The Roommate Situation That Lasted For a Night

I was ready to move out.  There were too many people in my place, we were all sick of each other anyways.  I went over to this woman's house who said I could rent a room for four hundred a month in some blue two bedroom place out in Moonridge.  She told me to bring a bottle of vodka.  I complied.

Everything seemed relatively normal at first.  She said I could put a lock on the door, and nevermind her three kids.  She had recently had a baby, the father she said had beat the shit out of her and the thirteen year old girl, so he ended up back in prison for two years.  He had sent her some love letter out of the pen, but well, she was already married to another person who had been sentenced to prison for a longer sentence, offense undisclosed.  Her mother who had lived in the room prior was arrested on two felony assault charges involving her boyfriend, who was picked up on a warrant.  We drank vodka and cranberry juice and talked about this.  She seemed a bit abrupt and overly excited.  I figured she was making gestures towards bed, which I was a bit uncomfortable with being that she really wasn't all that good looking, seemed fucked on something, and seeing how it was supposed to be my first night in the room.

She put on a Heart CD and danced like a lunatic, I danced too but just to have fun, really wondering what I had gotten myself into.  Thankfully her baby started crying, and the two other kids woke up.  Even they really wondered what the hell was going on.  She tended to the child, which was actually a thrilling thing to witness, seeing that afterwards she passed out on the floor.  I told her awake kids to make sure she laid on her side, because if she threw up she could choke.  I was drunk, but not on speed and pills and a fifth of vodka like the one on the floor.

Thankfuly somebody called the ambulance.  I would have but the sherrifs in the mountains are notoriously and cartoonishly disgusting.  My aunt got beaten in front of her house by one once, not to mention my other aunt who got arrested for being outside.

The next time I spoke with her she said that her ten year old niece had moved into the room from Imperial Valley.  Well, ok.

Really I wonder as a point of clarification at this point just what the hell is involved in doing something normal and human, like renting a room in the mountains.  Apparently all this was, I didn't get the place, and now I am moving on.  I might go back to Moonridge, but probably this time I will look for a studio.  I just want to be alone and write and listen to music and maybe watch birds for awhile.  This has been impossible for about a year.  People are always around.  It makes me figure that for awhile there was something wrong with the universe where a thirty year old man on a budget can't be alone.  I was actively trying.

fragmented notes on a peculiar morning

I was up as dawn broke in the weird ethereal blue.  It is and was freezing.  They are really going nuts with nail guns on the construction site up the street.  It seemed dumb to put up a house in winter, with the threat of snow in the mountains.  There was no snow to speak of this Winter.  California is in its worst drought since 1849.

Right now I am thinking of Ian, the poor dear.  He lived in Japan and attended a meeting I had in Culver City.  He brought his sister, who was far too happy to be at a meeting for us poor mentally ill-labeled folks.  I don't know why I mention him.  He was thin with an adam's apple, had trouble speaking, and then later had some huge party out in Long Beach.  I usually avoid parties, around here.  They were fine in the NW, but something about going to one in the sun in anything even having anything remotely to do with Los Angeles makes me feel like I want to escape into some dark corner, crouching there without muttering or thinking, but rather just taken aback.  Maybe, I should make this post about parties.  I don't know.  Right now all I remember was seeing my friend Rhea again, except she had adopted a New Way of Talking which was downright annoying.  I tried to pay attention, then I left, kind of wondering what the problem was.  I ran into her in a cafe before she left for France.  She had dropped The Way of Talking, gave me a big hug and chatted.  So, no problem I guess.

I was never one of the cool people when I was younger.  Maybe I was without knowing.  I stood aloof, drank beer because I got socially anxious and nervous around people, was capable of making up some really bad jokes.  I cared, for some reason.  Like I was really going to be held accountable years later for something I said at some party when those people don't talk to each other any longer.

Hmm.  Birds are out on the pines.  I can see my breath in the small movements of cold wind.  There is something I have to remember in the back of my head.  Just live.  Who cares about the rest.  Whatever happens comes towards and sometimes through a person, what does not just leaves and hopefully flutters away gently like those helicopter seeds that fall from trees.

The coffee is really terrible.  I would make an analogy, but I'll spare you people the details.  I am sure we are all familiar with bad coffee.  It jars instead of waking you up with a glow, it is labor everywhere in the body but especially weirdly around the teeth.  It's trying to say something somehow, like a vial of ink might suggest that it is full of letters, but more to the point, it socks a person in the gut.  I hate for it to stow away.  I bought a soda for the first time in awhile.  It made me forget the coffee.

Death (graphic)

There was this Matter
of bouncing from doc to doc for sixth months
in a state of near death
that didn't really get that bad
until I was vomiting buckets of purple blood
that had mixed with all that stomach acid
from some sort of abrasion somewhere
and my lungs, it turned out, were scarred
from some blood clot actively breaking into them
and I was scared only later
when I understood what I had survived,
some pirate scar on my neck where my second jugular was cut open
being the only evidence.

Really I could feel it in the back of my brain
I had to learn to walk again in some hospital,
all the old blood pooled in the cerebellum
and the Ecstasy of Flight From Life
still humming there with some gross machine
that was pumping yellow pus out of my surgical wound.

I figured after those experiences
that the Earth would be a fine place to live,
but I was wrong
as was proven by the sum of people
who still call to collect emotional and vengeful bills
when I want to look like I live in France
with maybe a glass of brandy,
just walking out in the field
with wildflowers up to my waist
humming softly
and thinking of the One I Love

fragmentations, aka This Writing Is So Weird

Two figures clad in black, approaching White France.  All the loops of former wires trailing from speckled
shell of dark coats, a pale vitality expelled from their snow frosted breath, faces masked by scarves.

Worn nuisances with a side saddle filled with worms, a dark pouch covered with lightning's red sheen
upon the pillow that rested only cowards who wanted to murder.

Haven upon a green porch light.

Black black tormented across the moon

Furthermore, it is a standard injunction to phrase the language in the most beautiful possibility of worlds.

One must.  One mast.  Scarred and flea bitten by hen pecked.

