Journal 54 - Assimilating Soil and Bumpy Tongues

I like a tap on the shoulder of a stranger telling me
she likes my smile or my hair, longer in recent years.
There is a bit of honesty in this pass-by compliment of
a stranger. I wonder if animals in the wild or the
non-wild compliment each other. Hey, that was a nice
leap one gazelle says to the other with a certain
twitch of head and antlers. Is communication as confused
among non-human Earth sojourners? Communication in
my world is like putting the 45 record player on the
33 speed setting; or like putting a high-density floppy
disk in a low-density drive. Communication is sitting
in a room at night with the lights on, unaware of
what's outside seeing only the reflection of the stagnant
furniture in your internal room. Halle Berry could be
standing outside naked and whispering I Love You but
who would know? They say language is a game and
I suck at games. Surrendering to the flow is lauded in
certain circles as the key to a more helping friendly exist-
ence; even surrendering like an Aeolian Harp though seems
rudimentary and naive. Should I float upon the
indecisive wind like a wondering leaf? A leaf dead
and falling off the branch though beautiful in its light
fracturing beauty, drifting wherever and whenever to the
ground only to rot and decay into the assimilating soil, or
to be raked up into a trash bag and sent to the local
government funded shredder? I think surrender is the
dream of an intellectual artist the way a white knight
is a dream of the callow girl. Surrender is the path of
trampled feet - but it's so easy to do.  Leaves can be interesting
in their descent toward the ground - providing a landing pad
for happy laughter inducing children - children with
laughs so true and dense that there is a slight strengthening
of the gravitational field surrounding them - sucking you
into the orbit of their happiness. Dreams are sleep-deprived
in their longing to whisk you out of the world you
cater to each morning and evening, drinking the water of
foreign fountains and staring at your tongue in the
mirror watching it turn black, noticing for the first time the
bumps she felt when she slid her tongue across yours while
everyone was asleep.


5.19.09

Journal 53 - I Like the Distant Sound of That

The sound of the music from the parties is distant and
unfamiliar in their atonal rhythms and quick dance steps.
I heard her say, "I like the distant sound of that"
while I sat stoned in the back seat of the brand-new
jeep rolling another joint from the seedless jack-lantern
bud we found on the side of the road day after a
road block. Best time to go hunting for free green bud.
I know I should be afraid of the hippopotamus but
I have to admit I look into the blank eye and goofy
teeth of that top-rated murderer and smile a buck-
toothed goofy smile right back as if we share a secret
sign of misunderstood brotherhood. Oh aren't we all
sad and misunderstood? Like the mouse and the king
snake? Now I lay me down to midnight past asleep
writing for my soul to jump into an understated bleep
on the taxidermists' radar. I am lost in this world of
post structured freedom; my identity was lost and left
on the hook of the bathroom stall back in 1909. My tongue
is cleft like a remnant of some forked serpent that
never presented itself until I wormed around. Wormed
is such a nasty word. Why do I fill these nice square
drawn rectangular pages with such depressing, gross, dark
images and verbs?  I don't know but it feels adolescent
and obsolete. But if that's who I am apparently I should
stop writing if I don't like it. There's a manic mockingbird
in my heart imitating the sound of a slow-moving
piston with these intermittent hiccups. I like to mix
with metaphors till the cows come to roost. The night
lost its cliched blackness the minute my notes on
the beauty of the sunflower growing on the beach
found themselves in the hands of another meandering
poser stealing strands of thought from the deadbeat has-
beens awake when they should be sleeping and asleep
when awake. There's no mistaking the sound of an
elephant snoring in the ear of your creative basilar
membrane. Lovely with its heavy duty wind-forming tiny
tornadoes, I mark notes of distress in her always
perfect voice; perfection is a dead dream of antique pens -
her perfect hazel grin not withstanding...


