MEDICINE
The Great Sadness was back.
Because The Thing was so beyond me
Its way crossed mine fifteen times
and I said say Chaos, this is order.
A palace ruined
in the earthquake of entropy
turned on a light.
AIR TRAVEL
Begin in San Francisco:
Girls in thongs in the shadows of contours
frozen by Pacific play.
A sky shaped by jet exhaust, condors
dancing in the waves don’t care I do
now and to forevers
wept toward shadow and contour
the sky shaped by jet exhaust
and memories deprived of colors
and memories of love
resistant to all poison.
DEODERANT
Performance cars with no natural enemies
have invaded the mission of bees
and the olive oil tastes of lemon, the coffee
of vanilla, the life, of suppositions
tax theories, of fraud and billionaire lotteries
the dead of the phoenix.
In a Viagra commercial clipped from the greens
of golfers’ lame skill, I was dumbstruck
as fuck by the value of numbskulls:
vapid wealth to water the Mexicans
and children bred to interact with machinery.
Great brown hills with nipples of gold
sat there, wanting, yes, but that was all.
Stunned in a garden of quince
I gave myself to acquiesce:
Persimmons and rotting wasps before a laptop
eating my mind, the fires rose
but the pool was cold. I thought about that.
Near enough but far away
advancing rapidly, smoke blew
a rich man to share
tequila, foie gras, and fuel
my dependency on thinking
analytically about decomposition
when all I shoulda done was loath.
ALCOHOL
I am still a self. Most likely
I’ll remain. It’s halftime
and only the finest quarterback can sense
the Great Trap kept getting me.
Radically employed but poor, the knife
to the neck, I’m like Bring it
because I’m already halfway to the other side:
shopping for hope in the graveyards of Alexandria
a slice of moonlight gleaned from the sphinx’s eye.
Fuck you you libbie false-flag fucking sodomite!
It’s the same shade of sadness wherever I go.
Dry doom and fires here to clear the waste
wipe away the world
and we’re two steps from warlords.
INSURANCE POLICIES
Bottoming in mysteries that are just mysteries
and, beyond that, conditions that are conditions—
in quandaries that are morass
answers that are known but will that is nowhere—
color is an error
or to see it is deceit.
Even the light has fucked me.
Like pirates in the hurricane
the map air, elements
make of the human face
leads deeper to extraordinary whirlpools.
The best I can dream for my daughter
is the life I have led, minus the problems.
The planet is peopling.
And people, just look.
The answers are known and we don’t agree.
FINANCIAL PRODUCTS
Dying of overdosed beauty
of stupid sacrifice and cowardice
I thought myself bland
as a landlord shitting gold
into the bottomless debt of his own creation.
To myself I said
You will eat the flowers
and be thankful.
You will eat medicine and steak.
This isn’t Africa.
Conservanothing red-state death-star dead-eyed parasite!
Take the money and run it to your betters.
That’s the way it was the way it will be.
MONSTER TRUCKS
The world breaks open
like a pumpkin of spirit and pus.
Now, come the Fourth
I join my fat Americans at sunset
waiting for fire to celebrate fascists
and contemplate these creatures beaten down.
Rockets twinkling in the sky
diabetics struggling on the bench
edema-laden marsupials sucking wind in the sulphur
none of them interested
in seeing their interests
drift like the smoke over schools
in which knowledge is traded
for a place in place.
O the parade!
PHARMACEUTICALS
Hunger sucks my morning ribs.
Back when I believed myself
more than a life-filled lump of carbon
searching for Maybachs of cash
delivered to kill
the last Amur leopard, the last of the last
we never ask to answer
like conquistadors, inquisitors, Belgians
I did not have to think
about the next what-might-be.
The moon is asleep and dreaming of sandcastles.
It is already wiping clean
every trace of the culprit
for children who have
long since forgotten their creations.
Decadence, eternal prophecy
so fulfilled it seems we wrote of history.
We are out of fashion
with ourselves and O Apollo
you would be my next ambition
if you weren’t already smart enough to see
we’ve made some bad decisions
and lost a step or two.
Forgive me for not seeing you
first and always. Trends these days
are easy to amaze. You see?
The real gets lost amid the surreality
of men who lead us by no way.
CREDIT
On a flood of lost days I arrive
on an island uncertain of my foreignness
or a monument-megaplex
ready to confess
spinning cancer or a pearl
for apes subsumed in their own noise;
the subduction of generations
consecrated by an epoch graft.
What is a useless citizen
who has reverse-mortgaged
all our basics for a dream of destroying them?
O the look of skin when I was twenty.
A game of baseball on Easter Island
and my love looking pretty in the twilight.
Now I am a block of carbon
making blocks of carbon
if the atmosphere complies.
HORROR
Kakistrocracy: what a word.
It has been heard before
and will be heard again. One day
you’re the heartbroken.
The next you’re friends with the heartbreaker.
The barter continues forever this way.
I have been saying the same thing
for 20 long years
and apologies for apologies
but it is a rapist’s world.
And trapped inside this garden which is rotting
in the sun and surrounded by fire
yellowjackets, wasps around my mind
I feel something like a whore locked
inside a tragedy endlessly retriggered
by the sound of the knock on the door.
I hear the sound of clapping hands and laugh
over the bulldozers, over the earthmovers.
I am surrender.
ENERGY
My goodbye by design
is neverheard and neverending.
My rage is candy to piranhas
with golden jaws and children’s tongues.
Bile is cream. Spit is silver.
I am vicious, I have no shortage
of cruel thoughts. No end of tender
names to call you.
I’m just the only one
who knows he’s dying.
And living in this cage cannot be right.
--9/16
