rain coming through the ceiling

then through the clothing

then to the floor - let's make a game of it,

she said

rain coming through the ceiling

then through the air

into ----the -----------dish

----------------pan

--------------------------------skillet

it made a melody or tune

one note never equal to another

and only out of key fifteen times

the last sound, profound -

our feet knocking them over, dancing

Out there the strange feeling of life in the shadow of war. Fear and denial in the streets. The tops of the heads of passersby in the street. The desperate thoughts inside each head. The war raging on the horizon. In times like these men like me matter because war likes the darkness I carry with me in my heart. Like a woman's secret rape games. Women walking by look at me like little girls. War doesn't like women, war demands that they masquerade as little girls. In the cool silence of the night the bombs can be heard in the distance and Angelica coddles in my armpit and shakes in fear and her pussy gets wet. I stroke her pussy. She passes wind like a baloon deflating and I stroke her to sleep.

When the stampede cleared there was still the dust. I walked in the dust and yelled his name. I saw one foot of ground ahead of me. It must have been a nightmare I thought. That one minute I'm in the same country I've known for ten years and the next it's an unrecognizable dusty hell should not be allowed. The hell with the cattle. I hope they stampede over whoever finds them next.

I found old Joe when the dust had cleared. His mangled sorry shape could've laid anywhere in that field but it happen to lay there in front of me that moment. I wasn't happy to see him dead. That life alots a man opportunities to make a fortune shouldn't be doubted, he used to say. Every day there comes a means to make a living and your ability to find it is called sense. That is sense.

I find sense to be that which keeps a man from finding opportunities to die. I find myself the one who decides what to do with old Joe's corpse. It is I who will either round up the cattle and drive them to Texas or take what money he had and make my own way. I have the sudden urge to take old Joe's young wife in as my own and play family with her, though as yet I do not know what to do with a woman.

Sense creeps across the fields over the raging cattle and the trickling rivers and finds the boy and breathes my new identity into him. I hear old Joe take a breath. He takes another one. He turns over. He lays there with his mouth open and his eyes closed, but he knows I'm here. I take his revolver out of his holster. I take a bullet off his belt and put it in and shoot him in the chest. Dust kicks up from underneath him. I expected more recoil. I load in another and shoot him in the forehead to make sure.

The elder statesman parrot concluded
That the best way to degrade people
Is still to mockingly repeat their sayings.

“To express oneself truly,” he said,
“In front of people is something like
Taking a parakeet out to see ballet.”

Then he mentioned the dolphins,
How they still insist on ferrying
Lost boats to shore- “If you ever find

A lost airplane, lead it to a mountain!”
Allison reached inside the cage.
“Pretty bird, oh, pretty bird,” she said

And ruffled his feathers. His tail
Feathers stood up. “Pretty bird,”
He said looking longingly at her back.

My beautiful dead disciple

The young man who loves easily and naturally looks at you through delicate eyes. Like a slender Roman statue, like an angel. His pupils that hover in their glass housing under the heavy eyelids have never seen a foul deed committed by their owner and hardly understand those of others.

If he knew the difference between his world and your's, he'd tell you it's women's breasts. The sight of a breast to you is privilege but he would like to tell you that women often walk around with their breasts exposed. They dance shirtless in their living rooms and watch the sunlight shimmer on their translucent skin, they wear loose fitting bathrobes and take secret pleasure in the way the silk caresses their lovely skin. A woman does not have to be in a moment of ecstasy to start at the bottom of her breast and drag the very tips of her fingers oh so slowly all the way around the curve and end in a gentle pinch and tug of the nipple. And they don't take their nipples for granted, either. If you asked him how he knows this, he would tell you it's because he is privy to the world of naked women because he has been the lover of so many.

The boy looking at you through tear-filled eyes. His face contorted with frustration. Your hand around his neck oppresses his breath. He truly can not understand why you are choking him and what it is you seek to learn by extinguishing his spark. The advantage of your world over his is realized and your way of getting what you want by force of will converts him. His world of beautiful naked women that informed his loving gaze evaporating, and then gone like they never existed like the fantasies of some author up in flames in the furnace.

Your beautiful dead disciple in the loving embrace of the dirt and the leaves.

In the depraved hotel Colorado I sit on the bed and listen to my friends make love in the other rooms. I am not left out, I masturbated into the toilet this morning.

They say where are you going, out to for a smoke. They follow me.

They walk the streets of the living in my pursuit, they inquire: what am I? I run.

