long sum derangement

or maybe not. it's been a while here and i've been wordless, or working. one and both together maybe. but some commentary now on the roll through of the hurricane. it bore the same name as my grandmother and hit her home town on the day of her birth in the year when she passed. so maybe when we die we become storms and make all the streams reacquaint with their banks and the people that surround them.

i've got no new leads into anything significant. my hands are still at the ends of my arms and i'm enjoying life as a married man, though both my wife and i could spend the fall in a hut of paper piled building-sized. she more than me though, what with the doctoring.

we talked about sounds that we'd like to carry with us last night. and the ticking of rain on a window as a storm starts, the noise of the espresso maker on the stove when it's not like the dentist's suction instrument that makes it hard to talk - let alone the fact that someone you don't know well has their whole hand in your mouth...

10:16

five dollars in the crisper
the gang signs off on the receiver
and all that can be played now
is card games, or lite jams.

adults contemporaneously get up
at night to go to the bathroom
and are depressed by light
and how long it takes to get
the bed back to their perfect form

one body in soot makes a clothespin look kind
another way of outsmarting the fox
is by simply turning
on the weather

all the waterfalls are moaning now
and bad-eyed gladys just stares out the window
she's that chicken from the commercial
going celebrity before pieces of meat.

2:45

they like to spit into the holes here
they lick their boots and begin kicking
the dirt around, pressing water down
with drillbits into the rocktalk backwards
through their handheld radios, backwards
through their dollarsigns and logging roads
the step’s a steep one if you can make it, they say
and unfold their dollar bills like clothes to wear

the day
is thin and so are we

11:46

3 shorter pieces that kind of interrelate...let's say we're all shored up now?



thank the grocery
aisles for
whipped cream
canisters

what dizzy was
is something new
now, vermont
1992--oohwahwahooh




the rush comes after
the break
in both waves
and theft

i learned this by watching
keanu and swayze
dance fight on the water

their black rubber suits
another clinging to affair
to contend with later on

the trust they almost shared, the sand
and ocean comb-like--rushed
through their hair




life gets easy
when you sleep
and when you can’t
there’s drinking

10:58

A bicycle seat for your perverted chair. The cost of shooting a hole right through the head of a stuffed animal, preferably something remotely endangered. A lopsided win on the playing field. The sort of day where you question what work is and how buildings can stand being so still. A forum for snake spit and skins that peel back like glue. The raised hairs on a body and stray tingle that follows a finger as it traces letters onto parts there. A jump-photo at an unrecognizeable landscape. The morning vestibule folded with water.

how much of a starter kit are you?
how much of a finishing motel?

11:42

still no ketchup, but some more words. have to make the napowrimo work for and against me...then it'll be back to occasional and photo-based meanderings...

keep a shitty tree
to hang your children
from
like leaves
but not let them
leave the grounds

keep a city clean
beneath four thousand
mounds of dirt
the burning asters
a form of situating distance
and what rail call
will come through that mountain
chugging and smoke
the last of the stalked grain

most hope for feeling
and get practically nothing
in return--the bump on the lip,
a fast switching spotlight that curtains
bodyparts, loose change in a jar--cattle
prodded further into the field
what setting beyond place
mats and mats to wipe your feet

10:44

I'm behind because of the weekend and traveling, but here's one thing and I'll have to get two others together and up in the next couple of days...


two syllogists
passage contraband
but their adding machines
make the reasons

one proposes a ring
without a finger, the other
hatches a planet from a pea

all about the round
the long winter danced

tables and chairs like tables and chairs

and the tents were inverse equations
trees of the possible watched their leaves
runt, turn over like a game of crowns

8:49

mist becomes the ghost
you thought your father was

when praying all those
ticked out minutes

before the sheetslap
a body bagged with night

complicated, cold wrapped
round your feet and feelings

and disappeared from there
once the eyeshut shut

trapping your mind inside
but so far in it seemed

no measure could capture
that distance

what it means to be
dead is no language

and single syllables beat
their one-stroke hearts

into how we know this

11:20

don’t stall your thermometer
for my afflictions

the bed itself is a sea of sorting
dampened corners, dreary window

my french fines
for your capped porridge

the glyphs: petro- and heiro-
concert their meanings
umber, charcoal, leafing through pale stones
each other kiss
a word, a folded book of talking
gestures drawstrung

11:04

trying on the hands
again
and what it feels
like to laugh until everything
comes up loose:
teeth, gas, and water
from the eyes
side-spittingly lid-heavy
a cone of volume
waving out from somewhere
beneath the belt you try
to hold steady
but tame is not the weigh-station
not the freight-laden
rig of fits born to highway
through you.

