stone cut man

I scrape clay from a stone
with a miniature trowel,
scratching at the earth
that obscures its shape.

One hundred thousand years ago,
a common group of men and women
(not yet tribe, not gaggle)
followed migrating deer
along the north bank of an
unnamed river.

From the clay bed
a sphere,
vaguely headlike? emerges.
I scratch with my trowel
earth from eyes,
or what I think may be
eyes, and they open out of limestone.

Skin painted, black hair braided,
draped in iridescent shells,
he broke from the disorganized stream
of Homo sapiens skirting the river. Noticing
a stone beneath an eddy of whitewater,
he thought, in uncertain terms,
‘that looks like I look,
they,
we

I think I see
what could be shoulders, a chest.
I blow aside loose sediment.

He lagged behind. He turned the stone
in his hand. His thumb surveyed
the groove that split the middle
of the bottom half of the stone.

Legs. I see feet
emerge from earth.

He turned the stone in his hand,
tracing with his thumb
irregular divots on its upper sides.

Arms. Hands
chipped onto clumsy wrists.

He realized he carried a stone man.

A stone cut man. I brush away the last bits of dirt
that mask its form. I lift it towards the sun
and squint to find its detail.

On a quiet evening, warm,
he rested against moss on a boulder
after a large meal. He scratched a deer tooth
into the groove down the middle
of the bottom half of the stone
and repeated the motion:
up down,
up down,
up down

Later
there were legs,
arms, fingers,
a head. He turned stone into man
and when he died many years later
the others left it with him,
returning to earth
that from which they came.

Me, now, to chip away at the block

I press my fingers to the keys
and numbness fills them.

Naked flesh to ice,
electric wax paper
buzzing against the teeth of a Hercules comb
(bendable, unbreakable)
like pressing index in screw hole
of a desk lamp missing its bulb.

Thunder

Sounds like lightning
Looks like thunder

Three glasses positioned on the leathercreaking oldwood my grandfather gave my father.
I got it when both were dead or dying. (I’m a bastard son-
Saying so
at least until I am and regret it)

No matter what order I place the three glasses, I lift them with a timid hand. Uncertain,
I raise a glass and halt, thomp it down and lift another, thomp it and another.
Finally I sip the cobwebs.

I had a feeling. Thunder across my background hearing.
Escaped from the asthenosphere, volcanic clouds barrel mindlessly
in that place where shingles show as pebbles, and trees like soles of feet.
The tremors of woodframe windows shatter chipped paint to rest
upon the gutter of my windowsill. Telephones cold against my ear,
one dying, another dying, this one plugged and dying still,
it cuts my lobes like grad students take slices of pizza, lobes.
Like technicians spend two years prepping for the day they slice magnetically and automatically.
Like standing before thick glass, soundproof and speaking through an amplifier
wired through the ceiling past soundproof glass.
My voice coming tinny. Her voice coming thin.
Thunder coming humble,
thinking thunder’s me,
but isn’t, and is August manifest,
congealed in the atmosphere I breathe outside, choked by the vigor of an August storm.

I had a feeling…
This thunder is far too fucking timely. Sometimes, you know,
you have a feeling? You feel like

shit is choreographed? Strung together (up, along, out) by some maniac who hates you
and wants to see you squirm?

(God: What do you need now, boy? You punched your gut and kicked the seat from under.
You’re alone and drunk and in the mess you’ve made, boy. Call to me?
Grilling a grilled cheese?

Do you know what I hate? You, and your grilled cheese too.

See? You’ve burned it cuz you fuck up what you touch.
She’s crying. And you’re hard behind your face, teeth clenched; somewhere hard behind.

What you need is thunder, boy. Ho Ho Ho)

Thunder when tears begin, and the white of lighting past my ruined window.
See them take the place of what you’ve tried.

(Ha ha)

Is that you god?

It’s what I did and lightning.
--

And then the storm subsides, and calm takes up residence in place of banished spirit.
A pillar of mucus ascends the inner spire of my airtight tubes, climbing towards the source of gravity beneath my feat. It’s all a matter of perspective, so when I close my eyes and picture my beating heart -- the squelching labyrinth; inner parts -- I feel mucus climbing towards my gut, not sinking. I hear legions march; shamans calling dance;
a druid chain of keening adepts
screaming for my pulsing parts:
I hear them cough when I pull smoke,
gasp to stay afloat
the pull of gravity, towards the center where I don’t mean a thing,
and really,
outside of me,
this doesn’t mean a thing.

It’s not so bad a billion years from now,
all my atoms pulverized into components of carboniferous matter
springing again in the form of an unknown island
where some poor bastard meets life
out the womb of his bastard mother.

