Maakies--Closure

IG-88 #3

Today I added a third set to the IG-88 series.

::

Dear Fanged One

This diet drink will conquer the world.

Lord, I’m feeling a nail growing into my toe

like a bad idea. After the surgery

in which the pure silver canister

replaced my brain, I shivered with

buyer’s remorse. Lord, I’m feeling

disgusted about tacos, and I’m

wondering if anything’s wrong. Did

you not get the check? I’m hoping

this diet drink is an invasive species.

Lord, I’m photo-shopping my soul,

overlaying banana leaves with spikes

& leather & real monuments of faith

like thunder & wriggling spines.

Lord, would you be satisfied with my

diet drink? Lord, I am breaking out.

The organ music you commissioned

is killing all the ladybugs.

Lord, This diet drink is working,

all the fences are clearing up.

:::::

Tom the Dancing Bug

On the Death of Ingmar Bergman

Softly & somewhere surprising the smell of the sea

flits upon us. Or is it just the rain, the tiny prayer

of bones the bats left to the corners near the burned

remains of a balsawood airplane I sacrificed to

the memory of decay which is the smell of the sea.

Encased in trembling branches, quelled to pride

by evolutionary forces, Jackdaw & maple play

dress up, pretend to whittle teeth from left over

thistles while a workman scatters bright brown

mulch across the incalculable memory of the sea.

On a route I travel from my childhood, I am at

the far edge of field of asphalt smashing vacuum

tubes from the ornate guts of a television set.

Like shrimp in the ocean, they keep coming,

materializing to my hands their alien encasings

then just as quickly turning into grenades I heave

to near distances to see them explode, juicy

fruits of exploding glass, tangy wires tangling,

spitting out two bottom nodes like bat’s teeth.

If I were left alone any more as a child I wouldn’t

now be able to see the vacuous tendencies

of rolling water. They say when a tidal wave comes

that the sea draws a breath so big the sand

is exposed for miles. In that combination of the sun

on sand is an articulation of clams pulling in

so hard to their shells they explode, before

the crash is a tinkling as if light could make

a sound, as if everything weren’t about to be lost.

City Baby Attacked By Rats!

Brightly Colored And Fantastically Depressing

I was traveling today and stopped to take some pictures of South of the Border plus a bonus creepy abandoned hotel. I could only do about twenty minutes in S.O.B. before I had to bug out.

Music Heaving Like Restless Seas

Ghost Rider Vs. Swamp Thing

The poet Jay Snodgrass is green and filled with tree limbs. Outcast,
Trudging, pine laden under Spanish moss, crosses straight sand
Highways. He carries his daughter on his hip over what hills line
Tallahassee. She doesn’t mind. He is mulch and swamp erect, his body
Is alive; the Belted Kingfisher, the White Heron, the Gator and Bullfrog.
He is aware of me and me of him. Our children have finally stopped
Fighting when we get them together. When I metamorphose
Erupting into searing blue flame, and ride my volcanic hell-born
Motorcycle through this blue-black Virginian city at night, it is the thought
Of our children, together, that keeps me safe, that brings me back.
It is my own combustion that set’s me out, my song thrumming underneath.
The cinders of my own desperation smolder in my own frame.

And Who's Mommy Are You?

May-may's Cookie Purse

Thanks Tan-A Market you crabby people you!

Anteater

:::: ::::

When I was eighteen I delivered furniture in a large

White truck, some surplice device

Of a WW II engine, outfitted, from mercy, with an

Electronic lift gate that I imagined

Could sever my toes right off, pop, pop, pop. And

That’s what I called the old guy I helped

Tote Frigidaires up into the recess of Military housing,

Pop, because he smoked Ole Grandad

Pipe tobaccy, and spat black wads of lung juice,

Lung Cookies as we called em. Ol’ Pop

Scuttled to and fro, his pipe hanging from the back

Pocket of his jeans like a lever

I’m phasic, one moon looking on underwater. Later,

the lights of the pool smiling up make me long

For the smell of lighter fluid which itself dreams

Of burning to life from some dark garage of

My childhood. Like Freddy Kruger my kid fears pop up

Like tube worms from the sea floor,

That is, like fingers who live inside the glove, eponymous,

Poking out to nibble-nibble on pieces

Of my darkness. And like the Anteater, Pop used to poke

His tongue out and lick around his mouth

When he was talking, just that tongue, prehensile exclamation

To conversations, going in, coming out,

I hear the words Step it up you rotten… lick out at me, I’m

At the pool, swimming in a dream, in the dark

The pool light comes on and in the dark it’s old Pop’s tongue

Come to clean the bees and ants crawling

On my towel. In my dream, I’m working. Lifting a Couch

Around a corner in a stairwell and my finger

Gets caught and, from the knuckle on my pointer, first

The skin and then the bones and then

Everything popping out and back

Darkness like a worm,

Weight like furniture, Sweat like hog in a dream

Working like a hog in a dream.

