I infinitely prefer the pen

Just give me a note-pad dammit
that way I can actually feel the pages filling up.
Run my hands over the backsides of the pages,
feel the words inverted and savor their imprints.

Snippets

It was so cold last night
I don't think I could make it
if that chill closes in tonight.

It looks nice now,
but the horn says that there is going to be storm.
The weather here changes at he drop of a hat.
Rain shadows are really quite impressionable.

it's okay to type the words over
and over
the work is never done and that is how it is supposed to be,
just like you have to live every moment up unti lthe one you die.
good god I am hungry.
Wish I could eat my hands and feat and blanket.
If I make enough words I'll be able to eat them too.
Maybe.
Better save the blanket,
there might be a storm tonight.

landsick

psychosomatic rocking
slung low
this hunk of dirt has a heartbeat that unsettles the feet
pavement is pulsing
under a gelatinous mouldy-fruit-skull.
There's a fuse under all that sway
and it only takes a moment
for everything to reach its pit.

I fly off the handle rocking
knocking into the backdrop
mouth leaking
spittle and words indistinguishable.

two 350wrd pieces.

Horror
Just thought you should know:
there's red running down your chin
and reaching in a curved stream from your ear.
Despite your white-toothed smile
we are now
only waiting for your lips to turn.
Olive branches are actually quite brittle
prone to growing sharp-edged betrayal,
leafy undersides plotting against the fruit.

Ambitions burgeon into a silencing stance
and my body
(as well as my body of work)
can't give you any more ears,
your mouth having eaten too many voices
"it's about what's good, you see.
For everybody.
We shouldn't being advertising that it's okay,
to be
like 'that'."

Well.
People are like that
and in your righteous bones
I can see a creature coming alive,
the infection gathering to a head
My listening gets stuck
on the way you use
"everybody"
you see unless you mean to say what's good for everybody
is food, and home, and drink, and love, and freedom to be-
then we're not talking anymore,
because I am battling back against that crawling thing,
whose eyes are fueled by panic
its engine begins toothy:
bifurcating us and them

Your monster makes violence against photographs and scantily clad canvases,
and your red rhetoric will only be read as a prophecy
for the hammering death of uninhibited expression,
cracking voices shake and shatter down to plexiglass
and bolted down foundation.
Violence empties out the access
and after the images fall back to their base elements
arts is left one last valiant act:
expose the splatter patterns,
unapologetically open its cracked mouthparts,
bring sharp and close into focus
what's been done to the mechanism.

Broken voices should never be wingless for too long.
Red rhetoric is a halo for the inhumane.
So please before you hoist up your hammers
let us clean our mouths of any possible massacre.


Instability
I.
Before taking the stage there are those particularly terrifying moments of physical vibrations, when all your neuroses seems to resonate at once, moving loud through your bones as if you were a tuning fork. The contents of your mouth lose their anchors. Your teeth and tongue become soup behind your lips.
The stage is waiting for you legs unwobbling approach. With it's lonely microphone dare your stomach widens it's nauseous eyes. Certainty fluctuates dangerously like a chain-smoking barometer. The modifiers getting ragged around the edges as the incongruities lumber in the corners growing closer.
Physics is picking on you, or maybe your (un)luck is bending the rules. But your chair is not familiar anymore. Laughing legs criss-crossed against your support. These are the moments of insanity. The legion of over-stretched moments in which the stage takes you, rockets every kind of neon neuroses through your veins until your name comes up. The Stage opens it's mouth all black and bright.
And you take it.

II.
That's when your train comes in, when the rails stop pulling your wheels apart. The timeless spinning stops, and you catch all of earth's gravity between your fingers. Your word-plucking fingers, making poetry shapes in the air and slashing hieroglyphs into the microphone. You are a singularity choosing its corporeal form as a typewriter. You are a sparrow building it's nest in a boiler, a flower getting hot with heartburn, a hard-drive with a headache.
The equation of living gets broken by your teeth, the marrow hangs in the air, now hot with the infinitely possible permutations. Numbers running algorhythmic through your fingertips as the numbness palindromes itself out.

III.
Neither is safe or stable or committed to getting back into balance. Poetry isn't about that. Poetry is not a checkbook. Poetry is instability.

prose poem (unedited cause I am lazy) NOW EDITED!

