Sunday, July 31, 2011

Stolen by the painter with the lazy hands




And what is the problem with curtains?

It’s the swirling apathy of the strings
The stitches that crackle in the autumn winds
The open windows that let a bit of—

And why do you chatter so?
It’s the banging on my ankles
By the insouciant neighbor-boy next door
My shackles ripping into flesh I can’t believe I have
It’s the penguin sticker on my—

My, my, my crisp loaf of bread
Hanging off the edge of the window seal
As the dogs jump and bark at it to fall
To crunch in juicing mouths
To hollow out their spiraling—

Before the fall?
Last week, before the fall, the day before
The fall
That’s when the bottle flew through the window
“when, when , when?” I asked to a darkened dungeon
When my skin began to rot as he baked upstairs.

But when the dogs jump the juices squeeze
And when?
And when the 20 pound dark filled the room
My eyes would blot.
The painter dripped onto my face.

And when he’s done
The bread, the curtains, the dead skin—

Saturday, July 30, 2011

The items on the itinerary: Nostalgia games


The oozing black metallic.
It, spilling down my leg, attempting
To leg up left-footed and right-handed swindlers
Of holy ambrosia, or micro-soul-portals, or so-or-so;
It is my friend.

If not my friend, then the sent-er
Of my goobly-globins from age 5,7, and 13,
When I stole the sights of side breasts and silk panty hoses
That would be forgotten by other night-geared retinal toxins.

And as the black cools the ankle—
The one filled with deadened cantankerous pores—
And as the sheen reflects its coordinates—
The ones at dorm-room-lane 2 inches up-side body 3—
The gentle silence plunges the nostalgic Seuses and Corsos
In the after-life itinerary

Those fears instilled and incited in the metallic
Chortle my spine, letting the droppety spill
From the edge of a flesh patterned bone, my bone
To the ground, to the next, to the
Moment, when the, when the, when the
Howls of a December moon
Caught dangling hands and open eyes
Glittered with the after sheen image

The imago, the reproducto, splinters on a dilated pupil
Alegro!
The printer ink rapture-raptor-captures the 2pm meeting
With the gathers’ nostalgia games.

But the ankle sensation is my own,
To repeat in Haze not Lethe, for me,
For me, the memory clasps my ankles and pulls
Down, around, under a vortex inescapable.
The thought is my own.
The memory is mine, mine, mine!
The nouns and verbs I grasp them with are not.

And at item 2 in my after-life itinerary
My helled heaven is still all of you.

Friday, July 22, 2011

les mots 2


The sound of a miniature chainsaw briefly, yet lengthily molested the tympanis of my ears.

Because it was so abrupt, and because I was so asleep, I immediately and in a panic sat upright in my bed—my heart is well acquainted with the palpitations that followed; for many years I used an alarm clock that would violently yank me from the world of dreams and spit me out into disappointment; my heart would be livid in its chamber of being. I looked with disgust upon the device that I had thought was a chainsaw—it was just my cell phone, obviously. And the real culprit behind all of this was Patrick, my friend. He had sent me a text message. It read:

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

I looked around the room and sighed. I checked the time and saw that it was 6:06 am and I responded:

“what the fuck is that supposed to mean and why is it 6:06 am”

I turned my phone on silent because I realized that he had opened up a dialogue that would easily surpass the span of three or four messages; I did not have the tolerance or really the curiosity for such a dialogue. I went back to sleep.  I awoke again at 9:27 am. At this point he had filled my inbox practically with message after message, 11 in total.

“why is it 6:06 am? It just IS 6:06 am, are you retarded?”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

“Tonight I will do more with my penis than just pee.”

He literally sent it over and over again and spaced them out so that I received one message every five minutes. I was sort of confused. He had stopped sending them a bit before I woke up. 

I lied in bed a while and wondered what he was talking about. I suppose he must have meant that he is going to have sex tonight. The routine motions that a male goes through with his penis are urination, masturbation, and copulation. Since he said that what he will be doing is more than just peeing, I immediately crossed that act off of the list. That left masturbation and copulation. I went out on a limb and assumed that he was not referring to masturbation. That is simply because friends rarely discuss their masturbatory lives with other friends, and it would be extremely odd I suppose to discuss through text message with a friend at 6:06 am. So, copulation must be the more than peeing that Patrick will be doing tonight. Men are often pretty excited about the act or prospect of copulation, so that sort of solves the mystery of why he would be informing me of this at such a strange hour.

