Quasi-complicated instructions for being

ok

Collect balloons and noisy fire.

Gather up all your mother's words.

Forget the flash of headlights

and disco balls

and swim beneath the warm sashay of dark

haired girls, fingering long necked

bottles of beer.

Wear limitless pain like a handbag.

Wear pain lovely with your back and your pale

freckled arms.

Be beautiful.

Please don't hurt yourself if you can't.

Wear thick grey sweaters

with slimming horizontal

stripes.

Grow a mustache if you like,

but above all you must try to forget her.

Her arms are folded and she chews gum

like a robot.

Like she was designed to be vacant and

distant and chew.

Loneliness is a machine

you made with your own

mechanical fingers

impressive as a row of empty shot glasses.

Pure as a blinding pain.

It won't stop. Isn't stopping.

Is stop less.

Be a fable vivisected.

Grotowski gutted on the bedroom floor.

Be a four eyed prince with five

o'clock shadow

and a princess with stubbly legs.

Walk out on the story with folded arms.

Turn your back on purpose.

Wear pearls and cheap copper trinkets

all over yourself.

Own a shiny belt and

sophisticated shoes.

Learn to love the color of your own skin.

You're a human colored thing.

You are bright with excessive dark.

So,

Be a skinny white kid with a beard.

Be a drinking problem.

Be young and full of fists.

Be a girl with nice assets and bad credit.

Be a broken blue lighter Kristina

slipped in your pocket and smiled and smiled,

and when you're done

salvage what's left of the tattered jeans

of your dignity and drag your jacked up ego to the door.

Mean things.

Mean every word you never say.

The angels can't fly anymore.

They are useless husks of dream,

hanging from the skyscrapers

like finished shriveled leaves.

I fell asleep inside you,

and the angels cannot fly.

I kissed your holy shoulder

full of stars with unclean lips.

I stared into your tennis shoes

soft forgotten light.

I wrung the darkness from

my sleeves.

I tied my scarf into purposeless

knots.

I believed in gods inside your

glances in every smile you never

gave.

I don't love you,

but I want you,

and the angels cannot fly.

Your crumpled sadness is a temple.

Your meaningless fits

of self are worship songs.

I'd like to Golden you with my lips

for seven hours

to salvation you every morning

with my bare and blighted hands.

But God cannot be fired,

and the angels cannot fly.

Words weigh more than the arms of God.
"Let there be"
was heavier than all of the matter in creation.

"Be there let"
is weightless.

I want a scythe of syntax heaving blows
of long clean limitless noise.

I want a drawer full of sharp omnipotent words.

Let this sentence be the knife
at gravity's throat.

Let the universe cringe upon my plate
Pulpy bits of Andromeda stuck between my teeth
Gooey dark matter bubbling in my tummy's depths.

Spiral galaxies swirling when I say
"flush".

The density of language.
My mind's star gathering dust
imploding. Happy, lightless
and gone.

September (part 4)

When last year's smoke is rising from your eyes,

The immortality of sadness,

The reason the sky is blue.

You will sit at that bar with people you hate, conspiring with a tipsy girls shoes.

You'll watch the white kids dance and wiggle themselves into meaningful lives.                                 

They'll wring the misery right out of their jeans.

You'll speak the language of short skirts and lip gloss, oblivion and beer.

You will stare into the eyes of limitless strangers just to watch yourself disappear.

You'll learn the irresistable comfort of being with those for whom you cannot feel a thing.

You will do what it takes.

To keep the trees from rising

to press the roots back down     

into the ground        

to shake the dust into a stripmall  

to useless grands of numbness      

that never feed.                 

Brittle rocks with nothing left to give.

Then you'll step outside                

and dream of August.

You will see through constant bleary eyes,

the stars that shake like leaves

beneath a wooden sky.

What heaven looks like

There is a mom with green hair and black laceless batman sneakers

pulling her giddy daughter over each and every speed bump

on a pink plastic scooter

just outside the Delta cafe.

Peppermint colored ambulances idle South at sunset,

lazy and useless.

No one's lives are dangling by a thread.

Friendless yuppies hold hands inside a busy laundry mat.

Gypsy girls on red motorcylces

are zipping off to better lives.

A toothless geezer in a silver van

smiles a gape toothed country brightness

at me from the passenger seat.

Old folks amble through the brown cafe doors

forever grinning, thier 5.99 overstuffed bellies gladly leading

the way.

Quentin Terantino films are washing over Julie's glasses,

 reminding her that she is growing cold.

All the other film school drop outs made remarks about detachment, and

 how our culture is slowly getting old.

They say she's better off this way.

Josh went home to end it all between the South Park and the Seinfeld.

Laughter makes it easier to quit.

 All his tiny blue electrons whispered "Don't", into his sadness, but Josh's eyes were screaming this is it.

They say he's better off this way.

They say were all better off this way.

 The ATMs and the Coke machines

can't give us what we need.

You see I am working audible algebra,

into the bleachers,

into the makeout spots

of some high school football game.

And I have ciphered a new alphabet,

of crumpled Kleenex

and wrinkled skin

of the inarticulate click of

another door closing behind you.

and I have finally scraped new colors

from the corners of our mouths,

from the word ashtray

and the shape of the word cerulean,

from that fifteen minutes I sat in silence

and watched you vanish into the word regret.