Category: Poems

Jumping up and over my branch hitting things with the hairs on my back sometimes relaxing but never repenting killing small animals with intellectual venom. I don’t know how I got here, where I remembered combinations and...

Things get kicked around. A slab from someone’s pizza ends up where it shouldn’t be, causing alarm. I thought it came from her. She said it was from “beyond.” Either way we handled it with surgical gloves...

Sitting on an expensive chair, bare feet not touching the floor, feeling like the little boy I am and always will be, even after I’m gone. There will be no man gone. Only The Boy. That is what my mother called me....

She said cinnamon knocked on your door all through the night, unable to listen for your visitor. You never answered, we think because crimes of seclusion will reckon your ability to mimic the billiard balls you so enjoyed...

She could not remember punch lines after setups went awry. Dollar bills crumpled with newsprint and saliva interconnected by non-functioning incubators. Slammed between Atlantic Avenue and an unknown cliff my steepness...

everybody squanders pasts, everybody, listless gradations and humblings, tirelessly diurnal ramblings, chomping of apples, stirring of laundry, idling of vehicles, spraying of radio, flat chesting of the elderly man bragging...

HEAD CREAMED UNDER GRILLED HONEY . FLAMBÉ JAZZ BRUSSELS PANTS ASUNDER FRESH THUGS OF DISDAIN SELF-LOATHING PICKING MORALITY PUNS SQUASHED UNDER COFFEE AND VICE . ON CRUXES OF GHOSTS I LUMBERED, A PHANTOM THROUGH THE MOMENTS OF...

Virtuoso I found you in a gray yard, politely brimming, policing the clearings in a stranger’s voice. Listening to a radio you wanted to intercept the meaning of what was heard, the anthill-like spaces, deep, filled by...

North of a hostile policymaking conflict the surviving descendants of Geronimo hoisted their demands upon their shoulders, lifting baskets and coffins filled with freedom-seeking unborn. Minute by minute, ounce by dripping...

to a fallen pretender of fame came ugly suggestions of blame a life sent to hell a knife lent to tell that the winners do not play the game control of the hovering blame is graced by a cigarette shame an empty motel a...

Remembering how I used to exchange poems with strangers. This is from a college student, November 1994. mark, haven’t seen you around in awhile 🙁 i’m hoping that sometime you will send me another poem or a story or...

O dark charlatan, snap-brimmed flip flops clapping between the earth and you, listen, listen for the vacuum that forms the fistfuls of words frowning in your pockets. You know the words that others will understand but you refuse to arrange them, decrying them as cheap. So take it easy. Handlebars on the platter. Jugs of […]

PATRIOTS RIOT! I TRIP AT ITS PORTS! I STRAP IT TO A PARROT’S ASS, PROP ITS POOPOO TO A POOR STAR’S TITS. IT TRAPS A SPORT’S ROOTS. SOOT IS POP’S POOP. I PORT POP’S POOP TO A PROTO-STRAIT’S ROT. AS I TROT TO PAPI’S PARTS. I POOP. I POOP!

I wrote a silly poem yesterday using only letters from the word “ASTORIA”. I did not use any kind of word-generating website or software to spell out all possible words that could be made from these letters. I was not expecting this to make sense but it almost kinda does: ASTORIA! I TOAST ITS AIR! […]

From our childhood comes a dull hum, trickling through our bodies as kindling feeds a bonfire. We think it signals something cosmic but evidence does not exist. Radiators tick. Vehicle ignitions sneeze. University crackpots continue their insatiable gravitation toward untenured plutocracy. Lights blink. Attentions fail to span even the slimmest distractions. You endure conversations with […]

Pursue redemptive alcoholism. Strip a jelly bean to its bone. Calculate three hundred and fifteen thousand six hundred and twelve minus pi. Calmly digest expensive tchotchkes. Inform strangers of their notoriety. Blend in to rotted woodwork. Bring lunatic dogs home. Steal candy from balloon-wielding arsonists. Timidly murder your education. Sleep calmly in mausolea of the […]

