This is a series of poems I wrote over a day or two or three (April 2023), and finally turned a "corner" in my mind. I didn't want to publish them but now I don't care as much, although later I'll likely read them and think 'oh yeah that's why I didn't want to publish them' and nowadays I guess we are responsible for our own censorship. The reference to anatomy on a statue is related to someone in Florida allegedly finding the statue of David, a canon of Western art, offensive due to the nudity. Without drapes, without leaves, here's the naked poetry. I think when we finally stop censoring ourselves we feel free. At least that is the "corner" I felt I turned.
Tea Leaves I
The tea was weaker than I meant to brew
The leaves were tattered and that is what is good for flavor
Nature is always on the loose
Paper was once a chunk of wood
On the wooden cross there sits the savior.
Could you, and me, and Jesus have some tea?
Whatever would we talk about?
The Philistines and rapture and the flood
Mary Magdalene and the color of mud
Could we just grab a gypsy off the street
And get our fortune read instead?
My palm is hungry for the opportunity
To know.
Plastic Panthers
His answer is a plastic panther on the wall, after the man and her
tattooed the whole movie on their palms.
Blue tea cup is almost teal in the bright sun.
Windows up, misery levels are down.
Tea is being consumed, and Tea is from the East.
The West is never won, don’t even try.
Just stay by the Lake, drinking clean water and holding a pound of salt in your palm.
You didn’t understand it the first time and you are dangerously close
to exposing the sand to the sea shells.
Bits of broken glass have been weathered to a sheen
Why can’t it be the same, for us?
Sheets and Shadows
A simple sheet lay on the bed, white and tight and clean. The mystery of how I will ever get to sleep, with all this pain in my head, is not for us to decide today. Let us bounce a quarter to prove a point that the sheet is taut and the bed is ready. Let us meditate a bit to prepare ourselves to wind down, to fall slow like kite does miss, slowly, a gust of wind, and just lay still until our blackness overtakes us. They say to know your shadow, but does our shadow long to know us?
Reasons
Manganese is a chemical in a weld, the chips of this can be consumed, the doom of razors and the balls of mercury we played with, I remember getting slammed to the ground, and I never stole money again.
Summer
Planets spinning and it’s hot up in the attic.
Mastery
The mastery of words is mastery of the self
Mastery of our own mind
Mastery of the thoughts that make us human
Mastery of our hands and ideas
Choosing the right word and the right time
And letting the sunlight dance on the curtain
To find that unexpected moment
That is art
Chump Change
I had to work out every odd moment, each spin on the singing bowl
Reverberating in my mind, money didn’t matter a damn bit.
You could come at me with a million dollars
It’s chump change for what I got in my soul
Oh, your attitude is so useless, you don’t even
Mute the channel.
Failure
It’s not okay that my words are failing me
It’s not okay that my words are failing me
It’s not okay that my words are failing me
Lifetimes
A lifetime of grime South of the state line
My mind is finding a fifth of gin
Leads to rapture and a looney bin
They’ve got me there all day,
Just waiting for the lights to go out.
Quiet Disco Revisited
Quiet disco I recall the quietness of being me
and the slow ride into stardom
kissing the tree
This isn’t helping, dude
you’re going to have to read
Shakespeare and then practice speech
Watch how the actors roll
each line off their tongue
Drink kombucha and dive headfirst into a tire
spinning on the highway
toward a noisy destination
I suppose I have spent so much time in quiet
Now is the time for the noise
It’s so distracting to need to change each letter
To have grammar check with I waaaant too mussspell things dfor effectte.
The Plane
Oh, do not revisit that plane
It’s flown in the sky
Yet there is something there
The stars behind the clouds.
My Legs in Vegas
Rock solid and hollow
Thought leader and shallow
Masked bandit on gameshow
Lowdown barber stepson
Razor candy suicide death watch
Yellow hearted son of a gun
Stepchild reading at a fifth grade level
Mastered by the moonlight sun
Pride freedom fame and gunshots
Plows horses felines and ducks
Games blisters sunburn and woodsheds
Pennies and pristine sense of luck.
Okay
Meningitis freezeframe dildo
Pressure wash groping
Hunted by gremlins and dimestore grannies
Praised by the leaders and award show contestants
Pleasured by biopic arms making cuts
Soundless and binded by corsets and rust
Pillowtalk Sunday on April new showers
Crimes on the dripping paint
My grape jelly roll
Men who like candy
And women who feed them
Grumpy old queen
Pissed off dogs
Cranes titling up to the sun
Sunlight dripping down on the moon
Radiation nuclear twist fuck
Funk groan window to my god damned soul
No profanity please
There are children sleeping
Rock my grape jelly roll
Liberals and Expectations
Thought you’d see me sleeping
Making mindless liberal touchpoints
Caressing the statue until it got hard
And welcoming Bernie Sanders to dinner
Me and him have already had a long talk
And I’ve raised his flag on my back porch
While feeding children with a ten foot fork
It’s no wonder I own a ball of yarn
All the better to wrap this up
Colorfully and softly
Just the way you would have wanted
Hollywood is the real criminal
But I don’t have time for that here.
Please pass the peas.
Pass the fleas.
Pass your worn out dog.
Loyalty to the cause has become
A fun way to make new laws
And now you’ve scared every conservative
Into going into a cave
And they’re on the crusades again
pretending like it’s 1230 A.D.
Please show me David’s dick.
I want to see it.’
Michelangelo isn’t on call
He did his job
And he wanted to be a sculptor way more than he wanted to paint.
The Sistene Chapel was like his living hell.
Oh praise him, don’t get woke and tell.
Is it true that you
Actually like pissing people off?
Well then all you’re going to be
Is writing Howl-type poetry
That doesn’t even land well
We all need
Someone in a buttoned up shirt
Telling us how to think.
My Voice
I am finding my voice. And not my cute little women in science voice with pink guitars and purple wrist bands. Nope, my actual voice caught in the tears of plastic and shipwrecked faggots, grimy with radio grease and painted with pricked fingers and chasing wabbits. Let me hear the damn thing sing, rip the dress as the 80-year-old aunt gets on the table at the wedding, and let me out of my cage, and then the cage within the cage, let it be like a fractal on a druggie 70s record cover, let it keep going and going and going and going and goingoinoininng.