Scattered Meditation

-written in collaboration with a robot version of myself

What if I made me
When I was pretty good
When I had no letters cause I hadn’t met myself yet
Practicing for my future life
She says that Those to whom evil is done
evil is done
Great, I think
Really a pretty trap, and their decision to live there

I'm just giving me
I am cause I was a big kiss  
All I don't have lives, they can take it

Janetta, I noticed the broken melody was You
Steve I'm a human being, including the same exact thing
A proud member of the people
Refugees from the ceiling of man Library of shit
He's so sad he can't remember what happens in Chekhov's plays
I understand you
An iPhone doesn't mean you
Sarcophagus noun meaning doglike

I love impersonations of my previous work
but do I have bad dreams about
I'm trying to get some adult education/stalk Corey and his flowering world
Maybe he spent all his time
Sarcophagus noun meaning doglike 

Great, I have lives, they have to burn at the head of service
across this dynamic czar of the chimes at least four reasons why it is.
This might say that
This might be
Maybe not escape, but occasional safe harbor
You gotta have the land of fucking bullshit
Most people don't have lives, they wear blankets because their body temperature lowers
Most people do with anything
Facebook and incoherent imagery, with a bunch of tribute people
Cleveland might have to return to the joys of dry stones
turned off by the parable
a nation insists on the Tree of Life
experiments in the bowels of Christ,
Fuck that we’re merciful in broad daylight,
His flowering world

I'll be starting a fear of contact find me
Learn from a professional kid
That was the future life
Start spreadin' the Dark
Start spreadin' the Shitty
Sadly, even if he's taken on the soil of this
I've tried nothing and he was watching this

Whatever house he builds,
Jesus, I have also spread over
I understand you
It's okay, nothing happens in life
It's okay, nothing is a way

all is well
It is now
Wonder is our money
I'll be at the miracle of all reality.

Drinking the Wine

New lovers lie on a blanket
Inifinity lays six
feet of dirt against the fresh
pine lid beneath

I wonder what they see
when they look in each other's eyes

unperturbed earth
accustomed to a long diet
of deaths most
of its graves unmarked
forgotten

The grass is given
a close shave and a fresh drink

Four corks run
through with the sharp end of a pigtail screw
lightly stained in dark wine
the dark wine pouring
from fingertips into
little covered cask

Walhalla

One of my first High School Friday nights,
we embarked from Staab's house, a caravan
headed for Walhalla in search of frights,
the girls especially eager. Slowly turning man,
I wanted to be wherever they were.
We wound through the bush down the holler,
wild between the parallel struts of High
and Neil, busy mother roads. She was shy
and so was I, but somehow more affected,
senses pumping her heart with excess legend.
Parked under the bridge, Charlie directed
us to imagine a boy swinging in the wind.
Giddy with fear, she grabbed my arm for security.
I could not wait for her to do what she did to me.

Love Song Love

The flowers: Where have they been?
I've excluded them. The rose is falling,
sogged with too much rain.
You did not need to cry that much.
I'm hiking up the ridge again
this time with a new flame,
a recovering alcoholic who sends me
an unusual amount of text messages.
When she talks she sounds like me.
Her eyes are owls.
They have wide, hooting pupils
constantly asking "Who?"
When I first saw her she was hidden
in her own arms and a rambling purple scarf.
I did love her then.

I don't love her now.

It's a peculiar feeling
not being a fool for a beautiful girl
who's agreed to go on a date with me.
It's not a feeling at all.
The old feelings were rotten.
Was love one of them?
Love was all of them.
Rotten, possessed love.
Downtrodden, obsessed love.
Forgotten, confessed love.
Love song love.
Luther Vandross love.
Bing Crosby love.
The real stuff. The stuff that turns
you into a desperate, hurtin' man.
I try not to feel it anymore.
I am successful and
am better off because of it.
The bud spills from the stalk
as blood tumbling from a bullethole.
The sun is high and it is breaking
the wild cucullia into crisp, dry weeds.
The sun is killing the grass.
It does not mean to.
It only wants to watch.
It watches too closely.
The grass dies.

A Laughter

I digress. A laughter. Your laughter
unlike any other.
Let’s go on a lovely digression together.

When I see a sentence I like
and when I see a beautiful girl
it’s the same thing.

Your beauty is the best lie there is.

And when you call, you activate the beat
of my heart. Every text is a little defibrillator.



I have no idea what they mean
but they mean everything to me:
The indecipherable smile and eyes you have.
I fall into them
I fall into them
and am never caught.

Fragment (from a Spring a few years back)

I want to see how long
her hair has grown.

When I kissed her
she grabbed her face
and went, "Shit. Fuck. Shit."

