The one, The Many, The HereticalFaction!
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Mood:
 uncomfortable....I just got an upset comment when I checked this journal for the first time in a week or so... It appears that I have been flirting in bad faith.... Of course, my flirtation rarely leads anywhere, so I am finding it a challenge to muster moral outrage at myself. I flirt now as a matter of routine - It makes the girls feel good, and I get to immagine briefly that I am attractive, instead of just flattering... Not that I feel I am unappealing, but noone is exactly throwing themselves at me, or making grand, romantic getures. I figure I give as good as I get... No, everyone is just playing along, trying not to show how they have started to chafe and sweat in their winter costumes... Not that sex is even the biggest issue these days, but I doubt I could raise the motivation for more than a cursory job of coitus even if one of these women took me up on my false flirtation. I just want to get some measure of the attention I feel I deserve. Narcissism is underappreciated these days... I need someone to inspire. | ||||||||||
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Mood:
 contemplativeThey peeled off his clothes. I saw the underwear that he died in. I saw the blue-grey veins in his pale, hairy legs. I watched the nurses prodding deep in his groin; searching for a pulse... I watched them minister so to so much cooling meat. I knew that he had passed the intangible barrier, from that which is to whatever else there is. I saw this man's.... I saw this old man's scrotum shoved aside as they prodded for a pulse and yet I felt no embarrassment for him. I could see that he was gone, unreachable. The students' white uniforms expanded around him, the veil of white became his dignity and he was naked before no one. You never see how white, how clean, how undifferentiated everything is untill you have some kind of contrast. We were all in the white, on this side of that barrier, and I was just a boy fascinated by the exposed testes of a corpse. The person who had been was beyond; in that dark realm of infinite contrast. Murder, however, I have seen every day. I have seen would-be murders over nothing between strangers, who then shook hands and walked away. I have also seen this poor bums' brains ooze like lava on a february sidewalk. I have seen hatred at nothing explode where it was never expected on someone who it had never known. I have felt my life slip away under loving ministrations of a man who to this day cannot tollerate my existance. I felt his deep and knowing fingers probing deep between my trachea and spine... every second, I felt the deep black bruises rise in depths I had never known. In the depths of a throat I had taken for granted. I heard his word of hate and banishment; I knew then hate like a psychotic cloud of bees, like an angry mob. I heard his words of hate as I drifted into black oblivion... For that short moment I saw murder for what it is; the sum of all our indignities. I pitied him that was straining on my back. You never see the white, you never know the sameness about you. See the pure, driven veil of snow that to you is just the space in which you live. In all the white, we never know the pale depths upon which we tread. Murder is like footprints upon the snow; it shows the depths we never before have seen. Three days past, the snow has melted into the gouges once left by passions; they fade, becoming shallower and more distant. But the gentle contours of the fresh driven snow never shall return. | ||||||||||
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Mood:
 grumpyOf course, as soon as my finances are secure, I awaken to find that my right tonsil is about four times it's proper size, causing burning pain throughout my entire throat. I know that this is just something that happens when I breathe cold, dry air all night, but I still feel more or less cursed. OWIE! OWIE! OWIE OWIE! ..... This is really the reason I have been looking so desperately for a girlfriend these past few months. Because every couple of weeks there is one five to ten hour period when I need to be babied a bit.... so I am being really unhappy and contemplating work and getting unhappier and unhappier and eventually I shall sublimate all to this into a more spiritual plane and just go around with a crappy attitude all day | ||||||||||
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I am really terrible at this online journal thing. It is terriffically unlike me to actually keep a record of my life, and so I find myself only posting when I have something I want to pontificate on something and I can't get anyone to sit still long enough to hear it. I guess that means I haven't had many interesting thoughts these past three weeks. I started to compose a really gripping portion of my story directly on to DJ the other day, when my connection failed. I lost about 1300 words. That drove me to not post for at least an additional week.... Anyway, this is my act of "getting right back up on that horse", but since I still have nothing to talk about I shall be going. | ||||||||||
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Mood:
melancholyI keep thinking about that split-life paradox I was writing about earlier... I have been acting very sill since my social life picked back up eighteen months ago. I think that I have been deeply untrue to the person that I was during the previous four years of isolation... A terrible time that I have no interest in reliving ever, but so much of my behavior in the past year or so has been reactive to that life, rather than the one I am living now. And so, I guess that the poetry that I wrote during that depressed and downtrodden period of isolation can hopefully explain (at least to me) why I have sought so assiduously to live out the weakest portions of my charachter since I found myself making friends again. | ||||||||||
