Rhinoceros

I was running erands, I was running out of time. I heard the sirens and looked for the trucks, the EMS. I went up monument and hung it over onto Belmont, I noticed the sirens hadn't stopped. I realized they were everywhere, or from one place very loud. They weren't trucks they were something else, something bad was happening. I didn't remember falling but I woke up at the foot of the stairs. I thought I had dropped the baby, the baby wouldn't stop crying. The baby saw something out in the hall which scared her. I thought there was something in the house, something down at the dark end of the long hall. I held the baby against me, she sobbed into my chest. I remembered the phone ringing, no it hadn't rang yet. The phone was going to ring with news of some bad thing, from someone else, someone that had died. I drove the truck through the woods, over the tracks and saw the man lying next to the rail. I stopped, no one else had stopped. He was bent at the waist. I thought his chest might be breathing, then it wasn't. Then he was standing and turned to look at me. I heard the sound I couldn't identify. It filled the woods. I left it there to make it's own noise.
The rhinoceros in the void, the piercing void charging, the feet at the end of my legs which carry me. My pickup truck and my son next to me in it. The music playing on the radio and we are quiet together. The thing making the high pitched siren noise, the thing that won't stop. The person who comes around when I sleep. The cave in the side of the mouintain with the cold stream piercing it. The horse that fell into the pit. The men dragging it out with ropes. The thousands of cobbels that roll under me on Monument. The bricks, the acres of bricks flying past. The unidentifiable music of bricks.

Bonding Agent

Hundred year old masonry sand from the house on grove that spills from my boots onto the linoleum floor of our kitchen. Baby May will crawl through my sand.

Three weeks of cigarette butts that will wash out of the flooded bed of my truck as I pull onto stuart avenue. It hasn't rained in three weeks.

I get the quarter into my mouth just before the light goes green and I bank the Honda onto the road to the nickel bridge. There are oil spills to be avoided at the toll booth as well.

There are no such thing as zombies. There's just me and Jay, our families, our lives.

Bonding Agent

Never mind the infernal clattering, wait till we get to the real show, where we take turns screaming. Bitching about the cats, the kids, the void, the void, the void. Tell me the story about how I ruined everything, I'm afraid I've forgotten it again. The story about the collision, the confluence. The five of us outside the place, the four of us at the beach, the three of us by the fire, the two of us walking empty downtown in the rain.

Zombcastics

Yet horrors, feet encased in plastic breath –
breath, squeeze: hangs in slipper, cantankerous
News clippings, sweet empty restriction, wall
Farms and collections to concrete hard wells,
the head’s irresistible smear, one force
one force matches in qualified splattered.
Can it be to smear for simple cruelty
One skull, its content slosh like lost message,
Content Forbidden, updates on enclosed
Horrors, the white tile, the teeth invite
Us to the waiting room, the encircled
Taper off of, a measured new hole bite.
So the empty room, human treacherous
Suffocated steps bind untimely deaths.

Motorcycles Have Nothing To Do With Zombies Either

Wildcat

Keep your ear to the rail to hear it sing. That baby will cry on the mountain high. The sky won't care either way. Keep your ear to the mountain to hear it moan, hear the trees who block the sky. The rail will hum, the rail will groan. The rail will run it's shining course, that brilliant arc, blind threatening bend. That serpent rail will never rust, those trees will wrap it overhead. That baby will cry because you're gone, that baby will cry till you come home.

Babies Have Nothing To Do With Zombies.

"And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely reveled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."

--Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Armor of God

SlingShod

_______________________________________________________


Un-hungry tights towards the east
Sting lemons with their eyes

And onward to righteousness we raise
The tongs and uncork our lord

Our demiurge fiasco all over the carpet.

Praise to holy stain we demure you.
Bleat bleat the sphincter of grace

Cannonballs to the forehead to redemption’s
Tourniquet.

We blaze the lord’s trousers
To pants and back, transubstance

Like the goon’s squad in the changing rooms,
Perilous to think it, think it out sighted.





_________________________________________________________

Jump On The TrainWreck

And surf through this drowned city like Kurt Russell. Hit the Default friend setting, process it in Group, whisper it to you Grief Counselor, your Addiction Counselor, cry it to your Family Planner. It's all for you, Damien, this ragged tapestry, these ministrations of un-cool. There is no liscence at the DMV to have a kid, there's no good reason not to go to bed hungry. You grow your grief into whatever shape is sustainable for you, nurture and care for it like a little baby. It is the pressure which blooms from it, it is the restraint that you practice which blows it wide open. Full bore. Frayed edge. Brain the most recognizable metaphor, breathe up a script, commence filming with your eyeballs. It's just another way to shuffle through this rusted train town.

