Archive for the ‘POETRY’ Category

I was the cockroach

with very brilliant gold shell

under an old log.

You were blue bottle

fly flitting about doing

good for the insect community, then

always crashing into trees.

We fell in love, made

two thousand children,

but I still prefer to spend

my time under logs

reading the fungus.

You still prefer flying about

doing selfless deeds.

Friends all marvel at

how well our marriage has worked:

you. kept from crashing

into trees; me, brought

out into daylight.  Still, the

greatest miracle

–our children, giant

flying cockroaches, fungus

loving gold-blue flies.

-Bob Preist

Drinks for my friends.

Eyes against mine

I pull the small of your back

Hands slice slowly down your waist

I pull again

Lift you into me

Breathe each other

You are here with me

We meet

Drink of each other

Brown dress and beautiful skin

Gorgeous in my head in my nose in my hands and in my mouth even my ears there are no words for this

Trampled flowers

Good kisser

She lingers on the end of the word

Unlocking the door

A girl smiling back

Oh I think Oh

Then the back of her

The book closes

I am lost

Danced too long

Too late I see she can’t

feet make patterns in the sand

I understand that she cannot.

Ever Never lethal it stings then aches

Then She betrays

Slowly the crack crawls across

Trampled flowers beautiful vibrant

Rotting and pungent

It breaks me

I keep moving the universe pays no mind

Carterenda has a smile that is slippery

Her smile slides over her teeth

Her teeth and lips are ideal flesh and bone

Flesh full lips beneath beautiful eyes across shiney lovely bones

Doe sweet eyes

Cinnamon skin some freckles and her hair silken from gold to black and around every fusilli

Her smile conceals all that she knows to be true.  She is wise and glistens.

I inhale her moisture and perfume

I am enchanted

She is flawless

She likes the horses, she likes the track.  She likes champagne and caviar and she’s adept at at concealing her distaste for the gringo

She wears a loose dress of subtle color yet her shape is obvious

She believes her hips to be powerful and her lips to be flowers

She is correct

Her lips pull back like you’ve no idea for a grin playing havoc with my belly too and she barely puffs from a long black stem with a cigarette at it’s end.  Her tongue escapes behind her lips and there is a tiny pop and a puff of smoke.  Her lips pull back again from tooths in wonderland.

She looks at me as though she’s about to ridicule.

I wish I was in a supermarket from my childhood.  Smelling the onions and grapefruits while marveling the glossy floor and symmetry everywhere.  Cucumbers.  The bread aisle pungent with yeast and grains and jars of mustard offending my pre-adolescent hyper senses.

Colors so vivid, I wanted to puke.

Pastries with jelly centers enveloped in loose glossy cellophane on shiny disposable tin foil trays…… all iridescent….rows of cereals, sauces and cans of everything.  Detergents and cleansers with shiny blue green orange logos.  Dirty sacks of potatoes that mother could make anything out of.

What does she want?  I’m really not sure what to do here.

Carterenda sparkles

I would take her home to do my best

Drinks for my friends.

The most elaborate and imposing apparatus ever constructed to paint a room.

Lit like a boxing match.

See it from a mile.

A ridiculously grandiose set of circumstances.

The wall of one room removed for a live cutaway. My house. Where I grew up. Tree in the front yard. Moon in the backyard. Pancackes, pot roasts, dead cats, snow, rain, early mornings and late nights. Genuine random. One constant was the smell of my feet. Another was my drumkit. Comic books. Chewing tobacco and dark beer. My house dissected like science fair project. Absolutely impossible yet it all took place.

An enormous, convoluted steel and hydraulic apparatus for the painting of one small room. It stretches through back yards and occupies most of the block well before it begins to even labor and pump. Thrust, grind and mash. Pulverize and obliterate. It’s huge, smoking and steaming and spewing.

Workers scurry, pound and shovel. They shout and signal among themselves. I’m wearing a hardhat. Eye suffocating goggles that relentlessly shift from yellow to green to blue. Some mask for breathing. Feels like I’m in deep sea gear.

Illuminated like the scaffolding at midnight on a twenty four hour casino job.

Sprawling and archaic. I explain the deed can be done easily with aerosol cans or a rented compressor. Rollers and pans, brushes and cans. So much easier than this. They won’t hear me. So much simpler.

I’m so angry I choke the ends of my sentences.

They don’t listen. Not as though they can’t. Much more like they won’t. It spooks me.

