiler that is, but it’s not really a spoiler because it’s been out for ages now and if you haven’t heard yet that’s your fault.
But look at this hidden gem,
what we’ve all been waiting for and investing in,
spoiled:
the truth is as follows
an endless barrage of lies
until you are caught in a place you call rock bottom
but Jesus calls red handed
and God calls you late for dinner again like your mom
and for christ sakes now all the end pieces of the meatloaf are gone
for Christ ate alone again
and he didn’t split the end pieces into infinite ones to feed the whole village again
but instead made fish which he knows you don’t eat because of the documentary and he turned all the vodka to water but it all still matches the volume notches God put on the bottles but now you look like a toolbox dickhead in front of your friends at Sarah’s party where you passed the bottle around because you hadn’t realized it was water on your swig because you were already drunk off Matthew’s bottle because his brother isn’t Jesus just Jamie,
and now Jesus shows up to the party and apparently he’s learned to fly which was never in the bible so it isn’t fair because it was never even in the bible anyway,
you’re pretty sure, but you didn’t read it all the way through even though your dad gave you a signed copy, but he’s your dad so it’s not that cool anyway, but you probably wouldn’t ever sell it because it is still sentimental, you conceded, unless you really needed the money,
which it looks like you might now because all your friends at the party like Jesus better and you’re running away God dammit.

Somewhere over the Golf of Mexico, 2022

Hollywood Party

Always another step to take in the dark ruckus
and no leg to stand on.
A skeleton with clackers dancing a smile across the desert on his face,
eagle eyes scanning everywhere else but dripping in sincerity like sharp honey going bad.
Blink it away my dear, blink it away, for you’re paying for it in teeth.
That’s why your smile is toothless as you politely extricate yourself to the people over there that “sorry I have to say hi to, one second, I’ll be back”,
in the breeze or a butterfly flap perhaps, but nothing more,
like all those who die, good and gone, and are ground to dust by the unconcerned weight of time, immaterial
-- ‘I’ll be back’, the hollow spittle sound echo falls flat on the bucking fucking wind kicked up in your wake,
spit in the face of the one left to quake,
‘I’ll be back’ like a kick and a poison hand shake,
‘and on to the next,’ a decision we make --
Immaterial gone, like this collision course of material wealth like too much expensive drink and pride
and vomit,
Gold Flaked Spit Up Sick,
snap a pic of that and fly it up the flagpole,
and everyone pressing their smiles deep into the foreheads of everyone else’s, drawing blood, branding and maiming the skin of our spirits
and something deeper that can’t be puked up in the wee hours and forgotten in your hair.
These bulls are killing each other
in this dusty SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY coliseum and the matadors are up in the grandstands diddling each others pinky toes for cold hard satisfaction.
They all care so much and are wearing red,
because blood is a battle cry, and on sight we charge,
and she makes a million on Onlyfans
and this whole septic tank wading pool of hollow shelled rapid fire engagement, not to say conversation, is made up of only fans and diamond studded pretenders.
The stars sparkle overhead
but fuck those useless balls of mass and light because were they on The Goldbergs?
We are big footed, big handed, Important and deep,
we are the stars who haunt your loins in your sleep,
and if I sell the world back to the damned,
and sell the damned to the wee rat in my hand,
and eat the poison they set for him,
because it gets me high and gives me the spins,
then, oh then, will my bones turn to gold,
and will I live forever and never get old,

because I’m shouting my lyrics to a jezebel chorus,
and they’re smiling and blinking a thick applause for us,
and I think if I reach out my hand cold and grab,
she might let me tell her the money I have,
and then if all’s right on this hot swirling night,
she might stamp my pee-pee and validate life,
and this memory I wouldn’t give away for the world,
cause I’ll sell it expensive to the next chorus of girls.
Am I a god or a hot sexy ghost?
I don’t want to be better. I want to be most.
Announce my name to the plebes, make them rise for a toast ‘Oh I’m just a loser like you’, I modestly boast.
“I’m so embarrassed” I say, in cute time.
If it still makes you gag, take it down with a lime.
Take take take take cause my wee fingeys are strong,
and I’ll kill what is right cause I’m in love with what’s wrong. It’s a suckers game, those who get stuck in the muck,
of the “good thing to do”, cause I just wanna fuck,
and “life should be true”, is a weak prayer to the strong.
I’m the brightest boy special, that’s why we can’t all get along. I was in The Goldberg’s and had a large trailer,
you’re a stupid no one, don’t pollute me with failure.
Oh no! What’s this? cancer and a blind eye.
She turned a cold shoulder? I think I might die.
I cry all alone in the shadows of night,
because even big stars are dark sometimes right?
DJ, cue this up, an ode to forget.
I’ll drink down all my dollars and spit up regret.
Love me, just love me, the chess master is tame,
‘cause a hand shake falls limp and that smile is lame.
Don’t we all want that sweet sexy lick of attention?
“Idolize me,” a prayer that goes without mention.
I’ve earned it, I have, they gave me a role,
and I had to wake early, and that takes a toll,
and I said a line that was written, with tears,
and I’ve been riding that broadcast for thirteen proud years.
‘I am better than you’ I say with a smile,
‘I’ve got to go for a second. I’ll be back in a while.’
Truth be told my bones know we’re all made just the same, we’ll all turn to shit, we’ll all lose our name...
But fuck these dumb bones. My words hurt even more,
I’ll pimp myself limp cause I’m a good Special whore.

Los Angeles, 2022

airplane haiku

Who’s armpits smell? Urg.

Why’s she barking next to me?

She hocked a loogie.

Mexico, 2022

Poem: airplane continued

‘Good luck’ the aisle man say
because he knows.
‘Please keep your tray tables up and your phone in airplane mode for take off’
were two instructions she doesn’t know she’s completely disregarding
because she was fast asleep immediately, now butt calling China,
with her arm suffocating my elbow.
And I almost don’t notice the size 2 running shoe lodged in the back of my appendix through this lovely blue vinyl foot condom -- the thinnest yet, feels like it’s not even there -- named 10 F on which I am seated,
but at least it’s kicking,
like a proud mother’s pregnant moment,
but I’m not pregnant, I just need to shit,
like whoever else is tearing ass in my immediate proximity,
silent but mercilessly not deadly.
Can you request an air mask from the compartment above?
No, but I will have to put my seat up, she informs me,
‘so please press the silver button,’
and I do and my seat leaped up the entire quarter of a centimeter it had been back,
but she was gone before I could steal the side eye satisfaction.
“We’ll have to taxi on the tarmac for only a few dozen hours” the honeyed voice from the speakers farts into my soul,
joining the silent symphony of percussive wind instruments surrounding me.
They are already patrolling asking for trash,
and I have some ideas.
Her head is on my shoulder
and it’s almost sweet because her drool has only soaked through two layers--
Oh, there’s the third and my chest is wet.
But soon we will be flying...
And “we have to de-plane.” “Waiting for a part.”
But here’s a coupon to TGIF for 47 cents and some razor blades.
She’s up now. I know because she just ashed her fingernail dirt on me.
Jesus has my bags,
but lost them in transit somewhere under Heaven and over Wisconsin.

