Conversations With My Self

—because if something is infinite, and time is circular, you see it all wraps in on itself, is contained within itself

in the vacuum of outer space that resides in the center of my heart, is also outside of me, a beam of light to an artichoke lotus heart,

a caved in mine shaft, draft of cool life steaming from below where magmas pain of daybreak forges metal skies,

afternoon rides down Perring Parkway going to the motor show, the car meet at the Dundalk pier pavilion, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Hickleman’s Edge, Catamook dredge on the Chesapeake to keep the beach from disappearing completely into the bay and only delaying the inevitable,

the credible eye witness fled the scene and is hiding out in a brown and white RV somewhere in the Fiddle State Corridor,

the bedroom floor boards warp up from moisture trapped in the air vents,

the care-warded ghost of briar, song and liar hold hands and swing dance on the burning canto—

after a while we all return to the nothing place, the shadow world of fathomless space in the deep conduits of time.

Gamut

He looks at her with kind eyes

as she freely paints the wall

the battle hall a sacred temple of fortitude and restlessness,

the ever gentleness of undressing in the mirror,

the masked horizon flaking

white stage make-up,

riots about London and bread

for a fair capital gains market

four-door hemi pick-up

dumped in the front lawn on stereotypical cinder blocks,

the front wood porch sinking at its middle,

depressed to be so alive

carrying the weight of five rotting generations

filled with buffalo wings and blue cheese dressing—

the dented mattress batted up against the wall

between it and the bed

where she’s getting it from behind

he looks at her with round eyes

and taps her stills like mountains,

augers ale from ancient pines

and stews a serum

naked stream the desert wash,

dappled moon tide

dips the sun in tar and feather,

chase it down like shivers in the night,

dogs in the night scream at me for being too nice

bite my tongue for me and send it to my mother

in a white cardboard box tied with a pink satin ribbon

a pair of ballet slippers

gnawed apart like chicken bones tossed on the trailer floor

over his bare shoulder—

the colder it gets the more I think I will be stuck—

I’m wrong, incapacitated

crying in the car on the way home

through hushed unnatural fog,

snow and ice on the ground on the tree branches

and the whole sky is white,

my whole vision is stark, bleak as Edith

caring for a miserable person

is absurdist humor at its finest,

pointing out and smiling at us

a raccoon digging the trash on the docks of Seattle,

stopped and turned to me to take a picture,

snitched some old Chinese food

and stickered away

to his cache of midday robberies.

Handed

Talon banjos

and buffalo trombones

revel the blue screen sky.

Green hipped mountains

lie the left horizon

on Tredmore Road,

Scarboro, Sandy Hook,

Kalmia cuts the two—

Ady trailer park boys

cut the headlights,

rattle shake bones

in the flower bed,

metal frame

open mouthed in the front yard,

Pentecostal laughter

in Sunday white shoes,

the little leather strap

and gold buckle

hugging her instep.

She keeps up with Mother

by skipping,

tossing the stone

and hop-scotching—

don’t step on the cracks

or you’ll break your mother’s back—

the Indian whoop wa wa

in the dogwood tree.

She lives like a blue bird

in a tree full of bees,

and caterpillar web nests,

snap beetles

snap their feelers

in one-two timing

for Mater Dei saints

and Irish war paint

bares male faces,

from Graceland

to Babes in Toyland,

the same song til dawn,

rooster crow man

on the weather vein

calls for rain today.

Not Even a Real Name

On Piper Road the county line stops talking around midnight and puts the down the bowl,

looks over at me in the passenger seat of the bloody Bronco, parked out on Old

Harlow Road, past the Anabaptist preacher’s home.

His daughter Nancy waits tables at the Bel Loc Diner in town and brings home almost no

pay but she can’t leave home til she’s married anyway.  Her Father is old school

like that, feels he’s gotta keep her under wraps,

away from the prying eyes of lusty young swaggers climbing the rain gutter to tap on her

bedroom window and whisper sally slippers in her sweet idling ear. 

The rear taillight is out in the muddy Bronco, turned on and running now but still parked

on the low ridge butting Silter Creek, after being bare naked and coming

on his left headlight, and held right there in the moonlight the angles cut his face like

Roman(ticized) marble, cast in alabaster clay. 

The wince home and clung in the parking lot like real lovers do you could get stuck in my

head he said, if there was ever one.

To what point and purpose, my dear, when I’m leaving in June to hit the effortless road.

You wake up each day and recognize its newness,

and I thought I had made the transformation complete, that I would be able to maintain

that state of mind back home in Harford County.  I don’t mean to complain, I

know that’s not attractive in a young lady.

You know, this cold means to hell with Al Gore’s whole global warming shit, he ruined

that, he don’t know what he’s talking about. 

Yeah man, I’m not sure any of them know what they’re talking about.  I try not to pay

attention to it.

Let’s slowly get up while he’s still talking, but we could just stand up and he’d keep right

on talking, and sitting in the blue Bronco we take turns talking about him like

he’s not right inside and we didn’t invite him. 

It all remains unclear in my forehead like a lost slipper shining on the steps but my

Grandmother’s been ruling pretty damn well for the last twenty years without a

husband at her side, riding the mattress tide down the grand stairway,

the back hallway leading to a vent spyware on Parliament to keep tabs on what they’re

doing, which is a whole lot of something compared to Congress’s nothing and

their what’s it seven percent approval rating.

