The Oddball Orb

The moon does odd things to me. It shines on my face at midnight and makes me think that there is a possibility of being happy in this gritty, grisly world. The light it casts cascades down my face like New Year’s champagne when you’re all alone and I think lofty thoughts that only serve to dampen the experience of reality when you finally experience it, the truth of diminishing returns, hand over fist stealing my joy away.

The moon affects me like wine and John Berryman’s poems.

A penny, pity, for the runaway ass!

A nickel for the killer’s twenty-six-mile ride!

Ice for the root rut-smouldering inside!

Eight hundred weeks I have not run to Mass.—

Toss Jack a jawful of good August grass!

‘Soul awful,’ pray for a soul sometimes has cried!

Wire reasons he seasons should still abide!

Hide all your arms where he is bound to pass.—

Who drew me first aside? her I forgive,

Or him, as I would be forgotten by

O be forgiven for salt bites I took.

Who drew me off last, willy-nilly, live

On (darling) free. If we meet, know me by

Your own exempt (I pray) and earthly look.

We are made of chemicals and when they splash about I feel like I’m lost on the high seas, a darling, timid little Pisces, adrift in the flotsam and driftwood of flooded cities and burnt down churches. I climbed aboard a steeple and rode it out to flee the evil that washed ashore while I was trying to entertain all the shiny, skinny people.

Old No. 7 BRAND devotion. My religion is built upon confusion and ghosts that dance at the witching hour. The cable box is making a whirling noise and if I was more impassioned I’d throw it out the window. I haven’t turned on the TV in 6 days and I make TV for a living. Like a priest who doesn’t believe in God. I am just going through the motions of being an artist. My art is the craft of fucking things up!

The moon is an oddball orb. I’m walking around at night with the jasmine blooming and cats chasing shadows and I can’t stretch the truth into a presentable lie. I’m my own worst enemy. I haven’t eaten dinner but I’m drinking and thinking about the Washington Avenue Bridge and how the water felt when John went for a midnight swim and the thought of dinner makes my stomach turn Don Knotts. I’m in love with Misery because her playlist has my favorite tune. Is it so wrong to just want to walk around with you? Tell me you’ll be true to this destruction and I won’t stray from its backwards lurch. In the air the rockets spell my name. FINALITY. The moon doesn’t listen when I recite poetry.

If you could map my heart would you print a legend at the bottom?
If you could lock up my soul, where would you hide the key?

Let’s just throw our hands up and surrender to the tides. You damn moon and your affects! Let’s just be children and throw tantrums when the jukebox steals our quarters. Like Buddha, raise our hands skyward and give up on all these Earthly defects.

But Buddha never walked in these chucks!

I reach for another Tecate as the doorbell rings and the Devil enters. Hello, I say, and rise to meet my doom.

(Literature Under the Influence of Whiskey, Beer, and Lunar Spells) My apologies…

If I were an instrument I’d be a tuba

There’s nothing wrong with listening to the same song over and over.

This is time of the night where the moon sits on my face and farts.

“God, that’s crude!” My one reader shouts from across the city.
“Well, who asked you?” I shout back. “You said you loved Bukowski!”

Cats scramble underneath the fence and a man leans on the fire escape and shouts for quiet. The blimp bursts into fire and the black sheep makes his escape.

If I were more patient with myself I’d make myself happy. Instead I’m downing another beer and listening to Swan Lake and wondering if I were made of ice would I have to melt to survive the fires of your heart. As I said goodbye we shook hands and the sun rose over the desert cruel and snaggle-toothed.

When it ends you have no good plans, just sappy, sorry sighs.

I took apart the cathedral and built a mantle from your church wood.

You softly cried one thousand moans…

You were the one made of bones…

Made of flesh that was on loan…

Not mine to own…

The drummer boy bangs on the wall, the ghost leaps across the finish line, the pillow thief left a tooth. Be careful if you hear love calling, it has no attention span and no getaway plan. If you could replace a piece of yourself would you take my hand? I’ve got a knife with a serrated edge yet no leverage on the dark, dark places of this heart. Buddha is no match for my evil streak.

