Because Richmond Sucks Less

This history, our history, in these buildings on these streets.
Burnt or left standing, elbows out for you and yours, We
Are coming back, with family. In eight pages or less.
Stay out of our way or we blow your house down. Break
Your fucking nose. Signed, The Gypsy Clampetts, or else
The Blancett family to you.

For Art. For the Mutually Assured Destruction History Project.
Moving back in order to eventually bury you. In Sixty years or less.
For Love of you, in this fucked-up town. Forever,
And our mutual family. You who are reading this,
You who are part of it. You will get yours,
I swear. Because I have never yearned for anything
So much as to return, in all my life.

The Mirror What Is

Mercenary Inquest

Diagonal childhood unmoored
As a source of light, as a source

Of making good on constrictions

Short colors and molecule dreams
Of appearances and other sources

Green shadow in ultra daylight
Presses away like frightened evil

Bombs. Strict picnic, enlarged.

The Mirror What Is Gazed

Barometer

Read the air. Not god but deception
Wired this bomb.
Not juice but horizons
Confirmed a madness

In the grease, chamber of pressure.

Feel the layers press
Of pulsing cages, the needles stitch
A reading out of
Not god

But robot insects made me
Convalesce in flame.

Inherited Ventilator

Not god, but my Tonka toy
made me a track star.

Inspired haircuts lean in
To shaving. So smooth

I wish all art was smoothed
Of ambition, of two handed

Secretions organized
To cookies, transmitters

Blossomed to will.

Tusculum College

Except replace with two garbage trucks colliding.

Pedastal Crimes

The rubber hands will be held under
The pistons so the thudding
Will sound authentic.

The alphabet in white lights
Will be the only illumination
Over the throne.

It should be deafening. Have
Men in authorized netting
Serve cheese.

The service of hands. Have
The point be that no one
Notices.

Across the Water

I broke through with hair
Into vanity, into television
Labor pains, into sixteen blond
Wigs crammed into British accents
Which smuggled into class structures
Every sweaty fist crammed into courage.

It happened.
It organized.

Thrice Arisen

When they come openly and with crumbs
down the hills of sunlight, I think of routine
and other clearing away. One day a man in rags,
undone by the state and misrepresented desire
(to be meaningful), the next a shelter, a couch
in leisure, reposed of vinyl, wrapping arms
of product, howling a maniacal obfuscation
of process. Now these legs, on thin memories
of muscular momentum come at me as though
I’m peeking from a manhole in the street.
They are white, faces, round half eaten themselves
and stained of teeth like the new Southern
Aristocrat, proudly denuding the landscape
in search of self-supporting decrepitude.

Iconoclast Bunghole

Because yer bunghole is where yer words come out.
Because ya never told yer mother in law ta fuck off.
And guess what, the stupid bitch is gonna save your ass,
Once again, shitheel, and your gonna owe it to her
Once again, because ya coulda been a lawyer, because
ya coulda been a docter and savin' people lives. But NO

You stupid shit, you decided to make art in America.
If you'd been a lawyer, the fucks would pay attention
Come Thankgiving. They'd stay afraid. They'd stay
Away from you. No Clinton come Turkey time.

In my mind, I am still fifteen years old and
Reagan has his finger on the button. I am
skateboarding down Virginia Beach Boulevard.
The bomb hits and I am rolled away under miles
of sidewalk. Under miles of rancher debris,
law offices, supermarkets, high schools.
Beneath God's allmighty hand erasing. Us all.

I guess I decided what I was to do
the day I learned how to acid-drop
off the loading dock, out back of Food Lion.
Push off hard as you can, twelve feet up,
and as you embrace the void,
trust in your feet
and the vehicle beneath them.

Just Kiss It

Whiskey Infirmity

Orange Spite

And whisky infirmity, this sprinkling
On my toast is circadian and unholy

Like knives in candy shape or toes
On fire with dreaming.

Solemn obituary tenants
I manufacture crowds of you

Marching in tempo to monarchs
Sloping through social reforms

Puzzle pieces sodden in puddles
Towards and linkable totem, an

Orifice of destinations dropping order
Where gargantuan soda pops

Twinkle to oblivions squared out
By the ultimate frozen delinquency.

Revenge Boat Forever

Pulling out of this harbour Ding ding
Headed for your town. Ahoy.

Here sails the son of a bitch.
Have you met my mother? Yes. She taught me
How to be dangerous, but my father never taught me
How to kill a thing. I had to teach myself with
Hardcore, Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, all the bands
History forgot.
History forgets, memory forgets, intentionally, forever.

There is no Lisa Thi in this poem.

