Sticks and Tomes

I Am Matter, Nothing More

Old Skin
Skin. It's the cloak that binds you; blinds you from the world. It's the spider web that warns the fly to rethink his route. It's the costume that ignores the tact of full disclosure and implores lengthy brooding analyses to the prize within the guise. It's your private canvas for you to paint and poke and cut and mold and stitch and ink and tan and pinch and bathe and kick and spit upon, and it's your blank page to write the wraths and remedies of your world. It's the front you plague upon the Earth. It's a business-plan synopsis - full of engaging anecdotes and bristling wit, only to bow under the burden of what's really underneath it all... You.
Ah! That's what we forget! It's you, and your hang-ups, your dreading, your bleeding heart, your fickleness, your quivering palm, your wavering sweaty soul, your crooked intent, your bellowing lovesick tummy in the humdrum sun-bloom afternoon, your elated tongue-dart psychoses, your plaintive floor-tom heart, your pulse-pump thump neuroses and your malevolent pig-fucker charity siren song that lurk beneath that old skin bag serenade. You've got a lot to hide. You've got the weight of the world beneath the skin on your shoulders alone; imagine what lies beneath the rolls of your brow! Second guess the synapse-strum of what you bury below your cell-speckled molecule hide, and when your house of cards slowly crumbles to piles of waxed-paper Arabic numeral nightmare, with Anglo-Saxon monarchy symbolists pointing and prodding your mirage, you're doomed to a stint in the pit. Everyone loves an ace in the hole, but nobody unearths a diamond in the rough without using a club. Check your vitals; it's the truth.

The Shedding
Slither out, frail pupas hominid; embrace the wind and heat and rain to your stark-pink sheen veneer. You'll always need to shed your skin, no matter what. No matter the social armor, no matter the costume, no matter your education or lack thereof. You grow and you wrinkle; you spread and you flake; you burn and you shiver. That's the way of it. Of all the ways to nullify the importance of your life, clutching that which is not you anymore is the most depressing. Ignoring the ripples in your mind, negating the chill at the back of your neck to morph and to mince words with yourself is to deny the essence of the journey. I've shed my skin too many times. Not to forget, or for regret, or for insistence on a me I'd like to be, but to evolve in the most natural ways to what is comfortable. Your skin is magnetic - attracting the positive, repelling the negative, in every way. Jobs, friends, love, bugs, harboring ultraviolets, shooshing the whispers of the damned. And there's no way around that. You are a billboard, painted with the missives of your world. And people are noticing, all the time.

New Skin
Embrace the changes. Get lost. Find things that nobody cares about but you. Tar and feather yourself if the mood strikes. Bleach and etch and cut and bruise. Everyone loves a clown. My skin has been stretched and shrunken, fattened, thinned, besmirched with plaintive worry lines, tagged by errant numbness in the legs. I walk around in this cellophane wrap, coolly calculating the streets with my tired muscle-lunge. This skin bag disguises phantom bone chill, broken heart, flat-panel rib displacement, pensive guts, weighty apathy and more confusion than the wayward moth in firelight. I will treat the outside as I treat the inside: I will degrade and deconstruct this flesh to mirror its infinite beyond. I will flake and burn and cut into it when I feel it is necessary to focus on pain and discipline instead of poverty, hunger and ignorance. It is mine. I am matter, nothing more.

From Main To Main

It was a chore, it was. Boxing all those doodads, scrubbing all those soap marks off the corner tile in the bathtub, sifting through six-and-a-half years of a life that I no longer recognized, all to move into an unknown city, with a long-lost friend, and mope and pace somewhere that didn't make me nauseous. I packed boxes full of papers, boxes full of toys, boxes full of trinkets, boxes full of trash sometimes, just to box them, to organize what was important to me, and what was in due time going to be in the possession of the noble panhandler armada on the sidewalk outside my storied Tower loft. I packed boxes of things I knew I would throw away. I supposed they needed a good send-off. They were precious to me at some point, and I was convinced at some point that they'd be precious to me again; that they'd tell my story to whomever came upon them so I wouldn't have to. So I could remain the stoic figure I feel like on the inside but don't resemble in the mirror. The tin Eiffel Tower key chain might have orated loftily of my time spent in gay Paris, though I'd never actually been there. It was kept to remind me that someone I cared about had been there, and had cared about me enough to dish me a novelty nod so I would remember that they cared about me somewhere else other than right in front of me. The black iron lamp with loop-de-loop ambient sheen and the crooked shade, which Robin's aunt Lynn had given her by default when she succumbed to cancer too young and then I threw away, might have expounded on my antiquated tastes in practical illumination, at least in a relative sense.