Mexico and Midair, 2022

poem

With nothing left to prove what keeps you in the soup sticky
with all the dead flies who forgot their wings,
like unquivered arrows.

With nothing left to prove
all the carcasses are empty
and you realize they always were and nothing smells bad.

All of it exists off of you,
the wind only comes close
and the bugs don’t even crawl on you any more.

The war’s over,
nothing but empty shells and tired white flags that have all gone the way of every casualty, forgot
but by the shrieks in your blood
that eventually go the way of every of the other kind of casualty,
quiet.

“Is it...”
“No. It’s a bug bite.”
“What?” the other one says,
and we say it at the same time... Cancer.
No. A bug bite. And for the first time that sounds good enough. Is this something new or is this where you finally die?
And that is where that questions dies, for the first time as well. And it doesn’t decompose and rot, it is just gone, because it’s a bug bite.

A bug bite.

Tulum, 2022

Pimp mama lA

Let me go LA LA, pimp mama LA.
It’s grips on my cock and the things I don’t say
and it just grips my shoulders but I still cannot breath.
I pray to sweatshop souvenirs for the courage to leave.
But is the grip too tight on my penis and balls
that I’ll leave them behind if the other shoe falls
and I stride away finally, a born again eunuch,
to anywhere else; launch a blitzkrieg in Munich,
Piss my heart in the corner of a drunk tank in Dublin,
Inhale eves top ash, leaves me east London tumbling?
Will my ego stay here, split-brained, mad, and disdain
the lack of cocaine praise only here can sustain.
I need it like blood, slutty vampire me,
Say I’m best and say yes to my dark fantasies,
and I’ll take all the slings and the arrows depressed.
Flaccid slaps in my face of my own disrespect...
No! I scream and I cry to the stars up above
but the stars under my feet feel a little like love.
No! I must go! Castrate all that coveted praise
that I pick up like change on my discarded days.
Push me Oh mother, from your boulevard womb
broken dreams hang in sky, the dank violet tomb.
Natal contraction. All these lost friends.
Nothing to do, time killed as amends.
Please let me slip on a divine fateful peel,
a banana discarded, like the love we can’t feel.
Throw me away. God let me catch a breeze.
Give me my wings or turn me to dead leaves.
Either way pick me up and throw me to tomorrow, somewhere hard smiles crack and break through with sorrow, for a blink nor a tear nor even true kindness,
have a place in this limelight, this pleasant blue violence. You can’t walk with the sharks who die if they sleep
so they’ll suck all the marrow from the toes on your feet. When you have nothing left but your pile of bones,
Only then can you shuffle, broken, empty back home?
Or can we find courage like a dog took out back,
a shot gun in hand, give that fucker a wack.
Goodbye to your shadow, that vampire friend,
‘cause a headless blood sucker’s all’s well in the end.
Run loose and run free, find the sun somewhere else
because my name is LA. I swear it’s not Hell.

Los Angeles, April 2022

Poem

Her face was weathered and her nose was big like the sculptor was drunk
and she wore bright floral print
closer to neon than true

like everything we sold in the mirror
and tried to hawk back to Heaven from this side of the tracks, until we’re hit by the train,
and the large dead flower she carried
was not the color Man makes
but the color time makes,
dead.

Tulum, 2022

Why Does It Smell Like Horse Shit On Canal Street?

The city’s breathing you.
It inhales you and digests you bad like 7 year chewing gum
but more flavor than ever bursting from
the seams
of their ripped jeans, torn egos, stretched faces, pressed pocket from
digging deeper into the lint
and shaggy contradictions forged before a magic mirror through twisted vision.
It’s bubbling tonight, churning, turning,
sautéing concrete under your feet
beating into your soles
like it leaps up pressing Now into our souls
like a heart beat collapsing, crashing, stretching around you
and you go with it, for it is a big bear
and it is running.
The lines sprawl out into the streets,
a few merciful breaths before the music and dark sucks it all away from you in exchange for a sheet blank trance where you may stumble hazy upon quiet freedom between the bars, under the screaming orgasms and night calls and lust bites and howls,
as you are drip fed,
drunk, bumbling, and stumbling,
bouncing off strangers
held up by their momentum into you
and the city propping you up on Electric
like the third track running through everyone.

The world converges
for a break
in the crush of humanity,
energy like drug seeping in
on the rain or warm air or spilt conversations and temporary tears
only temporary
and spit blood cigarette staining concrete
forever.
Paris is to the left of us
and to the left of them too but it turns out she was really from LA.
Working corporate for design firms and foraying anthropology into Events
and the coolest jobs in the world, every lucky one sitting a little higher at each table on the outstretched arms of those converging cities, old friends, around them,
like a Jewish wedding or Roman kings.

Morning won’t come and the night is young

no matter how late
because it’s still dark at six AM in the Afterhours.
There are no after hours in this city.
It lives on the clock somewhere between the ticks that the hand skips over and you need a VIP card to get in.
The homeless prowl and laugh with you as they sell you lies and you buy them with a smile and a bow,
His hands outstretched like a dagger before you chuckling yesterdays like tomorrow just quit. And the ladder is steep here and those mangy cunts in Soho will never let you forget it publicizing that multicolored rat poison,
teeth staining, bitch making, ground laying, rubbing alcohol they traded your right limb for and left nut.

