i encountered another vessel counting
fresh cut pages binded with blank black covers
drifting through dunes and whispering passages

onward

and now i've finally untangled myself from the
lingering notions of admiration and loyalty that
had once shaped my earlier ideas on love, or anything that
brought people happily together in my mind:
i've laid my eyes upon a new american landscape of
slavish adherence and lost transaction, dredging up
false memories reinforcing simple rationalizations,
and all loss of value and worth dressed up in
a newly stitched suit of excuses and bullshit.
all i see is a carousel of fools chasing birds with exploding lights--
a race of sick men carved raw with hungry words,
running barefoot on moonless nights
towards the dream of a horizon sinking
slowly with the world
to the bottom of its glass foundations

i only think the new winter nights
remind me of the older ones
when my
eyes would shut thinking about
a walk around empty shoreside towns
suggesting
gaping hollowed faces with their crumbling remains,
wind strewing sand
through teeth slowly disengaging
to make with some old memory or unraveling rant
on the depth of human misery and
its correlation with violence and exploitation;
or how you could never really trust a person
to know what they should want, which was reason enough
to never trust any of 'em:
maybe he's put his car keys into too many baskets
to even know what to forgive and what to forget.

i feel like i could sit sun baked and staring
at crackling brown hands fingering the stoic non-faces of
black and white chessmen, listening to
them argue about
where we should have gone or go, or the
various merits of the
girls they fucked and
girls they've known;
how little it means to whisper something
always told to someone else;
and just how well they've done for themselves
despite the odds they're stacked against

gone

new(,) old i found you stuttered
unshuttered and from you couldn't tear the everything
golden, broken, and unspoken that you held dear;
at times like these, i tell myself
that aren't we all just constantly running away
and don't we all just
intertwine and drown us out
and overtake us while we
scream and claw
something horrible again?

drives

once home i smother myself in books about shy girls forming their four
letter words
and movies starring sexy watery eyes hit by sunset lights like erlenmeyer flasks.
i hear full band film scores enrapturing triumphant guys with
unbuttoned shirts riding at the front of the line;
virgin lips rippling again in the predawn hours of busy bridges by
picturesque rivers, leading like roads to rome and all points beyond.

rain brings out the crooks on steamy
weekend weedless nights. poised, burnt, and dreamt down from the
smoldering morning.
nights, they know:
tomorrow comes and goes
like the echo of a dying man's cry.

i say bye too to my busy days
indoors morose, uninterested
blinds turned down and curtains drawn
to perfect symmetry, reading from top
to bottom:
lisa
carol
fremont
to the tune of ground loops
and feedback static

hallmarks

afternoon pages fly through my hands, and i nod off at the sentiments of
sagely predictable great men who have passed away or died beyond the ruddy glow of
memory's recall.
shame and its never ending friends fogging their glass windows again
forcefully gliding fingers over the same cheery piano refrain
and i smile slightly and tap my pencil across my cheek
until it stings a bit to let me know that i am
still awake despite the stubborn furnace blowing paces through the room
shuffling like angry senile veterans of various great industrial ages
insisting on their eternal relevance to dispassionate crowds
choking back smoke and laughter

kinds of blankets

i've got everything to be afraid of
despite reassurances to the contrary.
and guilt
for as long as i've loved.
it goes on never changing, sharing sheets
with blondes and black-haired jewish chicks
who beat the normal into us, the
busy frightened empty nests
who'll flee from them as future sons