Chaoskampf

face flush with rage cold as ice on high mountains
ears bloodred as the spit in my mouth
I crawl in silence to a corner of the cave

I think of all I wish to say—
my voice would split the sky as I roared
the lips of a cool breeze would brush against my neck
the corpses of a thousand insects would turn further into dust and winter
the chariot of the god would cast its gentle heat upon the earth on a cloudless day

as I imagine expressing myself, apprehension chills me and I shudder
my nailbitten fingers trace over the stone
as if it were a skull or the body of a lover

some ask why I would shelter in such a dismal place

they say the world awaits me
they claim that all monsters have been slain
and perhaps they even believe their words
but even now I hear the storm of wings
and the ground quakes with the heavy footfalls of clawed feet

innocently they insist that it will be safe to emerge,
but those who do not make their home upon the borders of the map
know nothing of dragons

Heresiarchy

I.     Genesis

Though she has many sisters, the Muse of music is without question the oldest of human gods. From the beginning of our days and in each of our cradles, she has bestowed courage to the afraid and hope to the downtrodden. She is the light in the darkness. There were not ever Gods in heaven, but divinity on the face of the earth is yet alive.

Every human except the most severely debilitated participates in the rapture of song.
Even the deaf can feel purity and harmony vibrating through their very bones.
They experience the presence of the goddess because their body connects to the land and air.

Architecture requires mathematics.
Literature requires language and language has many requirements.
Sculpture depends on knowledge and availability of materials.
Drawing and painting are constrained to creating ephemera until secure shelter is found.
Only the art of music is implicit to the world.

The miracle of music is the heritage of our people. Proper exposure to this sacred phenomenon transmutes the soul into a pillar of the temple of humanity. Wonder and triumph threaten obliteration each time the raw power of the Muse comes rushing from the molten rock far beneath my feet into the poisoned clouds above. Her voice is every wave upon the sea.

II.     Anathema

The immediacy of the perception of music presents a danger to those who seek unity of spirit among the human societies. The vast deviations in personal or cultural taste imply an elemental difference that separate the kind of people who enjoy listening to pop country from everyone else alive. Acknowledging this difference leaves us with the terrifying knowledge that an entirely corrupt and malignant genre can fabricate the illusion of beauty into the minds of millions, or even billions. Further inspection makes it clear that the separation is far deeper than one deplorable genre of music. The divide in humanity’s ability to enjoy art made outside the blessing of a Muse amounts to nothing less than the chasm between the righteous and the wicked.

A disastrously warped perception of one kind of virtue eventually prompts foolish men to create cruel and misshapen idols in celebration of many malevolent ideals. The veneration of blasphemous shrines quickly grinds any mortal spirit to dust- and into the empty space within the body where the gods give us the sacrament of beauty, the hollowed men force the sacrilege of images that claim falsely claim divinity. As soon as a heresiarch becomes strong enough, they condemn their children and lovers to this same monstrous fate.

 Their descendants after one generation have no opportunity to avoid perdition, and the few children blessed with genius and commanded by the gods to create beauty are beaten until they dare not speak again of dreams. After three generations a people can never be saved from their fate and brought back into the light of the gods- any who reject the faith of their elders suffer madness, for what man or woman could live surrounded by demons and not be broken by the knowledge? The uncountable heretics eat and dress and smile and fuck like normal people but they are shadows wearing human skin. They make a mockery of holiness and do not ever know it.

Though historical warlords and their philosophical heirs have succeeded in establishing minor princedoms and empires for a few thousand years, our species under the guidance of the gods has been tribal since time immemorial. Artists (and especially musicians) living and dead are the makeshift high priests of our makeshift tribes, pressed into position by accident and necessity. They serve the gods by continually reminding humanity that beauty and transcendence are birthrights- not accidents.

I was born into a tribe that did not honor the gods,
but I never brought their ways into my heart.
I remember my childhood,
knowing that our ways were flawed
and that our faith rested on a foundation of lies.
I knew that our conception of beauty
was not connected to what I felt when I looked upon the world,
aware even at six years old
that there was something severely wrong with everything
I heard and saw and felt
from those creatures who claimed to be my people.
I remember my father's hands around my neck
because I said too loudly that his rhetoric was idiotic.
His rhetoric was idiotic
and he would have known that
if he was still a man,
but like the rest of the tribe he had been dead inside for years before he hurt me.
I remember suffering for speaking the truth in more tactful ways,
before I realized that the others were shells
left behind by a man or woman that had destroyed their essence
and that those who could not hear the gods
would never be able to hear my voice.
I remember thinking that it would be easier to just give in to authority
and obey all commands-
then I hit myself as hard as I could in the side of the head a few times
as a reminder that no price is too high to pay for freedom.
Inflicting violence upon myself was the only way
that I could avoid the temptation of surrender.
I escaped the evil of my upbringing but I paid for it.
I will forever pay for it.

On all sides we are beset by hordes of enemies.
The barbarian leaders insist that they mean no harm
but immediately turn and order their subjects
to destroy or ignore everything that has been created
through the grace of the Muses.
As I struggle to sleep
I can sometimes hear maddened screaming
beyond the city walls
from their voices in the night.
Some have been dead for decades but their hearts still beat.
I would scream more loudly if I bore such a burden.
The bravest of them reclaim a shadow of the courage
that the Muse gave them in their cradles,
and end their lives
rather than languish in their created Hell
where life cannot offer redemption.
Their suicides are judged harshly
by their relatives and compatriots:
the dead are called cowards
for daring to reclaim their humanity.

If the victorious dead had eyes with which to see,
they would never have allowed their souls to be destroyed in the first place,
but not all have the strength when they are young
to cast a devil out of our own body
if it is allowed to take hold.
Very few people of whatever age can recognize the danger of heresy
until it is too far too late to reverse the damage
they have rendered to their own spirit,
but all know the cure for the disease.
Cold gunmetal pressed upon their eyelid,
they think back to their father's belt
slashing through the air,
the heat and knifesharp pain of it,
and how they stopped fighting their tribe
because they were just scared kids
who wanted to avoid agony and fear.
They were praised by friends and loved ones
when they began to starve their souls,
and without feeling it happen
they were soon dust and ash inside.
They think about the belt again
and the terrible price they paid for comfort
and the love of their parents.
They wonder if they would betray their children
as their parents had once betrayed them.
They ignore the tears coming from their eyes.
They put a little bit of pressure on the trigger
and then more
and the sound of thunder shouts throughout the land.


I feel no pity for anyone
who initially buckled under the strain of anguish.
They sold the the sanctum of the gods
to the darkness in their heart
for a bowl of hot soup,
but that was the deal they chose to make.
All who capitulate to godlessness are cowards
every day that the sun rises on them,
but in righteous suicide they show a flash of purity and courage.
They live as slaves
until the moment they choose to sacrifice the body
that their soul was murdered to protect,
and before their brain stops they are brought forward one last time
into the presence of the goddess and just for them she sings the lullaby
that she sang when they were young.

For their bravery, I honor them.
Hail the victorious dead!

As for the rest of their tribe, let them be cursed.
I shake the dust of my feet at their door.
I curse them with long life.
I curse them with good health.
I curse them with fruitful loins.
May they live forever as they are on this day.

III.     Lerna

I am deemed a pagan because I respect the inspiration of the gods of nature and beauty the way that heretics respect the false gods of their fathers. Once my tribe could be found anywhere with freshwater, but now we are few. A storm rages. The true names of the living and the dead Muses have been lost somewhere, I know not where. Nations crumble and the fabric of society grows threadbare, but my tribe shall not vanish so long as a single person with reverence for beauty draws a breath. We did all that could be done to turn the tide. It was not enough.

IV.     Chthonic

Like her sisters of the other domains,
the Muse of music has always given equal rewards
for evil and for good
for beauty and for ugliness
for love and for hate,
so it is logical that many should choose the clarity of evil
over the tangled web of the gods.

She has never resisted our expressions of freedom,
even when a hindrance could have saved our souls.
She allows heretics to love contemptible music
written in spite of her,
even songs written for money
about high school football or Christmas,
with the same intensity and honesty
that godly people feel toward the soaring monuments
she has inspired through the ages.
I shiver to see a god so careless with power.

Why does she bother to keep us alive, knowing the abominations made from her gifts?
Does she believe she will wither with the last of us, just as she was born with the first?
Could she truly fear death so much?

Autobiography no. 27

On June 29,  2009 I was in New York City
I visited Trinity Church
and I walked through the graveyard
and on the grave of Alexander Hamilton I placed two nickels
for him to pay the boatman with
and I thought it may please him
that the coins bore the face of his enemy.

