Journal 21 - Delivery Precision

I feel like a drawing or painting painted by
a pointillist - like Seurat. Each distinctive point
independent of any yet dependant on the rest.
Connections that seem obvious at a distance but upon
close inspection reveal a separation that contributes
to the belief in the disconnected but congenial
world. Words look so foreign sometimes – error
or world – outcasts in their hand motions for
acceptance. Now is the time to engulf myself with
tales of death. No deal. My heart, my physical
mechanical blood pumping heart is an erratic
attention wanting starlet – bulging in its pericardium
sheath with knight-like pounding. Its delivery
precision is diminishing in this corporate milieu
of disclosure. Short term memory loss is invading
my soul. The verb that predicates the subject is
lost in translation from my brain to my talon-
scratching pen. Losses are not always gains. Tonight
at 11 – reconstructed body parts for sale at a
local church – get your salvationed cells en
mass with a voucher for your immaterial – mas
importante – self, just in case. Conche su madre.
Words to be killed by. But so meaningless to my
English stricken tongue. Would I were a synthetic
language sponge – absorbing each tongue and dialect
like Brawny absorbs liquid stains. A quicker language
picker upper. My ego is too reflective to be a
genuine writer – characters elude me like the
dance of the basilisk or the brief flash of lightening –
fascinating but beyond my grasp and control. I
suffer from egomania with late onset tachycardia.
Racing to the finish line of death’s dream kingdom
or death’s other kingdom I know not for certain –
is that a jertain in my curtain? Words are fun to
play with but more pejorative when life is in the
formula. My position has declined in recent
years – it is not concerting; it is a mismatch of
desire and ability; drive and impetus; the catalyst
of poverty has not made itself fully known. I cry
at night.

3.18.09

Journal 20 - Picturesque Garden

The world is such a picturesque place with its
on-cue frowns and thumbs-up. Smiles are the samurai
swords of our correct century. I hear the clock
tick – tick tock tick tock – loudly while it always
obediently measures out each indifferent second to
our wannabe rebel lives. The flush of the toilet
whisks me back to swirling reality. The pope
himself must turn and flush the toilet of his
eminent refuse. What was it like in the 1^st Century
of our Lord? Or in the garden for that matter.
The real first century. Did the turd falling from Eve's
beautiful ass smell and reek like 2 day old chitlins
in the dead heat of a Southern summer? Were
the movements of Adam noticeable to the beasts
he named just days before? It's late in the
toxic corners of my shrivelling mind. Well, brain.
Is there a difference? I once knew there was.
Dennet tells a different story. One filled with
emotionless objectivity. Except for those times the
objectivity eluded the ambitious eyes of the young
scientist with his career on the line and his
raise in the interpretation of the ancient cell
residing in his drying Petri dish; Kuhn was
wrong but not that wrong. Revolutions are difficult
to pull off without personal damage. Even Jesus
and Mohammed couldn't escape the leftover doubt
and disbelief of their soon-to-be-obsolescent
fathers. We are trying to erase such accidents from
the collective memory of our once-again correct
culture – not even the primal miracle of wine
can save the worker from his work. Our minds
are sedated with the waves of the television –
please let's all get high and wander the streets
in child-like wonder – grasping anew the mystery
of grass and stars and moon-lit beetles on the
concrete walkway. Spider webs shine in the moon-
light if you manage to cock your head right, perfect
in their patient craft. TV is the Kevorkian of our
prosaic world – pestiferous in its grasp on the dying
consciousness of the next generation – an incubator for
the written off soul – dried teats of dreamy apathy.

3.17.09

Government

The air is thick with automotive farts
My eyes burn with the sewered scent;
The television warns our dimes are parched –
My pocket book weighs less than rent

Sulphur isn't so bad with the proper guard,
Tomorrow the leaves will die and fall
Sautéed and golden: a perfect rosy park -
Removing the deer for the industrial mall

I watch the air move and feign its way
Through dark clouds of labour-laden breath;
Mockingbirds, robins heave and sigh –
Songs deprecated for a small swallow's death:

O I miss the sheared green grass –
Blue skies have mated with epic adultery;
Oil is brandished on our helpless lives
Imputed for our swollen Uncle's perjury

Restaurant Writing

He walked into the narrow restaurant with a green satchel strapped on his shoulder wearing round dark-rimmed glasses that certainly made him look intelligent with his suede sports coat on. He attracted the quick eyes of those around him when he pulled a small notebook out of the green satchel and began to write in slow spurts – looking up and around periodically as though drawing the scenery with a journalist's eye. The waiter brought him a bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône and poured a bit into a small table glass. He nodded and thanked the waiter and took a drink of the wine before continuing his writing. He felt that he was getting along well when the door opened and he saw his friend A------ enter the café. He sighed quietly then smiled and closed the book.

