November: Outbox

You can listen to a reading of this one too. Click.

Recips include: Jasmine; Jeff; Steven; Victoria; Thuy; Kathryn; Bess; Eugene; Hal; Casey; Stephanie

Ran into Sarah at the rave. Crazy. How are you our starlit night map? Finally got it all documented. Wish the aliens would abduct me to their UFOs.

SEPTA is a rotting horse carc. Just wana ride and die for my steel champions. Just wana grab some babe and save some day.

The smell of eggs and coitus and death and apostrophe and maligned souls and burnt rubies having been burnt by lazers and honesty’s chafing arguments anarchist women who are babes but taken by themselves in South Phila eating dumplings ‘n’ raisin bread ‘n’ drinking Tuscono wine under a quiet roof hiding from frozen fingers. It’s okay to save weird for later sometimes if you’re not like me ‘cause I fuck shit up through illogic.

Beefcup panty surprise. You miss’d the most insanely depressing morning ever. I recommend you van it tomorrow if only to know this stagnant misery. If that wasn’t the most miserable waiting period of this city’s boiling year I can’t figure out what is.

She has a good kind soul. Wish I could be a rebel without feeling so alone. I understand why all men in Victorian novels hate women their age and go for the youngins. With what machinery will we yank them all?

Another night alone. A great feeling for a 23-year-old. Can’t wait for the two year abstinence anniversary. Should be pretty soon. I love the floors after last period. Like looting the dungeon. I see you but you’ll never see me. Neon gummy worm waste gut. Hope Mangum has been writing albums this whole time and releases them every month in 2012.

What a fuckin’ night! Insanity on the open plane. One of these days I need to convince a City year babe to take a day off and fuck me for the entire ten hours of the shift. Experiences become fresher through the ages as information becomes more available. Harder for us to get into reality. Slower to exist out of such. Tonight is more about opening people’s minds up than anything else. Doesn’t matter your stance. My performance will be addressing greed and hubris society-wide

We don’t need more Creeleys dicking around with single eyeballs. Only way to survive is to join something or make it. That only matters to silencing fields. I’ll read it all when I’m in Hell’s quantum playground. Sugar Mom’s. Land o’ Lakes and cheese fry innuendos. For every brute a brawn. Some more soul-crushing weather.

The Names by Don is agonizing, hilarious, merciless and important for expats and airport enthusiasts. Gonna skip everything tonight and read it, I hope. Wish I was on the Olney East team. They are in their office doing makeup reading, playing cards, and drinking juice boxes. The them is neutrinos and their presence in dark matter. Vice is perfect. Brian is awesome. Optimism personified. Like Jasmine but not eighteen. The El Bar’s backyard is like Union Pool but for people who know they are fucked. Strippers dressed in unicorn costumes. True story.

Alone at Fox and Hound is like being transcendentalized by a wash of noise. Just got done the interview. One hour long. Amazing. And The Names is great humor too but marriage dysfunction is the big lesson. And that is what comes next for us lame duck isolators.

You are the sweetest heart in all the Atlantic. We need a leader we can fall in love with. Where did political romance go? I like the smell of your curry.

Dome pg 28: Allens. Dome pg 35: LCD Soundsystem. Recovery from last night’s nonsense. Today has been nomadic misery. The pains of being pure at heart are nails in the head. The sky is great and post-Leonid creamwash this morning. Your sister called me last night. Said your other phone was found or something. Where can you get Grimbergen here? You drunken fuckfoot. Incognegro.

If I’m free. Many things. Maybe Blind Man’s Ball Tuesday. How old are you? What kind of cooking? I leave for Maine on Wednesday. Same schedule situation. 23. Stews are precious. Will update you after lost planner madness is resolved. Strawberries are a dollar a pack. No answer. Feverish.

I’ll get the cert in January. For now gotta make sandwiches and contemplate why not offing myself. Snusing on the job. Scoundrel of a raging soulless. Like in Myth 2 where I was number three on the official ladder. Bat your eyes mate. Weed cookies. A sly fox. But skinnier. Pic image you blues busta. Cookie effect noticeable. Bottle of aura and uproarious coping viz. Get up on it or bow down low before the elephant.

