Crushing nonsense cripples fluidity (It's just Gokyo Lake breaking up in the sun. )

Crushing out handclaps in silent reflection, white noise whisper from each of my speakers, the song long over, but the melody lingers, plays on for some time in my mind, over the reports of nearby car alarms, and muffled passing conversations, the loose plastic groans of my office chair. Another clear spotless day viewed thru slanted blinds bare cold feet on the ashy brown carpet, and my hands type as my mind slips away in a dreamlike state to another place on some lost past day. 


Ate too late and paid the price of fate. I said it short, but I set it straight. Crippling nonsense, but intense and filled with a packed-tight pain. Discomfort and distain from eating too late grilled cheese with avocado, Cazadores and cranberry pushing me from sleep, making a strong case, feeling filled with cardboard boxes from my feet up to my pate. Getting up too early after going to bed too late. Quite a sorry state. Disgrace? Not the case. Cripples fluidity, it does, that one brown duck among the aggressive and unpleasant, just that look on your face. Riding your rusted bike on your birthday, your t-shirt all fluorescent, your smile luminescent, once more around the lake and then we're all spent. Perhaps a beer and hug, both potential for tumescence. Grabbed at and poked, eating rusty water from an old brown case, leave a leather gun, leather-clad and hand-tooled fun for everyone. Wearing a memory for a garter belt and a trombone for a face. Find the avocado cardboard crushing fluid-idid-idity and you will have found the place.

On My Brother's Birthday

It's March again, sunny and crisp, the winter breeze through my window whispers about spring more than anything else. My brother lives nearer to Reno now than to Oakland but calls me and we talk excitedly about his three-year-old and our mother, our family, their sad ramblings, a job we worked together years ago in a place still filled with characters and strippers, the type of lonely souls we hope never to become. Energetic interruption fuels the conversation, pulling like putty pressed to panels in a comic book, stretching at times to distortion. We laugh often, even if we don't remember a Depeche Mode concert together. Before long he has to go: his wife on the other line making plans for a dinner, just the two of them, later tonight. I grab my smokes and head outside, before it's night again and time for work. Standing in front of the building, I smoke a menthol and reflect, smiling, the branches of the Japanese Cherry holding blossoms, sunlight, and leaves, dancing carefully in place.

COLD PARADISE from rabidmonkey69 on 8tracks.

A Lil' Ditty

Why you gotta be all vibrate-only?
What's with your distaste for "Only The Lonely"?
You're startin' to smell like a gold-brickin' phony
Like a 3-day-old fish on a log of ancient baloney
the color of moss and a wilting Begoniyee?

You may not be on the level, some kind of 2-bit crony
When I asked you straight out, you got all ice-cold & stony:
Why you gotta be all vibrate-only?
Can't you just do what you gotta and occasionally phone me?
When I ask, "Kazakhstan?" you reply, "No Estoniyee."

(Some call this an annoyance, I just call it some poetry.)

Candy Star Bonus Hearts!! from rabidmonkey69 on 8tracks.

Let's Get Negative from rabidmonkey69 on 8tracks.

Untitled

Bitter metallic lies. on the tongue. On the skin. a chill. Under otherwise sunny. Through the skin. Felt. We never smiles. The tongue a muscle. muscles. shuddering. flex of. bend into. An exercise. repetitions. Wipe it off. away. No, no. and the hands. no. Lick batteries. that taste again. as the words leave. the lips. the mouth. used to: accustomed or past. weird. mended. No more familiar or same. nothing absolute. resolution unfounded. Of the mouth. the throat. paper lantern voice box. Set fire. talk of it. Salivary unguence. unmeant. unquenched. Thrown out. every way imaginable. bitter. Metallic smiles. on the tongue.

Quick, Create Distance

I often feel other people's moods and emotions, but I'm blind to their comfort levels or immediate desires. Meaning no offense to the vision-impaired community. Image is a language that I speak. That's all. A soup can is not just a soup can. This is not a pipe. Etc. (Justin Etc.) Maybe I can say it in a different way. For you. In an attempt. It's like Bootsy stretching out. Over Bernie Worrell's rainbow ribbons of synth. They made a whole funky world. Let the cat out the bag. Nope. Slipped into the visual again. Is this too close? Should I stop now? From the microphone to the speaker. To you. Yes. It's a loop. Is this too close? It is? Sorry. The fact that I can't tell is off-putting, I know. A little creepy. Yeah, I can feel you too. Now it's awkward. These are the kinds of things I should probably keep to myself. Okay. That was rhetorical.