(It’s not so bad a week from now)

There beneath,
unknowing as I know

a bastard child aspirates
the thick dust his feet kick up
from floors of dirt his bastard father closed
in corrugated sheets of tin
liberated from garbage set aside
for life, liberty and
some other shit
that makes my problems grand
and real ones gone—

handed to bastard sons.

Define

As auto-completed by my Google upon typing the word define:

Love
Agnostic
Culture
Socialism
Integrity
Ethics
Irony
Leadership
Race
Napalm

A separate peace

Day comes and nothing’s there;
Morning, evening, night,
Stare.

Harmony extraneous
Pipes electrons up my nodes.
‘Nodes’ I say, sounding like
The milk laughed down my nose.

Have you ever had a thought—
An idea off beat,
Patented generations before you—
That amounted to little more than a mouthful of ignorance
Deposited oppositely, quite eloquently, by an intellectual type
Who puts it simply without saying
Because he's read books you haven’t
And cultivates quotes?

Have you ever felt he/they did it already?
Watched a trite movie
That said so like you say it
Every night you're, you know, like, really on?

Probably unimportant

Now,
Have you ever lived a week—
The kind of week where thinking’s done
And cleaning is of dishes eaten from,
Floors stood on, Cups drunk from,
Pots in which bubbling meals were cooked,
Sumptuous, wholesome—

Have you ever lived a week you want to?

Ass in sand on private beach
With beer and ass in hand

Sun past leaves of local trees
On trails of geograph breeze

Weakened by the breathing of a complimentary beast



Holiday

Is it scary so, ideal?
Worse, to say,
Let it go?

Stumble back in hole,
Light smoke,
Burn, groan…
Imagine where, one day,
I’d like to wear my basalt shoes
That weigh beyond the in between,
Beneath my bobbing
Presently-
Orange vest
collecting black,
Lips
sticking,
Taking on the color of the slick—
Waiting for when
anticipation
realizes, presently.

Drinking rum

Love

hmph

Geothermal

Here we are again.
The morning birds of spring,
Robins whatnot, chirp their chirping thing,
call the earthworms from tunneled loam,
frost to mud
oxygen, nitrogen
consumed by roots
in dirt i paint my face.

too dark to lie awake,
Light enough to wake,
An owl sticks my ears--
doppler whoops like
!oh? howling arteries
hatching veins in lungs
Where the flavor of Spring calamity gurgles up muck
Stagnant inside.

I really hope and really fear
That at the end of false light and fake death
When the sun expands to swallow the world
That like I've heard a few say
And like I've seen fewer believe
That there will be the snow and there will be ash
And the cold and untouchable will melt in an instant
back into their earth

The true dust made of all the crosses they've shrugged off

And the ash will remember the furnace and the sun will know his own
Because they've talked before and had their fights
And the snow will fall and melt for real
The flakes are frightened without their irony
And face to face they will flee, who could blame them?

And the ash will return to the flames
And know that what burned and scarred
was only the hearth of their home

Eggnog

Down the length of a trench of snow
Dug by the wide turn of a Ford Explorer,
Should I be my dog and put my snout to the tread
Dug along a shallow arc by the wide turn of an automobile?

Should I put my ear to the mouth of an evergreen strip
Between street, reservoir and mumbling parkway?

Should my shadows fall from the mouth of Chimney Rock
Rebuilt in white by haphazard plows and snowman piles?

Is winter really something to get high about,
Or should I tug his collar and take him home?

The view from the panopticon

In a comic once I read
the next step might be something like
taking off your own head and putting on another
like a new cap and tilting it a new direction
called for by new situation
schizophrenia,
but in a different direction—
beaming an innerstate with white lines
streamering cords of mucus and bellyburn
meals from shitty greasespoons and roomservice
meetings where turkeys and southern gentlemen
and anglophiles undress the queen’s royal guard
and gobble down the beef till we don’t notice it
streaming down our cheeks like broken hands pouring
tears that might otherwise be pouring down cheeks
if we had courage enough or knownwhatnow to show ourselves.

Does our technostate approximate the prophecies
of a burnt comic book mind?
A Modern Postmodern Post-Person place?
Where the person is a real face in a real place
for real in your face? The cultivation of personality
at a hyperindustrial pace?

In my hyperion orbit,
even as I grope the astronomy of titaninformation
before the cold of my open window huffing winter,
should I know whom the people who birthed and died before me
were talking about when they said things like, *(following will be filled in)*
“barth quote
“grotesque
“Hell is other people
“All’s fair in

My friends and I and family?
Were they trying to talk about people and the people now
who turn on cameras to film themselves and other people
doing things like living, screaming and living crazy?