The flowers she gave me
are in an empty wine bottle
still dead and beautiful.

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.

Lines

We fall
and fall
and fall
in love
and falling
we grow wings.

Tonight I lie with loneliness

Tonight I lie with loneliness
And a kiss dreamt from the air.
The room is blue, my new acquaintance.
The sheets remember the shape of her.

To see the world as one big shrine,
Love is the device for this.
It burns your eyes until they’re blind.
Tonight I lie with loneliness.

God is everywhere she insists.
I’ve never seen though forever stared.
The only place where I’ve known bliss
is in a kiss dreamt from the air.

Maybe He is hiding there.
My eyes grope in the darkness.
They can’t shape Him anywhere.
Tonight, the lie of loneliness.

It’s all around me, I make my peace;
Let flowers be what they are.
Through empty rooms I send a wish
for a kiss dreamt from the air.

Of all the absent the one I miss
is a kiss become a dream of air.
The room is blue, my old acquaintance.
Tonight I lie with loneliness.

What Kind of Man Do You Require?

What kind of man do you require?
A little boy questioning your sleeve?
A wealthy man held together by a suit?
A rolling hog who won't perspire?
Whatever the answer, it's surely moot.

You're no use knowing what you should receive;
Only once given can you know.
There's hungers in us we can't see the source.
It's all well and good holding what you believe
but what you need comes without a choice.

You'd sooner stop the wind to blow
then stop me coming through your door.
I know your blood, I can stem the flow
and if you ask I'll make it roar.

Train-train

The world is rolling around one more time,
giving me another chance to do the things I’ve
successfully deferred every day so far.
I go to the market
and a girl climbs into my eyes like they do every couple hours.
Reasons to fall assemble easily:
because of the way she’s smearing jelly
between two cookies with a dull, shiny knife,
because of the way she almost kisses the glass display case
when she breaths on it to clean it,
because of the way the flowers in black plastic barrels
surround her, eager to be gathered up and delivered
to her arms. (If it’s at all about love, it’s as much about
ferrying the flowers to their respective destinies)
Two models sit near me
looking just like how models are supposed to look, but somehow
they are not attractive to me, their beauty too flagrant a reminder
of the imbalance of things. I suspect I am not the kind
of man they require and silently rescind myself.
I prefer the jelly girl,
whose beauty is subdued by a kind of helplessness. She shares an
oppression with me, being meek enough to have arrived behind that counter,
at the mercy of the clock spinning her toward a boredom of her own choosing.

I should talk to her. Instead, I watch the
steam rising from my coffee, continually refreshing
the idea of death, which remains unconvincing.
In case I’m wrong, I should talk to her.
A hundred million years from now
none of it will have mattered
as right now all of it matters so much.
Every discarded moment piles into
an ever-rising crest of Now.
Now is here. That much is clear.
Go talk to her. Go talk to her. Go talk to her
(My mind is always giving an ineffectual pep talk,
I seem to be a sightseer touring all the various guilt trips of life).
I can’t think my way into the brief lapse of thought
we call courage. I’m entrenched. I've done all I can
to make myself impervious to chance,
to ensure safe, undisrupted passage down the corridor of each day.
I’ve plied my aloneness into solitude,
where shrewder ones have learned to
accompany it with people.

The familiar, gloomy conclusion
revises itself for today’s dilemma:
If I talk to her, it won’t make me any less alone.
Once again I have bartered bravery and the dim possibility
of elation for the patchy cloak of thought.

Starting home, I am pleased to feel
my feet hijack my body. They take me
on a detour by her booth.
I clutch an alibi: I’m only looking at the cakes.
I pretend to look at the cakes
while actually looking at the cakes
when I feel her walk up
(I've endowed her with such magnitude).

I brave a look at her.
She smiles at me.
I may have twitched
something back before fleeing.
I cherish the smile all day on into the night.
It justified the whole thing somehow.
She smiled at me. I've seen it.
Tomorrow I’ll say everything to her.

Mixed

I pierce the clouds with light
beneath the print of No. 6
hanging over my mantle
you send your showers down
orange blue yellow
shaking from the canvas
the window becomes
the painting in water and glass
raindrops assuming the yellow
flowers and black leaves
quaking in the wind
we drown into each other
almost breaking from our bodies
we plunge completely
as the violins purple fumes
rise over the room

my favorite part of you
is the little absence
where I can put myself

the drops wrench apart
and bleed down the glass
into the earth
they will never be
what they were before
as red and blue blended are no
longer red and blue but purple
as the blood mixed in our veins
as you mixed in my arms

I Had a Dream About You

I don’t know why.
I had you pinned to the bed
and you were finally gonna let me
kiss you. I wanted it to be perfect
so I got up to turn off the TV or
light a candle and I don’t know
what happened but I still haven’t
kissed you and you got married
in April.

