this will be an earthworm in 1000 years

What kind of bird descends screaming on a city of worms?

Saturday, December 30, 2006

hung

I'm eating ice cream
and sighing
the face man in his box
white window chips on his shoulder
mentions dying and his own smile.
He speaks with solemn practice...
it seems someone's Christ
sweats on a rope
and you remark "It seems..."
"It seems this is not really news...
not really
big news...
but I think people and their stupidity decide that
...ultimately."
Well, ultimately
I laugh
ultimately I say
fuck him
stone him
unearth him and all his treasures
lets make our babies on piles of dead gold
and atoms upon piles of dead horses
after all, isn't that the way it has been?
I think that's the way it has been
for a thousand and sixty nine years.
Does history applaud the prosperous and forget the poor?
I'm eating ice cream and sighing.
Aren't the poor only righteous
when sanctioned by God
or disease?
A disease lets call him.
A crowd. Yes. Let's maul him.
Who killed Caesar, Jesus and John Wilkes Booth?
Fragments of mercury bubbling in the blood?
A pauper?
A lobby?
One stringsick starstruck lamenting fool
better served to char his feet on a slave ship
than to dabble
to dabble
and dabble again
in politics.
Thank God (you imaginary man)
for politics otherwise
we'd never get anyone hung.

Monday, December 18, 2006

I live in a home

I can't touch the nurse or she screams at me. I used to have a wife and she was fat and we slept together every night. I got her when I was nineteen. She had tiny ears and a big butt...in a good way. She made me dinner every night. We had two sons and a daughter. Jake, Paul and Sheila. Our daughter is forty-seven and both our sons are dead. They got in a fight when they were in their thirties and killed each other. My wife died of a heart attack last year.

I say that wrong. It wasn't a fight that killed the boys as much as it was a car accident. But Paul was mad at Jake and Paul was driving and...who knows what the hell happened? Point is, both my sons are dead and I live in a home.

I'm not bitter. I'm just bored. And lonely-I can admit that. I know I'm hard to live with-I've always been kind of a bastard so I understand why Sheila doesn't want me to stay with her. I don't think I'd really want to stay there either. I think mainly what I want is to get back that slow time I had when I was 20...how it felt like death would be a relief. How it felt like life would take forever. Maybe even if I could have a woman. Fat don't matter to me.

It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't hat ethe damn TV. I hate that damn thing. Damn screambox. We never had one with the boys. We never let them watch it. I hate that damn thing.

My name's Amos. Amos Henry. I've got a nice cleft chin that girls used to really like. I remember one...this one girl...she had something wrong in her head, I think. She didn't last all too long. She took me over to her house when her mom dad weren't home and gave me the business.

The nurse won't let me touch her. I'd give her the business if I could.

No reason

Its fine to imagine being born for no reason. Being a free agent and having all these sweet deal every roads a different kind of life choices. I agreeeeeeee with that. I agree with that.

But then you see a picture of your grandmother. And you realize you've never considered her to be a person as much as you've thought of her as an extension of yourself. Then you start to think of all the people that think of you that way...as extensions of themselves. This is my girlfriend. This is my sister. My mother. Oh shit.

Reason? Reason then? The scariest thing in the world is to look at a picture of yourself as a baby and realize you look like a baby. There's people in the picture all around you that are old now. People in the picture all around you that are dead now. Makes you resent the no reason. Makes me resent the no reason.

Because then...choices, yes. Choices are good. But this meant to be shit? This family shit? It must be something we need and have created with our minds to attach ourselves to one another. It must be...a mind-created thing...shit...that we need...I'm essentially saying the same thing over again...but I mean, candles? set tables saying grace and holding hands and mourning for each other? You start to wonder...I start to wonder who are these people? I start to feel like what's the point of being a family if we're all going to live on seperate sides of the world and barely speak? So you have someone to leave your shit to when you die? No reason?

Friday, December 15, 2006

The window washer is an artist.
Him with plastic hands,
disappearing inky white
razor streaks
swirling neat
Him with soap for paint
and nothing permanent…
an ever changing canvas of faces
darting among the seaweed,
the cracked purple castle.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Thank you for sitting across from me
and for reading when maybe you don't want to do your reading here...
and all so that I can write something.

I won't tell you I failed.

Monday, December 11, 2006

staples and papers

licking envelopes
my sad little mouth
as the sun goes down
in the middle of the day
and drowns drowns drowns
the dark away

Friday, December 01, 2006

wake

I wake to the floor dark and quiet. A blank crouching sheet beside me. A pillow with no face whispering sometime in the dream you vanished. I am left to reason. You being bright, the starving night sucked the window open and ate you. I blame the need for breeze. I blame your restlessness on whaling black midnight and charred draining streets, on someone you may meet you haven't met yet.

The sun peeking through the window and pointing at my face. The sun laughing at my wet startled eyes. Your bone ground against the rickety bridge of daylight. Your simple somewhere else makes blinking lights seem dangerous and a quiet room indignant with guilt. Your body chewed by night's diamond teeth. I consider sleep and refuse myself. I put on a torn blue coat and run about like a crushed bug. I dirty my feet on the hallway floor. I cut them on the crust-glass stairs. Pacing the roof? I rub my eyes. Empty roof.

I have schedules and jobs. I have an art I practice with some regularity. How strange you should need to think. I have a reasonable set of friends I can occupy myself with and yet the discussion of a world, the concept of my time, the understanding of a thumb upon a page within a book upon a desk that I once bought is defined...my time is defined by your absence.