Keeping Company

While Autumn air pinched us with frost,
I told my cousin of my girlfriend.
She was a different breed:
one on whom I could depend.
She had the love I need.

Where leaves descend to die,
my cousin and I,
shared in tales of women,
with beer-wet lips.

I said how she was loyal.
He said how his was faithful and each of us thought in silence.
Those moments, for which I'm grateful,
crystallize as powdery dew on bark's dark side,
in a mind grey with age.

My girl was too shy to display her love publicly.
It was something too personal to bare before any witness but me.
Less joy I had known, less warmth I could conceive, 'fore her's was shown.
Hands worn from a day's chopping, muscles torn, she massaged the weariness away.
My body barely settled in its' chair before a hot meal was laid there at our table.

His girl was his lap-warmer.
He would fall on his couch from a salesman's day of walking.
Then his boots were gone and her arms encircled his shoulders.
She'd hear his jokes and they'd share a laugh.
He loved to light candles and join her bubble bath.

The wind pressed us, trying to enter our thoughts.
We enjoyed recalled feelings for a while more.
Finally we rejoined everyone.

Ambassador

The men I was sent to, who I'm to pretend I'm a friend to, Arcadians, have become genuinely beloved.
My smile cuts further inward than my split face to a lightless place tears are spilled.
I pat Ambassador Ilthua on the back and nod as he leaves, rod in hand.
He believes a treaty will be signed between his kind and mine for fewer trade and travel restrictions.
Truly, the army is already on its' way.
I swallow and hear the stomp of rows of sandled feet clomping down the street.
300,000 footmen march through the Temal Straights with archers, riders, and chariots besides.
They will accept no surrender. They will see no Arcadian survives.
After lunch I am to be attending a meeting of dignitaries discussing nothing in particular.
I've forgotten my stomach.
In a bejeweled hall I am the only flesh and blood man living and standing surrounded by specters.

Inaction's an Option

I wish they were
ever.

Cycling,
piped water,
volts via wires,
veins of blood,
the very galaxy, vacuum-sealed,
motion/information within a thing
not escaping.

Were a worm to turn its' silk to shield its' flesh while it changed its' ilk and afterwards, a moth emerged, with silent strokes of delicate wings it flew 'til its' white spans were tore by a boy who happened by, so crippled, feeling flying as a pain, the ripped fool felt it should have left its' shell a man, it would harmonize.

Though (a flow / a force) trans the thing, the thing does not trans.

Slouches Publicize Private Wounds

I hide beneath tattoos.
You embarrass me publicly, "get in the car".
The blues are a bruise.
"Why're your nails black?"
Depression's a scar.
I dress like a thief to be as seen as a star.
I mar my face with metal cleaner than my clogged pores.
Vampiric, I lick to taste the iron bolted through my tongue.
I could dress any way but you only think of your young son to worry if he's gay.
Awkward as they may be, at concerts I find my we.

Ineluctable

Green cornfed lake,
clouds arrayed around their sunny lord,
bitably ripe and designated red,
hissing subterranean flame-spring,
useless incomplete assembly.

Not Even Krunk

He told me he hit a rough patch, covering a path so weathered it stretched like bubblegum, all the sweetness chewed out. He continued and said above a flatland wider than middle America was a visage which contorted horribly the happier it was made to be. The only detail of his story I wanted to know, was why?

Hobby

Loaded, locked, safety off a rifle is a grown man's blue safety blanky.
It's hot as a handmade holster or silencer, flat black or matte gray: shiny machined lightweight weaponry.
They're works of art; simple ridges and minimal lines style fine profiles.
The opposite #, armor, gets medieval with dragonscale, good enough for generals but none for all the jarheads.
Tracer round casings tinkle, tumbling through the air, sunlight sparkling sharply.
Blaming the tool thoughtful fingers pulled is a (cop [out) as San Fran's fannie].
No fellow should be zen with them citizen-harming firearms.

Foreswore

Spiderweb veins in the wrinkled old mountain dragged assembled pellets of rain to the lumpy hills and blend with soft white expanses.
The smallest quirky clockwork gear grinds slightly with every spin, in sleep locking teeth, and the many-toothed tiny gears' motion allows the larger gears to function. Every part must be played in circuitous sequence for the pendulum to swing.
An over-filled glass carried by a drunk, the ocean sloshes towards one continent's coast then another's, back and forth, left and right.
The accrued drops' actions cause some variation in the oceans behavior. Choose a minimum position from the froth to stand at and standing there for the same minute in each day's cycle observe the water sometimes reaches and sometimes does not.
Our emotions bleed through our contacts, coloring our moods like celery sucking up blue die in a food-coloring-tinted water glass.
Lightning-strike cracks in the glass from differences in pressure let seepage spread.
Ideas roam as cattle through our minds, foraging for their feed, and what has died in us before now provides their supper.

