"there is no gravity, this world sucks"
This must’ve been my 11th tat or so.
We headed into the parlor at 2ish in the A.M.,
place bare, fluorescent white light,
flickering on and
off and
on to the country western on the radio, except
far off time.
-
I was flipping through books
with my free hand, (the other,
gripping my hipflask tightly,
filled with Drops vodka –
“antifreeze chic,”
old Jame-o used to say;
he was standing by me now,
pointing to polaroids of tattoos
in places mothers haven’t seen
in many years).
-
The pages were claustrophobic with clichés and pricetags:
Dancing Skeleton $35
Night Flyer $48
Iron Cross $26
everything something someone else already had,
but the spreads of our skin were as
bare and naïve as our journals’ pages,
so we hungered for definition, or
in this case, synonym.
-
Albuquerque was on fire in those days;
Jame-o said the ABQ was like a BBQ pit
in the way it could turn the immolation of bodies
slowly into something digestible, celebratory,
and family-friendly,
after you’ve seen the dead pig enough times.
-
Before picking Pixie to chisel into my forearm,
Jame-o pointed out the current customer:
-
he laid back pale on the recycled barber’s chair,
the boy’s flesh took the ink like
milk took chocolate; whatever he was getting
he was meant to have.
We inched closer, angling our eyes
to see his public secret.
-
Across his chest was written:
-
THERE IS NO GRAVITY, THIS WORLD SUCKS
-
Jame-o pssst the kid, and asked him what it meant.
His voice was mocking, but soft,
like the onlookers in the crowd when Nietzche said that
God was dead, he sniggered in awe.
-
The young man looked over,
eyes looking through him,
supernova-ing in the cheap pureness
the low-grade lighting exhaled.
-
“It’s something I heard in heaven,” he whispered,
“and laugh, I know, it’s hilarious,
isn't it? But it’s true,” he chuckled slowly,
and sighed, “oh, stranger, it’s true.”
-
He rested his head back to idle,
eyes to the ceiling, curiously cocking his head
to the fractals and all-meaning abstracts
his synapses and spinal cord were wrecking
themselves to conjure.
-
His older brother stood aside him,
flicking the dead ash off a cigarette,
onto the off-cream floor. He sniffed:
“Don’t mind him, guys, he’s just on some pretty
heavy acid.”
He brushed off his brother’s prophecies as magnificent nonsense,
as he struggled to keep his
own twitches in check.
We smiled, nodded, sighed,
and ordered our once-interesting Pixie
and Skull With Knife designs.
-
We glanced over every few minutes
to peer at the boy; he laid there,
taking in the needle to his chest
like shark takes a lamprey;
sucking up the pain in his sternum for
the dark disinfectant the thing
below it was determined to bear.
-
After all was said and set in skin,
we left the parlor, tore off the bandages
and struck each others’ fresh sketchings.
We spoke shit about that kid inside,
and were charmed by the omnipotent ignorance
of a youth set free by LSD –
we all felt the same way he was
some unimaginable months ago,
and now we here we were:
the smirking,
head-shaking,
ever-respectable elders.
And all the better for it.
-
The boy and his brother joined us
in the parking lot, announced by the
bright chirps of the parlor’s bell.
The both sat on the curb,
crossed their legs,
and lit cigarettes,
facing away from the city’s brilliant glow
to the bleak plateaus beyond
the passing highway.
-
We asked them what they were doing:
“Waiting,” the boy nodded, “waiting for tomorrow,
When we’ll wake up sober,
and we’ll be better people.”
-
Jame-o guffawed as he finished his flask:
“Daybreak doesn’t baptize you like that, little buddy.
I must’ve seen a dozen thousand suns go up,
and I’ve still got a glutton’s heart. How can you tell
you won’t fall back again?”
-
The boy tilted a knowing smile,
“Fall? No…” he stated, self-assured,
and smacked his chest with two heavy hits.
“Because there is no gravity –”
but
before he could finish, he was interrupted
by his own shaking squeal
as the pain from his new tattoo dawned on him,
and he clutched his arms across himself,
shaming a safe shell to console the pain
his body refused to process earlier.
-
As we all slapped our knees and sucked
our cigarettes, his eyes lost their veneer and
became dark and grounded
as he sipped the spit around his tongue, and wheezed:
“and this world sucks.”
atlas
blues man, man of soul,
writhing in my forearms.
a heart too calloused to pump.
eyes too full, fading to chalk;
thin wooden fingers, whining joints,
sagging biceps splotched with bleach,
a broom mustache solid in sweat.
it hurts, blues man, to feel you fade.
-
your sax bleat against the sidewalk,
the dry reed snapping on impact.
your canned bank spills nickels into the storm drain,
and i feel your shattered muscles shiver against my chest,
your spine spasming back and forth, pounding against your lungs,
blocked by all the shit you’ve eaten in your seven or so decades.
