Discussions

Gone is the need

for patience. 

Now, he can simply 

wear the suit 

and walk in screaming - 

that usually leads 

the whole room 

to a satisfying uproar, 

and then he can sit back 

and wait 

for the high walls 

of propriety 

to crumble like shattered glass. 

Job done. 

Hierarchy

Another weekly work, this one sneaking in just under the wire. 

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At last, 

we've built

a sturdy foundation

on the bones and dust

of nothing but

a thousand years

of someone else's

progress. 

Now, 

pomp and ceremony

akin to celebration,

brandishing hellfire,

lauding

the most vicious 

enthusiasts' work

and children ascending

as angels - 

but is it divine?

A thousand eyes, wings,

and a reach long enough

to touch men's souls? 

The knowledge of things

previously unknown, 

riches forbidden

to the lessors?

We thought not - 

and yet, here,

with sarcastic flourish, 

we are. 

Ears before eyes

Hours have lived
and died
in the space of this whisper:
Something playful,
but also unfriendly,
the invitation to a fight.

Anger is the twang
of a breaking guitar string -
startling, abrasive, then gone;
all an act,
and the remembrance
of everything unnecessary.

So he dances like
leaves falling in autumn,
barely aware of himself,
and taken
by even the slightest twist
of an outgoing breeze.
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Song of the Day:
Shad, The Fool Pt 3 (Frame Of Mind)

What's still to come?

Light follows your feet out the door,
the briefest imprints left behind
like prints on the beach,
soon to disappear in the darkness
of another hungry wave's pressure.

Here we tumble in the surf,
heads under feet, arms uncontrollable,
deaf in the crashing calamity.
But still: The sweating anxiety,
the fear - what's still to come?

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Playing on my Spotify at this very moment:
Flying Lotus (ft. Kendrick), Never Catch Me
(I can't quit this music video.)

Never to return

The cover of darkness
proves a poor insulator -
the stiff cold of winter amplified
over the steady buzz of silence.
A train pulls from the station, resistant,
until the tether snaps. Freedom.

And at each stop on the line,
the world has been asleep
just a little while longer -
a string of infinitesimal time zones,
the difference of a few minutes
as precious as true love.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Audioslave, Like a Stone

The revenge

When you wonder
how I'll respond
when I escape,
remember that my escape
is response enough.
Remember that this life,
fermenting in mason jars,
is only a distillation
of the past
(but not those parts,
they'll hastily explain).
Remember
that when I end my days
in a room of my own,
though the world outside
will surely be aflame,
I will be alive,
and I will be the revenge.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Warpaint, Keep it Healthy (El-P remix)

The world is flat

I need to lie to you.
It's slithering in my veins,
boiling my blood like a poison,
clamoring to be drawn from a wound.
Hand me a fistful of rainwater
and let me tell you about the ocean.
Lend me a cup of fog and hear
wonders of a heaven too sweet
to be light years from real.
This is no sin, this lie -
it is the work of an artisan
and as such, its creation will
rend me as though
you set upon me with steel.
I'll lay here, gaping,
until a snake doctor
sews me back together,
her iridescent wings
blazing a new rainbow into the sand.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Menomena, Evil Bee

A living room

Each deep breath is only a draft,
a tickling of hairs on the backs of our necks,
a phantom insect crawling in circles.
Each laden word is only a fraying edge of the rug,
spooling off into its own consequences
and choking the vacuum we've earned -
nothing will come up clean, tonight.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
The Dodos, Confidence

Detach

A new worldview has been commissioned.
It will be a singular lens, an uninvited,
glaring eyeball into the convulsing soul
of the world - and what it sees will horrify us.

To ignore so many significant things,
it takes something equally paramount -
they can call it politics, or faith, or ideology.
Science has another name: the singularity.

Here is where we dump our unneeded,
here is where we discard our anchors and chains,
here is where everything we'd like to ignore
is swallowed up and lost to failing memory.

And so it is proven that each choice, so stark
and so significant, is just one twig on one branch
of one thick arm on the largest of all trees:
Zoom out and see for yourself how small you are.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Lucius, Turn It Around

Better days

Herein lie the ashes of a memory,
carried by hearsay and worn pencils,
borne in fading notebooks and tattered journals.

See it now, spilled out and scattered.
See it now, huddled in the corner of the room,
nervous, sweating through its clothes.

See it now, angry and clouding,
bursting to and fro across the state -
an insatiable dervish of discontent.

See it now, exhausted and defeated,
panting against the side of a brick building,
breathing itself in and out, in and out.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Jake Bugg, There's A Beast and We All Feed It

We've been profound

I've sent you directions
to the nearest watering hole.
Meet me there at ten -
we'll take three random thoughts,
throw them together
and call the splash a poem,
the ripples a manifesto,
and keep the stray droplets
as tearful, heartfelt memoirs.
When our glasses hold
nothing but a breath of smoke,
order another round and escape
without ever paying our bill.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Big K.R.I.T., R.E.M.