5.18.09

Journal 52 - Salt on a Slug

The drab brown thrasher confessed his drab brown
love to the red cardinal perched in the highest bare
tree. The cardinal gave a tweet-tweet-tweet in response
and flew down south. That's "thanks for the thought" in
bird speak. There are too many red lights flashing at
me - so many meanings - my phone flashes for e-mail in
3 different accounts; the answering machine flashes (sometimes);
the traffic light flashes; the TiVo flashes; the VCR
used to flash; the car lights flash (on the dashboard and
outside); and the lights in the red light district flash
their ancient red lights like winking red eyes in the
subterranean night. I sometimes think my daily life at
work is like a large liberal does of salt on a slug after
a 3-week rain, the superlative of enervation. My throat
certainly feels oversalted.  Reaching into the bowels of a
friend's couch is an act of unacknowledged intimacy. So
much to learn and find and discover and reveal. Revelation
on a lazy Saturday afternoon while playing Madden '08
can be broken into an arpeggio of this or that and often
something else. But if your nose bleeds the noisy prophets
may be whistling around the corner ready to pinch your
cheeks and call you Xavier. Prophets would wear suits
and toes with neat laced shoes and perhaps a pony-
tail just to say pay attention. It's hard to be a prophet
among attention-deficit doppelgangers careening through
the streets with lucid crossed eyes dipped in emeralds or
rhodonite. Eyes are worth so much more than gems -
more beautiful too. I'd rather stare at eyes the color
of the Mediterranean than the Mediterranean. The horizon
is missing on that side of the world btw. I'm tired of
my throat feeling like fish sucking air outside the aquarium.
So many writers writing around the block writing about
writer's block and indefinite revisions of imprecise
collisions of adverbs and conjunctions. And yet I like
the facilitating conjunction. Adverbs though are for the birds
too stubborn to fly south when the food is stuck, frozen in
the local pond. The cycle of life eludes me like the
gravitational constant or the nickle-back defense. Are you
part of the cycle or part of the problem to paraphrase
my mother.


5.16.09

Journal 51 - Serendipitous Spinning Earth

Someone asked what the word was for a word that
looked like what it meant as opposed to sounded like
what it meant - her example was 'awkward.' I guess
so. I found on-line the words 'bed' and 'letters' - I
think those are brilliant. Other than 69 of course.
Sometimes the door to creativity is blocked by weird
coral reef partnerships and heavy green algae-ridden
barnacles of feces - remaindered thought hedging in
against you - sucking out the smooth coherent currents
of thought like a whirlpool - a large mess of un-
wanted decay deterring the straight thoughts of
chairs and conversation and hammocks and dogs fetching
yellow balls in the overgrown field next door to
the large green well-kept housing-project-killing golf-
course; large masses of nonsense throw off the gravitational
direction of thought more than small simple thoughts
that are common sense to the intellectual pedestrian
pedalling along the maybank highway at less-than-normal
traffic speeds enduring the honks and taunts from
beer-sodden automobilians believing it's their turn in
the spotlight. Yeah, bikers are a conundrum of yester-
day and today making their cycling mark on the
straggling little roads that split the day between
smiling hellos and back-of-the-head growls - terror
in the face of nothing is to be feared like the tiny
gust of hurricane-impersonating winds on the compact
beach of the Eastern seaboard. If the earth is spinning
around its axis and moving around the sun - how
fast must perception in my inebriated head must
be spinning to observe it like a basketball rotating
through the still quiet arena with breaths and mouths
silent in their anticipation for a serendipitous result
to carry their hangover through another robotic work-day
of squawking birds and pestiferous woodpeckers. Yes
I'm sorry woodpeckers are an image of egomaniacal
aggravation in their wandering loud annoying repetitious
pecking. Maybe they're our closest cousin - of the
kind that counts more - psychological. Why do female
homo-sapiens imitate the animal world with their make-up faces?


5.15.09

Journal 50 - Cuban Musical Souls

The foghorn hollers in the distance like the mother
of a 13-year old chasing cats around the neighborhood.
(no need to ask for what) But I am sitting on a
buoy out to sea, drifting out in the dark blue of
the night-time sea. I'm not gasping for air flapping
my hands like a dog in the water for the first time,
swallowing the salty water and coughing up tiny invisible
ocean water creatures like plaque and tartar. No, I'm just out
on the distant blue buoy leaning my head back staring
at he moon and the stars and even the milky way
in this light pollutionless wet world. The stars are so
numerous yet innumerable they are both distinct and
blurred together like a light charcoal drawing.  A clear
chiaroscuro wipes itself across the tired moth-eaten
blanket of the dark night-time blue sky (apologies to
T.E. Hulme - whom you should read! NOW!) I'm not even
thirsty or sea-sick out here bobbing like a child's
fishing bob on a neighbor's brown pond, though I'm hoping
not to attract the attention of the local flesh-eating
shark community. I sneeze snot vapors out into the
moon-lit starry night and I swear there is a glistening
beauty in it. Three dolphins or porpoises reveal their
crooked backs in the calm black water reminding me I'm
not alone but still cared for. If Flipper is here who needs
to fear the shark schools? I feel I need a straw of hay
in my mouth to twist around between my swollen
fingers and chew on as the night and the blue progress.
Or maybe a Cuban cigar. I could be in Cuba for all I
know. Just lead me to the bars where Compay Segundo and
Eliades Ochoa play this imperishable home-grown music
to a colorful garden of dancing flowers in the fertile
yard. Mil gracias a la familia grande. A thousand thanks
to you and to you too you Cuban musical souls who
raise your intoxicating notes to the beautiful rhythms
in the ancient nighttime sky. The sky is older than
man. There's something about floating and bobbing in
the blue night on the black water after a red sunset, hearing
the sounds of the Cuban soul in the wind on the waves in the
water - alone and surrounded by the suffering happy creation.


