Cash is King

If you only have enough money to pay two months rent, keep your money and risk eviction. If you know the bill collectors are going to take all you have and want more, don't give them anything. Owing one hundred dollars is the same as ten thousand dollars if you don't have either. Besides, you'll need it when you begin your new life.

Poetry is Expensive 2

Approximating a new P.M., a sudden mistake producing waves of grain and raccoon activities to rival not only the erupting magnificence of the drunk mastodon waving its tail over the ferns, but also the poor man selected as replacement for the tiger. A right way for everyone, a calling, a punching bag barely ahead of our reaching fists but just enough so as to dodge any indiscretionary clucking telephone or lame reel like a film strip letting the light bulb through. Germany, advancing and how long have I asked to be refrigerated shuttling from line to line as such that we no longer have radio to live through, no TV to practice memory skill. We reason as the world prepares gumbo and gammy hens, blood meridians where place asks place to be so barren and inhumane. Allowing us to go free, allowing us to winnow our way towards distant and exotic lands where responsibility can be measured by those who don’t know us.

Believe me I laid on my bed this morning of no consequence. Of no sequence asides from differential equationary partition vision of imaginary happiness, and lines of inebriation partnering with Japanese flowers as bulbous as the bread bellies and their feet sauntering. As Richard Wright Pulitzer dustballs, as part of the menial gym rat lame duck bridal shower pole position. Help me believe this is the fire side gospel, this chit chat macabre violent spasm piece together, the system of puzzlement over Broadways expanded as highway trucks ram their diesel engines through pavement and pay dirt

I wash. I bring you my notes.

Poetry is Expensive

i.
The beginning part father
would bring life statement
generalized
myself, and bring you
back; a nice feeling.

ii.
I remember a girl
my wife be-
came of age, the tough marriage
to read about
them all my libido.

iii.
I forgot to externalize
meaning for you
to you
lead you back to
my father, our guilt.

iv.
While walking the dog is actually
a great risk
of boredom waiting
to go on like this
to die.

I am lonely but not alone. I ride the train to work.

Unabomber
One-way streets
Noun
Black hole
Simple until realized
Day and night
Slips the fold and time begs often
A mother’s face
Without description
Folds of cloth
"Mary-Anne"

The strike
An elastic band
A mushed thing
Roses in your teeth
Outlines
Introductions, puffs of air
Lines of ice
Ropes
The second sun
Comes to me
A brave balloon
Grass clippings
Unsure of its surroundings
Chunks of a person

The an elbow bent over the back of a chair
A perspective
In bronze
A fish in one hand
Two dice and a basketball
Somewhere in between
Two figures and a roach
Galoshes
Screaming eagles and the rest
Famous people holding hands
Intentionally obscure
Pieces of eight
Advice
The tip of an elbow

a crib of wrought iron bars
yarn
a terrific pass play
beef rich in hormones
weather passing overhead
undetermined

Workbook

1. Ronald ________ roses, the heathen collapsed
__into the kitchen. Rescue us.
2. Torrid fantasies glad you _________ it
__wasn't hot enough?
3. The young only died, _________
__re: work site.
4. Give us back to God! _________

Love Poem

Thank you.
I’m sorry.
Say it.
I love you.
Say it.
I love you too.
I’m sorry.
Thank you.

Talking to Myself

i. Authority

My boss says, “what have you been painting today?”
and I says the doors, and he says the “doors.

What time do you get here in the morning?”
“Seven thirty.” I says, “You know, I work hard for you all.”

“Did I say that you didn’t?”
“No.”

“I will ask you what you have done,
do you understand?” Never

what I will do.



ii. Café, Tuesday Night

Christ died, I just realized
this is Christian
rock.

I called you by name (?)
Before you were free

“Were not of this world” (the question mark
is mine)



iii. Fable (no moral)

I asked my pants
which pockets to use: “All of them,
of course.”

Of course, stuffing
my wallet into the back pocket, thinking
are you sure

you don’t mind? The zipper
strangely silent, denim whispers my
passing hand.

I Bought

I bought a sweater I bought a pen.
I bought a small animal from the farm.
She bought a puppy and I sold it to her.

