Let's Start Digging

I have long suspected
that when you got down to it
Gomorrah was a lot worse than Sodom.

You hear a bit about the Sodomites,
after all. They were the proud
purveyors of sodomy

But whatever they were doing in
Gomorrah was some bad shit.

God struck it down so bad
that even the bad behavior
didn’t survive in language.

Sodom got burnt &
Gomorrah got buried.

in response to "fake empire"

six minutes and counting

21 bus line—door jamb to curb

a panhandles puddled cement

orange juice banging against my thigh

I reached out all breathy and tired

your cool forehead, your hot cheeks

beneath a spiky Mohawk

all fawna and flora

you lie.

milk thistle tears

the glistening kind

full of pin-pricks

we waited and rocked

knees to a chest

I saved part of the infection in a small plastic bag. A grievance.
You didn’t want me. To turn down your covers, or generate
a low tone. You were wet with radiation sickness.
A pair of eyes came out of you. A pair of wisdom teeth,
a practice…

Eventually, I pinned your left hand behind your back. I sang you,
that boat, that heaven, the three-armed love. Whether there was
a blind wind on... When the sash blew we knew it was close.
The hoodlum tundra, the icicle full of pills. When the first
and perfect, and each one its own tome…

Even my breakage. In the closet, I shook the vehicle… In the
back of the closet, I examined my own fur.

-Danielle Pafunda, from Pretty Young Thing a.k.a. the next poetry book i plan to read if i can track the damn thing down.

forewarned is forearmed

I have a microchip
Implanted in my heart
So if I try to escape
The robots will blow me apart
And my limbs will go flying
And land before the ones that I love
Who would wail and would weep
But the robots would keep them at bay
While I shut my eyes
For the very last time.

--from Citizens of Tomorrow, Tokyo Police Club

oh!

Oh blackened pit of despair!
Let me take you by the handlebars.
Let me fluff for you the pillow. My guts
are fruit punch,
Hi-C fucked open
at two ends
by metal.
It is a good day, the sun
appallingly bright and the sky--
OK, the sky
is hazy. The hydrocarbons
are having a field day, even if
it's the white ribbon kind
that even the fat kid can win.
No prize
for you, blackened pit! Today the trees
are weeping black
lullabies and my sadness
shines like a far boat
on the bay.

there was red lighted door two doors down from the house
where she left a note for me in her underwear
that I found as I slipped them off
the note said “stay out super late”
it said I lived in a fake empire
that I was half-awake

I crutched the city
turned the bus-stop over with my hands
there was one minute and ten minutes
there was my friends scattered across any distances
people reaching into their pockets as if it would never mean anything again
there was a gay boy with a black eye who gave me the softest kiss I ever had
there were bell systems, gun shots, seven and nineteen minutes
a woman who looked younger than she is up in her room with her plants
an unknown musical organism pissing on public trash cans

her parents were lovely in how obvious they loved her

there was a woman with a big ass in a short skirt
and a tattoo on her thick left sky
mostly I was alone out there so I brought the big dictionary I bought at costco with me
pictures of people I used to know in a wicker basket
two and fifteen minutes
homemade camper shells and new friend love businesses
I went down with all the same things I always thought

tail fin

professional-like

i-pod wars

"Blood and Love Tonight!" was written
on our tombstones for us
In the silence of these graves
I was digging and up came the whispers
They said:
"The Right will switch sides"
We'll have our bride
And I will love my enemy tonight!

"We invite you all to join us here for this union."
The notes were all received by the vanguard
early this morning.
"Please come tonight, our allies.
This great divide
Has kissed us with a surprise bride."

I've got blood in the palms of my hands
It's only blood they'll understand

In the dead of night you better hold on tight to
your loved ones.
The rumor is the truth, the furies are here upon us.
Ask: "Who switched sides?"
My bride.
And this fight moves on
Outside the cemetery lawn.

"Who switched sides?!"
Our bride.
And this fight moves on
Outside the cemetery lawn.

cemetery lawn, by the rosebuds

OCD

recommendations for 30 yrs

live life
like a razorblade. become
beautiful
whenever possible.
encourage
light, spread and
take
sips, sometimes
gulps, sometimes
the whole damn
enchilada all
at once. yours. make
every effort to
surpass
the common verity. read
as much as
is humanly possible,
then ever
so slightly
more. and maybe most
importantly never
forget to
rock,
rock and love,
love and rock and
more of that,
onward, double-bass drums,
howling,
the night.

lupo rima

What we gave
to the wolf
can never be recovered. Even
the strongest
of similes will eventually
leave us, black
as a pocket or
bottled
like the sky. So
don't. I am here
to give you
the rafters. I am
the wolf
with the butterfly's heart.

not finished yet but still

How many more sad
poems than happy ones!
It's all right.
Why borrow another's
broken razor
when what's really wanted
is one's own private hospital
for lost birds.
We all want to be
Frank O'Hara but
it simply isn't practical.
For example,
the single size of pants.
There is so much
to suffer, ice cream
to spill and everywhere
we walk may be
the 101 in rush hour:
to the bathroom at night or
to the kitchen to say,
I need you.

new yorker article excerpt

In 1969, the Congressional Joint Comittee on Atomic Energy held a hearing at which Robert Wilson was called to testify. Wilson, who had served as the chief of experimental nuclear physics for the Manhatten Project, was at that point the head of CERN's main rival, Fermilab, and in charge of $250 million that Congress had recently allocated for the lab to build a new collider. Senator John Pastore, of Rhode Island, want to know the rationale behind a government expenditure of that size. Did the collider have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?

Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are partriotic about . . . It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

adjective as a noun

hard as an eskimo pie.
hard as as a sheep-shackle.
strong as a bathtub.
strong as a corkboard.
strong as a lipstick.
black as a shoelace.
black as a dollar.
black as a susan b. anthony dollar.
black as a plate.
black as a theory.
theoretical like a beer glass.
theoretical like iggy pop.
hard as crutches.
theoretical as birds' wings.
black as a pocket.
strong as a pocket.
strong as a tub.
bottled like the sky.

two from the iggster

"All I liked to do was walk around the streets with a heart full of napalm. I always though 'Heart Full of Soul' was a good song so I thought, What's my heart full of?
I decided it was basically full of napalm."

"What happened was by the time I finished Raw Power, my standards were different than other people's. That's the only way I can put it. I wanted the music to come out of the speakers and just grab you by the throat and just knock your head against the wall and just basically kill you."

The London Apartments - Streetlights Are Soldiers

what else are you taking with you? (old)

Kat grabbed a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table, lit one, and lay back upon the couch. She put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, savoring the acrid taste. She heard the crinkle of the tobacco burning, watched the thin ember ring work its way up the cigarette as it turned white paper to ash. She counted the rings on the stem of the cigarette, the tiny striated lines marking the paper that held the tobacco. How many rings per drag, per breath, she wondered. She inhaled and watched the rings disintegrate into ashes. The rings of a tree, she thought, rings of the cigarette that mark time’s passage, our life together. This ring for when I met you. This one for when we first slept together, and in gratitude you told me that you loved me. Here for your birthday, when we drank too much tequila and I broke all the plates.