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********** Recently, I had occasion to show someone a representative sample of poetry that I had written. I don't keep these things very well organised, but it seems worthwhile to at least have access to my past writings if the need should ever arise again. This last entry(which should appear first) will contain poems which were part of a previous manuscript I compiled to show around, but which I have never bothered to make accessable on the web. So if you are my friend and I have ever handed you a big sheaf of poetry, you have probabally allready read these. After (before) this entry is a poem that belongs in the final group but which I had forgotten to add there. The third entry contains poems from some REALLY old notebooks that I found while packing to move. The fimal entry reitterates poems which I have allready posted elsewhere, so people farmilliar with my work from the Taboo Forum ought to skip that section.******** GABRIEL Gabriel, the deadest of my friends Calls to me rejoicing. His voice is lost in universe without end. I left my home To get some sleep. Avoid the screaming Of my screened phone calls. Ten thousand prophets shedding truth In proverb-flakes at me. Another Seth is screaming In a modern soundproof life. Saying I am god Because he is HE I am alpha But there is no omega, Limitless vocalizing In a world of chanting voices. The susurrus says kill your self And live without an ego. Why should I not? When I is a state With nothing to lose. Magical reason And irrational expressions Make more sense to me. ___________________________________ GABRIEL SPEAKS Smiling facts painting themselves On brooding bedroom walls. Happy hallucinations of time Reply to all my questions with anger. My habitat wants to know Why I won’t believe What I know to be true. Automobiles gleam like privilege through the window. Gabriel speaks like clouds drifting In inscrutable patterns on a red sky. He paraphrases scriptures of unreason. I see into his message. His words are uniphrasal distillates Basic meanings from a library of truth Heavy, heady volumes with the pages stuck together. He says I’ll be alright and it keeps me sane. What I know resides in each mind the same, Though fashionable wisps of vapor often hide the truth. We are made perfect as we are For purposes which are ours. Failure is impossible. ___________________________________ FRIDAY LAST The comfort of hot concrete on my butt, As I smoke a cigarette outside, Victim of the nineties. I am blinded by the chrome Of a parked motorcycle Crackling as it cools. But not too quickly now. Surrounding me, the jabbering jostling Of fellow human beings Like myself, perfect, they were all born once. So engaging this, that for the third straight day I get nothing done. Now I go to work. Serving cheese fries to drunks And emerge the next day with a leaden lump Of one dollar bills which altogether, Don’t add up to the rent. And I retire to the hot concrete To dream my stomach full. With thoughts and fantasies Of meaningful connections To my fellow breathers. ___________________________________ ARCHIFRACTURE The terrestrial commonness, The spiraling weaves Of brick and mortar Organic encroachment Of kudzu architecture Waves of reformatives Promiscuating through design Fueled by furies Through profligant copper Like rays of variable inspiration Propagated above the ether. If you build it, They will breed. Installing themselves Upward and outward And over each other. Until the earth has no more bricks to yield. They mine their own foundations, And penthouse themselves Into the sky. ________________________________________ THE GHOST OF A NAME Suffocating me, The still vital spirits Of half passed passions Clogs still clicking Across the patio floor. Did she owe happiness to tragedy? Was cosmic self mutilation Her recompense to fate? Did hope of passions passing save her From fear of having what was desired but never seen? So I speak streams Of conciliations In the mornings darkness To myself. This, the source of my regret; Memories are made in time Which memory, eternal, soon forgets Remember her still And though smitten, remember why. But quite out of mind Is how it was then An innocent moments breath Before the sigh. This illogic crumbles my cranial whole: To save our past perfect And know love in a sense and not a word Not even to myself speak her name. ____________________________________ ABSTRACT I I am a mind I am a maker My fantasies form mountains That I may lie in their shade While others, challenged, toil to scale The slopes my mind has made I am a lust And I am a vastness From my dreams pour forth oceans And I walk alone on distant shores While unknowing mariners seek their greatness Through facing the tempest to discover my world I am a need I am a darkness Out of my fugue I first voice the whispers Letting thoughts drop as I pass though this world This poison men recreate As gifts to each other, unknowing I am a concept And I am its conclusion I come from the static echo of a eureka! Framed by all mens certainty That none like I exist Therefore, a function which sees itself a fact All dreams like me are formed From the absence of bliss _____________________________________ MUSEUM ROOM Take a seat in the museum room Room of endlessly replenishing vegetable Four walls, no roof, immortal sky Room where time has shuffled itself Runic jewelry in cleft of breast Winks with the halogenic burn Polyester disco shirt Skin cleft, untucked In flannel green of poodle poodle skirt Penny loafer platform shoes In