Bumper Jumpin' from rabidmonkey69 on 8tracks.

For Your Health

Are you having, or have you recently had, a canker sore or cold sore flare-up? An irritating itch? An unsightly bump? A hacking cough? An unexplained patch or discolored blotch? Something more serious? Annoying AND embarrassing, right? Well, have we got some good news for you! At this very moment, there are a number of gigantic, inhuman, unfeeling entities that exist solely to make as much money as possible off of the illnesses and perceived illnesses (and the various and varied fears of illness) of people just like you! They grew out of dark necessity, out of the bowels of human suffering. They stalk the Earth, continent by continent, town by town, looking for the weak, the sick, and the fearful among us, and the dying too. They are constantly hungry. They are always looking, always watching, scanning. They are constantly feeding. No amount of pain or suffering, or death, can sate them. And there is no hiding from them either. They hunt alone, but there are enough of them now to find nearly every human on the planet. They are in every emergency room you've ever heard of. They control the minds (and destinies) of 92% of trained physicians working in the field today. They are both fantastically large and imperceptibly minute. They shape shift not to frighten you, no. They do it out of necessity. Like vampires feeding: to survive, to continue, to horde and dominate. To move imperceptibly into and out of your body, sometimes taking you by the ankles and giving you a good shake. Simply to make sure there aren't any bills or coins you may have missed in those deep pockets of yours. And to make absolutely sure that you aren't coming down with something, don't have any obvious or visible symptoms, that you're not hiding something from them (or their drone army of doctors, whose yachts and country club memberships can be taken away like THAT if they dare try to... but never mind all that.) It is important to them that you understand their messaging, that it speaks to you directly. You are both the chaff and the seed in the wind they generate. You live because they let you live. You thrive because they make you thrive. They were present at your birth. They will profit from your death. They will find you and penetrate you and consume you. They lord over the world's existing supplies of plants and tinctures and minerals and man-made chemicals and all the necessary (and unnecessary) drugs and medicines needed to combat all the known (and unknown) ailments that we poor humans suffer from. Hell, sometimes they have to make some new ones up just to keep the herd moving. But that's neither here nor there. We have wandered past our point. Perhaps it's a side effect of that new medication, it's so hard to be sure nowadays.

This is where I come from.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Little Debbie Downer from rabidmonkey69 on 8tracks.

Reunion

In peripheral vision illuminated pyramid steps. Venetian blinds framed by pinned back curtains, thinking about dead girls I once knew. Years ago I saw them peripherally, eating sandwiches sunlit on wooden benches, or nervously finishing Trigonometry homework, the cafeteria's unkind fluorescence. Talking excitedly to other girls in matching uniforms, in poorly lit hallways, in navy ankle or knee socks with white cotton blouses and blue, black, and white plaid skirts. Reflected through the glass doors and across the shining linoleum, the grass and beyond that the tennis courts. The sunlight bouncing around the cement courtyard, cement Virgin Mary gray eyes downcast. These girls now invisible, now dead and gone. One in an avalanche, others more predictably. Invisible girls. Gone women. Gone won't be at the reunion. Not in person but in lowered voices and heartfelt slideshows. In peripheral vision a white car drives downhill under neutral gray of sky, behind dusty pyramid blinds. These living girls returned peripherally to my consciousness, removed previously at some undetermined time. It's cold in here now. Thinking about those poor dead women I knew as girls. Lost on the periphery of my consciousness. It's not just nostalgia it's resonance. A card flipped over and the revelation of its face rippling through all human tissue for a half mile radius. It's ridiculous, this tiny island of living. Once about bag lunches and ankle socks and rolled skirts and ponytails and rubber bracelets. Now sitting thinking in a room so far from anything, fingers forming sentences on a screen. These girls I once vaguely knew. My classmates. I can't even remember their faces. Didn't live in their town or work with them. Never met their boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives. Never knew their children. Weren't friends online or off but still. In peripheral vision black treetops and green splay of houseplant a tiny dinosaur made of latex, day disappears with a sigh. I once knew your face, heard your laughter, made passing eye contact on way to class. This year 25th reunion. You re-enter my consciousness peripherally, as words on a page in a newsletter I don't subscribe to. I never dated you. I never sat in front of you, or behind. I might have drowned out your conversation once with obnoxious synthesizer music. Maybe I saw you talking to my girlfriend. Your face--my memory of it, you--lost in that unknown other place.