Isn’t the margin of error somewhere around three or four percent?   So really, who’s

counting or voting or giving a shit these days, a vote for Herman Cain is a vote for

Steve Colbert.

Did you see that sexy sax man video?  This guy goes around bombarding people with

Careless Whisper in public places wearing these tight leather pants and no shirt.

He’s got a pretty sweet mullet too, oh the wonders of the internet and the brain dump,

the gymnasium cafeteria referendum media replaced bypass surgery with a tourniquet and

released poisonous venom like an old album or Disney movie in 3D this is how

they want us to be

scatterbrained and scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast in the morning go to work

little hamster and come home to your wife and hamster in the birdcage

the often raged out little peckerwood steaming in the driveway melting the ice from the

driveway and sending it down Pearwood Drive, to the common ground. 

There’s an open concrete aqueduct that channels the neighborhood’s water into Silter

Creek bottom.  During El Nino we took inner-tubes down it and Courtney lost her

favorite green flip-flops but it was worth it.

We rode bikes down it on 9/11 when we got out of school early and climbed the tree in

her front yard singing fried ham, fried ham, cheese and bologna, and after the

macaroni we will have some pickles and pretzels and some more fried ham, fried

ham, fried ham.

Her neighbors, the one with the big black dog named Riley, stood outside talking to her

mom Miss Nancy, looking all distressed lately everyone’s worried about flying

the dark recesses of our consciousness,

the debasement we are under,  the praying Bronco, the dying buffalo, the torn down

sycamore, the why oak asking for a baby that’s been stolen.  The toll we owe is

innumerable and we deserve to be knocked down a peg,

that’s something he doesn’t agree with cause he sees all these people that would kill to

live here but I won’t do it, won’t knot its webbing.  I’m thinking of where

I should go with him

and you’d probably tell me to stop, it’s over now, but something in me wants to make this

go on for hours and pages even if I never say nothing. 

Well I’ve said something, but it doesn’t really add up to anything.  It’s never finished, if

it was, I would stop writing about fucking with boys in Broncos.

As a teacher it is not about plugging a flash-drive into my forehead, extracting all my information and then downloading into the student’s brain.  I want for them to discover knowledge through their own intuition.  I serve as a guide for that journey to self-fulfillment, for independent thought, letting them know that their voice does matter, that it is right to question pre-established thoughts on normality. If the student doesn’t like something we have read in class, or thinks it’s a load of shit, I want to know why, what is off about it?  There should be open communication in the classroom, no pretense of taboo, so that students may forge academic and intellectual friendships with one another, even if they are not going to hang out outside the classroom, that they can come in and be truthful with one another, frank about what they are discussing.  I want to drop the emphasis on grades because it fosters an air of competition between students, which is inherently counter-productive to their being open and honest with one another and with me as their teacher.  If they can find one thing, one thought, in our class and be passionate about it, go balls deep with it, they will succeed, and I will feel like I have helped them learn.  I want them to know that all I’m trying to do is help them, that I am not here to pass judgment on them or their thoughts, that I am not looking down on them, that I am in fact fascinated with what they have to say, that they often floor me with the things they come up with in discussion, surprise me, so that I learn just as much from them as I hope they do from me.

Beethoven is sobering after Mozart’s

 Casanova heart-fueled rally of an ending,

left me standing

up above me

there’s a spicket

taunting like a jabber.

He’s hammering on my window box.

Today’s the day we salt the piper

and chew the rats in stew,

the clover kind,

the lover’s mind

for the dawn before the day.

I’ve opened up a wider eye

to see the sun that lies inside

and built a home of clay.

Adam and I eat lunch by the bay

and Trapper eats shit like us for breakfast.

I forgot the rest of this before I thought to write it.

I conceptualized it backwards

like a reverse birth effect order,

the cow and the chord order,

the mastiff grand hearth steader

combing his land on his head,

quaking like earth in the bed.

The master keel rolls at last,

feather droll

drum bowls

beat the dapper night.

First of the Year

Cadence burns the midnight coal,

returns the winter to its Stonewall sleep.

I can wring my voice like a lady from a bath.

The rain started on the way home

and it’s been warm the last few days,

thunderstorms and dandelions in December

and snow in October.

The noble owl jocks his beak in my direction,

wastes me on the floor and I’m not judging.

I’m laying on it too across the room from you,

right next in bed to you, the blinds removed

so the morning sun can see in.

This year begins two hours ago.

I let it go and walk out the door,

down the steps and around the corner

Atticus seeps stones of testament,

sacred cost of living made George Bailey affordable.

The door is closing, marker drawn in the kitchen floor.

The glass jar poured the wincing shine,

jam house ground the kettle groove,

the muskrat stove pipe,

concrete wicker cabinet.

Sweep the chimney to shore

with Montana pine branches—

the hidden highways of riverboat men

and their blue belly tick beds.

I’m shaking a stick at a hornet’s nest and hoping to get money.

The prods of the cattle drive

and the cowboy hat tips howdy ma’am to an outsider.

The garden unpainted,

the last sliver gassed triumph down the Nantahala.

Arse Poetica II

my brain is moving really fast all the time.  it is constantly thinking thoughts that i don't realize it's thinking, but i can feel it working, thinking. that's why i write. if i kept it in, i'd go crazy more. when i can be calm in quietness, return to that quietness, my brain is able to process what it's been thinking so that it can be translated into words on a page.