a decade of short and sunken waifs Fashionable frailty Here where bricks bleed time Stones and shingles weeping history This the nave of anachronism Choir of the apocryphal A biting fog of memories mist Leaks through cracks in the heavens Paint to peel is laid, and so For decrepitude we are born. Left to us are these objects These works of life, blended to punctuate The atmosphere symphony of the museum room. _____________________________________ HETEROSEXUAL FEVER-DREAM ORTHODOXY My crusty eyelids crackle apart Sunshine is a glazing ache on a naked dream scape My tender astral body; bound by swaddling clothes In a shirt of hair, a one man penitant’s procession I walk the shattered diamond hobbles Invisible in my dream’s wetness, These purpose- caltrops Harry my dream time pilgrimage of pain. A [famous person] walks unhappily by A film director or art director A screenwriter or conductor or lecturer Anyway, he’s not an Inherently Erotic Celebrity He walks slump shouldered He’s hateful of heart His happy, (She wants to steal your power) Honey, (She wants to lick you dry) Alluring, (You only feed the ego engine) Vixen, ( But the fox won’t hunt) Siren, (Calling out the global sat-phone) Sex-kitten, (Cute, but don’t touch) Seductress, (She always gets what she wants) Wife.........Is a Dyke. And about his face still flashes Highlights of limelight Flashburnt Halos Upon his grieved and creased face The stereoscopic illusion of a winning smile I follow him into our privacy The sculpture garden of solitude A topiary of rosy- rippled flagstones A liquid projection of cobwebs and shrubberies And geometrically modern furniture remade in bronze Crying droplets of verdigris Upon the sterile earth Here we display ourselves invisibly Here there are mirrors to appreciate Here appears the aforementioned woman Walking silently in dumb conversation Nodding, contemplating Carrying on understanding of a sub-vocal dialogue Her, in apparition, the aforementioned woman Walking silently with her lover So beautiful the lover That she was made Deaf and blind (not to mention a lesbian) Out of cosmic fairness With a parting remark of telepathic significance, The lover walks naked towards me < I panic > I should not be seen whilst in my own dream But I am not the object For she walks blindly up to me And she walks blindly through me She does not hear my dreamy scream At perfections proximity She finds, unstumbling, her pedestal Where she stands One foot flat One lifted to the ball Radiant skin untwitching In the octoberish breeze A whispy, pinkish sensitivity apparent To make me freeze Erect for an age Palms upturned With arms outstretched But not so far as to be asking And a roguish smile, Perched high upon a pout In silence confirming That she will not be had. And truly, I can’t The closer I come, The warmer I get, With ardor internal Air solidifies Repulsing all approach. So I walk around this true reliquary Of the living art Searching for a hole But when I come full circle, I am not where I started. I am in the biggest house party of all time Where everyone is equally inebriated On the same nectar On tap and available, to all now and forever To pull a pint of pleasure, direct from the inextinguishable source The air is filled With a gangster-rap redux of the Gilbert &Sullivan number: “My object... So sub-lime... I shall achieve... In-time ... Let da’ punishment... Fit da’ crime Punishment... Fit... Da’ crime...” _______________________________________ Erotic winter evening is a friend. Feeling warm, loving life Hum within my coat. ________________________________________ The girl in white, I wonder where she’s gone. Daughter of a frigid dawn, Who burned herself upon my sight, I wonder where she’s gone. ________________________________________ The cold night is the long one, Long to be alone with my thoughts. The wakeful dawn is silent. Long awaited snows Warm the colors of the sky. Living grey through the trees and buildings, Which are insignificant against reality of winter. Now I can sleep safely, and long. Winter’s dignity stands guard Outside the window. | ||||||||||
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******** This belongs in with "Things I have previously posted on the Taboo Forum", but I am a terriffic slacker who can't pay attention********* COLD CITIES I The warren wardens of propriety call forth the dawn The moment of balance arrives Four thirty a.m. Too late to stay out Too early to be up Alone garbage truck inhabits the boulevard For a moment the metropolis enacts a state of fascist lockdown Curfew of circumstance Dawn breaks over the cracked horizon Glorious is the work of man when Liberated, I form the forbidden gesture And look up I see the city The northmans city As one sees Giza Lifeless, Triumphant The silence of so many Suggests to me music And I strain to hear it I strain and strain until the ringing of my ears Is quietly modulated by the spirit of the city The whistling of the wind The subsonic creaking of ancient brick structures The piccolo chips of telephone lines The lonely buzz of providential power mains The psychotic mutual destruction Of megahertz and megahertz of radio power But beneath this vivid background I hear the very thoughts of warren denizens Between nine minute iterations of alarm and snooze button To me alone they whisper The truth of their dignity: “We are inhabitants of cold cities Cities cold as to make lovers of friends We are crustaceans in cold catacombs Shelled in personality; armed with restraint See our cold cities with backbones of steel Hard arms of industry So powerfully real “We are inhabitants of cold cities Cities of ice; of frozen magma We, the nomad waifs of Moscow We, the identity gods of Manhattan We scurry unsatisfied from point to