Poem 2 (Odysseus)

You have such a funny perspective on things.
You think that there is some private conversation going on,
and someone was supposed to pull you aside and tell you
what to do, when, really, you are the one who decides what’s important.
You decide what you want your history to be.

Dogs barking, odd textures
of music and layers of graffiti.
Rooftops and smokestacks.
I have always grown up
next to freeways and crackhouses
but I never knew, growing up,
why my friends wouldn’t want to come over
and stay the night, why I would always have to go
to their homes. It was normal.
Folks from around my way
just look a certain way. It’s normal.

Say it loud...

I am a man without people. I am
No One, Incognito in black skin.
I am whinnying needle
galloping in vein,
I am bad trip incarcerated in flesh.
I long to merge with all other
like kind, by-product of brain-matter
is no exception -
I lust for all flesh.

Traditions

Poem 1 (war)

And Lynn asked me, through the smoke and brief distance,
What do you want to do for Christmas?
and I could only think of how war and abandonment
are how my family always celebrated the holiday.
There was a river, and a road that wound along cliff faces,
guard rails glinting in their silver patchwork of scales.
Walking up to the river itself, peering around figures,
warmth of awe and admiration that poured from skins
cut the cold. As the skiff made landfall, George Washington
waved across the breadth, teeming with ice flows,
faces turned from the reenactment, pride dissipating
to nostalgia. My parent’s bodies herded me, gently,
towards the car, their faces flat, having experienced this
as a distraction, an airing.

1a. (the lies we tell our hearts, bodies)

I suggested we bake Christmas cookies.
I shared this same tradition with Alice one winter.
I was on break from college, enamored, and lonely.
I remember how soft her hips were, like Lynn’s,
but less graceful. By the Monday I was due back at work, and
in between smoking weed, Screwdrivers and mid-day fuckings,
we had decorated ninety-eight.

Outtakes Week

This week, I would like to post poems that were once part of a writing project which I've been shopping around for the last few months. I'm calling the project "The Basement Tapes", but it has little to do with Bob Dylan & The Band and more about the vantage from a basement. I hope you guys enjoy, and I'm sorry for the missed day last week. I'll have some new poems for you all starting in March, along with a modified update schedule.

Post-Modern Alterations on the Buddha's Teachings (The Four Ignoble Truths)

1.

Always failing always losing always weeping
always sleeping off
the always present, endless amazement
and disgust:

small alterations
on the Buddha’s teachings:
Ouroboros locked in perpetual motion, Samsara,
that unmoving vehicle of Mahayana and Theravada;
their lotus lungs are drowned in combustion.

Smoke that never clears the system
always taking always making
love to the idea of endings – that blatant lie
on the tips of tonight and tongues and
this blind blade against your throat.

Scimitar of wind pressed
against eyes bleeding tears – acid carving paths
down your cheeks into ether – ever-flowing –
that smashes white
on the never-blue shore.

2.

Always praising never shaking
always slaving away for never slaked thirst
for quiet epiphanies and clarity –

that crumbled neon in the veins of amphetamine Venus,
forever fishnetted with injection wounds, pregnant
with sadness and

fears that bleed out of paper:
the cobweb capillaries of an attic
that houses a Caliban devouring lightbulbs,
its maw enveloping skies
of perfume.

That insulate of disconnected cables
that once joined jaw and skull,
synapse and electricity – the circuit
that’s been closed.

3.

Always wooden always named
always ashen, but never contained within
the words on the page – never breathing,
always aging behind the fleshy petals

of eyelids always darkened
but never closed – dyings caught
on the edges of lashes,

that passes through the small
of a needles eye – your eye – and punctures
unnamed stranger’s ears.

4.

Never trade end-stopped echoes
for bayonets and gunpowder –
re-verb-erations are more effective
in times of roses.

Always scamper and scuttle
along the bottoms of gutters
filled with blood, but never ask why,
why the manhole cover has been welded shut.