My summer is opening again and it’s got wild animals for teeth. Last time I went out away I let some of the words hang back on trailing postcards, the way a kite makes its tail from the pinching repetition bows. The intervals were measured by how often I could afford and procure the proper postage. The redwoods crept closer as the asphalt narrowed its tongue. And I watched yellow over take the landscape from Coos Bay to Arcata. The Bread truck hummed and Allen took so much care to write all the miles down with a carpenters pencil. The dashboard overflowed with numbers and wetted our hands in the paling green pickle juice. Jumped naked into a cold ocean. Came out with mouthfuls of kelp and salt. We stopped for sandwiches and peed in a field. The fennel cracked and breathed a licorice dust in the hot yellow afternoon. Even the shadows collected some gold flecks that were more than just dust, I'm sure. I saw the gray smile of sea lions too many times to count, they were like eyelashes in a blinking bruisy bay. The fog didn't even matter. We flip-flopped our way across on honeyed vagabond smiles. It didn't matter that it wasn't 1972. We stopped for every hitchhiker, even let some of them make love in the back as we fried eggs with sand between our toes. Low slung propane between he the dunes we made a mess of the pancake batter We gave whiskey to street performers because we did not have any quarters left, danced to the busking music as sunny skies began shutting their doors. We spent $10 a day until our pockets dried up. On the first hooked leg of the trip the forest nearly ate us. That was the night I decided not to do any of the driving. I resolved then to hang my body out the sliding wooden door, to sit in the chair that might pitch me into an asphalt kiss. I danced to Credence in a swirling tan contraption of a dress as our wheels howled down the California coast. The fog nearly coaxed us over the cliffs. Hwy 1 breathed purple down our necks and slipped us into danger with switchbacking slings and swallows. We've got the dents to prove it and I hope there is still some of that hillside worming dirty in the cracks of the van. Two mandolins made conversation and in between all of that we picked up Thea. She drew a pirate on the naked pine siding and gave her voice to the road. "I've been doing this since I was fifteen" she said boldly to our dumbstruck faces. She said most everything boldly. She told the best jokes, dirty and otherwise, fetched us food still-warm from the prizingest of dumpsters. Girl knew all of the tricks. Lived large and made grand (pause) exceptional laugher. I received a voicemail from her the other day. Said she's be in the headed west again soon. I hope she calls me back. Maybe she'll want to sleep in my yard, even though the city sky seems to make her sick. You could tell from just one conversation that she was made of all love and endearments. Lit her cigarettes like they were candles for the hopeless. She gave. defended the downtrodden when the tourists bent in to snatch a moment of their motions. You should always ask before the flash. My name is knocking around in her mandolin case. I hope Thea calls me back. And that somebody records her music, in case to road ever decides it’s done with her. My mind keeps wrapping back to those licorice fields, where we didn't know who owned what part of the land, listened to how overgrown the "no trespassing" signs had become. We sang a few songs and watched the highway pass above us. I hope someday the road calls me back.
My mind is running out. My mind is running out on legs growing thin as ball-point pens. That can’t be all of it, it just can't. We saw elk, like icebergs, in the tall grasses. Only visible from the eyes up. Drank all through the night with our campsite neighbors, hoping their 9-year-old daughter couldn't hear the dirty word falling sloppy from our mouths. That morning, over a mountain of bacon and all the leftover vegies we'd carried 600 miles, we spilled coffee on each other's toes. At one point there was a ping-pong table. I traded a new book for an old one. And stopped to cherish the dog-earing pages. I hope the road calls me back.
I still haven't looked at the photographs. I took so many photographs and I still haven't looked. I left them on a disc in a drawer. A shiny silver donut shut in my bedside table. In the second drawer, where I put the things, I really, don't care that much about. Old birthday cards and giftbags I intend to re-gift. Giftwrap is far too expensive. I ate a hamburger for the first time in two years and slept all the way back to the ocean. The concrete arms tied us down for a full forty-five minutes. We squirmed under its arching freeway tentacles. Sometimes the highways collided so violently that I was convinced we were gridlocked in the sway of two gargantuan cephalopods making love. Or making something convoluted at least. All the way down we lived on tuna fish sandwiches. The road called out our names with repeating yellow tongues and I hope that the road calls me back one day. Her cracked asphalt voice is one I have begun to silence with empty pocketed excuses and a sad sack of somedays. And I miss her. In conjunction the whirring roundness of rubber and his old engine reluctantly turning over I miss her voice the most.

Some subjects (a summary of the untranscribed)

lately all the words
(nearly self-forming at this juncture)
have been falling between the binding cracks
notebooks harbor huddling places
for lines washed into blues shivery-thin
and bent down, wine soaked corners.

