the one hundred thousand dollar pyramid

look at me i lost all the weight

e diet changed my life

free online membership

free, what are you waiting for?

you have a 50/50 chance of walking out of here a millionaire

from television city in holyywood this is the 100,000 dollar pyramid

oh good audience, thank you

we really need someone to go to the pyramid, it's been a long time

i teach achievement for the SATs, well good

shes a singer, not only bright and attractive but a run for your money,

thanks nipsy, somebody's gonna win today, i can feel it

alright we're gonna take horseplay, things associated with a jockey

good choice nipsy, you'll be receiving first this round

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.