Brain, entirely vacated. Vanished.
Gone in the panic mode of the evening.
A fear of eviction, dereliction, unkempt disharmony,
Eris waiting beside my boots
as my feet bleed through now stained socks.

-----
My mind is in such a shit place right now--not depression wise or anything, either, just...in that panicked state it gets from time to time, something no amount of drugs can help with--and that is probably a good thing, really, because...well, just getting through your life by hopping from pill bottle to pill bottle whenever a problem pops up just...seems kind of unpleasant, I recognize that I write this as I have forty milligrams of serotonin-filled candy in my system along with some other tailored poisons to the beasts that slowly eat at my brain. Such is life. My dog is snuggling in at my feet and suggesting huffily that I turn off this devil box and sleep too, so I'm going to do that. Peace

A poem for Eugene.

I wrote this for a poetry class, so there were requirements to be met—namely, that I had only ten minutes to compose the piece, and had to put some form of the word ‘shiver’ in, as well the words ‘raft’ and ‘ambulance’… The result turned out to be a memoriam of sorts to my maternal grandfather, a man who always carried a sort of quiet mythic air about him. And the doughnut shop in question is Alie’s, in case you were wondering—if you live on the East Coast…stop by there and devour some for me, will ya?

Lake Cha(rgoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungam)augg and the Mournful Doughnut.


Roiling mists on Lake Chaugg hide a raft
a springboard for naked flips into the water

the sweet, high laugh of a friend’s lover,
later, the sound of an ambulance, a banshee’s wail

someone in the family has died, will die,
the sídhe keens, my aunt insists she shows up before each death.

Now, all that exists is that lake, cloaked in the colors of dawn,
another ambulance behind us on the road in Middlesex, Mass.

Shivering, I ride shotgun, a box of doughnuts, best in Rhode Island, at my feet.
Jelly with powdered sugar, cake with white frosting and sprinkles.

I can’t eat the jellied ones anymore, too much sorrow in them,
memories of a dead, mourned, and never-really-known grandfather
linger in strawberry-red smears on a white shirt every Friday morning.

A surrealist tale. Brief.

She gently licked the strawberry, it liked it.

The long sigh at the end of a weekend

No, the weekend isn't officially over until Sunday night at this time, or maybe Monday considering the holiday moved in order to avoid acknowledging the true Labor Day on the first of May, when the rest of the world's workers take out the red and black of the Internationale and organized workers as opposed to the black and red of Fascism (awkward, we really should make fascists use ridiculous uniforms...which, well, they usually do use semi-ridiculous uniforms, but they tend to take the niftiest colors...at least black, red, tan, grey--though there is something to be said for the Allied uniforms of the Second World War, the coloring of which, and the design, is that of victors, of peace of a sort) and parade down city streets, drunk on a mix of their own power and whatever the locals ferment, distill, or otherwise let sit in out of the way barrels for a while, maybe just some mare's milk if that is all they have to ferment, but maybe something less creative...like buffalo grass in Poland or barely in most of Britain and Ireland, still...it feels like it is starting to wind down, the sails left at an angle to catch the next breeze in the doldrums of impossibly hot September days. And that is how you write a run-on sentence which could have been even longer if I went into digressions about various uniforms or cuts of uniform. I woke up earlier than usual this morning, and after tossing myself in the shower, cursing the lack of a fresh razor, I devoured a bit of breakfast with the standard crew plus some guests, and struck out for downtown to meet Comrade Eric for tea. Tea actually consisted of tea for once, which was nice, because I'd been thinking about tea all morning, and having some in my system allowed me to at least pretend to function. Functioning, in fact, included a stroll over to the local (ish) Spanish market of El Paraiso, a wonderful little joint just south of the public library, for some ginger, a lemon, and a cactus fruit. Eric said I was one chicken foot short of a Voudon ritual. He wasn't far off, excepting the fact I try not to waste food on divinities. I offer them mindfulness of their existence, and figure that is pretty much the most valuable thing I can offer to any being, divine, mortal, or otherwise extant--mortals, these wonderful brain-machines going about in an armor of meat, bone, nerve, tendon, and skin are divine in their own way--anonymous though this divinity sometimes is, we look around us, especially when we are in the old and sacred places of the world, and remember that we are not the first people on this planet, that even before your named ancestors were making progeny in the fields of whatever land you come from, people were doing things other than just breeding--people took time out from the rather important act of perpetuating and providing for the human race just to build monuments to themselves or powerful enough folks within the bands, tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires of this world we attempt to call ours. It is much more and less than that--it belongs to the dead, and to the often touched on in Greenpeace advertisements 'future generations.' Memories sparked. Meeting a friend of my father's in a small cafe on a forgotten little street in San Fransisco, chocolate croissants passed around by this otherwise nameless, sort of faceless, and maybe female visitor. You must try these, they implore, they are to die for. Personally, I've never been a fan of dying for anything other than protecting those weaker than you, or perhaps those who are too busy doing things to make the world awesome to protect themselves from rather mundane deaths like getting hit by a bus or being kidnapped and sold into a life of torture, death, and rape, and if you are lucky, in that order, by Tajiks living near the Pamirs. Or maybe by Senderos down south in the Andes. Memories fade as quick as they materialize, reminding me of a need to take certain drugs to regulate chemicals going into my brain, alarm bells ring in my head, go, they say, walk, stagger, move.
So off I go.
Eventually...well, tomorrow my brain might function...so...I'll write something then. It is amazing the success, poetics wise, I'm having--not that I'm planning on doing anything with this poetry, it is just nice to know that my brain has not turned to dust in the last year of freedom from any sort of academic constraints.