Offend me, Jesus!

That’s right you pussy son of a bitch,

don’t fuck around with any faggot P.C.

pidgin, doesn’t the motherfucking shock

at least resemble truth somewhere along

the line? Maybe the truth is we were

damned to original sin the first time some

cunt cocksucker ever said nigger. No, don’t

blame it on the language, we’ve been

vivisected for millennia of kikes and dykes,

since slope was just an obstacle and

chink was still a weak point, and they

persist as such in a way, but don’t, don’t you

motherfucker act like cutting all this

bullshit out of the jargon is enough, you

avant-garde mewling asshole. Take a sharper

tool, go for the whoreson’s throat, my mind,

your mind, and dig it out until your vision

catches just one raw and bloody color, red

rainbow, but you better be ready, ready

for pain like this, motherfucker, ready to feel

it sting and bite as initials and symbols and

bleeps and substitutions, ready to learn

just how original your sin really is, ready to

repent, to pull it from your heart, glistening.

Señor Alvarez

I been outta prison bout four year now,

and son, you look downtrodden in that

special sitting-next-to-Señor-Alvarez-

in-traffic-court-makes-me-uncomfortable

sorta way I seen the last few times

I burrowed into this cement, and that’s

a fuckin’ laugh riot, boy, because you

don’t even know what it feels like to be

in a real courtroom, you probably ain’t

even got hair on your cojones yet, boy,

but regardless I know you haven’t stared

down wolves like your friend Señor Alvarez,

no no, taking “The People of North Carolina

vs. Señor fucking Alvarez” as seriously as

you can while you trying to scratch both

of your arms off and wear them around your

neck on a chain, well, son, you gonna fuckin’

make eye contact or what, you gonna stare

down the wolf, boy, they’re calling your name,

boy, the People vs. you, and remember, they

mean to kill you if they can, boy, you tell ’em

el lobo Señor Alvarez fuckin’ sent you, they’re

calling your name boy, remember, remember,

remember me.

The usurpation of Bob Rasa

Oh Bob Rasa, saint of the clean slate,

I have seen you muse on truth from

another dimension, and I want you back.

We diverged at birth, you see, identical

astral fetuses of this warm, amniotic plot

arc, and now, each choice compounds

the distance between us, greens your

grass with time and envy. Be bolder still,

imagine there really is a heaven, imagine

the weight of all your conjoined phantoms,

born of crossroads, dinner choices, minutes

difference in departure. You have stolen my

heaven, Bob Rasa, and I dare to take it back.

Do you hear my voice calling to you through

sleep, reminding you (so vivid, impossible!)

of past lives replete with friends and lovers

of the erst? Vacate, Bob Rasa. Leave behind

this stone depression for the impossibility

of “could have been” drawn in thick blue

van Gogh brushstrokes. Even Orpheus never

realized the true tragedy of looking back: dispel

the smoke, see me assume the throne you so

gleefully abdicate, see me scent the faint perfume

of sweet pomegranate on your lost queen’s neck.

 

https://missiontomercury.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/the-lonesome-death-of-bob-rasa/

Real Housewives of Mars

Girl, this shit is fundamental,

this shit is universal, we all

be Gods of war no matter what

county you bitches be in. Bitch,

I encircle my eyes with iron oxide

and cool liquid glass to give you

the stare you deserve. Girl, you

call us real cause we be real, time

you learnt about the outer space

of painkillers and mimosas. Bitch,

men may be from Mars originally,

but we be red red red raging red,

we do it right, we make it perfect

and spherical every week at nine.

Us creative types

“Certainly not, he merely imitates”

~Plato

 

Us creative types incubate all day.

Us creative types real cool.

Us creative types walk on papier-mâché veneer.

Us creative types brains like slow cooker pulled pork sammies.

Us creative types paint tunnels on the cliff face.

Us creative types self-congratulate and self-immolate.

Us creative types call it oleo.

Us creative types masturbate all day.

Us creative types got a screenplay.

Us creative types got a Crock-Pot.

Us creative types get by with a little help from our Franz.

Us creative types walk on Vermeer.

Us creative types call it exhale.

Us creative types self-flagellate.

Us creative types want somebody to love.

Us creative types paint tunnels on our faces.

Us creative types need somebody to pretend.

Piper’s Pit

“Rowdy Roddy cuts his locks, but don’t worry, woman, he’s still a fox.”

