idiocy of the ostentatious

She weasels past

in a disco shaded gallop,

dropping trou

but only in her mind.

New York's gone retro

for a wink in her honor;

she is wit beneath

the idiocy

of the ostentatious.

And yet she's howling mute,

rendered silent in her fury,

still locking horns

with seething demons in her head,

trapping an overpowering sense

of righteous wrong

left empty -

turning, bending, twisting

in on itself.

She felt her life flashing

between her eyes,

falling down into sickness

and up into the laundry hamper.

But still she's turning, bending, twisting

in on herself.

And still she's shaking, writhing, falling

onto her sword

of Damocles,

chased by a whiskey

with always the work

left to do.

Season's Greetings

The air stands heavy

and thick as mold -

though not nearly so inviting -

as a sweet December

squats rotting Saint Nick


midst a wind-blown snot-dusted ice sculpture called life.

It's Christmastime

for Charlie Brown

as Linus makes love to his blanket

and Lucy mixes cocktails

of Bourbon and Bacon

for Peppermint Patty

and nobody else.

The Puget Sound of Wayward Wasting

I walk down

hallways

of smoke and stucco,



my kicks scuffing

frayed braids

of thrift store bounty.

I float past

the ringing

of party lines calling,

through kitchens

caught avocado

and dining rooms

born singing silent.


I echo down

basements

through backyards to alleys,

then trip on

corner curbs

to vacant lots

even the plum trees scorn.


A gray splash

of rain drops,

melting my remembrance

toward the Puget Sound

of wayward wasting

here

but no less wasting away.

Memories, like the horror of my mind

My childhood memories

in the light

remain threadbare,

the core hiding hideous

in the muck

of my mind.

Still, they fracture

my senses broken

punched up from

those hidden bygones -

they illuminate

my present horrors

from down in

those dark recesses -

where I dare not follow

lest be consumed whole

and vanish into

the bad old past

for good.

Pub crawl in Oz down the Yellow Brick Road

Dad was scarecrow stubble,

all jaundiced meandering mumbles.

He didn't look much at people

those last few years,

staring off into space

at scabbed tidbits

of pleasant small talk crippled,

slack jawed all wrong.

Watergate remembrances

of Colgate on the leaking sink

and Terry Jacks on the transistor

drowning out Mom and Dad in a fester

of afternoon numbing,

drunk and drained of the blister

that was morning father shaking

on the living room couch,

dry heaving over Barbara Walters

or sometimes J.P. Patches

but never Captain Kangaroo.

Pops, with his steaming wake up cup

of hair o' the dog that ate him whole,

barking up the pieces

of our fractured family photo album,

burying the remnants

of our torn and frayed lives.

Trash Day Cometh, 1995

My refrigerator sparkles

with splashes of poison;

my trash can is bulging

with remnants of pleasure.

My toilet, it whispers

to me, empty from nothing;

my heartache keeps throbbing

to punk rock religion

or perhaps simply finally, to regret.

sunday funnies

The cold gun metal

pressed against my temple

is trying to tell me something,

perhaps.

Her razor soft warning

sliced into my longing

is worth a gun's chilled muzzle,

almost.

The acid washed Levis

wrapped around her leaving

are fading into the ether,

a ghost.

The empty bottles

of Grey Goose and Effexor

are dancing on the ceiling

of my dreams.

At least until the barrel

full of monkeys and munitions

has warmed to its calling

in a white hot flash of brilliant blue.

Falling

she grows aloof,

i fall afield;

she's calm serene,

i rage away.

an autumn sun

bonfires the sky.

october blues

melt yellow to orange,

a gorgeous nonsense,

where acid laced donuts

choke sad sacks lost

into the waxy white

winter to come.

The Throbbing Numb

My mind is awash

in the joyful filth of thought

until a wayward worry

scrubs it glassine clean.


I can't write my way

out of this spic 'n span,

hard as diamond

without the sparkle;

I can't think my way

clear of this sanitary muck,

a throb keeping time

to the beat of my breath.

----

Life for me

is but a raw nerve exposed,

torn asunder

lest stoned to stasis,

holding at bay

the fever and flavor,

baking in nothing

but the throbbing numb.

Almonds & Sulfur

the breeze died empty

on this autumn weekend,

set free to vanquish

into sunday funnies,

her short breath tart

of almonds and sulfur.

the night keeps edging

my reckoning to the sidelines,

for a while past echoes

until at last no longer

yet forever sadly yearning

for the comfort and the stupors

of a tanqueray morning

drained dry.