There is a saying in another language

There is a saying in another language
and it is beautiful to hear, the way
the syllables seem to drift aimlessly
like leaves being swept away
in the torrent of a swollen autumn river,
the rain long since fallen,
but the scent of nature strong and pure.

There is a saying in another language
and it is beautiful to hear, though it is
somewhat difficult to translate.
We have worked tirelessly
to uncover the hidden meanings and
have found, very disappointingly,
that now it is just dry, old, English words.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Oscar Isaac, Fare Thee Well

Latency

I've been murdered
and every step is fire,
treading on
brand new asphalt
in the Grand Canyon.

All I want now is
a solid workout -
push-ups until my arms
no longer function,
until the only movement

I can manage is
a feeble thumbs up,
enough to tell
the forlorn paramedic
I forgive his lateness.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Xavier Rudd, Messages

On the edge of a knife

Oxygen was only life
until some idiot
introduced it to jet fuel.
Now it is combustion,
a great trigger
waiting to be pulled
as it eases, quietly,
in and out of your lungs,
the breath of millions
clutched by a breeze.
And all it will take
is for one junkie
to scratch that itch,
turn that key,
press that button,
light that biggest match,
and what was life
will all be ruined -
will all be set to burn.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Jamie N Commons, Wish You Were Here

You won't even know I'm gone

painting by Adam Lupton

The chair next to you will still be full,
another body and a different mind,

a wire that stretched out to trip you,
trick you and keep you captivated

even though the future is impossible.
The waves that pulse through your brain

tell you things you don't want to hear -
things you can't bear to know are true -

the rules to a game you could never win
once the deck has been stacked so high.

And every day apart will feel empty,
and every day together will be worse,

a choice between pulling the arrow out
and letting it stay, blood and skin festering,

the phone ringing nightly - distant humming
of molecules as the temperature drops,

and the nightly summer rains will start snowing,
and the cold could snap July clean in half.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Blu, Vanity

On flights of arrows, sharper than we'd been led to believe

painting by Brad Phillips

Romance is not a
car crash, but a natural
disaster - you seep
into my brain and
poison all the ground,

and when poured into
the form of a cigarette,
you would be sweeter
than nicotine, but
just as cancerous.
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From the most recent decomP, an excellent poem from Will Arbery.

And here, my friend Zach absolutely kills it.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Skyzoo, The Definitive Prayer

Range

photo by Nicole Hunziker (check her feed - absolutely gorgeous)

Where is the chance meeting?
Two people on a train
and they couldn't be farther apart.
That blank space, mere inches,
a filth of fog and floating particles,
something about tension and
the dry heat of emptiness.

Hope is laid like bricks, and
one loose foothold would ruin
the entire avenue - a gust of
cold wind, so cold it hurts
in the spaces between our teeth,
so harsh it brings down the
entire mountain on our heads.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Shad, Comprimise

The Old South

Time has been melting,
just as Dali painted it,
and somehow our customs
have maintained solidity.
Our surroundings, though,
are no less surreal,
and we decry change
every day - in large groups.
It's the lure of new culture,
the destructive urge
to progress, to make new,
to fix what isn't broken.

We are the opposite
of amorphous, like
how the Spaniard made
an angular, metallic Newton. 
Unlike the scientist, though,
no holes in our head,
no holes in our chest,
nowhere for tolerance
to filter through and grow.
So we've built anew
the Old South, as current
in the 21st as in the 19th.
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Quite a story from Emma Smith-Stevens on Wigleaf.

Another from Wigleaf - Edward Mullany writes a great short.

Leonard P. Wilson is productive, lately. This one is especially good.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Shad, Remember to Remember

Burden of proof

Investigators
respond immediately;
their analysis is
abrupt and callous.
No difference,
they conclude, between
the bullet that killed him
and the one that missed -
simply a matter
of forced perspective.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
InI, Step Up

Manipulator/Squanderer

[The Greeks] bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language, the word enthusiasm - en theos - a god within.
- Louis Pasteur

Deconstruct a mind.
Find only a mess of
melted ice cream and
the myriad species of
ants that crawl over it.
What real sustenance
might they find there?

We remember being
a wasted construct -
we remember that it's
rolled up sweatpants;
we remember that it's
angrily burning insects
with a magnifying glass.

We remember that it's
rolling joints in receipts
at four in the morning
and watching the sun
burn through early haze.
We remember that it's
power, pure and evil.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Arcade Fire, Reflektor