One thing led to another and
that night I stumbled drunk past the people on the street hawking shirts
of Michael Jackson, who had died a few days before.
After I got to my room I went to sleep and in the morning I got up again.

Autobiography no. 26

In the long hazy moments before the sun rises upon the world,
I sit in a deteriorating chair on the porch behind my house.
Steam rises from my lungs or my coffee cup.
The world is new and I am old.
The dog tosses a ball to the ground four or five feet away from where I sit.
She thinks that I will rise from my chair to throw the ball to her.
Either she is right, or I am.

On the Floodplain

Ideas and places left behind by time illuminate a view into ourselves that many do not ever wish to see.

We looked for the building for more than an hour, driving slowly down a dirt and gravel road always looking at thickets and copses. We drove down County Road 58 and didn’t find what we needed, so we continued on. We turned onto County Road 59 and drove and in one of the yards by the gravel road an angry redfaced redneck with a dozen pigs in his yard hooked his thumbs under the suspenders of his denim overalls and he stared at me and I stared right back at him and a small boy was sitting in the driver’s seat of a derelict full size van. I waved to the boy because I wasn’t thinking. He waved back, as can be expected, but the boy’s relative saw the boy’s friendly gesture in return and the man’s eyes hardened.

As we continued down the road there were no more eventful moments to be shared with the locals. The land was lush and fertile and everywhere crops grew and the weeds grew too and the air was filled with the sound of the redwing blackbirds shouting out their specific vocalizations, phonemes so foreign to the tongue of my mother that I declared my inability to transliterate or find a semblance of meaning within their warbling tones.

We resolved to take one more pass around the County Roads, since the building certainly existed and certainly it was on the road we had been travelling. Suddenly I looked over my left shoulder and said “Darling, slow down. We need to turn around. I think I saw a roof through the trees.”

We turned around and made our way to the copse of trees that I had noticed and I felt my heart begin to race in exultation, because I had found what had been sought.

She said “I can see the roof!” and we parked the car out of the line of sight of the road. When we got out of the car she came over to me. As we saw at a brief distance the entrance to the abandoned school, she looked into my eyes and her pupils were huge although it was a bright day and she kissed me like she really meant it. The doors were invisible or removed or decayed, and in any case no barrier obstructed the entrance.  The stone and metal were still structurally sound but the trees that grew over all things and the ivy climbing walls gave me the sense that I had come upon a holy place, one that nature was retaking, and that I should tread lightly upon this sanctified ground.

 As we approached the steps to the school the sky began to fall with the violent buffeting of wild turkey’s wings. My love became alarmed because she was unused to turkeys waking up from a perch above her head, but soon enough she calmed and we went into the abandoned school. To my everlasting shame, I did not bring anything to clean the site and so I was forced to view cardboard and Doritos wrappers and crumpled bags from McDonald's and the occasional 24 oz. can of beer and it was my lot in life to pretend I did not see them. And I let the trash lie there on the hardwood floors of a schoolhouse abandoned for my life and ten years beyond it. We are judged by what we do not do.

There is much more to say of the building. It still stands. In one room there is a piano in abject disrepair. Some of the floorboards have caved in, but not nearly all. There is a marvelous breezeway outside of the section of the building with the classrooms. Not far from the center of that breezeway you can hear the constant horrifying buzzing of a thousand stinging insects. If you should unwisely trace that sound to a particular open-air room, the buzzing amplifies to unbearable levels and the sense of danger becomes palpable, but even as everywhere the air vibrates in threats of pain my skin was not pierced. I backed slowly away and muttered and shouted curse words under my breath and soon enough the evil flying bastards got back to normal.

There is more to say, but
I do not know how to begin.
It was a lovely day in April. We had just hiked for several miles and that was nice,
and then she remembered that we were near an abandoned building she wanted to visit
and long before we walked out the archway and down the stairs and got back in the car
I was aware that I was in love with her and that my love made no more sense
than a thousand wasps deciding to build a hive in an abandoned schoolhouse.
It did not need to make sense. It just was. In one room the wasps build nests.
In the next I fall in love.

Earlier in the breezeway I found a couple spent shotgun shells and I put them into my pockets out of habit. Half the wheel of the year has turned since that day in Carden Bottoms. I once prided myself on being a man with roots, though I am admittedly a poor one. I did not feel the need to travel and explore, reasoning that my books contained all the knowledge of countries familiar and foreign. But what immeasurable happiness could have been lost if I had not taken a trip that day!

Autobiography no. 25

It has been said that democracy is two wolves and a sheep
deciding what is for dinner
but what no one bothers to mention is that
if three sheep and a wolf decide what is for dinner, the wolf still eats. 

Hallow Ultima

She lay silently on the couch with a blanket over her body.
My eyes touched lightly upon her, as sanguinary as the mosquitoes
that delighted in feasting on her skin on long summer nights as I sat nearby, unbitten.
I intended to protect her or consume her- I had not yet decided which
when her eyelids fluttered open and she guilelessly said
“Why would you want me? You could have any woman in the world.”
I smiled with my teeth bared and replied
“That is a silly question. Because I can have any woman in the world, I wanted you.”

Autobiography no. 24

There were turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving and I took them from the refrigerator
and heaped white and dark meat onto the plate then piled cheese and gravy on top.
As I reached toward the plate to microwave it, my hand slipped
and the Corelle plate fell to the tile and shattered.

I was overwhelmed by fear of punishment and when my mother came to investigate the noise
I blamed my younger brother though he had only been standing nearby talking to me.
We were young but I shall not ever forget the way he looked at me as I accused him
and let him protest in vain, frozen by my injustice,
frozen by my fear of the eventual anger of my father.

I knew then that I was destined to be among the worst of men,
more evil than even Judas Iscariot- for Judas only betrayed a god
but I had betrayed my brother.

Autobiography no. 23

I was eating two pounds of baked beans at the table
and using tortillas instead of bread because we were out of bread
and I was struck with a desire to write about my very short imprisonment
and the only paper I could find was the shopping list I made days before.
I wrote some shit that was boring and predictable, then decided to finish my beans
and drink more beer and resolve to go to the grocery store tomorrow.
Most of the piece was not about being thrown in jail for being crazy-
it was about being angry at my cat for scratching the hell out of my leg for no reason.
At the end of the shining obverse of the grocery list, on the last line of paper, I noted that
there were possible replacements for every item on the list, many of which would be better choices-

just as there were a million replacements for my poem and that every one of them was better than the one I pretended to make before this one. Maybe the precursor is real, scribbled in rough handwriting in blue ink. I do not remember and in any case should not be trusted.

I feel the same way about what I am doing now as I do about shunning the cat who cut into my flesh, but I no longer give a fuck about introspection or grocery shopping. I wonder if there is a limit to how much I like to talk to myself. As everyone knows, that is the only reason I started pretending to be a poet in the first place. The problem with honesty is that it is short and life is long.

I finished the beans and a few tortillas then brushed my teeth and went to bed and I, the child who dreamed of being Heracles or Ajax, will slave away in a kitchen tomorrow but now I am free. Free to talk shit and be mad at the cat and write bad poems and ignore the way that other people feel.

The poem on the back of the shopping list is almost certainly better than this one, which is not skillfully made or particularly readable. I hope the list gets thrown away anyway.

Autobiography no. 22

I notice that I have nightmares only when I am afraid of losing Her.
They are not the twisted bloodied horrors that haunted the sleep of my younger years-
Instead She appears as a vast formless desert where one cannot die of thirst
Or as an ocean scoured of every living thing where one cannot drown,
And always always the sun beating down incarnadine.
Or it may be that I am that ocean.

Autobiography no. 21

I was drinking a decent beer from a local brewery and burning trash in the back yard. It was two in the morning and I was upset about something stupid. An hour after that I felt almost fine again but I could not sleep. The price of tea in China was about 200 yuan per quarter pound.

Bukowski no. 39

Would you trust a man without broken teeth
To teach you the way to eat an olive?

Autobiography no. 20

For some reason lost to time I had decided to not learn the tables’ numbers
and I gave them names instead.
I was bussing tables because I was qualified
and I was young enough then that the work didn’t numb my hands
or radiate pain from my wrists to my fingertips.

She was named after Octavian’s daughter (I am sure this was incidental)
and I was in love with her.
I am being very imprecise. I thought she had beautiful hair and she was nice to me.

One afternoon she arrived at work and instead of the normal artificiality that she clad herself in
she did not even fake a smile at me and there were the remnants of tears in her eyes
and I asked her what the matter was, though I am terrible at helping people who are upset.

She explained that her young daughter was sick, nothing serious, but that she wished
she could be at home with the child instead of slaving away underneath the lights and lies
that characterized our profession.

I had been drinking for most of the day, but sparingly, and as I walked around, cleaning tables
and making sure the placement of saltshakers was perfect, I watched her.
Goddamn did she know how to move around a room.

