Family Time

No poem today and probably Monday as well, folks. I'm sorry, but I have to take care of some things today with family and Easter's on Sunday, so I don't think I'll be able to give y'all what you're looking for on this blog. Have an awesome weekend and a great Good Friday.

Drawn and quartered,

A.J.

Supergirl Takes a Day Off (Part 2)

It seems a shame that not one famous work of art
can hold my attention, but I can sit here in my sweatpants
on-the-verge-of-tears-laughing at dogs with eyebrows drawn on them.
The people on this planet who imagine they have
a heightened sense of things, their work seems... incomplete.
There is so much ego and too little attention to what's important.
The one artist whose work I can actually enjoy is Bryan Saunders.
This guy's done every drug imaginable and painted self portraits
under their influence. I tried LSD once.
My body processed the chemicals too quickly, but I felt
what could be called fear, if only for a moment.

Clark called and left a message on my machine. It must have been
while I considered the benefits of spending my small allowance
on Captain Morgan or the extra large jug of Carlos Rossi.
I wonder which side of the family he gets his need to be right from.
Clark never takes a day off. Even on his days off
he drags me to events he thinks will make me feel more compassionate
towards humans. Sometimes it does help, seeing them come together
to change the spirit of a neglected neighborhood with a public garden or
reading about charities that make a dying kid's wish come true.
But his sense of justice is too fairy tale for my taste.
I can't say he doesn't, that we don't, do good on this world
but you can't save everyone. And you can't stop the brutal things
that these creatures do to one another, to themselves.
It seems like the moment we intervened here
human nature itself began to change. The people we save
are beginning to look harder, twisted by their past,
something we can never save them from.
Clark and I have saved lives but I wonder
just what kind of lives do we send them back to.
Would Clark's sense of justice waver
if he saw one of his saved beat someone to death?
If one of his saved committed suicide, what then of right and wrong?
Not knowing how he'd answer, I deleted his message, sight unseen,
and picked up the receiver.

Supergirl Takes a Day Off (part 1)

At least it's raining today. There was a bus crash
on a mountain highway not in any way designed to handle a bus that size.
I turned the TV off before they announced the number of dead.
I could have flown over the clouds, above the rain and listened
for the bus to make the turn, for the sound of hydroplaning rubber,
for the vibrations of the bus scraping the metal barricade, for the moment
the barricade gave way to too much weight.

Even though my legs don't tire on this planet
I don't think I ever paid much attention to how far away
the supermarket was, the liquor store even farther
on days like these. I could fly to Detroit and back,
with enough time to get a Coney Dog, in the time it took me
to pick up milk and chocolate syrup. A news article said
that twenty minutes of cardiovascular exercise will release
as much endorphins as a chocolate bar, but sitting at the kitchen counter
drinking my chocolate, I disagree.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother saving these animals.
Clark can be such a pussy, with all his "Everyone deserves
to be happy" bullshit. Earlier, on the bus, when that pig grabbed my ass
I could have broken his hand into minute pieces.
I could have stopped the bus, held it over my head
and brought it down on his face, over and over.
I slapped him instead and grabbed him by the testes and asked him
How does it feel? He probably enjoyed that part,
that humiliation. Deep down, maybe that's what he wanted.

Happy Hangover Day

I know I usually have a poem up before noon, but I was...scratch that. I still AM hungover and kind of sick again. Fun times. I'll post something less creepy/disturbing on Friday, but for now please enjoy the product of me editing a poem when I'm drunk: "The Man in Unit 4-C".


Dizzily yours,

A.J. the Ulcer

The Man in Unit 4-C

He is composing his opus, his overture
as he snips the piano wires and stretches animal sinew

across warm wooden bodies. Like his neighbors,
he has always wondered what inhabits that other side of the wall.

Curiousity devours each resident's mind, eventually, and
they can't help but wonder What is he DOING in there? What

IS all that noise? Thin walls of the complex make their question
a defining aspect of the space itself, and it's almost cannonical

for tenants to move in next door or across the hall,
as if proximity would let them make sense

of the screams.

Tuesday Sutra (Laundry, Baseball and Underemployment)

It's a funny masquerade
of patterns that float in Santa Ana breezes.

You couldn't tell, today, that just last week
the landscape was an asphalt floodplain.

Clothes on the line and exhibition games
of baseball on too many days off
in between shifts is my normal.

When I heard the bard say twenty years
of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift
I thought it was the Truth, but I never imagined
what he was saying would be true for me.

When I was just a child, maybe
I didn't have much imagination, not a clue
what my future would be; all I had
was a desperate drive. I did not know
I was racing forward, towards death
with such abandon, not knowing how I would wish
I could slow down, linger and savor my twenties.

I am not yet a man, though I ought to be.

Perhaps that is the point.

Maybe the clothes should sway a while longer,
the baseball season should never start
and my time between shifts ought to be long, droll
and filled with echoes.

