The Archives: Texts

Once upon a time in the year 2000, I wanted to write a great American epic poem about a river that could destroy towns at will and would flow in an increasingly violent rampage around the country causing a lot of property damage. I wanted it to be beautiful and sad. Many readers, including myself, were, in the end, unable to take the project seriously. The last two lines were going to read:

and then they knew how to stop it,
the only thing it wanted was love.

When it was asked to draw a picture of a pet
the ghost drew a picture of a gun.
Is it going to get you
drill inside your old bald head
at Devil’s Woods

                        emergency ulcers

                your neck’s beaver shavings

     dizzy Kali nightmares

                low-grade erotic tunnel vision?

In no time at all the smoke
mangoes had been eaten.
I put a silver penny
in the music box.
A large insect-o-freak
antennae growing through
the fourth floor
window frame.
Midtown incinerators
blacken the new
fallen snow with
Styrofoam ash.

Yowling hounds get kissey
after a second bowl
of mimosa. The yellow
orange flesh browns
and sours. I spit out
red plastic bags.
I want to eat a wolf
but I’m afraid this will change
me. A trail of roach
droppings now over my legs
how did I get this
paralyzed—twitching
a panicked creature bumping
against the lid of the boil pot
or lawn mowers running
loose in a freshly
buried casket.
Does your belly bear
the mark of the six stars?

No one really knows about
my absolute hunger
since my diagnosis
a small sweet lick of the underbelly
can feed my music machine
green tambourine
I just want to
watch my life go
by undisturbed.

Your prospectus, YOUR TOMORROW TODAY
arrived yesterday by afternoon post.
I carried it to the edge of the cliff
where you are always
at your worst
tired mass hysteria
suddenly numb Astro Zombies
war nerves going limp
without substance would you dare?
psychopathological persons’
misinterpretation of known objects
specifically cloudiness
a substantial rumbling roar
gas masks intoxicated beyond timed clapping
dropping liberty caps into the lion-fish fish tank
grab the hairy vogue & spines
catfish sex wrestling with arms bound behind its back
10% Snake Chiew liquor hazing
perfumed superstar water jets
six times brighter than an equivalent area of sky
finally breaking the bed of lube
a drunken horde doing what it can
to perforate your safety suit
waiting for your blood to pop
an ecstatic frenzy of involuntary twitches
that is not the tomorrow I want to know
try again here’s a tin funnel
sweatband diagnosis
a meat like object of tremendous size
As you will most likely unwillingly recall
the George Washington Birthday Luncheon
even the dishwashers wore no underpants
and wielded bullhorns
the gold anointing bowl
brimming with a thick brown stew arrived
the more noise from the funeral dirge
the more you lustily ate the more
I came to realize that
I now know beyond any doubt
that you are also filled up
with the Ten Terrible Qualities.

Even the wind here incarcerates
the wild in living things
clips away the ragged palms
orders pine trees: stand up straight.
I just want to snozzle in the sweet grass
disappear in cane stalks bound with white cloth
into a bundle to forget
those weepy explosive afternoons
that almost killed us all.
Clementines and orchids always
smooth out the rice liquor
& every moment tainted by last
last potato, last moon,
last honeybush, last gong solo,
last vibrant bowling limbs.
The last world flattens the trees
into monotone sharp broken bottles
atop the stone wall (watch out birds!)
all my money for her cures
but nothing has done any good
with my hat caved in
I feed her fleshloaf
a pantry filled with buffalo jam
whatever she wants now
grape boots
pink plastic bubbles
and purple tin starfish
on her shoes.

Simulated green diesel smoke not unlike burning pine shoe leather from out of the tailpipe, puffed.

Straddling the cardboard Cadillac and waving a paper bottle of Hennessey X.O.
Uncle Wort untangled the red thread and released the baby wild goat
into the concrete garden.

It was happy to be free and when it hopped up onto the bear trap
you could see the tattoos of six stars on its belly.

It’s hoofs tapping on the trap-teeth made for a jaunty beat. Grandfather would have wanted it this way.

Clapping along, the children cheered and threw hell money into the air.

The goat’s head said to its ass, “We two can never be joined again.”

Pink dawn hitchhiking I am in a pick up
and I am going to see the doctor
for an annual physical with Jack Nicholson
and he is driving. He’s got belly rolls of filet mignon
(sicko!) guzzling spit bug moonshine foam from a jar.
We had never seen each other before.
He says he saw a vision of himself reborn in a hell world
holding a clear monkey cigar surrounded by nurses
and manatees on fire and came out
of that inferno with the an incredible
lack of self esteem—germs he says
germs are germs where ever they go
glazed onto the dashboard dark and heavy
lacking dankness and of modest green
a barely satisfactory huff of reefer
from the heating vent whirring hogs
between crustacean shapes but wait
what is in this stuff? paralyzed chickens
hospital cinders, a gupping fish maw
Flossie opening her nightgown
for a locust tree, a red petal edge of sky?
I want to be in a separate examination room,
and away from this drug enforced intimacy.
His hand now is always somewhere on or near my body.
“But since my parents are dead, I could
never get another brother!” There is not any
other good doctor within one hundred
and fifty-four miles.

I look down
at my appointment card
I try to bend it
it only makes me feel more
like my muscles are melting
the world will not stop
for another suffering time-out
might as well roll me a little wine
     greasy Kai-lan
     heart ribs
     at the food wall
     then dissolve
Was that a two-fold nothingness
or a one-fold nothingness?
When there is no desire for greater comforts
and pleasures of the world
THAN the two-piece fried rat dinner,
you haven’t succeeded
in leaving this world quite yet.

breeze quietude
tightens the nut
inside my skull
your ink my toner
offerings the last time you
were dead on the moon.
The referent is nothing
that I am pure ammonia.
The ghost frog pulled itself
up from under the black mud.
My human friend, why are you
wandering about crying in panic?
Must life necessarily be based
on hydrocarbon reactions?
main artillery blasted
that was what I was reading about
Why are you lying there?
This is the meaning of the time
the car service decided
not to fuck you
alive in the sun.

A parked black Datsun
leafless tree
at the water’s edge
lake weed
a vegative animal examines itself
let the snake wait
while I get pregnant
bagpipes typing on my belly
they did the ultra-scan
such rollicking measures
then I blacked out
the noisy sparrows
sweep the sidewalks
cripple the trees