Sleep Talk

Leave a man at the door leave hands in pockets

leave wishes and rose petal voodoo

leave smoke

leave more

Leave seven pm alone leave the ice cream cone torch bearer

golden lock, cherub cheek, ice-cream-cone-torch-bearer gift from god himself

leave the book and the thorn

Leave your heart of scorn

and leave your questions

Where I've been is nobody's mind

So leave mine

Inventory

I have

Sore thumbs,

No money,

A bit of a buzz,

A little love,

Tired friends,

Sirens,

Restless hands,

Tired eyes,

An empty glass,

Crossed legs,

Quiet vinyl,

1:30 on the clock,

Tired friends,

Not much time,

An urgent need to urinate,

Rum munchies,

A little love,

Sirens,

A heavy stomach,

Hunger

I've got

So much

To learn

15,000

I know what I want but I hate how I'm getting there.

Frustration Ad Nauseum

I want to open up my head and let in the Universe

Let what Is flow into me without the blur of these primitive senses

Five senses, all jumbled and begging for attention and colliding

In this mind at this moment

The I wants to explode with the frustration

The Overwhelm

***

Imagine a glass jar filled with water floating in the ocean,

the only way for the atoms and molecules to share themselves

is to pass slowly, eternally slowly through the glass.

I'm dying to pop that lid off and be with the Ocean.

Funny, I think dying is what it takes.

Quiet

Cancer mouth

Speak freely of the face you saw

Schizophrenic diary, dual entry

Paint a picture in blood

Paint a picture in guts

The more morbid, the better the story

Be a dark one, paint a dark face

Put your hands into the hole

Put yourself into the grave

Sleep and be free

Cancer mouth

Sleep to me speak

Speak to me running blood

Run blood to the valley of my dreams

Dream me the answer

Answer my riddle

Riddle my night

Night, a cold place

The Earth a quiet time

Sleep to me speak

Speak to me of Earth

Killer

Midnight 1 A:M 2 A:M 3 A:M Sing

How bout we open up

Logic and mind to three ideas

One, Love

Two, Peace

Three, Earth

Idiot, industry won't save your skin

Idiot, I won't be found within the city city beating heart

the city city beating life

Hey,

go outside and

see the sun, your mother sun

sing thank you

sing

Struggle

Swallow your pride, with a little salt water,

with the tide

Tell him anything, tell lies

Overboard there's a squid and an ancient sailor

Be the raft, be the life preserver

Overboard there's a squid and an ancient sailor

Please just be the calming of the water

These Days

I've got a Love so hungry, it's chewing holes in my chest

And I'm aimlessly leaping only to find myself choked

on a three day chain

Jeremy The Tall

I am Jeremy The Villain, three eyed

peanut butter fingered eight years old

and caped in red

A stick, a stone, dirty handed and alone

on the street where I will grow up until I'm ninety two

I am the Red Racer, and a kite running genius,

the King of hide and never found

I invented anti-gravity the same day that I

wrote a novel about my adventures with trees,

trees that spoke that speak to me and bark the night to birds

I am Jeremy The Terror, mortal enemy of the closet monster,

the business suit tentacled psychopath, a man shrouded in cancerous black

I've seen his briefcase, seen the eyes that peer from keyholes deep deep deep

Keyholes meant to keep

I am Jeremy The Strong

I am Jeremy the Tall

I am Jeremy Whatever I Wanna Be

Liquor and Peanut Butter Granola

On a Friday night

A Song For 2035

The sun is in your eyes

and it comes as no surprise

when you're lying on your back in the field where you grew up

Thinking about clouds tattooed on palms so old

staring into all the holes where God might be

Exploring all the space around you

tearing up the place to find the

questions to the answers and you haven't got the cancer

but you know the burning know the burning

in your palms

The sun is in your eyes

while the river bed it dries

so you lie upon your back and sing the songs of dissolution

The sun is in your eyes

while the field openly cries

to God to God about the poison in its Earth

It can no more give birth to seed to root to bleed to human fruit

it cannot grow or gray or give

it cannot any longer live

The sun is in your eyes

as the Earth it slowly dies

as the madmen hypnotize each other

signing the God songs of war

And sadly,

I don't believe that art, love or lsd can save us.

