//Locals w/Tom//

Somewhere, the sun collapses beneath a prudent eye.

Silent silhouettes sit burnt up, broken, and misled, and wake to a cracked windscreen.

They smoke and marvel, that each breath is still their own.

The truck crawls forward, low on all fours,

embracing the future, and forgetting its own.

//Washington D.C.//

//Washington D.C.//

Think

if it stood in your power

to cause clocks to regress.

A small bowl full of big fish

begets a stunted pond.

Your malaise and theirs

-are miles apart.

That's not the worst of it: Nothing ever happens.

//Faith in the Anvil//

//Faith in the Anvil//

Words flounder in decay
-how I wish they'd never flown.

The returning smile of a jackal explodes.

I quietly count my time, even though I know it isn't really there, until they name the hour, and I politely carry on.

These hours, marked by cigarette ash sometimes seem more needed than my mind -and in the best case, I make a discovery in a spare moment or a heavy trance, that's outstripped my time.

//Ghosts that we know//

Cook the animals.
See the cathedral.

Plough the fief, and die thereabouts.

When I was a kid I played all day.
Now, I tire awake.

Ghosts that we know,
chain and feed the sun.

//Start to a noir//

//Start to a noir//

One warm and rainy day in spring
I stood at the bathroom mirror, shaving.

The cat's meow is like an old screen door.

I feel like a dented can of soup,

because I never knew that my youth,

so far could reach.

Headlights, pass over the window,
and seem to incinerate the room.

This came out of the Recession-era a few years back when it felt like I was in total opposition to everything around me. Since then I've adapted: I shave strategically and less often.

//Figuration Nº.8//

//Figuration Nº. 8//

The chaw-stained smile of a hard-hatted scarecrow

turned corporate confidence man
calls to mind shades of a chequered past.

He cuts his Cope with coffee grounds,
farts and smiles
like the Devil,
and bears his old denim jacket the same way.

His dog

-shys away from him still.

“You’re getting older. You’re going to have to live with yourself soon.”, I say, as the lunch hour litter of newspapers, crumbs, and soft-pack cellophane ebbs its way between bathroom stalls, into the parking lot, under lockers -only sometimes lapping at the lip of the trash can. His quick-lipped close-snipped speech for once fails him. He's puckered tight as a dog's asshole.

17:01.3

I’m running

past the old school

so there’s Mark?

Joey’s friend

on the elementary

playground

I’m running past,

maybe eleven, drawing

from a cigarette

he found. Joey’s watching him

and I’m

standing away plotting

how to save his life.

I act,

I won’t just stand by.

I bury the butt in tire chips.

my fingertips stink

like hot rubber.

I shake the memory

but not the smell.

and as I pass her house

I’m still in love with Staci Williams.

I still kiss the stream she drank.

I can still run by her house one night

I even crept into her

backyard but the windows were closed,

shades closed there was a black forest behind

me like a poem.

something about coming home, bicycles.

I thought these people neighbors,

they couldn’t

look stranger.

running through

beauty or close-by you want

to be honest for the sake of a butt

you remember when you keep forgetting the world,

17:01.3 or something; the exact time it took

to run down the hill and come back the same.

if you sat and watched you’d only

ever see me running downhill. 

//Seam//

A seam wanders

your body over.

It rakes your neuroses.

//Spiders and whisky//

//Spiders and whisky//

It's turned cold
and I've been killing spiders and insects in corners all day.

I put the Windsor next to the toaster.
They both warm me.

An account of last weekend.

A few prompts for presence

It's grown quiet around here. Here are some prompts that will hopefully lead you out into the street from those foggy white margins. They are in the past tense but put them in the present. Give them a presence and a context, a reason to exist:

a. The afternoon grew dim as the wind whistled through the window and the sound of an ice cream truck clattered off into the distance.

b. S/he stood in (his/her) underwear as a glop of jam slid from (his/her) knife onto the floor. “Today’s going to be a good day”, s/he said.

c. A cigarette flicked from a passing window bounced down the roadway; “CHAOS 2000”, "Who are you?”, “Pressure Treat the DEAD” are written large on the overpasses. Smoke from someone burning their garbage in a backyard by the highway drifts over the hedge.

