old armors
black and cracked,
asphalt where they hid and
phosphates at their wear
from particle war
as chaotic as a scene

hieroglyphs painted along old coffins
codifying death
and releasing life
into a common alphabetical formulation
that was organized
according to human lore
regarding cleanliness instead of sanctity
for christs sakes.

what happens
to all of those old soldiers
who slid down hills
in zippered combat boots
to lob explosives into concrete caves
for the sake of some industry lobby?

names at best to us
as we were beaten back
with the artillery of humility
and tricks of humiliation
that cut our garb off with scissors
before we saw our fabric

remember remember
old useless iron
wretched from dead gauntlets
and carried as fealty
to executed kings?
history books remain too boring
to teach us of women smoking sage
before shattering the earth of battle
with triumphant fires set to enemy siege engines
and old combats from the nurses station
applied to Russian fighter craft
spilling ammunition into ages

i could
say
that Mars
bedecked in Roman red
regally fucked humanity
in its first rites of divinity
and left us stranded

no more
blasted rock in the water
where i let my feet swill in cold
before i landed a date with a Persian doctor
which was a year ago

no more hiding vodka
with some weird woman
as we walked to a campsite due east
and tried to start a fire in the frost

my boots fit in the gravel and crunched
i had too many whirls gyrating around my open head
and when i got back to a locked door
these felt like the settling
of some oft forgotten wound
as the wind played with chill
across the scattered lines of my open face
there were the old emotions
where i had buried my heart
in ancient mystiques
like some bedraggled coyote
attempting a rest
in a snowed out desert

carved into my mail
were odd old skeletons
and a few femurs danced
in obvious white
and poor yellow

writing in the sky

i knew

looking at old photos

forget.


angel,
i should lose this
in a heartbeat

like a car
like a cat

all i know
is old
so
don't call me Jim Carrey.

three days

when i
got through

there

weren't words

for a red helicopter
ten feet above the beach strip
or mr. edison, homeless
there with his sack full of electronics
and post cards to sex

jumping
from transit to alley
i found these fake roses
in the sideways split
between shoes and theft
where police wandered in
and a seven foot white man, bald
lifted me from the heavens
and out
back down to grimy steel hell
with an assault rifle
in an old suit
worn fight
awoken
like Joan of Arc

jesus fucking christ

heels
on my shoes
company leather
odd old feather
used to titilate
in some European cult
some girl wanted me to join
until I told her something at two in the morning
about German flamethrowers
even though I clearly wasn't interested
in what they had done to people
since
I obviously wasn't any sort of aggresive fratboy
interested in legal rape with controlled substances.

well
it probably consisted of four people
to tell you the truth
I should have flown to Serbia
and been a soldier
maybe I would have learned quicker
about how what comes to pass
is not just about love

i left a velvet coat there
on her doorstep
she was insane
and thought it was about our relationship
when i was having an argument
that ended my residency in the area

that
argument
should have

instead

free bus rides
job as a writer
knight on a bridge
in foreign weather
no joy
panic through painted glass
kinds of hospitals

mangoes were my favorite
i wanted to live there
in a grove
old growth with moss
brick two story buildings with white wooden frames
all of it
i already did
pitter patter of rain
silence at three
old
tired
documented
work.

so you know now
i got kicked out of college
for winning an argument
against eight people

i may even tell you why

Ship

going to the slow boat
slow boat to stupidity

it is impossible to observe a robot at an altitude of twenty thousand feet
and other such wisdoms

these might be the names of the worst books in the world.

two of my old ones
were called from me
out of the sound of depths that
weren't the least bit poetic.

i hate poets
they are the worst
just talk and speak
and write how you feel.

A misspelled Seames Heany
should go back to his Beholding
of The First English Poem
and slice up his arm
after he does some heroin
the night before writing in some amnesiac dream
for the local press all on the same dope.

hey writers
you used to know things
until the day that post office sent you phenazipam
mixed with toulene that some sixteen year old schizophrenic
mixed in a dope lab somewhere in the Midwest.
Now you aint even infants, kids,
you can't even congu-ga-gate
the words to order your dumbass espresso at four thirty in the morning
because you had some peculiar drug reaction
that sent you wandering on the pavement
thinking you were Billy the Kid
and that your pen was a neologistic device
pinpointing Blackbeard's buried treasure.

