roar of love

forget the linear story for a moment
let's convey our yearning
cultivate life like cat owners
housed on hardwood floors covered in litter and ash
you the pisces, swimming through early morning dew
resembling our mothers’ understanding of God
and me at a bar named grill unable to remember your face
your face
a compass always facing pillow
beautiful but vague
with all the permanent properties of cloud

all that’s left is this room above the indoor pool
same stale situation every weekend
stealing elusive plans of escape routes
from hopeless loneliness in the silhouette of each arm’s vein

black dogs sense dinner is coming in nighttime
you walked out a little over an hour ago
I'll forget that I'll never call
she laid back on the bed naked and full like a cat
rubbing between her legs like fucking a star
on the dark side of the endless road
a dog barks and I think "I’ve been too busy" to be myself
in the void where we are lost, catfish smacks between your lips,
we've let our hair grow long
light through the fresh and filthy air filters
onto clocks always searching for an hour
an hour
like this one
ensconced in the rambling story of a man
who reminds us of our fathers hairy back
depicting pocked limbs in purple shadow
and closed eyes full of teary passion

Black Hole

Let it

When you came in the phone was ringing but I would not answer.

I could be sprawled in a deep curve of the corner couch.  Smiling blue lightning beneath a polar ice cap.  Gray as a blanket on the threshold of tatters, and just as directionless.  I'm fine.  No one can reach me, but you may try.

Every day offers fresh evidence of night.  Fires and ashes, water reflecting water, your sticky hair on my caked and bloody pillow and our eyes rolling from their sleeping lids like pearls unhinged.

Ring Ring Ring
Where am I?  You do not know.  I could be anywhere.  Anyway, away.  I don't care.  Taking an elusive plunge into the elbow of the onramp, where forever roaring freeways tow that dry dismal echo of whispers into the shadows of naught. 

You know if you could find me I would let you in.  Show you something different.  The fornications of scream.  The vanity of light.  Messages scrawled in the drinking fountain.  Insensed voice inside my head that belong to you. 

I would tell you about the stars if you could find me.  My language is your desire as the phone gives up.  You call out my name higher, happy hearing the shattered cold glass of your own voice decompressed into vacant breaths of absence.  My answer gives up.  Subtle words, tender and tortured and lost on you before they were never spoken.

When you went out from there you were never here.  I gave no answer you could ever hear.

I feel fine beyond reach.  Fucking alone on a sleeping berth halfway to Mars.  Drawing the abstract anatomy of terror and fright through ghost pads filled with blank windows stained and sundrenched bleachy white.  And anyway there are no stars out tonight.

An Infinity of Intrepid Losses

"Ah, I love the colorful clothes you wear"

Brian Wilson

 

She took me to a movie tonight and I paid.  The rainclouds rushed away as I bore into the lion’s den of city, their black tendrils sweeping back from whence I’d come.  A song in my heart, on the rusty radio, a red Toyota Celica bearing one passenger and no time for reservations.

I arrived late, she arrived later. 

 

YOURSEADREAMS: Hey I heard we have a new president.

DMSQDMN17: I’d rather not talk about it.

YOURSEADREAMS: Not into politics?

DMSQDMN17: I didn’t vote.

YOURSEADREAMS: Why?

DMSQDMN17: Not just because I’m a registered felon… Its just that there are other things dominating my life right now.

YOURSEADREAMS:  My life is fucked up.  I welcome the relief of a good cocksucking contest between baby-killers and ass-kissers

DMSQDMN17: Mean Ass-Killers and Baby-Kissers?

YOURSEADREAMS: Same Diff

 

If someone in the listening heaven had directed puppets to have a conversation comprised entirely of talking about themselves, would they see their words were burning?  Crossing 13^th street the fog rises from appears, or is it smoke?  Nebulous asphyxiation in the infinity of that city of memories.  Your things are my trigger strings.

Dishes, keys, and quill pens.  Holding me here while you fly away, as if you could ever fasten your body to anything.  All sinewy limbs and flung recklessly about the ether of his promises.

 

SlowaDucha: Love is the bastard child of hope, and all those other suitors suggesting anything other than what science is slowly “proving” to be survival over time.

*** Auto-response sent to SLOWADUCHA: Burning words- writing smoke- pain inks its black contours over the canvas-stretched pages of my heart.

SlowaDucha: come back! prolific emo wrench!

 

Spent every last dime on butter.  Entered the dark breast of the theatre just in time to crinkle our popcorn at shoddy previews in progress.  “Where do you want to sit?”
“Let’s just stand here. Pretend we waiting for someone.”

A preview about hope permeating the lives of those living in some shithole African Nation where little boys can grow up to one day be twelve and carry a gun to shoot at their neighbors’ moms.  “How do you feel about Hope?” 

“Don’t get me started,” she said.

 

Staring at the lake.

Wearing your brother’s army-green jacket, and staring at the lake.  Clouds reflect there, and this city, and the sun isn’t really setting, it’s just the Earth spinning.  Those clouds aren’t permanent, but maybe that’s where I’m wrong.  Maybe nothing is permanent except those clouds.  The ever-changing is the one thing that will always stay the same.

        “I didn’t recognize you,” she says.  I shaved.  I have changed but she recognizes me.  Somewhere below the surface, the Man in the Mask is still me.  Still just me staring at the lake.

Staring at the lake.

 

DMSQDMN17: this isn’t happiness.
NOSTLGIA4SMRFS: I'm afraid of everything.  I can't help myself.
DMSQDMN17: Dissaffectation’s the word, have you heard? Have you heard?

NOSTLGIA4SMRFS: There’s nothing up, only down.  Snowy weather and noisy white static smothering my senses

NOSTLGIA4SMRFS: with empty promises

NOSTLGIA4SMRFS: of later nothings

DMSQDMN17:  Make good on disappointment through the redemptive power of art. 