All food has turned to inarticulate balls of hair. Grade school craft projects have assumed souls, their dignity damaged with pencil-lashings. Slashes rip leftover radios still chirping nightly news summaries from 1922. Craven fantasies of hedonists lie vanquished, each dream suffocated under its own flaccidity, clustered like punchlines declared righteous by the solitary comedian but dismissed […]

I never knew your mother. According to house rules she filled churches with garbled tantrums of political candy. Sometimes chocolate, other times yeasty, she cancelled without violence the restless boils found fidgeting in the pews. No one knew of her until saint-driven Cadillacs appeared to glory her away, high in the sky but low to […]

I never knew your mother. According to the gossip of legend she filled small churches with irrational tantrums, brooding in controlled watchfulness as context threatened to complicate mystery. She gave birth to millions, proportionally robbing the hungry to feed the dead, never pursuing recognition for the work of her immortal library. Today your mother’s powers […]

Complexities. Smiles all around. Happiness, even, as mistrials of obscurity obliterate incoherent conversations, creating literatures of independence expressed by deafening revelations. Seas embark on pursuits nimbler than drowning planets. Mountains decide to move toward plutocracy. Pipe organs shuffle military exercises in the hands of unskilled church musicians, whistling invisibly through watery threats of angry nuns […]

Lives are lived on mattresses. We run around difficultly. Easily we grump. We absquatulate into non-existent mornings, listening to cars pass like winds in the howl.

Your interpretation is meaningless to nostalgia, your statements of context artfully crafted to conspicuously elude the trap of immortality. Presenting yourself before audiences is an accident waiting to clap its hands, a story waiting in a jar as hospitality unbuckles its appetite for horror. Whales and eagles blink their eyes, alarms go off, individuals who […]

You arrive at a point where nothingness seems impossible. No death in a universe so active, no tidy dismissal of eternal life when friction creates its own renewal. You uncover old shoes, remembering how painful they were, not the comfort but the memory of bodies trampled, flowers swallowed. I saw you in those shoes. I […]

Beneath my forehead creaks a half-opened cigar box, labeled appropriately for villagers and lost adventurers, tunneled into by flamboyant parasitical darkness. Tossed among grainy lives of unfulfilled laborers I study generations inspired by years of kitchen grime, I deliberate over demonstrations of totemic puppetry. Scrambling for guidance I find, instead, eyelids creased into stereophonic slipstreams, […]

I guess not. Sympathies fail in ways unknown: Retroactively. Intrusively. Despotically. I never attended a rally like those going on in today’s creamy oceans of America’s collective subconsciousness. I don’t know where anyone is or why they would return when scenic crimes transfer thermostatic continuums from cigar box to cigar box, swerving at times but […]

1992, AT A PARTY WITH STRANGERS, DUDE WITH LANKY HAIR AND STUPID NOSERING SAT TALKING, POOBAH-STYLE, I COULDN’T TELL WHO HE WAS TALKING TO (anyone?) AS I APPROACHED, HIS ARMS CROSSED, NERVOUSLY TOUSELING HIS OWN DAMN HAIR, TALKING INTO POLECAT ATMOSPHERE, HE WAS AN MTV PRODUCER WITH A TELEPHONE AT HIS DESK SO I NON-HOMOSEXUALLY […]

Things come together. Things fall apart. Only the sound disintegrates. Only the sound.

Dance on the target. We dance on the target.