The ghosts are moshing. Fuck Mitch. Assembly line assassin today. Post-weed cookie and gregarious feast hangover. Feel like a cookie monster. An egg salad sandwich gutterfly. The warehouse was called Wood Stove and the dogs were perfect and I remember spicy cornbread and a curry dish. Oh no! My brother! Snuggle with the decapz!

You or your fam want chocolate PIE? I swear your insanity is bolding. Same diff as head exploding Mine defined. Yours to be announced at your convenience. Goodbye all the lonely train trax. I forgot about the absolute terror of driving through Maine backwoods stoned into treebark. Bush transplants and shit. Trying to figure out naughty vs. nice. They don’t sensor the word “tits” on the radio here

Four out of ten spice-wise. But the nicest male waiter in all of Portland said a 20 has been done before. Hope hope hope I get to see you, oh Smile of Maine. Take Benadryl and zombie this one. It’ll resurge your Goats commitment. Plane leaves at 6:09. I hope I’m not delayed at the PWM eleven-gate wonderland. Is hanging in PHILADELPHIA ok, oh suburbanista?

I’m gona fast all week. Anti-caloric highway patrol. Remember Disturbed? Maine radio still plays them. Other highlights of the past three days—Blink 182, Tool, Eminem. BUY 3 SNOWS GET 1 FREE. Tires Brennan. It’s all about the tires. Drinking Long Trail. Typing. In front of a half-cranked woodstove. Now I know why Creeley loved this region during those last days.

Hope I don’t get arrested for medical THC blobs. Boarding time. This team blows. Too passive. Where and when am I meeting you plague fiend? This plane is so cramped. Nice seats though. The background on the phone of the person next to me is of herself. Made this shit. Bar bar bararanne Philadelphia’s air toxicity makes my grin much deeper.

Ungodly screams from Spaghetti Warehouse. Tenth and Vine. Homeless summit. Bring your baby carriages. Rolodex init. 4 blox My phone’s dying Front left Sex and all Jonathans in ten. So tired Someplace does. Some nether region place I feel like the underbelly of Hope Blvd. All of it.

I wish we could wrestle at that house every night. Lucky foothold. Sexual demon. Want a babe? Maybe two? Or three? Come to RT where the pussy’s free to see. Irish dancer convention. Creepily beautiful children with kinky curls. Thanks for the animalistic evening I love you both as though you are older siblings

No road tonight. Just too many lagers. Battle wounds. Miserable in the land of redbots. It’s so funny how lonely it gets at City Year when you succeed in rebelling. Buy a pink helmet. Start a development off to the side. My uniform. My bloody mouth and Rittenhouse Square. You are the stochastic huzband. Face mask land. Espresso suck pump. Banks armed with cash like Kabul patrols. Heroin sequin dress. Keep your eye on the lost memory of penguin warmth like me It’s where the ogres originate. A paisley time.

Just learned Olney’s Hispanic guidance counselor was jumped by a bunch of youth last Friday afternoon. Was on his way to the clinic for his heart. Died. Heart attack. We don’t know anything right now Short notice issues. Did she cure you for that day? Short lived departure. Fear is too large. Sexuality prevents. I don’t learn anything when I’m abstinent. I unlearn things when sexually active. 2 reasons to die. You can take it right between the eyes. Suck up.

What does that Japanese mean? And what existential place are you at? And why strange? I just made 2 delicious potluck items.

Jeff Brennan’s Last November of the First Decade of the Twenty First Century

You can listen to a recording of most of the following. On it Jeff plays guitar while I do vocal reenactment. It was recorded on November 29th in the Ol' Bread Factory in Philadelphia.

(6)
Wiki ruby ridge and you’ll get it. Played the adjective icebreaker. Want to fuck Artistic Allie and Adventurous Amanda.

(13)
Elliot Smith heart-stabbed himself at this time of day on a day like this. I read these guys to access the forbidden intelligence they wave in front of our faces like the opposite of money. And what’s tomorrow? Also: easiest airport day ever. How’s the sogworld treating you? Rescued another person from Ayn Rand. Made her buy White Noise.

(15-17)
Most zombie day ever. Two sleep hours. A whole new kind of moonwalk. Hope you didn’t not make out with her.

Snus was made to go with warm mustard pretzels. These should be the themes of Steven’s party. Moments like these are what make being most likely bipolar worth it.