And that record collection. By God, those twirling black grooves would have proven, absolutely and finally, the merit with which I opine upon the world of music so routinely and profoundly. If only I hadn't had to sell them all, so that they were still sitting in neat rows on my wicker shelf that I threw out, whispering the cosmic coo to lookyloo voyeur art Nazis that even though they disagreed with my assessments on the wildly influential derivatives of Mark Arm to a new generation of fuzzed-out retro hippies, I was probably right. The proof was right in front of them. Who would they be to argue with their paltry stacks of CDs and an iPod full of illegally downloaded pander-punk and neo-gospel soul? They would be, well, the people who would know the story of my life without me having to tell it to them. And I might miss that most of all.

Owning a lot of things doesn't make you richer or greater or more sentimental or more worldly or more insane or even happier; it just makes you weighted. It just means you fill your space with things that might serve a function to you that you'll never use for that express function, that you keep bottle caps and newspapers and birthday cards and 10 cent jewelry to help you remember things that you don't really care to remember, that you're ignoring breaking under the weight of a bunch of detritus that you don't realize yet is stifling you from learning about the future instead of making you worry about remembering the past. If life is about what you have, and what you have is a lexicon of largely unimportant knickknacks and hand-me-down couches and chairs and a bed that your friend sold you for $25 and posters and dishes that you only use a few of but keep just in case people come over, it seems an empty life. To fill it, you have to go, go, go. Outside, upward, downward, sideways, fly. What you need is inside you; it's always been there, and you can add and subtract to that treasure of you as often or as little as you like. And you don't have to pack any boxes to do it.

And my friends, my family and my former lovers; lest I forget them. They've been stacked almost as densely as all those records. They don't get thrown out or donated or sold. They become foundations. They hold true the walls, rafters, ceiling, floor, stucco, windows, doors of me. But they aren't there anymore. Not the way they used to be. Not in the flesh at my call. Not here to distract me from the absence of my possessions. But they're inside too, and they kick and throw fits and pester and nag and elate and comfort me still, like the memories of my grandmother at home next to her stereo that she gave me and I threw away. Like the way I can taste food I love but can't afford before it hits my tongue. Like the way Japanese Maples remind me of 7th Avenue fall in Chico, or how the scent of bad coffee I can afford reminds me of my dad. Like the way the first few notes of Saves the Day's "Rocks Tonic Juice Magic," from their album that I sold, whisks me away to when I was 19 years old, to older friends I don't even talk to or want to talk to anymore, to ex-girlfriends who've long since moved on, to the baby steps of living on my own for the first time. Like how seeing gallon jugs of water flashes me back to dropping acid in the field behind Kent's Market by the Redding Airport, and how easily I had crushed the jug to pop the top off with my super-human drug-addled synapses and then was convinced I had been the cause for JFK Jr.'s watery death the following morning, even though he was all the way across the country and stone-cold sober.


These things don't go away, and they never will. Those sensory attributions may seem base, and mostly they are; but they're mine. And they're all I need. It's the little memories, not the little gadgets and medals that make me who I am and provide me with even the smallest semblances of worth. So, it is with pride that I've found myself on another Main Street, this one in the wind-swept Northwest metropolis of Portland, OR, 500 miles away from my old Main Street in the sun-scorched valley din of Chico, CA. I am lighter now, in more ways than one, enlightened. I've got an empty room to prove it.

Crooked Arrows, Crooked Tongues

You used to be a mission bell, measured clangs at hour's half, flailing gongs inside the steeple of the pyre-high synapse.
In the morning you would wail and creak, your brass-elastic moan took turns to mark the mealtime break and seek the salvage of the summer's burns.
The click of second hands insisted strides to tread the toil in time; the minute-slither hoisted tides to bend your choral waves to rhyme.
And sea-salt shock of ocean's freeze to tease your toes meant little more than empty deeds to feign your hunt for keys to unlock hidden doors.
When Earth stood still and turned to you, alone and shrugging, burned for you, to know which way to turn for you, to wonder when you'd chime in tune,
you closed your eyes and fled the sky and crashed into the ground to die, with shards of chords and tones you sang, refusing evermore to lie.
For time's a fleeting whim in wind when fires grow too bored to scorch, when flocks prefer the south to north, when old men pace on half a porch,
when rugged stones are smoothed by river flows and ancient tallowbeds, your moments, ticks and tocks and bells won't spare one wink for sleepyheads.
So sleep to dream, through smiles lie; smash every clock and lullaby.
Your timing's never what it seems. The mission bells will always sing.

