expansion

Warm saturation of dark colors.  Moody, the broadcasts are ersatz information, rummaging through files and video clips for some definitive optimism.  The graphics on the cheap cans of coffee are changing again.  I don't know, for instance, what BGI is.  It sounds like a trash company or a low rent designer drug.

Here in the woods.  I'd let a robin's egg rest on my palm.  There are jays, robins, sparrows, ravens.  Squirrels, chipmunks, the occasional coyote.  It is the plan of outdoor house cats to fight each other for territory in the dusty climate of a desert forest.  The deciduous trees are on the decline, and there is a young apple tree and avocado sapling out back.  In the front there is dust mixed with pavement, dead seeds and stale bread picked up by birds.

The people seem muddled.  That is mostly all.  There are some really sad stories that I know personally, but thankfully those people seem half conscious and checked out, no terrible spear of fate plying at their nervous systems and emotions.  I'd intervene but it's trouble, like taking on a sea anchor as a possession while diving.  That's enough about the people, mostly.  Some of them seem tough and wiry in fall and winter clothing, faces like parts of landscapes, telling of the weather of humanity.

Waiting for the snow to fall in the midst of a drought where the el Nino pattern off the coast became obliterated.  Well, they are looking for signs of its return.  I wonder how long that ocean current pattern existed.  My guess is probably not just for ten years.  There are memories there, of gigantic waves in fall that would break over harbor breakwaters, that would reach higher than the LA piers, days when you could go down to the lunar scene of the beach under black clouds and watch it storm from the emergency berms.  Sometimes the waters would flood the beach mansions, the sight of sandbags amid the torrential fall rains.  Those seem consigned to a distant memory, the weird glowing dust of middle childhood, where beach toys were abandoned for surfboards and new friends who seemed to have better senses of humor amid pre algebra lessons and changes in diets.  The only thing that seems similar now is that I am still voluntarily allowed to drink soda when I want it.

I don't know.  Rummaging for old files of happiness is a lot like being a washed out librarian.  You look to the past for solace, sometimes in things the shape of a necklace cameo or the way the sun could burn your arm when it rested on the inside of a grey passenger door in some used car that you happened to be in.  Too much yawning desert, freeways intersecting dirt house lots irrigated by water from the eastern rivers.  The torsion of water rights in a desert landscape.  Need I get into it?  Probably not.

Nightfall and bank thermometers broadcasting the temperature.  Fifty six degrees seemed colder than forty three for some reason.  Walked into town with two men.  I left.  What was I doing, trying to be tough?  I had no money and they wanted to go to the bar.  All that I learned about bars is to stay away from them in the dead of nighttime unless you are in a group.  Well I left.  Not much of a lesson there, the two men parted from each other anyway, there was talk of polygamist sexual politics which didn't sound appealing in spirit, practice or design.  A lot of broken pavement from last years frost, laid bare in the turning from summer to autumn, shredded newspapers with hints of crime reports, community news, and a sort of aura of positive thinking and attitude that seems like it is on the verge of failing.  The lakes still there, water levels are low.  You could see the recession even in nighttime, walking on the cracked pavement, while the universe burgeoned above in a dark sky without clouds or moon.

There were echoes of stories up in the stars in the sky.  The ones that fell from horoscopes, the old legends muddled with modernity, constellations in derelict geometries reminiscent of partially completed spider's webs.  Stories on the fringes too, the ones that filled bookstores, science fiction feats of landings and politics and war and outposts set up on Pluto for the sake of cargo.  It seemed upon contemplation of a stranger mental landscape that maybe man would not make it to the stars.  The point rested in the fact that in between the stars and man was ultimately man.  But that is another trajectory entirely.  Ellipses, charts, and graphs and mathematics overlying star matter and space, but for billions of years they got along just fine without the notations, without the hooking orbits of launched satellites, without the telescope's half orb imploring of celestial beauty like a fish eye, wonderous and slightly terrified of what we cannot subsist in without costume swaddling and spaceship walls, while even then we are lost like fallen earrings on some massive beach.