We no longer dance, you see.

A probability curve is heretical across even a graph page made ludicrous by rulers that measure inches instead
of centimeters.

One must chirp.  Two masts and a sandpiper writer.

Sampler at Denny's costs an arm, har. har. har.

You could have given me examples of rusted blood, woven into those serial killer novels planned and tuned according
to carberator noise.  A gaff, strung up with metallic fishing line and preserved.

PT Barnum was a private in a war.

A yes...A yes (he slithered).

ELIZABETH, what a vulgarity lopped into a zoetroppe and paged from nastersiums kept in crystal funnel.

Hell has no freeway.  Ironic, or fitting?  Both.

Ensign lies about ownership, can no longer buy or sell, har. har. har.

"I'm wondering where he is.  Based on the time, he is in one location or in several at once."

Delirium tremens, shaky substrate of plant rot decanted into the lily-livered apportioning of those
who are scared of happiness.  "Happiness is a bit faggy, yeah?"

et Celine

Searching for work that is not offensive is relatively impossible.  I just sit here and write and live, sometimes living through debacle after debacle, wandering towns and downtowns, sifting through things with that cold wind of humanity that refuses to hold on to virtue.  I would have made it as a guttersnipe, but I was tracked after a month, picked up in some cafe after calling the police on former friends who were following me.  It took awhile.  I was all over the bus and train system, searching, mostly for places to sleep and live.  It wasn't that bad.  There were construction sites and people's heated laundromats, a mailroom, the freezing beach, places on the cliffside penninsula where one could dodge people pulling up in their jelly bean sports vehicles, wearing work out outfits.  I really felt like a Witch.  Things came into view more clearly that I was Dark and probably didn't deserve to live.  Call me nuts, but it made more sense that I existed than people clearly concerned with nettling conceptions of Good.

I have a Call as opposed to a Calling.  It shifts through broad avenues, is there when I walk through the open doors of the Hera Hotel in North Inglewood.  I am not ornate or pompous or serious any more, I just work on odd things here and there, trying to find some kind of living sustinance in a scrap of news overheard in jail or some type of flowing ribbon of breath when I ran, out of breath, to ditch some Latino muggers in downtown LA.

I usually escape.  I've only been caught a handful of times.  It's mostly not by police, nor when I Give Myself Up Voluntarily Because There is No Other Recourse Except Aftermath.  That and I am usually polite.

There was this matter of the drop point knife that was in the parka a waiter stole from me at the Redondo Beach Cafe for failure to pay.  Well I offered Labor in exchange for the overpriced sausage burrito, but he suddenly wanted a bunch of money and my clothes.  Fine.  I felt happy later finding out that my wallet wasn't in my jacket at the time.  The park was bright green, warm, and ugly as sin.

People in the city mostly want to do drugs, sit on their fat asses, and bugger.  It's boring and reminds me of a Mansion For Pigs.

You can move around, swift, observing story to story without writing it down.  It makes a lot of sense.  Transit workers are pestered, they won't let you relax, and the manager of a supermarket chain would just as soon see you starve than give you a fifty cent apple after you had six days of not eating.  Well, compared to myself, it seemed like they were made of money.  I told some Authority this later and all they did was laugh.  I got arrested for using a park bench for sleep, they told me that some woman in an apartment saw me and thought I was dead.  The cop was surprised when I sat up.  Apparently people usually die on park benches by the beach or something, but this was not where I saw the dead.  They were all over the ghetto on Sixth Street, laying there in fluids while SWAT cars howled through the trash strewn street with sirens, all the store fronts closed up with corrugated metal.

I figured at some point that I should get a job.  Really though?  It was too easy to evade.  You just sat on the train like a normal person, although in some sort of conundrum in terms of laundry and showering.  You just sat there and heard the black boys rap about getting high, and then some old Mexican woman gives you a dollar because you probably don't smell like chemical deodarant.  In businesses you make up stories when People Ask You Unnerving Questions, you use marina showers and the ones sticking out of the sand on the boardwalk, you move, most importantly, you move and keep moving, not expecting where to end up, wondering at the same time how it could all be so Beautiful and Breathless.

drunken poem on love

well

the problem is
that i never stopped loving them
but they all opted
for wallets and jobs
as opposed to the taste of blackberries when we were poor on vines in Portland
or how sweet we were

i was always
"we can just make it as companions"
when they were mostly
well
"the harsh facts of life say we need money."

but when i was loving them
we didn't
because love is not a currency or a stock exchange
or a marketplace
it is a soul that is birthed between two people
when they discover that they are a nation

and if you really hate me
then you would ask me about this, please.

the easiest trick to me
was to give proverbial blowjobs
to some office manager
for some supposedly good position
but then I would have just come home
filled with his hatred
saying things instead of cooing
all my song knocked out
while babbling about whatever Johnny had said
and I really think that that is the worst death in the world,
so I said it

hiking excursion

Last night in the thirty degree weather
I decided to put a bunch of leather scraps on
woven with fabric
to make this coat
that I could brave the ever-loving Wild with.

I hiked in black boots up to my shins,
feeling like a Wraith in the dark
until I laid down at peace in the forest
and heard the coyotes howling
which was unnerving
until I saw a Mountain Lion
which is when I figured that
maybe the Pacific Crest Trail
wasn't for me
despite its Proximity to Freedom.

I came back, dejected but quick
wondering how I would have survived
without a Weapon
and I figured that maybe I wasn't about
getting in fights
so I came home
and curled up in a bed
that was more uncomfortable than the forest floor
and just wondered
about how beautiful it was to look at all those foreboding stars

atmosphere

Once 

I followed the wind in LA

to see where it would take me,

paying attention to little tugs

and questions

like when it wanted to lead me

across the street on a bicycle,

I really wondered then

where I was going

and even what I was dealing with

because it didn't seem random

or even ordered

but more like gentle kisses

as dawn broke

Strangely,

I never ended up in apartment complexes

or in jail,

I would just move

however it happened to suggest

with the Santa Anas 

coming from the South

and then sometimes

the westerlies

moving me East and away

from those bleak LA seas.

