Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Life's ambitions of a wayward nineteen year old
....please note the date and the SWITCH TO DECAF NOW imminent astrik.....11 years later and still no such luck....
Thursday, July 26, 2007
God rest his soul!!!
Fellow Bradley University grad Jerry Hadley shot himself last week in New York state with a rifle. He graduated in the same class as both my aunts, in the same department (music), singing in a building less than 200 metres away from where I scribe this now. God rest his soul. God rest the soul of Leonard bernstein as well.
Monday, July 23, 2007
How to make love to Sarah McLachlan
Even though Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
Would be a seventh grader by now
Having left the feathery white interior
China of Miss Mclachlan’s thighs over three
Presidential elections ago—finding itself
Now in the scratchy Homecoming glitter
Hallways of a Canadian junior high school
Its voice not able to hit the high note on the title
Track since puberty a slight peach goatee
Sprouting beneath its lower lip like a hive
And even though we have to listen to the album
Through my DVD player since the time
I inserted the burnt CD of my own
Father’s eulogy—reliving the testimonies
And hymns of a man whose spirit was yanked
From beneath him in a jaundiced hospitalized
Half-breath and how since that experience
No other compact disc seems to function
Without skipping a melodious pulse
In the pouting plastic jaw-line of my stereo—
And how after Guinness and Beamish
(Which you punned “Be Amish,”)
The empty cylinders of imported stout cans
Resembling vacant diminutive silos
Overturned in a breeze of conversation and laughter
Emanating from my back porch table
Before we adjourned inside
Our lips unbuttoning each other
Untying flesh from skin branches of limbs
The hushed neon blue of the television screen
Casting our shadow into one contiguous
Nylon mountain range over the Murphy bed
And the sound of Sarah McLachlan
A chimed stain glass echo resonating like a bell
Like the sound your body makes inside my body
A fumbling angel trying to inhale after a wayward
Quill delicately slipped past the hemline of her torso
Massaging the mysterious cross of her body
More holier than halo or wings
Reminding us that certain joys are forever
Beyond our possession, that your tongue and lips
Taste better than ice cream
And that when the morning June sun
Splashes ripples of orange light
Across the prayer shape of our bodies
There will be nothing left in this world to fear.
Even though Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
Would be a seventh grader by now
Having left the feathery white interior
China of Miss Mclachlan’s thighs over three
Presidential elections ago—finding itself
Now in the scratchy Homecoming glitter
Hallways of a Canadian junior high school
Its voice not able to hit the high note on the title
Track since puberty a slight peach goatee
Sprouting beneath its lower lip like a hive
And even though we have to listen to the album
Through my DVD player since the time
I inserted the burnt CD of my own
Father’s eulogy—reliving the testimonies
And hymns of a man whose spirit was yanked
From beneath him in a jaundiced hospitalized
Half-breath and how since that experience
No other compact disc seems to function
Without skipping a melodious pulse
In the pouting plastic jaw-line of my stereo—
And how after Guinness and Beamish
(Which you punned “Be Amish,”)
The empty cylinders of imported stout cans
Resembling vacant diminutive silos
Overturned in a breeze of conversation and laughter
Emanating from my back porch table
Before we adjourned inside
Our lips unbuttoning each other
Untying flesh from skin branches of limbs
The hushed neon blue of the television screen
Casting our shadow into one contiguous
Nylon mountain range over the Murphy bed
And the sound of Sarah McLachlan
A chimed stain glass echo resonating like a bell
Like the sound your body makes inside my body
A fumbling angel trying to inhale after a wayward
Quill delicately slipped past the hemline of her torso
Massaging the mysterious cross of her body
More holier than halo or wings
Reminding us that certain joys are forever
Beyond our possession, that your tongue and lips
Taste better than ice cream
And that when the morning June sun
Splashes ripples of orange light
Across the prayer shape of our bodies
There will be nothing left in this world to fear.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Jello
Was how his voice sounded as he answered the phone, holding the lower
receiver of the plastic conch up to his lips like a fountain tip lick.