What is it that I want? Just more question marks????????????

I’ve got a fucking box of them and plan to have a garage sale.

Are you interested?

Your name escapes me but the memory of your face rapes me. “How crude!” You shout again. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, I built a mantle from your church wood. “I’ve never sworn to sophistication!”

I had a friend. I had a mother. I went to a dead end with my lover.

If there was one instrument I could play it would be something so large I could never leave the house to play it. Like a piano or maybe a tuba. I would have grand parties with fabulous, glamorous people, worldly in myriad ways, and entertain them with song after song, and marry some girl named Zelda who dazzles the audience with her boa twirling, and we would recite beatnik poetry till the garbage trucks come and remove my guests, and then me and Zelda retire to the bedroom to dance silently among the sheets and whisper little secrets. Things no one else knows. Like, when I was six I locked my cat in a drawer for three days by accident. And I would start to tear, for the universe doesn’t know forgiveness and this early in the morning my sensitivity is too heightened to share secrets. And I would hear the cat purring as I drift off into ocher dawn.

Whiskey is just a smoke screen, like expectations and confessions…

But the truth. The truth, the truth, the fucking fucking truth… insomnia plagues me again.

My old friend keeps me company these lonely nights. Helicopters patrol the lower heavens where smog pushes paper airplanes crashing into blueberry bushes. If there is a God, I’m already screwed.

I push repeat on the Ipod and am reminded of cupcakes and tuna fish sandwiches…

Zelda wakes me up and whispers, “you’re talking in your sleep again, F. Scott.”

So I am…

Goddamn.

Live Grenade

Coats and scarves must come off.
Your perfume trailed ten feet behind you.
We ran laughing through the grass,
on grass…
This car needs a heartwash
This heart needs a tuneup
This tune needs a melody
This melody needs to stop!

!!!!!!!!!!!! ? !!!!!!!!!!

I’m consistently blinded by the drawings
of a 5 year old.
I’m perpetually aware of the words spoken
to me at 5am.
I’m persistently insistent upon my destruction
500 hundred times a day.

The army is knocking at the door and they want a glass of water.

Bluebird is either a love poem or a pirate,
or maybe they’re the same thing and I just am holding
the picture the wrong way. Arrrr!

I’m the captain of a ship of fools and they’re all in my head
where the seas are briny and whitecappy.
A cry goes out for mutiny but I hush them with a lullaby.
They stick their thumbs in their mouths and purr instead.
I wake up to a daydream and at night dream about work.
I guess I am human after all.
What a fucking sad thing to be.

Martians have landed in my backyard and want to borrow a pair of pants.

I’m the flag you plant when you conquer foreign lands,
dripping with blood,
I’m the Wyomingite sky the last buffalo saw
before the bullet pierced his hide.
I’m the clown nose John Wayne Gacy
wore to the party.

Tender kisses deliver venom.
The handsome singer vomits on stage.
My eyes change colors and shapes.
This poem is a live grenade.

Even poetry is a weapon of mine…

bEarD oF BeEs

Sleep-deprived, medicated zombies
steal quarters from the Goonie’s wishing well.
Weeping willows, dead flowers on pillows,
the living leave morbid poems on Speak N’ Spells.
Saturday night turned to Monday morning,
the glinting glitter on my cheek softly fell.

Devils and Angels have a hard time keeping up with me.

(Sing it) I climbed the mountain top
(See it) I found my bottle cap
(Fleeing) I ran past the mouse trap
(Dreaming) I befriended my heart’s cop

All that mouthwash won’t rinse away the words you said
that night you cried ‘I wish I were someone else instead’.
I listened at your door with a stethoscope to the wall,
with my hands fully extended in case you chose to fall.
I placed them together and made the shape of a prayer
while fantasizing my fingers running through your hair.
I’m nothing but your humble servant, fervent and meek.
Your softly batted eyelid, mysterious like a pyramid, I seek.
Given the awaited moment, I seized it with daring aplomb,
and all the finesse and tender gentleness of a nuclear bomb

“Who told you it was okay to rhyme?!” A voice inside my own shouts.
“Who else can embarrass me like myself?” I replied.