Wish we could just vote Dave into office and get it over with. Went rogue. Person Pitch as anti-R1 ambiance weaponry.

(18-19)
Swamps finally dead. Call in the fish gods for the tree-bare rapture. Back at collegiate weight. Gonna eat pure garbage to celebrate. Chainsnusing. Looks German. First time this feels like my neighborhood. I know because I would kill a malignant invader.

20
Soldier returning from two years in Iraq. Left a baby here and gets three months to be its mother before heading to Afghanistan. We should adopt some Asians.

21
Market East brickwork deserves its own monopoly space. I never remember summers. Winter though. Winter is familiar. Seeing Victoria alone and leaving that place was my demise. Oh and the pills. I need to learn fitness or at least the cheat code for it. Should’ve prepared a lesson on snus since I just explained it to everyone anyway. Snus, Delillo, airports are the only things I think about. It took a tobacco to push suicide out of the top three.

22
Don’t let prostate cancer take you out of the game. Wish I were allergic to something weird.

23-25
Marathon babe as supercustomer. Tampa-bound. I would make this Alabama babe my lady. I can’t believe they left us with these hippos. These hungry, hungry hippos. This place is retarded today. These are the kinds of days where I buy Dewars and Vaseline on the way home. Austin is probably the best place in America. This sickness might be the start of a new Quiet Times.

25
They put angels. Christmas music is undoubtedly the most suicide-inspiring. The babes are the only things that keep me going. The media is here. Going home early. Sick as shit.

Combos and scotch. This is what I am now. You can’t. You just straight can’t. Haha. It’s awful. Nothing good in there.

26
Let’s start a non-profit steam factory that we only the truth about to children. We could put it near the airport with the others. Where they’re zoned.

Just release a hurricane of matter. Biblical bowel movements. The airport is only ever morning. Agnostic recreations.

27
Dome life looks pretty good. Let’s settle there if we can resolve life. Toblerone is angel feces.

Just saw new Nick Cage. Awesome as usual. Killing time at the old wooly mammoth until the Road starts. Love this city and St. John’s Wart placebo effect. Bawitdabaw. Get in the pit and try to love someone.

The Road is great. Pretty much what I imagine suburban Toledo to be. At Skinners thinking about life choices. Gotta score some molls for the showdance. Would rather culture a supervirus than life with this cold one more day.

Make her snus and then she can live in the dome we’ve commissioned. This is a rewind to my high school soul.

28
Trapped in a colony of unrealized sexuality. I understand my self-genesis through these humbling epiphanies. Might not make the show tonight. I think I have the flu. Can’t move. Hot and shivering. Vomitron. I’ll know by five if I’m up for it. This headache could be a headache celebrity. Gotta get my bike too. Oh no. Oh no. Dreamt of football pirates in teacups eating spam. Cell phone screen light hurts. Remember elementary school where ice-bags cured everything?

Where can a nigga buy some sorbet in this ambulancery? When will you be home? That’s why we let Maine stay in America. I miss being able to drink beer bottles in my house Metro workers are the carnies of the Winter World.

29)
I’m still at this hen house. Waiting for the infirm to awake. Meanwhile staring at a map of Australia, pitying their highway system. An inaccessible middle. Santa was probably much more believable in the time before Toys ‘r’ Us.

30))
Just me and the ambassador of crack on the el now. Taking inventory, stock of metaphysical things. Needle in the hayyyyy. Hysterical American Life segment on Chik Fil A The goal of today is 500 calories. Zertec-d makes one superhuman. I am becoming. Time releases, ticks on black wire. The world as static touchpads and orgasms. A truly Cyber Monday. This life is just one big burn after another

Babylon was built on bad smell air.

Guy Debord would’ve loved Zyrtec-d. All the personal illusions of health but the worst, spectacular Castorpian coughs. Inside me is the ideal image. The image and a Breughel phlegm pallet in lower relief.

Yoga and yogurt. Who was the defiler who made pseudo into speed?

The day was great. She’s great too. It’s confusing. Maybe I’m entering incel as you depart it. Just watched a child get locked in the automated checkpoint. Her backpack initials: DMT.

Been choking on tongue coat flecks all day. Not too far gone to care.

