The Dissolution

The distance between two people, measured in geographies and histories of battle.  Old treatise locked into the confusion of argument, the sane babbling in just as much nonsense to the insanity of understanding.

Locked in a rose, federal papers with coffee stains, old files and the 1970's image of a cop at a used city desk as the old "landline" rings with annoying bells.  

Something sordid about that old college girlfriend.  Dirty bruised knee, clean clothes, face with that unclear complexion indicative of drug and alcohol usage.  Was it even necessary?  Those days and nights on blue mattresses as the sun would enter with that beat up alarm clock playing the Shins in those drunk dream days, nights passing over and under us, stars and atmospheric disturbances, disturbing talk at quiet parties in those days.  Siamese cats, sickness, open windows, dead birds, and a drunk guitar player.  The television only added to that confusion.

There were fields of tall grass that itched in the summer heat.  We had a keg outside in a dirt pit filled with ice, someone earlier had thrown wine in my face.  These memories are better kept to myself.

June

Through the converted bedroom window, I could see. 
It began as an insult.
There were bicycles being taken from up the block, "men" with big haunches and tanned leather faces began walking them down the slope for the purpose of theft.  Like you could sell your father a bicycle in this market.

Hot weather, stricken with radioactivity.  Descended through blankets of black purple smoke earlier that smothered every diseased living thing down the hill, sort of like wandering through some type of space age mustard gas, coughing, breathing it in, making it communicate.  It looked like space, dense and set against white noise coming down from the atmosphere. 

Later in LA two dock workers discussed stabbing me.  I sat at the restaurant table, eating a hamburger with ortega chiles, and I wondered really.  Were they just nuts there over at the other table, having been listening to all this murder while bring up their children?  Or were they horrible, out to protect gang rights and territories, counterfeit forms of imagined ownership raped over in sickened minds unattuned to the impoverished environment, knowing only a lifetime of drugs, sex, and violence (as it turns out maybe the former two are just forms of violence).  I paid while two other screaming lunatics walked out.  Then I wandered, looking at the old fisherman and sailor's plaques on the dirty and dilapidated waterfront in front of a pink Maritime museum.  These people had been honored, but that night I got hurricane drunk and forgot if they had been fisherman, sailors, or dock workers.  I guess I don't know now, except that those people were forgotten and unknown, unnamed but for on some disgusting decaying plaque set in black tiles on a concave walkway where the streets were closed by traffic laws.  Why even set names like that? 

Later on the freeway ride home (I had an appointment) I felt a series of seizures while trying to sleep despite having done nothing but drink coffee and feel in an offhand sort of manner that I was quite tired of driving in clean automobiles as the filthy air recycled in some grotesque manner through the vents in the dashboard, sucked in with everything under the hood.  It was like driving through a chemical factory, smells, scents, highs, lows, feelings you couldn't trust and feelings that you loved.  What was unnerving were the other drivers in their lonesome crowded cars, hiking out of their houses towards work or off to vacation. 

Getting back home, the signs said that outdoor watering would not be permitted.  I thought of the garden, sighing in the heat and exhaust and smell of gas (even though this was in the woods).  When I got to the garage I felt like garbage, couldn't smell, and wanted to see if there was anything left at all in this world but machines.

matchstick breath
in jeans and cheap clothing

came running through the night
in flame of moon
with the diseased

old friends with the macabre
machine that sewed daylight
into the backs of black cat's heads

they placed him in New York
they placed him underwater
they placed him in a job
with a green apron and a greener smile
they placed a golfball on his sternum
and hit it into Central Park
but it went through someone's filthy livingroom.

what his purpose was
is to illustrate
what his purpose was
turned purple with his diabetic feet

drug addict
fireman
dead beat father
maggot shit given equal rights

i could have screamed.

Radiation Sick

There's a nuclear plant down the hill
everything is over.

a) radiation exposure causes chromosome deletion, addition, asymmetry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders

b) cancer is caused by radioactivity

c) it causes things to get old quickly

d) half lifes from nuclear disasters last 10,000 to millions of years

e)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents

forsaken cataleptic quid

I'm nervous
there is too much silverware
in the drafting room
and the attic is stuffed with old canvases
painted by some madwoman
who I met in Los Angeles
that has since turned to drugs
to escape that miserable flight
into sober matters
that cannot be controlled
nor conveyed
but with sobbing

My liver got the worst of it
after three months of harsh winter
trying to forget those places
where they stuff people into boarding halls
and expect them to smile
for the sake of manufactured consent forms
swirled in at those moments of crises
when the madness of folks
intervenes in the life of an individual

I got a fifth of vodka here somewhere
and I'm wondering now if this is that water
I was promised in that prison
where the birds would come around
in fey slips of spent fabric
during those long waiting visiting hours

But unlike water
it moves
through an ocean of silver
where we relapse into nonsense
and hugging the gutters
for fear of someone's child
beginning another nuclear war
spread out across the Pacific
but congealed in press releases.

I could fill in the doubt
but I have vapor songs to drink
from the tortured sky's morrow
in the sorrow of those vagrants
that passed like Poe
through out the oblivion of cobbled street corners
after their wives and daughters had been sold
to some counter-estate at odds
with a slash of humanity
they once knew as children.

No I won't change my eyes

drunk in public

Left by with the lore of yellowed books,
dwindling pennies into cardboard soaked with vomit
a passing police officer noticed nothing but my words
in the dark glen
off the side of gravel
where we left our last shovel
that we took from those grave robbers
that had smashed our car windshield
in the vine traced cemetery.

Elementary school where we used our lips
when the fey noon aides
were wet with rage and drugged,
caustic lessons in subtraction
salved by the slit of paper cuts
from heavy tomes
that proclaimed an easy arithmatic
unattached to the body.

Where we raised our flags
in the noontime sun
across those baseball fields
was where we showed our IDs
after the work of teacher's pens
scrawling blood red notations
in the margins
of vocabulary.

Could have spoken
in eloquent lore
about the history of sherrifs
but we'll leave that one up
to the court.

good fortune

Through the landslides
of old buildings
marred with Mexican stucco
exposing peach overtures
us with our hangovers
and small notions
about the desert
with our Pina Colada beam
talked through spirals
I saw the old books
for what they were worth

Supper's sunset
is all we talked about
those genetic helixes
all crumbled over our salad

History left us
in the shape of some earthly paradise
as the future knitted poisons
into the veldt of time travel
and astrophysicists
forgot their car keys
when describing the shape of the Earth.