I went to an art show at a comic book shop.
I ate Thai Food in East Hollywood.
I performed little miracles while tapping my foot.
I brushed my teeth and took my medicine.

There’s a door to a room that is always going to be locked,
and no one knows where I hid the key.

Don’t bother me.

I’m growing a beard of bees.

Saturday Night Seizures

By the time I’m recovered from the night before the next night is upon me like a tiger — claws first — and I reach for the spirit that turns a starry night into a disco ball flashing and spinning all around. The heavens heave themselves down on us for a momentary respite from trekking through the mud before the sun returns to claim its place in the sky.

My phone is only three years old but people look at it like the Shroud of Turin when I pull it out of my pocket, like some foreign coin they don’t recognize. “Is that a flip phone?” People have asked with an accusatory tone to their voice. “You need to get a new phone,” they say, as if I’m using some rotary relic and connecting to an operator to place my call to Cincinnati.

Everybody is traceable by satellite; in many ways this is both horrifying and romantic.

There’s a spot in your brain where music is recorded and later in life you might hear these songs played back during minor epileptic seizures. It’s true! These musical reminiscences can be triggered by electrical shocks even. You touch a tiny nerve in the cerebral cortex and instantly you hear Tainted Love by Soft Cell or In Da Club by 50-Cent, just like it was happening in real life, or how it once happened in real life. You might be walking down the street and hear your mother belting out Christmas Carols when you were five.

Dostoevsky had epileptic seizures and said they were preceded by an intense surge of joy and that he couldn’t imagine life without them. Can you imagine that?

When I dance people think I’m having either a seizure or a religious experience. I’ve been accused of being a bit dervish on the dance floor. I think any time you lose yourself in the moment, escape from the constant voice in your head — the one that is yours but sounds nothing like you — it’s a religious experience, at least what I call religion.

I’m the most spiritual atheist you will ever find. Not at all a contradiction in my holy book. I can’t look at a roaring river and not feel a connection to divinity, and I can’t read a passage from the bible and not feel that it was written by man, for the purpose of consoling (or controlling) man.

They’ve done studies and the same part of the brain that is affected by psilocybin is also shown to be most active when people undergo “religious experiences” . Could it be that God is just a chemical reaction in our brain? If so, does that mean evolution actually created God?

It’s approaching nightfall in the city of fallen stars and I am about to hike up Runyon Canyon so I can get a bird’s eye view on all the minute happenings of this city as the sun dunks itself in the Pacific. It’s amazing, startling even, how easy it is to escape the world sometimes, how close that escape is. All it takes is some hiking shoes and a bottle of water and the determination to move the ground underneath your feet. Sure, there’s always a thousand other people swarming up the mountain with me, and people on their cell phones, and power lines buzzing overhead, and you’re not really escaping much, but still…

The Death Of Coffee Shop Chatter

Remember when grabbing a cup of coffee involved entering a room buzzing with chatter? when a coffee shop contained an atmosphere of socialization and of friends catching up, dates winding down? how Ross and Rachel, Monica and Chandler, Phoebe and Joey would meet at Central Perk and sit around kibitzing for hours, or at least a half hour until the episode ended?

Well, those days are no more. Now when I get a cup of coffee it’s completely silent. Everybody is on their laptops, plugged-in, quietly banging out their shitty screenplays, surfing the net, or stalking ex-girlfriends on Facebook.

I could go to the morgue for a more lively experience.

I hate it. I miss the old days. Back in the late 90’s coffee shops existed purely to give folks a place to gather and converse without having to go to bars. I miss people actually talking to each other instead of furtively glancing around while they IM with people in a coffee shop on the other side of town doing the same!

There used to be something very cosmopolitan about the bustle of a coffee shop, now the lack of bustle is just creepy! Twenty souls silently staring into luminescent screens… click, click, clicking away. There’s no reason twenty people should be in a room without any of them speaking to each other, unless it’s church. And even then there’s a minister getting his preach on.

I feel like going down there with a buddy and sitting right in the middle of the room and having a loud conversation until someone asks us to keep it down; then I’ll remind them that this is not their fucking office, or a library, but a coffee shop!!!

