THERE AREN'T REALLY ANY RULES

You've felt 

this coming—
as a kid, it

drifted

towards you, 

then pulled away, lifting 

the little hairs on your bare arms 

and legs as it retreated. It

waxed

and waned like this 

for years, but it always 

remained.

Now that you're 

old enough,

the full consequence

suddenly surges 

to smack you, exactly 

like an orgasm would—

on some spot 

on your body 

that you can't 

really locate. For about 

four seconds, 

there aren't any

any rules. And

at first, you feel 

vulnerable, then 

emboldened by the waves 

of brave coolness 

prying wider 

and wider

this ecstatic invisible 

wound deep inside you,

and then, finally, 

there's that combination

of relief and 

moderate disappointment

in the familiar pithiness

of its fizzle. 

Another betrayal—

no sound, 

no visual,

nothing 

demonstrable. 

Just a 

sucking feeling. 

An implosion

chased fast

by the usual aftertaste

of rusty imitation

vanilla.

NONE OF THIS IS MADE UP

You don't
have to

pretend anymore.

Blink once,
twice,

whatever—boom.
You're in a

grocery store, you're in some
all-night

diner smoking and
bull-

shitting, you're
at the gym, sitting

in a movie
theater—it doesn't

matter. Everything
overlaps.

Music is being
piped in already—"It's a

long way
to the top

if you wanna rock
and roll." Everything is

measured,
labeled, neatly

chunked,
temperature-

controlled
and manageable.

And you're afraid
even to

cry—tears
so real

and so
artificial

as light
as flavored

CO2 bubbles,
but lacking

that fizzy
pizazz

and pressure

of the
real thing:

constant one-
upmanship.

HANDY

After a rush, 

a little initial 

blush 

of enthusiasm, 

this dream—

like so many 

of your other 

ideas—

sucks 

itself 

inside out

and becomes the color

and the vague 

shape of everything

it's not.

You've got no choice but to

lock this one up in a drawer

with those others,

you tell 

yourself;

this map

which calls 

such attention  

to its own utility 

and to the

fact of its 

having been manufactured.

The harder 

you stare,

the more it looks

like the sort of 

manicured and 

captioned thing kids draw 

after they realize 

they ought 

to show someone.

MUSEUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

If you knew
something,

but you
couldn't do

anything,
did you

really?

*

That rose—over
there is (probably)

a galaxy
of furtive milky white

feathers, gently
nodding

in sympathy
to Newtonian Mechanics.

Over here are planet earth's
most likely

artists and writers in residence,
all getting bored

into—
chewed mechanically

to pieces—
by scores of little syphilitic bacteria.

*

Take these tiny gold insects,
a thousand brain-

dead bees—
too busy (making honey)

for cosmology.
Epiphanies

bore too deep,
the cavities

they made
were too huge

and disrupted
the surface

tension.
Most things

nowadays
are

too profound-
ly simple

to be misunderstood so
spectacularly.

A EUCLIDEAN SPACE

X.

Things would just
be so much

easier
if this whole thing

was flat
and boring. I mean—

a little kid
can hardly be expected

to use
trigonometry every morning

when he has
to determine

where in the world?
his whole

world
keeps going.

Y.

Day after day,
hurtling
through space—

just the dizzy thought

of that
accelerating effort, so

unfathomable
that it made you go

crazy
with certainty

that everybody just went around
lying

to you
about every-
thing
all of the time.

Z.

I watch your car pull away
every day,

I see
spinning tires, hear

them groan,

but think—
about how the dead center

of a wheel
doesn't go anywhere,

and I know
there must be

something clever

about us
in that idea somewhere—

not because
it's a metaphor, but because it's

a thing
which doesn't mind being seen,

but which
doesn't ever want to be

known.

THE THREE COMMANDMENTS

Imagine knots of greenblack

caterpillars 

writhing

in filthy jealousy—

beneath the neat 

arc of a mango 

and orange- 

cream colored paper 

butterfly—

because 

they don't even

know they don't

know.

* 

What is your body,

if not 

a temple—and 

what is 

a temple, if not 

a tomb?—or maybe 

it's more like

a life-

boat? A tent

that gets
pitched?

Portable
flimsy and temporary

housing—

to droves 

and droves—of pilgrim 

abstractions.

* 

Think about it—

One single person

cannot be a 

revolution.

BOTH

Weird thing is, when he
fucks her, it really
is like

he's
tunneling into her,
desperate to escape, disappear

so deep into what she holds,
the space she controls—
to become her child.

For her,
it only works
backwards—it's

afterwards
when he's
asleep next to her

that she feels
the most
motherlike,

the most
afraid that she's
penetrable.

But time, being
cruel, insists on barreling
forward

always in the
direction
of increasing

entropy,
giving both of them
no choice

but to compromise.
And so
they will

continue tearing
themselves
in half.