I run through the gates to the world of the dead. My friends standing at the gate in the world of the living, badger me why.

The melting faces of the walking dead. The essence of the place something like that painting called Scream.

I give my cigarette to a dead salesman. He takes a drag and gives it back to me. His slimy dead essence on the butt of my cigarette. I place it in my mouth. I ask him if he is a nightmare. No nightmare. No nightmare? No, no nightmare here. The ground beneath my feet began to open up.

The stench of my corpse steeped in coffee, marinating in coffee. When I die the spirits I've imbibed and the chemicals I've inhaled boar out of me. All of it. Souls of women emanating from my grave, like a great bent ghostly smoke stack. They declare themselves in the night sky, we the screaming souls who gave this man a piece of ourselves to be buried with, who wont let him keep it. When I die the pulp of my existence will flood the town streets. The width of the assailment like the girth of my indulgences. The duration, that of my long, long life. In returning what I've taken from the Earth in life, I will take twice that amount in death. Because you won't let me have it all.

The wind blew a visible gust. It will
Dry the semen shortly, the old man
Thought. “Zelda Zelda Zelda,”
He said still standing over her grave.

Even in her old age, she wouldn’t
Be offended by the act, nor repulsed
Any more than a mother by the greedy
Love of her mischievous-spirited son.

“The heavens, with their airy clouds
That hardly even exist, but belie the true
Austere gates designed against me,-
Did I even ever stand a chance?” he said,

And sighed the same familiar way
He does after every one of his early
Morning graveyard rituals, and walked off,
Checking his shoes for stray drops.

Zelda’s tombstone-portrait smiled at his back
From underneath a tiny smudge- the
Uninformed might say despite it, but
They both know she smiled from underneath it.

She takes little risks. When you think she's out marching the carnal-minded places, she is really sitting in bed with a book. Her legs crossed indian style, her hair hanging down to the page like sagging summer weeds, she looked up suddenly because an idea came to her. She dragged her finger along her lip. Her endeavor to make the change like a drop of water hesitating to fall from a clenched fist. She takes little risks.

At the park, mothers brush the hair of future emporers. They sleep with their head in their mother's laps. The mothers are careful not to interrupt the dreamy gaze of the young heirs. They cultivate the relaxed brows and the slow breathing of the toddlers with their touch.

She dangles an inflatable doll made in the likeness of her son when a frightening thought enters her mind: what if her daughter is too secure in her reign over the toys in her brother's absence? The boy suddenly becomes tired of the inflatable doll and punches it in its silly face so hard it tears off the stick. He lays his head back down, not even impressed with himself.

She insists they will be late for lunch but he dismisses the notion with a shake of his head. She entices him with ice cream. She's glad she didn't have to demean him by using her stern voice. They are replaced on the bench by a young Indian couple arguing. Back at home, the interim husband-king sleeps his last years as reigning champion of the world away.

The boy picked up the crippled bird in his chubby hand. He walked a while with it. He stopped and watched the stranger dressed in black who walked down the dusty road. What the man wanted from whatever was at the end of the road. The stranger's past that beckoned him to make this walk on this forlorn dirt country road. The boy dropped the bird. The man kneeled in front of him. He touched the boy's cheek. His scruffy man-face and his voice that had the momentum of someone who could change this boy's life forever, if he wished. He asked the boy where his father was. The boy said he didn't know. The man said where is your mother. The boy looked behind him down the road. Ok, said the man, I'm gonna follow you to her. You lead the way. The man and the boy walking down the road in that country that was experienced on the long walks between its places that lay there like a new bride and waited to receive the will of such men.

The men that inhabited that country. What money means to them. Their gaze over the country on their way to the bar from work. They will spend everything they got. They spit on your ideals. They've never looked at a stranger with a welcoming eye. They are the incomplete fantasy of a young woman. See their beards, their shoulders. Their illegitimate children. Their fantastic romances and their brutal way with women. They watched the stranger walk the rode with the child.

When he got to the boy's house he and the mother spoke in that way of old acquaintances.

The boy looks fine.

Yes.

Your place here in the country. You're doing well?

Yes, fine. She began to cry softly.

It took me a while to find you.

How long did it take you?

Oh, enough for that boy to be born and learn to walk I guess.

She wouldn't look the stranger in the eye. She told the boy to head on out and entertain himself.

Is that my half brother.

His father told me he found you in the street.

So he is my brother.

She insisted she thought he knew he wasn't his real father.