frigid point From place to perdition And home hanging hats from aluminum bedposts “We are inhabitants of cold cities Pressed upon by skyscraping gods Unable to speak; to breathe a weakness We still communicate, still live One another’s lives with respectful courtesy In our souls we set forth the banquet Our cold erotic beauty of imagination Break the bulkhead and we die of consumption “We are inhabitants of cold cities We speak not aloud of the cauldron keeling crone Our village magic worker, giving us our power In Baltimore they converse on her in the language of eyebrows The rustle of Chicago’s cashmere in winter echos her laugh From Copenhagen to St. Petersburg they are pouting kisses for the mothers cheek Moaning thank yous to her womb “We are inhabitants of cold cities In iron cells we remake ourselves Metropolitan mitosis of individuality Separate we, hold holy ourselves Our lives not linear but fractal Environment of dew and breathy vapor “We are inhabitants of cold cities Hopeless ye of carnal ambition: Hot city habitues dance denial darkly Spraying sweat, rum, and semen On blistering desert sands And radioactive beaches Desperate to irrigate the emptiness “We are inhabitants of cold cities We study strangers to understand ourselves Our own need is understood We search pulsating crowds for love, or lust And find other lonelies separate and ungiving We betray ourselves not With the raresilent warm breath against our frigid cheeks” II I lay on my back on the pavement I acclimate to the concrete The city is my lover My personality reinvents itself every moment Through every detail noticed I find a pocket of alley Left uninhabited for years The alleys career is written In a centuries stink and foodscraps Echos of my footsteps bounce off the walls Reverberate my spirits chitin And fly skyward through the fire escape Seeking sky, seeking oneness with the metropolitan murmur Even here the overlooked nook Of a forgotten corner is now and forever Alive My passage upsets a melancholy Djinn of history Undisturbed in the alley these many years He weaves memory veils of his time of vitality A time of great war and a world insane A time of young men who died of great age Amongst the silted wharves of cold cities Man-burrows of ante-centurial plaster Age-yellowed as part of its nature To shelter refugees and prostitutes Gouged into the paraffin stained cement Bullets laid these eighty years By a hapless young man of a forgotten war He sought to kill; for that’s what men were doing in those days “We are inhabitants of cold cities Our past is not forgotten But sleeping Like a book you never read” III “We are inhabitants of cold cities We travel our lives across endless steel vistas Keeping not our houses in order We make our beds of nails on the convenient precipice Our humanity is little price to pay For a universe of adventures in plastic and glass We never tire of our quest for the perfect thing “The perfect success for which we’ll skip gaily on the heads of the multitude “The perfect love for which we are knowingly trampled into the grime Of ever darkening nights within nights At the feet of divine sex-sweating demonesses “The perfect power Inspired, we destroy the world “The perfect beauty Which resides in the chest cavities of derelicts and madmen To be excised and appreciated And wiped of gore and put back Apparent to all at the point of death “The perfect mind Which writhes and convulses Evolving into that which accepts only the ideal And creates only the sublime And despises the faulty works of god For man exceeds all bounds “We are inhabitants of cold cities Our perfect things wither and grow rancid From the point of creation on So we hide them away to view only in the dead of winter When they can draw their power from the ice” IV “We are the inhabitants of cold cities We’ve raised the old banners time and again For mind, for culture, for man’s higher purpose, We’ve borne all manner of pain and provincial pettiness “We are inhabitants of cold cities As from the earth all life abounds From our cold cities has arisen all greatness And we sustain all pure virtue and all pure vice Our corruption is at hand The many claws of history Which love all things mundane “When all our clans are faded to cliques And all our thought is reduced to sound bytes Our manic meanderings of taste and mentality Are seen as fads of the kids these days When knowledge and truth are forever subdued by faith and dogma Because Suburban security is now preferable To the tumult of genius And the psychotic self-proclamations of real men “Then the whole world will cry out: ‘Fallen is Babylon the great, though all the nations drank of her fornications!’ Because our passions will wilt to fornications Our glorious boulevards and quays will fracture from the whole And become the property of nations once more And no one will come to take communion of our spirits As they did when life was pure.” PAX VOBISCUM | ||||||||||