5.13.09

Journal 49 - Unbreakable Bricks and Dirty Kleenex

Searching for the right phrase the way a cat searches
for birds and mice has left me chewing on too many
geriatric bones, or worse - adolescent pre-mature
driftwood of a rat's soggy bone. Images are not like
kites on a windy day, but sailboats in the middle
of the harbor when all the flags in the city droop
down like wet towels on a clothesline. Sometimes I
feel spent like a deflated plastic bag of wine separated
from its barrel and its box, crumpled and thrown in a
bathroom trash-can, stuck with Q-tips, dirty Kleenex and
make-up caked cotton balls. Others I feel more like the
painting on the wall everyone stares at and talks
seriously about, tossing out compliments because they think
they're supposed to, but never really taking the time to
understand or penetrate. Like a painting I can't say or offer
loads of help - silent and amenable to whatever they say.
Would I were a weather-vane or a gentleman's watch,
a set of speakers or a stringed instrument of oily
fingertips. I hear the wind and the rain outside
kneading the burnt summer street; leaves in the wind
and leaves in the street swirl inside my swollen head
concocting deprecated memories of my distant-
sounding childhood, where rains can be the solution
and the problem to our farmer's lives and our athlete's
dreams. Athletes can withstand the deluge, as can their
muddy fields. I am more like the soybeans, corn and
cotton - the deluge overwhelms me until I cough up water
and untimely born seeds of half-duplex thought. There
are boards nailed up blocking the windows of my soul
like and abandoned 2-story house in the Mississippi
delta. I think I'm the little piggy who built his
house of of sticks' ti's said that God is the one
who built his house out of bricks - imperishable and
unchipped. But alas, I haven't seen this beautiful
house of unbreakable bricks; I wonder if I would
recognize it if I did. I want to have eyes to see
and ears to hear but all I see are the boats at the
yacht club and the wind in the leaves; the life I'm
taught is behind it is as plain as the new moon...


5.12.09

Journal 48 - Bastard Time and Pocketguns

I know that time is slow and methodical in its
patient countdown of life but does it have to be so loud?
I don't hear my heart pounding against the wooden slats
of my wooden floor but I hear my 2-year-old crying
tomorrow morning for lack of something incommunicable.
Incommunicable desires are like incommunicable distant
attributes of God.  This person and that person each has
his own table of what is incommunicable and what is
merely confusing. I'm confused by the blueness of the
nitrogen molecules in the daytime sky. I'm confused by
the splashes of paint on Pollock's universally praised
masterworks. I'm confused by the sudden need to
stand up and pee. Apparently my body suffers from
involuntary procrastination - quite independent of my
willing indolent mind. I'm not sure that my dreams
are meeting their minimum potential; I don't wake
up thinking, 'Wow I must tell someone what I just
dreamed!' I just look at my wife and say, Hey.
Books aren't alive but they mock in their colorful
stoic stance of ridicule. I imagine myself as a
rock star sometimes; Einstein imagined himself as
a photon spinning around a neutron - we can see who
made a bigger footprint on this large discombobulated
world of streets and markets. The laughter of the kid
in Korea makes the tide rise a half an inch on the
East coast drowning my beach towel before I can
save it. Bastard. Laughter is not overrated until
it gets you stabbed in the heart in a dark bar at
3 in the morning forcing your fiancee with the
irreconcilable decision to leave or stay with this
new person created from the blood's reconfigured
path after suffering the blunt rusty blade of the
pocket knife. I worry that knives are created to
be carried in pockets in the workplace. You never
hear of pocketguns. Of course bullets with their
artificial acceleration carry more force than the
manual knife. I think there are more knives to
enter the body than the metal flat sharp kind -
some reside in rolled paper, others in bulbous glasses.

