Channelzero Podcast Episode 12

Worms turn beneath flowers as the birds await their feed

Flames cascade down toward the earth

Fitting exactly between the collected tall buildings

Workers, mothers, preachers of god’s word

All run for their lives

Soon after the white cumulus turn blue, then black
Snowfall is reported but

This city

My city destroys any purity long before it can reach us

 
Its concrete surface remains clean

As we fade into evening and disturbed sleep

The streets clear except for a broken toy

Springs and cogs poking from the innards

As we slowly turn from the sun yet again

Surplus fumes and winter death

Words drip to a stop for all the tired writers

For today there is nothing

Good

To report 

Untitled (seasons)

I want to live where it snows

Every single winter

To awaken before a jagged horizon

Where mountains block the sunrise

I want to live where it is too cold to rain

In the autumn

Only orange leaves dry and

Crunching underfoot

I want to live where the summers

Defeat the average man

Where women and children wilt and

Rejoice in the searing heat

I want a billion stars shining each night

Wild animals prowling across my porch

A post office and general store

And a small bar in which to get drunk

I want this simple string of things

I need them as you all do oxygen

I need them both alone and not

Alone

Hidden in the dark of night there must

Be a road straight and true

And

Out of this town.

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.