a dream of cities built of fire
it was a strange night when we
at the edge of the lake
gazed up at the stars in wonder
and saw them shrouded in unnatural haze
we weren't so far from the city
and downtown loomed in the middle distance
but part of it was broken,
leaning,
belching smoke
it was the strangest thing
the kind of vision a mind cannot rightly ken
the world as you know it rent in twain
flames pouring through the crack
one by one the skyscrapers
and financial centers
lit up
the wind carried the faintest hint of screams
impossibly far away, and tragic
and an angular shape crossed the edges of our sight
travelling at fantastic speed
"what was that?", I asked
not expecting an answer
"I don't know", you said,
"but there's about a million of them, heading this way"
and, sure enough, I looked up at the night sky
and a full third of the stars were moving
closing in on a skyline engulfed
<3
I would like to fall in love,
to wrap legs around legs and twist in the dark
tangled in fine sheets
to send fingertips tapping up the softest hairs
whorls pregnant with spirits
loops cordoning a special static charge
to nestle buzzing, warm, in navels
tracing circles around your finest circumference
you've become so distant
and the calls have lost rhythm
and sometimes the line only rings
rings
rings
when was the last time we stole a kiss beneath streetlights
or umbrellas
or the awning of the corner store at midnight,
lit only by the neon letters of a sign saying "Closed"
though we had never been so open?
there were rose petals in the gutter the other day
the rain was carrying them to the storm drain
floating, orbiting, careening
cutting a path through sewer to ocean
circuitous and bashful
like the early glances, or a furtive touch
I wondered from which rose they had fallen
from which thorned stem they'd been torn so rudely,
left to cup the air and struggle for the surface
suspended on a rainbow shimmer
in the early fog I knelt to gather a few in my palm
to scoop them up, as a mother;
bent my nose to the velvet surface and inhaled
expecting a familiar perfume
the nape of a neck
the breeze after rustling a skirt and playing about fragrant legs
but found only the fresh rot smell of spring's sodden worms
redolent in the nostrils
the incomprehensible solitude of extravehicular limbo
a shroud of stars pulled taut against the frame of existence
oxygen hissing dryly through a hole in the void
in this moment i am cradled in null
faded in lull
vacuum's cold grip clutching the hull
spiderwebs creep silently across the face of the glass shield
threatening intimacy
a sword of damocles dangling in a low-Kelvin medium
you are the frost crystals begging their way into my retinas
you are the clutches of mortality creeping silent into the cavities of my chest
you are the darkness that flits at the peripheries
you are the red light flashing grim in my gauges without sympathy
ones and zeroes
ones and zeroes
ones and zeroes
the low O2, the poor lost youth
the deadly empty, hung uncouth
a suspension of memory, bold and brutish
forcing its way beneath lids, so foolish
a dim throb
a heart's fob
a dead lob
a quiet mob
heat death, sleek and deft
letters left, sentiments unsaid
mere debris at earth's equator
seldom missed; I'll see you later
Cold Comfort, Pt 1.
This is Corinne. She has a purse. She carries an awful lot of things in it, of course, because that is what a purse is for. There are several receipts from shopping trips. More than a couple of them are for food which has long since been consumed and forgotten. There are about 6 different shades of red lipstick (4 of which still have their caps), because one cannot get by with just one or two. That much is obvious to anyone with a pair of hot lips and the youth to properly utilize them. The purse has several pockets inside whose purposes shift with the tides, and it's anyone's guess how she has decided to designate them. One pocket currently overflows with single-serving condiment packets from Chinese restaurants. Duck sauce, soy sauce, sweet and sour sauce. There is a single chopstick in the main compartment, and bits and pieces of its wrapper (all red paper and incomprehensible symbols), but, though Corinne doesn't know it, the chopstick's mate is actually residing under the front passenger seat of her 4 door, mid-90s Jetta. It is one of many things hiding under there. It will be at least another 3 or 4 weeks before the car is cleaned out again. When she takes it to the car wash and deploys the vacuum and gives the vehicle one of those real life-affirming, detail-oriented re-freshenings, she'll find an errant high-heel shoe from her once-favorite pair --that pair having been displaced by another, turquoise and recently thrifted-- and a business card from a suppressed rendezvous whose emergent memory will bring to life in her addled brain a brief moment of concentrated grief, accompanied by that trademark microfrown of hers where the right (and only the right) corner of her mouth dips down, trembling, almost imperceptibly quickly, in a sort of deferent bow before returning to a reluctant and mildly apprehensive baseline.