My father is my father. So that is my brother.

He watched her. He came closer.

She looked down at the desk that she was pushing herself against.

Your life is fine here. You could have done better. Your beauty is wasted in your life here in this town with the boy.

My life is fine here.

You must have most of the money left over.

No.

They paid you well.

Nobody paid me.

They paid you.

In the clandestine backwoods of the country, the soldiers have passed. The boy walks in the crushed grass of their wake. He basks in their essence that radiates from the things that were in their presence and the things they touched. He dilly dallies under the canopy of the woods. In the bark of a tree, marks that the soldiers have left. Each one stuck his knife in the bark as he walked by. The boy runs his palm along the scratches. The men's pathetic boy essence left in the tree. Like the dead cats found along a dirt country road, like the mutilated frogs. Like the sadistic ghost stories the older children may tell the boy that have him shaking in his bunk all night. The boy's idea of the soldiers is romantic. He imagines them standing near and feels at ease among their legs.

When the boy came home he found his mother bent over the desk. Her stillness was peaceful. He ran his hand along her dress. He went to the cupboard and stood on his tippy toes to reach the jerky. He came back to his mother chewing. He watches her. Her gaping mouth, her hair that sticks in the drying blood on her face and her neck. He does not touch her. He sat on the chair and watched her. He began to cry.

The stranger stood with the end of his gun in his own mouth. The soldiers surrounded him in the woods. They had him up against the face of a small cliff. He got there after a long run from the soldiers in which the journey of violence and evil that lead him to this town presented itself very frankly to him. He had a chance to regret it at every fall and scratch along his hasty retreat in the woods, but he never did. In the end he knew it would end this way, and in fact he felt lucky to get this far. Lucky the soldiers were such incompetent trackers. He began to laugh. The first lieutenant drew his weapon at him, but the stranger pulled the trigger, and what could only happen did happen just how you would expect it to.

The soldiers on the march back. Their drooping eyelids, their heavy weapons. Their own personal stench that began in the armpits and other dark places that permeates all their clothing. The stench of their lives. The awkwardness of their romances back home. The things their wives will put up with. The stranger sliding down to the ground slowly, a smile on his face. The structural integrity of a man's skull compromised is an image they will never forget. They will pass the boy's house. They will perhaps raid the food stores. If they do they will look down at the boy with some sympathy. Some. They will pass many such houses on their way back to their homes, which are a considerable distance away on the Earth. This time in their lives of submission to the orders of older men. Their future lives of giving orders which they may or may not live to give.

She thinks hard about men saying wonderful things to her like, frankly I love you. Men like Humphrey Bogart. Men like her father, and even men that she thinks her mother likes. All kinds of men. Because she is a young girl who hears a different romance in every song, and whenever she looks into the eyes of a man, she allows herself the possibility of love with him. She looks at him like the women do in the material that inspires her fantasies, like the movies and romance novels. The men look back plainly, unable to comprehend. She pities men for their manly inhibitions. She pulls back the vale over her secret fantasy life.

You may find your headquarters to be a shack in the woods. You sitting smartly at your desk. Outside the shack a line of visitors. Each one comes in and asks to see a different person. The young blond man is here to see Mr Russel and the girl is here for Dr Rossenburg. You are him each time. You give them ambiguous orders across your desk. Sometimes they conflict. Sometimes you go back on your word. Sometimes you give the order to kill the visitor who sat in the chair last. They do your bidding. You the puppeteer of this chaos.

Young men are taken in before their final act of betrayal, not afterword. You can fantasize about rehabilitating a traitor all you want. You can take him on a walk on a deserted beach, and instead of placing a bullet in his brain, you may think to place this thought: one day you will ask yourself if you’ve lived your life honorably. Your answer to this question will be more important than you understand right now. You will ask it of yourself, and because of what you have done to me, you will not be able to answer honestly. Therefore I sentence you to a life of self hate. This your final punishment. Now go and never betray me again. But because the boy is forever a traitor, he can only offend you again, you see. You leave him no choice in the matter. He can never be an honorable person again and he will betray you out of bitter jealousy of your unwavering integrity. It is cliche and heart breaking, but every subversive boy must die.