 

Lemme learn you about some good

old-fashioned highland conflict resolution,

italic characters ripped from the borders

of your American nightmare. The pipes

scream and flail without direction, but

they always hunger for blood in celluloid

magenta and blue. This is what happens

when the words of the heel make their

own angular tracks. You ain’t the first

son of a bitch to wake up out of their

dream. My power is the poisoned edge

of the double-entendre, forged to cause

war, to destroy. Bury me, please, in a field

of tropical fruit, bananas and coconuts,

rife with the untamed relief of the offensive.

Remember me, please, as a man who was

just as real as you needed, and just as fake.

 

Sick Boy

Sick boy, phlegmatic in your humble

disregard for the whirl, will your eyes

crust shut against the war?

 

Sick boy, stormy in your handy quiver,

a body that threatens to dissemble with

rosy cheeks, will you be my antonym?

 

Sick boy, fervid with eyes that glow out

of the subterrain, so much life left, such

spleen, such gall, and will the healers

dare to call you fluke?

 

Sick boy, vitreous and molten, you are

the one who smiles like ashes, and yet,

will you hold my hand and make me less

afraid?

Repulse me, Jesus!

— Jiminy Crab Cakes, what in the name

of all that is good and, like, you know,

fucking holy is that thing?

 

 

— It’s, ah, looking right at me, the kind

of stare that lays bare ones innermost

conviction that Descartes was full

of shit, that we need better proof to

argue our existence on a world that

could produce this, ah, thing that

is currently giving me the willies.

 

 

— A fucking cicada? You think it’s a

fucking cicada? Why don’t you come

look at it? It’s got these like, oh God,

are those veins coursing up and down

its flanks as it lazily kicks one segmented

leg in the air? Those are firehoses, deep

sea oil pipelines, autobahns engorged

with sticky black traffic.

 

 

— I’m not going to, ah, touch it.

 

 

— Ugh. It’s like squinting at me somehow.

I can’t smell it, but I’m confident that if I

moved my face closer, it would reek like

the tomb. I find myself inevitably doubting

the awkward, fumbling advances of those

who insist on Nature’s master design plan

coming from some sort of creative intelligence.

 

 

— Or if it did, he/she was having one hell of an off day.

 

 

— FUCKING A, LET ME BACK IN THE CAR!

 

 

— I’m the coward? I’m the coward?

Did you see it fly at me just then? Miss

Stay-in-the-goddamn-Datsun-and-watch

is forced to conclude that I am the coward

in this relationship from her lofty perch.

 

 

— Great.

 

 

— You know, I really think that may

actually have been a cicada.

Thinner

Take two of these and become

a well-oiled nothing, racing to

paint the environment bloody,

assimilate the world, cover

it with your essence that oozes

out of every caldera, every pore

and vent and orifice dripping,

try to remember, remember

two times one half of thirty

every meal with a glass of

pulpy orange juice, and when

you inevitably overdose, leak

out into a smear on the asphault,

well, realize, dear one, that you

can never be truly memorable

until you have evaporated from

this shimmering black mirage.

Space Shit

If this were a world more real than the one

your two tank-treaded boots raise dust in,

well, you might find that the truest reward

for your hubris is nothing more than ironic

retribution of the most sinister variety. Think

through your search for God in a particle

of molasses, and you might realize that mass

is the greatest gift of all, mass that allows

you to focus your energy in one (x,y) point,

thinking, screwing, drinking boilermakers

as cheap as you can possibly find. Beware

this reductionism, these claws that shred so

you may watch the embers dance like fairies

above the bonfire and adore their beauty. You

might almost wish for retribution, for something

greater, if only to free you from this horrifying

responsibility, this glowing, beating, knowledge.

medical school lesson 9

or, “Death to Videodrome, long live the new flesh!”

 

now there is so much truth

it has taken on its own life

so much truth out there it

exercises its own unique

brand of body horror slicing

through my ancient logical signs

and definitions and replacing

them with syndromes disorders

symptoms that now I have

to live up to and defy my very

emotional existence to live

up to the condition well that old

joke ha ha son you’ve caught

the human condition well all

this truth is clouding reality in

a scary way by now and I don’t

know what I got anymore I just

know it’s new and changing and

mutating all the time it’s the human

condition it’s malignant growing

all the time metastasizing to my

innermost heart my secret soul

Il brutto

Once upon a time in the west,

I was fool enough to believe Him

when He said the choice was mine,

each man contains the three points

of the triangle, and all he must do

is set the device a-spinning through

its six chambers, stopping it with

a sure hand and a still heart.