Hobo during Prohibition

Dis here distillery will sooth ye, drain away the pain plain upon your face, have a taste. A drop of white lightnin has a mighty power to right wrongs. When my boy was runnin a truckload the police unloaded without so much as inspectin his trunk. What they didn't confiscate I drank. Hate to let good booze go. They demanded I show them all my stills, insisted I desist and cease. After they drove off I drank til I felt deceased. Alky-hall-ism's a disease we's always had in my family.
Atleast my boy went in modern days, in cleaner ways. Back in the day, a man may feel cold steel steal his breath with the seal of a sword's edge. Or at the start of things, the cops would lift large stones honed to sharpened spear tips and slip them in past your skin, bust your guts wide open buddy. Ya see, an electric chair don't sound so bad now, do it?
Alright, maybe your life's all gravy and ya don't need this tumbler like this bumbler that I am. Heh, maybe you're a tea towler and can't slam them back like I's kin. But this drink's free, all on me, cause it's shore lonesome without someone sharing this medicinal poison. They call it a sin son, "lips which touch liquor will never touch mine". Well, how in the hell would you know?

No Solutions

Wasn't Jesus love that God above, the greater being, He leaves the righteous recesses of Heaven to lands unleavened, unraised by the yeast of holyness, to raise those below a slight mite closer to his Father's sight with nine inch nail-pierced hands?
Then it is somewhat similar to a parent, devoting his being to raising a child, causing its' virtue to rise in tandem with its' body, maturity keeping up with physical growth.
Yet Jesus had his Father, against who all else is powerless and can not contend against, to reach down and pull him back up. He was like a deep sea diver, needing only to tug on his rope when out of breath to be brought from the depths and returned to a boat's secure deck.
There is no Deliverer for us to call upon.
If you think otherwise, ask yourself, has no woman, in our rape-filled history, called for holy deliverance from her attacker?
Yet you've never heard of a woman angel-saved mid-assault.
Did they say the wrong name? Not call out loud enough? Were they not sufficiently sincere? Was their faith too little? Parents pleading for the lives of their dying, cradled children, did they have bad dharma? Did their kids do evil in a past life? Did they not meditate enough? Are they just distracted by the illusory life of suffering they hold onto? Are we just fools then, the man tortured for intelligence just needs to realize the jumper cables on his testicles aren't real, right? He just needs to ignore that surge of electricity causing his body to spasm, the smell of singed pubes, the cool of the metal, digging and cutting in with a firm grip. Have we not sacrificed enough to some pantheon or spirit, chanted insufficiently, forgotten to burn enough incense or bow enough to carved statutes to be saved from monsoons that carry them away and break them? Were the stars never properly aligned for the old man weak from cancer wishing he could stay around long enough to see his grandchild born? Is it the law of attraction? Did African children have getting raped on their mind all day before the jeep full of soldiers pulled up? Is it for lack of governance? Did we just need a politician to grant his blessing to be healthy forever, free from poverty, and fulfilled? Don't our votes make them gods? How big an army do we need to stop thieving? Our scientists are saviors? Should the boy bleeding out from a stray bullet have studied harder in school so the lead wouldn't pierce his flesh? Did we not give enough of our earnings to laboratories writing down measurements of cow farts to gain the cure to aging? Did the man who ate his wife's poisoned dinner plate not believe enough in the goodness of his fellow man? Was his love too small, the flowers he bought too few?

With nothing above us to appeal to, when we lower ourselves, we may raise others, but we stay low. We have no friend sending angels to roll the stone from our graves. There is no tree under which we'll finally reach enlightenment. Our father wasn't Shiva, finding a loophole in a blessing so our arrow will slay the enemy of heaven. The plan for our life is our enemies, our rulers, they could always use more slaves.