///No Title///

I know someone
Who speaks in riddles
Got tall tales to tell
Got time to spit
Got nothing to give
I smell the jasmine and my head spins
When it's all done
Where have I been
Will you find me?
I can't be here
anymore
please

Attention Span

The teenage boys, smoking on the parking ramp
proving each to each who’s horniest of the bunch,
not really by anything they say, but by an attitude of standing.

There are enough strollers in sight for a stroller factory,
and enough babies for an orphanage, or a nursery.
Abandonment or growth, both alive here among the many
futures to be lived. The shops counting their numbers,
and the crowds throwing theirs away, and still their children weep,
but not for anything in particular.

It’d be clichéd if it weren’t true.
It’d be stale but their hypocrisy is mine.
And that lesson we must learn, but don’t
or won’t, not in time
that in between getting rich and wasting away
is a road where the leaves are bursting
with red and orange, brown and gold,
where the wind breathes onto the night.

///The Afternoon///

Stiff wind blows

Shatters the bottle that held my flower

I'm staring at the broken glass

Water drips down

I take a walk down the street

No one walks there, really

I do, though

And another hour has gone by in another day

And I love it

//Figuration Nº.3//

//Figuration Nº.3//

She runs her hands over wine stains
fondly -and saves dead flowers

Minds her p’s and q’s
and dots her I’s
as she slowly,
packs away.

These are getting to be a bit out of order. I mill over some longer than others but they're all tagged under 'figurations' for quick reference.

This one's a figuration of someone I know captivated by life's abstract impressions and expressions in the form of stains, spots, dried leaves and flowers or funeral offerings and what-have-you.

//Figuration Nº.5 (in memoriam)//

//Figuration Nº.5 (in memoriam)//

A man fills himself with dog smiles
and dies a dog’s death.

This is a poem about an old guy I knew growing up that lived on my street, and below is a bit of prose from the initial notes I scratched out on my memories of the guy.
---
He somehow wound up stuck living with his two invalid sisters in a clapboard house the entire time I knew him surrounded by a yard with a slight fence populated by nine crazy shelties, crumbling birdbaths and one of those gazing orbs that look like an overgrown Christmas ornament.

Consequently he shuffled around town most of the time chain-smoking from dawn to dusk, and dusk to dawn in these C.W. McCall type sunglasses with a perpetual marmitic-sepia sort of sunset cast over his eyes, taking out the bins of people that had let another trash day slip their mind 'because he could', 'because he was shuffling to the doughnut shop to get their day-olds anyway' he'd usually say in the tone of a concrete mixer chewing something over.

//-{ }-//

//-{ }-//
(Sv.)
Du
död

den eviga tungan
huvud gud.

(En.)
You
dead

this eternal-tongue
head-god.

I wrote this one night while I was sitting drunk in front of a fridge covered in Swedish magnetic poetry. It was in reference to the idea of the homunculus/the notion of the 'self' -the Minnikin-the small child that lives in the head or the private dialogue.

...Yeah I don't know, some nights it's this stuff others it's cartoons and questioning my competence to consume hot eggdrop soup without burning the roof my mouth again, go figure.

Crawlers

An explanatory preface: I work at three separate bars dealing blackjack and for months have been writing small vignettes on actual people I have met/observed while dealing. My initial goal was merely to relieve a bit of my hopelessness at seeing so many people waste their lives at these soulless businesses, desperately searching for some bit of solace I figured they could never find there. Nearly 40 vignettes later, and it has become less of an emotional outpouring and more of a philosophical inquiry into the existential insights bars can provide. These are the first five I wrote, all of which were quickly scribbled down in a small notebook during my breaks. Some of the names are real, others are not, but all are actual people with larger stories than I am able to tell.

1. Marty
He's forty, perhaps forty-five. A gangly and awkward man, he wears a tan zip-up and blue dress pants every night, even when it seems uncomfortably warm. He has never spoken a word to anyone, just eyes us all from behind black pupils. His dark hair is greying and barely a wisp slumbers upon his pointy skull. I would think he was a serial killer but for one tell: he only watches the dealers. No girls in skirts or waitresses in short-shorts get his attention, only the cards in my hands as I shuffle and deal smoothly across the table. He plays only as often as he speaks, yet there is a game being conducted in his mind as the queens and kings fly back and forth, back and forth, over and over without end. Without looking away, he slowly raises his hand for another glass.