She made a lot more money than I did, because my work was easy.
She was good at her job and at smiling but after working with her for a year
I was conscious that I knew almost nothing about her and I preferred it that way.

As night drew closer upon us we had not been very busy
and she had  this table of teenagers that were only getting fifteen dollars worth of appetizers and taking up space
and the name of their table was Eurydice because the next table was named Orpheus
and just beyond Orpheus was the bar. I thought all of this was very clever when I named the tables in the first place.

I went to the back and thought about it a little and then drank some vodka out of an apple juice bottle and went onto the floor and waited for the teenagers to leave and I swooped in about fifteen seconds after they departed and crumpled up a twenty and tossed it on the ground and as she came up, sighing and saying “Ugh, at least they’re gone now, kids never tip.” I cleaned the table quickly and she took a couple of things but didn’t get in my way. She told me thank you and walked away from the table and I watched her walk away and I was glad that I watched her walk away. After a few lecherous moments I called her name and she turned around. I made a show of picking the bill up and tossing it in the wire basket on the table and I picked the basket up and handed it to her and she lit up like a Christmas tree.

I told myself I just wouldn’t go to the bar after work that day and that that would justify dropping the bill for a woman I barely knew and that made a hell of a lot more money than I did but after everyone was gone and I mopped the floors up and said “I’ll see you tomorrow morning boss” and clocked out, of course I went right to the bar anyway.

Bukowski no. 38

it is easy enough to ignore the occasional crawling sensation
that intermittently presents itself as a feature of having skin or madness,
but after finding one small tick meandering around your ankle
try and ignore it then
just try

Alba

The middle school had three major sections:
a central administrative area and library and cafeteria,
and two wings (composed of two long hallways)
one for sixth graders and one for fifth graders.
There was a small parking lot in front of the school for administrators or visitors
near the American flag and basketball hoops and four-square paint
and a larger parking lot behind the building for teachers and school buses.

The fifth grade wing was further south than that of the sixth grade
and both wings ran in L shapes
The grades were structured into five Teams each.
Teams 1 2 and 3 were in the north-south wing,
and teams 4 and 5 were in the wing that ran east to west.
I suppose the system made sense when they designed it
and in any case my community was always said to have Good Schools.
Only later in life did I learn that the phrase “Good Schools” was code
for not having any black or brown people
but this is not a story about racism.

The fourth team was mine I was on “5-4”
which is just what I’d say if anyone taller than me asked me what team I was on
and then they’d send me down the well-waxed tile hall to the section I belonged in.

As you walked up our hall the first door on the right was Mrs. P’s room and she was a hell of an old lady who taught us how to diagram sentences and if you ever didn’t want to do much work that day you could always just mention Bill Clinton’s name and settle back in your chair for her frothing condemnations of the man himself. We read Sounder that year and for my project I baked a cake from scratch “just like it would have been done back then” except I used electric egg beaters and the oven was electric too and my family didn’t make the flour ourselves or the butter or the baking soda but I did collect the eggs myself, big beautiful brown eggs still warm from one of the hundred birds that the 4-H Club gave my family in exchange for something weird like promising to pick the three best looking ones and show them at the county fair. I never knew how to cook and still don’t but I think the buttercream frosting was very tasty so maybe my mother made it or the cake but she might have made me make the cake.

As you walked past Mrs. P’s door you immediately found Mr. K’s door and he taught about history like it was for children but I suppose the others were children and he always had a bit of a short beard and I liked him and I think he liked me too because he would let me write essays on Thucydides instead of filling out front-and-back worksheets about why Andrew Jackson was an asshole, or maybe they were about the National Bank. I liked Mr. K a lot because he treated me like I was a person and he let me go to the Gifted and Talented room a lot when I was bored and I liked GT because they had this fun game where you simulated living on a resource scarce island and all you had to do to play the game practically all the time was to solve a bunch of easy logic puzzles and do algebra problems and or answer tests about marine biology because you had to do a certain amount of projects per hour. The thing I liked best in the game was fishing because you could build a shelter close to a source of food, water, and fuel, but it was sometimes fun to try to be a hunter instead. If you played long enough you could be rescued but if you beat the game you weren’t allowed to play it anymore... so my characters always decided life was hopeless after a certain amount of time and went off in the wilderness to starve because they never read Robinson Crusoe.

Several paces from Mr. K’s door was Mrs. Pa’s door and she taught mathematics and didn’t like when I read books in class even if they were by Descartes and she had rosy cheeks like she was sick or an alcoholic but she taught math well enough to satisfy the standards of America.

On the other side of the hall from the other three doors was Mrs. K’s door. She taught science and she was a member of the 4-H Club so I guess I kind of got the chickens from her.

In front of the school like I said there were four-square courts painted up and basketball goals and they had these long crossbars, long as a road is wide and two inches thick, one at the entrance to the asphalt recreational court and one at the exit, twenty-four-foot long beams that swung and fastened to thick black bars and they were painted yellow and they put them there so they could lock the place up and also keep us safe during recess just in case and when the bars were not locked they were difficult to move even for me and they did not sway much with the wind.

It was Sunday. February Second of 1997 was the day and I was ten years old, and I’ll never forget it, because Mrs. K was the nicest lady and I lamented once that I never got to have a birthday celebration in school because my birthday was in the summer before school started and I didn’t want to bother my mother because she had enough to worry about but Mrs. K said she would make some cupcakes on Wednesday for my half birthday. I told her that Wednesday was named for Odin and she frowned a little, in a way that she thought I would not see. She was a Baptist and didn’t like the ancient myths much or didn’t seem to but she never told me to not read The Edda in her class when I was bored. Of course I wasn’t at the school because it was a Sunday and we hadn’t had the conversation about the cupcakes on a Sunday but it was Sunday. The sun was passing through the sky as was its custom and it was in everyone’s eyes. Someone forgot to lock up the crossbar painted yellow as the long beams of the sun and she must have left church and went to school to make sure of something or get some extra work done and since the school was closed she was going into the front parking lot because it was closer to the building  and she drove her car right into the crossbar and it either cut her head off or basically cut her head off and the next day at school the counselors offered us soft drinks and they kept asking if we needed to talk and they took the crossbars down for a little while so that they were not straight like sunrays and instead they made them deeper, slatted with bars as if to prefigure a prison so that no one could Not See the bar again if it wasn’t locked up and I always wondered about the man who didn’t lock the bar because she left behind three children and she was kind and it cut her head clean off or could have and how could he sleep and what about the metalworkers who made the new crossguards were they just making money or did they know she was still dead her funeral was on my halfbirthday I don’t know who cleaned up the glass but it wasn’t there on Monday and before you knew it we had a new science teacher and Mrs. H was really really pretty but what did that matter? I did not know. I did not know if Mrs. K was pretty but everyone said it about our new teacher but I think that’s just what people say about women before they have something else nice to say. She taught the other children as much as any teacher would have and she never told me that I couldn’t read in class and when they put her name over the door it did not bother me too much because the classroom was hers.

If you were to drive by the school today the posts for tethering the metal barriers are closer to the public road than they were in my time. They are locked by the entrances far from where the children play after lunch or the visitors park their cars. They are still slatted now and not narrow to save money on metal.

She was a good woman and got her head cut off, or close enough.
She died quickly and alone on a cold day.

why was she even there on Sunday
why was she even a teacher her husband made money
why did they offer us soft drinks
why did they keep asking us to talk when there was nothing to say

I planted a white oak and I gave it her name
And it grew there for years on my family’s land
Then we didn’t have the money so we had to leave.

Three months back I drove by to show my love
The bayou and forests and place I grew up
But when we arrived I did not recognize a thing.

The strangers who live there now cut down the trees, every last one,
The three sweetgums near the road and the sassafras by the driveway
and the hundred pines that marked the edge of the goat field

They had painted the house a different color
And behind that new house you couldn’t see a thing
They had cut down it all
The giant black oak with the tire swing
The ancient elm that was half dead from lightning
The plum and all the hickory and all the sycamore and
All of it all of it all.

Many times my heart has been broken
But it can never again break as it did
There in a car sitting beside my love
Looking out at those twenty acres of desolation.

I had always daydreamed of somehow getting money
And buying the land back but now it is no longer there.

Your tree should have been twenty feet high by now
And it should have lived for two hundred years.
I am so sorry, Cindy. I will plant you another
As soon as I find a place where no one can cut it down.

Bukowski no. 37

I thought that her eyes were very lovely,
like the color of malachite before it was worn smooth with time or water.
We were sitting on a ragged leather couch
that might have been expensive once,
and she had done her eye makeup
in that dramatic variation of Cleopatra Philopator’s style
that had inexplicably been resurrected back into fashion,
and her shirt was tight on her shoulders and cleaved low beneath the neck
as is always in fashion.