LIFESPAN

I.

Punk-as-fuck

cardinal,
lickity-

splitting,
practically

spits his red tousled

crest at the
driving rain.

Can you
even

handle—
going home to

write about that?


II.

Is it just me—
or does

this moment

always feel
like

the exception
to some rule,

chiseled into
rock (for
emphasis)

in one of those
foreign languages

you can read
but don't really

speak very well?


II.

Loose lips keep
sinking
ships,

as if

that
was the only
option.


III.

I keep hearing
my own
dumb voice
saying

"I like to mix it up."
Which, it seems
to me, implies
a next time.

So, wow,
maybe
we
are

in agreement
about
something
after all?


IV.

Perfectly balanced

On the shoulders of giants,

A man

So small you can't even see him—will keep

Slamdunking 

the same

clock into every new blue 
ray player,

until he's rich 
with old.

When he dies, he hopes 
to come back
a bird.

UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCE

Time's not a thing, it's a
procedure

and it
proceeds—to pin

everyone
down to everywhere.

It's a war
marching

out from
and into everything,

sneaking past customs,
roughing

the passer, fleeing restaurants
without paying

for dinner. It always fires
the first shot,

which inevitably punctures
a hole in the very last sack of flour.

With that same kind
of maniacal

tyranny of the majority, it fixes it
so that someone

is always "there
first," which is why I never

really feel
like I'm accurate or

authentically
sitting next to her.

A NUCLEAR BOMB GOING OFF

It's never

a huge vision or anything
(though not exactly

an accident
either). It's just,
you notice—

The Soul exists

in the smallest 

of objects. 

Heaven in 

an appleseed—

God trapped,

Starving hysterical etc,

Inside a labyrinthine 

atom of hydrogen. 

The proof
is—that you can't ever

solve these
things,without
killing them;

therefore,
bingo—nothing

living's
ever really finished
meaning.

Unfortunately,
that's a pretty

useless trick,

since—at this juncture,
there's a huge

difference
between those things

that are repeatable
and those

that
are automatic.

VICARIOUS

Islanded stacks
of canned
motives,

fragments
patched, into jerky

green symphonies
of pleasantries—

"How
are we?"

"Are we
finding
everything alright?"

Alright.
Fine. So I'm a little
over-

aggressively
air conditioned Mr.
Nice Guy.

Mooney and glowing, to me,
there's no

discernible difference—
between

what they say

and

who they are.

But fine,

for this one,
by necessity,
no discernible

difference, either—between
who I am

and what
I buy.

HEARTBEAT

After all of this ends, after one 

last vision—

after ruin and separation, when 

I never talk, never open up

my eyes, never 

finish another thought,

I hope I become a ticking watch—

all of time 

talking through me,

little constant clacking music, 

an uncorruptible

sentinel always standing 

between you 

and the things

you do. 

I could be—the time 

it takes you

to get to work, to brew 

your coffee in the morning,

to make 

a few calls, to undress before bed; 

my benevolent, easy sound—the thing 

that keeps 

you going, the only thing 

you cannot possibly 

use up—all by

yourself.

AT FIRST

the dreams you have

will not seem 

to make any sense. but 

still, they are transfer-

able. Still, you'll feel—if you just 

keep talking, keep on

describing their blithe little

arcs of motion with noble electrified 

hands, that

at last, it might be 

you and not them who makes

the breakthrough—that

the only way to understand
is by feeling it, that practically 

nobody living has ever actually

touched the dehydrated fantastic

surface of the moon. 

And yet—

after you've seen it, what more

do you really need 

to know?

EMPIRES FOR EYELIDS

Okay—you say out loud, I see it

now: your body's a filthy

little room that you're doomed to understand 

too well, because you've been puttering 

around inside it for ages 

now. You know the exact placement 

and relish the impalpable 

smell of every stained stick and nicked 

up corner of its furniture so well

that you never even think of them 

as being there at all—which is why

you also never think to clean 

underneath them anymore. And even 

when making the least consequential 

of decisions, no matter where you are, 

you cannot help but perfectly 

picture the dim color of its 

walls and the precise way they make

your sickened voice reverberate

whenever your ears 

hear it say—okay.

A COMPLIMENT

In the morning, when I lie slack
and not quite yet awake, sometimes you

rise, early and neat, and you and place your simple
lips on my cheek

quickly before you leave. I know that you do,
even though I'm still

mostly asleep—because, later in the day,
that place on my

face will remain changed, marbled
with this charged blue feeling—that I used to belong

wholly to you, that at some earlier point,
I was a defenseless

and sentimental object; not a separate
person, but an asset

of yours, a prized possession—
like some specific

part of your body
that you've always been proud of

or a faithful stuffed animal—but also
because later, I'll feel so much heavier

than those things, massively slowed
down with the feeling—not that it was

only a dream, but that it all happened
too long ago.