Teddy

my high school guidance counselor's husband won the lottery and she quit the next day

I took ceramics because nobody told me to take AP English

I hate the lottery

The Penguins (previewing)

Introduction

My penguins are hotter than yours.


Part One

My penguins are dicier, more clavicle, robotic-winged than yours. I don’t care if you’ve never seen the colony. I watch my penguins with interest. It is all about penguins, snow-white-fresh cocaine, and me. Believe me as sucker emcee. Goodnight, y’all, believe me and the ball that got rolling when I necked down on the floor, soaked in patio grime tracked in from outside under the slivered moon and purposed children were dancing for once in their God-forsaken lives.


Part Two

When my penguins get together they listen to up and coming orchestra. The flapping of wings and sucking of frozen feet, limbs appendaged upward, create snow dust on the coasts of Antarctica. The great mother looked at her children and screamed about politic's policies. I'm getting used to freezer burn. I'm getting used to being a loaf left in the back for months. My penguins rule the country while sucking their faces off in lust. My penguins are sexual deviants.

Part Three


Deicer, the word that the penguin king lives by, is like a cloak of ice words getting ready to melt for a few moments. You will be consumed by its chokehold. You will drown and the king will smile. Fresh bait baited.

Cameron Diaz

For The Fat Asshole I Almost Hit on My Bike

"Well for one thing you're going the wrong way"
"I know," I say, "I know I'm going the wrong way"

I feel like all the people who were just kicked out of the library for looking at porn
Who are they kidding when they claim a banana is a "solid food"

Hello, we're calling from the Suburban Station Lost and Found office
Mom thought you died or something, nope, still here

"Your session is over because this is certainly not research"
"I know," I say, "I know this is not research"

I find a watch on my floor and ask my friends if I should wear it
-Yeah, wear the watch, sure
-Do you like the watch? If you like it you should wear it, ya know?
-Watch?! I don't have time for this or did you forget what I'm going through!

An older friend believes his virus scanner is what's giving him viruses
"The fix is in" he says, smiling with pride
smiling because he's above the corruption
the corruption that's drowning us
that we're pretending we're swimming through

The way you set up your room now makes me think you're having sex with other people in it

This is me at my most spaceman
doing a whole new brand of moonwalk

This is about the time of night I start thinking
about the letters spelling Cameron Diaz

The time i think about "sweeping up"
in verb form

The time I think of Jodi Picoult
menstruating somewhere
somewhere woodsy where the heat's always on
because it always just snowed

Tourism

from Don DeLillo's The Names

"I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't clin to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expect to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dystenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event." (pgs 43-44)

Panomie

After Koestenbaum

Shedding the filth of adult urbanity,
you may have recognized them as necessary golem.

It is in true thought, in perfect form for the deranged,
that this is all hotel life. The transient stagecoach.
The backward doors and upside down Chinese in mirrors.

You would do this amazing thing with your hands.
Choke up on the buster of greening balls. It was made:
adamantium, human skin; oil degreaser concocted
by the wrinkle wizard wearing blue satin.

He was in his penthouse suite shining his shoes.
Too soon, you said! Grabbing your stickered bag
and letting go while spied upon by private eyes.

Snickering curses through the revolving portal.
You were the large gray whirlwind up front and in tune.

You were wondering in idealist conjecture.
Where there's will there's an answer. I could
have lost you like tennis balls flying by cameras.

But inside and then underneath your clay pockets
sat a recording device: vibraphone; instant finger
plucker response system. Your mind painted news.

It was you on the opposite veranda. All balsa.
This capture the flag game. This treaty of verdant sides
creeping along another king's kingdom garden path.
Where they hide the dead, where they hide your family,
is what sucks you up and makes the skin sticky.

You packed up bags and fled, thinking about robot
transfusion, neutrinos, and the red dots bouncing off
black holes during a mushroom trip your boyfriend had,
where the ceiling was molecular pancake mix frying up.

There is no blame to be spent when courtesy markets
are down: shareholders holding pens like pigged projects.
A giant glass dome made out of thousands of squares.
Rectangular thought provides intimacy and warm showers.

The Haunting of M. P.

