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Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Lines from Club Charles

i. again

You can read if you want you have read it before.
The future comes at us
a pink fireball with limitless horsepower.
Every step into the future
platitude gimmick bluster and hoax
find tragedy with an endless equation of sequels.

You follow the policy like herrings shimmering
in the six dimensions of their one decision
to enter the gape of the whale.

It's starting to happen it could be happening now.

ii. editor's blues

All messages appear red bold and speeding.
Never read anything twice and you will understand
the way things got this way.
Every day after day
keeps going keeps switching on its on
switches keeps switching off its off, its
squaring of the squaring up
the supersupreme that manifests the mean.

Ever felt yourself the agent
of an Almighty Buffoon?
Ridden like a fly-by-virus
a continent by plates
a nature underneath
with secret interests not your own?

Five hours behind myself
the days end up in the sky.
I am burnt steak
raw inside.

Never read anything twice and you will understand.

iii. cipher

Dissatisfaction with what it is: O original world
with my hands forked in your soft sides
I am lines on the bathroom wall
phone numbers to paradise
a demolition derby of colliding ink
marked up when people are laughing
and you can't remember your name.
Don't look too deeply the numbers have changed.

iv. working for the philistines

Where to from here Captain Hazelwood?
When I want to be remembered, I think
It's tacky to last
like plastic bags
ragged-wrapped
around the broken autumn limbs.

I could get past some of my limitations
if I could just get past the rest of them.
But the insane attract the insane
and you learn
you're insane.
Turned upside down in a hijacked plane of missionaries, trailer trash, 70's burnouts,
tattoo-parlor confederates, Black Panther chefs, corporate reps, philosophy breakaways, sect survivors, grinning bankers,
                              government workers
                                                                 going bonkers.
                                                                                           Whatever comes next I'm not ready don't push me.
I'm hanging by a thread, yes, but I’m hanging
by the strongest thread in the world.

v. cancer moon

Strange world out everywhere
hopelessly in total control.

Bacon by the overpass curling thru windows
and people get evermore starry eyed.

Extraordinary bullshit is upon us.

Look through the windows of cars at their standstill
Caligulas of human rights braiding death on the interstate
the wear and tear real as the tears
forced out by the 5 p.m. glare.

I’ll light my fires 
for the rush of highways 
and massive architecture
floundering in antimatter

broken records made to last

dust motes snowing in projector rays.

vi. ecstasy in the boardroom

So many loopholes, so little time.
The numbers begin to take meaning.

Bothered by the facts, caffeine-free headaches, the arctic sugarcube:
Good morning. It’s 10:30 in the United States
But I could be anywhere

more or less unstable on those
tectonic plates of intercontinental time—
neurons limp as boiled sage
the sphere diluted to experience of optics
quondam possibilities resurgent again

scented of chicken-fried woodsmoke
nailpolish-colored construction
cones, tail lights lost

the summer evenings
original elements grow appetites
meet, plead, and wait
to be devoured.

Having heaven now
I must make peace with hell
and cancelled sitcoms.

You future kids
don’t hate me because I’m serious.
I tried to be an organ I’m a cell
devoted to its process.

I don't dream much anymore
but when I dream
we’re Easter egg hunting on Mount Vesuvius.

vii. butane sundown

Without speaking you know what I feel
in the air and dancing
oases forming and unforming
umbrellas in the rain
begetting operas in the wind
Come off the interstate, sunset graded
on the windows of grand hotels
Hyundais racing through the streets of hit and run
everyone exhausted by their own interpretation
of the language makes no sense.
Even with a fantastic suntan
one day you'll roam the twilight construction
turning into chalk
brain sharp as cracked crystal

panic in your roller coaster eyes
discovered by the wrong people and speechless
cut from your no-answer's-good-enough-for-me
puppymill of corporate cluster#*&*<#)!@#%
as the night goes gorgeous
shades of teal
trademarked in Bora Bora
by outlaw bastard patriot friends

viii. thinking of sunday

Ever get that feeling?
Like an orgasm in the brain
on country morning drives
the spears of joy come flying in.
I think Let spasms of light
through the trees at high speeds
defrag my deep memories,
till the impacted mind
for something it can celebrate
unqualified.
I so want to be
projected away from emergencies
far from the feral cats howling under my window
move forward again to that cliff in the sky
where it snows in the sun
recalibrate all the senses and when it's done
the perfect succession of images
let unlock the orb

let flow the eternal caramel of satisfaction.

ix. autodidact

Another attosecond another metamorphosis
another Russian roulette of jelly beans.
Gather in stimuli--
fake ecstasies and press conference meltdowns.
Life after excitement keeps secreting new products:
170,000,000 pages or more
of interactive global index fantasies
wacko textile designs,
sunshine you'd better love.