When you hit bottom, send me a postcard

I'd like to know what yours looks like. I can't remember it all but I know I just don't fit in out here among eighty-six-looking fifty-five-year-olds, already on their way out. Their ghosts won't stop chattering. They persist so that they won't dissipate, so they'll continue to exist somewhere in someone's inner ear. I just don't fit in out here. My mind moves too fast and my body too slow to keep pace with these songs written for hunchbacked children with too little clothing on and even less input on the world of false promises they'll inherit from their Boomer parents. I just don't fit in out here. I just don't fit in... Stamped down ire pushes up through sediment each morning, lighters clasped and middle fingers raised to burn my small happinesses to the ground and scatter the cinders. It is easier to be dumb, to be led. Alcoholic recall catches in the sky nightly, brings with it carcasses of other nights, nights spent in hallways full of the stink of fresh linoleum and lingering aroma of boiled cabbage and fish sauce. It brings with it brief images of eyes clutched by words unspoken: Please! Do something! Help me! Please... and slow waltzing to the flurries of cocaine in their heads, her limp wrists and unsure hips wreathed in something smoldering just out of view.

My wife takes my hand as the first volley hits

~after Edward Kienholz's "The Portable War Memorial"

In waking dreams I climb unreal mountains of pallid skin
and curl my body into ecstatic positions
of worship and reverence and despair.

I watch the flag of divine right, destiny
manifested in starlight patchwork,
raze the capitals of countries and kingdoms.

I watch and I listen.

I watch and I listen
for the era of war, of error,
to end.

I watch and I listen
for the perfumes of bombed alleyways
to find their way home, for streets so flooded
with bodies of the displaced.

I can only hope that the aluminum faces
of partisan leaders will one day crumple
into weeping.

I can only hope that their wrought-iron backs
will bend in embraces, that their copper hearts
will oxidize and bleed Lorca’s green love.

I can only ask that you, too,
watch and listen

for breath
for swelling
for wind pregnant with hope.

Center of the Universe (Collapse of a Star)

The concrete bruised flesh of the homeless, frozen and black, thousands
on the brilliant streets of the center of the old universe protesting their status
as economic rape victims, cradling paystubs and shitting on cop cars,
dictatorships and African post-aparthied empires disbanded like so many gangs,
hunted down, and executed. In these future times of holograph phones
and rusted chassies of American-made indentured servitude to our new god, Debt,
I find my thoughts occupied by what it means to write, to feel, to be a Poet,
holiness or something like it and I have to scold my mind for such departures
from what is going on around me. But sometimes you have to move far
from where you once started, light years, sometimes you must abandon one center
and find a new one untethered by time. I don't recognize myself in the mirror
or in old poems. The future and the past are in the same room, but
they have nothing to say to one another. There were so many centers,
identities, blasphemies and loves left on the wayside to what I am now - physical
but not physic, unexpressive and sublimely lonely. And yet these things I've left behind do not define me.

New Schedule, Writing Projects, New Blog

Hi guys,

As I said, March will be the month of fewer posts and (hopefully) higher quality poems. From here on out, I will update this blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. If I work late on those days, I will post something for you all the next day (along with, maybe, a bonus poem). I've got to turn my hustle-mode up to eleven this month so I can find a job I was trained for and start saving for the wedding next year. I'll try not to let the site suffer.

I've been half-assedly shopping my chapbook/broadside/collection of poems around, and I'm glad you've been enjoying the outtakes. I've come down with some kind of sickness, so I didn't get a chance to write anything new this weekend, but I'm posting a poem that does appear in the collection. I'll probably sprinkle in some more of them throughout March's updates.

And an old friend from graduate school, Nick Gaudio, let me know he had a blog that he updates with some degree of frequency. It's called "American Quixotic" and if you're alright stepping outside your comfort level, as I'm sure the readers of this blog are, I'm sure you'll really enjoy Nick's work. You can click on the link embedded here or click the one to the right under "My Blog List".

Thanks to everyone who visited the site last month and I hope you all stay tuned - there should be an "Interview" page coming down the pike.

Sincerely infected,

A.J.

A Garden State of Mind

1.

Ignore the numb in your fingers, deny
the cold authority of the fire inside
(if you're not careful, it will consume you)
You borrow guitars not knowing
if you’ll ever return them, you beg for change
in liquor store aisles to feed the fire just enough
to keep it smoldering, you drink
too much black coffee at night just
to get the lightning out
(you can forget so much in an instant)
You take a beating here, but
you can’t create something
if it comes easy
(nothing worth a damn, anyway)

2.

This was how we all grew up.
This is how we make it:
in the streets,
in the rain gutters choked
with rotten leaves, between shifts
riding the bus beside bangers and old folks,
living on our in-laws' couches and skating by
on sixty bucks per paycheck.

We make it without fear
of bill collectors
(This call is to collect a debt...
Get bent)
We make it without guilt
(a friend once said if you’re looking back
you ain’t moving forward, that’s for sure)
We make something of it
because the alternative is extinguishment,
that slow death by asphyxiation
in a rainbow of polyester blends
and aloha patterned ties on Fridays.

You have to have something
to grab a hold of, something
worth fighting for even
when you've got nothing left to lose.