The crucial minutia of the world apparent to her from her bedroom window. The way the pigeon takes off from the ground. To anyone else there is no significance, but to Yee-Wong this was everything. Imagine if you will, a pigeon taking flight in extreme slow motion. Watch exactly the way its wings expand and contract again. Watch every feather. Watch ever follicle of every feather. In these seconds the pigeon makes a thousand minute adjustments. Each particle plays a role. No one pigeon takes off the same and one pigeon never takes off the same way twice. In the grey paranoid streets men are picked up and shuffled roughly into black cars by mysterious men in trench coats and fedoras. Where they are taken nobody knows. Miss Yee-Wong can divine where they are stolen away to in the feathers left behind after a pigeon’s ascent.

He looks out from his world. His bulging eyes, his neglected physical appearance, his lack of regard for others. His empty glare. This soul's journey that will not be documented for scrutinizing after the end. His lewd thoughts that come and go that never end. When he walks down the street he sees through you. You will not remember his face. His mother remembered him, until she died. With her all evidence of his existence was gone. His point of view was never acknowledged. The minutia of his personality transparent like a ghost's. In his memories proof that he once walked in and out of your life, that he indeed played a role outside of his imaginations. See the man as a boy among the other children like a ghost. You don't remember him being there.

His understanding of things and his point of view. In his class picture where his face was barely visible his intellect took up the whole room, metaphysically speaking. He knew you better than you thought. He came equipped with a world his own. He knew your strengths and your weaknesses, too. Thank God for the secrecy of his fantasy life.

charlotte

We join Charlotte, our tragic heroine for this passage, as she begins to dance in front of her television to the tune of a commercial. “Have a very merry Christmas,” she sings along and repeats long after the commercial ends in a cigarette-ravaged voice with much vibrato. And she really means it, with her hands clutched at her chest in sincere good will. Her weight shifting from one foot to the other as she sways drunk beyond belief, Charlotte wishes you a truly wonderful Christmas. But lets not dwell on poor Charlotte, for she never stood a chance. Her determination this morning was something unstoppable, and there she lies now in classic film noir fashion, her lovely (if a little old) figure prostrate in a natural position, her hair dramatically draped over, and here comes the lettuce-green vomit with little white pills inside that will prevent her from ever taking another breath and us from calling her death graceful.

Pirates of the heart

The boy took the girl in his car to the place he knew lovers go. Her in his car under his gaze. She and her shy femininities exuding from her like vapor, surrounding them in the night. He thought to himself, how lucky is he to be here in the atmosphere of her love this night. Her mind beat against the inside of her skull. He took her hand. His content gaze out over the city and the stars through the windshield and her crazed animal mind not coming through her skin to him.


Little did the boy know the spirits that gathered outside his car conspired with the girl against him. They circled outside the car and saw the boy's innocent love-aspirations and what it was that he saw in the girl and regarded it like pirates of the heart. They swung open the door and pulled the girl out of the car. The boy tried to hold on but he really didn't stand a chance and the spirits carried her to where they wanted her and lifted her up and held her and did those things to her. More spirits held the boy down and made him watch. The girl whaling in the trance of the will of the spirits and the anguish of the boy like a very tragic faerie tale that night.


The girl looks back on the night later in life in the all's fair way that every woman looks back on the memories of her heartbreaks. The man who sits in the chair beside her's who was the boy in the story reaches over and takes hold of her hand. The woman's pretensions that a man can't understand and the story of her life like she wanted it. He holds her hand and they look out from their porch. The man sitting there more content than ever in the role he has played in her life and the woman's mind working hard on her next fantasy.

The backyard with piles of bricks and stones disarranged about the place according to a boy's will. His imagination dictating that this stone here must not be there where it is but there where his hand must take it.

The look in his eyes when he looks over the property in the ambitious afternoon. A girl's crying once interrupted the look of unstoppability. Her mother elevated her above the fray in her arms. In a long sigh she said that someone always cries.

He thought, how did that pretty girl get her mother to win the war for her. And without even using her hands. The boy built himself a shelter with the bricks and stones from the little girl. Above the doorway he wrote, you musn't cry.

The girl burned to death in the fire

The girl burned to death in the fire. In her baptism by fire her will to live was tested and her pain was religious and in her final seconds she saw God's eyes that defied her in those seconds that were like minutes she let out a blood curdling growl that would freeze the blood of Genghis Khan. Her clothes burned off and her elegant graces defined in the light of the flames. Her wonderful skin charred. There she is now, her devil-anger gone and the house just simmering, the thing that happened that would make a devout monk jealous over and the music of the firemen and people and her body in the carbon of the wood and other materials as if it were never anything else like the bark of the tree in the songbird's song.

