Vesuvius I

Vesuvius I!
Accelerator of heat and steam
conjuring visions
like volatile wisps of smoke
marrying neurons, making
the forehead dance
like a buttered walk, a shingled house
under tropical rain; my pain
is the under-earth river, the
stoppered spout turning its tide
around
to lick its original lips, grip
and shake shells boiling their
insides solid; and liquid heat-dreams
squeeze dark
across ruinous landscapes of pillow,
shadows lapped and layered like batter,
clawed
and caressed
like clay, profane
as heathen dancers
spinning the wrong way,

Or is it me? a wheel
or globe, a centrifugal
molten core, a gestalt top
of stars bounded by far-reaching black
and sweat-stained blankets.

I kick at quilts, leave
slug-trails face-down, licking
run-off
from my lips.
I'm a pressure cooker
on a vision-quest, pressing
hands against the rattle, ready
to burst reborn, fully formed
of phlegm
from my own head,
an expectorate god of wet and whooping wind,
and my sighs are saturated,
and I am thickened
by vicious soups of viscous sin,
cracking the nut I live within.

Willing My Eardrums to Rupture

Go pop!
Break the levee
of my inner-ear
and drown out noise,
peaceful relief, a
liquid sigh
of red and green and air
commingling, estuarial, a
drip drip
onto the pillowcase
slick with
pain bleeding out.

Oh, how it would spout!
Cooling slowly
in magma scabbed mounds, a
gorey rorschach
of brown, shaped
like brain matter
splattered, in Pollocky spurts
down the easel
of my lobe.

Back to Poetics of Grossness

So, as often happens to me during times of good weather, eating relatively well (for me), and generally taking things easy, I've come down with some sort of sickness, most probably a flue (though I secretly suspect brain-ebola, or nostril dwelling head slugs). In any case, I thought this would be a good time to return to some of my favorite stylistic tendencies, namely the descriptive power of grossness and disgust. I explained my use of subjects normally considered odious or repellent in a previous post (which I'm sure you remember, dear reader), but to illustrate those principles again, I'm posting a couple of poems inspired by my sickness, both mental and corporeal. Hopefully these verbal children of my fever dreams are of suitable poetic interest, or at least a decent read. Enjoy!

Clarity

I held my grandmother's hand
and my brother's.

Clarity was
hostage to bones, spindly, twiggy;
clarity stays strong, but for bones
beholden to fragility, like eggshells, or
luminous
as the powdered glass of shattered flourescent lights
never again to flouresce, but
for clarity, the camera's peripheral unkindness,
brittle at the edges, like a perfect
frozen lake, like an old vanilla frosted cake,
angelfood, tasteless, light;

Hands squeezed at the edges to
complete the ring, never breaking the ring
despite flighty urges
to pinch nose bridges, fix glasses,
wipe away the fog, wipe
sweat-sullied temples, uncrease cheeks,
for hands to be
the warm erasers of clarity,
thumb heels
rubbing out the watercolors, but no,
the permanent semi-fade remains a ghost
behind rainy panes, melting in its
pristine clarity; clarity

Should, like people, slowly die; it's hidden
expiration date counting down
to darkness, or
infinite white, no negatives remaining
to seer across
our paper sheets, but
clarity's burning image becomes
the background;
the stark throat cords
strain a tremulous gulp before
petrifying in thought, our
Lady Clara, our
serene statue of delicate repose,
unfractured as she sinks
beneath silicate layers;

Clarity dreams for me,
dreams my dreams, and sings to me
but not to sleep, no,
she just sings to be.

There isn't a Force in the World that could get me...

Lacking no sinuous
libido, I can't set the
light to a wick, can't slink silent
links around a wrist, not for not
liking the stuff, for
laps unresponding or untouched, but
lacking a certain
lo-jack for response, the
low-cunning seen in so many other
lotharios around me, I
lick my wine stained
lips, unburdened by caresses soft as
lotus petals swimming in warm water, like
life, so
leisurely it forgets to float as the
lantern submerges, I
lurch from
love to love unaware of how
long they'll
last, or how far apart they'll be when finally
lain.

Highway 99 and Bethel, 2009

Ok everybody, this is a special poem written about a time I had in the place specified by the title. My friends know this story well, as it has become part of the lore of myself, so I thought I'd share it with you, dear reader(s?). Thanks, and enjoy.

"First, there was a moment of blood

here"

and he brandishes his thin hand

to illuminate the scar,

"That brought my face

into focus, reflected

in a pebble-pitted pool of rain water.