They keep building. Assembling with machines themselves the size of houses. Monstorous vats filled with molten metal and boiling concrete, bubbling like simmering sauce. Cauldrons baking the damp earth in my chilhood back yard.

Splattering sparks and startling discharges of air and steam. The periphery of my senses kept busy with all things making me flinch.

I’m trapped here and there, now and then, by the giant engines and the things they are building. Malicious, mindless. Climbing out while watching for sudden tons of movement or keeping distance from an industrial dragon gone senseless.

Madness and they won’t listen.

I make it to the bathroom in time to witness all water pissing on every book I’ve ever owned. Hundreds, maybe thousands. My bathroom. Familiar. No soap. No shower curtain. No valve for the water. Nothing to do. The water slows pissing and stars gushing. I haven’t stepped foot in that bathroom in almost twenty five years. It haunts me, that bathroom.

Dad is on the roof hammering so hard the noise is from a cartoon.

Construction continues so before I know it I stand in the middle of what appears as a refinery Sunlight from the west glances off it’s gleaming spires. My boots are dry but caked and heavy. Wild iron contrivances looming like Vegas billboards along the 15, the size of office building skeletons without yet any concrete or glass for skin.

Bristling with cranes and open elevators, lifts and chutes.

Equipment dangles and sways. Before I know it, everything commences to swing and twirl like carnival rides and it’s all I can do to keep from getting crushed by the whipping insect head of an oil pump or sliced to ribbons from braided steel blown and slashing by an impossible tempest.

It’s these machines I fear the most as no human sits atop them.

Death is everywhere until a young latin boy in a tailgated old Chevy shows up on a construction elevator with hot dogs, tacos and flan but no onions or clean napkins. I see the front of his facade is a regular food truck and we’re dealing out of the back. I speak spanish to him but he ignores my requests or acts as though he can’t understand me.

I know better than to ask for mayo.

Just then, one of our forklifts is completely obliterated by a heavy metal object orbiting with abandon from a crane broken loose for reasons I can’t grasp or even see. I watch it’s arc and hold my breath at it’s apogee until it comes all the way down. The violence of it is breathtaking. It obliterates the dense little appliance like a wrecking ball vs. an ice sculpture. The forklift explodes and I see a man’s head cave like an egg filled with berries and pale pudding.

It’s chaos and massive amounts of burning steel lands like munition everywhere but where I stand. Destruction so sudden and extreme I can’t run.

The smell is is metal and fuel exhaust, fossil lubricants and the grit that finds it’s way into your lungs and under your nails. And burning. Burning. Tar. Constant fire.

The irony is not lost on me as it’s all for a very small thing. A task for two humans for an afternoon, maybe two.

At this point, I begin to wonder why my mind is playing me this movie. It’s not the first time it’s done this sort of thing. It’s crazy, my mind. It does this sort of thing. It plays me really weird movies.

It’s not who you are but where you are. Waitaminute. Not where you are but who you are. Something like that.

Who wants to go sledding?

Drinks for my friends.

Bear with me. Take your time. I had a lot to say.

Little explosions of pork fat in a heavy iron skillet. The fire is hot and I’m not sure, so I pull it off. Good move. The bacon just overdone but still sweaty and fatty. No aroma like that of fresh thick bacon. Most folks like it cooked this way. I use tongs to put it on a plate.

Motes bob and dance in rays of sun, a subject of birdsong, butterflies and dragonflies.

Man has almost complete authority over his own clock. Animals, from rodents to whales, have the sun.

I drop a fistfull of white raisins. Some diced yellow onions and a little butter into the cast iron.

Next up is to smack some eggs in the fat and put the skillet back on the crackling morning combustion. Beneath a canopy of primeval. This part’s easy. They cook like that, the eggs. Smacking and spattering. Hope ya like yours yellow loose. Quick and hot. Soft in the middle with brown bubbles at the edges. They’re done. Sea salt? Tapatio?

Someone else is doing coffee. I smell it. Raw like tilled earth. Berries.

Potatos cook the longest, garlic and rosemary. Moist in the center, otherwise crispy and taut. Steaming. Glistening with butter and oil. Fresh ground pepper. With potatos, I don’t play games I can’t win. The best way I’ve found.

Everyone stares up and around. Nobody looks at their food while they shovel it at their mouths. The savour does not compete with the vista, it compliments it, the ambiance of a deciduous forest in the chill of a late summer morning.

