Listen Down

Three frogs croaking.
It's the silvery
light that knocks me down
and the croaking
that helps me up.
A voice rolling to a stop.
Made of dots
with lots of space in between.
A voice that came to party.
Meanwhile things get silver
in the silvery light.

Death Dreams Of

Death dances in his underwear.
What kind of underwear
does Death wear?
Little blue sailboats all over.
Death likes to travel,
Death likes the sea.
Death dances outdoors in the breeze
under a big peach tree.
It's the kind of jig
you might do if you found out
it's your turn to toss meat
into the tiger pit
before putting the twinkly star
at the top of the tree
beside your long lost sister.

Do You Like To Party?

Mop buckets, these profusions
of desire. Scum swilled
into the soapy water,
grimy rind along linoleum.
You thought it was you
but it wasn't.
Pronouns haze out.
Plastic timers ding.
Birds are glimpsed
from far away,
black butter knives,
the knocking silo in the wind.
You read in the paper
the other day that a crow
never forgets a face
and now you read how
you couldn't help
but wish a crow
would remember you,
follow you home from school
as you silently count off
talking points, party plans.
This is front page news,
smudgy pages rising to the sky.

Rusty, Injunction II

The dogs will run after you,

friends.

Barking

echoing as into

a cold barrel.

Confetti can

disguise

the tatters.

Take this gift.

It's isn't

much.

It isn't

drifting

but a slow surge

pulled by the moon.

Rusty, Injunction

Fust, unus'd, friends.

Diminish yet
be kind.

Scale model replicas
are yours

to keep.

Take this catalog
with you.

It is a gift,

friends;
do not be afraid.

The dogs will run after you.

You Can Thank Me Later

I didn't think it was any big deal,
how I didn't come to your party
yet ate all your treats.
Not like this:
earthworms that move super fast.
How creepy is that?
If those worms would've
come to your party
you could be upset,
and probably frightened,
too, but they didn't,
probably because I ate
all your cookies,
all your cupcakes with pink icing.
Now super fast worms are after me
and just what do you think they'll do
when they're done with all
one hundred forty pounds of me?

Poetry at the Denver Art Museum

Five Facts About the City of the Future

Shit yes we put product in our hair.
People high-fiving in the streets.
Green cubes on toothpicks.
Digital umbrellas.
People hunting for Mars in the night sky.

There's A Hawk In Your Eye

I'm not a fan of your theories of infinity.
There's so much too much already,
roller coasters in malls, ponies
tied to the fencing behind
the souvenir shop nestled
into red cliffs. On the other hand,
I'm a fan of the red cliffs themselves,
how they make my brain squeak,
taking the clocks back an hour.
Red dust making my red socks redder.

Poem In Which We Are Wild Grasses

Geese streak through
leaving gauzy contrails.

On Sunday mornings
we gather together

because we have no choice.
We talk of how unlike

tall brick walls we are,
gouged with initials.

Face

It's good mooning at the red swirls
on the weather map,
looking into the yellow light
of late afternoons.
It's like a bucket
these things go into.
And it is in the middle of
red swirls run with yellow light
that I love you most, when you're
a rattlesnake and I am a dusty rock.

This Cry

This cry is a bad rallying cry. It says
over and over, "Give up."
Who is it talking to?
Most of us gave up long ago
when we first realized
the haunted faces and ashy hair
we saw in the streets
were the same as we saw in our homes.
What scares us now is the possibility
that the cry is meant for us,
that there's still more to give up.

This Ear

This ear is a bad ear. It picks up sounds
only in melons, and only in melons
that are green.
Do you know how many sounds
there are in green melons?
Two. One is the sound
of tiny mandibles on shiny black bugs.
The other is the sound of growing
which is an imperceptible rasp.

This is an interesting profile of a fascinating man; his blog is here.

Beef Jerky

Here comes a guy with a face
like a fried chicken wing.
Probably he wants something,
probably something you don't have
and want yourself.
The kitty crouches over the canary.
The suburb explodes
but into a new suburb.
Though the exact lines are lost
like a rural highway winding
into nighttime cattails,
the mile markers busted in two
by drunk teenagers
getting their girlfriends pregnant,
if it weren't for the human drive
to make someone else's face
all weird, to reduce a city
to little airbrushed statues,
a civilization to salt and mercury,
we wouldn't have iPhones.
Cormac McCarthy novels,
Hollywood, probably
we'd have F. Scott Fitzgerald still
but in a different way.
Less or more drunk.
Jacques Vache flies away.
The imagination gets in
its rumble car -- steel cages
all around, speeding into the arena
and then into the night, all lit up
like an explosion just a second away.

