January 2012
1 post
Jeremy
You look up at the sky and there’s all this primary fruit color and flavor, like a goddamned Fruit Roll Up on a Saturday morning of yore and you’re there at the streetcorner with your littlekid attempt at a yardsale selling a bunch of crap you shouldn’t have been selling to a bunch of jerks who shouldn’t have been buying, a bunch of cheap crap—plastic toys and knickknacks and...
November 2011
3 posts
Better Going Down
when I pissed
the cure it
landed in
spittoons meant
for beer and
‘backy
there it steamed—
it smelled like
lottery
failure stubs—
I ordered
Round Two.
Underpass, Auburn Avenue
they floated as wraiths
and itched like saints
they scanned for tourists
and horked cheap smokes
they hacked at honor
and licked old bones
they puked the pavement
and smiled at stairs
they wanted money
and all I had
were words
Yellow Leaves
I may not
have pushed
myself
toward
being
alone
I may not
have plumbed
the waste
of heck
had I
not seen
the stars
gleam atop
mountains
cold and
so blue
September 2011
2 posts
Observation, 9/7/11
There’s a big rambling group of blackkids out of school for the day, shambling down the hill, hoodied and longpanted in cover of September coldfront faux-fall. Laugh it up and grabass, guys—there’s a crisp in the air and you could even convince yourself the leaves are changing but that’s only wishful thinking—it’s only latesummer drought and the green leaves crackle with dehydration, like early...
North Highland Rainscape
In foursquare rooms
they’ve cordoned off
the walls
and heat oozing
from the windows
drips the skin
like watertorture
and coaxed from
the rooms by threat
of watertorture,
we enter streets
rendered warlike-
-flooded sewers
potholes
the uncaring filth-
-travesties-
streets no better
than foursquare rooms
only more open
more per-square-foot
helpless shrugs
ancient glittering
STOP...
August 2011
1 post
Ford Factory Waitingroom
the parking lot smelled of puke
and pork rinds
and the pizzashop was open
and pepperoni
and the rooftops were ablaze
with neon
the Marta was belching
the bums were bumming
the kids were kidding—
I waited in the car
July 2011
1 post
We were failing to understand the significance behind that mathematical preamble, that playpen for bigkids, pent up and bored—the stylish ennui of teenagers—and we thought we were so cool but what were we really?
Dorks. Whale penises. You didn’t figure that out till years later, after it was far too late to go back and change all the things your hindsight said you’d done...
June 2011
2 posts
The Competition
An infinity of competitors down in the streets. The vagabond digging through the dumpster—competition: he lives free while I live chained to my chores. The Mexican kid rolling the mop bucket to the sewer— competition: his is a heartening tale of American ambition; his entire life sweeps ahead of him. The guy pedaling his bike down North Highland— competition: he probably...
Reflections on an Old Notebook
a last page-en-ing
a soft lax-en-ing
of thoughts un-think-en-ing
but now—
we’re here and not
there and not
bolted on pages like
idiots abroad
no wordy preamble
no Tower of Babel
no flaw left unnoticed
no clog left un-hairy—
scary word—last—
whether page or song
or friend or glass
or life
it’s gone and no
chest-thumpy gutcheck
will bring it back.
May 2011
4 posts
Four Great Motives For Writing, by George Orwell
Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get...
Patina
And as the days go
so goes the sky and
as skies go so go
minds, hearts, assorted
cellular viscera
muddled down to dreams
________________________
and dreams steaming up from
sewer grates like New York
fogs, saxophones blazing
over burnt sienna
70s butt-rock
parodies—but where were we?
Brine
The air smells of salt
and tastes of dust
a chalk as fine as
powdered wig workshops
and black cats waiting
in the wings
in the dark
for tunacan handouts
and rainwater in beercans
and broken mirror beardtrims
of SatNite pre-revel
drunk on nighttime and sauce—
powdered nose nightcaps
powdered nose nosebleed
powdered nose bloodsneeze—
filling up only to empty
and fillup...
