midnight mass

midnight mass christmas eve and already, the 27th,
there's butchers blood on my shoes and I can't keep my palms clean.
it's nearly time for my conscience to come calling from tulsa.

later, the sky is gold and blue and pink, and I'm in the back seat
following a smudge of black birds with my eyes
then our station wagon intersects underneath.

later, the bike ride from your apartment tasted like snow
and I was hyper-aware of my hands on the grip
and I thought of all my molecules separately when I was home.

it was cold as sin and I was hungry as sin and the low
warm fog gave me energy for an hour.  the sunlight that eased
inside all afternoon escaped orange through the blinds.

good friends, I have a dream of wholeness:
for this year, I'm a mass of tissue stronger than a paper trail,
brighter than projection, and as warm as blood

a rant, fully out of context

I think Wilde is wrong, wrong in that flowers are useless
or that art is a mood
I think it's more like a mind that is displayed
on a pedestal
and so we have a conversation with it.

discussion brings reform and we want to be reformed!

not polite or civil, but constantly reshaped and resharpened
by the world in a painter's creation.

and today, the trending photography in blurs and browns?
oh, it's fashionable
for a reason
and thus for only a use. then let's not overuse!
let's not follow the shy colors and mixed shapes of Fall
with Fall with Fall with Fall.

it's old because it's in style.

and on Miro, is art more than the aesthetic
we give to it?
can we revel in the ugly because we appreciate
how it hasn't been done before?
I hope so, in that case we can relax our critique.

no! no! ugly is easy. too easy, almost accidentally easy
and art is in the challenges
that make it profound.
it challenges me and I want to admire someone
who can overcome better than I.

there isn't a disconnect
between what we make and what influences us.
you'll never separate our habits
from the atomic structure of our hands.
meaning this: as detached as we make ourselves
there is always a cause
which is often unseen and unnoticed by the viewer.

but art is an effect! effects have causes
and causes are us.

and who is a sculptor
besides the person who visits the quarry, the tool store
and prepares the garage space?

or a painter
besides the student who learns the right techniques
and has a set of brushes.

there's no distinction between who is real
and who is an immature creator. And we wish there was
a divide
but we aren't sure what side we'd be on.
and there's beauty in the comparable
when the man and woman behind them
are so dissimilar.

I for one am done comparing myself
to my peers
to find any worth. I want to match up against my heroes
and find a similarity
and say 'yes, this is valuable in me as well'
and move on
and keep creating.

yes, I'll never be known as the artist
or writer. OK.

I can agree with Oscar on one point:
art isn't about selling or the money.
apartments are and their rent is
food is
gasoline is
galleries are
but not the works themselves!
when we make a new friend we like to show them
our home, as with a painting.
and then the price is born.

the artist has to get by.
but aren't artists motivated by the money?
yes. yes. yes.
but money is made more easily elsewhere.

modern woman, cold salad

modern woman, cold salad of disbelief,
I want to break you all apart
and take your breakfast, steam
your bloodlines—Hades or some Trinidad.

knock all week, brass on oak
like a turquoise scattering back
and forth in a bathtub until you
find the drain, then a lead ess pipe.

hello conquistador! go expand your
neighborhood, allow the plague for boredom.
find 'outside' as your father left it since
he never expected you to follow.

a swarm of pores, weak
but your skin's still living. "ah, Andrew
you're very kind."  keep listening then—
a new priority, girl!

crush the alphabet, at least.  your elbow is an ell
lead pipe on the keyboard. you're a lovely dialtone,
there are no vocals, no pulse on the line.
you are all lead pipes, it seems.

go to hell, you

go to hell, you transcendentalist, I'm still here in the thick of it on the 23rd st exit by a man with the crumpled sign, "every little bit helps."

and come swim with me in reality, in an explanation of winter, all bitterness but bold self-miracle of survival.

I stalled, while you planned your escape through the turnstiles of the fairgrounds, your parents' kingdom, and your love books.

soon is "we're so glad to have you back," but I've run out of canned soup and ice has me wrapped up here, buried in a sunday paper.

it's monday, so forgive me tuesday and I'll be welcome again.  I'm no threat to your sleep, I won't stir much. can I give him my gloves and hat, and you what's left over?