Distractions, Reactions and the Darkness of Sunday Night

Living is waiting to die,

the rest is just distraction.

Those of us who dip our toes

into the rip tide of addiction

simply thirst for a fortified diversion

from this elephant in the room.

Now wandering the desert of sobriety,

I keep my thoughts scattered down other avenues,

the scent of childhood permeating

my present tenses sour.

The stink eye of Dad's Camels

looks up from his bygone ashtray still,

in a staring contest with my mind's iris

through a cloud of ghostly smoke;

rising up from the 1970s,

blending into Mom's Alpine

menthol haze of yesteryear,

echoing past a boy's living room dying.

It's sadly rot gut putrid

as distractions go,

but there it is nonetheless:

hanging on,

gripping tight,

claws out.

Resolve

She burned cold

then broke down.

He turned south

then caught empty.

We came apart

then ached together.

We lost, naive;

then found resolve

hoping to err,

human as we were,

on the side of angels.

Summer Unbounded

Her melt into happiness

on the tip of my tongue

clots my bloodstream a river

of cappuccino steam

until a stroke of luck

cools me down



to a drip and a drop.

Our capillaries winded last past whimsy

with the rhythm and blues

of a gasping window AC unit

playing harmony to our ecstasy

as we wring sheets of sweat from the mattress,





safe for a moment

from a summer unbounded.

Gone Daddy Gone

A Coca Cola Coffin.

A Marblesque Bobble-headstone.

A Plexiglass Lava Lamp Urn

with Racing Stripes.

Some kind words,

or at least some kind of words.

Appeasement and appeals

to the gods and angels

that they welcome our loved one "home."

The rituals of a species

still early in their evolution.

We bury, we burn, we stuff.

We entomb and mummify

and jettison to the sea.

We conjure up fantastic scenarios

of reunited ghostly bliss

to quell that most primal of fears:

the absence of consciousness,

the disappearance of self.



What a horrific thought,

that something

- everything -

can in a quiet instant

become the void.

We think of that place

as a bottomless solitude,

ascribe emotions

to what is by definition their absence.

This is perhaps to me

the most merciful thing of all:

you're never around

anymore to deal

with what has happened to you.


You are gone, daddy.

Gone.

Cold Into Coffee

He hasn't the strength

to dream weary to his weakness

let alone the lift

to muscle out from his bygones.

She's only a tickle

in the lost recesses

of a mind but for that unkempt,

a psyche otherwise unmade.

The bedroom door

peels eaten, flakes forlorn

ground down by withering wanderlust

in the palm of its only handler.

The shower head bleeds

onto caulk-crusted porcelain.

Toweling off dawn's regret,

he faces the toothpaste, mirror and music

of another day.


Blending cold into the coffee as always.

Ode To Nancy Botwin

She sweetens the light

at the end of my tunnel,

leaking of mystery

caught wayward fantastic.

--

I open my fridge

seeking florescent solace

bleeding of boredom

and anti-depressants.

--

She comes once a week

in through liquid hot crystal

and lasts half an hour,

fading back into the ether.

--

I welcome her home

to my sunny delusions

then sour and sigh

amidst scenes of my sickness.

--

I am bathed in the maraschino

cherry of exhaustion

at half past tomorrow,

dull eyed with regret.

--

She's only a notion

but always my savior

if just 'til hiatus

when it dies of exposure.

--

Her wicked wide eye drops

to a promise born broken

in an eggshell of blues

with the yoke torn and running

--

like a nose choked with coke,

blowing out shards of horse shit

gummed to my optimism

like the sole of an unfortunate shoe.

Cookies and Damnation at Grandma's

Grandma was determined to save my soul from eternal damnation, a fate she'd already resigned to my parents. I'd have a wonderful time visiting on the weekends as a child, with her Norwegian cookies and her home's quiet nature, free of the smoke and drama permeating my own homestead at the time.  Wonderful that is, except when she'd tuck me into the guest bedroom and tell me a bedtime story.  It was too often a tale of demons and brimstone, of pitchforks and blood curdling screams that go on forever.  Satan ruled over everyone here and my folks were pinned to the coals for infinity with Lucifer's forked toes firmly ensnared 'round their necks.  My primal lizard brain soaked this shit in like a sponge and try as I did over the years with booze and coke - Beelzebub knows I underwent this method of treatment with gusto - and of late with psychiatry, I haven't been able to ring it back out.