She has a list in the purse. She wrote it herself one night under the influence of maybe one too many G&Ts or maybe one too many Adderals (hard to recall which) and then she folded it in half and then in half again, and stuck it in one of those uncategorized purse-pockets, and in the months that followed the previously white paper has faded to a dusky dun. The same goes for the writing's ink, which has decayed to a dull gray where once it was a crisp black. The folds of the paper are wearing dangerously thin, and the crucifix of light that shines through presages the fact of the paper's imminent demise; when the list falls into illegible quarters in that same purse pocket Corinne will breathe a small sigh of relief. On the front of the small and increasingly worn sheet is a list of her faults, and on the other side is a list of her good qualities. These lists are very subjective, and their veracity is as dubious as any self-reflection tends to be. Items of note from side one:
* Too self-critical
* Neurotic
* Complacent
* Cannot commit
* Cannot disconnect
There are two scratched iPods at the bottom of the purse (iPods are very dense, and tend to sink). She knows about one of them, but not the other. It's just the same; she never remembers they're in there when there's a long and tedious silence in her routine: the bus, the doctor's lobby, the DMV with its unambiguous "Now Serving #(Someone Who's Not You)" signs; preferring instead to deconstruct her own subconscious or to analyze the events of the day, and particularly those events that didn't quite go right (which in her mind happens to be, as you can imagine, almost all of them), she tends to while away those common pauses in relative silence.
Corinne's great secret is that she has a dream. Of course, everyone her age has a dream, but there's a difference: hers is realistic, and kind of touching for its self-conscious banality. She would like to be kind of happy. Kind of, that's good enough. She thinks she can accomplish this with a few simple steps: find a decent partner. Not exciting, not passionate, not even necessarily wealthy, but decent. Step two is to find some work that she thinks she could manage for a couple decades without committing suicide or being totally unfulfilled. Step three involves some reconciliation with her past, but let's not get into that just yet. Step four is a cat or two. Probably not three or four, though, because, you know. Cat ladies.
Life wasn't how it was supposed to be. Corinne went to Dartmouth for Communications and graduated in '06. The world was supposed to be a big slimy oyster. Do a quick, unpaid, demoralizing internship. Get coffee for people. Become a little disillusioned. Get hired. Pay down some small portion of her mountainous debt. Picket fences, hybrid vehicles, artisan radicchio.
The unpaid internship at the ad firm, though predictably demoralizing, never snuggled into a cocoon to metamorphose into a career, and her fallback --barista-- proved less than lucrative. It was alright, for the time being. It was a very hip coffee shop and she got to trade cultural references with artists (bands that play gigs and photogs who fill real galleries and actual, successful people who happened, surprisingly, to be about exactly as unrich as she in spite of being known about town). She got to write the day's specials on the chalkboard, accompanied by fairly competent illustrations of such as: sandwiches, steamy-hot cups of soup, tall slender bottles of HFCS-free low calorie fruit-flavored fizzy drinks.
She got to know the regulars. Greg, the obligatory weekend writer. The archetype of which everyone knows at least one instance, and who spends every Saturday plopped down with his Macbook tapping out some really trite novel, but who actually turns out to be a really nice guy with a lot of experience and interesting things to say about most topics once you get past the cardigan. Walter, a really old guy whose hands shake so much to begin with that the cup of coffee he shows up for every day at 8:30 sharp cannot possibly be beneficial to his health. He also wears a cardigan, but one feels like he has earned the right to it, possibly by shooting at Nazis across no man's land in his globetrotting and now impossibly distant youth. Jen, who's such a wonderful and attentive woman that her infuriatingly complex and queue-inconsiderate drink orders seem majorly incongruous with the rest of her otherwise tidy and efficient personality. Jojo, the 19 year old punk kid who is either a squatter or merely cultivates the look of one, and yet somehow smells amazing every time he comes in for a dark roast, black, no room for cream. The clickaclack of small polymer wheels rolling over cracks in the sidewalk serves as a kind of percussive herald of his arrival; the tiniest fanfare. Corinne smiles a little bit in spite of herself when she hears the skateboard's approaching racket. She's barely 23 herself but still thinks of Jojo as a kind of precocious child, which is her fond impression of most of the worthwhile individuals she runs into who cannot yet purchase a 6-pack legally.
A Subjective Report On The Trials And Tribulations Of A Winter Bicycle Commute in These Twin Cities Of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.
Note A: Nokian A10s perform admirably on anything which is reasonably plane-like and also not slush.
Note B: Tiny historical glasses become choked with snow almost improbably quickly.
