Borderline

One idea is to account for all gravitational
and electromagnetic forces and matter
in a mathematically complete system.
Another idea: fudge.
Which would technically
be accounted for in the first idea.
Problem is we're not sure where,
our dry-erase boards
immense purpled smudges,
neat rectangular sequences
detailing an angry sky
over an angry sea.
It's hard to tell
if all our theories
are successes or failures
especially considering
they account for so much
including logical and mathematical
flaws and those gaping holes
people from the past
appear to keep falling into.
Whatever happened to Tony
and his dream of tractor-repair?
Sheila and her salon?
Already you've been gone
for more years than you were here.
One last idea is to wave your arms in the air.

"Something in your eyes is makin such a fool of me"

Someone keeps on smashing the multi-
colored gong of despair
in the warehouse of sorrow!
Wait, that can't be right.
In the Heartbreak Hotel
Billy the Kid is forever
sitting in the yellow light
of his bedside lamp,
methodically cleaning his revolvers,
boots ready by the door.
Someone in the street lights an arrow.
The pigeon misses the window
but not the wall.
Cue the trombones of regret:
also not right
but still something bubbles on just below,
something chthonic,
tasting of tar,
something nearly sweet.
A blue curtain's slow rustling
over the credits:
evocative of something
or other, for sure.
For how little is going on
it's surprisingly difficult
sitting in a chair for hours,
staring at your hands.
Always will I sometimes
with confused ambivalent locutions
miss my time in the dark
wondering what was moving through the air,
birds or electric waves or bats,
when I could not see you
but feel your lips just by my ear.

To Do

Release internal memos to the general public.
Stitch my shadow back together.
Conquer my fear of spiders by holding a spider in my mouth for no less a duration than thirty seconds.
Find a puppy and play with it.
Stretching is important.
Untangle the circular for the local drugstore from the vines which have yet to come into leaf and as of yet are still brown and dead-looking.
Stop staring at the vines.
Stop staring at the models in the circular and thinking morbid thoughts about their vacuous eyes and vapid expressions which upon close inspection appear positively embalmed and dead-looking.
See Slumdog Millionaire like every other person on the freaking planet.
Eat some food.
Take vitamins.
Get up and/or get down.
Scrub the blood from the toothbrush's bristles with second toothbrush.
Assert alpha male status by belligerent drinking at local bar.
Pretend to be dumber than I am.
Pretend to be smarter than I am.
Spend an inordinately long time fussing over whether or not "to do" is hyphenated or isn't when it is used as an adjectival phrase versus when it is used as a compound noun and then decide the whole thing just really isn't worth the trouble.
Cut my losses.
Look at my reflection in the mirror for a duration of no more than thirty seconds.
Ask myself what the hell it is I think I'm doing.
Have at least one good answer.
Give an effort.
Check the stitches in my shadow for wear and tear.
Give up.
Chuck the thing and get a new one.
Sing along: all right.
Test my political viability by adopting an unpleasant demeanor and quasi-unpopular platforms to be delivered in a monotone.
Profess to hate flightless birds.
Recant.
Check e-mail and then never again.
Write a bildungsroman.
Turn it into a musical.
Pour my heart out into a single letter and then take that letter and seal it up in a wall for future generations to find and exult and puzzle over.
Leave clues.
Recant.
Be punk rock until I die from being all like punk rock and therefore have everlasting punk rock credibility forever and ever amen.
Get some health insurance and then that operation.

Act Like You Know!

We have seen the different formulae
for the rate of surplus-value
exchanges re: carcinogens, potatoes,
sunlight skittering through the parking lot
and wisteria-laden kudzu
all but glowing green on wet summer mornings
and we remain skeptical.
This we signal by
pinching at the corners of our eyes
and the bridge of our nose
while adopting a weary air
even as a load of blue balloons
stream by the conference windows.
Still to consider is the cat:
did she eat that rubber band
that we swear we left on the kitchen table?
Still to consider is the car,
the complex cave systems
made more confusing by their
stringent grids and flickering lights.
Flyers are going up
at an alarming rate.
The expense accounts are frozen.
Pancakes seem like a myth.
There is a bout of mild panic on the 30th floor.
The ghost of Joe Strummer
has been seen in the john
where junior executives have begun
waterboarding senior executives,
stripping them of their heavy gold watches
and racquetball techniques.
The beginning or the end,
it hardly matters.
The ghost of the dead King also appears
but only to janitors late at night
who lean against their brooms
and appreciate the abstract art.
It looks like the intersection
of mortality and desire,
lots of gloopy reds and blacks.
The helicopter is considered off-limits.
All our bright ideas are bouncing back.