12.16.03

Slow Whispers

I listen each night in bed
for whispers; whispers of a home
absent of the closed-eyed headache
of my own. My wife is good
at curtaining the shadows of
our world our worries our wisdomless
spending of our waif-like souls.
My children smile so sweetly, and
laugh so greatly when I implode.
They all make my sad world explode
with a circling sense of slightly sober
tinkering. It is not fair, the whispers
knocking at my rain-rusted door.

I ache still surrounded by such playful
drippings of concern. It is not known why
we stare outside our warm busy home,
drawn toward the whispers rapping at
our window over cold November snow.
It seems there is a land of effervescent
slowness. A land where snow and rain and
wind consort to perform a languid trio of
imperishable desire for this irreconcilable
earth. A land where laughter and forgetting
teach us how to remember each slumberous
mediocre inch-by-inch silly day.

10.16.08

Journal 19 – Talons and Vicadin

If the heart only has so many beats I hope
I have the heart of a camel; though I think
I may have the heart of a jackrabbit. Though
it's said rabbits are good at something else. That
may be up for debate in my case; or not. The
cyan evening diminishes in glory when the new
moon rises to meet the dark night of the woods –
where great horned owls talon people mindlessly
wondering in pretence of fat-lopping exercise. As
can be seen my pen died and had to be replaced by
one less refined. Perhaps there can be a rebirth,
though hopefully not by flame. My heart has
converted but not in the religious sense though I
would it were. It just now sucks the blood in and
spits it back out correctly, without the wild erratic
gyrations it fell back o. But my legs still twitch and
ache from their abstinence. Abstinence makes my
heart grow fonder, or calmer. But it makes my thighs
and calves feel like they have dead tissue – allegedly
a painful thing. Vicadin is here to save the day. My
voice is out with the moles in the ground tonight;
recalcitrant in its adjustment to the new altered state
of being. Things are different when sober. Lots of
crazy shit out there. Pathetic is the sound of the
words reverberating in my hollow skull like a
million pinballs ricocheting off themselves in
shattered confusion. A vision in words would be nice,
reaching for the tree of style and plucking a
leafy branch or two would be just like the
derivative hack I am. Will my thoughts congeal
into thought one day – one coherent stable and
developed thought? Instead of the jumbled
third world mediocre drivel that drips from this
pen like drool from a slow 18-month old with
no teeth. They should have come in by now.
What's the word for longer than latent? That's
right – there is none – it's grasping at dandelions
in the wind. Wolfgang glares down at me with his
prodigious condescending eyes. Einstein stares back
with his pool-black eyes.

3.10.09

Journal 18 - Sangiovese and Nietzsche

My heart still beats to the sound of its own
drum; literally it manically pounds inside my
chest – quite visible to any eye. It was a mistake
to take the Sangiovese. The cowslips and the
purple bowers are diminished with their lost voice –
Romanticism is such naïveté. Why mark a word up
so – the Romans weren't so cruel. Why must I
have a large appetite and a weak heart? It shouldn't
fail me but it could. It is troubled like a foster
orphaned girl exasperated with the cat-calls of her next-
door friends. Friends is such a tossed about word;
like love. If English could be Greek. Phi and Theta share
so much and are so different. Nothing to see here, pass
along. I glance at the bikinis bathing in the sun at
the Food & Wine Festival – there should be a law about
who can and can't wear bikinis. And those who can –
must! Sidewalks are ambiguous in their unclaimed owner-
ship. I mow the grass on the other side though. Smells
good however abused in poems and others. Bent grass
tells lots of stories and betrays many stow-aways. An
eyelash looks a bit like some expensive bent grass –
the kind people sit in bars and listen to experts,
inaudible experts, pontificate about. Philosophers
are no longer real – having taken up comedy or
cheese. Wittgenstein did close the book on philo-
sophy; so many still don't want to believe. They're
good historians of 19th century problems and 20th
century solutions. Correspondence is not coherent;
yet coherence is abstract. Math is tautological yet
dictates truth. I know, math is more than mere
tautology – at least so say the mathematicians.
Empiricism and Rationalism are either circular or
self-contradictory. Leaving us with nothing. Nietzsche
took a baseball bat to the head and laughed his
big German laugh. Was Berkeley crazy? (Yes!)
But there is no real answer outside of God – and
yes, which God matters. God is like the unknown
uncle who has been following your life paying for every-
thing and remaining in the dark – receiving no credit
when the police reluctantly release you from prison.

