These pictures of you

I’m dirt and grime. I take pictures of myself on the ground under some witty piece of cherished graffiti. I take pictures of myself hopping and leaping in mud on the cold nights of some drifty city somewhere, but in America only. She--my muse that is--, she is perfection, sweet elegance and she uploads pictures of her beauty in Milan, in Brazil, in Paris, and the straits of endless passes that only she can visit. Each photograph I put up stands in the utmost contrast to hers, and I know we’re both thinking of pictures. Which will we allow? Only the best of our worlds, and hers overpower any I could ever take. Her beautiful dresses hanging next to doctors and lawyers in some Indian city I could never name, and certainly could never think of going to. We picture our pictures’ lives and the people at their computers thinking about those lives, and we plan our facial movements in accordance, in perfection. The watchers eat them up, comment on them, mull them over; they’re really effected by them, or so we think as we wait through the few moments required to transfer a picture to the public’s eye.

            Those white and shining dresses she wears and flaunts on our mutual network are only mine. I devour them, vigilantly scouring for updates on a pose, a new pore I never noticed, a neck vein, a muscle in the leg, whatever is new. The only thing I need from her is the new. I need more clay and she needs more molding and we play, even if she doesn’t know of my eyes and my thoughts or of her leg muscle, neck vein, eyes, eyes, beautiful eyes, I know about them.

            No one has ever seen a picture of mine except for her. The typed words on the screen from some long non-existent person are purely fiction, a system edit. Every picture is for her; it couldn’t be any other way.

Enough Ithakas

don't ever want to sit
don't want to stare at the wall
under the words of some interesting little pet from the local college
don't want to move spit
just want to move calloused feet and bruised toes
to the west and wester 'til I’m all in a fret on a boat.
want to follow the ho chi minh trail
until I hit the bricks of town walks with gray and indigo colored people
I want to leave those and these nice weather people
Leave the nice words, nice clothes, nice person people
with a wink, a skip, and nothing of my essence.
I'll horde it all and they won't see my serious funny stupid puking eyes.
the beautiful women and the chuckling old men
the carrot eating bohemians, the African widowers
the world townies searching will search, or not,
But I want to walk into the oblivion of the lines on the road,
or at least into the center of the earth.

The gravel with give "it" up
I know it
I read it in a book,
or maybe just in between the cracks and crackling of a lunge forth as a kid
I want to walk until it's enough to walk
One day it'll be enough to just walk.

World townies will all go home
and eat dinner
and happy
they happy, and it's all they can do.

the mouths of the lines on the road are flat,
and they makes me a porcelain plate,
we're the same
and the crunching of the ground won't ever stop
until it's flattened
and the world is flat or round or neither
but regardless we're slipping into each other
discovering our edges and fondling our skins
and "it" hurts me and pulls me and throws me
like world townies do on Christmas eve at downtown bars and potlucks
like wild cat-woman dressed lovers do in yellow smoke back alleys
like crimson knights do to Boston groupies.
Pull skin back, grab flesh deeper, burn into and through.
the crunch of its flat mouth is all I need
I want to walk until it's not enough to run,
One day it'll be enough to walk.

Word documents

Kill the artists and call it Euthanasia

They've suffered long enough.

Paintings, pretty pictures, canvases,

And word documents

Won’t heal them.

So Kill the artists and call it Euthanasia

It's for the good of happiness--

That happiness covered with the wall's shade

Crouching in the corner,

It's suffering,

It's dying.

The paintings don't help long.

Look away for a moment, artists of the world,

Then you'll feel.

You're always feeling.

The sight isn't feeling.

The joy isn't feeling.

Look away

And see if you're still feeling

Or just hoping to stop.

Beautiful Toxicity

I thought about holding her hand too tightly. I thought about pain, maybe a little about ecstasy; sometimes they're the same, sometimes they don't exist. Most times there's just apathy, right? We sat facing the veranda and smoked it into waves, but it wasn't for the moment, so we relocated.

I change my mind so much, I change it over and over and I think of my mind in the same way I think of the piss stained couch maybe that soaked in my mom's house when I was a kid. We relocated to anywhere I wanted us to. King of her castle I was for a night or two, two years into the past and three drinks too many. Yes, my lips could cling to her gown. Yes, my hand could paint circles on her back. Yes, yes, yes! I wanted "yes" and who wants "no?" She said "yes," we wandered around a Wendy's parking lot. She said "yes" and we went to the most putrid smelling parking garage I could find.

"There's beauty in filth." I said to her with my serious eyes trying to get a serious feeling and failing. "But there isn't really, is there?" She said nothing and I kept talking and I wondered if even she thought she was there with me, smelling what had to be shit, sitting on a curve that had to be toxic, watching a blank street with no cars.  "This road is our canvas!" I said. A blank is not a blank canvas; it's sadder, more likely to provoke melancholy, and that it did. We were feeling sadness drape itself around us and we both hid under the same veil, apart. I'm not sure if I could say we were ever together. But my hand did touch her lap, and her smooth skin did glide, so smoothly, so obliviously, so-so.