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******* Now, the following really is shit, but again, there is no reason to allow your shit to just dissappear for a lack of transcription. ********* ME, MYSELF, TRIUMPHANT. I'm sitting on the railroad tie Of life, with my head stove in. The rock of forever in my cranium, Broken into gravel again. My thoughts are shattered through and through, All manner of earthly residue. My corpse is talking. But my corpse can't feel. Impotent, in horror, I watch as it reveals; I'm absolutely real. I'm absolutely real. I'm relying on the chaisse long Of luxury to give me strength. It'll never cut you slack, But it will cut you off your length. All the filthy animals, And all the great men, Can't put the meaning Together again. Theirs to break, and mine to mend. They'd rather build, I'd rather rend. Pull it back, and tear it off. And under the peel; I'm absolutely real. I'm absolutely real. I'm absolutely stoned. I'm searching for A metaphor. Of all the things a mind can hold. At any given point throughout the day. The answer found denies all sense. It's apparition recompense For everyone who, in mind, themselves betrayed. Away.... To seem, to look, and to appear; In fractal form, I'm invisible. All my parts divisible. And when that's done, purely conceptual. I just feel much stronger being that way. Identity is just a sheild Intoxicating, this power I weild. I'm absolutely real. I'm absolutely real. I'm absolutely cold. _________________________________ THUNDERSTORM I am a thunderstorm I am composed of winds in opposition. And rumbling mumblings Of internal friction. My light shines brightly And momently. And you do not see my face, But the burning memory of my face. That which you thought you saw. And when I speak, I speak in anger. My direction I do not determine. Fear to the weak, Inspiration to the strong. But no glory in it for me. If I had a definite direction, And blew myself hard enough, I could reach down And touch the world. (Yup! you guessed it! I wrote this entire poem in order to write, metaphorically, about blowing myself.) ___________________________________ RAIN Driplets Dropping Whetting Washing Drooping Droll Designs Divine Slathering Sweating Happy World Growing Silent Standing Still Gravity Gathers Life To Us Witnessing We The Somber Sussurrus Of Rain And Rain Verbs Happen Rain Occurs A State, Therefor Which Everything Wet Does Share Some May Weep And Some May Stare At Divine Designs Of Droll Drooping Dropping Driplets ______________________________________ LOST IN THE LAPTEV SEA {An attic room in a west Philadelphia boarding house, with a giant map on the wall} Australia floats passively Before my eyes. As I suffer to slumber. In the garret room Of this palace of forgotten lives. Freemantle to Suez: 6,222 miles The east wall plaster bears a map, Of the world circa long before. Oceans seven, And seas thirty four The eastern wall, long suffering, adorn. Freemantle to Djakarta: 1,691 miles Chile is interrupted By a hippie craftsman's joke. Rough sawed and slab-fitted lumber describes A black painted cabinet cube of strange device. Built of talentless idealism and minimalist contempt. Djakarta to Manilla: 1,578 miles It's cubby cavities to bursting are stuffed With mass produced folk art Of quilting and ragdolls. A liberal's loot speaks of a young man The landwidow once knew. Manilla to Yokahama: 1,757 miles Bright buttons decry the minimum wage Fading to pastel in late middle-age. $3.35 may be a crime still, With 'Stu Bremmens' long gone from city council, Having joined this collage of old passions. Yokahama to Dutch Harbor: 2,547 miles Art for Art for Art for Art's sake, Breath for breathing for living for long, Have long lost real meaning. For joy or whatever, Long lacking a Purpose, Paraphenalia has done my host wrong. Dutch Harbor to Ambartchic: 1,792 miles A long life's Life magazines Stacked high along the floor, Moulder and meld together from 1940 on. Unwanted and irreplaceable, Unrecycled and unread. Ambartchic to Nordvic: 1,654 miles This phantom life may be unremembered, But how remarkable it has been To sail ever north Onto the ceiling Edge of the Earth. ______________________________________ AGE What will they say about this human holocaust? What will they think when age is cured? When death is done with, And all are young forevermore. This will be the first generation To live forever. Will the newly youthfull mot remember The source of our mortal insanity? Or will they know, by right of blood, The confusion of mortality And the wandering loneliness of the future dead? Will they conceive of failure? I will never face this question. We, the eldest, will never be asked. None will read me, to live this life vicariously. When all experiance is assured them As they fade into forever. ____________________________________ (because everyone needs to write a sappy love poem as a teenager) TO GO You are the one who is home to me. The warmth of your breast, The silent vision and comfort of your smile. That world of we, my need. A golden and invisible thread of our knowledge Links us chest to chest across the miles, Coaxing me to come home. I face the rear of the bus That I might watch you as I leave. Each conveyance that pulls me away Weeps in mechanical understanding of my misery. My baggage weighs on my shoulders unnaturally It knows the wrong I do. I am the farthest of these travelers. People flitting to and from jobs, homes, social engagements. I have the silent innertia of one leaving love. Leaving you and the whole of my life behind, I drop the fare no man can afford, And book my passage to another existance. Empty roadways of recycling cement Through regions where time is a liquid and drowns us Past the plains of high cropped hatred And furrows of anguish. Now here I am where all are strangers, Doubly to me, but also to each other. I mourn and drink the blandness Of the taste of my own mouth. I work so hard to scar my hands. To lose the appearance of the me that you knew. I bring down fire, both chemical and vegetable And purge my flesh which aches for you. Thus, when you visit and pretend to know me, You'll smell the lingering stink, And see that I have punished those parts of myself Which had neglected to forget you. | ||||||||||