Journal 17 – Greasy Reflections

My heart has turned against me and now
pants while beating to a ditty of Schoenberg.
I taste metal in my mouth and my breath
stinks when I yawn; waves of heat and
dizziness proceed across my oxygen-thirsty
veins while my arteries cry for a little more
thickness and air. My eyes are either tired
or bleary like someone just punched in the nose
for laughing at his girlfriend's scabby haircut. In
each day is enough time to do all the things that
uplift the soul – produce a painting, wander a
museum or a few acres of trees in autumn with
living creeks and pregnant ponds – write a poem
or catch a fish – read Shakespeare or track a
buffalo over green plains in Wyoming – stand
at the head of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls
and try with all your strength to not raise
your arms to your side, smile the smile of a
martyr in plain sight of heaven and jump into
the beauty. Death by Beauty isn't the worst way
to enter the kingdom of death's dream kingdom. I
often think I am ready for death to visit me
when I can no longer see the beauty in a
rainy day, though children ameliorate the tendency,
as the poet says, My three year old's red coat hangs
on her door screaming No. But still the threat is
there – you're either that person or not; maybe the
categories are the same, populated the same, as Weak
and Strong. When I do see death out of the corner
of my eye glaring with elongated white eyes I
shudder in cold fear – suddenly the blinking cursor
on my monitor or my boss's blather or my
life's waste doesn't weigh so heavily. The greasy
reflection of the pine tree in the puddle of water
behind the benches at the park looks like a portal
to a world I don't want to leave behind. My
daughter's hair, out-stretched while swinging pulls me in,
while my son's laughing teeth in his sweet mother's
cuddling arms set me down like a duck on the feeding pond.


3.7.09

Der Mond Naturlich

And though your smile is hidden in a stare,
    cloistered near a chastised grin –
    seductive – knowing I will never win
your treasured hand from his inconstant care:
fleeing like a vulture whenever he is there –
    trapped inside my nourished sin,
    I pray you would with warmth begin
to steal my vagrant eyes; steal his devilish glare,
and escort me to some strange esoteric ride
    where women, bathed in sunlight’s close embrace
    wisp and moan each other’s withered face:
and I, with you – and you alone along my side
    will naught but smile at their unlucky plight –
    content to have you constant in my sight.


From 2001-ish.

Foreign Streets

In foreign streets of drunken lore
I sigh; and sigh a little more...
Struck like William in his final draw
Finished like some Cretaceous dinosaur
And left to decay like any worn-out, legendary
animal will do; to be replaced
by some more adapted carnivore;
Into the ground my withered carcass goes
on unclipped fingers and unclean toes
like some forgotten outlaw of 1888:
into the dusty ground must I lie and sleep:
stuffed inside my grave - sullen and strait:
forgetting how to weep;

Upstairs, the bed it creaks and moans -
like my late grandfather, it wisely groans
for more of what it lacks:
Women's ripe and fruitful tongues - that
follow in tempestuous cracks
of sensuous shrieks and cantankerous tones:

supplying dreams for drunken splendor
and endless nightmares with innocent, tender
farewells and young forget-me-nots...
(hearts that swell and minds that hinder)
lusty seductive plots
thread with indecisive pleas
of lovely, playful, sultry kisses
upon her water-laden eyes -
with tears and tissue and blushing lies
in a dream she silently wishes...

that we would wake without good-byes


From 1997-ish.