Serial Balks

I keep myself company
with black asphalt snaking up ahead,
canyons blooming with the dead
of a hundred thousand trees.

And when I read between the lines,
I skip the consonants and rhymes
'til nothing matters but the whines
of Us and Is and Ys.

And colons seep like python bites
to trickle, cloak, envelope, dive
and filthy every other word,
annunciating useless verbs.

But every time I see a ghost,
I'm reticent to make the most
of he or she or it or thing
and ban my eyes for simpler things.

When I looked into your eyes
I saw a copperhead with fangs,
dripping venom through your thighs,
wafting toxins toward your bangs.

Moons are blackened by your ashes,
suns are crimson through the gray,
smoke and sorrow blankets grasses,
Buds and seedlings hide 'til May.

When in June you reappear,
dusting aphids off your shoulder,
seething with a different fear,
with the news you've gotten older,

Every second seems a lifetime,
every victory's a gaffe.
Each and every time your heart pumps,
you're almost certain it's the last.

You know you lived among the lilies,
and you drank from bubbling streams,
'Til you collapsed from your Achille's,
had you the warbling top of dreams?

So with or without syntax spike,
we'll croak and eek and sputter noise,
and with or without trails to hike,
We'll find our way. We're lazy boys.

Northwest Rumination

Laurelhurst Hoof

Living in infamy, vagabond operatic
hiking up lost hills
through the floral walks of Laurelhurst,
I concede now to the pre-fab
pleasantry of the pond,
where ducks and black swan swim
and dip for food before me,
Looking for handouts of bread
from dirty hands of tempered man.
Soon it will rain,
and soon I'll be drenched with the dew
of a foreign cloud.
Lonely, lusting, poor
save for the wealth of spirit hiding
somewhere in my heart.
And now the ducks and swan come rushing
to the shore to take the bait from children's hands,
their biggest thrill today by far.
Their mother sees the penman scribble,
lurking, looming,
and ushers her offspring away with the knowing glance
of a wary jungle cat,
seething with frothy mouth, cunning and counting lives in nines.
So I just smoke and look away...
I can see now why Olmsted's visions of scenery
flanked and bookended the plots of park we now take so for granted.
With sweeping strokes, the willow droops for shade
and hides the island birds,
the douglas firs jut to kiss the sky
and glint like pyres 'gainst the pond's murky sheen,
But the moment has passed now and bullet-boys
march by as reminders that without them
we'd all be nothing but ash in this pensive, plaintive grove.
Long live the Empire of Greed.
Greed in the Grove of Green.
But tell me, decorated generality: What flower wouldn't droop to bow
and note you as you pass?
Which nightly, pining, wanderlust will finally be your last?

Streetside Provincial

Wet thumb to air for wind,
to tell me which way I should walk.
Drop lines in code to speak
but I forget how to talk.
The neons have all died out
and the sidewalk's scorched and gray.
Now all that's left to do
is tread 'til sunlight fades away.
In fits and starts we step and trip,
pretending not to fall.
In puddles we can splash the grime
to paint upon the wall.
Mud splat splinters, trickles
like a Pollock phantom genius;
psycho Braille explosions
feigning only now to rue us.

For when I am lonely,
I pace and whisper to myself
that nothing's needed;
only greed and drugs bring on the dawn.
But when I'm happy,
I've got starlight tracers shooting
from the rapture that I've pleaded;
like a ripple in the muddy river
where comfort comes from specters I've withdrawn.

Old Words; Or Why Fire Breathing Dragons Was the Pinnacle of My Lyrical Ouptut

"Heads Will Roll"

This is a test.
This is a trial.
This is a sign of things to come.
These are the words that I remember.
While you foil a life that I'd prepared to lose.

Of all the things I've heard!
Trading bees for fireflies?
Basking in new dawn, trial by ice and open hands.
For every single note sung with love and broken glass, there's a sneaky pitch.
But failing never felt so right.