Too much, too little, equations balancing invisibly across the board.  The mathematics of the human race and the planet, subjective when observed, terrifying when put into fact or fiction, majestic when left palpable and barely known, like a pack of undiscovered black wolves, rushing around, following something mystic like the flight of ravens in a metaphorical desert sky, rushing despite of us, flowing, existing as a curve at the limits of understanding.  Some sky, some moon, some stars.  Really though, in retrospect, perhaps these quickly drawn notes here were and are about the fate of the Earth, nudging and subtle, avoiding didacticism and categorization into intellectual perimeters.  I don't know.  Slate, stone, obsidian.  Chalk outlines drawn with pieces of coral.  Old dead satellites cast out of the solar system, a few into the sun.  An old man's careful drawings wrecked.  The poorest flute solo you ever heard.  Random images, junctures, united by threads of association, not working or working.  Our finest.  Our worst.  You.  I.  Them.  Us.  We.

Electronic Postage From the Outpost At the End of the World.

Latest real-time notes.  We are out of money, beer and wine but there is some cheese left and some dubious Church food bank food that as it generally goes, is rife with manufacturing defects on the packaging.  In terms of food, I wonder what this portends, especially if they are failed GMO commodities which I suspect is the case.  I offered to volunteer there once for free in exchange for the free food, and they didn't want me.  They said I had to be a part of their church.  Well, like the Maid Marion says in Robin Hood featuring Russel Crowe, I prefer my churches to be quiet.  I do.  It is better to sit on old wooden pews in silence to face both the grim and the awesome instead of listening to some corrupt preacher run his mouth so that his parishoners will be charitable.

This is, unlike my poetry, real stuff.  I think I am sick of writing poems.  From now on I will just keep an observational journal on my blog, patched in with science fiction stories and the odd poetic verse from time to time.  If you read this, hey, expect some sort of change.  No more wallowing in darkened poetic hallways.  More minor news bulletins, happenings around the town with the slant of one reporter instead of the slant of a news corporation.

Today I was quite sick of life until I stumbled across an old friend's blog.  There was something spiritual there that I don't want to investigate because I am sick of examinations, but I was thankful for it.  Somebody cares about something.  That at this point is favorable news to me.

War is breaking out all over the world again, all those hideous doomsday weapons concealed.  I wonder if people think of those.  I would speak my peace but I still have fear, if only because I have a sensible body and slightly askew mind that even then is sensitive to slander and people's ugly words.

I walk around town sometimes when I am bored with writing and I can't get up the money through a complicated interpersonal loan system for a beer.  If the beer is there I can usually chat and smile and pretend, and well the other night I danced to the Rolling Stones on Youtube and then to Brody Dalle.  As far as I am concerned in my private thoughts, Brody Dalle probably deserves to be royalty in heaven.  I saw her perform when she was in the Distillers years back when I was just coming bravely out of high school, at a club in Orange County called the Glasshouse.  There were a lot of pretenders there.  Young kids interested only in drugs who dressed up in punk rock gear since it was a fad.  Some of my punk mentality made it from that time to today, so yes, I am thankful for Brody Dalle and her recent musical releases.  Not just something to listen to for me, but with a dirty history of being a scene that sold out for flash in the pan glamour at the time.  Not her.  I wish some of those punk acts had more promenance, especially the ones from the late seventies.  Admittedly, some of them were dumb.  I never thought for instance that Black Flag sported much of a message, but I was supposed to like them because they were from my home town and I was into punk as a non for profit activist and writer.  So much for those dreams.

I am trying to reconcile fear.  It comes with depression, and it's not a mental issue, its really based in serious and fleeting observations I've had through the course of my rather brief life.  It seems that people in a small town could be nicer, especially to the ones they run into on a daily basis.  I'm beginning to see things more clearly though.  Spots of beauty are nice, even old rainwater on sideview car mirrors reflecting the sun as white film.  Fear won't settle the issue though.  A lot of this has to do with humanity and where we've come to as a species.  Unfortunately I am left with the conclusion that as a species humanity is either a failure, or secretly arrived from off planet to meet with conditions it couldn't grapple with biologically or mentally, hence the explanation of it being a war-like species.  These are mundane and slightly grim charts.  I wonder who else besides me can bother to care.

Like I said we are out of wine.  A bottle would be nice, all that warmth in the mountain air while a strange hurricane devastates Mexico from the Pacific seaboard.  It's hard to be funny anymore with the Ukraine situation, ISIS, Africa, and other unsettled problems.  August was the hottest month in the history of ever, its official.  No wonder I spent so much time like a sick dog on the deck of a sailboat as the heat sweltered in nauseating flue recently.  But otherwise.

