The Man On The Moon

The moon is at the top of the sky and falling…

There’s a pebble in my shoe.
The long distance flight of a pelican
makes me long for home.
There’s a rumble in my heart.
The soft swaying note of a violin
makes me write this poem.

In faraway eyes I stared and realized
it was nothing but a carnival mirror.
The image became clearer when I stepped
forward and took my beating from the Lord…

Hallelujah. Make me bleed like a maple tree.
Hallelujah. Your bending body sets me free.

In this town, there is no dirt on the ground.
In this place, there is plastic on all the faces.
In this body, there is a 24/7 costume party.
In this brain, there is no sweet refrain.

I talk in withering prose about my life
Lend an ear to my diatribe
And I promise to wrap you warmly up inside
These faulty arms of mine…

When I was 13 I was afraid of crossing the street.
When I was 23 I was afraid of losing the beat.
Now that I’m 33 I’m deathly afraid of me.

Neurology is just an excuse. Take your therapists and
psychologists and make them dance. Make them holler
at the moon so that we can analyze them. Make the
economists pay for dinner while we make-out over the phone.
My voice goes hoarse when I keep silent. I’m not a bad kid.
I was just raised by TV and have no respect for authority.

Lead the way… I’ll follow the touch of your monogrammed glove.
Everything in this life is claimed. Why can’t I be?

One more song. One more dance.
One more glass of beer then I’m gone.
Just a fawn of a man, I carry on without a plan.
I walk to Whole Foods and eat directly from the buffet.
They kick me out. I stand in the parking lot
and shout bible verses I just invented.
I wrote this poem on my Iphone
while being questioned by the police
“Yes, this really is my faltering gaze!!!
No, I didn’t steal this broken prose!”

The moon is at eye-level now but still 384401 miles away.

If all my skin sloughs off and my ribs and lungs
and kidneys were exposed would you finally understand
what is inside of me? Or would it not matter?
Would the cats and iridescent rats still scamper
upon the mention of my name… when you steal
a quarter from the wishing well, whose wish did you steal?
Would the gnats and phosphorescent bats still scatter
when you question my fame?

I am 20 feet tall and more determined than Orpheus.
Stronger than oak. More courageous than Odysseus.
Mellifluous melodies pour through me. I am solely,
completely, unreasonably the hero in my own story.

Whiskey, like expectations and confessions, is nothing
but a smokescreen. Still, one more shot and I think I’ve got
a handle on how to finish off this poem…
it goes imagery, then pain, then irony, then resolution.

A saying…
A final dusting of philosophy.
A call to arms.

Then a picture.

The werewolf in white
grabs your baby,
makes it into powder,
so we can smell pretty.

The man on the moon
swirls the oceans in our souls.
So rise up and splash all over me!!!

(in the brochure it said things would be easy by now,
everything would be figured out. I want my money back)

The Postulations of a Pompous Pedant

Have you ever tried to put horse blinders on your vision and speed through darkness like Sherlock Holmes on a foggy night, lantern ablaze, creaking loudly over the moor in search of the killer, the thief, the wayward prince? Sometimes I feel like my life is a fairy tale — like The Princess And The Pea, and I’m the pea. I’ve sat at this desk for too long without result, writing quasi-autobiographies, trying different formulas; but the beakers shatter and the Petry dish won’t grow a new me so I’m close to hanging up my scientist goggles.

The search for meaning, for substance, is what leads us to the edge. We live in fear of Nothingness…. and as a result fill our lives with things we don’t need. Plasma TVs, designer jeans, MP3s. Those that don’t have fear, live with nothing to lose. They’re the ones we label crazy. Once we accept that everything is made of nothing, we realize we already have everything we need. There’s a picture on my wine rack of me as a baby, big fat cheeks, blank baby stare. I look at it and think of the years in between and feel a tickle in my throat from the all the words I’ve spoke that disappeared in ears I’ve loved that don’t listen to them anymore.