But the buildings stand taller still than anyone.
They are our mountains,
our Olympus that we kneel before on our best days
and the tourists point at the Chrysler building at all hours,
“Empire State” dancing on their tongues and starring their eyes.
The Great ones of yesterday still frequent these dives turned sparkling mirror show rooms
and do not roll over in their graves tonight, because they are drunk too.
It is Greater than anyone and will eat you like the sun
if you say you fly too close to God
because not even New York is God
so neither are you,
and you best believe it you dumb stinky bitch
like all the dumb stinky bitches sweating and rolling through the homeless piss stained concrete sidewalks
like rooms for rent,
cheap with vacancy and late checkout.

And the bouncer scanning too fast with a dead face bulging at you like tired eyes and the quiet places are up above floating like moths in thick water
or butterflies suspended in retired time
that you can rest on like clouds

but down here the seats are wet and the floor is hot and it’s a raging bustle of flailing limbs failing reckless and negligent and chipped teeth and backwards words and thoughts and a jubilee struck through and spinning like a lighting carousel but they keep on going, on scanning, on sliding, on floating, and jumping and dancing and singing and gloating and screaming and kissing and fucking and kissing and running out and down to the bright bodega, the one where they sell hot sandwiches, and flashing yellow like cabs with the light on that shouldn’t cause it has an arm coming out the back window and the ripped ripped jeans torn up before the streets got to them to knaw and chew like they always do.

Smile wide and let the truth shine through your teeth like our fluorescent, made divinity swelling around us and buzzing from signs and high beams and honking, and confess

and repent
and give over and give way
and ride this train till morning forever.

Good morning and day, the bright and the haze And the rattling from above
like furious rodent scratches,
the sky crying from AC units.

And midtown hollow
with not a coffee pot to piss in
or shadow let alone a corner
unless you want to piss mid-street in full glorious indecency, indignant on the passing cars streaming by like falling angels in these whipping wind tunnel avenues
and stepping on grates over infinite falls
with sounds loud sharp clatter clash cat calls, murmuring up from the depths
and the best conversations happening in the wide eyed shock and awe of the long haired skinny man or woman
talking to himself amongst the torn bags on the ground
writing his thin story with his long finger in the air
as permanent as all else
in this fast breaking,
shifting jungle named Entropy,
the canopy glass reflecting it all back to you forever
and gone as quickly.

‘Feel The Power’ says the man on the corner and the woman with the war paint face slather, unrecognizable as human beyond silhouette, trying to hop into your taxi for a fuck and a quick pay.
“You’ve Got A Nice Heart’ says the fat man, bald with the styrofoam

and you smile
and don’t know if his smile is sarcastic.
And the thick lady with clenched fists, a white knuckle prayer to the last fraying shreds binding her to the metal underpinning of Really Here and Really Now,
came with wide eyes, red and trying to break free from what they’ve seen,
screaming into my face and walking on.

Double footed hurdling turnstiles and cops shaking their heads.

3 piece suits and ragged preachers hoking cheezits
mid-leap between the cars.
His begs are drowned out by rote and the subway tracks squealing and chatting but he’s on his knees with his hands out loose in the air
wearing knee pads and a back brace,
all worn down, by rote.
Orange seats and a cacophony moral assault on the head from both ends
shearing gears through both ears,
twisting thought off like the hot knob too hot,
all on hot pause for a cold minute frozen until 128th is missed for the second time.

Planted loose in triangle stance,
power stance guitar,
no guitar, no shred,
swaying over your knees like a dope head
in Tompkins seeing God in the particulates before his eyes before anything else because there is nothing else,

but no dope, and no God particulates, just hope
that he who has hopped on the track between Astor and 14th will be cleaned off before you’re late to bump shoulders with destiny as scheduled by commerce and ketamine.

“You only live once” from somewhere in the air,
us all swaying to and fro in blank submission to momentum
all somewhere else dreaming
stained by this symphony and the droplet rain of sounds splashing far back in our thoughts from right here.
Bodies stained by last night and kisses like she made you promise.
When it’s fast it’s a symphony you can feel too
this metal giant blazing through underground
opening at West 4th.
And plastic bags filled with wet plastic and cans shuffling past.
Scratches, tags, names and dates tattooed on walls,
as permanent as it gets,
and means nothing to few
and less to the rest.
And ‘allen was here’ in the concrete with a stick.

Diarrhea splattered on the ground
lighter than it should be
and doesn’t smell till half a block later
where people are laughing and turn around and walk back towards it. They don’t know or don’t care.

And the guys in bucket hats and pajamas playing chess in Union Square yelling and throwing the lighters at each other’s queens
saying “it’s always the white people.”

The sky is grey and the wind is cold but the ground is warm from the sins of old,
and the subways charging about beneath them.

Can I sleep on this dirty concrete
that smells like caked memories under rough nails in damp clothes and recycled stories?

Pickpockets and stolen thoughts and nights stealing time
and lights stealing night
and exhaustion

and pressing on through the cigarette smoke blanketing the sharp scents and good sense
and rising, painting the city heights soft and beautiful like five blocks away and an avenue
is back in time through the hot haze from
the burning daylight and smokes.

And Cocaine and roasted beans and caffeine at all hours of the day
and the screaming crowd rising and dying like spring, summer, and fall all at once and the girl cooking DMT in her basement and giving you diazepam on the Hudson and the dark stumbling
and the rats, roaches, and joints and flasks of tequila and tomorrow morning goodnight

And so many girls
tight asses in loose pants and tight pants
and pizza.

And all the quick I love you’s and fucks and nose bleeds and dog shits and pots and pans and broken plates and glasses and goodbyes and good nights and hugs on one foot outside the subway station and false smiling hell and crooked toothed giggles and hands on their gun and angels disguised as falling pigeon feathers and God bless you’s and the woman on the sidewalk on her phone with her pants down sitting in her own shit and stolen glances and stolen wallets and stolen hearts and brawls and bawling falls head over heels and bodies thrust off buildings and bloody end marks like X’s and souls thrust into each other disguised as that cheap fuck and quick I love you. And the rain on all of us.

Living under plastic bags while it pours or walking under a wet pizza box
over the red heart concrete.

Trouble
and thunder
and rumbling youth bubbling up through manholes and flooding the bars knee deep
on Christmas eve and drowning good sense and the scent of death, stinky with rational and truth, undeniable and suffocating.

Wet cardboard smells like shit and the streets smell like shit
and they’re rushing to get off the elevator before the doors open. This is the best city in the world.

Buildings suspended by wires from the sky
like 5 dollar psychic readings.

Elevators outside buildings descending, scratches and scrapes from the sky
and shrieks from the thrill
silent now
chasing them down.