I guess 

I ended up here

which in some sense of the phrase

is a triumph and Beautiful,

as though those winds

were nettled with true and false paths

that settled, carried, tore away, and gave

in direction, caress, lies, and sometimes

with it in your face trying to keep your scarf from staying on,

I feel there is something in that

but I feel too lazy

to describe the changes

how the airs would filter me through different situations

until you realize that maybe zephyrs

are a metaphor for human life

and the way we move

which is an easy thing to forget when driving

unless you are almost blown off the road

or when you are inside all the time

with nothing but settled demesne

notes on a Wrinkle in Time

That children's book
set forth from a used bookstore
convinced me at a young age
that I was supposed to save this universe somehow
because even as a kid
it was readily apparent
that things were completely off.

My delusions were centered around
the ugliness of that planet Camazotz
where everything worked
but for no end except wretched ugliness
that sadly
evidence of this in our world
drove me mad when I was twenty

so i started staging events
discovering that people were ants
and only followed money like it was food,
which i thought was this sadness
of trying to find some magic key
that when it turned
made everything nuts
like that thing in the book with Red Eyes
that hypnotized a child to hate his kin.

really what finally got to me
was that IT from the book
ended up being computers here,
computational time
computational mathmatics
linked to global finance
because look at the world of evil it did,
just saying.

i remember the three witches in the book
watching IT devour entire stars
and how two of them
were so damaged from past battles
that it took too much to speak somehow,
and i think that really left an impression on me
in the way it relates to scars amid grief.

autobiography

I think when I was born
all that I wanted
was the sound of a viola
with its two cello strings
and two violin strings,
not knowing that it was the hardest instrument to play
because of the finger and hand tension on the left hand.

I had one later, but it got smashed in the mail
and there was this matter of its horrifying picture
ending up in my mailbox with issues of mail insurance,
the dark cherry wood split
and all these weird overtures
in the correspondences between myself and the company.

Looking back
it beat all those bar fights
and then the day when my whole life became one.
I'm putting these down
because nobody will give a damn to write about my life,
at most maybe the Internet will say one day
"minor poet."

I used to have a highly functioning vocabulary
where I could use words like "crepuscular"
as points of humor
but I ceased that
after discourse became a series of comebacks and stabbings,
I had to save the good ones
for drawing a pen knife out of my pocket
when three men came out of the Zebra Room with a baseball bat,
my cousin running off into the night
and leaving me there with about two inches of nothing.

Viola strings
are a sparse and expensive commodity
and I don't mean the ones that are woven in steel
that last a long time like some people often do,
they are too common.

Those notes and my sore left hand
on fretless ebony
one time I made my instrument lament
because I was probably living
in some filthy Los Angelean debauchery
with the fly girls and boys
all on their corporate prescribed speed and anti depressants
when I was all looked down upon
because I refused,
and just would hang out on the warm patio
in these iron chairs made to look like rose vines
looking at the mint and tomato plants.

But even this was a long time ago.
I gave my violin away, it was too easy to make noise
and well like I said that viola got smashed in the mail
so all I did as a person
was look at the designs and patterns of smoke
from too many cigarettes
and wonder about wine

Dark Ages

Old drawings in journals

about how one could live in a well

off of its water,

eating only divine mushrooms

that are reminiscent of witches

in that palpable sense

of the Dark Ages,

converted into taste

without the inherent synethesia of attribution,

but more just written thoughts

of poor ones locked in ancient stone towers

for some misconstrued

and therefore grievous offense

against God and King.

I had thoughts that I would save my own life

if I were some outcast woman

because as a male

I would rather die,

not being afforded

the svelte mystery of long and mottled dark robes

on horseback in the long night 

of pitch black forest,

brambles tugging 

as I galloped from forsaken Kingdom

to forsaken Kingdom,

no weapon

but a pittance of silver.  

Gallows are even,

counterbalanced even with trap door

and the worst part 

is that kicking paired with the slow filth

of rough hewn wood and unkempt rope.

I don't even think of such things anymore,

they are just there

like our prison system,

showing the world both that people don't know how to punish themselves,

that, or they don't do it enough

Raven feather

scrawling in old leather bound books

while old men bitch

when they should be proud of their scars and pain,

as though they were the sentencings of Heresy.

I will keep my Ulcer, my Crescent Scars

and forget them only when I pick Rosemary from the Earth,

I will not pray 

because it is better 

to wear a hood lined with fur while using old boots on crackled stone

on those cold outcast evenings

where it is all just about being Alive.

people

There always was
this urge
to make oneself tough and perfect
like a gunslinger
but when you are waiting
at a snobbish country club
where nobody likes you
and then someone you love
calls up to say "I don't like you"
it is difficult
not to cry in public
after giving the cook a twenty dollar tip
because, hey, you were a cook too.

the longshoreman cared for some reason
and came out with a bottle of tequila
that you both broke in the parking lot,
he was even willing
to discuss time travel and metaphysics,
and then you discovered
that he had seen somebody die that day
so you emphasized immensely
and had a good time
going dancing at La Cita in downtown LA
despite even getting kicked out of the club
for wearing cowboy boots.

i want to say something
about people in general
like how they seem so different to us
and yet the same,
something awful
something terrible
something Beautiful and sometimes
they are shocking
in just how goddamn down to earth and true and human they can be.

notes

I decided to put this down before I forgot.

I went to the store last night to buy cigarettes and found the store clerk giving discounts to police officers.

Of course I said something after checking the prices, basically "Why the hell are you doing that?"

He tried to say that the products were damaged and that their coffee was cold so I was like "What, so police officers buy cold coffee?"

He tried to change the subject so I insisted that if I came in and bought beer that I thought was warm that I should get a discount.  He kept changing the subject, so I asked him why he was wearing a Dodgers hat if he wasn't from LA and then finally left after letting him know that he had a bunch of orange shit around his mouth.

The reason I'm pissed is because the cops don't do shit.  They wouldn't break up a domestic violence dispute at my home, they wouldn't even prosecute based on drugs and a theft of a phone on top of a hundred dollars, but they get free fucking coffee and discounted food?