“Jello?” Served as the inquiry. As the salutation. As the formality.
After sex there was always cigarettes and after cigarettes there was always coffee and after coffee there was somehow always jello.
“Jello?” As if the rubbery starch of his lips were served on tin lunchbox platters to grade school princesses for desert—
When I was seven I looked the word hymen up in the dictionary, confused
wanting to know the dry wall palisades of my inner thighs
Wanting to know the part of my body, the zip code of my loins, realizing only
Later that Eve still is not aware of the kind of fruit she tasted on a dare—
“Jello?”
My virginity slipped down past the caps of my knees like a homecoming shadow, bannered in the aqautic hallway still of Woodtucket High; a bonfire autumnal breeze set in after the dance we skirted around
Home Depots parking lot shuffling a bottle of Southern Comfort between us like
An organ pipe, trying not to let our peers conceive the paucity of our swigs.
His fingertips were a nest that fell from a branch I was unaware of
His body hitting my body like an anvil, like a scrape,
The grunts and flaps and afterwards he looked at me; the damp moist jam, the sound of
Cars with alarm systems shrilled—two to be exact—at the same exact moment,
They went off, an annoying din, as if my high school beau had swung the handle on
A slot machine instead and after all these years I still have let the
The sound of tokens clattering through my body, my eyes, a dizzy blur of cherries, of
Promises of lies.
receiver of the plastic conch up to his lips like a fountain tip lick.
“Jello?” Served as the inquiry. As the salutation. As the formality.
After sex there was always cigarettes and after cigarettes there was always coffee and after coffee there was somehow always jello.
“Jello?” As if the rubbery starch of his lips were served on tin lunchbox platters to grade school princesses for desert—
When I was seven I looked the word hymen up in the dictionary, confused
wanting to know the dry wall palisades of my inner thighs
Wanting to know the part of my body, the zip code of my loins, realizing only
Later that Eve still is not aware of the kind of fruit she tasted on a dare—
“Jello?”
My virginity slipped down past the caps of my knees like a homecoming shadow, bannered in the aqautic hallway still of Woodtucket High; a bonfire autumnal breeze set in after the dance we skirted around
Home Depots parking lot shuffling a bottle of Southern Comfort between us like
An organ pipe, trying not to let our peers conceive the paucity of our swigs.
His fingertips were a nest that fell from a branch I was unaware of
His body hitting my body like an anvil, like a scrape,
The grunts and flaps and afterwards he looked at me; the damp moist jam, the sound of
Cars with alarm systems shrilled—two to be exact—at the same exact moment,
They went off, an annoying din, as if my high school beau had swung the handle on
A slot machine instead and after all these years I still have let the
The sound of tokens clattering through my body, my eyes, a dizzy blur of cherries, of
Promises of lies.
Monday, July 09, 2007
The wayward art of anonymity in the composition of fiction...
Writing fiction is a lot getting drunk off the draught of the keyboard (Home Row Happy Hour) and then squeezing your heart into an empty gin bottle and hurtling it as far as you possibly can into an ocean of unknown variables. You don’t know what sort of current your script will get caught in; how large the tidal wave will be. You have no clue how many seasons your heart will spend bobbing up and down, succumbing to the sloshes of nature, the indifference of mankind, the boiled insouciance of an accelerated society whose paws have more and more freely adapted to the rectangular scepter of the remote control and less and less to the tattered lapels of a book jacket. You have no clue what foreign shore will be privy to your psychedelic scribbles or if your heart will even wash up in the hands of an appreciable audience at all.