“who you gon fuck?”

I sent, naturally, and waited for a response.

In the meantime, the sun filtered into my window through a rectangle of glass broken into columns by the wrought iron lines that run parallel to one another. I could hear the sound of a massacre of verdure being committed across the street by some neighbor’s lawnmower. Genocide—No, upkeep. I heard a buzz.

“Francesca.”

I smiled. Francesca is the girlfriend of one of our good friends, Kevin Ralston. It all made sense now—the odd hour, the emphasis, the strange wording. Patrick and I had been harboring secret crushes on her since…Well, always, I suppose. The wallpaper on my cell phone is a candid pic of Francesca lying on her side drinking a Monster energy drink. How did he manage to swing that?

“What how u do dat?”

We all sort of joked about it out in the open; either Patrick or myself would talk about how one day we were going to run away with Francesca and start a family. Kevin would laugh and think it was funny and we would do the same.

“idk. les mots.”

Les mots. Whenever we talk about girls it’s always les mots:

“Jesus Patrick how did you get her to go out to dinner with you?”

“Les mots,” he’d say with a smile.

Or,

“Christ Patrick, she had sex with you? She looks like such a bitch, how the hell did you manage that?”

“Les mots,” he’d say after creating a noise with his lips that sounds like “tsk” and a look on his face that meant “shit, don’t you know this already?”

I responded to his message,

“lol. Where u gon do it?”

I was really curious. At this point I had gotten up and gotten dressed and began thinking vaguely of coffee. I noticed that my eyes lingered for quite some time upon the magnetic knife rack on the wall by the garbage can in my kitchen. Maybe I was just tired. My thigh twitched:

“kevin’s apt. he goin out of town tonight haha.”

I grinded my teeth a little then smiled. I thought that I should probably go out and get some coffee at this point since it was almost 10 am. I figured I should polish one of the heavy stainless steel butcher’s knives first though.

“lol jesus ur psycho.”

I polished the large knife with care and then I put it away in my back pocket, I guess. I left my house at 10:07 am and decided that I’d go to Java Joe’s because everyone knows that’s the best coffee in Binghamton. I figured maybe I’d pick Patrick up—you know surprise him, because he likes coffee too. So, I headed to his house on the East side.

I left Patrick’s house at 10:26 am and went to Java Joe’s and enjoyed a coffee and raspberry parfait. I read the Press & Sun Bulletin for a little while. All of these quotidian devices like clocks and the news got me down so I turned myself in at the Binghamton Police Department located downtown and told them what happened.

This has been my confession.

12:06 pm. 

Friday, July 15, 2011

Man of sweaty mess

"I’m dead now. The rest is posthumous."

The porcupined phallus relights my night. I wake to it pricking my leg, smacking my face, defacing my lace cloth that I value above my life. Porcupine-d won’t go back to sleep. My clutche-d loosen a bit as the pork is real is realized. Slitheriding across my chest, spewing its sweaty mess, leaving me…with a feeling of post swim pool’ed adolescence and restraint. I feel me standing on the concrete ground with intoxicating chlorine settled in my ears, and the group I'm with leaves, my mother leaves, someone is leaving.My renewed clutch-ed reifies nostalgic wishes: “I wish I were young,” wish “I wish I were giddy,” wishy “I wish I knew everything again." And the wishie passes—nee! washes, right over the same path the porcupine lathers. I know now that when I unclutched my hands upon awakening I was dead and my reification was posthumous.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Life of Lacan

