Two Months of Random Writing...

Nothing worse than the itching urge to write so bad that it is not an interest
but a piercing flaming jagged rusty raw razor-edged desire,
an unyielding compulsion whose violation risks your very sanity;
no longer a want but a physical necessity;
when it is a wild animal, visceral and savage, all sharp fangs and claws,
teeth and tendons and straining sinew slashing and gnashing and smashing
against the prison bars of your rib cage...

and you have writers block;
my pen and keypad emitting nothing but a
weak limp drizzle of wasted words and uninspired ideas
hobbling across the page held up by cheap cliche crutches.

When the entire time all I can imagine
is sinking a fountain pen into my outstretched and tied off arm
and depressing the plunger to fill my veins with the ink and words that beat
and beat and beat in my heart till
I’m completely infused-

then I would lift up on that pens pump
and fill its empty chamber like a loaded gun
with the infiltrated red ink of my blood
and use it to write words like ego piercing bullets
to fire into minds and penetrate thoughts leaving
inspired exit wounds of wonder…

I want to craft and create pages on whom hang
the memory of time and the secrets of life,
filled with the magical moments of mundane beauty
that weld together each days passing,
those unmarked meters that tick between seconds
as unaware we wander through life
from home to work, to bed and back, waiting and
waiting for what we don’t know but
something anything to remind us that there is more…

letters like neighbors talking on patios
over fences on sunny summer Sundays, 
words laid out together building strong
sentences like we used to build communities, communities
connecting into paragraphs of disseminated hope and prosperity
that make up the page turning foundations of our storied cities,
and pages of cities, made of paragraphs,
made of sentences and words and letters all together
in an expansive book of our best selves
that would be called The Great American novel.

But we all face writers block,
locked away from each other and the punctuating
connections that make our lives make full-stop sense
so we run on in circles of masturbatory
misappropriations confusing dollars with worth
selling our souls for cents running always ever faster
just to stay in the same income brackets
too distracted to notice that who we once knew as neighbors
we now just keep up with as the Joneses.

But if we could rediscover how our livelihoods
are as dependent on each other as clauses, then maybe
we could begin to craft the right words required
by putting our interests and investments back into our neighborhoods
so empathy and understanding would replace envy and self-interest
and together we could make the greatest book ever written.

The only destiny that is inevitable is the one we don’t want.
The only future that’s certain is joining together or falling apart.
We must recognize that we are the authors of our fate
and what is needed will remain unwritten
if don’t put action behind intention
and put our pens to the page.

These two sides of our nature are like continental plates
colliding they slide then stick as the pressure and power

of unimaginable masses meeting and moving us
towards the building finality of their fusion finally forcing
a ripping bending breaking eruption and explosion
of decisions that threaten to  mend
or shatter the fabric of society itself.

...there are no fault lines here.
The faults lie within us all.

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

Fingers like loose lips spilling hidden half-truths,
this is not me; this poem is a lie.
Oz the embodied mediocre writer and poet is
not the same as the man behind the microphone curtain.

This is a deception, like any performance;
practiced pauses and punctuating “perchances”
imitated inflection and intonations filled with
implications of imbued importance,
this is not my voice.

If the man who sat in that seat said and spoke
in such a manner, he would have no friends.
This poem is a lie.

My speaking in not filled with fancy or forced metaphors.
I do not frequently use the same excessive amount
of multisyllabic words whose meaning was only made manifest to me
with a rhyming guide, thesaurus, and a dictionary.

This moment may be the longest I’ve gone all week
meaning less than five measly minutes, without saying
like or um. And I didn’t even make it the full five minutes.
This poem is a lie.

The false confident front that you are facing
is a forced fiction formed to fake feelings
to fight the intimidating inner anxiety that has been
instigating slathers of sweat and the sensation of a
sick and sour stomach.

Alliterative prose arranged in neat rows
nestled nuggets of nice sounding nouns and
verbs all vying and vexed in this vacuum of time
for your attention are the antithesis of how
I actually write.
This poem is a lie.

