Happy

The telescope made love with the atmosphere
and I walked around
with constellations bleeding in my strobe vision.

The fireworks show was delaying traffic on
the freeway,
because they couldn't get enough of you,
and I couldn’t either.

Your paintbrush was like
stars dripping out of organ pipes,
God feathers
sliding down my lower belly

A thousand inappropriate remarks at the conference
made wrong merely because of context,
but I saw them perfect and honest.

You were rolling a volcano cactus
across the M that my legs made...
you made an M just like my name.
That cactus was about to erupt
in the best way possible;
the dams were going to break
returning the borrowed water
back to the canyon.

"BZZZZ",
the lamp
"BZZZZEZ, I SAID"
the streetlight looked like heaven,
and it sounded like it too.

I became a little bit fearful,
as fearful as looking at heaven can be,
but was still fuzzy and inexplicably joyful.

I hurriedly tried to get inside
and into my room
before I underwent judgment,
before the cold or another dimension ate me up

I was in my element,
right at home,
watchamacallit? oh yeah, "comfy,"
as one says.

We shared a meteor brain
when all that was left
were some boring memories of earth.
Yes dear, I was quite happy
living in your sky castle.

Disquiet

An ominous wind was blowing
from the east,
down from the mountain.

It kicked up newspaper
and soda cans
like tumbleweeds.

The air was electric.
It was
daring forks to jump into sockets,
and those perturbed forks of fate were, in turn,
daring the children of the neighborhood
to stand on their roofs, offering
lightning rods to the unforgiving sky.

Around the corner, a stray dog
was eating trash from a can
that had been knocked over by the wind.
Eerie marks of the beast
in common canine
delicatessen.
It was an irrational terror.

A random fear
like the sound of hoofs outside of your bedroom door
at night
or
waking up to find that everything you have ever known
is made out of clay,
for your friends and family had thumbprints
on them
where their faces once were.
They are from the place
where the fingers of their creators
played with them too hard.

The dread farmer collected honey moths to begin eating up
everyone's sense of things like a skin harvest on a mission.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day
termites start at the feet.

It took me ten years to gather the courage to write the next ten lines:
When I was younger
I had a nightmare that the last thing
I would ever hear on this earth
would be a single beep.
I couldn't sleep for days.
I watched TV at night
so I wouldn't sit in the chilling disquiet
waiting for
BEEP
and then nothing ever again.

The storm was coming.

The hills
melted away from a river
that had been collecting acid from
paper mills
for too many hundreds of years.

The hills
melted away from the river
like the spine collects nerve
before it separates from the body
to drag itself across rain soaked pavement.

The dread farmer heard the rooster crow
and began combing the fields
for silence.

Bye bye Junebuggggg

All of the monsters come in the afternoon
during that week or two near end of July
or the start of August where temperatures rise
consistently above one hundred degrees.

All of the monsters come in the afternoon
when the loud fireworks have since come and gone.
The fan counts time by little relief offered
aid of which the clock has none to offer now.

The TV turned into a gaudy prophet
and showered sweat all over my hot sore skin.
It was so bright outside that it was pitch black.
All of the monsters came in the afternoon.

God eyed the sun too long. Burnt his retinas.
He blew the curtains and trees till they sordid wept
wet like an orgasm, or a funeral.
All of the monsters came in the afternoon.

A kid on our block fell off of his bike at
4PM and we never saw him again

Things were shifting, tectonic plates of madness.
Stars were exploding all day long. Nobody
saw them. Unholy mirage made it under
front door. Nitrous gas from the nightmare dentist.

He made me drool scared. I saw him standing there
by the door and he looked like how people are
not supposed to. A body of water
shaking, quaking, mistaking me for the prey,
I could do nothing
so I spit into the vast sea
with tears of epilepsy.

The high court, but honestly, pretty high in court

I felt the pain in the rag tag chain gang.
With my orange "Westside Community Court" vest,
people looked at me like I was the bane of society.
It shows the hilarity of life
that a minor violation, a petty crime,
can draw a line in the sandwith "us and them" intention.
A few of my wayward comrades
asked me what I was there for as we took in the filth
with trash grabbers.
My head blossomed with ideas
of what to tell them.
…
…
…
"Aggravated assault. I've got a lot of hours to fill up,"
I said,
wanting to burst out laughing!,
wanting to pull down the pants of strangers!,
wanting to run wild like a lunatic!,
wanting to pull a practical joke rivaling itself!

If I can make jokes that only I will find humor in,
I think I am alive and well at last.

I kept my face straight, and they nodded. Some explained their crimes.
Some of them:
speeding tickets,
minor violations,
public indecency,
disturbing the peace of our streets.

For the pavement,
it is serene.

It is filled with
cigarette butts empty lighters fliers gum broken glass old newspapers
and severed Christmas light wires.

The demographic is as wide and unpredictable
as the things we find in the muck:
addicts students unknowns lawyers transients politicians teachers liars lovers
maybe even a handful of celebrities
maybe even Joe the plumber.

All of them -
dirty
dirty
dirty
dirty
dirty
just like me.