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***** The following will be nothing new to my friends, who have seen all of these before, but I figure I ought to post them here simply for the record. ********** AFTER THE BLIZZARD After the blizzard, all was quiet. The trees grew too tired to sway, And finally relented under their burden of snow. After the blizzard, warm, safe bedrooms Cautiously raised their heads above the ice. I saw their lonely hearthlights shine Across the vast expanse of suburb. After the blizzard, we were bound From all sense of purpose, all industry. The world would sleep or smother under snow. * * * On a collapsing matress I sat, And she sat beside me. And drew my attention back From the vista of the window. Love is found in commonness, And beauty in accessability. The greatest intimacy always is With the person who is there. In an unrestricted moment, She had said that she would share with me. But now she felt the pointed trembling; February's unrelenting urgency. Her face! Oh how she looked at me. I felt the flooding warmth of hope, But distance clouded her flashing eyes. I watched myself become a symbol. * * * After the blizzard, the air cleared; As sheltering walls of tempest crumbled. I felt much-hated reality returning. After the blizzard, my love grew ashen Her trusting serenity ebbed, the fever grew. The world pulled her across the bedroom And into the hatefull, silent afternoon. After the blizzard, I watched from the window. I saw her float away on snowdrifts. I sat in the wasteland of the bedroom. ________________________________________ DEC. 26, 1999 3:00 A.M. PHILADELPHIA BUS TERMINAL A note of caution: When boarding the number 551 bus, New Jersey Transit to Atlantic City, buy a round trip ticket. You never know how your fortunes might turn. The slick-back hansom-hack Approaches me again With his well pressed cargo pants And his well kept loafers His price is seventy five To take me where I want to go He was asking one twenty five An hour or so ago I offer him twenty (He laughs) “Twenty five?” -Business is bad- -In December’s desert night of dry and cold- -Christmas just passed- -But the ghost has yet to know- I chuckle in my temples But betray a heartfelt sigh Then he shakes his head with a glance at unseen sky And roguishly strolls away He’ll be back I’ll offer him fifteen. The shitter smells of (what else?) Piss And I, untrusting, brought my luggage. A voice croaks from the second stall Pleading for a smoke, I’ve got a bag in one hand My dick in the other, Which does he expect I set aside? My business done, I help out the stranger “God bless you” he chokes out “The lord be with you.” Memories flood back From a Catholic church I never went to. Roboticaly I mumble out “And also with you” The midlescent gentleman Across from me is clad In a white oxford shirt, a thin black tie And faux-velvet waistcoat. Polyester blazer comedically small. But bright and fresh are his camouflaged pants, His boots are brightly midnight waxed, A promotional baseball cap, never before worn Casts shadows on his face, A rocky, unreadable face, A pinkly human face. Wraparound sunglasses Fail desperately to disguise Hundredstrong constellations of tatoo teardrops Ever perched about his eyes. He sits bolt-upright Through the cloying, waiting night As if afraid of himself. When he notices someone glancing his way, Artificially, he begins to shake and sway In time to the Muzak. This act spreads unease Like a weary persons plague. It is now 4:15 A.M. The number 551 is leaving again. The scary man is on his way To wager himself in the general rhoulette Of highways and New Jersey. My thick-throated friend Is still in the toilet. And the once and future chauffeur Paces anxiously outside the glass doors. Impatience’s heat, keeping us alive. It’s Sunday. The Lord’s day. The day of rest, But no one sleeps. Something unnamed and terrible has happened. And now no one ever sleeps. ________________________________________ ON THE CORNER As Michael and his thugs Enter the whore of Babylons abode And drag her kicking through the door I stand with my brothers Transfixed at the corner Watching our lover as she goes screaming into fate. As Michael and his thugs Cuff our obsession and carry her down the street We ponder the availability of perfection In acres of skin which spoke so sweetly To us and one by one As we prostrated ourselves at her feet As Michael directs she be bound and gagged I swear that I can spy The glint of lechers victory Brightening the angels hateful eye How disappointing that only I Know love as I know her As Michael and his thugs Toss her in the car and roll silently down the street I stand with mankind Transfixed at the corner At the end of our boyhood The end of all joy. Defiant and aloof My one love turns her ten thousand heads And meets each one of us eye to eye. ________________________________________ Loree, Lori, Lauri, Laurie, Lauree Loree was this girl I met, On A Saturday in Washington. She punched me in the gut With a spontaneous Introduction. And slapped down my assumptions With a smile and "Hello" I don't remember what I said then; But I'm sure we didn't last So long in conversation That I'd remember. Saturday in Washington Is full of thunderclasps and flashes, Sensations and Impressions. But very little tops the bar Of memory With an "O", Not a "U", Two "E's" Loree. ________________________________________ HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE FRINGE I’m viewing the insanity The chaos of a million rational beings Following perfectly schizophrenic directives Issued on the strength of individual style. Designer jeans patched with duct tape Or Dickies to make a statement Shields the sex supply Sustaining the farce. Through the streak-stained plate glass window, I angle for a view of girlie buttocks Bisected with panty-line promises. The world alternately categories itself Under systems of elegant reason. Dualities, trialities, quartogenies, pentiphanies Parvamque laboramus est? In the language of a schooled and suckling mind. Time to be