Journal 16 – Entropy and Something Else

I was told the large rising moon is an illusion; the
brain is fit for filling in gaps. I have many gaps
in my liquid grey brain – could they be filled by its
three dimensional cameras to instill a bit more
consistency to this well developed post-everything
world we've stumbled and tripped our way into?
I don't think ducks quack any more than I think
rhinoceroses snort; lorikeets flutter in bright
wet green kaleidoscopes of light licking the sweet
nectar from the clear plastic container – oblivious to
the toothy joy bequeathed to the tiny placeholders
of future lawyers and executives. Placeholder
sounds like an objective insincere pejorative insult
to our carpe diem children. It is. Entropy lasts
for a lifetime but disorder is a subjective flash in
the pond. My marrow is at wallowing ease with the
cheap wine siphoned in from the drab cardboard
carton on the floor. I asked for a leather wine-
skin but cardboard is so 21^st century. Indeed
death is drunk and angry around the corner waiting
with a silver blade in hand – unsure of time and
space but aware the frayed yarn is nearly spent.
Death is like a dream before the big track meet. It
was only a dream; won't happen to me. Death is
slow and calculating, having its way with us from
the day of our entropied birth. Disorder is subtle in
its clever deception. More more more my bones call
to my cortex for its inebriated cry for more intoxicating
injections of inhibition. Alliteration is a pitfall I
slip into like water running over a small ridge –
falling in inanimate bliss; or an old worn pair of
paint splattered blue jeans. Alcohol is a worm
eating away at my corporeal soul with tiny little
chipmunk teeth, anticipating the day I forget how to
spell 'I'. Certainly a day to be remorseful about.
Worms make me shit and puke. So does mescaline
but one is preferred over the other. My mind interprets
'one more drink' the way my 2-year old interprets
'one more story' – one more then one more then
one more – ad infinitum. It's OK though; just one more…

3.6.09

Journal 15 – Elections and WASPs

Laughter bounces down the hall with the pictures
arranged in chronological procession, filled with teeth
and snow and leaves and swings and fences. Our
fences plunge themselves into the dry earth with
wry sinister smirks of demarcation. Election day
is the most pretentious day of the year. Lines
formed of the dead, the quiet dead in the year –
filled days, placeholders when politics bubbles to
the surface, broaching the temperate topic of
PC conversation – hoping to remain quiet so as not
to betray their own inherited ignorance as to what
the current conditions and proposed solutions are;
their party vote is what counts. Silent bud deadly.
I've seen the cousin to the viper coiled around
itself next to a clear plastic bag of rabbit food –
silently waiting for its young springing prey. I
could be prey. Though I've marinated too long in
wine and bourbon – a brown purple glaze for the
diner drifter – perfect for the exasperated and bored.
Ennui enticed Baudelaire – I find flowers quite
charming in their ubiquitous ability to bring candid
smiles to the sullen faces of this hindsight generation
of well-wishers. Well the mistakes that I've made;
they do sometimes bother me. If I could only show
you how I feel – you would then say to me –
hey hey don't bother me, you and I are the drastic
terrific same – same as the Nazi bellowing for the next
twitching death; same as the fish-flopping death of
one who puts his head in a plastic bag – what a
disciplined way to depart. The ivory of my skin is
said to say so much. The chocolate of hers is
off limits. There is no double standard except with
WASPs. We bear the weight of the world's ills
on our flogged shoulders – beaten and spat
upon. We still look up with incredulous tear-filled
eyes asking Why. Such a deprecated question. We
should recognize our obsoleteness with wide white
eyes – shameless and vesseled in our attempt to
adapt like a 4-chambered heart in the Palaeozoic age.
Disconfigured.

3.4.09

Journal 14 – Sin...pretty much

Sin once dictated the behavior of my young
fearful self. Sin crept in dark corners where cob-
webs sat, where rats – wet stench laced rats –
wobbled along; sin left numbers on bathroom doors
needing friends and wonderful times; sin walked
out the back door of someone's clean house carrying
her entertainment center in the palm of his
hand. Sin is a smiling face on a public bus –
laughing at the call being made to your wife at this
moment to release your funds or sacrifice your
son's life. Sin was once so clear to me – echoing the
low bass of Paul's deep voice – concrete and
physical in its subtle manifestations. Abstraction
and indirection is difficult but necessary to relieve
oneself of any responsibility. Sin is a grown-up
with a pointed finger and shrilly voice squealing
that every pleasurable thing will bring death in
the afternoon. Sin is a drunk, drunk driving his
small children through the city to mid-day
practice of some uplifting art – football or piano.
Sin is throwing darts but missing the bulls-eye.
Sin is sleepy at 10 in the morning once awake
at 4 in the morning. Sin sees church goers smile
on Sunday morning while cursing their children
on Sunday evening. Sin never cries foul –
unless it isn't. Sin is a bloody sheet. Sin is
the small gathering of vomit on each side of
your bed dirty from last night's womanizing in
Jim Beam's comfort. Sin is laughing heartily at
any discussion of the merits of sin. Sin is in
the mother or the father's reaction to the eternal
crying of his or her child. Sin is wandering the
streets at night with a wad full of money and a
pocket full of goods to sell to all the drooling addicts.
It seems that sin is everywhere and all around
us – what then is it really? How does sin mean
something in a sinful world with nothing to contrast
with it? Unless the stories of Jesus in the Bible
are true; but they just say – He was without sin.