Our Grid

From Class

Holding onto color like a memory a forgotten leaf languishes on brackish gray-green water, waiting. A torn-out page from a truckstop Bible random in its placement yet veined with purpose: drab putty of anticipation unfulfilled and still, expectant.

This is how I remember it feeling.

Limerick

Sand in the soles of your shoes
wincing toward bullying noon
You sank a tycoon 
& corrupted a baboon
but these treatments won't clear up those blues

Sandpaypa

First I notice the scar. A pink swash underlining his left eye, loud, shouting up the block. Louder than blowing garbage, louder than piss, louder than shriveled junkies, mice running nervously, louder than the night. He stumbles up to me in a cloud of backstory: grape wrappers, dark whisky, skunky ganja. Syrup- and herb-blurred eyes. Spare and random white drizzle on the back of his hoodie. He comes in for the love, begins a quiet litany. I'm thinking fast money hustle or "Oh, hey, Dog, you got a smoke? How 'bout a light?" but he's gonna linger a little longer. Impossible-to-hear words dribble onto the sidewalk, he weaves in and out, riding waves of inebriation. Gives me a free CD and explains with a hug that it's he and his brother on the cover, doing each track. He's doing a slowed-down dance, pinballing between the parked car, the posts for the tree, the wrought iron gate, and his own two feet. He talks shit, he yells, and he tells an ongoing story only he can know, only he can flow.

On Hyde Street Again

He stumbled up
booze breath arriving first
mixed with the stale piss and 
god-knows-what garbage
of the broken street
His weaving walk familiar
like a punchy old boxer
just barely remembering

Soft Warm Reopening

It is both great and sad to be back on Hyde Street tonight, a mix of old faces and new outside the nightclub. The stark scarecrow of owl-eyed Kenny, with his constant bumming of cigarettes and an ambitious request for two dollars (to get some food, he claims). Emilio and Katie and Grant and even the new kid, Justin the barback, who seems like an uncanny fit for the club. All the various and varied DJs and promoters and their friends and fans and girls and boys and everyone so very glad to be back on one of the toughest blocks in San Francisco.

While I'm still deciding if I'm celebrating being back on Hyde Street after midnight on a Tuesday or not, a drunken rapper shows up with a pronounced pink scar on his left cheek. His slur is somewhere between pimp patois and having been sippin' on some sizzurp for a little too long, along with, of course, some weed. But he is lucid enough to require me to give him the "private party tonight" line to keep him from trying to insinuate his way into the club. He is obviously way too wasted to allow in and I can't tell if he is cool or just another of the neighborhood's newest cracked-out denizens.

He slurs something and I nod and smile vaguely and mutter, "Yeah...", but I cannot understand a word he is saying. This conversation, I'm guessing, is mutually based on a rough reading of energy and body language. We bump knuckles a few times as his low and mumbled monologue continues.

Apparently his reading of me comes back positive, as he produces a CD from his back pocket. It is a professional-looking affair: a clear plastic sleeve with full color cover, double-sided on glossy stock. It feels like a familiar exchange and I quickly explain that I have no money to buy a copy of his homie's album. He explains, head still down toward the sidewalk, with the occasional violent sideways swerve up toward my eyes, that this isn't his homie's album, but he and his brother's.

He suddenly swings his head up and in toward my face, holding the CD in front of both of us. "See? Thass me,” he says, jamming his dirty finger into one of the confidently smiling faces on the CD cover, “and thass mah brother." He forces the CD into my hand, then stumbles diagonally backward into the wrought iron gate in front of the club. I get off my stool and start toward his slumping figure, but before I can reach him, he lurches up into a standing position and wobbles stutter-step back toward the curb. He kicks off one of his shoes, stoops low in the middle of the dirty sidewalk and carefully examines the papers and bills from each of his front pockets, weaving obviously and straining to focus his eyes. The club's smoking patrons watch quietly from against the fence and comment in loud whispers to one another. One of them makes a grand gesture of giving him a cigarette and a light.