I am not the calm clean cut compassionate caring
creature you see standing before you,
I am not the nice guy or nerdy neighbor I seem
I am not the sober smiling person speaking
into the microphone.

I am a bastard. A drunk jerk off jack off, a
jaded jester out of jokes. A wanton waste,
a womanizing weasel, a whimpering wise ass
all worked up and whacking of to his own washed out
washed up wasted life of words.

This poem is a lie.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Slip-shod and slack jawed words tip toe and trip
     tying themselves up trying to traipse across a tipsy page



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

I am a fucked up person,
faded, faithless and fickle,
frozen hearted bleeding icicle tears
of whiskey and women and wonder;
wandering a world
that feels like a wonderful
emotional wasteland.

With cigarette dangling dead dreams and
ash wishes for what, for a love I don’t dare?
For a future or fate that has ass fucked me
with my own goddamned goals?

What promised prison is this passionless life
of painful pursuits and hedonistic pleasures?
Why do I betray those who depend most upon
this damaged individual? What damned demons and
destructive ends do I dare desire I can escape with
my escapades of enlightened unenlightenment?

I dread dreaming because hope is hell, hollow,
half-hearted, and hungry to swallow the desires
and drives that drag me down into defilement.

What damns me is myself, my inescapable image,
my face’s freckles and teeth flashing back in a
sadistic sarcastic smile telling taunting tall tales
that I can or could ever be liked, love,

or be loved.

I am a bastard. I am a bat-shit buffoon blundering
my way from saloon to saloon, slutting
through beds and bordellos and bodices and belladonnas
with all the nimbleness of a nightcap of nightshade.

I lick my emotional wounds with shots of foreboding,
drown depression in depressants and dealers;
the broken breaking man who thinks any problem he
cannot drink or fuck or dodge or drug his way out of
is not his problem at all.
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Heartbroken with desire for a dream

She, my real or imagined perfect counterpart.
And because of her perfect imperfection,

We can never be.

I cannot pull her down from the stars
cannot pin her to cardboard or press her between pages

Preservation is death. We cannot be anything more

than a shared distant dream.  Anything else
would be sacrificing everything it is

that makes her,

Her.

I’ve heard that love isn’t holding on,

Love is letting go. Like a bird, love may return,

But it will never stay. Love is wild, like her,

The world too big and begging her to be explored,
even the largest of hearts cannot hope to contain

Such a beautiful beast.

Love is loss, life is suffering;
The moment may be fleeting,
but at least it’s memory is something

I can hope to hold onto forever.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wound up old wounds weeping

Heavy is head the wears the heart as its crown

Dreams dashed and drowned by their own deep desires

A life filled with paradox and impossible

Inescapable contradictions;
we always kill the things we love.

My banality hides a broken-

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

Love is a toxic emotion

it eats, an acid stripping the bonds
of independence, dissolving identity

We are unable to reconcile

Our hearts with ourselves

Our conflicted and confused ideas and egos
emotions which strangle the unbound

Beauty we see

you cannot frame a mountain range,

Nor lock tiger in a zoo’s cage

Without something priceless being lost

Wolves become dogs,

Domesticated dependable
dependent. Shadows of their
wild former selves.

One can be admired outside, one possessed in the house,
but each is incapable of surviving,

of being, as they are

Were they to trade places with the other.

--------------------------------------
Emotional thoughts pushing feelings
like explosive pistons, overwhelming
impulses racing in response, overreacting
to minor incidences.

All taken away with a lubricating puff
that stops the friction and the slows down
and puts distance between you and the issues
allowing thoughts to emerge;

Rationality preserved
_______________________________________

Shifting seasons as snow melt and cold
spring suns give way to warmth.
Tulips taking over evergreens as lush
life buds forth from once bare branches.
The thermometer’s mercury hands reach out
grabbing desperate grasping gasping
souls and spirits who, rising,
revel in each measured degree
of its slow ascension to summer.

___________________________________________________

“Shit son,” said Joseph, whose
next unpacked phrase suggested,
now’days, all our words heard
can’t hardly help cut through the
contemporary grammar of our increasingly
digital disconnection from meaningful discourse;
all said with a single, resounding, sighed syllable,
“F’ck.”