At tanning wheels with police escorts, humiliated traders of steak-soaked treason, we mumble incoherent lyrics to forgotten Beatles songs, humor tomorrows with presumptions of their arrivals, fleece our childhood’s crayons, rob punctuation of its sentences, burglarize silent forests of insane Elvis Presleys.

worlds are filled with cities cities are filled with worlds we avoid each other’s soil our smiles emerge with blinking sympathy

I found an octopus in your thermometer. Its eyes looked human, its mouth was a dog’s. Behind the sucking sounds of its tongue it asked simple questions: Will there be Sundays in October? Will future religions worship electricity? When will Manhattan’s tallest buildings dismount from their tricycles? I answered as best I could, inhaling organized […]

I was never the most important Beatle. As the third most important Beatle I subsidized my education with packages of oats. As the second most important Beatle I glamourized myself with mustard and pennies. As the least important Beatle we choked on each other’s vomit and donated our flannel shirts to charity. As the umpteenth […]

Life is a pack of lies. Success stories thrive in press releases and art school propaganda. Reality languishes in sewers of spiritual meat. There is no meat in America’s hope chest. Grandiosities torture your neighbors, humiliate a city’s carbon footprint, dry paint on fingernails of gingerbread boys. Most of your friends do not know their […]

nothing was right about the building. floors rose at unexpected angles, closets were cluttered with oversized tractors, kidney-shaped doors were small and hairy forcing all who passed through to squat down for passage to other rooms which tolled from vast and impossible to tiny and hazardous. elevators led to floors with comical names like “DANGER” […]

In a needlessly plowed field you sense pressure from beneath the surface, a gnawing gust of air trading fistfuls of heat between blindness and death, pouring honey into the cracks of the elders’ faces. You take your helpings, hoisting energy from the soil, setting it free, forcing planets to dip their peaks toward this impossibly […]

Thursday, May 16, 2013 4:56:46 PM It is time to think about how you really feel, how you refuse to admit into clinical observation of your own self, a standalone, standaside, stepping stone’s throw from obsolescence of indifference, your aloof philanderings nowhere near as magnificent as you think, not deserving of unspoken croons from reversible […]

July 16, 2012 You must do this, ordered the telephone call. I should really not, said the seventh century. Wearing shorts and nothing more I went to the hot towers of justice, approaching with 11 women on whom I saw something. To dress appropriately I arrived early, drowning in funds of time with advanced sartorial […]

June 20, 2012 emergency ghosts on the pier assume their intentions are clear but no one can stare at the stampede of air as it occupies bravado’s fear loafing on passionless art is like drafting a numberless chart you can’t comprehend and so you descend to boiling a prisoner’s heart jazz and tomatoes are new […]

6:25 PM Friday, June 29, 2012 Elvis is a lonely man his song floats humbly high He sleeps among the fabled and lives where none can fly He is a bleary vision an Elvis fit for all his suicides and poisons portend our country’s fall ….. The loveliness of sadness is the grace with which […]

Dookie Cough Cot Hoffee Gubble Bum Peck Blapper Cap Cukes Trench Foast Rathboom Whole Wheat Claw Rams Muna Telt Spanana Blit Chork Pops Cab Crakes Dot Hog Mocolate Chilk Robster Loll Ficken Chingers Steese Chicks Schneach Papps Cop Porn Sticken Chrum Dicks Oilive Ol Pipperoni Pezza Rushmooms Squtternut Bash Rot Poast Beesechurger Tix and tap

Sweeping oceans and parking lots. Washing a president’s dishes. Wringing underpants. Drying hair, cutting fingernails. Taking out garbage (replacing new bags in the cans). Filling out forms, mailing needless documents. Serving and consuming mortar. Sharing expertise on cities never visited, (and political complexities new to you). Picking up telephones, slamming them down. Opening refrigerator doors. […]

For real, these people distrust happy coincidences, refuse to play games of consequence or truth, bumble along on bad advice submitted anonymously through layers of bureaucracy that confiscated itself violently, called itself epithets and trailed after covens of decision-makers punished by history, maligned by repetitive legalese unleashed indignantly but decisively upon crowded rivers that threatened […]

Monday is a whore Tuesday is a whore Wednesday is a whore Thursday is a whore Friday is a whore Saturday is a whore Sunday is a whore