I sat there barely making eye contact.
Although I had been invited I had no idea why I was there.
I guess she was looking for the same thing as anyone else.
I did not ask her what she or other people wanted.
She sloppily poured gin and it was sliding down her throat and her wrist
and she was talking about some cruel things that someone had said about her
and because her hand was on my knee
I realized that she expected me to listen to her
so I sat there and she said

“She said I was an alcoholic, and that I don’t have my shit together, and that I was a fucking whore, and that I was terrible at my job!”
-and then she went on and on but it was the same sort of complaint only at greater length  and I noticed that her carpet was very clean but that her baseboards were in a state of terrible disrepair perhaps brought on by the scratching of domestic animals, and then she stopped talking.

I looked at her and she looked at me unhappily so I shook my head slowly
and it seemed like she expected me to say something so I said
“I thought you made really good money at work”
which was probably the right thing to say
because five minutes later her mouth was on my cock.
I had a hell of a good time for a little while but of course then she went to sleep
and she did not have any books
and I was not tired so I started drinking the rest of the gin she’d left out
and after I found the unopened bottle of Beefeater under the bathroom sink
I drank that too.

An Anxiety

unable to do something so simple as drive
but the car needed to be driven
and I was preternaturally aware of the asphalt
and the lines that separated me from others
and then the first Mack truck drove past

and oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck keep the wheel straight don’t speed don’t go too fast around this corner you can’t have a panic attack right now you can’t throw up right now you can’t stop breathing right now you can’t slap yourself in the face right now you are moving fifty five miles per hour and this car weighs three thousand pounds you have to keep breathing Datta Dayadhvam Damyata Datta Datta Datta datta datta now you can stop the car now you can go vomit in the nearby dumpster now you can hit yourself now you can hold your breath now you can start breathing again datta. Datta. Datta. Thirty more minutes in the car to go home. Datta. Datta.

Now you can shake on the floor. Now you can take your clothes off and slap yourself in the face as hard as you need to until you stop crying because there is nothing left of you but the headache. Datta. Datta. Now you can try to cover your shift tonight. You will not get a raise this month but there is always September. Three seconds of breathing in, five seconds of breathing out. Don’t rock back and forth so much.

Of course after that I got very drunk so that I would not be so ashamed of myself.
Tomorrow I will pretend that this never happened and I will get in the car and go to work.

Autobiography no. 19

THOCK
THOCK
THOCK

Chips of Spanish oak jumped into my hair
and I wished for a pair of safety glasses.
I became too conscious that my shoes were no protection
from the blade of the axe that glinted silver in the afternoon light,
but I swung again because I was confident I could fell the tree safely
and my form was well practiced and calculated to cause no injury
and anyway my love wanted a more clear view from the kitchen window
that the limbless leafless creature was unconscionably obstructing.
Suddenly as I prepared to swing again a wraith appeared at the corner of my vision
and I slowed my hand as the damn white dog jumped up at me and licked at my heels.

Before I began I had imprisoned her on the deck, poorly,
and so she escaped and nearly killed herself
on the back end of a swinging four pound hunk of metal.
I would have put her inside the house but she’s so goddamn dirty from the rains
and I would have chained her up outside but I don’t have a chain or a leash long enough
and now that I am inside drinking a beer
I am not sure I wanted to cut that tree down today.

After She Fell Asleep

I grabbed a couple beers (light, domestic, cheap for whoever paid for them)
from her mini-fridge.
I had made my mind up to run an edit on this piece I scribbled
down onto napkins a few months ago,
when I was still sleeping on the floor
and she was sleeping on it too
just because it was the floor I was sleeping on
and not because she was trying to become the Buddha.

I suppose if I took long enough tonight, I could recreate the spirit of that lost piece,
but it was in prose. It did not tell the truth. It only reported what had happened,
sedate as a newspaper headline and as full of lies.
I can recall a fact from when I was aged five
but I can scarcely remember the myriad deceptions of yesteryear
of which I am heir or author.

I consider for a moment going to find it-
I do not mean the paper.

I
Could
wake her from her comfortable sleep
and drag her to this carpeted floor
where I anxiously tap my foot until the cat hits my foot for being interesting
and kick the cat out of the room and lay with her

And afterward she
Could
look over at a bookshelf and say
“What is that?”
pointing at a serrated wire long as a garrote,
with hoops at the ends for you to put
Your fingers or lengths of wood into, depending on what size branch
You need to fell to its mother, Earth.

It would rest on a shelf in front of a few minor works of Marquez,
a few feet from where a man would lay his head in this room,
if a man slept in this room.
I reply,
“It is called a fingersaw”

And she would suddenly become embarrassed
at the scant light cast upon her wrists her shoulders her breasts her collarbones,
though just minutes before she was a goddess come again to the world,
and pull a sheet up to her neck as though she were not so beautiful and rare
that her very existence caused jealousy in flower petals and cold-clear alpine streams.

She would ask,
“Why do you have a fingersaw?”

And I would laugh and laugh,
My sweat and her sweat snaking in slow trails down my naked body,
As I square my shoulders and smile down at her
And reply
“Why do you think?”

Bukowski no. 36

I got this tremendous vase or statue
For a good price.
Hell if I know what it is made out of
But it is heavy.

It is different to the vanity of being alive.
I paid for this,
I think.
Anyway off in the hallway a woman steps upon linoleum
Or maybe it is carpet. I am not there. Where I am
The rum never runs out and I work for no one
But one man,
And he is a generous master
And I always pay my landlord and anyone else who needs money
Because my master pays me on time.
Though I rely on someone else to live and though I am not a man
She asks if I am happy and I tell her yes.

Autobiography no. 18

-Won’t you have pity sir? You know you are not Virgil. -Quiet, woman. The world does not need your voice upon it. I bought several books from what is called a salvage store, but what is in fact a store for the poor to find things like saucepans and bluejeans and mason jars and old televisions and books about wizards and books by Charles Goddamn Dickens. The Holy Bible is free.

Autobiography no. 17

The day she told him I existed,
while I was working
he showed up on her doorstep
with two cards from a drugstore
inside of two envelopes.

He gave her a keychain
and a figurine of a classic film villain
and a bouquet of roses and there were
one dozen white roses and one dozen red roses
and two dozen pink roses
and he brought her a clear glass vase
for all of them to live in.

She put her keys on the keychain
and the figurine next to her toothpaste
and I moved the flowers into the vase
already on her windowsill.

The petals opened slowly
and I kissed her every morning as the sun rose.
I changed the water
until the leaves and petals all had withered.

After a few days the leaves curled in upon themselves
And they fell and drifted listlessly in the mouth of the vase.
Soon four dozen dreams bloomed, desolate
with the dull brown tinge of decay,
and when the very last bulb opened up
I threw the flowers away.

Autobiography no. 16

Five years before they put her into the ground
we were sitting together and drinking on the steps of a campus dormitory
that neither of us lived in.
She asked what I wanted out of life and I began talking animatedly
about my literary pretensions, and how I wouldn’t always write
bad short stories like I had written those last months.
After a few minutes passed
the wind suddenly covered my face in her cigarette’s smoke.
She was smiling at me and shaking her head.
The oak leaves were skittering across the pavement
and the air was cool with autumn
and the moon was bright and nearly full
and with the moon’s voice she said
“If you dream it, it is a dream.”

In Search of an Honorable Death

you cannot slide a dull steak knife or razorblade
across the soft white hollow of your wrists
or let oil and gunmetal be the last heavy tastes upon your tongue

you cannot leap from cliffs to trees and rock below
or dive from the passenger seat of a car
hurtling down the sunbaked interstate
to roll your skin over the concrete and heat

rope or water?
poison or fire?
a simple thing will never do

you can let your teeth rot and fall lurching with heart disease
you can smoke cigarettes or have a few glasses of wine with dinner
every day and wait for your organs to fail
you can care about what happens to animals or gods or humanity
and watch the lines of worry sprawl from your ankle to your neck

or you can not give too much of a damn
love a few people truly
smile at your woman in the morning
never accomplish much
write one good poem
(not this one or one like it)
and no one will wear black at your funeral

Autobiography no. 15

 For whatever reason
I was whispering lies to myself.
She asked what I was muttering so I told her
“They say that the largest organism is the redwood
but it is actually the planet.”

I looked at her, really looked at her,
and I realized that I did not mean anything I said,
that barely anything was alive and that trees were no exception,
that I would burn several large forests
or the whole fucking continent of Asia
if the alternative was losing her.

I did not want to let her know that so I kissed her.
An hour later
she vomited noodles all over my carpet
which I did not expect to happen.