A Dark Song

Sixty years of a smile I imagined I had mastered

And all that time I smiled through disaster

Sixty hours isn't comin any faster

Well now I'm the slave,

and you're the master.

Watching

A man sits down at a desk, the chair legs whining across the old wooden floor

He lays down a single sheet of paper and a pen

For a while, he stares at the paper, and then his hands, and then again at the paper

He begins to write

His writing is long and sad, elegant in its melancholy,

The words spill on to the pages like tears, he writes

In the audience, no one talks, all eyes are on him,

In his boxer shorts, a t-shirt, an old button up

Fake sunlight pours through a fake window into his fake room

The stage is the only place alive in that moment, all eyes, all souls existing for his story

He finishes, he leaves the paper, he walks out the door

The audience is alone

Halos and Hard-ons

Don't confuse wanting to fuck a woman

with believing in God

A Song For No More Heaven

I was lost

in the wilderness

in despair,

disrepair

with a hollow,

with a horror

with sand

in my pockets

And Jesus

he found me

he told me

heaven's gone

So I sat down

by a river

and I cast my

soul to see

There were mountains

there was water

endless water

open sea

There were mountains

there was water

endless water

all for me

And then Jesus

sat beside me

and I asked him

what he'd do

No more heaven

no more salvation

no more prayer for

eternity

And he told me

to stay here

by the river

with my soul at sea

With the mountains

with the water

endless water

open sea

With the mountains

with the water

endless water

all for me

I'm Not Crazy

I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you I could love you.

"I'm not crazy," he said, furiously scratching his pen across the page. "I'm not crazy, and they can fuck themselves if they try to make me believe it for an instant."

"Relax James, you're going to burst something." Steven was usually right about these things, but his determination to offer unhelpful advice was bordering on sinister. James straightened up from his hunched position over the desk. He glanced once more at his testament to passion and then took the papers and placed them alone in an empty drawer.

Meanwhile, we're all born with mothers, but some of us have lost them.

Kodachrome Loveletter

Last Sunday, in the orchard by your favorite pear tree

you said, "Stop, the light is good here,"

and you took your camera, and fiddled the knob

and dialed the fiddles and you adjusted something,

just right

And you said, "Now hold still, I love you."

Snap

Now I know it's a beautiful summer, and I think that you love me,

but winters come and love isn't always an Evergreen

What I'm trying to tell you is this,

that a picture's worth a thousand words and you just caught

a thousand of my best

Like honesty, kindness, gentle, forever...

But I've got more words than all your Kodachrome could capture

Like marry me...

I want you to keep more than just my film,

Keep me

Exhale

Who, new-tongue

say it ain't so

Cast indecisive trifles from tip toed moments

and embrace the inner weird

Tell me I'm beautiful for who I am but

love me any-me, for who I strive to become

or what I say I will become or even

the me I dream about

Because I paint you those dreams and you taste them,

licking all my canvases, searching for the salt sweat

mingling with sweet promise, the pleasure and satisfaction

of Me realized then materialized then actualized then third eye'd,

and in turn I taste my own why's and what's and smell the cleaner air

I breathe easy for a while

Later,

Beautiful Sunday, 8 a.m window light requiem,

songbird orgasm, yellow, pale blue,

one moment of truth and then fresh coffee,

and snapping back to reality, and bills, and drudge-fuckery,

being a grown up, within a child's cage within an adult's body,

in the boy-world of men, yes, beautiful Sunday 8 a.m window light requiem....

Wrench

She enters our conversations with pistols drawn,

drawing angry faces in the clouds with a scowl like ashes,

and laying her hands upon the glass jar that contains my love,

she squeezes and black bile and tears flow from cut fingers and broken glass

Gravity

When I was a boy, I could throw a baseball farther than anyone on the street,

and when I was a boy, I could ride faster on my red bike than any kid on our block,

and when I was a boy, seed spitting was my kingdom and the neighborhood kids, they were my people.

