Monday, October 30, 2006

86'd

In the movie by the Italian, it started with a sailboat listing up the east river. The nypd that boarded it was attacked by a zombie from below deck. I began like that, with no explanation. That's all I remember.
It was on at the Sweetwater in Williamsburg, now long gone. Dennis was there. We drove the Impala my papaw left to me, which I had given to Dennis, wedged like a grey brick across Canal and over the Manhatten bridge. It was daytime and cold. Regulars, bikers and punks drunk early on a Saturday. I got us lost, like always, trying to find the place.
Dennis left for Dudzinski's wedding on Long Island, and I stayed and got drunk, left around dusk and took the wrong train deep into Brooklyn. One night like a hundred other, wandering wide and lost in the city, staring at the sidewalk, making people nervous waiting for the train.
I'm glad I never saw how the city might look over-run with them. I tried never to let myself daydream it. A year later the Impala threw a rod. I moved away from the city. I could forget about the trains and the direction they took underground. I could forget about fortifying that apartment, ripping out the stairs and the fire escape. Where exactly my circular saw was. Somehow they never came for me there either.
Somehow I never wrecked that car. There never was a boat that floated in from the ocean with an abomination in it's heart, but there was me, shambling through China town, bleeding as the sun rose.
None of it was enough.

Henry's Photographs



More or Less Ensnarled

To twinkling I revert the under eye, her television
surcease, the twitch I give over to sleeping

all along the couch bed, break bed, fake tread
on the floor brain outside all the rational things

I’m sure your ovens bake continuously. So I mean
asleep I hear the acorns ting and crunch out

on the sidewalk and I hear them coming, hear
the arm resurrect itself to show out of the dumpster window,

to breath; I watch the heat convection off car hoods
in a parking lot of late summer, easy autumn

too cold, I hope inside my cranial, giving less to more
I choose not to be reactionary, to recheck the locked door.

Imagine this: the zombie movie made entirely from
the zombie’s perspective, because, I’ll say this,

the worst parts are when the eye is out in the parking lot
part of the gaggle, part of the slipping yet unnoticed.















:::::::

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Shambling Darkness Project-Year One

Forgive the Camber

This thin covering isn't my skin, it is a continent adrift, a landscape.

Under the horizon of my chest there are oceans tumbling. Hold your breath.

Bones lashed tight, worn in hair and sinew throughout,
Don't ask me how it happened.

I have my boots to bear the leather. On which are the scars.
Scratched out across the steel half dome. Under which are my toes,
Gnarled and balancing.

One day I'll uncurl and spring. I'll be aloft.
It won't matter to anyone who isn't reading this.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Thursday, October 26, 2006

My complaint Is Overwhelming Me To Quantity

I surprised my self with the shopping cart
Just meals beyond the ice cream
Two folds of ham in a diner jacket appeared
To hold a soda, supplication to the gourds,
Did I say gourds, the holy crappers
Carrying dishrags to wipe the mouths
Of fallen leaves, each appropriate stain
And the new sky of tree branches bares
A butt tattoo to the new sunset, today’s
Fair chance of gleaming. The new series
Of lung gurgles I’ve championed really
Are turning out to be bad tenants.
So much so I’ve hefted brand names
On the carpet I’m weaving to cover it all.

Distort the Many Shipman

How like a fresh hole in my trouser cuff
This stretch of afternoon inspires me to grief.

How like a noose of charming praise
This holy temple I am walking past.

How like a fist raised up to razor wire
This goat farm, its independence and its smell.

How like a locomotive of shame
This trumpet of cold air, a pealing crease

In the stitch of sleeping. How like a goose
In honking flight, this wristwatch of destiny.

How like a set of Tinker Toys this burly
Complaint, a hair in knots around a finger

How like the tiny whiz of a wind up car
Held up in the air this on and on I whirl.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Interglacials

I.

One snow, the leap out of memory.
My child’s eyes, blue in keeping
With the decay of clear soda, cola
To kangaroo leap, the eyes are blue
Like the memory of prehistoric fruit,
Frozen fruit, the social amplification
Of the cereal box, the migration
Of will across loops of commercial
Evolution, the wrong, just wrong
Creatures of nature’s uncolored: blue
To the jungle, blue to the ice sheets
Blue to the plastic doll’s eyes, one in
Every package, collect them all: leap
Energy contracts, the ice age snaps,

She looks up.


II.

She looks up.

Where the trees used to be breach
Of shade, where the metal securing
The slide clangs loose, one screw, one
Nut away, on a bench eyeing the little
Ones, the navy of youth burgeoning,
All army of the to be, horse stepping
And dance raiding the pretend housing,
Still able to imagine free air, the pretend
Arms of flight, and the trees, they used
To be, but now it’s so hot and the sand boils
Even in the furrows fresh feet plow
The swing arc gives no relief, the slide
No shelter, the kangaroo hop necessity
Strips blacktop from shoe sole,

From hunger.

III.