I want to rekindle respect, and trenchant forgiveness.  As adults, most of us as lived and seen things we wish we hadn't.  The enormity of grappling with this while there is a generation trying to rise beneath us is a bit unsettling.  How can we even speak to children of terror?  But do we expect them to carry on through this as we did, groping blindly?  I don't know, maybe yours is a different story.

But if you are good and kind and brave, then welcome, maybe you cared about beauty and love as I did and still do, on the outs with society and cowardly labeled a menace here and there for doing little but singing.  There were a lot of fights in the past.  For those I am sorry.  I don't know anymore who's fault all the world's fighting and struggling is but it has to stop for the greater good.  We really need to remove a lot of awful inventions from this planet before we are going to get anywhere on the peace and justice front, which is all I meekly have to say right now.

I used to write short excerpts.  I understood that people don't have the time.  Sometimes we do.  In that case, cheers, nothing needs to be written down except for extended messages of hope.  I am wary about classifying the times.  Things swing up and around, not at all, or down into hell.  Hopefully one day we can sort this all out.

prose poem notation

it's too late
the edge of the doomsday clock
has edged non-comically past midnight
but the truth persists
in black extra dimensional horror of fear
that our weapons came from the ages of anxiety and intemperance with each other
so i instead am trying furiously like a Frenchman
to write down some of the good things that enveloped us
like love,
that was pretty good for awhile
yeah, you too
and lack of fear
with all those star-like lights
jazz on hot Tuesday afternoons
being alone sometimes
being together sometimes
doing and observing things
without being a gross pedant
but god
how i loved to make fun of the snobbish technorati
with their plate glass touch screens and ventures into failed artificial intelligence
amid contraptions that hadn't been reasoned with logically or philosophically
like a waterproof smart watch that is capable of calling your whole family
while you are in the shower
but go slower please, reader and listener
in case we are at an end or the end
what did you like here?
her, desserts, wine?
too many variants of some particular sense of humor
that wormed its way infectiously into your mind
until it became an old saw,
those fat faced friends who you could shake hands with,
board games?
sticks, bones of yew, antique work benches, the color blue over the Mediterranean?

none of us should leave for death or ends
at least not until we've decidedly sorted
the good things from the bad things
until we can place designations on people too
for their affinities to the afformentioned assortments.
for instance, it seems like a good if not overly stuffy thing
to have a shelf on a bookcase filled with Russian poetry
but bad to be nebulous about certain fascist British poets
some of whom remained famous after writing propaganda for the WWII Axis,
meaning Ezra Pound
and his dark friend Eliot who supported his early ventures
but whatever right now
because those are not common bad things.
do the sour things of this world make the good things harder to name?
do race riots detract from the visage of the constellation Virgo
or does Virgo herself as a figure of justice in the night sky
compel the abatement of ugliness in racial struggles
to the point of bravery and equality winning?
there are questions like these unfortunately
that are tougher than calculus
so I let the dull chemistry of tap water from the sink
run into a tarnished stainless steel pot filled with the last rice I possess
while I try to admire the concept of objects shining
if you get what I mean,
and if not,
that is fine too.

where are the great libraries
filled with value notations in circumspect
on the moral horror of a spear used on men
or even questioning just why something so primitive as the spear should exist
because men are often driven by objects as masters
etc etc
to the point of being some sort of particular weirdo
and is it valuable
to be a particular weirdo
or not
especially in the instances of dangerous spears
and the prospects of horrible future battles?
maybe we need a cautious library
that would survive the end of notation.

i don't know
what i have written here
is not that good
so throw it out
unless you like it please
the rice is done
music still hangs in the air
a kiss for the moon
and a smile for tomorrow's sun
as we prove the clocks wrong time and time again.

urgency

some of these pages have been lost
not by memory but by flame of incinerator
tended by men in white smocks
ripping things to pieces
in a frenzy of psuedo science
masking very real hatred.

i could draw a rose stem with realism and ink
but i am wondering about these dejected wolves
who lack the beauty of archaic mystique
and even the black night at their bristling shoulders.

