Sometimes I just don't feel like talking

[insert dream here]

un-useful

What use is a poet in this age now

when everyone connects in short verse anyhow?

What use is a writer, a teller of tales,

when everybody tells all they do, without fail?

What use is protesting

as you're dragged out of the dark?

Life now's about openness,

it's not about art.

We, considered

Consider this a call to arms

and hands

and after-love-made

bodies tremblin'.

Consider this a lucky charm

a plan

a perfect daydream

worth rememb'ring.

Consider this amidst its

lies

its careless thoughts

and misspent youth.

Consider this as bona

fide

as magic-wrought

as bitter truth.

Consider this as evolution

as moving on

as pushing forwards

sans regret.

Consider this as pure pollution

as righting wrong

as hoping to be better

yet.

Consider this as absolute

indelible

unbreakable

and free.

Consider this 'does not compute'

unsellable

untakeable

and

consider this as we.

Absent friends

Absent friends

whose absence brings

a horror and a sorrow

to my heart

that I may never

encounter true again

all that being there

and taking part

such as happened when

we lived together

rolled together in

nights that felt

strangely holy

for all their unfaltering

pursuit of sin

and low-priced booze -

if I could spend my

days with any people

I would spend my days

with all of you.

The Blue, part 2

Most films make me cry,

or nearly do,

not just because they're

sad, or

funny - so I laugh so hard

it brings the tears -

but because I'm jealous

of the way they

travel, and don't just get

one shot

at things like running

mad into the ocean,

like buying the best

food near a Marseilles

dock on a specific date

in one specific year.

They last shorter than

the average human life,

much shorter,

and yet I envy

them because

once they stop they

get to get played again,

the same,

unchanged,

and so there's always hope

at the end of

Shawshank,

leaves me wishing I could say the same for me -

the only thing I

have over cinematic

masterworks is

that my will, at least,

is free,

but I get to thinking

that might not be

enough, if I don't

have another

Marseilles moment soon...

Still, the future's what

you make of it, I

guess

and it's my fault

if I choose to spend

it going green-eyed

over films in my

front room.

The Blue, part 1

Saw it in a film,

and had a flashback to

the sea,

blue-eye-blue Mediterranean,

watching waves not watching

me,

digging feet beneath the

warm sand, discovering

half-shells with

my toes,

freest time of my life was

over,

sea said I had to

let it go.

Music in Full Time

I haven't had a soundtrack

full-time for far

too long,

and so perhaps that's how come

I'm feeling like

all my rhythm's gone,

but there are voices

heard on occasion,

belonging to my friends,

that give me hope

of fixing

and of soundtrackin' again.

This

It all comes down to this

at some point,

though what this is

you're never told,

just left to guess

haphazardly

that it has to do

with getting old.

It's curtains at last for the neighbourhood watch

Left-side car headlight

coming down the street

like a star magnesium-

burning on its inglorious fall from

space, and

I watch it through the window,

until the curtain takes its place.

Americana Barrooms

Of course I remember California,

I remember New

Orleans,

I recall the sights, the

sounds, the barroom smells

from all those cities

I've never been.

I remember Highway 61

tarmacadam, its blazing

touch in midday heat,

and I cannot forget the

feel of being

exiled on Main Street,

and I recall the sunrise

over New England

whaling bays,

and looking on as Alcatraz

appeared to me like

ghost of Marley through

S.F. haze,

and Woodstock posters from '69,

leading me on my way there,

and crying over Vietnam,

cryin' it ain't fair,

and I know I'm not American, or anything,

but I want to be

sometimes,

just so I could say I lived

in New Orleans, or California,

and have those memories

be mine.

basic division

he stumbles in strange patterns

though the canyons in

his head

he weaves the tale in such a way we

are unaware of

being led

he paints such carefully hypnotic pictures

that our tongues are tied

just keeping up

he rushes us all over cities with green

lights for go and

red for stop

he breaks our world into little pieces

stones and pebbles

rocks and gems

he breaks things down to basics so

that you know it's him and you

not us and them

Elephant Rags

I am tired and my train does not stop. The desert rolls past, and I peer through the dust that clouds the windows, looking for the cities I have been told they build of dried mud out here. I see none, and it doesn't take me long to get more tired still and to stop looking.