Tom the Dancing Bug

For Mr. Snodgrass

Zombie Trumpet Phobia

Herds hoard fields
felled towards
Such ringing moans.

Clung to worships
Wrapped in garrulous
Sting-bonnets

Contusion
Blossoms throughout
The hospital dark

Yet stains the bone.
Fires left from intention, what
Thoughts sparked or
Reasons marred to singing.

They’re all after me. All
Night the groaning tuba –

Erase the bomb shell after
Glow so there’s no where
Left to hide

Bomb Insert a string
Shelter Digested wound,
The string stuck –
Wound around
Intestine

Skyline
Suffocates on bowing necks
Bent sanctimony
To the stone’s crush

Weigh in to fields
Fibrous or sonic:
Contusion’s two shuns.

There is No Lars in This Metal

The Lars of my payee department
Is all out of the bullshit concessions
For the tempered video metal
Everyone’s choking on while the kids
Are in the closet praying to be dissected
From the malignancy growing out
Of their televisions and conjoining
Their heads in a neat column
Of mush consumption, a pulpy
Regenerative credit card you like to see
Swiped through your purchase orifice,
Lars, before you slam a ding dong
Of garbage into their pie shaped
Falsified emoticon receptors. There are no
Remains, Lars, only the broke and fetidcore.

Ninja Crack

Propane Ninja.

Zombie Propane.

Metal Zombies Eat Your Brains.


Propane Ninja Zombie Crack.

The Poisoned Mind

I woke up again and the house was empty. I was on the couch. The house was always empty, abandoned, I only came there to get high. No it was my friend’s house, there were always people and music and girls there, and we all got high together. Except it was empty, no furniture except the couch by the big windows in the front, and all the lights on. They had left me there. No it was the time I woke up with all my clothes on in the bath tub filled to my chin with cold water. They had left me there.

I got onto my feet and they were under me, somehow. I had the right things in my pockets, I hoped I had the right things, the front door was wide open again. My feet and legs worked together. It was cold and dark and I could hear lots of people outside. I could see out of my eyes, except my brain was poisoned behind them. I knew it had sickness in it, but that was okay. If I knew it was poisoned I could think around it and get to somewhere, somewhere else.

There were people everywhere in the cold under the streetlights. They were careening all over the sidewalk, they were laughing and falling into each other. They were falling down in the middle of the street. They were laughing and moaning and they were all dead and they hadn’t noticed me yet, none of them knew me by name. None of them recognized me.

I shoved my hands into my jacket and looked at the sidewalk, I couldn’t let them see my eyes. If I had my sunglasses I could put them on, but that would attract attention. If they could see my eyes, they’d know me. Someone lurched and almost knocked me down. I stared at his feet, he was missing one shoe, I could hear him breathing loudly as he passed behind me. A man was on top of a woman on the hood of a car, her legs were around him, he was devouring her. She was laughing at him as he tore off a piece of her neck. There were hundreds of them shambling around the intersection, the orange from the streetlight, ah god jesus that orange light, that light on their faces.

When I saw the children, I started running, everyone else looked up, I didn’t care. I think they came after me but I didn’t look back.

I felt better in the alley, there were none of them in sight. I hid, stuffed myself between two trashcans. I tried to slow my breathing down, but someone in the trashcan heard me and started to come out. He pushed open the top and I could see his eyes, there was nothing behind them. He came over the top and crawled down on top of me, his mouth was open. He put his mouth, his mouth was on me, my face. He wanted my eyes. I found a brick and smashed his head again and again.

After that I forgot, I went back to the house, I don’t know if I ran or crawled. I had something on me, I thought it was dirt. I was wrong, it was blood. I locked the door and sat on the couch. I couldn’t stop shaking. I got up and went to the kitchen, there were more of them out the back window, but they couldn’t see in. They couldn’t see me. I found my phone on the table, there was a message from my friend: “Hey man, where you at? Let’s throw down!” I wrote back to him, “Please, come find me.”

I woke up in the back of my friends car, the lights were passing by overhead, they were passing quickly. My head was on the lap of a girl and she smiled at me and ran her fingers through my hair. “It’s going to be okay now,” she said.

Flying Dutchman

Wounded to the point of not being heard, diminishing into the horizon.

The house was built on stilts so the sea could wash under it. We could be carried away in our Ophelial delusions should the need arise.

Consider the north-easter blowing through the open bus window, cool and singular on the seat beside you. Consider the foam wash blown over dunes, the lone figure and his dog in the distance. The body tumbling in the shorebreak, that came ashore as a great turtle split in half.
Consider pipers hunkering through December.