At the Premiere

A fistfight breaks out at the premiere over the bassoon part, the alleged misuse of the instrument and its virtues. The violence quickly intensifies -- there is a measure of kicking and biting now -- as row after row of well-dressed women and men begin to tear at each other with extreme rancor.

It, the violence, rolls through the audience like a great wave. The police are called and they arrive quickly but are only able to restore limited order.

There is a cloud in the night sky that looks like a whale, and the police's many rotating lights make the cloud look like a whale that is underwater, then on fire, underwater, on fire, underwater, on fire. Afterward everyone agrees that the musicians had performed incredibly well, without fault or flaw.

The Poem for the Day Is Slash's Totally Awesome Guitar Solos

And also Axl's dancing.

A Few Words Regarding the Strange Power of Modal Auxiliary Verbs

How wonderful and terrible the to-do lists of humans.
Keep the past from slipping away, okay, but how?
Your dad pushing you on a swing
forever and then not,
not a playground around
for hours,
all this weak shitty coffee.
The clouds huddle up,
get some big ideas.
Burgeoning umbra
gathering in the burgeoning shadows
in the berserk zinnias.
The thing about shadows
is they're always burgeoning
even when you're not looking.
It gets late and
then it's very late
and you're not even
out of your pj's --
this is maybe not the worst thing to happen.
Fizzy martini lunch date,
those you cannot stand.
How to remember to fix
the chain on your bike
when the planets are moving
at such high speeds?
Turns out your fortress isn't much,
your adopted city has a problem with you.
If you were a child it would step out
of the dark while you slept
to savage terribly
whatever wasn't covered by the blanket.

Poem

I like you, I say,
and your smile goes
into my face and through my eyes
and from there it goes
into my brain,
which gets all breathy
like a Debbie Gibson song.
I don't know what I love more,
the trees or the earth
or the clouds above both
and then I remember
how stupid it is
to try and compare
and/or quantify loves,
at least as it pertains
to inanimate objects
upon which we depend
for survival.
However, I do
love the fog.
And frogs.
And all those other
things that are a part
of this world
like air and light
that allow us to sit here
and smile at each other
like a couple of jackasses.

Sonnet

You didn't always traffic
in the totally obvious --
looking into the septuagenarian's
seamed face and feeling
the telltale pricklings
of tears in your nose,
similarly, the upturned face
of the sunflower,
by autumn bent low
to the dirt, anticipating
your shared future. Listen,
your bones are singing.
They sound like ice.
Right there. Listen. There.

Views of the Mortal Coil and Our Shuffling Off of Said Coil

1

The aristocrat bursts from his carriage and makes something of a graceless dash to the nearby bridge. The water below is cold, quite cold, small patches of ice drifting languorously downstream, gathering and dispersing, producing frothy contrails on the water's surface, which appear as white streaks against dark blues and darker blacks, which are also the colors of the aristocrat's livery, high above, leaning out over the water.

2

One wolf, fine, good. Wolves travel in packs, though, a trait not entirely atypical of ice age survivors.

3

We are used to reading between the lines, as it were, exercising the powers of interpretation on a daily basis in order to ferret out meaning and significance from the info-static barrage. Already we draw lines of congruity in language giving rise to human experience.

4

Our enemy bleeds in the sand! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

5

Across the street there is a rotating sign advertising a restaurant, which is illuminated by neon (the sign, not the restaurant, which looks dimly lit), which is of course an inert noble gas, an element that is extremely common in the universe but a little less so on Earth.