 

Now, you see, my shameful genetics

have eroded me to stooping, spurred

bones, free only in imagination, for

when you see the winking vacancy

of the barrel with a face like mine

behind it, well, the sneer is beyond

my power to choose, my mouth will

always contain rot, and somehow,

no matter how fast I draw, your fears

of my purpose are always unholstered first.

Low Places

After she leaves for good, the excavators

will work with even greater ferocity, excited

by their first scent of dark, jugular oil.

 

Razor tools will fumble blindly in the dark,

searching for the fading ruby glow, lost

amongst the veins of rich, breathing

mahogany that only a bitter nose of

whiskey competes with in the lungs.

 

Once the first scars are weeping across

the earth, the only way to make them go

away is to dig down everything around them,

deep to that hungry inner Triassic soil–

 

–it’s the only way the foreman is willing to try, at least.

The Home Place

Who says there’s no sense of humor

in these lawyer-ridden fumigation circus

tents? The paranoiac knows better

than the rest of us, but I would be lying

if I claimed not to see the beady, nefarious

intelligence of these unseen arachnodactyl

hands, stroking bearded chins until erosion

renders them prepubescent. Five senses

add up to a playground of heartbreaking

half-realized memories to pull the wings

from. You see, They lure you onto these

streets with the smell of beer and floral

hand moisturizer, keep you there with

a single cut and twist, rendering one-

sided strips of infinity that would raise

the gorge of the most fiercely dogmatic

mathematician. Have pity, Dr. Mobius

whines! That said, by all means, keep

coming back, keep driving by the same

mailboxes and rusting basketball hoops.

It will change, detail by tiny detail, the toy

dogs speciating into wolves, their barks

too easily mistaken for laughs as your

drunken cognition tries to resolve these

two overlapping worlds. Recall: for some

knots, there is no recourse but the sword.

Incidental Eye Contact

Oh no, no no no, this was not some sort of desperate salvo,

not that I have never made attempts of this sort in the past,

locking eyes across the frigid wasteland, but this is not one

of them, I like to think my naivete has gone the way of my

regular use of colored pencils and Mountain Dew.

 

Oh no, no no no, this time I just looked up because the airport

intercom went off with a clear directional origin behind your head,

call it instinct, an urgent human need to visually interface with

these gods that address, tell us our silver Toyotas are sleeping

with their eyes open.

 

Oh no, no no no, this one was just me checking to see if you

had noticed the last two, and since you clearly did, I’ll just

look away quickly now.

 

Oh no, no no no, but now that I think about it, you really are

quite the looker.

The other half

Oh my dear Jane, to see you gaze

upon these creatures with such well-

composed benevolence does my poor

old heart some good indeed, orders my broken

boards into a shantytown full of interesting

corners and smells, and to think they

actually live here, who needs a Candyman

Candyman Candyman when the contours

are so sharp to begin with, it makes one

wonder if they can understand the elements

of our higher world, things like love and Home

Depot, you know, I bet somewhere primal

we all truly do speak the same language,

you know, it intrigues, excites, but better

still that we are only here as tourists, visitors,

that soon we will return to our home, remembering,

imagining, feeling our hearts race and dive

as our sickly knowledge fades to sepia.

Spiders rhyme

Your stilted free verse tribulations

have never had the legs to explain

all the tactile, tender titillations

in the eight-step pizzicato quatrain

that shivers down your spine. Tear

out the pages trying to fit it all in time,

but I’ve watched their legs echo near

and far, and somehow spiders rhyme

no matter what poet tries to watch

their motion. A consensus is achieved

no matter how you must abuse and add syllables to your line to vaguely match

this desire of those few who still believe

that words so consciously arranged,

oh so coyly planned with preternatural pep,

might dance a darkly sensual, deranged

step step step step step step step step

The lonesome death of Bob Rasa

Please, theorize until your puzzler

is sore, imagine, as Lennon instructs,

there’s no heaven, at least not as you

picture it with the clouds and the ice

cream, and the gratuitous unrestrained

sex all day. Perhaps, Bob Rasa, it is born

out of your flaws, out of each time you

fell, you ordered the wrong latte, said

the wrong thing, married the wrong

woman (don’t take this badly, she’s

a lovely girl, really). Does paradise

spring forth, land of exclusion, of what

if, of a perfectly realized life? The glamour

of the lie is what has attracted so many,

but even now, you feel its presence, don’t

you? The ache of possibilities. You might

say, and this is only theory, that the only

way to know for sure would be to wipe

the slate clean, to start over. To try again.