Nothing pro-found is anti-found in the navel
of a woman or child, but do not covet their bodies –
covet their capacity for ripping open the seams
of your desires.

Continue dreaming of eyeballs
wrapped in burlap and red paper,
lumpy packages bound with twine,
of love and of nights
when it goes un-found.

And if you are consistent,
if you never falter in your conviction
that we are all convicts conscripted
to walk all night to gallows the next morning,
then you will be able to peel back your third eyelid,
disassemble eight-lane highways,
and sup from pools of beauty,
of horror.

Dream Week

"The only truly natural things are dreams, which nature cannot touch with decay." - Ben Whishaw, I'm Not There

116th Dream

What keeps me coming back to this place
are the frayed nerves under my skull,
the mercury thinness in my veins.

I need to know
how many times
must I watch Eve stroke the hair of Samael
as he weeps into her breast “It’s my fault – forgive me.”
See the moon cupped in the hands of a blind man
with a noose around his neck,
Ophelia standing in the mouth of a giant clam,
her sallow neck draped in pearls.
Watch the mouths of children fill with dead petals
falling from a shattered window of sky,
Little Red Riding Hood broken and naked,
victimized.
How many times
must I find my sister standing
outside our family home,
its skeleton smoldering, her nightgown singed,
her face, eyeless…
The silhouettes of angels making love,
a clown without makeup,
women with sad complexions,
each bearing a different shade of midnight,
a fire-pump that pulses
in place of a heart and lung…

This alley has the same sour drafts
that come from nowhere,
the graffiti and eroded bricks
that all the others have,
but each time I pass it,
I feel as though something’s vanished,
as if a sound had dissolved
a moment before my arrival.

And though my pace quickens
when I approach it, I fear
what I might see
should I arrive
too soon…

Posting delay

So it's been seven days without a day off, and that has really cut into my update/posting/web manager timetable. I'll post something new tomorrow, but I'm positive that February will be the end of my 3x a week updates. Thanks for those of you who've visited the site.

Your festering ulcer and schizoid one-man-jazz-band,

A.J.

from "Sixteen Ways of Looking at Streetcorners"

i.

Cool liquid sipped
past a woman’s lips
flush with summer.
To see them kissed
would be a disgrace.

A man’s gaze
of lust and want
is some safe prodding,
probing, if
concealed by distance.

The round of breasts
stretches white fabric
and draws male attention
from across the street, yet

under an awning,
dark circles under a boy’s eyes,
darken further – I wonder
why?


ii.

In a corner of sky
wreathed in grey clouds,
the color of stratosphere filters
through slow moving wind –

the sway of purple flowers
releases a tart perfume
that delights my nose,
but tears at my eyes.

Silver arms of a clock
perpetually spin.
The sound of the bell's
crescendos splash and

a stop sign’s authority
wanes
as each season passes.

iii.

Blasphemy, to me,
is making love in too much clothing –
it chokes, condemns flesh
to craving,
unslakeable thirst.

There are reflections
in the false eyes of passing faces,
in black lenses devoid of laughter –
they make us both seem
so remote.

Street sounds are indiscernible
from the overhead speakers’
Bebop discord.
Are you even listening?

Blunt edges of sound:
scrape of concrete
on iron chair vacated
before coffee could be served.
Muted notes
in the bodies of a basses,
on the tongues of trumpets.

American Sentences

This form of sorts was developed by New Jersey's own Allen Ginsberg. The form is Ginsberg's interpretation of the haiku form into a very straightforward and open, or "American", form: One sentence, seventeen syllables. While I have written over one hundred of these things, I mostly use them as building blocks for longer poems, and which I've applied directly in the poem coupled with this post. It's actually a synthesis of Frank O'Hara's "Lunch poems" and Ginsberg's American Sentences. I hope you enjoy.