The crescent moon cast a light on the water as it licked the sand, compressing its surface.  Mark, age 10, sat in his room miles away from the windy beach, but nevertheless he saw the porous moon reflecting off of the rippled waves. Underneath the sky, above the sand, Mark saw himself sitting with his little sister Joan. Joan wore a ponytail and the polka-dot skirt their mother dressed her in on special occasions.  Here, in Mark’s daydream, was their wedding. He could finally kiss her in that way he imagined he would. For the rest of his life, he could smack her face with big puckered up lips and lots of spit.
In real life Mark was very shy. Whenever his sister was near, the world became overwhelmingly bright and his head would focus on the floor.  In addition to her gloriousness, Joan was very mean to Mark and was very big for a seven year old. She once grabbed him by his shirt corners and pushed him against a wall for hovering over her: “YOU’RE ANNOYING ME!”
But in his world she said nothing. Her glue sealed lips were objects to be kissed. He was puppeteer and she puppet. So, as he lay on the beach in only his swimwear, he began to recite poetry of his own making into her ears, and her ears began to bleed; wanting to be much closer to the source of the words.
"You look so pretty/ You’re so witty/ I love you so many.” Mark wanted to be a poet one day, so he would write several poems each week with Joan as the inspiration. He hid them in his underpants so that if anyone ever checked his pockets he would maintain his secret love life. On the beach they were lain out with audacity in a neat pile next to Joan’s feet.  
They had gone down to the beach to escape the wedding. The priest was nice and funny and they both laughed through the whole thing, but his dad stood ominously shaking his head in disapproval as his mother wept with so much oomph that it appeared she had gone to a wedding when she had in fact prepared herself to go to a funeral. Dad wore a suit and had his hands clasped at his torso. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t bark or smack Mark’s forehead; he just stood there with his eyes digging holes into Joan’s head, occasionally swinging his wide jaw from one side to the other.
As Mark read his vows he saw his father begin to shake in rage like he sometimes did after he came home with a putrid smell, a loosened tie, and glazed eyeballs.  Mark was prepared to shout “You can’t do anything about it!” but he lost the courage and instead grabbed Joan’s limp little arm and urged her to run with him to the beach. They ran, and ran, and ran, but it seemed that after they began to flee they were safe from harm and needn’t continue. Eventually it dawned on Mark that there was no need to run; they were safe, and as their breathing began to labor he looked back at his younger sister and started to laugh. He wanted her to laugh, and she did. The run turned into a prance and they giggle-laughed until they let themselves fall on that patch of beach with the view of the moon and the black sky’s reflection.
The sight entranced them as they lay with their backs to the ground and their hands behind their heads.  The intermingling was as natural as anything could be. They had to be the same: moon and water, darkness and light, brother and sister. Mark decided that that moment was perfect and looked up to Joan to see her smiling—not thinking, waiting for her next instruction.   
He got up onto one arm to lean above her as he began to speak, and thought it might be nice to surprise her with a kiss. It would be perfect. “Joan, I have something to tell you…” But before he got a chance to give her one of his wet kisses, she smacked him. His face hurt beyond imagination and he couldn’t figure out what happened to those innocent blue orbs.  Her stern eyes were already racing away, but her body soon followed. She floated up and out like a dandelion on a breezeway. Mark was alone now and he let his attention turn back to the water only to see the moon’s image leaving the it, and the tide rising.
There are toys on the floor. There is meatloaf oozing into his nostrils. There is no sand, but in his tiny room with racecar sheets and Pokemon cards scattered on the floor he can still see the fading image of the moon escaping the water.
Kids! Come down for dinner!
Hearing his mother’s shrill voice he knew his sister would never read the words, "You look so pretty/ You’re so witty/ I love you so many.” He shook his tiny jaw and sobbed salty tears that leaked down to his lips. His mouth was glued shut.
He pulled out his penis and began to castrate himself.

More Than Love


A man tiptoes out of a ceremony of frilly decorations and an assortment of white chairs. He escapes from the ostentation with his beloved by his side. They walk along the beach until they settle next to a patch of tall grass on an elevated dale of black sand quite a ways from the bridal party they had just left.

“I’m sorry I invited Ted,” he said as he shot a quick glance at a seemingly vacant chair, “it’s just…I love to see you sullen.” He smiled.

“This whole day was just amazing—like some sort of euphoric dream. My body tingles with excitement, from my head to my little toes below, every inch of it in love. In love with you, my dear.” He smiled again at his beloved and held against his bosom in a warm embrace his true love, his “little Annabel Lee.”

“Did you love it when I kept saying ‘will you marry it, marry it, marry it?’ at the ceremony?” He chuckles a genuine chuckle. “I bet the priest thought I was crazy! He doesn’t know you like I do…Nobody in the world knows you like I do.” His look was serious as he held his “sweet, dark angel” at arm’s length. 

“Tell me,” he said as he let his darling rest on the black sands of the shore, “do I too have a Meinkampf look?” He stood as solemnly as a soldier as he swept his knotted tufts of hair across his forehead and remained stolid, eyes piercing.

“Just joking! I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” He assured as he deftly slid into place again alongside his “princess of doldrums.”

“You know I could never treat you like him. I would never bite your pretty little heart into fourths—we both know the state it’s in now, thanks to him!” He shot a glance of fury once more over his shoulder. “If only I could shower his blackness, his demonic aura, with dagger upon dagger, each one landing in its own special spot on the surface of his wretched brain, I would!”

