Black Sheep Fun Club

or words by felix the bee

[yellowheadedfish]

Humans do not hibernate. The season's fall breaks our appetite, leaves our bones stubbornly hungry. When frost starts making collect calls we don't take them but the ringing it wrings our wings dry, they crack and crumble into dust, that's the stuff some kids cut into lines but others just stand on corners and watch the particles plié across rubber kissed city side streets. It's an elephant day, this means the clouds are full of memories and the sky is feeling nostalgic, watching its childhood run off like a tear caused by wind. When the sky was a kid it tore a hole in its coat once, trying to climb through a hole in the school yard fence. It would tell you it just wanted to see what was out there, in that soft humming Big dark, but it'll tell you this on an elephant day, it's eyes closed anyway, wearing a dusty sweater and just sitting there on a fence, dreaming.

[yellowheadedfish]

Tree Stars

We met in 73' in Berkeley. Huge waves of soldiers returning so the city was a riot, but the gentle and wasted kind (Nixon didn't do shit to this green scene). I was running a table on Telegraph selling poetry books for a publishing company I'd interned for, and then dropped out third year to work for, peddling some sort of German Realism trash. Like a Frost fanboy just took a lit class on Beowulf. It beat working with my dad in the butter plant though, choking on animal fat and the American wetdream. Easy to score lucy, pretty people browsing my table and smiling at me like some sort of literary shaman, tossing me new style prayers like poker chips. I need a poem to stop fighting with my boyfriend. Can you teach me how to write a poem that will make her fall in love with me? Show me a poem that matches my energy. Meanwhile, you had just enrolled as a student of Sculpture Art and Anthropology, sailing in on a fat scholarship because someone's rich uncle happened to be attending your community college's mixed medium final reception. Berkeley wasn't quite your element, agnostic raised Irish Catholic on the poor side of Pomona, but that jungle of vibes welcomed your old world mind and new world eyes warmly. It happened awkwardly, as these things often do. I'd seen you at a couple parties in passing (we had a mutual friend, Venner, a dual major Anthropology and Theater. I helped throw a couple flash mob open mics on the Bart with the stage kids the summer prior). I had a rule with myself then that if a stranger ever caught my eye and I felt too shy to do anything about it, I had two chances and then on the third encounter had to suck it up and break the ice or forever be cursed by The Stone Mother or Loki or, well, you'd know better who’d be best for the context. That was twice. The third time you walked past my stand with a big oak leaf in your hand, taking little bites out of it. You didn't even look my way. Now, eating leaves isn't remotely weird for Berkeley, but I didn't expect you to be doing it. I think by the scholarship Venner mentioned and the coastal blue of your hip silk I'd pegged you for a rich kid. I was too busy tripping on my failed analyses to notice you were now standing over my table like a haunted clock tower. You didn't make me break the ice, which is good because I was terrified. You asked me if I had any texts on the life and mummification of Ramesees IV, and I told you I'm sorry, I only sell poetry. Then you asked if I had any poetry from the Nile region Bronze Age, and I asked for your name and a bite of your oak leaf.

[yellowheadedfish]

@

Don’t mind our lack of light; I’m saving up for that top-shelf I love you,  the one that doesn’t  rely on finicky couplings to power through the night.

[yellowheadedfish]

single player campaign

Drive your self into a secret, one where what speed limits  of the heart persist pass their equations in less than fifth. Show no one the coordinates, not even your own body, bodies being  backseat tattle tales. And  watch your step  as you  meander down the rubber  rabbit hole, don’t let the gasoline turn your glow into smoke. The magic is illuminating, but the weight of your boots on the pedals unbearable. 

[luvbey]

nature

[theliteraryjournals]

I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me happens to me as I am discovering this. I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else – your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry – and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That… is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.

Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters (via theliteraryjournals)

[yellowheadedfish]

Always Tell Me the Odds

Do you realize that all commuters are starfighter pilots, working for the Empire on swing shifts and the location of the rebel base? It’s in their cup holders, in their ass-pocket journals. In the texts they send to lovers like last escape pods. Do you realize that all poems are either pleas for help or warnings? Emergency lights flashing on the overturned semis, mechanical whales passed out drunk on the road’s beach. I’m sorry I never called you back on my break. I barely had time to find the pieces I’d bitten my tongue into, and besides, they just landed a low-orbit rocket upright and we are still figuring out how to put down our cellphones. I can dial in any base numeral system, but I never learned how best to call for help.

[yellowheadedfish]

Minimum Sentencing

I wish I could tell you that I dreamt my body only a prison, that there existed still a door out of my room that led into sunlight, every other door bullets into only the rotten districts of my brain. But look at you, throwing Molotov’s at my window like you were the first to see love as an act of civil disobedience. Beware the new city ordinances, those stating the page limits of our romantic postulating. Beware the where-water and when-wet parting we will fall apart, like a flake off a biscuit, like a liquor bottle off a window, a lonely fire, a thought so accusing of the status quo that you pull it into the side room and beg it to leave out the back of your mind, before being seen by anyone, especially you.

[yellowheadedfish]

Scenario in which you Develop a Curiosity

You were only hungry for the appetizer dream; didn’t want to doze off into that Big Dark, but haven’t you heard? Only ghosts allowed to vacation in Nod.