Everyone walking close and no one touching.
And people stepping over Spanish plates of meatballs
left for a moment on the ground
to adjust pants and rant and throw fists through the 12th street wind by yourself at the devil dragon
and yourself.

Life here swells and overtakes many rearing it’s head
ugly, red, beauty
brown old shit

stumbling sparkling down hard lined streets
rushing out of restaurant side doors
sleeping so fast and right here, eyes stretched open on a promise and a surge
winking back at itself in the next causality of commerce and heroin hedon and mama gone and slurping up straw-ful electric shock through gritted teeth and clenched jaws and full release swing swing swing and fly

headlong skydive headfirst contact and now you’re swaying on 27th amidst the plastic bags and hags and blind eyed forgotten long strides and garbage smell and warm wind.

It’s all one way streets like veins to this beast that we can abuse
or use as intended.

Don’t walk.
Fuck you.
The subway screams again.
Walking from top to bottom and back
and forever forward,
stepping on burst blueberries on the ground like gunshot constellations and everybody moving forever.
And all the pretty young girls. Again.

Blood red gun shells shed loose and free like dropped green on dead dirt and old grass,
bullet hole glass and shatters tell of sirens and school bells and jewel cells and jail bait and hate crime and j-walk eight times and on the ninth live capsized and catapulted by beat cops prowling for hops and barley drops and liquid breath and witnessed dead all swept under the rug of grime and settling time in the dusty mist morning on the L-line in the Zzz-train.

A yellow school bus written ‘funeral’ in the front window parked on the dark street bleeding white paint.

Flashing lights to the south and east and sirens all around.
Temporary solace from storm under awnings as you march on through,
death, birth, deliverance, and delivery,
prosecution and assault in battery park, and shooting up till the stars come down, and weak knees and swaying on stiff legs, a leaking head, and being dragged out into the street for concrete rites and blessings,
and confession, confrontation, transgression.

Thick streets with headlight hoards charging on.
The woman clutching a big money Louis under her tee-shirt guarding it from the drizzle, other hand on her crotch holding up her shit stained sweats.
Rhinestone luxury preserved by cold cold blood and frozen beats of heart and dark streets.

My hands shivering in the warm rain
from the fray and no sleep creeping up like last night poison again, and the wind kissing my naked face
virgin at long last
trembling on the edge, fresh, above the freeway before the East River.

Thinner than skeletons skinny down the streets, shiver shake a bone to break
hot air release, a soul to take.

Sore feet and tired eyes still gasping the beauty in relentless.

And angry air catching hems and tearing seams to hot
black garbage bag plastic death.
Decomposing Stuff and fertilized regret and afterthought and misplaced insignificance assaulting you from all sides, a sidewalk Monday late-night barrage.

Steam rising out of cracked streets from boiling underbelly,
blocks exploding into psychedelic disorder and stone-by-stone foresight blind
as you descend into the depths of hot heavy hell headlong or animal unconscious, or downtown.

Chinatown
where the heartbeat boils
and the blood bubbles up like life in all colors.

The walls dripping letters from nighttime,
holding moonlight to their heart, secret from the day, quiet and concealed, from their conception and splashed birth years ago, reanimating every night in the invitation of dark again like the first time.

And midnight squeals through tired doors at faded hours.

Sleeping in the loudest bustle on the rawest bench in the
crashing crush and rush of metal on raging light on hissing hot air, blowing back all facades and boiled and brewed tears of the gentle, cool, innocent, whispering quiet
and mariachi on the subway for only one stop until the next car.

And all of us on this car, hot and sweaty backs dripping down to socks and those eyes locked at speed in the express beside you
and then the body-blurs as they whip on forward not stopping,
never stopping.

They Go till the dirt, as they do here,
where they hope they Go once more
further still
To somewhere else bright and forever, Heaven ever after, or at least New York again.

Day 5

A fragile box “glass!” hoisted by strangling duct tape
and two scribbled notes discarded on a subway bench boasting dragons of devotion and demonization
for their sister
“These words I write for you.
Only your eyes.
Keep it close to your heart where no doors lay.”
And a crossed-out post script “only a single entrance and exit. Tunnels”

A golden Mother Mary with a sickle on a shaking chain
and slouches and side eyes,
drooping eyes and dropping time on broken luggage and longer yellow fingernails on the Canal Street station bench.

Neon dresses, moon boots and acne back on him licking lips at oncoming traffic on Canal.

Loose limbs, thin legs, and cross street stolen glances because a model is paid to be seen not see.

Paint melting
wet again
bringing you up up by the nostril.

Blasts of hot air right after your inhale
and the stampeding bulls bleed more,
blinding regale then hot and heavy jail stale, celled in by rows of concrete,
blue oceans parting for the delirious grey.
No air left, collapse this way.
Flailing wet and fresh till you’re naked and bored and a flower mint on the floor.

A skull and cross bones on the back of the black truck, more pirates sailing this concrete than not.

And the pouting baby slumps in the shadow of the moon under the weight of his own crown and the sun coming down in desperate reflections striking your eyes as you look up
like they don’t here.

Old facades rebirthed before the ash
cesarean scaffolding for the phoenix
riding the waves that drown and erode and bring the distant tides and sediment here coloring it common,
says the cynic under the city grates and at the roadside cafe table over the glasses bridging his nose to his father’s and grandfather’s tears before him
like luke warm baby blanket
condolences
that should be taken out to the back of the farm and set shotgun free to roam and run.

And the Hasidic ponytails
and everything unreciprocated and smiles
and the good ones here too
and what Artists call themselves.

And ambition disguised as nothing
and speed too
everywhere
like sharp teeth and glittering grin flashing the sun ‘nice cock and balls and tits and ass

and tight pussy’ so the sun laughs.

And the ghosts you don’t know with the legends you do all whistling the city-bird, hummingbuzz tune.

Day 6

At the crossroads they would kneel and dirty their knees as the story goes, they’d beg and plead
and trade their soul on the count of three
for a guitar playing melody.

