Me - I only went to jail once for stealing She - Sometimes I wonder how many crimes you've done Me - Let's see: Adultery Car theft Vulva licker Armed robbery
Dope dealer Shop lifter Narcotics Speeding Running from police
Smuggling Lying Driving without a license D.U.I. Running red light
Jaywalking Parole violation Probation violation Independent thought
for example
Probation Violation 9.18.1989
Drunk while I intoxicant wipe out fence n fire hydrant
Forbids me
drink
drugs
company unwanted
and travel out of state
All of which I did:
I drank booze with southern men with beards
I talked philosophy out of state
I smoked psychologist's not psychiatrist's dope
I made an ass of myself
Business unusual
I survived the to and fro
The roads with bygone bankings
The bankers buying lies
And lie
To eat the bodies
Left infirm in hanging
O yes - I also
Stole, killed, cooked and ate a big black & white bird
From Spokane's Nat Park Zoo in the winter of 1962
The manifest expressiveness of your
veined arms, as though veins carry ambition
down to the splayed fingers on your knees.
And my personal textiles--my familiarity
of the curve of your black ribbed socks--
Oh, intelligent socked creatures, your toes.
And your modest waiting eyes, neck in a
downward sideways tilt, waiting for me
to say the next thing, for the continuity
of our existence to ooze over to the next
moment.
You gently growl, you tenderly pick up my
hands, bow your head, and kiss my fingers.
You are a tired animal.
All I did was listen to the Fates
I blew up the United States
Now little bits of Texas
Are floating up in space
I blew up the United States - Was (Not Was) “I blew up the United States”
He makes it so my feet won’t touch the ground
He tells me he’s got bug-fuck love, bat-fuck love
that cancer would have been his answer had I not
come into his life. He would have just let it grow--
smoky through his throat croak-- until you could
see it, bubbling out his caw
The bill extrapolators--certified liars--strap Steve down
on a table. He wears a mask and fake skin, some type of
curious wolf man counting medical sheep
and thanking the universe with a Buddhist mantra
The doctor says to Steve, You will receive a large bill.
Do not be alarmed. This is just procedure. My hands
are tied.
nam myoho renge kyo
Steve’s my superhero, my symbol solution. He tells me
radiation treatments will help develop his latent powers.
He “O’s” his mouth round, smoking super cooled smoke
through thick bent phallic bong as we hear Feinman on
a radio retrospective where the O-ring was found
to have been not thoroughly tested, Steve—let’s test it
some more so it’s best to be married and we’ll play Was (Not Was) I blew up the United States like seeing
astronauts on the moon in perpetual MTV eternity--
The bands of your voice are melted together now
and we liquidate your assets for our own ride, another
country’s weather, and oh, we are owed
There is a warrantless feeding, a
tap tap tapping and everyone eats
each other in this country
Oh, we don't get into specifics of
anyone who has been arrested. Every
soul is an authorized sleeper and
potential for badness trends over
time as does potential for sadness
I worry for the babies and how
they are going to find a drip of work
I rock myself on the rocking sofa,
imagine it is a big cradle from which
I observe the art on our walls, that
there is just the now and I haven't
yet learned how to worry
Steve says the babies are energy
beings who had to have a bodily form
because they love to live, spirits
in body bottles
Whatever the rich do, they're sure
it is all sustainable because of the
obfuscation of educated vocabularies.
We don't allow classified caveats
because it is all taken care of,
squishing the poor weasels who don't
have luck or health insurance or
blindness-
the co-worker with untreated cancer
tapping on her education-paid-for
keyboard with minimum wage rage
Oh yeah, and education:
a robot will destroy my life
but I have to pay
for the kill button first.
You lay asleep in the loft water.
You lay with my love, my respect, my friendship, my companionship.
Thank you for coming into my life.
To this catbear, you are my goldilocks savior.
You changed my furniture, chopped my food, checked my throat.
My life within and without is better, finer because of you.
The poet in me is wowed by the poet in you.
Thank you for loving me.
Thank you for giving me someone to love.
Both make me better.
There is nothing i would not do for you.
There is nothing we cannot do together.
You are my poetry.
We are the poem.
In our house the variegated book spines, the
piles of cds are shuffled disordered
minisystems--macrocosms that extend beyond
their frames to collude with other frames, to
collude with the observer, me
The door through which I walked is still
partly there. I saw the door--your face--
and how it looked and I remember what I
thought of you, and now I know whether it was
correct or not. The original brunt impression,
thinned lower lip, decisive nose, scowling
mannerisms all came together to form your
collective presence
Now I am through your door and I am
transformed but I do remember how scary it was,
to wonder if it was open or not, or if it was
one of those temporary places like a shadow
on the table or an unwashed plate
I want to be in the jazzed up municipal darkness
of Cleveland on a wet June night, orange lights
dancing in the rain puddles, the dog breath
of an open car window and drops misting in,
my hand on shadowed gray vinyl, the car seat
spritzing down the road, a Love Supreme's
Resolution propelling me torward to the lake,
to open car doors, to a joyous boyant bon vivant
a warm forgotten blossom forth
My blaring mind appreciates
the peacefulness of running outside
under the world-wide sky,
my legs made useful
I am a determined woman on the street.
