grace in rags

it's the day before work the day before
the beginning of the school year. my computer's
power jack is intermittent. i may lose touch
with the outside world at any time. the house has
fallen into entropy. i plan on becoming a wave
for a few hours, riding my useless advice
into making my own surroundings something
comforting. last nite aching from another
failure, impossible bills, world insolvency, your derelict
soul came over with a ball of beer and a bottle of jack.
as always you came to the wrong house. the partay
was down the street with peeps of your age
whom you despise because you see your self
in them. instead we watched the first
episode of the twilite zone on cbs.com.
the one where a guy comes to, walking down a road
alone, toward a town where everyone has
left one second before he gets there. smoking cigar
in the ashtray, percolator just beginning to perc. on top of that
he doesn't know who he is and there is no one to ask.
wonder what foucalt, unbuttoned, would make of that...

i want to take all the credit between us, our children, computers,
our high speed internet connections, talent, brains and will
and go to the commune now, k? i think there's enough of us
with nothing to really lose to be able to do it now.
the technology for sustainable advanced living is available
and the prices are going down, the housing market's
in the toilet, guidance for interpersonal relationships within
alternative communities is readily available...

ah what am thinking? not enough drugs in the world.











()_******





you tell me you're a ghost. your body is back at your one room
apartment, on the ashfilled floor, covered now by fleas
and eventually, if no one comes to find it, eaten by the cats
those fleas live on. for once you'd have done them some good.
i wish you were catholic so someone could absolve you.
spoiled rich kid that someone always bails out.
how eventually you come to accept that you're a fuckup
at everything but love. and even that is twisted
back into yourself because you hate you.
i dunno how to answer to the crime of being human.
i sometimes feel as if joy and beauty is bound in a full moon
falling on the twisted trees that have survived
this round of the developer's bobcat in the lush empty
fields between the centers of control. a person could feel
alive with the silvery light falling on the mushrooms all around.
touch one, a dry sponge- unimpressionable
unless you squeeze it, unimpressive unless you eat it.

















*()(*



so i don't know how to fill
a black hole. stretched on the verge of eternity
i'm gone in a second. you could look
on me for eons but
the light you see isn't all me at all.
you could call it immortality but i don't remember
anything beyond this small stretch of now.
and it hurts, this sloughing of photons.
the hot shower takes away some of the pain.
concentrate on the muscle in order to forget it.




















U*)(

a couple weeks ago i wrote my will
on the bloodstained couch in your place.
you made music which seemed
to turn you hopeful and which sits
in your ears now like bluebottle flies.
you can't undo the thinking -
consciousness as an antidote to hope,
idiocy its repetition. i took the yellow
sheets on which i'd written my post mortem wishes
crumpled them into balls, she shoots she scores
two points and the other becomes a toy for the healthier
kitten to bat about the room in a pretense of hunting
till she learns the meaning of inanimate.
good use of materials, imo.









*()

and you have so many more years of this.
i think i've made you disbelieve in love
and for that i'm profoundly sorry.





again