She said "yeah," and "whatever" and "okay" and yada yada that eventually blends together, because they aren't words. Words express something, they signify, but there was nothing to signify and I might as well have been sitting with the sex doll my friends bought as a joke for me during Christmas of last year.

She was too beautiful with the Wendy's streetlamp bouncing a beautifully muddy light onto her cheeks as she looked forward, played with something in her purse, kicked a rock. "She should be a model!" I'd tell my friends both before and after "we." The idea of her extreme beauty knocked me off my feet. I wanted her to look into my shy eyes, cut me off in the middle of some silly rambling, and tell me I was beautiful and worthy.  I wanted to be worthy of her glance. I could prove I was interesting. I could prove I was good, whatever the fuck that means. "She's fucking beautiful," echoed in my ears and I couldn't hear the real world. I tried to hallucinate, but couldn't. O asylum! O escape! O this was the apex of drudgery.

I took her to the shitty sights this night. I let her walk in crap and rub her chilly arms, cover her nose, whatever. Even in the crap she was perfect, saying "yes" with not a touch of humanity. Picture that, the flies are buzzing around her mascara covered face and she's slapping them every other minute, and she can't say "Hey douche! Take me home!" She just sat, and I watched her and spoke, as if everything were in line. I spoke, she listened and her straightened eyelashes poked up while underneath somber ridden eyes peered through her purse. 

 "Let's leave." I smiled and she smiled back. Squealing and straining, dripping smelly drops onto the road, my car took us through the swaying red lights "GO, go, GO!" That's the life I wanted to live. That's the life we lived and still I didn't feel anything. Stopped on the sidewalk in front of her house I saw hair falling into her face. "It must be uncomfortable," I thought. It had to be. I took my little pointer finger and I poked her face then dragged it along until the hair was behind an ear. I could almost hear her saying I was beautiful just then, but the crickets outside were the only sound creeping into us. I went to kiss her and her lips tightened. Sitting back, always back, never forward, I guess, I was ready for us to sit there for eternity and my car to become oblivion and her face a statue to be admired and worshipped and cursed. I was ready for the blackness to settle in, but the streetlamps were still hitting the windshield.

I hit my steering wheel and the car awoke with a shout down the street, and her body came alive with a flinch of painful fear. Her eyes became heavy and she began to fall asleep. As she floated into dreams, I stayed in mine and let my eyes absorb her, until even the moving of her chest under the gentle breath of life seemed ancient, and she became my statue.

August Guest Posts

Hatred Poem

I kinda wanted to show her how I really get down!

Show her my moves!

Show all my buddies I know how to PARTY

take part in taking apart the dance floor. !

Confetti man, the Partyguy I am the stuff!

Come quick I'll show you a trick and then we gotta split

like a yellow skin banana and run to the shop

before it closes YO!! Are you the girl that's blah blah blah

Yeah I found it in the hallway by the whatever

Come by my room later I'll give it to you,

sorry. Fastforward,

yo Dude wait up!

Rushing to the shop before it closes!

Time passes made it to the story crazy times, 

Partyguy pays for it all! All on me I don't care live it up

YO EVERYONE back to my pad. I got the tunes.

I kinda wanted to show her how I really get down!

Self conscious attack I'll sit back and let the party run here we go

Girl you wanna come up stairs and get those...

Yea this is my main crib check this out I've got dual things,

Sit down oh hold on let me show you this video while I

"Try and find your"...

Isn't that so crazy? My friend made it. He's so smart.

I look up to him so much he's like a brother to me,

(not like other brothers I could have mentioned)

(unlike other videos I could have shown)

(probably should've given her the box sitting there on the shelf)

Show her my moves!

Sorry!! I didn't mean to hit you there! Are you ok? 

Here lay on your stomach I can fix it, no seriously I can!

Turn on your stomach! I can fix it with a massage. Seriously,

I'll take the pain off your mind because my massages are awesome.

sorry. Fastforward...

Two dead bodies!

Rewind a little. sorry,

Divorce, restraining orders, mild burns and emotional damage.

Rewind,

Pregnancy. 

Rewind,

Bumpy dating, deceit and mate fumbling bumbling decision making,

Rewind.......

Stop. 

Hell..your life forever to watch for eternity.

...Play.

Slitting the Throat of a Country 2

His knife blade is sharp. He has been imprisoned far too long with nothing to do but whittle a stick to a blood-drawing point. This morning he lost his fetters.

Dank. Grime. Debris.

These were the conditions in which he was imprisoned. They fed him the chicken bones and the coleslaw; the remains of the prandial parade across the coffin-like dinner table he had only caught a glimpse of upon arriving in the mansion. He sucked the saliva from the bones for nourishment, plus whatever miniscule jiblets they had been so kind as to forget.

Fury.

He broke from the dungeon of a basement sometime this morning. I have caught word that his waif-like figure tore through the manor, leaving nothing behind but a strong scent of mildew and drops of blood from the struggle.

Flight.

Unaided fellow. Here he flocks. He is crawling up the coast of the Eastern United States one impossible step at a time; he has barely enough energy to breathe. Still, he comes. And he clutches his little whittled stick in between his bared teeth and perforates the ground wherever he can, desperately clinging to the belief that, if he never arrives, at least he made the earth scream in anguish for a time.