WTF, yolo.

thoughts on nature

I really remember sunlight so thick
that you could drink it like wine,
pouring golden through thick leaves,
the sun up there like a mango,
just leaving me to my warmth and thoughts and tragic writings.

Somedays in winter
I got bitter
about the cold
that froze my joints into brass knobs,
but I always loved spring
when I was waiting to find jokes
and not in books
but amid the lifting depression
of life's cycle.

All this would be fine
but we still have
government buildings that use linoleum
(you can always tell if a place is wretched
by looking to see
if there is linoleum at all).
And because of being at the bottom
of it all
I would be lying
if I said that I liked bicycles anymore
but mostly because of how ugly they look
when they cost more than the lowly hundred dollar ones
and what more
with bored cyclists jazzing up hills with cameras on their heads,
in terms of that
I have really had enough.

There were sketches
that couldn't control the seasons
but only those thick and thin lines
of more off putting buildings
because Nature never used a straight line
unless it was a Beautiful Accident.

soul

i bought mine
on a frieghter
that was leaving Belgium

it got stuck in the North Sea

overdoses

Sometimes
I really can't care
and this is not the function
of some brain or personality disorder

but for instance
when some idiot
takes a bunch of pills for food
on top of meth
and then drinks a half gallon of vodka
dot dot dot

all i can think
is if you really want to go
then make your death beautiful,
don't leave a drug overdose
of fluids
like the last fourteen people
i saw in the slums
scattered and fried on that pavement

For Samantha

We got married at the Church of Elvis
when I was twenty.

I should have told you then
and maybe I did casually
that I had a really fun time,
but the truth is that that sounds like some common phrase
for having sex and doing meth
like anybody else there
was interested in anything else
but sex and drugs

all i remember
was that our thing was making out
and being cheap
and drinking Gin
while waiting for the Present either to end
or ensconce us in rose petals
the hue of that weird morning
where you sent me to the store sans ID
to buy a bottle of merlot
and I didn't get carded.

You probably thought that I was a beggar
instead of a robber,
but I don't watch cowboy movies for nothing.
As a teenager
I had always understood that somehow
a couple could take a towne (or a city)
but that couple could never be apart,
because friends are a part of the scam
especially when they break in
for parties that never happened
when all we wanted
was to stare at each other
and make out in the back seat

The Gifts

There were three gifts, made of metal with slide openings, with a little glass window.  Though they were more than decorative, ornate even, they had a heavy understanding attached somehow, like it permitted the ethos of the viewer to be warned.  Each of the three was exactly the same.

1910, Russia

A child finds one.  A twenty seven year old thief finds one.  A dark hair woman in her late teens finds the last one.

Each has a similar experience.  They find them difficult to open.  Each eventually presses a finger to the glass window somehow, and the window glows red.  They are all over come with emotion, but only the kind that can touch the very soul, the deep earth shattering awe that comes in partaking in something that will never be forgotten for a lifetime, or a century, which ever came first.  All three are overcome with the desire to think of a wish.  The child wishes for Luck, then divine poverty.  The twenty seven year old thief thinks of Power.  The woman in her late teens, in her shitty pre war Russian apartment, wishes for Seduction.

Rushes of voices through the child's frame.  An older girl in her late teens is speaking.  "You must give me what is in your gift," the voice says.  Then a booming males voice "No, I am stealing that one."  Then the woman:  "You can't until you undress me."  The child takes the box, leaves, and buries it in the woods.  He finds a gold coin.  It was a test of Luck.  Divine poverty didn't come True.

I figured
a briefer note
than a poem,
and after
wanted to live on a train
shuttling all over the country,
just sitting there in a seat
and staring at nothing
letting my head recover songs from past times
where I had this tenuous relationship
to thoughts of High Art.

The old drawings came out of me today
after I had to call the police to break up a fight
and they left saying
"Well, they must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed."
What wasn't so funny
was the amount of violence
and me left amid it
and new theft
and goddamn this.

I wanted I think
as a child
to live somewhere where it wasn't polluted
and to capture my dreams with the nib of a pen,
and to clarify
I should say the stuff that happens after dark
and not those stultifying wishes for such and such job
or such and such life.

There was this early dream
where I was escaping a train
coming down the tracks
and all these terrifying oil pumping machines
were walking in horrible turquoise,
and I feel the essence of escape
from that motif in my life
would make me saner,
like hey,
here is a pet bird on a leash that I can impress people with
instead of using money and compliments,

wouldn't that all be nicer
than asking to work at some IT firm
or needing a new car
or having thoughts of some mystery person
coming into your life
to try and love
what we don't even know ourselves?

Death In Cornelius

Through the open crook of the door
there were moths in the porch light
through my soul as it shifted in dark twilight
to breathe about all those babies
who got killed
in that womb,
the hairless and clean murderers.

I awoke to an explosion outside
the guns were drawing down airplanes from the sky
and all that I could smell
was that perfume
as if I were in some blind cowardice.

Last night
the television turned into a triangle
and one of the speakers blew
as they ran through the thoughts of war
with Putin's box
held up close to the laser system
of communications
translated through sound with mirrors
and then I knew
that the only things I could do that werent doomed
were to make messes
that smelled like some perfume
as wax and white and wine,
unlike my old friend Raoul
who tried to get through life by being clean and kind,
that dead and drunk old fool.

There is a man
speeding through the I Five
on meth
and inching closer like a killer
in need of a shave
as the radios blare
and allow him through
when the Doors pick up on the tunes
he feels nothing but other people's sense of doom,
for I was annointed once by his knife in my neck
and a visit from a brothel
that he patroned like the bar,
only I stayed out back while he slayed
what was left of human cognizance.

One day my health turned out the window
and produced a half poem,
I was laying in blood
as think as milk
that said to me
only go homeward
through those brambles and thickets
where others had annointed their guns there,
if it were heaven
then it made a Christian sense
out of death as waxen red as wine

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Creep, or A Movable Beast, or Portrait of the Young Creep As a Movable Beast

I sat in college, satisfied.  My medical execution had been removed, but there was still the financial one.  Who cared after the horrors of a research hospital coupled with experimentation and the general flagrant idiocy of people who couldn't handle their nursing jobs with anti anxiety drugs.

