the Bleeder

The Bleeder is not a man prone to discuss minor topics with folks. He is aware of his limitations, and he is a careful man. His neighbors regard him as praise-worthy, but they are somewhat nervous in his presence. His only defect is that he bleeds at the slightest irritation. Sometimes even words can make his capillaries burst. The harsh consonants of someone speaking German are especially traumatic for him. The Bleeder writes poems in his spare time and enjoys salt & vinegar flavored potato chips. It is said that his father never uttered a single word to him inside the walls of their home and that his mother was the snow white dove of which Hank Locklin once sang. The Bleeder could not be reached for comment, but it is reported that he recently planted a small garden behind his house, okra and bell peppers, mostly.

poem 777

I am drawing up music for
Watching the end of time.
You know, when women begin
To radiate up into the clouds
And spigots and turnstiles
Disappear with a pop and
drawn fsssttt not unlike okra
Dropped in hot bacon drippings.
I am painting my face to
Meet our makers for a game
Of Cowboys and Indians,
And I'd like to think that
The right team wins above the sky.

Toothbrushes are wilting,
Spoons flare up in a white light,
Slapping out a joyous tintinnabulation
On the backsides of stern kettles
And collanders and the rims of champagne flutes.
Keyrings float by dancing,
Their jagged smiles hiding nothing,
Not even metaphors.

The wineboxes have yet to be stuffed
With peppery Rhones, the picnic basket
Has sprung a leak, and my old lady
Left me for some new paper religion.
Yet already I hear those trumpets
splitting the night!
There's nothing left to do but
Stick a mockingbird feather in my temple
And dance this last Rain Waltz
Thirsty and alone.

One the Hard Way

Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman recalled hearing someone yell before the collapses that something was falling from the towers.
"It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other," she said. "We didn't know what it was at first, but then the first body hit and then we knew what it was."
"I was getting sick. I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn't have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit."

I don't know what people think anymore. I don't know if people even really do think, if you know what I mean. One thing I do know is you can't carry this shit around; it's no monkey on your back, it's a goddamned Acme safe straight from the cartoons. It'll flatten you quick, your Wil E. Coyote ass becomes two-dimensional. I couldn't watch the news for over a year after that shit. I wanted to hear something good, like Lassie saved Timmy from drowning in a well, but it's all just more death and shit, mierda. People in Wisconsin, people in Georgia, sure, they felt emotions, right?, but I saw charred flesh, I saw fucking human beings fall from the sky. I want people to get this, remember it like I do, and that doesn't happen with a fucking granite memorial sculpture in Manhattan. I don't know how it does happen, but Jesus, I need for people to know.

I lost a few friends that day, people I worked with, lived with for years, with their fucked up habits and their fucked up clothes and their fucked up tastes. But these friends were only doing what we get paid to do, and most of us love to do. It's no goddamned joyride to walk around a room with a temp of around 500 degrees plus Fahrenheit toting 80 pounds of gear, but you get in it and the shit you learned just kicks in. Trust your instincts, trust your equipment and save some fucking bodies. Not that day, my friend. We just got killed, fucking bombarded.


I never even got in the tower. I was on a crew setting water lines, and just like that Rikkert yells, "debris falling!" and we all look up, and fuck if it's not a human being, a real live living fucker spending the last moments of his life as a reminder that the acceleration of gravity is 32 feet per second squared. We watched him become a fucking human omelet, and we cried. I won't even tell you about the firemen who died; it's just too fucking hard.

You'd think it might be easier to go back to work the next day if you know you might never see the horror of the day before, right? You'd be dead wrong. Twelve dead on our squad from smoke inhalation. Four crushed in the rubble of the collapse, not even a body for a funeral. The same fuckers whose tastes and clothes I couldn't stand, I think about every night until the booze and the Valium kicks in, and I no longer want to jump from a flaming tower myself. You'd think four years might put some gulf or moat between yourself and your self-loathing and inability to save a single goddamned soul from frying to death 800 feet above you, and you'd be wrong again. And you would turn to something for escape, or you'd go bat-shit crazy, and then where are you? My girl left me about six months after the attacks, and I loved her more than anything, but I don't even think about her. At all. She deserved better than a shell of a man, and right now I'm not even that. I don't want to sap someone else's life of decency, I just want these memories to go away, and if you live like that, you can damn well expect to see your woman walk out the door. Fuck it, I go to work 4 shifts a week, 18 hours a shift. I put out fires, I administer CPR at pools and weddings and bat mitzvahs, I even pull cats out of trees like some Norman Rockwell bullshit, but what I don't do is forget. Drink as I might, I can't. And I won't, because of all the people who died, some right smack on the ground in front of me. It's four years now, but it's every goddamned day.

searching

We were looking underneath the couch for something I can no longer recall, maybe it was money or a hairbrush, maybe a book on herbal remedies, the remote control, a bottle of pills, a telephone number on a restaurant napkin, maybe the key to a giant safe that held all of her favorite colors and words and family members and a never-ending cache of Thai spring rolls with hot mustard dipping sauce, maybe it was the Vice President whose name no one remembers that disappeared on Arbor Day (which falls on a day in a month I can not remember), or a balsa wood model airplane, a ceramic beetle with a secret cavity for hiding valuables, maybe that little chunk of the moon that fell on my grandfather’s head when he was stationed in Korea, or maybe it could have even been her silver spoon; the point is, as it turned out, we were searching mightily, but in vain.

