high definition

these days sport has too influence on much tee-vee
which sounds like a pound of flesh when it hits
your big screen
a place where honest no politician is
is no politician honest
in a place where
rhinoplasty is the magnificient entree
and the best book of 2008 howls in the night,
just a dog and his boy, all grown up?

Shit Luck

I've seen cries and outright lies but
the one I missed is the one that trapped me,

buggerfucked on cheap red wine where
not everyone there was just marking time.

How do you claim that you got played
to the one who for fun is the one that played you?

Some of the blame's got to wash on you (right?)
and with my shit luck it ain't gonna wash out.

Among the Reeds

In thinking about the spirit,
one must move beyond the water,
must step out of the daily eddies
and move toward the reeds
at the water's edge. Somewhere,
beyond the third or fourth clump
of reeds, is what gives us life,

huddled, clumped to itself
to the reeds
to everywhichthing
in way that could only
be traced if you noted
this part in every whole.

So what's lurking there
for you? My spirit guide has crystalline
eyes, is stunted by too much sun,
and stands still enough to trick
the water skimmers into thinking
he doesn't exist

as if spirit were a ghost,
an inconvenient phantom,
a gimmick from a sitcom
that played out while the writers
tried desperately to think
of "real ideas."

But watch the reeds flutter
from nothing you can grab,
see the skimmers curve and jive
without cause and you will know
my spirit's there, breathe
easily into everything that moves.

An Explanation

My first concert:

1986. Cal-Expo Ampitheater.
The Beastie Boys
opening for
Run-DMC.

Every concert since
has fallen short

because

only
"old school"
gets it:
the connection
to the fans
makes the music.

Why else would
you pick up
an instrument?

Why else would
you grab
a microphone

but to relate,

to find how
i am you
and
you are me?

A Vertiable Love For Hip-Hop Done Up In True Cheesy Rhyme

The break beats
make ya
move feets
put off
sweet heat
from tha
true streets

and bob your
chick head
unless ya
so dead
or got
no bread
preferring
pop instead.

In the burbs
nothing's
going on
but hip hop
salutes
the long gone
by riffin'
old songs

with new rhymes
an' dropped bass
that rattle
your place
jus' to give a
small taste
of someone
else's space

not a stage
but a mindset,
not rapping like you
dead yet
but enticin' ears
to not forget
words show life,
a hardcore duet

of commerce and heart.

The Utmost, Numero Uno Thing to Remember for Now and For All-Time

All an artist
has to do
is stay in the room.
It's not spiritual,
not Zen, unglorified
in every way. Just
stay in the room
and follow your art.

Not Fearing

I have seen hip replacements
and cataracts -- this isn't
the curtain of age people fear
to pull back.

Maybe it's the feeling of immobility,
the sense that your legs could go
at any time. And the thought
sparkles 'til you can't not look.

For eightteen days I beat these
thought welps back. I lost sight.
I moved by fingertips, by luck,
by feel. And now the only thing

I fear about getting old is if
my eyes can't see enough to be able
to pick bone slivers out of fish,
or not watching my child grow.

Got Loose

It wasn't dirty, nope,
just good and hard

in a backroom with blinds angled
to let moonlight splash across skin.

The motion left the bed creaking,
rocking, breaking, left friends

in the next room clapping, left
us floored in a tangle of limbs, laughing

as Brenda yelled "you're gonna
pay for that" over a song she had cranked

to level ten to unhear the biology groove
down the hall on mountain night

in sweat-sweetened June.

On Speed

Jeezus he cut that with baby formula
where's his kid? his kid's in the back
room, sleeping, there's a rail for you
on the kitchen table and your pupils
are pinwheel dots and oh yeah you'll
see the sunrise tomorrow and tomorrow
and forever the way you garden-hosed
that last gagger and turn the music
down, turn the music up, down, up,
man, I gotta go outside, out on the deck,
where my skin can breathe.