This passed for home, this was pivotal, this was cold sand blown over an adolesence.

Propane Leak Maybe

You Smell Gas?

Maintain-o-saur

Which gravitates through under snares
And clinks glutinous and feathery to your shoe

And some shoes! Getaload O stool farmer

Yes.

Because he has no cheeks
Gas blooms the sidereal and later
A strip of bacon beamed through memory
To your loose crosshatch,

That’s right, the squint eye recess
The give-n-go hand fan

Links every overboard to a function of choice
Sheer luminous presentation
Of the youcanhaveit gleam,

The I’d-rather-be submission hold
To your cantankerous SBD charms.

Ricmond IOP

Affirmations of Some Basic Rights

Nobody has the right to know my mind or my buisiness or to tell me what to think, what to feel, or what to do.
I have a right to my own thoughts, feelings, values and beliefs.
What I share with others about matters that concern me is determined by what feels right to me, not what they want.
If people are abusive or disrespectful to me, I have a right to tell them so, to ask them to stop and to avoid them.
I don't have to be nice to people who aren't nice to me.
I don't need abuse or to be disrespected.
I have a need and right to love myself, respect myself and to stand up for myself.
I alwas have a right to express what I feel and think for myself, as long as I don't try to tell others what's right for them.
I have a right to be who I am and to harmlessly live my own life regardless of whether others don't like it.
I don't have to feel guilty for not behaving as others might want me to or for not giving others what they expect from me.
I accept myself just as I am in the moment with whatever thoughts and feelings I have.
I accept my right to make mistakes-otherwise I couldn't learn and grow.
I accept my right to my imperfection and shortcomings and don't feel guilty for not being perfect.
I believe we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us- to be treated with love and respect.
I believe that if I am tru to myself and live by the highest truth I know that things will turn out for the best in the long run.

Richmond Vs. Tallahassee

Or else what, you'll take my number off your phone again? I don't believe you, I don't wana talk about Han(g)over street, I don't wanna fight (or maybe I do.) Did I mention the Starbucks across the street? Did I mention they tore down every Stuffy's in the city limits? Did I metion the monsters are all afraid of us now? It's incredible, you hold up your kid and they run away. We're fortified. We're winning back our town. Read your big book: history is vapor and tomorrow is a train rail that will always hum if you hold your ear to it. All we gotta do next is blow up Buddy's.

Metal Vs. Not-Metal

1.





lovely









2.
oh dear jesus.




*********

Canto The Tubing

________________________________________________










Things in jars collecting wounds
Are nice to talk to often.

Some trailing winds of white insecticide
Offer cab fare, bloody decent

Or narwhaled up inside, you might
Consider the bounty of spoiled ham

Incarcerated delight like a knife
In a light switch.

That’s not code either.

Or, if you ask, the Shiksa plate
Comes with a side of pre-ringed intestine

And guilt like mm, mm, mm some
Body stuck a whole fist in an

Twist it, twist it, twirly bird. If you
Asked. That’d be the best way.

That or the tube.












________________________________________________

City, Morning 2

Thousands of bricks, stacked upright, marching down the alley behind Stuart. Cigarettes littering. Beginning here, where the zombies came from.
This is the Zombie headwater, clear-eyed and keen. This is our city.
Come home.

City, Morning

Before the fruit ground to pulp, to reveal what it has inside, there is the shower to soak my soreness. With the water running through the hair on my chest. Rivultets like a creek. Water over the fungus blossoming on my back that I'm nurturing, plaster grit in my hair, whatever else I'm carrying from yesterday. Little life shed, begone. Washed away and under the city. We invite water into our homes and it carries us away. Running in darkness, running fast and clear, with it's own mold blossoming. Billowing under current, passing over bricks, eddying red and green.

Interrogations 0.1

________________________________________________________





List.

As in lean through to falling
As in coordinated flailings



Concession.

As in retread pasture, dreams
As in dynamic concrete pourings



Floatation.

As in upheavals, denials, status of wings agreements
As in temp jobs wearing spikes, slippings




Defer.

As in righteous boundaries, barbed in uncoiled coke cans
As in magnanimity unbound, deteriorations




Trance.

As in pianissimo on the gong, triad killings
As in loose puddles of certainty.








__________________________________________________________

Construction Crane

_____________________________________________



The submerged antipathy pops up
For a gulp with its spine-lung

So it keeps the kettle going for privacy’s sake
For the collected sludge boiled down to

I’m hopeful but the overstatement is also
Pathetic, thus the vegetation

Imagines harmonies of illusion and whatever
I’m still just fidgeting, fidget, fidget

Whittling back bones out of crusted
Milk gobs. Looks like a stick maybe,

Brush off the ants and lets have a see
What’s buried init.

