Minced Words

11:23PM - Doctor

How many, do you think,
immediately regret the decision?
To throw oneself,
to fall in her arms.
Death, a cold bitch
with warm skin
and a hard bed
like the canal's surface below Bourne.

11:19PM - Hunter

When you stand in the desert like that
and fire a gun,
you hear the blast so loud,
and again, the echo off the plateau,
the cactuses stretching to the horizon
seem so much closer.
It's amazing what that volume will do
for your concept of permanence

10:57PM - Sunburn

Mr. Sun,
I know you married that blonde girl
just to watch her blush.
I know how your heart soared
when her nose was peeling
as you lifted the veil to kiss her.
How she reached
through the surfaceless blue,
and how she beamed
through the infinite depth.

Mr. Sun,
her skin is a fragile thing.
Her chapped lips still softer
than any mass in space.
Your long limbs' caress
is a salted wound.
Your lips on her's, a roast.
But the multitude cried with joy
and the rain fell
on her burnt face.
She shook with delight
at it's cold caress.

What a shiver of consummation!
The dress clung like a mer-tail.
She swam through the atmosphere
to float there,
at the surface of earth.
And, you just sat
with so much exosphere between you,
unable to reciprocate
the journey.

9:33AM - Stoop Marsh; Moving in for March 1st or Lies and Butterflies (in progress)

The way supple sirens bounce
the round taurus down a tidal creek,
visage shrieking frequencies
visible on an impossibly still
looking glass of marshwater.
Such a calm beauty bathing
lies with butterflies
and better lies
and sulfur in the air
but not in the wine.
Camped on branches
heavy with water
struggling to bolster young love
with awkward kisses
so low above the ground
without the lift of innertubes.
The responsibility rests gnarled elbows
to take root between the coarse grasses
by roosting plovers and digging fiddlers.

Sponge-like and soon saturated,
the branchling buckles under it's own weight
to dig fingers in again and so on;
stolons ad nauseum.
These are not butterflies,
these are fears
these are drunken constructions
these are patches and patchwork
these are a few of my favorite things
that you don't do.
but I am charlatan
and not the namesake of cities and rivers
and i am not yet nauseous
but i am sick with
nomenclature and nostalgia
for a time before last
the smiles before cynicism
the miles of conservation before criticism.

No, these are not butterflies
though they spread with
beauty befitting flight.
These are willows.
Don't they hang swarthy with
gothic architecture of Spanish moss
and such strange fruit
in the clutches of widow's webs
and other carpetbaggers
cotton-picking in a mismanaged reconstruction?
Was this your good idea?
Was this so much beauty
behind a freckled smile and a sun dress
fair and supple beneath the suns tresses?
Did you see i blemish like you
though mostly on the inside?
A surly foil to your winged daisy
and confused with desire
wondering what's between an angel and a siren,
floating downstream in the willow's shade?
Is it wings and sun dresses and freckles
and is that a good idea?

9:24AM - This is about getting high and trying to drink soda.

5:21PM - Matissetriss

Riddle me this:
Who fails to develop as an artist?
who would have killed herself
right there in the psych ward
with a simple blue wail;

a Jazz Icarus
against the sterile white
echoing down hospital halls
a brilliant cobalt
like so many human muses

the way Matisse approached the sun
the iconoclast of poet's dreams,
though never vestal,
and,of course, soon invalid
valuing canvases with scissors
and a model he had never slept with

You were uncharacteristic of
a bourgeois man among the bohemians,
a beast among frogs
a frog among hedonists
one who'd work in chronic anguish
and periodic breakdown
who's catharsis was a viscera of brushes

You, neither picturesque nor pornographic
a jewess among whores
before the odalisques
and outside the law of veils

4:09PM - Losing Hard-To-Get; For Jen and Amanda

I wonder what it was like...
Her belly, so flat like crème brûlèe.
Her hard shell crisp;
a stained-glass rampart
burnt by flames of youth.

And when she cracked
the caramel anger,
that gooey ooze
so sweet across the spoon,
it crossed your lips and hers;
those boysenberry lips.

And, I wonder what it's like
to wake in Steel Valley
to bake the ramekins.
And do they realize
just how quickly it's consumed;
those custard ounces
so small against the clay
against the bliss of fading sweetness.

1:45AM - goggles

she considers the moon's cratered face
and the probability it's struck again.
she considers the time it takes to heal scars like those,
and how one gets home
without the jealous atmosphere protecting her

3:26PM - Backsliding

Backsliding,
with the inherent vitriol of a 10 year old
and equivalent sex appeal, but
exploding like some visceral diorama
for everyone to see.
You do not live in an age of gravestones
when a person's life was worth a monument
and the estate it stood on.

