skipping church to pray for rain

as I had hoped
last night,
three AM,
drunk,
for a heavy
and soaking rain,
it did come
and I heard it at approximately
four AM,
not nearly as drunk,
too tired to be drunk
though the feelings may
have intertwined to create
the stupor in which I had
earlier in the witching hour
hoped for rain.
in my prayer I was terse.
(I call it prayer due to
the fact that weather
is as close to a god as I have.
it determines my mood and
my action as if the holy one
himself had bestowed in
precipitation the power
to rule me and pull me around
by sweat-tinged collar
and throw me into wet or cold
or blanket-like heat that
is so hot it becomes imperceptible
to the skin and at which point one can only
experience the meteorology of hell
through pursed lips and
the knowing of the history
of july.)
the wish for rain then was
less abstract idealism
(idealism in rain
is the sound it makes
on pavement
and the smell the pavement
emits)
and more a conjuring of the only god I know
to deliver me the parallel of
how I was feeling.
then today
I awoke not to four AM rain
but ten AM gray,
like the smoke of burned out tires
from a race which had just begun
or just ended
though since you were not there to see
a luscious girl swipe the air with her
handkerchief
you are not sure which it is
so you are left in limbo
like me, this
morning,
unsure of whether the rain had just stopped
or was about to begin again
or whether it would be another two weeks
before it was acceptable
for me to lay in bed all day
in long-johns that,
at this point,
are out of season.

two more poems

a pear

in air
I wait,
still
like air.
summer air
breathing myself.
I wait for
you
to resurrect
yourself
as the heir
to
psychosis.
the hair
you cut
will not
self-destruct
on tile floor
but lies
in separation
from a head
I learned to
deconstruct
as you ate a pear
when you and I
were a pair.


melancholy, hey
hey!
melancholy!
light my candle
my lovelight
my exploding
fourth of july
my birthday cake
my spring hemp
my summer
my summer
my summer
is always too far away
and too condensed
with ideas of rivers and
trees that I've climbed
and been cut in and
loved under and
had hearts broken
and broke hearts.

two poems

lost and found

faces at
grand central
are searching for
the lost and found.

all they find are
mirrors.


situations

the revolution.
ha!
situations are dead and so is debord.
he was a square anyway.
capitalism consuming itself
is like the flame that
catches more fire.
there goes the neighborhood
said mrs. haymarket.

standing on the kegs of
gunpowder
is prime time
for a chinese celebration.
don't buy the confetti,
shred your dollars.

a thicket: robert part two

robert,
vanity I mistook
as your virtue,
as if you knelt for
prayer in the mirror,
not to see god peering
in the window behind you
but to gaze mortified at
the age that
has snuck upon you
in the dark.

you were younger
and just as skinny
and you had a girl
who was yours.
but you singed
her hair with your wayward
marlboro reds
and she
left,
charred and still
delicious.

vanity,
robert,
is your swaggering
heartbreak.
your comb straightens
that which can be undone.
your heart
however
is a thicket.

electric faith

humming hymns
head down
she shuffles
in poverty.
crisis of chic
irrelevant
to the gospel
singer
mumbling
on the f train.
blonde rider
cries
or there is dust.


this is a new york poem. i miss new york

a completed project of mine

this is pasted on a starbucks wall

fifteen years or so

I had a dream last night, well, this morning actually, that really came out of nowhere. it was just a scene from my childhood that I remembered very vividly.

when I was a kid my sister and I would spend a lot of time at my cousin's house. I must have been about 8 or 9 and there was a girl who was in high school, a blonde hippie-type girl, who lived across the street from them. the day that jerry garcia died she made a sign that said RIP Jerry and then put paper flowers around the inside of her window. that was in 1995.

I wonder whatever happened to her. She might be married and have kids by now. I wonder if she remembers making that sign as much as I remember seeing it...

can you hear me?

so I was reading a blog written by this california gal who happens to know how to write a hell of a letter and I got inspired. she writes in an entirely different style than I do but I totally dig it no less. some of us are romantics in our prose and poetry, others are just straight up schizophrenic. here it goes, it's called 'can you hear me?"

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

robert
you vain fuck,
carrying a comb in
your back pocket
like I would carry a flask
if I were a drunk.
I am no drunk.
but you are a vain fuck.

how did I die
last night?
with a migraine
and a belly full of wine.
am I a drunk?
no,
wine is a literary device.
it's red.
imagine it to be red, ok?
so it's red wine
and it's spilled on a white carpet.
soaking in,
party guests staring,
host angry,
sidewalk under feet
NOW!
no no
it's white wine
and it burns my throat
on a cool south african evening
in june.


robert
could you show me
how to grow that mustache?
really, I'm serious.
I'm rarely sarcastic
I grow a frenchmen's mustache.
or a pirates.

no more repeating
it's unflattering.
reader
do you find it as unflattering
as I do?
reader
did you realize this poem
isn't about her?
I know,
all of my poems are about her
even though she is someone I've
invented as if I were a painter
whose brush manifests figures.

as much as I am a drunk
I am a painter.
I paint color,
I don't paint with it
my fingers are earth
and my muscles rain.
that's where color comes from,
no?
reader?

for old times

I'm going to be writing on one of these very soon. computer text is so passe. the sound of hammers hitting paper is satisfying. that's what we've lost in this technological age; things are silent and aim to be further silenced. soon we'll live in a world where all you can hear is wind blowing, which normally would be nice but when it's the only sound that exists it will be the saddest sound we know.