I wrote about the letters running together
"Sincerely,"s bumping into "Love,"
the coincidence lets us round ourselves up.
We both ate too much that day.
My mouth is full enough to avoid the conversation all together
Instead I invite the furnace to be our mouths
or at least to gesture the way our mouths might.
It's good to stay warm.

One day
You'll open to the momentary-ness of the words
(instead of loading them up with all that momentum)
start approaching your typewriter
like a finger trap
its keys teething down
pinching anachronisms into careless digits
sentimentalism enters most easily through the fingers.

Regrets can only be swung one way at a time.
you see
regret is an odd number
maybe even prime.
with strange angles that gyrate
defying measurement
or any intent to condense.
Even when you consider all the factors
the numbers open wide
and laugh like unbalanced odds
One side of the metronome is alway hungry.
Still
it's worth deliberating him down to one-sided echoes.

The air is electric with revolution
in both political and carousel forms.

The Earthworms

The earthworms yawn long, magenta & mauve
over Seattle's glossy sidewalk mouths
wet concrete tongues
stubbled with pebbles of milky and ambitious size.

Singing above the street lamps
power cables crackle open the throat of midnight,
in movements sharper than a hum,
lines vibrating edge over edge.
The mercury drops through April
sharp and heavy with intent.
Cold air forces spring into a fever pitch
of shivering restrained colors.

But the earthworms,
you must pay (you pen's) attention to the earthworms,
slow like a meditation master
they make breathing a full-bodied endeavor.
Dreamlike
the sidewalks are splitting
under the force of one more season
that's where the earthworms come up
and make the most of the her jagged and unconscious rupture.

Secret Ambition

At nine(teen)
my ambition had rose petals stuffed in her mouth
and lace wrapped around her ankles
we muffled her with romance
and hid her body in a trunk.

And now it's all crashing down
with the smell if decomposing romance.
there's no money there
in the murder or the hiding.
We've got extra smiles under the counter
who sell themselves much better.
Smirks provide the best business
& I've start keeping nickels between my teeth
the heavy metal takes up my breath
pushing poetry back into the trunk,
I mean,
the deepest part of the throat

I'm sending a tea-cup hug to my tempest tossed throat pocket.

But the nickels are falling round from my mouth
and I used my last paycheck to roll the tax man
one long cigarette

And the poems are lining her body
dusting the trunks innards with romantic decay
chocking down poems and rose petals
I have to keep the coins inside
no matter how many debt sores open the gums

This ambition is made of somersaults
and cinnamon echoes
her feathers are fluxing and cruxing,
but we stuck her hands in the dishwater,
made her dance in the broom closet
stuffed her dreams into a hairnet.

She gets quieter as the rent gets taller
never chooses secrecy
with hands too fast to be anything else.
but the empty pockets
stifle the frenzied speed
and anchor stillness
beneath the fingernails.

This boldness is getting chomped
between the typewriter teeth
the hammers bruise the paper in alphabet shapes
and the whole damn world is imposing again
widening the emptiness of pleats and pockets and purses.
All those dreams steep like tea
or a field lying fallow
as the toxic machine pinches the pennies in.
My feet move me forward
round coppery bruises and all.

Seattle Somtimes

too long
the inattention swicks back and forth
like lazy windshield wipers
their slanted eyes and cagey minds set
to move as slow as possible.

But that's what it is to move in Seattle,
You become intimate with the needs of each rainy rhythm.
The sky dribbles
because the seal on that gray horizon never quite snaps shut
like a half-screwed jar quietly wetting your bag
and all of it's contents.

Observe in horror the wrinkled words and blue lines run amok
mourn their passing
and then slowly (over the course of several sunshined afternoons)
drip back into complacency.

this turned into 2 different pieced up on edit

Start from scratch
pull the doodles
and their marginal dancing
into alphabetish glyphs,
make a mouth for every journey,




Every day I drive along one side
of the two roads
whose triangle mouths parenthesize Jet City's murkiest river.
The margins stretch through each compass point
in name and distance.

That was where I saw
(what was left of)
them.

I've wanted to write about those dead geese all week
their bodies sit still and oval
necks hanging lack
across the yawning diamond lanes
but the cars got in the way,
headlights too loud
for 4AM birds rounded down.

buildup

written 3.22.11 while waiting for a friend
There are moments of genius
& then there are others.
Mustard yellow times without distinction,
murky like watery tongues
creeping up the wallpaper.