If I can declare myself emperer of this town
By standing on a rooftop overlooking Main Street.
Then I can claim revenge by leaving it. Those old houses
Disintegrating without Clay Blancett. Those cabinets
Never built out of cherry, they never knew me. Ah the wasted
Economy of it all. Here is my curse for you:

Waste, slowly, for the length of your life.

Have your rednecks on your roof, Greeneville, have your Git-R-Dun. Have your trailer dotted eternity. Your Baptist-centered daycare. Your blighted pine-tree Appalachia. Your stunted conversation. Your fucking humorless, stunted, conversation. You can have that with yourselves. Forever. You’re not worth wasting a rapture on.

This revenge boat is sailing for better waters.

Marsupial Transcendence

Take a penny leave a penny.
Pinch the dogma in her snout.

Link a dedication to harp string,
Malingering
House coat
Born in tract housing and inspired
To trudge delicately
Through woodland zoning.

If I orchestrated an elongation
Would the principles declare
A solid wound, a victory in wood

Plaque me to the sky, limit
A memory in Formica

Or, looking down for root trips,
Try out the stump to ruminate
A lost casualness
A narcoleptic

Clumping. I’m sleeping into

Marsupial transcendence.

Stelarc

Organ Mania

In close patterns and dishrag omens
Squalor ranks high in foredooming

Scales of ostentation. Did you see
Thos drapes, mock the robot cleaners,

Ha-Ha. Your look back is also marked
By treasures of iniquity asking: could I be

Any more of a house? I’m a carrot stringed
Curtain all loose and imaginable

They took the steel plate in my head
To use for an ash tray. I remember the carpet

Like orange sunset through toxic runoff
And make guesses about childrearing

And other important facial ticks, gestures,
Expressions to hold luncheons on.

Heed the Call

<

Revenge boat forever.

Remember the struggle, boy.

House Cakes Olmec

After a time I’m manufactured of bad words.
Receiver seven holes and the chime incoming.
My ear, my ear, in between the thumb

Pressing this, dots, dots spitting.
I’m pressing through the split, ivy emblem,
while

I myself can not.

Eye mouth, eye mouth interred
I’m going on a breeze all waxed up

Stooping to get the message.
Which is bruising through the neighborhood
Like stilettos in blood, house cakes

Watch me put on the weather
And trudge.

Homeland Security Has Done Nothing About Lisa-Thi

The Wind In The Willows

Lobster Stuffed With Cotton Candy

Chelsea, Manhattan, summer of 1999- why art should be destroyed.
You enter a space, crammed with hipsters, smelling like hot seafood.
The piece in the center of the room is this: One guy behind
another guy, feeding the first lobster, with his arms through
the first guy's shirt. That’s it. Maybe there was a soundtrack,
I don’t remember. It took twenty minutes.
The piece was titled, “How To Eat Lobster.”

Then outside, big sign- Performance! 2:00 p.m.
behind a cotton candy machine without it’s bowl.
This is all in the shadow of the last standing
elevated train line in New York, wrought iron and rivets overgrown
with forty years of plant life both indigenous and exotic.
Turning the thing into a graffiti ghetto paradise
that they can’t decide whether to turn into a park
or let Trump tear down for more gold-clad condos
in order to further bully the Hudson.

Anyway, the guy comes out at 2:15, bald with black everything,
duly pierced,and fills the machine with it’s historic carny substance.
Turns the machine on. Without it's bowl, wild pink strands whip out,
uncollected. The man bends over it, winding his hands
around and around. He slowly mummifies his hands in this shit,
stooped in half. The best part of the whole day was the wind
catching the stuff and tangling it into the clear hot sky.
The only poetry of one whole day in the summer of 1999,
in Manhattan, right there.

Meanwhile, the guy, after some time, decides he’s done.
Stands up, hands partially encased, and walks around the corner,
up seventh avenue, with the crowd following and collapses
on the sidewalk. And that’s it. Five blocks beneath
where my wife spent two hard years with a trust fund boyfriend,
in Hell’s Kitchen, years before me, back when it was exactly that.

I remember never wanting anything more
than to kick that asshole in the ribs while he was down,
go on to disembowel art forever and leave it
bleeding in the streets of Manhattan.

boite de bijou

Because my brain is like a box, the primary elopement.
what I put in there is important,

the cadences of strangled vines, tree-sky vocals.

I’m sure you’re burdened with that too
all those incisions,

meaningful abrasions everyone’s looking after.

This box is carved with teeth, apostrophes
to dignities gently masticated down

into bank notes, suffrage and quality
observations. Look at me, ma, I’m so damned

shapely, mitered, honed to the touch
and square with the escape plans.