I’m a writer, I like to get my write on — and sometimes I do it in public — but it’s just gone so overboard I can’t take it anymore… I refuse to add my non-voice to the non-din. Back in 01′ it was fun to take the laptop down to the coffee shop because of the conversations around me and the convivial vibe of the place. I was an avid people watcher and passionate eavesdropper. I used to be the only one, or just one of a few, with a laptop, but now that they’ve taken over so completely it’s no longer fun.

Maybe I sound like a Indie snob complaining about the band they used to like before everyone else started liking them, but that’s just how it is. Half the time these folks are not even drinking coffee but just sitting there isolated in their own little cyber-world, anti-social furniture.

Go to an effin’ library!

Give me back my coffee shop chatter, I miss it.

Technology is supposed to be bringing us together; yes, it’s easier to connect with old friends on a very surface level of status updates and sugary photo comments, but what about new friends? What about the person next to you reading the latest issue of Time? Now that they’re doing it on their laptop as opposed to holding a ratty old magazine in their laps, how are you going to strike up conversation based on the cover photo of Barak Obama? Sure, it’s rude to interrupt a girl while she’s reading, but it’s downright creepy to be caught looking over her shoulder on her laptop to do it!

In the synthetic, are we losing the real?

In our hyper-connectivity, are we losing some traditional, more endearing, methods of connecting with our fellow man?

Are we led to believe we’re advancing as a people, while devolving into automatons deprived of the most basic human interactions?

It begs asking.

Nighthawkkittyscratch

I’ve been too much of a nighthawk lately. I need to come down for a rest.

It was my birthday and then my friend’s birthday and so we celebrated with shots and more and then my sister was in town and we caught up over bottles of wine and then it was just a beautiful Sunday afternoon and so a perfect excuse for burgers and beer at Father’s Office and now friends are talking sushi and I’m sitting here forgetting all my commas and periods and wondering how long I can keep this run-on sentence running on.

I guess that answered that!

The other day a cat was on my doorstep, purring its little lungs out, scratching at my door like I owed him twenty bucks. I took it as some kind of good luck. Like I’m bound to win the lottery or something.

Do you remember being young and writing poems about surfing and blond girls named after flowers? Yeah, me neither!

I’ve been catching up on my T.S Elliot… the women coming and goin’ talking of Michaelangelo-in’. I’ve been staring at my shoebox of receipts, afraid to count them all out and put names to the faces or faces to the name. So many ghosts come and go through the vaporized smoke I can hardly type fast enough to escape the good times. She had eyes that could penetrate even the toughest of stones and yet she never used them for good. If she were a waitress I’d have tipped her thirty percent, but nobody tips a heart-thief.

My name is in the papers, but that’s not me — or else it’s really me and most of the time I’m someone else. I’m Walt Whitman’s spurned lover. The crushed grape used to make the wine that Dionysus drinks. The guitar pick left onstage when you discovered Rock N’ Roll can save your soul. I’m Rodney Dangerfield’s wife giving him no respect.

I have three spiral notebooks, with torn pages and half written-down ideas, sitting on my desk like literary detritus, my soul’s flotsam. They stare at me menacingly, like a short chollo who just got a bad haircut looking for trouble.  I grabble through them, looking for trouble. We meet in the dark and battle for supremacy. Sometimes the art wins, sometimes the starving artist. Tonight I’m more thirsty than starving. It ends in a draw.

Patterns of patter perpetuate themselves like DNA helix. I have a bag of frozen gnocchi to heat up on the stove top and it’s not a Pulitzer, but right now it’s going to have to be good enough. Satori flashes about me like St. Elmo’s Fire and I think for a second I’ve found my kingdom come, yet there I am after, alive and transmogrified.

A stick figure with bubble thoughts…. A Joshua tree alone under the moonlight….

You’re out there, I know, with broken zippers and fuzzy slippers. I’d pen a paean to you, but I don’t think it’d matter much. You have other, more beautiful, subjects to praise you. People think that you’re holy, but I know the truth is you’re just nighthawkkittyscratch.