Well I don't dope
don't even drink anymore.

I could care less
about the twitching nervous wreck with glasses
who twitched onto the bus
with a bunch of fucking pennies
and got off on the wrong bus stop

I could care more
about these deep overtures
I made
once
and not in the least

going and returning and going
without a horse to ride on
its like my life is filled
with these sideways elevator shuttles
that look like coffins
when I try to see who is driving.
fuck cars
get a horse and saddle it up to ride
call it something sensical like Latika
and wear a riding outfit
with an old rifle slung over your back,
hat braced for wind
with a compass on the pommel
but this is not advice
for people who strictly believe me
or the modern era.

could have told you anything as opposed to something
but now there's this matter of a ship.

oi gevalt

used to be an Archter but only one person understood that
how the lithium cleaves instead heals
since lithium carbonate is used to manufacture industrial glass.

no one to speak to or of
what happened
for fucks sake
to conversation

save it

Well
they too

So you understand
I never speak like that

nor would I ever say
"So you understand."

Got volts in these vines
I call tapestries in hue of room's twilight
that perfected the nightfall

Forest in the high desert,
the scum, they drive residential SUVs
like living room cabs
while I got black boot on grit of pavement

Old crow speak for hey.

for Moriah

dark lens
in the supermarket
checking out your milk
like you were naked with your wallet

some fat tub behind the counter
who was some kind of fad

oh yes oh yes
he thinks you'd say
because you bought sexy shampoo

he can go rip his dick off

Dali

old ironsides
made from typecast newspaper.

yeah

you believe in surrealism?

how can something not be real even
i mean
Dali was really insane
nuts
to play a piano that he had trapped animals inside
like it was fun
after he took Gala
from a poor writer
who was a fucking member of the French Resistance in WWII

who cares about assholes
i'd rather blindside some cretin
with an impeccable litany of nonsensical artifice
so that he leaves my love

tired of knock knees
old scar tooth suits me fine

had, too
impeccable flu
washed over
washed out
kept in like a criminal
without riot
ha. 

with iron sights did our vision become a war
i have to versus your i want to
when you were winning

jackknifed transportation
in the moth strewn highway
could import
chemical wheat
as though our sons
knew and understood

dawn

mmmh
discarded lunch i am
lest there be hawks picking at my ribs
in some gutter world out there

im not this
im nit picking the conception of the human corpse
along with being sick to death of invocations of the spirit
both of which got along amply
with the American military

oh coo noise
old dove with black pepper

living archaic like a portrait of 15th century peasentry
humble and humiliated
with a cast iron bowl beaten by a blacksmith
who buggered his children and horse
since smelting low gravity mercury
proved him
to be the town's leading apothecary.

but i got this medicine too
like heals like
is all i have to suggest
maybe some truffles
for a bit of a blade
stuck ringing by the temple
and edible flowering herbs
for those chaotic colors pressed
to your old slave collar
now hung up by the lamppost
with your old smithed shackles.

got some news for the town crier today
that all those do-gooders out there
are Macheavellian bureaucrats
who chose
their victims with rounded gold
instead of with a keep's broadsword raised to signify
a path
to that afterlife

already superstitious
about beautiful tangles and collections
like old jars filled with sand
and crackling lodestone
kept behind fireplace brick.

you could
drive to see me one day
on the back of a caravan
just don't bring a friar
or a toss from a basket of nettles,
glowing heliotrope.

well my dear
to my unparalleled delight
we appear to have entertained
the auspices of some fascist guest.
we gave him up
after he smiled there like a jerkass
and talked about vehicles
like he worked at a relocated autoplant

Trains melting too
your face an anemone in a pool of glass
all I gather
is that the love letter made it through
like new impressions
of an old oak tree.

Death in the Sun

And Angela
no birds singing
just a flock of crows reading the samples of the sky
and the beaks of old white doves
plainly picking at the pill counters.

