the frozen muddy

She is a whisper

of dawn

at midnight,

a sharp breath

of clarity

born.


I dream of nothing

but blackouts

and madness,

she is the promise

of morning

come dawn.

--

She is a figment

of my

exhausted pointless,

the last filament

of desperation's

hope

with daydreams of nothing

but delirium's

coitus,

disappearing

into shit storms

of shimmering sleet.

Damaged

down South Street's

filthy drifts devoid,

she is gone.

Leaving nothing behind

but the frozen muddy.

everlasting delirium shakes

dripping colors
of sunburned regrets
bleed through my dreams at night,
chased by daylight nightmares
of stumbling stasis
draped down in corporate ruminations
of my albatross.
--



she's always just off-camera,
gone from lost thoughts
out the corner of my eye,
a goth ghost
fondly remembered,
drifting toward existence
only after leaving me behind.
--
meanwhile, foreboding parties
of social grace failings
cut me screaming mute,
as though to peel away
the peptic perspiration
of conversations gone awry,
hemorrhaging reflux like museum wax figures melting.
--
i cling to my precious precipice,
balanced between the glory and the gored,
with my spiritual stupidity
up crevices divine,
twitching 'longing after' glances -
down toward echoes of elation -
at the normalcy i envy ...
--
... wandering giddy
into the warmed over death
of everlasting delirium shakes,
dissolving into the infinite past tenses
of hallucinating happiness,
shooting up idyllic confabulations
laced with imaginary days of yore.

plumbing supply chain blues

My father danced

from the gallows of life,

a Don Draper swinger

gone to advertising seed.

Should you find yourself in need

of plumbing supplies

or second hand cirrosis

and can wait out a Strand Hotel

bender or two,

come on down to North Everett cira 1969

and darken our door -

my daddy-o, he can oblige;

this hep cat pappy,

with his dad gone mad skills.

Sweet sounds of sickness

and Aqua Velva whiskey fragrance,

deep thrusts of indigestion

and tortured circumspect;

the fury weighed heavy

on this slightly animated corpse

but he'd be glad to help you out

for just a taste

of formaldehyde distilled.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Final Peel (Dreamland Fog)

She peels my mind

like a grape out of season,

keeping the platitudes

from the reach of my mouth.

Compulsively itchy,

she's a mammoth wooly blanket,

stinking of casinos

and new money dung.

I remain ever clear

through the forest of my anger,

just a slick twist unstapled

yet hard wired to my fear.

Begging the fog,

"Please masquerade my confabulations!"

And coax me gently

from the raincoat jello shakes.

Blur me resolute

and absolutely fabulous

with delusions of Disney

painting shut my Looney Tunes.

I need the fog of dreamland

when my furniture finally passes;

my best friend, my chair,

of malignant bad posture.

I need the fog of dreamland

when the night keeps its promises

of smoldering loneliness

even television can't consume.

With my gills gone gray on grime,

the fog drifts me asunder

coating my mind's eye

to a soft focus rose.

Peptic, vaguely pompous,

my fog frees me from the vanquished,

as even the grotesque flee,

making sick at my sight.

I share with them their nausea,

I am stillborn of their nausea,

I am master of their nausea

embodying its essence,

while watching my entrails

twist in the wind.

Of Sal Bass and Other Concerns

I'm colder than a February

salmon out of season,

aching for her warm caress

to fold me into slumberland.

The rain runs down the periphery

of the cracks within my conscience,

a chill and wet I've known too well

without umbrella or galoshes.

April looms across the damp

of March distended and corroded;

teasing, loving, sour sarcastic,

she drains me for the springtime thaw.

Yet still distant sirens

splash curbside vendors

struggling for dominance

in city scape paintings.

The perpetual motion

of life lived elsewhere,

contrasts with the rigor

of my hardened self portrait.

The colors run

down the easel,

frightful from me

until I'm translucent gone.

Real, real gone.

Bee Stung Sensible

She's all frost blonde bee stung lips

and half frivolous shoes,

swaying, tripping, on the nod,

settling into my ghost horizon.

She whispers sour and warm

to my sweet icy edges,

contemplating a tender burn

of steely wool failings.

-----

The subway takes me back downtown,

she follows drifting on a tide

of corporate sweat

from the workaday bodies

stacked like cordwood on the F train.

-----

Cupid creeps stalking his prey

on Bowery north of Houston,

writing Valentine's Day poems

on the back of dead band flyers,

torn off telephone poles

and abandoned holy shrines,

blown haunting down Bleeker

after the spectre of Joey Ramone.

I toast them righteous

with a goblet full of glass,

in the end bloody doomed

to shit out the shards

into tenement toilets

of artists unbowed.

-----

Side stepped sick to my soul

down the alleyways of promise

past a rain tickled insolence

free of ethics and ideals,

I taste sulfur and circumstance

and the cyanide of seekers,

when all along she's merely bleached,

free of stingers and the stung:

tied off,

pushing a hot shot

into her hell bound panic;

surfing plasma,

left to fade.