3.2.09

Journal 13 – Scepticism and Hope

I suppose research is tedious yet irresistible in
its call, like whole fish flounder with crusted
crab meat – bony and overwhelming. When will
research discover hope – real hope in the brown
toothy smile of a basketball bellied African living each
day in hope the new American Junior League funded
business will perpetuate and stimulate her fly swarmed
economy and territory out of its great drastic depression.
I've seen the excitement in the eyes of wealthy
bystanders feeling the call to support of a good
cause – unable, well unwilling, to act themselves,
they flood non-profit organizations with their semi-
hard earned money. They¹ can't be bad. Sure we can't
know their expenditure or balance sheet, but to
doubt all they do is just stupid right? Right?
No-one would ever do that. (Ebbers, Madoff, Stanford
others...) Hope is the bread winner of so
many starving Africans that our faculties are
almost unnecessary. HA. With so many foundations
why are we still in such a terrible wretched mess?
Not enough folks like the good Birminghamanians?
I'm being obstinate and ignorant. Of course we're
stimulating their economy. Of course without us
their life would be utter shit – as ours is so
wonderful and fulfilled². Each day the skin stretches
tauter against my brittle jaw bones until it
flaps in the lightest wind like in a G-force machine.
It's the grape of the Rhône valley. Our bonds are
easily broken and re-forged with that bastardization of
hope we wondrous Americans call practicality – or
pragmatism. Realist. That's where wisdom and
good behavior reigns. What did Nietzsche say
about the realists? Nothing good. Pragmatism is a
philosophical ground based on no more certainty
than its own assumptions – that what works is
right; just as reason is not based on anything but
its own assumptions – namely, reason. Lines with
circles arching backwards get me through my faint
struggle with the possibilities of time and accomplishments.


2.28.09

  ¹ The organizations.
  ² I realize there are lots of problems and holes in what I wrote above (and below). Snippets of arguments, like most of the other stuff written in this journal. I just thought in this case I would make it clear I don’t agree with everything I wrote. Remember this is a journal that I try to use as a ‘write whatever pops in your head as quickly as possible’ journal.

Discipline (Speaking of Knowledge)

Somewhere someone in some back-room
Of a pipe smoked sofa laden club
Said Appearances are all we'll ever see;
Appearances are all we'll ever groom –

Nibbling French bread and sipping warm tea,
Licking tobacco marinated lips
Doesn't surprise the children one bit –
Grown accustomed to such philosophy

Knowledge is a slippery, layered thing
Not found in some finger-printed book
On an oily shelf in a well-observed room;
It is an acquired taste, a third look

At letters, sweat and bloody rules;
Penetrated through calloused, hardened skin –
Sometimes learned in pedagogical schools
Sometimes found in accidental discipline

Appearances are all, she said; they're all
We'll ever know; all we'll ever see;
I asked in a most understated tone,
Whatever could a prime number be?

Journal 12 – Rainbows and Knowledge

Saturn raised his ringed head in defiance of nectar
dripping from Jupiter's last lick of the tongue
polishing off the last dish of ambrosia. Knowledge is
a tricky subtle elusive object. When do we know
we know that knowledge is elusive? When does
the yellow school bus really appropriate yellowness?
Inching along with misplaced keys I wonder if I
know my location at all. Is it ever consistent or
coherent? Does it correspond to the chatter I
receive through various wet channels? I know when
the fire is hot; I know when the road is turning. Do
I? I believe in the past I experienced a now faint
feeling of hot pain when grasping the blue of the
fire; I remember not crashing into that other
car thingy that looks like mine. They say crashes
can be deadly. We believe. Do we know? These
questions are simple and formulaic I know. What?
I know questions about knowledge are formulaic?
Knowledge is a shadow flashing in the corner of our
eye – brief enough to alert us to its presence
but fleeting enough to not sit still and be owned
or possessed. So we grasp at lightening and call
ourselves enlightened. How nice. There are so
many things we know except the foundation and
truth of knowledge. But ah I have God – the
great coordinator and linker. I know I'm sleepy
or I feel sleepy? Sleepy like a hound dog. Nodding
off is such a delicious treat. No knowledge but
words talking of no knowledge. Meaning? What
is meaning; what is what; what is is? What
happened to receptive reason? Drowned in a tired
Fibonacci sequence. Symbolic logic has no meaning
but great consequence. I turned the wet leaf
over in my hand and watched it stick like a
strip of scotch tape – yet colorful in its late autumn
death; science stands strong with raised sickle
in hand – slicing the beauty of the wet leaf on my
hand into the beauty of hydrogen oxygen and other
ostensive molecules – cold philosophy unweaves ten
thousand rainbows leaving us without a foundation
of knowledge.