Before she died the girl in my arms. Her skin and her hair in the sunlight in my arms. Against the world that took from her what it wanted without giving back and exploited her kindness and moved about her too quickly like a pack of wolves that threatened to tear her away with it but couldn't in my arms. I said to her I will take you from this hour to the next like this like birds in flight like a house in a tornado. She without fear limp as a feather in my arms. This beauty created for me for the world to take from her and to appease my will. For me to save and for me to break. She a woman for it and me a man for it.

The red of that sunset that I saw from above the clouds. The sun encased in the horizon like a jewel, like a pearl peaking out from the oyster. War-clouds marching on beneath me to do battle in a hurricane-skirmish too far ahead to see. She was betrayed more than once. She cried after sex and I said go ahead and let it out. My love overabundant like a well overflowing. Something wrong with it. I ran my hand along her back and legs and arms that were for her and along the tender parts that were for me. Her cool skin that glistened. That belied the flames that came from within after all, that destroyed the love that soared for me and for you who aspired to have it, too.

the unscarred soul

The unscarred soul offends her. Lethargy in her thin wrists in her twisted hips. The truly useless vagrant drunk throws how can she do this to herself in your face. This monument to distrust. This unfemale woman. The lovelessness of her ho-hum do-nothing swaying. Devil may care in her gaze but no masculine mystique in her low-hanging mother breasts and in her thin bones. This truly useless drunk from whom you want nothing. Who claims to want nothing from you.

The sight of a child repels her. Like a heretic at the sight of her God. The child's affabilities not endearing it to the woman. If she could get her hands on a child it she'd throw it in the fire. Her own wasted motherhood glaring back at her. Condemning her. Dooming her. She and her tramp friends coconspirators against the essence of a child. They warm their hands over the trash fire and worship unforgivable gods in the night.

Those that know her come in and out of her life. They have no clout with her but one. The devil comes to her in the hiding-dark of the night. His loving gaze her nourishing nectar. Every night she tells him the same story of the drunk ecstasy her lover now, her child now. They don't know the happiness I feel. He tells her that's all right. The woman-drunk wants nothing from you and chases the only ecstasy she knows. The unscarred soul offends her.

They call it rape.

So the man was in one of those strange moods and when him and his woman were about to run in from the rain he grabbed her and tackled her and after a while she played along it was one of those things and when they did go in she was all hot and ready and the foreplay was fine but when it came down to it the man couldn't get his dick up. So their relationship entered into another month of misery. The story of this man's life replete with such periods of sadness.

The man sneaks out to see movies when he can. When he watches a movie he's brought back to the place and time of a boy. He looks out from his world at adult life like a movie like everyone has a role like everyone knows what they're doing. Doesn't see the desperate and lonely lives. The man's disillusionment as he lays next to his wife. Sometimes he gets a boner in these moments but he doesn't want to bother her with it.

One time a woman said I'm the kind of man who would get into a car to kill himself. Nothing to do with the car. Just to have a place to sit and shoot myself. The earthworms in the dirt and the songs of birds vibrating in the air and the neatness of the garden. Soothing to me somehow. Like that in a woman which I pay a dear price to have. The world rotating. And the gears in the clockwork of all the working brains driving on. The instruments of their will do it what takes. But if the wind put a gun to my head, if it told me it was the Devil come to take my life I think I wouldn't mind. This old sperm donor sitting in the car going no where. His woman who knows him better than he knows himself comes in the garage and tells him to come inside and close the garage door. The children who disregard his presence wait at the table for their mother. If the wind put a gun to my head I think I would not mind.

I figured out how I'm gonna get rich. I'm gonna seduce Alex Trebek. I'm gonna pin him down and suck his dick and I won't enjoy it very much but I'm gonna blow him into submission and he's gonna give me the key to the world.

In the winter of the boy's twelfth year the man put his hand on the boy's shoulder as he looked out the window at the snow. Out there winter's full fury was coming on. The boy said he knew the snow would melt in spring time because by the summer there would be no more snow but at this time he could not believe it, such was winter's triumph that year. The man said that snowflake by snowflake the snow builds up to a considerable mass but the slow coming-on of the summer sun was enough to melt it all quickly away. But the next year the snowflakes will be back. He avowed their perseverance. How beautiful they are, each one unique, and how gently they lay down among the other flakes. To await the coming moisture, then congregate in a stream nearby to someday have another try. But don't think that you'll ever be so lucky.