I got too many scars inside my face
to know which lithium tried to decide my race
of beautiful or mutant plant

Health on the wane again.
It's ok.  It makes me feel like a firework
ready to come undone in color
without flame
in too true movements
of where this speck has been
in such a relentless swirl of weather and pollution.

Goddess,
I should have died in December 2012.
On the New Year I was coughing up blood
with horrible fever
and it felt quite like I had some tumor in my back
and all they told me to do in detainment (...)
(fundamentally made me think that people can't understand science).
Well
flu and pnumonia and six times the maximum amount of Invega and Latuda
aside with blood pressure at 70 35
I wonder why they spared me again

Gee, this 19 year old girl there and I
traded tylenol and orange drinks
because she was dying too, her fever reached 106.
You should have seen this
meaning
I got through a car accident
and walking two days through the San Bernadino ghetto afterwards
just to look at this girl's pallid face and listen to her mirroring my feelings
of "Why am I in this pain, I am in pain."

I wonder again why they spared me again.

no I love my Lydia

Kingdoms come
and kingdoms fell
if I had a choice
mine would have been a rock and roll show
without the glib sucking of dick
or the turn of currency's trick
it was meant to be a meadow
where our joys could be made violet and emerald
like a scrap of some quilt below an earring.

Yet I have been brave for too long
before this emperor of Hell
that just for show and tell
made us in abeyance
to some schizophrenic Father
chastising his outlaw daughter
for eating something sweet at the prayer for birds
with wounded feet
and those poor young boys turned into meat
within the tin corrugated walls of a slaughterhouse's hallways.

Time to erase the concepts
of abstract portrayals of love war and hatred,
I got this wound from glass by my left eye
when some guy cursed with Jesus cursed me.

I lost my last knife when the police erased my constructs,
just little models of happiness where no one could die
in temples dedicated to the sun and to the moon
when I came back from saturnine cages
all the room tore me up to ruins
because they got these slabs of beef coated in censored chemicals
that will make your frontal lobe turn to soft red clay.

Just to say I lost my faith dear Lydia
when I vowed if she had starved that I would
go to Vegas and suck a politician's knob
and say that I found a hundred out in the snow
because after all the universe had this heliocentric show
so I figured if I sacrificed myself
that the rest of it would be fine
like unfurled wine colored sails
moving above the darkness of a stranger Neptune
than anyone had cared to point our way towards.

I hobbled down to the store
on wooden heels through hell
just to understand
a few uncouth things about jail.

I gathered that maybe the mental hospital
has a worse attitude
and that only the poor end up
locked up
since the authority figures
get so paranoid about their lives and ways in general
that the only thing they want to do is trap them
and keep them from being out there free.

I dreamt last night
of spectacular lessons
in terms of subcultures
and really recalled the lecture at night
that the reason for war
was to murder people who had become enlightened
and above the curve of survival and knowledge.
The rest of them were savages
as you and I should have figured
from those black and white photographs
of teenagers with flamethrowers.

meditations of a jerk

Something about being this half Russian
with a clear glass of tea that looks radioactive
and wearing black cowboy boots
with stolen pants
and a long coat
makes me feel at odds with the American placement
of sensibility.

From what I found on the ground
outside the 7-11
I could form stories about the ignorance
of people who have never crafted a style
or a device.

They used to mock me unless I was drunk.

Whatever is clever.

I'm sure also that you've been thrown on the dirt
a couple of times
and had to accept this with grace and a smirk
to avoid the knives that could snap open in a sliver of dead silver.

Could have been me too, maybe for the better or the worse.

All I remember of LA
are things like drug addicts trying to jump me outside of questionable establishments
when all I wanted was a fine beer
or just a secret smile
that wound up being controlled by the insane animal sentiments
of hooligans leaping out of dying cars.

I should smile for all that I have survived
but it nags at me
from the cheap unfeeling floor
to the expansive harbor in bloody curfew sunset
where the oil ships lurch out like sick bellies or old rusted kitchens
trying to cleave across all that mercury beauty known as a sea,
which is where I would reside.

One time
I sat down and wrote twenty five poems.
You just sit and write
and let the mistakes and funny business come out.
If they're bad
then you happen to be like most of our poets
including my favorite.

Old memories of midnight tribes
like black volcanic glass
found there is the everyday disarray of common stone.