This lonely streetlight

He fails to grasp the overall concept,

a shining, hungry will-o-wisp down

the empty avenue, could be a few feet,

could be a mile, but he is the yellow

taste of licking the inside of a bottlecap,

he is alone, yes, the selfish one will always

be alone, casting light only to give himself

a better view, to flick a dramatic reflection

off the mugger’s naked blade with a violin’s

sweep, beckoning, begging to make any

whose eyes dare to venture close enough into

fervent knotted dancers, then silhouettes,

then suggestions, then nothing at all.

Sexual Habits of the Adèlie Penguin

Deviants, deeeeeeviants, like say it just right

and it needs no definition, the signified wraps

its legs around the icy sign as it dares to bury

itself in any open grave, like deviants, like

deviance, like devious, like the word itself

is the line drawn in the snow over which

toes tenderly tease their way, like those

beady little eyes in that white ring are full

of accusation, like by observing them I am

the deviant, but no, you frigid little purveyors

of kink, you dastardly buttfucking seabirds,

offend me in your native glacial climes, yes,

and the avalanche will come, strong and rigid

with retribution and spittle, as long as you

know how to read into it, ride it into the ocean.

Confucius say: movement 4

Dear Confucius:

Sometimes I just want to lie in the dirt

and smoke some excellent chronic and

listen to Bob Dylan and sort of like twitch

a little bit every so often such that passing

beasts will know I am still alive. Tell my

mom to stop worrying about me.

 

Toking Wildly in Tulsa

 

TWIT: I have heard it said that poetry is found

not only in the sunlight’s reflection off the obol

in your grandfather’s passive, wordless mouth,

but also in the flight of the salmon upstream.

Also, here is my phone number if you want to

get high as shit with me and discuss social justice.

[redacted]

 

Dear Confucius:

I consistently masturbate fifteen to twenty-two

times a day, on each occasion thinking of a different

James Bond girl. So, does the original Casino

Royale count for these purposes?

 

Bad-Ass Snake Tamer Around Raleigh-Durham

 

BASTARD: Never in waking, for even as the heart is so

flighty and full of life, no more held in one’s hand than

sunrise or the nervous tears of anticipation of the chrysalis,

it is also, so they say, substantially less prone to chafing.

The argument

You stand at this frontier between

the logical connections of your mind

and your heart’s caged, kicked mongrel,

lashing out for the joyous aerosolized

flavor of warm red copper. This is the land

of the weird and beautiful, shimmering

amber life force audacious, daring

against stern crossed iron forearms

to leak, to escape through the pores

and crevices, hot and wild. The surgeon’s

pitiful crostic of staples can only do so

much, mounted against this inevitable

weight. Your boots straddle the divide,

and as the jagged grimace widens

and opens, crooked lips racing towards

opposite ends of the earth, fighting to

swallow the sky, well, I think we’ve all

seen enough disaster movies to know

what happens next.

These damn kids!

With their rock music and their Led Zeppelins

and their hooting hollering howling at the moon

and their glowing red asses and their bulbous

top-down crests and convertibles and their

freaky long fingers (like Catwoman like scree-

ee-ee and crawl through a circular hole in

the window/in the wall) and their boobs are

all like just hanging out there in the salty

acid breeze, do they like even have parents

or what these days, with their sniffing of

the fecund anal glands of academic philosophy

and their Pabst Blue Ribbon and their participation

ribbons and their well-patted little heads

and their drooling dissemination of DNA

and their hearsay and their heresy and their

hearsay and their mirrors and their mirrors

and their mirrors and their bravery, real bravery

to be rude be bold and their mirrors that shatter

and display me in fragments, these damn kids,

and they sneer, because they know I am one,

but at least they are not scattered into the prismatic

ashes of our ancestors’ machinations, right, right?

campfire ghosts

Young enough to still feel primal,

to appreciate Prometheus’ gift

as it takes on the amorphous

ferocity of fists and hammers

and clouds, invading our lungs,

and the possession completes

itself in subliminal flashes of red

and yellow, the accusing squint

of that which lives beneath our

embers, the steel hook dangling

from our sedan in the parking

lot like jewelry, the cell phone

that buzzes with the whispers

of the dead, and we hear it well,

yes, and we dance as though our

nocturnal shrieks will hold the points

at bay until the sun will rise, scatter

them like broken glass and song.