Autobiography no. 14

The first woman I ever loved gave me
Bukowski, Regina Spektor, Joni Mitchell,
and a hollow ball of cells that died in a doctor’s office
somewhere, unmourned.

Though it has been many years I see her
each time a pretty girl with curly hair walks by.
I do not know where she is now
but I hope she never has to see me.

Bukowski no. 35

Some mornings the alarm goes off and you are sure

that it is for someone else but you realize it goes on too long

so you push all the gin off your heart and bring silence to the world

for nine long minutes.

You don’t remember why you drank so much

or any of the reasons that explain why you are shackled to pain

but after a few minutes of being awake

you remember everything that has ever happened to you

so as soon as you can you start drinking again.

Autobiography no. 13

When I was a younger man I believed I was as evil as anyone,
and when they shelled the Buddhas of Bamiyan into oblivion
I thought I could have a home in a dark brotherhood like the Taliban.
I looked around and there was nothing
ancient or timeless or gigantic to crush beneath my hands
and the only beautiful thing I could find to destroy
was myself
so that is what I did.

Bukowski no. 34

“That’s the problem,”
I said,
“You get everything figured out and think life has rules like algebra does,
but you never really know what you’re talking about.
You’re not even that fucking good at algebra.”

She came in through the bedroom door
with her shadow like the obscene curves that every woman has if you look too long,
and she asked me a question
while she stood there looking like a goddess or a piece of fruit or a grave
and she said,
“Sorry. What were you saying? I couldn’t hear.”

I told her that it did not matter, and that was the only time I ever told her the truth.
Before she opened my door, I did not know she was still in my house.

I do not know why I talk to myself so much,
But it would be harder to explain my motivation for talking to her.

Junilla

I.

My father, Lucius Aelius Sejanus, had been born of the equestrian class
and rose to honor as commander of the Praetorian Guard.
When I was still learning to walk and dress myself,
the princeps civitatis, Tiberius Julius Caesar,
left the city for an island in the sea
far from where his fears grew fangs.
The legacy and power of his adopted father
he entrusted to the loyal hands of my father.
But one fell day, Tiberius returned.

II.

Nurse handed me a crude clay cup and bade me drink,
though a sip was as bitter as the touch of thorns upon a thigh.
I made a face at the taste but she told me
that a girl of nine years needed courage.
I am eight but in the village Nurse grew up in they count the years differently.
I always obey and so I gradually drank the cup and the dregs were sweet.

My mouth felt thick and when the soldiers came for me
the sunlight felt as though it would blind or drown me
and they were all so very tall.
One giant slowly brushed his palm against the pommel of his gladius
and said “Come child, we go to meet your father.”

-But days ago my father died a traitor’s death
and he was thrown down the Gemonian Stairs.

I walked or rode or was carried,
I do not remember, but suddenly
I saw the Forum and the silhouette of the Capitoline Hill.

A man waited and he was dressed as all the others
but his eyes were black as crusts of bread left too long in a fiery oven
and wide as Diana’s waxing moon.
He walked to me, looked down, shook his head,
then roughly grasped my arm.

The stairs were still red from sunlight or my father and he dragged me up the steps
and before I knew it we were no longer climbing.
He pulled me to a nearby cart covered in straw
and said “I am so sorry, child.”
and he looked sorry for a moment
then his face twisted into a mask and he said
“A virgin may not be put to death.
It is the law of our Father, Rome.”
He put a cord around my neck and threw me on the cart
and tore my clothes where they were fastened to my waist
and though I had been given courage I was afraid and felt the pain of flames.

As he hurts me his eyes glance downward and he does not look sorry anymore.
I cry enough to flood the Tiber’s banks.
I beg and plead but the gods do not hear.
His hands are around my throat and I notice that he is smiling.

Autobiography no. 12

-You stick with her and you’ll be rich, ya dig? Not “I got a two car garage” rich, but the Fuck You kind of rich that means you go to other countries on vacation, not to your momma’s house. Kind of rich that eats steak every night if they want, ‘cept your girl is a vegetarian so I guess you ain’t gone get that.

-Parnell, I asked him, what is the fucking point of having money if I don’t get to eat rare red meat whenever I want?

-Hell I don’t know. Get a different woman then. Get fifty of them. Shit, you’re a young man and you got a roof over your head, food in the cabinet, money on that bank card for beer and anything else you wanna buy. I don’t wanna hear no more about this “I don’t wanna live” bullshit, man. Go cheat on your woman with the first pretty girl you meet at a bar. Go buy a ball of coke and get back to me about all that suicide bullshit. There’s plenty to live for. It ain’t gonna be happiness but it’ll feel good.

I finished the beer I’d bought and he finished one of the beers I bought him
and I gave him five bucks for breakfast and said goodbye
I walked to the door of the building my condo was in and swiped an electronic key at the door to make a light turn from red to green as a lock disengaged then rode an elevator up nine floors
and a few hundred feet away from where I laid my head on a pillow with clean sheets around me
he went to sleep in one of the trees in MacArthur Park the same as he did every night.
I slept in a bed then. I don’t anymore.

Autobiography no. 11

She was furious and I remember rolling my eyes a little
Because she was just a woman
And she hit her fists against my chest
And cut her fingernails against my eyelashes as I stood there.

She kept saying saying absurd things like
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
And I didn’t think it was the right time to say
“Woman, it was not my job to tell you that you were in love with a junkie”

So I let her keep hitting me because she wasn’t very strong
And she left him and then was with him again
And I didn’t give a fuck either way.

Autobiography no. 10

She quoted a musical at me, saying
“You’ll never share in love until you love yourself.”

and I thought to myself
that I never told her that I wanted to be loved,
that all I ever mentioned was my despair and impotent desire to die
and that I liked Russian writers better than those of other nations.
I said “That is an interesting point.”

After I got back to my apartment and unlocked the door
and went to my room and laid down on the carpeted floor
where I keep my pillow and the quilt my mother made me,
I thought more about the miniature conversation we had.
Many people I know give advice that would be solid as stone
if only they were not speaking to a madman.
In retrospect it seemed an almost cruel thing for her to say,
though I know she did not mean to draw blood.
Of course I agreed with her. She was telling the truth,
but she didn’t seem to know that the coin had another side.
If you don’t love yourself you know that no one will ever love you
but you have to wake up every day anyway
so that is what I am going to do tomorrow.

Bukowski no. 33

She came around the corner shuddering and I asked what the matter was. All of her skin that I could see was flushed with the heat of blood and she clenched her jaw a little and said “People are so disgusting!” Half-joking, I asked “Did someone touch you?” She half-laughed then suddenly the revulsion came back into her face and she said “No. It’s just the way that they look at me.” I told her that she was very pretty and that sometimes people cannot help but stare. She shrugged and walked away. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen but never loved. I felt certain that I looked at her the same way that the others did but most times when she felt my eyes on her she’d turn and smile and speak to me. I watched her walk away and she looked damn good even with her hair pulled up. I was glad that I was not in love with her. Beauty is easily muddied by emotions and I preferred her as she appeared in my daydreams. Perhaps her hair turned to serpents in the sunlight. Perhaps she would decide to eat me alive on a bright spring morning. Perhaps I will see her tomorrow. I am not sure if she exists.

Blight

We know from Hesiod that Zeus fashioned mankind for the Age of Bronze out of the ash tree
and that these warlike people lived on until the Flood of Deucalion covered mountains.
In the Year of a Lord 2016,
Chalara and the Emerald Ash Borer may make those sacred trees extinct
or practically so, much as the elms disappeared from Europe decades ago
excepting ten thousand here or there—
though once they were planted atop the graves of heroes and withered only
when they grew tall enough to gaze upon the desolate ruin of Troy,
and there were millions more planted by the breath of the winds
and Ptelea the Hamadryad was not yet the pitiable husk she would become.

She had all the ass that the gods ever gave a woman
but it was a damned shame whenever her mind came out her mouth.
Eavesdropping on her conversations was perilous,
as she would quickly alter the arc of thought from television programs
to the things she genuinely believed about the world.
She was a woman who did not know the meaning of the word “inevitable”
and had opinions that crashed like a tornado through a forest,
but I was often distracted by the rhinestone fleurs-de-lis
fastened onto the back pockets of her jeans so I got along with her well enough
except the day she was singing pop country music loudly
and I spat out the most offensive insult I know,
telling her that she was lucky she was pretty.

It’s a hell of a world where creatures like she or I get to eat and drink and fuck
while the nymphs are quietly dying, all because some asshole a hundred years ago
brought the spores or eggs of poison carelessly across an ocean.

In the country of my birth,
our trees do not have souls.
We have the beetles anyway.