Now this particular piece of dysfunction is minuscule when compared to the heaping helping of shit ol' Mom and Dad ladled into my psyche.  And unlike some of the things the folks visited upon me, Grandma's tales from the crypt were told with the best intentions.  You see, she had retreated deep into fundamentalist Christianity toward the end of her life after having lost her husband and son in the space of a few years time.  Grandma was suddenly alone save for an aloof daughter (my Mom) and went looking for any raft she thought might save her from drowning in this strange sea that was America.  Oh sure, she had other relatives around - a sister even - but it wasn't the same.

Grandma never felt comfortable here in the US, out of place and phase with a culture both too diverse and too fast for her, despite having lived in the relatively slow-paced, white-bread world that was and is Everett, Washington since arriving on these shores from her native Norway in 1929 with her husband and son in tow and pregnant with my mother.  She was woman not yet 30 when she first gazed upon this land and yet already well set in her ways.  She'd always been a "traditional" Norwegian, meaning a staunch and very conservative Lutheran.  She'd been brought up on a farm and didn't comprehend or approve of the pop-obsessed culture that dominated this country and mesmerized her children, particularly her daughter.  Her fun-loving husband was, in his way, fascinated with this culture as well so there was no commiserating with him on the matter.  She'd spoiled my mother as a child to the point that there was no hope of reaching out to her and receiving actual understanding or emotional support when she found herself a widowed sixty-something at the dawn of the 1960s.  She then lost her son to a heart attack in 1965 and was "on her own" in a very real way.

Grandma eventually married again, a neighbor, more out of loneliness than anything else.  But she gave her all in those last years - her heart and, yes, her soul - to the Jehovah's Witnesses and with it accumulated the Armageddon-laden baggage that such a belief packs.  Thus came the images of my roasting parents and the possibility that my sister and I might join them on the rotisserie should I not stand straight and fly right.  As such, whenever somebody waves a Watchtower on my stoop, I never fail to answer such a greeting with a hearty "Hail Satan!" before slamming the door shut in their beaming faces.  Well, I don't because I'm a wimp.  In fact, I often pretend to listen to their rantings before begging off after some imagined task they're keeping me from.  But I'm thinking it the whole while!

My time with Grandma was brief - she died of bone cancer when I was not yet 9 - and as I mentioned, almost completely positive save for this one thing.  Still, even as a fervent non-believer in any accepted theism - I've been thus since I was old enough to form an opinion on such matters - it's there, festering.  Nightmares of demons and terror.  I can't even watch movies like The Exorcist or The Omen lest I cower in fear for the next several weeks afterward.

I believe that whatever the great truth about reality, the universe, the multiverse, etc., that it's something far beyond our current capacity to understand and the odds that any group of people have guessed it right is stupendously small, especially when almost all of them believe it relates somehow to kings and angels and devils, good, evil, punishment and rewards, and all the things that seem very specific to a time and place long ago on our little old planet.  But that's just me.

Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite.

The Dyed In the Dermis Statue of Inky Naked Liberty

My father always had a lady on his arm and she was unfailingly naked. No, he was not a galavanting playboy or strip club devotee; rather, this was a tattoo that ran down his inner arm from elbow to wrist. It was one of the more visible, persistent reminders of the innumerable mistakes Dad had made while in the throes of alcoholic bliss. It was perhaps the single biggest source of embarrassment for the old man, who took to wearing long sleeve shirts at all times, even in the midst of a particularly noxious mid-August swelter. I'm guessing it was just too large to consider removal, at least with the means available back in the fifties and sixties when he might have been in the position to weigh such an option.

I never thought much of The Lady, and frankly don't even remember the details all that clearly. I think it adorned his right arm but maybe he had one on each; my addled flashbacks have been edited for sanity's sake and these bits must have been left on the cutting room floor. I do vaguely recall asking him about it as a toddler but the only really clear memories I've retained relative to this matter are the incessant threats my parents made as to just what they'd do to me if I mentioned "her" in front of others. The folks lived in terror of outsiders discovering dents in what they viewed as a lovingly crafted model of Leave-It-To-Beaverism. The truth is that dents were the least of this model's concerns when all that remained were gaping holes by the time the late 1960s rolled around, the ghosts of June, Ward, Wally and the Beaver flying off into the night in horror at being associated with our unique spin of familial dysfunction.