The Relationist: an advertisement

This is, as they have said time

and again, a tough job, but

somebody’s gotta do it, the world

needs a Relationist in such trying

times of swollen collective

unconscious, just absolutely

full to bursting with movie quotes,

bad jokes, Muppets, American

Idols. It is, you know, quite a bit

for one brain to handle, your

head gets all swollen and veiny

and gross, and the sick thing is

they keep adding more, more

more more, until your grey

matter hemorrhages out your

damn earhole, making a puddle

on the linoleum that your dog

is, regrettably, only too quick

to lap right up. It isn’t safe to add

more, to think new thoughts, to

be original. Let me ease your

pain. Make the connections,

string yourself a web of words

and arms and legs and raised

eyebrows. Soon you’ll be an

old hand, and yeah, your breakup

really will be just like that old

Led Zeppelin song, your friends

will be perfectly assignable to the cast

of Sex and the City (more than 4

friends? Try killing one off, but only

if you do it just like in Die Hard!),

the birth of your daughter will

be (more or less) just like Stevie

Wonder said it would be! Let

the details fade away, let the whole

mess of life and love and experience

and pop and literature compress into a nice,

easily digestible low calorie spread.

Let me help. Let me be your Relationist.

Confucius say: movement 3

the digital fool sits neatly ensconced

in his palace of faux-sophisticated

academic affect and asks me, as though

from a great distance, what can anybody

truly give us that has any deep significance,

that is any more than a series of maneuvers

in our railroad switch cyborg brains

 

oh simple binary reductionist, would that

all things were as easily shrouded and

confounded in your facile metatextual

bullshit, but once you have held that on/off

construction in your hand, watched the light

creep through the brilliant, angular amethyst

corridors, actually bothered to care and feel

without aloof condescension, well, then you

might understand, my dear

Rhett Bastard

Frankly my dear, he doesn’t give a

fuck about anyone but himself, and

that last only by the existential default

of too drunk, too bored, suit’s too

tight. He twirls his moustache like

an infinity sign, and he has no idea

that he occupies anything but, that

a man with such a fine, oil-slicked

black crown could be other than

permanent. Sure, “everything burns,”

he mutters through the corner of his

jaw so rigid and set you suspect he may

even have tetanus, but he is nothing

if not adaptable, trimming these unkempt

edges of his faux-sinister affect until

the girlies squeal (his words, not mine)

at the bare hints of barely contained.

At some point, I’m sure, your heart will

break for him, watching as his lonely shell

grows red and brittle, surpassing myth,

for even Narcissus could fall in love.

Until then, just enjoy the view. He will.

Voodoo City

I would ask you to imagine

what goes on in all the darkest

corners of this city, but I know

you’ve done the legwork well

in advance, populating cracks

and crevices with crawling

millipede fingers under an

array of streetlights that only

extinguish to spite you as

you approach.

 

 

Could it be my own salvation,

an object of amusement for

the clucking, pitying blankness,

that behind my veneer of assurance

I am perhaps in even greater

fear, not of any city in particular,

but of all the places one can find

spraypainted words that speak

in a language we learned long

ago in our most tortured sleep?

 

The next time I jump out and scare

you as we walk alone at night,

try to understand: even as our

hearts return to slumber, even

as we laugh with relief, I can feel

the eyes that quiver and hum

in my back like an acupuncturist’s

needles, content to compromise

the horror with me for now, to

negotiate like there is some

dignity in the process.

 

After all, they are patient. They

have nothing to lose. There will

always be a next time, a next

place, a next brisk October

night lit only by a reddening

moon diffracted by our phantom

breath.

Sawdust and Cotton

Shall we call the taxidermist a poet,

or is the opposite closer to the truth?

He is artisan of futile surgery, stringing

sweet linguistic nothings along with thin wire

and steel to remember the kill, the sob,

the icy, chattering exhale. Does he array

them so carefully in his living room, his

workshop, for anyone but himself? For

any cause but the sheer aesthetic pleasure,

the emotional trigger, the memory of what

it meant to be alive in that moonlight?

Memory

The heartbreaking thing is not the forgetting,

the sudden lightning strike of loss that finds

its home in your tingling hairs as they raise their

arms to the sky in prayer, oh no, it’s the storage,

the coding, the inherent act of almost unbelievable

disintegration, a system, to be sure, in which acts of such

cataclysmic importance turn to silhouette, and yes,

now that first kiss cannot help but resemble the lyrics

of some popular melody once the frame of reference

is set, the birth of your child is only an axiom or nursery

rhyme, and if only your neural vocabulary was as skilled

as the sweeping symphonies of your erstwhile heart,

to think that you could hold the prism in your palm

forever, light dancing upon the wall with mischief and life.