I lived with a lot of writers, and not necessarily as a mark of pride.  There was Chas, some rotund devil who was already always taking photographs of myself and for some odd reason, writing poems about me for poetry class.  I gathered that the rich white artists hadn't been exposed to punk rock, so I was either a novelty or a terror to them, but I certainly was not writing poems about their personal relationships for class.  This happened more than once.  Another guy's name was Jacob, who wrote a short story about killing me for doing the dishes.  I don't know what went wrong, but really in retrospect it was probably all "Nights of Secretly Using Drugs."  I did my schoolwork and drank.  When I got rowdy, I would throw bacon grease on the kitchen floor and kick over Christmas trees that didn't belong in the hallways of that horrible old three story, five bedroom ramshackle house that had bursting rusted plumbing and only one bathroom.

Lacer was a different story, but the same.  Spun out on speed, she would spin out volumes that just sounded like Kurt Vonnegut, but in an affectionate way.

Really, Bren was the worst.  She hired a meth head to cut the lawn once, let him stay in the shed, and we had to pay ninety dollars for him to cut our lawn with our own lawn mower?  There was also the day I got out of the hospital where she expected me to do all my backlogged housework.  After a hospital stay?  Damn.  Her art was childish and mostly about manatees, which seems dangerous in the offhand realization that you realize she didn't really give a fuck about anything but art and roommates.  It is arguably a dangerous system of chores that would force a person with neck surgery to mop the floors and do two weeks worth of dishes that were not theres that piled up when his neck was being sliced into to remove his jugular vein.  She dated Chaz, wouldn't pay the rent, and they are still together up there in the Northwest, taking pictures of coal and filth now instead of people.

Like he was on assignment, Chaz took naked pictures of Bren for an art exhibit. All it did was estrange people.

Lacer dated Matt, some con artist with a rich family that couldn't stay in the same school or smoke cigarettes without breaking them in half.  For one exhibition, he just bought a bunch of hamburgers from Wendy's and threw them on the gallery floor, charging a grand per mess.  What a real bloke.

Robbie was ok.  He contracted leukemia later, so I felt some inherent sympathy for him.  All he seemed to do was drink, which seemed fine by me.  He wrote a sad story once about being gay and drunk and having to hitch a ride to the funeral of an old lover, called "The Patron Saint of Merlot."  He was funny in a way.  Turned out he knew some of my Portland friends, so I voted on him moving in when Lacer ran away to the east mountains in a breaking van.  There was that whole mess.  I'm being funny.  The whole thing was really an entire and complete mess on top of being a waste of time.

Nobody seemed remotely interested in artistic theory, but they were into literary criticism.  It was like their theories were autistic, just pulled from the campus textbooks.  I've heard idiocy in my life, but I've never had to sit on a porch, bathed in cigarette smoke before with the feeling that I was wasting my time.

Washington, circa 2010

Living here
amid the morass
that is circumspect
to audacious inquiries,
one wonders
what happened to the olde oldeander,
if it had been on the table
next to the dishes drying on that rack
in our small apartment.

black forest nights
met with the racism of the day.
we made our funerals
just sitting there doing nothing
since we weren't cowboys yet
but just some people
who had been caught under the rug
while trying to do

i could have thrown
the knife rack
that awful one bought us,
like it was some perjorative problem
to have to slice potatoes
with a pocket knife
after she came
and bitched at us in a bar
for talking to the girls and boys,
like we were some male prostitute.

well she got really fat and dumb,
as for her parents
it is probably best
not to think about the time

The Titling of the Nights

Tomorrow, The Moon.

I had been analyzing cross weather patterns with thoughts of circumnavigating the International Date Line in a dirigible.  The theory was that one could persist in a flux of differentiating days, since it is never officially Friday or Saturday on the Dateline, it being a function of time zones and differing cultural feces regarding the establishment of Time for the function of labor.

I hadn't really been struggling with the aeronautics.  I took a few whiffs of Helium and began calling up major news outlets to tell them of my plan.  They thought I was High, I thought it was funny, considering altitude and stratosphere navigation in the SS One.

It was grey and sharply reminiscent of a woman's shoe.

Once you put the helium in it, man.

All I could say were a few words to some passing Frogs that happened to destroy my delicate jet engine system on accident.  I gather that it was a boon, even though the design of the dirigible had a self destructive intent.  I was to test pilot to see what would occur if somebody crashed on the International Dateline.  Theories of Emergency Response Systems were detailed, but there was this other theory that was proding me.  What if no one came, because they couldn't calibrate the calender correctly?

This worried me to no end.

I felt like I wanted a sundae (har har, punny) and so established that on the time arc of the curve, the best possible experiment would not be to crash (Frogs and Skinney Puppy aside, to sound completely asinine) but to delight in Ice Cream Sundaes for this whole venture.  It would happen on an idle Tuesday/Wednesday when all my financial affairs had been sealed.

Sailing the currents of wind sans engine, I discovered that the Anglo Saxon names of Days really were foreboding and bizarre, especially on Thursday/Friday, which rolled into Thursday Night/Friday Night, but often while sleep deprived I would become befuddled.  I forgot what Night was supposed to be like thunder.  Did it lead into the next series of days?  I was confused.  All I could do was smile when I came up with a solution.

The solution was dire.  Days had to be recorded like histories instead of flung into the future with repetitive names.  The same for Nights.  For instance, on my voyage, there was the Night of Tumultuous Purple Atmospheric Effects, which for all remarks, was visually stunning and remarkable in its revelation of asterisms that were held behind the oxygenated Night sky like a veil of jewels.  There was also this Incredible Night Of The Veil of Jewels, where I beheld with some candor and fresh fish from the sea (sans white wine) the remarkable motion of the cosmos as it escaped the light blue murder of rays from the Sun.

Days were more focused on occurances.  There was always Routine woven in.