The first time Margerie was haunted it was the one year anniversary to her marriage. She was getting married to Benjamin Russle on her 23rd October 25th. It was a date I recommended to her on the eve of my honeymoon while we both cascaded significance through painkiller cocktail torpor. As I bit lazily the dead skin at the base of my cuticles, peeling off strands, pretending to get ready and spit them out of my mouth in haste, but primarily swallowing them down, I assured Margerie that as her father I was an authority on each October 25th in her short life's catalog. All save the last, her 21st, which occurred while she was, as she told me, studying diligently at school. Little did she know that I checked all the credit card bills that came into my addresses, including those which contained purchases on the card I had co-signed with her. The card was for emergencies. It was her first time away from New England, away from the town in New England she grew up in. And as a responsible and progressive parent I nodded off under the gulp of a pill for back pain the strange, minute charges for soda, trail mix, and condoms over in Flagstaff. How she made it all the way over to the other side of this country without using her plastic is a phenomenon even to me, her omniscience. It would be a lie if I told you I hadn't screamed WHORE to a beige living room wall at least once after the weekly, alcohol-soaked social. But this is not about me. This is about Margerie Pacingfield, and her haunted existence.

October 25, numbers one through twenty, were important dates for all of us. We always prepared for Halloween in our own ways, starting on the 25th of the month with a bang. Here is a brief composite of Margerie's explosive wind-up prep periods:

1) Ba-ba.
2) Da-da.
3) More cookie dough please!
4) I don't want that.
5) When are we going to the store? The doll!
6) I need more makeup!
7) I miss Kelly. (this was her school friend, a female)
8) I miss Bobby. (this was her school friend, a male)
9) The bad kids told me they'll egg me if I go out there.
10) But what if I just made a costume this year!
11) I'm gonna get more candy than anyone else out there!
12) Can I go trick or treating with Bruce this year? (her first boyfriend)
13) Mima's having a party and yes her parents will be there so can I please go? Please please pretty please?
14) I don't want to talk about it to any of you.
15) Halloween? Halloween is for losers!
16) Halloween is so fucking awesome! This year will be the best! (and I don't care WHO you are, I said, I told her, but watch your god damn mouth when you're under my roof)
17) Halloween is against my religion
18) I'm just gonna stick around here this year.
19) If God is dead, then Halloween is dead too.
20) (most recently) Josh and I will stay home and watch the candy. You guys go have some fun. (her first "steady" relationship)

Josh was the last one. With him came the haunting. He held the ladder when I fell from it and injured my spine all over. He was okay in my book otherwise. The association still paralyzes. The purple pills paralyze. Unfortunately despite Josh's good intentions he failed at severing the cord attached to the failed relationship with Margerie. Following the breakup, exactly two weeks after Margerie's 20th Halloween, Josh began his frenzy. There was reclusion. There was aggression. There was anger and pain. Like many hauntings, there was a lack of evidence, and a victim. There: Margerie smiling despite everything wrong inside the picture.

DUNE DUNE DUNE DUNE

1

oh my good GOD
---my understanding of you
(now that I know you've got
a calf clutch
on that T-Mobile
flip cam)

2

Listen up there
instead of down here
where my head sticks out
like an architect
on the verge
of collapsing
cell towers
disguised as birch
queens.

3

It was redemption at first.
At second (glance)
my QWERTY
caught fire and was more
dust for the fingertips

TESOL Free Write On Pedagogy

We start with the system
it's working parts
the consciousness that seeks to be assimilated
Frank O'Hara sounds that way because he thinks that way
I do this I do that
and schools are birthed
and entire industries from those schools
which is what Pete was talking about, passionately
which we are coming back to

the big picture and only mattering details
teaching as impressionism
only approaching, like cursors
for the occasional Icarus crater
or the tenebrism
or if you're Dan Brown the way St. Peter
sort of looks like a babe

the big picture and the system that produced it
which is the point of systems
and why we like pictures

Wishing You

Unlike the wavering reception of the traditional accordion, which derives its hulkish, centipedenal sound from some handsome 19th C Germanic roots (Dear Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, this one's for you, who never did dance with me, when I was traveling back in time, and couldn't get a grip on your skeleton's claw! You who sulk! You who unfolded your instrument for me and begged me to worship! Nevermore! Nay, I'll keep an eye on you as I pry each of those diatonic buttons out and pound them into your corpse dust!) and has long fallen decayed to the many tests of Father Time, the twin-lipped human whistle has proven its significance through a popularity never known before. Since its inception, and through until now, the whist, as it is called back home, a name generally accepted and often found adorable, has captivated audiences of all circles for a good twenty years now.

