June 2011
1 post
Goddamnit why is
distance a thing that exists
in such quantity?
February 2011
2 posts
One crumbling old building
says to another
crumbling old building,
“Let’s make this
fall to the first
floor really last.
Let’s make it
worthy of our
broken steel bones.”
I made these eggs
with good intentions
but even the best intentions
mistake sugar for salt
November 2010
3 posts
Short poem 17
In an alternate universe, there are Disney Princesses auditioning for roles as 19 year old subway buskers in Brooklyn.
Haiku 2
the dilemma of all childhood nursery rhymes long lost remembered
Haiku 1
hot on the skyline in a chase scene of sorts, to where the sun is at
October 2010
1 post
Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
wanted to live to
the year 2000
and be 80 years old
and fuck 18 year olds
like how he fucked
women in their thirties
in his fifties, he always
wanted to get closer
to youth when he
got closer to death,
and he died in 1994
when he was 73 years old
and he wasn’t fucking anyone.
September 2010
1 post
Short Poem 12
I can always tell
you’re listening
with any varying
degree of elipses
when you open
your mouth to
not speak.
August 2010
2 posts
Short Poem 11
Like biking up a hill
and upon reaching the peak
feeling free
and falling
Short Poem 10
You get big and realize
how deep the river isn’t
and how deep the ocean is.
You get big and realize
how little you know about
being small, smaller than
you were when being big
was a big fucking deal.
July 2010
2 posts
A Fucking Poem About A Dumpster
Do not play
in, on or around
or occupy this container
for any purpose.
Containter must be placed
on hard, level surface.
Load uniformly.
Keep container on level ground
at all times and avoid tipping.
Do not fill with things
you cherish. DO NOT
bring yourself to put
this container on a pedestal.
Do not write beautiful things
on this container.
Do not let this container symbolize
...
Fuck The Wind.
I burn black smoke,
burn black the branches
and break them,
rust the fog,
leave a trail of broken
dreams.
Fuck the wind, it leaves
yesterday’s bad smells
in my clothes.
Fuck the wind.
June 2010
1 post
Walk To And Away
As I was walking
to where I wanted to be
the leaves were blowing
in front of me from behind
because my new north was
the way the wind was blowing
for the first time in my life,
my two winds were aligned
May 2010
6 posts
Dreamy Dreamers Dreaming Dreams
Dreams are all we get.
And even if someday they’re
Covered in that goo
we call regret, that
placenta of death, know that
once they were your life;
the future, never
the past, something you can go
back to, and have, and
maybe will before
you’re dead, because dreams are all
we get, in life, and
all that we are left,
all we have to want without
exception, sometimes,
our only regret.
Short Poem 6
Look, you know how well
I don’t respond to pinches
on the arm, it’s not
St. Patrick’s Day and
don’t wake me, yet, don’t wake me
I’m just dreaming, dreaming.
Short Poem 5
I still think it’s strange
that double-u
doesn’t have a ‘w’
in its name
and that it’s ten o’clock
twenty-four times a day
A Ton of Bricks and Feathers
In all my waking hours and sleeping infinities, I’m dreaming not unlike a somnambulist tightrope sleepwalking trapeze artist with my feet, and with my arms I am treading water rather than falling, I float A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers both weigh the same as a pillar of salt, so I never worry too much about looking back.
We Are All A Full Moon
In a swirl of blurs and hurried whispers, the night we were thunder and we were lightning, when all your stars were out, all your stars were out, and we vanished into all but sound, all your stars were out, we were loud like gods we were like earthquakes we were gods among mountains all your stars were out
No fires we try to make burn like wild fires, and...
Your hair in the wind
on the viaduct that day
when we were just kids
it was red and the
world on fire, and we, by all
means, let it burn, burn.
But we were just kids,
meaning we’re not anymore.
It rained in our world,
much to the dismay
of our umbrellas, never
ready, full of holes.
Haste makes waste, they say,
and days sway in the wind in
idleness since then,
since we never could
...
April 2010
6 posts
It's Nice To See The Burnt Ends of the Night
We bit off bits of bread going through bagguettes like we were steam engines. We had loaves and fishes We had dynamite We had motive and conviction and teeth to grind. We spit the seeds of our fruit like we’d done hard time, seasoned criminals, the hardened remains of left-for-dead people, stone-cold fossilized. We had that fire in our hearts, though. We had that look in our eyes that said...