2.27.09

Journal 11 - November Love

November is the saddest month, breeding glum gifts
out of the dead only to return them for nothing worse.
hope is like bypass surgery. I've bypassed many
opportunities and forays into a world where dreams
are apprehended by the divine, where the first
syllable of the sentence is a simple introduction to an
elegant development of grace and deliverance. Each night
the crickets stroke their spiky angled legs for my
aggravated soul. Moths can be interesting in their
cultured black/white camouflage. Very modern with
their simple adaptability. How quaint. Where is the
nearest Science journal to assuage my forlorn fears?
It's all good since it's all neither good nor bad
but just left to matter. Energy was the darling of
our forefathers. Matter was quite socially predictable –
Haeckel (not Hegel) danced the nature dance and spun
great tunes of philosophical blankets in the cold. I
remember the day my teeth shivered from the point of
the gun thrust in my young face in the convenience
store at night – Haeckel made it all better. Hope is
a worn out pair of blue jeans with little holes forming
around the knees and splayed at the bottom where
the heel of my boots grinds it into threads. Jeans
can be patched or replaced. A river still runs through
it – runs through the eroded yards of fun filled children's
dreams – runs through the city taking in bird-levelled
aircraft – runs through the water-carved canyons of
the water-stricken west – runs through country and
19^th century wedding feasts and dances – runs
through our largest continent giving up its water to
overrun our banks where experienced natives smile
at their welcomed preparation – runs through the
songs and the fathers and sons and mothers and
daughters – the river runs through heaven and hell
absorbing everything in between, vomiting random
bits of swollen flesh. Love is hard like living with
rat extermination. The blood and fur isn't easy. Love is
hard like fat bellies that so want to be flat but without
the discipline and work. The ends – not the means.

2.25.09

Journal 10 – Presidents and Happiness

The dawn belched that morning though it may have
been the frogs or my wife. I didn't bother rolling
over to feel the cold side of the bed; my...

---

The dawn felt like brown sandals in Zaire
on July 4^th – firecrackers flailing and cracking
around in mock celebration of a has-been
liberating country. Now soiled we wallow in the
sty of liquidation and timely bailouts with
Monopoly money. After dinner I walked
outside and belched as loud as I could at both
Presidents, at all Presidents. The office has
slowly deteriorated since breathed in by that
slave owning Jefferson. Where will Barack take
us? Is he a political belief? I sigh at the
breathless tycoons who manage our money from
their penthouses and corporate jets. I wish
I had a corporate jet; is that why I berate
them and disown them? Envy? I chipped my
tooth while eating ice-cream from a cheap
marble slab; drunk I sued the owner for
willful intent of personal harm as he never
tried to improve himself. I've found I
think in a piss poor way after many sips
of broad red wine -> or thin. A vanilla
flavored cigar only accentuates the happy
laden influence. Happiness is a fleeting
apparition of some laughing half-cocked
loony convinced there is something better
waiting on the other side of dreamless death.
Loonies aren't so bad this time of year.
Happiness is floating on the suds of dirty shit
flowing happily down the street or into the
tunnels that feed the beautiful harbor of our
holy city. I've felt the ending and fleeting
gestation of happiness. My neat drink washed
it away like the wasted toilet paper it is.
But there is the voice that sings the song in
the sparsely seated church on Sunday evening.

2.21.09

Journal 9 - Broken

The road was long and the gravel splitting his
bare feet, dry in the July heat. Each pebble felt
like a burr in his toes, each fried step fired pain
signals to his waterless brain – fully aware of where
his bitter feet were leading. He cursed and flicked
his dry-sucked cigarette off to the side of the
road into the crisp leaves of the forest; that wasn't
his problem. The wind blew the last drag of smoke
into his eyes so he squinted and relaxed,
then kept walking and cursing. She left him with
his shorts and shirt but everything else she took.
As she drove away – with her friend driving, her in
the back seat, head turned – she didn't smile or
mock or even flip him the bird. A tear slid down
her cheek, leaving tiny cakes of mud with the dust
on her face, like a dirty rivulet. He watched her as she
drove away and watched her try to not wipe the
tear from her face. He turned his head and spat
on the ground and then watched her motionless
until he could no longer see her. He glanced up at
the whiteness of the sun, shook his head and
started his painful hot walk into town, tying
his shirt around his head and lighting his last
cigarette. There wasn't a cloud in the sky as
he walked.