taken in By the licentious in lithe clothing And their venally dressed voluptuousness. Time to be taken on the tabletop By harpies of the hip Where Formica woodgrain is unconvincingly worn But writ on my flesh is the Pinnochio’s truth of my being. Today is the day when every nose must be chained to its cheek, Lest it fall off in the furror. _______________________________________ Blushing, round-faced beauty Stares out flatly from the photograph. For once I am allowed to see The log before the plank. Remember, It is late November, And the Time for jokings past. I must be myself To conserve myself Unto myself. If I am but my plans for spring, I will surely not survive. Now, the feral moment in the saloon. Everyone is happy, healthy: All full of blushing and revelry. But in five minutes the lights come on. I can already see the lights come on. They are hollow in their happiness, For in five minutes the lights come on. And Hideous vision consumes the Earth, December is upon us. (Heres the point: Every time I see this poem, I am sure that there are at least six blatent plagerisms in it, I am just not sure what they are. [working in bars is sucky!]) ______________________________________ PRIDE Let’s spend our last thirty dollars, friend. Let’s feel like yuppie scum For the next three hours Maybe if were quiet, They won’t notice our serfdom. Money Is pride Pretentious length Of job description Is pride A pasteboard degree A licence For Pride We don’t belong here We have No Pride Let’s spend the hour With our people Self-Forgotten The professionally Interesting Are looking up From cappuccinos We’re about to be food For the pride _______________________________________ ESCAPEMENT The absoulte clock which is heard but never seen Awoke me this morning. It ticks off moments which are not seconds Intervals without names. Escapement pulses forward through proscess, The hours irrelevant. The days are passing tableaus of memory The Calendars have nothing to say. Some Days ago, Was it two, was it three? It was warm and I was driving. The ground released an odor A memory of summer, It smelled like 1995. I remembered peacefull saturdays And turned up the radio. And S was there with me in memory And I was still in love. I used to be more worldly, wiser. More confident than I am now. I used to think my decadence mattered. Now all is proscess. Somewhere in all this meltwater, I can smell it, Somewhere is my unnamed something Running off into the bay. Escapement runs me round again to friday, I am now friday. I give up and put my faith in friday, Ignoring proscess. The Clock which has no face Calls me out into the world. _____________________________________ August Ice cubes shiver and sweat, anticipating. Black coffee lightens and reddens, diluted. Condensating a puddle my afternoon will sail away on. A pigeon lands on a rooftop, sizzles and squaks And flies away again. Deciding against reason, She dives up into the inferno. Blue bottles stand in review, Obscuring their own reflections. On mirror-backed cabinets, spring water surety of refreshment. From wells sunk deep in better lands, Human irrigation three by three stands. The hydrate essence of vanishing forests and unnamed mountains, far from the concrete desert. | ||||||||||
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Mood:
 relievedFascination is where it starts; there is a line from the Koran that I used once in a poem to describe this: "Ever darkening shades within shades"... The loved one can only draw you in, fascinate you more and more. More, she is like the harsh chill of icewater on your brow in the radioactive desolation of the lonely summer. She is allways new, unexpected... she refreshes so thoroughly that all your memories of her seem like idle fantasies in the face of her immediate presence. She communicates to you through your skin, through your heartbeat, staccatto breathing, and the electric chill in your spine from her attentions. She may never know nor can be told how this is for you, as words are too small of vessals to contain all that you might wish to say. And so you are dumb and mumbling in her presence, witless and wonton. All of this is selfishness, you can not transmit your love to one who is not recieving and so all of your obsession simply builds to desperation, impacting her not at all. And so, with my stomach in knots of worry tonight I told her of this; of the year and a half I have waited; of the guilt and uncertainty; of the unique place she posesses in my cosmology of self. Most of all I explained "I will take any part of you that I can have; your frienship, kinship, confidence or love." Of course, I do not determine anything. I am human and powerless and can only react. I hope that in some way she will be closer to me now, but I am afraid that I will never truly have her. The last time I fell in love, she was as silly young and confused as I was; when all our designs and machinations collapsed finally under the weight of our inexperiance, I went off and joined the Army. During the long months of training, the one luxury we enjoyed was access to a few minutes of hot shower a day. And so, naked and beaten, I would every day let the hot water beat on my scalp and think of her; humming songs of loss and survival. I didn't notice any privation in my life at this time, as I was preoccupird with my lost love back home in Maryland. I would immagine myself alone in the cold salty air of Annapolis early on a Sunday morning, swallowing a night of trauma and resolving to live on anyway. All of my stories now involve this immage: our hero, having made mistakes and been the victim of his own weakness, pushes all of that doubt and self loathing into a fiery kernel of memory and resolves to live on anyway. And so now it is out; I have loved again, and I have again failed to be worthy of my beloved. But I pray that I will find here a new story; where the hero is forgiven, and though he may never posess her, she can see through his misdeeds with pity, and accept his distant devotion none the less. | ||||||||||