The whist is one part synthetic-human lip-skin, and two parts conducted-air current. For every batch of tones created, only a select amount of joules are needed, and these are negligible when the measurement of beauty commences. Have you noticed the latest tools in aesthetic quantification? Look into the matter further, if you dare. Buschmanns need not apply.

It is no surprise that the whist is finding its way in every home. Professor Dunbar just purchased one two years ago and utilizes its preset tunes every night. He marvels at the Bach; he snaps to Eldridge; he bangs his head to Megadeath. He is quizzical and prays to God every night on the euphoric, almost sinful qualities of this curious musical instrument.

Little Annie down the street knows similar aural satisfaction and bewilderment as she listens to the mouthed -O- coo her to sleep. Ba Ba Black Sheep, Have You Any Wool? And when she wakes up in the morning to Miley Cyrus, the mimetic inclination rings her own lips as though one day, yes--oh, she is just a dreamer.

And yes, Marcus, oh Marcus--how his life was changed by the whist. Found on the streets by the WhistWonder 2XXL, a gigantotron of a whist, proudly displayed in the front window, bullet proof, down on the block, Marcus did not even know what was in store. But he stopped dealing, left the crowds he always considered friends, and family. Now he is off unemployment; off food stamps; and away from the government-issued housing projects. In the day M does cultural development and marketing processing downtown at WhistWonder's HQ; when he gets off, he sets up his two whists--one a prototype that only a select group of WW employees are allowed to know of, the other the original 2XXL--definitely inferior, though humorously, and touchingly nostalgic--on each side of the room, and creates mash-ups of popular folk songs. Big Rock Candy Ring of Fire actually found airplay at the local WURY station, famous for its innovative playlisting and advocation for experimental "sound artists."

Before I took the five minute drive to go and buy the whist, my life was hell. I had been a scholar in classical composition; my forte was piano sonatas. I could never "get it up," as they say in the office, to the string quartets or the symphonies or the nu-operatic. Even the dueling xylophones over on Ridge Street, during the student block parties, made me quiver more often than not. But none of that matters now. The plaguing life of family--wife, daughter, daughter, son--and the university position at the local League school--who really cares at all about 'consonant vocabulary' of late 20th-century composers?--and the weekend job doing research for a local comic book hero-artist, which sometimes provided me with the opportunity to write up some of the subplots--all went out the window, the attic window and the basement window, with the arrival of the fantastic machine.

As humans we spend years moving outward onto instruments. We strive for abandonment of our bodies. Security is fashionable. Always. From the dawn of time the goal has been to feel extremely comfortable with our own bodies by distancing ourselves from them. The painter picks up the brush and oils and canvas. The writer picks up the pen and notebook. The engineer builds models out of small wooden pieces. The doctor will only feel okay in life if he wields his scalpel. And the warmonger his tank. And the goddess her lightning bolts. And me, well, my whist.

With the whist comes a rationale that is grounding. It sobers. The whist will make us cry, will make us laugh, and make us love. The whist brings peace. At its current rate, it should end poverty and world hunger in no less than two years. In four I suspect the imperialist system throughout this globe will deteriorate and fall off like some old garment no longer desired, no longer sexually appealing. In eight years, the whist will come to be a language commonly accepted in all households. In ten, the whist will be a model of worship. Inevitably the whist will end and will be replaced by something else. The emulation of the human voice will be surpassed by the real human voice; but that state of enlightenment will not be immediate. There will be a crysis, then a dark age, and then, perhaps, the renaissance. Our mouths will quake and our moans will be deep and sound. I will be long dead, probably gathering dust right next to Buschmann. But that is okay. The whist, sitting next to me in my coffin, will provide my requiem, and my safe passage to the land of the silent.