5:54

my other voice is a bottletop
blown over

the white scribble of jets
in a pail of water

my vow to you is always
to catch your sighs

my other voice
is a handsaw, drunk

on the breaking
of days

deserving of praise and anaesthesia
the sun blinked off

x-d out eyes and the sketch
of a skirt on the wind

drawn into a plain pine board
with a felt tipped pen

here’s where to begin
blind as the dirt

where the din of your mind
can steer toward the quiet

of the cooling board
i woke up this morning

how do you reckon
hurry, hurry

the salve will settle
the skin, the sun

knows better than to blink
back on again

10:00

the fairnesses we inherit
and sort of similarities to others

take the nose
from a statue
and hold it still

form your own bangs
let the water come away
from the faucet a little
introduce your neighbors
to your other personas
live like you think
famous people are
the worst and berate
them as you water the tv
and berate yourself after.

grades of B or lower will
no longer harm your chances
at becoming a leader
everyone's open for potential
discovery at the hands of women
or men with more money
and experience

in order to sell out
stadiums, you've got
to have a good hotdog

i can't get more helpful
than this in less than five minutes

10:56

you have people
you fall asleep: Donald Trump

says he knows what country
his hair came from

and we would need to
interrogate this

fascinating dynamic.

8:59

allowances for glassing and your fake gold teeth

add the bears to the palm and wait for showers of foldable burial

these words are shouting and like wine will age to bitterness

my project is to complete

the sadfoot works until it's lost all gourds

what can be poured is poured, such hustle pre-prepared

a maid for the stage and inclusions

and the directions where you look when you're lying

down and solid--the ankles are available for support

6:02

fergie carries her notes
around in flaccid plastic bags
and our eyes
at the bottom of the ocean
get eaten
by limp worms
turn on their phantom
lights and list after the faltering
leads farther willing electric bodies
everybody leaves
of good chance
it’s what gets taken then


here’s an ode to the black eyed peas:
get off stage
banter
when you’re backed
into the future
and thousands of microphone-looking
people question why
your songs burn into our fizz-addled
minds on the dance
floor. breaking palace gates
and plates, a three-cheer
chandelier gets placed atop the stadium
and the lights wink
like beats upon the shoreline
thumping the whales
and lesser crustaceans into the original
refrain of “let’s get it started”
because class
and ass rhyme, bitches.
pop the mazel tov
and take off your t-top
to let the boom boom buzz in

11:22

5 minute sonnet (not really)

the way the world works is not apparent
you wind up being born, you wind up screaming
about how little you can change, your parents
try their best, the same with all other animals
some of which don’t make it though and agency
doesn’t strictly apply to the animate
we imbue things we like with human
qualities--cuteness high on the bar, but
the vices we subtract. there are no venge-
ful bunnies, no greed stoked sugar gliders
and evil plots are not hatched in hatcheries
but what if the conspirators were dizzy
with their advertisements ballooning profit
margins and a boardroom full of dour faced
puppies? we’d all still snuggle home in dirt
we’d all remain blind to our final net worth

4:47

retire that
walking method

tiger among
mean streets

the itch
in the corner
of the eye

and all that snow
falling from
your head, ally seedy

oh, the hs we’ve missed
so many shows
i tune into

for anything that happens
and watermakers
mark the page

edgeward, to cute the image
add some red
to cuts

and heavy as candy
in the hand is
the wait will be
held too

8:38

to swear the sprinkler system
will go off any minute
is to stand beneath a sensor
with a fire in your hands

10:53

the dreams of ghosts are being cloned
a washing machine moves on through country

broken-down horns squawk in the belly
of the cars set on blocks in the drive

i hear the sound of saws
being played at cutting

no fear grows from stumps
the rings a sign for hole, a singing sky dips into

you can only translate doubt
into however many languages exist
at a given moment

pull the lever and the wrong order
drops into the vending machine’s
no-longer-empty holding space