When I was born there was a soul placed in orbit that was destined to crash into me one day, like the asteroid that will eventually strike and destroy this planet. I have been living in fear ever since the day the umbilical was cut. I cried at the wolf but it was out the door before the doctor removed his latex gloves. Love is like — whatever your dream it, nightmares and all. Unfortunately your heart doesn’t have a ‘you break it you bought it’ policy.

I’ve seen the end and it’s just a small puff of air, the gentlest whisper from the church mouse.

I’ve said it before, life looks aflame from afar but close up it’s just fireflies in a jar.

This is the truth, life is simple. An orange. A crosswalk. A wristwatch.

From this spot by the window I can see my car and watch the dust settle across the windshield. A homeless man is rifling through the blue, city-issued recycle bins for cans and bottles that my neighbors and I have tossed away and he is humming a tune that I am sure he made up. To others it’s a sign of madness; to me, art… who is able to say?

There’s a man-made lake by the ocean with statues of all the Gods placed around it in a garden. I hope to go this weekend and take my place by the water.

There’s a park on the hill overlooking the city with droopy trees like loveless faces. I hope to go there tonight and bend towards the city lights.

I’m eating
fruit cocktail
from a can…

Tonight the glare of the streetlamps careened towards me like bisecting bisexuals.

She believed in God and I believed in her.

I need the Ez Comb — for a new hairstyle… in just seconds! Only $9.99 for a limited time. Imagine the possibilities. Shipping and handling is free. The men and women in the commercial look so happy. It’s like nothing can go wrong for them!

Ice cream scoops at Basken Robbins were only 31 cents today. Swine flu will kill us all but at least the ice cream will be cheap. I’m never going to turn back time but I’ll try anyway. Erect a monument to all failed artists, all starving boulevardiers who drink the most fashionable brandies with malarial smiles. My muse is a magician because all she does is disappear. The roller coaster attendant pushes one button to lock the safety bar and off you go. He’s seventeen with pimples and dreams of the girl who sits next to him in Trig.

Elliot Smith sings and the cockroaches hide underneath the potted palm. Los Angeles is filled with people like me, people barely able to get up in the morning but who can’t go to sleep at night, who refuse. It’s a city of cacophonous beauty. Models and murderers. Debutantes and derelicts.

I brush my teeth and floss in between the gaps. Toothpaste flies on the mirror so the reflection of my face looks riddled with white bullet holes. It’s two in the morning and I need to get some sleep but the wolf is knocking at the door and I’ve run out of dreams anyway. The water in the Brita is copper colored and possibly poisonous. There is nothing left to do but open the door and pour a shot of brandy.

Hello there…

Little Birds

The sidewalk unfolds in front of me like a long, hot, charred dream — one you wake from sweaty and nervous, the birds chirping so loudly you grab a little hammer and bash their little brains in. Every step I take is another realization of all the mistakes I’ve made, smeared down in the asphalt like a piece of chewed-up Trident gum. I wanted to be Charles Dickens but I’m more like Charles Manson. The smokers stand outside on the patio watching me and my midnight, somnolent grazing. The bite-sized birds run in fear. I feed on their little hearts. The smokers shake their heads when I shake my fists.

One hundred degrees at midnight but I’m dressed in a jacket to prevent the flapping wings in my chest from breaking through. Can you hear me breathing when I’m kneeling before the pew and the priest’s hand warms my crown? Pieces of straw form a nest where my heart used to be. Can you see me dancing in the middle of the street where the cars form a conga line on my back?

The sky above and Earth below traps me in the middle.
Every word I ever spoke spirals and becomes a riddle.

The sidewalk turns vertical and I slide down to the abyss that sits at the bottom of this city. Every abuse and excess is contained here and I search for you knowing the day you cracked the shell was the day that the sky turned various colors of Easter eggs. There are scented candles burning here. Rotten butter. Gasoline. Durian. Everywhere I walk I’m faced with mirrors and in every mirror there is a smaller and smaller version of myself. Eventually I’m only a stone’s height. Behind that last mirror is a towering bird and I look up in time to see its giant beak coming down on me. Peck. Peck. Peck. Blood. Concussion. Blood.

