in the Year of Zoll

Sometimes I just can't believe that I live in the 21st century.
It's not that I can't wrap my head around scientific adavances
like robovacuums
and bacon flavored vodka,
it's more so the fact that that I can't even get comfortable
with writing out the numerals 2011
(as well as all the nostalgia clustered around that discomfort).
Every time I write it out complete
I don't see a number at all.
In point of fact, all I can see
(until I put other numbers around it)
is the word
Zoll.

Now this may be entirely due to poor penmanship on my part,
but I find I quite like living in the year of Zoll.
Indeed, I find I greatly prefer it
to living even in the notorious 21st century.
All necessary respects being given to the visions of Jules Verne,
the gadgets here buzz ostentatious,
too busily widening the having gaps.
Smartphones have become a nearly clear-cut socieo-economic identifier.
Incomes expend and the Apps pile up like magazines
on the cement in your uncle's garage.

Zoll is much miles less mundane.
In the year of Zoll
people began punctuating their buttonholes with pinwheels
and folding manifestos into fortune cookies.
Zoll opened with daisy-mouthed whimsy.
23 turtles sunbathing.
Hashbrowns that couldn't help but be slipped from your best friend's plate.

Zoll was the year that progress and gentrification finally saw through each other's skins,
began seeing other people,
only making contact prophylactically, and under the safety of goose-down covers.
Venn diagrams became very popular,
so much so that it seemed you could draw them about anything
and anything else.
Zoll became all about intersections and collisions.
Nobody scorned garish outbursts
or crying out while masturbating.
It was in the year of Zoll that they started cracking down on empty intercourse,
volunteers posted conversation prompts in elevators
and bathroom graffiti was encouraged
by mandating each stall have at least one wall lined blue like notebook paper.
Etiquette instructors secretly bit their nails, and became more obsolete.
On new years night the mountains called out cloudy-voiced to the Moon
and She broke open like a dusky pinata
showering our archived bones in foldable light and clockwork mnemonic devices.

an explosion of freewrites

Pre-interview rambling
I could write here,
hugged by the soft music
& soothing directionless light.
The knocks upstairs are mysterious enough to spark my circling imagination.
The cooped-up coffee machines have got silver eyes
& they scream their histories from inside glass cases.
The ceiling is showing off,
exposing the strutted beams
and creamy underbelly.
the photographs bend my window through history
& I feel the music smoldering in my heart.
The city yawned into a yellow pocket with goldenrod ambitions.
This lamplight is a cradle
& I don't even care that one of my buttons is coming unbuttoned.
A gold-faced clock stares me down
as it leaps from the wall
like a white rabbit
showing off its slow motion hands.
This room is a dusty August
with an open top;
a quiet wedding in summer's backyard.


For Poets and Coyotes in this Time of Economic Turmoil
Your words have got incredible currency
-deep fish-filled lungs tug at your river's underbelly.
Your words are a brush fire kept in a safety deposit box.
Your words are a rattle-snake's skin left to crisp along Hwy2

I remember that E-burg cop
who tried to impress us by rolling up his sleeves to say
"You know, this is the most dangerous stretch of road in all of Washington?"
Why do you think I am here?
These words won't rock me to sleep
& yes, thank you, while I do enjoy the blanket
of an unscheduled dream
That is not why I am here.
That is not the reason these syllables hit the pavement.

This road is not safe
this highway of sound uncontrollably hooking together is so dangerous
my teeth begin chattering away like 10,000 typewriters.
There are coyotes waiting in the wings
& the thick-edged fists of basalt lean forward like eavesdropping bouncers
who spit their broken teeth at passers by as their fight rumbles on.