When I was a boy, I took fireflies at night and threw them so high in the sky, whole constellations were born.

When I was a boy, I was a God....of hide and seek.

But now, I've got more debt than any Dad on the street,

and no Jim, John or Steve in my neighborhood could top my blood pressure.

I haven't met anyone yet with bigger hemeroids,

and it seems like the only line my kids are at the front of is for their first welfare check.

Things were lookin so bright for me,

but then I remembered, "What goes up must come down."

Shit, see, when I was a boy, I could still defy gravity...

Soul

When you eat your soul with a

helping of gracious smiles,

candid I love you's, and

stale soda crackers

When you eat your soul with honesty,

and with charm

When you eat your soul with the one you wanna be with,

and you're both sitting in the back seat of your first car,

it's raining the fattest drops, the ones that'll drown the ocean,

and taking off your clothes is the last thing on your mind,

when you're there, in that moment, eating your own soul

You get a quarter and you find a payphone, and rain or no rain,

you call me up

Cause' I wanna know what satisfaction tastes like.

Shoelaces

The shoelaces that join our feet are longer than the summer days of our childhood,

when I would wear that ragged costume of Peter Pan and you'd be Wonderwoman.

When we'd fight the phantom crime of imagination, and never grow up doing it.

When kissing came long after Crayola, skinned knees and multiplication,

after spelling bees, climbing trees and the longest games of hide and seek I can remember,

the ones that go and go until we all come out to find you, "It",

asleep in a field, with a butterfly in one hand and the moon tattooed on your dreams.

Those shoelaces are long, longer than four years of college in another province, in another world,

the shoelaces that join our feet are longer than the names I gave to you.

Longer than the riddles your grandfather knew, longer than ten minutes of silence at eight years old.

The shoelaces that joined our feet have worn, frayed, faded.

Now I want to replace them with a wedding ring.

Dream Within Waking

I have lived this life, even though it is not mine,

I have loved friends and family, ghosts now

As I awake, back from where I started,

I feel the ache of longing for that borrowed time

My heart breaks for the illusion lost,

I would give anything to be back inside the dream.

While

While we immerse ourselves in the echoes of animals

while we pray at an altar of plastic goods

while we dance blind in pools of crude

while we gnaw at the Terran jugular

while we sleep the day and wake the night

2009 discontent

2009 anxiety

2009 impatience

2009 uncertainty

while this

while this

while this I hope

Bed

I'm sitting here,

at this childhood wooden desk

my usual hangout, and I'm thinking

I want to spell the poetry of Man

but I've got to go to bed.

I want to scream the secrets of my skin

but I've got the go to bed.

I want to dish on the dreams I've been having,

I want to fish around in a puddle of words,

I want to take Truth, Gonad and Amnesty

and turn those three words into the

Nobel fucking prize for literature,

but I've got to go to bed.

I wanna talk man,

but I've got to go to bed.

I wanna whisper strange incantations that I composed just to sound cool,

but I've got to go to bed.

I want to stay here all night helping the Universe realize itself

through conversation with the sky and my offwhite keyboard:

"Hey bro, I'm you, you're me, everything's gonna be okay."

But instead, I've got to go to bed.

So I close up this laptop, I take off my socks

and brush my teeth wishing teeth didn't need brushing,

and I climb in bed with a pen in my hand and a notebook under the pillow.

And when I wake up, that notebook is full of human souls

born scribbled in a stranger's hand.

See, whether I'm awake or asleep, I don't have to worry,

because my process doesn't stop.

You can't kill my creativity,

you can't beak my pencil.

So I'm going to bed.

An enquiring mind is not something to mind

God Bless Google

The Book Of Humans

Seven shelves of lies bound in leather and skin

Billions of lives all recorded within

So many hearts, they're all fostering sin

And who is the judge when we are all kin ?

Dreamcatcher

I don't need a dreamcatcher

I put a notebook in my pillow,

and in the morning the pages

are filled with the poetry of sleep

scrawled in a strangers hand;

The Book Of Humans

Padme Khan

2000 Faces of Love and Hate

Duality & Choice

"If I asked you which you believed in the most, Love or Hate, what expression would I capture within this portrait?"

