tombstones and embryos

the end might be near but so might be the beginning

that i belong with my shadow

and some pray all day
i wait till 4 pm and make my first drink
i guess we prayer together at 4.

revisiting houdini

the plate moved across the counter without any human effort.
I knew it!
I knew there was magic in the world!

everyone smells like a barn at some point during their lives

they shoot us these ethnic country culture definitions.
they inject them into us from hour one in the circumcision baptism birth certificate room and that arouses a lot of suspicion in me.
i treat a man where he’s at. he’s a country himself and so that makes about 8 billion countries or however many freaking people there are on this planet and screw international mercantile cooperation. give me the potato farm and a shack in the back to get drunk before more picking in the morning when some new guy will get off the bus and he’ll have his way of pissing and his drug of choice will be the songs he sings and we’ll get drunk and the bus comes everyday.
8 billion countries.

the ten of diamonds

i’ve seen religious skirts and leather pants and I love McDonalds coffee and all this just sort of happened and it must be magic and we’re gonna find a four pillar porch or a green park bench and sit and chug chinese tea or portugal wine and we’ll remove our hands from our pockets and shake around and maybe we’ll walk east and west and collect cans and get enough aluminum trade in barter for some coins to get us a cigar and we’ll smoke it behind the bakery and drink what’s left of the portugal wine and we’ll think about religious skirts and leather pants and McDonalds coffee again and we’ll know that it’s magic and then the mood will change and things won’t seem so magical anymore, but we will hear of an old friend who is grey and needs a cane and never stops talking and loosens people from their grips and has lots of love to give and we’ll know it’s magic.

drag race fumes

better get going
better get going what you need to do
dance on a bar room rail
suck a skunk tit
eat a cherubim
write a manifesto
do it fast because Andy Wilkins just died and he was only 23 and renal cancer got him
and that scares me and so
i better get going,
better get going what I need to do
dance on a bar room rail
or i already said that?
like death,
always doing its same god damn thing,
snuffing us out,
did I tell you I love you?
well, I do
and the coupon clipper and lotto buyers and business high rises too.

breakfast with rimbaud

i guess it was superficial to look up your photo on the internet,
to see what you look like now,
but it was no different than my breakfast.
i didn’t eat. I injected coffee,
looking for a fix,
looking for you
and you weren’t there,
and the coffee didn’t do much either,
so i grabbed rimbaud’s “season of hell” and read a few pages and didn’t understand a damn thing, but knowing nothing smarted me, it had me feeling like a big loser, a nobody, an ignoramus, and oh so ordinary, so then i said fuck it and put the book down and downed the rest of my coffee and walked around new neighborhoods i’d never seen before and heard whistles and car honks and catcalls and “how are you my beautiful stranger?” in private bus cabins and when i arrived back home which has cobwebs and no guest room, i didn’t feel the need to read more Rimbaud…instead i thought about my upstairs neighbor. He’s retired like Rimbaud and plays tennis and i want that life too and so maybe i’ll ask him if he wants to play tennis and we can play and take a beer at Lefty’s Saloon after we play and then who knows, life might seem ok again for us in what suddenly seemed to be not Rimbaud’s “season of hell.”

i remember this from a long time ago and I guess it was love

the instant heaven of hands touching

professor confusion and a new baby

so i got to see a baby again. i like hospital cafeterias and the ice scream scoops of potatoes and the new kid is like a dog. he doesn’t have to hold it in. he pees and shits and cries when he has to and when things go wrong, he cries some more.

seeing all this newness inspired me. i walked into the community college classroom. it was a course on american literature. i wasn’t going for a degree or anything, just looking for some connection to something bigger than my self.

The professor recited poetry and i liked the confusion it inspired in me and based on the questions of the students,,,,,,,well, they sounded confused too….and so i thought how great, we could all be confused together and maybe figure it out, but I knew we would never figure it out and ultimately head out to the bars or some beer basement to at least try and we wouldn’t go so far as creating a fraternity or a brother hood, but we’d be less alone anyway and i’d have stories to tell the new baby

but don’t get me wrong, i like chicken and hamburgers

i felt kind of cruel tonight standing there and staring at a brown idaho potato boiling in water, bobbing up and down, trying to escape, desperately longing for a previous state and for a second there, i think i understood the potato because i remembered how good it looked just a few minutes earlier with its brownish pocked skin, all dry and crusty, ready for a nice rain.

i like to take my potatoes out of the suffocating bag and let them breathe and hang out and look at the bananas on top of my microwave or the white wall or maybe they don’t look at anything which wouldn’t be that bad either. i like a few minutes or days of not looking at things.

and if that’s the case, if a potato has eyes, but doesn’t look at things, then i’m like a potato because i have eyes, but i haven’t looked at a sunrise or sunset or a crushed beer can rolling in the wind in forever and i’m slowly decomposing too.