HOTEL WENTLEY, A.D.
“There are few times in which we know something with absolute certainty”
echoed as the walls melted
into worms’ mouths and mouse droppings,
while I laid in their pollution—
Crying off the side of the bed,
or in the kinks of the closet,
Banging my wrists
into shards of flint
purging for friction
without a flame.
Then the scene changes—
sheetrock turns visibly stale
and the air, or lack-there-of, begins to show liver spots;
aging exponentially.
It had planned to be forgotten,
it had planned to leave us
with the swift tickle of a hawk’s beak
against your optic nerve.
Mauve walls. Aqua trim. Hardwood. Daises. Paisley. Summer. Black tea. Children’s screams. Anger. The diagonal decline. Wine bottles. 9-1-1. Intruder. INTRUDER! (Home?) Mauve walls. Aqua trim. Hardwood. Daises.
The static settles here:
Where the self-serving meet the communal,
and the void checks in to a hostel room
in a black cloak with the brim of his hat turned down
over one eye,
sub-consciously grinding
500-watt gluttons against sun-stroke victims,
it’s all the same.
Throw the welcome mat on the burner—
let it char and sizzle,
until it becomes something
darker,
trespassing into metamorphose.
The light, it leaves us, it’s all the same—
The ways in which skin eclipses
as it becomes something else,
turning the entire sky
Golden
long enough to hear a single
searing of palms—
So who’s the joke and who’s the one telling it? (Cue: laughter)
It’s all the same.
Grass stains. Down-pour. Bartering blood. Who are you again? Roof-top. Red dress. Nose scratch. Junkie toddlers. Peanut butter toast. The intangible cocoon. Grass stains. Down-pour. Bartering blood. Who are you again?
Forgetting: in progress (37% complete)
I am a traitor.
The fingers on the edge of my mantra
are biting themselves off,
sparking and hop-scotching my skin
against pissed-on bed-sheets,
it’s all the same.
The chameleon has a name once again,
and it is: _______.
But this time,
the title is just kindling
for the leaves of metal
flowering in the veins
of staccato lightning.
This time,
the heat was taken for ransom—-
I didn’t have to apologize for my burning,
but I couldn’t help but say sorry
when everything else followed suit.
Bio-degradable Mimickry
Wash over it,
Rinse it out,
Repeat
Repeat
the first three words
you learned
to speak
graphically,
Standing on the death
Of unspoken imagery
For the last 22 years.
Embalming the walls
In LipSmackers busted appendices,
Melting gold coins
And stolen ideologies
Out of your gypsy skin.
We were all new once,
Uncreased parchment:
Boring
And wingless,
Listlessly waiting
To be folded
Or torn
Into an origami archetype
With stepford skin.
Now germinal,
Struggling for a breath
Or Freudian-slip of nourishment,
Would that be enough
To keep it clinquant?
Would that be enough?
Would that be enough?
Would that be enough?
Would that be enough?
Was it ever going to be
Enough?
It was only a matter of time
before becoming obsolete,
Hurdling itself out of a meninge-encrusted
Catapult to kiss the corpses
Of walkmen and phonographs,
Or the anonymous deaths
Of the people
Just like you
Or I
Who thought
We were going to change something,
Leaving nothing behind
But another hijacked landfill.
Oh, Spicer, Bernstein, Duncan and O’Hara:
I am with you there,
As each gentrified lobe
Turns to clay.
Oh, Williams, Corso, Synder and Lorca:
I am with you there,
As pubescent maggots feast
On your wasted brilliance.
Bleed,
Bleed over it,
Bleed it out,
Let it wash over the page
And turn everything to a symphonized crimson,
Unable to purge yourself
As any other color
But the screaming, embryonic stoplight
Of self-deprecation
In absolute harmony
With the strawberry-freckled sunrise
a quarter-past significance.
Pulling the placenta from
the crooks of your eyes,
spitting up chromosome tinsel
and intestine frosting
to hang from your bedframe
in a zygotic Christmas display,
to entangle your dirty fingers
in your own essence,
dripping down
Into black puddles;
Murky wormholes
Of egocentric bloodshed
spewing your junkyard DNA
into a high-voltage juicer
to steal
what was left.
(Have you had enough yet?)
Whatever you do,
cover your tracks
or someone
might find you important
someday.
3rd Degree Catscratch (Unfinished)
Part that jersey mesh
securing the mezzanine,
to try to catch a glimpse
of Osiris and Eurydice
sitting somewhere up and out
of eye range,
clipping their toenails
to clink against the window;
bleaching out
the last three colors in the UV spectrum,
or what the northwest had come to know as
‘summer.’
Manchester sandwiched his head
between two silk pillows,
a bottle of Orangina,
and a Lupus flare,
something buzzed in his chest
and began to sting my hands
in pulmonary tangents—
The wasps watching the room
were beginning to
wrap their heads in chenille throws,
and mummify themselves
in the back of my skull,
Sky-diving off of
the power-lines flickering on the page.