-
your shoulders slump as your chin wilted to your wheezing heart.
i laid you down against the wall of Mother’s and searched for a payphone;
gazing back, you looked like an old black Atlas.
i stuck a few quarters in and yelled at a machine for four infinite minutes.
i stare, and see people looking anywhere but your face,
dropping change in your saxophone case.
your fingertips soon stop shaking,
and with it, my old earth sank into space,
and you thrust me into a new one.
it hurts here, blues man, man of soul.
it hurts here, and everyone’s got that rasp in their voice.
---
Published in Now, Then.
Michigan
We said we’d give them a lesson in uncompromising and relentless recklessness
We’d strip off our shirts and our rosary necklaces
We wouldn’t be ashamed of bodies or ask for frecklelessness
We wouldn’t fit ourselves in three-walled receptacles
We wouldn’t be happy with lives imperceptible
We wouldn’t let our eyes grow tired and un-skeptical
And most important, we wouldn’t settle for being merely acceptable
But exceptional, loud spectacles, not susceptible to inevitable
But shining spears of something seminal
It wouldn’t matter if it was criminal
As long as our thoughts weren’t subliminal
And our seen flaws were merely minimal
Because, baby, back then we were animals
Cow flesh boots with the tan of ten camels
Our teeth gnawing down our parents’ prepaid enamel
Kisses emblazoned with a beer breath flammable.
-
But look at us now, baby, look at us now:
-
I cover up my calf tattoos with gold-toes and oxfords
Cheap ones from TJ Maxx and man, do I look awkward
I try to keep my mouth shut, and hold back those locked words
Even with an outfit so normal, I manage to feel so absurd
Like a gold-plated turd or a mockingbird
Mocking a roadkill pigeon with just a smidgen
Of ketchup on the corner of its beak.
And its so frustrating because I feel so weak
At this stage in my life I seek
For something I reasoned was better than our dancing in speakeasy boutiques
Messy halls with Victorian-style freaks
The bitter early-lesbian with an Iggy-Pop physique
The solitary programmer who spends his cash on lonely tweaks
Desperately wearing a flag of a Star Trek shirt, looking for other geeks
Not that we were any cooler, we just didn’t let that side shriek
Cause we were meek freaks with mystique in a bleak bar that reeked like Mozambique.
-
But we assumed that because we weren’t a bourgeoisies
That we knew something about being free
From a system, a brainwashed culture, a cult of banshees
But we were just the debris of society
For the people who had legitimate dreams and weren’t just “rough” and “artsy”
Who didn’t just take Polaroids of friendless trees
But designed things, volunteered, and didn’t make their good deeds decreed
They lived and we reported, they played while we recorded
They spoke while we retorted,
And man… those comebacks weren’t clever
But the worst thing that we did was when we sadly resorted
To those jobs we needed to keep our windows un-boarded
And our illusion of life-loving was sucked away, snorted
By some unseen god-junkie, an experimental Lord-kid
Who had enough of this game of Bohemia
And liked the concept of necrophilia
And had our fading souls love one another until it near killed ya
And you left with my money, my stash, and a map of Slovenia.
-
I realized then how our lives were constructed on a foundation of pure fantasy,
And all the Salvatore novels in the world couldn’t support the house we built:
A ramshackle home raised and razed on the hallucinations that we thought we shared.
-
When you left it burned like bad cider but I can’t really blame you one bit
Living in Detroit was like being a peasant in a plantation that sowed shit
Two punks in ’88, living a life we were too pompous to quit
It was hard baby, being plain-dwelling Gypsies in a Midwest that wouldn’t fit
But you popped off this place so simply, like a zit
Or a terrible-two tyke having a fit
But it’s fair enough, your nomadic fingers wouldn’t commit
To the cavers’ keyboard that wouldn’t permit
You to scream all the spontaneity you wanted to emit
And yes, yes, yes, I know, it can stick you like a mucus pit
Impossible to escape, like climbing with your wrists
But baby, that’s only if you keep drooling the spit
That entombs your cubicle like Tiger’s mitt
-
I tried to keep you from letting it happen
But you kept trying to make the noise of one hand clapping
Deafening your eardrums with the percussion of your frustration
And calculating your future in beat to your own underestimations.
And it hurt to watch you gnaw on your own feathers,
But would you have wanted me to cowl your head in leather?
I knew you had to fly, so I let you cut your tether,
But I thought you’d look back, at least once for good measure,
But I guess an idealist and a working man can’t dance together,
At least not if the one with greasy feet is trying to lead.
-
I dunno where you are now, baby, but I hope you’re domestic
A wounded rotting hippie without antiseptic
And I hate the fact I’m an automaton, as well
But at least I admit it, and didn’t run at the sight of hell
But plunged into it looking for an elevator up
And if you never walk through the flames, then the magma will keep you stuck
So live in your montage reel of rides in flatbed trucks
But until you grow up and keep your shirt tucked
Your nothing-searching soul is clipwing sitting duck.
-
You can still be wonderful and weird and extravagant
But you don’t need to not contribute to have it
So make a difference, don’t portray yourself significant
Realize your smallness, your worthlessness,
Your beauty, your old mind’s thoroughness,
And take pride in that the fact you’re an urgent mess
Because yes, baby, we’re all insignificant
But at your most mundane I found you magnificent.