Note C: Strange that, of all the places I've been lost in at night on a bicycle, Victoria north of University is the only place I've been called a "Cracker" in earnest. It was a few kids hanging out in the park at night, playing at boundaries and self-assertion, picking a target who's obviously on his way somewhere and wouldn't care to stop and confront it, but it's remarkable that a word coming from someone half my age who doesn't know anything about me but the way I look can still hurt a little. Also remarkable is the fact that I was born into a situation where a slur directed at myself is trivially rare, rather than a part of daily life and routine. Where it's something I puzzle over for a few miles instead of, say, grappling face-to-face with it in a rough neighborhood bar or in an alley after a show or at any type of establishment trying to barter for goods or services. It is disgusting that a huge portion of the people of this nation have to grow up in a world where superficial derision is commonplace, rather than extraordinary and baffling. Now seems like a good time for myself to give a little thanks to the world for my comfortable place in it, and I might suggest other readers so blessed choose to do the same.
Note D: there were also probably some other things I was gonna write about but fuck 'em
for Ginsberg
time it is for truth and time it is for the flipping open of the manhole covers
and the counting of the rats
who course blindly through the sewers at night to feed on refuse
and who build nests of mcdonalds wrappers
and who shiver at the precipitous drop in the temperatures at night
as men of means and wills suck energy from the very air within our lungs
while the cruel cruel cruel relentless march of endless fashion and mendless passion
coil and twist about the skies above in fervent displays of anemic glory
and tight-skinned drums beat a nervous war march which resonates hot like lover's breath
in the steel cavities of our empty chests
and which pulls with gravitational persuasion the bread
and butter
and electronic guns of home
to cross oceans and to storm deserts and to blow plaster holes in the white walls of mosques
while other men strove and struggled up hills and through thistle
you whistled an honest tune
found strength and peace and some measure of self-awareness
in-between the lonely notes of the clear sine wave's vibrato quivering in the night air
lovely threads twisting from the mouth
wrapping themselves around the hearts of the world
which beat in fettered silence
when torrents of rain turned our world to mud you bravely donned a rubber hat
and tore the handle from a trashcan lid
to sit, cross-legged as the buddha
and you propelled yourself down the slick hill, arms pinwheeling
howling towards some imitation of the velocity of finches
and of diving hawks intent on the red feast of nature
when the earth opened up and swallowed you
there was a violent drop in pressure
as though the wind were kicked from the heaving lungs of the earth
by the steel-toed boot-black toes of censors
shining blinding lights in the eyes, demanding access to the retinas
to follow signals through nerves to brain
but gray matter resists, opaque, bending light only by choice to shine from golden mouth
into fine-lashed lenses at dawn's cold break
show and tell
it's a dog eat dog world
a man eat smog world
a writhing, twisting, long forgotten world
it's a glass landscape refractory
and an artless heartbreak factory
a torn and wind-beaten, laugh to keep from crying, wind up and set it flying environment
a placid lake tinged at the edges with reeds and with partridges
while at the tangential horizon young men fire cartridges
set fire to magazines
enlist in the marines
sail the seven seas
and come back again with souvenirs of frantic unease
with no name for the disease left gnawing at the peripheries of unbidden memories
and let me tell you,
you would not believe what I paid
for this fucking condo
Bones #1
There's a skeleton in Horace's bed. It's very hard to convince anyone else of the fact, but he knows it to be true. He's taken to spending his nights camped out in the living room, on the oak slat floor, to avoid having to commune with the thing. He hasn't been sleeping well. It's the rattling that keeps him up, really, and not the lack of bedroll or mattress.
It's been so long that he can't remember when the bony bastard first came around. The old fellow used to click clack on into the place once in a while before departing to wherever it is a thing like that might go, but his stays have grown longer of late. One year it was just a couple nights around Christmastime. Maybe the skeleton was in town on other business and happened to find Horace's home to be the most vacant. Maybe he just liked the look of the eaves, or the way the siding is gapped just enough to let the spirits through. Maybe the skeleton was too tired to keep moving on to the old motel down the street. Horace lives in ignorance of the thing's motives, ultimately, since he hasn't been able to get the thing to talk. Oh, he's tried. Ask about the weather, local politics, the meaning of life, whatever -- not a peep out of it. Every once in a while the skeleton'd muster up a sort of noncommittal clattering, from lord knows which joints. Horace is frankly uneasy at the mere sight of the thing, and tends when speaking to look not directly at the skeleton but rather just off to the side, or down at his own feet, or out the window on the other wall. There's not much to see inside the room or out, but Horace has a hard time focusing on the gaunt countenance of his visitor. At first it wasn't so bad, but every year now Horace's face and the skeleton's look a little bit more alike, and frankly even a little bit of resemblance is still far too much.