All you have (intrinsically, I think) is the joy of composition. The moment when that blank slate of the computer screen is gradually dotted with syllables and motion—the inward paradoxical feeling of having somehow, magically, traveled simply by sitting on your ass for eight for hours straight and tapping out crunches into a stream of jittery alphabetical shapes. You have that feeling of feeling less alone in the world, the feeling of connecting with something inexplicably spiritual. The feeling of devising a story, of living out that story through composition and in giving that story (and not caring, in a way, if the story ever quote unquote “makes-it”—in the immortal gothic cadenza’s of Black Sabbath “Give it all and ask for no return/and very soon you’ll see and you’ll begin to learn/ that it’s alright—yeah it’s alright” )
So true. Fiction as genre has been fuckin’ alright but it’s also been a nudist colony. Through the orgiastic process of group anonymity, we’ve been capable of sloughing our linguistic attire, unzipping the fly of our own inhibitions and anxiety and letting everything (from Prince Albert’s to lego lesbians to generously surfeited jello-tacos).
Being anonymous has also allowed me to be naked with many blithe and voluptuous creatures I’d NEVER have the opportunity to get naked with outside of the medium of fiction. What an unbidden voyeuristic delight to watch that sublime creature you’ve harbored a massive hardon on since ENG 101 loop accolades on your prose from across the classroom—knowing that she has your heart in the editorial palette and, judging solely from the winecooler-like color her face has gradually blushed into—she has fallen in love (if only for a moment) with everything left inside of you.
The beauty of anonymity is that it makes circulating fiction less authorial and more of an entitlement for the humanities. As poet Coleman barks once commented on the mystical renderings of Rumi “The fact that we are multiple is not so great as the fact that we are one.”
So go ahead. I fuckin’ dare you. We’re already naked. Put more of yer’ heart in that bottle. Open up a few veins and pinch the reader with something that has never been shown or said before.
What—are you scared to be naked? Are you scared that no one will like what’s left inside of you?
--written with zeal for George Chambers....attfuckingboy!
Thursday, July 05, 2007
commandments of healthy male living...
my best friend john just moved into his own pad in Naperville...attached is a list of rules (courtesy of Jon Dainis) I found stowed in my inbox this morning.....
A few of my house rules you should know...
1. Just because Kathy is walking around the apartment in nothing but an apron doesn't mean you should interrupt her cooking or cleaning. She is there to WORK and service my sexual needs on the hour.
2. No peeing or defacating off the balcony unless you are sure Christina's douchebag boyfriend is standing below.
3. Happy Hour is all hours. NO EXCEPTIONS.
4. Male crying is not allowed UNLESS one is watching the White Sox World Series DVD. Then it is completely acceptable.
5. Male signs of affection are ONLY allowed in the case of an ass slap and "thata boy", quite obviously preceded by the banging of a hot chick that was picked up at a bar the evening prior.
These are my rules. Please learn and abide by them!
See ya in a week!!
Lookin' forward to seein' you John...Love the rules....
A few of my house rules you should know...
1. Just because Kathy is walking around the apartment in nothing but an apron doesn't mean you should interrupt her cooking or cleaning. She is there to WORK and service my sexual needs on the hour.
2. No peeing or defacating off the balcony unless you are sure Christina's douchebag boyfriend is standing below.
3. Happy Hour is all hours. NO EXCEPTIONS.
4. Male crying is not allowed UNLESS one is watching the White Sox World Series DVD. Then it is completely acceptable.
5. Male signs of affection are ONLY allowed in the case of an ass slap and "thata boy", quite obviously preceded by the banging of a hot chick that was picked up at a bar the evening prior.
These are my rules. Please learn and abide by them!
See ya in a week!!
Lookin' forward to seein' you John...Love the rules....
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Harold and maude
You’d have to pretend you have a penis
The curious brown tint in your eyes
Cosigns you to the title male lead
Which leaves me as Maude
Neal Cassidy’s vivacious
New-age mother-in-law
Driving stolen cars in a hazardous slop
Across sidewalks and state lines
Attending every bodies funeral
Except that of her only son.
But being Harold means that you are rich
No more burgeoning student loans
Or scraping by on noodles three times a week
You could invest in a lucrative seminar series
Teaching individuals how to fake their own demise
Hanging themselves
In front of creditors and critics,
Offering the world a refreshed smile
As you walk away from the
Silhouette of your own mock suicide
Whistling out the chorus to a Cat Stevens tune
Leaving all over to start again.