Seeking sandy shores shaded with the
shadows of palm fronds and freckled with
shells whose sounds echo the sea, siren’s
songs searching for a return, calling-
longing, for the cradle of their creation.
_____________________________________________________

Coconut dreams and tropical drinks;
delirium drifting across continents
chasing eternal summer suns-

Equatorial rains and warm waters
clear blue colored waves washing
against reefs and rocks with
fish and crabs like rainbow spots-

geckos grasping at ceilings
seeking sustenance watching over
sleeping shapes whose unseeing
eyes bask in the twilight of paradise.
_______________________________________________

Rising sun at dawn set against the clear sky
of the horizon like a blazing blue eye
opening up to all the promise and
possibility of a new day.

Heavy sighs of hope

and worry and wonder
and worry and excitement
and worry
and worry,

Joy and jangled
jumpy nerves fraught
and full with feeling
wounded and weary and
hurt and hopeful and healing,
heaving my stuck self forward
struck and stuttering and straining
sorrow and joy fighting for
freedom revealing my
hidden heart reveling
in tomorrow trapped
in today until
tomorrow or
the next day,
or…

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

she arrives, that sprite
and I’m feeling
I’m falling
I’m giddy as anticipations
fingers tap on my nerves
and tug at my insides

I’m scared and excited
braced for hope or hurt,

Searching for my faltering
false confidence that evaporates
before my imagination of her
leaving my vulnerability
bare and exposed
---------------------------------

Life: A sick hilarious sad spectacular unending all-too-brief depressing fucked-up fabulous random fated heartbreaking heavenly tumultuous tragic magical mundane experience we live love and somehow still take for granted each and every day.

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

Beaten and broken by our best intentions,
Choked by our choices, defeated by our dreams;

We walk into our traps, fall upon our own
swords and spears, pierced by the very tips we shaped
and shaved and sharpened.
------------------------------------------------

I am the unpublished author of unread un-
written words whose only lifeline is hope;
drowning in a sea of decisions that  
rope we desperately cast and clasp
guiding us through time and tragedy;
knotted grabbing and grasping  
as all around we are buffered and
blindsided by the fraught and fickle
winds of faithless fate.
Who we coil and cling to climbing
and clawing hand-over-hand hoisting
ourselves from darkness and despair.

It leads me onwards upwards forwards towards some
seemingly inevitable improved unknown ending…

…where I am finally found fallen
off the tapering tip of my own bare broken
breaking branch on this blooming tree of life,
strange fruit slowly swaying hanging hung
by the noose I never knew I was making.

Intolerance

Heart half-hung and feeling knocked
about and abandoned by the locked
lips and whispered words of shocked
belief at the audacity of my admonishment;

that tolerance is not a virtue.

You see, tolerance begs the subsumption
of ideas and beliefs and all the lower-
case-t's that we have embraced as
upper-case-T's to prevent the occasional
inescapable reality of offense. But...

this is a lower-case-truth.

Because the inherent inhumanity of relativism
is equaled by the inhumanity of any establishing
-ism that takes and breaks off and stakes out 
some who burn and stake the always outside 
other which is a mistaken claim of sake

-redness.

We make and forge sabers' whose rattles
take lives and words that would could break
these brittle false nationalistic bonds that 
we forged and create plows that could 
have fed the herds but whose those
now unheard words...


...are lost...

because the stock prices seen by corporate
boards could increase if only the greedy
hordes would be whores for the rampant
marketing wars that perpetuate the idea
that the color and origin of foreign borns
defined by our straight white-collard
evangelical lords are equal;

in every way...
but the one that really fucking matters.

Because equality is not a cultural norm 
or a truth discovered on our own foreign
shores but a way of existing without fear from
being seen as being anything outside of your
own ability, but equality of opportunity is a
dream when we exists in cultures and economic
conditions that define what and how and 
where are the limits

of our own fucking dreams.

