For Katy

You, who saved my childhood in your eyes,
You, whose song throughout the cosmos cries,
Do not be troubled by the death of kings,
Do not fall victim to the little things.

Yes, you are the child of vim and vale,
As are all others who have lost the trail,
Through you, the fundamental Word still rings,
Do not fall victim to the little things.

The carnal weight pulls heavy on your soul,
But do not pay the slings and arrows toll.
Be wounded, yes, but fight with vicious swings
Do not fall victim to the little things.

Your eyes can see abeyant prophecies,
The dreams of forests and the face of trees
Do not let candlelight your pupils sting
Do not fall victim to the little things.

Our primal mother through your body springs
To you, the great ancestral force still clings
When last the closing note the spider sings,
Do not fall victim to the little things.

June 5th, 2012

I loved you before I knew what it meant and before society hid its meaning behind veils of sexual taboo. Everything you did was so unashamed and wonderful, and through the voice of glowing blue orbs and golden-eyed Martians, you taught me it was okay to be human. I remember your words spoken from my mother’s mouth, and as I read you now I remember summer nights on the waterbed, grasping at understanding and trailing away on a thought about rockets blazing orange trails across a purpling Waukegan sky. I never knew farm-life or religion, but I knew that both could be beautiful and dangerous. I never knew people until you brought them to me in a tin-can soaring through outer and inner spaces alike. The universe is benevolent and not indifferent. You saved me from the bitter atheism of my generation. You saved me from resentment and hostile coffee-shop intellectuality, because now I know how to respect all things, because you showed me the insides of their heads and that they’re only just like me. And I miss you, and I miss knowing that you’re somewhere, but because of you I know that you’re everywhere, and when I tell stories in my head, I’m telling them to you.

On the day that you died, Venus was passing far above the Earth. Perhaps you were caught in its shadow and pulled into orbit on your way up. It may not be Mars, but I’m sure you’ll make do.

Triolent

I crave the chaos brought by tragedy,
I wear each sorrow like a separate sin
Rejoicing in the wake of malady.

Each aching sad I eagerly soak in,
In sensuous solitude, I play my part
My nodes engorge; the rest of me grows thin.

Yet even while the grieving makes its art,
The entropy brings structure to my ploy
Like playing with an arrhythmatic heart.

No likely end my appetite can cloy
I‘d rather feel it deep within my gut
Than leave it for the cosmos to enjoy.

An Acrostic Prayer

Hear my prayer,
O sightless name,
Sung in celestial resonance
An anathemed creator calls,
Not seeing where the shadows fall,
Not feeling where the echos land
Amassing bits of salt and sand
In between the fingernails
Not bothering to understand.
Tell stories to  your only mind
How something else embodies you
Existing in your lonely mind
Held in the highest gratitude,
Identical, and yet not you.
Go, find the place within yourself
Hidden from whence existence spread
Eventually, all stars will be
Stories, procured from fire and lead
Told in a lost creator’s head.

Vile Nine Tones

Alright, this is my most recent palindrome, which is more of a palindro-em. I haven’t posted it up before now because I was hoping to make a badly-photoshopped graphic novel out of it, and I had a couple of other people who might make illustrations for it at some point as well, but as that’s coming slow, and it’s finals week, I guess I’ll just post the palindrome by itself. I’m also working on another story, but it might not be up until Christmas break so, for my four or so followers, you know, expect that coming.

The palindro-em might need some background, so here it is: It’s about a group of sailors who wash up on shore and find this mermaid tangled in a fishing net, lying, apparently dead, on the beach. The last people to find her were fishermen who fled once they realized what she was. So, they find her and she wakes up and eats nine of the sailors’ hearts out. Then, she plays a song to seduce the narrator, who is trying to escape, and his shipmates run away while he is entranced and leave him as a sacrifice. She eats his heart out as well. I would go line by line, but it’s probably better for others to derive their own meaning from it.

UPDATE: Here are the slides I have so far. Yes, I know the photoshopping’s terrible. I’m going to say it was a stylistic choice.

Tide-mandated daemon, no mead det ‘ad named it,
Porcelain net-necrop, or centenniale crop,
Stink stang ferrel like killer ref-gnats. Knits
Drowned algae. Sea gladen word…(spoken by a sailor in the graphic, “Mermaid”)

Tide is lapse. Vile nine tones note nine lives, palsied. It
Peels on. “Yield!” I say, as I’d lie. “Y-No…sleep.”
Lire, play al. Peril
Nie. Racem eyes eye me. Care
Not felt. Fade, traitors. Rot. I arte daft, on
Tallats, planets ten alps tall! At
Fin, know elbo’ n gill, in as an ill, ignoble-won knife.

Angels in America Part 2

2. Come closer. I can hear you.
Why do you tremble? Here, let me help you.
You don’t have to be angry. You don’t have to speak loudly. You don’t have to cut corners.
But it helps.

All in line, I’ll help you. Feed me well and I’ll help you.
Everyone deserves the chance to be right.
Tell me your story, I have forever to listen.
You don’t have to speak loudly (Please do speak loudly.)
Hush now, I know darling, life isn’t fair

…but I am.