Special

You're the only unique you.
How special your partial match.
Why partial?
Part of your heart must latch and lock with similar individuals by shared components.
You can't synch w/out a shared category with which to compare your measure.
Then what's different, distinct?
Things extinct soon as they're witnessed.
To even know them we must exist on the same plane.
In one dimension we're held in suspension.
If your singular aspect/s can't be conceived what relief is there from a sense of predestination, the feeling we're matching mechanisms?
What's the difference between a thing unobservable and a thing nonexistent?
Semi-quasi-non-sense-able things are proved real by their effects.
We neglect.
We can't help but ignore the unnoticeable.
What's the importance of aspects missed?
They're (if they are) you.

Cardinal Church (North East West South)

Pliant is the mind pickled in media porridge
pulse invitingly do the pores
information pours in
giving smell to the mind in brine
an invisible ephemeral scent dancing ascendant and descendant for a chance at delivering its' pheromone message
the wind winds from speaker to paper in people and screens
data pops mechanical and fleshy, digital and tangible
from Marrakesh to dirigibles and billboards the word spreads
a susceptible receptacle is the mind unfamiliar with proselytizing
prose is another part of a synthetic effigy
statues, idols, and icons are made to glorify beings separated by a degree or more from our perception
'cept folks forgot the reminder-representations created purpose and trusted them with devotion to things greater than man
like a rag read after it stops stalking your famous love interest
so what does this infrastructure resemble the form of?
does it or they consider our nightly attendance at the anchors' service praise or offense?
What do we owe for our works?

Scaring Yourself Serious

In twig-split midnight sky I hear howls.
Pale yellow moon bathes the branches.
Yale campus soon dews and frost creeps across acorn, blade, and sidewalk.
Wind slides, turning shade light and back.
Students flip in layered sheets, chasing sleep in chill illumination.
Their souls jump the mind's track.
Scraps, hatred and sorrow leftover from murdered men.
They've lost their sense of name and when.
Spirits are dense as the swollen fog.
Quasi-voices scratch psyches enveloped in brows now moist.
Quality normality is sent far from foreheads soggy.
Squishy human anatomy feels the pressure.
Worlds, living and dead, press closer to amalgamation.
Wood moans and groans, beds send sleepwalkers to cool witching-hour-air.
Analog ambulation retraces the tread of folk long dead.
Fat faculty actively unearth locals' caskets.
Girls lose their maidenheads to a red-dressed hot mess of a man.
Youths' animus corrupt bodies through oils and allegiance to the oldest foe.
Robed men chant to bless el diablo.
Planets properly aligned, circles in wax and blood inscribed, pacts are made.
Powers of the fallen host toast the health of Anglos ignoring their better angels.
A cult carves shapes for sounds plain English can't produce.
Dug up embalmed puddles struggle to stand.
Slumbering mugs in local pajamas won't taste the morning's orange juice.
The cowled chanters and the powers reached a truce.
Vacant vessels are steered through waxblood circles for infernal use.
I wander, looking for my body, lost 'tween live and dead lands.

The Lie Never Experienced

Shake hands in a shaken cradle while shells crater the burning cities.
Making an armistice requires armed soldiers shooting citizens.
Policemen obey their captains like pirates charmed and sold on intimidation.
Bankers release no nations from debts and mutineers are taught regret.
Bandits cease raiding when they're colder than a disarmed NRA.
Thieves sneak food from farmers' yards, traveling far and working hard.
Every administration kills for a rumor. Where were you during the revolution?
Resentment or acceptance grow; both responses impoverish hearts of soothing lotion.
Love's a balm bombs turn to fuel, burning earnest optimists, would-be pacifists.
Whether or not the Bible's true one brother slew another in man's 2nd generation.
Very many are born straight slayers. Survivors convert to the movement.

Lent

See the crown is blemished,
tarnished, scratched and sullied,
it reflects a littered dirty floor,
has gaps where were stones,
the points are bent,
its' sides cracked,
the old face wearing the symbol knows it holds no power,
and I look 'tween his wrinkles rimmed by white hair
and see no hope glimmering there.

The joker laughs and prances near,
he speaks riddles the king can't hear,
their answers insults to raise noble moods,
lament rules their hearts and cheer can't intrude,
starved as it is,
in this famished land,
where smiths turn panhandlers,
and only coiners keep clean hands.

Ed the Poet

Here are the B-sides. If you think that other shit's bad here's the worst. If you love my stuff here's more! The following are selections of poems and thangs I started to write and gave up on. They're pretty bad which's why I abandoned them. Also, I forgot what I had planned, subjects, rhyme schemes, etc. for them all (and some I'd no plan and thought a line would be potent enough to set me off).