That we view each other differently for skin 
color or the gender of our chosen lover or
the way we conform to the conventions of
culture and success as defined by the height
your portfolio grows to lift you into upscale
high rises and homes and we surmise that these 
prizes are both earned and divinely granted cons
-ignments because dollars aren't racist or sexist 
or phobic just tools used to repress those that 
we don't want to own them.

And that is why tolerance to me is such a
bullshit phrase because it asked we be tolerant
of the world's inhuman aims; it asks us to respect
as a difference of opinion discrimination, repression,
and dysfunctional acculturation in the name of not 
offending our friends and slave masters as Jim Crow 
laws continue to be daily made and enacted and all 
of us who are regularly impacted by these policies of 
breaking the broken huddled masses to grind down 
our communal bones with legal infractions while
ignoring the need for more progressive taxes
imprisoning those who heed any call for action
while waxing the morality or their immoral factions
who impose bastardized christian regulations,
ignoring the science that that should be forming 
the basis of our decisions by defunding the agents
charged to protect those in vulnerable places
and turning this nation we see as an oasis into
a desert mirage of wealthy masturbatory
actualization.

...or, simply, because oppression, injustice, 
and inhumanity are capital truths; and there 
is never -any- justification for their tolerance.

Bloody Someday

It was someday after Saturday
when we would rise and gather
with pressed dress
to make the drive to the mega
mall-church out in the dry hills
among the dilapidated dwellings
that spread out towards the east.

Someday; I would dream
doodling on benches and
pews as the droning cadence
swelled and fell with the
regular tempo of admonishing
and adorating devotion.

Somedays' signalled the
silent commandments of
sit; stand; sing; sit; stand; shake
sit; listen; stand; sing; leave
that narrated with metronomic
regularity the arch of my
sacrilegious boredom.

Someday, at 16, I drove
seperate and never arrived.
Playing hookie with god
became my first act of
creation; I began, reborn
on the day he rested and
I discovered the truth of
my greatest nagging fear:

in all the dark nights of
prayer and reading and
worship, the silence I
heard was not the
distance of my own
original sin echoing back,
but the freedom of
total nothingness
waiting
for me to hear its call.

Someday, I anwsered.
And ran away and towards
the nothingness that had
hid behind the wizards curtain
and ripping that strange and
foreign cloth, embroidered
with guilt and shame and
fear in the color of blood
and called true love and
turned it into a cape that
I wore and defiled and
desecrated with all the
pride that wearing a cape
in public, in school, at home,
brings.

Someday, the cloth may
fade and grow bare, as
will I.
Someday. But not today.

Toast and Tree Story: Holiday Edition

My Toast

When I say 'Merry Kristmas'
let's raise a glass 
and give a cheer,
for the loved ones 
who are with us
and those that aren't
that we hold dear;
thank you Deb and Steve, 
Don and Patti,
for the gift of life. 
Now merry Kristmas 
to all, and to all, 
a good night!

Tree Tradition!

Twas four days before Kristmas,
When all through our place,
Not a creature was stirring,
Except Perry in his cage;
Our socks had been flung
Recklessly on the floor
While Cat slept in bed
And next to her I snored.

When out in the living room
There arose such a smell,
We were startled awake
By the waft of pine and tinsel!
We ran out the room,
We slid down the hall,
And before us was a tree
Nearly seven feet tall!

Black Santa had come!
Our Kristmas was saved!
And though he was gone,
Towards the window we still waved.
For each year together,
(this time makes two; score!)
We would wake-up to find
A Kristmas tree on our floor!

I feel bad for Santa,
Because somehow each year
Without cookies or milk
He still brings us cheer;
And no goodies out for Santa
Really feels like a cheat,
Since each time this happens
Cat gives me a morning "treat."

Newton School, Connecticut; Anytown, USA

There are no words
To describe the screams of children.
When horror after horror
Tumbles down the newspaper pages
Ink running like blood
And the nightmare of guns and violence
Continues unabated.

How many mothers, children,
Fathers, sons, daughters, friends, lovers
Must we continue to lose
To the unending madness of madness?
Whose rights are we
Preserving when the most vulnerable
Remain unprotected?