It's most odd how the skeleton only takes the bed. He's never seen in the sparsely equipped kitchen, rustling through the silverware drawer or cleaning the wood stove's ash dump or admiring pots and pans. He never gets up to use the bathroom, though it's hard to see why he'd need to. He's never even walked around the bedroom to more closely admire the old photos framed on the walls, or to wipe the spiderwebs from the neglected corners of the room. Aside from the occasional snake-rattle of dry vertebrae he's never attempted communication with his gracious host. It is that fact which most upsets old Horace, who wracks his mind during every skeleton tenure for something approximating a cause or explanation.
Horace has even gone so far as to sit down at the desk in his office with a sheet of parchment and a full inkwell and make an honest and complete account of his sins; perhaps the guest is some sort of sign, some impetus to atone for wrongdoing. The skeleton does bear some significant resemblance to Scrooge's third ghost, but what good is a spirit who lounges about in bed all day? The thing's never offered to take Horace for a walk around the block, let alone into the future to see his pristine grave, presumably immaculate due to a conspicuous lack of heavy-kneed mourners.
The list that Horace comes up with is not a long one, but size isn't everything. The Civil War accounts for about half of his offenses, for which he hopes God will grant some leniency due to special circumstances. Perhaps the leniency comes in the form of a slothful skeleton, rather than a murderous or otherwise bothersome one. It's no walk in the park getting booted from one's own room into the drafty parlor, but Horace supposes it could be much worse.
The first and most obvious charge against his soul, murder, is written lightly, and the strokes of his pen lack confidence. In fact, it's not completely clear to him whether he committed any acts of bloodshed in the war. Sure, they gave him a rifle, sure, he loaded and fired it many times, but he can't recall ever drawing a true bead on any of the men in gray. He made a good show of it, for the officers, but he was never a crack shot, and even in the midst of battle he'd never managed to get right into the fray. From a couple hundred yards away it was easy to miss. Hell, he didn't even have to try to miss. It just sort of happened. It's certainly possible that one or two of those bullets, though lobbed carelessly, might have bounced off a rock or taken an unpredicted turn in the air to strike the enemy. Crazier things have happened. Just the same, Horace has spent plenty of time flipping through the smudged sketchbook of his own mind, trying and failing to recall an image of a man on the other end of his rifle collapsing to the ground or merely clutching at the gut or arm in response to his musket's report, but his search is fruitless. The first item, "murder", is adorned then with a question mark, and it seems very unlikely to Horace that such an indeterminate guilt could conjure a spectre like his calcified companion.
The second, adultery, is quite a bit more definite. Does a touch of infidelity really merit a ghoul, though? Back when his friends were still alive, Horace had known more than one of them to have dallied in their own life, and to his knowledge he's the first and only to have had a skeleton visited upon his bedsheets. However, if ever some poetic justice were to be served to an adulterer, it seems a dry old sack of bones under the covers would be a fitting punishment for the accused's lustful wanderings. Horace's thoughts drift back to the summer of 1863 and the whirlwind of petticoats, and not even the deathly racket of that damned skeleton twisting and turning in Horace's own warm bed can keep him from drifting off to slumber, his scraggly gray hair dipping into the ink bottle as his head sinks to his chest.
Plummet
a droning sound begins to roar
above the bones that coat the floor
and click and clack to take the form
of shapes horrific and unknown
which stalk the hills and prowl the moors
uprooting cellars, breaking doors
screaming oaths to peasants poor
hateful tones forevermore
to echo long and mournful for
the lives which, lost, determine your
merciless fate before the Lord
while judgement falls like lightning's bolt
to rend the world beneath your foot
It’s there
Johnny whose fear seeps on up through the floorboards
Erin whose fear keeps the gate
Joseph whose fear won't be silenced by mortals
Carl whose fear kept the date
Martha whose fear creeps through shadows and darkness
Annie whose fear shakes the branches and shingles
Jürgen whose fear sleeps in ponds of his dreaming
Herbert whose fear bent the bars and escaped
Billy whose fear won't take no for an answer
Jenny whose fear 'round the corner lies waiting
Amanda whose fear takes the form of a dancer,
crossing the stage in a nauseous display
Pablo whose fear howls from deep in the ocean
Fernando whose fear takes the form of a bull,
raging and bucking and out for his blood
Emmy whose fear she will clutch like a blanket
Bobby whose fear chokes his airways with mud
Sarah the penitent
Donald the son
it dictated their actions and blotted the Sun