Peck.

I wake up in my bed sweaty and nervous. The day breaks outside like an American-made car approaching 200,000 miles. The alarm clock turns on and a generic radio song fills the room like ether. A tune you’d recognize even in the next life. I reach over and touch the emptiness of this one. My cold satin coffin bed knows nothing else. Outside on the bough of a pink flowering dogwood tree a little bird lifts its legs up and down like a child needing to pee. It looks at me with its little yellow eyes peering through my soul.

Jesus, is that you?

___________________________________

Inspired by the song LITTLE BIRDS by Neutral Milk Hotel

Little Birds

Poem?

Police Tape

Unfurled

Murder scene

Somewhere

Bartender with curls

Straightened

Border’s books…

Flattened pancakes

She spoke of roses

while I smelled them

walking down the alley street

Are you willing to take this risk?

She moaned…

I don’t know.

I do!

life… passes,

while waiting for the bus.

My voice quivers, yours shouts.

Friends on Facebook aren’t really friends.

Hey? What? Nothing…

Is this a poem?

You’re damn right!

What else would it be?

I don’t know…

Fuck!

What?

Nothing.

Huh?

Nothing…

The World Is Too Ripe To Hold

A wise man once told me, “You have the world in your hands.”

I don’t know what he thought he meant by that or if he was even aware of what mind-boggling responsibility that entails. I didn’t take it as positive encouragement. I thought it was absolutely horrifying. Something you’d only wish upon your worst enemy. I wondered how wise he really was.

Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, or something in the air, or the secret signals the TV pumps into my brain when it’s not on, but there is a profound unease with the thought that the world is the size of an orange and rests in my palm. Shit, I don’t even know what to do with my own life much less the lives of 7 billion sentient souls on this planet. And why would I want something so grandiose, majestic, awe-inspiring and complicated to be shrunk to the size of something that could fit in my hand?

That would make the Alps about as tall as a hair. The Gulf of Mexico about the size of a thumbnail. You and I wouldn’t even be visible.

If the world were in my hands I’d never be able to dance or throw my hands in the air like I just don’t care. I’d walk on tippy-toes everywhere and wouldn’t let dogs into my home for fear they’d jump up on me thinking it’s a tennis ball or some chew toy and snatch the world in their jaws. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. I’d keep the world in a jewelry box by my bed and stare at it all night long. Midnight would find me stroking it, cooing lovely lullabies in its direction in hopes that I could turn the world from a raging brute into a sleeping, peaceful child.

Some people would probably put the world in their pocket and just go about their day. I would wrap it up in cloth and shield it from the blowing snow.

Thankfully the world is too ripe to hold. Too large for just one person to carry around. We all do our part holding it up. Like that childhood game where ten people lift one person by only using two fingers each, we don’t even feel it.

It’s late. I’m done worrying about what I would do with the world. I’m going for a midnight jog because the air is crisp and cool and I can’t sleep and it helps me think, or stop thinking — one of the two. The stars wave dimly from above and barely pass through the Hollywood lights to reach me, but, still, I feel guided by their quasi-twinkle, by their secret Morse code. They hang there just for me, like a charm dangling from the neck of my lover.

My lungs will expand and contract and if you see me I might look like a man being chased by invisible coyotes. In a way, I am.

A wiser man once told me, “Live your life now, don’t wait until you die.”

Time to run…

Coachella… 10 Years Later

This year was my third Coachella attendance. I went to the first one ever in 1999, when people worried it would turn into a repeat of the disastrous Woodstock concert the summer before, when Limp Bizket incited a riot somehow. I remember seeing the desert stars, the mountain backdrop behind the stage, the sun, the wafting smell of patchouli, the polo field grass; I remember wasting a few hours in the beer garden, camping out by a reservoir in 110 degree heat, and how awesome that show was! Ten years later, ten years older, and it’s just not the same. There wasn’t much of anything memorable this year except my feeling that Coachella might be too much of an institution to be interesting anymore.