But this story flows in multitudes on these hallowed streets
for every street is crossed by more, for prowlers on their beat
so they drop to their knees and pray to whomever and sacrifice their feet.
Now they hobble crooked around the town on stumps with sparkling teeth
but no song comes, and their pain they gum, till they’re shaking bare in the freeze
and are shot right through, and don’t know what to do, and in their dying beats they bleed and those final drops, red that doesn’t stop, trickles free in melody
and their dying hum and bloody um’s are what finally sings beauty.
At long last, the trade’s been made and now Forever burns

at long last their souls have past, entered the nostalgic morn
where they see their face reflecting back drowning in their scorn
from the rippling lake, for heaven’s sake, and there’s nothing left to take
so they give for once, their final breath, to the city that doesn’t break
under the weight of death-rattle taste and carries them away
but the crossroads don’t stop, and the wanderers drop
from Canal to Sugar Hill.
It’s happened before and it’ll happens again, even now it’s happening still. They live under gun and tempests of shun and the player prayers they bade
but there’s not just one, like the prodigal son, where they go to make their trade. There’s crossroads at every corner, riddling this city through
rippling like aftershock where the players pray for you.

Day 7

The siren blaring above
like biting your eardrums relentless
just out of arms reach to remind you you’re alive and only human.

Leading with the bald crown of his head
like a billy goat charging
sorry
embracing the ground with his whole heart and crossed left eye
like a sweet smell floating on secret through the shit and sweat and heat.

Up up again on the paint and putrid.

The wavy air dementing
in heat
and even still steam rises from lower
like the city fuming
rip roaring rage and snort
while Everything paws its hoof and charges. And then there are the lights
outshining Heaven’s gates.

Clicks and clicity-clacks
and sick cracks leaped over like a giggle and stomped on like the dark.

Gigolo fingers letting slip tender goodbyes,

forged and hollow decrepit.

The Want is manic bodysnatching
as the toothless man with face tattoos swirls the hot air with ramrod arm
and the one toothed boy fucks
and the faceless man phantoms the haunt and the hunt
and a big engine rumbles blowing hot air around the city
and the waving white flags blow hot air more
and the mouth breathers and panters and panthers and air pushers and drug pushers and approachers and hallucinating street dreamers and sidewalk speed racers and preachers of tomorrow and yesterday driving out the devil
push hot air around the city.

‘free bibles’ say a cardboard sign
‘we’re all dying. help the homeless’ says another.

Sour sweat sits in the air
misty stinging clouds and AC rain. And prison busses and greyhounds, exhaust all the same.

And all warehouse clearing sales and grand openings.
And them talking to themselves looking at you and pissing.

And falling down the metal stairs to the subway and entering through the exit.
And all going downtown.
And you can see their balls up their skirt.

And cold poles on rough skin that feels soft now and doesn’t look it.
And they’re sitting at cock height and running from the express to the local when you don’t have to.

The flat bird
preserved between pages in time on cement like a signature of the inevitable that will be washed away in rain
but the stain on Life is permanent
because it is here to stay and never wasn’t
even in your moments of dark spinning vision when you forget.
And eight flies crawled out of its head,
his beak open like a cracked pumpkin seed.

And the swinging metal of cranes dancing

and walking between stalled cars
all stacked in frozen kamikaze exhaust.

And yelling into closed car windows
“you don’t know where the fuck you’re going” and they might not.

A fortuitous lean,
tits showing out the top like a halo, and you smile in case God is watching.

her stiff hips
and Her swaying hips
seen from behind.
And the hair going all the way.
Holding my hard throbbing thoughts like icing a bruise or carving a promise.

Locked gates like a polite plead and red video surveillance.
Nothing means anything to invisible ghosts bloated with indignation, and skywriting on the ground
and you always end up back in the East Village
just passing through
and loud loud sirens too.

“just leave it the way it is” say the advertisers
selling back to them what they already own,
the attitude they vomit back up like poison and an early night.

It swelters like a heart on fire and in the morning the concrete sweats all the way until night falls like a broken promise
and the Mets
and a run for dear life and family,

glistening silent performance
under the widowed veil, too thin for the wind on Lafyette.
A mask promising true and transparent, concrete smile uncracking,
lips dead stiff,
speaking through stabbing glances
and shitting itself.
And entire matinee shows on the fire escape .

Shit or cherries in a thin, clear plastic bag.

Is she naked?
Her naked back promises unfulfilled.

Her head 90 degrees off her neck
impossible
her white hair halo blonde as she goes for the door talking in full force to the floor.

Promises promises
words of warning and vow.
It all mean something that time won’t allow.

And the corner bar is still a blur, bubbling up and fornicating within itself and birthing much more than is conceived like divine insemination as we all gather and gulp and prattle and hide stumbles in sky smiles all together for the first and last time
celebrating the beginning and end

like there never was one of either before.
And the waitresses hoisting empty glasses and stolen glances and given glances like cheap tips and lush tips in their full dripping beauty,
each and every one like seraphim and sirens bringing us all in for one more so all rage virginal in this trembling, giggling rush blur blush where time has stalled and free-falled
never to be found again,
it promises and you know
on First and First.
Lucien lucky.

And God, what a fucking frown
that you wish you could unsee of burn into all of their eyes or hug and kiss
for no other reason

“really fucking hot today”
and the Indian man behind the counter bangs the table then whistles “sweaty sweaty sweaty,”
“I go walk for one hour and I’m really fucking shocked.”
and the other man sweeps under my feet so I lift them and leave.

And eyes too wide
playing it straight and sane
bad with big limps on short blocks.
And the Westside market slutty and loose in the East side, everything expanding like cancer and like everything does.

Wine and liquor on every corner
like tonight painted in the stars
and on the other corner, bars
like hand guns and dime bags before the incapacitation incarnation extinction.
And the past shooting up, the spire piercing the low cut skyline plateau in this flaccid no-mans land

austerity punctured by hard cock history fuck me or hate me,
conquests
still here in hard tissue, discolored now scarring the skyline.

Sexualized neon
and full body veils and lace coalescing like chocolate covered pathogens and plucked veins ringing out
And chocolate covered vows,
the opposite,
“Narisa I will love you for a million eternities”
in concrete that doesn’t break
and time that doesn’t melt on.

Each moment so loud, electric, and light
that Forgiveness comes guaranteed as everything else crashes in its wake.

She streaks towards you
like a dead wrong cross out correction
Like now was wrong before, only a class clown sharp F, in stride
bursting off the street
out of the grey and into the black
and lives in the poprock, crackling red.
All the pussy and tight tummies in the world.
This is a dream,
magic slobbering on a street-side trick.

Dodging hanging lightbulbs
like eurekas put down to miracle rest.

