Why do I care for you so much?
How bout You made me laugh like a maniac and cry like a bum.
You looked into this tinfoil chest.
I was cooking old vegetables.
I am being ripped by these looped sentences.
How could you sleep with someone you hated?
You are dating a fella whose head spins in a zillion directions.
Maybe I want to lock fingers and shut up.
I wanted into your skull to undo some sentences.
How can I measure up to the rich older fellas,
The hip art sensibilities,
when a bit of flatulation in January made me laugh through all 1998?
I goof off. I am poor. I live on a little ship.
My job isn’t stable.
I have no mystery or rebellious grit.
I like dumb magic tricks, skateboards and being tackled.
When you told me about losing your virginity
do you know I wanted to be there
to shake you and say Wait dammit
wait for me.
I think of how I’d feel without you
and I am ripped into freeway trash.
I fell for you twice.
You’re a big fat fuckin’ wow,
so where do I belong?
You used to kiss me mean and good.
You don’t anymore.
I don’t know what you know about me.
I don’t know what you wanna know.
I am the kinda guy who will call too much,
make mistakes on the suave scale,
say the wrong things to your friends,
play American music,
kiss you like hell.
I wanna fix what the other upstanding Christian boys wrecked.
I wanna punch out all the smart, clever
and coy billboards you dated before
and stalk all the boys with secret crushes
and places their hearts on Pungee stakes and say Suck it
she’s mine.
One survivor.
I needed to flush it all out on paper.
Karate chop!
This isn’t an encoded message.
This is me being as honest as I can.
You may have learned nothing from these ramblings
and Jesus… wait
I don’t even know if I’ll ever
show this to you.
VENTOM
I love women. Just not this one.
CONQUERED VENTOM
When a writer is wronged
in comes sweet, sweet shiv-in-the-spine revenge
in a public fashion.
You said Run like the wheelchair is calling.
Kiss hangmen cause nooses can’t hold you.
Love like a leprous woman.
All of it—piss in the mouth of a Bedouin begging for water
And let’s talk about our so-called sex,
the sex…Ha!
The sex…was …was… beautiful and meaningful…but the lies!
Your vagina is a white lie.
Your vagina is Virginia spelled wrong and packed with just as much boredom.
Your vagina is a body bag for fraternity dropouts and once-hopeful fetuses.
Tear me from your lizzie borden modeling agency.
Tear me from that pink community axe wound forever.
How could you not tell me that they used to bottle your mother’s saliva
and used it to taint the punch at Jonestown?
How could you not tell me her maiden name was… Beelzebub.
Your heart-colder than a necrophiliac’s first entry
Your pop astrology has already made your decisions for you
Your sun is in drama
Your moon is in bullshit and an American planting his flag in you.
I could use a bear rug
with your head in its mouth
to remind me that someone else
is tasting you right now.
This is my confession
This is how I repent
This is how I pretend to be OK
in a public fashion.
The polar bear misses his eyes
but most of all—misses his insides.
Oh gosh kitty,
how long must I wait covered in lemons,
crippled in this chalk outline
unable to trust—
sour milk at every table?
I am worn like the steps to a children’s mortuary.
When the poetry vending machine breaks—
all that comes is—I am so worn.
When you said you loved me so hard,
you’d kill for me,
I didn’t know
it would hit
so close
to home.
THE WRINKLES UNDER LIPSTICK
Most old people don’t talk to each other when they eat. What day in a relationship does that become O.K.? I’d rather drive off a cliff naked on a motorcycle than live a dead love life. No love is better than lethargic love.
There is a man
sitting across from his wife
in a senior citizens’ buffet joint.
He loved fixing broken things.
She loved the garden.
He likes cornbread.
She always been partial to muffins
and neither ever knew.
His cameras zoom in on her lips
lipstick on coffee mug
on napkin
on partial muffin
on everything but her lips.
Remembering his lips painted with hers long ago
Remembering how they’d laugh when he was wearing more lipstick than she.
She only kisses the grandkids now and his mind carousels around
“…she used to…”
Creamed corn-bi-focals
Prunes-pill box
Mocha mix-lipstick
Cornbread.
He swallows and leans forward slow.
He waits until the wrinkles are ready to speak.
“When are we gonna die?”
Plates full of mistakes smeared in front of them.
She is staring at a young man to her right. “Whaddya mean we?”