I got there a little late for my favorite band, Okkervil River’s set. Wil Sheff seemed disturbingly frantic onstage and although it was great hearing some of my favorite songs live, it was uncomfortable watching him flail about and fall down and have the lackadaisical desert crowd chew on their hands while he gave it all the grit he had.

For Real:

I want to know this time
if you’re really finally mine. I need to know that you’re not lying,
and so I want to see you tried.
And I don’t want to hear you say it shouldn’t really be this way,
because I like this way just fine.

The lineup wasn’t that solid this year, but that’s okay, I’ll just go and enjoy the scene I thought. But then what’s a scene without a soul? Was it just the music this year? Or have we as a generation — this place in time, 2009, with the economy deflating and with nothing to rail against left in office, the cultural sinkhole this country has become — misplaced our soul?

Sure, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were great! Karen O has a great stage presence with her Mick Jagger strut and beaming countenance, yet my soul was unmoved. Not like the year The Pixies and then Radiohead captivated me for three straight hours and I nearly lost my mind in the music. Or Beck coming out dancing to his Midnight Vulture era white boy funk while the stars spun kaleidoscopic overhead. Maybe it’s not the concertgoers at large that are too blame. Maybe it’s just this concertgoer?

A lot has happened to me and the world since those less-than-heady days of 1999, including but not limited to: graduating college, George Bush, romances, the death of romances, Tsunamis, Katrina, my career, wars, Barack Obama, and on and on… yet Coachella feels, disappointingly, unchanged. Two outdoor stages, three tents, a bunch of abstract sculptures. Kids taking drugs. Parents taking babies. Women in bikini. Men in straw hats and torn t-shirts. The constant parade of humanity up and down the polo field reminded me that we’re all connected, we’re all the same, in this small world of flesh and pain, and damn that’s annoying!

I bought new shoes for the occasion and they sure don’t look new anymore. All beer-spilt and mud-crusted. What was I thinking? I would have been better off wearing old rags. Speaking of which, while I was taking a break sitting under a tent in the shade, a disheveled lady — missing teeth, actual dirt stuck to her cheek, armpit-stained t-shirt — asked me if I had spare money for her to get something to eat. This was not some druggie having a bad trip. This was a real-live homeless chick! Inside Coachella! How the f did she get in? I contemplated giving her ten bucks just to find out. That’s besides the point, but at the same time is my point exactly, what happened to Coachella?

I’m 33 years old and a shinning example of a man too loose at his hinges to ever make a proper door. So don’t walk through me!

I’m 33 years and 60 days old and a perfect blueprint of a man without a rudder. So don’t try steering me to your paradise beaches and sea-shelled coves.

After watching Flavor of Love for two seasons it was hard to go and rock out to Public Enemy. I left before hearing one beat. I have to wonder how much power they’re fighting these days? Is that fair of me? To judge a band by the exploits of their flamboyant hypeman? Probably not…

I left before hearing one forlorn lyric from Robert Smith. The sun had barely set behind the mountains and I was already heading for the car, of which I had forgotten the location and whereabouts, making the exit evermore painful. I put another Coachella behind me in the dust without much fanfare or even looking back.

The night air was kinetic with strobe lights and buzzing gnats and the dusty road swirled around me and I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was the end of an era. The spectacle felt so unspectacular. A hullabaloo without much balooing.

Will I ever return to Coachella? Maybe. If they book my favorite bands next time, and if the situation calls for it. Ah, who the hell am I kidding? It’s Coachella, I’ll probably be back, but I’m not going to buy new shoes next time.