You might see my fisted banging breaths
from your car window
I hop over sidewalk cracks,
and think, how good, how good
to be alive under the open eye
of the sky, to be seen, to
participate
And how good when I am finished
to sit on the stoop outside our
building. I watch traffic spirits pass
indifferent over the shadows of the
trees on the ground, the buildings' blue
shadows, the weathered
paving material
Thrumming blood hums my fingers,
invading my head, renewing enthusiasms
about the possible planet
The rhythm of my petting
the cat's hot pleasured fur
is the rhythm to Nirvana,
I tell Steve.
Steve said there was a sign
he always wanted to steal on
a road between where he lived--
Brahman, Michigan--
and where he had to go for
unemployment-
which was in a place called Nirvana
and there were big white road signs--Nirvana--
and the road's name was Mad Dog 20--
because it curved so much--
the person making the road
was drinking Mad Dog 20
and made all the curves-
Steve said
I was unemployed
from third shift shiftleader
so I was managing 5 ppl and
after a while I got tired for
not being paid for it
and so I asked for a raise
and they said no
and I said I quit
and they said
OK, we will pay
I said it's too late
I quit---
and by the way, can you say
I was let go so I can get
unemployment?
And he said you're quitting
and you ask me if I will
say you were let go so you
can get unemployment?
Yep.
OK.
And then while I was on
unemployment I got
this interview for sludge
flow management
I thought I was qualified, too--
I was educated I was smart--
I didn't get the shit job
and I didn't steal Nirvana--
what more can I say?
I was so much in the flow in Brahman, Michigan.
I walked half a mile up to the highway, stuck out
my thumb, and a guy drove me all the way from
Brahman, Michigan to Chagrin Falls in Ohio. One
way, door-to-door
And during that time--DMT time--I had collaged
my notebook
with word balloons from comic books
and at least twice on that time word balloons would
answer my questions, like one time I asked my
notebook What should I do now?
And a word balloon said, Well, now we eat
And later it was raining so I was high up
under a highway underpass, smoking DMT-soaked
parsley and reading one of my religious books
a small, black Brotherhood book
I looked up and it was still raining, and I looked
down and saw I had 20, 30 pages left to go and I said
Well, I'll finish the book, and when I stop
the rain will stop, the sun will come out
I finished the book, rain stopped, sun came out
I stood up in laughter, said some sort of joke
to God, to reality, and it was at God's expense,
and I stood up laughing
Lost my balance, and ended up sitting in a
puddle of rainwater
I made a joke on God, God made a joke on me
by getting my ass wet
On the way back--hitchhiking back--this
very attractive girl pulled over and picked me up
and she said, Oh shit, if you're going to kill
me, kill me now
And then she explained that she was on
speed and she had to have somebody to talk to
And I said, I can help that, and I reached
down into my pack and she flinched,
and I pulled out my pipe and some marijuana,
and got her stoned
And she drove me all the way back to
Chagrin and gave me her phone number
but at that point I was being faithful to
another man's wife and never called her.
That was one of my regrets
My living room has the quietness
of the placement of things,
untended dust on the windowsill
The dead pope is on TV.
The volume is mute. The pope
nods and gestures, raising
an embroidered arm
My cat swallows,
moans in hot sleep
I am bored with myself so
I change the channel in my head;
I think about lovemaking and
my stomach tightens. Excitement
constricts my breath and pinches
my tits and surprises me
And then my mental weather turns.
It's anxiety, survival planning,
my estranged tape loop.
Global warming over and over
I cannot relate the ubiquitous
sightings of Jennifer Aniston
at the checkout line
and my ears sour to the
obfuscated utterances of NPR's yes-men
It's a derailed future, the wrong world.
It's all been a terrible mistake
Everything was sad and bright
like a January morning,
a puff of frozen breath
She had painful eyes,
wet and deep and direct
glistening as she listened to you
And a wiry body
and fiery cosmology,
the constellations of friends and
brothers in perpetual descent,
suicides falling silently,
firecrackers falling through firecrackers
or a candle flame dipping into
itself, the abundance of
an unrecorded history
the eighties are back in style
opening zebra-striped possibility
I will be a girlfriend
I will wear a hat and a scarf
and a flower and sneakers
a totally ecstatic fanatic psychopath