5.10.09

Journal 47 - Words, Video Games and Cedar Waxwings

When will names run out? When will words run
their marked up course? When will the notes of our
music and their arrangement and re-arrangement dry
up like  dead unspoken language?  Are the notes and
the words infinite like natural numbers? And if
so,, what sort of infinite are they? There are varying
levels of infinity it seems. But don't tell the philosophers.
Their heads may split like cantaloupe on concrete.
I see a black-sand beach with red reprieves and
alternatives giving way to black water, a red sky with a
purple dome overseeing it all - I'd like to walk the
black sand of a black ocean beach - will my feet
melt like pieces of white chocolate? That's worth
cannibalizing over. I think if my skin were
like chocolate I would take masturbation to a
whole new level. Or at least hedonism. What's the
significant difference? Social mores? I'd like to
shove my hand into those social mores and cry
'Get over here!' Alas my life is not a video game.
I sometimes miss the thoughts and perspective I
had as a toddler. In high school. Professional
students are as indecisive and immobile as a flock
of Cedar Waxwings sharing their fruit in a death
tree - shot at by overzealous young students of
another world where life is a simple hierarchy of
the good bad and the ugly. Homosapien on (or near)
the top since we devised the whole charade -
careful to put the divine above; no-one likes a
straight up arrogant fool. And I'm pretty sure
hope is one of the first and original genomes we
managed to save. I wish I could say that matter
accounts for the world of experience the way
the world of rocks but I'm not convinced. I lie
in bed at night tossing and turning, unconvinced.
I began a quest to hunt for images and phrases
to use in my invalid desire to create a poem worthy
of paid responses.  Critical responses. Instead I've
found slugs and wine and pops and dirty fingernails-
at times though I hear the voice of the girl
leading the choirs of my childhood's heaven.

5.8.09

Journal 46 - Loan Shark Rattlesnake

The settling of a debt with a loan shark is
like the settling of my soul with the world-
mistaken in advance and trembling when shaking
hands for the extravagant closing of the ordinary
deal. I don't expect much from the world as I
wouldn't expect much from a loan shark. I still
navigate through disconfigured and malfigured
holocausts that circumnavigate the marshy blue
world like intersecting serpents on an ancient
emblem of decimated hope. Sometimes hope is like
the billfold left in your pants and washed with
the rest of the dirty laundry - forgotten and possibly
clean on its return. Except it's soggy and the value
is easily torn from delicate use. And sometimes hope
is a child's laughter in the face of the pointy fangs
of an Eastern rattlesnake. Evil doesn't need to be
silent through it often is, disguised as shaded hope.
It's difficult to watch your mother struggle from
sitting to standing to walking up 4 stairs.  Those
legs once carried you in that body's arms as though
you were made of paper machete. I don't know
that being a piece of paper is the worst side of
this sand-bar of existence - receiving the thoughts
and feelings of those who think and feel enough
to record them (though this digital world cheats
and bypasses it) - and the maleability of origami
is to be praised and adored; who wouldn't want to
expose wonder in some nice soul's eyes and hands
by shape-shifting from a 2-dimensional boring
sheet to a 2-dimensional  perfect square to a 3-
dimensional bird or cube? I want to shape-shift.
Shape-shift into mans' best friend or the proverbial fly
on the wall - not to mention everything in between.
What an irresistible worn out phrase, or silent
cliche. Avoiding cliches is like avoiding the police -
they _will_ find you. And your only viable option is
to surrender. Unless you want to be a grammatical
criminal. There are some vigilantes in the sunless
walls of prison preaching to a deaf amputated choir.

5.7.09

Journal 45 - Charleston Green

Tires screech in the back of my mind each time
I contemplate the nature of this or that and
my truncated words smell like burnt rubber.
The street is a place for fat cats and car-jackers -
te streets of my brain are riddled with pot-holes
and mushy hot ta. And afternoon for you is an
afternoon beside the sprinkler and warm summer
scents of herbs mowed grass and barbecue grills
with children sliding down the yellow banana
peel in the wet yard with true-joy smiles on
their inexperienced faces. It's a shame that ex-
perienced means droopy-eyed sullen hard-shelled
thickness; why must experience break us down into
pieces of entangled parts always on the lookout
for the smelly wet deception? I want experience to
wade into the ocean at night and laugh at the
salty darkness, glowing in the dark Charleston green
of the waves under the thin cloud thrown moon.
Is it so difficult for a smile to mean something?
A smile on the face of an adult without all the thick
layers of social make-up and botox mores? I
suppose it is too much for the only animal that blushes.
It should be simple to walk into a group of fellow
sojourners and commiserate in our serendipitous
solidarity. We all should see the world in close
solidaritous filters - I need Photoshop for my mind.
It's all a dream and I should live with out-of-tune
crickets. I think my teeth will be the death of me.
A back-rubbing hug with scratching fingers is a
beautiful thing to be given. Human touch can
mean so much no matter how trivial or cliche.
I'll take the cliche of her touch any time of any day.
I hear the distant sounds of footsteps stepping in
a funeral quick rhythm marching for my wet
forlorn soul. they sound like footsteps of a dark
suited slick-haired executive in black Armani,
smirking through the smoke seeping out of his mouth.
I see the sprinkler spraying water on the banana slide
in summer fostering and fertilizing wide imperishable smiles.

5.6.09