Omnipotent terror negates every fear.
Flip through any magazine:

You can feel the crashing planes 
turning sculpture into sculpture
events unfolding the way lava sets as it cools
dirty pictures of sleeping canyons,
computer-modeling images,
the shaved rock of Appalachian highways
glossy shots of isoscelean hair

the 30,000 years it takes the sun
to send its love this way
with a brightness blind as the cave lizard
groping for footholds in frozen streams.
I never could see
what was right in front of me.

My wayward learning maybe
confounds the few remaining
who take our kind to be a gem atop the kingdoms--
Human in the sense still propounded
by rarefied nuns, banjo troubadors
neocons on safari.

But I know what a diamond's worth
to the pressures of the universe

cuz I am just an object of divine consumption
a squid sprawled on the cutting board
soon to be calamari.

x. summer slaughter

Gargantuan withered midsummer leaves
wilder than despots after midnight
never learn to pace the sun
spread quickly, die slowly
so what that's that.
Disintegrating infrastructure grows on you.
Ivy on the chain link
grows on you.
And what makes any sense
gets more and more specific to the year
to poor outdating policies
distant students will never understand
designed to crumble like a warehouse in the rain
or cigarettes burning to the heart
of what can we escape with?

I do believe we are destined for je ne sais quois
saved for some reason or chance which-is-which
in a flash of paper whispers
by starving children jealous of our crimes.

I said no more runnin’ as I ran

said how I hate the nick of time!

An indistinguished garden 
joins the underbrush.

xi. conference calls

White walls white walls.
The blank walls where everything’s possible nothing is likely.
The white walls of Insuperable Tedium—
majestic in the immense lack of promise
erotic in the lack of imagination
distracting in the desire to meld
beginning and end like the clock stuck at noon
on the white walls white walls

unchanging as the voice of instructional films
somnolent in the effort to interest us
                             in something else
continual as the ringing of telephones
flat as the plaster and concrete
and loved like the fifteen-day work week.

White walls white walls,
today I found my hands colliding.

Today I wondered
What am I applauding?

White walls White walls
When does the color come?

xii. la palma

Long wild year
sure to disappoint
everything except reflections
rigging truth to be what else:

Heavy days, away with words.
Still in the August daze
limbs overreaching their interest
for a taste of something 
more than allowed--

tests inconclusive
state secrets stolen
stocks on the rise
the bubble goes pop….

We all face La Palma.
If it comes if it doesn't
like the worst kinds of wars--
the ones we don't know we are fighting.

xiii. bizarro

Pretty sure we are not doing
the ordinary life
Why not more
extraordinary push?

Life impels unjustified
action to make the best of.

A moment dawns mid-33.
The time is free
beyond the orbit.
Come with me.

I praised the herbivores--
mad bucks who broke the mouths of wolves and leopards
praised the Zulu against impossible odds;

praised conquistador-in-shell
sent to circumnavigate
his shadow carousel
lay from his hands the expansion
of infinite matter and sound

reach past the hypergiants
knowing nothing but next
and doing what comes
to his immediate mind.

The blood on his hands is a shame.
And yet among the dead
you know his name

the supertraitor
equal in all betrayals.

I walk in the way of extremely rare men
though something less would suit me.

I praise the herbivores
but the carnivores win.

Til the herbivores win.
Til the carnivores win.

Killing me kills you
as always.

This is the way of revolutions
or at least
dead revolutionaries.

xiv. nude on the ledge

62 trillion in the red
the sun’s angel face
a passing fad
I saw words in the wrong
places, curves in the stitching
L-O-V in the Braille
of old adobe
snakes in the talons
crossing the freeway
some kind of hieroglyph
on which I was stuck

sunbathing nude on San Francisco
TAXI in the wind
as mirrors caught my beast
in every dimension.
Liberty’s invisibility today.

Liberty is a tan ass
no word from Washington or NYC.

But because I was
and the other side of the story
always made me less brazen
I listened to my enemies converse
and saw the limits of the universe

helpless as a baby
frisked by security
in permanent emergency
and decided to do something but grieve.

Because I was
middleamerica as a crying cheerleader
no rocketfire ministry argument stalemate
no logistics or TV timeout
would pause the march

toward quiet days we wanted loud
and louder.
Consumer piano, play over me.
One option only
confronts my day:
children laughing English, Spanglish, Japanese, Hello
canceling to traffic moving
toward 61 trillion in the red below.

I rose. The sun set. I moved.

xv. the big pass

Stardown, metadata cries
microtime, our destiny.

Taste the derision:
the possible is not impossible
only difficult
beyond our means--

presidential in their limitation
confined to sets of unwinning options
anyone can see.