2.15.09

Journal 8 – Dried Currents

The breath of the afternoon was gray but warm –
somehow transparent in the evening calm. Another
bridge before the day decays like simple plutonium –
whatever that is. Forgotten is what I see each day.
The bees are forgotten and the ants; the sycamore
tree is sliced to death when the fever comes to
town. Night night. The afternoon delays my thoughts
like a constipated woman in tight underwear. My
thoughts are dried and parched from the winter sleep in
heat and wine – dried up like a desert stream, no
currents to fire and connect ideas like webs. Spiders
have so much to teach about design and beauty – the
unapproachable kind.

2.11.09

Beauty and Love

How many poets, who at their wits end,
Have raised their dizzy heads to a dead muse –
Hoping after hope's last breath to portend
Glory in their quest for an image to use
To compare Beauty's pleasure to Love's pain?
Learning rhymes and tales of lovers' rich store
Has left them more to learn and less to gain
Of how to blend two realms of faulty lore.
For Beauty finds pleasure in deceiving
The weak hearts of countless untrained men.
And Love, the fickle harlot, prizes weaving
Grand fated plans with an infernal grin.
    Undaunted by Love's sideways back dealing,
    I assault your beauty with words (un)appealing.

Journal 7 - Rancid Sleep and Ennui

The fall afternoon glow is forgetful in the twilight
of another day where penguins chatter like cocktail
parties pretending nothing is coming but the wakening
tides of tired eyes and scampering feet. The days are
long and tiresome with eyes glued together with
sleep that eludes the father and the daughter.
Why have mornings become torn with rancid smells
and stumbling feet; walking through hot milk and
dry coffee? Yawning never seems to accomplish
much, but stretching the skin over my jaws and
squinting my horrific eyes. Salad is nice on days
like this. Dawn lays down an orange kiss that
follows tempestuous little sisters to their sleep,
hollow and watches the teams of reindeer slip
drugs to each other waiting for their time in
the limelight. Nothing sacred when the world
is secular and no longer in need of the sacred –
crucified on the cross of selfish anonymity where
each religion is treated the same – with condescension
and faux tolerance. Religion was the opiate of the
masses. Now it's entertainment and psychology.
Ennui is the new god – praised for making it through
another day in a lonely disembowelled cold universe
where all that is is matter – not even understood by
the experts themselves. My back hurts but so what.
Teamsters carry the day, and shallow thoughts
of each Neanderthal descended person drop like
stones in the ocean, leaving ripples that betray
influence but lead nowhere. Lead me to these
shallow oceans and let us begin again with
first principles and unfold the layers of the
world until we find again the hand drawn work
of the divine smiling like a happy mother playing
peek-a-boo with her children. Always there even when
not seen, God is like a hangover hanging around each
torpid day reminding us of our previous misgivings
that is cured with living water only obtained from faith
and tribulation. When the night comes from passing
through to the other world what will I do? Will I smile,
yell, jump or piss my pants?

2.8.09

Journal 6 - Blood and Laughter

Blood is all around us. Seeping out into our nuptial
beds, standing in a bottle of fine red wine, covering
the names of books and the themes of our best songs;
it rests in the setting of the evening sun as it wipes
away the dreadful sins of another menstruating day – dry
scalps on covered hands. Blood is not haemoglobin or
plateletes. Writer's block is an African mask hanging
on the wall of a single broker, on the single wall
by itself. I don't want to write in women's
clothing depressed with the passing of our yellow
daze. Each tick before dawn I hear the wolves
moan on their personal cliffs a wailing mournful
tune to the bright dampened moon. The end of
the night is a sad time for them. And with
hanging eyelids heavy with last night's drink I
roll out of bed and put on some shorts. The
TV is barking at no one about new sales and lowest
prices. The days have ended that found ourselves
fat and jolly in our late afternoon happiness with
ice cream and watermelon keeping us occupied. Now
the time has come to eat with cornbread fingers and
gravyless biscuits while the water turns brown
in its chemical treatment plants failing with the
laughing economy. Laughter is a dream that fell apart
when the government tried to walk us to the tune of
freedom and protection. The dream has died with the
little pieces of teeth kicked in with a presidential
boot after offering his serpent wrapped hand. The
smile of the green serpent haunts me in my dreams
like an African dance of the dead. The dancing
should help the passage of time but the noon is
here. There is no more chance to kiss her now
than before. My breathing is heavy with wheezing
with the blood-dried baked snot and boogers in my
reddened nose. Everything is regurgitated from
yesterday's failures with the last ring of hope on
the teetering ladder falling over the emperor's mansion.
The sky is dark in the noontime meadows where
thunder is another word for day. A crying spell of
a tired and heartless earth.