Ice

Encased in a February

labyrinth of ice,

my spastic crazy chipping

at the melting warmth beyond.

I haunt my flash frozen

nightmarish winter dream,

a ghost of roads not taken,

a spineless spectre of bloodless flesh.

My boyhood filled with climbing trees

and kites strung taut against the sky,

I grew up to something else unsaid;

ground down to something less unseen.

-----

The ambiance of emergency

room chaos pumping out my stomach,

fruit of concrete glassine dances

down back alley homemade drugstores.

I'm out of phase with time and place,

wobbly on the hospital gurney,

until I take my blinders off

of ambulatory sanity

and drop back into luminescent

summers running through the sprinkler,

winters sledding, snow fort battles,

drunken, choking smoke haze household,

boozed and battered fish and chips

and cookie dough raw as the nerve endings

I gnaw on.

And on.

And on.

The Drifting Fade

I'm blind to the brewing

of the great unwashed

though I am counted among them

in circles I avoid.

Jacked on coke,

candy and bile

and a gargantuan weakness

weathering time and tidal tears.

-----

I'm railing rancor incandescent

at myself in unseen mirrors

reflecting my mind's eye

glaring back at me unforgiven.

Cracked and caked in piss stained

crimson gold and peeling

nicotine yellowy ceiling - walls - frayed,

unwanted and half betrayed,

at the feet of plaster knick-knack figurines,

arms askew, chipped and fractured.

Ghosts of my childhood,

haunted and haunting,

clotted from waiting

for me to arrive at some kind of solace,

gargling flesh and blood with lost animation,

vomiting memories of paternal delirium.

-----

My seismic hungry

licks all the CD cases clean;

my perpetual panic

tears apart the couch for crumbs;

my inner chickenshit

grips the bedsheets slick with sweat

soaked sweet

from the gin and juice

of a thousand drinks gone by.

-----

Summer some day is

a distant light from here,

the drifting fade.

-----

Blistering angst cuts

on a rage lost in thought,

the angry call.

-----

The mind blends to nonsense,

blessed chewing on my nerves,

the peptic turn.

-----

My wisdom's stillborn stupid

with an instinct for fear

and guile and guilt.

It's what I have and what I am:

the drifting, shivering, sanctifying fade

-----

Lucid Lacerations

I suffer an open wound somewhere in my being,

ground into glass, lacerating lucidity.

Down supermarket aisles dull-eyed and aching

as daily endless offices spill into vacant villains

like sloven doped up stooges running roughshod unrelenting.

-----

Lactose intolerant demons climb

from intestine to my brain stem, driving

incandescent fever visions of SEPTA trolley greasy wheels

where sickly souls go diving into

muddy puddle storm drains unwanted and unseen.

-----

A mad man is simply he

who's bled the gauze of avarice from his eyes;

is simply she

who's finally broken her baggage, tossing sad to the wind.

Oh how free the lunatic fringe truly is,

straitjacket laced clozapine blues not withstanding.

-----

Alas, I'm infinitely sound of mind in all the wrong ways

despite the malpractice I preach

alone to my congregation of dying furniture and home electronics;

this will be forgiven, I pray,

lest a yard sale see them banished as inanimate nonbelievers.

And through the heart of every

never quite psychotic night,

a sleepless dancing cavalcade haunts my graceful failures.

Or is it simply failed grace they taunt to all but tearing numb?

-----

Through it all I smile past teeth

ground down from caramel caffeine jitters,

count my lucky stars for what I have,

and vow again this year

to find out just what that might be.

-----

Unless, that is, there's something

especially good on the tube.

Next year then?

For sure.

Repugnant Beauty

A sweet stench

of snowflake

wafts off rivers

icing slowly.

January lifts

light as lonely,

settles in

soft as Sunday,

its beauty

so repugnant

from the outside

looking in.

New Year

Existence is a tingle, an itch,

a silly, persistence cacophony.

Too often, life is but waiting for itself,

reeking of recursive regret,

the lonely eying 'if only' in jealous frozen fury.

*****

I'm standing mid December

on a breeze blown bitter Sunday,

contemplating New Year,

with a gimpy psyche broken.

*****

Sweet sweat of horror

creeps needles up my spine.

Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,

drifting snow cold through my mind.

*****

Sweet twist of sadness

falls forlorn down my back.

Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings,

as life shoots up the dropper's neck.

*****

Auld Lang Syne is everywhere muddled,

toward resolutions torn asunder,

as Chinese New Year looms to catch them,

a safety net through January

until the dragons dance.

*****

And after all the promises

melt into March,

she's still softly sour

but not bittersweet,

caught in a storm

of nerve ends dying

caught in that place twixt

self loathing and writhing

in the New Year.