feel good sunday!!!!!

one evening
sitting beneath a tree
positively after your usual bed time
its musculuar branches obscuring the moon

that shorn sphere was then a broken white plate
on navy carpet
unlike, the plate, however, it could keep doing its job

i wonder how many applicants there were for the position

and if they, upon rejection, receded into space
with the speed of one thousand impotent
men's luridly painted automobiles

embarassed stars

im sinking into the cotton out in the field
with the workers suffering from sun stroke
on a sunday afternoon, when the sun is stroking
my exposed parts with a remarkable conscious grace and caution
and, oh, how enjoyable it is
and, oh, how relaxing it all is

and, oh, how preoccupied
you can get turning all these
smooth stones over in your soft hand

that you will not even notice him then
your favorite worker
is covered in bats
staring in your direction

truth serum

after work
i pull into the driveway
to contemplate that typical misery
of southern evenings

just to sit still
like a sleeping horse
vacuous
in my vibrating car

a jesuit
cycles past behind me
on a child's green bike
or a saddled grasshopper

in the rearview mirror
he was a fish
darting through the evening ocean
before the eyes of another man
wearing patent concrete shoes

inside
you, in your undulating plaid house dress,
that youre always wearing,
are tapping your shoe
on the hardwood floor

sending sharp, repetitious wood claps
from the front of our happy home
to the back yard

swimming across the house
and filtering through the screen door

to join the symphony
of bullfrogs
and cicadas
that wander screaming
through the growth
like survivors in a plane crash
landing in the jungle

i examined that metal screen one morning
while the coffee machine was mumbling
and spitting in the next room

i found the residual particles
of your song of impatience
that were too thick to pass through pores

the notes of which,
upon examine nation
spelled my initials

my acronym too thick to pass through
and dance in the feral yard
like sinners at the gate

but, nevertheless,
im not paying to cool the outside

so next time
all of those raps
will collide with the door
like windshield insects
and spell your maiden name

self portrait of another man

i am a family
going out for dinner
at a fast food restaraunt

passing napkins
and thimbles of ketchup
to one another

i am a violent man

i have a small brown dog
who looks at me with disappointment
everytime i get up early
to look through your purse

while, you, my sweet mannequin
remain supine in plastic dreams

i am a little kid
squirming in his chair
at dinner

squirming
squirming
squirming

like some devil
waking in a coffin

red mechanical elephants

I.
red mechanical elephants
were walking
with the trains
on thursday
at 4:30
                           seemed to be a lonely group

II.
three middle age men
stood together
at the train-tracks
on monday

and at midnight
slept in the railyard
until thursday
at 4:00

when they returned
to their original position
at those horizontal ladders

II.

in the afternoon rain
dust will turn to oatmeal


the men sang
and line danced
like some native american ritual
as the train pulled away

and in the afternoon rain
dust turned to oatmeal
and asked him for the time


as their three orthopedic shoes
swung together
like sledgehammers
hung at the hip

and i remember them stopping

i was combing my hair
fashioning a handsome mason dixon line
upon my scalp
which is pale


and i remember them stopping

as the elephants' trot
turned to loping

grandpa series (2)

grandpa,
going
out
to recieve the paper
found
a fallen bird
in the yard

it most resembled
an old
leather
shoe

green blades
each with a
single
sphere of morning
bowing over
it


in my pessimism,
they were
middle aged
rubber necks
each adorned in
a single diamond

in my better moments,
weeping
men
or
offerings or
monoliths

and lifting his head
heavenward

"lord, i will not die in your prison"

great wings
then burst
from
the flesh folds
beneath
his shoulder blades

grandpa series (1)

from his bedroom
grandpa with raised rifle
fires

a collection of black birds
like splashes of ink
on the azure

scatter
and disperse
like endorphins

cantos for medusa

I.
medusa, my darling
when we met
as children
i begged you to fandango
across pools of ether with me

to drag your ivy across my limbs

to move through the quiet dark of evening together

in the stead of such romance
you spit magma
from graveyard teeth

and i stood ashamed before you

II.
dear darling medusa
you revealed a chink in your armor
by laughing
one day
in the park

i removed my drugstore vampire teeth
and told you a joke
about a baseball player
nicknamed "sweet chariot"
who always swung too high at the pitch

things were good then
as teenagers

III.
oh, sweetheart medusa
habitually late for dinner parties
frozen before the mirror
you're too hard on yourself, dearest

disregard the optometrist's fictions

even dracula must see a dentist


IV.
precious medusa,
what god crocheted you together, woman
for what god crocheted you together

those bones that explore internal
negotiating the soft bags and loose corners of your skin

those bones to which muscle clings
like some hirsute, parasitic creature
fallen from the knuckles and thick of a tree

a tree
near a tiny pool of ether
where we fandango
somnambulating

songs for a prison guard ONE

i didnt notice
her missing finger
until our second exchange
when she handed me
a few coins
and a dollar

someone had marked three zeros
after each "1" on the blll
if i could meet them
i'd tell them it was funny

maybe i already have

"there's a correctional institute
off that exit,"

is said inside the car
skating down the freeway
like an aluminum can
holding two candles
moving downstream

and he's having his lunch break
in the tower
feeling paternal
watching the sequences
and steps
of their sportive, concrete dance
to dribbled metronome

shifts in his seat

wearing that belt
has been worth
twenty years of chafing

but secretly
the justification is the satisfaction of taking it off
before getting into his car at dark

of seeing how long he can withstand
the irritation along that dehydrated stripe
and knowing the results
moving down the highway
past teenagers
who stumble along
in flesh toned MIlwaukee braces

moving down the highway
like a corpse
in river tide
towards home

inbred bull

I.
at the sale
the family bought an inbred bull
if that tells you anything
about how the farm is doing


they brought it home
in a tin can
connected to pa's truck
the bull memorized his license plate along the way