6

Certain words and phrases pop into our heads from time to time, things like "occidental marmoset," things that have no obvious origin, antecedent, precursor, or catalyst. At first we are amused, then we are puzzled, and eventually we grow frightened. "Occidental marmoset" is merely an example of some such idiopathic word or phrase and is in fact not a thing we have ever once thought of in our entire lives.

A Pretty Brief and Limited Look at Hard Work/Labor Through the Ages

1

Outside the castle there was much hubbub and to-do. People of various caste and ranks and hierarchies milled at times even swarmed about. For all the world they looked like they didn't remember stratified socioeconomic theory or how labor is divided among the different types of ants.

2

There also was an apple cart that was overturned. One person saw this occur and it reminded this person of the previous week when a cart full of dead dogs was overturned in a similar fashion. The person made a very quick nearly sub-neural imagistic com/con between the apples and the dogs.

2.5/1.5

A similar process occurs within the brains of the ants. There are many, many ants, with just as many brains. Somehow it seems that there are more brains than ants kind of, perhaps something like a hive mind, a thing that is larger, regulating more than the constituent components.

3

This is later:

Ralph Emerson sits at his writing desk. He looks out the window. There is a pond that he can see. He taps his pen against his incisors. He draws in a great deal of breath as phase one of his plan re: Deep Contemplative Sigh, and startles himself when he lets it out in a single gigantic sneeze that sounds to him something like "Oversoul!".

He sits silently for several moments, stunned, before beginning to write.

4/0.01

The servants of which there are quite a few, women and men both, with great but not too great not ostentatious or distracting but rather subtle and discrete humanly fanfare bring out the main dish, that is, the last dish, after the berries and bread, which is a big spiny purplish fish with the head still attached.

Poem In Which No Lawyers Are Involved

Deep inside the decomposing skull of Frank Sinatra
a secret glows like a coal.
In my former life as a jazz musician
you could never have told me
about clouds, their ability to swallow sorrow
or their awesome powers of destruction and regeneration.
Such improbable beauty one finds on their own or not at all.

Don't Forget Your Free Gift

It's impossible to tell how deep
the trench is until you're already in the thing,

at which point the knowledge doesn't do
a whole lotta good. I mean,

there you are, you're puttering along,
worrying about dinner, the yen,

that stupid thing you said, and then
the sun is an angry speck,

all the birds angry little specks,
the pressure gone all wonky,

your head a thousand pinpoints
catching the light of the big glitzy

celestial riptide for just a second
before going under to limn

pulverizing blue fringes
before being lifted again

out into warm gulf air.
This is what all the books say, anyway.

This is what I caught from the lecture
before I left early, crinkling my

dainty plastic cup now emptied
of complimentary red wine

and drifting through the smoke.
This is kind of like that time

about a dozen years or so ago
when a goose or something hit that model

in the face while he rode a roller coaster.
This is kind of like seeing an airplane

enter a cloud and then you have
to go inside and take a test.

The bee ducks into the flower,
it rains and rains and rains and rains.

At least 98% of the universe isn't there.
You've got a 25% chance even if you're guessing.

Poem In Which There Soon Follows the Frantic Application of Semiotics

Things weren't
going our way.

No doubt
about it,

we were
in a bad way,

no getting around
the unfortunate

incidents that
had befallen

each of us,
a sandwich mishap,

that poor dog,
named in CIA

memos re: torture,
etc, etc,

we six
strangers who

shared a
terrible secret.

A Short Note from Management

The Daily Poem Factory-Machine has been pumping out assorted nonsense for just about a year now. My goodness. Sing it.