“fuck i just dodged a pretty smile” and into a slumped shoulder.

I’m breathing with my cock and pulling every push.

Winter blasting out from those fluorescent respites an affront to your face merciful on the sidewalk,
a lustful tease
as you search for the one drop from

the sky
until the lightning strikes and thunders rolls and it all falls hot.

Selling our own morality loose and lucky
for a cheap buck, quick fuck, nip tuck, reimbursed sins and a true blue crescent moon.
Deep dive seeping into shallow reflection and strike outs painted fools gold shimmer like life in bondage.

Frozen in the sway
the swing step
for only a blink every breath, a stutter in time,
dancing in the street.

In a black dress
she bikes off into the night headlights.

Momentary sparkling concrete infinite
like worlds winking in. Croaking voices

and half-block goodbyes.

And puddles of cracked glass
and that air-con rain again
and the girls in twos
and the lumberers and mumblers in ones solo kamikaze

and blitzkrieg birds pissing on the corner crowd and heads up pennies,
all good luck
we can conclude

and concede to our own best interest

with a little nudge and wink blind, unseen in the darkness.

Bleeker street humming birds stepping off the train onto the platform in this stale air Unmoved

Yellow Nails still hasn’t moved since last time I saw him, still clutching the rail,
frozen in twisted crucifixion,
liquid asphyxiation,

sucking the hot bloated rodent air on
the Canal Street bench.

And she fell with a baby on her chest onto scraped knees,
feel the bruised breeze down,
in an unconscious crack

and freefall prayer to split second deliverance,
inconvenient devotion and immediate absolution,
temporary like wind endearing angel wings while they descent and then she barrels on
pressing the air out of the concrete with each stomp
and the child none the wiser,
enlightened, still an umbilical to God uncut and slacked.

J-walking in front of a flashing Chinese hearse Death in a new age.

Limbs long and screwed demented and surgical gloves.

Crumpled black tutu fallen through the ghost and the ground bucking under your lost step.

Angry collapse, slug lump pressed out of proportion,
the up is down as he lies sideways
yelling “you angry faggot fucks and Chinese police” until he disappears between the cars like into a cloud.
The blood red under the cracked orange.

Laugh like a tommy gun.

The sidewalk is opening up to the left and right Endless places to fall and end

metal holes and rest stops.

alone: human
pleading
shaking and two fingers on his temple rocking
screaming
sobbing in the 1:44 pm afternoon light “some asshole sabotaged me”

Pigeons racing the avenues streaking and painting the sky brush stokes on the gothic blue.

And when the city is most vivid and blinking awake it still steams with the mist of a dream in the loose eye sockets of night
and drooping off the baked bones of time like a nap in the undertow crash of midnight electrocution and waves

because time is slippery and falling.

And metal tubes in taxi cabs to push the AC through the hot air but it still dies before the face of the passenger
reaching them only as a hollow carcass of respite.

Subway running under the theatre
filling the thespians’ Meaningful pauses
and shaking your seat,
a fragile, shivering embrace,
not emotional, nor pregnant, nor Meaningful, good.

The wind is not soulless though it goes by that name, as do the jagerbombed on 27th and Third,
but solace is made not found
and our cells all beat to the same rhythm,

even the drunken slobbering ones. And the weightless immaterial ones.

There is no morning dew
but hot sweating sidewalks and pissing pigeons,
sweet all by itself,
and rumbling with the tracks up from underneath the face of this city in the charging blood, never a pause found, but occasionally one lost.

The sixth avenue bomber streaking up the blue streets cutting through the afternoon breeze, bombing through the intersections, a two wheeled hurrah for freedom
and a hocked loogie at the black Nissan rolling rust can
and pigeons exploding up

and an orange IED slushy
or projectile, futile and flaccid in the wind,
at the yellow gypsie cab for honking at the J-walker
and bending at the hip to pick up heads-up copper dogma
and the loud lady unconscious on her back lying on the garbage her head pointing to heaven
her neck Open
exposed to God or pigeons.

Sandbag statues collapsed like crumpled bodies under the weight of sunny discontent
and headless angels wings
and the brass animals dance above the demented bells a torrid hum looking up, craned to dying idols still falling from
the sky
and crooning voices very nearby
singing God
and more stretched voice,
strained in holy surrender and cracking
“Jesus is our savior. Jesus coming soon. Thank you Jesus”
and the buildings like sacrificial sons shooting up out of the trees and lavender and butterflies and crickets which will all die in the winters,
and the boy climbing the high rocks up to the right
alone.

Commerce hot in the drunk spittle and bubbling haze and the walk home was only a slip.

And it smells like horse shit
a recurring offence
and jazz sax and bongos and helicopter blades beating, the tribal circle fighting the jazz man fighting the sky, A symphony come to blows: a symphony

Whistles and ants
and dancers and shakers and shimmering abuelas and clacking shoes and face pressed into a hard hand salute getting naked in the middle of the road and clattering smiling grocery cart pusher and the white people with earrings double stepping and snoopy slouching in
and the naked man leaves
then crouches like a tiger. more ready to pounce

then he salutes and marches again
all back-lit by the white shining mausoleum catching the sun with an umph and then the wheelchair man with bags of piss rolls up and asks for one dollar and then the music stops hard to smattering applause and whistles again
and the naked man says ‘it takes my legs over.’

Her panties are showing as always
as she sits and rants philosophical with beautiful sparkling fairies
and her paintings on the wall
and others called Meat Cake and Dame Darcy and her black hair shooting out from behind her glasses that open over the bridge of her nose
and her laugh isn’t a cackle exactly
as she talks about what is kinky,
an artist.
There is no time here
it is all just sparkles sparking out of midnight
and conspiracies flying like fireworks
charring the walls
and shooting at your head like a bottle-rocket you have to dodge and
no bystanders are safe, and none are innocent,
like her
and the music mellowing through
and engine thunder exploding in from down down on the street
and the music stops again.

rave review reread and reread Motherfucker!

and cross eyed dog Assholes!

Ragged eyes and sweaty clothes from days and days still going
and she’s counting her blessings rampant and mad on her fingers over and over again or counting something else.

Worshipping at the altar of convenience and themselves.

And Uptown Digz with the pink scar winking beside his eye and he growls when he laugh
and laughs a lot
and wants a lot of pussy he says.

Tonight’s art show is at 89 Crosby
on empty glass in hollow storefront like the marrow has been sucked out and coughed up onto the sidewalk like the rest of the phlegm and glory days.