We shot the shit while we picked up Portland's feces.
We talked about police brutality.
We talked about the basketball game last night.
We talked about how the Christmas light wires were telltale signs of junkies,
using them to tie off
and subsequently shoot up.

A middle aged guy
from eastern Oregon
but living and working on Southeast Foster
bought me breakfast during our break.

He was nearly halfway through his community service hours.
I asked him what his hours were for
and he told me that he got in trouble for talking to a lady.
I was puzzled.

He then told me that a "friendly looking woman",
near 82nd and Johnson Creek was smiling and waving at him,
so he stopped and talked to her.
He said he was charged for attempting to pick up a prostitute,
but all he was doing was talking to her.

"Just talking, only talking. That's crazy isn't it, man? It's so stupid, I mean I got arrested for talking to somebody. It's fucked up, right?"

He was speaking really fast
tripping over his words.

His jowls transformed into
vibrating lunchmeat, and in that one moment,
those billowing curtains of ham made me want to go home and sleep.

I said, "Yes, that is very fucked up," not really wanting to talk about it anymore
although it sounded to me like he was very much trying to do the dirty.

Guilty as charged.

It looked to me like he might beone of the lonelier ones.
Melted and charred
by whatever it was that made
his suffering

solitary and
horny.

From then onthe day blended into itself.
Walking, walking, talking,
walking, walking, raining,
raining, raining, dripping

except for an apology from an ex-lover ripped into a dozen pieces
scattered on the ground in front of me.
I could see the anger invested in
the purposeful tears in the letter.

I carefully, caressingly
picked up each piece like a fossil
with my metal & plastic garbage arm,
putting them together, reading the words.

The rage of destroying memory
made sense to me.
I felt a bond with those who bury the pain and the
insincere apologies with hate shovels,
all the while thinking that those who have wronged us so profoundly
give us nothing to keep our backs straight.
I felt little more than bad blood shared
with the one who cast me into the quarry,
forcing a fleeting smile and thinking that commonality
catches us in the strangest places.

Grdfthr clk

A person becomes changed
whenever they are run like a horse on the track.

Their silence becomes static and obscure.
It is still and surely
time is still out there
frozen.

The whole gang of dangling keys are
hanging out in mono sound
spending too many days working
on becoming a work of fiction
instead of actual creation.

With down character eyes
saying "I was born this way."

When I fall
my heavens will come down...
but not yours.

Certain circles do not spiral inwards.
The sticker on the bike reads:
"Nobody Dies All The Way Alone."

We are merely bicycle wheels with transparent spokes.

We are
connected to and removed
from
one scary burning sun.

If you yell inside of here,
it is going to be so loud
that all of the miserable tyrants
and heroes of history
will awake and undoubtedly curse your name.

Just like the grdfthr clk of God
declaring midnight in a strange world.

So if you can be quiet
please stay with me for a while.

There is plenty of sitting room on the dream train
with its seizure cars running reckless
through my withering vein tracks.

I am trying to have a dialogue with my own head,
but instead,
I accidentally eavesdrop in
on a phone call to a fax machine.

A person re-arranges their consciousness
when they are run into the ground
by this
awful,
confused,
cloudy,
cloudiness.

Care mansion

We put the wallflowers up in our favorite sitting room,
up there on the most treasured walls
where those eyes we collected in the pond
followed our paths on the cedar floor.

Their vibrato of language;
narrowings, widenings
and the soft flit of eyelids
sounding off as curtains in the butterfly house.
We put them with the recorder
just to hear and hold onto the deep tongue
of the color and the story.
That dialect,
on permanent loop in the air raid sirens
of Care Mansion.

Grey was cold steel.
green was rare fire,
but we couldn't talk about the blues or the browns
because they sucked on our hearts.
They spoke without words
enough for themselves.
They were melancholy enough to sober up a man
just so he could drink the sadness up all over again.

North and east can only mouth this dirty west -
these eyes don't need some appendage, some direction.
They belong here where it is safe,
where the tall grass grows indoors
and the gardener blows
glass humming like a generator,
cornstalk sacrifices we made to
the scarecrow god
because we have cared for our hay men
and they were
worn and weary of hay fever.

Their throats were burning
up up up and away
so we put the wallflowers up on the spire
next to the windpipe
looking over the wastelands,
looking over the storm that had passed
and the pink swollen earthworms
washed ashore.

They were wiggling routes to leftover puddles
on the drying asphalt.
There was no way they were gonna make it
so I picked them up one by one
and they were
bottled and tangled
in the jam jar.
The joy fingers made a prayer
and said a reverent word or two;
a nod to the prosperity
of the oligochaeta posterity.
A better tribute to compassion,
they dropped into the stream where the fish ate them all up
because of how much they cared.

AAU Wizard

J.P. would have had us all believe
that Jason Kidd was the best
basketball player,
the most important thing
in a relatively
basketball un-related
human history.

It's all about perception,
that's what they were all getting at
in fate
even if they said different,
Jesus
and
Adolf
and
Theresa
and
Mussolini
and
Ghandi
and
Talaat;

The great players
in the greatest tale,
protagonists and antagonists
on the same bench.

What makes you think
that you are any different?