Autobiography no. 9

I was going to write a poem but instead
I knocked a mason jar of water onto my notebook.

Autobiography no. 8

Since I was a boy I was skilled with mathematics.
I was no prodigy but I was capable of factoring certain complex polynomials
or solving chess problems
and my mother would take me to the grocery store with her
because I was faster than a calculator.

Often people have expected me to find success,
reasoning that my talents would lead me to a comfortable life,
but once my love said to me “I am going to have a baby”
and I noticed she did not say “We”
and then I asked when the child would be born
and after that I never wanted to do math again.

Autobiography no. 7

“Why are you here?”
I said.

Two thousand and sixty years ago, Gaius Julius Caesar the Dictator was killed
with knives as he made his way to the floor of the Senate.

I don’t know if she knew or cared about any of that
but it was two in the morning and she kept pouring Scotch into my glass
although her restaurant had been closed for four hours
while we sat on barstools with most of the lights blanked out.

She asked why I was there and I looked at her cheekbones
and the sharp curve of her teeth as she smiled
and I told her I was around because no one had kicked me out yet.

“Why are you here?”
I said.

At certain moments she would breathe sharply as if possessed by an idea
or a windstorm and I thought that I should try to kiss her,
but I waited long enough for her to drive away.

Autobiography no. 6

She was over forty-five but still was sporting
the white-trash red hair dye that you find on teenagers or strippers.
I won’t say that I hated her for that, but it didn’t help matters.

I was throwing pizza dough at this restaurant in Little Rock that failed after six months
and she was always trying to break my balls
and she was as dumb as anyone I ever met only she was louder.

Day after day she kept bothering me and eventually I snapped at her
and she pursed her lips together and said,
“Well, it sounds like somebody needs to get laid.”

I laughed and stood up as tall as I was and squared my shoulders.
I looked down at her and grinned out of the left side of my mouth and said
“Where do you think your daughter was Thursday?”

Autobiography no. 5

I liked the shape of your hips
and the kindness you showed to animals.
I didn’t like the way you dyed your hair
but that was none of my business.

In some ways I have seen you in every woman
but your voice was like none of theirs.
Your vowels were harsh and clipped,
or long like the trail of goosebumps climbing up your back
as I grasped a handful of your hair and pulled your mouth to mine.

I might have fallen in love with you
if I could have believed that you were not real.

Autobiography no. 4

There have been moments when I forget myself
and I seem as human as the face in my mirror,
but just as suddenly the sensation passes
while you pull a plastic clasp from your hair
as if you were releasing the dam on a river.
You are too young for me
but while your hair dances down your shoulders
you are older than the canopy of rainforests,
more ancient and formidable than a statue
carved into the heart of a mountain.

After you were satisfied and I was tired
you asked me if I would write a poem about your body in the lamplight
and I told you that I would, although it was a lie.
Even this is not about you.

Autobiography no. 3

You blinked the hypnotic sting of sleep away,
your eyes the difference between lanterns and torches,
and spoke a sentence you would not remember.
After falling back into a dream your breasts spilled over the blanket
and I watched your soft skin tighten with the cold
for a few long moments
and then I put the blanket over your chest
and went to make myself breakfast. 

Autobiography no. 2

Sayram Lake is the most beautiful lake in the world
and it is nestled near the mountains of Tian Shan
in the conquered land of Mongolia close to the Kazakh border,
where they bow to the flags of Chinese Empire though once they were masters.

It is an enormous lake and the largest by far at such an altitude,
but speaking of its volume or comparative size disguises the beauty of Sayram.

As with every natural formation that fills us with wonder and awe,
stories have long been told of Sayram.

It is said that once the lake was a vast dry chasm cut deep into a valley beneath the peaks.
A young woman of surpassing loveliness and virtue loved a young man of her village
and with the logic of myth he loved her in return,
but a Devil stole the young woman away and imprisoned her in a cottage in the mountains.
She managed to escape and when she felt the Devil coming close behind her
with his breath blistering her neck and his hands close to grasping her hair
she wept and leapt into the open maw of the earth and fell upon the rocks
and afterward for agonizing days her mortal lover searched for her
until he found her footprints and gazed down to see her body floating upon her tears
and his bitter pain cried out and was added to hers
as he stepped to his death to fall to his rest beside her
and today the waters of Sayram are a monument to their despair and loss.

Autobiography no. 1

I was constantly playing games with language and history.
I knew that the people I spoke with did not understand,
so I would make dozens of references to Ovid in a night
and watch them blink away confusion so many times.

It is not exactly that I was contemptuous of them,
although I held them in slight regard.
In truth I do not know why my life was as it was.
Certainly I resented anyone who was friendly to me
and suspected them to be either idiotic or untrustworthy.

While I slept I was the only one alive
but each morning robbed me of that purity
and forced me to conjure up the world anew.

I was conscious that I was constantly creating reality,
that although it was convenient that I should encounter a woman
who looked liked Titian was painting her as she moved through her day
I must acknowledge the obvious artificiality of her existence.

There was a time when I thought she was what I had been searching for,
but she never displayed cruelty or fits of anger or wanton disregard
and because she had no flaws I knew that she could not be the Muse.

Bukowski no. 32

The moon was the size of my narcissism
and that would have impressed me a little,
but I knew the moon would go away if I waited.

I ate fish yesterday and I drank some black coffee.
I fell in love with a woman again and I did not mean to do this,
but that is the deal you make when you stare at Artemis.

The Woman Dies in This One

At this point in life, I was young and had not yet murdered anyone
and I was working security at this shitty dive bar
that served burgers until three in the morning.

She was the kind of woman you wanted just because she was an actress.
She did something else for a living and she lied more than anyone I ever met,
but in a good way.

It’s a terrible thing about being a man
but when you find a woman
who goes out of her way to make you smile
even when she is torn apart by danger
and sadness and poverty and neglect,
it makes you want her even if you wouldn’t have wanted her before.

She came in and sighed heavily and slid onto a barstool.
I didn’t know much about her except her name and face
and the way she blushed when I looked too long
and the way she twisted her chapstick
and the way that her life was drawn
to a tragedy like gravity,

She drank for a couple hours and no one bothered her and she left
and when she passed by me she gave me a hug goodbye
and pushed herself against me for longer than she had to
and her hands were burning me like the touch of people always did.
At this moment I would have smelled her hair if I could smell
but instead I was stuck there feeling those familiar needles on my skin.
I stopped breathing til she left, but she did not notice or mind.
She was beautiful and kind
and a few years later her husband pulled a trigger three times.
In a different universe she has four children
and they plant apple and plum trees and love everything,
but that is not the world that will have birds and flowers this spring.

Bukowski no. 31

The only lonely nights are the ones where
my friends are asleep. Or maybe they died.
Normal desires are somewhat circumscribed
But you don’t have to be a honeybee
To eat the hive.

Bukowski no. 30

I liked the way that she looked because she was wearing glasses.
I enjoyed her face and the metaphor but I knew I was taking it too far.
I looked at lenses and saw facets of understanding,
I looked at frames and saw the construction of a view of the world.
I knew she saw me through them and so when she smiled at me
I knew that her vision had been corrected, that without the glasses
I was a blurred monstrosity to her
and just because it was true I thought she believed it
so it made me uncomfortable when she wore contacts.

I thought I had run out of olives but I found another jar deep on a shelf
and I ate a few dozen
and the ones I didn’t eat stared at me from behind the glass,
but there’s got to be more to their lives than that.

Carmen 53

I told her that I had scurvy twice.
She laughed at me and told me not to lie.
She was just a waitress, not even mine,
But she smiled at me and sure that mattered
Some of the time.

I slowly fell into the frost and rime
But the air wasn’t cold so that thought died.
She moved across the floor smooth as her jeans.
Each time her legs moved I did not feel a thing.

Maybe that’s all lies, but how could I tell
While I leered at her thighs as they moved twice?
I thought she was a lie but what is a lie
When the one that feels it is barely alive?

Her legs stretched half the way up to heaven
But I knew I had to show up to work at eleven.

Bukowski no. 29

I don’t want to boil water. I am afraid I will forget it
although you are not likely to appear at my door.
If I burn up the pan I’ll have to use the other one
and I do not like the handle on it so I just won’t boil water
and then I’ll be hungry tomorrow too.

I could have made coffee or rice but the moon was almost full
and I felt it like I was shaving with a dull knife
and anyway I never turned the burner on
so the water sat there on the stove.

I thought about nights of us doing cocaine
and the way you’d crawl right in through my bedroom window
as if you weren’t twenty two years old
and I remember all the nights you never came
and the moonlight beats upon my windowpane.

Carmen 52

Her eyes were green but not like mine,
not hopeless or hateful or steeped in disillusion,
just bloodshot ‘cause she did not sleep enough
and green for a much older reason.