:::::

The Imperial ‘Stache

I see a man whose mustache is the bigger part of his face

And I feel the century cascade on upon itself.

Even in this bright cadence of light upon the upper leaves

I’m gleaming in the shape of upper things.

One measure is upon the skin of moisture, one of doom

Upon serrated antechambers of the grocery store or cloister.

I see, in limpid television screens, heads of men severed

Into society’s blooming wax of modes indifferent,

Tweed embouchure of governors in kissy-face, patched

Between the seemlier beings of sweat & gas,

The honest clinging lisps of bodily emulcifants which

Cotton up the works & shake the barrel free of sticking things.

One man in the light in a century which continues to be

Bigger than all the imagination of a country made of facial hair.

:::::

The Orange Goldamn

Shiver me tremblers

And decode the Oafs, the later damnable

Periscope gliders.

Then up, up & a weigh a ton

On it, sparkle-sparkle

Damnable olfactory.

The music of a violent death is much happiness

In crime, crimp, devoid

As inside the overhead compartment

Your tension straw slithers

As closer we cramp out shoulders.

I am driving on the ice, a thousand times

Spun with threads, catchy notes & song

Department officials trailing off

In the left hand lane, blinker-blinker

A flutter.

What do you mean? Asks the book.

This new undressing unveiled you. Spiraled

Notation, bank hammer

Smoothes the eggs into latent cups

Of disease, loose nostrils, tendrils in the outreach,

Search for the belligerent mother.

::::::

The Hero

Turn it up Dude!

:::::

In the Stigmatist’s Bedroom

In the issue of blood, I am already ready

To misread this garment of light.

She is wearing the look of a woman in a painting

Wearing a look of a woman in a painting in a room

In which only ten minutes ago the last drops

Of blood were cleaned from the floor, from the beckoning

Dark leather of the couch, from the frame of this frame

Within a frame.

Then, breaking the oil around

Her lips, she finally muttered a long low negative.

This woman of a bright room in a painting of a bright room

In the newly minted room. The cleaning woman gone

Also but the smell of ammonia, ornament of defeat.

This woman is bleeding herself into the room from

Her painting. She will be the lady of broken glass

When the story gets out. It will be the fight for

Ascendancy, for the wounds of the room, if the wounds

Of the woman in the room are opened,

& they are, this will require some stitching, for though

The blood flows into the mop heads & into the gleaming

Sewers, & into the mocking jowls of cleanup,

It will eventually become static, with enough air

& light. There will be millennia of clean up

Because the room is bright and the light of the room

Is in the room and of the room and the blood is the blood

Of being to, of being in the room and being the room

& it will come on, & continue to issue.

:::::

Over Southside

John






and me


went taking pictures again this weekend.

Ego Soup

Ego Soup

You wake on Sunday morning to find

A drowned squirrel in the kiddy pool.

Nowadays the Anchorites float more fashionably

Belly up in petroleum rubber. Those priestly burdens once

Scooped out of chapel walls are just as

Withdrawing-ly faced from the tub

With a box of Kirspy Kreme. The bolsters of the lord

Find easement in the facades of saints

Above the television.

The good lord waxes:

Come to me squirrel

The trumpets are nigh.

I feel in my desperate & slow burning calamity

To get the bills paid, to be attentive

& occasionally forthright,

The rubbery zip zip of the squirrel’s claw

Upon the dazzling rubber, such water,

The yellow, the blue, the sunrise

Into drowning.

Now, the squirrel reminds us, we are free

To scoop the little corpses from our day.

Thank you, lord, I continue to beat the wall

With the apparatus of my forehead, the rubber

Vestibule of my brain, which squeezes off

Saints like other orifices shoot out bullets,

Other venoms.

Remember: The brick wall stained with blood,

The scrambling claw.

Weekend Wrap-Up

A squirrel drownded in our baby pool last night. This being a week after May-may pooped in it. Before that it was under the deck covered in mold and spiders. I believe the pool to be cursed.

The Enertia Electric Motorcycle

From Brammo(!)

Fully charged in three hours.

Top speed of 45 mph (but I bet you could eek another 15 mph out of it.)

Oh, it's got a USB port!

The Shambling Darkness Welcomes the McSkillet Burrito

and whatever in God's green earth could possibly be in the fucking thing.

Oh, it has a blog too!

The Velvet Paranoia

Boy, you’re all really out to get me, aren’t you?

I know because of the velvet serpentine a river

would make, if there were enough rain to make

a river. I know you’re out to get me because if

you weren’t you’d bake me a red velvet cake.