6:52

try the temple
are they eating
dogdogdogdogcardogcarcat

here is the song
and here is the dancing
one thing will make another
mean more if it's placed correct--

are you busting at the seems?
sea am, shore. watch the walls

go stale-ing
it's not the more
you swallow, it's the whale you get
whole. and spout, one loves to leave.

ok the cat's dreaming now, i can see
its paws knead.
the next one will be
fore the worst way to make a forum
is by asking along the questions,
same sames the same.
ones won the ones.

and to stop scratch, apply water
in heaps. aptly, water ain't easy.

11:18

in the compartment to back through the neighing a sumpthin, the packs were savory. here's a voice, here's an apartment with old carpets climb through the highway to get back sorting into a weekswalk. think of the mansions in newport and what someone pressed so hard against an iron fence the snapbacked chairs are making a comeback and all worry can be traced to momentary lapses of motion and congruity. i mean it's easy to dance like your suit is an animal you're trying to save from the formal dissection that often happens at parties. but the corporeal is just another space. and the other people are being surrounded as we speak, this foal cannot make legs look more or less clumsy. two solid poles dance at the edges of this planet i am pulling the legs of the table back and forth and you are mentoring the deckwalkers in gull charts. the grip we have. the suitable clobbering that happens to clothes after. i will attend the lighthouse against its better suitors and defend maturity from my non-slip footwear. Here's a cookie and ranking system. Here's the list of all those things we thought we wouldn't see. in the store window a pair of plastic swans. at the table, strangers.

9:10

how to start a parade

the cat’s near the chicken barn, say
‘cat’ a thousand times
until you don’t recognize
the slits of its eyes through
the crease of the door of the ‘a’ in its belly
letting light up
on the birds. the feather lines
will lead straight to a fowl heart
plucked from the chest
of one of the hens
like a flower,
a beating gift.

9:04

Two shorts--one from yesterday since I didn't post

forget me
not the creeping
of traffic as it strings

the welts
we cut out
of fruit

a sign on the door
says only one
person at a time

it spills us
together into
the empty lobby

6:52

from yesterday...

home on the lam

ore renamed
the part where
you place your junk

it heaps all over the room
maybe you thought junk meant
what you keep in your pants

or the trunk
that hands out signs in front
of the elephant, but I’m not buying it.

in essential nature, the clam
is nothing more than
a lickable burrower

take your friends for a walk
and see the new statues
made of presidents

our nation’s capital made
easy to grab at—just
love someone wealthy

the newest form of living is found
dead on the seaway
and salt will make its home

anywhere the wind takes it. this could
be a way to continue. this could
be the winter.

5:40

This if from this morning--forgot to post yesterday's bit...will do that later on this evening


the signature is a new average

take to the hills with your walking and sticks
all the animals won’t bother to meet you here

nondescript pastoral experience gloats over
the film of your eyes, a reel burning there in the light

sing your favorite song quietly while commuters
also sing their favorite cursewords

god loves a man in shoulderstrapped gun
loves the angry carriage of noon

high-beams traipse across the median
as the warp-speed snow gathers brown

it seams onto the edges of the causeway
over these abandoned townships the sky limps

each doorframe a measuring block
for removal--what sound crisps

in the fame cage is not the youth gone wild
it is the lack of pinholes in the bottom

of a beer can that makes the liquid stable
and a whole case of ponies is calling

from the trunk and our better judgement
loses to the distances we travel

and where we set each heart is a trophy
and the land will get us there

we just need to erase our way through

8:12

behind the times

I will die in a fort of strapture, fit with laughing
I will die without punctuations or monetary curbs, cures, curves

I will die in a town named after
I will die a thousand times a sparrow, but once a corvus

I will die with my love bound up in books
I will die with my hand bloated and trapped in ink

I will die in the eyes of my wife’s fast blinking
I will die in the throat of my schoolchild as she learns her alphabets

I will die in the band sounds stilled beneath the metal bleachers
I will die in the keys of the janitor and the pressed pedals of the upright piano