I need no gravity to fall into my old order, but give me a week to control my mouth.

how many times?

how many times have I walked over your empty acreage
while you're away at work or asleep
in a comfortable house nearer the city? thank you
for leaving it open for me. thank you for not farming it
or developing it.  thank you for letting the grass grow
and the trees age in peace.  you're absent and generous.
and tonight in the dirt, my feet draw a line—
everything that's beautiful, I like to think is mine.

you were 17 when we met, I think I remember the time
or the place, at least.  I couldn't trust my eyes then
and you laughed.  it ran though all my days
in that school and I liked to call you 'friend.'
I remember your expressions and I keep a file of each one
like an eager secretary who can only shake his head
at his own foolishness.  a bolder man saw you shine
but everything that's beautiful, I like to think is mine.

in Crime and Punishment are two pages I won't read
aloud to anyone because they are my story of redemption
from sin and murder and are not Dostoevsky's
to share with anyone else.  how could he have meant
it otherwise?  I can't be honest with my favorites
or I will give too much of myself away.
I'll claim a radio lyric, a story, a rhyme,
because everything that's beautiful, I like to think is mine.

an old watch on Main under plate-glass display, your hands
at the end of the day on the dirtied windows of my car,
the smell of grease at the airport that means I'm home,
and your voice on my answering machine—all grit my teeth
in possession.  how can I be full without these accidental gifts,
without this rich landscape?  how else can I stake my plot
in this gold rush of identity?  there's peace in what I find,
because everything that's beautiful, I like to think is mine.

when my feet are cut up

when my feet are cut up and red
I have nothing other
than to walk on them.

when my sleep is short and dull
I have only to wake and revive.

but when the cosmos is sore
for expanding and needs a rest
then I'll lay out too.

oh time persists
like beard stubble and rough weeds
in each season.

Wooden printing screens

Wooden printing screens half-fill my apartment.
The place is hot and closed, a courtroom
or a kiva for decisions, but my mind is wholly away
in the plowed, foamy dirt south of Slaughterville.
 
The house was white once, the two aluminum sheds
are still painted and padlocked.  And I park under a tree
facing my own home, twenty-five miles back the black road.
I catch my breath, take a leak, and count my steps to the middle

of land owned by insects, a broken porch, and me.
Four meteors in an hour.  The heavens break in Halloween
like champagne and the air is as cold.  The ground is warm yet
and a patch of straw is my pillow for the show.

The stars are salt, preserving the nightsky
so I am an archeologist, though a pauper, and alone as well.
I am healthy when I become empty here,
collapsing in the hollow ruts.

I want to sleep here tonight, curled in my car
with my suede coat and flashlight
but I make it only to four before the job is done
and I crawl home in peace.

here's what music can do

waiting long, outside the gate, I told a keyboardist
"your music has helped me write many english papers"

and he replied, "if you help one person write a term paper,
you've helped the entire world get a PhD, it goes something like that."

another night, I quietly held a pen towards a guitarist, who asked,
"what exactly do you want?" and he laughed.

"I like to make people ask me directly for an autograph,"
then he signed "yo! -TL" and we shared a sense of victory.

if I drank tonight, I'd drink too much—for the other, empty end
of a booth, for the headache, and for the music.

added up

added up
the zenith of every rocket ship
makes the earth a porcupine
and the nadir
of the appalachian hills
is a collapsing coal mine

added up
the migration of gulls
would be cirrus cloud cover
and the atlantic would be flat
like the face of my brother

added up
I'd be stretched out thin
like a headlight photograph
and for the time and light and speed,
I couldn't do the math

colorful honeycomb

in this dream
I was the size of my two-inch
plastic airplane.

and while the rest held onto the wall
I held onto the plane
and took a leap into the bright cavern
of that colorful honeycomb.

I think Andrew Bird
was whistling "Heretics" somewhere nearby.

"Hold your breath!"
it worked! and when I inhaled,
I swooned upward through the warm air
and my thin, orange propeller
went "zzzzzzzzzzz."

we all rose and fell
with the rise and fall of our lungs
and we swam in circles through it all.

I get distracted easily.

I think the way to enjoy a live performance
is to pick out the most beautiful woman in the audience
and laugh and clap only when they do.
or
I think the way to enjoy a beautiful woman
is to take them to live performance
and laugh and clap only when everyone else does. 
or
I think the only way to enjoy laughing and clapping
is to do a live performance
with an audience full of beautiful women.

all I meant to say was

all I meant to say was

"here's the place that made me,"
or at least
"here's where I don't feel guilty
for my mind drifting."

and
"here are my margins
and necessary empty spaces
all pushed outside"

location, location, location
like a constellation of thumbtacks
in a cork-board map
or a chorus of crickets, each loud voice
specific and unknown.

all I meant to show you was
my state, a field, my origin.