I think The Lady is the primary reason I never desired a tattoo of any sort and have never understood the appeal of body art in others, whether it be ink or piercings or like forms of self mutilation. In fact, I don't see the difference between a person with piercings or tattoos and the ragged razor scars of a cutter. Sure, there's an obvious difference in intent and the former might be more aesthetically pleasing than the latter; however, the psychology of intent can be many layered and not at all obvious to the conscious mind while aesthetics are, by definition, subjective.

A news recap this morning showing a group of Independence Day weekend revelers included a dude with what looked to be a very familiar tat running down the length of his Flexor digitorum and the hazy memories of Dad's ink-drawn Elke just sort of washed over me like a fog.

The 4th of July is often the time when my childhood remembrances come to the fore: it was my father's favorite holiday after Christmas and it is my mother's birthday. She'll be 82 tomorrow. When Mom was celebrating her 41st birthday, my cousin Jennie (my Mom's niece) gave birth to her daughter, Lisa (who, if my highly advanced math skills have calculated accurately, will herself be 41 tomorrow). Dad loved to buy and light off fireworks on our country's birthday and we did so each year until my Mom had her stroke in June of '72 and Dad took his final plunge into the bottle shortly thereafter, never to return again until his body bobbed to the surface for a toe-tagged gurney ride to the morgue a little over 5 years later. But prior to this slide into oblivion, I had a giddy anticipation of each Independence Day that was only bested by Santa's annual sleigh ride.

Where I grew up, "Safe & Sane" fireworks stands started popping up in June all over the town and we'd peruse the season's "new" offerings with excitement. Really, there wasn't much new year to year (sparklers and snakes intermixed with various pinwheels, rockets, and fiery cannons). No firecrackers or bottle rockets or M80s and the like. They were certainly available on the sly but Dad mostly stuck with the legal stuff. After the fireworks were expended and we were done running across the lawn with fists full of sparklers, finished watching the "snakes" melt into the sidewalk where'd they leave a stain lasting the rest of the summer, sick of going 'ooh' and 'ahh' at the pinwheels and sparkle rockets as Dad ignites their glory; after all that, we'd go to bed and wake up again into the usual drama that defined our lives outside of the spell of the 4th and Christmas (and, perhaps, for a few hours on Halloween). Thanksgiving sometimes dampened our dysfunction, but just as often accelerated it (sort of like a gasoline-based fire extinguisher, if their were such a beast).

The Lady on the Arm and 4th of July seem inexorably intwined, even if the random news clip hadn't jousted the Freudian gnome living on the European continent of my subconscious to change the reel of my yesterday-dreams to Scenes of Dad's Ink-stained Other Woman. I guess it's because pop did wear short sleeves while orchestrating the fireworks, likely because the fear of polyester melting into his skin outweighed that of the neighbors eyeballing his epidermis artwork.

In the end, when Dad was cremated, The Lady on the Arm went the way of the fireworks that freed her for an annual night unveiled. I guess it was her destiny.

Ooh, Ahh.

A Moment Saturday in the Summer of '70

Mom is gardening

in the summer sun out back,

smoking and probing

at what might one day be lettuce, parsley.




Inside, Dad's head bleeds sweat

through the couch cushions,

sweet stained remnants

of endless bourbon daydreams.




I am manning a lemonade stand

in the yard out front,

earning some coin

from kindhearted strangers,

though I'm the one drinking the Kool-Aid.



Sis is away with friends

trying to blot out homestead time bombs,

a normal teenage girl

trapped in the body of familial dysfunction,

trapped in the bailiwick of parental decay.


We are all in our own place,

frozen in a fevered fear of fate

not yet written but already carved in stone.

Broken Bell Bottom Blues

She was perfect

in every flaw.

He was hopeless

but looking up.

Just your average

sad sack couple

born of hard shell

fecal magnificence

festering around a chicken shit

suburban core.

This early morning quiet

remembrance

waxes my ears, sears my mind

silly.

Through it all

the sun still she rises

and the crows collect payment,

mockingly.

The Walmart Empire

finds its footing

even as our sad sacks fade

into avocado

deep pile purgatory,

their dancing days short-lived

yet so sour sweet.

Memorial Sap

Memorial tree sap pastes my car

until the garden hose and chamois sponge it clean.

If only memories could be vanquished

with a turn of the spicket, a touch of elbow grease.

Father bleeds into my mind's eye,

all indigo camel, jaundiced bottom shelf;

Mother's wheels grinding behind him,

all stink-eye pasty, acid tongued whiplash.

People say I have her nose and self pity;

I have his eyes and liver.

The spitting image, but it matters little.