I hear nothing distinct, odd exclamations of “I don’t know,” questions of intrusion as strangers enter the room, sets of sensibilities that know “for sure” how to find someone in a squalid quagmire of tourists and cheap desserts, who find atmosphere in a thawing tundra of half-eaten umbrellas, clear and present strangers infiltrating spontaneous composts, […]

everybody squanders pasts, wastes graduations, tires of ambitious ramblings, chomps apples, stirs laundry, idles vehicles, sprays radio sounds. flat chesting of an elderly man bragging about his television commercial, claiming he never saw it, sunning himself, (flaccid breasts of aging men sunned to no-stick crisps) letting on that maybe he saw himself on a television […]

Anything is an accident of everything. Accidents of deceit, accidents of forgotten lies, incidental aftereffects of woebegone vacations that never completely ended, neutral vibrations of moneyed investments evolved quietly into troubled financial incontinence, northern songs and hoary arias auctioned at slaughter whence no one denied conspiracies to route opera houses colonized in mistakenly brewed equities. […]

Graduation day has come and gone, a greasy blur preempted by long lines of ambivalence, meatless tacos of intellectual ammunition artificially bolstered headstrong by winter’s unexpected demise, the season’s revision out of public policy by means of freshly-sharpened swords, enormous blades slashed forth and back by keepers of a mostly mythical iris-thin firmament few contemplated […]

important decisions made by some guy sitting at a computer influence rising and settling of bread, tempers, plutocracies. indecision, blithering, stepping into screens, standing outside completed novels, faking death at bottoms of emptied beer thimbles, these movements cause tremors among unlinked food chains, incoherent advice on conserving nonexistant commodities. seagulls swarm cunnilingual graffiti sprayed across […]

Police want to speak to a man suspected of abandoning American principles of shirtless therapy, paying instead for sessions in spiritual retaliation that stranded bill-paying Catholics at the altars of power. Last seen in surveillance video taken at a Manhattan pub named “The Mill” the man was thought to have earned free rubbish from disgruntled […]

Don’t answer the phone if you think it’s a freedom-loving loudmouth. Don’t answer if you suspect a tyranny is coming to drown you. Do not answer your phone if a wavy rain of Beethoven’s Große Fuge rolls through your undeleted e-mails. Answer the phone when tides and dramatic weather calamities disrupt the inauguration ceremony of […]

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday were crushed last week by a stampede of quacking automobiles. The attack was blamed on Chevrolet’s new hybrid Corvette. The newly-designed hybrid reportedly sprouts dozens of enormous wings on the vehicle’s roof and stilts on the bottom. Then it belches out a horrendous quacking noise that frightens other vehicles, causing […]

Hungry enough to eat freezerburn I call you to stipulate a rosary made of cheese for some of your punishments, a crucifix made of magic for your forgiveness, and a church made of cash cash money for your whoring vanities. Nothing shall remain of visions created by conspicuous gold necklaces worn by trashy conversations, bulleted […]

When the moon fell out of my mouth an ocean of coffee flowed from Hitchcock’s exploded marrow, roaring through robotic airholes like the pants of a dozen alcoholics rioting inside a car trunk built for 4. Alfred’s plastic spoon stirred kerosene into critical speed benchmarks, upending traditional assumptions of aging and decay with foul but […]

how much you want me love why not just try to make sure you are looking for the next day. how do I get to know if you are looking for a few years ago. The only problem with this product is a little bit more than happy hassle. grass is not only a small […]

Drop by drop, line by line, a strict waitress stones herself across three centuries, raining pellets of dissonance where mimes inhale spirited democracies crushed by celebrity. Superior winters trample the noontime forcing happiness into neglected strains of a city, emptied of all but vaguely remembered tragedies, emptied of all but stranded fools and the failure […]

    Two dudes proving themselves to each other exchange books and stare at the floor.

