la abuela habla muerte

someone's abuelita died. donning our blue rubber gloves, we unceremoniously lifted her tiny corpse which was folded up like a child in the fetal position waiting for comfort.
but in the dream version we dont have a gurney for some reason, and carrying her of her humble house becomes a procession and we are lifting her light bones high above our heads, me secretly wishing she will just be assumed right there into heaven rather than a cold metal locker and a leering mortician downtown with pumps full of formaldehyde.
we are getting her into the back of the ambulance and something slips, her body tilts in our arms, her mouth parts and spills tar and ash that covers us like a cloud of damnnation. the bystanders scream and retch, i can hear it splashing all over the pavement and it is cold soaking through my shirt but aint nothin else to be done except moan the same low song and wring our hands all covered in black death.

riverside portrait I

he is thin as thread and grizzled as the flagstone sidewalk hes settin on. 35 and lucky to be alive, he preaches now to his brothers down by the river who are always sneaking slugs of colt forty five between their amens.
he absentmindedly traces his trackmarks, watches those wretched men wash themselves with water full of the sky's clouds. when they catch a hint of their staring reflection they slap the still water away, bring their hands to their whiskered faces to see if it really could be true, if the drinkin and whorin have really cut lines deep as oak bark across their sunspotted skin.
they ask him for soap, for lye, for lotion. he just shrugs, spits.
'them stains dont wash off. youre jus gonna have to answer to yer tally one of these days.'
each looks down his clothes, noticing the traces of gray that stay now after scrubbing, after bleach, even after stealing new ones from walmart: the cotton is spotless for a moment but
something telling always seems to seep through.

for judas

the other day I met the Big man behind the biochem lab where I'll be doing research this summer. he smiles, gestures, welcomes me as a new acolyte; projects are discussed, chemical reactions go up on the white board. i politely resist the urge to say that
it strikes me, increasingly,
how quick stainless steel and plastic entirely replaced stained glass and iron crosses as the ornate monument to a myopic obsession with invisible things. these new alters are maintained (much the same) by devoted, celibate young monks in robes of white; now their gloved hands hold not chalices but pipettes, with bunson burners to light the sacrament.
maybe cause i am not a man i cant revere this dissection, vivisection, the deep satisfaction of gutting, cutting, pulling everything apart into tiny pieces, separating gray into black and white.
even the smallest molecules themselves cannot have their peace: we drown them in magnetic fields till they are forced to let go of everything and fall apart.
once the last fragmentation is complete, he at the helm turns toward me
so delighted in all this golden hubris,
with his pale face bathed in the green glow of so many machines.

monday

amongst all this toil, all       i want is to be reincarnated as a june thunderhead
blooming blue above them red mountains

in rambling,

longshanked highway runners
live to fix their vacant eyes on an empty horizon,
never holding nothin but a cheap butterfly knife
tween them and the dark wet places flying by beside the road.

apple & farmer

i got these tattoos,
electric imprints beside my breast, the skin surface changed forever --i will be drawn to rest someday as an old oak cut with the easy scars of verdant sapling youth.
any spring tree could tell you that nothing grows back quite the same after each frost. its new april-green chorus is shaped with notes of misshapes that are their own memorial:the freshly marred bark flaws mark the memory of fruit and leaves who already done breathed their last sunshine and let go of the sky and wind to fall

down there to them earth standin men who watch simple and hungry
with the moon waning in their eye, reducing to a scythe, their harvest beneath the blade coming up cold and colored red in its final phase

put me in the ground

of late i find myself dreaming of bones, living and dead:

and these days, i am afraid to open my mouth fearing that my ribcage may fall through; i could
never
live down the embarrassment of spilling such    personal things all over my professor’s floor. what would become of my bones' mess spattered there on the linoleum,?—aint no reverence in science; &i could never put em back myself.
their new livid stench would draw forth so strong that vultures'd circle overhead like id been gone for weeks.

gambling

sometimes i catch a faint tendril of your scent—your discarded t-shirt in the bottom of my dresser i keep aiming to wash but never quite do. i open the drawer and

your tan face suddenly glimmers flushed and sharp like a casino’s neon lights rising like knives out of reno coming forward from the cloudless brown desert.

dream a highway

i do not know if the way memory fades like so many tungsten faces is a blessing or curse, only that now it has twighlit some august night just short of the end of days, back when you could smell the girl so ripe in the dusky heat with her sweat dripping like honey to stick
the bees down towards her naked toes sunk deep in the red mud. it is almost enough to know that junipered hillside wont never answer to us again, wont forgive the time our campfire defiled a millenia of sandstone talismans.
the moment dissolves into the shimmering air above the sunbleached miles; the blacktop cleaves the desert driving mercilessly forward, each minute one more distance between that body and this one.

now it's one month later and your lank hair has faded on the pillow of a hazy morning you awoke in agony while i retched up the hangover having crashed up my bike on broadway in some overbrave 3am mania.

sunrise on route nine

there are two motels on route 9, not so far apart but spanning an entire lifetime of mine: i can yet see the green carpet at the hadley inn, us the rapturous and unwashed gazing at the lampshade’s new hole where it hit the floor while the laboror’s pickups idled outside in the dying night.
down the street on the other side of that dream there is a hotel chain’s cheap façade with a window facing the stripmall that caught the sun in my eye so shockingly crystalline that morning with me lain out screaming and screaming on the tile.