Dissolving ghostly bygones

into the present tense,

I breath a sigh of relief half restrained

and go about my day,

these remembrances pasted still to my tomorrows.

The Ol' Neighborhood (Plum Crazy)

Summer, 1970.

Violent trees of violet plums

stand guard over our homes,

carpet bombing bitter fruit

'tween the sidewalk and street of my childhood hallucinations.

I climb the limbs of our abode's digestive sentry

and survey the neighborhood's blossoming decay:

Look, there's a pickled Arlene Warfield three doors down

making quiet sick into her flower bed with grace.

Look, here's Father clumsy fumbling toward the curb

'neath my purple camouflaged catbird seat

before mounting his trusty Mercury Comet,

the sonic blast of mufferless combustion

signifying another cattle drive underway

'cross suburban prairies to liquor store ecstasy.

Dad, the shakiest gun in the (North) West.

Dad, slow drawing double barreled bourbon.

Dad, outmatched by six shooter cirrhosis.

---

I pick off a plum and suck out the pulp,

amusing myself with malignant metaphors

drifting nowhere and serving scant purpose

until nature absconds me to the ground,

rushing my ass toward the family confessional

that is our only and blessed toilet.

I learned, that day, two stark truisms

which have never wavered through time and tribulation:

human beings can be quite dead while busy living

and plums are simply prunes in hydrating disguise.

Radio Hour

My parents were

performance artists,

acting out a menagerie

of dysfunction

some called their lives.

Mom was Norma Desmond

without the showbiz pedigree.

Or a kind of Martha

Virginia Woolf fraidy cat

fortified juicing bookworm.

Dad was Don Birnam

without the suit

and writer repartee.

Or maybe he was Willy Loman

but with only the shaking

and his sick left to sell.

I had a front row seat

to shows played always,

the Sanislavski method

taken to extreme.

When my eyes tired

of this gray grotesque,

I'd listen to their broadcast

through my room heating duct.


I then languished in repose

from my poster plastered cell,

a coffee-stained typewriter

pecking dreams out of my nightmares.

My childhood pet beside me

growing old, confused, and heavy;

bestowing unconditional love

beset by uncompromising fleas.

My eight track

stereo punk soundtrack

cracking snide on the death dance below me,

harmonizing with the rain on the roof.


Finally I collapsed on my bed, out of life

and chanced to glance over at Joe Strummer

screaming from the wall and through the speaker wire,

never growing up

yet both old before we aged.

Easy Joy

As a child,

there was such effortless joy:

riding an imaginary horse

with a banana seat saddle

and streamers for ears,

a hot water heater box

transformed into a fort,

the arrival of a traveling 

carnival come to town.

...

Now the daylight fades 

into diamond dust

and I take a breath

then turn away, unmoved.

----

I've learned so much,

grown so old.

--

Too wise now, it seems, for easy joy.

Twilight Twixt Time

My mother fights the British and swims the English Channel

drunk on jug wine, tipping off the love seat,

nose lost in the pages of the wonder of others.

I am not impressed.

----

My father grins on sour mash piss laughing gas

slick with sweat, writhing on the sofa,

staring dull eyed darkly up at our snot green shutters.

I am not amused.

----

I'm Schwinn spokes kicking down the neighborhood alleys,

banana seat running from cadavers still breathing,

buzzed on ten-cent candy bars and two-bit paper kites,

haunted by parental ghosts gone sour.

----

The half life of these remembrances

stretch to the end of me, fraying without decay;

blurry to begin with, those polyester yesteryears

nonetheless grip

a raw nerve end at the root of my mind,

tugging some ugly bygones

kicking and screaming into the now.

-----

An ice cream truck down the block is lost in song;

another Sunday in the twilight twixt time.

bowel obstructions (and other family roadwork)

I feel the weight of the weird

and the strength of sad weaklings

as I crawl through the alleys

of childhood dreams.

----


I arise to the noises

of garbagemen retching

and I yearn to be trashed

until numb to the numbskull I've been and become.

----

Yesterday's misery

is mailed to tomorrow

as time disappoints me

once and again.

----

I'm malaise bloomed incarnate

in Kafkaesque shit storms,

drenched in digestion

of booze battered lineage.

----

I'm swamped in the ethos

of failed adolescence,

bathed in the strychnine

of putting up appearances.

----

I'm the muck that I'm stuck in,

cut on shiny shards of family

through the deep shag of sick

and the avocado bygones

of disco sad psychosis,

shot past present tenses

that haunt all my tomorrows

like an out of style spectre

cursed with everlasting shame.