P.S. - Sorry for the late updates. For the rest of February I'll do my best to post on time, but as I get busier with work and if I find a second job, I'll have to revisit my update schedule. Thanks everyone who has listened in on my little corner of the world. You're the best.

Sympathy - After Francis Bacon's "Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef"

Is it agony or fear or disgust which haunts your face?
What is it that has stripped your mouth of its gums
and stitched to your back bloody, ribbed wings?

Marooned in hallways perfectly black and limitless,
do you sense regret?
Was it you who severed ligaments
that joined happiness to your heart?

Or is it our hearts that pump glass shards through veins,
inner darkness flooding our own hallways?
Is it our eyes that have been stripped of color, varnish,
oil? Are we numb to our own wings? Will our wingbeats
shudder the air around madness and propel us?

Will we ascend to your vacant seat or will we find some brief light
in the golden mouth of your absent horn?

Not a sonnet

Today's poem is a fourteen line poem with a turn in the last two lines. No it isn't rhymed, no it isn't iambic (purely). I still think it's a sonnet. It's also an ekphrasic poem, meaning that the subject matter is located in another media, either visual or sonic, and is in this case a painting by Francis Bacon. You can view the artwork at http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/4884

-A.J.

Behind the Curtain

'The Circus’ is such a dirty phrase that does
no justice to the old magic of the
word 'Carnival.’ The carnival was such
a place of intrigue, false identities
and shrouded faces which we flirted with
as children, peeking from behind our parents legs.

The men and women of the show did so
much more than shock with feats and tricks.
Away from paying eyes, the people under
the paint and hats, the lights and leotards
and glitter, lived in trailers cracked with rust.

With no one watching, they would play the songs
of home – of Spain, of Sweden, and Utah –
to children of their own, and whisper tunes
in French and Gaelic over tinny sounds
of mandolins and banjos under their
deflated Big Top and ice-white moonlight.

Form Week

Hi, folks. Sorry for the delay in posting new stuff. It was my brother-in-law's 30th birthday this weekend, and I had too much fun at our 90's themed rager of a party. On to business.

This week I'll be posting poems written in form. For the uninitiated, that means there are certain parameters that I've adhered to which dictate the poem's line length, rhyme scheme, or sequence of repetitions. I choose to write mostly in free verse, but switching to formal poetics is a nice way to reorganize the thought process, and generate poems that would otherwise go unwritten.

To start the week, I'll post "Behind the Curtain", a poem written in blank verse.

Thanks again to all you folks that have visited the site and read my work.

-A.J.

From Memphis

These days your name is a
phrase that tears my ears,
and writing is catching my foot on a nail
or stepping in broken glass someone left behind.

A phrase that tears on my ears
fragments your face. Hearing your name is
like stepping in broken glass that someone left behind –
it reminds me of objections left unvoiced.

Your face is fragmented, and your name
has become ashes that crowd my tray.
Spring reminds me of objections left unvoiced –
of reluctant copulations and uncomfortable sweat.

Ashes crowd my tray because,
these days, your name reminds me
of our reluctant copulations and uncomfortable sweat.
Writing this is like catching my foot on a nail
and my tongue is trembling on the seal of the envelope
that I don’t know I’ll send.

Barroom

I have drowned my sorrows in ethanol litanies
poured from malformed mouths.

the dust of ashtrays mingles
with Mingus counter-points to my rage:


rage at the sight of women
without smiles…


skirts sodden by raped flesh…


disillusionment in the eye of a child,
their hero slaughtered by defamation…


withering perfume of magnolias…



religious wars; persecutions of faith
and damnable laughter
on battlefields –

executions executed by unofficial agencies;
victim’s skulls
demolished by rifle-bullets –

unconscionable treatments of prisoners;
cauterized stumps of fingers, removed genitals,
nipples severed from chests…



an ultrasound that reveals
barrenness inside of a woman
and the divorce that follows –

an ex-wife’s suicide
and the vomit that pools
at the back of her throat –

seven people gathered for a funeral,
the deceased all but discarded by their family –

a home abandoned by warmth…



a musician struck deaf,
who will never again hear the voice
of the music they love…

a sixteen-year-old girl
whose spine has been severed,
who will never feel the touch of a lover…

a blind man
who’s never seen the faces of his children
or how steeped in pain they’ve become…

an amnesiac
who may never remember their spouse
or the love they once felt…



I do not kneel and pray.