Littering

He was prostrate on the blue rail bench trying to work the last of the coffee out of his body and commit the defining event of the day to memory. He imagined he was safe here, with his water, a lemon in it, at the Philadelphia International Airport, at the Terminal D R1 stop, the only sheltered railroad stop in like the entire airport rail-loop with benches large enough to lay prostrate on. It was so ordinary--a notable ordinariness considering what had happened. “How could everything feel so ordinary?” he thought, laying prostrate in the enclosure, waiting for the train to bounce back from its final stop: the E Terminal.

This is what he always did after work although using a word like always seemed more than a little ridiculous in light of the circumstances. Henceforth, he thought, there would always be the way things had been before the event and the way things were after. His life-line now sundered by some pre/post duality. It had been one of those days where history becomes binary.

He noted how ordinary everyone else was being.

“This is ridiculous,” he said to no one in that nothing-voice we use when addressing ourselves.

“But-,“ he almost replied before being rebutted by some other cerebral pundit. In times like these self-talking is often shaken down to breath-heavy prepositions or whichever expletives we’re most invested in at the moment. Plausible narratives, causality, other words that basically mean “meaning” weave slip-shod quilts in the frontal lobe and, due largely to latency issues, these paltry push-pins of language are all that escape. It’s as if what we conceive as our “lips” were trying to remember the dreams of what we conceive as our “self” had had last night.

He sat up. He was sitting up now, no longer prostrate, although we know that the rail bench was long enough to accommodate his 5’10” 160 frame. He thought about what he must’ve looked like there on the blue rail bench, under the sign that said “Terminal D: all Gates, Ticketing, Baggage Claim,” at once the Airport’s anatomy and its religion, mouth-speaking things to the ether. He thought about memory and experience and perception and eventually cinematic perspective. According to the sorts of authors he always cursed because they were always right: “I’m in your movie; you’re in mine.” Ergo, he wondered: where would they place the camera in this scene of the bio-pic? What would the other scenes be? Surely today’s event would be incorporated. How could it be skirted? Anything with this many breath-heavy mouthed words behind it must hold some belly of biographical significance. Surely, some theater-goer or reader (because, at some point, he probably would write some memoirs or letters or something if that’s still the trend for “the greats” when he’s had enough life experiences to be called a “life” and the desire to feel young again—a desire to return to days like today: the day of the event…the day that changed everything forever ago.) Surely someone could cull some meaning from things like this, things this traumatic, things this memorable, things that inspire this much fucking introspection and meta-fiction and poetry that will surely be anthologized as his post-“whatever-the-media-and-internet-are-calling-the-event” period, which represents a major departure from his juvenilia.

The train slid in exactly when the paint-chipped sign said it would and he left the enclosure, leaving behind the empty cup, a depleted lemon inside.

“What an asshole” everything who boarded previously at the E Terminal and sitting in the seats with windows that could see into the enclosure thought as this indignant, self-absorbed litterer walked through the requisite series of automatic doors and joined them as passengers.

Sixty years later he still feels guilty about littering because it’s the only thing anyone else remembered.

"Minor Things" or "Nantucket"

Let's start with a nod to the irrational numbers
followed briefly by what we consider imaginary
and who could forget the fractals
by which Star Wars is possible
that teenage ship-launcher
like mine, Times Square, eighteen
at B. B. King's
the guy who bought me the first bar shot
meeting Magner in the crowd like a smoke monster
that one guy with the backpack with the acid
the myth he was until you found him
and train-ride home through the laughing gas of youth
how youth ends at drug use
how drugs make Plato credible
and Boltzmann, Morrison (who I hate), Coyne, and the current anorexic music slump
and Timothy Leary
who JFK Jr. summered with
great plane crasher, great Payne Stewart figure
great vicarious sadnesses
a depressed father driving through Massachusetts
the lesson on the "Texas Wedge"
how small and awful this island really is
how these are the poems your father would like if you shared yourself
but if you shared yourself
but if you shared yourself
but if you shared yourself

The Middle of the Atlantic

For Future Breakups

It became clear earlier
that this was no time to be happy

I know you think the stage extends everywhere
but this is Fishtown
and we're in a parking lot
and the sky just went on strike
it's been without a contract since March

you recognize the horizon from the broken churches
where only the locks work
and we keep swearing at each other in our graffiti
about it being over, about it being too un-tragic

