Category: Photo/Poem

I Have a Friend in Jesus

 “I have a friend in Jesus”
 says the kid sporting a
 second-hand suit and
 disinfectant eyes.
 
 With a righteous buzz he
 greets strangers,
 distributes pamphlets,
 spreads his word,
 immune to their
 rejection and
 avoidance.
 
 How comforting his faith must be - 
 to swim the
 medicinal vapors
 of certainty,
 
 rather than gather
 apples in the
 orchard of
 not knowing.

Segment of Historicity

 Friendly travelers
 casting off gravity,
 transmission built to talk to ghosts,
 a roadside distinction.
 
 Just say this:
 transit of spirit animals
 nothing living,
 don’t tell lies.
 
 Beat spirit,
 respirator buzz,
 shadow gratitude,
 
 confessions to my unborn daughter:
 when the heart emerges glistening,
 one mustn’t expect figs from thistles;
 
 to see what other people don’t,
 to see obstacles as inspirations -
 to be a peaceful warrior 
 in an invisible cinema.

Sometimes Things Just End


 It doesn’t much matter
 what yips and squeaks
 leak and dribble from our
 little selves,
 those cuts and scars
 tattooed in the caverns
 of memory, beyond recognition,
 like electricity.
 
 Habits, hankerings
 and those entitlements
 play like cheap burlesque,
 to an audience of nought,
 
 and miss the point:
 
 everything gets gone,
 not sometimes,
 but always;
 
 and one of the
 numerous human tasks
 is to know
 when that inexplicable end
 
 is important.

Desponsive Position

 
 Learning to fly in a downwards trajectory,
 a tragic achievement with scatological insults;
 the overspill of emotion part of your geography.
 
 Memories slurred in cabbage and broken glass - 
      smart junk,
      disposable wit,
      fetishized objects,

 Pilgrims of Derangement impersonate Fantasists,
 a forcefield around eternity.
 
 Autobiography deconstructed from relics,
 bleached of meaningful distinctions
 fungal avoidance teasing out moral complexities,
 esoteric longings and the nature of proportion.
 
 The prejudices gave spiritual status,
 sensorial tonality, master of shifting discontent and
 diagonal momentum;
 
 Too much to say 
 very easily becomes 
 nothing but static.

The Moody Gospel

 
The impoverish soprano saxophone improvisation
 kills the Moody Gospel 
 in an free wheeling jam session;
 a series of inconsistent contradictions,
 refusals to be contacted,
 doing his dirty work, 
 by proxy.
 
 You think it's money, 
 it's not;
 it's personality,
 and you haven't got one lieutenant.

 What has he got that Susie likes? 
 Lost his leg to a home town sweetheart,
 a feeble alibi for amorality.
 Your every move is obvious,
 all antisocial perversion of value, 
 not cleverness, not imagination, 
 just brute force.
 
 The line of wolves who are nothing to anyone.
 You are 
 Genghis Khan, 
 Alexander the Great, 
 Caesar -
 Yes, they were skilled; 
 but were they subversive?

Sprezzatura

 
 With beetle-browed irritation
 here we go again:
 Sprezzatura -
 essentially or inessentially
 an identity derived
 for the pop imagination
 of a self-exploding
 book.
 
 Not a prison house
 or a world view,
 this seems a little different,
 not in cognitive taste,
 but in cultural flavor.
 
 The amperage of misunderstanding increases,
 these darkly funny night sweats
 a correction to complacency,
 a strangled, atonal blend of
 billows,
 stutters,
 and cracks -
 a free-wheeling orchestration of
 liquid samba and depraved forro.
 
 Pearls hang down in necklaces,
 islands come round in archipelagos,
 two pupils and one fool go yelping
 with little allegiance to tradition;
 concertina remixes on high wire,
 tightrope de crescendo
 scowling in god's pocket
 beyond basic logistical discussions.
 
 There are no rehearsals.
 
 The language of flowers:
 a trio of violets,
 thistle squiggles,
 overlaid on mulberry
 dead palms and live parakeets,
 angels show up elsewhere,
 no complexity, virtuous intentions,
 maudlin caricatures, or amplitude.
 
 The waggles of focal dystonia:
 my light from one lightbulb,
 I stand illuminated,
 and the bastards tried to stop me.