Missing and wanted
both blurry and forgotten
both look like the painter in central park
“The above pictured perp did strike the C/V in an unprovoked attack causing pain and swelling to the face.”

At the supermarket tables
all head bowed in unconscious prayer to rest sleep
under the limelight of day
and the fluorescent Bowery overheads nowhere else to be or nowhere at all.

And she walked right through the construction workers like a storm
with her head down
howls painted on their foreheads

bouncing like an accident off the concrete.

Holding his pants up in the cloud that always smells like shit and death premature but here
and hold up his pants
too big

always
with an open gash under his shoulder
so open.
Makes you not want to look at the dirt under your nails.
Walk it off like a fairytale
because the exhaust already got in your mouth.
She has a fat ass.
Makes you want to scratch your dick.
Walk it off.
And once in a while you get caught walking behind the old ones only for a moment now until you spring step around those fuckers,
God Damn!
And then she’s walking so slow
too slow or heroin
hearing Gods and demons trying not to look at you
and slip hard into invisibility

and she is already infinite.

And the most expensive apartments are rent protected,
garbage flowing local flowing unknown squalor
and forgotten pits of once upon a time, scribbled prayers on the wall, and pleads to please please take your shoes off to step on the lima beans and syringes
and music too.
And a flag in the window keeping it all out and in
like time can stop right there if that silly cunt would so oblige,
if you please.

And cardboard signs on every corner spilling their MO
and the color of everything they see like we all have

but we don’t have any cardboard
and the next guy sat with his legs crossed with a cigarette and a book like his cardboard was a pitiful accident of Third Avenue wind.

And they walk so close behind you they’re like your shadow and then they start twitching
because they know you know
or he’s a twitcher

and now you’re his shadow.
And the asian man on the bike barreling at you like tomorrow on the other side of the street.

His feet are snarled as are his face and he scares glare up spines on 59th, a sorry mistake.

And if he’s there when I get back he’ll get a dollar from christ Himself.

“Lucky charms, they love em”,
she proclaims to herself
not even the pigeons paying attention as she scatters Charms onto 2nd street “I don’t feed birds often actually, I just happen to have some cereal”
she lies.

And one psychotic flee,
rabid in its flight,
sporadic and unrelenting,
suspended in animate life temporary, through the air

like pocket-watch hyper hypnosis all over the place.
What is it spelling out?
Just cursive scribbles

probably.

It’s garbage day like the lord’s day, a day of rest
and the putrid rise
resurrection

plastic carcasses riddle the streets
the discarded week of creation come and gone
and you pray through your mouth because of the smell.

And the man in the wheelchair on the corner God Blessing you had more pupils than people have
like two suns in the sky and many more moons.

Blues blood bruises
and a dirty tennis racket like a deadly weapon
and two dollars poking the man, crossed deep in heroin nirvana for now,
the two dollars for later and red cheeks.

Buildings downtown disappearing into the clouds
and a strong wind will blow us all away, like the heat in our sweating souls.

He touches her still face
like the last time cold
and the sun touched them both warm in this breeze a moment out of time
out of the city.

He didn’t need a hand
the one legged man pushing himself backwards in the wheelchair but deformed echoes of “great american” fall out of his mouth.

They all had tickets for sale and missing teeth.

Lipstick soaked like blood on the butt of the cigarette. Yesterday smoked

and littering these streets, stepped on for tomorrow in the blaze of today.

Officer lee walking around the heatwave in full military fatigue.

And the entire chorus of pigeon wings
screaming through the sky singing fear and then hunger into the calm.

And the fat man, a mountain, looming over the two little boys in the corner,
his odor threatening all who pass let alone their little nostrils
and then he lumbers on, his blue eyes dead raging and drilling ahead into some other life out there past the horizon
and then he took the little boys hand gently
and they walk on
like him.
And the sour taste left in the air, worse than his thick sweat, of being wrong
or worse being right.

A dress and a band-aid and a shaved head and a broken cigarette and murmuring and spit that hits you in the face.

And the corner restaurant charred and burnt down
but it doesn’t smell like smoke
and cars still drive and they drink next door in the rubble.

Shit stained napkins
and “I want to tear my heart out through the hole in my chest” and a kiss that haunts your lips and turns them decrepit and black and you want them to fall off like dead memories.

It’s tears you apart at the seams and from the center of your chest
so you’re just shreds on the ground
and you want to go home and be sewn by those childhood threads in your teddy bear but at least you’re flying with the pigeons in the wind all over town at once, scattered and nonsense and confused.

The walls peeling and strained by the dirt even underneath everywhere,
true blue.

The man with the bike and 10 gemstone rings on his fingers

each a different color
and he wears orange
and he swerved in front of the crying old man on crutches like stilts over again
predictable and consistently.
A black pigeon pecks with orange eyes
moving out of the way for feet but not that truck
and is now painting the street pink and innards
until it’s all run black again
trampled by treads.
And they sweep the garbage off the sidewalk into the street,
still garbage,
just there.

The ground buckles under your feet
because you walk hard
going Somewhere
and it’s metal and thin and only here for a reason and the same man on the streets is still here

in the same spot
like that other man but who’s gone now.
The streets filled with familiar corners
all gone now
in many real ways
and haunted
in others.
Maybe that’s why your thoughts buckle and break and you carry them on your shoulders like real weight
and they leap at you like out of the shadows screaming,
warning you perhaps
to feel the thin metal under your soles here now while you can
because you haven’t earned your stripes and won’t ever haunt here again.
Millions of people who used to be here
so walk hard.

And a feather is stuck in the muck
black gum stepped on black hole collecting dirt and time and the feather is black and white
because good is a white lie
and human is an inconvenient truth
and someone eats it
like stale breath is worth it.

Why does it smell luke horse shit on Canal Street?

The bus horn
dancing through the streets is a bumblebee sonata.

It’s full of last times and first
and festering middle,
each giggle bubbling up clean and pure through the dirty air and fresh eyes and virginal glances that keep coming like a blood sacrifice who rises on their own hot air and the helping hand of whatever divinity swirls and bucks and revs in the sewers and the streets and the clouds.

And all the names in block red
of the famous people who stopped by this jewelers,
blood diamonds and fake diamonds
all fools gold streaking the street and reflecting back the good and pretty promise of youth
and sparkling in it like drowning in small satisfaction.