The old man stands and steps outside.
He stares at nothing on the asphalt
waiting for something to happen.
A SHORT SONG
A SHORT SONG
This was a very hard day.
Lo-fi ultra sound photo sat on your lap
like a war letter to a mother
delivered by men in uniforms.
An infinite grief
wrapping your shoulders in a black mink
and dark ink.
The nauseousness left covert,
snuck from the theater of your gut, whisperless
and your new feeling of healthiness meant terrible news.
Like a lover with fists you will miss,
if you could still be sick for two more months
you would.
What do I say?
The vacancy signs of motels made you weep.
Secondary drumbeat please come in,
heaviness in your hollow.
It is a sleep that is breathless and safe.
No heartbreak, no failure, no words,
just fuzzy pictures and
the option of funeral
or leaving it at the hospital.
A doctor voicing it with the importance of fries or soup.
Maybe the child was too amazing for earth.
Maybe God is an Indian giver.
Maybe the angel of death is as fast as a bored policeman
and just as dangerous.
Now you are tested and created to carry on
to begin again.
You were created for creation.
You are not a morgue.
You are a factory of mud fights and beauty
and if the assembly line goes on strike
just negotiate
and things will start running again.
When the doctor told you a day before the funeral
that is was actually a girl, I know it hit you harder.
The confusion. The name change. The small clothes abandoned.
Girls seem to deserve to die less.
I watched your boys play on the cemetery trees during the ceremony.
How I wanted us to join them.
I noticed
at most funerals
the only room for an audience
is among the grass and graves
seated on plastic chairs with velvet covers
upon the sloganed tombstones of the departed flights.
I wept
sitting on a man’s grave with a long name—
wondered if someday
a boy would come
sit upon mine,
not wonder about the huge way I sneezed
or kissed nervously
or idea’d my way through cashless lonely nights
inventing ways out with pens and garage-sale lights.
And when his plastic chair rickets back
he might see my name
and notice that graves are things we walk upon
and must walk away from.
If I could un-invent shoebox sized caskets
I would do this for you.
We are mist.
THE ABSENCE ANTHOLOGY
THE ABSENCE ANTHOLOGY
Besides living on a boat, the best place I ever lived was on the roof of Casa Grande apartments near the Belmont Pier in Long Beach. I could see Vons and the ocean. It was actually an old laundry room. I had to move downtown cause I couldn’t afford to live there and tour doing poetry. The woman below me would make very jilted sounds when her older, richer lover would come visit. She was always wearing designer gear and such. You know the type. Thirty-five or so, hungry to be married, has to say ‘I’m worth it’ every time she goes shopping. It made me think about perfection.
In a bar where everything is new
but beaten up to look old,
a player piano played perfectly.
Ghosts of elephant tusks in the keys.
I wept the color of smokers’ bones,
the color of night breath packed in whiskey…
Or I guess I could’ve just said my breath seemed orange.
I don’t know what’s with me these days,
the older I get
the more I try to force things to be beautiful.
The cowboy fight songs pours forth
guided by the vanished.
Some people know this feeling.
No one claps for a player piano
I stumble into the night.
Sober up hours are spent in a small Long Beach apartment
bending away the foghorn sounds launched from ocean.
The sound crawls up my stairs
like rapists on Valium.
As an interlude
I get an equal share of the young woman below me in apartment 10
begging her older lover to unRolex and turn on the water
to bless her sugar walls with the crush of Jericho
to rock her trench into something hot
codes in the ‘keep trying’ curve of her moans.
They are a passionate bag of chips.
I’ve never seen her face
but I know her moans.
Her moans are surrender,
like a coach that puts you in at the end of the season
when you’ve way lost.
Coach waits till the last minute to put you in
and it doesn’t feel good to be in the game at that point.
It was over when you got on the field.
What you once thought you wanted you don’t want anymore.
Every time she squirms or breathes out her tense sweet,
I become more alone.
My bed grows larger.
My body heat drops. Addresses vanish from napkins.
The phone line incinerates.
The foghorn slips to the ocean floor
and my only consistent company
of cars outside grows silent.
The only tail I get
is when I bet
on heads.
So I focus on the sound like the player piano and move my fingers.
Stuttering them in the air like a pianist
till her moans become music.
I turn over
and slide down the bed a bit
(which is now a quarter of a mile wide)
and aim my mouth right at hers
so we are aligned
and not in a metaphysical way.
