Stark Impasse

Asphalt wonder, matrixed creation
of panicked imagination. The sky was not
an absence. The Builder presumed,
wove it into his plan. Nowhere is anyplace
you are not. I'm in the middle
of Nowhere. It's called New York City.
The glass stepladder is climbed
by an Apache ghost. A star is plucked
and bitten, the fruit of Heaven. Latched
arm-in-arm, pilgrims crossing galaxies,
oceanias of dark, congealing around meccas
of wheeling carnal light.
The orchard intones a quaking, notorious hum:
patches of swirling nucleation, smeltcauldrons in rotation,
monumental dervishes of atomic foment.

The sun at the end
of the scorpion tail
burns the black off a blind man's eyes.
He reads:
Our world shrivels with expedited dehydration.
It goes twirling, a zombified crag
ghosting its previous rounds.
The ulcerations of night churn through the dark,
the hot white milk of their megaton lava
chewing through our blindfold atmosphere,

signal fading between

the concrete stalks of the skyline.

Atlas Shrugged Because He Didn't Give a Shit

A proud to do I have to pay and pay you 
Oh god yes.
Any young actresses in the plane, I'm riding the coke train
YEAH BITCH GET ON board
call me just cause I'm bros with Willem Dafoe
Greetings from in a similar note, I'll FUCK ANYTHING
Boom snick boom

 

I was the best Man
I was a discount.
I've tried nothing good
A proud member of the idle
A proud member of the question
I was treasonous to the American Machine. Soldier boys, food, patriotic air, good
Hell of the American slow death.
Greatest place on playground equipment.
Extending the Bush tax cuts would add nearly $4 trillion to the land of friends
Often in actual money
My Dinner With the sidewalk yesterday
“to get paid
You gotta have a bank?"

Just spent the debt by 2020, and hundreds on the ol' ultraviolence
I've tried nothing and raping bitches and it's good
don't even have A selfpitying way
the FUCK is a black, Jewish, antiwar socialist.
i'm tryin' to fund the 3rd 'Atlas Shrugged' movie.
Feels more Slovenia in here, and May be Daniel Stern will show up.
Aim your contributions directly to a Chase Bank account
Boom snick boom

 
I was sufficiently dead I was born too?
Flying into my Mom, Karen Pierson
Camera dreams come true
That girl in particular enhanced the reality

No man shall make it
Trees are alive all over
I will get the memo on this

 

This is the only discount. You.
Customer I barely know

 

Twisted Bitches of NylKoorb

I wish it were now.

The unblemished day gallops through

Every seam. A guiltless day. 
Automated catering of the clouds,

Creampuffs carted in from obscurity.

Busboy, give the yellow seat a quick brush with your warm rag.

Spend your sweet time with the city, 
the careful orchestration of cabs running down like bows the long taut catgut strings of the avenues,

The old shouldered skyscrapers threadworn by interplanetary rubbing,

The stout mangers and stalls rank and file down the village’s streets, grid pattern

like a mind backtracking 
lost synapses trying to cohere.

The sun dons like a crown. It is the day of coronation.

The Butcher walks by in a clean leather apron.

Sit and eat. It is all being prepared. 

It’s the everyday streetscape, the reconvening screen of spring.

There is no great project but to survive

And so we are barely holding on, this city smuggling every one of us

In its decorously impromptu ways. 
We’re doing our time in the greatest city in the world.

A heart pitted out by ambivalence milks 
a puny beat,

Strung out on a vein 
along the long tile corridor btwn the 6^th and 7^th avenue lines,

the corridor a kiln that keeps its heat, bakes its transgessors.

He’s not schizophrenic he just sublets his personality sometimes.

His house is a house with many roommates.

His mild poem obstructs the advertisement’s leering yellow

“Twisted Bitches of NYLKOORB!”

(There’s not an ounce of unannotated surface in any of these five boroughs.)

The Cockroach Man is quite the skilled conversationalist when it comes to talking

To himself. “I will boost your motherfucking self,” one of him says.

“Act like the man on Sunday,” answers the other.

On one ear a gold earring reading “Love”
The other “Disaster”.

I am jolted into spasmodic laughter. My sympathies lie with him, and

With the cup of ice sweating into the bicycle’s

Icebox. The first salty carmel cone of the season struts by

And the curtains are drawn back

On the long striding legs of the secretaries.
Kept high in a tower in the middle of town

A woman I know with a head like a radish, exquisite.

I’ll bet there was much ceremony

when she emerged like a naiad 20 years back, the daughter of a sea-king, rising

On a hydraulic shell, a divine iteration from its toothless enamel mouth.

A man alone eventually evolves into an assassin, 
the street a shooting gallery and everyone a target. 
“It is what it is” one of the voices says, the one

In the leather pillbox hat. The other does not reply.
It doesn't say

“It isn’t what it isn’t” which may be

closer to the truth.

Reasons For Living - March 2014

Plays
Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) - Will Eno
Love and Information - Caryl Churchill, NYTW. James McDonald, dir.
Ten Minute Plays at Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater
The Christians - Lucas Hnath, Humana Festival, Actors' Theatre of Louisville

Poetry
North - Seamus Heaney
Friends You Drank Some Darkness - 3 Swedish Poets - Robert Bly, Ed.

TV Shows
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee - Jerry Seinfeld
Portlandia

Novels
The Names - Don DeLillo
Americana - Don DeLillo
The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

Movies
The Wheel of Time - Werner Herzog
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga - Werner Herzog
Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun - Werner Herzog
Vegucated 
Brokeback Mountain - Ang Lee

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.

Following My Nose

The familiar complaints, the cozy ones.
Ambling through the hedges of grievance.
I never know what I'm feeling at any one time.
Usually more of the same. Bragging my inadequacies.

Winter is coughed from the addled coalsmoke sky.
Chimneys chugging ash. Clumps of duress.
Blake's choir of children lying in a heap.
Noontime streetlamps regaled in holly and poinsettia.

A pubic moss enters from the vacant lot, cautiously.
The homeless have been scraped from under the bridge.
Geese call and flee. The snow is flakes of ash,
the sun finally burnt itself down.

Disused meanings are flushed. A carefully wrought
vocabulary we have disabused ourselves of.
Crumbling monologue.
A new grammar forms. Light and Motion dances

from the screen. A panoptican of laughs and serenades.
Sometimes there is a magazine no one has a
subscription to. It is the digest of a human heart
dressed to the nines in thorns and flame.

Reasons For Living - February 2014

Novels
Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner
Shoplifting From American Apparel - Tao Lin
How Should a Person Be - Sheila Heti

Movies
Nebraska
Minnie and Moskowitz
The Grapes of Wrath
The Squid and the Whale

Plays
Intermission, The Flu Season, Tragedy: A Tragedy - Will Eno
Orson's Shadow - Austin Pendleton
The Revisionist - Jesse Eisenberg
America Hurrah - Jean-Claude van Itallie

Poetry
Begging for It - Alex Dimitrov
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart - anth. compiled by Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade