Not sure if Bukowski runs to his table inspired,
Or just sits there all night, drinking, typing.
Just wondering if he runs to the computer to type
The first line of his drunken poetry

I am like you
I am just like you
Except that I am so much younger
And skinnier.
But that's really just like you
After all, isn't it?

Your whores my whores
Your drinks my drinks
Your women my women
Your emptiness my emptiness

Somehow I'm always receiving mixed messages.
The outside world, in their dark, moving poverty.
And this isn't an emotional poem
secondDeath
thirddeath
we stopped counting

Our Fall From Grace
wouldn't you read something a bit more modern?
Wouldn't you read at all?

Well, dear, I think they see a lot more without reading
Than you in your ivory tower will ever feel

You are so post-modern

I ran away from you
I just wonder how you can always hold your drinks
I know you're vomiting but it's stylized
You're so postmodern

At least Zinn reminds us

There's something more than drinking all the time and whores?

You're so post modern

I paid sixteen dollers for your book at BookPeople though I should've
Paid $3 at Half price but I was actually really buying Zinn and Darker Nations.
Have you read that one?
Anyways I'm going to return your book for store credit or
maybe a fucking full refund I haven't decided yet.

Do you know why you're more important in Europe?
I won't get into a debate of internationale and egalite here
Or Google or whatever

If you are like me, you run to the sea seeking to be free,
Sputtering, spatter, stroking, sinking you're a soulful shellfish.
But you are not like me for you are the sea.

Tattooing myself for you, pounding and throbbing.
Cutting myself for death, our withering beautiful love.
Your canvas hashed haphazardly smearing blood on my fingers.
The silence resonating through your form is unbearable.

I hold my breath for days inside you, diving deeper to your treasure chest, bashing open the lock. Flooding your flesh. You who understand suffering, who I have loved forever.

I place my soul in a bowl on a pole on my nose.
Hopping one-legged 'cross a tightrope-
My image of you soaking on a rock in the ocean
With the other creatures of the deep sleep-
Slipping on a dolphin tail my balance fails, my soul flails and is carried into the sky.
Millions of years later I am reborn and flying and
swoop down to the ocean with my pterodactyl claws.
Setting my jaw on your fleshy neck I carry you with me high into the sky, away from the mammals to a distant planet, where it is only you and I.
Placing my soul in a bowl on a pole on my nose.

"I'm stuffed," said Desmond, pushing his plate away.

"Me, too," said Tomas, "to the fucking gills, man." He tossed a final pork rib, the meat half chewed off, to the pile of bones already adding a chaos of thick white lines to his plate's dark circle.

Sylvia looked up from the roasted quail breast she was happily deconstructing. "My grandfather was so fucking corny," she said, licking her fingers. "He'd never say he was stuffed to the gills. He'd always say 'McGillicuddies.' He'd be, like, 'I am stuffed to the McGillicuddies!'"

"Your grandfather would've gotten along great with my grandfather," said Tomas, smiling.

"My grandfather," said Desmond, reaching for his wine glass, "always told me to never eat until you're full, that you should always stop short."

"Always leave 'em wanting more," said Tomas.

"No," said Desmond, "because it takes your sense of fullness a few minutes to catch up with what's actually going on in your stomach. Seriously. You're probably already full before you can feel that you're full."

"My grandfather," said Tomas, "always said you should go for the extreme, that life was too short to follow that 'everything in moderation' crap." He raised his own wine toward Desmond; they clinked glasses. "Of course," continued Tomas, "my grandfather also told me that he was the unacknowledged father of M.F.K. Fisher's daughter Anne."

"M.F.K. Fisher?" said Sylvia. "The Art of Eating M.F.K. Fisher?"

Tomas nodded, took another swig of Cabernet Sauvignon. "That's what he told me."

"Damn," said Sylvia, frowning. "I wonder if that's true."

     I never saw the bronze man that night outside the warehouse, but Sal always swore he did.
     This was years before you were born, sweetie ~ decades before. It was another world, another time.
     We shouldn't have been there in the first place, Sal and I. In those days Red Hook wasn't the kind of place to be snooping around at one in the morning, especially if you were a couple of green kids like us, but Sal was going to journalism school at Columbia and he liked to think of himself as an intrepid reporter, like Stanley hunting Dr. Livingstone, some wild notion like that. Fools rush in ~ like they say, right? And there I was, rushing in with him, because ... well, because I was his best friend and he could always talk me into anything. We were maybe the slightest bit tipsy from a few beers at Muldoon's, too, although Sal'd had little trouble steering his father's car to where we'd parked beneath a Royal Crown Cola sign a few blocks away.
     This was just a minor reconnoitering expedition, he told me, a little look-see at someplace bound to be more interesting than our usual haunts.
     Besides, he said, it was no big deal, he was familiar with the neighborhood.
     "Since when are you familiar with this neighborhood?" I asked him. I buttoned my coat tighter and took a glance down the deserted streets. Enormous buildings of brick and wood spilled shadows in a black flood across the cobblestones. A few streetlamps struggled against the night. I had this feeling of dirt, that all the surfaces around us were covered with a film of grime. "Since when do you come anywhere near Brooklyn at all?"
     "Since August, dummy," he said. The chill of mid-October danced in little breezes around us, bringing a smell of the Atlantic from piers a few blocks away. "When LaGuardia cut the ribbon for that new Rec Center? That big swimming pool the whole city had conniptions over? Who do you think covered that for the Spectator, huh?" He jabbed a thumb into his chest, grinning. "Yours truly, Salvatore Adorno."
     "Truly a force to be reckoned with," I said, "here in your home away from home."
     "Hey, when in Rome," he said, shrugging.
     "Since when are you familiar with Rome?"
     He gave me a look like I'd just asked if he'd mind kissing Jean Harlow.
     "Sal-va-to-re A-dor-no," he repeated. "What am I, a Chink?"
     "What you are ~ " I began, but Sal slapped a hand over my mouth.

[to be continued]

Twitch, and you twitch alone.
Dance, and the world
will nail a better mousetrap to your door.

These are the words by which we live,
gleaned from maps our mothers made
on the other side of cross-stitch samplers,
turned always towards the walls of home.

These are the words, my missing one,
whereby the futures open wide their mouths and grin.

It is better to have loved and lost
than to have removed one's own kidney
with a short sharp stick
in the back of a speeding taxi
on a rainy night in Valdosta.

These are the words by which we live,
the lingua franca issued us with the A, the C, the G, the T,
the deoxyribonucleic assiduousness of which
we remain powerless to resist.

These are the words, sweet absentine,
that put the primrose in your prisoned past.

Cataclysm. Cataclysm. Cataclysm.

This is my heart for want of you.

(Listen: Beneath our feet, the small talk of tectonic plates.)

You will be the pencil rapidly recording thoughts and passing dialogues,
I, the child finding your poem online after coming home drunk, feeling
The joy of a future untold and unrestrained.
And you, in your infinite selfishness, write alone.
Screaming for you to glue me back together-
Silent stares, brimming with sadness, forcing me to remember all the smiles I had given you.
This and every letter I fantasize of sending you but never will.
The gap that bridges two intersecting lives-

Jumping from the precipice of our unbounded love, you who bade me climb ever higher, escape me.

Wake up remembering not to jump across the track slitting my neck
for you who I don't really know at all.
God, who alerts I to the wolves' deceptive costuming.
The hidden meaning between your lines is brilliant and throbbing
it's light through the cracks in your walls tonight.
Your gentle river becoming a rapid I am happy to hear of your departure.
Absolved from the pretension I make my way into my head and watch
you all from a safe distance, laughing.

Your smell of broken flowers
Sowing your summer garden, falling into you winter.
My bones are strong from you, swimming my
Clarity comes in monsoons, human affections raging,
Protected, I sleep inside you, your rough bark skin,
The nectar of your childhood, swaying in the wind growing
old and massive and beautiful.

This shattered city
Torn, our divine ecstasy,
Love, coddled in the dark.

I dreamt forever sleeping the days away,
My solace in fantasy, a world I could affect,
Symbols for my passion, hysteria,
Sleepless, restless, becoming the sun.
The ocean your intuition my relief swept broad

Stroking incessantly abreast the waves I find you exhausted
Exhaling seawater, counting the ebbs that must wash you ashore
To me-

Your rolling features
Frothing over
Pounding blood beating out
Our only rhythm

In the moonlight your eyes ravaging the horizon
Seeking out your fantastic shoreline, my promised harbour,
The coalescence, water finds land, you're flying in the ocean
running through the moonlight swimming through my flaming heart
converging.

Drill deep into the skull's dull egg,
derail its train of thought, undo the yoke inside for good.

Trepanation, trepidation,
an id their only separation.

Bestial, my beating heart. I should, I should, I should.

Now this ish is old school.

(click to play or right click and "save as" to download)

Love is luck
Fancy timing and a good mood
Subdued
It's a dance with yourself and a stranger
It doesn't take your hand until your walking off the floor
When you want no more
Love is a joke
Makes you giggle
Releases endorphins
It's that annoying friend who's insecure and apologizes too much
Love is luck
And luck is chance
All at a glance
When you don't want to look

le temps detruit tout (click to play or right click and "save as" to download)

     This isn't really the story of your gypsy uncle, but those are the words that Colin Meloy was singing in the song that was playing on Deborah's stereo when I introduced the alien spores into her lungs and this is why I think it's a sensible title for what I'm going to tell you here.

     Deborah loves Colin Meloy and his band the Decemberists, although she has never actually met them, and she frequently asks Dave the floor manager to play their CDs on the stereo at work. Deborah has said that I look a good deal like Colin Meloy myself, except that I don't wear glasses like he does and of course my hair is thoroughly blonde as it should be for someone of Nordic ancestry. I've never had to wear glasses or contact lenses like some people do, because my vision has always been 20/20, even before I introduced the alien spores into my own lungs.

     I wash dishes at the Jonquil Cafe on the east side of Portland and Deborah is a prep cook in that same restaurant. I have been washing dishes there for eleven years, since before I got out of high school and was able to remove myself from the care of my foster family and take an apartment of my own. Deborah has been at the Jonquil for two years. Our working shifts have matched up for only the last four months but I was aware of her before that: I was taking my afternoon break at the counter when she came in for an interview.

     Dave was the floor manager at that time, too. There have been four other floor managers since I started washing dishes there in the twelfth grade, but for the last three years it's been Dave. He was sitting next to me, which I didn't like, and working on the next week's schedule when the front door opened and a short girl with orange hair and freckles walked in. She looked kind of like the old Raggedy Ann doll that my stepmother kept sitting on a shelf in her sewing room and would sometimes let me play with when I was a little boy, although of course this girl's clothes were more modern and very much like what all the non-manager people at the Jonquil wear. She had on jeans and sneakers and a gray T-shirt that said AFK BRB on it in white letters and a black jacket that was supposed to make you think it was leather even though I could tell right away that it was only vinyl. She was skinnier than Raggedy Ann, almost like a Raggedy Ann with anorexia nervosa, but Deborah has gained some weight in the two years since she started and so she doesn't look so much like a person from a concentration camp now.

     Susan, who no longer works at the Jonquil because she went to Santa Fe with her hippie boyfriend a year ago, was counting change behind the counter. She has a tattoo of a Chinese dragon down the outside of her left arm, from her shoulder to her elbow, and everybody makes fun of her because she smokes menthol cigarettes. Deborah walked up to Susan and said, "Hi, yeah, I'm here for an interview?"

     Dave cleared his throat in a very fake way and said, "You're late." He said this because he's an asshole every chance he gets, especially since he moved up from the waitstaff three years ago and started being in charge of everybody.

     Deborah turned toward Dave, who was sitting on the other side of me. Her eyes looked confused and panicked at the same time. "I am? But I thought --- "
     "Don't believe a thing he says, hon," said Susan.
     "Hey, it's cool," said Dave. He gave Deborah the big grin that lets you see all the dental work he's had since he became a manager. "I'm just messing with you." He reached around my back and stuck out his big sunburned hand with all its rings. "I'm Dave," he said. "You must be Debbie, right?"
     "Deborah," she said. She walked over to shake his hand and stood very close to me.
     The freckles on her face aren't like constellations, which you always read about freckles being like; they're more like a nebula of different-sized pale copper spots, so many of them that they overlap and kind of bleed into each other all over her cheeks and forehead and across her nose. I stared at her face and thought of pictures of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

     "Okay, Deborah," said Dave. He picked up his blue schedule book and got off the stool next to me. "Come on out to the patio and let's see what we're gonna do about getting you a job."

     How I found the alien spores was that I was riding my bike in Powell Butte Nature Park, which is actually the remains of an extinct volcano from back in the early Pleistocene era. It was summertime and very dry, so I was riding my bike there whenever I had a day off from working at the Jonquil. The rangers close down the trails when it rains because they don't want people adding to the erosion of the soil, so I always ride as much as I can when the weather allows it. I ride on the trails where there aren't very many people and I can be alone with the wind through my hair and feel the muscles of my legs pumping my old Sears bike and there's hardly anything at all to bother me, just trees and smaller plants and the packed dirt rushing past. Sometimes I like to stop and chain my bike to a tree and just walk off into the woods. That way I can be really alone with my thoughts out in the world and not have to worry about seeing another human being at all. That's what I was doing off the Old Holgate trail when I found the spores.

     Please be aware that I know a good deal about mycology and even have the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms written by Gary A. Lincoff, which my stepmother bought for me when I was doing a science project on fungi in the tenth grade. I know how to identify a wide variety of mushrooms, but the puffballs that I almost stumbled onto that day weren't like anything I've seen in the Field Guide or in any other book. Also, I almost stumbled onto them because they were in the center of a circular depression about three feet in diameter, like a giant doodlebug pit out there in the middle of the woods, and I think that the cause of the depression was extraterrestrial in origin. It could have been a place that some animal had dug out, or the remains of a natural hole that had collapsed, or maybe some people had even dug it up for some reason, because you can never really tell why some people will do the things they do. But it looked to me like a small crater created by a micro-meteorite, which I'm very familiar with because I've read a good deal of material about them, and so the big clump of white puffballs in the middle of the crater, each about the size of a plum and with dark stripes down their sides, would have been the organic survivors of this crash.

     I always knew, even when I was a small boy, that one day I would come into contact with life from beyond this planet and this is where it finally happened.

[ TO BE CONTINUED ]

The red red dirt of the iron ore.
The long dull road that we always swore
we'd leave behind us.
The rugged banks of the river shore.
The way the water forevermore
flows to remind us:

We grew straight and twisted
in a land where life resisted order.
All the pale ones' sons & daughters
missed it when they crossed the border.
All the sons & daughters weaving
stories backward to their leaving ...

The deep dark green of the jungle floor.
The strangler vines that we always swore
would never bind us.
The falling salt in the ocean's roar.
The way the water forevermore
chose to remind us:

We'll grow old and tired
in a land where life is half expired,
marking time until we die and
stranded on a concrete island.
All the pale ones' sons & daughters,
sending dreams beyond the border.
All the sons & daughters weaving
stories backward to their leaving ...

Time to run
Sweat's dripping
Head's ticking
Stress hives
Heart breaker, you got the best of me
Given me wrinkles and a newfound pathetic perspective
I feel sick from the head to the toes
And it grows, and it grows
I'm ready to run
Across the border with my hair down
Ready to drop it all
You've done nothing
I've done it all
Just needed a little push to fall
Holding down my gag
Holding onto fucking nothing
I'm a work of art
What a show
What a number
Now if I can just get up off of the floor
What a mess
I am
Today

a pile of dirt
a pit of mud
that prostitute is spitting blood

what a dirty mouth
a slick sticky square
gobs of gum stuck in her hair

stinky feet
chum chunks of meat
test-tube babies spilled on her sheets

stick chicken legs
cock-doodle-doo
she'll crack an egg and gulp the goo

she took compliments
like condiments
mascara, make-up
mustard, ketchup

a broken bird
fell from the tree
she cut my wings off with a key

she ate my death
a cancer chunk
and climbed out of a dumpster truck

what a deadly tongue
cut like a knife
i think i'll take her as my wife

We were sitting naked and sweating near the foot of my unframed futon cushion, a white porcelain bowl of cantaloupe chunks between us on the dull gray carpet. The ends of her dark red hair tickled her clavicles as she peered at the tube of lubricant in her right hand.

"This stuff's got a spermicide called Nonoxynol-9," she said.

"Uh huh," I said. "That's why I bought it."

She shook her head, hair dancing lightly along pale shoulders. "There's just something fucked about the ingredient of a sex lube starting with 'No-no,' don't you think?"

I grinned, cantaloupe juice dripping from my mouth.

"Ew," she said, laughing. She shoved at my chest with her free hand; I rocked back against the futon cushion. She looked at the tube again, turned it to read the smaller text printed on one side. "'Safe for ingestion,' it says. Damn, that's pretty forward-thinking, isn't it? These lube people actually thought about how people would use their products."

I nodded, swallowing cantaloupe. "Yeah, but you know what worries me? Because, I mean, who ever really knows about these things until it's too late. Because that No-no stuff is safe for ingestion by itself, right? And cantaloupe juice is safe by itself, too. But what if, if you ingest the two of them together, the combination ~ of chemicals and enzymes or whatever, all the weird shit in there that can interact ~ what if the combination creates some, like, potentially fatal toxin?"

She used her index finger's long nail to spear a cube of melon. "Then I guess we're fucked already, aren't we?" She placed the melon piece into her mouth.

"Ah shit," I said, grimacing and grabbing my chest, shaking my other hand like a palsied claw. "It's the big one, 'Lizbeth! I'm comin' to join ya, honey!"

"You big dummeh," she said, chomping cantaloupe, shoving the tube and the bowl aside, crawling toward me, her eyes brighter than television. "C'mere, you big dummeh."

pull the head off a baby doll's neck
fill it full of tears
and drink from its hollow head

(the color pink
wilted rose pedals
soft skin
moist paper)

look into the baby's eyes
those black beady eyes
full of wonder
full of -
fear

wooden buckets
full of water
hanging from a thick rusty chain...

blinding babies' eyes with buckets full of water hanging from a chain
blinding. babies. eyes. buckets. full of - water. blinding. babies. eyes.

...hanging from a thick rusty chain
attached to a hook
screwed into plastic flesh
hanging
attached
hooked
screwed
plastic
flesh

i heard a baby's soupy cry
from deep inside a wet, wooden womb
it came from inside me
i heard it while i was inside
it's coming from inside me -
for me

(diamond-plated steel
wet corrugated cardboard
a mobius band of barbed wire
the taste of salt)

there's a voice
inside a bubble
beneath the water
effervescing, percolating -

pop it.

put it through a carbon filter
stick it in a semi-permeable membrane
and separate its particles via reverse osmosis -

drink it.

SCENE: Two people, A and B, standing around talking at the counter of a coffeeshop.

A: You seem kinda down today.

B: Yeah ... [shrug] I am a little, I guess.

A: But there's nothing drastic going on, right?
I mean, there's no specific problem or anything, right?
Because you said ~

B: Yeah, no, there's nothing in particular. It's just ...

A: This time of year?

B: Yeah ... that's probably it.
It's just this whole, you know, the whole "holidays" kind of thing.

A: Like SAD, right? Seasonal Affective Disorder?

B: Well, maybe.
I don't know, I ~ I mean, I hate to think it's something
that you could classify as a Disorder, y'know?
Like somebody just happens to have a feeling
and suddenly it's this fucking Disorder all of a sudden.

A: Well, I didn't mean ~

B: No, no ~ it's cool. I know what you mean, okay? It's totally cool. Seriously.

[beat]

A: I heard this thing somewhere ...

B: Yeah?

A: Or maybe I read it ~ this thing about smiling.

B: Oh yeah?

A: Yeah, about how, supposedly, if you're feeling morose or whatever, if you're feeling, you know ~

B: Gloomy? Glum?

A: Yeah, if you're feeling like that ~ like, despondent or whatever ~

B: Like, depressed? Dejected?

A: Yeah, exactly. If you're feeling like that, that you should smile.

B: Why, out of spite?

A: No, no, not out of spite ~

B: Because who the fuck would you be spiting, right?
You'd be, like, spiting yourself. Which would only make you sadder.
I mean, if you had any sensitivity at all, and somebody's spiting you, even if it's yourself ...

A: Yeah, no, that makes total sense.
But that's what I mean: It's not about spite, see, it's because when you smile?
The act of smiling ~ the muscles that you have to use to smile ~
it releases these chemicals in your brain that make you feel better.

B: Oh, c'mon ...

A: I swear, this is what I read.

B: What is it, like endorphins?

A: Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't know, I don't really remember, okay?
I just remember that, if you smile, it's supposed to make you feel like you do
when you're smiling naturally. Like ... happy or something.

B: So, like, instead of a Runner's High you get a Smiler's High?

A: Yeah, something like that.

B: And you want ... what? You want me to give it a try?

A: [shrug] Sure, why not? I mean, you know, if you want to. Whatever.

B: Okay. Okay, fuck it. Okay? Check this out ~ [grins, really pushing it]

A: [smiling, watching B's big smile]

B: [maintaining the grin] How'm I doin'? Hey? Is this good? Does this look right?

A: That's great. That's, yeah, that's a hell of a smile.

B: [looks around, kind of head-bobbing, maintaining the fierce grin, looks back at A]

A: You feeling anything?

B: [still with the grin] Yeah, I'm feeling something.

A: Good, good.

B: I'm feeling like a fucking idiot. I'm gonna stop. [stops smiling]

[beat; maybe B rubs jaw]

A: So ... you don't feel any better?

B: I'm fine, I feel fine.

A: You feel happier?

B: I feel pretty much the same.

A: I thought you said ...

B: Yeah, but you know what? Every now and then, I get a little depressed, okay? And sometimes it's around the holidays, because ... well, you know, there's a lot of things that get associated with holidays, and ... it's just fucking depressing sometimes, that's all. And there's nothing wrong with that. Y'know? Seriously. It's like, there's a time for cheer, and there's a time for lack of cheer. There's a time to laugh, and a time to mourn. That's, whattayacallit, Ecclesiastes, right?

A: That's The Byrds.

B: Yeah, whatever.

A: No, really. [singing:] To every thing ~ turn, turn, turn ~
There is a season ~ turn, turn, turn ~

B: [joins in with A so they're both singing]: And a time to every purpose under heaven.

F I N I S

Sharkskin Jackie's got a stroll on him as smooth as the inner thigh of an albino debutante in a silk Chink dress, peeling Franklins from a fat green wad, waxing Lombardi over a vodka collins until some hired Dmitri in pinstripes knocks him sideways and the gig is up. Look again, Dmitri: this ain't Jackie, it's a ringer in gladrags, coldcocked there on the linoleum. You're done for, boyo: the torpedos moving in, Jackie himself gliding from the shadows with a grin on his mug that could charm Medusa snakeless. Dmitri, my vulgar boatman, your goose is cooked.

-for Graham Reynolds

Early into the night's slow day,
the speakers a stipend of remembrance,
the floor meeting walls
in hospitable corners,
equations from the algebra of need
opening across the low counter, among
cup, cup, cup, cup, cup:
the apparatus of this chance community.

(Your map, their territory.
Exes marking the spot,
ghosting what chambers they can find.)

Food
is often an excuse
for something else you may have lost.
Atmosphere
is always somewhere you can breathe.

Dear thom yorke
You've given me a reason not to cut myself and kill myself
Die
I though I was the only one so tongue tied I
Want to forget every thing else and

Start/rry over with you

My/your fear/elation
At having seen I pull out that money outta my pants
And count it for you-
Her mom!
I don't know why

I don't know why

I wanted to see you

Die die die die die die die assassinated
Assassination

Drinking WHILE peeing is like chemistry for me.
A PHD.
APHID

My Halloween costume

2007

the year of our chrysanthemum pathetic disease/demise

my eyes pour out of their own sockets
i can't see anymore because things are so wet
trip my toes on shattered concrete
pluck pedals from flowers on fire
heart-beat-me
and maybe someday i'll see again

Two people - two line cooks, say, taking a break out back of the kitchen,
sharing a single cig which they pass back & forth, puffing, as they talk:

One: So what're you doing for Christmas?

Two: I don't do Christmas.

One: Yeah? What're you, you're like the fucking Grinch?

Two: Not everyone does Christmas, man.

One: Yeah - the Grinch. The Grinch doesn't do Christmas.

Two: Fuck the Grinch. This has nothing to do with the Grinch.

(beat; they pass the cig)

One: So why don't you do Christmas?

Two: Because it's bullshit, man.

One: (nodding) Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. It's all about money these days, isn't it? It's become this totally capitalistic thing.

Two: No, man, it's just a rip-off. It's a totally Christian rip-off of ancient pagan tradition.

One: So you do, uh, whattayacallit? The solstice? You do the solstice instead?

Two: Saturnalia, man.

One: What's that? Is that like Bacchanalia?

Two: No, it's like Saturnalia.

One: So you celebrate Saturnalia?

Two: I don't actually CELEBRATE it - I'm not really into rituals, okay? I just, you know, I note its passing.

One: You note its passing.

Two: Exactly.

One: The passing of Saturnalia.

Two: Fuckin' A.

(beat; cig pass)

One: What are you, like a Wiccan or something?

Two: No, man, I'm not a fucking Wiccan. I'm not into any of that organized shit.

One: But you note its passing.

Two: Yeah, the passing of Saturnalia. I'm aware that it's happening.

One: Yeah, but Christmas is happening, too. Christmas is going by at the same time.

Two: Yeah, but fuck it, it's total Johnny-Come-Lately bullshit. I'm not gonna acknowledge that, I'm not gonna do it the goddam favor. It was created by popes to sit like a fucking cowbird in the original pagan nest, and that's the only reason it happens in December. It's not even Jesus's real birthday, y'know? So fuck it.

One: Jesus's birthday isn't the 25th?

Two: It's not even in December, man.

One: Yeah? So when is it?

Two: Fuck, I don't know. But I know it's not in December.

One: Then what's so special about December the 25th? Did they just, what, pick that date out of a hat? Like one of those big pope hats?

Two: Because it's when the Romans celebrated the birth of the sun, that's why. And the Christians thought it'd be a hoot to usurp that shit with the birth of the "son" of God, ho ho ho, big fucking joke, try the veal.

(beat; cig pass)

One: You know whose birthday's on December 25th?

Two: Yours?

One: Nope. (grins like he's got a Big Seekrit)

Two: Okay, who?

One: Pikachu.

Two: What?

One: You know that Pokemon character? Pikachu? Little yellow guy with lightning coming out of him?

Two: You're kidding me, right?

One: No, no, I'm totally serious. Pikachu's birthday is December 25th. He's Pokemon #25 and his birthday is December 25th. You can look it up. Check Wikipedia or whatever.

Two: What're you, twelve years old?

One: (shrugs) Hey, one mythology's as good as another, right?

(beat; cig pass)

Two: So, what, you celebrate Pikachu's birthday?

One: (shakes head and smiles all sly & cool) I just note its passing.

(beat)

Two: (mock-angrily, trying not to smile) Fuck you, man.

music download: aphex twin's avril 14th

(right click and "save as" to download or just click to play)

A few years ago -
I stepped out.
But then I fell back in -
again.

A big black velvet box,
with one eye-hole,
surrounded by cinder blocks -
dark and wet inside.

I got washed out the window
I got dropped through the door.
I've got eyeballs between walls of mirrors.
I can't get out / back in anymore.

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

-Dr. Johnson

Buckled knees you dream the trees
Our fantasies of falling apart
Melted shattering last embrace
Shorn my poison skin
I'm on fire for you

Killing and dying, bleeding and thriving
Dreaming of the ancestors
Take my orders from god

Your rotted mouth tonguing my
Nightmare waking up to you
My dreams of destruction
Left to another night
Of hysteria
I can't breathe without your
Bloody teeth satiating I.

She called them her scribbles
Feminine and loopy like a girl's handwriting
She needed them
She loved them
And she fed them with the concentrates of lust and worry
All for a good story
They came out of imaginary spaces of time and acknowledgment
She appreciated them for all that they meant
And they went
Sent away
Like another day
She called them her scribbles
Feminine and loopy like a girl's handwriting
She needed them
She loved them

...

nostalgia from the future
the feeling of remembering
of realizing
something

big clouds in the sky
sometime/s/zzz
make me think of
something

talk to people
understand
?
up my eyes open
make me feel
something

tits and ass!
cock and balls!
animals. set free. from cages.
(noise)
make me feel
(NOISE!)
something

i can't remember
a thing
i haven't felt for ages
something

9 to 5 am i alive or did i die already (sic)

forgetting
i remember
feeling
to realize
i seem to be
forgetting
something

li(fe/ve)
be born
love and grow.
become - ing you/r/s/self overcome - ing,
and then -
electricity
death                sumthing.

...

In your salons,
as though
Your Furious Six
Were the only Six
To have ever-

Deriding remembrance.
Re-siegeing the flesh,
In clothing,
and
Fresh, washed mouths.

Making plans to leave when you arrive
at fortune's vomiting orifice.

It is you I have been missing, Muse-
My angel hallucination-

In bed,
Our white ceiling
Hallucinating you
In our rondo.

The gut versus the heart
Who would win?
The gut has stomach acids and butterflies
The heart never rests
The gut digests everything I stomach
Keeping me going as long as I eat
What role does the brain play in all of this?
The ringleader?
The referee?
And my face?
My face just looks at you and hopes
Innocently hoping while the brain yells, "Foul!"
Who knew you could feel a butterfly's wings after you eat it
In the end, they all win
Together they gather the bad and spit it out, like yesterday's cigarette
And I wake up again from another dream
To find my guts all over the floor

Have you ever felt like a steady fuck?
Like a duck on land?
Like quicksand?
I'm just trying to rhyme
Just trying to have a good time
While my dog licks my foot and I brush my dreadlocks
Thinking of you
Thinking of the things we use to do
To cause me dreadlocks
My heart knots
My chest sinks
I think of the mountain air and those reasons why I shouldn't care
Because you weren't there
Just a nice stare
I brushed my hair today, and tomorrow I mow the lawn
I'll write about fire and glass
A new dawn to pass

Witch Doctor (right click and "Save As" to download or just click to play)

*Performed by: Cabrini Green

My heart is beating
and my body's bleeding.
Got a brain that's throbbing like a wad of god meat,
eyes that flutter and balls of butter
and a prick that's pickled like pigs feet.
Got me a monkey tail, ripped fingernails,
blackened bruises, broken bones.
Every body is dead inside my head.
No wonder why I'm still alone.

My hard-on's aching
and my bodhi's breaking.
Got a head with a deep-drilled hole through the encephalon,
man o' war tentacles, dinosaur testicles,
a flesh-pressed, blood-penned Bible / Necronomicon.
A lust for life and a butcher knife,
and a gut that's hungry for the slaughter of some species,
Got sour piss and syphilis
and I'm up to my asshole in feces.
You got me.

My toad is horny
and my rose is thorny.
Got hemlock caulk oozing into my esophagus,
escargot, frozen embryos,
and a fiery stack of shit on a sarcophagus.
A ripe disease, rotten fruit on trees,
I fall to my knees, peel back my face.
I'll drink the juice, I'll suck the spruce,
and hope no body takes my place.