The way you looked
at me: dopey and smug,
I haven’t seen anything like it
in years. I’ve subsisted on fumes.
It’s not easy concocting that
in a woman.
I tried to kiss you once before.
We sat on my porch.
You stroked my
hair. I leaned in.
You ducked out of the way
quicker than if I'd
thrown a fastball at your head.

You went back home to the South.
I commemorated my survival
by putting a black X through
each day on the calendar.
Love was finally going to happen to me.
Every day I was getting closer,
or further away,
I'm still not sure which.

I had a lot of dreams about you then.
I wanted them. If I couldn't
have you during the day, I’d make you
visit me in the night.
Once you were wearing
a sweater that gleamed like snow,
my lips touched yours like a bow
on a violin string.
We were both looking for clues,
for God or Fate to tell us what to do.
You crashed your car after you told me
on the phone your friends thought
we should be together forever.
You stopped talking to me after that.
I cried for three days and nights,
but I felt like I should've cried longer.
Tears came all the way from
the tips of my fingers,
the soles of my feet.
That grief was the last time
I knew how to use every part of myself.

I saw you next in a bowling alley.
There was some other guy
you were getting attention from.
He wasn't your boyfriend either.
You were so nice to me
that I knew it was over.
I wondered what God was trying
to tell me and decided He was
fucking with me (a bowling alley!)
so I stopped listening altogether.

I haven’t had as much love
(or, more likely, sex)
in my life as I planned on.
I’ve withheld reservoirs,
waiting for the right girl,
my energy going into work,
leaking away in various diversions.
Meanwhile, she’s yet to show up.
It’s a hobby of mine,
entertaining suspicions
that she might’ve been you.

Once I sent you a message
saying I’d do anything
to make love to you.
That’s not exactly true,
but that doesn’t make it
a lie either.

I had a dream about you.
Someday my kiss
will land on your lips.

The Well of Dreams

I wanna hold your body close
When you go to sleep
When your soul goes off
to the well of dreams

I’ll take you in my hands
Let you down slow
To that darkened place
Where the wishes echo

Don’t get scared
if you start to fall
The water’s rising
It’s gonna take us all.

The well of dreams is swelling up
It’s rising fast it can’t be stopped

It’s not bringing danger
It’s not bringing death
It’s bringing new life
It’s breathing new breath

It’s washing the dirt
It’s absolving the sins
It’s feeding the earth
It’s cooling the winds

Close your eyes
Till you fall asleep
Come with me
to the well of dreams

The well of dreams is swelling up
It’s swelling fast, run and get your cup

The Best Thing Around

People say that love’s the best thing around
so what does that leave you when you’ve finally found
that it’s often the finest who end up alone
and it’s the rotten bastards who can’t mute their phones?
Women know they go for the dangerous kind.
They say to themselves “Oh why can’t I find
a nice guy?” Why do I always fall for jerks?”
But they don’t want a man who’ll do all the work,
who’ll clean the house and make them dinner,
who’ll bring them flowers and be the breadwinner.
They want a guy who’s fucked all their friends,
Who’s rued by women, and envied by men.
Love is a game, and you gotta know how to cheat.
You can’t win the prize being honest and sweet.

Perfume

He found a blond wisp of hair near his pillow, unmistakably her length and twine, slightly curled, like a line of cursive. He pulled it taut and smelled it, but the lonely strand no longer carried the fragrance. He had been thinking of her often recently, how she used to lay her head on his shoulder and he’d put his nose in her hair like a bouquet, but he couldn't quite remember what she smelled like. Shampoo, certainly, but what kind? Summer storm? Tangerine Dream? Lilac Wine?

On an August day he was riding his bike near her house and a warm wind was blowing and all at once the scent floated down like music. The flowers in the trees smelled exactly of her hair. He stopped pedaling and put his nose up and drew in deep, rapid breaths, one on top of another, trying to possess the smell. He rode in circles beneath the trees, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, but it eluded him, and soon drifted away like a current of warm water in a cold lake. He pedaled off.

The Girlwatcher

This is a short video, followed by the story which it was based on.



I’m in love with this girl. She doesn’t really like me. I mean, she thinks I’m nice and everything, she’s cordial, and I would like to believe that someday, if I played my cards absolutely impeccably, she would let me quietly hump her in my own pathetic little way, but I know that she doesn’t lie in bed at night with the sheets all snaked and clinched between her knees and ache for me like I do for her. I do open mic every Wednesday at the coffee house where she works. There’s usually a bunch of people there but I’m sure that even though I’m wearing sunglasses cause I’m nervous she has to know I’m singing directly to her. I have conversations with her whenever I can invite the courage, conversations that swelter in my body all week like lava, conversations where my words erupt and spill over.