2. Gloria
She's always on her cell, pausing only to switch hands and ears. She'd be a mystery if only her high pitched voice didn't give away her high maintenance issues; even the lesbian cougars know to stay away. We all politely ignore as she sobs and rages at her "Lydia" (girlfriend?wife?lover?pimp?) who slept with her own "Sam" (also known as "Cunt" and "Vag Slut" and the "her" of "It's her breasts, isn't it? So you prefer slutty D's now, is that it?!"). I have no sympathy for her until the night she - quiety and without the usual fuss - tucks her phone into her bra, eying the cougars with a deep calm confidence which could just as easily be interpreted as insanity by those of us who know better. Maybe it's over with Lydia, or perhaps she's finally past the point of sexual loyalty; either way, the cell is off and it's obvious there is nothing and nobody left worth sobbing over.

3. Lewis
He comes every Wednesday for the baseball games, but stays for the cards. He smiles even when he loses a hand, only raising his voice when Metallica comes on over the speakers. He calls himself a silver fox, and he is, but also reminds me I'm too young for him so "don't even try, sweetheart." He pulls out his Blackberry to check facebook each time I shuffle, explaining that it's the only way his estranged son he abandoned at the age of five ("When I was dumb, young and desperate") will let him keep in contact. He carries the device in his breast pocket, close to his heart, tenderly tapping it through the faded fabric every time he gets a blackjack. His grin never falters.

4. Avril
She's a cultural slut and I hate her guts. She sings to me at least four times a night though, so we do our best to tolerate one another. She's won every battle we've ever fought, stealing the players' attention away from the table each time her puckered lips and digitally enhanced breasts thrust out from the large HD screen. I sing along to her songs out of habit, until the night a player comments to me as I mouth along to her #3 hit single, "Wow, you know all the words. You must really like this song, eh?" "Fuck no," I reply. "She sucks and I hope her candy ass explodes tootsie rolls all over pinata-style someday." The player, a girl in her twenties who could be a dead ringer for the aforementioned candy-assed devil woman, laughs and nods in agreement. Avril - 20,000-ish, Me - 1. I will win this war yet.

5. Maria
She's the fat girl of her group, the one who shyly decides to "watch over" the drinks and purses as her friends slut it up on the dance floor. She's the most dignifed of them all and I want to tell her so, but she doesn't have the courage to approach the table. She won't even look me in the eye from across the room, or match gazes with any other girl in the joint for that matter. Glancing at my shuffling hands, she seems mildly interested, and for a moment I think she's walking over to try a hand or two... but then she veers for the side exit, cigarette and lighter clasped in a sweaty palm. Her downcast eyes and teal-painted lids tell me all I need to know; she's many lonely nights away from the day she'll take a chance and just bet all she's got.

Drone In The Back of My Mind

Listening to a Scottish guitar play its drone

Wandering through a dark place, lead by its hand

Wondering what comes next

Imagining what might be

Dreaming of a deep deep sleep

Ocular Herpes

A name far worse

Than the disease.

My vision clouds six times daily

And a sting-

Fire to my eyes and vinegar to my nose.

Nuclear water

Drains down the pipes.

Now through glass,

The world seems smaller,

Almost quaint.

I only hope

That at the end

I keep the perspective,

Leave the pain.

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

There's nothing terribly introspective about this. Quite the opposite in fact. In Russia, I got ocular herpes somehow. Too much unprotected eye sex maybe. Or perhaps the metro. In any case, I had a really awful routine. Every morning, I had to flush my eyes with some kind of liquid that looked like yellow hilighter had been soaking in. Then, eye drops. Wait 5 minutes. More eye drops. Wait 5 minutes. Manually RUB cream into my eyes. Repeat 6 times daily for 4 weeks.

//Figuration Nº.2//

//Figuration Nº.2//

Single serving charm
Minican soul
Made for tv disposition
Pat Sajack haircut

-MUTED-

.awareness

He is the things people see
with the warmth of novelty.

Another figuration. I'll be doing a series of these. If you recognise yourself don't get offended too easily. Identity's not the point of these exercises. Essentialism and foolish Romantic notions play no role here either.

Feel free to sketch me out too. I'm too bound up in myself as is these days I think. It'd do me some good.