I landed and my musings were dismissed.  I was put up in a hovel by Nasa and forced to solve gravitational arcs for some time until I begged for The Night of Mercy when I would be done with Days of Investigative Physics For The Purposes of A Federal Space Pogrom.  That, and I was a psychic, reading cards with a flip book and pen, designing new ways of testing the young.

I needed someone who could look back into the past better than I to qualify my testing methods, but I realized that there was quite something to those Qualified Days and Nights up in my dirigible, the SS One.

Someone said something Beautiful,

THIS WORLD IS NOT A FUCKING MARKET PLACE

but it was a cheap scrawling
in a hospital
where they put a scalpel into his dying hand

A Personal History Of Books

War and Peace
is something I was pressured to read
way back then
but instead I meandered through his ruminations on some long forgotten Afghan war
from the nineteenth century
and decided that Tolstoy was not that asinine (or very problably was)
so it made him a bore.

I wish I had wasted the fourteen dollars
at the bar,
which brings me to some distant memory
of seeing some short sleeved man
reading a hardcover book at The Matador
for everybody to see
regardless that he was in a bar
with no light.
I felt like throwing his book,
the apparition of the image
made me want to vomit in disgust,
as is often the case when I am in public
and without spirit,
just looking through pictures of faces
and their stupid get ups
that they buy for kicks, I guess
(I refuse to call them "hipsters"
whatever that means for us here
and the rest of the world).

I liked Vonnegut
when I was in high school
but I realized later
that all Holy Hell
and Beauty
was lacking from his work,
there was nothing but just Shit
and some misbegotten "Damned if You Do"
mentality about the whole affair
that made his work seem fascicious later
until I realized that he was writing for famous monsters
that would later prove that they couldn't read
when they were burning his books
twenty odd years after their publication.

Dostoyevsky
Fyodor
had some quacky hand
when he kept saying stuff
and I thought I loved it when I was nineteen
but I realize that he was a gambler
and just in the profession to get published
so he would cram garbage about anything anywhere he could,
like Rashkolnikov's bloody sock
that I had a dumb conversation about once.

Celine I think I liked
because he had compassion
even though he was completely nuts.

There are many more,
Krauss writing plainly but without heart about Love
and as someone is probably my witness,
she could have just been John Dillenger with a pseudonym.

For awhile there
it seemed like all American writing was about Family
only (and I don't want to be arrested by some Literary Felon/Cop)
but Sedaris seemed to sum it all up with his pinch faced
lack of awareness
about what supposedly makes people
quirky
and I realize in retrospect
how unintentionally sad and familiar his stories were,
especially the one about him doing meth and pretending to be some visual artist
which he crammed into Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Palahinuk or however you spell 'em
was some weird enigma
that ended up seeming worse than anal sex
because he wrote about some of the dumbest and grossest things
that have been committed to paper,
like that Fight Club where some Jackass Forgets that He is In Charge of A Fighting Club
or whatever happened
in the other one where the Jackass is Choking Himself In Restaurants For Money On A Premise Devoid of Reality and Meanwhile He Has All This Sex As A Homeless Prostitute.
But really what takes the cake were his other two,
something about Jackass Telling A Story On A Crashing Plane and Trying To Make It Raw for the Audience,
and then the other one about Jackass Forgetting That He Was Not A Woman and Will Not Have A Baby, or something just as seemingly Idiotic.
What I liked about him
was that he was gay,
so I didn't have to compare myself to him
when I was young and writing
not for an occupation
but merely to see all that language begin to pour out
through natural adult developmental stages
and how odd it is
to try to chart the psyche of an adolescent
who wrote forty page short stories.

Dreiser was another Bore,
he was up there with Cheever
and you had Mailer, Sartre, Bukowski, and Philip K Dick
using Meth
to get their work finished
but I guess Hunter S Thompson never overdosed
so there was that

Orwell seemed ominous
but now it is more transparant
that all he saved were political allegoires
as a weapon
to sound high fallutant.

Then there are all these Modern Authors
who write like Advertising Campaigns,
trying to through in something for That Sweet Housewife
along with Strange Over Educated Billy Who Read So Much That He Became Delusional.

Don't get me started on the science fiction,
but to tell you the truth here
maybe Ray Bradbury ended up being the only author I ever really liked.

observations

something about pennies in the pocket
make this world feel
a little colder,
but like I ever thought that the experience of modern life would be luminous
even as a child.

these days
i would prefer to talk in person
to anyone
but this has proven difficult if not impossible
because i am usually boiling over some thinly veiled lie
about my economic worth
while they are cavorting
in some store bought style
through the insanity of their actions
and i hate to be rude,
so there.

i already told someone that i was an outlaw
this is not true
based in the plain fact
that i am still living

if i really were
i'd have a lock literally on my heart

and i would leave it closed to insanity

like every other criminal i have met

and honestly
i can't take the illnesses of others very well
when some of them were their fault and stupidity,
like someone cutting down on their alcohol consumption
to become a hardcore drug user
before
telling people that they hate alcohol
because I'm sorry
that seems like half the idiots
that I know here in the mountains
and given that opportunity
I might begin to interrogate them
about what was so bad about a glass of wine
that they had to come to work with a bleeding nose
on top of general insanity
that isn't recognized
by other rapists of the human spirit.

one of these days
when i am somewhere
i will really write

and i mean that honestly
because it makes me want to tear up my internet papers
that and horribly.

there was some thing i dated in LA
i had to get tested for AIDS
it would only do things out in the world
for Adderall, heroin, and pot.
i still remember all the horrible aggrivation and crying
when the notification clicked
that this was not a human being at all
but more like a bleeding Dr. Seuss character
that I couldn't help
so I probably said something like :Scrambled Eggs Super!"
as a parting gesture
and to be frank
the older I get
the more I understand
just what a horrible disease it is,
all this addiction and drugs and hatred and coniving
on top of the foundations of human waste.

one of these days when i am warm
and not shivering from literal lack of heat
i will write something sweet,
and not to be perverse
but i have already
and that i love
but their abuse has to quit (the others who are not so dear)
because they are destroying a large part
of what I found beautiful.

when i walk down the street with ugly pennies
i get dour
when i see non beautiful people zonked
in their pricey cars
going home to prescriptions
and illegal gambits
honestly i am sick, and horribly
but when they cut open my neck in an operation
i refused all their fucking pain medicine
and found myself sudeenly thankful
for whatever that was
being that i don't do it for fun
with the side effect being a fucked up and aggitated personality
when you can't feel that false bliss of nothingness
acting from a white lozenge.

that and i'm lazy.
i quit going to the supermarkets for about two years
i just let other people bring me food if they want
and it is really just a laugh riot
all the microwavable burritos
and bacon packages pile up
and i found that i am impartial to being a pig
because who am i trying to impress anymore,
some girl
who steals money
just to zombify in front of a soap opera?