Crisp vacancies, some
Looming hope out. One edge sparkles

Under there, slick like fish bulge.






.

A Number 1

God lives in your feet.


Keep them moving.

The Limitation

The species forages for its exit.
The space inhabited is defeat.

What making leads to nowhere
The species is stunned by non vastness.

The space for god to inhabit
Resounds through this chair,

This very limited chair. The sun
Is at its disposal. Everyone is

A monument, complete with headphone
Walking tour narrated by

Harry Dean Stanton. One voice
For the mass of marble we make of

Beginning, middle and end:
All around us, praise the Limitation.

And So Perilous

Yet cozy and flexed
Or is that my kitchen window
Stretching her new found view effects?

The house now, makes snow
Or heaves a humid afternoon, this is all grand.
Ain’t we all Performateers?

In the floorboards now a little water
From the storm, now a little ocean
With sea women, sea teeth, an ambience of drowning.

Now to so comfy, the particulars are dispersing
Some toad evolution to the movie-plex,
The fist piecing together a glancing

At your fixed leg, at the tree you stake to;
Some ambulating variable gaining strength by use.

Day of Wonder

What is this burning in my eyes?





*******

Rabbit Tobacco

We determined the need and then constructed great buildings of sleep. We allowed for some settling. We fortified against any of those challenges, the unexpired ones, that startle you cresting the horizon. We built and contemplated that our lives were not of our own making and thus, had become free.
The nutbrown of our surroundings became a template for all we might do. We incorperated the arch of the river willow into the idea that we might fail. The image of failure became the forms for our enclosure, the hideous idea that we might be consumed by our own imagination. We determined we had become insane.
We accepted that our frailties would be interwoven into anything we might accomplish. The patina of authenticity, we called it, and applied it to the surface with a pair of trowels. We decided that to in order consider the project a success, we need never wake up. Our structures would stand for thousands of years without us.

Route 33

There are all kinds. There are those smoking asphaults out there, they are breathing under you, you are moving so fast, you are hovering over over them. Turning. Elemental. There are those ghost roads in North Carolina, who curve under woods, they are travelled by no-one. They all have their roots. Our mountains, our roads. Turning. Absent. Ever turning you are there.

Tennessee Plates

Wintersleep-Jaws of Life

Hold me like a child

In your warm, warm arms

Whisper parables

Keep me safe from harm


Oh my sagging skin

Oh my burning skies

I will close my eyes

I will close my eyes


There was laughter once

There were pretty songs

Pull the metal shards

Thin my clotted blood


Oh my rotted skin

Oh my burning skies

I will close my eyes

I will close my eyes


Oh the jaws of life (x3)

Bivalve

Horned Doom metal, the treader who
Bows steak-ward metal like circumference.

Hedge metal to the toad, peeping to your garbage.

Garbage metal like the dream, all
Wound down, to spires and mold stretches.

Gleam metal, like the hair in the sink.

Roach metal who promenades through crumbles
The leaning heart metal who chimes

Gravity wide, the crunch metal, vertebrate
Dangle metal, loose baggie metal

Some over the face metal, some caved in metal,
Shank metal and bereaved grind scorn metal

Tied up in burlap metal, the shaded avenue metal
Who feeds in the wreckage, the sucking metal.





.

Cool Your Blood

I'm waiting for something to collapse this august summer of bees and wasps. Take away the meanness of eggs every morning for thirty one days. The meanness of scrapple. No more hot wind blowing off the interstate through the rolled down window, no more hospitals, no more stitches. Cold winds blow and freeze the swarming flies swarming my potato salad, cool the red from my son's face, take the wasps worrying him from every back yard. Take the wasps take the hornets take the flies. Take the flies.

sea beast

Erroneous Calamity

Juice Tokens heaved to the pond
And the guy in scrubs up to his knee in broom spit

Grumbles some more and more snakes
Ooze into the T.V. memory

Indie! I am the monarch of the sea
The level of the grand pincer groomed

Even to steam up anyone on the block
Headed to shower and easy street

Catch these in the net, abandon.
They slip right next time through

All them gosh its great to yous

Hearty chunks in the wire, phoning
Next season, I promise, we get

A little throw you out, squeezed pulp genius.

I am Ahab.