The higher-ups tell me my work out here is important. I am carrying civilization. I think, but do not say to them, that if a single man can carry it, there mustn't be much to civilization at all. I keep quiet and nod sagely and act in a manner befitting a man proud to be entrusted with such a thing. Empire-building is the art of selling an idea, and, in order to do that, one must first seem as though one has been fully sold on it oneself.

My eyes must close for a while, because I am woken later by a native who tells me I have just missed the most majestic caravan train. There is a disappointment in me now, the origin of which I cannot completely explain. I long to be part of such a caravan, perhaps. I long to be free from this colonial express, with all its wooden panelling and doors with gold-plated handles. I assume they are gold-plated, but they may just as easily be well-polished brass. I am not such a fine judge of metals as to be entirely certain of the difference.

At one point in the track, the train swings from side to side on the rails like an elephant I rode once when I was younger. The wood panelling is suddenly scorched the colour of the blankets that beast bore beneath the box upon its back, bright red, green, a lemon shade. Just for a moment this lasts, and then it is a plain mahogany again, and the will within me to sleep through the journey returns. I have forgotten the name of the train's destination. It holds too many letters, and, doubtless, too many faces that I do not know.

Soldier, Soldat

I carry my gun.

The wind’s howl has long gone beyond beginning, and yet still that old song is the only thing in my head. The Dylan version. The harmonica screech is ingrained along my ear canal, I think.

I carry my gun.

My boots are heavy but I’ve stopped feeling them as anything separate from my skin. They make flying fish noises as they rise from the shallow swap mud, and they make diving bird noises when they go back down. The reeds and other long grasses shudder.

I carry my gun.

I watch the ground and the horizon line and the sky and my eyeline does not waver, not at all. Not unless I catch the fleeting sound of helicopter behind me. Not unless there is a shape below the stretched spirals of cloud that doesn’t seem to carry beak or feathers or claws. Once, just once, what I heard as helicopter was just that, and I lay facedown in the mud for uncounted minutes, authentic swamp thing, until the rotor-drone buzzing departed. I held my gun out before me, two-handed, keeping it an inch above the water. Keeping it clean.

Yes, I carry my gun.

The mud dried on my face and I did not wipe it clean. I have not seen the patterns it has made there. In the few places where pools of water have opened up between the grass, it is not clear enough to use as a mirror, so I cannot be sure if the feeling I have of my boots becoming my feet, my armour becoming my body, is true.

I carry my gun.

In the distance sometimes, beyond that horizon line upon which my gaze is centred, I catch sight of brief fires. From the shape they make in the air, I can guess at the causes, I can work out by exactly how far I should avoid that zone in order to resist recrimination, or toxic contact. I have not shot at another being in weeks.

I carry my gun.

I have not seen another being in weeks. I have heard no voices, save for the old-time scratchings of Dylan in my head. No plowman digs this earth. No businessman around to drink the wine. In fact, no wine. No grapes.

I carry my gun.

I wonder if I am to be viewed as an outlaw now. If there is any place to which I can return and sleep and eat and remember with a roof above my head and four walls around me. With mud as my skin and boots as my feet, I travel through this marshland watching will o’ the wisp lights explode and maim and ruin everything beyond the line across my vision that demarcates the surface of the world. The one line across which I never seem to cross. The helicopters are beyond that line, I think, and I am listening for them always, underneath the Dylan song, underneath the fish and bird noises made by the soles of my feet in the mud of the swamp that I never leave.

I carry my gun.