And how we would find ourselves married
By a simple conjunction
Modeling nude for fictional artists
Brandishing banjos between hookah drags
Frequenting local arboretums with purloined city trees
After Motoring around the lush countryside
In a makeshift jaguar-hearse
Stopping ever so often
To somersault or to scream
Ending the day in a duet of piano keys and voices
My Maude offering a dimpled request
To your Harold
Asking him to join in on the chorus
To sing out if he feels like stretching his lips
To be free if he feels like taking a deep
Breath of new way opportunity
Dancing around the living
Room on a Persian carpet
Clapping my hands together like a prayer
Saying “Oh boy, that was fun!”
The curious brown tint in your eyes
Cosigns you to the title male lead
Which leaves me as Maude
Neal Cassidy’s vivacious
New-age mother-in-law
Driving stolen cars in a hazardous slop
Across sidewalks and state lines
Attending every bodies funeral
Except that of her only son.
But being Harold means that you are rich
No more burgeoning student loans
Or scraping by on noodles three times a week
You could invest in a lucrative seminar series
Teaching individuals how to fake their own demise
Hanging themselves
In front of creditors and critics,
Offering the world a refreshed smile
As you walk away from the
Silhouette of your own mock suicide
Whistling out the chorus to a Cat Stevens tune
Leaving all over to start again.
And how we would find ourselves married
By a simple conjunction
Modeling nude for fictional artists
Brandishing banjos between hookah drags
Frequenting local arboretums with purloined city trees
After Motoring around the lush countryside
In a makeshift jaguar-hearse
Stopping ever so often
To somersault or to scream
Ending the day in a duet of piano keys and voices
My Maude offering a dimpled request
To your Harold
Asking him to join in on the chorus
To sing out if he feels like stretching his lips
To be free if he feels like taking a deep
Breath of new way opportunity
Dancing around the living
Room on a Persian carpet
Clapping my hands together like a prayer
Saying “Oh boy, that was fun!”
Thursday, April 05, 2007
....tithed scraps garnered from clearing off desktop at work
Every morning when I wake up and brew generous amounts of Maxwell House Irish Blend house coffee in my room, not wanting to go anywhere near Manual-not wanting to skim the contours of the building or to even touch the school itself-realizing that the moment I set foot into the school will be comparable to floating in an aquarium, face down, little bubbles of self-esteem and self-worth bobbling north from my blue lips, expiring perhaps when they hit the surface of my dreams-popping with a sweet sound of freedom.
I wear blazers my grandfather Frank gave me. Stylish, Nineteen-seventies and late sixties bowling alley chic. My hair is routinely sculpted and sprayed. Looking back at pictures of me from Junior Years I now consider myself handsome, but perhaps it was Manual Singers, or Cross-country, where my time never seemed to dwindle. Where the emotional bruises festered into physical welts and I found myself isolated, all alone, throwing punches at my shadow in my room solitude, a haphazard stash of C.D.’s sloppily arrayed, pictured of art-Rembrandt and Picasso keeping me company.
I smoke illegal cigars. I sporadically congregate with friends. I walk alone down the streets staring at the curved heads of the streetlamps, watching the jaundice glares emit their final nocturnal yawn. Two trips to Europe have already been fastened beneath my belt. My head swiftly lolls to the light melodic sways of the Smiths. I feel that I am hated for Loving. I feel that I am haunted for wanting. Most of all I feel lonely and I feel that if I could trek it to Calvary and clamber up that russet cross, even squinting with my glasses doffed, God would still evade me
1995 I spawned a friendship with Matthew Brown. Mark-Andrew in all likely hood lost his virginity. I escaped to San Antonio, reaping poetry books and pouches of Starbucks coffee back home with me in the deep, blistering heat that was to transition into my Senior year of high school. I remember Coach Ricca calling and my dad (my poor dad) typing out a letter to Coach Ricca, telling him that, because of the lavender shadows that skirt across the shore of my emotional stability, I will have to cross the laces of my sneakers together and retire my jersey. I will have to leave.