Do we arm every student
Every teacher, administrator, parent?
Should bullets replace candy
When an answer is correctly given in class?
Is the answer to
The fear of the atomic bomb; Pakistan, Iran, Syria,
To give one to every country?

How many tears
Will be enough to cleanse ourselves
Of the almost daily
Horrors that we enable and support
With our silence?
How many schools and malls and parks
Must we scrub
With bleach and ammonia and scalding water
To erase the
rust colored stains from our memories?

And how long till
We forget? How many days or weeks
Will pass before
The ritual of death, like a biblical plague
Returns to take
Our first, second, third, fourth born
Children away again?
How much longer
Can we continue to pay the cost
Of inaction?
How much longer will we be greeted
With the acrid
Smoke, the loud pops, and the sounds
And images of bodies
Laying like so many ragdolls among the debris?

There are no words
To describe the screams of children.
But in America
We have heard their sound so many times now
Words are no longer needed.

Rhyme Of The Thieving Bum

Walking down the street strolled I with
Three good friends, for food and rum!
When from the nearby dumpster
Came ‘round the ghastly hobo bum.

The hobo caught my arm and held me
With his only eye, a bloodshot lens;
The restaurant’s doors were open wide
and onward continued my friends.

The eye whose gaze did pierced my soul
And filled my spirit with dread.
His voice then rasped, like scraping coals,
And this is what he said;

Dinner-guest, your friends have left,
While your wallet and phone remains.
For drugs or rum, for food or fun
I wish not to anymore abstain!

Once I was a handsome man
With a closet filled with clothes.
I ate fine steaks with high class dames
Till my house the bank foreclosed.

On the street, nothing now to eat,
It was either steal or starve.
So the first man who came down
The unlit lane I intended to carve.

In sank the blade, out the wallet came
But then his face to me turned-
And I saw the white square on his collar bare,
And it was with horror that I learned!

The priest was dead, on the street he bled
And the stain my hands did hold
Could not be washed, I felt a cross
Now weighing down my soul.

Into the blackened depths I sank
Of darkness and of woe.
The chill of fright and mortal fear
Turned my blood to snow.

I could not eat, I could not drink
I could not get warm.
Even on the sunny days
I felt a winter storm.

Woe then when a spirit came
When I should by now have died.
A frightful sprite whose hateful delight
I was expected to provide.

On my back, this demon rode
And oh, the drugs, it made me indulge
And woe, for more, the truckers
I have blown, and more so, the beatings
That broke my bones, and as the diseases
Began to show, the final price and
Lasting toll;

My eye was asked in trade to be
Left alone from the terrible fiend!
The deal struck, the penance priced,
The demon flew and with him my sight.

One eye remained, but I could see
Why the evil spirits had befallen me.
A lesson learned, a moral taught
And now I will be able to change my lot.

But, bum, I interjected quick,
Your robbing me, so what was fixed?
His blood-shoot eye quickly spun around
And held my tongue from further sound.

After this time, I will be done
But before I change I want a little fun.
Once I have gotten high again
I’m sure I can quit, with no problem.

And before I could make any reply
I saw the knife, for it was in my eye!
I felt my wallet and phone removed
Shuffling off he left me there unmoved.

I head the clamor of my friends,
Coming quickly from the restaurant.
And as I bled out where I lay,
I saw a seraph turned away.

Beckoning me, I floated near
As below an ambulance did appear.
The screeching brakes, the flashing lights,
I turned away and walked towards the white.

And as I left this mortal coil,
A sound from beneath me followed.
The thieving homeless hobo bum was
Nearby, robbing another person.

The Best Part Of Waking Up Is... *sigh*; Repeat

Wake up before dawn.
Contacts.
Fridge;
blueberries, raspberries, blackberries.
Plain salad.

Dress.
Coffee/cigarette(s)
Books wrapped in backpack.
Zip and serve.

Keys, phone, wallet…
Guilt about using
Ziploc bags for lunch.
Reuse yesterday’s;
renewed sense of moral
superiority.

