Here you are.
- Lisbon 6
Watering Hole
I.
I had written it down again,
written down the line to put me in last place.
No more do I get to try. No more will I try.
Not like I caught it from you, womb cauldron.
Fun to cross that off the cross.Thanks a lot, says womb cauldron, sarcastically.
Piping in hot sounds of love to the unadorned,
By a warm pool on a wide white plain of dust mostly,
Odd hills make way for a predator—the birds are in office overhead.That sounds about right, how I felt you vindicated.
Which one is that? A fox.
I palm the oily insides of my thighs,
God, how long have I had to pee?
The answer would be relief enough to let me die.While I’m only an outlaw—this pain in my eyes is ripping,
Yes ripping—you may not injure my sensitive injured boy.
I’m only protecting my son, in a way,
Even if he’s no less a murderer than I.What’s that they say about how fine you must be,
To be a man? I look down, it’s starting to stink in steam colors;
I’m not getting any better,
But I’m in the sun; what goddamn use is it crying?
Watch where you pass, hue shaped sparks.
Watch where the oil burn scars. You suck.Watchfires light my oily thighs.
Why stop there, guys?
Don’t you want to gut my sinus cavities?
That stalactite of my nose is dribbling softwhiskey.The loam—sand, silt, clay—on your sandals,
Calves, and where they ripped open your finger nails is a warm salve,
But, excuse me, I’ve made it to the watering hole.I’m gushing blood by this desert bottleneck, head of the lion line.
Coughs rattle my soon bleaching bones.II.
Then, my grandfather says in a soft, kind voice,
Odd genitals marked the surface of the earth,
A piping hot mucus plain. I had sucked out
My own brother’s vocal cords, and wiped them dry
with a dry towelette. Today, in this year,
we brake the neck of sound before we wipe wipe wipe.A cage door flaps open and closed, again,
but the buzz horn always fades.You tramp! says the smallest of us.
Somewhere else, the old man continues, I wouldn’t be here,
but here I am! Our gasps are penetrable only some months, you know?As if to underline his point,
Hot air pushes out a hole in the neighbor,
And we clap as the dying sigh overwhelms our wee ears.The new wind pushes the bushes, and rattles a few seeds
in my eyes where they might make root
but my ducts are dry and drainage poor tonight.
I’m just a child, but I have a family man’s pride.Why haven’t you been dead yet, it’s a gas, says the eldest child.
I’m the kind of guy that dies in the watering hole, spoiling it for
Everybeast. Picked clean doesn’t even begin to describe
how I must appear to birds like these. And senses
wash clean my weakling dream. You say this is Egypt,
but I can’t see beyond the idea of my lard ass.The antique hacks his last. A cough lickering on his lips,
his daughters line his eyes in pylons.
I bake his lipcakes in cough ovens, while
doughy chocolate smokestacks trail out to
inform the others of his intention to pass.We take turns poking his raw softwhiskey nose,
his shanterns are dry with flies, and see what the crotched
blind ol’ stopgapherd can do about it. Nothing.Swouncing the dilligentsia away with his battering ram of a hand,
he pukes out his last lines in his old tongues: Pulp, I trapped sound, I coaxed sin out. O my dirty woundery. Face me. Me ply. Me feud for!I caught the drift of what was his whirring rattle, and lit the saint’s body.
When I turned, I saw lines of men, in jackets cut from canvas.
One turned his eyes on me, and there I saw what I wanted—delirium.
Proudly embraced, our fingers crossed for more.What I hear, that I have a spirit, that it’s dark and makes men fear,
Is that the stuff you’ve been saying? It makes you small, signs you off the list.
It’s not that I don’t feel castrated, honey pies,
But another greater gash is higher, and begins to smell if you let it.
- NW Chocolate Festival 1.0 is live
Check it out.
- Morning Pie
Here’s a song I made a few days ago; it’s less inscrutable than it could be, and more playful. Someone should add drums to it.
- This morning choose work/ over sleep
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- Effing
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- Lisbon 4
“And once
The city is complete
Each night,
They lift
Off”My bound mind is a vegetable on its own,
cold,
And like a sun dried skull in a buzzard’s belly,
Shivers under its warm coat of mold,
Even as we conspire the prospect of cooking it anyway.The possibility that it can’t make it through to spring
Without some new knife skinning it of its hide
Is hard to bear, even for a seedpod drying and yet unscattering,
For some reason too hard to not cut gem fruit love.But you picked it up anyway,
Brushed off half its slough,
Said,
“This one’s tired today,”
And found a brewer who’d take the pomace.This was when things really turned around for us.
We crafted a practical nozzle, and with the new distillation
Blasted our limbs free of eschar.
Sand down my hipbones.
Scientists will cast the powder into a cheekbone for you.Now, as your mouth narrows to a purse, the tube of your throat extends.
You sing higher; the audience giggles.
You make a funny sound forever; the audience
And you can choke together.
We dip in a narrow vat of chewed and spat merriment.
Together, at least, we’ll keep it warm for another hour, until you draw the bath again.Pay attention, though, you’re not really done learning from this drunk.
Where once only possibility shone,
the limning force pulls away
And boxes of sandbags for weighing up the flying monks
Become the centerfold, the business end, and the money shot.