The First Good Time

Set aside the fact that I have
watched more dirty scat vids than
I can count. Ignore the fact
most of my voyeuristic wristing
came from countries
that lost world wars. What porn
don't tell you is that it ruins
you for reality. So drink,
so forget it all, so remember
what keeps a man up: a nostalgia
unruinable by callous and slo-mo
indiscretions.

So substitute this memory
in dark-lit slow-mo:
a mixing of lips with hips,
of one pair of lips
feeling a path to another,
of suckling the nape of neck
just to feel it there,
of hickeying inner thighs
just to taste it there.
Skin heats air, repels
the world, and yet the world
is in every movement . . .
movements I replay
in those moments when I need
to believe,
and I can still feel my fingers
slide up her breastbone
to feel the thumping
of a hummingbird heart.

What Words Do

Verbs show action unless spoken but not done.
To speak it leaves it at the gate;
a gate it must still walk through
with the veracity of the body -
else all is lost.

All praise ye action words: they frame
our thoughts, goad those of others,
punctuate resumes and CVs. They count
among their believers those who think
words equals deeds, just by utterance.

As I sit here, am I? Does the act
necessitate action? Does the shiver
of vocal cords incant action? Do I
mention that as I write these words,
I sit here, alone?

Derangement

Emotions go back years
like words on pages or
the smoothest gunslinger
you ever heard, leaving
you fearful, or worse,
a sucker who cannot create
a new republic because your
stuck on the first of everything:
the first o
or the first cash flow
or that time antennae
fingered your skin, out
in that back lot
the one day you were afraid
the day that stays so
run it back
republic new a create
or for full form and function:
etaerc a wen cilbuper
a moonwalk finished with a pirouette
that puts you back where you started.

Deep Kick

I'd seen her in a bathing suit, all tan lines
and tattoos but never undulated
never as her musculature slunk toward me,
her back arching, her thighs parting,
my fingers caressing the light switch
downward, downward, ever downward
and walking tongues spelled out the night
in strokes and licks and moans.

Go, she breathes,
hair in hands,
leave me nothing.

So release the hounds and lock hips in rhythm,
so push the pace until shivers pass way beyond
love then turn serpentine, swirl her yoni, flick
with cock and tongue 'til legs twitch free
from sockets and die supine. The room gasps.
The count: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Seven. Eight. And she makes good at nine, eyes
re-lit with purpose, mounting to unlight mine.

This Is Supposed To Be Sad

This is supposed to be sad,
supposed to dissipate like dewdrops past sun-up
but to find what you're supposed to find
and do what you need to no longer allures,
so this poem will hang
like bullets of rain without gravitas.
Your neighbor who delivers her kids
at eight each morning might like this feeling,
this bleaching of all emotion,
and pinstriped businessmen may even welcome
the grey skies that provide a ruse
for dress-up games and justifications
and a return to nine-to-fivery.

But this limbo is torture
it makes you want to
start again
start again
start again
to cry out in the night
like a moon-waxed wolf,
to howl a reaction to a slow first kiss.
It's a howl that will not let
DNA slip into mediocrity
and while the mother
stares dumbly at the radio's digital display,
while casual Friday becomes a victory
and the young go unattended to,
while lips untouch and are left nothing
there's no telling
which fate
is ultimately sadder.

Blunt Instrument

Writing has but two parts:
what to put on the page
and what to leave out.

Functional

The weaker gender has always been masculine;
intent spread taut across leg and limb
so thick that form itself is lost.

Now the feminine is more than purty:
it has give -- not in that dickdreams way
but in artful curves from head to toe.

A pearl that'd be trapped between breasts
would roll right off a chest. And men don't mind,
since a pearl should've never been there.

You want to see the definition of cringe?
Go up to one of those manly men, the one
who is straight but works out at Gold's anyway,

benches three hundred, does squats,
'til veins spring from his forehead
and inform him of his beauty

not as if he were Adonis or penis
or anything but an after rainfall rainbow
in the eyes of a wide-eyed child.