1 banana
1 carrot
3-5 broccoli florets
3 baby bell’s
1 baby cucumber
Grapes, 1 bunch
3 tangerines or
Tangelos or
any citrus, season depending

1 apple
1 pear
Handful green beans
Misc. fruit/vegetable,
for kicks,

Zip.
Mouthful juice.
Dream of not having to
Limit self to one gulp per meal.

Hate calories.
Self.
Check mirror. Re-
discover love.
Leave.
Realize still forgot ______.
(______ varies daily)

Insert key.
Turn; loose fan belt
Screams, angry
at being so rudely
woken.
Dawn.

Reverse; gas,
brake.
Onward
on-ramp
*sigh*

Cola

"My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola"
I overheard the drunk man say
while being carried by his friend,
or partner, or lover,
away from the bar.

Their happy campy laughter
bouncing off the city with
the throbbing beat and bass of
dance music as each song is
mixed and blurred and looped

forming an endless carbonated
stream of sounds and sexualities
bodies and identities bubbling up
and carousing down the dingy and
dilapidated downtown district.

The effervescent sticky-sweet
smell of ribald revelry condenses
against the cold night air as
friends and lovers stream, beading
and coalescing against the pane
of being alone.

Love, or lust, or friendship, or
loneliness like an accident
striking blindly and meaninglessly
startling and sudden and shocking
and banal as a shattered glass.

Somewhere else on this night
in this city another man may be
being clutched or carried confused
and calling out desperately
desiring a drink of Pepsi
or Coke.

Frogs

Next to a small patch of grass
the bass vibrato emerging hides
a small tree frog somewhere within.

I see, on Facebook, people I once knew
now the moon-shaped faces of strangers
married, with children, praising god.

I hear my parent's voices when I call
slower, different, filling with the pauses
and shuffling cadence of time.

I return to the grass, the cool
crisp sun of the desert's early winter.
There is no sound but the distant hiss

a far off sprinkler, whose cool waters
must have flowed down, and for a brief
moment breathed life into this little world.

Automatic Flushing Toilets


I bid my time.
Wave after wave comes crackling
invisibly towards me.
Patiently I wait
until the ruins glow with life,
first one...
two...
three... almost there...
waving frantically, I catch them;
four!
Four bars! My weapon glows
with life and power
as it downloads the newest articles to read.
Ready, my quest begins.

Walking the eternal hallways
lined by the sirens and succubi
of privatized corporate hell;
brandishing my smile like a sword,
slicing through the managers and minutia
that pulls at me from all sides.

The journey is long, but
the first part of my quest is over.
I enter the realm of the dragon.
The sounds of running water surrounding me
in the alabaster chambers; I enter
while the beast slumbers.

Finding its den, I approach, gently,
to place the veil over its unblinking
single red eye.
If it awakes, all is lost.
I settle down, my victory assured, the beast blinded,
and begin to read.

Minutes, hours, days could be passing
in this magical land where time has no meaning.
Obsessed; enthralled; I must summon
every ounce of my strength
my courage,
to pull myself away.

But as I stand, the veil rustles, and the dragon wakes.

I roar emerges just as I leap to my feet to avoid the
plague like droplets that explode from its mouth.
As one lands upon me, burning the skin it touches,
I am thrown back, and in my blunder,
the weapon slips from my grasp.

Legs bound together by a spell I stumble
in pain and confusion reaching as I see the
weapon falling in slow motion towards
the dreadful mouth of the beast.

The monster lets out a final roar of victory
as the weapon slips into the evil blackness
of plague, and death, and disease
that are its twisted mouth and bowels.

I stumble, falling over myself,
bound by the spell I spill out of the beasts den;
all hope lost, the creature is victorious.
Exiting, I am overrun by the monsters
that have been waiting outside.
Until, finally, I am one of them.

My last, final, shuffling thought is haunted by
that eternal single unblinking eye
that sees every breath, every motion in its land;

...with no cell phone, how will I be able to bathroom read again...?

and the hero's journey ends,
with one less hero than it began.