Submissive floor lets me walk all over it and sprinkle crumbs



Grass-rilled hills thrill at the thunderous touch of exploding napalm.
Dirt were there was a farm.
Smoking jelly where there was a farmer.
Their skin and fat flow thin and wax, popping crisply in the chemical mixture.
Bubbles of lymph steam on short blackened blades.
The Vietnamese have seen better days.



Wisdom is poison lived in and tested, wistfully remembered.
Pain's presence a comfort familiar as romantic essence.
We're between mortar and pestle, stirred, mixed, shrinking into tinier easier to dilute pieces.



Apple's a flavor
and strawberry too
versions of taste



In your provinces are piled high
beliefs in many insubstantial lies
the light of electricity dispels no darkness
of the sort thick as fog in minds without sense
Crushed by seven gables
was the shaggy mantis
who Abe's 8th general
shaved and skinned in public.

The exoskeletal clips
piled in chitinous heaps
were listed as raw walls
(industrial matter).



Dry circuit boards, childless mothers, present an article on water boarding, what we're learning at our boarding school, leaving pretensions of

Great Nuncle

Mist is harsh and no comfort.
Bakeries' sugary delicacies aren't delectable enough to toughen my delicate mental state.
Blue plastic cups carry amber liquid which shifts in stomachs then twists through intestines.

Today's forecast is another marker on a road to worsening conditions.
Stolen property clutters the rooms we'll soon abandon, swooning before sleeping.
We're riding on rails, the cardoors are locked, and the conductor laughs maniacally while we approach an unfinished bridge.
A boxcutter mutiny may salvage our dignity.

It's hot. But not from global warming.
We're poor. But not from lack of working.
We're fools with weakened wills.

Zz...z

The open door is an open mouth and I feel it wants to spout me out to roam about,

exhume me south from my dwelling with an expelling exhalation so I don't sprout roots binding my shoes to this plain plane of blue cobbled carpet.

Sitting still feels like a nut about to bust wanderlust is nuts.

What winds me up so my spine whines when sitting emitting an electric neuron impulse to neurotically pace post-haste and quit when exhausted?

Hunger's an energizer but milling isn't filling the quota I dote over very often: how many places I've been in per minute aught to've caught my accountant's attention but not a move takes away tension.

I'm pensive, pent in when standing in an open landing, a clearing with stars for a ceiling isn't selling me fulfilling healing I'm wondering then wandering mentally and physically shifty.

Could be a gift, for he who drifts most lifts his glass in glad toast to more sights than men who keep in the lights.

Exploring isn't trailblazing when someone has been there before or no follower blasts stumps 'til the path's cleared, pebbles laid and smoothed grooveless by sandals, hacked thoroughfares our handles on undiscovered lands fair and inviting.
My motor's cranked permanently so I attempt the accent more energetically than my peers in lower gears.

Inevitable

Every shape in universal scape squashed flat, a y-axis of zero.
Schedule.
Planned in a boardroom.
Help me mount my horse sirrah.
Briefcases canary yellow letters tell the cues.
Bring timber to the saw.
Your blue skin does glow.
Yeah you descend from clouds and nagas lift you up.

My body is as solid as a face in a painting seen from a distance. But up close each splotch of paint is telling.
What's it about?
Release receives boos.
Tricks of the light are subjects of awe.
Aurora Borealis isn't a magician's bunny, sniffing cutely for carrots over the brim of a top hat, smelling mercury. Our eyes are crooked telescopes showing a McDonald's sign where there's a yellow line.



There is only illusion. Lifegoals are shams. The falsities are so many they distract from one another's faults. Cutting through a wall's fabric shows there's nothing solid or better beyond.



Probing at best finds a better prestige. Else the searcher is consumed by lack.

Shining Absolesence

Puckered feet-flesh. Some walks were water-worn smooth, a contact on heels relaxing as brushing dogfur. Chilly. Presumed frogs hop from shrouding grass to pass plop-indicated dives (ripples eradicated in an omnidirectional river). A sogginess catches on his left hand and he lifts it to see shredded brown...leaves? It returns to the current which bore it from a flick.
Along comes the stench of a man who hasn't washed in anything cleaner than clogged sewage debri. He hasn't come to clean up now.
"Sancho you sumbitch don't stare at the bark so. You're making lichens grow."
Our unnamed foot-dipper doesn't reply. The stinker sets down his pack and sits in Sancho's place, leaving his feet in wet-run, until he is Sancho and forgetting his dirty clothes leaves the stench.