A life's sentence
Sometimes I think
we’re a set of parentheses
with too many words in between
and words lose meaning
when they are translated from feelings
I think lips are made for kissing and voice boxes
are for voices, but only for the sound the other makes
that makes us feel something bigger and better,
Bigger and better like the sky or an open mouth breathing
or an ocean sighing or the moon kissing...
Happy
True happiness is being happy regardless
of all the bastards and the heartless
of the people who hate us
and the people we hate,
the people who love us
and the people we love instead
of the things that own us
and the things we will never own
of hospital bills and high tides
of overcast skies and receding hairlines
of miles and miles of barbedwire fences
of cars that have dashboards that...
To Be A Raisin
I am a like a grape
whose raison d’etre
is to be a raisin, and
my reason for being
is to have a life
that leaves me juiceless
for all the right reasons.
I want to give my juices so
I can be so happily dry and
eaten by people hungry for a
life with meaning.
I don’t want to be squeezed
or squashed in the process,
don’t want to be made into wine
that feeds more often...
And These Words Are Failing Me Even Now
I don’t speak enough languages
to tell you just how beautiful you are.
There aren’t enough languages
for me to speak, to tell you
just how beautiful you are.
And if there were enough languages
for me to speak, to tell you
just how beautiful you are,
there isn’t enough time.
And if there was enough time
for me to tell you in all the languages
it would take for me to...
Swinging
We work all day and all night
because life is like a string
tied together at the ends
and we have to make the ends meet
so we can sit in the center
in that crescent a string
tied end to end makes
and we can swing,
be free where they
can’t make us
be anything
other than
that.
March 2010
5 posts
Our Eyelashes, Cheekbones, Our Noses
We’ll see the lights
forever everywhere
from the same skyline of
our eyelashes,
cheekbones,
our noses.
The buildings with lights
turning on and off
where business meetings
with pitchers of water and
papers strewn in piles on tables
make big decisions about money.
Where motels sell sleep for a night
with the lights that shudder silently behind
curtains with the patterns of...
Breaking Speed Limits
Time flies by because
we are having so much fun
but we have forever
so it just feels like
we are going fast
all the time,
so say goodbye to each moment
because it is only momentary,
throw your arms up and feel the air
on your fingers, setting fire to the hairs
on your knuckles, and buckle no seatbelts,
because if we fall out, it is just another direction
to head in forever,
if we fall...
We Were Kids
We blew smoke signals
when we smoked
when we kissed
we said I love you
like Native American Indians
we were kids
we shivered in the cold
and we kissed
we touched noses
we were Eskimos
we were kids
A Still Life is Life, Still
Like a fly too blue
about dying so soon
he thinks about fruit
the fruit he’s bitten off
and chewed
the fruit he’s consumed.
Like a fruit
she, too, bleeds juices
and muses
the meaning of life:
to be squeezed
and eaten
thrown at cars
put in jars
dipped, sipped
nipped in the bud
by flowering
counterparts
to rot into
Motts applesauce
so the seeds
she keeps
can grow...
Again and Again and Again
They poked holes
in the pie
with a fork four times
so, underneath,
the cherries could breathe,
and it sighed;
it sighed as a sign
that it was just fine
with the thought of
being eaten alive.
My, oh, my
what a humble pie
that will sacrifice
it’s life so that
others can lie
on their backs
in the grass
and close their eyes
and buy some more time
before they have to die,
again and...
February 2010
1 post
Fossils
With the cigarette butts
and the plastic bags and
glass coke bottles full of dirt,
in junkyards,
we’re fossils.
January 2010
5 posts
Heaven on Earth, Fire in the Hearth
We can see the fire, we can see the garbage in the sky
The satelites on a windy day in space.
It no longer looks like the Earth has braces
and is kissing the moon’s white teeth.
And we can feel the sky fall
and it feels a lot like the heaven of my childhood,
because I feel like I am flying,
and the clouds are so close
and everyone around is dead.
Heaven on Earth and fire in the...
Eternity
Could I last forever, please?
water resistant
even in this weather?
I’ll wear a life jacket, a helmet
elbowpads, kneepads
condoms and a retainer when I sleep;
waterwings, even, I don’t care,
if it will keep
me here forever.
I could be a slab of concrete
left over from what was once a sidewalk.
I’ll be anything as long as it doesn’t wear
A fossil yet...
The Air We Speak
How we breathe the air we do
and everything that’s in it
Skin and dirt and lint
and don’t know it.