Tea for Dinner, Blood for Breakfast

Two Suns at Noon

Pearl Spektor Pays Respects

This is the poetry of sleep

Kill Me I Love You

She said,

"Come and join us please

on the corner selling pamphlets for fifty cents apiece

and please and thank you's,

and smile like you know the human heart like a book that's been read a thousand times"

I thought,

Kill me I love you

Kill me I love you

That's the mantra of the human heart

That's the language of my unconscious

Fuck You Modern Days

We've been hanging in the poets room

that languid place with the stale air

and the stuffy atmosphere of trying-too-hard

Our plaid has grown threadbare, our calluses boring

the coffee is old, the generally accepted confusion

isn't confusing anymore,

because we've all figured out the pattern

where there wasn't supposed to be one

And we're trying hard not to see it,

but our anti-uniforms aren't so anti

and the young ones look just like us

and we seem to be mocking ourselves in them more and more

What's old is new is old before it's new again

Maybe we should go naked

It seems time for a shift but to those who know,

the change in scenery is just an illusion

because the patterns repeat, ad naseum

ad nauseum

ad nauseum

ad nauseum

ad nauseum

We need the atom bomb.

I said that before.

Two

So that when my creativity passes the bottleneck of laziness,

it spurts in such a chaotic mess that

I become paralyzed and dumb

With this frustration comes that sure understanding

that we all need the atom bomb,

we all need to die now.

We all need a purge.

One

There's too much to say all at once,

even if I'm bound to this typewriter

or this pen, even if I'm chained to this desk,

there's too much to say all at once

and I no longer function

productively.

So I pour another drink and consume

the world through my eyes and ears,

immobilized.

I Never Finish

In between the lines you read to me

I hear the beating of your heart say

"Take me to the forest, take me to the forest"

As you read I fall asleep, my eyelids heavy,

my fingers warm and numb

Today - ∞

Today I found a dead snake under the porch. It was so dry and for a while I wondered if thirst could transcend that unfathomable barrier of mortality. So I buried it and poured a bucket of water over the fresh soil. I felt merciful or compassionate in some poetic sense, but later I decided that all I'd really left behind was a wet dead animal, buried in the ground.

*

Today I sent a letter to my grandmother. I'm twenty-one years old, she's eighty-something; I'd never done this before. The letter simply said, "Grandma, please don't die too soon. I have too many questions."

She died that afternoon.

A week later, I received a letter saying, "Sorry to disappoint you, but that's life."

*

Today I read a book I thought I'd never read before. I was wrong though. I've been reading that Bible for years.

*

Today I saw the sun and the moon share the sky, and then I saw the Big Bomb fall from it.

A wall of black one hundred feet high and dark as a mouth raced outwards from the centre.

That black mouth ate everything on its way to me. I smiled.

*

Wholesale

Human hearts, wholesale

Hollywood cleared the shelf

And now they'll sell them back to us

Eight dollar tickets at a time

But when you get yours

you'll notice that things aren't the same

The thing they called Romance

just makes you a creep

My Consuming Question

Where are the brilliant women?

Ilustrator

Illustrator,

lying on your bed, it's probably damp and stale down there,

and you're scratching away at something,

and I'm thinking to myself,

What's your story?

Who are you?

And in your head, one thousand feet above the city

scratching away at something still,

my pencil's snapped but yours remain unbroken

so I'll live a little longer

in your eyes as you lie calmly in your bed.