When a girl walks by I never fail to look at her sexy parts and the girl who sits in front never fails to notice me noticing. Whenever I look at a girl I think to myself how does she regard herself when she's naked in front of a man. Is she a bad little girl? Is she a woman who understands what her little woman-curves do? Is she in control, is she excited by the thought of losing control? The girl who sees me thinks what kind of man am I. She thinks how do I regard a girl naked in front of me. I would be lying to myself if I thought she hasn't figured me out better than I know myself. I want to smile at her and make a joke about our little conversations we have without talking but I'm regaled because she knows sometimes I'm a jerk who holds a girl's hands behind her back and sometimes I'm a coward who can't bring himself to dominate a woman. I walk with my confidences and my failures tattooed on my skin. I smile only in the light of woman's forgiveness. See my fragile ego in the sun? The cracks visible only to woman. This trying eggshell alligator. My sweat and effort against my man-blindedness.

The boy in the man's home. His mind regarding the night. Regarding the arrangement of things. The man amidst the things he collected. Their significance and his means of acquiring them a matter subordinate to the particulars of this man's life that was unfurled upon the surface of the world little more than arbitrarily. Time relegating the events of the man's life to history like stale food like the dust to the boy. He stood by the window and listened to the night-time sounds. The dogs in their paddock and the things he couldn't see or hear but whose presence did not escape his concept of the world. The things inside somehow more dead to the boy than things outside. One day the boy brought a butterfly into the home and in the flashes of its white wings could be seen a sort of grace that could not be found in the things on the shelf or on the table that distinguished. The butterfly and its insect-panic in the corner of the ceiling. The boy looking out the window. The man regarding it all with his back to it and knowing what it meant. The boy regarding the man.

A toast to the all the men who marry a girl half their age because a woman made him feel ashamed of putting his cock in her mouth. A toast to the subversive princesses who effortlessly fool older men with their charming act of innocence. At fault is the stupidity that mother nature has endowed us with to keep the shenanigans going. To all the girls I've invited into my life who surreptitiously took it over and made up for all the disappointed women who shook their head at my peevishness and gave up on the dream of not having to fall in love with an old fart.

I stumble on the stairs in the dark because there is a light switch downstairs but not upstairs. The people who built this house coconspirators who aspire to embarrass me. Good thing they can't see me in the dark. Or they'd have a laugh at my fat ass.

I'm in love with my 19 year old neighbor and she's in love with me. We've never met. Her blond hair and her tan skin in the sun. She's unpacking things from her car. It's shorts weather. God put me here in front of this window this morning to witness this perfect being. The leaves circling in the wind. They show their face to me and turn back again on the merrygoround wind. I write on each one as it goes by: In my old age I have a cock that works. I indeed have those fantasies, she writes back. But no one must know. In the dark and in silence then my dear.

Sometimes I look up at my young wife at breakfast when she's not looking at me. Her ease and her comfort. Her playing house in here like she learned in her childhood bedroom like she learned from her mother. I reach across the table and slap her. I curse God as loud as I can. I blink. She says do I want some blueberries. Of course I want some damn blueberries. She comes over. She kisses the corner of my mouth. And she runs her fingers through my hair in that way. In my old age I have a cock that works.

the black dog

The muscular black dog sits chained outside the coffee shop. He watches his owner's masculinities at the table. The sunshine that his coat knows to shine in and the music of the street. He knows it for its essence. He lets it wash over him. He swims in it. This sidewalk pavement where the man just doubled back to pet the dog and the boy walking the other direction that the dog knows to act excited for, a platform for his subversive puppy-ambitions. The boy's hands along his coat and his good doggy voice vibrating in the air like a ribbon escaping in the wind.

The boy's back to him. The rhythm of the traffic that people hear but don't hear. Sunshine days of the dog's life that are remembered for his successes with people. The mountains in the horizon. The wild world he is connected to but disregards for this world of two legged creatures he controls without controlling. The sun that will set that in its red hue reminds the dog of getting home to a pile of food and there is his owner now getting up from the table.

The majesty of a sunset like everything else but a context for the dog's seducing of people with his good-doggyness. Like a girl coming into her sexual womanhood that hears a different romance in every song. Like that which goes without saying that is neither explained to man at his creation nor whispered to him by the earth he will be buried in that is the secret world that the dog is also a part of.

the jaguar hunter

The family that just came in that is still out of breath said they didn't see the jaguar but saw him in every darkness between the trees in the night-jungle. They said they thought they heard his patted feet behind them but someone else said the jaguar was stalking them just outside the house and they heard him on the roof before the family came and if indeed the family heard one behind them then they brought a second jaguar to this compound and the family said so be it. This house that is the only roofed house on this side of the Amazon that cramped two tribes in fear of the jaguars because two oracles independently predicted tonight to be the night the jaguar kills and two oracles have never been wrong. The people who sit in whatever positions they may in tired fear. The boy who boasts of killing a jaguar on a boar hunt. The villagers' hope in him that intoxicates him.