Have some champagne.

Next up, pine trees and a good classic novel. Some Fitzgerald or maybe Jack London. Twain. Capote. Then a nice clean spot to evacuate oneself and soap and water and towels after and what not.

I bring my own ointments and salves.

Maybe an afternoon walk.

I never would have made it as some pioneer or frontiersman. Maybe if I was some version of royalty. Afforded a certain amount of privilege and staff.

I just want to live in San Francisco.

Gin and chocolate.

I believe in mankind’s right to self medicate.

There is simply no reason in a country as wealthy as ours that people should go hungry, without health care or as much education as anyone can tolerate. I can’t stand it.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and proclaim that a little socialism might not be bad for us. Not just to give the folks who fall through the cracks a leg up, but to headbutt the absurdly wealthy who have enjoyed political, social and economic advantage by virtue of obscene largess for so long, the phenomena has manifested a momentum of it’s own now centuries old.

It may also serve to highlight the perverted version of Capitalism and Democracy we have chosen to embrace. We are in a place where our adherence to and practice of “free market capitalism”, as is the contemporary model, isn’t merely foolish, it is reckless, dangerous and unconscionable.

Fear and spying, rendering and detaining, holding people indefinitely without charging them………what does that look like to you? An economy hit by a wave any fool saw coming, so strong as to temporarily capsize us despite our size, displacement and power? More waves on the way.

Rotting infrastructure and an attitude of every man for himself on twenty million lips at least.

Hated so much a journalist throws shoes at Dumbya’s melon inside the Green Zone? More on that later.

We are stupid and greedy. Not necessarily in that order.

Fuck anything that moves.

Make these prick CEO’s live in a motel for a season. Three months. Twenty bucks a day per diem. Introduce them to the miracle of cheap chunky peanut butter and applesauce on the same spoon.

Ssshhhhhhhhh!!!

I covet and admire the idea of self determination. So far, the concept and my practice thereof has allowed me to reap almost exactly what I’ve sewn. Can’t ask for more than than that. What I’d like to see is that degree of parity afforded to not just every American regardless of race, color or creed, but every human.

We could render organized religion obsolete by achieving just that. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think so.

Replace an archaic institution that withholds (religion), with a concept, maybe a mandate, far more inclusive and progressive that holds as a fundamental ideal, prosperity of the earth and it’s inhabitants simultaneously. I’m a goddamn genius. Give me a can of beer and a Nobel, bitches.

Anyway.

I honestly believe that the defining moment of Dumbya’s reign occured on this very day, December Fourteen, the year of our Lord, 2008. I’m sure you’ve seen the footage by now. To his credit, our President did skillfully dodge two well launched shoes from not very far away. We learn that this is some major insult in that part of the world. To throw your shoes.

An Egyptian reporter with a pretty good arm fired said shoes at Dumbya’s head and screamed:
“This is a farewell … you dog!” “You killed the Iraqis!” -CNN

Ha! That’s goddamn golden. Forgive me, but if he’d taken one right in the fucking face? I would have called paramedics before screeching sobbing laughter could consume me. Go ahead, picture it. Me laughing ’til I puke or him taking one right in the kisser. Sheezus. That would have been gorgeous.

Picture it.

In any case, it was just so perfect. Vicariously cathartic. This really should be the swan song for the dumbest man to ever be President of America. We should remember him forever as the guy ducking shoes thrown hard by a journalist at a press conference in the “Green Zone”, the safest place in Iraq.

Bush Sr. had, “Read my lips…..”, Clinton had “I did not have sexual relations with that woman……”, Nixon had “I am not a crook”. Dumbya, among all the other ridiculous shit he’s said and done will nonetheless be remembered for his physical adroitness in ducking angry shoe leather in contrast to his profound lack of any kind of mental acuity in any shape or form.

He still doesn’t get that he’s an idiot.

Meet your legacy you stupid sonofabitch. Beet the Meatles.

I just want him to know what a complete loser he is. It’s not just angst. Hundreds of thousands died because no one in this man’s life had sense enough to teach him banjo and take him to the river everyday. They took him to school instead. Millions of Americans made the same mistake and now we’ll pay for it.

I went to hand her the remote. She said put it next to me dear, I’m scratching my butt right now. I looked and she was. So I did.

The Holidays. Weird. Didn’t have the Christmas I was used to last year. The old man was sick. Very. Spent my time at the hospital or sleeping because I’m a pussy and that’s what I do when I’m afraid. He’s so good now I want to punch him in the mouth.