Poem In Which Our Deepest Fears and Anxieties Are Externally Manifested as Crocodiles and Lions Which Then Eat Us Alive

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It's For You

The spider in the corner bundles into itself.
Sometimes you look at a banana
and see a banana,
sometimes a yellow telephone,
too often perhaps crippling metaphysical self-awareness,
the prefrontal cortex gone berserk,
a Christmas tree in flames,
a mottled me me me
recumbent by the Kleenex and coffee.
Ring, ring.
The ex-nihilist prepares a bubble bath,
lights a couple candles,
the whole shebang and shebop.
Probably he believes in something nascent, inchoate,
like how you see the shadow of a cloud
and know it's a cloud,
it's also vapor miles away
and you are here,
earth-bound and more,
ice cream dribbling into your fist.
The smell of lavender:
one reason to love spring.
That spider in the corner,
waiting patiently,
providing a valuable service
even as it creeps me all the hell out,
also a pleasant reminder of spring.
The ants streaming
across the white walls.
Merely the color green,
the earth like a blacked out window
and beauty like a brick through the window
or something like that,
something less smarmy
but not more comprehensible,
busted, reconstituted,
shiny, sharp, repetitious as in
like over and over and over
again in mussy/wussy ya-honking cavalcade
in which there's
someone calling long distance
in the middle of the night,
running through the airport
in the middle of the night,
the hazy flux of self spinning itself into a spring,
a frog slipping below the scum.

Furtive Dispatch from a Small and Windowless Office to a Far-away and Magical Land

What I need right now is a photo
of a puppy.
Maybe two.
Photos, that is, not puppies.
Too many puppies is something
I'm not sure I could handle right now...
Aw, hell, sure I could!
In fact,
I don't know about you
but I think I could handle
not only the photos
but the two actual puppies plus
all your leftovers and mine, too.
Ice cream.
Lots of funny hats.
Today it is sunny.
Today I will ride my bike
in the sun.
If this isn't obvious,
this is a draft of a letter
I will soon send on a long journey.
In a movie a friend
said she saw
there was this valley,
right, in which
dinosaurs survived
and ruled the earth,
and then some cowboys found it
and had to fight the dinosaurs.
This is where
I'm sending my letter.
This place,
or something like it.
There are many ways
I'm thinking
about ending my letter.
One such way:
The newspaper says the police say
the Strangler will be caught
any day now.
Another:
Hello, please write back soon.

Poem In Which a Person of Indeterminate Age Maps Out Her/His Inner Topology on Monday Morning

This could be Russia.
Or, not Russia, exactly,
but some obscure province rendered incomprehensible
because I'm a latter day American with a shaky grasp
of what's not right in my face.
What's right in my face right now:
Facebook.
Ellen DeGeneres.
The sun comes tinkling in
like glass ornaments on chandeliers
laugh tracked to investor confidence.
I don't know what I'm going
to do after this
cup of coffee
except to have another.
Sometimes when I'm quiet and still,
I imagine what flowers would sound like
if photosynthesis were a song.

Poem In Which We Land on the Moon Again!

Huh.

Poem In Which We Land on the Moon!

You heard
the captain.
We're here
to bring the party
to outer space.

Poem In Which We Wrassle with Inarticulateness

It's not just the sometimes-nagging
sense of being stuck in the cosmic Whack-A-Mole,

you, down to your last few nickels,
me, all out of dimes,

your mom rearranging the rigged milk bottles,
the ghost of your father haunting the midway,

the ghost of everyone's father haunting the midway,
the sky turning slowly into a Southern Gothic,

all around us the spastic colored lights
and big felt hammers falling,

the all-at-once imperative of overload!
Eat this, it's deep fried!

The difference between the feel of a flower
and its smell is typically pretty nice

cognitive dissonance, the delicate
step and slip, slurring through the curve.

Even those flowers I read about
that smell like rotting animals.

Even in the midst of abstract intellection.
You're still here and already I miss you --

a sure sign of something or other,
one would have to guess.

What I'm trying and failing to get at here
is something explained best in overheated,

longwinded metaphor, a white beach
upon which there are many mussels cracking in the sun,

a thousand eidolons casting shadows
over the profligate beauty of this world.