FLOOD-new orleans, 2006 (previously published)

The bottles had been underwater long enough to soak the labels off; they were dark and anonymous. We lined them up on the floor next to the mattress we had dragged in and then we lingered in the electricity-free silence for a few minutes. Dead computers surrounded us and their associated hopeful vocabulary—modem ! keyboard! url!—was tacked up on the wall and peeling. Rescued religious statues regarded us from their pile in the corner.
I kept flashing back to the refugees' scrawled notes still on the chalkboards.
R gave me a long look and twisted the cap off. Not a tight seal. He smelled it and brought it to his lips—"a little funny."
I thought of the squalid, horrible place this liquor came from.
He looked at me again with those eyes like an tomcat in the darkness, killed the flashlight, took a long draw, passed it to me. Opaque brown bottle. I raised it and drank; it was whiskey with a faint taste of the smell of rain near factories. I raised it and drank what brought fragile order to its knees, what roared through houses and filled lungs to the brim. tearwater mudwater bloodwater: the flood of the people's funeral. i swallowed until my stomach was hot and my eyes burned. and then when the bottle was empty and r was unconscious as usual, the ghosts came in and we raged in the ruins with me laying down my body and them breathing in their bones from my breath.

Alone in apartment 89

at midnight I closed my eyes on the weary sodium lamp yellowing my cellblock-sized bedroom, falling asleep to the most curious feeling of tiny seeds unfolding under my skin. things were moving, pushing through, there were green thorns splitting my flesh. i had no choice but to tear a hole in my t-shirt between my breasts and let the wildflowers push out of my chest, fragrant and dripping from the bone.
my sole witness, the sodium lamp, just buzzed jealously as i twisted up in the sheets with visions of those dandelions lit by meteors burning across the night up there, way back in my eyelids, on top of some summer mountain.

after eden

and what of adam? these days you'll more'n likely find him cursin the lord jesus, laying in a bed of fleas he made himself with hands full of murder and seed spilled on his shrinking belly, reeking of dread and emptiness.
as for her, eve, the new whore of babylon? she is still wet from the fuck, all slimy with snakespit, mascara running in the mud and smelling of her rebirth in a den of feral dogs.

a humble ode

in denver back then it was all threadbare houses and drinking cheap tequila deep in the chill of july midnights. id been desperately in love with her, with that supernatural gleam and ancient tragedy weighing and lifting her skinny brown body. id always wanted that night, out there by the bonfire in a weedy backyard. she was yowling like a bony allycat under a red moon some old blues song. everyone was drunk without watches and time stretched till i could barely stand having been overcome by the smoke and her perched so high on that splintered log with her songs and scent drifting down to cover us in all of our earthly mortality.

wade in the water

only thing worse than seeing someones eyes too full is seeing them too empty. when the soul is a forgotten gray rock sunk in some cloudy pond.
after the eyes go, all you got left is your pulsating blood in a fraying body. soon it is tripping down the asphalt sticky from the heat, bellydown draggin slower and slower away from the demons,heaving into porcelain till everythings thin and brittle as twine.
i heard the splash but the road was steep so that i didnt dare turn back to see the submergence. i knew it and i just moved aside cause baby went to drown wasnt nothing i could do.

a hustler's lament

“strippers only wanna fuck and get high—an down here they want you ta think they wanna fuck jes you SO THEY GIT MORE MONEY!!!” the lonely man hollars in the parking lot to nobody in particular, alternately exhilarated and cynical.
inside the rest of them are still twisting in their bar stools feeling lusty and nervous. they are married, religious, or otherwise, and they are buzzing from the bud lite and neon signs and visions of moaning whores as the next one takes the stage.

what a specimen of thick strong limbs, drawn from some ancient majestic bloodline! she is carved out of granite with tits and ass like epic rolling hills. her ebony hair could flow all the way to the sea. when she moves surely the earth will shake and its rivers part. why is she not on the ceiling of the sistine chapel, what business has she here in this smoky den of dingy men?
and o lord! how she dances, though the pole is no worthy consort. the rednecks closest to the stage start to feel faint: there are tigers, maybe even demons buried in those Hips. beads of sweat roll between her breasts; the flimsy g-string can barely contain itself. they only want to bury themselves in her milk and honey, to be smothered in her smooth flesh. but she won't meet their eyes, no: her face is bored and haughty as a proud racehorse paraded in a petting zoo.
will someone not break her free and bring her to sanctuary or green pastures! but there is no room for heroism here between her full thighs and the clapboard walls of this swampy town. and so she gyrates, knocking unbelievers stonedead, wondering if the campbell’s soup’ll still be on sale tomorrow.