The moon-shine on his lean arm muscles that gripped the spear denoted something like, this human body that aspires to find that mystical strength that you the jaguar possess innately is as worthy as that of any Greek or Hebrew hero and demands worship from others just the same. As he stepped out he said to the jaguar: I pity you for standing between me and my loves who trust in me.

As he rounded the corner where he swore to himself he knew the jaguar would be, the deranged nightmare-cat's eyes aglow 10 yards ahead. The cat unmoving as he approached. It sat in the open night and looked at him plainly. He told the jaguar that he will slide the spear into his heart unabated like this tragic scene was a dream his will once had. When the boy's spear tip touched the jaguar's hair his half brother leapt from the roof of the compound and pinched the boy's neck shut with his jaws and waited there until the boy breathed no more. The spear laying there like an abandoned aberration of a tree branch.

The sound of the boy's bones in the cats' jaws vibrating in the night along with the hissing wind and the lapping waters. The jaguars heard nothing from inside the compound. Their low hanging belly hairs mingling with the grass as they walk back into the darkness of the jungle where the family swore they saw them and sometimes really did see them.

They watch the people file out of the compound. In their jaguar-eyes reflected this world where the tribes live under the jaguar's gaze and curse them in their manic ecstasies and offer them sacrifices in their sorrows. This strange animal who peers into the jungle with the arrogance of a god knowing the jaguar looks back at him and lays his faults bare to be witnessed and measured by his enemy. Who looks into the jaguar's eyes and sees only his own reflection. Who looks at truth and sees only lies. He wonders how the cat's mind entertains itself in the sameness of the jungle. The cat's mind is concerned with the jungle that is not itself.

my french coffee colonel

She liked a well made thing. She elbows-out pressing her coffee. Then the foot-tapping wait.

She told me her anecdotes. The sentiment always the same. The moral never anything heavy.

Then I watch her laying on the sofa with a book in the sunlight. I want to lay with her with my face in her belly skin. I watch the coffee steam until it goes cold.

Her face contorting with this, no that. Every thought occurring to her except the presence of me.

Memories of fondling her that morning.

The ice cream stand outside. The chubby ice cream-faced toddler. Glad as a sailor at war's end.

Me open-arms screaming at God. I do not lay with her with my face in her nurturing belly skin.

My one way ticket to England, I will leave her in the cold clandestine morning.

Why, a story for God to tell her in her crying-dreams.

Your fat older cousin in his mediocre middle age

His brain pongs between his ecstasies and his fears and he aspires to relate to you in a witty exchange that he is quite proud of this or that little endeavor that never made his heart race. His fat neck and his glasses that he doesn't even notice anymore. His dark well kept beard. His pensive stare. His quiet life here on the property that can't be called small that is ending like a thing in space that extinguishes but whose death wont be noticed in our lifetime because, as he recounts every time he looks up at night, we can't know which stars have died because their light takes so long to get to us. His brain pongs between his ecstasies and his fears.

Bob Dylan told me in a dream. We were in a bar. He said to me: So I heard you killed a man. He wore a cowboy hat. His jacket was leather. He told me that the world is full of men who think they can kill and then some of them do and there is no tragedy in that because those are the margin-few who never planned to follow the word of God anyway. He said all the ghosts in the world are those that haunt the men that killed them like that one over there that's in every dream I have. He asked me if I thought being killed was as bad as a ghost's vengeance well it doesn't matter because God makes it equal in the end. I said why he said well because killing's wrong because God says so. He walked back through the swinging doors. His jingling spurs, his hunched back. So killing is wrong and we start from there.

The young man who haunted her adolescent dreams who made her squirm in her moist underwear. The beads of sweat that populate her skin then evaporate and are carried from her bedroom into the night by the night-wind, this elaborate story of traveling teenage steam in the night hidden from her in her trance, do you see the innocence in her face? Do you see her earnestness, her genuine surprise at her new feelings and her agony to hide them? You and your religious ideals. You who condemn her.
So you can guess what would happen if he were to appear sitting across from her in a cafe long after she thought she forgot her adolescent indulgences. What could her father do, even if that young man was me? You and your knife in my dreams about the structural vulnerability of my jugular vein. Did you know that she dreamed of me putting that knife into your chest? If I crash my motorcycle going as fast as I can the angels will catch me and gently set me down. I walk with the universe smiling at my back - I dance on the tight rope above the toothless sharks.