Poem In Which We Are Untethered Either By Our Own Doing or By Some External, Unlocatable Stimuli

Your million tiny victories and sadnesses,
what are they now?
Vapor above the little puddle,
a glint flaring in someone's eye.
Alternately, a flaming wheelchair.
A broken stairwell,
gathering smoke into itself.
Where we are now,
no one knows.
Where we have been has been documented
but gaining access is the thing,
even if they're in your head,
obscured behind heavy glass,
bulletproof, smeared
with a complex set of emotions,
scratch-and-sniff stickers.
I always liked strawberry and grape.
Certain songs I don't listen to much anymore.

Poem In Which I Clearly Have No Idea What I'm Talking About

The best poem I've never written
is titled "Your Time On Earth"

and it's been clunking
through my head like a gutter ball

for the better part of a year.
The pronoun there is kind of vague,

which is one reason I can't figure out
how to write the thing.

You, me, your cat, a vacuum
attachment reaching into the warm dark folds

of heavy black curtains, who knows?
We're but one hurdy gurdy

whizzing through the cosmos,
creaking out our song,

one urinal cake skimmed across the glacier.
Fleetingly, like interrupted air guitar.

It's not all the time one's head
is full of hammers, thankfully,

sometimes it's a gaggle of split geodes.
Winking in the sun, the aftermath

of the duck's sudden take-off from the water.
When I was younger I would sit by the river

in my adopted hometown and watch the ducks
for hours. Why I'm thinking

of this now, I've no idea.
I didn't then, either.

Mimetic Art's Successes and Failures: An Incomplete Overview

The snake has one head and is kind of harmless
but later after a few years and incantations,

a recantation and fireside singalong
(a couple kumbayas and a blanched canoe),

it has seven heads and plus also
several more for every one that's cut off

though ultimately it's fire
that puts an end to everything,

that and a big burly dude with a sidekick,
meanwhile there's a big yellow wave

hurtling through the sky, thirteen black
balloons bobbing outside the parlor,

the rapping at the chamber door,
the fistfight near the river,

a tire iron flung into the weeds,
a tattoo given to a young man and when

they (the tattooer and the tattooee,
oh, who are in love, duh) must inevitably

split and but destined to meet again
the tattoo is the external manifestation

of their internal feelings (cf,
additional parallel re: permanence)

and but also serves as in important plot device
inasmuch as it's the means by which

their vegetable love is recognized
and grows through time's fiery chariot,

etc etc, as you can probably guess,
fire is important here, the big 'ol

end and beginning, except in the totally true
story about Beckett, who, after being stabbed

by a crazed pimp on a Parisian street,
later asks his assailant why he drove

a dagger into his chest, the pimp replies,
"Forgive me, sir, I do not know,"

and Beckett spends the rest of his life
producing literature not as weird as that.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

It's the next day and still I'm thinking
of yesterday's burrito,
how much has been left unsaid.
Does this mean I have an innate grasp of joy
or that I'm stuck in some sort of groove
turned unseemly existential rut?
I don't know the difference between
always and never or between
the sky within my head and the one without.
In the outside sky there are planes
and birds and small bugs
that sometimes get caught in my teeth
when I ride my bike in high winds
while in the other there is none of that,
just a lot of white noise,
sometimes pleasant, sometimes not,
sometimes you are there, sometimes not,
mostly it is indistinguishable
from what's around it,
small bugs, high winds, an argument
for the porousness of borders.
This throws the concept of transgression
into a whole new light, which is how I mount
my defense when asked for an explanation
of my in/actions, how I could
possibly justify eating three burritos
in a single sitting or losing
Morrissey's number after totally hitting it off
with the guy after his show, standing
in the windy and cold parking lot
and talking about his hair.

I'm Not Bored

This burrito does not bore me.
How could it! Why, even the avocado
inside said burrito is far less boring
than the press conference the auto company calls,
which, admittedly, is kind of boring
except not when I stop to consider
my brother used to work for an auto company
but doesn't anymore, but still
so do lots of other peoples' brothers
and plus also the people themselves
and I'm not remotely bored.
I haven't even gotten to the hot sauce yet.
I imagine Morrissey in the fancy supermarket
near his home, picking out avocados and I'm not bored.
I imagine Morrissey getting a tattoo of my face
over his heart and I'm not bored.
I quit thinking about Morrissey and am not bored
because I'm thinking about bicycles
and the sky lately, how it's bluer.
I look in the mirror and see not just the stupid haircut
I gave myself late one night but also you
standing beside me and I'm not bored at all.

