It's Nothing Personal

This used to be a real blog. Now it's mostly a poetry clearinghouse. Sorry.

[xlenc]

When we fill our balloon, we'll fill him with capers: the kind that casts pipes down whitechapel alleys, the kind that casts sour each thunderous salad.

O pages, my pages, my salt patterned mason, my valence, my mulders, my bead-sweating pulp. Please don't send me postcards from your road trip. Please court the bison in Golden Gate Park.

[xlenc]

Guiteau

president garfield and the bullet, president garfield and the man, president garfield and the bullet and the man and the way things are.

the bullet and the depot and all of the trains, the trains that above all bring presidents to the depot and whisk presidents away from the depot, the bullet and the depot and the train and the job and the man.

the man with the bullet and the president with the job in the depot, president garfield I need a job says the man, a job and a train and the way things are in the column of steam from the train in the depot. the president with the job in the column of steam from the train in the depot turns to the man and the bullet and the way things are.

[xlenc]

almond

There are three weeks each year to

fill the world with almonds, to haul a billion

buzzing pilgrims to California to feed,

to mingle with bees where the winds have failed.

It happens in February.

What I want to know is does this bag conform

to the federal rate of burn standard and also

will I ever see you again, you are so pretty, wow.

The rest of the year, nothing can live here.

The rest of the year, there is nothing to eat.

That with which you cannot part and those for

whom you pay no heed,

only with such faith would I leave

my boat in the care of the ocean.

This is a poem about justin bieber just

kidding this is a poem about you, obviously,

please watch courtroom dramas with me.

[xlenc]

Sunday

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In mornings, I smell

the grass of your flesh,

the grain of your forearms,

the loam of your fur.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

My lust is coarse paper,

bleached pulp rolled into sheets.

My voice is a leaky cell,

silent and twitching and warm.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The festival throats of each morning,

like files in folders in vaults,

like mandalas singed into wood,

like kidneys in freezers for friends.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[xlenc]

Missoula, MT 10/24/15

It isn’t technically a nose ring because

it’s open at one end, more like

a nose horseshoe really, which I

guess is what the willful young punk

bulls would be wearing given

the chance, you know? So you could

still look tough sporting jewelry that

makes you fucking bleed when you

first try it on, but nobody can tug you

around by the nose anymore, no

way, you’re a cow in open pasture now!

When the railyard wakes up and yawns,

this entire warehouse growls in a dream

-splintering, resonant belch in the anticipation

of trains, her brother from the mountain’s steel clay.

Did you know that there are vampires in

Montana? Because I’m staying with one here,

we know each other from back in college! &

have you ever noticed how weird it is that

vampires are basically parasites, and like

other parasites (i.e. malarial plasmodia) they

need permission to enter your house and

exsanguinate your sorry dumb corpse, so

they use the voice to trip up your shitty

Barney Fife immune system, your fickle

personal boundaries, and pass through

the threshold of your liver waving the

RSVP in your sorry dumb corpse’s pale face,

belching up blood burps by your side

until you are reanimated as an infectious

agent, turning all of your friends and family

into sorry dumb corpses, you dumb asshole poet.

Listen, I’m sorry that the conceit of this poem

is about comparing you to a bull, it’s just that

I’m in Montana and there are a lot of cows (and

I like cows, for the record) and the only other

metaphorical creature in this poem is a vampire,

and it seemed like calling you a vampire would

be way worse. It isn’t some convoluted bull dyke

joke, I swear, and I do like your nose ring, it’s just

that, you know how recently reanimated protagonist

vampires always try to compromise on their

satanic bloodlust and negate the literal death of

their humanity by preying on cattle at night

(except for Blade in the comics, who is straight-up

allergic to animal blood, but whatever),

as if they were really all that great when they were

alive, as if slaying cattle for their own sense of

purity like some dweeb from Leviticus? And you

know how in the beginning of Dracula Jonathan

Harker is just so utterly fucked when he gets

locked in the count’s big vampire warehouse that

he looks like a moron for pretending he’s not

going to end up as a sorry, dumb corpse by

the end of the evening, and it would be

way more dignified if he just lay in his bed

like a patient gazelle reclining in the maw

of his lioness? I just think that maybe we were

like that, (the cows I mean), and there

all of these delusional, puritanical satan corpses

sizing us up like rations, and like the septum

nobody knew your name until they started

poking holes in you.

[xlenc]

Stalingrad

Each morning, all morning, the torn concrete,

the rattle of shells,

measure your steps in the fields at the city’s edge,

and the taste remains the same:

the cold scorch of your flask and the

salt of your lips,

waving a wand across the anguished earth,

downing for kernels of death.

I was and am a child of tremors, tilting

at mirrors, nursing an anxious

head, but, guardian of limbs, we

can no longer speak, I can no

longer wheel you, with your pruned

trunk of a leg, to our translator, who

relayed stories of drunk, ruddy comrades.

