Coming down from the mountains
like leeching off, away from comfort of a lover under velvet blankets,
down and out of breath, scarred with deep longing.
Ginsberg
Ginsberg
No Miss Lonelyhearts and no Mister Right,
we are stuck at the volta, fighting void,
the best minds in generations destroyed,
Peaches and penumbras don’t scatter light.
We are peaches, all ripe with poems airtight
in our lungs to expunge, hearts not decoyed
we sing our songs, make words more humanoid
more than our human bones, thoughts taking flight…
We are all flowers with roots to ground deep
whether it’s in sand, cast stone, or graveside,
it matters not, make matter of the reap.
Consider, you are strong against the tide,
face unangelic America, keep
remembering madness is not to hide.
In remembrance of Allan Ginsberg, as his birthday is soon approaching…
Amarillo Nido
“Google Poem”
Using artificial intelligence for clip art
Revealing the new google earth
Combining food delivery home service n
style tips
Fact-check feature rolling out
Google down?
bits of bias
Build answers
Voice search records and keeps conversations
Google is your Friend
gender pay case against google is about definition
about think with google
2 billion lines of code
Tough on sym an t c
*For this exercise I googled “Google Is…” and formed a poem from the headlines that came up.
Knowing the Risks
Super markets seem too convenient, these days—people used to have to go to different stores in order to collect supplies pretty much for anything that involved more than two items. The other day, I was at a super market to get my oil changed. During that forty minutes I bought bubble wrap and a snack, sat at a café and hammered out a couple of applications through the free wifi. Doing all that in one setting exhausted me for two days afterward. The possibilities are endless at super markets, maybe, but like I mentioned, they can be…too convenient.
Like for the guy I saw last night while I was, once again, at the super market collecting a rotisserie and some other goods. He was older, maybe in his seventies, but it was dusk and he was wearing a generic brown cap which covered most of his face.
I was loading the groceries into my trunk when I looked up and saw him enter an old brown car, maybe some Oldsmobile, that I did not notice was parked in the pedestrian walk by the front entrance, empty. The man approached the car with a logo-emblazoned plastic bag in each hand. He entered the car, and I went back to my groceries. Weird, but I’ve seen people do crazier things during retrogrades—or in Colorado otherwise. They say Boulder County is “inundated” by growing mental health concerns, these days.
As I slammed the trunk shut, my view went back to the man in the car, who was still sitting in the pedestrian zone about a thousand yards away from me so it was difficult to see the man, who mimed the actions of taking turns drinking and shooting something into his mouth. There weren’t too many people around as the day grew to a close, not enough people to cause a fuss about the car’s position, until he got out of the car a moment later and began to shout—
“Film me! Film me! Everyone needs to know the truth! The truth…” he half got back into the car, reaching to whatever was in the other bag, saying over and over “truth,” like some memory wandering off, but then he came back out and immediately began pouring a large plastic container of slightly yellowed liquid over himself, walking towards people a few at a time, rounding them up as an expert herder. “Everyone needs to know the truth!”
I got in my car quickly, locked the doors, but rolled the window down a crack to listen to the wet man with his arms up, a preacher in the parking lot—
“THEY TELL YOU THE FBI IS HERE TO PROTECT YOU, BUT IT’S ALL LIES.” He took out one of those lighters with the long necks, like for candles that are about to dry up, way down in the bottom of the glass jar. He tapped the little dots of flames to various portions of his clothing freshly doused, calling out, “Do not put me out!” But someone was already yelling “Call 911!” at the same time as the flames quickly spread across his limbs, a soft glow radiating in the early night, set on creating some vision for himself, some vision of turning ghost to haunt us all.
Even through the screams of onlookers I could hear him talking through his flaring face, I was living in the movies where all the plots twist, don’t make any sense anymore, and he saying, “They never let me sleep. All I’m doing is trying to make ends meet and all they’re trying to do is fuck with me! There’s nothing left when everything you try to push through pushes you back—they’re pushing me and I’m done being pushed!”
All this while, people are beginning to go after him with jackets, following the fuzzy hot monster to extinguish him, his words. I sat frozen to the scene, half knowing the ambulance would be on it’s way and in my way in a moment, half stuck in the movie reel. The fire-man slowly crept across the thru-way between the parking lot and store, occupying the space where the most people can view him, a shape of a him, rather, some shadow hanging on under a mass of reddish-orange. Those set to save him finally tackled him down, covered the flames in heavy fabrics until the smoke took its place.