I'd fallen." He implies this

with

hands and waist parallel

to a strange ground.

"I'd just been drinking wine, 

at

an art-kicks art-show; pop-art

arranged around trays

of blueberry flavored (and hughed)

vodka shots, and paintings made

of multi-colored dots,

and custome sharpie-colored shoes."

He sips from his cup, shrugs,

and continues, "You know

that I love the stuff, but

once again, I drank too much."

He grins, and waits for approval.

He knows his audience, as thier

knowing laughter proves.

"So, I was at a bar, where

specifically there, Gin and Tonics,"

and he emphasizes gin

by throwing that cup back, 

dribbling a little,

a quaver of self-conscious lip receding,

"-uh, they're my 

kryptonite, my

night of thought, my

darkness time, you know,

GIN and tonics. 

Equestrian anatomy

for the thinking crowd."

He giggles, happy with himelf,

kicking in his cups.

"So I went over the fence

at one point. You wanna," he burps,

"Woof, uh, piss off a bouncer?

Hop off of the fence. Wave and

smile, wear tweed and 

say bye."

He waves lazily, but his eyes crease

small, happy crescents

where his face does not.

"So, the house party,

was breaking over my head,

and instead of a friend's bed,

I wanted my own, though

not before blood was spilled,

or wine, watever, some red

had to die, a bottle I never finished,"

he crosses his arm over his eye

as if tragedy's red cowl

had passed by,

"Poor thing, poured

down the drain. Thank Bachus' sweet grapes

the memories I can't retain."

And for a moment he faulters

under that liquid weight

of draughts memory never attained,

"I, apparently left for my place

in a 360 degree mismatch, a

movement of poles, a change

from my house

to home on the range.

Subconcious, direction found

a profoundly strange space."

"So I found the spot I wasn't

and had not looked for, a dot

on an unfamiliar map, a lack

of place. In gravel and shingled roofs

that loomed down, where

later I learned there were no

noise ordinances

to stop trains from floundering

your screams."

And he laughs at that,

not to lighten the mood,

because he cackles

too close to crowing

to ease anyone's mind.

"So I looked at my dying phone,

oh! this one!"

He holds the pitiful thing out,

then ponders its small power.

"The art-show friend helped me out,

google-mapped me back

to places unlit by ghost-lights

and unfamiliar street-lamps, talked me back

past weird reaching trees

and highway donut shops

so lonely in the 3:00 am air's charcoal outline.

I spoke

strange and distance-strangled

utterances

circa-airports

into small electric-holes,

and made my way back

to Me."

He bows, and then directs his applause

towards the hidden heroes 

of which he spoke.

"And I found a 7-11,

and bought chips and a coke,

and proceeded to soak

in my shower

until 6:00 am, 

lotus position, finding a center

in the heart of hot-water, 

a slow place to stew. I 

tell this to you because

I have no reputation to lose,

and because 

that night

I didn't have a fucking clue."

I Think It's Nasal Congestion

One eye waters, so

tears well, unintended, and

drip, trickle down; I look

half-sad, a tad confused, and

my dominant side blurs; the

liquid world smears

and refracts into webbed rivulets

and tidal cataracts.

The right eye pulls

the weight of water

to sight's whirlpool;

its wheel-well pivots vision

into a rain-laden swirl.

Eye-lashes unfurl like umbrella tines

to brush the pulse of water

into a swollen wall of salty brine,

and over the lids red-tinged lip.

It doesn't even happen when I'm emotional,

unless

the amber flow of suds

consumes my soul.

The curtains let light through,

yellow, and then blue

as morning's hung-over glow

moves towards afternoon's

guild laden bough of low shadowed leaves

and into evening's angled eaves, and I

angle my arm, tragically bent

in forms forlorn

across the right plane of my face,

a hung-over disguise; the un-sleeping angle

of the formerly drunk.

Tired Tyler: Parts III-VI

III

Classes kill paper

paper paper

sheets

(his room covered),

classes kill trees,

eternities.

Piled, sucking

his pen dry,

thin sheets frailed

by time and spilled beer

hold his inky fear.

But classes! Professors

wash him

in their bleachy words;

he does not so much learn

as lose mass

like linens rinsed clean.

Picked up like dirty teeth, he

pulls up his paper,

pulls words out of

wet foot prints.

Notes prattle on

about Yeats' eternal anachronism

ever spinning,

about Native American

talking animals, translated,

lists of unrelated things,

flowers barely recognizable,

lightning lines

that strike margins,

boxes swallowing each other, spirals,

furious marks

banishing shameful bad-things

to blackness,

Fuck.