Big hands are waving me over.
Big faces are hiding the shame of such regret.
We'll be uptight when we're older.
Today let's swim in the seas of violet.

And heads will roll, just as they're told.
Violet's misleading when you've never seen the sky.

I'm settling for less; wishing while I've got the bug.
Trading stock in fear and wading through a vat of blood.
But we'll find diamonds in secret corners of a maze; polish through our sins.
These wicked plans are never right.

The darkest night's most trusted flights hover over lightning then dip into descent.

Night falls on dolls when you flip a switch.
To bed we lay the martyrs.
Tonight we'll fight and toast to the void; we've nothing left to falter.
In time we find that our lot in life leaves nothing left to conquer.
Oh, all the fame! Through all of the flames your legend will endure!

"The Apple And The Whip"

The smaller I am, the more room I have for maneuvering the lanes.
When weaving in and out becomes a sleight of hand, I plan my dangerous escape.
So I lay down and shade my face from the light; hide my life from the sun.
I watch the birds take flight on any afternoon, and in their dying light, I'll burn their favorite field.

So, I'm getting out alive, but I'm going it alone.
I found the reasons why I left and now I'm never coming home. But with a subtle disregard, you'll never bother me.

Our size don't matter now, and as victims we're allowed these open-ended lies.
We'll use bed to mask the sound. "Oh, there's no need for your gown! It's too heavy with the sweat of the messes we'll forget."
It's too fake now. "You're too vain to be surprised. So 'tween pops and crack of stolen skin we cry."
"And those swells can be repaired, though they're nothing when compared to the crimson cuts of one too many blistering nights of woe."

I'm getting out alive, alone. By my God-given right to cast the first stone.

We're over our best days...fly by night
And all we are asking failed tonight.
Look over your shoulder...please don't lie.
Your past's but a whisper...so don't fight.
Fill out a request for full access.
Erupt into laughter, but don't jest.
Decide if the battle's worth the war.
We've got too much riding to be bored.

You're choking at the bit
The Apple And The Whip

"Underneath Each Level"

Underneath each level of the lie, you'll see me; enveloped; verified.
To us all, give shredded bits of light, years from now, if we choose to decide.

My senses are becoming dulled.
Just give me one more hand to fold.
I find something to look forward to before I run right back on you.
As drama mocks us all tonight, it's hard to tell who's wrong or right.
My God, you can't be so severe when your intentions seem so clear.

It's easier being deranged.
I'd settle for feeling the same.
With focus receding...retreat.
White flags are unwavering.
Defeat.

I've lost something I can't explain, and all my efforts, though in vain, are structured to relive a time when my actions justified your crimes:
1. False hopes designed to soothe the meak.
2. Double-back methods (oh, so sleak).
3. Frequenting squats in search of truth.
4. Denying both pudding and the proof.

All I've read leads to promise of a better day.
But time well-spent means nothing 'til you find the way.
"So, file through until there's wrong enough to follow you."
"I'm biding time in search of everlasting paradigm!"

Underneath each level of the lie...you'll see me.

Portland Casket Gloom

I. Monaco Morning Delusion

The maids have forgotten to draw the shade for us
While crane labor screams
Old men with hardhats at work on a weekend
wrestle with the warmth of their pockets
Mill around and point to beams
Stable the frames of the shell of the shed
hammering new wounds on graffitied rooftops
Fifth Avenue doom impends throughout
the crane is crooked, bevvied, old
And the ton-scale molds do creak to its fulcrum
Flanked each horizon by jutted parking monoliths
taller than most hotels
And the Monaco concierge implores the
will of the housekeepers to rush the
turning of the bed.
But we're not awake yet
Just tossing
turning
yawning with the maw of the crane.

II. My Father's Place

She reads like a racecar;
sputtering, lightning fast, stuttering
stanzas in sordid soliloquy
in din of dim diner smoke

III. Division Walk

Oh Portland casket gloom,
illuminati peeking through the cloud
to warm my neck but for a second.
Why do I punish myself
on crooked, cobbled walks
to count the steps between the slats;
to trip on root-jutted faults in concrete
where nature yearns to best the modern world;
and cats' paws labor for the
cushion of quartered plots of grass;
and crows perch the power lines,
ignore the trees and peck at littered chip bags on the street?
Oh Northwest teasing rain:
Show thyself or never fall again...