Where We Are Now

This place -- pumpkin bread
is what it smells like,
rinds of scummy ice
and a few yellow birds
reeling through a sky
rearing back like a blue
and white tire iron, God
knows I'd like to think
what we do matters, over
a smattering of red trees.

Poem In Which We Define Our Terms

Sadness gallops into your brain.
Abstractions are like that,
assuming a form, doing destructive things,
then poof -- nothing but vapor
like when you try to recall
your dad pushing you on the tire swing.
Nothing there but air.
Are feelings abstractions?
Not like cookies, that's for sure.
I live down the street
from the cookie store
not the feelings-station.
Fine by me.
I remember feeling not like a brick wall
but like the neon green bubble gum
squeezed between the bricks,
here comes the pestle.
The graffiti above the urinal.
BL + RQ = LUV 4EVA!!!
Happiness measures your blood pressure.
The nurse leaves the room.
The charts are all wrong.
They want you to come back.
Here's a feeling like a little camera
shoved into your nose
then winding through the thorax.
Ambivalence, necessary evil?
Maybe feelings aren't abstract.
Fine by me.
I just needed a way
to say the sky is turning pink
above the cookie store.
Once you saw a fox among the watermelons
then it slipped into the mist.

Where Babies Come From

This tree is the tree that lovers bash their heads against.
It is their happiness that makes them bash so.
Sad lovers don't even bother with the tree or the bashing.
They simply walk away and are never heard from again.

Poem In Which You Discover Your Heritage

These three brothers are magical, see,
and they sit around for a while
before they decide to invent clouds.
They invent the loom and gold
and some other stuff to pass the time.
Then they go on to invent wolves,
which promptly jump out of the cauldron
(this is where they do their inventing)
and devour the three brothers.
That's the end of the line for them.
Then the wolves race into the forest
(the forest was already there
and had always been there before
the clouds and the three brothers)
where one turns into a red bird,
another turns into a green snake
and the last wolf stays a wolf
and keeps on eating villagers and shit.
This is probably some kind of symbol
but no one knows for what.
One day a villager's parents are eaten
by a wolf and so he goes on a great quest
to find out about life in other lands.
Along the way a bunch of things happen,
some of which involve different colored
birds, beautiful princesses, horrid hags,
and at least one family of ogres.
Eventually this villager gets strong
and wise and digs a hole to the center
of the earth where he finds three sisters,
one of whom breathes oxygen, one of whom
breathes snow and ice, the last of whom
breathes fire and lava and molten rock.
The villager decides to stay and live
in the center of the earth forever
in a castle made of air and fire and ice
made from the breath of the sisters.
This is the last we hear of the villager
or the sisters, none of whom
are very important, it turns out.
The wolf from the beginning of the story
stays around pretty much forever,
though at some point he becomes
a small island dotted with coconuts.

Poem In Which We Dream of Making Good

For now the dingos prowl around the house,
the well coughing up dust.
Later we will strike for international waters
where we will make our living
by professionally not giving a shit,
eating mangoes all day long.
I say we as a fond wish
though I know that you are more
invisibility cloak than motorcycle,
your blue minaret nicely outlined
by the moon. The more you dig
the closer you get but to what?
China, the upper territories of Canada?
The sentimental? A school of fish
barely glimpsed through the thick kelp
that for a second seemed to be glowing?

New Issue of SUB-LIT

Official word from the proper authorities is forthcoming, but until then, please allow me to plug the good folks at SUB-LIT. The new issue is up and it's really good; definitely go check it out when you get a chance. You won't be sorry.

Summery Anecdote

What happened after the firecat
closed his bright eyes and slept?
Dreaming dreams of order.
The rocking horse rocks right
off a cliff, an ice cream date
on university greens ending
with a black squirrel peeing.
Half of Oklahoma blows away.
It has a beach now. Seagulls
turn back around, circling
a silo full of rocket fuel.
The air fills with so much static
everyone forgets everyone's birthdays.
Snow comes and quiets it all down.

Historic Voyage

This town has a low river

whose banks don't often flood.

The low-slung post office

is poky and reliable.

It's probably never seen

a tank blown to bits.

There's one person, though,

who has imagined

the gray water tower

as a giant ball of fire,

dripping great venomous

snakes onto townspeople.

He's the mayor

and he likes compromise

and BBQ potato chips.

Happy Birthday, Baby Brother

I like your style

but what I

most admire is

your ability to hold

a bunch of bombs

in pounding rain

and not get even

one fuse damp

and how you keep

your cool in

a roomful of zombies.