Revenge. Boat. Forever.

Art Must Be Destroyed

Because it got soft in the middle, took that cut from Jesse Helms. Poetry let the “storytellers” and the stand-up comics take that money. Have you seen the Arthur Ashe memorial. Have you seen any recent New York show. Art is as dangerous as “revolution,” on the Tee-Vee, as dangerous as “rebellion.” As dangerous as a box set of Crosby Stills Nash And Young. Art let history blanket it, with every pissant intellectual neuter it for an eight dollar/hour excuse for an adjunct salary. Nissan took it out of the campus, Coke took it out of the streets. The Radio studied art and removed it from itself. Every Hippy girl from Berkley that ever swung an acoustic guitar clear over to Doc Holliday’s on Avenue A, singing ‘bout revolution, Shit, she killed it her own self.

Art Has Been De-clawed. Has Nothing To Do With Nascar. Art Must Die.

Art Must Begin Again. Do You Hear Me? Art Must Begin Again.

What Happened to My Billy Goat?

Drop Cloth

My visit inherits creases like facial lines,
Other qualities made of tribulation;

Vehicular tranquilizers, mostly plastic
These days, like your smile.

When I came out of the operating room,
The paint drying on my new heraldry,

Intoxicants were loosed, corporate ingredients
In atmospheric carcinogenic patent numbers

floating in click me boxes to my lungs, my reciprocal
Aperture. That hole in me I’m breathing

To a new quality, a new condemnation
Made of self. I’ll goo up when I get to your place

Being dead so long, you might want
To put down a towel.

REVENGE.

In The Black Shirt On The Right

Is Gone.

Solace

In A Big Country Dreams Stay With You Like A Lovers Voice Across A Mountainside.

I'm Going To Punch Greg Donovan In The Face

We the people, living against this blessed earth,
scraping our sustenance over thine skin. Crawling.
Can you hear us? This withering over crust,
above the colliding plates, just under the atmosphere.
Who shall name us after the books are burned?
Then what books shall carry our names? I don’t trust
the tides to remember Clay Blancett and I don't trust you.
I trust myself to one day break the face of the one true liar.

Challenge For A Civilized Society

I'll Be A Wrinkled Old Man

The spent oil poured into a coca-cola can
the weight of the black iron scalded clean
the blistered and writhing skins, boiled off
the meat of the potatoes

No Matter The Damage Already Done, Doesn't Mean It Will Ever End

Inimical Paradisio

Won’t it be great when we’re all dead
and zombieing around.
everything will be like Prom
except with eating people instead of gowns
and maybe shotguns and survivors
instead of corsages.
And of course all that awkward guilt
about my dancing abilities will be
turned into gnawing hunger
instead of gnawing shame.

The qualities unburdened by any clear
critical stance make me blur

with distinction. Healthy trumpets
wake the dead again. I’m cloying.

Breathing

We Are Breathing

In Tennessee, and Are Breathing

Just A Little Off Little River Road

502 Maple Avenue

http://www.parrishrealty.net/featuredhomes.htm

Intense Destructor

I made it through one good day
and it was made of rooms

I imagined a world of rooms
made of bodies
made of rooms

wherein sat metallic skeletons
and clothes hangars
and dust swirled in sunlight
through the opening

The purest joy is to be chosen

I press the detonator
to jubilation

this room by itself is falling
back into useful space

joyful.

Inbox1 Fr: Colleen

“Talked to Dennis last night, said you send him wacky txt msgs too.”

Sent her one this morning “Give the Bastards Hell;” my friend back in NY, striding among the assholes every morning. Waking up and going out to work
Cause I finally figured out how to do it, change the diaper and type on the phone.
Sent one to Dennis too, “Never Surrender.”

“Hell me & Dennis go all day long. Henry is riding his bike!”

Rather well, down the hill. With helmet, around the mud, peddling past trees, feet spinning as he goes up onto the training wheels. He’s loosing me in the distance as I type.

The trail goes for miles. Opposite the truck across the baseball field, he dumps the bike and runs downhill for the old barb wire. The phone beeps in my pocket:

“Must be nice, hanging out all day”

I get him up the hill, the bike onto my back and we make it across the field, mid February. I am walking beside my son in the middle of wet Tennessee and that boy, right there, can almost ride a bike. His mother is nursing his sister back in the truck. We are going to get burritos in Johnson City. I somehow keep him out of the wet clay of the pitchers mound. We somehow have fifteen hundred dollars in the bank and I can still work the phone:

“Harder now that there are two. Marys work got health ins.”