The rainbow rows of Hawthorne fan
like Chinese foldups,
manipulate the grid to
labyrinthian treasures of gold.
But all you find are faux doubloons in rustic yesteryear
bottles in ditches
behind cordoned projects;
tenements spaced 'tween dream homes and cafes;
the streets urbanized by aluminum siding and spiral-stained condos;
tricking the tourists expecting the lore.

IV. Over The Rhubarb Bounty

Beyond the sizzle-grill suare,
just past the cubbyhole clubhouse in the shed,
the rows of citrus, berries,
dandelions, ancient deciduous trees,
snakepit monoliths and cooing blackbirds wait,
taunting sinful beauty
and cutting to the quick,
wincing in the face of this electric world.
I can go to corners of the hill,
quartered in the plot
beyond the music and the masses
to sit and shut my eyes to dream;
to fashion silhouettes on tree trunks
with my hands in the sun;
to lie in trippy flower beds
and brush bees off my face.
And you and I and no one else
will ever need another thing.
Over the rhubarb bounty,
the tudor-home rooftops domino and squeeze the sun away.
The motorbike coughs and sputters
by the will of the throttle,
poisoning the berries and the grass
with its luminescent howl
and I suddenly remember now
that someday I will die.

V. Post-Closet Revelry

I stabbed myself today
in the knee
by fleshy jointed cap.
I didn't mean to;
I just hate everyone, that's all.
The ballpoint shank pierced the goosebumped skin
to spurt the crimson truth
on all the nascent babies
Nowehere near the navel-lathe
where nothing thrives but native suns.

Skin Bag with Foreverness Inside

Oh, through whose veins does my blood flow now?
Do my vices hinder hosts?
To whose heart does each breath yield doubt?
And does this mean I'm a ghost?
For all the dreams I left undreamt, and the wishes I unwished,
Does playing God enable me forever to enrich?
I'm stuck inside your body like an amber-fossiled bee.
And with every step you take you know you wouldn't without me.
I recall longing for the day when I'd know when to quit.
But now that's left in your hands.
In setting sun I'd moan to know which stars were still alive.
But now my eyes can't see a thing, that is, 'til I arrived
to haunt you and to fight the wear of puppetry and mime.
And now I'll live forevermore, or until it's your time.
So help me prove that life is all a storybook to read.
Think of me on lonesome nights and know it's me you need.
Pace and bellow openly, 'cause that's what I would do
If I were having trouble sleeping, only now it's you.
And I'm sorry for my restlessness,
I'm sorry for the fear,
I'm sorry I can't change the way I died.
I made a big mistake and now I relive it through you.
Help me to redeem my sins in time.

Tonight I'll Drink Wine

Tonight, I'll drink wine and insist on staying indoors, shielding myself from the musty humidity of this unwelcome heat.
Tomorrow, I'll be hazy with puddles of sweat on my cotton pillow case, dripping with the destiny of fever dreams I'll never recall again.
It's with swallows I yield cottony smack of gums on teeth to groan and breathe first nascent breath upon my tomb of a room.
It's the sliver of sunlight slicing through my blinds at angles to my eye that stir me from my sleep and deride me for forgetting to think.
I'm at odds with the morning, too tender to care for even one more day without an enlightened guffaw to keep me real.
This tome of my life, too empty with spotted speckles of ink, ellipses drawn where marvelous minutae should thrive and cry to all to know me.
But in time I can dive in the deep ends of pools, to swim and open my eyes underwater with stinging Chlorine imploring the wince of my soulless lie.
To be braver than God and to dine on the mystical berries of the cavernous unknown, spelunking to depths of an echoless chamber of love.
I can see the shimmer of moist corneal detritus when I blink, and can guide my heart by the pulse in my neck.
And when the ropes start to weaken and tethers unwind to fray and threaten my doom, I can learn to float in the void of black and nothingness for you.
And you will see me, weightless, bouncing, gravity at odds with my sordid delusions of might, and sigh the sigh of the lonesome lioness, waiting for her King to come home.
Ah, but Kings do one thing well, and one alone: Besmirch their husking lusts for fear of overthrow and dwindling grip.
And keep their passions at arm's length until they're drawn and quartered.
The mighty beasts of justice do capitulate and exact the swift red rivers of the gluttonous and sin-soaked demons.
But if I float here long enough, blind within the colorless casket gloom of the bottomless cave, my kingdom will survive.
And my queen, my lioness, will caress me when I return.