Jungle growl from the back
of the throat. The way he
shreds that envelope, teeth
and claw. I think, it could
be the bird in the window
feeder, the splayed talon
of my hand at rest on a furred
back. Woman feed me, he purrs. Now!
Poems never arrive
Like taxis
When you need help getting
From one thought to another.
They rarely arrive when you
Sit with your journal
And brand new pen
That doesn’t skip.
Poems arrive
When your hands are occupied
Or you’re in the shower
Or driving down the interstate.
So you repeat the lines
Over and over
Until you are sure they will
Live forever but
once you find a pen and paper,
The poem is dead.
All you can recall is the feeling
You had when you birthed it.
I guess you can’t photograph
The passion of a kiss
In the backseat of a taxi.
We stole
Her holidays away
With our births
My brother kept her
In the hospital
All of Fourth of July weekend
I came along
And made her forget
Her own birthday
Just four days after mine
She doesn’t even get
Mother’s Day
For herself
It falls too close
To my brother’s
Death date
Few things come as close as this
to a kind of paradise I could get behind;
a breath of morning air
after the storm in the night
as the blackbirds perform a jazz orchestra
and dance upon the wind
the night shift at the warehouse behind me
graveyard-shift radio tunes still humming in the ears
all the grievances held dear given to yesterday
beginning another day with shower thoughts and the sun rising
Watching for cops set up in the medians,
as I listen to “Speed Trap Town”.
The lead-colored clouds that have
stalked me all morning are
spattering the windshield
with liquid buckshot and now
Jason Isbell is making it rain
inside my sunglasses as well.
What I am calling Mixed Media, you might call trash. Bits of string. Ash.Crosshatching and layering in white and grey. I layer the paint and let it dry, carving into the relief as I go. I see tall grasses nodding in the wind with each stroke. an endless striation of light. The brush in my hand feels lighter and more burdened at the same time.
Have you ever had some problems with light? With Sunlight? With the weight of light? Nothing is as it appears. A chandelier is a throwing star.
Everything is unexpected and counterintuitive. The only real recourse I have against art is to keep making it. I have instincts I never knew and they are sharper than ever. The painting helps me to see the world’s ugliness. In a way it is a heightened version of the world’s ugliness in my ever shrinking apartment. The work has occluded my life, spread it’s wings.
Paint dries and cracks in fault lines running the length of the ten foot canvas. I attack with a trowel, carving into the paint, creating a light, an immaterial light, with the weight of ice. And if you can’t find the light, cut a skylight. Cut a skylight and lift her out into the park. I can see the higher math at work, a metamorphisis. I can see a transformation in the collapsed layers, like an umbrella left opened on a cold marble floor or the robes of the Virgin Mary.
I noticed you being a slutty editor
shoving a typewriter into your slitty pussy
professing professing
marriaging a disaster
fuck you for being such a dude
how lame and bygone
go back to subbing
go back to rescribing your accolades and
stop trying to fuck
everything that walks with words
whip out your magnetic dick on the russian train
pass out the spoons and we’ll see ahat sticks
Guido