I thought she could see the tears in my eyes
but she couldn’t or maybe she thought they were just part of being alive.
I thought I had tears in my eyes
but she was beautiful so she made my past pain dry.

I was so much taller and I looked down at her
like I was allowed to just ‘cause I was taller.
I try to forget about it but a wolf ain’t gonna stop tryin to swallow the moon.

I’m lucky I didn’t kiss her but I wanted to and she could see it.
I’m always joking with her and quoting Scorsese but she doesn’t know the lines
so she thinks I’m a genius and I let her think it.

Her eyes looked up at mine
and instead of kissing her eyes
I went home and cried and poured straight vodka on mine.

Her eyes looked up at mine
so tomorrow I’m gonna stare at the floor the whole time.

Carmen 51

I got so mean. I know how.

I hope I'll burn to death and I won't have to remember this.

I did not think I would get so mean but I look at a mirror and i see.

I could kill anyone for anything. The only tragic thing is that I do not.
There is no tragedy. Hamlet is dead and so am I and so are you.

Diary of a Madman

You should get out of your blankets.
You should kill yourself.
You should stretch.
You should do twenty pushups.
You should kill yourself.
You should brush your teeth.
You should take a shower.
You should kill yourself.
You should boil some noodles.
You should eat them.
You should get dressed.
You should kill yourself.
You should go to work.
You should work hard.
You should have two cups of coffee.
You should tell the gorgeous woman at work how you feel.
You should remember she has a boyfriend.
You should work hard.
You should clock out.
You should walk past the bar.
You should brush your teeth.
You should take your clothes off and lay down.
You should kill yourself.
You should kill yourself.
You should go to sleep.
You should do this all again tomorrow.

It is not like hearing voices, because it is only my voice. The same voice that tells me that I hate Wuthering Heights, the same voice that says “Damn that ass is fat!”, the same voice that I use to quote Cicero or Gogol and to talk to my mother and to say hello to dogs or newborn babies. I no longer believe anything I tell myself. I have proved many times that I should not be trusted. I wish I would stop talking.

A History of Madness

No one else in the world was breathing and there was no light
and only the sound of a second-hand window air conditioner
or the clang of a furnace turning on or off.
Depersonalization is one of the benefits of solitude as you approach sleep.
Only in the darkness can you forget who you are
and pretend that you will not wake the next day to the tedium of life.

almost you disappear but there is still something left,
the taste of a cigarette
the sound a hat did not make as it fell to the ground
skipping a day like a rock on a lake in the rain

but you will always wake up
and you will never be free

________________________

The hickory nut fell down as green as the wind isn’t,
taking four dried leaves and another nut (entirely closed) down to closely cut grass.

The leaves fluttered slowly in the air
as if they were dancing
and knew they would never dance again.

The two fallen seeds began a conversation.
The younger was livid and screaming “My mother loves me and you took me from her!”
The other smiled where his skin was beginning to split and said
“My brother, she was always going to drop you.
Perhaps you are too young to fall. Maybe you will rot here on the ground,
Maybe the monsters with long teeth and thick tails will spirit you away
and bury you in a secret place, only to eat you when the world is cold.

But this is how we become a tree someday and many of us die,
and maybe it will be you because I made you fall too early
and for that I am sorry
although you would probably have died anyway.”

The younger thought about this for a moment and suddenly a wizened old man
raked them both up and the four leaves too and put them all on the burnpile.

___________________________________________

Her hair was black and her lips were red
and she drank a different beer than I was drinking.

We were at the Mexican restaurant close to my apartment
where Happy Hour started at about one in the afternoon,
and at the table she sat across from me and I looked at her
and she was beautiful
and her boyfriend was there too and he was loudly talking
about something but I was not listening
because I had a tall beer the color of amber, without an orange,
and I could pay for it.

After a little while I had to take a piss so I wordlessly stood
and walked toward the bathroom.
Before you walked right or left for a door they had these miniature saloon doors,
slatted like window shutters, and I opened them and heard footsteps
so I stood to the side
and then her tongue was in my mouth and she was pushing me against the wall
and before I knew it I could breathe.

I said “Are you trying to get me killed?” and she kissed me again
and my desire was careless so I lifted her off the ground
and her arms were around my neck and she was a flood I could not stop
and I tasted the light beer she was drinking and her lips were red
and then there was a sound

so I put her down and quickly went into the bathroom and locked the door
and said “Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ”
although I never believed in Him
and took a piss and washed my hands and by the time I got to the table
she was sitting there by her boyfriend
so I looked over at Mariano and raised my finger so he would know
that I needed another beer.


_______________________________________

I could hear the wine pouring through the phone into her glass
and she said

“I want a baby. Did you know babies can learn in the womb?
Isn’t that beautiful? They would learn so much from me
and if it didn’t turn out well
I could just give it up for adoption.”

And I laughed in the terrible way that I know and later
she said “I don’t even think you can be sweet to a woman,”
and I said “I can be,”
and she asked me how, so I told her
that I am half-decent at giving massages
and don’t mind giving my money away
and that I know how to brush hair and make breakfast and get water
and hold someone when their cramps start up
and I told her I wasn’t really such a bad guy as I pretended to be
and then I started crying or maybe I was crying all along.

Later she explained to me that she did not want to date me or fuck me
and all I could think to say was “Man, I never asked you.”

________________________________________________

A History of Madness 5 is spurious.

_____________________________________

The present controls the accuracy of memory
more than the past ever could.

Often, in some shitty sports bar or cup of coffee
I have tried to summon the ghosts that kiss me to sleep at night.
Who knows what lies I have whispered to those shadows and plumes of steam?

I find that I feel guilty for any injustice that could be imagined,
even if it existed in fiction. The mere names of countries can fill me with dread,
knowing that at any moment my brain will begin a demonic litany:
Years, numbers of the slain, names of villages that are no longer villages.
And why should I bear the hate of mankind
upon my shoulders as if they were broad enough to hold it all?

I do not mean to suggest that I identify with the victims or their families.
I do not believe that I am capable of any such emotions,
but many times I have worn the bloody boots of monsters as I drift through sleep.

When I created the world I never meant for any of this to happen.

________________________________________

I stood on a slab of concrete
killing ants.

When I was a younger man I knew their Latin name,
I could define their mandibles and thoraxes
but now I crush them
by the hundred beneath my heel.

I believe, though I do not know why,
that their dying sends a chemical signal to the others.
I see them shy away from a fallen friend,
but what does an ant know of death
and why should it be feared?

There were two carrying a corpse larger than they were,
the others scurried past them but they walked crab-legged
across the concrete slab without getting anywhere.
I chose one and smashed him right through the brain.
The other struggled, unaware that his comrade had died—
he carried the worm first one way and then the other,
he tangled it in the fallen leaves, he abandoned it
but none of the other hundreds took up that burden.
He waited for about fourteen seconds then walked along the line the other ants had made.

I watched him, my eyes focused on his black armor,
and I thought of her
so small against my chest,
her black hair flowing all around
while the devil told me his daughter’s name.

I let the ant go into the hive after he tore up a piece of a butterfly
and placed it in his jaws before beginning the long walk home.
I will kill him tomorrow.

_____________________________

Once I was proud of the things I had learned.
Any moment could remind me of another—
Ivan Grozny murdering his son could be evoked
by drinking vodka on a cold and rainy day,
the phantasms of summer evening were more terrible still
and arose of their own accord,
and any woman could be brought to life
through the touch of a different woman.

Memory is not an insurmountable thing,
but most times we are not willing
to make enough fire to entirely burn our library.
We are left with husks:
proper nouns
the shading of green in a lover’s eyes
the words she says when she is asleep.

Nearly everything is dying again.
I have been waiting for winter all year
but it does not satisfy me.

I loved a woman once and she lives on
like the pine trees that are planted
to hide a forest that has just been cut down.

______________________________________

The actions of man are as easily explained as the vagaries of the weather.
Any account of a moment or a life is necessarily colored
by the one who is aching out their remembrance so that we may understand.
Who benefits from these exchanges?
People are either capable of telling the truth or they are not.
We must believe that all the souls of humanity are not base liars,
But who among us has not recalled in detail a conversation that never took place
or a childhood summer spent on the shores of a lake that cannot be found on a map?
It may be that time is changing behind us, and that all our stories were once true.

_________________________________________

I said,
“I went looking for you in the winesinks and in the bars with sawdust floors—
You were not there.”

I said,
“I went looking for you in the whorehouses,
where the women have the names of gemstones
but their eyes are dull and dead—
You were not there.”

I said,
“I went looking for you in the jailhouse and the gutters,
where I kicked over a hundred bums looking for a tattoo as evil as yours,
a blade carved deep with runes that told of devouring hate and desire—
You were not there.”