The man who lives in the cupboard

The man who lives in the cupboard sees through the crack in the door. His bemused eyes that reflect the light that shines through like a yellow snake in the dark sea like a man who understands despite his condition. The people and things passing through his vision a conveyor belt-display-market: which idea of his about the world does this one reverberate. He lays his judgment upon them with dogged conviction.

His thoughts passed along and fondled in the clockwork brain. Illuminated in the candle light of his awareness. Each one a pleasant surprise to him like a dictator's faultless children. His white beard, his white wrinkled face. His eyes that never gave a look back to another's. Your meek and ancient grandfather. He lives in the cupboard and sees through the crack in the door and loves being Hitler with his thoughts.

brain farts

A toast to the all the men who marry a girl half their age because a woman made him feel ashamed of putting his cock in her mouth. A toast to the subversive princesses who effortlessly fool older men with their charming act of innocence. At fault is the stupidity that mother nature has endowed us with to keep the shenanigans going. To all the girls I've invited into my life who surreptitiously took it over and made up for all the disappointed women who shook their head at my peevishness and gave up on the dream of not having to fall in love with an old fart.

Colorado you are too easy

Colorado you are too easy. The sign in the driveway that leads to a large unfinished building said no trespassers. But if I ventured in, if I trespassed on your pavement you would not begrudge me it. You wouldn't make a fuss if I interrupted your pristine snow. My foot steps in the snow that lays so comfortably across your vacant lots tell your security guard exactly what they are. Another restless traveler seeing how far his will can take him, he must think. He would not try to sniff me out. My freedom unabated in this easy place. Like being able to pass my hand along any part of a girl's body that I please because she loves me. My boyish desires and my demands and all my deviances. Appeased here on your land like on a girl's skin like my mother's love like the Earth abused and depleted in my greed. Colorado you are too easy.

I have been in Denver for three days

This new town in the desert. It doesn't really understand itself. Like a young overdeveloped girl. It's organic foods movement is Midwestern in its ideals but New York in its execution. Pizza by the slice shops everywhere where the cheese and the sauce is too good but the dough is slightly off. New York prices. Four fifty for a sausage egg and cheese in "Heidi's Brooklyn Deli" on the next block from me, down the street from a bar where the locals spit on Brooklyn and yell out when they make a shot in pool and get shitfaced at happy our. Get it? It doesn't fit. They call them bagels but really they're too soft and small and have too many flavors - jalapeno and parmesan is not a type of bagel. New York City needs to send over some of its proper Jews.

The cafe I'm sitting in has the best atmosphere I've ever seen and charges two dollars for a shitty cup of coffee. I ordered a latte and they gave me a macchiato. But the enthusiasm and the customers are there. The people as soft as the businesses. No aggression in anyone. On my first night I was playing pool against two drunk rednecks and one of them calls sloppy on a difficult shot that I didn't call. It was my only shot I said and he belched sloppy again and again after my back was turned. I looked at him and he said it again like a little kid like he was talking to himself. Eye contact but no momentum in his face.

Guys see me check out their girls and they don't change their facial expression and the girls look me up and down and we keep walking. It's ok to want to fuck people here. In Brooklyn if a hot girl looks you up and down you know it's go time in Denver it's hello. The guys are not herbs here. They are outgoing and over polite. No aggression like we have a pact of cooperation like disrespect is not in the spectrum of social interaction. I feel like I can seduce every girl like I can convince every guy it's in his best interest to be my friend. Like a piranha in a goldfish tank.

Why I have the chemistry of a 13 year old I don't know. Why I wake up in the morning with that itch in the center of my thigh muscles like if I don't fuck or go for a run I'm gonna kill you I don't question. More hours in my day like an abberation of the Earth's rotation. I said give me New York without the bad parts and bought a ticket and Jet Blue came up with the perfect answer. My mathematically immaculate life.

The doomed soldier hung in the jungle and screamed horrifically,
But the old doctor peeled his skin lovingly. He put the scalpel
Between his eyes to see if they had any secrets to reveal.


This lovely poem brought to you via a drunken game of immaculate corpse.