Epiphany

I can somehow walk and think, and looking at my boots, that is art. There is the forty hour week, and there is money, which both can kill art. Republicanism kills art. War murders art. There is the chattering darkness all around us. In work and in war. You’ve taught me all my life: Art is war, yet I’ve decided we can win. So let us wage our lives against.

Fernandina Beach Libertarian Women’s Tennis League

Because we are not striving for actually anything,
We are enjoying ourselves. We are winning.
We want to keep it.

pickles and mustard

You’re wrong, you’re decay means everything to me. I’ve built a fiasco of a deck down in North Florida for my parents. Am going back tomorrow, to build it; out of need for money. Went down with Henry, just me and him. Because there is no use for art in our great country so we go and build decks. “I want momma,” he sez. Almost every night. Because I dragged him four hundred miles for money, because an artist father always needs money from somebody. We all sit down on the porch steps eating Krystal hamburgers for lunch one day, I scrape the pickles and mustard off for Henry.

“You’ve got grey hair,” my mother said, astonished, still in her tennis skirt. “I can see it in the sunlight.” “Yeah, I got lots.” I say, and that’s all, because of the same truth that makes people stop behind school buses. Or else they don’t stop.

I am not a whining liberal and I will break your fucking nose if you call me that. I am a full grown American craftsman, doing my best to keep from dying.

Necrosis 1.1

A crisis in the upraised, I’m enjoying what’s coming down on my head. The treatment of my youth. Its hallways of hypnotized dilution. I watch it on TV for the reality. The shared grave. I make it up to me by not killing myself. What goes up comes together. It’s the primary rule of transmission: my decay is everything, except to you.

Unassuming

Either giving or eating, the teeth stay focused, dedicated to the knowledge of the impossible, for them, the teeth, it is the engulfed, the consumed. Love is to the masticated. The sky is overcast. In the city it is all the ruin of teeth. It is abutment, adjustment. Giving in to the blackmail of love, (How Useless?) I am engulfed by the sky, its limited potential for giving; I am dismembered to the knuckle, its exact placement.

Put A Shiner on It

Oh temple un-slurred, unnamed
to be priced,
unbecoming price reader

I’ll be homeless at the bar
code reader,

macho up to the confetti
man for syllables which,
showing deference
I’ll forget how to say
then spend the rest of the night

putting the ham and eggs back
on my grandfather’s jokes:

“I’ve only had tea Martoonies Ocifer..”

such time as made the wooden years
a mantle mount above us all

the Midwestern fireplaces forged out their
indifferences from uncertainty

and named her Art.

hark hark,we are making art here

The Art that comments on itself
the rough cloth on the door
nail catch of skin,
I'm in too:
Name this.

What is the space where art is madof art?

Hey Paw, getchyee college fund.My can put a finger innit?

Looky here Boy, there's wharn them dead juices a-bubble up. Don't Toucheet!

Soufflé & Sticks

Tender spirit, living, father. Despite this quality, you cry out in the night. Face enshrined in breathing apparatus and life’s true intention: the struggle we pretend is a game to make it sweeter. Me? I'm forming a likeness out of remembered trees, leafless winter trees and a mood of zombies coming back through the cold like parking attendants to the gray morning, or waiters summoned to dance in dark uniforms. In this spirit, father, I struggle too. The labored sky, the half remembered ideal that pursues me through conversations on devastation, on recalling myself, memory, trees. For the waiter’s tip there’s nothing. No retrograded tenderness. No chivalrous denial of foreboding. The meal you ordered is coming. Quick. Undress.

Yeah, I got nothing to add to that....

*****

Mysterion Hyperdrive Daycare

Linked to fatuous underclothes, I’m the forecastle’s blurb,
Delicate like whiskey-breath on a dad at daycare.

That perilous infirmary, I implode the wax of its being.
Inside are candies, sliver and red and naughty

Like tinkling, like the twine of a homeless shanty
That binds my heart, my chronicle or self-repair;

Or, mechanically, the way I ignore what goes on at
The bus stop, the guy passed out, the wonder of his abandon

Shuffles me out of some delirium made of cakes, traffic horns
Defrosting me from the stalactite habit, a daycare

I’ve mucus-ed around me, a cocoon made of worship,
I’m shifting already under the weight of. Back off, Translucency!

You unwind by linkage, this cupcake of total discard, fondled
Until the finger holes, groove twists, are ice cream shelves of shame.

Horn-ed KidneyBomb

Barbarous orchid blooming in my kidney
you are my moral roll-over to which

external maintenance becomes only political
esp. in light of this pain

this ranch grass infused with terrorist dreams,
the women in tears, strong and clever

dying for recognizance and butter.

I inhabit a dream of bile, where every tube
is constricting around my stone

I admire this. Now if only my urethra
would burst into blossom.