    The refrigerator goes dark. You suspect rationing of electricity. No brownouts are mentioned in the newsfeeds but you feel powerlessly convinced that your energy is restrained at some times of day and in certain weather. No evidence exists but in your solitude the theory grows wings — fat, hoary, mossy wings that exalt […]

    I underestimated the Detective. His knowledge of pornography is thorough and forever. He suffers not through common anecdotes of throated organs and fetished parts in the sexless halls of God and government. These pedestrian anecdotes are poppycock compared to his anthropological accounts of 17th century smut and its summary influences on today’s unshaved […]

Thinking of the two girls I saw on Christmas Day, 2011. Sisters or friends, I don’t know, but they skateboarded through empty parking lots and vacant alleys. Having a good time, it seemed, ‘boarding through an empty city on Christmas Day, their bodies as skinny as my arm, their voices loud for such spindly timbre. […]

      At the jazz house tonight conversation litters the music, the struggling horse of mutually deaf communication coagulating into sprinklers of spit and teeth. Voices rise above the music which returns to itself in the imagined rewards of strangers. The years pass like strangers, just like every human being. Only the days remain […]

Stereo rumble of golly good-golly plunges through pungence and pundits, hassling the barkeep and rekindling Floridian romances from high school and earlier, the kindergarten crushes your sister instructed you to have, the grade school teacher and mother figure whose generous hugs you pathetically craved to the point of inventing sadness, inventing discord and loneliness, perfecting […]

Over the ribs of a naked city I collapse into a gravy of rotgut tumors, poisoned lumps humbled by a sexless rhythm that fails at jazz, that fails at remembering specks of truth comprising its lies, a listless rhythm of dumb topical bloat diseased and dismissed by hairless rebels whose artifical insanities are humbled by […]

The bleary-eyed radio host steps to the microphone, croaking out rudimentary information to the spider-legged plaster of human beings spiraling like a tangled mess of collided kite string and jump-ropes, spreading away from itself but joined at the spittletips by the signal, by the voice, by the unifying entries into the minds of castaway strangers […]

A white hot sidewalk opened up to me today at Rockefeller Center, in a place where no miracle could occur a blistered carpet removed from a concourse closet was unrolled, seducing to usher me to glory, to the hot shine of responsibility, to the houses I’ve known and the homes that remain strangers. There is […]

All in all a poisoned politico mumbled her way through stampeding hoarseness, bullying transient coalitions with free coffee creamers and fleshless telephone calls. Pressure from gunslingers sent incoherent flashes of mental incontinence through expansive platters of pretentious nobility, petitness of distinction like nothing under the crystal stares of demanding strangers. Viny creatures gently strangled decrepit […]

I saw Russia while lying like a masturbated pancake, exhausted, across a Florida Interstate From that vulnerable driveway of death I saw every vein in my eyelids, and wildly predicted my life’s ports of call: Antarctica, Louisiana, Cuba, New York (always New York City) grafted flax bruised quarter liberal pumpkin vile condom thickness of highway […]

You own what is left of the irresponsible asides, the lunging gossip and the hoary retorts. They addle your relationship with the greatness of resignation, the satisfaction of ignorance, the simple joys of disdain and unspoken tribulations. You remembered the words, each one, as they rose up from your unplacid sleep, biting your morning as […]

when the music’s over. shut the snap on the useless travel satchel. until the end i see me in a hoary motel room pecking at a tiny keyboard, the text landing far away, deposited as evidence and ceaseless accumulation, invisible to me. I don’t want to see it. Like Dmitry Kolesnikov, the Russian naval officer […]

HEAD CREAMED UNDER GRILLED HONEY . FLAMBÉ JAZZ BRUSSELS PANTS ASUNDER FRESH THUGS OF DISDAIN SELF-LOATHING PICKING MORALITY PUNS SQUASHED UNDER COFFEE AND VICE . ON CRUXES OF GHOSTS I LUMBERED, A PHANTOM THROUGH THE MOMENTS OF MY LIFE, A DARK TRICKLE OF EXPERIENCE WASHED INTO DUSTY TUBES OF MECHANICALLY IMPOSSIBLE RESURRECTION . PRESSURED HEATHENS […]