This Is The Real Shit
They told you this was the real shit. The good shit. “The best shit around, ATM.” You think it is shit. But in the crowded smoky bar, mashups mashing in the background, the hipsters speak of it almost mystically.
This is the real shit.
PBR cans crush underfoot. Pretty girls blow smoke into the faces of hapless boys in jean shorts, and the hapless boys drink the smoke like a sip...
April 2011
2 posts
Extra Crispy
Chaff for the dogs on coffeeshop porches. Chaff for the dogs in police dog cruisers. Chaff for the fire of nights. Chaff for the waffles of morn.
Pink flesh of showertime mornings. Pink flesh of rawdog mornings. Pink eyes of hangover mornings. Pink lips of lustful night.
Toys for the children of soldiers. Toys for the dogs of the side. Toys for the porcelain horses. Toys for the hares in the...
Rusty Tracks (excerpt)
Dirt for dust, ashes for bloody horrible dirty dust, gone for good or coated across the wasted trackside buildings like jelly on some shitty toast from some shitty shifty breakfast eaten in furtive corners inside shitty trackside diners, and the indigestion here on these tracks- eggpuke coffeepuke across the tracks. Bumshit pile off to the side. Disgusting.
March 2011
3 posts
Rusty Tracks (excerpts, pt. 2)
Hazy responsibility just a dissipating shadow here in this gulch, responsibilities dissipating to the realer concerns of railroad time, watching- for broken ties jutting from the tracks, odd little brown snakes snaking around in the unruly brown grass, ready to strike or so you think, bums bumming never mean but sometimes surly, nasty-looking Atnalta skaters, golfballs flying from golfball...
Anonymous asked: why are you do gay?
Rusty Tracks (exerpts)
The fascination in a chainlink fence, the way it cuts the scene, the hard aluminum wires twisting looping converging to a little twisty tiptop, seven feet of implied menace but not fooling anyone on a gray blusterday, trying to taverse this fence en route to conquering the Beltline of the mind literally and figuratively. Climb over and see, see you on the other side, climb over and try not to...
February 2011
2 posts
Bloody Brandon
It’s a flame and we draw to it like moths, like flies, like the make money money this street has become. What does the visiting Englishman say when he sees this street and its Resurgens stagnation? Does he see Manchester in it? Or maybe East London? Certainly the names have changed to protect the uncaring, and the curbs are red with the blood of Brandon who fell from his bike onto the curb,...
Neicy and Mizz June
Each was each designed to
die-
alone, gobs of fat great vats of
fatty fat
vasc-
ular- dead words dead
birds nasty hoarder house
gross-
Gummo yard mullet man-
look, like daycare teacher
hell, daycare teacher smell
rotten-
dead alone don’t die alone
Goddamn.
January 2011
4 posts
Virginia Ave.
Fauborg Rousseauian Paris late afternoon cloudroll, Atlanta-style- dense light falling in rays down upon the tops of the plateglass banks and equity firms and Elton John condos and silly moustrap buildings- gracefully soulless- made profound by the tumbling light of God, parting the dense milk gray clouds as when Moses parted His sea (God’s sea). But we get ahead of ourselves. We forget to...
Jaywalker, Jaded
She’s past caring- -that hit, blunt impact, that lights-out tumult, bones breaking and bending under in ways unnatural, the ringing of concussion blood in bloody ears, the nauseated screams of onlookers, the “ohfuckohfuckohfuckohgodohshitohgodohfuck” of the lifeshattered driver, sirens, ambulance gurneys hard as steel, red lights, reporters, the fever heat of lost blood, swimming thoughts, the...
Snowblind
God-enforced exile indoors, going wonky gazing at icy sludge streets and slate skies and snow-covered roofs, same view unchanging three days and counting, no letup possible, slate eyes in leather chair procrastination purgatory, mental muscles lax and flabby now flexed for first time since last week and firing! firing! coffee the fuel and hack prose the ammunition.
Who knows how fast the...