down the river phlegethon

He was shaped as a mole, with a hunched soft body and a sharp nose. beneath the large, balding forehead his skin had the permanent pinkening of a white man who has languished too long in the sun. he’d caught wind of my politics.
“you fucking terrorist,”
he snarled, accosting me with eyes long deadened by whiskey and cocaine. even his drawl was reminiscent of something washed out, faded, shriveled in the middle. though educated, he was wanting in both depth and wit. he was losing.
“sir..,” i set the glass down sadly. “hateful of many things as i may be, i know there isnt righteousness nor honor in violence; all dreams of such are vanity. the maggots waiting in the ground for the war dead don’t taste the difference between iraqi and american. it is all dust and vanity.”
he couldn’t answer and my words faded unheeded into the smoky air. he was deadset unreachable and i should’ve quit. but this strange desire for cruelty was rising black in my veins, hearing his prideful declarations having never seeing the horror of a human body coming undone and bleeding its life out.
i sat there quiet, dragging the remaining bourbon between my teeth, knowing that the last blood-choked cry in the saharan heat wont carry god nor dignity.
but he will not see this, and so did not deserve punishment— yet i found myself wanting to hold a mirror up to the dumb spittle exiting his frothy mouth so that he might gape at his own foolishness. some part of me wanted to play with him as a cat mocks a caught mouse, to disembowel his simple argument and stretch its oily tendrils across the filthy floorboards. it would've been easy enough; he wouldn't have been able to keep up.
and so verily weighted by these violent thoughts, i watched myself sink to his level. i turned away, held my tongue, and couldnt help but smile cause all of it aint nothing but dust and vanity.

hobo tomb blues

I was walkin down the old train tracks by the bayou and after an hour
I had to pee. I turned toward the scrub sticking out of the retaining
wall, and lo & behold, a cinderblock house half-sunk into the
hillside. the sea had aged it past its years but it was solidly built
with a concrete slab roof wreathed in empty cigarette packs. I peered
through the tiny glassless gap of a window, which revealed the edge of
a sleeping bag and a table. upon the table was an open bible, an empty
bottle, and a fresh book of matches. the rest was darkness and I
couldnt make out if the sleeping bag was occupied.
I crept toward the low door with some perverse urge to know what
passage stood open in the bible. but as I got closer I was hit with
the ripe smell of rot, washing familiar through my memory like the 9th
ward after the Storm.
there was broken glass all over the floor--some final rage? was it Job
or the Revelations? but I remained on the threshold in the silence,
unable to enter, not knowing the fullness or emptiness reposed in that
fraying red nylon fabric.

the sky meets the sea

Wandering down the chilly beach today, trying to think peaceful thoughts, I came upon a large heron in its last hours. it was disconcerting to see such a formerly majestic bird laying on its back, spread as if on a crucifix beneath the sand with its feet pointed toward the ocean and its head resting on its chest staring wistfully at the sky.
it gave a small cry as I approached but said nothing further.
indeed, it died more quietly than I imagine its sisters did. beneath the watery winter sun it was eulogized by the rising tide with a cairn of broken seashells and, for flowers, man-o-war jellyfish washed ashore and gleaming.

'shopping'

clutching giftcards from distant relatives, we descended into a carnal
haze of capitalism that blazed gloriously with pink neon and overfull
bodies. the shopping mall was perplexingly large and misshapen, with
no natural sunlight or landmasses to offer reference or shelter.
I hadn't been in one for some time and felt a pavlovian panic as the
heard moved through its linolium-glazed hunting grounds. what if there was a stampede, a feeding frenzy at the nintendo store? we'd be crushed!
I glanced around nervously, wishing I'd brought some kind of weapon
for self-defense, a lasso, or at least wristguards.
people stared at me, as they often do. was it the wide-eyed look of
horror on my face, the ridiculous 40-year-old dress or the enormous
faux-gold thriftstore belt buckle? obese men coveted me between
attempts to look longingly at the victora's secret postergirls, only
their equally robust wives kept blocking the view.
restless, I ran through the buffalo, dodging their adderall-addled
seven-year-olds, and crept between clothing racks that whispered like
the collective memory of the trees beneath the bulldozer and concrete.
distracted by 3 elongated starvation victims
adorned with sequins, I lost my footing and stumbled, falling between
gym calves and spiked pumps. parting their crocodile-skin purses, I leaned my unpainted face up and asked the blank lady at the Macy's counter if
she got any rosaries.