I will die on a midwinter’s day and on the afterpolice shot of summer—walking on the moon
I will curl up into smoke and Dramamine and the goats will eat their cans and chew the grass
sprigs from my sockets

I will die with my family’s crest—a series of spaces between the waves
I will die in the cornucopia of a faltering national identity

I will die tomorrow and tomorrow and the rest of them will come to take you to bed
I will die a manor and campfire

I will die on the off-ramp of an odd numbered highway with salt still frosting the lines
I will die with my wife’s fear of dropping out of the sky and my own fear of finding another me inside these dreams I’ve signed

I will die of long-in-the-tooth, of rickety-rails, or choose-your-own-adventure laid out for adults
I will die sweating inside a handshake, the palm and fishlike

I will die in every curtain of lakewater interpreted as a walkable ice-way

6:44

the repetition of numbers is of great concern among the major religions

and i will never die

the horse of carting and the field of listing out demands for terminally ill patients in hospice care, who only want to swallow that last bit of food without interruption and with a swallow of stoli from a martini glass, up with a twist

and i will never close my right eye again in measurement of distances

the flowers drowned along the edge of the tidal basin with sunblock in their buds and paling which corroborates the similarities between work that has moved from the land into the stack of boxes labeled with light and glass--pale blue filling with white and then washed to grey

and i will never lift my hand with a shovel, i will not pare the bended branch, i will not leap from the road's edge into the paused traffic like a signpost felled by a strong wind

the satin touch of a young machine as it spins its gears and produces something you know you never can live without and how this item gets transmitted through time and space repeatedly to wind up on your television screen on sundays and in the morning hours of the lesser week

and i will never part with my folder of interminable diagrams for how to earn an education

there are photos i wish to recreate and ways of stalling in conversation, i hope this lever reaches you way out on the form--the harm--the flame of a cloak and dragon

4:51

no ideas butt in
things you can't help
but think about--

The quality of water reportedly repeated
in poems the new yorker publishes

one can guess brackish, thorough

is the listing a series of pauses a form
of entrance or do we inherit
the stalls our thoughts program--see the source
is master and the master is a set of chairs
empty behind a curtain--strong must rising

One fires their friends after
years of groveling for affinity
and on
with the tempering of metals
softer than the teeth. Tuned radios, too, command
attention. What's received, what's blasted
from the pill gun and shushed beneath
the table's cloth. Food in scraps and tapping.

It takes 5 minutes for the water to drain effectively
from the page. All the words a-smear and mention of forestry
in ranges of syllabic meter will not help.

To mend the floorboards or the industrial fan
might require a sketch
to compile its parts for fixing. And fists
are not good instruments to bludgeon
with. I learned this from fiction--another use of the forearm...
there's less intricacy there, or the forehead.

But drawing requires a deftness
that can be turned over
at least a dozen times while sleeping.

Remove all references to lakes
and swimming from your life
or reconsider the use of fins in film.

The use of fans in blading,
the use of floors in waiting.

A separated body pours into the glass.
A need in noon to track heads fast
down the draintrap.

5:41

the pinhole inherits a whorl
this day is formulaic
and the birds are not a chorus

but you can silver your bullets
and cram another mouthful of grapes

i mean more on, more on than this

i lost the will to open the mailbox
and the key is another instrument toppled
by excessive use

just think of all the empty shelf space
in detroit and how a cat can
manage its daily tasks
with no shortage of complaint

i will go tell a man my waist size now
and flock with the other cars
and eat the raw potatoes
and climb a numb moment, a flight
with scissors for its cutting hair
and the monuments will still be
washed before they're reconfigured

no more stone in the suit
a flank made out of pockets
and to find the hole inside your year
where you can stack things like this

like so many beginnings and mysterious pranks
take the one with the back seat
and the thousand gallon sink hole
or the fist tanking your eye
until it can only hold banks and blanks
like dollarbills and sighs.

i am not compute, will not make this model-truth

2:57

revving up for the month of april, where i intend to post a bit each day under certain const(ime)raints. this will mark year three of napowrimo, which before this year didn't really realize was a thing. yesterday i learned what a wombo was. i'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes. today i spent time at the library and sorting through clipart and doing the new-ish office job. happy to be a workin', even with(in) the rain.

in preparation, all the nude accordion

players gathered, their boxes squeezable

their hands and harmonies (hormones) at the ready

it wasn’t too abysmal for the end of matches

some burning thing and then a quiet pause

a forest called for the end of trampling

the seats you were supposed to bring

are all garnished with rest now, no creek

to wade through, no separated shoulder

or rave to scamp with glowsticks.

