Biblia Satanica

“…because they believe that God is not an external entity, but rather something that each person creates as a projection of his or her own personality—a benevolent and stabilizing force in his or her life.”

Two months before just another number, I walk into the living room to find you setting the stage, drawing connections through the ash on the turned table, fingers filthy from all the playing in the blank space. You’re hunched over on the spare stool, jacket on like any minute you might leave, studying harmonies and storm warnings, German cigarette traversing the frets.

Still flush from the dream, I pull a fresh volume from the dusty shelf, squawking randomly on about something or other, a typical interruption you watch cautiously from the corner of your eye, the way the cat watches us both at a safe and escapable distance –

We’ve drunk our dinner again, and the evidence is everywhere, piles of notebooks and cut paper, empty containers,… guitar picks littered across the floor like leaves on a sidewalk.

Of un-actualized plans, I try to tell you something new, like if I had a bigger window I wouldn’t need as much moon,
Instead this keyhole, splintered vision, gazing navel, god-shaped hole – (squawk)

Reaching deep into the devil’s advocate arsenal you pull up a few dissonant chords, all our so-called sins extolled.

The further from the wild in us,
the closer to the wild in us:
Big decisions barking like Colorado Bulldogs in the distance.

To Mend the Clip

Womb for the thing that waits to know what winged ones know
I watch the open door the way that one would watch a dance.

Rendered imbalanced, my envy lacks her grace,
thin calves carving arcs over shuddering blood feathers:
a blankness when I start to search.

Ever the blinded, worried bird –
A weathered copy of Ariel, and midnight manifests,
Mas Luna Menos.

The girl behind the glass 30 years gone now,
I tell myself that it will have me when it’s ready,
The moment stretched long like an egg from the shell.

Anything to get airborne,
I drape myself in staying –
Amber and wine, crepe paper and linen,
the color of the blouse she wore, of the thing that he spilt.

Trespass

So that the dead could not follow us home, we shed our masks and cinched our hoods;
pushed til impassable the edge of the jetty.
Assuring you that none shall, I Curled into a low curve and watched as you ascended –
sand from the cape in the cuffs of my jeans, stones from the shore rolling back into the waves: evidentiary proof, both collected and rescinded.
With blue jay wings and a sugar skull full of funeral dirges,
the regular metricals giving way to a weak beat, hopes to manifest like ragged quickened breaths caught on the fog around you;
Omens and portents, all things dark and nice
Climbing half bare into the arms of a fall.

Sitting in a Psych Ward somewhere

and rumor has it my name may or may not be on the guest list.

Pressing colored pencil to a pre-drawn mandala, I fight to keep my face blank when you say you’re glad I came.
In the fluorescent light of the activities room the critics are abundant, more prolific even than are the slashes on your wrists; a mottling timeline told in thorny pinks and whites.
When I pass you the plastic bin, something passes between us,
Easy and unusual unlike our clumsy conversation suffocating slowly in the stale, medicinal air.
While you admire my artistry and color choice, I try my hardest to admire your courage –

You color a cat red and nearly die again from the hilarity.

…is an open throat

Seventeen dollars dropped, I watch in awe as it spins. On the hand-made table with the built-in ashtray, the turn-table completes the (w)holy hyphenated trinity, the good times rolling on just as god, John Darnelle, and a cheap bottle of Cook’s California Champagne intended. 

                 I don’t intend to think of any moment but, but here in this beautiful living room it happens     anyhow –

those old lines like threads braiding themselves reflexively through the dreaded knots of my dark curls —  the objects in the rearview both closer and farther than anyone ever promised;  lovely, ugly, all the way around incomprehensible  … here and yet … (k)not. 

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Static, then another track: memories to fill the gaps… transparency over transparency…nothing begetting its eventual nothing. Everything off-kilter, unnervingly centered — delicious is the mystery that makes itself seem so painfully obvious I say.

 

Probably.

 

 

short story long…

he ran for the hills;
I built a barricade beneath one.