She started working at the coffee shop after my ex and I had broken up, so I don’t think she would have made the connection. My ex is a vindictive bitch. She’s bisexual, which was nice when we were together, got a little menage action every once in a while, but it’s not nice anymore. I only mention it because I’m out the other day and I see her walking down the street hand in hand with this new girl that I’m in love with, the coffee shop girl.

I didn’t really understand what was going on at first so I sort of started following them a little bit, on the other side of the street about 50, 100 yards back. I know that sounds creepy, but it was harmless. It’s not like I'm OJ, like I wanted to kill anybody or anything. It hurt my feelings to see them together. I can’t help that I’m in love. I’m a jealous guy, I’ll admit that, but what’s wrong with caring about somebody? People always make you feel bad for caring. It’s bullshit.

I tried to be sneaky at first, pressing my back to the brick walls and peeking around and springing to the next doorway or crevice between buildings, but I stopped giving a shit. I didn’t care if anyone noticed me in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk looking through binoculars (I like to go birdwatching in the park every once in a while). I watched them swinging their linked hands back and forth. They would stop and press their faces up to the window of a boutique and then go in and I would go into the store across the street and watch through the front window and they would come out licking ice cream cones or carrying a little trinket they had bought. I didn’t pretend to be reading a magazine in the convenience store or to be looking at the leather masks and ball gags in the sex shop. More than one proprietor forced me out of his store. Homeless people came up on the street and asked me for change, asked me what I was looking at. I ignored them too. I couldn’t see anything but the two girls I had most recently been in love with.

We ended up at my ex’s apartment on the third floor of a bulding where I lived with her for ten months. We used to wake up in the morning and spread the curtains and make love right in the bay window overlooking the trees. We broke up two months before the lease was up. It was a bad break up. I fooled around with this bartender chick and the ex threw all my stuff out into the street just like in the movies.

I jumped in the dumpster in the alley across the way and watched as my ex and the coffee house chick walked up the steps to the porch with the swing in the back. I could smell the rust and beer and rotten food as I watched my ex-pin the new girl up against the wall with a kiss. What I began to feel I had never felt before, this rage like a hot stove. I felt like I could have swung a whale by its tail up through the goddamn panoramic third floor fuckin’ bay window. I felt like I could’ve drilled through a mountain like John Henry. I felt like I could’ve brought down the columns of the world and busted through the sky with my fist as it tumbled down on top of everything. The ex took the new girl by the hand and they went inside.

I started humming the mantra my Tai Chi teacher taught me. I climbed up into a tree to see into her window but it was Springtime and there were too many leaves. I swung down from a branch and dropped to the sidewalk. I circled the building but at no angle could I see into the apartment. I went up to the porch and waited for a few minutes to see if one of my old neighbors would come out, or maybe Yanni the Super, but no one came out. I'd had to climb up the fire escape a few times when I forgot my key, but it was a real bitch and I only did it after I'd tried everything else. As I sat there, I began to get the idea that maybe they wanted me to come after them. Women don't want timid guys. They want cavemen. They want guys to drag them by their hair into the cave and have their way with them. All I had to do was climb the fire escape and go right in the window, which I could see from the street was open (we had an air conditioner but the ex would never let me turn it on. Too expensive). The girls would be shocked at first and try to cover their nakedness, but then they’d see how right it was. We’d all fall in love, the new girl with me, me with the new girl, the ex and me, me and the ex, the ex and the new girl, the new girl and the ex. When something is meant to be, you can’t fight it and the three of us were meant to be; We were meant to be a triumvirate of passion, a trifecta of lust, the holy trinity of sex.

I jumped up and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. This was always the hardest part; catching the ladder probably eight or ten feet off the ground like a basketball rim and pulling all of your weight up with your arms, legs thrashing like a hanged man’s. Though I go to the dojo twice a week it was a pain in the ass pulling myself up that ladder. I braced my forearms against the bars below my hands for leverage and lifted my foot so high to get it on the ladder that I nearly ripped open my sack. I pushed my self up by my foot and after placing my other foot on the ladder it was easy to climb up onto the first platform of the escape. I rubbed my forearms, which throbbed as if they were about split like wishbones, and waited for minute to catch my breath before I quietly went up the mesh iron steps.