Which is a favorite of dock workers & their stolen

nights. Come to think of it, that hook they use

to pull packages, the one Brando laces across

his shoulder when he bunges up the courage to

go back to work at the end of On the Waterfront,

THAT kind of leisurely gaff, that’s also how I know

you’re out to get me. The bent needle stitching

together the two velvety halves of flesh inside

my wound. The wound you made trying to get me.

:::

JOB FOR A COWBOY

Entombment of a Machine (interpretation)

The Black Ruckus

Spotted on Davis between Grove and Floyd.

Brain Group: 6-11 Servings

Thanks to J. Murdon, internets superstar.

The Poet Jay Snodgrass and I

Took our children to the beach and I ran over him
With my mother's kayak. I was the triumphant Tuscan
Raider, the paddle was my truncheon aloft
Hrukk-Uk-Uk-Uk. I was the mighty Inuit fisherman
And he was a helpless harbor seal. Or had he become
The Swamp Thing wading determinedly
Through the waves after me? I couldn't tell you
What the children thought of all this.

If you were the Swamp Thing, it wouldn't seem so hot,
Covered in your layers of vegetative mass. Also if one of your friends, say,
Lost an arm, the Swamp Thing could grow it back for them.
Thanks Swamp Thing! If you were Ghost Rider it wouldn't be so bad
As you would already be engulfed in blue fire and the Hellfire
Covering your skeletal frame would be very cold. That's how Hellfire is.

None of us have the benefit of these things.
Instead the heat devours us and our lives become fused
Like one singular, volcanic
Gonad.

American Beach

Just south of my parent's place is an historic African-American community on the ocean front called American Beach. My dad drove me through it last week so I could take some pictures. Most of these are of a hotel as well as the old nightclub, Evan's Rendezvous.

Simpson's Claybee

Thanks, J's Notes!

400 mile ride

My father and I rode our motorcycles through central Florida Thursday (well, I was riding my moms' bike) and I took some pictures.

It Dreams of the Death of the Wurlitzer

We are in charge & the day is long.

Organ music over Formica,

Forsythia. Hour after hour

The day is long. We are in charge.

There is no finish to the flooring,

No finish here. We are in charge

Of the organ

Music. Long over the floors. The day

Is long. Over the music. We are

In charge.

I can’t look over this

Awning any more. The light is loose

Corn among the bricks. I’m not in charge

Of them. Their sounds are loose

Like tongues in the wind. Reed born

Vessels of air, humming light, open

Lungs, the breath of steam and yellow

Light, we are in charge.

The light is long.

I can’t hear

The vacuum any more

You must be done. Earth & organs.

The music in length,

The length of music.

A trombonist at the window

Counting the length of light.

Repeat. Come back

Into the dark. Leave into the light.

Hours. The day is long. We are

In charge.

:::

Greetings From Fernandina Beach

Self-portrait on my mom's 883

Chambliss Harkening Process

Garr..

Pushing The Lexipro Envelope

Mr. Snodgrass: "So what, this Flickr thing costs like twenty five bucks a year or something."

Me: "Yeah well, how much you spend a year on that cable tee-vee?"

Mr. Snodgrass: "Well, how much money would you have if you didn't smoke those fucking cigarettes?"

Me: "Yeah, well how much do you spend a year on being a fucking dick?"

Mr. Snodgrass: "Well fuck you then!"

Me: "And you, yourself, sir!"

The Helix Mobile

Your sun’s on a track, one finger

Of casual disinterest flicks

It in a half empty room.

Bangers & walls, balance along

With felt and terrible stew,

The wheel turns on its straw.

Most shadows make quadrangles

Against sock slump, laundry

Of creaturely mass.

Or the moon’s nurse, gravity’s noose

Blends crumbling & growth

With an amusing curse,

Course & the grime & the nectarine’s

True adventure through

A blooming awake.

Imploding fruit, rays on the string,

Funnel & stirrup markers

To north, to nowhere but dark matters

Slurry crystals of ice & begotten

Shades trip failure & bombs. So long

The unfrozen’s unrotten.

:::

Ultimates

Here is what you think:

I said everything:

Notice the blowing, full bore,

Nightly endured

Production, still, out of bounds.

Nobody said you would make

A flywheel of ground dinosaur teeth;

–A sewage system of forgettable –

A canonic undertow of unwavering vanity,

All, reigned in to the heart-thump.

I SAID: you may

Northern. The sanctity, cowling doomsday,

The great ones wave banners.

Their gloved fist at the sky. Superhero

Dilettantes, the total crimson cut

Of cosmic declaration, a super-cision.

While the superfluous over bite, fiend to crinkle,

Listens to the over-sound: here comes

The report: Dupe. Acquittal. Spectral

Fade.

Don't Risk Paralysis