DisJunk

Zombie pulp and cash flow enmesh
Their descriptions, drive new cars

Into the ditch trying the ramp
Over the razor wire, wire dogs

Mash computer files of dream sequence
Gone sour, aphasiac like the noose borne

Shiver me chiggers, me skin’s loose up
Not sad about it, just not altogether

Neither, there in that suppository dark
Peeping tracheal for melancholics

Who there trips out ship chop bloody
After blocks, party hammocks

Giftwrap coke machines dream stink
Swipe patterns on green, splatters.

Discuse

Pointed like nails
North heads into the kitchen

Folds a chair into the soup rations
Between hard stomachs.

And veils on the ice
Stacked water crumble into housing

Most anyone can notice.

You brain, intense refusals or scraped
Dimes, are treatment

Curtailed to faucet candies, destroyed
Moonstrosity,
Lousy hoverer!

Illuminate the benches
my knees are chaffed to

Glue in some brain cankers
Every thousand feet.

Medications

safe and sorry

Spanner

If it could rend open this metal, if it could make its way to Brazil. It was the element I couldn't remember its name, I called it a spanner just to have something. It dipped into each flower, I ran it wide open to Midlothian. Everything felt tight, the whole thing sounded compressed. It was the compression, it migrated, it felt like it might flip at a high rate of speed and be reduced to a sum of it's components. I thought I might be trapped inside it. There was no reduction, it moved too fast to see the wings move, it was graceful and small and terrifying. I felt it bleed inside me. I felt the river under the bridge, I felt the space under my truck, I felt it going by rapidly, I felt terrified. In this way I spanned the bridge.

Hummingbird Moth

There's something coming down the rails, something coming, I won't be able to outrun it. I won't be running, I'll always be running, over the river. I thought the running would restore me to sanity, I thought the running would restore me. The river would return me, my body, down the river to the sea. The river running by the city, the river running, the water under me. I thought the city would return, the city restored to sanity, the city rising and I'm running beneath it, running down the river, running down the river.

Jaws Of Life

wintersleep

Promalade

Spreader and enriched
Gourmet memorables

And harsh reams of dining experience

Called out to sea, to squalor
All the smooth instability

And treading water, panting
The whole dream on a dance

Slot to go round, Vibratron
Steam mistress

Hullabaloo and an ice bucket
For the melting swimmers

Ice age man in fedora
Unearthed to classic steps

What carnage at the buffet.

Glass Carpet

On the weave we pray
Every bonnet gets treasured

And so the loom gets her dignity
In the up and up away from hands

On the cover up
We leave the stains

For the next residents to unearth
Like proof of the cosmic joke.

On the walls, maybe some paint
Or ships-in-flight wallpaper

Will get a Granny to commence
Excavating her specials

And sparkle demons dragged
From the 30’s or on a vessel

Bound for the church of a far land.
We know its fake, Granny,

Give it up. Lets get the crunch
Crunch out of the way.

Here's Your Explanation:

None of us get what we want and then we die.

Consider the Ruckus

And the possibilty of punkrock made into a machine.
Consider the simmering room, the thousands of red lines
Representing roads in Virginia. Consider the roads
Of Richmond. Consider punk rock.

Everything representational, Everything that returns.

Bring the ruckus.

What Time & How Burnt

Probot is metal. Probot is not metal enough.
Not enough to wake the babies, to grind the strawberries
To make the smoothie. It is nothing to relapse over.
Trigger me this: If metal is not necessary, then neither
Is breathing, and Lamb Of God needs to quit the tour
And come home.

Zombie Country Pulpit

Wearing number three with ribs
mm-mm
some falls off some gets got

looky looky numbers collected
to the Cinnabon
for the toll taker’s left overs

some soft serve soft bits
gets the puddlings, some slip

from the hilltops surround the mall

and busted open atrium
thin rain fizzles to stem up the odors

hail thee prince of pride, hail down
some froze rocks and tonka-tonk

some loppers tumble to gaps glacial
closers,
give us this glip our daily sludge

we mumble into halves
get some big ole hats

just for being here for the very last one,
bath and body works
ironies alone
near Perfumania which tickles
atmospheres around the wandering
limb chawers,
spit slips out now
no reason to be offended

no more a deceiver, we’re home lord
Anne Taylor, Lord and Taylor

Six feet up, escalators still tearing

Welcome the pulp to the pulpit.

Belligerence

Triangles inseminate their own dark
Cuticles.

Slipshod demons sterilize
Some crepuscular dogs
Who found their way through to
Gnawing the rusty girders,

Enfenced, scoops of glisteny mud

Languished broken razor blades
Congress

Greater forms decline
To join the community of crank

Batons beaten upon the skull
Of deformed democracies
Clinging amoebic

To the hands, to the
Oppressor’s dream cranks as they
Trawl the crinkling
Stomachs, the stomachs.