We breathe the breath people have breathed
and maybe that’s why we say the things
we say, because we’re just breathing other breaths
and why everyone says they love each other in Paris
and talk about the cold in Chicago
and maybe that is why I cough a lot sometimes
...
People, Places, Things
I need things to do with my hands
and places to go
and people to see
and things to think about
so I don’t think about other things.
I need a place to call home
and a place to keep my things
and I need some things
to put in places I own
for people to see
the people I see when I go
to the places I go
and I need to keep my hands busy,
or I will think myself to death.
The Life of a Fly
I was a ditch digger, my dear
I was an elderly woman
and an elderly man
I was a strawberry, once,
dipped in chocolate and eaten
alive
I was grapes growing on the vine
I was a bird
I was a baby lion
I was a beetle
and a snake
and I was a real monster
at times
I owned a deli on a street
much frequented by hungry people
I was a Whirling Dervish
and a silent movie actor
I was a...
December 2009
2 posts
Ballerinas
I threw the lit cigarette
out the open car window
and watched
the tiny ballerinas
dance away from me,
on fire, hopping
along the white lines
on the road,
in a pirouette.
Science
I couldn’t do math for my life
and I don’t know a single thing
about the biochemistry of a neuron, and
to me, physics is just the study of things
crashing into other things and
biology is just a bunch of eating
and shitting and fucking and dying
But I know all the science I need to know
I know there are things we cannot control
I know things will always crash into other...
November 2009
3 posts
Crashes
We could feel the warm breath between our teeth before we
could see it turn into moisture under the streetlamp.
Waiting for the towtruck, we talked about all the
car accidents we had been in in our lives
and for some reason this one was no big deal.
Waiting for the towtruck, that night,
we talked about all the ways in which life was
like a collision between vehicles—people, places,...
Circles
I like how the words “longer” and “shorter”
deal with both distance and time,
because I like to think that the longer
I’ve got, the farther I will go.
It really doesn’t work like that, though,
Because there is only so far you can go
until you are right back where you started.
You just go in circles, from place to place,
trying to come up with different...
Phones and long, long distance.
When I talk on the phone, in the back of my head is a
place I used to know well.
When the We we once knew wasn’t around anymore, either
you called me or I called you and we got to talking about
getting back together again.
Absently, I was at the playground where I used to brood on weekday afternoons.
I manage to go to all the places I used to be able to find solace
when I...
October 2009
4 posts
Veni Vidi Vici
We dug up their graves with the little spades
they gave us that day in Kindergarten, when
we were learning about fossils.
Looking for dinosaurs, we plucked out the
bones of chickens that the teacher had
planted there the day before.
Our imaginations put in our minds the image of
great lizards that reached only just above our knees.
We felt like the Romans, conquering history, as a
greater...
The art of bending fingers
The man with the simian face
is staring at his hand as he
moves his fingers into myriad
contortions, as if, in each
flex of a muscle, he has
discovered something beautiful.
It is as if he has discovered art,
the art of bending fingers.
Good Goddamn
You said, “For what it’s worth,
it’s not worth giving a good goddamn
giving a good godamn about
anything that’s not worth
giving a good goddamn about.”
And I do say, I do have to agree
with everything you said, just then,
but hardly anything you have ever
said before you said that.
And what’s more, you never said anything
that I could ever see as...
The Intersecting Lives of Fact and Fiction
When we run out of paper, we’ll write our stories
between the lines of older stories
that have existed for longer than our lives
Before we die, we will write about ourselves
as children and adults, about how many times
we fell in love and how many times we convinced
ourselves that we never actually were in love.
We will write about what it is like to be
old and how different it was...
September 2009
8 posts
Books
As a city, we realized that
everything that can be written has been
So we made a big fire and burnt
as many books as we could
for the warmth of their pages
The ink stuck to our lungs
and when it was all ashes and embers
we spoke to each other in other peoples’ words
He spoke Hamlet, She spoke Frankenstein
The people who gathered by the museum
to watch the inferno—they spoke...
Short Poem 3
The years past, since we were
two confused kids without first kisses,
they’ve been good to us.
Short Poem 2
Through our six degrees of separation,
everyone in the country at once
felt it magnified.
Armageddon
All the ones who believed in fate,
who believed that one day
their time would come,
they cried the hardest and the loudest,
because they knew that something
something was vastly wrong
with the way things were—
with them? with what they had done
with their lives or others’ lives?—
it all sped through their minds
in that last second,
when they were all hugging
and...
Short Poem 1
All the great memories in this bed:
how you wrapped your toes
around the posts as you slept