Coach Ricca is understandably peeved, as I would have been, had I been loosing the Captain of my team-the character who has trouble making shit happen.
Always the optimist. Always the dreamer. I sailed off into the ominous teasing future, wondering what ill-fortune my senior year would avail.
In line, Fee day, Coach Simmons can’t shit me with the whole elevator pass ploy anymore. My hair is finely combed-a tad longer, surfed to the right. I wear a blue shirt I’ve had for nearly a decade, a blazer on a hot, sun burnt day, jeans and a pair of year old Doc’s.
She is standing in line, and wearing thick Doc Martens also a skirt Vanessa would have given a covert thumbs up to before composing a poem laden with interclass stylish envy. She is standing, as if she is about ready to jump into a swimming pool, next to Amber. Patrick McReynolds had not met Amber yet, nor will he for another three months.
The cusp of my senior year and I feel like a looser. I feel like how I feel today. Feel like I have swung the bat at every pitch that was every thrown at me. Have swung the bat as hard as I fucking cold. Have stepped up to the plate, apprehensive, choking the tapped end of the bat as fiercely as I could, swinging before the pitch was thrown, in most cases. Not keeping my eye directly fastened onto the velocity of the pitch. Thrusting my entire weight into the direction of the pitcher. Not caring if it was a curve, a fastball, a knuckle change-up. I just wanted to hit the ball that I always struck out. I struck out swinging freshman, sophomore years. Midway through my Junior year I wore my hard hat backwards and held the thin-slant of the bat a little bit looser. I struck out watching at first. Sometimes complementing, using arcane terminology. Eventually I struck out because I felt that I didn’t need to knock the dirt off of my cleats and step up to the plate anymore. I felt like a failure.
All of life was readily transpiring around me and I had failed. I had failed.
I wear blazers my grandfather Frank gave me. Stylish, Nineteen-seventies and late sixties bowling alley chic. My hair is routinely sculpted and sprayed. Looking back at pictures of me from Junior Years I now consider myself handsome, but perhaps it was Manual Singers, or Cross-country, where my time never seemed to dwindle. Where the emotional bruises festered into physical welts and I found myself isolated, all alone, throwing punches at my shadow in my room solitude, a haphazard stash of C.D.’s sloppily arrayed, pictured of art-Rembrandt and Picasso keeping me company.
I smoke illegal cigars. I sporadically congregate with friends. I walk alone down the streets staring at the curved heads of the streetlamps, watching the jaundice glares emit their final nocturnal yawn. Two trips to Europe have already been fastened beneath my belt. My head swiftly lolls to the light melodic sways of the Smiths. I feel that I am hated for Loving. I feel that I am haunted for wanting. Most of all I feel lonely and I feel that if I could trek it to Calvary and clamber up that russet cross, even squinting with my glasses doffed, God would still evade me
1995 I spawned a friendship with Matthew Brown. Mark-Andrew in all likely hood lost his virginity. I escaped to San Antonio, reaping poetry books and pouches of Starbucks coffee back home with me in the deep, blistering heat that was to transition into my Senior year of high school. I remember Coach Ricca calling and my dad (my poor dad) typing out a letter to Coach Ricca, telling him that, because of the lavender shadows that skirt across the shore of my emotional stability, I will have to cross the laces of my sneakers together and retire my jersey. I will have to leave.
Coach Ricca is understandably peeved, as I would have been, had I been loosing the Captain of my team-the character who has trouble making shit happen.
Always the optimist. Always the dreamer. I sailed off into the ominous teasing future, wondering what ill-fortune my senior year would avail.
In line, Fee day, Coach Simmons can’t shit me with the whole elevator pass ploy anymore. My hair is finely combed-a tad longer, surfed to the right. I wear a blue shirt I’ve had for nearly a decade, a blazer on a hot, sun burnt day, jeans and a pair of year old Doc’s.
