pulse

slipping through my hands

I press a pulse-bar and my

fingers light-up, charged now they

glow faintly, electric purple

snakes in a dark metallic hallway

packing

Those missiles you bubble-wrap

18

An invisible sion,
Judea Icarii - fallen.
Steps to an old pavement,
parchment & flagstones
rubble & ruin

pugilism

Charlie’s gone for now – stunned as I am

to be introduced to an old man in

an attic, not the gutter-drunk pugilist you know –

this turpitude some sad joke from

a sick movie

I couldn’t do that sort of easy breeze –

he’d say I hadn’t found an edge, the

next-bottle focus of a consumption

that spurred him through all the

hovels and whores and walk-aways –

comfort kills that grit, I’m begging to

see

words obscure words, a shower of noise

in a sea of thoughts, scraping at your

brain, moths tonight set to

sizzle before they soar.

Exercising charlie

Poetry is what happens
when nothing else
can ~

Charles Bukowski

Charlie (Hank, Huck?) was right when he said

nothing else

is left.

But the space between words,

that’s the truest time -

soldered to a chair, port-induced

haze mingled with free-based elegies

and steep admissions.

they walked you today

out and across the bridal veil,

water tumbling like sheets of photo-chemicals,

all slick and deep and burning

You stroke the keys - like a gland for milk

and nothing but association to factions survive

you type and hope nothing’s left that isn’t yours -

even though they’ve all said it,

maybe you’ll follow Dylan to the grave – rigid with adoration and clogged with old, dead, poems.

do your slippages account for these gaps?

the little times bereft of ‘comfortable, clever poems’ maybe that’s all there ever was – hazy winter wanderings, padded and pandering declarations

and half-carved demi-gods – mortal and yet stained

can you construct this? Charlie wouldn’t ask a question like that, buried up in his room, candy wrappers and bottles and hate –

his dysfunction a fuel, his fucking an ode, his drink an answer.

he might not have seen it so…grandly. He wouldn’t have talked to you – but you don’t know that, at least

not tonight