How To Get Published, Apparently.

Wait until you're dry.
And when you have nothing to say
Start with a quote in a foreign language.
Then proceed to say nothing
And if you can, say it about flowers.
Or sex.
Or that look in your grandmother's eye
That haunts you.

Say the Nothing with authority
Like Moses with word salad.

Write in short, simple sentences.
Write about writing.

The publishers will love you;
Those syntax janitors,
Counting syllables
Masturbating in your water-flavored water
Knuckle deep in between mirrors facing mirrors.
"Writ
ing ab
out writi
ngggggggggoooo
H my GO
Dhhhhh….."

And the bankers and the coke heads and the poachers will go right on.
Exxon will have a thousand of your dollars before you've finished deciding between commas and semicolons.
The politicians will go on.
So will the window washers.
And the arms dealers.
And the dead-eyed Bachelor of Arts in the cubicle next to you.
And your grandmother too, in her way.
That world will keep spinning safely.
The only difference will be that now your name will be a series of ink stains
On a small, cheap page
In a small, cheap book
Which is (let's be honest) all you ever wanted.

You Have Two Hearts

you have two hearts
and i choose the savage one
i take my chances with the parts of you
that border the sea
the angles of you
that tell the pulsing tides
"here, and no further"

you have two hearts
and i moved my bed
into the one that drinks the rivers dry

others have their causes
their politics
their shallow share of dirt

but in your savage heart
i have a homeland.

I Can Firefly In You Like Nowhere Else Alive.

(I can firefly in you like nowhere else alive 

I can

ache

benedicting and refracting 

it's you:

your cunt like warfare and sea salt

you as the smell of cut limes in my skin 

or the energy of my paranoia while I escape The World

its hands 

its devils 

through the frantic space of your thighs in the chaos mathematics of my lengthened muscles sweating black lights and broken glass 

your shoulder blades with their electrons and cotton firelight turn me into photons soaking through your bed

summer storming and riding

penny scent

giving in you

surrounding polestars glimpsing the song outside of time

seeing in the slow oil paint

the suffering

let lost

at last

endless howling cadences and riddles and sugar water and rhythms 

glass seas

great heights

whispered belongings

glands and property rights

probabilities

impossibilities

synoptics

logoi 

blaring double helix promises through our sub-light eachothers 

careening through your hallow alleys 

hurricaning reckless voided begging angels in your will and luminescence 

glaring back at empty rooms

wide-eyed flinchless orgasms and

five-fingered machine lights

kissing underneath this

vast mirror waking dream

sweat-salted hard hour

peeled bare mutant fruit

sobbing relentless poetry into our mercury flame blue moment

arriving

arriving

arriving

(I love you like))

Dear M. Star, Thank You. Yours Still, A.

(i) see you clearer when the lights go out.
Swaying; slowly; listening….
         aaade iiin
"…fa                   to yooou…"

&(~am)
        straining hard
to hear
-through the static that the stars leave-
that winter whisper you linger on and on and on
in the cold;
        and clear;
              and still;
            aaaange you neee
"… str                               ver knew..."

see
dreams like you
contin-
    ue.
they stain the world we call "awake."

She's got a tell.

She's got a tell.
She shows her ghosts,
Her shades,
The hints of her ellipsis.
We were dressed better
In our secrets.
We were,
In our sheer light,
The evening lightning of our hunger.
She kisses more convincingly
On the verge of tears,
And then the sun comes up
Across her angles
And she whispers things
Too beautiful
To repeat out in the world.

Somewhere in the 21st Century.

I was there when we won.
I saw Chicago glowing through its lonely terror,
illuminated and hopeful though aching and cold,
clear-eyed through the acrid smoke of the defeats of the past,
free enough at last to shatter the four walls of chances hamstrung by history.

I was there when we won
and, love drunk, saw my city:
(beautiful in its fire flowers),
terrible and terrorizing to the nightmares of oil and money;
pulsing veins full of America (which is pure light)
flooding the subways, bursting above ground, fire though the sky on L tracks.
alive and holy and changed and charged,
tested tortured tempered
unafraid;
human with hearts full of rose thorns and language and razor wire tongues on lilac pallets at doorways out of alleys at polls irrigating deserts
flash flooding laugh lines with the majesty of youth and poems lived instead of read.
Perfect.

I saw my city recalling with a wretch the near decade of law laid low;
of money-clutching claws stained crimson
With power, collected at any cost.
Remembered how the fix of fear dilated our pupils
and how some of us never sobered up enough to stop it.
Remembered thinking that freedom is like language; you aren't human if you lose it,
and wondered what monster it made us to let it go
without even one Molotov cocktail for a chaser, but came around in love to see my city beginning the revolution here at home:
rejecting at last the skinny-jeaned trust-funded cocained over-sexed decadent apathy of Wicker Park's carefully crafted irony.

I was there when we won.
I saw Grant Park's million-headed hydra scream at the signal when it came
and understood at once the meaning:
The Death
The Wheel brought
The World laid low by
The Emperor multiplied by
Strength.

I was there when we won.
I saw my city sing,
called my father and cried a bit and
waited for the wave to come.

J'accuse!

J'accuse!
Moloch that lurks behind the hills on frozen nights!
Dream eater!
Coward who hides behind the facts!
Diseased bringer of water and sugar and bitter pills and hope!
Godless revolutionary angel -flaming sword in hand- wretched Michael!
Firefly!
Flamethrower of rules!
Specter scent in my sheets!
Friend foe enemy archenemy NEMESIS!
J'accuse! J'accuse! J'accuse!
Wall of cinder and spring light!
Pathway of flowers!
Gateway of scales!
Gog of desire! Magog of despair!
Chemical feather pheromones and Marathon insomniac salt water lung equations! Atlantis mathematics!
Shoulders who shook for reasons!
Deep south afternoon nakedness!
Sweet tea legs!
Slow drawl lines!
Dragon hiding in the silent treatment!
Temple! Psalm with living legs! Heresy of absence! Undeserved forgiveness out of love!
Lion!
J'accuse!
Sphere!
J'accuse!
Hammer! Rain! Snapped oaks! Stormshine!
Barren rain-slicked streets in August!
Lover of almond anythings!
Understander of cats!
Alarm clock nightmare! Dream of "someday!"
Jet-stream! Gulf steam! Changer of world!
Brown bear!
Bad road!
Bad...BAD road!
Maker of my hands into mirrors!
Resolver!
Reason to walk toward the light at dusk through the dying western desert to your arms!
Elipsis!