LSD-infused spiders
crocheted a sticky gauze
into metropolis,
As Olive Street kept dying,
no matter how much Eurydice
watered it—
This last weekend,
he died with one foot in a child’s
plastic wading pool,
and one hand
in a toaster (breakfast would never smell the same.)
And in rancor
for his charred body,
he ignited everything with
A man-made lightning.
I sat above myself,
burning with them
like a salary,
or a childhood trauma;
Branding every
bare piece of skin
…Until
the power
goes out.
And Robert Durst comes busting in through the door,
shattering it into ramen and moths,
grabbing the edge of my tongue;
The only part that was still wet,
saying
“You’ve been standing on the edge of this
for too long.”
Taking the rubber stamp
to the third degree
with a toothpick
he pulled
from the gap in his teeth.
His gums were bleeding,
dropping hot strawberry purée
onto the scars on my hands.
“If your fingers were any longer,
You would’ve already had it.”
Thank you, I’m glad you liked it. (:
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Close your eyes
To the wind-up chattering teeth
Starving the faces (facades)
Of everyone in the room;
Stripping them down
To monochrome,
Sounding like laughter
In a Max Linder film.
As your name
And a few other
unintelligible syllables
get tattooed
Above streams of piss
For rats to claw at
With their alcoholic genitals.
The letters fade,
Fall out to
Line the insides of trench-coats
To be sold in Ziplocs on Pike St,
And get wrenched
Between the teeth
On the monsters
In Burrough’s Bardo—
making your ears spit up
Chicken’s feathers.
Rorschach projections
Of our filthy minds,
Each mamillary body
Holding the other in sadness—
We weren’t ready for this,
Spewing ink from every orifice,
Turning white noise into black coffee
To keep our knees from buckling up.
Make a blueberry mount an orange
And it’ll taste like blood,
Take a bite
Of any typography
From the Black Mountains
And it’ll taste like blood
That died eras too early,
looking in
to the barrel of the page,
saying
“I want you
to ruin me.”
Falling down
the stairs made of sandpaper,
Throwing wedding china
To make the walls bleed out
More fervently
Than a botched abortion
Because somehow
Porcelain
Holds memory
Better
Than glass.
Was this dreamscape
The only landscape
we could make of a
Condominium backyard
With
Plants of
electricity and concrete?
Seattle
always keeping every pair of knees scabbed
To promise
A mixture of incestual pathogens
Known as “community;”
Boxing us all in
To this bag of vines
Mimicking veins,
As the arachnids weave veils in the corners,
Either from poor lighting
Or boredom.
We stand beneath them,
In fear
Of chaos,
In fear
Of resolution,
In fear of change
We hold jingling in our pockets
Like a McDonald’s campaign,
Gripping onto
a child’s education
Encased in cubic static—
We are running from ourselves;
Running to say sorry in turquoise trousers,
Too young to know of the pain
In impatience:
Nothing ever came quick enough.
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Jaundice in the Delivery Room (Unfinished)
They drug themselves
From the swamps and ditches
To lean their elbows
On copper bar-tops,
Vomiting personal ads,
Work history’s,
HIV tests
And eye-lid saliva
Into pint glasses—
Scraping the insides of their cheeks
With their gums
To try to find something to say,
Their words mixing like oil and water;
Infesting one another
Without committing.
They’re opening Moroccan restaurants,
Birthdays,
Stripteases,
All in the enzyme cascade
Of cliché.
The man nearest the door yells
From his liver,
Sounding like jaundice
In the delivery room….
…As I took steps back
To give him
room
To crack
So I could sandwich my image
between his better and worse selves
to see myself
In the soot-striken window
Directly behind him,
watching the honey
slowly rinse
from my eyes.
There was a hive
In the watering hole,
Their feet embalmed with honey,
Their tongues unable to taste it,
But tossing it behind the bar
In its written form—
“Honey, honey, honey…”
She wasn’t as simple
As you recalled
But she still
Remembered your typewriter scent
And where the words
Would trail off at the edge
When the ribbon
Purged itself
Of pigment,
Draining itself
As your surrogate.
You still crawled
On bloody knees
To the porcelain feet
Of the toilet
On nights
Where the hive
Was buzzing too loudly,
Honey dripping down your temples;
On nights
When it was all too real—
Reaching,
Reaching
But only grasping
The corner
Reaching
Reaching
But only grasping
The place
Where the canvas
Draped off
Into Sheetrock.
She still held your roar
In the webs of her fingers,
Long after
You’d shaved geometric patterns
In your flesh
to rid yourself of that crown.
Your time was one
Without hands
So all it could do
was slide downhill
on bloody knees,
reaching
Reaching,
But only gripping
at Helium scenes,
Reaching
Reaching,
But only gripping
What wasn’t.
There was a hole
In the hive—
Catacombs falling through
Onto copper barstools:
You made it this way,
You made it this way,
You made it this way
…taking steps back
to give it room
to crack.
“…Honey, honey, honey!”
All wings
Stuck
In honey.
A MOLOTOV COCKTAIL THROWN IN LIMBO
Embed the fever pitch,
Whirling through our clenching ears
In an indigestible monsoon—
The stench of it baffling
Our nostrils
With the shrillness
Of the intangible.