[yellowheadedfish]

The Label Room

Clock in to the box at golden hour, rounded at t-minus four, where in sunless minds peace and quiet is as scarce as Anthony’s rubber bands, piled between the wave printers like the bones of a battlefield. Sweat beading on his large Hispanic forehead like Ventura dew as he rhythmically folds the labels to the pick mods, one two one two three one to the end of the download, strings of CPG hung over cubicle walls like unwanted laundry. He hums to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, placing special emphasis on the line about loneliness. He hears a new voice holler break on the radio, but he won’t be bothered to break his rhythm, fanning labels up into his palms like an industrial magician, counting print waves like sheep as he dreams of sailing on up the corporate ladder, family name laminated across his polished hard hat. But there isn’t time for even that. He’s got 60k retail to print and no gossip but the hiss of the printers as distraction. And he’ll get pulled off shift when his surgery is ready; he’ll get pulled off life’s dock when his trailer is ready, this tired tank of a body never having to call in sick for complications again.

[yellowheadedfish]

Mog Why

Like waking from a fading wet dream is to coming, so will be this I love you. And though it’s not true, in my mind I find you smoking  in the Alley of the Alter of Moon Circles, with the pissing vine and broken lawn chairs, past the screen door we’d try to midnight move through like ghosts but would always make wail like a hungry baby at every opening. The stairs descending into the foggy moans of a basement washer, watching the steps like thoughts on a summer comedown. And the room, seeding torrents surrounded by torrents of tissue hiding spilled seed. You’re still there, eyes glued to the LCD. And now the sunrise is trying to sneak in through the garden window, but you’ll have no light spawn-killing your geometry of unreal,    you prince of the cloud fiends. Sometimes your smile like a junk balloon unopened. Sometimes they say there are paper corners lost in the deep cushions of every sofa chair you ever lost your mind in. Sometimes your face war painted while meditating in medication  like a war chief dying of cancer. In the August empty, your full dick hard in my palms, the ones god wrote pop clichés on but you strung out, sung an old folk lie to me. Your wife and child by the beach, your hate thesis to the diatomaceous waking, where I laid waiting faking sleep with the sitars, writing poems about mold and stars while starving   in half-smoked sweaters and on thank you letters to the band you tried to die to. Tell me you felt none of it too. Tell me this cold  ghost I can’t even catch on a digital note  isn’t you. Is your memory dehydrated again? I’m still making the comedown coffee.  

�����G ��

[yellowheadedfish]

Idle wild

Her room was a museum  of thrifted curiosity, tapestries woven in the aimless hunt for some feeling I know not what stirred inside me, much like the apprehensive flap of a dead sail suspecting  hurricane, raising its nylon eyebrows cautiously just  before falling back asleep. 

[yellowheadedfish]

You wore a hoodie when I met you, stole my heart fed it to the poor

[yellowheadedfish]

Flocks of Parcels (slow seasons)

You sat to my west when we met and faced north like birds migrating the way they were told not to. Remember when you were in Austin, the mountains tossed like a plot conflict, lost like a GPS signal on a last minute road trip and you drank wine, learned how to miss me. But then we both burned the class notes hoping the thrill (or at least the wine) would refill itself, hoping the colors would go Oregon on us, pack light, kiss some new questions or house band dance with old answers but since when was either of us some sort of domestic Jesus? The third date, you made my hopes rise again. OK I forgot to count the dates but remember how I spent all afternoon brainstorming how to cross that December river dry and found myself chasing you across knee deep like a hurricane rescue. Don’t call me chicken, kiss me like a hot afternoon depressed cooking in the kitchen. Call me your  yes-fly zone; where we’re going we won’t need happy ending notes. Your tongue, loose from your thoughts like a hatchling from the sac. You’re going to cross my deathbed-ed mind like a goose on its way to Antarctica, Karen, a carapace over my affections but peeled away by the sight of your summer skin sleeping. Migratory creatures have no vocabulary words for goodbyes, only the syntactic structure of the seasons.

[thesyllabusforclass]

[theadventureto-be]

Galileo falling 9.81 meters per/s/s

                                                         With a chin made of bebe bullets

                                       and bricks, my dominant facial

                         expression has become that of

                 gravity. 

      Gravity is a set of holy commandments.

It pulls the brevity of perceived strength to its

human knees.

Birds are sinners, pecking at the scripture of earth -  

                                  -mocking gravity’s attempts to keep them.

Gravitational resistance is measured at the

length of a wingspan.

I find my own feathers where there should be

feet; bristled wing-fold joints in the

     place of 

                knees. What do I have to fall upon?

                        I count the cream-tipped feathers

                                     of a sinner 

                                                        who cannot fly.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I don’t like people who say this has all happened before, we cannot write it. It is happening now. NOW.  I can see my fingers on the keys, a half dead plant with a leaf like a rabbit ear bent left faces me, the women of the world walk in my brain, a rat gnaws my stomach and kicks his feet, an icecream truck passes bing bing bing bong bing bong bong, and Art, Art is nothing, it’s my fingers on the keys NOW carving and crying Chopin and music and rebellion, to hell with the classics, to hell with form, to hell with Pound, go out, go out and bleed, bleed limitlessly against the mob, the halfRome, halfpoem, half-fire, halfkiss. Go out, go out, go out.

Charles Bukowski, from a letter to Sheri Martinelli (viaatmosthetic)