From Hunger

Sometimes I’m alone in my slick car
Of hunger, my metalized plastic cover
Of desert. Sometimes I fetish over water
Like a snake in a hole. Sometimes I cross
Bare dunes on a stomach of surf, boards
On the surface, logged days, stripped
Beaches from a tsunami of questions.
Proportion? Water to fruit and eyes
Parade through small town kidneys,
More convection comes with its own toll
More sweet crenellations freeze up
Bombastically like fruit in Tupperware
Memories. Ice age this to the eyes
Strew the slick in the forgotten fridge

Of heaven.


IV.

O Heaven.

I step away in to the mulch, brown
Separations left everywhere like bait
Fish in a sink. I step away on legs
To reach to the holy ground everyone’s
Talking about. So tonight’s show
Is hopped up to glass meeting
Pavement, can’t wait either. The sand
Used to be a star and now things
Are iced over, the blue dressing gown
Strings to cold beyonds, out of the park
Out of the systems of nearing, furthering
Tickling shards of left over infinity
So much left to stop and eat of, from,
Lobsters in the glass, so close to the end

They reach out.


V.

They Reach Out

From innocence to voices of comfort
Hips in motion, slithering to roundness
Like the forces of erosion make
Jewels of planets, experiments
In gifting and joy gone extinguished,
Gone out to baby’s eyes, quick
Spherical orbits which are on a level
About right to the eye of the sun
Which no one seems to think is weird.
So alike the family orbits this television
Theater: out to the playground, out
To the moose head invitational which
Is really only a rehearsal of the soon
To be, the quick switch and the remote

Lost in space.


VI.

Lost in Space.

Egg in bacon greased pan, you are preventative,
Unsecured heart stoppage and work release
Of the heart’s maneuvers to franchise
These fingers which like sea shores wave
To motion in a clap, an applause for the new
Series of bright mornings which clink
My eyes open each morning like icebergs
To my dreaming ship full steaming back
To the wetness, to shuddering and stink
Oh voice, oh slide oh pectoral airliner
Overhead creasing the orange sky like
“look,” she says, “A shooting star.”
To which there is only the squeak of unoiled
Chains, the two of us, faces pointed up

To the beyond the outside.


VII.

To the Beyond The Outside.

And outside the kangaroo sets, her
Blanket eyes a stereo, the street fills
With a thump-thump like bruising,
The trees shudder to autumn out
Their thong-ed oppression, I inhale
Ice crystals through waves of shrieking
Children, further than empty, orbital
Such as removed twirling, snakes
Of feeling, path-wise to ice age and blue
Hydrangea, corn flower, violets, blue
Bells, the cranked up forge of genetic
Memories, ice aged across the play ground,
Smeared mechanically into the ticking
Tooth rind of the whole speckled

crater.



















:::::

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Yet Sequential

Ordered early so as to infiltrate
I strap on this gum stain and smile
Verdantly so as to bemuse the laser
Detectors sweeping for any one qualm
Of significant unhappiness.

I bought it online so they have my credit
Carrying a disease. I hope it snuggles
Up to the bath water, to the breathing
Babies they mutate and lays a little egg.

One bus, two heads bobbing, two busses
Thousands worm up from the manholes
In my head. Beboparoo, natives used to
Rub stale fish scales and palms of pine gum.
Now the only cure is this store bought

Parade, the conspicuous cowboy hat
Or right thinking.

Unholy










Up in the strips of teeth. I reassemble. The biblical luck I have discovered in the assemblage of certain flowers hurries me like as through a time warp from the boiling pot on to a discussion of glass manufacturing with the head man who is wearing spikes of moonbeam in his lips. This makes his speech elaborate like a sunset. I nod. He wishes to cover it all, the jungle and the mountain side in glass, levered with the bones of many thousands already dead.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Augury

Ride The Incline

Strange Apparition





Anything should make you happy.


Nothing could make you be scared.

Dystrophic

In fizzles the depression melts sheets
Of ovaries, in thistles we trip grumpily
Through the tweed scars, breaking our
Fingers in go lucky fourths, I incline,
I incline the neck a twizzle after the eyes

One zombie tropic look for luncheon
On appeal, mud swivel leg for limp about
The mall, a luncheon of shoppers, a skein
Of filamentary vessels, blood and the scraping
Room, so much wiping and the hands

Just smear it around and around into smiley
Faces. Oh the squeezed out regard their
Appeal as a form of justice for effort, the kind
Of snug toothy relief you get from flossing.

Metamorphos Migrationary

There was the blonde girl slumped in the corner of the trailer. She crossed over, she transformed. There was the one laying in the tall grass who sat up suddenly. There was the man and woman silent inside a house in the middle of a field, it was not their house. Shuffling from kitchen to bedroom, sometimes they were in the bedroom together. Sometimes there were groups of them. The individual made up part of the whole, the whole took up the great wandering. What did they think of one another?
There was the lone one. A singular metamorphosis in the middle of an empty northern city. Stumbling under bridges, past vacant hardware stores. Hunched along the length of train tracks cut through great woods. When it snowed he sat under trees, sometimes he lay down and let it bury him. Boulevards of great houses marked his slow passing, snow drifting into open doorways. No one played inside with babies, no one brushed another’s hair, no one slept warm under the weight of wool covers.
Twisted wrack of live oaks, burdened with snow, sprawling over him one day, thinning into beach and sea. Lone traveler staring out over the foam driven expanse, ankle deep in snow. The great ribs of a whale, washed ashore there and jutting skyward, white over white. The white over dark of the gnarled oaks behind him. Welcome home, friend.

