Friday, June 22, 2007

wait just a second now
here’s the birth, nine months post nativity
postal tongues
poster factories
hey, I know, let’s start a war in old man johnson’s barn

I used to narrate the songs I was driving, but I take the bus these days

I used to pull the rickshaw
offer to cut people’s hair
but it always seemed obvious to me that I was up to no good

each driver’s profile as they go past
some of them moving too fast

fisher price friends
you’re not the man they hoped you’d grow up to be

no one is ever going to like you fucking their daughter

pages with words are different than blank pages
even before opened
go on, look, I’ll wait

the word smolt wants to be in this poem
it wants to sound more like comic book fire than a fish

you’ve never had this thought about me:
“maybe I’ll wait an hour, he might be hung over”

we want guitars best
we want that lone person walking in a vast space look
we want to pretend to want to hurry home
we want to be nervous sometimes
we want some people to be homeless
we want to name streets after martin luther king, but we don’t want him back
we want people to look like famous people for some reason
we want to say goodbye not long after
we want to wear old people’s shoes
we want sick children
we want paris in jail
we want skin
we want sinners eating t.v. dinners
we want sun hats
we want stalkers
we want someone to know so we can tell them they’re wrong
we want more skin

Monday, June 11, 2007

chicago, one year later

next on the flat iron a woman sitting across from you in a café
because there is always a woman sitting across from you in a café

you get an hour, two sometimes

bikes get hooked up to metal
metal embeds into concrete
heat brings skin
skin moves the afternoon along

you’ve lost the right to my name
it doesn’t matter how straight a chair you are
or if you wobble to fall over

it never dies
it drones
or purrs like a cat
immoveable tempo
all chairs are eventually poor
eventually bastards
sitting for the sake of direct action

when the chair got sick the only option was to stay in bed
even healthy, as a chair, it had few options

how do you tell that a chair is sick
or when it laughs
or cries
or hysterics the hysterectomy

chair sex, it’s happening all the time
mostly mathematical
but also the game you play across the room
the one where someone gets caught looking

the worst thing that can happen to a chair is fire

the chair says to the new sitter “are you the continental”
the sitter doesn’t answer
both open legs for the new position
a sit that would look good in any age or language
let’s imagine 1957
irish accents
cities get walked everyday, but sometimes they look new
streets incline to open up skin
because every chair knows that skin moves the afternoon along

a self-defining chair thinks of itself as a mechanic

a chair’s mother thinks of it at least once a day

most chairs would drive if given the choice. anywhere.

chair police carry bic lighters
chair bank guards get a book of matches

never play poker with a chair

chairs have no fear of guns

chairs are a volcano, a river of the hot stuff, the note you passed in high school to sherry with the big breasts and the hooked profile that didn’t stop you from knowing where she lived or that she was going somewhere and you wish you knew where that was, but so what, you’re sitting on a volcano just waiting to stand the way a can of coke opens when air is released into more air, when you’re old enough to have a few stories and a direct gaze, when you take the four legs you have for granted, or the good tree that you have in the center of your chest.

chairs are traced back through thin white paper, or wafers bound with sugar and milk,
everything infantile tongued at least once

boy on the bus

he eats gallows
owns several city streets
jokes the expense
eat sweet bbq chips and spills them on his giants jersey
jersey as flag
lottery of a proud ignorance
cub scout and fake fighter late
we are not the same
nor will we ever feel that way
even hard plastic bends I tell him

Thursday, June 07, 2007

that was the year...

I said something to everyone I know, in june