I was partly myesh, or slef—keyed

into opening like a cabin

and the slurs were easy to roll out

a noodle-like rope slipped from the trunk

of the car back into the home you left

another type of fairy-tale trail

that would be eaten by good intentioned birds

and the madness we suffered was called adulthood

a cheap fixative to ply the calendar with

sticks in all the stone rolled quarters

and nowhere easy to lay one’s head down

for a song—even if it was limber

and galumphed from the wrinkly hands

and worried bodies of poorly trained nudists.

so last century with their concerns

for authenticity.

gears and upping

the ante

so bet your better parts, sew buttons onto the traffic standstill
and for what comes back to bite your ass
there's a mirror to look behind you set up just in front of your face
and the aces are all buried in the deck
some swift handled-barmaid may come along to watch your dealing
or guess how much to lose and sidebar gambling
is a product of illy wrought children

i'm trying here to not notice what the season will be up to when it closes
or how the better pitchers always end up
full of the wrong type of beer
or in the wrong league entirely

come april and the spittoon of fakery
come all you burned ghost factories, spitting new clouds
and bird-shadows into the sky
some sun work is backwards and the retinal cues
a photograph captures will mark each pupil bloodstained.

this i learned from my future
father-in-law
while waiting to fill my jowls with cake

seagulls chased a crow until it landed in home base
and everything went quiet.
trees storing up the sun
had begun to spit up green parts and flowers

my tenses kept catching--

this many days

thinks the drugs

is for the doctors.
and the dreams are for the teeming
the teams for sports and reams of courtroom papers
the gone ingrain sings long in training
a slim machine is freezing rain
and now i've got such
such a carefilled
brain it's almost broken each railroad tie
one neck one sends to the tracks
one brother never comes back
before the beating.

this code is doltish
and a coat i wear
to keep my skin suit
from coming up for air.

and the dry cleaners sing obla-living-on-a-de-da-prayer
just like new jersey's always sworn to go on
long past the thrill.

A Pair of Teeth & WIDE NIGHT

If anyone who reads this is in DC during the upcoming AWP, Flying Guillotine Press authors will be reading at two offsite readings later in the week. Matt Sadler will read at Iota Club and Cafe in Arlington on Thursday night. And on Friday Sasha Steensen and Mark Horosky will be reading at Wonderland Ballroom in Columbia Heights.

Both nights are full of other great readers and the night at Iota will have two bands at the end of the night. Come out and hear some good words, have a few drinks, hang out with small press folk. Punch a duck. Sing to the frogs, whatever.

A Pair of Teeth (Aperatif) Iota Club and Cafe 2832 Wilson Blvd. Arlington VA 22201 7:30-2AM
WIDE NIGHT Wonderland Ballroom 1101 Kenyon St. NW Washington DC 20010 6:30-9:30PM

some say

the ice cream attacked me
while you sat idly by

dim bulbs itching into the early morning
and the ice on the ground is the same
as the ice in your freezer

think what swears for the working man
and all the fortunate imposters
whose wounds heal beautifully
because they're putty
and very pretty beneath all that foundation

some say it's easy to bend your climate
or take another year to flop
it's a guess you make with numbers
a very important guess

Everybody knows this is nowhere

and for a song that short, yes
like a founding match and its lick of fire--how to turn one simple thing into another.
i watch the television with an ease that's hard to refund
i clap when all the gameshows growl
and when i'm painting my crows back into the sky
the sattelites go bling-bling, blind

remember the neutron dance? remember the pointer sisters?
i've got a snowstorm in mind and a white datsun pickup
there's a new neighbor joining the next accident
there's a flap of skin to drape over each eye
and the 1980s came down like a stray dog, hungry and matted

my curse and cure is almost memory.