So with a wafting, decorous sigh, she dropped her end of the couch and said We’ll never find the goddamned thing here underneath this couch which is a place were we always look for lost damned things but never seem to have any luck, so blast it all, I think I’ll play some music. Then she went and fetched her beautiful golden harpsichord, and she played a spontaneous toccata that lasted for two days and produced such vibrant and angelic and resonant melodies that at the end of the second day the harpsichord dissolved into a heap of fine golden ash, and she stumbled over to me weeping tears of insolent pride, and we made quiet, sweaty love on the floor by the couch for another two days until she fell asleep in my arms, the lost thing now completely forgotten (only to be remembered some distant Tuesday morning when lost things regain their importance in the lives of their possessors and become inevitably necessary, and normal, intelligent people begin searching in bathroom drawers, freezer compartments, underneath couches and other unlikely places for such said lost things).

And myself, I held this beautiful girl, whose name I can not remember, with her beautiful, resonant melodies, and her pile of fine golden ash, and I thought out loud to God or anyone who might be listening, how long will it be before one of us walks out into the freedom of midnight, heading for some town or person North or maybe Northwest of here; and I thought to myself how long will the memory of this beautiful and fine and vibrant four days last?

Hangover w/ quiet footsteps

I make you
You make me
Naked
In squares
In selfless colors in the air
In sound composition
Blurring scape
A note so long
So low, so sweet

My endorphin
My Morning Glory seed.

Song of Faithless Street

The Song of Faithless Street
Stay
Stay with me in this car, engine still running
I hope you feel welcome

Or we could have some whiskey
Find a sepia-tone bar almost as quiet
As the night around us

I could read you a poem
Or maybe cup your breast in my hand.

Ceslaw

Ceslaw is not as dumb as you think
There are two different worlds, you know? Yes, yes, you know. Like strip clubs. When you are in, you are in, you can slap the dancers on the ass, you can spill drinks. But if you are not in, the nigger at the door will hurt you. This is never good. You have seen rap videos, eh? I do not like the intrinsic violence of the nigger. But, see? I am in. In Estonia, I killed a cab driver who talked too much. My cousin said I would be good in America, and I love strip clubs. I have muscles and brains and I have Dakota who will suck me and share my cocaine. My cousin is a jeweler, and he is a killer.

My apartment in America, in San Jose, is vast. I share a room with no one, unlike Estonia, where I could not masturbate without an audience. My apartment has posters for visual entertainment, Michael Jackson when he Beat It, and Michael Jordan who is unstoppable. Think about that. Michael Jordan can shake your faith. He is a good nigger. I want to know why Americans hate them so, the niggers, because they are all the place has to offer other than the strip clubs. Even the cab drivers refuse to pick them up. In Estonia, Michael Jordan could get a cab. In Estonia, we do not hate niggers, only people who snitch.

I am only hitting that man because my cousin pays for my vast apartment. It is not ugly, and I am sure he needs hitting. My cousin would not lie to me, he is a jeweler. Have you ever not wanted to feel your body? I don't want to feel my body when I hit people for my cousin. I love my apartment when I am alone, I love both Michaels, and I love America.

In Estonia I drove a cab, and I watched out for my family. I am blessed with muscles and pain does not come to me. I do not know how my family has made America it's new home. I only know that I have been called, and I am not afraid. My cousin has blessed me with a vast apartment, and many strippers suck me off at the club he frequents. He says Such are the spoils of wealth, Ceslaw. I laugh and I do my cocaine with Dakota. Sometimes I have to hit the people my cousin tells me to. It is a job. America is a neon sign.

skin of my skin

My nails have become
one with the dirt, black-rimmed and unsociable,
although I can not
recall what I dig for
with any certainty.
It is a fine thing to
commune with the dirt.
Wealthy and sinuous I feel,
but these aren't the words.
The loam doesn't afford
one time for definition,
so I claw on.
I'd like to find her bones
and some remonstrance.

carotid

The blanket stills smells like you, like dying angels and upturned coffee cups. I made crisp lines of delineation when I folded it and placed it in the bottom of the closet. The blanket was a source of your refusal, you needed it in nights when I needed something more than plagiarism. And now the apartment sits without adjectives; it smiles over and upon a great lack of things and more so; being a part of something. I have my memories of quilts and stained sheets. My memories of sleeping in the back of that pick-up, then fighting your father. I even remember when you said you'd take care of me and we both laughed as Leonard Cohen played in the backgound. I remember there was a me before you, but he is awfully cloudy and quiet.