And if you ever think you’d like to live a human’s life again,
Make up for Narcissus’ sins,
Or consider having a wiser next-of-kin…
I could really use you back in Michigan.
ACQUAINTING ETHEL
The professor’s fingers curled his stormcloud beard
into a single smooth cumulonimbus.
He was tired;
his blackboard was now a dalmatian of equations.
-
There were so many variables to account for:
the wind’s angle and velocity
the earth’s rotation on its axis
the humidity of the ocean air
And who can forget the goddamned moon, he mumbled in his mind.
-
His chalk click-clacked against the black,
hoping to answer some stumbling questions:
Where will Hurricane Ethel go?
What kind of baggage will she bring to east coast?
And what will she take away in the divorce?
-
He tossed his chalk to the lecture hall’s skyline
and marched toward his bookshelf.
His finger aimed across different tomes like a sniper’s scope,
Wind Velocity on the World’s Scale,
Unnamed Hurricanes from 1860 Onward,
How to Predict the Setting Sun.
-
Yes, he’s read these books,
and yes he’s made these predictions before.
He’s given plenty of lectures talking about
the shapes and tones of clouds
and the formation of rain, but,
with his graying brain,
his synapses are no longer striking as closely,
and like a child counting seconds between lightening strikes,
the electrical impulses drift further away each time.
-
Click-clack-click-click-scratch
his new bar of chalk rambled on the slate,
drawing long numbers and letters
spelling gobbledygook between parentheses.
He carried digits across the board, heavily,
and the weight of the white grew over time.
His eyebrows angled acutely,
his azure veins lifting his wrists upward.
He bit his lip.
-
I am a professor of climatology at Mississippi State University.
-
He stabbed against the black in a clear-eyed fervor,
some mist convinced itself his mental sightline,
forming vague certainties in his mind’s horizon.
After a flurry of screeches and with a resounding clonk,
a final hieroglyphic followed an equal sign:
-
Hurricane Ethel will enter Alabama in 44 days,
causing approximately five hundred casualties.
-
He breathed a sigh of relief,
and placed his hands on the monochrome mess,
smearing most of it into five-fingered fogs.
-
He lifted his tired legs,
one after the other,
and carried himself outside,
sitting on an old stone bench,
and one-by-one,
serenely counted the playful drops
preluding a late summer’s rain.
-
Six weeks later hurricane Ethel slipped through southeast Mississippi,
reportedly killing one man, a professor,
“indirectly.”
black vinyl doo-wop wasp's nest
The needle hits the black
scratching when it lands,
then the music plays itself:
a phonographing hand.
The chords play that goddamned beat
but that chorus just repeats
but we know the purpose of the song
is that way it moves the feet.
So I like to play it often now
‘till the vinyl wears to smooth
the black, it slashes grey
‘till there’s pouring, pleading grooves.
My heart hardens to a chrysalis
when the music belches honey
a sticky sweet junk funk cream
a bled brain breakfast: ordered runny.
Bees buzz into my coffee cup fist
burrowing deep in the handhive
oscillating into my nails
making honeycombs: yellow, five.
One per finger, an outstretched source
of saccharine comprehension of another’s sentience.
The gooey golden tendrils spill and touch another beekeepers’
and then we both know what the honeybee’s dance is all about:
both of us – simultaneously and matrimoniusly implode in understanding
of the black vinyl doo-woop wasp’s nest that is the bright wide world:
a grinning big buzz that shakes the tectonic plates in time to
Gillespie’s swearing in the studio
did you hear the way he made that brass boy wail?
I found what a life means and through that man
and it means a whole lot of scary sudden things I can’t explain on a page
with twenty-six measly letters and one ancient color of ink
with the hexagonal code of #000000 because we have 0 need to desire anything else
because we’re comfortable with that infinite digit of history’s monochrome.
But I know how You feel and I feel when we do the things we do
because all men are men and women are men, you dig?
Queens are drones and vice versa and that’s why my arm swallows this waxy stuff
is so I can have the good fortunes of realizing this, you see-
and these bees are the only ways we can enter each other’s nests
without them, we’re on isolated trees with deadbeat pooh bears climbing the trunks
but we can’t feel them or know what they want because we’re only trees – you know what I mean,
lad, boy, child, queen bee, everything that’s you and me inside the way you twiddle your thumbs,
like that, yeah boy now, you are man – you are the human experience!
and boy I am getting tired, and- and- and
and now five hours have past since we dropped the needle, and the songs’ slowing slow now
And it’s getting pretty cold in here, so I’m gonna get going
it’s really grey out today grey as a - stone or something.
and I’m really itching scratching for another song
but how much? Too much.
I’ll be finding a way though ‘cause it’s too quiet now
And my feet are too stationary and – there’s a bee in your house
I’m always scared to be stung because they die when they sting you
If you take out their poison pin - pop! - out go their belly bits!
Just like that, their soul goes splat.
Just like that.
---
Published in Route 57.