Were they talking about the things people do
before people told themselves?

Inventing cold fusion for the silent audience
of himself on a youth mantle and Muhammad Ali in photographs --
(a rolemodel and jittering adversary) a pictured image of
what could be, might have been
if not rape and insanity—in the public restroom where he filmed himself
and his polandspring litter alchemy.

Now the world may hear him speak!
And my time watches the horse’s mouth.

When the good old letters were put to pages by pen
or set to strange arrangements by the freedom of type,
were the minds behind preparing us for the truth of things
that we in our gentle positions may not yet have had to see?
For the benefit of those in proper homes:
where lunacy and heartshed and person to person intracontemplation
hide in nests of shadow
between gothic woods of southern shapes
and alongside faraway tracks where a station waits
to hold late locamotives to task?
Hiding like sideshow after sideshow showed
Crying like lost brothers when those called brothers go home
Grotesque when grotesque is too foreign a word

What did they know I don’t?
Did they know what my hyperion station would bring
as it belts around my time and rings?

From a balcony I watch a blond haired boy try to bellow
with all the might his young neck could, it not coming
more than wounded screams. I watch from my balcony
on a balcony through the eyes of a telephone and I hear
a disconnected excoriation of laughter that coincides
with my own disconnected hoots and I hear the muttering
of a third party in the company of the conduit
but am unable to decipher her interpretations.
The young blonde is bleeding down his face
and the scene is a flurry of skull printed sweatshirts
and peacoats and branded swinging sweatshirts
being thrown down by angry participants
who decide that maybe a fight is not the way
and tears alone are more insulting than another punch to the face,
then dissipate, then the blonde and a faithful idiot descend
towards midnight streets where only bicycles still ride
to blow off steam—the idiot accompanies to do what is right,
to calm the blonde say it’s all right.

And have I been there before?
I’m sure
I’ve been somewhere nearby
the blood in his eyes,
the madness in his words and on the same world
that swallows him up and folds him up inside
the head that finds these things important at that time.

And if I weren’t I could say
that for that night at least,
I saw the same things he did
and I saw the same things the nameless balcony did
that we all stood on and watched from through
the electric eye in the hand on some funny guy
who recorded the show and put it to music like it were a show
so myself and countless others
could unscrew our heads and put on another
so we, for those few interspective minutes,
were one
watching him, a nameless character in simple story
acting out the history of literature
beneath a balcony
into the camera of a mobile phone
behind a plate of image and sound
alone in my bedroom
before bed.

A body of water

Hot across my jawline,
up my nostrils and down my sinus
my eyes burrow brow and strangle my spine.

The people on television with orange skin
at once cry what is wrong
and what is wrong with them.

A laugh cry thing-
do they joke,
am I,
or is the joke the fashion it’s told?
Laugh or laugh with them?

This is the aria of what we eat:

The potholes in asphalt

are craters carved cautiously by mad scientists on Discovery
to make room for commercial breaks

and are

dishes of unrest
burned into our foreign lands
for the benefit of startled villains in stretched Hanes
who are also men smiling for glamour shots
under balaclavas and banners proclaiming beneficent actions
that bury lands in craters
and balaclavas and Hanes

and are

parts of children and human shields
in ruined babymalk factories storing arms
and ignorance and symmetrical history

and are

potholes we avoid with a flick of the wrist
or miss and drive over in a moment of uncomfortable jostle
that wake us for a moment on our way

and are

nothing but a series of unoriginal geography
peppering the landscape like Oh’s in a photograph of the moon
but plus erosion
so that the Oh’s are more like ‘Ah’s’ of wading in an August stream
that’s been running longer than the bombs have gone off
on asphalt on television and in my head.

And are these contemplations mine?
Or do we all make them
sitting on our ass
watching things go by

like breasts descending with age
hairs turning gray
skin growing lined
mind go blind-

aretheyisthis the way things go?
Like some Greek said,
‘The next generation’s worse than the last?’
(I paraphrase)

Or is this the bank of a stream;
the Mississippi really wrenching away
those bold protrusions of earth that peer into the bends of moving water?
Or
do both reach the same end?

Pink nimbus dawn over Green Mountains
looks like glowing coals in a newborn fire
in an oil painting
of a pink dawn
over green mountains.

farts

Chestnut wool
Falls in curling leaf
And hot breath.

It’s a summertime expression
That leads me to believe
things are for me.

A thought of one left out

God,
I love you.
Please forgive me.