hideout palace: a love poem

There’s a waterfall across the street.
Right next to the river
is a big white house for sale.
I want to buy it
and live there
forever.
Dog.
Truck.
Pistol.
It’d be nice if you could swing by.

This little town I’ve landed in
screams of abandon
and in its loneliness
proclaims something tender.

The air sticks to things and makes the light all thick.
The wood spits paint off,
made ill by the way it splits with the grain,
and warps somethin’ awful.
The pain all comes with a sense of awe, though,
and although there’s a question mark
I feel well in my sadness.
I feel a well of sadness.

The river makes sleep noise.
The state bird says things that are pretty.
At the risk of sounding stupid
I’ll write sweet things if I want to.
I want to.

So it all comes back to my baby,
sweet as mariachi bands,
tough as nails,
making me hot for things simpler
than what love used to be.
Making me knot for things
and fray for you to be
all tangled up in awkward ways
and my limbs.

I love you.

Tags: love, personal, Poem, Poetry

an old one found in an old journal. I don’t know what to do with it.

I want you all to keep your eyes peeled later
because I am flying a Cessna over the front range tonight
carving poems about all of you into the unblanketed sky

One warning:
I turn around when I see thunderstorms
with names we couldn’t pronounce if we tried
boom boom
I wish my words could be a shotgun blast at midnight
but boom boom
I keep gettin’ upstaged by that sky
and my
boom boom
gets weaker when the lightning rod mistakes clouds for thighs
and a lot’s riding
on a lack of rain tonight
and the sun talks too shy on my crazy skin
it’s hard for me to believe clouds break tonight
I thought they were more fluid than that
and it’s hard for me to believe in solidity tonight
when everything’s punchin’ change in my face
and I swear I’m gonna change in this place
where the air sucks
and the clouds tuck
their sleepy stars into bed at dawn

spurs for a lack of valor

For most of us,
early dawn duelers
were out of our league. But me,
I ache to duel at sunbreak,
a six shooter is a Labrador
for those taken by loneliness, like I am.
That draw is a dignity I don’t know.
That quick is a valor of the moon.

There is a distinct type of afternoon,
the kind that casts sane on your loss,
draws break to your cozy,
and shatters the delicious pint glass
in between.

Dirty is a foreign lust,
leather’s an obscure thing.
The boots, they’re too stiff,
and the jeans don’t fit,
but the saloon’s ripe
for a gentlemanly
nasty old gunfight.

Tags: Fiction, Poem, Poems, Poetry

Your makeup is blotchy, Lilah. I like your manners, and I miss you like you couldn’t know.

The clouds all rolled in,
the thunders all broke for you, Lilah.
You knew something gruesome in your gait,
something cruel on your tongue,
and the pistons were all grinding teeth for your sad.
You used to cry when you sang shotgun fellatio blues, Lilah,
but your slate is so much blanker now.

I’m not a trained chaplain to the broken,
and I’m nothing better than simple,
but I know the man who took your virginity is a pervert, Delilah,
and all your friends are bandits.
You are a minstrel to this world
if an end to this doesn’t know you.
You are a vacation for a balding lawyer
if an end to this doesn’t know you,
and you’ll know home in places better suited for sinners.
That hurt you cried from stays without view.
And that burning you shy from blazes for you.

Something strikes me beautiful
in a man of the sky being worth living for.
Something strikes me rich
in a source of surrender.
But I think you’ve taken refuge in a ghost, Lilah,
in a mask to the heart,
and to the blood that it beats awesomely.

Nothing kinks my chest muscle like it does to turn,
but something better is hard to come by,
and the leave seems only natural.
Everything flowers obnoxiously in its time,
everything has its sick step.
And now, with hesitance and mountainhurt,
all I have for you is a rusty
“Goodbye.”

And so, Lilah, goodbye.

Tags: Poems, Poetry

splash

there are times for a break of bread, times for pistols and whiskey, and times for velvet. it takes a smart man to know the difference. I am not that man.

when
I realized these friends
are the deaths I’ve chosen
to most gracefully mourn.
when from my fire escape in chicago
I could see only one star.
and when,
since I didn’t have many to choose from,
I wished upon it to
“STRIP ME, STRIP ME, STAR, STRIP ME
cause these clothes are growin’ holes,
and anyway I’m sick of singing fiction
to strangers.”
when all of it comes to a
great lack of fill, the only thing
I know how to do is fall open and unlocked.

the time, I don’t know it.
the place, never been there.
I’m taken by an old man,
a dead one.
he looks back
on his lack of a son’s visit.
he looks back
like a fly on the wall of an imaginary
crooked and sick menagerie.
he pulls it back and sews it
into a complete absence of weight
and waits. he waits
and stays there.
pathetic and completely
wholesome.