- Lisbon 3
Twin Billions
Close all the windows, nail them closed.
Friendly, though we be, we can kill on command.
Though we be friendly, we can kill the commander at the drop of a hat.
We can drop the commander off at daycare.Or care for and cradle him in a shawl wrapped around the shoulders of giants,
On which we stand, half of us raking the buffalo sauce off our frozen bags of angel wings,
half of us shaking spear tails, batting our talons for eyelashes.In our ancestors’ ears we scream commands,
while the commander sleeps idly sucking pap,
gasping for air in their manifold love handles,
grasping for doughy flesh that pulls out in disturbing tufts like our hair.Wrapped in black taffeta (to temporarily blind us with our warm reflections)
the baby man is fevered beyond a popular grove,
to where a clearing comes to rest his bones.
There we are gathered here today, next to him and beside ourselves,
beyond all the sadness we’ve ever known.
I, 17 in strapless dress and pushup bra, pair my eyes
(through the steam that pours out of them), to see you,
on pumps and in love with some sticks and stones, singing:
Sunshine, on my shoulders, gives me cancer.
Sunshine, in my eyes, can make me blind.
Constructed for war, your playhouse crumbles
under the weight of its unity. A wholeness for breaking bones.
Your screams are ignored, can never hurt me.“Bake me a cake
As fast as you can,”
We chant.
We get what we order,
And are withered.Your sister was quaint, but she too hadn’t had enough movement to solidify.
She moved in a lump. When we sat her straight to read to her,
her back would break like an icicle falling four stories.
Rather than take the risk, she plummeted sideways into her favorite fantasy:
Mark my words, Sunday will surprise you, and after that, doom.Of course if you watch all that footage, its happening will
take up in your head and play house with your finest china.
So I’m told, and to act as a self-censor I must cook for myself.
Baked for the freezer, however, our muffins taste burnt.
With some frosting, they become carbon cupcakes.
So I washed my saucer, it was on fire.I got pierced in the gut with a steeple spire.
Sunday loving brought me toast and brandy,
While the lonely chef directory warmed the
Fireplace to an empty room.We reached the limits of the sun.
Now fire burning in a chamber underground pulls
Its oxygen from the telephone,
singing “Phone tag, phone tag.”
Welcome to the beginning of the rest and all that.
- Lisbon 2
“Not a right angle in the ocean.”
Five minutes behind the final day,
you see, of a new silo opening its roof,
the now-blind guests baled in hay on the first floor
meet their maker, in the market.We unleash the Dogs, they are small
and fetid after tea with the Pigs,
And O the wrenches we have to toss
to get them off our legs.
For their humping is another, purer song,
Which if we listened would seem not unlike
One-upmanship. They have it down,
so to speak, and innovate wildly through the air.Were we following the same orders,
Were our possession complete,
Were our occupation over,
When we saw each other again
Would we disregard what hadn’t happened,
And commence with the making so?In pre-occupation France, wasn’t it grand
How father occupied father,
baroness possessed baroness?
Even a signal that our smoke
Breaks in half hours before dawn
Seemed long enough was too quiet,
Baking sooty loaves,
Sheets of butter cuspsAnd ill apostrophized to thee.
Some tumble, others grace, but most
Plod visibly neverward.
That’s a ship I’ve never been on, but one
I’m all too familiar with.
I wrote the plans.
I printed my name,
then signed your life away.
And what a deal.
Get me your femme,
I’d like to have words with her.Plains away a boy and his
Plains away a boy
Plains away a boy and his
But not to sing all day
- Lisbon 1
Tearing up the atmosphere, laying low in the endpoint place.
Watch if and only if it comes to rest here,
If and only if the size is light enough to heft.
We worry, together and openly, what if the weather breaks?Outside, albino berries grow from the back of a rooted tree.
Six fine crevices work down its wide sides,
Where we put our fingers to grip the lame being, mutely free,
From its wind dried shakes. Apples litter other grounds,But here no refuse yet prefaces a turn of tides.
I’d like to split it down the middle.
I’d take my rough hewn static axe,
And break that weakling’s skin, skinny arms, and muckUp its face with tar, black over the worms.
We talk like we don’t, but it’s what we want,
And in warm strains of storms, talking is effective as
Any other lightening. Get these words out! you quiver,Under umbrella. (Fun to see how the shaking irritates
The skin against it’s shells, how the it speeds up
Under pressure to be a shallow blur, wiped scarified
By the count of 3) We haven’t even started beforeSomething, the white berried hulk, sheds its skin in
Shafts, which drift empty upward (we’re upside now, downhung
From our feet from a rope from his branches)
And mingle with the grassy mud above.Look, the summer storm is black;
Tornado’s coming back.
Deep staring down with synthetic gasp,
A mere cloud uproots our unholy worm.The trunk is shuddered by applausing air.
Thunder’s all, my eyes are so far gongs,
And to the final, sweet crack of its lasting branch,
My hanger, “In the air,” I sigh, up there.With a tightening sigh, a bereaved compliance
To the bereft song of order, I swing low in the storm.
With you by, the fruiting albino upends itself.
Only, this time, some windows are broken.