When I found you floating by the river
your lips were purple like the toga of a god
and the back of your head where the bullet made its exit
dripped slow crimson tears into the water
and you told me many things and afterward I let you drift away.

___________________________________________

After sleeping on the floor for three months
I realized that I had not learned a thing.
I slept or did not sleep. Women arrived
Or they did not, it was the same to me.

I did not understand then that a man lost in a forest is lost in the past, although a forest was outside my window. Even now I do not understand.

__________________________________________

Like any other god I am sustained by belief.
For many years I have labored to reduce the faith of my cult,
but they stubbornly persist.

Always I long for death but their prayers keep me here.
I am cruel to them, inconsiderate beyond reproach,
but they insist on forgiving me.

Though I have never told them,
I feel they are aware that their love keeps me alive
and so nothing I do can dissuade them.

They do not even know that when I die I will destroy the universe.
They are doing it just for me.

finis

A History of Madness 12, Final

Like any other god I am sustained by belief.
For many years I have labored to reduce the faith of my cult,
but they stubbornly persist.

Always I long for death but their prayers keep me here.
I am cruel to them, inconsiderate beyond reproach,
but they insist on forgiving me.

Though I have never told them,
I feel they are aware that their love keeps me alive
and so nothing I do can dissuade them.

They do not even know that when I die I will destroy the universe.
They are doing it just for me.

finis

Klara

He was an honorable man so he readily understood
that it should fall on me to tell my mother that she had breast cancer
and that she must prepare for immediate surgery
and that this surgery was unlikely to save her life.
I felt the tears flowing down my face and was ashamed at my weakness.

Though I had only seventeen years I found the words to thank him.
I bowed to him as I left his office and went into the waiting room after wiping my eyes.
I managed to smile at my dear mother and as we walked into the street
I gave her my arm as I had done for years,
though now she seemed heavier than in my youth.

It was a cold day in January and we walked through the door.
It was cold inside but not so frigid as the street had been.
It was always cold inside.
We spent what little we could afford on fuel and stole the rest of the heat
from the walls of our neighbors or the sun.
I led her to the sofa and closed the door and turned the lock
and I heard the metallic thump of the bolt or my heart.
I walked to her and sat down and said,

“Mother, give me your hands. Let me hold them. Mother you are dying. The doctor says that it is breast cancer and that it is very advanced. We have arranged a surgery in three days time. Most of the tissue must be removed but there is a chance that you will live. He says that you cannot possibly survive without the surgery and that even with it the chances are small.”

She closed her grey blue eyes as if she were praying and she swayed a little
and as I reached out to support her, her eyelids flew open suddenly.
She looked at me with pity and said,

“My boy, I am so sorry. God calls for us all but it is cruel that you should have to tell me these things. Still, you are the head of the family now, and it was your duty. We will have the surgery and God’s will shall be done. I will pray to Saint Peregrine. I beg that you go to the church and ask the priest to pray for my soul.”

How could a soul made of steel be in danger of hellfire?
I walked the cobblestones with bitterness and rage as my companions.
I wanted to scream and smash my fists into the windows of buildings
but when I came upon the church I quietly opened the doors
and stepped forward until I was standing beneath the altar.
I delivered my dreadful message to the priest
when he arrived in his nightcap with wine still in his eyes
and then made my way back home.

She was asleep in her bed, piled high with thin blankets.
Near her bed, hanging on the wall, was a watercolor I had painted when I was a boy.

She had put it on the wall then too and when my father asked why, she told him
that I was going to grow up to be a great artist,
so he sneered at her and bloodied her lip with the back of his hand
and then beat me with his wide belt for being vain and lazy.

She always believed in me and told me that I must honor my father
but that did not mean that I must always believe him.
After his death she took my watercolor out of some secret place
and put it on the wall again.

The surgery was as successful as it could have been but it was too late.

The cancer had already invaded
other parts of her body. She became so weak that she could not climb the stairs,
even with my arm to aid her, so we took what little money we had and moved our residence
outside of the city. She was brave and pious and accepted her fate readily but I did not.
I made my way through the city streets and came to his office. I took my hat off and went inside.

The woman who handled the doctor’s appointments looked at me with expectation
but I was resolved to wait silently and I sat in a chair with my hat in my hands.
He was too kind a man to smile at me. Instead he nodded and brought me into his study.
I had never seen it before. The fireplace was comfortably warm and he had many books.
He was said to be a wealthy man but his desk was simple and without ornamentation.
He asked if I would sit so I sank into one of the chairs in front of his desk.
He sat beside me and asked why I had come.

All through my journey to his door I convinced myself I would be stoic and emotionless,
simply ask him for a consultation and inform him of the facts,
and to inquire if there existed some way to alleviate the pain that flooded over her.

I do not remember what I said but I know that I shamed myself again and cried.
The doctor said all hope was not lost,
that an experimental chemical treatment could perhaps slow the progression of the disease.
He warned that it was not certain to make anything better and that the pain would be unearthly.
A long moment later, he mentioned in a whisper that the treatments were quite expensive.
I told him that I would give him all I owned and even the clothes I wore,
my future inheritance, and any other thing he could ask for if he would only try to save her.

From that day on he came to our apartment, early in the morning or late at night,
even on the day which his religion holds sacred he came to us.
He arrived when he could and soaked bandages in the chemical
and pressed them into her wounds and though she was brave and strong
she sometimes screamed and cried.

We moved her bed to the kitchen, since it was the warmest room.
He came every day without fail and continued the treatments though
her condition constantly deteriorated. He was always optimistic when speaking with her.
Only when I walked with him outside did he tell the truth.
He put his wide-brimmed hat atop his head and told me that I should prepare for the worst.

Her throat became paralyzed and she could not eat.
She was terribly thin even before she lost her speech
but soon it seemed that she was made of only bones.
Her breath rattled while she slept.
She would wake as if from a dream with a mad fury in her eyes
and try to raise her body up.
In her eyes you could see that she was desperately trying to speak.
Her every muscle shook weakly as she made these attempts,
her skin was paper with water flowing through it.

She could not form a word or hold a pen but I knew she would want a Christmas tree.
I took my axe and walked miles deep into the forest and found a proper tree.
I hacked it into ribbons then found another tree and mutilated it in the same way.
The third tree I chopped down properly and I drug it to our ground floor apartment
and my sisters and I decorated it while she slept.

Days later she died with the shadow of the tree looming over us
and I sat beside her and sketched her face as I had known it. Before it was so very thin.

The doctor came, I know not why. Perhaps my sisters sent for him.
He signed the death certificate and we laid her body to rest beside my father
the next day. My sisters and the others walked away but I stood by the grave.
Sometimes I believe I still stand beside it.

A few days after her burial I approached the doctor and told him
that I wished to settle my family’s financial obligations.
He named a sum that was impossibly minute:
less than a man would spend on potatoes in a month.
I stared at the floor, composed myself, then took his hand and told him
that my gratitude to him would endure forever.

Hagiography

I kept finding myself entranced. I heard her singing once
but she was embarrassed at my eagerness and never sang again.
She would walk past me and delicately place her hand above my hip
so that her fingernail grazed against my floating rib
while I inhaled her hair and smelled nothing
as she walked by and finished the ordeal of the day.
She would look at me and my tongue turned to ash.
She would look at me until I remembered the hunger of a starving man,
and then she would still look at me but when she smiled she meant it.

I bought a white orchid and a box of chocolates
with a vaguely European name emblazoned on the front.
I took brown card-stock paper and with my black pen I wrote

“In Saint Valentine we find the curious case of a man and legacy remembered by a world that never knew his voice and may not have ever known his face. Even now men confuse him with his precursors or descendants, thinking that he died pierced with arrows and many sorrows, or for romantic cause. But can they be blamed for this? Valentinus of Rome has never been well attested. We find in his holiday the ideas and repetitions of Lupercalia, that much is true. But we also see throughout time that in each of the stolen, timeworn, pagan festivals there was an aspect of a god who came among us, who separated from our lives earthly toil and worry. We never find specifics of the life of Valentinus, his death, or even why he should be a saint. And yet he is a saint. If humanity can venerate someone for centuries without mentioning why, I hope you like your chocolates.”

I folded the paper and felt its thickness give way under my fingertips.
I wrote her name on the outside and put the card on top of the box.

I thought about it for a little while and decided
that her man would probably not appreciate my daydreams.
I doubted that she would appreciate them, either,
so I took the card off of the chocolates
and let the labors of foreign chocolatiers melt into my tongue
piece by piece

with punctuation marks of whiskey
drowning out the sunset.

I did not know what to do with the card,
but I burned the orchid as soon as I felt drunk enough to make a flame.