I have folded my pity in an envelope
and mailed it to God.

I'm technologically retarded. Sorry.

I have taken down the "Literary Criticism" and "Music" pages due to the fact that I can't post content to them like on the home page. One solution is to overwrite new material over old material, and that's the way I'm leaning, but I've got to get to work, so I'll probably have the pages back up by the end of the day with some new shit. Thanks everyone for visiting and reading.

-AJ

East of Los Angeles

I want to prove that Los Angeles is a practical joke played on us by superior beings on a humorous planet.
~ Bob Kaufman

Hollywood I salute you, artistic cancer of the universe!
~ Bob Kaufman

Outcasts and long fingernails,
bucket lists and sidelong looks from communities dead
to those on the other side of the barbed wire fences
posted by bigots who shout
DO NOT CROSS YOURSELF UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN HISTORICALLY SANCTIONED

***

Jumble Jumble rolling sliding in and out of ears, opened valves,
and with no money to pay the water bill…
Overrun electrical plants humming under streetlamps,
a burning cathedral pump,
a blessing and a scream…

***

The hobos have new homes
in the flatbeds of tanks, modified for road-tripping – street legal.
Phillip Morris owns helicopters and
magpies and mockingbirds sing car alarm songs to wake neighbor dogs
while brakelights signal FUCK YOU in stenciled shadows
across windshields at 2 AM
when drivers just can’t wait to make their turnoff
to sniff flowered bells…

***

The poet stands marooned in the Mohavé with his peyote trip worn off,
with no more freak shows, raves, or fuck-puppets to write about anymore –

he can only masturbate to his preconceived notions of Chicana lesbian dreams
and press on the outside of pants once sold for 19.95 for its irregular stitch in the side
because it laughed too hard as the Cambodian seamstress ran it thru the machine….

***

Marines coming up from Sandiego with purple veins in their necks and purpler dicks seek out college gurls who swoon over muscles and the threat of death…

Immigrants from NorCal are dearly out of place among putty-faced snowglobe-nosed Hollywood, their innocence endearing for all their politics…

True Americans, the people standing at the intersections selling fruit to you thru your window, making
their own way from the ultimate bottom up – I wonder how many cats they’ll have to strangle before they get to the top of the garbage heap…

***

perfumed plumbs from way up on top of this hill can’t cover up the smell of ash
falling from the sky that looks like snow and smears across foreheads like charcoal,
a blasphemous Ash Wednesday:

exactly what’s expected in summertime in southerncaliforni-a,
burnt to the ground and rebuilt again, then burn, harder, bigger, faster
and with twice as much news coverage…

***

Spend two weeks there and I’ll bet you’ll be able ta kick the shit out of any New Yorker
any time, any where.

Rejection

This week I'll be posting poems that have been previously rejected from literary magazines and journals. One day I hope these will appear in a chapbook of sorts that will highlight what's acceptably "far-out" and what's too far-out for public consumption. I hope y'all enjoy.

The Hike (myth bone thunder kerosene)

Thunder cracked like bones under the pressure of a steamroller.
Cradling our kerosene lanterns, the promise of shelter escaped us.
It became a myth told through the line, some truth uttered
only by those who believed in strength.

Scaling the Wall (plastic rope leaf teeth)

Staring up the wall, the leaves trembled.
I could not believe my camp counselor
when he said that a little round piece of plastic
and a knot of nylon rope
could keep my teeth from being ground
to dust.