it came with a tremor,
we thought you were clever
but there's not much time
when you get down to it
man is not really an animal
but an approximation of something worse
and i wish we could just sit
and break out the spirographs or something slightly neat
but to tell you the truth
there are still automatic weapons
that sound louder than old fax machines
and the romantic stories disappeared with all those packages of cash
meaning, great.

now i'm left here with ashes in some clear glass
and am wondering about the Church of Hell
amid scarred trees and filthy roads
while i practice my aim with poems into the wastebasket
trying to drum up something calming
or at least familiar
while the sunset turns to trash on the horizon
and all those people in Los Angeles, meaning very plainly "Fuck."

love

i barely remember
in the hall of heartless bliss
where we lost our machinery
and just wondered about life's light knocking
as something between us
beat the same in our separate breasts.

we used to know the oriole
as he'd make small leaps amid the branches
that our eyes shared in glances made askance
from the robin on the roof
and the sighs coming from the radio
while we fought off the weight of our individual debasements
just to speak the words of love amid a glowing night
hidden from a hideous star
that only showed old scars
when the dark crested our shapes
into who we were supposed to be,
hidden but alive and brave there in our blindness
while the moon wrestled for prominence from the stars
and you told me only
"shhh."

i'd never decide,
no, not ever
knowing you had lips more beautiful
than daytime mountains and the entire stupid geography of the Earth
that must have been there only
for you to shine in nightfall, as we slid amid the dress of the dark
moving with curves through out the black sand of the end.

and i'd say only
we made it, we made it
listening to stupid punk rock
or dancing in a tiled kitchen
which had just been swept
and you there, laughing
I really wonder now but in fact I don't
where magic comes from
since I halfway decided that it must have been your laugh
that sparked that concept into existence
but not set against the days that seemed humurously cursed by happiness
as if you and I were King and Queen of absolutely nothing
but that moment cradled there by the negative space
our forms made as we moved facing each other for the rose, for the love letter, for the quick taste of chocolates
while the neighbors made furtive glances and we just howled with laughter
crying at the idiots, telling them
only keep for yourselves what you don't want
since the rest belongs to joy

dark requiem

a long way ago

through the distant moors that diminish moonbeams

down to the murk of ageless water,

sitting there like a written raven feather

lays the darkness of embers

through which we must learn to breathe

in a struggle without lore.

i remember the catcalls, the cries for dear mother

and the black swath called loneliness

that intensifies to a dark envelope

around the licentiousness of people.

i could have told you a few stories maybe

about the Weird West

what he had on for news the day his father was murdered

or how he figured his lady

had been some prize like a white orchid meant to adorn the cosmos

with her beauty,

some brambles of imagination in his head

before the hammers of work beat them to flattened pulp

and his lady went with another mouth

instead of his lips that held wine,

something else there too but darker

about the inherent lack of virtue

wrapped up and discarded too even

by the pigs of the Earth

who had strangled the concept of home.

used to know other stories that died.

how is that?  were they beautiful?  the sadness is they all were

but we don't speak of such things

when there are fake flowers on the dinner table

or when the jackasses come over with rape in their eyes

and we are polite

because something false inside of us 

tells us that these are or were friends.

too many overcast skies in the past

though these seem heavy with the death of heart

we carry our bones in our arms through silence

and let these travesties past

as though they were smaller workings

of some insipid needle

or like a stain of tea on a white shirt

were meant to be discussed with others as trifles

instead of a fulminating harrowing burgeon

of black clouds ahead and past,

all the tragedy of passing amid strangers

with nothing but a frail wrist to shield our tired faces

as they do it again and again,

those backroom butcheries 

set amid the consistent fall of man.

i used to know failure amid terror

but all i had to do was hold out my arms for no one

because then it seemed important

to keep putting on the actor's faces and manners

when their were people out there

really killing each other

before they came home to their children

to offer them the lessons of murder.

spent a few coins on some cigars

and how they burn like some objective external pain

that as a snagged fishing line got caught in the universal plan

before taking us overboard

and then some of the good ones too

who were brave enough to not be morally ambiguous or cute

but lacked the sense of not being too good

while black star me sided with beauty only

and left love here and there for the starving stray dogs,

the ones that look at you with pleading eyes

so that you have to remove yourself from the alley

to remind yourself that they're still human.