To know my old man is to understand that he’s the shit. He’s only afraid of one thing. It has nothing to do with him. If you’re smart you’ll guess it.

My brother in law, Todd, a man I’ve known of since we were boys, lost his Mother just a few months before. Her name was Dixie and I really liked her. She was a writer. I see her face.

Here it is again. The Holidays. I’m expecting something different this year. It will be somewhere between now and then. Holidays are always a little step back in time. We may all have a similiar lense for this one. I hope so. I’m looking for the love and warmth of family unmitigated by illness and sadness. He is well now. I think it will be big and special.

My ass is broke so the only gift I have is my etchings.

Not being able to buy Christmas presents used to scare the crap out of me. It nightmared me. I was a fairly prodigious giver. I’ll bring really good wine.

Life is good.

Here’s the thing. A well worn theme for me, forgive me if I bore you. The difference between humans and animals is not the ability to reason. It’s not love or compassion. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to share your life with an animal you loved, you feel me. The difference isn’t even a sense of humor. Every cat I’ve ever shared a house with has been funny as fuck and tragic all at once.

The difference is art. Animals don’t make art for the sake of art. Humans do.

I sit telling you this, one of my cats is high up in a ficus tree I’ve had for twenty years that has been dead for at least a year. My other cat sits next to me on a dilapidated red velvet sofa staring at her. If only they could talk and I could understand them.

Happy Holidays.

Drinks for my friends.

I never actually bleed when I’m sick.

When there is pain, there is no blood.

When I’m sick, the bleeding stops.

An ear closes and the blood stops.

It will return when I feel better.

The bleeding.

See, the insistent periphery of my enduring malaise only rises to the occassion when other issues are at a minimum.

To remind me that no matter what, I’ll never be well.

Normal is out of my reach, and therefore, so is peace.

My cross to bear, for whatever reason.

Who, besides a fool, trusts the universe?

Drinks for my friends.

She is death as she rises and settles

Ominous, tip of a spar in seas always violent

An impossible vessel

I’m afraid to board her

I know I wont be able to get off

Ever

She is mostly underwater.

Narrow decks sit above above a vicious ocean.

A small town of precarious platforms
to be pounded by gigantic swells

A wind that will ripple your face.

She cannot dock in a typical port

She is too deep
She parks well out to sea, beyond the shallow shelf

Crazy ladders and insane slick polished tubes to
take you below

Way below

Tunnels originating in closets

twisted escalators
with claws

Impossible angles and hard to believe machinery

Almost all of her is below the surface
I worry at her buoyancy.

She rises and falls with a very deep ocean and I
understand the dream is about death.

Death blows across my forehead.

She’s swift enough to make her own wind

It’s an impossible vessel.

Impossible, as she is death.

There are wrenches at the end of poles that open
narrow ways to go beneath.

All topside is fraught with disaster

Underneath the waterline is slow sticky death

Hatches and portholes for no reason
She’s fast enough you could be swept off without time to cry out

Below the waterline is comfortable sticky death.

Deeper and deeper with staircases and narrow passages that taper
and taper

The food is warm but the chefs can’t explain it.

They smile as their teeth disintegrate

The white curved walls, the steel reveals the deep and the cold.

It’s an utterly impossible vessel.

A fin that barely breaks the surface with hundreds of
happy dead below the waterline

She speeds on
well ahead of the wind
making her own

The emaciated movie star calls me on the phone, he tells me how great I did coming down that one ladder in the whipping and gusting wet ocean wind

Everyone yelling at me

Another one like every
single other one that leads to comfortable sticky
death.

We dock and brush up against safe places but I cannot
get off her.

They beckon from the white sand but I must wash or
clean or maybe cook.

Always a reason

Below they consume white meat in dark sauce off
pewter and are merry with their flat brown ale.

They are sticky and horrifying.

Their heads have no eyes.

Then this song plays and all is well………

“Caviar and cigarettes
Well versed in etiquette
Extraordinarily nice

Chorus:
She’s a Killer Queen
Gunpowder, gelatine
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytime ”

Do not think or talk over the solo.

Ha ha ha. Fuck me! Welcome aboard! Death can be
sticky.

And then………

“Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer
Not a trace of doubt in my mind.
I’m in love, I’m a believer!
I couldn’t leave her if I tried.”………….

Woke up and took a shower with my mouth open.