Brett Favre

My best friend is taking
the mayor to jail.

He's a jailer,
so that's what he does.

He likes his job
all right

but once he confessed
that he wished

he had 30 inches
of small intestine removed

and that his middle name
was Lorenzo.

Dwarf

Wandering the icy expanse, what's a girl to do?
The philosopher gets distracted
by the dog-walking woman in red.
This treatise explains the attraction
of wrought-iron table legs,
of pilings hammered into the earth.
Only the ones who can afford it get it.
They live on oceanic cliffs in California,
cognizant of the dangers of earthquakes
but much not afraid of them.
They read about icy gulfs, once.
How full of fiery lace are most people.
Longing sublimated into quality control,
a row of winking porcelain dwarves.
The philosopher gets moony over a poodle,
his pink tea cup rattling uncontrollably in its saucer.
Not far from here, the smell of the sea.

Pants

They weep for you even as they plot your doom.
They think they're Spanish conquistadors
one second, the next
they're made of hummingbird bones,
twin sparklers among the oil drums.
They watch too many videos on You Tube.
They are unassailable in their despair.
It runs not like a river
but like water-logged monkey carcasses
down a river. Probably a river of blood, even.

Snow

The party is gregarious. The party occurs for hours on end (though this description is not specific to any party in particular but can be applied to most any successful party).

The party occurs on snowy nights; there are no taxis; the party is the only source of light for what might be miles; the party takes place in the dark, snowy city. Snow gathers in the thin branches of city sidewalk trees.

If a person happened to be walking down a dark city street, he or she might glance into the rather bedraggled and choked city trees filling with snow and might think them rather pretty. He or she might think that the snow collecting in the branches, snuggling into the various crevices and forks, looks like a dusting of wigs. A handful of fluffy white mice.

Miraculous, in this day and age, that person might think as his or her toes grow damp and cold inside their sneakers, for she or he didn't wear the proper footwear, for snow was not in the forecast. Look how the lights from this party catch in the snow that is itself caught in the trees.

This person might then decide that the chill is growing too strong, that it much too late, that it is time to go home. This person might then look to the brightly lit windows of the party and think that people are gregarious, not parties, and it is a quality borne of intensely private, unfathomable loneliness.

Nothing To Do With Us

Strange creatures perch up in the trees,
booming out at odd intervals
like a broken PA system.
Sometimes it's only after
certain wires are bared
that things get a little scary.
Is it our conscience that roosts,
hidden, shaking our nerves,
instilling the nascent notion
that, really, we should just give up?
It sounds like a language
we should know but don't.
Not everything is a projection
of self, you know.
Example: spaghetti dinner.
Snake eating another snake.
Reality is only a measurement
of the observer -- maybe,
but measuring what against
which standard? More importantly,
here's what you forgot
to get at the store, the first
in a variety-pack of failings.
A dance turning into a lunge,
a compliment deteriorating
into something horrible.
The ball of yarn rolls into the marsh
and we follow the thread through
the trunks and root systems,
the scaly legs of awkward animals.
You'd never believe that they were capable
of flights of over fifteen miles,
that they and their brood live
on average twice your lifespan,
that even with red twitching
chunks of meat in their bills,
they are pretty, pretty birds.

Can't Stop Won't Stop Hagiography

In 1980 the author turned to grit
in what would prove to be the first
of thousands of poor decisions.
Much better to turn into a tornado,
a fly cleaning its wings,
even a sizzling light bulb
but what did we know then of kindness?
What did we know of guilt's mutability?
That shit takes a lot of time
and in 1980 there wasn't a lot of that.
It was burn or be burned. To wit:
that same year, our president
defeated Monster Zero for control
of the world's supply of forgetting pills.
There were lots of parades and looting, and
later everyone turned into giant glowworms.

Green Green Grass

There's no better time than now,
thinks the gut-shot gin-runner.
Old money bleeds into the dust.
Muddy soldiers pile into the boxcar.
Give it twenty years
and this place will be an almond grove.
Pineapples as far as the eye can see.
Suffering is a waste of time
but also unavoidable
so it's best to make use of it,
cf, The Divine Comedy,
lighting his Oxfords on fire,
not reality television,
but maybe in another twenty years.
Simply wanting to
is never good enough.
The watermelons ripen.
The firecracker goes off in your hand.
Another headstrong ruffian tossed
into the brig, a bit of booze
stashed in a baby's bottle.
Held up to the sun, it doesn't look
like much but already
it's mussing the syntax, making
the stranger the sworn enemy
when really you have lots in common:
disastrous pasts, beanbag chairs,
rivulets of lava running from your hands.