I stood in line but changed my mind.
I ran out of the store with a new pair of glasses.
I stole some fishhooks. I bought a book after trading in some used books.

I rode a horse into the saloon and bought a sarsaparilla.
I bought a cat’s health.
I paid the veterinarian.

I bought a train ticket and took a trip.
I bought a bagel and ate it in the store.
I bought one but forgot it. I bought a bag of barley and fed the horse.

I used my debit card.
I used my debit card to buy groceries.
I used my debit card to buy groceries at Trader Joe’s.

Trader Joe’s is crowded full of shoppers buying smartly packaged goods.
I’m one of them.
I was given allowance and I spent it.

I told my sister I was buying food but instead bought pot.
I bought an airplane part but didn’t know how to use it.
I bought into it.

I lied.
I lied to myself about what I wanted and bought wheat bread.
I wanted to buy white bread.

Careerism

Lines of poetry flashing through my head all night.
Poems I will never write. A bitter man rots from within
sings Smog. The line preceding it goes:
bitterness is a low-er sin. It’s too late for the rhyme.

Bought a Boston Review and read it, each article
a reminder of what I haven’t done, what I could be doing.
Instead I took work off early and pissed the rest of the day away.
No poetry, but a trip to the grocery. Pornography.

Why hasn’t anyone picked either of my manuscripts?
Can’t they see how brilliant I am?
Instead it’s this striving, this wanting
to be something other. Perhaps I need a psychologist,

or a dose of good news from an outside source.
Perhaps I need to be saved.
The life of the bourgeois.
Werner Herzog and the

paved road, but my imagination isn’t brave enough
to envision new surroundings. Work a while
and wait. I ask myself:
what good can come of this?

Liz made hers to cream the competition,
the only way she could get heard. Forrest said
“some people get on the 1st train car”
and said I was one of them.

The only problem is that I’ve been staring out the window
way too long. Passed on the way to the dining car.
Faceless and nameless.
Thingly.

What I want is to be published, to have a book
that people can read and get back to me about.
To have and to hold. This
I think, is what I want.

Easter

A man with blood on his head stumbles into the street.
Wind swept plaza at the corner of 34th and 7th .
Sadness.
I think I’m beginning to know what this is.

The corner of 42nd and 6th.
“It’s not hard to leave you just do it.”
Unless you miss the bus, I thought to myself.
A windy day.

Nobody cares how you do it.
I thought I.
A man drinks his Coke.
The shadow of One Penn Plaza.

Between us, a young couple escapes into each other.
An old man wanders without bearing.
The pull of the moon.
The bus.

Poem on my 30th Birthday

I remember rain
running down the shingles
of the building. Seattle,

2001. I sat in a green chair
in a pink room
under orange light.

I wrote poems.
I remember the rain running
down shingles

just outside the window,
the view a corner
and a few branches. The green

algae on the black
tiles. Evening in Seattle
and nobody

was home. I sat
and wrote poems in the warm
orange light.

Sestina

Standing on the great wide plain
I tried but could not feel embarrassment.
I clapped my hands, farted, walked in a wide circle
Flapping my arms and shouting obscenities into the sky.
Still, the emotion refused to emerge.
I got to thinking in terms of metaphysics:

The basics, not this “what is being” kind of metaphysics,
But the idea that things, plain
old things, real things, will emerge
as solutions to problems like embarrassment.
A bird might drop dead out of the sky
Or likewise, looking behind me at the circle

Of worn dirt, dust rises in the shape of a circle
Sticking to my sweaty head, thinking about metaphysics.
Suddenly I see a tree outlined against the sky
And it comes to me, somehow, it’s this plain
This place. I’m too comfortable for embarrassment.
So in order for it to emerge

I began to remove my clothes, to emerge
In somebody else’s dream, thoughts racing in a circle
In myself, but still no embarrassment.
The wind, or the metaphysics
Of an imagined wind, pricks the hair on my arm, the plain
Curve of a goose bump beneath the sky

Blue sky
Apart as object before nerve endings emerge
And I feel connected in plain
Straight vectors from the bones that en-circle
My heart. Removed from all this talk about metaphysics
I touch my lip: embarrassment

Not as addition to but embarrassment
in place of. The sky
turns red as the Earth revolves or metaphysics
As explanations that emerge
And replace the original: a circle
For an eye, a line for a plain

For a sky filled with embarrassment.
As people began to emerge, there I was on a plain
naked and walking in a circle. We didn’t talk about metaphysics.