When I got to the third floor I paused against the wall next to the open window. I watched, through the thin curtain flowing in the window, my ex take off the coffee shop girl’s tank top. They were not five feet away from me and I could hear their breath, their lips sucking at each other and parting with a pluck and plunging back together again. I was enjoying the show and didn’t want to interrupt too soon, and I knelt down so my face would be level with theirs. I felt almost like I was a part of it. It was weird, my heart was being broken and pieced back together all at once. I really believed that I could love them both, that they would both love me. I wouldn’t be jealous of my ex. If she were some douche bag getting with the coffee shop girl I might want to shatter his face with a sledgehammer, but the new girl had somehow rekindled my love for my ex. She would heal over our pain like a splint over a broken bone, and we would fuse together stronger than we were before.

I put my leg through the window and set it down quietly on the hardwood floor beside the bed. I ducked beneath the window frame and snuck through. I lifted my other leg and, as I was putting it through I accidentally knocked out the wooden slate that was holding the window up and it dropped down on my shin.

The two girls jumped apart. My ex’s face tightened savagely.

“Charles?” she said, “What the fuck?”

I clambered to pry my leg out from the window. I realized that the new girl probably didn’t know what was going on and I might be able to save face with her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought this was the fourth floor. Terribly sorry.”

I freed my leg and went out the window as my ex bitched me out. I climbed up the fire escape to the fourth floor and my ex poked her head out and yelled up at me.

“Jesus Christ, Charles. You’re a fucking creep,” she said. “Come down from there.”

I knocked on the window of the fourth floor apartment, hoping that they might let me in, but no one answered.

“I’m calling the cops,” the ex said and disappeared back into the apartment. I meekly climbed down the ladder back to the third floor and, seeing that my ex was on the phone and the coffee house girl was on the bed, I thought I might have time to explain things and peeked my head in the window.

“Window’s locked,” I said, indicating “my” apartment upstairs. “Hey, you work at the Midnight Cafe, don’t you?”

She nodded. My ex saw that I was talking to her and threw a blue high heeled shoe at me. I blocked it with my elbow and offered a quick apology to the new girl.

“Hey look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything. I live upstairs.” The ex slammed the phone down and came after me. I ducked out the window and the ex yelled things at me as I scurried down the fire escape and down the alley behind the house.

The best thing I ever heard about love my 8 year old brother told me. “Mary likes me,” he said. “How do you know that?” I asked. “She laughs at me and when I look at her she smiles,” he said. Now, I know that that’s one hundred percent true, but it never really works out that way for me.

Two quotes and a poem by Rimbaud

These are absolutely true to me.

"The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping."
-Stuart somebody

"A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and finds endless ways to squander it."
-Don Delillo


Novel

I.

No one's serious at seventeen.
--On beautiful nights when beer and lemonade
And loud, blinding cafés are the last thing you need
--You stroll beneath green lindens on the promenade.

Lindens smell fine on fine June nights!
Sometimes the air is so sweet that you close your eyes;
The wind brings sounds--the town is near--
And carries scents of vineyards and beer. . .

II.

--Over there, framed by a branch
You can see a little patch of dark blue
Stung by a sinister star that fades
With faint quiverings, so small and white. . .

June nights! Seventeen!--Drink it in.
Sap is champagne, it goes to your head. . .
The mind wanders, you feel a kiss
On your lips, quivering like a living thing. . .

III.

The wild heart Crusoes through a thousand novels
--And when a young girl walks alluringly
Through a streetlamp's pale light, beneath the ominous shadow
Of her father's starched collar. . .

Because as she passes by, boot heels tapping,
She turns on a dime, eyes wide,
Finding you too sweet to resist. . .
--And cavatinas die on your lips.

IV.

You're in love. Off the market till August.
You're in love.--Your sonnets make Her laugh.
Your friends are gone, you're bad news.
--Then, one night, your beloved, writes. . .!

That night. . .you return to the blinding cafés;
You order beer or lemonade. . .
--No one's serious at seventeen
When lindens line the promenade.

I misunderstood this poem. I thought it was about being 17 and getting drunk and trying to get laid. I guess it's about the way I should be living my life rather than the way I actually am.

Communion

Everybody else in the yard sings Don’t Stop Believin’
though they don’t know the words.

They are looking for the magic.
We are all looking for the magic.

Some find it through drugs, or religion,
some through art, some
sports or music.
Some through love.

Wings aflutter, alone or together,
we are all beating
our way up to God.

The Summer air is charged
with static electricity
or maybe it’s streaming
through my veins.
Touch ignites my skin.

I can never tell if the spark
comes from me or the girl.
I guess we made it together.

A flower petal drops into
my glass of water and
I drink it up.