We had long coats and carried old pistols
behind that barbed wire,
looked for ways across the stagnant river.

It could have been you
who just pressed a hand to the back of my neck.

I let my heart rest.
Old magics assimilated from Assyrians
in black curls of ancient hair
and near Egyptian eyeliner
we contrasted with the modern doll
fit to factory clothes
and made to fill the stupid fancies.

Somebody brought me a fashionable pair of gloves
but they were too bulky to find your hand.
I wanted you to forgo those tacky mittens
with no trigger finger
but you risked hiding against the icefall
that tore down the damp clouds
and fell against the black asphalt
in the tinkle of horrible bells.
Ringing, always ringing, knitted there
like a cap through the caked blood in my ear
that had listened in red to love.

i love it when people say something snide
like perhaps they think they are clever or witty
but all it does is make you hate them
for not being very kind
but for having a disease that is rather plain
like eczema wrapping around their face
and getting in your coffee.

i was rabid earlier
but i have to let this go.
maybe i will walk over
and break their things
and see how much they enjoy
unwarranted criticism
when it is not based in their reputation
but rather in what they worked to own.

time travel

old memories and pasts rotate back into circulation
when you have already settled their feel and currency

all i remember was that i loved her
and she loved me, she told her children that one day
while we baked some impossible food
i think it had cinnamon in it.

i mention her because i had this dream
that i had glanced in some article in the paper
about her life that was misconstrued and clearly insulting
and i was very upset
and beyond livid
which is how i feel
when i think of what she had to put up with
because people thought she was nuts
when all she did was work for the county
and try to help confused people who wound up in the jail.

i can't tell you her name again
i don't want to talk about things
that i should keep private
not because they were secrets
but because perhaps they are too beautiful for you

i hid all the good posts
people didnt really deserve them
which is why i quit
playing the violin.
you could go mad giving people art
and love
and having no one even like it or you in return
so the best tactic
was to wear black
and pretend to mourn things
when it actually had already broken
that shade of pink you used to keep in an old heirloom vase.

i mean i guess
i miss my sister
who used to record sounds on a tape deck
and make up songs
when we'd pretend that we were werewolves
living on some mattress pad
in the basement of an old white house
that had paintings from the thrift store
and old bookcases marred with paint.

she never found out
what happened to me
how and why i had to leave
so i guess it should be said that it was sad

i don't hate you
because of dandelions.
something hard kind of melted down
and i lost what i knew
which is bliss
as opposed to idiot talks of enlightenment
and knowing by dumb chefs
and poor architects
struggling with drug addiction
while having a son in college who plays the drums
from a divorce three decades before.

can't manage it after curfew.
i need a glass of wine.
something finer would be appreciated,
white curtain lace draped in smokey moonlight
and an operatic song, i would protest
because my body has been ransacked
by the worst rapists i know,
old tricks of apothecary draped in white health
but without the designs of the Hippocratic oath
for they professed to help the mind
when they destroyed my body too.

i might dogfight memories of Artaud
so as for your sake.
you don't want to hear.
i mean, i wouldn't care or mind
telling you about his 127 electrical shocks
and how he dot dot dot.
old murder got perfected
with him locked in a white tile closet
smearing charcoal on rough paper
in the shape of a scream.

i'd scream too but they pulled that atlas from my lips
when the world of pain featured my explorations
in common lousy heartbreak with nails poking my feet.
i'm not sorry for myself so you understand,
just currently abominable.
i need to dance
and buy somebody flowers goddamnit and goddamn this.

they took my fucking car
after they took me.
five times the legal amount of medication
and i was put in the ER
feeling like I had been put under some horrible gun
that wasn't exactly psychiatric or medical
but maybe more like it was made of cheap steel
and supposed to help and warm
while existing as a science fiction dream
in fealty to other people's delusions of grandeur.

so i coughed up blood there
and had to talk to detectives
between gasps for breath
while being put under
as they placed some tube into my lungs.
i was terrified that i had babbled while unconscious
and said something like for instance
that I hated America
which would have been true.

might be facing six months
and a warrant
so i figure i can just write.