I'd rather date a flying monkey.

My last oberservation is that I am pissed as hell
for being lied to
about being able to have what others stole at the drop of a hat
and really what makes me sick about this America
is just that nobody respects its Founding Laws
because I have never seen the Bill of Rights
do anything for anybody
myself included

traces of Death Camp
held in nomenclature.

they shocked us with sticks
and you didn't take their ever loving fucking pills
so they consigned you to the Radiation Department

and after, all you gave me was a white feather

that said with love

"You are Beautiful, I Love You."

Like they'll ever understand period

All I wanted
was to be your housewife

mega delerious

i guess
that i was affected

by something so deep
that my bones rasped and rotted

thinking about the state of the world

and it might sound cliche

but there were times

where suicide
seemed pleasent

compared to thoughts of six year olds
stitching my sneakers and wardrobe
in Myanmar
just so they could be repaid
with the pain of living in a factory
where their work was timed to the tenth of a second.

and really
when no one will buy you food
that takes the non existant cake
because it only says
that people are too inhumane
to live with each other

the fat and the starving
the dead and the living,
something said to me
that the greatest injustices
were extracted on the dead,
those targets that fell into iron crosshairs
only to be blasted out of the flight of life
in terrible scenes of wreckage
that are so horrible
that they aren't shared in a sense.

i could tell you
about the rich
but it is talking only
about the disease of the human creature
that can never have enough
even when its tissue is strong enough to care.

math

twisting Time
through spherical objects
was never much of a bother
except when you were in an Algebra class
staring at a filthy government-run clock
that counted the numbers
you were supposed to idly be placing
in lieu of letters.

Geometry
taught nothing of shapes
but all of those triangles and circles
that nobody cared to look at through
a sextant lens of Beauty,
all those wasted scratchings
trying to determine
length width and heighth
for god knows.

Trigonometry
was about Lighthouses
and how tall they were
when used with functions
that had to be looked up anyway
like half of the answers could always be
in the textbooks themselves
but the real bother was
standing outside of class
while the teacher held a string
and we were supposed to gather its length
for the purpose
of gathering the length of a string
without being able to measure it
but by being to measure every other goddamned thing?

Math, math, no mention of Time
which seems like
a hideous addition
if you can imagine what
those government monstrosities
where and weren't doing
when you sat there stuffed into a desk
having to listen to them yammer on
about special books
that were licensed by the schoolboard
only to steal your entire fucking youth
with worthless shit
that now you fail to remember
unless you were an afficinado
of FOIL and not the graphing calculator
they made us buy for only one hundred dollars
that had games about selling drugs on it
and other such novelties.

bar scene

I can't figure out the bar scene.

I mean I can from the smell,
and just looking at overly sexual
middle aged men
as they hit on a someone
half their age,
but really what worries me
is when someone goes into one
and is all lit up on cocaine
and just starts firing half assed jokes
to whoever they meet
that aren't funny
but more indicative in a way
that there is something way incorrect
happening in that person's brain.

dream

i wore a white shroud
and was named "Lisa"
but in the dream it was a thing's name
made of stone skull
and black flaxen hair.

i should have been shot
but some war was brewing
where people were trying
to build neutral tools
to sell to both sides.

the leader of the foreign army
looked like a green cartoon faggot character
with too much upper body strength
and these metal wristbands

so my wife and I sent out letters
and moved West
maybe out of harms way

we found this house
filled with mango
that is actually there
on Monterey Blvd
in Hermosa Beach
that I remember as a child,
all those gorgeous sunsets
flooding the wide upstairs windows

strange absence

cream soda
in a dream
as a child

looking back at this starving world
no one has ever fed it
but with plastic junk
some packets of methamphetamines
and Chinese made implements.
Where are the flowers growing,
shipped in teak holds
of ever strong clippers
that they gave the kids
rides on
to pass out flowers
to those desert coasts
where stories
and hourglass sand
was traded
as people laughed
and smiled
and held each other,
even over the bottle.

cream white walls
on that luxury liner,
made with splits of black wood

but for the Fedex junk
and the houses of horror
and the people blowing their minds out
you wouldn't know
where we are.

i'm glad that i recall
that cream soda
that sold for fifty cents
in some store
that smelled weird

but I guess it was lacking flowers,
and as for its naval charts,
they didn't even have a navigational table
telling them where they were at
and where they should go
under the nightmare desert sunshine
that led some deft existentialist
to write about killing an Arab
(people liked it so much
that it was celebrated and fed to school children,
it was called The Stranger).

letters and flowers

the chance of a chyrsanthemum
unfolding
has the same chaotic probability
as something nuclear
but we mean here
the gyrations of the nucleus
and not the flash-bang of inhuman Death.

someone once told me
not to send out letters to strangers
because they would come back strange
if at all
so I argued
that it was a more succinct way
of watching the wind of the socius
blow through the small vents in my home

but really what i argued
is that people needed love somehow
that they couldn't get
and what could be less threatening
and more Romantic
than the old ways
of sending letters
between two ships on their passages
through the steel woven Miasma
of all that remains Unknown.

i got some back,
little flowers unfolding
in there known three part ways,
some lead to great and horrible
new adventures
while others remained limp
on my clothesline
after their authors had fallen into some sea
to sad to even write about here,
all those hearts and beautiful eyes closing shut
with a thump

i could tell you
listener
about when the letters themselves died

should I?