if i could wind a ribbon

around all of this i would

and say merely that was this

and it was their ways

and maybe falsely

that we were really charmed

but the terror of age

is the realization that things aren't funny

because of this backdrop of suffering

that is voided out too

by the most inherent ignorance

known by almost any name

whether it is "television" or "family values"

and me

I would take a hopeless black ember

even if it were fuming

and try to wonder in frail spirit

what night creature created hatred and gore and murder and rape

wondering really how people can believe in the judgments of a benevolent God

when the belligerence of Earth is often testament to something worse than a Satan,

but you, whoever you are

you know me only as Stan the writer

not the kid who almost gotten stabbed on a 4th of July that happened in the dead of winter

or how they all wanted to be my wife until they found out I was mad instead of cursed

but that is a different story entirely

I would would rather stick with beauty

and forget the names and faces until a white river appears again

where we can smile weakly and pass out flowers to the poor ones who got hurt again and too much even then,

even then.

the night, she is black

and our charcoal masks contrast with our pure tears

in these moors that beckoned with ebony silhouettes

until we learn one day

that somebody at least thought we were so good and kind

that they felt our words were made up. 

a star has fallen
and the people
have come out into the street
to watch her die
in slow languor of flame's deep crackling fizzle

that crackles quicker than the questions
of if she fell from love
or from fear
as all that effervescing neon
that she kept inside
burnt one last time
to ask the small but large question
if anybody would help
or if they would say

come look, a star has fallen
in the street
and we have come out
to watch her die
as the last bit of her life
snaps out like a sharp ending breath

look, look,
a star has fallen.

city of nowhere (edit)

in dark shifting ink
crosshatched by lucent white
are the artifacts of lost cupboards
where wooden apple and scissor bandage congregate
in the musty corners
of an unknown unrelated to the coroner. 

thatched and tiled roofs, sepia and maroon
cross sectioned
and geometrically torn
are the only artifacts of wisdom
in the wide map
that resembles spilled paint
stretching over that parchment canvas
leading us to knocks in a corridor
and the curiosity of a glowing pear
kept under an old lampshade
with shoes arrayed in some dark splattered hallway
that suspends itself above a whitened orb.

gather that people's projects have fallen under here
and instead of unraveling
became consumed by a deep murk that dulls auras of objects and intention
like a fool's last wish disappearing into a stadium of echoes
and but for the odd splash of marble
you would think this place dead in light,
all the lipid flow obscured in smoke like behavior
begging at us
to both forget and remember edges
as the cause of old sarcophagi
work through purple lanterns
which floated in on thick lengths of chain. 

love here begins as the swath of a stain
caustically taken to old terse cloth,
the blouse of an 18th century maid
or the lapel of some dead lieutenant
carried over from the back of a wind up stationmaster's watch.
only a scrap
instead of a parcel or an exchange of fulminating light.

there we have it,
finally,
too dim to see in
the cats call the streetlights dead
and cobblestones etch bad design in detail around the arches of a crimson tower,
there, that is the capital
all the nonsense from nowhere conglomerating into a sea of swamp
beneath the last outpost of order
the sameness of nothing
moving on and below and even above
reminding us somehow
that we had that verve were our skeletons lay empty
like cathedrals to the dismal Gothic statement
that life may support only an iconic cruelty for the sake of pursuing Death,
and my
how we long then for a cupboard
or a postage stamp
to set our frames back and away from dark rasps of half-visible ravens
and old boots becoming undone
there
on a dull black stage
and we could say finally
that life lost its shine and vigor
when we discovered this place of moths
eating into space like hot ashes sown over linen
while the directions of the compass melt and give way
to instead the simple symbol of old dead wine without a year,
those days
those years
this nowhere city bereft of love or fear
as stark as a dead pier languishing over the rot of a night sea

and then when you return, you see past the veneer of experience and its baubles
nothing left there but ghostly blackened tatters winding through the old wind without geometry
our old eviction notices crumpled yellow
and left in a shoe box
as the final souvenier
for useless struggles, transient demands, and pale extractions
that take with them the beauty of the blood coursing through our hands
and deeply weaken the architecture of faces
into hollow odds and ends
where we had seen the cartography tattered black.