It is fully loaded, I know, I check, but it feels lighter every day. It feels lighter and seems to tremble sometimes, as though it is hungry, as though it is starving for something. I still have enough rations left in my pack, but it is making me hungrier too. It is making me feel hungrier and lighter and lonelier. I have a dry-mud taste on my lips with this hunger. I wish that I could find some other beings. I wish that I could cross the horizon and find some other beings.

I carry my gun.

Lives in a low-down shoebox

Of course you're compelled

by the perfect

storm of black words on

white page with which

the book opens,

or which you open the book to find,

and of course, once those

words have settled in a

right-seeming

order,

you ease back into your

chair, your pillow, your

mattress,

transfixed.

The perfect storm gathers

into rougher, stranger shapes, an

almost mechanically intricate

typhoon, and you note

all of the things that

the gusts of it blow and beat back and batter and

you are astounded that such things as this can

happen as the weather-

bringing pages turn,

turn, turn,

and you watch, of course,

the typhoon build up into

a maelstrom - you know,

the galaxial kind,

the standard-issue universal type -

with colours that human eyes

can only touch through

the telescopes and kaleidoscopes

we make,

spinning like Scylla's

vortex water,

pirouetting dazedly and drunkenly and delightfully

between the opposing

cliff-faces

that make up and are made up of

the soft-cardboard

covers of this

book, this book,

this flattened-shoebox

object,

this thing that is, of course,

a perfect form.

Border Crossing

McCarthy dialogue dances

& meets mine in the

middle of

some desert plain I

have not yet visited.

I find myself swaying

to the rhythms

it makes, & hear the

foot-tapping sound of my

left boot on

this left-behind land.

War drums, perhaps. An

approximation. Dry lightning, thunder,

scaring only those who've grown with

a reason to fear it.

The words of it are

unguarded, not enclosed,

resolutely un-fenced in.

Free-range speech.

Vicious,

but tender too,

sweetly attentive in

the way it seeks to pick out

the things people do and do

not want to say.

Mine shakes a bit,

at first, nervous

at the master's

knowledge of his art,

distant drumming of

my boot still humming

its strange susurration

out through the red red dust.

I am learning. I am beyond beginning but

not my own master yet.

Not unlocked enough inside

to have a soul worth

captaining.

McCarthy dialogue still dances

& I, learning, try and keep

the beat.

Dear reader

So let me write,

dear reader,

and swing loose at the

universe

with a fist full of

fingers labelled as

vowels

and the other palm

painted with consonants,

growled, roared

into the faceless

shape of the sun,

at all of the suns

and the spaces in

the vacuum dark that

they don't reach,

and the little green

men we still

haven't seen,

and the hideous nightmares,

the horrible dreams of misery and malcontented,

malevolent, destructive desire, which

we've seen fit as a species to cast

out even beyond our

soiled speck of blue

to haunt the unknown,

which may still hold

untold and underloved

beauty,

and if it does,

dear reader,

rest assured that my roar will

find it,

and, when it does, rest

assured that it will quietly

quit

raging

and instead be still

as my eyes and my mind

tick over,

cataloguing all of

that unknown as best they can,

to bring back to our blue and

sometime-beloved

dot within my calming

fist,

so you can, indeed, read

of it,

or just breathe deep

and go find it again for yourself.

teeheehee

teeheehee laughter

comes across as

electronic compressed

beeping

modem dial-up

torture noises.

Not funny.

Not even close.

late fall

autumn comes to me

as ground stuffed

with bones of leaves

and small bodies of

muddy water

that dogs lick

when they're not

trailing each other

around

If there is no talking and seeing real skin

People will love less

fully & care less

fully & hurt less

fully &

feel happy more often.

But they will feel

happy less fully too,

& being alive will

not even mean as much

as it does now.

A Quick Chat Before the Killing

'Killing is my job.'

'And you're good at it, I guess?'

'Yes.'

'Then I understand. I wasn't good at mine.'