NOSTLGIA4SMRFS: I’m not dissuaded.  Art fails to grip or illumine me.

DMSQDMN17: Today's the day.

NOSTLGIA4SMRFS:  You mean like all the events that will transpire due to my aloofness?

DMSQDMN17: Today I smoked a Victory!

 

I hate watching people eat.  Repulsive!  Our frenzied animal need for replenishment in all its variegated formalities and ritual.  Such a disconnect— our basest penury vs. our highest aspirations.  God Dammit!  Human needs are the only endless thing.

 

Love is for vanishing into the sky

Rumi

 

SuppleCinStringSextus: I am worried about John McCain.

DMsqdMn17: I’m worried about losing my job.

SuppleCinStringSextus: Everybody loses everything all the time

…

DMSQDMN17: Sorry.  What? I was distracted by the rain.

 

Tickets and tears exchanged for drama.  “Well, thanks for yet another evening steeped in merriment and friendship,” I sniffed.  Craving a hug, we do not touch.  Yearning for a past that never was is the most powerful kind of yearning.  Men hold onto ideas.  The world holds onto nothing.  “Goodnight,” she said. 

It’s quiet tonight.  No where to go and too dangerous to get there.

 

Utopia.  From the Greek Ou Topos or quite literally 'No Place.'  This city is filled with fog, and somewhere hidden heaven holds onto our dreams.  How do you not have hope?  Fill the empty spaces with abstract proportions?

A little leeway on the freeway.  Long open road while a New Orlean funeral dirge blares triumphant on the radio.

 

YOURSEADREAMS: Stop making promises you cannot keep

DMSQDMN17: You have to believe in Something, right? 

YOURSEADREAMS: No!  Why? Do you?  When’s the last time you took your mask off?

 

When does the mask come off?  After work?  No! At home there are just more masks.  And happiness eludes me like semi-bucolic sunshine during a progressively dismal series of rainy days in the heart of the outskirts of this city.

 

DMSQDMN17: I keep telling myself if I had more time to sort this or that out… but I never do.

DMSQDMN17: Maybe this is who I am.

 

 I am driving in the wrong direction through this pluvial dance of rain.  Chaotic and by turns dull, droplets of water fall and splatter to their deaths. 

Little liquid losers, too numerous to name or mourn.

 

hiyacutie232: Is there something wrong with that?

dmsqdmn17: It just means nothing is solved.  It means all my problems are being postponed until later.

hiyacutie232: At least you have something to hold on to

dmsqdmn17: like what?

hiyacutie232: Did you have a good day today?

dmsqdmn17: She took me to a movie tonight and I paid.

 

 

Where I Live: Each Exigent and All-Inclusive Empty Moment

All these empty houses in the brown autumn air of the afternoon
and I have the feeling that someone is coming home to all of them
spraying high-fives and hugs and 'How was your days'
in the roar that is common complacency
when you see

Every day is Perfect.  But some days are more perfect than others.

Swirls of yogurty clouds reflect their enamel light 
across the surface of our silverware
I reach for a spoon to eat up or bluff
sniffing back boogers to blow into a hankie later
as you get dressed in the semi-darkness of the closet nook
filled with black and white shoes that remind me of
the happy frowning children next door listening to Iron Maiden
who once blazed a conquistador's junkie trail out of the underbrush
where that deer disapeared at night long ago
those woods that come out by Moore and Governor Insurance
and you have a ticket in your hand
and it is autumn.

I say goodbye, and you say goodbye
and soon you will be listening to a woman talk about safety
and watch the language of the earth's surface
spell out in its curlicues and sprawls indecipherable
like Scottish cries meaning war
so many words forgotten that mean the same thing that no longer exists
like tinted shadows overlapping in the yellow cones of streetlamp light
where I drive my old used car and allow myself to follow the course
of all the red taillights turning slowly away, thinking of
so many empty rooms in this neighborhood, filled with men
who dream of you.
Or someone like you.

At 6PM the church bells ring
tonal odes to the river in this city passing sisters worried about their mother,
passing churches and businesses closing their doors,
passing dirty cabs at airports and brothers who felt "yes, I think we will stay for dessert" only now asking "Did you get enough to eat?"
Animals souls who really care. 
You, staring down with a prairie storm blown across your flat face
remembering your equation of phallic art with Midwestern Cities,
their rolling cold amber waves of grain giving way
to vast and verticle alabaster erections that sink into the shadowy depths of
the world beneath her as she flies away.

Imagine the world "Hill" in a language no longer spoken
and you wake from the alarm clock of a ticket in your hand.
Walk from the car almost to the door, blow my nose and
see every expression as a variant of the thought "goodbye."
All these empty houses filling like coin-slots in the late afternoon sun
a web of sewer pipes and wet dreams connecting all of them
until the steep forest's edge where all the children and deer play,
slip into the blackholes and nether-realms of animal existance
as orange stars come out, winking goodnight and good luck.

I wear our wet lawn on my back
and it cries out to be free,
wouldn't be the first time I
muffled screams into my father's shirt.
Next door a neighbor pulls in and doesn't see me
all his lights come on and I worry that he'll think
something is wrong
seeing me lying there flush and discarded,
the word for a house that once was mine on a night long ago,
but he is thinking about his childhood
and I am watching the airplanes chalk their lines across the last
glimmers of purple twlight.

Who's to blame for ruining a fine work of art?
Who's to blame for forgetting a word when its no longer needed?
This city is filled with emptiness, thousands of windows where thousands of people level screams of thousands of words that mean nothing more than
goodbye.
Each day is perfect, and there is a reason for everything.
But some days are more perfect than others.