You can't coax it
out of eating the entire bag of cotton balls.
The endeavor softly upsets:
"Consuming what's soft won't make you nay softer."

What's required is a reversal of the voice box.
The chords getting seasick in their nervously rocking throat,
but this challenge isn't about lapsing backward into genius.
The (r)evolution requires non-euclidean progression.
Quantam shivers must crowd the dance floor
with exponential happening
Their coupled bodies falling through the phases
Tongues frothing up mustard yellow.

The ending pulls it in
collapsing all the syllables down.


SLAM
In this space the train speeds past simile,
hot engine pushing on
straight into rocking metaphors
this night
IS
a tattoo in the mouth of the gods,
a rumor corrupting the dingy corners of the pantheon
gossip passed between the mouths of Athena & Hephaestus
just before the world tears out your liver.

If we blink the museums might catch us,
and kill the throat-ness from out words
oh yes my friends we must move quickly
keep warm our stages and vocal chords
before our words are made like the older legends
into cold and cracking stones.

Small snippet
I am working on so many poems
they are molding into dead hounds by the roadside.

I pinch my pen like it's the last drag
of a blue cigarette
rolled by the hands of a dying lover who tells you
"I'm quitting tomorrow".

Jars

It comes back in angles you can't quite trust.
Fire truck; reprehensible; catastrophe;
The words are just words right?
and not really our relationship.
Or what you really meant when you read those poems
in that way
(far too tight).
We are not comprised of empty ricochets
or words
whispered across a wide-based library staircase.
I didn't mean to call you out
as echo
when your body left the room

but when your body left the room
My mouth chased the ricochets into the newly empty places
I breathed ghosts into your footprints
and gave in to the limbo encroaching on the other side of the bed.

Our communications are more than just a forgotten turn
signal
stretched out in a lulling down turned position
click
click.
No. We're not like that at all.

We are buzzing erratic
a clock whose schizoid cuckoo
has both claustrophobia
and performance anxiety,
fidgety hands that think too much
and a yellowing face that melts much faster than any mustache could possibly imagine.

But now that your body has left the room
I am catching the ricochet in jars.
Without your blonde body to balance it out
the echoes begin building into a downhill prediction
and I should screw them down before they leave me too.
Jars are good for keeping things in.

When keeping hope to a minimum you must
make sure you've twisted their mouths watertight
like the words you read too close together
(or maybe meant to be run all together
like some of your favorite German words)
echoes need a tensioned seal.
If you put a poem in a jar it stays fresh
and wet with unwhispered ricochets.
When untwisted
the poem empties out
unencumbered
& deaf to the multitude of yesterdays it's been
since your body left the room.

300 word prose poem.

It's funny how the small things can catch you. An itch scratching itself just beneath the skin. Exposed by the curiosity of a lover's glance. And his kind hands pulling your fidgeting habits from their softly frantic dancing interplay.

I'm not doing it on purpose. Or blaming the imbalance of my body.
The fingers just get tired of finding themselves (and begin picking the rough skin away in bits). Each finger is a riddle with reddening jigsaw edges. Ten extended back stories, with their brittleness unhinged. The cracks have got salt in their teeth. Fingertips rip easy as the callouses are whittled down and down. When you open the rind the citrus pores intensify their misty glares. Ouch. Didn't mean to pull it that far. Several seconds of subsequent staunching and the prints begin to close up their red little mouths. So small. So loud.

All it takes is a faucet to get words going again. Fingernails carried away in a dizzy sharpened tension. And there are commas falling from my hands. Gotta keep this list alive, pull out the skin and let it breathe. The callouses make too much of sentences. They dry out the endings, and must be pulled back to a red-line climax. Correction. Some things you just have to cut out. To really get the feel of it I mean. Push the words back from hardening. Sharp red marks keep the fingers soft.

Enough of that now. It's really a nasty habit. Nobody likes a fidgety picker. But the fingers keep finding themselves. How can you keep touch from touching? Let it be. The cracks will know what to do without you. But you have to let them get over you. All over you. Wait out what's brittle. And let the context of your skin stiffen.


Prompt provided by typetrigger. Fresh prompts provided every6 hours.

this poem got left in an open window

It's been a year
and I've still got words by the napkinfull.
Too many notebooks get lost in the move.
sunk between the cardboard cleavage
the crooked pages aren't giving it away anymore
soft blue lines pine sideways after lazy bookspines
These poems need excavation teams
and at least two restoration experts
to bridge the gaps between jagged serifs and flooding narratives
where the steering wheel intruded
and the words began to swerve.