[xlenc]

I've got like ten songs for the parasite, the dancer who lies by his food, the friend in the nexus of an older touch

In my capsule, each morning's a roomba who slumps up beloved detrius: the sweat and the leaves and the bark and the hair in the vaults of an archive of dust

We clasp a vessel, a vessel to hold a parade of paeans to pop, the spoils of crepescular juntas, the works, and like I know it's gross but I hesitate to vacuum the ghost cells (with ghost organelles! [ectoplasmic reticulum!]) from the curves in the sheets from the folds in the books, I care for you, I really do.

if poems iff cuddles iff nods if The Sea, iff I can remember like three songs for the parasite

[xlenc]

To trackers, to cowgirls, to men, I am a sad dictionary, Strangled to life on a vandercook And issued in leaves. Like, x- to bury your parcel in the loveless earth, x- to witness your failure as it unfolds, x- to bevy the landscape with cottage cheese, x- to mop up the pinions from the floor of a zoo.

I can be so much more, and I say that like I've never actually been to a Cheesecake Factory before but I'm pretty sure I know what it's like: a gallery of tomes aligned as a spectrum, like, x- to shit in the winter's cornfield, x- to piss in the graceless sea, x- to snapchat in hellfire, x- to lace up new kicks in Target and walk out.

[xlenc]

at sixteen I would dream

of the miles traveled

to visit a distant lover

---

I do not understand the ones who

are sanguine; in my welling anxiety,

I am myself warm with blood

---

in touch, in grace, in words,

we drafted blueprints

for better living

---

the smell of ocean and

the bustle of limbs and

the silence before leaving

---

a crack of rosemary and

then the fear of speaking, I love

you I love you I love you

---

do you know what a nation is?

it is the long, furrowed scrape

of a dead glacier

---

you prop up the rotten timber and

you lash the beams with your limbs

and then, you call it a house

[xlenc]

Waiting for the bats in the bridge that holds you. The autumn of the hand, wings unfurling from slender bones like taffy, the prattle of hungry mammals.

I hope they leap, the ravenous birds of the lake, hope they howl and chew the sins who draw from your arm a welcome banquet.

I envy the bats who roost each dawn, round with chitin, baffled by the crisp savor of their teeth, truly, could I have faulted you that? The winter of the hearth and the arms that hold you, the vision of a homily screeched: to gather up rhinestones, to be a Texan in Texas, to stand on Congress Avenue, and wait.

[xlenc]

Leningrad

Each morning your mother swaddled your face, swollen with youth, in the loam of a ribbon of wool. Cover yourself, Мышонок, hide your cheeks!

My first corpse was my grandfather, pickled and cold and enormous, filling the entire church with his dead presence. How could you move with so many bodies? So light with hunger in apartment stairwells, so heavy with frost on the streets.

Why cover cheeks in a desperate Russia? A shield from the decay of cold air, perhaps, or the modesty of a child who has known bread? You asked your mother after the war. Had our neighbors seen your round cheeks, she said, they would have eaten them.

[xlenc]

enraptured: those queens with flaxen drawls,

jazz-soaked eyes and fingers cast like cat bones,

conjuring soap from the birthdays of hell,

these are the birds I most admire.

to speak pleasure, you lap up teeth like a nipple,

like a thirsty rock, aspirational, but for real,

I think if I booked a flight to Tampa I’d be dead before takeoff,

mushroom-swept by cruising altitude.

To speak flirt, graze your teeth on the subway

and drop your lips with a flash, but honestly,

I was just a techie through high school,

I merely painted the sets they thundered upon.

[xlenc]

we taxed hands for pedigree,

we tapered yard to cell, yeah,

I’ll flag against the cold vessels

who carry all the bodies.

I’ve got friends in Sinaloa, I guess;

to break, to pour, to leave,

their hands are slick like voles in earth.

To dig, to rev, to run,

to gather flowers for the raff,

forgetting for now the bordertown meats,

and cheer for Rosarito’s princes,

for homes in funny deserts with

cold, splintered vessels for men.

[xlenc]

I’m kind of out of practice

The thing about California is

there’s these birds everywhere,

the ones with the red shoulders, you know,

the ones with the red chests,

molting on my crumpled sloop.

Do you realize just how seldom birds sleep?

If I can’t leave California,

I think maybe I’ll be a minotaur, you know,

that maze-stomping uggo swallowing

maze-stomping artists from the midwest,

like a grisly 12th St. tarot card,

like rats chewing thirsty pigeons

flailing lost in the BART stations.

Dude there are so many birds in California,

and I don’t like hate birds, I’m just saying,

there’s like a whole lot of them.

[xlenc]

Although I have felt compelled to write things down ever since I was five years old, I doubt my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life and exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook (1966)

[xlenc]

wearing socks and skin on holi, cups running with flirt, I don't know what it is about artists, I swear. The intervals, the temporals, fix me a Bhangra mixtape to hasten new networks: ballads of hair dye; paper, the aphrodisiac; nipples as chewing gum; sex as personhood, obviously!

[xlenc]

I found my queerness in sun twirls, but this has been the shortest year, and I've aged. I remember San Diego, where we chewed raw persimmon and you drew me like a bath; the bridges over canyons where we spoke. Each May we build a rhythm by tapping the third rail, a dotted code announcing that we don't speak anymore.