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Henry and I,

we're striding together through tennessee.

Bring Me The Head Of Larry Williams

No Matter What My Wife Says, Beethoven Was Not The Britney Spears Of The Eighteenth Century

EYE TEN

Asleep on the road
Mile-marked agitation, eye droop
Looms. Somewhere market shares

Are investigated, bet on, overrun
With rat revenge,
Outer space shudders

At the thought of carnage, what

Could have been a radiation jet
Liner cutting time out of the sky

Nightlong, across
The ocean

Overture, spawn, wreckage
What’s left are scraps dogs fight over

The trucks heap themselves in defeat
Just from looking

I stop off for gas, the dying cities
Gulp for air. I don't know how to

Think about this. Dawn is a frown
Of ferocious sky. I don't know

How to think.

Let's Have A War

Dishwasher Utopia

Dismembered insects
All along the sink basin,

Sludge in the caulking you’ll
Never get out.
Quick inspiration

To drawbridge knife.

The ants are escaping along my arm
I’m only just dead
To this grief: The world’s
Unfixable.
I dream it unhinged

The tide is roaring somewhere
You’ll see it. You. In your
Apron marked with spear points.

Zeitgeist Franchise

Supreme haze on a leafy
Sidewalk. Zero abstraction

And wood smoke to beat
All increments.

The hedge is a deteriorating measure
Just as parking is liable

The zone of leaf-blowing
Increments total

Bashfulness over the squirrel.
Her nests are abbreviating.

The price tag’s showing
On dig shit. This dream

Is a carnival heaven.

Transcendent Apartment Complex

Only the blond leaf buds
Despair at the frost.

For us it’s investments in baggies
And hoods for the war effort

That crawls up the tree bark
Gnawing impressions of city

Streets and names like Bandwagon.

You get me a pair of hypodermic
Bluejeans. You get me.

Get me
Out of this place.

I don't remember anything I don't have to, anymore.

Motorcycling in East Tennessee 2

I can run most of those curves about 50 plus these days, in the high end of fourth gear, and I’m afraid to run them any faster. I figured I knew what I was doing when the locals couldn’t keep up in their shitbox accuras or beater Toyota pickups anymore. However I’ve nearly ground off both heels on my boots and I can always tripod the front wheel off the tarmac should I plant a footpeg hard enough in a turn, then we get to find out what a highside is like. There’s the gravel trail left by the quarry trucks headed out the Rogersville highway, the occasional sandy washout on the one stretch of 208 headed to Erwin, there’s no phone service on just about anywhere, and I’ve never seen a police vehicle. Should I wreck, I’m in god’s hands with god’s children with wife and two kids back home, back down the mountain.

They used to be dirt tracks, these roads, winding the easiest path through mountain passes and whoever’s farm they bordered. Laid down when there was no way or money to cut through the rock. Laid down with horses and carts, intended for horses and carts. Running the length of the creek that had always been the flat land. The valley, the holler in the mountain’s shade. Running those roads in fourth gear, you are moving through a world of living geometry. Everything is active, the clutch, the brake, accelerate, downshift, your shoulders bearing down. Keep your head level and sight through the turn. Meditate, always, on traction. These are not hills, they are lumps of hills piled against one another, built of ancient rock, rubbed granite, perhaps. Every facet of landscape is transformed into a geometrical problem that you solve as you arrive at it. Including the dogs.

I don’t know what kind of rock it is, except that if you glimpse it, therein lies the root of the smokies. Those houses, with worn grey siding, sit atop those stones, wedged under those mountains. Goat straddled in the yard, rubbed up through the turf and covered in moss. Hidden under moss and pine in the laurel grotto overhang. The rock forming the nubby spine of this road that you ride. The machine under you being the hand rubbed against its crippled form. The hard shove after coming in hot through a turn. Whatever violence occurs on its surface, it is the rock that forms this high Appalachia, it is the rock that shocks clear the creek, and the stones within the creek. Appalachia enough to make you weep.

I see a bad moon rising

rope-a-dope

What Zombie you knob? Aren’t you just looping, that is, walking in ignoble circles. To the supermarket, to the mall, to the god forsaken ruby Tuesday? Perambulate this, drip, drip like the most anticipated of tortures, or a cup-o-Joe. I just orbit out, cold cold hyperspace and then the come on back, loop de loop. It’s a fact of mankind that a shamble is just a loop of rope, ropadoped, the knocking pipes –who’s knocking, is it you god? Fingers finding purchase – around the neck.

The Collapsible Frink just collapsed in a heap.