This road is sunk between this threatening architecture
& a hard unforgiving sun
which bakes its history into you skin.
& I am here for the words goddammit,
the words that are hot & strong & dangerous,
the words that wedge me deeper between burnt rocks and howling hard places.
I am not here for network dreamscapes
I am here for the words that will never be comfortable in the mouth of the holster,
I am here for loaded pumps of possibility
& words that put bullet holes in my paradigms.
I am here for the un-crunching of numbers
for the miles to open their bodies into the journey position
I am waiting for my paycheck to waste away
I am here to watch its meaning whittled down to a stub.

Because your words honey em-
your words are dangerous & unbankable
& your words have got coyotes in their throats
Your words are a revolution running down your lips
& passed the last ATM days ago.
This highway is dangerous
but honey I am here
for all its curves & potholes.
I've got your penmarks scratched inside of my ribcage
and the back seat is stocked up with your deep and heavy-measured breaths.
We are moving forward with empty pockets and broken ball-points
but when the sun gets all eaten up
I know we'll have arrived
because baby
your words have got incredible currency.



Moving Mountains
You give me shivers of the skin
so small and numerous
I can feel the deadness crawling through each cell before it flakes.
The hanging-open heartbreak pops with blisters
& forgetting you is like dancing all night in my baby sister's shoes.
You've got to pop open their angry mouths before you sleep
we don't want a callous now do we?

I am tying myself in knots of gristle & whisper
Quickly- now is the time of guillotines & pendulums.
The clock sounds swirl and quiver into a waterfall of moments
I am not spending with you.

Another unfreckled fifteen minutes scrapes by.
And I notice the rotten-toothed horizon
that holds me
this sky yawns wider than the shriek of your name inside my ribcage.

I see you making volcanoes in the distance,
stop myself from eating the ash from your sky
& let the thickness settle.
Watching you ash over is harder than that he bedrock gone cold.
Only you can choose yourself out of the volcano.

& I am one more time keeping my mouth out of your sky
trying to feed my own hungry sunflowers.
But the mouth still moves in the shape of your skin
the gasps still punctuated by a smattering of overzealous freckles.
(and my God are your shoulders crowded)

I am on fire with ginger punctuation
there is a volcano in my chest
(and I can't tell who it belongs to anymore).
But now is the time of guillotines and pendulums;
a time a carefully calculated puffs of smoke,
To wait
To eat food that fills holes
but doesn't impact the soil content.

It's a lie to say I'm only here for you.
I'm here
to hook my dreams into the mouth of the volcano.
I want our mountainy mouths to breathe smoke-spirits into the cracked-open atmosphere
& when our smoky bodies would touch the sky
you'd put thunder in my mouth
& shoot lightning from the teeth
our skins shifting so hard and fast
the elements shiver at the sight of us.

But the mountains are making the most of their time
and I am only building my own avalanches anymore
cold white cascades making time between ruptures
(I love you. I love you. I love you)

& I do hope that springtime comes before the next explosion
or at least before the blistering snow
claims any more climbing souls.


One More Former Student Goes Unemployed
I am the great white hope,
full of literature and promises
my belly is tearing from the weighted hooks of student loans.
They told my I could be everything
so I took classes on Rimbaud and Bukowski.
Instead of computer science or grant writing
I learned the way of the Albatross.
My teeth got broken from a too-long hanging on
and now
I use the broken bits to scratch out cheerful cover letters
for jobs that hit me as wantless as their implied mouths mouthing
No.
This poem is a headline
about my body falling like an omen from the sky
shot down by one more capitalist captain.

Time

I let the days read like a pendulum
drawing an endlessly open parenthesis
to hang on gravity's mouth.
She breathes in measured motions
a mediation of falling
and blazing forward on spring-loaded hope.
I let the days read like a pendulum
trusting the rounded measurements above my head.

The words of a clock

The minutes got hungry and ate themselves while waiting.
The air is sour and emptied by each tickticktick.
Machines gnash their teeth in circles
Spinning gears
whose mouths measure what they cannot touch
Time cannot be caught
only hollowed out
by the words of a clock.





(written in 3 minutes)