For the OWLS

The lie wouldn’t last. They never do.
Somehow they're overpowered by time.
We’re always scrounging for a truth
No matter how scrawny or windblown.

I wish a red dress were true.
I wish your lips were true.
I wish I was already there.
I wish goodwill were true.
I wish all the smiles were true
and don’t you know they are?
Even when they’re hiding
in a mouth full of lies.

The granule of truth endures somehow;
in the blood flowing under the blood,
in the smallest intentions of each heart.

The minds clenched, the hearts clenched, the eyes clenched,
they are being opened
like empty hands
not to beg
but to be filled,
not by work
but by the sun,
by other hands.

We are finding our way again
in the dark creases
of each other’s hands.

You Men With No Destinies

You men with no destinies.
You men with no callings.
You accidents.

At the end of each day
you are alone
and you have no idea
who that person is.

Then, you close your eyes
and disappear.

You no longer have dreams
that live you through the night.
You are blank.
You don't exist
and neither does
anything else.

You have replaced
who you were
with emptiness.

You men with no destinies.
You men with no callings.
You accidents.

Reclaim yourselves.
You are the ones
who can save us.

Aphorisms for Myself

Listen, get rid of your blond hair.
Listen, nature is a love story about violence.
Listen, the glitch of motorbikes is necessary.
Listen, Dennis Hopper is not on that roof anymore in his cowboy hat.
Listen, how many generations of flies in each summer of humanity?
Listen, the stoplights seem to know what they're doing.
Listen, listen.

(Read fast.
Don't understand.
There's nothing to understand.
The mirror tells you
everything.)

What can the guidebook show you about Costa Rica?
You'll never find any legs in this book.
Madness is the only way to chart new ideas,
Insight comes as a frenzy.
Thinking can barely move a thought across a page
but that thought could roll the whole world.


You and the mirror have a confidential relationship,
the intimacy of a prisoner and his visitor across the glass.
The pure eyes of the mirror
will be whatever you are.
A mirror,
it remembers nothing.
It testifies nothing.

You need to make yourself
into some kind of desirable sexual product
otherwise, what are you? Why are you here?

That girls' dress is so pretty.
She must not need anybody..

The flower is it's own art;
The flower flowing into
it's body
imagining itself into
such a beautiful thing.

Nature is a series of catastrophes
which somehow caused us to happen.
Did anybody ever think so hard
as nature thinking us forth?
Or was it pure time?
Time gave the accidental collisions
of atoms falling in love with each other
a place to hook up.

It is impossible to waste time.
Time is always lived.
You can never not live it
unless you're dead,
Then time is moot.

All we really do is waste time
in the most creative ways we can think up..
Time is all there is.
Time put us under this sky to ask why,
to investigate and archive the circumstances of our being,
The upkeep of memory; these seem to be our chores.

Why does that girl wear her smile that way?
Why does she have that personality?
As if the world were mud
and each day should be a coat
laid at her feet?

That woman with the basket on her bike riding down Bleecker,
from her lovely white loft to her lovely glass office,
the heart on her shirt held firm by her breasts.
She must be happy. Her skirt is blowing in the wind.
She must be happy. If anyone is, it's got to be her.

A hawk tore a pigeon apart on the church roof today.
He flew across the sky carrying it in his claws,
it's red heart all ripped across it's chest.

The Long Way

How did I get so far
away from everything?
I am such a small person,
with such a small scope,
and such small knowledge,
How did I get such large opinions?

I've never been anywhere
close to love.
It's all I've wanted.

How did I get here
and not there
in your arms?

What is this misunderstanding,
this judgement
leading me to?

Is it bringing me
the long way around
to love?
Is it taking me
the long way home
to you?

Love

Love is the only way
we have to fight against death
and death is not winning.

We are alive.
We make love.
We make each other.
For every one who dies
two more are born.

Yes, you will die.
Yes, I will die.
Yes, the beautiful flower will wither.
Life goes on.

Even if we all go
we will return.
There are seasons
to the universe.

Lost

All these words
and nothing to say

It's lonely at the top
but it's also lonely
on the bottom

How many years can one spend
not getting anywhere?

Oh God.
I look up and
here I am
in this life again

Surrounded by
the same people
the same walls
the same food
the same words

But I don't want to find it yet.
I don't want to get there yet.
I want to stay lost.
I want to get more lost
so you will come find me.

To Charles Bukowski

I never liked
Charles Bukowski
but I'm starting to.
You've got to admire
the long years of
serious commitment
to drinking and rejection
it took to ferment
the anger that singed
a million minds
with only the true love
of a typewriter
to see him through.

He saw the gunky carpets
the cheap apartments
not with the eyes
of the trust fund poet,
that have never been shot
through with the blood
of ripple wine,
but through a face
of salted meat
and eyes hardboiled
and pickled in briny
late nights of
dinged up legs
and dinged up cars,
hungover days
when the dust
haunts the empty room
that the sun won’t
leave the fuck alone
and the empty bottles
chime in the trash
like the dying honks
of a seagull or
an old Ford.
The real days
we're living.

Sure, the clouds
are always there,
the sun, the stars,
but they’re so
high above.

When I see Hank
(If I may call
him that) sitting
in someone's hideous idea
of an armchair,
holding fast to a
cigarette, I see
my grandma coughing
like a muffler
her beautiful red blood
into the rusted snow
of Columbus, Ohio.
Hank is angry,
Hank is nasty,
but Hank is not
wrong

and he is
folding the cocktail
napkins of hotel
lounges into roses.

Charles Bukowski is still read
by the real people
in America
who no longer read.
The real people in America,
whose struggle
is not epic
but mundane, or rather,
whose unhappiness
is heroic
in how small
and ugly
it is.