A handheld hara-kiri
Lurches out in cinder-block formation,
In caricature of Prozac Pez dispensers.
A handheld kamikaze
Fuses with each impossible dream,
Spiraling out towards oblivion,
Barely dangling from the clouds of devil’s dust
from the cracking leather roots
Of nude deciduous trees;
Barely dangling from the fleabites
We call personality traits—
The naked flesh of your
derailed embarrassment,
making journals everywhere
blush a tortured baby-doll pink.
If we all died the deaths of dreams,
Someone else would awaken
In our ashes,
Trying to pinch together
Our remains
Whilst
Washing away our memory
With a blistering shower
Of cold sweats
And lighter fluid,
Painting their eyes
black;
Painting their eyes
into wormholes
to pull them down
To the living room
Embroidered with
our skeletons.
The curse of consciousness,
Shriveling the flesh of your
Aorta and liver;
As you become as human
as a dried apricot,
with the last few
grains of sand
leaving their beds
at the roof of the hourglass,
to collide with the ground,
and puncture your skin
to give that inbred monster
room to breathe,
and I can finally
taste the smoke,
desensitizing the desensitization
as my senses
erect themselves,
spewing spores
of me
into a foreign terrain
entrapped by a Dali canvas.
Numbers melted themselves
Into gears and wires,
Waiting to be wound back up again,
Allowing us to
Stop time
For just
A moment,
Allowing the flood
To fall from our fissures
Down through our bloodstream
In a downward spiral,
Dizzying rationale
Into oblivion,
As the digital plague
Enflamed our palates,
Wishing to be analog,
Wishing to be analog,
Wishing to be still,
Frozen
In
Time.
The clock will never die
By its own hands,
So why should you?
The Loss of a Stranger (in C-minor)
Embryonic lungs afraid to purge
The water of our mothers,
Afraid of drowning externally
Whilst over-hydrating our lungs
To the point of floods
Naturally.
Because SOMETHING had to crack
And fling its asphyxiated particles
To tip those scales (in C-minor)
Leaving you feeling
Uneasy—
Your hands, sick with ergotism
Gripping onto bump keys
That couldn’t unlock anything,
Their forgotten origins
dangling from them
Like cigarette smoke,
As your impossible-to-forget origin
Dangled from your neck,
As an accidental suicide—
Rippling out past your monogrammed flood,
To stain stationary, smart phones and Gatorade bottles
With surrogate salt water,
As we all placed ear-to-rapid
To hear what ‘blue’ sounded like,
The slit of Poseidon’s eye forms
a tight-rope to walk across
Into unknown territory,
Into new terrain: stripped to the bone
To feel our touch
Turned empty
Without the fires
We normally lean against,
Disinfecting water-logged tongues
To keep poetry soaked in coffee and turpentine,
To keep the diamond
From turning black,
To keep cross-modal reality
In a constant state of flux—
to keep us alembic,
Taking our new identities
As consolation prizes,
Waiting for the copper wires to shrivel and snap,
Waiting on the electrocution,
Covering our eyes to keep them from popping,
Spewing sautéed secrets
On the faces of anyone who happened to be in the room,
Waiting on the retribution,
of the null persona we rejected,
tossing them into the frivolous heap
of the daily mundane,
as if we had never known them at all,
embracing the void
resting its decaying head
on our shoulders—
This is the last moment
I will appear silent:
shedding my cocoon shell,
raising my hands
and voice
to crack the sky.
A void rested its head
on the shoulder
of every lost stranger.
NEXT STOP: WRITER’S BLOCK
Bending my mind back into a hangnail—
The words hit the page
As 100 transatlantic runners
With salt-soaked shirts,
Each of their strides clapping against the bare-white,
Sounding like a typewriter heartbeat,
as mine was
Dawdling
Off
And
Dwindling
Down,
The hubcaps adorning my knees ricocheted off the pavement,
swirling in the aborted winds
Of those sprinting stanzas,
digging a melody
for statues to come to die in.
The moon’s body language splintered the stepford tide
To give me room to run (with them)
Along the Xeroxed wrinkles of the sky,
But gold chain links pecked one another along my waste,
Weighing me down like a loveless childhood—
I wanted to unhinge the acrobatic ties of my tendons,
I wanted to glide boneless into penumbra
And fall into a maraschino heap,
Lost in a cabernet.
I wanted to run, gliding heel-to-toe on the home-row keys.
NEXT STOP: WRITER’S BLOCK
Belly-flopping into the netted landscape,
Fishtailed emotion slithered past,
Growing limbs of its own,
racing against the northern winds,
Sauntering off with bloody nipples—
My dulled talons clawed at them
And left nothing but cat-scratched games of tic-tac-toe
On their evaporating fin-prints.
The well began to run dry,
And my panting hands rung themselves out,
Dripping nothing but salty piss
From the irises ending my sentences:
Poetry was a Basilisk
wilder than I could tame,
faster than I could catch,
soaring past me with wire wings.