hey man
i don't want this life to choose
again
i would rather have a glass of good whiskey
and just look at some good woman
who bothered to speak like a human being.

yes and no

used to be
a black fabric anarchist
dressed in veldt of delusions
and rose petals
working at being kind.
got shot up
in this hospital
for being nice
so i said fuck them
and they thought i was sane again.

i wish i could kid around
like when i was twenty one
but all i got now are bruises shaped
like patches of Africa
where I lost my first fiance
to a year of terrible travel
in the navel affinity of letters
i would rather not burn
or see again.

last night
i didn't want to be this male
wondering about the world
through small things
like an engraved wooden pen
and when the fabric and gasoline
of the earth would run out
how much it would cost
without people willing to give.

i got it too
i miss people
that left life
and who are still alive
who left sanity

love and war

to all my old red lipped lovers
we were on the offensive.

the barbarians receded
as we placed our pistols against inhuman chests
filled with oil
and shot black
back into the escaping night
where they placed their lack.

oh now we would say
it was just love
now we would be paralyzed
with embarrassment
at those old stories
graphed to the curve of the past
like some lost cartography
yellowed away even from the past.

sometimes we were cowards
even with ammo locked in pepperbox
but i miss you too

old bones

murdered lips
should have spoke
before secrets conspired
dark blue poisons
around the heart white face
that shocked the sky
with her beauty.

old times
spent with trade
and barter.
you know
the college never talked about death
or why the rich could murder the poor
or how the poor put others in the earth
with twists of blades.

i got this debris in my pocket
that says love
let us spend our life hiding
in pink fabric and red thread
winding around our arms
like old projects
instead of sliding into prisons of fear
where we got no ideas
except for a life of cold stone.

i got this fear
that maybe people aren't evil
but ignorant
which is harder to take in
because naivety and innocence
in wretchedness
cannot be met with recourse or justice.

permanent rose

sister
we can't let them have guns
i don't want no citizen gang
pulling our flowers from the graves
of our departed
and shot with meth and cyanide
firing at our desperate house
like they did in June
when we put up our wallpaper
and listened to the train move by
like a tectonic plate.
sister
i don't want them having drugs
i don't want them hanging around
with knives placed in their pockets
we can't even have them in the living room
for tea

war

I did it out of love crying with butterscotch and found old cloth in my hand

fame

Eager tongue in sliding snakes through orchid dreams held with painted blossom in a paper cup through wine stains in nightmare scapes scraped from the bottom of fences raised a yard from gallows noise. old dreamtime fairy costume lost in the ocean where they fed you fighter plane space messerschmidt old dead brits and a comic strip lost my easy tongue in difficult Mexican love where my daughter found cocaine instead of our dove. dreamship time travel through DNA and old fucked drugs distorting our physique like crack fucked the thugs old dna in pen written at length through purple ribbons making hair dark not yet dank graveyard script and old movies in junk drawer filled with rose paper and gin perfume. i loved her for loving her not in some storm of ego's fighter craft poised for dancing with itinerant acrobats called space case Pilots.

for sis

Easy honesty in first sister kiss, no porno on the blood rose cheek, there we embraced with no remorse scattered horses in desert deaths all we got to prove ourselves is leather left beside the beside of ruins there where we had pianos in our temple, candles by the fireplace til that day they tried to sweep with machine gun transvestites living like a bloody stitch in the dreams of wishes we had spoken too. Old vampires surrounding young daughters all the proof i got is a schizophrenic father old werewolves lined with vinyl for World War Three Christmas time in fascist California.

The Designs of the Beautiful Dead Held Between Your Eyes

I saw the designs of the dead
held between your eyes
and I thought it was my emptiness

instead

we left with sand escaping our hands
that was strangely timed
to a world of surgeons donning their masks
and saying "Let us cut in."

I broke my eyes
to see with granules of fragments
around the sight of sighs
and yellow road signs.

I broke my ear drums next
to deafen the traffic of words
so instead
I could remember the sounds
of your thinly veiled white lies
that said with love,
"That was the dead between your own eyes."

And autumn, and winter, said
"Shhh. They'll rise in eastern oceans
humming a song instead
to fragments of hearing and those lovely dead
that were between hers and your eyes."