In Response to the God(s) of Ecumenical Politics

Breathe me, the power:

twos bend over the back of hard labor

nines slit their wrists over the kitchen counter

Threes are serial injectors, stealing catharsis as trophies

Fives claw, lungs scoured clean

Fours scream black and bloody against the electric sizzle of

bare cattleprods

Ones smoke cigarettes calmly, on the curb,

waiting

and sixes provide cannon fodder,

ashing the cache of science

Kaikeiyi (Draft IV)

The king of Ayodhya, Dashranata, wants to crown one of his son’s Rama as king of Ayodhya. However one of his wives, Kaikeyi, has her mind “poisoned” against Rama and his mother Kausalya and seeks to displace them in favor of her and her son. Many years prior to this she had saved the life of the king and been granted two boons- she claims them now to have Rama disinherited and her son Bharat installed as king.

Mother may I?

Son you shall.

*

patrimony is always an uncertain proposition,

lineage only identifiable in

the folds of a silk sari and the smooth slide of golden bangles

Counterpoint to the swath of sweat clinging to your distended sides

Chanting furiously through the

Wet pains of contractions

A portion of divinity wrung out in every gasping breath

*

A mother’s love for her child is idolatry,

(Not the crimson spotted handkerchief called martyrdom)

Fear not for the curves of meat

Bathe the boy in the milk

Of your regard

There is no mother’s love that is

Yielding, that does not cut both ways

Viciously.

His limpid boyhood will be eclipsed by the

transcendent fury of his ascension

*

For love of sons we make

Enemies of men

Motherhood is a strange armor

And we wear it, ceaseless

Strapped to the legs to

Keep us sinking.

Mothers and martyrs

The love that lets itself be

Wounded must be terrifying

Tyrannical, despotic in

Standing and striding through a hail of arrows

Risking the perfumed cascade of

Twilight hours to secure my

Progeny, is another word for sacrifice

That contains all the elements of injury:

Scar, fire

Timely is the Garden

Flowering in insurrection
What blooms under glass never expands

Let us be defiant
Scatter the matted ashes
and begin again in the fullness of our time

(Tehran, Tehran, Tehran- a shadowed dream of sunshine and beaten rugs hanging exposed. Tehran Tehran Tehran- exsisting only in my father's language and inattention to detail.)

Let us be defiant
Tear down the scattered paintings
shroud ourselves in shrapnel
if martyrdom is the cause to which we will degrade ourselves
then these flesh-ridden bulleted skeletons march

When I grow up- (in lieu of my nativity which is approaching perniciously)

When I grow up my father will buy me a pony
so that later, in the street, I will not starve

When I grow up I will be an astronaut
hermetically sealed in a miasma of my own excretion

When I grow up I want to be in movies
freezing myself forward through the design of my intent

When I grow up I will plant a flower for every love
so that I may walk forever in my garden

When I grow up I will find Area 51
and beg them to send me home

Imperative (Not a Pejorative (not necessarily))

Be a good boy drink all your fruits and vegetables and process the plastics and toxins that you need

For instance: Eat the HoHo and the wrapper to avoid pollution and to bring your nutritional absorption slightly out of the red

Don't worry, by the time you are big enough my baby boy they will be making organic whole wheat Ho-Hos with fresh cream and a triumphant man will address you from the box and claim that finally we are making progress

Saving the planet is something I plan to do before I am fifty. And die. But by then we will have cut you into roughly the shape we want you to be and I am sure you will be totally capable of filing down the detail

Scribble Two:

The essence of this life is the jaw cracking in agony, a slow festering that imobilizes the mouth and cuts down the clavicle.

All I am is hunger, a yawning black maw that cries futility for that which is intolerable to it. A yearning for breadth, for depth. Cut back the flesh and peel the bulbous veins from it's surface- Cmon doc I want to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Startin' something

so hey I am an artist sort of

so word poems from here on out I guess, until I can think of something better. this is the refuse, the post-it note throwaway poem/prose space. So I can wad these ideas up and toss them out

Believe indoctrination
the senseless violence that calls itself victory
and threes are serial injectors, stealing catharsis as trophies

I will not be a king or a martyr or a lunatic or a fool
I live endless, swirled
mired in the paint and slashed in syllables
cut from the cloth that
is the only gift a man will buy you

I write happy poems when
I safely despise every inch of you
when I shine incandescent from within my bulbous veins
not ever sugar makes me manic
spikes the core of me solid

Firenze

It was pouring on election day and my phone died and I was STARVING and frustrated by the minuscule size of italian sidewalks.

then heather found me huddling under san pietro, in the shadow of brunelleschi's dome and opposite Ghiberti's dome. she took me home and wined me (cheap Chianti--better then water!) and then took me out to election night party where i saw a professor and a live country band and ate free food all night.


then dancing and wine and secret bakeries studded in the winding avenues of firenze

Venezia

Oh my Venezia.

well first Milano Centrale-- 14 hours spent in the station sleeping on wooden bench and freezing to death and starving and being generally miserable. it was also a night of superb bladder control. 12pm to 6am though i only lasted till 3am before doing something highly illegal. and to all the sketchy men of Milano Centrale--va funculo! I piss on all of you. such depravation though i tell you.

so of course, first thing in venezia I devoured a gigantic pizza the size of my face--and got into a friendly conversation about Obama. christ it was a delicious day.

then the piazza de san marco and il rialto and the palazzo il doge and wandering wandering wandering, footloose and fancy free and BED under pink sheets in a pink room with a purple plastic rhinestone chandelier. pain di something or other smothered in nutella and six bowls of cornflakes in the morning. gorgeous gorgeous sleep and a beautiful puppy