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Mood:
amusedhttp://www.afa.net/petitions/marriagepo | ||||||||||
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Mood:
uncomfortableWhen, like right now, I get home, cool off, and think for a moment how I have just dumped on the people I have been hanging out with, I really embarrass myself. Then I go out, get in a conversation, and it happens again.... | ||||||||||
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Mood:
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Mood:
 giddyThe next time I sign into Dead Journal, I expect some responses dammit! I know at least one person who is reading my DJ. and has linked to it in her website, so there may be others... (Kim, your a sweetie and I love you, now please help me feel appreciated). I WANT TO BE POPULAR FOR F***'S SAKE!!!!! If you don't know me, it is all right, a brief note summarising how brilliant and clever I am with a description of the many ways that reading my DJ has changed your life will be sufficient... | ||||||||||
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Mood:
amusedIt is not so much that no one understands me, they must. It is more like I do not bring every part of myself to the table in a given situation. The truth is, I don't understand myself all that well, but when I hear a statement like "of course you must think this..." or "You are really only interested in...", I know that who I am seen as is who I am not. This is uniquely important for me to remember around the hollidays. I am sure that I am not unique in this, but when I get around my family, I am somehow propelled into modes of behavior from earlier stages of my life. For months on end, I get to really believing that I am this person that I have created in my everyday life... and then after a few minutes around say, one of my aunts or cousins, I find myself acting out the role I lived as an asshole teenager. I find this really annoying. I have (rather painfully) re-created myelf many times. I am not so much 'Marcus rev.4.0' as a whole new person, maybe 'HereticalFaction'... who knows. So then I find myself during this time of year occillating madly between my past roles: Precocious Wunderkind(1980-1993), Teen Punkoid Rebel(1993-1997), Self-Destructive Hemmingway Wannabe(1997-1999), Urban Bohemian(1999-2001), Whatever-the-hell-it-is-I-am-now(2001- ). I am, at times uncertain of my role, vaccillating with whatever old acquaintance I next meet. And then someone from here and now, someone I am close to only in my current incarnation tells me "Oh, you are just still worried about..." And I realise that I have forgotten... I have forgotten this place... I have forgotten this context, and with it, I have forgotten who I am and have been since whenever it was that I thought I was again.... This sweeping, nauseating vertigo of personality overtakes me... If I am so many people, how is it that I am coherant to those around me... I manage to give the impression of an integrated personality at most times... Because the Machinery allways functions, no matter what program it runs... The machine has no true memory, only STATE. | ||||||||||
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Mood:
numbIt seems most unfair to fall out of a pleasent dream and into a sinus headache. Now, I have heard that one's dreaming mind will incorporate the sensations of your sleeping body into the dream's sensation set. Like: If I hear my alarm clock going off, then I will hear a siren in my dream with the same rhythm, or if I have a headache, then I will suffer some trauma to my head within the dream narrative. If that is the case, then my body does not recognise this hurt in my head as pain the way I do. The underlieing structures of my nind must rate this throbbing pressure in my cranium as a "better than average sensation", and so they send my sleeping conciousness pleasent dreams, the message being: "Hey, HF, sleep away! There is nothing to concern you here... Just a pinched nerve in your T-6 vertabrae, and a honking big sinus headache.... No problem right?" To which my concious mind would answer(If only it could): "What the fuck hindbrain? Did you get some crack and not share? That Sinus Headache Sucks ass! It feels like someone is reshaping our cranium with a bench vise... How could you let this go that far?" This is where the more primitive portions of my brain begin to taunt me: ""Ooohh! I have a Sinus Headache!" whiny little bitch! At least your not wasting away from scurvy or rikkets. You don't have any improperly healed broken bones. Where are your pustulating sores? Your'e a goddamn Wuss! When I was the height of evolution, you could take that kind of pain and still stalk game, sleep on a rock or breed!" And there is nothing I could say in response. My forbearers, the Homo-Erections, Neanderthals, The Bear-wrestling, Mammoth-humping ice-age barbarians, Bronze age herding warriors, Plague survivors, hell, even myu mom and dad who managed to survive the Disco era without committing suicide... All my ancestors were tougher than I am... Most of them would take this a sinus headache in the morning in stride and go right back to dreaming of rape, conquest, and raw meat.... Ow, I wanna go back to bed. | ||||||||||
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Mood:
 apatheticI just could not sleep without writing something, now I have, so I can, ya'dig? | ||||||||||
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