I catch those sounds
brand them into my throat like a blacksmith’s kiss
and memorize the nights she is alone.
The next day,
smell of diesel.
I see a moving truck outside my window.
I ask the manager why she’s moving out.
He told me someone was actually moving in,
a young Marine and his Korean clean-cut wife
which is about time
since Apt. 10 had been vacant for over nine months,
partly because of the high rent,
partly because of the woman who hung herself.
CHEAP RENT
The Jewish, the Irish, the kid of the UK and the Aussies have the best senses of humor in the world. I think this poem came out of the idea that a town exists somewhere and everything is happy and fantastic, but there is a small boy locked in a cellar that must starve so that paradise can exist and have a point of reference in regards to defeat and heartache. I think I started wondering about what that boy would snack on, that is, if he was the snackin’ type. Also, who doesn’t imagine having a little Jew baby every now and then?
She, a strange landlord,
pointed to her chest and said
If you lived here
you’d be home by now.
I, the stranger with no deposit,
pointed to my chest and said
If you lived here
you would have to be
very…tiny.
I think of her smart hips
and the days left before their unhinging.
Our love was redder than the eyes of McCarthy.
Our love was blacklisted and strong.
Our love was a brawl in the street
with spectacles on.
Eyes of bayonet knives,
Brass-knuckle sex,
crowbar quarrels
and the nunchakus of my mouth
which I tried to use with great aplomb and theatrical flash
but always ended up knocking myself unconscious.
‘No, you don’t look fat in that dress.
Yes, that sentence does assume you look
fat in some dresses.’
Kapow. Right in the face.
This love remains a tongueless boy
in a basement
that you snuck graham crackers to.
He loved to see the glaze
of your hammer-and-nail-polish.
You kept him alive.
He paid you with a finger every time you arrived:
One to clean your elfish ear.
Then two
to check your pulse.
Then three
to make
an unbreakable Boy Scout oath.
Then four
for karate.
Then five
so you could rest each one
of his loose fingers in between yours
like couples do when they stroll
through shitty carnivals.
When we first met
she told me of the brilliant in Israel
and the erotic vision of the cynic.
I tried to turn her on by talking to her about
skinning animals.
She kept hunting for a metaphor.
I wa
s actually just talking about skinning animals.
Now I can’t stop thinking of how our baby would look in a perm
with massive elk for eyebrows
and then in comes the Tel Aviv
of her mouth on my dirty neck.
Our mouths building a jangly, red swamp
they will call weirdo Louisiana.
This kiss spills her silent resume:
She is the poster child
for the Willy Wonka suicide camp.
Her stomach is a summer full
of black ice-cream-truck hijackings.
Her eyes are highway fatalities
you can’t stop staring at.
Her skin is rehab for sandpaper junkies.
She is my landlord
and she lowers the rent,
points to her chest and says,
“Man, if you lived here
you’d be home by now.”
LAST NIGHT IN PARIS
LAST NIGHT IN PARIS
Someone told me that Paris was the city of lights when Joel Chmara and I drank our brains out there. It was a terrible time and the boat thing actually happened at the end of this poem. Blasted in Paris is nice. To me it is the city of love, a sewage kind of love. Let’s just say they didn’t like this poem when I read it at La Sorbonne.
For the delightful Maureen Hascoett, the last great French woman.
Say bonjour!
Say au revoir!
Say si vous plait,
or the French will hate you.
I assured my well-traveled friend
that in the City of Love
all I needed to speak was the language of love
(which is of course…English)
and they will come around.
They did not come around.
Was it the Austin bats in my jaw?
The Brooklyn fuck-you in my stride?
The Long Beach bar breath in my fists?
The South Side in my desire?
The mutt in my blood
that sent the foreign legion scrambling for American poets on the radar?
‘Hu hu huuuh. Les are ruining everyzing. Les american poets are stealing all
our mademoiselles, pumping them with their inspiration, and now France is
full of ugly babies with crazy nipples. What do you do with a silver dollar nipppple!’
We will bleed all over this town
and make you think Hemingway blew his
brains out
because he had to live here for his daily intake of crazy.
We plant a flag here tonight and this-here Franceland is ours.
All you have to do is plant a flag these days.
That’s why we got the whole moon and all you got is Tahiti.
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