After a few drags, he sloppily throws the smoke into the gutter, takes a few wobbling steps, then crumples face down onto the trunk of a blue Honda parked in front of the club. Perhaps he is finally unconscious. His pullover black hoodie hides most of his upper torso and head. I'm sure he's still alive—I can see his back rising and falling regularly—and at this point, that's good enough for me.

After a few minutes of face-down deep breathing, he flops over violently and lurches into a slumped sitting/leaning position against the parked car, pushing back the edge of his hood with his wrist. He focuses his eyes, and nearly indecipherable speech, on me again. "Hey, mang, juss hol' ontuh tha' disk... Iss free... iss free." he says, making a pushing motion with both hands. I thank him profusely as he falls face-first onto the filthy sidewalk. As he rolls over slowly and starts trying to get up, demanding to know who just hit him in his face, I repeat that he still cannot come into the club, but I'm not sure if he hears me.

Close Captioned

Behavior data: Alkie attaches
Twinkle Oklahoma
Hispanics they've got
Wood-burning kilns
By day they're taking a bite
GW iced 9mm
blow up sheep myself
Introduced to you like
declassification clockwork
Directly into your jacket
and ethnic group
You say goodbye

You're right: I didn't get wages
Rainwater is going to do it
Delinquents living there
trade voltage lines

Some say resolvable
about the overworked
I think they should be asked
The shanghai crops
fogged with trepidation
& bad weather
The environment
already threatened
Played with in Chechnya
Rubber progression

Overhead at last
Some okay competition
Pete Stark obit
Watching dots respond
Data, if you're into it

Flows or series
of arteries
of batteries
It's hard to write
We usually get six
Plus, it's polluted
The right surroundings
You know people in Montreux
your out-there donors
your subtle ingredients

I'm reading at Quiet Lightning in Santa Cruz

It's just the living that's fucked up.

Most times human interactions 
are so difficult, so complex
harder than one imagines 
even while in the moment
looking from a distance 
at one self in a mirror
the mirror another person 
with aspirations and visions
there together, sequential instants
pulsing and scanning
reading and rereading
shuffling and shelving
thinking and sending
perceiving and receiving

giving to and taking from
in imagined equal proportions
of equal or greater importance
than consciousness or cohesion
just seconds of skin touching
first fingers, then the arms
the lips and then it feels 
so easy and so simple
lubricated and fluid
falling away from the complexities
to the simple animal memory
even while in the moment

Doubt

If being madly in love
is knowing exactly what to do
then I fear, my dear,
that perhaps I 
never truly loved you

It's great to be appreciated.

A blog post from Fourteen Hills issue 18.1 featured artist, Chris Koehler, a very talented illustrator and a darn nice person.

Make with the pirate talk, Toots.

Yeah, that's right, I said it:
They made me kill chickens
right out there in the yard


Watched from the windows
their faces smooth and neutral
Victorian glass behind panes


Supper my trauma
washing and scrubbing
time and again and again

End of Empire

What do you call it
when they make you
bend over and think about
tomorrow from the perspective
of the implausible?


And what do you call it 
when we Jabba the fuck out
on Funyuns and Diet Cokes
and Little Pizzas delivered
by acne-addled young masturbators
in cars borrowed or stolen 
from over-medicated old neighbors
on rusty old side streets
in long forgotten apartments?


What do we call it?

& You & I

years of slow smothering
an avalanche in spoonfuls
cascade of dynamos
a splash of magnificos
meat grinding disposal
dumping drawn drawerfuls
gone truly analytical
free-forming breakdancers
now forming perspectives


      [slip a smoldering leaf
       between incendiary skins
       My book writ large
       on the flesh of foundlings]


&, btw
I don't mind your mind's way 
of damn-near breaking my spine

The New Kid in Town from rabidmonkey69 on 8tracks.

Lip Moves - FHA.USA

Breakfast of Champions! - FHA.USA

In Front of the Rain from rabidmonkey69 on 8tracks.

