New Work. Oct 2017

Weird people

Not the different

Not the odd

Not the dysfunctional

Round peg in square hole

Types

But the weird

Those who are kind of

Slippery and glossed

Calm and sallow with a

Volume never above a mediocre

Voice

Untrustworthy and nauseating

Happy and agreeable and

Out for themselves only

Ever and for

Ever

They are sly and cut like razors

And so you bleed out before even

Finding a wound

And they are the majority

The climbers like

Spiders on a web of success

Reaching the top and dying

Still ignorant but richer

Than

You.

 Normal people

We are small

And caring and look too far

See too much

We understand the fire

The insect and the elephant

You have no idea

The difficulty in maintaining this

Façade

To awaken every morning into anything but

Normality

And yet still become the shape of it

The weight of normality continuing

Permanently crushing

Unceasing and tireless

Our days an unseen high-wire act

Between street and office and café and

Finally home

And throughout our finite tolerance

We still manage to love and compound our art

Into the everyday hum

And it becomes at times impossible

To maintain the

Façade that we are part of this

Normality

Middling

Fitting

Square onto square onto

Square

And we are small

But not the smallest

We look too far but are not blinded

By it

We are nothing like you.

Dying Laughing

 

The gods are not the artists

The painters or

Writers

God forbid not even the musicians

Though they come in a

Close second

It is the comics

The comedians driving from city to city

On lonely roads of sadness

The stand-ups that hold a mic

And control and dominate

And finally overpower all

Those faces beyond the spotlight

These are the souls racing far ahead

Of the rest of us

Words coming at you unfettered

Unfiltered

Brutal truths direct to your third eye

These are the gods

It is not a painting

With a hundred meanings

Or a poem swollen with

Metaphor

They instead send us rock and soil and the

Air we breathe

And nothing I could ever write will

Ever

Come close.

Dream up to the bell

She wakes up at 4am

6am

Makes a god awful racket

Though trying not to

Flushes and gets back in

Feet cold after only a few minutes

Out

It always wakes me in that half dream

Kind of way

Where you’re there but also not

Your toes still off the ground

Then back into it I go

Other nights I dream right up to the bell

It goes off and you open your eyes

In a micro second turning the sharp corner

From some rainbow/dead friend/Atlantic ocean

Storyline

To a white sheet and blond hair in your face

And wondering why the sun

Hates you so goddamn much

Coming up as it does

Burning away out there uncaring and

Unaware of you

But pushing you forward towards

Your small day with its bits and pieces

Screws and fixings and dust and clutter

And all the needful things

Too

A push and pull of digging in your heels

Rolling up your sleeves and

Hoist the black flag, as the man said

But then also

To see an end

A beautiful end and remain powerful enough

To climb toward that too

A cycle of wanting and the waking world chasing that

Want from you

And there is no secret to any of this

Other than to fight against the days

Follow the sun

Rest in shadow

Keep dreaming right up to the bell.

the chz podcast episode 11

8 to 5

I am not drunk enough

There is wine but

It is a school night

And a hot bath just took me for all I have

Listening to Joni Mitchell and drifting

I even had the beginnings of a story

About a man newly homeless

Surviving on the free things of life

But that too has drifted away

It is a stranger’s bath

Better than ours

It swallows you and the taps are a classic

Brass with china handles

None of this is important

To anyone but me

I am not drunk at all

It is Monday night and I am ready to sleep

Already at barely 9.30

What in god’s name happened to us all?

I lay blame at the job

The money that buys things and

Loses me time

But I need my red meat

My steak and good bottle of red

Or sweet oak of a dark bourbon

I need the car and the books and music

So

How to reconcile and balance the scales

There is no conceivable way

No poet will survive this

Barbaric age.