You text:
"Even if it is Jeff Koons
a wax penis in a beer cozy
won't win me back"
Which I immediately forward
to all my fake lesbians

rather than photography
let's bank this instance
for the next time we're in a long line
or staving off ejaculation
or on the El dodging H__ N__'s
or trying to forget about you
forgetting about me

Bumping Some Coke With You

Another Frank O'Hara Fantasy

is even more wonderful since once you told me it makes you horny and I'm in the market for a life experience
partially for the fact that we both love Morissey
partially because this is a send-off on a roof-top
partially for New York picketing cross-river like a gold-leaf chorus line
a city with more Exit signs than memories
instilling it's children with a wholesome insignificance, hiply disaffected
all so temporary, like tattoos and erections
every public works project the internet talks about happening but are less real than ocean maps

but they will approach it as long as its perfectly still

and this is what makes you a legend and also what makes you a movie

and it’s tremendously inspiring this isolation we’ve imposed

is it’s own form of madness

And how do they stay in business, these cartographers
is it a family thing?

I look at you, sadly, because you will never engender those Vincent feelings that make literature possible to care about
you will never be the white space or the belly button in a "You Are Gorgeous And I'm Coming" or an iamb in a Lunch Poem although you do have feet and are unshaven
and your mother most likely accepts you since you didn't turn out an artist or something
or a dancer
so I'm done wasting energy on you and about that time on the roof near the satellites after we licked the bag like two new celebrities
and return to the ordinary muggings endemic with the gentry

Your Holiness, I Beg You

The hole was gently smuggled in across the Bulgarian border. There was no directive. The hole moved silently about the landscape like iron on curtain. Your mother was there and she told us all about it when she got back to Dayton, Ohio, where the cat jumped a few times. It had been twenty years since she left for Europe. The year she left a hot-air-balloon took off and had a tragic crash only several hours later, when the man, young Thompson who I went to college with, shot himself in the head. The day had been bright blue, some puffy white clouds jumping out of the background like forested explosions. When Thompson pulled the trigger, he immediately flipped out of the basket, like in rag doll physics.

The bullet had been aimed upwards and shot upwards. Thompson had been looking down at the gun's barrel. It was his father's gun. I had seen the balloon floating along in the sky thirty minutes before the bullet tore through the balloon's fabric material and caused the previously-rising sky device, having lost weight when Thompson flipped, precisely 190 pounds of good, standard weight, to be exact, to fall slowly. The balloon tore with all its weight. I was studying for the SATs and didn't notice its fiery descent into the baseball field in the center of town. There was a large bang and there were some children remembering moments earlier when they had been screaming and running and looking for a place to hide. When I heard from Coach Jordan, my physics teacher, about all the clandestine chaos and resulting whimpers, I remembered being in the woods with my stepfather some years ago, maybe two, and felling trees left and right. There was definitely a fear of being squashed. I could be a LEGO man too.

As mother flew across the Atlantic Ocean headed for god knows what, because I was only 15 at the time and didn't give a shit about Europe or balloons or sissy music either, she had some fears of her own. Like a shortage of Perrier on board the flight; like obnoxious older women hitting on her; or worse, older anybodies farting next to her in the type of flatulence you associate with death and the most uncanny of resurrections.

But think of the odds: I am a god now, a living and breathing one, and I tell this story because it humors me. To think about what all the mortals like, in their pasty lifestyle of prowls and ill-humor. I can't imagine what they would do if the cows came home. What would you do if the milk boy delivered peat moss? A beer a night keeps the moss deliverer away. Get your best lagers out, is my free advice.

When she lands and when we're done playing the last card game of the night, where I'm stuck on the sidelines, having lost over and over, and have my imagination turning as I watch the mobiles hanging from the ceiling and the wine stench rotting holes in my mouth, I think about the hole. The hole marches back across to Bulgaria and is legally represented by an assortment of other holes. After the trial it gets penetrated by a stampede of beast feet. Where is the herdsmen? Where is the woman with the golden pipes? Where is father, his axe swinging, blowing the masses into pulp and plunder?

My mother takes a picture like a tourist. If I had found out she had done that I would have hated her for several years; I am currently hating her for several right now because she didn't tell me, and I found out about it, because I'm a god now, and when it comes to fourth through sixth dimensions in Bulgaria, I'm there. Hi mom.