Friday Night

I sat singing.

I sat singing free of torment
or joy,
bland dull and friendless.
I sang mutedly of acquaintances, relatives and neighbors.

Christ would come and sit on my windowsill,
his head cradled by Mother Mary.
And my head cradled by mine.

Void of light:
Men would whisper tone poems
and psalms-
their mouths aching from speedballs and mush;
but their jaws urged on by porcelain angels,
white ladies and smut.

Pointed tooth’d Magdalena would come (tunelessly) to fuck
in front of sisters and
sponsors.
And I would sing soundlessly,
watching myself
being watched.

City Sons and mascots
burnt as candles.
The wax of their bodies dripping into the alleyways and avenues,

like Spiritual blood running down
heathen streets.

We saw cops skipping town,
snuffing out police torches
with tongue-
moistened fingers.

And Fire!
Screamed out from every frigid window.

I sang straight not sleeping for five days before-
to get a full nights rest under jail fluorescents.
(while Hawaiian giants tempted my cousin from across the hall).

My cousin was not an apparition,
a distraction,
or a manifestation!

He was not that man just out of sight
behind my shoulder during seven day speed freaks.
It was I not he who wrote bitter essays
(disguised as love notes)
to the Pharisees.


(we) slurped stolen wines
drowning not only sorrows
but fears regrets and inhibitions.

And (we) piss streamed out the kitchen window
drizzling golden showers
on dirt lots and passersby.

And (we)
listened deaf to Children’s poems,
and (we) rambled intentionally
over (our) father’s enumeration of symptoms.

And (we)
spoke in soporific sonnets,
and all around (us)
would-be saviors
collapsed in deep sleep
on their respective
Josephs.

False fathers,
with virgin lips.

Shadows of the main road at dusk

Was I trying to build something in a past life?
Did I look at stone structures and threaten to burn them down?

The altar they built
4 miles north
of the city
is made of only sandstone and lime so that no
righteous flame could
ever lick its structure.

Set free your heathen slaves!

Let loose the fire that surrounded Shadrac
but refused to touch!

Look west to the land of ancient
indigenous fucks.

Cloak yourself in the flames
of satan’s furnace.

Keep the burning around you like a halo
and burn through
the sandy night.

The sheriff and the slave-holders
moved out into the dust bowl plains
to shoot wildly
into swarms of locust and burning pyres.

The sheriff shouting
and flashing his badge.

Your empty western homes have been reimagined,
and are now products of the industrial revolution!

Where is the anti-industrial progress?
what agrarian angel will come
to make our beds and promise light at the end of the tunnel of night?

When will our dust bowl morality
turn its head and eat
the Midwestern cities that have become
more delicious than useful?

Who dares speak out from the mind-numbing
weariness?

Stacks of paper and smoke build up high and dare to create monuments of themselves.
Another false revolution!

There is no more beautiful word
in any language.
Yet they took it
and subjugated it.
whipped it and
made it take their family name.

Those captains of control
who oversee the measuring and mass marketing
of childrens blankets
will not likely rest until those gilded stacks
of smoke and paper.
Have stars or angels at their peak
and speak of muted Christian celebration with their mass.

Wet him up then I'm swayze (or: An ode to Ron Toby)

It’s all been weird,
fucked up more or less.
Since B____ told me the story about the dead 8-year-old girl
in sunglasses
riding the subway.
That was around the same time the la came back,
like a gust of unwanted winter wind in April.

The dead girl with sunglasses bobbing with the shimmying train between two void-faced obesai...

I’m a doctor,
that girl was dead.

The fucking sunglasses
-probably pink plastic with dark square lenses-
the kind they give out free at credit unions for opening a checking account.

Her flaccid body slumping and rising with the jarring bumps of the train, and the black lensed oversized sunglasses, and her probably pale skin along with those skeezers who just dosed and then drugged that 7-year old boy and locked him in a closet thinking he was a spy, and the vomit that looked like sweet potatoes smeared on the panes of the glass tunnel that stretches over the freeway.

We need to get off of this train
right now.

All that paired with the eerie sounds and muffled laughter
coming from behind my roommate’s
locked door.
Along with the blade and the Canadian whiskey is making me feel
like everything is fucked.

Like we live in a world that eats children
where full-grown beasts draw borders in blood around their snow-white escalades,
-did I mention I saw that too?-
devour 7 and 8 year olds,
let their purile blood drip across the wrinkles
of their pock-marked
too-tan faces,
until they become too fat
and pedophilic,
and reach their hands down their gullets
to molest the salted flesh and then go too far and vomit up the day’s feast in splattering spurts of sweet-orange filling.

You just have to trust me right now,
I know you’re scared.

And I’m pretty sure some part of it is taped on security-cameras
or helicopter videos
and beamed back to my roommate.
And he watches the carnivores and laughs,
holding his hand
to his mouth.