Girl, you got it goin on.

Girl, you got it goin on.

But please tell me why.
Why the barbs,
why the wire in your dreams
and the sharp shards
and the broken seams.

Girl, you got it goin on,
but no one sees.
They forgot the days of smoking
in the aisle.


They forgot the champagne blue
and the pills for two.
The short skirt a work unto itself,
and the designer cocktails from the top shelf.

I break a bottle for you,
against the shipwreck,
and the wreckage.

I poise a crystal glass in honor of you
and your prima donna tou tou.

Unfashionable Jeans

Give me your biggest card,
your biggest, sweetest eyes,
your soft hey in passing
your . . .

Anything

But this, this has got to go.
Nothing like nothing to make you dig a hole.
Nothing like the nothing to make you
see the things that are not there.

There’s nothing like the abyssal planes
of mundane, of another cup of coffee
of forgetting your own birth right

To Live
To Breathe
To Give in

To nothing that don’t suit your fancy
your fancy please

getting down on one knee
nothing like that last shot
of whiskey

Here’s one for you and your last soul.

Here’s one for the folks prying metal ships apart
and the watery lakes
where one grain is harvested at a time.

Here’s one for the crowd
and the stylized bars in dreams:
there we wear boots and unfashionable jeans.

Hide and Reveal

Hide and Reveal

I.

After two long days you flinch in recognition
like being confronted
with a scene from a dream
washing at your feet amid the banal.

There are thorns here, small grasses
that will cut your toes,
some powdery remnants of glass,
a tax on smiles
and a silent way of edging off the fringes of laughter.

But here it is, beyond all that:
a delicate shiver on your spine,
a twitch of the eye,
a picture on the surface of a pond,
gone in a blink.


II.

To be left, nails scraping in dirt,
an earthworm emerging after rain
attending to small tasks,
is to make a return
from a reckless voyage
where ships circled castles in the sky.

There is no end as near as here.

And there is no return like the final one,
and no solace like the bitter knowledge
that is balm rather than briar
to the prurient soul.

Anhedonia

It could almost be
a regal woman's name,
but is instead a creeping slug
made of dark matter, no, not
the kind that draws all inward,
but a cousin, like the umbra of the moon.

It is a house built on a foundation
of perpetuation
of human condition
of the ugliest, and most private despair.

It could almost be
an illustrious blue period
for the soul,
one tempered with booze,
one numbed with food and with lack of food,
one undone by silence
and one put off by noise.

It is a star leaking its light
in the sky
until only a dark point
remains,
like the period at the end of
a life like a sentence.

Letting go on a grey day.

Empty and surprised
I gave up today like an old sweater
with unraveling sleeves
and a hole in the back,
put it in a paper bag
and sat it by the door.

I let the grey light seep into it
and the wind knock it over.

Finally a cat came and drew
it out with outstretched claws,
toying at first with the loose strings
before creating new ones.

Like saying goodbye
to an unwanted guest,
I said a few words and turned to go
without looking back.

A little metatext here . . .

There's nothing lamer than ruminating about blogging on your blog, but I feel that the weight of my snide, peeved comments supersede this rule. Besides, I am the editor in chief here in my humble little universe.

This is the thing. Why does it bug me so much that blogging supplies a raison d'être for some people? Allow me to clarify. Some people record the minutiae of their daily existence on their blogs. This is what my cat ate for dinner. Oi, how I can't get this stain out of my sweater, etc. That's all fine and dandy, but what I sense is happening often is that sooner or later the anticipation of blogging, or reviewing (more on that at a later date), starts to shape not only the experiences before they are recorded later, but the perception of them while they are occurring as well. It is my belief that this phenomenon later results in doing things merely so that you can blog about them. To me, that's insincere, and disturbing, mainly because it highlights some of the existential ennui I feel when I think about what makes other people tick. It's the "look at me!" syndrome; the need to do things merely to be able to do the telling of the doing. It is disingenuous and jarringly narcissistic. Let's see. How many ways can I say fake? Phony. Artificial . . .

I think, however, that I must accept some of the blame for my ire. Why am I always searching for authenticity in people when they are merely trying to look good or seem intelligent or fashionable or successful or confident when they may in fact be none of these things? Perhaps it is the power of shaping your existence with thought, with tempering a trivial, grain-of-sand experience with a little meaning. That's meaning in the form of someone caring enough to observe and read the vain, trying recordation of someone else's not-so-interesting life.

I suppose we all want someone to care. But I don't want to want that. I spurn that want. Consider that want denied. I deny that desire because I want to have my own, private, authentic experience. But I am a hypocrite because here I am blogging about it. But it's only slightly hypocritical because no one reads this blog, so really it's just a readily accessible receptacle for inane thoughts.