Scrapings

And yet penned, the colonized
Rehearse their mummification
With cocktail engines and scrambled
Craniums carried delicately
In party napkins,
Something with turtles
And martinis and sacrificial lobes

And the parking is atrocious, we expected
That, but the boys in straight jackets
Mouthing drink trays and cursing

Make me fetish for a clear landscape
The kind of thing that makes housing
Tracts, the kind of scraped mud
Moon chore that conjures up
A colonoscopy or a party band
Specializing in dirges and headstones.

Freak Engine

On the moon, everyone votes
For the skewer. That’s because
On the moon, everyone gets the free tote
With purchase, containment
And a hanky full of votive nails.

In the freight to the moon
Everyone hammers on the walls
Well most everyone, the one guy
Who’s gone nutso-so-zombie
Is making the mall turnips
Scramble back into their brain shells.

Moon squadrons scramble out of caves
Built in the sides of craters. One
Invasion goes smooth as a severed hand.

Dogectomy

If I’m watching my dog take a crap
Then its early morning. I say this
So you’ll know how to appreciate
The envelope of air my gut skin takes
When I heave in to scoop the crap
Up into the strategically offered
Square of plastic bag the complex
Lays out like little beetle skins of bait
For dog owners to remind themselves
Of how, just how humiliating dog
Ownership really is. If I’m bitching
About this again, and you’re sick of it,
Think that the reason I tell you is so
You’ll appreciate each clear breath.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Geography II




Midlotian Group Therapy






Pep Rally

Many mangled Tasty Cakes
Avoid the dumpster’s toss
Of the late night convenience clerk.

The rats and men collect,
Witnessthe president’s motorcade.
The rats and men grovel to the food,

And the president, who passes,
Thinks they worship him
And no one there is who dissuades

The holy vision of the holy man:
Holy men of leisure, deliver us
A golf course, deliver us from the pig
Farm which stench invades the golf
Course, deliver us the check made
Out to rats, to men made out of rats.

The limousine is bomb
Resistant.

Which is good for the rummage
The new job listing of the dumpster’s prize.

The rats elect each other
To bite the filthy men

Into remembering they’re forgotten




::::::

Thursday, October 19, 2006

I Do Love a Trip to the Science Museum.

Sparta Music

Raise your voice in the valley, Jim, and sing it against the mountains.
Echo it back to us, ragged and brave. Thrust forward, with guitars billowing,
Arched masthead of music. I'll race my children through hills in my truck
With the sound of it stretched overhead like borealis.
Entrenched in music, they will never touch us,
Man, child and infant. The camber and apex of each curve,
Trees fingerlocked overhead. The outcrop of limestone,
The abyss. Never stop running.

"All The World Will Be Your Enemy..."

& be covered in a layer of monsters. Lay awake, hungry in your bed, let your belly devour you. Your hand can drive a thousand nails, your hand covered in skin, filled and intricate with bones. Your hand can rot.
Vast among the hairs on your arm, the great traverse of your back. Imagine mathmatical patterns evolving like living victorian lacework, purple and green across the distance of you. It is nothing to merely get up and eat, it is nothing uncurl.
To wake and rise and stride into the morning once again.
It is everything.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

I. Call & Respond



II. Geography


III. Red/Green




Trisquatch

High in the dark most fear
The hard bar
A containment

Of eggs, asteroid vet
On a wide plane of scripture

The tongue on stone
As frightening as the hair
Of swamp water, green comatose

Be-treed lurking.

He’s in a hat, large, vesseled,
Dome of abandon clear as the blue

In rain, in the humming
Wires across the universe

In the dream of the smell of escape
Of the universe.

Recombinant Cometoid

Too late a bit, couched in gills
Hard fish the morning sneeze

Commingles to the dust in sun
Like particles before time.

The trees play birds to rock-star
Proportions, one flies red away

Then the shaken leaves, coalesce
Into the mower, motor and engine

Revved to make the sky flinch.
In the sound grown out of darkness

A fuzz to face the light like
The imperceptible register on the amp

Still turned on, the show is coming
To memory across a fractured mind.

See Rock City

Tuesday Is Like Tuesday.

This morning fills in some rooms, blue and cold,
Nothing mysterious nothing enigmatic.
Silver grey streaked until the sun burns it off.
Something to look for, under a new thermal skin,
Cornering in a hollow of bricks, crouched on the idiot porch.
Spreading out, happily, growing moss in the shade of this town.
Rehab zombie remorseful. Wake up.