Poems in the key of KABLAM

[Jon]

"The difference between a lake and an ocean is how powerful your thirst and binoculars are"

Good stuff!!

[flaggwalkstheline]

(open this poem from either end, like a peach)
I am a blind wave of saltwater
Terrified to meet the shore
Messenger of thin coughing clouds
A sapling in a grove of ashes
I’m just
Awaiting the bulldozer
I know what the machines will do to me
When I come down

We can meet in the center like mimes
With a secret language
Unable to touch

You’re just
A wisp
From the chimneys
A sly gesture of air
The wish from a dandelion spent
A moonarrow dancing through brambles
Behind the eyes
You’re a lit match
Lighthouse trying edgeward
Signaling frenetic
Slowbreath extinguishment

[flaggwalkstheline]

Pain
To what would I pray for and to,
If not this soft rage?
I can’t get a job, can’t work
The people who give them out, like theoretical candy
They’ve got my name
And I’ve got their toothbrushes

My sadnesses are not profound enough

Can’t make money, can’t make love
Can’t make the grade, the cut
The cult, the butcher, the surgeon

A child in the fields till a dawn of shivering calves fills his belly with doubt
He knows
Plucking an old arrowshaft like a gone violin from the soil

I cannot have
The big star nova cortex eureka from the very wound
No
Mine are the small, mean, petit mal passions
Understanding with a world, a dream, a disease, a nation
A thousand cuts
That I wish would just open and excoriate me
Into the doorways I keylessly know are waiting
For those more gorgeously ruined than I have the strength to be

[flaggwalkstheline]

The great American Past-Time/ A Historia Ludicrum

Certain aspiring Dr. Freuds would say my car crashes are a result of repressed sexual energy

But I have more ears than theirs to whom I can speak

And precious few I can listen to

It’s all static and battery-rot except for one marble

So blacken my airplane teeth like your Nixonian rice paddies

When I give up burning my ears out with satellite noise

We’re gonna firework our platonic inkblots morphable down the streets of a new suburban scar

Distort the new kid into acts of sugary martyrdom reconstructing the past like plastic surgery

Hallowed be his sneer!

When the money stops breathing the vision will still be waiting with chemicals in the grass

In ripped pants for the zoo

Here I am, first of the new trolls

Now you see me now I’m disappearing into logical holes in the theater cellar

Shimmering glades of coffeepot migraines

We in the back of the thrift store fondling defunct flags,

We beg for the cherry bombed outhouse

Take away the tattooed morgue attendant to puke it up like yesteryear

Or let him come to me in lace and homeopathic snorts

Can’t even count high enough or tear bee wings off fast enough

To win the severed loves of the bus depot repossessionary

Indigo eye wire

Actors on stages, on stumps and on stilts

I am not the pixilated wood-nymph you’ve been waiting for

Mold in my hair, bargains with Mayan death-gods stretched along a boxcutter

Phone numbers nervously denied

Speed dialing in the bleachers

Smell the thorn of Barcelona

And all the meatpacking snickers

Marker scents I can’t induce downwind galactic seizuring torn cassette tape ribbons

Baldy Babe Ruth swings and misses and the laurels fall from behind his ears

Chimpanzee apostles dump his glowing death from the Hoover Dam

You don’t understand, I want the uranium deposit slips

In your infection behind locked doors

There, in a rocking chair

That’s what you really want

The identity, the stockbroker’s head skimming Polaroid obsolescence

But I want the stampede, the submarine

Skydrops of sunshine revolution

Air shards stuck like the snow queen’s three minute mirror

From concentrate and you will see them in military formation

Parting the crocodiles, hairy feet walking on purified water as they prepare to drop him over

Blackjacking handsmacks of the castrators

Hear my highpitched neep!

With shackled hands raised in classrooms deprived of oxygen

This should be the way we always were

Best friends holding hands and pinching their noses before the volcano

Hunger blindingly heavy

I’m coming back around ducked down in a burned out Chevy

Trying to drink all the sand from my Victorian hourglass

Figure of my breathless lust engine, swing and a miss oooo

This is the artery clogged with folkloric PLEASE

Stuffed with hotdogs and leeches

Sell me all the hyperventilated tuberculi in the closet

And I may obliteratorily tell you why I tossed the dirtclod past swaying wheatstalk skyscrapers

That would circle like eagles if they could shake the gasoline fleas from their shaved grey backs

I went curveballing wrong

When I looked up into the edge of the Baron’s long grinning nighthedges and stole the shine of his clippers

So be forewarned: I have armed myself in the nakedness of dictators

And will claim the swimming pools of your youth

Long after the mosquitoes have paved me beneath

Mouthed in yellow lolling sleep

What part of my silver skies theoretical Europe do their shovels not comprehend?

We are in new worlds now, old parties all crashed out

If you toss me skittering down the King Kong wishing well

I will sit there weeping for a nostalgic meanness I never had

Except for that brief spacely moment when I sailed over the parking lot

As a bruised and sunk fruit of lost American past times

Spun like scorpion semen in the gears of some grandfather clock whose heart ticks to a noise his lungs cannot scrap

So this is my snarly heap

If you’re going to chop down a tree that Einstein pool-cue

Then swing hard into the next century

Or say nothing when the cannonball tugs my tears into the Pharaohs’ California sick-bed

It’s time to funeralize the 20th century

Finish the game, go back into green dusk

And ahh my double edged grin growls among the microwaves

We can dig unreal into the tundra

Disappear cold and lovely into Eris’s waiting arms

They are coming down from the hills in black hoods waving coupons

The new imaginings just laugh with cool good water cupped in their hands as they sip to the half moon

Somewhere between mutual eclipses I hum wondrous at the itch of my fractured baseball bat