Swirling stinky reflections pooling beside the skid marks and concrete cracks like long magic fingers screwed into a shaking aching promise,
more than its shallow depths can deliver,
muddy and the muck and the thick spit spilt word nothing sweet nothing

and the sparkling shoes on her purple old feet, stiff and pointing up.

Walking spine erect like a board like dead
like rising to the Heavens stepping off the train car

and crossing yourself.

And they spin on one foot
a drunken ballet
and fall close enough to the tracks and get up themselves,
sideways again.

And piss like shooting stars
streaking fate away
towards its final place,
stepped on by walkers on the way to theirs.

Your arm sticks to the pole in the subway,

metal and sweat,
a moment that will only haunt few sticky fingers, and between one stop the underground opens up forever dark all the way that way
for no one to see
but everyone who passes to know,
and everyone passes.

And bonds are broken like fresh air needs to rush out not creep because it’s all loud and fast here.

He thinks two or three of us could ‘take’ a snow leopard you just have to protect your neck.
‘But he’s gated in. He couldn’t get out if he wanted to. So if someone was in there they couldn’t get out.

You’d be in trouble
huh?
Even if you tried to run that way
you’d still be gated in, huh?
You’d be in trouble.
On second thought
if we were just walking regular like humans
you think he’d smell us in advance?
He would, huh,
and he’d just swoop right in.
That’s why you don’t tread on someone’s territory.

Sitting in the shade of the concrete angels wings caved in but not collapsing quickly,
and a piranha where a head should be.

You’re tripping more now and you will fall
and you’ll say you flew in the gutter

and a tumbleweed rolls to the back of the train car and bounces
catching flight as it falls back down,
loud like it all is,
the pride and joy of this quiet ocean everywhere else but not here,
the dark boasts of billboards and electricity bills and chemically induced oasis, an oasis from the forever silence and dark and not,

life as indignant rebellion,
vicarious through the veins of this place,

and we shoot up on it here, until we pass out standing in the park.

Suck it all in and hold it deep
because this New York air dissolves to other places fast so let it scratch your heart and pray for a scar that stays.

All roads leading one place
uptown
and then up
through the gates back to the green and the grass and the gentle winds in through the window on 12th and Avenue B

with the rambling rant of the friendly neighborhood schizophrenic , a New York lullaby
and wake up call.
Rise and shine.

New York, 2022

Poem

Don’t try to keep up with the privileged kids

They run too fast in moon boots

On papas dime

And inhaled lines.

The life is fast and free.

A big old empty.

Don’t try to keep up with them.

You can’t.

You don’t have the bankroll

And your morals don’t help.

Just watch and drool

At their tier one schools

In their Pier One chairs

And their fear none smiles

Bearing teeth

Being silly

Because death is in their daddy’s pocket.

And they gallivant

And gallop

And swirl through night life

Like a sparkling tornado

Looking for problems

Like they’re searching for their souls,

But not finding any

as they bound boundless

Through bound and gagged gimmicks

And constructed chaos

That they pop like pills

With pills

As music drowns out everything it needs to.

The wind stays in their hair.

It has a timeshare.

They’re tan and mean

Lean fighting machines.

Watch them twinkle

And drool if you must.

Indulge in only fantasies

Of painless pain

And champagne stains

On the Louis,

But do not try to keep up with the privileged kids.

Golden teeth

I want to smoke cigarettes and wear white strips with you

Until our teeth are yellow and rotted and brilliant white shining diamonds

And eroded down to nothing

But dust floating on the breeze from one last laugh at something I said

Or a look you gave

Where I knew you were laughing on the inside.

Right?

Please tell me you were laughing on the inside this whole time.

We’re toothless gummy-mouthed people

Looking like old people just between our lips

And in our wrinkled hearts

Because old people know what real love is

Even if their heads forget

And we’re laughing at all the sharp toothed idiots

Walking around chomping things.

We’re just eating soup.

It’s the only thing we can eat.

Our muscles aren’t all that strong anymore

But the chicken soup fortifies our souls.

They are strong.

Mine could bench press my heart

Which is a lot bigger now

And weighs more,

That fat bastard,

And it’s your fault because of all the chicken soup and smiles and hidden-inside-of-you laughs.

It’s like my heart is giving yours a piggyback.

And my soul could bench press that all day.

So take that suns out guns out dude.

She’s mine soul shines.

Dude.

Don’t smoke kids.

It makes your teeth yellow.

Unless you want to wear white strips.

Poem

Don’t give up on something you love

Unless it’s love.

Then take it out to a sprawling farm

Where it can run free

And be happy.

But why did you bring the rifle?

And why do you smell like gutter?

Is it gutter love now?

“Gutter love isn’t love

It’s just roadkill,

The memory of which will be smelt but not seen

And then nothing

And then will leave room for a new love running around scratching the hardwood

And peeing on your favorite shoes”

You tell the child who will now be prowling and excavating gutters for the rest of his life looking for his lost love.

Poem

We met under the suicide bridge

For the first real time

I gave you garbage

You saw a ghost

Syllables & Definitions

If you write poetry 

people will say it’s beautiful 

so “beautiful” just means “poetry”

And “I like your shirt” means

“I noticed your shirt 

because it’s a peacock assault on our retinas,

a neon spew

on the visual landscape 

with it’s functionless zippers 

and acid wash trim.”

“You were great”

means “I sat through 120 minutes of you crying on stage 

not stage-whispering 

so I didn’t know what you were saying

and now I’m meeting you in the lobby.”

Great. Beautiful. Moving. Truly. 

Transcendent. 

“Special” means

you are who I am talking to

right now. 

This smile means don’t feel uncomfortable that your joke wasn’t funny and you used the word “microcosm” wrong. 

Love means one of many thing, a sprawling wasteland stretching from a 9 am emoji wake up call

to the moon and back

which might actually mean something. 

If you’re looking for truth,

these words are steeped in it

but are coated in our hopes and dreamful interpretations,

wishful sugar-coated thinking.

They are true 

but not in their phonetics,

syllables,

or definitions. 

It’s in the context dear boy,

and our desperate optimism and affirmation-seeking little neurotic people-pleasing, hidden-sneezing, asshole-appeasing, bereaving non-grieving human nature. 

There it is,

what our words mean, 

if you must know. 

You look resplendent. 

I love you. 

You are special. 

But 

I love you. 

You are special.