He sat, fuming. His chest pumped furiously, moving in and out in tandem with the waves that slashed the coast. Each crest reached its peak and lunged for the two lovers as they sat in a prolonged state of gloom.

“He tortured you! Left you in tatters! That black marauder…that filthy panther. He sucked the life out of you and left you speechless before me: a man who you can trust, a man that will take care of you!”

He wiped away a solemn tear with the thumb of his right hand. He sniffled slightly.
“He sure did a number on you, my darling. But, it’s all over now. You put it best when you said he had ‘a love of the rack and the screw.’”

“I’ll tell ya, I know you’ve loved one man, but if you love two, I promise to you all that I’ll love is the screw!” He laughed most heartily as he cocked his head back and held his seizing midriff.

“You see! I have a knack for it too! I have a way with words!” He chuckled lightly as he poked and teased his beloved.

He sighed a sigh of relief and looked off toward the sunset at a volleyball court roped off in the sand where a game was in progress.

He prodded his beloved once more and pointed gently to the court, “You know they don’t want us to be together. They think it’s unnatural what we’re doing. They don’t understand true love. They don’t understand anything. All they do is watch TV and play dumb games in the sand. I feel sorry for them! I really do…”

“Forget them. All I want is this moment. This moment, to contemplate eternity with you and you alone, my sweet, sweet, black angel.”

He lay down alongside his beloved. He closed his eyes and held his sweet Annabel Lee closer and peppered his “dark mistress” with kisses.

Off in the distance about 50 meters away sits an old man on a bench along the boardwalk. His blistered and chapped lips clamp down upon a robust cigar. The smoke his cigar emits lazily trails off in a winding trajectory above his head. He is reading the local newspaper. From the corner of his eye he notices a man rolling around in the sand near a patch of lengthy grass, hugging a book tightly to his chest. The old man recoils in disbelief and the side of his mouth becomes a snarl.

“Nutjob,” he says as he snaps the newspaper into place in front of his face once more. The front of the paper faces the shore, staring out into the depths of the sea like a great probing eye. The headline reads:

“MAN MARRIES DEAD POET SYLVIA PLATH.” 

Thursday, July 7, 2011

The Weather (excerpt)

Scene: A man has sat down with a group of people he does now know in a coffee-bar he is familiar with. He smiles at them and they smile back and he feels words begin to pour out  of his mouth, funneling into their ears, as he flabbergasts and amazes them with his gall. 
That’s how it has always been. He sat down, he said some words and things went, life moved, people spoke. It mattered only abstractly what they were talking about. The words could be almost any words; they could be recited words, false words, poetic words, but they couldn’t be senseless words. He would get up and move if someone said some space-filling sentence about the weather. Smurnov would leave his parents if they started talking about the weather. In high school his friends talked about the rain and the sky almost every day. They would grab their trays and shake them a little bit while looking him right in the eye to talk, talk, talk about the weather. He would stare back into their eyes and put on an interested air, but the next day he would get new friends. Smurnov would plop his food onto his plate and pick a table, any table, to set his new tray on. The process of courting a friend, talking about the weather, and moving to a new table repeated so often he got to know just about every group in the school. Occasionally, he would redouble and rejoin a table to see if he had been mistaken or wrong in some way for moving. In his senior year, his class superlative was “Class Friendliest.”

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Disembodied bodies (excerpt)


The power rangers diaper crumpled in his four year old hands, realizing the might of the youth. Smurnov recognized the diaper had never said a word to him. It had never coughed or sneezed or grunted to show that it was one of THEM, so he knew it was in his realm of dominion. The thumping of feet could be heard from the basement as he ran to the stairs, then taking deliberate and careful steps up the CREAAAKing metal. Eventually he stood at the top, overlooking the empty living room, with water spreading across the floor from where he had just a moment ago spilled his cup. “GAAAAAA,” screamed out of his tiny lips as he threw the cotton diapers out over the banister. The body thrust into the air, making it go a short distance out, and then curving downwards. The heavy end of it moved directly, but the rest spun, hectically, without control, almost making screaming gestures, but not having the Right to, so it only made the sound of colliding with the ground to lay in peace.
            The boy’s eyes were wide, his mouth puckered presenting squeezed lips and inwardly drawn cheeks, and it appeared he was waiting for something. As usual his mother walked out into the living room for the final second of the Diaper Flight. She didn’t say a word. She picked the diaper up as water slowly streamed towards it and looked up at her son.