Tag: october 2017

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Blind Date / Channel U / Suburban Amnesia

I was behind myself
                                                no spooky action all summer
the dead becoming a friend                         almost a mother
              Today I learned more about enemies
                                         in the fall heaving bracelets and heavier breasts

in the dream kiss the little girl                 behind the satin-lined bureau
              to work up an appetite
in the dream pointy hats and why it went sour
              we grew up awry                           to be cheating wives

I never thought him an old man
              huffing on my pink and white  bike in the fire
the brass band counting down the great generation
               skin tags and flags (more…)

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     Tater is not Tater’s real name. When he was younger people called him Tatertot, but that wasn’t his real name either. Tater is 19 years old and about 5 and-a-half feet tall, weighing in at around 300 pounds. Some people have started to call him Potato. He is hoping it won’t catch on. His mother is crazy, she can’t hold down a job. She reads secondhand romance novels all day and when she isn’t doing that she’s smoking cigarettes and playing candy crush. Tater’s mom has not kept track of Tater’s social security card, or the number on the card. She also lost his birth certificate. Tater does not have a father or a driver’s license.

     Tater stopped going to school after turning 18. He was in adult ed. He just sat in the back and played his Gameboy, nobody noticing him. Tater doesn’t think anyone noticed when he stopped going to school.

     The first time Tater found out he could teleport was when he stole food from a gas station down the street. He had a liter of Mountain Dew Code Red in his pants and was loading up on beef jerky and nachos. The gas station guy caught him red-handed and laughed, saying not to move and that he was calling the cops. But he said it like Tater was a funny video he found on the internet that he had to show his buddies. Tater shut his eyes real hard and all-of-a-sudden, when he opened them: he was in the parking lot of the apartments where he lives with his mom, with the food.
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                                                        or bourbon
trying to see actual bullets
                 my face rubbed christmas
when she squeezed my neck at a scene
                           which reminded me she was there
i reached for maybe her hand but found a cupholder
in the aisle behind us                 an usher was crawling
between us like a kid who couldn’t swim
looking for scraps with a flashlight in his mouth
i was thinking about how much i like how fish
                           drink their way forward
omelette steam coming off the sidewalk
egg shell halves sitting like baseball caps
and daytime moths rising from them
like glitched pieces of sunlight (more…)

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The lantern’s wick is lit from
the flames of our bodies.
Demure and sweet-slick we
pluck our fangs from each
other’s teeth.

More readily accepted
among men, among
those arrogant believers.

They shove scriptures,
mortal tinctures down
our throats, in hope
we parrot some divine
message collected from
their small gods.

We roll our dimpled
hips in time, as one,
as many. The lantern’s
pulse, our hearts
stuttering, intermittent. (more…)

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Our shoreline speaks of night; we can’t hear it but we can see its mouth move.
                                             I am at the ready for god, but let’s be honest.
I gloss over the jetty, watch a seaflower hold its breath between the rock;
             I hold my breath to move between the veil.
                                           Miracles, we sing.
Death only happens to the living;            even the quietest corners
              pale away. We grope at rooms of mirrors, through tufts of flora,
                               for the rose of Jericho. Let me tumble to resurrection &
              stop me from sleeping all day. I have barely seen the sun. I won’t wake up
                            until I have forgotten the scent of absence. There is an obscene goneness
            in my palms.
Somewhere on land we dirge through the malaise. I am nothing
             more than a girl who cries on balconies
at this point      at this point I am nothing more than the balcony.
               I gaze at the petals; they gaze at my wound.
I’m so wound-bound.      I’m so lost to the vanity
                of staying. Stay. (more…)

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I Am Constantly Seeking Reassurance

My thoughts are homeless & stealthy.
They make an orange moat
                                                 of my tongue,
                  some slack-sided
constellation of moans that would confuse
              farmers’ crops into growing
                                           crooked stalks.
Please tell me
                             I am not
                                               going
                                                            blind.
              Kaleidoscopic eyes across which
              glide dissolved specks of proteins,
lilac & laughing.                            My boyfriend
can only                                 reassure me (more…)

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Behind the Gateway Shopping Center
Portland Oregon 1971

Something in man’s form
hunted small boys
like me

Would melt away
when I would spot him
by the billboard

Unless he had already
seized prey
his words to them still venom to me

Take it, or you’re going to get hurt.
If it won’t fit, play with it.
Grab it fast. Grab it fast! (more…)

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     The ghost who lives in the hallway used to be quieter. When we first moved in, I’d see him only occasionally, on nights where fog was thick or the moon full. He’d just float there, bowler hat on, side of his face melted and slipping off, and watch me. As far as ghosts go, he was pretty harmless, which is why I never screamed. Never even told Ted about him. I’d just pass by him in the hallway, nod politely, and go about my business.

     I think he liked being seen. I understood. The longer we lived there, the more he’d come out. Soon he wandered out of the hallway. He’d hover near the kitchen table and watch me do the dishes. Sometimes in the mornings, after Ted had left for work, I’d pour an extra mug of coffee and leave it on the table. I always made too much anyway.
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Prologue/

How can writing be linear? It evades the bounds of time, creates its own change within itself, harms itself, heals itself, transcends itself. Writing is influenced by nothing more than the mind, no external or variable factors besides the ones that inhabit the mind. Writing is exhibiting the word-illustrations of the mind, which contains implacable meaning, cannot help itself or do anything besides meaning. The mind and the brain may be two vastly dissimilar things in regards to writing and meaning.

My organs aren’t real, and I know that, we’ve never met, they seem standoffish and busy.

Todos palabras, truly hollow.

All good writing is really just poetry, and poetry is painting mind pictures using words, thus creating an image, and time and order has no place within images, since images remain the same images regardless of their position in time.

Writing uses a juxtaposition of associations that relate to one another to indicate or replicate time, but postulate for a single shining moment that all could be seen and realized, no longer a limited perception, rather an omniscient perception of all at once. An extinguishment of the practice of writing simulating oral storytelling and instead developing a truthful juxtaposition of word-images that inherently entail ideas. A word-portrait. /
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     The blade dropped, and its precision left much to be desired. Another rodent’s escape. She was spread thin, like the last bit of jelly on her Saltine crackers, sifting through a pile of yellowing envelopes weighted with bold-faced capital letters. The textured wall beside her supported a body that, though muscular, was losing its strength, and the tears that met the peeling paint softened its edges into the kind of fungal clusters that grow on dead logs.

     Three or four steps from her kitchen sink and she was spread atop her sheets and comforter, considering the irony of its name. It provided no sanctuary from the square of springs it dressed. Dressed, something she did and undid for the evening shift, and a heel had broken off her last pair of shoes the morning before.
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