Advance Praise

Slowly does the sun undo the ice.
Soon the lake will be all over the sidewalks!
Dogs will run through it!
Bird calls in abundance above
as the lake slowly rises into the clouds.
Of course I'm imagining all this,
just as I imagine running under
a thousand ladders propped against a skyscraper
to a lemonade stand that doesn't sell lemonade
but that thing I always want and can never name,
some kind of golden-lemon-ricotta-thingie
except not food at all. First, though,
the earth needs to rotate, or,
more accurately, the rotational tilt
needs to swing back around
through the ecliptic plane
calling back all those gone-away birds,
waking up all the constipated sleeping bears,
just as I need to swing back around
through my own totally figuratively speaking
gone-away constipation and but also
the sunshine on my way to the cookie store,
shedding all my comfortable despair
and oh so fashionable sadness.
How anyone can be that sad
is totally understandable
but how anyone can stay that sad
is another story when just yesterday
that old writer came on tv to talk about
all your mistakes and screw ups,
about how tomorrow everyone will still remember
and also the day after that,
but the day after that might be different,
how the sun is actually closest
to the Earth during the long winter.

An Imperfect Editorial Recreation of the Young Doctor's Letter Home

The days [...] here [...] and are cold. [And (?)] [t]he nights are [also] cold [er still (?)] with many [...] and trial[s] besetting [...] all sides. Oh {indecipherable}! Yea, at times I regret ever even having left the [warm (?)] cockles of home and [hearth (?)] for this [terrible (?) and frozen land]. And yet, what [...] is [one] to do? I am can only {unintelligible}. [...] For the [truth (?)] [...] of the [matter] is [...]: [...].

I have {indecipherable}, my [love (?)] for [you] and our unborn [...] child {water (?) damage} and will hang in the [sky (?)] like {large burn}, expand[ing] and [contract]ing {terrible smudging, dark matter/fluid (?) obfuscating text} according only to us [below] and [...] [through (?)] the movements [of (?)] the {darkened torn page} [...]!

And most of [...] the [time] we [re (?)]shape the [world (?)] as {illegible} we [would] like it to be [...] with [no] regard for [...]. [Anyway] [m]ost of my training [is] use[less (?)] [here]. [...] {torn} bloody infect[ious] [...] the best [I] can. {smudge} And tomorrow, [...] [or] the next day or the next or the next, when [they (?)] finally come in the night as [they] surely will to take away [the rest of (?) everything] [...].

Flannery O'Connor Writes Two Short Stories on Twitter

Bble slsmn stls hr leg (lol?) & kids brn dwn the frm

Polyvalent Gazebo

It's at once difficult and easy
to be both appalled and afraid,
circling the crash site,
watching the little birdies
duck in and out of the feeder.
The double bind quadruples,
pain spreading through the chest
and down through the arms
circling the blue air.
At a time like this,
who knows what to say or do
at the garden party of sadness
and courageous good cheer.
At a time like this, every gazebo
seems to necessitate razing
just for being kind of stupid
and in such disrepair you can
see its end without much imagination:
the doorway is splintered but it works fine.
See, you can just walk right through.

I Don't Wanna Dance, I Maybe Don't Think

They were fooling with the nail gun
then something went horribly right.
Elsewhere was the horrible wrong
which is where horribleness is
about 98% of the time.
One bird takes flight
drawing the predator's attention
to the bird still on the fence.
What kind of bird?
Who knows the names of birds
that don't have striking colors,
aren't assigned baseball teams?
The image dissipates
just before we get it.
The earth curves away,
the unnamed predator goes back to its den
or parked van or mountain aerie.
The pool boy squints into
the dappled dawn blitzed
across all that money.
Deep in the Earth's core
the Earth is born and dies again.
Deep in the center of your bones, a certainty.
Out in the morning sun, an abundance
of people walking around
talking in phony accents.