She is standing in line, and wearing thick Doc Martens also a skirt Vanessa would have given a covert thumbs up to before composing a poem laden with interclass stylish envy. She is standing, as if she is about ready to jump into a swimming pool, next to Amber. Patrick McReynolds had not met Amber yet, nor will he for another three months.
The cusp of my senior year and I feel like a looser. I feel like how I feel today. Feel like I have swung the bat at every pitch that was every thrown at me. Have swung the bat as hard as I fucking cold. Have stepped up to the plate, apprehensive, choking the tapped end of the bat as fiercely as I could, swinging before the pitch was thrown, in most cases. Not keeping my eye directly fastened onto the velocity of the pitch. Thrusting my entire weight into the direction of the pitcher. Not caring if it was a curve, a fastball, a knuckle change-up. I just wanted to hit the ball that I always struck out. I struck out swinging freshman, sophomore years. Midway through my Junior year I wore my hard hat backwards and held the thin-slant of the bat a little bit looser. I struck out watching at first. Sometimes complementing, using arcane terminology. Eventually I struck out because I felt that I didn’t need to knock the dirt off of my cleats and step up to the plate anymore. I felt like a failure.
All of life was readily transpiring around me and I had failed. I had failed.
Friday, February 02, 2007
......................
SOUL MATE
I never could figure it out How two souls could mate
Undressing each other In the cloudy mist of the next world
Forgetting the buttonholes of skin plopping open unzipping drifting
Above
crinkled puddles of sloughed flesh
shoved into the backseat of a hearse
Entering the terminal of the next world
Sprinting down a tunneled terminal
Into the light of my beloveds eye
Two wispy sheaths invisible sigh
Pressed into the spine of the pearly gates A sparkle aural nimbus
Searching
for respective cloudy genetalia For free weekends, votive candles
Pulling her halo down past the cumulus white of her kneecaps
Spreading apart her wings Feeling the silk of her feathersBrushed into the blank navel of my torso
Entering her body with a splash of dawn
Eternity
Shaped origami Valentines
Mystery of Time space causality
Unveiled in the atmosphere beyond
Oxygen chemicals of a name now
OneSmoking cigarettes rolled with grains of sunshine Cradling our wispy appendages
Around each other’s scent
Nestled besides the nuclear glow of a nearby star Candles lit with the squinting tips of constellations
Or perhaps it will be like in this world
With the woman I love
Our bodies unable to connect
The cloudy haze of our embrace Touching,
Not touching
Passing through each others sight
Looking over a balcony into
The smudged oval pasture
Our prior solar inhabitance
Marble necks of tombstones sidled
next to strangers we
Never understood
Wondering what took us so long.
I never could figure it out How two souls could mate
Undressing each other In the cloudy mist of the next world
Forgetting the buttonholes of skin plopping open unzipping drifting
Above
crinkled puddles of sloughed flesh
shoved into the backseat of a hearse
Entering the terminal of the next world
Sprinting down a tunneled terminal
Into the light of my beloveds eye
Two wispy sheaths invisible sigh
Pressed into the spine of the pearly gates A sparkle aural nimbus
Searching
for respective cloudy genetalia For free weekends, votive candles
Pulling her halo down past the cumulus white of her kneecaps
Spreading apart her wings Feeling the silk of her feathersBrushed into the blank navel of my torso
Entering her body with a splash of dawn
Eternity
Shaped origami Valentines
Mystery of Time space causality
Unveiled in the atmosphere beyond
Oxygen chemicals of a name now
OneSmoking cigarettes rolled with grains of sunshine Cradling our wispy appendages
Around each other’s scent
Nestled besides the nuclear glow of a nearby star Candles lit with the squinting tips of constellations
Or perhaps it will be like in this world
With the woman I love
Our bodies unable to connect
The cloudy haze of our embrace Touching,
Not touching
Passing through each others sight
Looking over a balcony into
The smudged oval pasture
Our prior solar inhabitance
Marble necks of tombstones sidled
next to strangers we
Never understood
Wondering what took us so long.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)