From Open Window

We’re sitting at the open window when you had me the pistol and say
                         “pick one.”

By the cold twilight of your eyes, my own doe-like morning dews focus hawk-like on the whites of my thighs
less dimpled and hideous in the amber light than I remember,
..’ruebenesque’ I recall somebody saying,
proof once of wealth…

       “There’s plenty of women in this world with tits and ass” you tell me,
coaxing my fingers around your cold metal
               “it’s up to you to choose to be more.”

                   I can tell by the tattoos on your wrist that you’re serious.

Below us on Broadway the flood’s begun its retreat,
Piercings and leggings washing out into the Sound
as if as pulled by the moon as the hammer in my hand:
idle seeds inside my gut.

           From above
                she’s easy to spot -
Face down on the ground and wailing contritions;
cursing a name in the same breath that asks for its forgiveness,
short skirt riding just below her cresting wave.

Making whimsical excuse for a cold calculation,
Her slim figure kicks pirouettes across the sidewalk;
A tantalizing tantrum that entrances even me.

I want to go to her,

          And I turn to you to say as much.

         In the pale blue of our reflection, we’re celestial:
features blurred and overlapping,
       swirling gasses,
          dead light:

“That’s good,” you say,

      “now let’s work on your aim.”

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Before the razor, came the rope, became the pills…
Or wait, maybe, was it? the other way around? You can’t remember now,
Your full moon face casting shadows on the worn brick,
slender hands working frantically as if threading knots in the wrought iron;
Scrambling the combination to see what it will unlock.

Lit red by the neon from the burlesque bar across the street, my own bare hands appear to me to be too stout, clutching tightly to a book on essence and resting on drawn knees: desperate, ugly, weakling things,
And I think to myself (and myself alone) that the sequence doesn’t matter much…

But then again, in my case anyway, It was ALWAYS jagged glass –
All those Little ditches dug with a juvenile exaggeration,
The tender insides of a forearm hidden easily in sleeves,
Nothing so extravagant, understand,
The blood sometimes drawn where our similarities begin to end,
No big deal really, not the same thing at all.

Watching as you watch your own ghost dance on the wall, I feel
ashamed for never having had the guts to truly wish I weren’t;
all those mythic moments of murderous sacrifice exposed at last for the fleeting forgetfulness to insist on gratitude that they were, momentary deaths to your total and complete need for…

Yes, that’s right, that’s it. Neck over wrist, wrist over pumped stomach,
That’s how it happened, best two out of three:
“Ro! Cham! Beau!”
and that dark companion of yours shifting with you as you do from one foot to another, as if in finding balance you will also find the answer,
And my ass growing cold on the fire escape grate, as I listen and recall How all those old selves tried to die.

The Bold and the Bilious (this is not)

With a Vanilla Milk Stout and the same blanketing blankness that has come to dominate my autumn days, I sit myself down and prepare to lose another staring match to the wide un-blinking eye of yet another empty, open page. Amazingly enough, I manage to hammer out two full lengths of complaints and confessions: asinine yes, but none-the-less gratifying knowing now as I do that no words could be worse than the absence that’s become of them.
Pressing so hard that it hurts my arm to compensate for the lack of their impact, I take pleasure in the dismal act of describing the nauseating task that I find in trying to write them; trying to remember how I once believed it could lead elsewhere.
When I finally get sick of looking at my own slick vomit on the page, I go in search of a place to one day place my fabled poems, another act of faith, another game of make believe — only by now I’ve really starting getting into the role, going so far as to get genuinely upset when I discover that SoftSkull no longer accepts submissions of chapbook manuscripts, not even the pretend kind, nor the kind with just a title and a frame with fresh stretched canvas.
Despite the underwhelming feel of futility in the event that is this Monday evening, I have to admit I sense a suffocating spark somewhere deep within my pudgy gut; a fragile thing at best, but still present, not dead, at least not yet…. Goddamnit.