Idiotic Folgers Commercial

"I've been on a bender for nine and a half days
and all that prevents me from losing my office job
is ten cups of coffee in the morning,
it gets me out of my hovel
even after something happened at the bar
that I don't rightly recall,"

all this coffee
every day
is like running an oil change
through the engines of that body

"i'm sure that
when the time comes for a new liver
i can count on Foldgers
to be there in the hospital cafeteria
when I have to sign an organ contract."

its always on the shelf, you
so pick some up
when youre too hungover
to do laundry
or otherwise care
about the state of the world,
Folgers will remind you
how to lie to your world
about the amount of energy you have
and your inherent disposition

this is a war
i will not fight.
like Luke Skywalker
I will not fight family,
I will not
with blood rusted armor
carry the flag of my loved ones
into hopeless massacre.

The black part of his hand
speckled like a robins egg
with blue

someone told him
one time than twice,
all he did was refuse
until sparrows came out of his mouth
instead of pale words.

he pressed his blue speckled black hand
to an automated grocery machine one time
and it spat out a few quarters
for some odd reason
he had been paying for an apple
like in some dream
but tried to void the transaction
and then threw the apple in the trash,

all that parifin.

he had one yellow eye
and oddly it was natural to the Moon.

in love with a space cadet once
he tried to look at her navigational computer
and was told politely "No."

All he said with his sparrows
was like the end of a Kurt Vonnegut novel
after the Fates had split them apart.

But he knew
something solid
in the shape of a pearl
and kept it there not only in his heart.
All it did was ::buzz click::
in small motions around static electricity
but he figured there was the path of Io somewhere there,
too far to be even a pearl
when he looked at the night sky
and tried to find the destiny of love
in thoughts of old navigational lore
he hadnt been allowed to view
even with a golden eye.

cost

Truely
when something is priced at twenty five dollars
it should not cost forty,
for whatever reason
it cost forty
after being priced at twenty five.

I tried to give them thirty
and was told no.

Pasadena

I was sitting in the black leather
staring at the console
are rigged with ebony
and the owner says
"Why don't you..."

all I could think was
::here it comes::

so i spun off some story about sherrifs
that he turned into some Masonic conspiracy
which is ok
better than smoking drugs
in some ex-Marines Lexus
while you bum a ride from Pasadena to Torrance
on nothing but your weird old leather clothes
and some rude conversation
about being a poor writer
in Drugged Out Ville
where the police were making a mess
as is custom
where the mess was already there.

Robbery

"We got tracking on number five, active credit balance shows two hundred and thirteen cents, phone number is 555 5555."

This is what happens when you now go into the supermarket.  It is disgusting.  They ransack your wallet with RFID and wifi card readers before you reach the counter and probably your pin.

There are pictures in a google search of video tracking systems that look like some sort of fucked up football replay screen.  Customers are assigned tracking numbers and outlined in yellow, blue, green, red, and purple.  They scuttle under the cameras, their phone numbers out in the open, breaches of privacy underlined in secret and on purpose.

My understanding is that this is reverse shoplifting.  They swipe your numbers and information because you want to have a Mexican themed party for whatever occassion.

Cacophony

When did music become like the AIDS virus?

It's all susceptible, it feels like your head and ears are shutting down while sitting in a pool of urine.

Inexpressible.

I guess the drugs aren't that great or beneficial or whatever to musicians these days.

Yeah, guess what, I was a drug free punk rocker.  Not straight edge (which I suspect now is just slang for a razor they were doing lines with, I mean, how can you get that fast and angry?  Who knows, maybe they were only sixtenn, but I think Alec MacKaye and his famous brother were just closeted speed freaks who got so paranoid and mind numb that they told people they weren't using drugs).

Music.  Can anybody even remember what it is?

Storefront

Maybe I will open a shop.

It will sell broken parts of all types, my way of getting back at those people who offered me nothing but brokenness, knowing or unknowing.

I will play "Godspeed You Black Emperor" all day and sit in a metal chair behind the counter.  Nothing in the store will be broken except for the items for sale.  Bicycle with no chain, a pair of hedge clippers rusted shut, some halved golf clubs, one shoe for the left foot.  At night I would be a shut-up and drink coffee.

I wish people would just shut up.  I can't even hear anymore.  "I own a hunting rifle..." etc.

They are sad, even in their happiness, like birds who forgot that the sky was never infinite, but a system of pulls and tugs on the frame of bone that casts small silouhettes.

In other thoughts, people and their stupid bullshit can go to hell.  I am listening to recorded audio that portrays the sadness of humanity.  I don't want to hear another poem.  People seriously need to adjust their states of mind and start cleaning.  In the meantime, here's half a coffee pot.

Lod

Well the world made another circumnavigation of the sun throuh orbit, and people watched a lit up ball drop to mark the occassion.  Isn't that wild?

Foreign dispatches alert me to the weariness of life.  Sending out messages in a split second that run through internal spying apparati, only to bounce back.  All for the purpose of having seen somebody say "hello" and share some lame platitudes.

I got a cup of coffee because something was missing.  My head space is all elaborate cupboards and desk drawers.  I am rummaging.

There was this city known as Lod.  It was heartbreakingly beautiful, on some imaginary map of what looks like central Poland.  The churches and religious buildings were raised in dedication not to the owner of the universe but to worship Beauty and its Forms through education and awareness.  The irony of Lod was that foreign travelers introduced Slavery, which was thought by some of the citizens to be Beautiful.  A married couple lost their minds because of this, and moved out to the frontier to become outlaws, since no place was more ugly than the frontier.  With Diamonds in their Minds they remained Beautiful, without Slavery, but only Love.

Some other scraps there.  Something about slave traders passing by with slaughtered cattle, the quest for a house (without the desire to build one), drunk dreams of famous turned infamous Lod and all the Slaves who had their Vision and Dreams scattered as the Churches stood and weathered the undercurrents of disgusting Principles.