That Room

The room with the wing chair and the skin lamp,

the velvet curtain covering an obscene canvas

that room with the smell of embalming and stale forgiveness,

that room, your hideaway

You're in that room,

with a pearl handled letter opener in your hand,

and no letters

You're in the room with a sound like subterranean clockwork

Your room, your haven

The room with the whispering library, beautiful souls trapped in pages

Your room with the rose carpet stain, the perfect likeness

Your room with the raven, the cat

You need sunlight and the wind that will forget your past

And I need you with me at last

You've been in that room with

your third eye closed, and

I've been waiting too long

Delirious

Purple heart, virgin hands

Machine oil celebration

Chakra of Choice

Base of Honesty

Temple

Pillar

Slaughter lamb

Delight in walls, in paper

and safety too

but Home, with mother's cancer

and her knowing eyes

We don't need trains for tracks

we've got many feet

and strong young backs

Nostra Algia

When we were children

we had names for the summer, like

swimming, watermelon, running

O.I.S.S

Look, when they said

Overboard is sinking ship

We prayed for the dead

Overboard is sinking ship

Fight the angel tooth and claw

Overboard is sinking ship

Must obey the mortal law

Overboard is sinking ship

*Some of these words are [somewhat] borrowed from Amanda Higgins

Sad Flicker

She sat on the bus, all in blue,

something second hand with

worn platform sandals on her feet,

headphones in tangled hair,

talking to the window, and

Laughing occasionally in timid Mandarin,

twitching from time to time,

like the sad flicker

of an ancient lightbulb refusing to die

On the subway I sat where I could watch,

but I only got the back of her as if

she had no face to show

She sat, chin glued to the window's edge,

eyes wide, dreaming the waking life,

that of long time drug use

Then she left, that station

seeming as good as any other

But with the fraying of that woman,

you could hear the weird tweaker requiem

Love/Hate, Binary Like Your Painting

It's a hard hard thing for me to hate

harder than carrying water in my hands

It's a hard thing for me

to let myself tumble with that voice that says

"Hate her, hate her"

But I listen to my stomach's weight

I know that heavy hate

But at times I am an empty room

where curses fly off walls

Echoes in the hollow of my chest

And my mouth is a cave

I am lost in it

I hate you/I love you

I Think I Exist To Be Heard

I miss you telling me I'm good

I need that validation

Wash

As loud as a whisper

our hands tell the stories of our hearts

Stories of silicon disillusion

and two dimensional days

Fly away while you can

escaping this century

Hide, hide, hide away

from the heavy gut

Hide away from lazy

Hide from time

Hide from consequence

Hide from thine

As loud as a whisper

our tongues spell the song of extinction

As loud as a whisper

As sharp as a knife

Silent Heart

My heart is a sound

and it goes

Disclaimer

There are three things you should know about my story:

1. I can't ever decide where to begin. If I could, I would write an entire book of disclaimers, endless forwards, an interminable stream of author's notes, each more sudden, more urgent than the last. The only reader who finds this more aggravating than you, is me.

2. My book is about that one, singular purpose of my thinking existence - that which consumes me. Women; a memoir of gratification, and spiraling, frantic introspection. These stories of addiction and weakness, and moral instability are often pathetic upon examination - I feel pathetic writing it too. Which leads me to my 3rd point:

3. I often find myself suddenly realizing that, while everything matters, nothing matters. I find it quite difficult to complain about anything at great length, or explore the pathology of my lifestyle with any serious effort, when that which was before considered to be pathological, is suddenly regarded as harmless, unimportant, or benign.

Is this book simply an ill constructed sob story, designed to validate my neurotic exploration of self pity to be passed off as epic tragedy worthy of reading?

One Hundred

We're having visions you know,

something of the future, a taste of the present

Black holes shout from our arms,

the lips of modern disappointment begin to pout

We've forgotten how to cope, we were promised the Sun

The roses in my eyes have bloomed madly 

and seen love mingled with hate

Last night I dreamed I was swimming in a sea of 

cellular phones and God was made of plastic

I dreamed that a pair of hands would crush

the last white bird

A mob would come

One hundred years from now, we will say

Oil came, oil went

One hundred years from now we'll sleep under

new stars, new skin

Things will be very different,

One hundred years from now.

Trois

I fell in love with those triangle eyes,

those light triangles underneath,

that three sided heart,

the three lines in your palm.

Summer

Tell me to tell the trees,

to tell the secrets of the bees,

the honey waits for air and kisses,

wings and promises,

the grass it listens

to the sky and to the sun,

I've found my love, 

I've found my love.