Where did it go?

Did rage or boredom

cross it out?

Which spiral bound wound

swallowed the syllabus?

Tyler will turn a page

and build a cage for memory,

but lost in each small age,

each frame of day,

cast slowly out to sea,

Oh let those imprisoned memories be!

Don't let him get below a C.

IV

Long lines

make old words older.

Bodies speak,

but who cares?

Tyler furrows

at normal inaneities

rolling through the college lounge,

Things heard

without context.

One remembers

getting marbles for picking up Spanish,

a vocabulary

paid in glass.

"I'm in a play for the German department

next Fall,

but we don't know what it is yet."

"Do you have any lines?"

"No, but

it's a very physical part."

Tyler doesn't understand

how she knows,

but he believes her.

V

Tyler thinks in abstraction,

bodiless bodies

twist through his small head.

Sometimes love lives in dread,

but it can't, of course, do that,

having no life

and being nothing at all.

Love's fear is his fear

transposed on a concept.

Dread blooms daintily

on the tip of his nose.

He doesn't see beauty, he

merely sees

and beauty evades his description

because he merely

describes.

His compunction, volition,

his unerring doom,

the sublime impressions

that don't actually exist,

the carpet, the footrest,

the linoleum floor,

the hardness beneath him

that he writes out of physical form,

the letters,

the language

clumsily hugged,

the words he depends on

to remake the world and impressions,

it all passes by him

and falls to the bin.

He lies down.

VI

Later, bleary Tyler

wakes up, eventually rises, eventually

does it again.

Tired Tyler Final Interlude: Driving

Driving.

The gas drains

to a

glowing line of red,

a barely

slanting angle, a

neon finger

feeling the matte-black dache

before

the ground-floor,

the empty signal

flashes.

The truck is

thirsty; it sucks

the tarry tank

of shadow, liquid

seepage

from dead things long dissolved

in the solvent of years.

A dead plant's midnight tears

ignite

in the deep-purr

of pistons; the

truck labors

its asthmatic breath

through

my vibrating frame.

13 miles, almost

a gallon

stretched into

ribbons,

pressed to

spun rubber

and rain-dented asphalt.

A raccoon hunches

its velvet shoulder

over the yellow

median's dashed line,

all nocturnal meanness

and feral menace dented

into gentle repose

by some fender

or the jumping

pop

of bones spread

and released form the lock

of ligament and joint,

flattened beneath

the fur-softened fabric

of hide,

shoulder

forming a line

of sleep, a curved line

so much like sleep.

Tired Tyler First Interlude: Drinking With Johnny

(I)

Johnny flits

like sparks from

static touch,

stings skin patches numb

and rubs hands

like uncut phantom limbs.

He rubs elbow

creases

into dry, smooth peaks.

He keeps busy.

The gulp method

keeps his buzz afloat

as the sud-line lowers

its film

from the crystal lip.

If only, oh

if only

each glass

were a well

distended, descending

its dark worm of liquid

beneath table-top lacquer,

if, sweet, if so

then Johnny's dark-worm throat

would answer those

malted depths

with vacuum.

(II)

Tapped Tyler

twiddles his thumbs,

tastes

his raw gums, and

nurses

a buzz

from the faithfully

sloshing bronze

breezy hop infused

wet-nurse

wetting his lips with

artificial happiness

like a sprinkler's dewey fog, a

sticky mist of yeast colored

cold liquid-gold.

(Cat Cry)

This cat

just doesn't shut up.

It's the first

truly mewling sound

to

pierce his ears, to

pry his

sleep-searching head

from awkward

side-slung laying

(a crooked fetal

line

dividing the bed)

to look up

through star-punctured dark

and mumble reluctantly,

"What the fuck

does that cat want?"

At least it's not an existential query.

It's the

domestic cat-cry

theory of food,

rather simple, two-step

geometry

as only a thing

more aware

of the common denominator

of surviving each moment

can be.

Life that close

to the stomach

doesn't

make you a killer;

it makes you

complain.

She does this

for

the old smell

held fresh

in pastel colored tins,

thumb tabs

pointing

to well-fed

felicitous kitties;

all for that taste

of orange-brown

puree, shaped

like rotten sea-food

molè, each hill 

plopped

with a gurgle

as air seeps

between

the brackish fish-syrup

and its quivering mound

of processed

sea-stars, dolphin teeth,

horrors of the deep

cleaned, gutted, and

chopped to fine paste

for feline consumption.