My heart is bleeding
and my body's beaten.
Got a brain that's pulsing like a wall of war cheese,
feet that wander and thoughts that ponder
when the tears pour out like whore seeds.
Got me a dirty dick and and a muddy clit,
that filthy fuck of an unknown.
We got each other until we died
and then I got myself alone.
You got me.

My raving fantasy of your city burning to the ground.
I haven't cried so hard since my father died.
The crumbling concrete buildings,
My homemade 9-11 tattoo
Inked in red with a heroin needlle:
"You deserve it, child."

7 years at Guantanamo, shackled and raped,
Oh, you lovely fascists.
America dreams of sweet suicide,
Watching the emperor wearing no clothes,
Stripped you with meat hooks in the town square.

Oh, your lovely barbarism,
How has an artist as myself become so homicidal.
Watching you bleeding, burning, crumbling,
Crying out:
"Please, comrade, spare them their suffering.
Forgive them, comandante, for they know not what they do."

Your children, fatherless, motherless, no auntie, no uncle.
Feeding my grandchildren your nationalist porridge,
My kin on aesthetics.

Where my pen becomes a switchblade,
My melancholia, madness.
The heat and the passion
Your body in flames.

This one is for 1492.

I am laying on my earth,
Crying for your departure.
God has entrusted me
to exonerate our soul.

Bouncing off the walls around you
Brush against your hip
Beneath your dress

We're not going anywhere
Buying furniture
I thought you were younger

Waiting on you
Watching them
Waiting on you
Choking on my racing breath

Smoke more than me

So dizzy these meds
Throwing the 9-ball through the window
Racing home you become a child

Your second face reveals itself
I want it more than the first

At last, she opened the window and let some fucking air in. The room
all filled with smoke and phlegm and sexed-up restlessness. "I cooked some eggs for you, darling," his affection so ... how do you say? ... inexpressible ...
    "You know I don't eat that shit, dear. How much clearer can I be about my eating habits? Salted spinach and bloody pork loins. Please strive to be more remembering in the future. As much time as I spend correcting you, I may as well be fucking my silly foreign friend. You say potayto I say potawto. Just learn English you silly midget."
    "Do you want chili sauce or ketchup, you wretch?"
    "Oh just come over here and fuck me you silly boy. Or must I instruct you on that too?"
    "Speaking of potatoes, you really do know that this house smells like wilted cauliflower, don't you dear?"

And on and on and on for several more minutes - all a wonderfully modern
prelude to sweaty, sticky sex. At least some things remained in tact for more than a day. With all of your ADHD, I'm surprised your cock hasn't up and left you for a more fashionable underwear. At least she was smiley and had a big ass. Something to write home about. A real winner. Torn clothes and dirty fingernails. Screaming about whiskey or the DJ's new really great hat. Don't fucking exoticize me you white fuck. Having a bit of pigment doesn't make me such a bore anymore, your stupid western civ. - get a fucking life.

I swear to god he drove that big dirty Escalade at least 20 blocks just to be dropped off at the express station. God, how I long for their demise. Their passe pillage and rape - has it really hit home yet? Do you mean to say that they are turning on their own flesh and blood? Sending your brother to war? Oh, you poor god-fearing fuck up. Can't you get a real job and a punching bag? Admit you're just as pathetic as everyone else? Intent on showing up in your carefully color-coordinated costume carrying metal and dynamite, ranting about freedom. Yes, I'm sure they really do love you when you give them candy and firebomb their homes.

I let that part of me go
       Not to the club
       To hell
       Where I was born

I reminded you how unimportant you felt
Disaffected disillusioned bored high American
Four points on your moralizing compass

Killing an arab
i mean
a cop
i mean
your
flacid
impermanence

. . . I got somethin' in the eye. A fly. A god-damned, good-for-nothing, dirty, filthy fuck of a fly. I can see its wings from my seat. A frequent flyer.

A black hole for a mind. Got a dark star behind the ol' eye. Pulling at pupils. The junk. I got a flicker of light in the eye. I forget if it's starlight.

Smoke in the eye. A pot for a plant for a brain. Roots bust through the bottom of it - often. I smoke Brand X cigarettes 'cause the cancer's so good. Siftin' that sick sticky sycamore tar through some yella teef. Drippin'. Ooh, that delectable drippy. That thick nectar of death of my tongue. Sugar. That poisonous pleasure'll end - someday.

I'm colorblind now. Got somethin' in the eye. Gray, black and white. I can see. From my seat. On a frequent flyer's flight.