II.
i sit at my desk most days
listening to richard marx
watching that derivative bull

watching its grotesque musculature
swimming beneath
brown
and black
like a collection of children
kidnapped
and shuffling about a duffle bag

not caring to mingle with the colts
or bloated heifers

III.
the morning inchoate
is the part of the day i prefer

so i was awake to witness it

the existentialists
were sitting in rows
in the corn field
perpendicular to the crop lines

smoking cigarettes
beneath the dawn fog

when he came galloping along
with clumsy strength (the worst kind)

and crashed through the line
like bowling pins

bowling pins
black sweatered
reading glassed

it felt like some kind of victory to me
but id be ashamed to admit it in the presence
of anyone
but myself

riding partners

we, us two partners, will ride out
of the stables
in the morn

will cross the pre-dawn dew
on cold wet hooves

tearing whatever fences we come across
with one swift crash
breaking those brown skeletons
with tough hide
and momentum

"cowgirl bowling"

and when i squint hard
cos the artic wind
your muscular grey horse
looks like a mechanical baby elephant
galloping along
when you speed up flirtatiously
putting thirty feet of green hair
between us

we built a fire
in the woods at dark
amidst teenager's abandoned pornographic magazines
what sordid leaves we've sat upon

orange glow paints the windows of the distant cabin
not from the warmth of the fire
but from the bowl of clementines
on the oak coffee table
but we'll ride on without ever meeting the inhabitant

and talk about coffee in the cold mornings of the trip
like it was some divine elixir
maybe it is

"we could have fed our horse a cup or two
watch them things sprint untiring"

my partner, my dear
you thought that might be animal cruelty
but a good talk, even though

you were working on a poem then
"bumblebees and trees"

the teenage years of non-human animals
are just as awkward and embarassing for them

the umbilical phone cord
stretched along with us

The Medicine Horses

Hey noone! If you are interested in buying my new album, "Milk", by my band the Medicine Horses, wherein all instruments are played by the now only fan, me, write in the comments and I'll contact you.


"cutting school to go drinking at the dam. skin mags in the brambles, for the first part of my life i thought women had orange skin."

CDm

monday 10:51

a swollen, grey tick
stepping off a leaf
upon
onto
red and black flannel
a farmer's shoulder
a forest fire

there is a plastic bag on the desk beside me
it was brought into this earth
like a robot's birth
yielding only placenta

theres a bumble bee inside of me
i feel him moving around and mutating
somersaulting transformations

the gymnast is aging throughout her routine

mosquitoes turn into vampires
like tadpoles into frogs

and i still sit and contemplate
if there is a fundamentally different
conscious experience
between the tadpole
and the frog
or this plastic bag
and the author of all this

monday 11:05

trojan horse capsules
galloping
pon molecular hooves
"dont move, i think he's outside
standing drunk on the lawn"

then there will be
the musk of the dog
who came back from the creek
from curious nasal adventure
because he missed his master


come back from the creek, my brother
ill be waiting on the front porch
breathing aerosol
that sends a thousand sheeps into the heavens
when i aim it heavenward

and up the seretonin river
just half a road up the mile
through skeletal brown
and business branches

there will be a man:
an octogenarian cannibal
who will speak to you philosophically
defending his position
if he could
but his voice would pierce
the universe's transparent membranes
and the world would skip

like the portable cd player
connected umbilical to the cigarette lighter

but it wont matter, really
because when you return
she'll be standing there
blushing
in diaphanous dress

and it will all implode
the universe screaming


at least to you, it will seem such

Sun 6:26 am

when my fingers begin to grow
like feral stalks of bamboo
i attempt
to calculate
and average
the facial expressions
of every person in line at the DMV

there is a second moon of this planet
i've seen beneath the earth
i've seen it beneath the earth
when i was an old man
clumsily walking the beach with a metal detector
a robot dog eagerly sniffing the sand

in the subway tunnels
i've met the bureacrats of yesterday
settling in for the night
with the paper

after the red milk wars
a generation of lost cowboys were found
in a bomb shelter outside tulsa
behind the blood bank
where plasma spins
and exposes itself
like some erotic dancer

oh injuns
guard your kin
put them on white horses

and send them forth
to trample through pre-dawn black
resembling, in their speed
a thin, moving creek of milk
across the static undulation
of rolling green

if you are reading this at your desk
let us not forget
that some day
long past
not a single part of this bureau existed

and while charles
is standing above the concrete plexus
tearing pages from a novel

and watching them fall
like dying moths

i am writing in red pen
all over the bathroom stall
a short illustrated history
of man
its really funny
and so are you, my darling
in a different way
ive seen you swallowing ice cubes
like diamond pharmaceuticals

they travel in your stomach
and die off
a series of tiny miscarriages

as form rises spirit wanes

oh gentle darling in summer gardens:
it clings to thee flesh and flesh alone
diaphanous cloth draped upon like garlands
hangs perfect from your skin and bones

oh gentle darling in your august garden:
in fields i pushed you down
and to the ground we fell
a descending series of waves

let me take you again
amongst all this brush and greenery

create we will
struggling shadows
flesh and flesh alone
in your august garden