Mineral Point

Bob.
Susan.
AbbyBen
and Tyler.

April.
Lucy.
SterlingTuck
and Andy.

Tom.
Alpha-Romeo.
Watercress.
Dirt bike.

Ted.
Adam.
Matt.
Cathy.

Tuesday, 4:54 PM

While fantasizing about
publishing
a Korean tour bus pulls up to the curb.

They spill out
to take pictures of San Francisco
City Hall. Five minutes

later
they climb back aboard
and drive away.

Scene

Walking home I imagine
my life as a movie: it’s raining
and I jog across the street. A cab

cuts through the midground and large
grainy yellow names
are brought to the fore. I imagine

this as the start of the story's
arc, propelled under the careful
guidance of a trustworthy director working

and keeping watch, while I sit
watching basketball
at a Mexican restaurant in Oakland

California.

Advice

Liz told me to be careful of assumptions. That
you know what I know, while I
often enough don’t know, and assume

the same: we are lost
but at least we’re together. CD
chided this loyalty, a tendency

based not in work, but in
gratitude: the fact of Gale being in his office
everyday. The fact of

Hello. Meanwhile, Forrest
announces “something inside of me is broken”
and leaves us, unsure if we should clap.

Or more so, I helped Liz move
when the Iowa winter burst
her pipes. I painted

Brecht’s bedroom. My father insisted I be
myself, not to worry
what others do. My mother

told me about her summer at Dartmouth,
the press of sororities
and gave advice: if you don’t like

where you are, leave. “You don’t have to
follow him,” Susan told me
on the edge of my father’s bed.

I asked Professor Peterson
if there were limits
to sociology. He drew a grid.

From then on I wrote poetry.
More accurately
I don’t know what else

to do. Poetry as an escape
from making decisions
about How to live. What to do.

Wallace Stevens. An insurance executive.
Dr. William Carlos Williams .
George Oppen

organized unions, and disappeared. He shunned
his family, his fate. Most
of the writers I know

are in school one way
or another
unlike Erika, or Adam, who made it out

on the farm, or bookstore
respectively. I look for an authority
and find none. I look

to my notes, to books
to people
in hopes for instruction: A slender neck

is a sign that one
has never been in love. A long hair
on the left eyebrow

is a symbol of long life. That an attempt
to save a drowning man
is to offer oneself as substitute.

hi. its a dribbly drippy night in san francisco. its supposed to be like this all next week which is good because there hasn't been much rain in these parts lately. the rain is good because it keeps plants healthy. it also provides drinking water for humans and animals. buses are good because they take people from place to place. the ones in san francisco run on a wire mysteriously powered by electricity sent from a central hub. tonight i used one to get to the meditation group that i sometimes attend on sunday nights. eugene, the leader, was back from his trip and he talked about his trip to africa, expanding ones horizons and stepping out of comfort zones. it was good. i met some guy from ireland who had come to san francisco looking for work and ran into greg's brother ken, not that anybody who reads this knows who these people are but that's kind of part of the fun isn't it?

anyway, i've been away from the blog, not the computer but the blog, busy being sick (a three week flu like thing), working, and sending out manuscripts. its manuscript season in the very tiny poetry world that i like to think i inhabit, so it was time to prepare a hopeless manuscript for a hopeless contest and throw my lot in with the ten thousand others who arguably *deserve* to be published. its kind of a yucky feeling preparing and sending out manuscripts, essentially paying strangers to read your work. it's so much more normal feeling when you know the people (or at least have an acquaintance with) you are sending the work to. instead you spend your time preparing work for the great void. but i'm not complaining, just reporting on yet another suck ass state of the nation that one is told they need to endure. which is a great segway

to my next trick: i'll be posting a little collection of poems, one a day or every other day, throughout the month, mostly little lyric poems from the last year or so that i'm too lazy to send out to journals. i call this collection "I Have Wasted My Life" after the line in a James Wright poem that can be found here, on this suspicious looking website. So please, enjoy