I watched those same people who put the man out run to put the car out, which had also caught fire sometime during the running and ranting that I didn’t catch. About five hundred yards from the car, the coherent and smoldering man sat up and crossed his legs. One man noticed and stood near him, letting the man say without response, “I want to get my message out, tell as many people as you can, tell them my message…” until the sirens came into earshot.
The car was put out, and the cloth-wielders stood through the smoke panting as the blue and red began to illuminate the shadowed volunteers. The rest of the crowd had vanished, a few store employees stood at the doors. Even several hundred yards away, I could see how the man had no clothing left, hardly skin left on his body, third degree burns in the least, all blackened, i swear I could feel the residual heat from his body on my own skin.
I turned on my car and pulled away to the scene in my rearview mirror; EMT jumping out of the white truck with a gurney, sound of helicopter propellers incoming.
Death Anniversary: Eric
So two years ago feels like two seconds ago when you lose a life that hasn’t fully lived. I mean, Eric lived his life “to the fullest” in every day he bombastically flew around St. Augustine, or any part of Florida, New York–it didn’t matter where he was. He was ever-present. He is ever-present, even now, an energy among the undeserving. He didn’t deserve to blink out so quickly, he had so much more life to live, accomplishments and light to spread…
I’ve been re-working this piece, and I don’t know if it will ever feel complete, probably not, because life is not complete without you here, man… For Eric Scott Christian, Jr.
Cardinal feather & sage bundle smoking in the sill, ritual to find any answer:
I feel the same, not changing as fast as Midwestern skies: white, bleak, then gray haze & they wonder why so many teens are choosing to medicate & blink out instead of droning through the crossroads of Nowhere – Dirt Road, but is it really so difficult to empathize? & how many more are done with waking to aching sunshine, feeling half of who you are or can be, unable to wash out demands from our throats, shape incantation into action..?
I see them, trying to find the soft grip of moon waning, wanting to spool threads of stars around it, their bluing fingers, their disarticulated bones without air to spiral through lungs, expel. From the fire, can’t make clay; from heartstrings, we find only witnesses with the rough touch of something faint that won’t stay in the catastrophe of the past. & they say if someone leaves it’s best to know why, & I know why you both left, so what am I supposed to do with all the left-over drugs? How am I supposed to leave Death since witnessing her bare & raw, enchanting charm?
Aimless. Down to shores of Ana Island like some wishful fools off to find the Fountain of Youth (11 Magnolia Ave.), feel flood tides crash against crumbling seawalls again and again, crash and crash again. Not getting any better at resistance…
a weekday outside the Magic Beach Motel: stars keep shooting off behind
Eric’s head; pink yellow white, pink yellow tings with tequila
chain-smoke while he tells us about future plans (memorials now)
another sunset down the gutter, how every Floridian’s
night begins, antique muffled voices all born unlucky
with skin (rub salt over the shoulders, repeat daily…)
I imagine littering my feathers behind, the world taking
a long drag
sigh heaving, ocean crash somewhere nearby
A long drag, crash and crash again as I bring shears, tear into memories of chipping seafoam faces: all the days thinking of those bluing eyes, thinking of those waves cross-country, thinking of giving you guys up or joining you, no longer caring about direction or light. In dreamscapes, translucent hands try breaking every expectation the sun will rise again tomorrow, O, so tired of circling the same track of cosmos, every day…
another Thursday, after the psychic reader on Bernard Street
performs her fifth reading flipping Ace of Pentacles
then she walks into the Atlantic, pod of sea weed washing up in her place
more memorials. Mouths stay close but closed off
like stretched badlands along arid shores,
eyes doing more swimming,
learning to see with salt clumped to eyelashes.
— Should I have gone long ago?
Cardinal feather and sage bundle smoking in the sill.
Springing
Rising action, rising tensions
into whirls of metallic drums
drumming out of sync,
stamped out into a moment of fighting
pink tings, pink up. Why,
mesmerized under blends
we can’t find the strings to tune
the right way, strings when
rubbed against
makes friction sound soft
and drawn out humidity
like some memory of you, samba
beneath low-hung moon–Not
a sun-worshipper, worship
drinking spending every catch like
a catch requiring release:
regulations for regulation,
everything we are
when the time comes, dangerous sun light
delicate sun rise
we will take you for a loop
on a loop, flower petals
unfolding over
pink petal.
