Dudefest '98

Dongs and dongers
Dongs by the dong
Yardage of meaty dick
slappin' the inside of thighs
flappin', shying away, nuts swinging like church bells
98 dudes lined up on a stage
in Cancun on Spring Break
Dongs on display, a white coat of sunblock painted on their snouts
Dudes very careful, applying, carefully, Hawaiian Tropic Suntan Oil to their pecks, their gluts, their quads
Dudes stilted by the heavy cable of their muscles, their profound muscles,
their big, exploding muscles and little dongs wrinkled like almonds below

A gentle ocean breeze takes a swipe at their nut hairs, frizzy, blonde, nearly invisible in the sun
The blonde chick comes onstage  98 men circle around her, in fear
She covers herself in honey
Dongs sprout loving
Her hair drips like honey from a comb
in a TV commercial for breakfast cereal
The honey sticks to her breasts
She batters the air with her ass her flesh swings
196 eyes hide behind sunglasses
98 dongs elongate to get a closer look

Poem I Could've Written When I Was 15

The sweet few minutes before school
Crunchberries and Darkwing Duck
I stick my head under the shower to tame my hair
and we leave at the last possible second

trash night

a choir of ambulances sings
me from my sleep

I am helplessly back in nyc
sty of shining glass
thirty centuries crammed into sleaze monuments
hard stone involuntary trees flowers rescinded
misdeeds loom headlights of tomorrow's moments
bearing down the future's flacid eyes
in the night of profound depth
this valley exploding in darkness
the little blossoming candle of
the megalopolis

it's not that I am lazy
it's just that I am scared
and lazy and that's why
the night awoke me
with the heat of its blasting moon
its babbling carhorns
the night a crypt the earth a flying tomb
basilicas of smut leapt from every streetcorner
manhattan gleeful with money
vituperative lights crackling from its marquee
I pull my curtain tight
against the hot breath of city light
columns of trash heaving slowly
on the breast of the lamb
windows guzzle darkness
jigsaw thoughts piece themselves
I will come out of this tunnel 
with corrected ambition
born from ultimate murk I streak
like burnt rubber you have your trees
and I have mine
and don't they all look the same anyway
the galaxy paces reinvented oceanic clock
boys and boys fall to the sidewalk
this night they must be reborn
the amniotic darkness construes me
into dancing form of smoke
a great creek falls on my head
subsumed in turpentine squalor
tomorrow that romantic aversion
the knees will press into our god
soil their proper pew
scuff marks culminate
in a utopian bastion of sound
sneakers squealing myriad
across the shiny gymnasium floor

flowers sting the french bulldog's eyes
she bites their leaves she likes the taste
strawberry potato leaves mint
in the chasm of night a soul is being prepared
we the ingredients mixing the future
I am half a recipe
let me carry my starving self nearer thee

my stubborn insistence on remaining who
I was
passes
like a stone
I give
myself
up

to you

and you

and you

and everybody

renegade musings prevent me from mattering much
smatterings of partially informed skepticism
my solidarity campaign with vanished torches
       lit and held by search party sent
       to recover the chanting stream
       that gave itself to the holographic pioneers

these pages lift no one but me
I the advice column I answer letters
I've written to myself my main task
is to hold myself back

batlaughter scratches the sky
strange punctuation sleep grows
over me like the mended sore of a grave
a wound sutured with ignorant death

maelstrom surfed
on a wooden door ripped
from its hinges

flashlight
eaten by limitless dark

flashlight
eaten by limitless illumination

The Older Years Age

My older years age
The receipt falls, yellowed, from a book bought just last year
The lost memories of young years
they stay young
in rerun, that same blonde boy
living them
That young me who I admire from this far post
of thirty years
The young me is young even in memory
He is not me
He used to be
He still is who he was, dropping his popsicle onto the backporch
and it being overrun by ants
I lived him for brief seconds. They still are young
These older years age...

The moon looks young for her age
casting her long milky leg on the smooth water
of Buckeye Lake
the same lake for the nearly 30 years I've been coming
My Uncle Pat is catching catfish and I am 3 years old
and Uncle Paul and dead Aunt Carol are reading the paper and I am 14
Water is the oldest thing around
it tastes like youth
for every one of its 5000 drinks

I push farther into the new millenia
The new crystles shoot through the pavement on Astor Place
They weren't here
when I got here
My older self, brother of the weathered tenement
passes through the glitzy facades built over
the old stoops
remembering St. Marks Place crusted in snow
slipping into St. Dymphnas' Tavern
beneath the strung Christmas lights
I am still 24 years old
every time I pass
drinking that frothy beer on New Years' Eve
and my friend Anna
is dislocating her knee in Luca Bar across the street
dancing and mopping closing the place down
Most of my life is behind me

I don't know how to go back
to being young
I have seen what I have seen
I have worked hard to learn things that I'd have been better off
not knowing
I am a tree with a calloused hide of rings
The years are shields thickened
against the blows of maturation
My older years age
Every day a newborn
Every day reborn
the same man
another day along

Reasons for Living - May 2014

Plays
Manhattan Repertory Theatre's Spring One-Acts

Poetry
Robert Duncan

TV Shows
Mad Men

Novels
Big Sur - Jack Kerouac
Ulysses - James Joyce

Movies
Escape From L.A. - John Carpenter, dir.
Certified Copy - Abbas Kiarostami, dir.
Pootie Tang* - Louis CK, dir.
Tree of Life* - Terence Malick , dir.

Prose
Gary Snyder essays
Marshall Mcluhan, Joseph Campbell, Robert Anton Wilson, Stuart Gilbert on James Joyce

*partial