Sunset in North Concord

Old Fred the Cab Driver

One sentence

I want to use words like "verdant" or "mordant", but can't bring myself to double-check their meanings, a.k.a. my understanding, so instead I type on in the early dawn hours of a Friday that was packed with action, but now filled with packing (rather than working), meaning as far as sleeping goes, it will have to happen more sooner than later, but not at the moment and perhaps not much longer than the thought will take me to form into something worth not only remembering, but perhaps even documenting, yet returning to my purpose and my point, as lost as it is, I want to write something, or maybe a drawing, that will give someone somewhere something to remember, to hold onto, to cherish, to experience like no other, yet that leaves me thinking about words that I don't use when I'm talking to others, fancy collections of letters like "umbrage" or "hacket", or "mordant", or "colossal".

1979

Cross a bridge

to the pants dance

Strike that, reverse it

So much wait time

even less time, still waiting

still ringing (and ringing)

at the tone

at the tone

it's at the tone

Cut along dotty spotty memory

red face flushed, contorted

that yam sweater spotlit

hiding in plain sight

amid the manic flutter

Follow the powdery trail (it always knows!)

The British are coming!

and coming! and coming!

Crouch down in the bushes

The sticker bushes!

Tiny needle-sharp thorns

making exclamation marks

on the skin of your shins

Poink! Poke! Prick!

Count to twenty-nine

where your needle is holding

just above the record's

surface dotted with wooly lint

A tiny distant relative

coughing in the night

out the night, coughing

dead skin and fibers

Cross back to a shot of the kid

BMX bike in midair

backdrop a hillside

his black tuffs the envy of all

his green-eyed companions

Moto-X Fox shirt torn

like a battle-worn flag

flapping gulps of Delta gust

Moving

It's so hard to start
Rusted metal in the backyard
Under the warm crust
waiting to come out
be revealed
Exposed to the wind 
and the light
Spotlit on the stage
of your life
Folding clothes alone
packing boxes
Breathing the fumes 
of permanent markers
Upending an ending
Digging it up
excavating an ending
Starting a new dig
somewhere else
Taking my bike and boxes
Leaving town
Opening the door and stepping
Putting down the metal detector
and moving sand
It's so hard to start
but once it's started
I've begun
and that's how it begins
Dust off an ending
from the stack in the closet
and while you're at it
hand me a beginning

Reading at VelRo on November 9, 2011

Understanding v.02

Downpour

remorseless cold sculptor

running mask silver

changes your face

abrupt saturday morning

Papier-mâché body

laying tired against itself

felted wool weeping

contour edged in tears

cuffed glass filigree

dancing for warmth

CocoRosie Live at Amoeba Hollywood

Understanding v.01

We talk in planets

atmospheres
transient amulets
often lost in thinnest air

Transient ambience
intentions losing air
a soup of stars
lighted last words listing

Mist conversations cast out
crossing breaths toward atmosphere
slipping stars of sand
through words of hair

Parking Lot Abstract

Hearsay Say

They say it's about

crossing it up

blocking it out

putting away what yesterday

left behind

Moving forward

unencumbered

But that just sounds like

swimming

without making ripples

Is atrophy my only option

really?

Bend at the waist

tie them up & sit up

Walk, run, then jump

out of the darkness

into the unknown ink

Dance, if you still can

Rise from your accepted spot

to make new

But try not to move

while they're nearby

or you'll get eaten

from both ends

ukelele to tuba

Lost Count

I saw it in your eyes
a lost Christmas morning
I was young, Shane was five
Broken toys and still more tears
I hate this day so much
I cried
Bruises and beers
before the magic got trampled


Perhaps not that morning
but some other just like it
There were so many
became scripted
blocked, choreographed
I had hoped someday, somehow
to laugh, shrug it off as the past
but it rips through me like a gunshot
Echo repeat echo
its resonance still


I saw it in your eyes
abstract remembrance
angry colors flashing
frustrated clinging
and slamming
as I had said to you before
again I said
You're not that person anymore
and then I realized
cupped my mouth
and cried
You held my hand in yours
and for a moment
we were fine

The Cruelest Month

Eliot said April
but did he ever
spend December
in northern California?