O dark charlatan, snap-brimmed flip flops clapping between the earth and you, listen, listen for the vacuum that forms the fistfuls of words frowning in your pockets. You know the words that others will understand but you refuse to arrange them, decrying them as cheap. So take it easy. Handlebars on the platter. Jugs of […]

I could not sleep and so I explained it’s part agony, it’s part hard-on, it’s the dull buzzers from next year, it’s the choking miasma of    unconcoctioned aftershocks    headfully hustling where    dancing girls fear to tick, it’s Ronald Reagan grinning like a    dust storm under    rented Chevrolets driven on    voided alleys and    computerized fields, it’s […]

idiot grimace followed violence burning vibration hollering streets choleric frays nubile crooners humpty jumps ice rabies bowery triumph spool thump ablative face languid Linus I want a pine needle that sounds like rat forest that sounds recyclable that sounds like strawberry sounds like munchable looks like staple friezes not like popochondria much like bubble placards […]

If you wrote poetry as a youngster you may be cursed to remember it for the rest of your life. Worse than the laughing stocks of “Exquisite Corpse”‘s Body Bag but not lively enough for kitsch, these verses are literally unspeakable. Their nubile limpidity retains a jingle-jangle innocence. Moments of dark exaltation see you blurt […]

The repetitions of the tomb cradle you tonight. Hair grows wilder, nails spew curlier, your collapsing back disregards the bitter comforts of the cosmetic cushions. Sweet is the residue, hoary is the hobo detritus we discussed.

GNASH GNASH GNASH YOUR COMPLETE WORKS FILL A TIME BOMB

I saw Chuck Schumer (U.S. Senator for New York) on Madison Avenue last week. With the terrorists in our midst I decided it would be imprudent to snap a picture of this public figure, in a public space, being interviewed by a local TV station for public broadcast. I had places to go and things […]

FORGETTING FOR THE HOUR HOW HARD IT IS TO WRITE A COMPREHENSIVE SENTENCE I HURRIED THROUGH A WIRE STRIPPED OF ITS ARTIFICIAL WRAPPER, EXPOSING THE NATURAL YUCCA PLANT THAT SENDS VOICE CALLS AND DIGITAL MESSAGES AMONG THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LEAVES AND FORESTS, FORMING A CLOUD OF CONVERSATION THAT SUMMONS ITS SELF-MADE ENERGIES BY FORCE OF […]

a hickory amulet melted to outlaw slop hangs youthfully in its shadows, crooking tastefully per the cult fashion of loathing. its jolly viscous throat squeezes its way through an old radio in the emptied basement of your garage. no one hears the signal, the beautiful static hum that wastes itself in the sponge carpet. loitering […]

you look ahead to where this will end but a complex of lies has no word count, no pages. cadences of a high school dance band convene in your mind like bachelors in the sweet gum of humiliation. you learn the languages of paper-folding and textbook indexing to express your droll processions of blight, those […]

Hisconcentrationblasted a universe into being.Immediate war hedeclared among instant extinctionsto dry the galaxiesof theirbitterlydifferent philosophies. Invisible to history,unknown to poets and popes,his universe isinferred by thesoaring, sour squalls of your griping,sublingual mind. It huddles near his ceiling,follows him from his hole,then scrambles at his ankles like ahungry stray.

We saw a mighty grave at Calvary.Tall, the proud angel looking east,the structure looked close to collapse. The bottom had fallen away,   the hillside itself eroded,   the inner foundation    of the tomb    revealed as a    buckling thicket of    bricks. A hundred years old anddangerously close to ruinI saw this tomb as a […]

I see myselfonce here and then thereas others see me.As a person who does things,spends his time this way or that,not mysterious as I imagine butpuzzling and trapped byslothful poisons.Yes, yes, those things and more as Iquestion quantity of lifeversus quality,the greed for more years at the backward-reaching expense of their meaning. I have been […]

I call it “scum” today.