Monster Movie
You do right
By doing wrong, I do wrong
By doing wrong. Ladies and gentlemen
Of the court, I call myself
A ghost, I call myself a demon—
No, I call myself Satan, I call myself
To the stand to testify
I’m not fit to be trusted
To testify against myself.
I’ll swear on no Bible, I’ll not sacrifice
A drop of my blood, I won’t plead the fifth,
I’ve come here as an expert witness to the crime
Of love and my testimony, now unscripted,
Is this: I’ve never seen any of it. At that scene,
What crime then?
Outside the court
The law is
Outside of us
The law is
What?
I swear this is my first haiku
Cigarette. I swear I haven’t had
Much to drink yet. I swear I wrote this
Poem the day we met over Burnside Bridge.
I swear it wasn’t me who loosed
The Voltron-like monster on the city
But I will plead guilty for playing the music
That meanwhile lulled the populace into
An unstirrable sleep of a dream’s dream.
Neurotransmitters
Why stop there? Everything actually
does not matter.
Two neurons meet in a synaptic gap. One babbles
endlessly of a beautiful atom, the other responds
by firing back
“Shut it, deluded brother”.
I recall two mismatched socks
intertwined under your desk. I wished
to tell you, to marvel together at inanimate love,
but instead of where they should stay clasped
they would drift away —
O delusion! What delight you
take in a little “je ne sais pas”
sprinkled over that art-child that
calls himself an orphan only to find himself
the centre of beauty later. Imagine
there was once a certain young Mr. Z there,
now stands a self-proclaimed rogue-knight templar.
“Fountain overflowing!” A drought in Seattle
is reported on the Phoenix ten o’clock news.
To Pierre
As a practice to perform my ritual dance
for that voyeureuse I get drunk before noon
every Sunday, sitting on the edge of the Santa Cruz pier.
Feet kicking the air energetically, I smoke an entire pack
of menthols and drink a bottle of cheap wine before
walking away with glee. This is the only time I smoke
in the hopes of you walking up and asking to bum one.
The only time despite disappointment I feel happy.
Why are we thin boys who call ourselves the men of Salem,
Oregon still attempting to imagine the perfect golden
bird? Are we not content to watch the shadows of the colorless bird
that pecks at our feet? I may be alone in my disbelief in gold
but I believe in the value of an Atlantis torso
a chest of treasure sinking fast with a flushing sound
that can only be heard by what is in and by the chest itself.
I am of the type that never cries. And yet
here is water, and that damn tickle
I haven’t felt in so long. Why must I think of such dumb words
while I want to bathe in the beauty of every
word you chose? I’m sure I started writing this sober,
I started writing with something completely different
in mind but here is this intent to recite
to you to remind you who we are when we are in each others arms
again, but the bystander days walking towards and away
without a mention of you or your self-shamed sigh fluster
me, making me acknowledge this will never happen.