Dear Ironiclast, keep your aesthetics to yourself.
It turns out bookshelves hold imperfect things
and cotton is renewable.
Dear Ironiclast, your art will not exonerate;
to completely lose control of self
is not a super power.
Your libido, overflowing,
your thick scars unlike the moon's,
you can fuck a lot of people in a vacuum,

but not all of them.

9:46AM - Getting High Before Bed in Tropical Climes; For Dan and Frenchie

A precious canopy hangs this mosquito net
hangs over head protecting him from god.
And, so akimbo with the holy light;
the bolstered shade, it rests on glowing empathy.

She exhales storm fronts on his sleeping head
of sleep's imagination,
falling 'round his crown and seeping in
to gently swim beneath the dura mater.

And, doting over the dopey prey,
a proud and sleepy victory.
Oh, how like a narcotic are these pheromones.

They, thick within the burning bush
within the burning page
athwart all clarity with palindromes;
the end so very much like the beginning.

12:30PM - Cardiac Puncture

   Surgeons mask, latex gloves, gaunt eyes and a nitrile smile; when she pushes down on the 
stomach like that, there is such a short distance across the peritoneum that the needle's tip is 
puncturing the diaphragm before the bevel has completely breached the abdominal wall.
   She pulls the plunger out two hundred microliters, reducing pressure in the syringe. As the 
bevel clears the diaphragm, the needle's tip glazes a tangent over the left atrium. She retracts 
instinctively, changes trajectory and thrusts again. As the needle punctures, the syringe fills 
with blood, a vacuum, and she pauses as the air bubble shrinks until it's pressure matches that of 
the heart's chamber. She slowly pulls the plunger out further, until the blood stops filling the 
syringe just shy of a milliliter.
   Flashback two minutes to the pinch test: When the rodent is completely anesthetized, it's 
reflexes will not respond to pressure applied to the feet or tail with forceps. Still, while the 
heart drains, the head jerks forward as though gasping for breath could shake the ketamine dreams.

9:47AM - It's on Squire Rd.

   "Do you wanna watch me shave?" she sings, the constitutive exhibitionist. She flops over 
on her naked back, feet high in the air. 
   "Shave what?" I think, watching the soft spot behind the bend in her knee while her feet, 
platform-bound like a proper western geisha, ferris wheel to halt right back where they started at 
their apex, knees extended. 
   She steals my attention with the clap of the platforms and the flick of a straight razor, 
magically. She cuts her underwear sideways, and the unsubstantial garment snaps away, pulled by 
her left hand but revealing nothing further. She slaps the blade against her hamstring, "Take your 
hat off," she demands, coyly enough for me to protest, "...but it protects me from God."
   "...and shouldn't he see the important things? I know you shave too. It's OK, lots of boys do."
   When she cuts herself, we're both surprised. It's shallow but the blood is so red against her 
pink. She lets out an orgasmic yelp more surprising than the accident. I still think she liked 
that. When she cuts me, only I'm surprised. She grabs the dollar from my hand playfully with a 
mischievous smile and the crisp, new bill slides between the troughs of my fingerprint. She 
immediately grabs my hand, putting the cut in her mouth, and before I'm afraid to touch her, she 
slides a crimson trail down her thigh and the two wounds meet like an opened-mouth kiss.

9:32AM - It's on Chestnut Hill Avenue

   The Hertitage Museum is on the first floor of the Brighton Senior 
Center, but it's only ope during business hours when they let the old folk 
down from their rooms to roam behind the glass. Usually they're standing by 
the foosball table drinking Kool-Aid. But sometimes, when Morris is losing 
the bridge game, he'll just get up and leave the cards in as much limbo as 
the players; taking his turn around the stacks of crossword books, 
construction paper and safety scissors wondering why people take the 
comparison between the very old and very young so literally. 

   He lasted clear up through his seventh year before he lit t he trash can 
on fire in celebration of his 368th visit. That was an exciting day for the 
museum patrons, who were mostly regulars except for this one guy from 
Wisconsin who had heard about the museum on the internet and had a thing for 
watching caged primates. They took Morris away after that, because with that 
act he had breached his contract and the lease was thereafter voided or 
something. 

   I stopped going that week because I had moved across town but I don't 
think It would have been the same without him, and it definitely would have 
been interesting to watch a stable hierarchy re-establish itself.