The triptych of is was WILL BE 
creation endless 
in its provocations
as its modes of exit:

sexual obliteration, orgasm by fire
too many people to love
burning through time
like invasive species chewing mud
left by appetites
defaulting Earth to hollow rind
beneath the doveburst of moon concerned
by all those parasites.

Liberated, I would close my eyes and drive
the wind and white lights evolving me home
to flowers and sex in the median strand

roadkill twitching in the margins
of the mind--eternal burning
not in hell, but in myself--
making fire of my inner cities.

And to burn is beautiful. Just watch the flames.
Observe the drama. Hold tight the hands. 
Feel deep the air

heavy as a hurricane, smelling of fish 
and chemicals and mysterious plumes
so sweet somehow as my street
when blooming rose
and honeysuckle meet 
among the diesel fumes.

One deep look into the purple clouds--
the August anycolored flesh of sky--
it is the blush that sails me
down the long long road
toward the whirlpool I could die
to save myself from the inferno
of what's true.

Stardown. Metadata. Microtime. Our destiny.
One long bend with a beautiful view.

What waylays you?

xvi. let’s rock

As the mood turns ugly--
and it will turn ugly
whatever your empire--

tequila with gatorade
and sardines and walnuts
will nourish the nights

fuzzing around by the excommuniques
trying not to get devoured

one hour closer
to the virtual burqa
of willful stupidity
self-selected inequality
and actions chimpanzee.

Fate opens weird

wild doors on us, man. Days
so heavily encrypted

to read along the patterns
makes a mockery of nature
increasingly itself, a word
mipselled
precious like time 
when it's running out

vicious like love
when too much exists
all at once
in one place.

Precious vicious always the same
the language has butterflied
to museum conversation
auditorium discussion
foyer rumor
airwave hearsay

politician in the morning.

The mood turns ugly.
Simplicity is rich.
Lightning is at play.

Welcome to the polygraph you cannot pass.
Every word you speak is true.

xvii. mach 9

Pregnancy. Thunderstorms. Postfinancial coronaries.

The days are ferns unfolding in a crystal-granite sea.

Alone in the city's erotic enormity--
a tsunami of architecture
encounters a tsunami of fog. High mist
plays tricks, swells the buildings
like breasts under gauze.
From such overestimations
I deduct my dreams and voila
reality downs
a fearsome, wounded bird:

slanders and promises in front-page ink
young ladies ordering birth control loudly
bad kids on bikes                
green shade.

Voila, monsters:
A tsunami of architecture
encounters a tsunami of fog.

Pretentious, ignorant, but self-aware
I don't lie.
                 
I see angels with orchid wings in the sky.

Black Buildings

The sky was dull black as a chalkboard.
But the buildings were brilliant.

From a bridge miles away
the city in sequins rose.

The sky was dull black as a chalkboard.
I dreamed I saw a friend

signal to me from the shoreline.
He was ready for a tour.

I was going into an oven of an underworld.
But the buildings were brilliant.

Hunger sucked my ribs in the morning.
All was starch black as a chalkboard,

but the buildings were brilliant.
Over the sidewalk everything blends—

gunshots and laughter and trains of reasoning.
Stray cats were dying in the alleys.

Rabid dogs descended,
and so I pitied tortured torturers

and supplicants alike.
My face collected pasted moths.

I walked around in search of a mirage.
I dreamed I saw a friend

waving to me from a window.
He was fixing hot food and preparing my bed.

Dawn arrived without a sun.
Still there was no light in the furnace of this place.

But the buildings were brilliant.
The buildings were brilliant.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Visions

Looking into it
like a shipwreck through stingrays
I catch a glimpse in the reef.

Looking into it
from a mountain through the clouds
I see a sand temple with green windows
defy the avalanche.

Looking at it
through a flurry of comets
of candy-coated planets
I feel my sympathy away.

O the delirium
in my penthouse aquarium.

The Shaman

Rich with heaven and hell
bones engraved by history’s
endless column of gray misty pain
skin like a Great War battlefield
nacreous skull tall
and filled with stained glass windows
light warming 
the brain of his butterfly through
stomach full of taste buds
his head a seamless aigrette
bars of ice in his throat
holding the fire within
and blood the flavor of cherry
He could confuse the laws of karma.
Could play the chords correctly incorrect
earn a robber peace
or twist justice out of lies
and monsters with static for a face.
Smarter than the elders and dumb
to the universe
badly weakened, barely able to breathe
unable to procreate.
Language did not restrict him.
Thoughts did not govern him.
Dreams did not stop.

He came this way one time.
I invited him in for gumbo and whiskey.
He left and now all is well.