Bobby Golden Sandwiches

They called him
Bobby Golden Sandwich
and he had the calves to prove it
a steam shovel mind
the resolve of a soft shelled crab's
tiny reserve of hope
between catastrophic erasures
a bed of popping bubbles
Bobby
bubbles popping shining star
miniatures spitting sand


They started calling him
Bobby Sounding Like a River
but no one took to it
& he ditched it at the crossroads
and it floated on back
like the cheese he kept
under his hat
messy guitar affair
a sea glass slide
strop for a strap
cigar box worth of dimes


They sang a song about him
Bobby Golden Sandwiches
with his funny short pants
that star-spangled tussle
his fur bow tie
A heart full of lotion
in the clasp of vermin
leaving no contusions
his tiny hound resounding
tincture of hamster
a viola of saxophones

FED RSV Filled With Clowns

What follows is a 
close look G'd up 
with grass roots 
grown by 
the establishment 
Memorable broadcast 
moment 
A tertiary season 
Clown show on speed 
her mouth said
A real reality 
television hole 
in the wall 
It’s officially a 
reality television 
Culmination of a process 
Money supply that surfaced 
Away away 
The devil is dangerous 
A puppet running 
the show 
Camping downtown now 
ya hear me? 
Clowns are promoting 
the only break in the action 
Mind your business 
Calm down 
Polyamory of trading entities 
24 hrs a day, 7 days 
Another member of 
The Children 
Every manner of idiocy 
A former bank to 
take over these movements 
For months it has coiled 
Declined to give comment 
Wannabes are happy enough 
it says 
realizing there is no brain 
Claims are mostly criminals 
Slimy rhymes blowin' the lid 
Promoting the only tea
party worth being at 
Breaking bank and shop window 
Eyes and legs twisted 
cannot deal 
Our stolen rights 
ridiculous it did 
We're all singing 
I have the mouth

Goths With Grillz

Did anyone thoroughly

read the gift options?

VERY STIMULATING IDEAS

Emo girl found to be

almost entirely designer resin

Incomplete without

appropriate vampire accessories

Linked to the use of applied art & science

Emphasizing the practical uses of

those early years

A bare-bones operation

as opposed to George Wallis

"Keeper" Collection

Multi-foiled arches

many unavailable

secure this online system

Whether hot construction guys or

They are, after all, many

more moneyed and

usually extremely tight

An edgy black now

lugubrious even

The day losing its glitter

Healing this space

fine examples

copying fine replicas

put your feet up and slip

a necklace with a cross

over these vast spaces

this cavern

easy & secure

They are the billions

who lack cardboard

or we guess

profound exploration

of what means

and what is now

sculpture

tucked away & plain

3-Day Cycle (Krampus edition, red)

Video Chat

Crowning blows
don't you go
don't you stop
don't stop the music
Pretty baby, you are the soul
crossing lines of tape
or scansion
ribboning beyond & within
a silky starlight
twilight place for love
truck stoppage
Skiddley-scatting our way
thru the Milky Way
Is there any other way?
Endure this hurricane
tiny house we frame
just like last year
this year, the first day
met us at the old town's
favorite bar
The Nook
restaurant above us
it was great
everyone looked so healthy
in the multi-colored lights
river bar, Minnesota-bound
seeing where you used to live
you don't know
how things are gonna go?
Crossing lines
breaking it down
from the backseat
imagined acreage
future farmed out

3-Day Cycle

Slam your face shut
eat it up
unknowing domination
untitled entitlement
claw barking the trees
hound absentee
offering a nest of hair
then another
within seconds
kick-starting yer muther
artificial entanglements
repeater conceiver the other
kick out session @ 7am
48 hrs of the same dream
salad & ice cream
excited driving drinking
slow jam following
everything offered 
& nothing forgiven
auto pilot handouts
on a broken river raft
outer space time
just another hate crime
foreign barking tuned
just right flashes
2 for the price of none
forced coffee marches
never mind the blow back
yer own private dog track
horrified cashiers
with every purchase
granting understanding glances
polluted stage set
curly handclaps
& banned shampoo
oblivious villagers
jabbing not prodding
strip mining for love
get that thing out
of the trash
slam it up
eat your face shut

CJR

A night report, blast of light 
a starter pistol, a flare gun 
pointed toward the two of us 
covered in dog hair & foolishness 
wanting more than having 
hands woven around paper cups of wine