Pearl

How the soft breath of the person
we love settles like a leaf
out of time with past and present and future,
a spun chronotope that lingers
beyond breath and body and life.
And what can you say that's gone
unsaid? We see what we want in the eyes
and lips and the image freezes.
You close your lids to that curve of chin,
the indentation of the hip you catch
as an outline beneath wool pulled tight,
the steam from the cup between
your hands warming, obscuring,
and forget you've known mornings
where you've woken alone, not lost
but unfound as birds chirp
innocence outside and you feel the beats
and pulses of your heart flutter
like mothwings as its valves go dry.
Now her ribcage rises and falls
to mark those pindrop seconds
and there is nothing else but
to match breath with her and remember
what it is you love.

Ire 'n' up

There ain't no such thing as desire
it's a something we make up
to explain away the fire
the something that kicks up
a biological pismire
sprung from a breakup
or a moment that expires
a causeway smashup
still too close to satire.

Hustler's Ache

The words unfurl like a late night wave
as the tender bumps the eight ball one inch short.
"Just like love," the tender says, and the hustler,
holding the broomstick he used as a snooker cue,
ashes into a plastic beer glass he brought
from the car.

The whole thing was disgusting really: driving from
town to town, from bar to bar, looking for marks.
The hustler'd never enter a place through the front,
leave his fedora on the dashboard and read
the room, the lids half drawn with eyes
underground.

It had been a good summer but he was tired:
nights of heels rubbing against boots he'd taken
off a guy in Amarillo, long nights of standing
leaning
waiting
arms folded
eyes most closed
knowing an opening would come.

He'd swung north after Texas,
his mattress padding the truckbed
as he wormed through the foothills
and crawled into the Sierras
for nights gone cold and snow come early.
As he centered his weight over the cue
ready to kiss the eight ball home
he thought of the stun in the eyes of the tender
the look on hatred leveled him in Amarillo
and the pan of vodka in the cab
that he'd soak his feet in to take away
the aches of the job.

Welcome Back Monday

Tomorrow someone will piller me with pleasantries
and inquire with convival levity "how was your weekend?"

It will be Monday, and I will feel greedy. Maybe I will reply
"I want last weekend back." Who knows . . . what if

honesty serpents into my throat and I say "putting me
closer to the end" with a smile that only undercuts

the grimness a little. Maybe give the whole moment
a twist. How about a wink to retort the

perfect Monday morning question.

dive

when someone with talent
turns from it as if to shield
their eyes from a too-brilliant sun
it is reminder,
a cry that when something puts you
on the floor what comes next
is a choice
and if someone stays down,
convinces their body the floor
feels good enough
and is comfortable enough
a little part of spirit
is severed from me
and the world

Eventide

Who knew we weren't together
arm in jaunty arm as we cut
a swath through a train station of people
like something out of an MGM musical?

In step and in time we guided each other
by hip and glance through a throng, a sea
shrunk to just you and I. It was assent,
the final moment when one mind would grip
a word and the other would pluck it.

Now the world's with us, its shadow too close,
too spectral, and those old moments flutter like paper wings,
dancing away from me even as my pen strains to put
them to paper.

Creation Rebels

The creation rebels roll notepads in t-shirt
sleeves and bounce to Fela Kuti in the gravel
lot, just mad dawgs in the midday producing
the kind of lunacy that draws police
and thieves and persecution.

The rebels jitter and twist, head bobbin'
not jobbin' or robbin'
but probin' the land they love for frog belly
softness 'cause they know dissent is a step
in gettin' what's got to go
to go.

Yeah, you read that right.

Yeah, it's possible to dress in no logo,
you pass, you prance, you secondhand it,
you grift the system to show it what it's missin'.

So the rebels poke antlers into flesh and smush jellybeans
onto gunracks and prance like there's no tomorrow.
This dance is all about now . . .

Recondite

The moon is a smudge.
The clock's hands fuzz.

It is Day Three of facade.
Making eye contact with voices.

But whats unknown scares less
than keep on keepin' on

so I lie, staring at students whose
visages have long gone indistinct,

nodding when their vocal cords vibrate
as any acknowledger should

even one doing what he should
hiding what he feels he should hide

from not the students but from himself