Angels in America Part 1

Alright, friends. This is the first in my series of angels that I plan to post. Each will have a picture and an accompanying poem, and each will represent an aspect of American society that I think is destructive/needs reform. Try to guess them; I’ll write a poem for you or something if you guess right. Maybe I’ll just give you a high-five. Or a book of patriotic songs for the recorder, smeared with purple hair dye and peanut butter. It increases the value, I swear. I’ve also decided to start posting the original, hand-written drafts of my stuff because I think it’s more intimate that way, and I always like looking at people’s handwriting. Here’s the text anyway, though, in case you can’t read it:

Tell me again why you love me.
I remember a story that used to be told.
There were talking animals and Kings and Queens with names that tasted like caraway spice and sand grit, polishing your teeth as you spoke them.
Most were wicked. Some were not.
I was there, in the story.
I was the story.
And I know it doesn’t seem important now that it’s gone, now that the pages are lost to wet caverns and buried deep beneath the ground, but at the time, it was everything.
And after all, what are we but our stories?
You can persist, you can re-write yourself, you can, you can because you created yourself and CHOSE your own image.
But answer me this:
In whose image am I?

Tell me again why you love me. This time I’ll listen, I swear.
I’ll listen.
I’ll listen.
I’ll listen.

Moon-Eyed Man

This is my homage to Neil and the Sandman series. It’s actually based on a dream I had before I read the series, but after I found the books, I realized how perfectly it fit to Mr. Gaiman’s description of Dream and Death. So, here it is! An oldie, but…well, it’s an oldie, anyway.

MOON-EYED MAN

The moon-eyed man speaks in mumbling tongues
Handling soft carapace-beads in his time-worn hands
The sliver in his eye makes his face turn down
Encrusted in his brow lies a thousand sands

Sliding through the world, like sepulchral silk
At a moment’s pace, death flits behind
Sending sympathetic glances to the corners of the Earth
He sees the world; his face is blind.

The moon-eyed man feels for all in plight,
Though help may come with dissonance
His tools are apt, his steps are light,
He blankets you in ignorance.

Palindromes for decaf coffee boys and Insomniacs alike.

No sleeping, this instead:

Wed DNA line, lived off o’ devile-nil and dew,
Seeped in seeded sad as Dedee, snide, pees.

It’s a palindr-oem. Dedee is the mother of a woman who has abandoned her impoverished, low-class family for a life as a well-to-do career woman. She never calls, she never writes, but she has come back to town for her sister’s wedding, because her sister is the only family member that she ever really felt a bond with. To spite her daughter and to show her own pride in her own way of life, Dedee pees outside, in full view of the wedding proceedings. Okay, so maybe it becomes less impressive when it requires a paragraph of explanation, but just imagine that there was a situation where this was relevant, and I totally came up with it on the spot. Holy shit, I’m amazing.

So also, last night, we went to BJ’s, because I was feeling like a sugar mama and I wanted to take Katy out someplace fancy (she proceeded to make BJ jokes the entire time, and even thanked our waiter for serving us BJs.) So anyway, I asked for two decaf coffees with whipped cream, and he said it was going to be like ten bucks, so I asked for one instead, and he said his boss was on his ass and that if he caught us sharing he might get the boot. He ended up bringing us two decaf coffees with extra whipped cream and gave us free refills, still only charging us for one. I folded him a crane and wrote him a palindrome:

Named “Decaf,” faced de man.

…I was still kind of proud of its relevance, despite the fact that, to make it make sense, you have to develop a Jamaican accent halfway through.

Sestina of the Living Dead

When the possums come, I’ll be long gone.
(There are bugs in my blood in my bones in my brain)
When the feeding seeded mouths come gumming on my gizzard,
And the molting sultry moths suck the juices from my spine
When the sinewed sad sepulchral saints come knocking at my door,
I’ll be spitting, sputtering, blinking winking gone.

Eyes spitting out the noon-day sun,
For possums who can never be
Sad for their losses, they don’t hold mass
For the dry bones of their long dead children,
Once filled and brimming with the sucking life-force, now
Flopping from the sloppy mouths of long dead dogs

Wise words have never whispered forth from tubular mouths,
The spitting image of their pater-mater-frater-soror
So many, so similar, so why not be cruel? Suck
From the possums their fill, their kin
My bones fall out to meet them, but I can no longer swat or squeeze
Never sad for the mooches, les mouches, the flies.

Nor sad for their gilded cousins,
Living in the mouths of monks and miners alike,
Structured cheek-bones of a phylum of filth, order Entropia
Fluttering behind my head once, and spitting in my soup
No need for possums when
The wind-sucking mada-maters come.

The collective only a stagnant, passive inhale, sucking only potential
They’ve done me no sad, no hindrance, no help
So I swat and swing and hiss like ferrel possums
Until my mouth hits home and the infection spreads
Spitting foam until the very end
And my aching bones will never fall to rest in my own plasticine home

They’re laid among the bones of the others,
Where the sucking soul-wind picks them dry of substance
Spitting out the rest for the saints who come like beggars
Those who used to be my own stand sad and helpless at the door of someone else’s nature,
While I have already made my home, and not in the hearts or minds or mouths of the righteous
For the possums never say a prayer.