One more Okkervil River lyric for the road…

A girl In Port:

Let fall your soft and swaying skirt
Let fall your shoes, let fall your shirt
I’m not the lady-killing sort
enough to hurt a girl in port

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Fish, Dogs, Haunted Houses, and Lucid Eyeballs

A revolution
the blinds, the cat, this heartache
A zombie’s deathwish

We walk into the sun
talking about things that passed
Wearing old denim

Fish jump up and dance
On glistening tabletops
While birthday cakes melt

I break from structure because I’m afraid
of the way things were, or will be.

I decide to erase the lines in the sand
and take as pets termites in the haunted house

Lucid and kind, she flashed her beguiling eyes,
but they never landed on mine, just some distant spot
somewhere behind the mirror she stared into…

Rivers softly stop
Waves scream and then gently break
Bottled time is naught

Pens write the writer
The dog scratches at the door
Knives stab the killers

I can type a poem a haiku a suicide note
I can cook salmon make a pie bake a roast
But I can’t catch this butterfly without a net

New Phone Blues

I recently upgraded my phone so I can send text messages faster and so my camera phone shots come out less pixelated — so you can see just how drunk I am in the back of the bar with a slanted grin plastered on the whiskey glass. I avoided it for two years while everyone got Iphones and phones with keyboards. I held onto my flip phone with pride, but last night I threw it on the floor in a moment of soused passion and busted the screen. I was stuck! So I got a new one and now I’m feeling the new phones blues.

I lost all my pictures, all the ways I identified people when they called were lost due to a one second decision to chuck the thing at the wall. But that’s not what I have the blues about. I am mourning the end of the era of my blue LG flip phone. It went everywhere with me and was the vessel to many a great conversation. It was a great friend in some real bad times. Blue LG flip phone, I’m going to miss you. It’s like the passing of a love one. You remember all the things you shared together, the good and the bad.

But my new red LG phone is pretty groovy. I’ll get over the death of my flip as I usher in the era of the burgundy keypad phone. Life moves forward interminably. No matter how much you stick your feet into the ground, you remain in one place, the Earth is spinning like a slow-motion treadmill, and it carries even the sturdiest of fence posts with it. That’s why I’m so dizzy half the time. I can feel it spin-spin-spinning. Unlike some, the touch of the world turns me on. It glides over my body as I lay supine in a field, counting the myriad universes, twinkling, midnight, velvet gossamer.

John Paul Sartre ain’t got nothing on me and my existential ennui. Pity me and all my beauty. Crumple up my brain and discard it with the other recyclables. Make my soul into a plastic bottle and fill it with flowers. High-five! High-five! Life on this planet ended in 1976, the year I was born and the year Punk Rock was discovered. Everything since then has been replicas, simulacrum, and static feedback. There’s no more starving artists, just arts of starving. Just a hollow fisherman by the L.A river with an empty line waiting for the wind to blow this paper sailboat to sea.

Keep me in your heart while I float in the ether of your disgust, hold me close like a match you burn down your house with.

I’m as far West as this continent will allow, still I can’t get far enough away from America to escape the new phone blues. I’ve got Woody Guthrie looking on, shaking his head, and I know damn well this land wasn’t made for you and me.There is no ‘you and me’. There’s just me.

Fuck you, Woody, it wasn’t!!!! Why did you have me believing that for so long?

The only sky is blue, and big, and the only blood that pours is red. Yet… I can’t wait for the poetry to come to me, I have to chase it down like a cab at Times Square, ten minutes after midnight, on New Years. The world is a crow, heckling you. My heart is a bull, charging you.

Take me in your killer’s grip. Fuck the pain away. I look out the window and see the city, blistered and cruel, seething under a bed of neon lights. Call me by my made up name. We’re all extras here. Two-bits and one-timers. We’re all craving the cringe. Feverishly decorating our souls with designer religions, fit bodies, and death citrus. I have a new phone and it’s so cute and fancy it makes me feel hollow and morbid.

Los Angeles, so sour and bitter, let me taste your lemony kiss.

I am a robot that can only compute sadness.

Los Angeles, you are my lonesome home.