2.6.09

Journal 5 - Dishwasher Mice

I hear the dishwasher squeak like little mischievous
mice in plot to overturn their wet world. I
recall last night that I was shot with round lead
bullets, from a musket from 1865. It hurt, like
a minor heart attack or a bit of an ablation. It's
sad when mice sing songs in the dishwasher, songs
of a lonely heart broken with their little feet
made of cartilage and flappy skin. Smiling with
buck teeth doesn't endear them to my wife or
to me. They squeak. And scurry. Why scurry
if innocent? The days are ending when the dishes
are quiet in their hideaway rocking back and forth
knocking wine glasses off their high horse. There is
folly in the other room, and folly in this here room –
these words are scratched at, known to be meaningless
and filled with nothing. If nothing could be
logically analyzed where would we find the empty
conclusion? These little gifts of a broken down
prostituted muse have wormed their way into
some part of my head that I don't quite understand.
Could it be the Greek that I claim to study?
I'm cheating. Torn blue jeans are inevitable. Like
books on a rainy Sunday. Intemperate I crawl
back into the clothes I mocked yesterday on the drunk
passed out in his own urine behind the liquor store's
dumpster. Sleep could be sound. And silent. The little
man who watches her count the coupons on her new
shiny pocket book smiles to himself in some crooked
sly way – knowing things not known before.
Shiny little truths like ink on paper, discarded
with last year's hit movie. What was the
name? Yeah, that one. Where words are crammed
in people's mouths like cinnamon rolls gushy and
tasty but left with nothing but a false high
and lard. Foi gras is easier on my hand than
this writing. Need to slow down this fast writing
before my hand cramps into a masturbator's clutch.
How droll. Stop the coach.

2.5.09

Journal 4 - Orange Cliché

The night sky was an orange cliché where silly
men in standard manly boots strut sideways into
the gasping sunset – tired of their stubble and
hoping for another scene to capture the faux visionary
mind. He steps on the smoked cigarette and looks
into his splotchy horse’s blank eyes. Where are we
goin? he asks. Neigh of course is all the
splotched polka-dotted horse replies. Horse speak for
everything and nothing. He places his spit-laden
boot in the cracked stirrup and puts all his weight
into it – just to aggravate. The horse bucks –
2 can play at that game. Again he tries to
make the horse his servant – and the horse knows
who’s stronger. Flat on his sun burned back he
smiles at the placid horse with his stupid little eyes
pretending to know something. The horse almost runs
off to the next town, but doesn’t. He doesn’t
know the way.

2.3.09

Journal 3 - Antiquated Aphorisms

Evening in the antiquated village with the mouths
pouring forth old-timey aphorisms in the light
of another foster program where the news is carried
from house to house in little sealed envelopes
licked with wicked tongues that no longer re-
verberate the sordid reality breathed by
the whole clan. The day passes by like dirty
dishes left in the grimy sink – intentionally
neglected. They will clean themselves we hope.
Hope is such an ancient concept – contorted with
human philosophies and world religions. Hope is
like a soap dish on the side of the toilet
where strangers wipe their dirt and mask
what little dignity they continue to lie to every-
one they still have. Why is hope no longer
found in books? Books have such great smiles
on their rigid cases. Since the time to come
to sleep the years have passed in obsequious
mercurial apathy.

1.29.09

Journal 2 - God's Damp Moon

The moon was cold damp and sad in its wide
eyed following of happy sounds in each other’s
ear. No-one could believe the voices in the coffin
where he lay dead for three whole minutes....in
a coffin? Why not on the slab of concrete,
where they all die cold and snuffed out like
Eliot’s match flame. The universe has nothing
against the world – nothing but its own selfish
meme to continue living the lie that nothing
really matters. What would matter if all
the world was matter? I find the writing of
quick words easy but no good. I find the shower
the happiest part of the day until dreary sleep
when who knows what will waken us from that
death portent. A cloud in the sky could be
the fluffy head of an elephant or the nasty
lips of a pontoon boat. Maybe the elves left on
purpose and intentionally to rid us of our sickening
dependence. It’s not so bad to depend. It’s crying
time for the children. What is there to cry
about – everything and nothing. When will I hear
God’s voice in the musical noise of the city?

1.28.09