NATIONAL ANTHEM

Ever notice—whenever you're
sure you've got 

something worth saving,
it's because you can sense that it

won't be sticking

around for much longer?

It's like trying to savor
a frosty, tall chocolate malt

without watching it
melt away into thick milk

on a soft, July night—
or the happy desperation,

of a big group of people
all singing along

to this summer's

biggest radio song

at an all-night party
on the back lawn;

when the lyrics
consist only

of the track's total run-time
counting down to zero,

sung one half-decibel
more quietly each second—

and the underlying chords contain
every single melody line

of a universe 

filled with vibrating strings,

each giving its own self-
centered, independent concert—

all stacked on top of one another,
and each one

just so-happening
to sound out simultaneously

once or twice—giving off
the very temporary

illusion—that none of this
is nonsense.

ANTHROPOLOGY MASTER'S THESIS

The relentless
way so
much smallscale

biology keeps on
brainless-
ly creeping—

some
lichens, a
few sand dollars

cloning
and bottom-
feeding—eventually

taxing
every last
coin ever minted

inside geology's
formerly-
sanctified bastions.

OVER THERE

In big cities—the news of our victories
actually travels
more slowly,

having quite a bit
more vertical
edifices

off
of which
to go—unanswerably ricocheting.

For instance, here
in summer—
it turns

out—World Peace
is only a
slightly more

propitious
version of
its old wars: Cubs

versus White
Sox, Coke against
Pepsi, God opposing most of the things

those teenagers on the corner
are doing—that sort
of thing.

DASHED

Every good
idea takes time—unfortunately,

no one ever said that
to the

finch chick, whose pathetic
sketch

of brittle peanutshell
skull—you

very
nearly just stepped on.

DYED-IN-THE-WOOL

Nobody moshes—none

of the punks

skank anymore

at the killer

sorts of shows you 

now go to; 

the tallest and 

brawniest ones you can observe,

are all a little 

too busy—rebelliously clawing

and pawing 

at the screens of huge smartphones,

back and forth, through 

several dozen 

fiercely different variations 

on the very same 

ultrasound photo 

in the dark—clumped together

as ever, 

in their confrontational-

ly close ranks, which are now 

instinctively congregated

underneath most hardcore

ceiling fan in the place—its 

proximity to those heady motherfuckers 

up on stage be god-

damned.

PURGATORY, IL

Confession—sometimes, I feel so
distant from the opaque
look of love, which I
still see lingering on her face,

even though she's no longer
here in the same
room with me, that I grow
coolly certain

that the world is
not really the whole world—
that somehow, the earth
is actually a billion

different and
ghostly transparent planets, each one
the exact same size,
all of them—timed precisely

to keep
orbiting, pale and silent,
indifferent
but exactly—actually, make that

excruciatingly
cruelly—right on top
of one another,
forever.

NOT VERY PROFESSIONAL

There's a whole galaxy
locked up

inside me, so there 

must be—at least one
knocking around 

in you

too. That must be why 

it feels so profound-

ly businesslike

whenever we 

come together—
those little stings

are just billions

of hapless little
individual 

planets getting annihilated,

all for the
designless

inevitable

sake 

of some invisible force's compulsion

to merge—and thereby

to always 

make more of itself. But why?

I'm starting to

think—

so that eventually,

it'll never 

have to say goodbye,
only—see you 

later.

ORIGINAL LYRICS TO "TUBTHUMPING"

In the midst
of my deepest 

black miseries,
it rushes 

to fill me, bile-

thick,

but 

so clear—

that 

the very same vicious 

pair of hands
which keeps on sadistically 

pushing

me 

into these

pits cannot stop me—

from taking
a nice long-ish
rest while I'm 

down here.

CHILLING

To be God—
and to think:

after
I light this

one last
fire—I know

it will burn
fine

on its
own, exactly like

the others, for a
very long

time, without me
having

to do
anything—

without me

having
anything

to do.

WIN SOME LOSE SOME

I awoke
and found I
was, at

last, no
longer a
person, just

a pen—
only,

unfortunately,
not
cinched

calm but
firmly in the
palm

of a very wise
woman or

some
illustrious
man, to write

wrongs
or praise scintillating
dawns in

poems or
earn lots of hard
cash in pop

songs;
but in-
stead stuck

twiddling
around
forever

in the bony
black tyrannical

hands—of an
analog clock.

MAYBE

Is it selfish

of me?—really,

I don't

want to know

the answer—the way I 

always try 

so hard

while you're

talking, to make 

all of your problems 

look and 

sound a lot 

more
like my
problems, if only—

I swear—

so that I

might under-
stand them
better.