9:17AM - Open Letter to my Creator (in progress)

Very funny, Sir, yes.
I knock down the dominoes
when they're all lined up like high-rises.
I start with the sixes
and the ones all come last
but I rarely care to sort out the middle class.

So here I am, Lord.
Is it I, Lord?
I here with the fornicators
and other land-borne beasts
yet neglected by the rhetoric
seeking proxy in the senate
dreaming of like types.

Dear God, what's it like to be on top?
Do you share my enmity for beeping things?
Are you still mad about the rodents?
Did you expect we'd love
the things we've named?
Aren't you so proud that we can build?

Oh, when I fall, will I fall hard?
Will you carry me parallel the Earth?
Will you carry me cloud-like, a lamb?
Why aren't you proud of what we've built?

Oh God, are we a chain reaction
arranged for your amusement -
enumerated skyscrapers
endless kinetics and
how did it get like this?
Why don't you flick that double six?

4:15PM - Have you ever tasted a penny?

Between the hydrostatic lattice,
His diction barks like a dog does.
He lies with a lark in a bog without cranberries;
tart like a bit lip
but less incendiary than the flavor of pennies
or one hundred broken marbles
pouring down a wooden staircase.

5:06PM - With Love, For a Courtesan

She likes fucking shiny things
on banks of sacred springs
at dawn over Delphi.
She climbs Helicon and drinks Aganippe,
swims Hippocrene.
She tastes the halosphere
with muse's word's conspicuous toponymy;
More desert than the Gulf of Corinth,
where Pegasus fears to tread.

She kisses Nemesis and picks Narcissus flowers;
the snare for a bloom-like girl
on banks of sacred springs.
With haline hubris, Phryne of Thespiae;
her statue Helen of the Gulf of Corinth,
where Pegasus lays his head.

He steals Persephone with these Narcissus flowers.
This bloom-girl; Phryne beside the Gulf of Corinth.
He fucks her banks with shiny things.
His angel's face glows brightly with topography.
He lays her down beside the aging saline,
filled with muse's words
but no more room for breath.

9:26AM - It might be Chicago

2:55PM - In which Ilya sets himself on fire

So, in the lab we have this habit of "flaming" a jar aperture to kill any microbes that may be hanging out under the cap trying to sneak their way into whatever is contained in the jar. This practice helps keep the jar contents sterile and otherwise undisturbed. Ilya is our Lab's Technician fresh off the boat from California (bless their little hearts). Ilya is interested in practicing good laboratory techniques because this is his first job after graduating from UC Santa Cruz. Today is Ilya's birthday, but instead of blowing out the candles on his cake (this will happen in 10 minutes) he had to wrap himself in a fire blanket after flaming the isopropanol, in an attempt to keep the three-carbon alcohol free of bacterial contamination (as if anything could grow in 200 proof isopropanol).
Fantastic!
Now everyone has been calling him things like "pyro" and "Iliability."
Happy Birthday, man. You're doing a great job!

8:18PM - (y(x))

if x then y
She wears the beauty of genius awkwardly
which is to say; well.
Rare elegance remains the grotesque sexuality
of unbridled ingenuity.

all x are y
A cartoonishly attractive woman of thirty...
one, with wholly validated solopsism
who'd often pop like a grape;
wet and tart with amphimixis.

no x unless y
That young sinner with
clumsy drums and
a love for machines that
were made to make money.

only x if y
She was not broken in the obsidian softscrabble,
but she'd cracked, retaining function.
lost in an alabaster oblivion.

if no y then no x
past.
perfect.
tense.
An apocryphal namesake

8:24PM - Possumboy Sleeps

The dream is different every time.
It's always a vehicle and a homocide.

First.
It's a small side street,
packed with stationary vehicles,
and it be one-way
because I sit in the driver's seat,
parked,
on the left side of the road.
She runs in front of me
crossing carelessly,
all pigtails and facepaint;
smile like a faded pink t-shirt.
between the cars.
When she's hit,
I'm not surprised.
How could I be?
She's run completely over.
What takes me is the hit and run.
To scream for help in a dream -
you can never part your lips
or feel the reverberation in your ear -
in no one's ear.
"Get that lisence plate!!!"

Then.
It's a cold, rainy day
and the breaks on my bike
don't work perfectly
for the wet road.
I'm stopped at a light
right in the crosswalk
when the fishtail slaps me
like a linebacker.
I jump to my feet,
an oversized, animated rodent
and as he opens the door
shouting, stepping out,
I kick the door to close
on his shin, forearm and face.
He falls out of the car
to the pavement in a pile,
where I proceed to beat him
with my bicycle
which remains rigid and light;
cartoonish.
Like a baseball bat.