Thank you and goodnight (afternoon, morning, whatever).

Life is a Tambourine!

No it's not, but it got your attention anyway, didn't it? You little mysterious, imaginary little ghosts reading my blog.

What liberation it is not to always take life so seriously. It's just life after all, folks. I don't know what everyone is so up in arms about. But they're awfully serious. They, they, they. They won't eat pastries. They neurotically check their hair in the mirror . . . because hair is an especially serious matter. They worry about their taxes. A lot. And the planning of vacations that must be tackled with great seriousness in order to set about the business of the divide-and-conquer tourism routine. They worry about reproducing, about creating little serious replicas like themselves. They frown at a lunch time beer and shiver at the thought of other similar kinds of weaknesses. They . . . well, they are American, no doubt. They won't buy cream and believe in margarine. They honk their horns in petulant ire whenever someone has the audacity to circumvent the flow of their structured little (and I mean little) universe. I could write a book about what's wrong with the way people drive, and it would be based on the premise that people take life too seriously, which you THINK would be a good thing behind the wheel, but not so, because all of that seriousness is kind of like a poison coalescing in the body that eventually metabolizes into misery, and it is that resultant misery that makes people impossible toddlers masquerading as responsible adults on the road. There, I said it.

But not to be too serious. That's my goal today, because there's nothing like Monday in corporate America to wipe the smiles off the faces of even the most jovial among us. Oh look here comes someone with a face like a jack-o-lantern. Better go . . .

A Room of One's Own

Puffy-eyed, far from center, with a coffee in hand, she sits, slumped and rumpled before a screen. A screen can portend many things, and this one is no different. It tells the story of 7.5 to 8 hours. Of email. Of listless conversation. Of looking down the barrel of another bleak few days. Of denial. Of improper syntax.

This is the story of your average maiden not-so-fair. There is nothing on her breath but the hush, hush, hush of more words unspoken. In the evenings she tries to consume with restraint and not to regard her phone. A phone is a nightmarish thing, a portal to despair, an offending reminder. Better to put her hands over her eyes, her ears, her mouth and pray silently. And move silently, from room to room, from wall to wall. Eyes roving and then resting on dry knuckles, skewed fingernails. There are sheets of something overlaying her face that she notices in her small lit mirror, also a nightmarish thing, a portal to an insuppressible reality of physicality, like wax figures in a museum. Tonight she is one of those frozen figures, caught, anatomized and splayed for the viewing pleasure of . . . well, no one, but the fine particles of air and dust, resting silently in each plastic pore.

From the sinking glut of a white couch she envisions another inhabitable space. This new space is without strictures. Loneliness emerges from its cocoon to become more sophisticated: an hermitage. A clean desk and a bookcase. A cup like an endless well with no bottom. A life within pages, within the folds of brain tissue where unrequited longing sits, yawns, stretches.

Death at the Window

From my window I can see San Francisco,
and a couple walking a dog,
the man joyfully swinging a bag of shit.

Death is a lone, friendless universe,
with no one to talk to ‘bout pending doom,
or the end of life,
or anything of any import.

Jack Kerouac was a drunk who partied in Frisco.
He woke up in hotel rooms with strangers after long wino benders.
He loved jazz. And haiku. And being a Buddhist bum.

From my window I can see the bay,
stretching landless and lightless to the prickly
San Francisco skyline.
I think of pizza in North Beach,
of noodles in Chinatown at the edges of the Financial District,
and finally of the lonely workaday hallways.

Death is something maudlin, something mundane.
Death is a plump martini
at the edge of a marble bar at a crashed gathering.
Death is knowing what you know and
not knowing what you know.

We Drink Coffee

We don't go to gyms. Not really. We coalesce, we drink things like coffee, or maybe a night cap. We don't have issues with chairs. We like sitting in them, actually, but prefer a couch.

While young our bodies may be lithe and svelte, but as we grow only a little older, emerging from our teens and our tender twenties, our bodies grow a little thicker, and a little downward. But we can still be beautiful, navigating from our desks, cup in hand.

We can sit and read forever and get up only to use the bathroom and to have snack time. We'll go hiking, but we go slow up the hills with heavy breath, smoker lungs wheezing.

Sometimes we conduct anthropological experiments. We observe passerby from a café seat where sometimes we see the other kind walking jauntily, healthfully. They run marathons and do bake sales on the weekend. We think, actually, how a bake sale would be cool. You could sit and drink coffee and eat tender pieces of banana bread and take money and maybe even smile a little.

(Thank you to Dogmilque for the beautiful coffee photo that I found on Flickr)