I think of him
when I remember my journal
from the days when new hairs came
as a better blessing than moneyrain.

I’m just an asshole,
who falls in love quick and
knows too much about desperate.
a fellow who knows too much
about a hearty and bullshit
lonely.

a letter to the saddled muse

Dedicated to Devin:

Saddled Muse,

these things I do, they are
an acceleration towards a stale
green light. all my friends,
they’re horses.
all my enemies,
cowboys, with double barreled shotguns
for tongues, who spit rock salt
at tender things like soulmates and
human hearts. every flirtation is a dosado,
every party, a rodeo,
and this valley and this ranch shine
with heartbreak. these dirt roads
tremble with earthquakes.
my hat hangs on every word, so it looks
like I’ve found my way home.

with spur scars on my sides,
in hesitation of blinders,
weatherfield

Tags: personal, Poems, Poetry

riotwalker blues 9.72: the finale

By a trick of the light I thought I saw someone else worth living for. I was hung over, so I figured fuck it, I might as well go for broke and give my world away. I stand here as the romance of everything I ever wasn’t. I’ve lost too many things to think I could own myself. I’ve been stripped down to the man I always was. It took me twenty-two years to write a poem. I read it to no one. I remain silent. I forgot my party hat at home, so I refuse to raise toasts.

I threw myself on the floor once, begging the lineage to wake me up. There were three bottles of wine in the closet that went untouched. I learned what Alone is. I know better now than to ever go there again. I manipulate my emotions. I’m just fine. My neck is a straw, stomach’s a barrel. I met a philosopher on a Tokyo train once. He had a distinct feeling I would make the world a more beautiful place. Exhibit A for the irrelevance of instinct.

Nothing proved worth it, so I sold everything and changed my name. I had a hideout in the Motel 6, pistol in the nightstand, until things blew over. I burned down my hometown and threw all the old love notes into the blaze. This isn’t a sad story. It’s a story of becoming. This is the story of everything I am, of taking or leaving it, of all that is in question. The story of a small boy in a big body, who knows nothing. Though somber it may sound, everything always feels like an ending to me. In that honor, I am going to assassinate the Riotwalker tonight.

I forget why I write at all, my words expire as they fall on the page. There is dirt on my tongue when I speak. And though we’re all made of meat, something keeps us from rotting. There is some sort of throbbing heat at the center of all of this. Let me shift allegiance to That. Let me become an agent of That. Let me break with That. And if someday my mind should inevitably turn from it, please accept my apologies. After all, I’m only human, and sometimes Grace is not my consort.

Good night,
I love you,
Weatherfield

the things that throng our lives and make our throats swell, the things that evoke truckstops and squalid motels. meanwhile somewhere scientists say life affects our nervous system.

riotwalker blues 8.39: a fiction song for yesterday

I’m going back to Las Vegas for every time I didn’t wake up to you crying in your sleep. For every time I said the wrong thing. I’m going back for the flashing lights and plastic women. For the free well drinks they bring you at the slots. For the ashtrays over gaudy carpets. For the heat. For the time you denied me everything, curled back into your bedsheets. For your groaning from the old springs. For the magic shows and bar tricks. For every single time you called me beautiful.

I’m going back to Las Vegas with no money and a lot of baggage. In a red velvet shirt, biting a cigarette. In the name of Vulgarity I’ll smoke constantly. When my bus gets in, it will rain in Vegas for the first time in 27 years. It’s the place where dreams come true. I heard that somewhere. I’m putting it all on the table, to the high rollers.

I won’t bluff at all. I won’t fold till sunrise. If I happen to win anything, I’ll laugh at the irony. I’ll come home and buy you whiskey. I got nothin to lose, baby, and only through that will I win.

Your skin is something that will give me nightmares. Your pull is something that happened yesterday. You’re golden, sweetheart.

This is a fiction song that I am afraid to write.

And so for one last time:

Tags: Fiction, las vegas, personal, Poems, Poetry

quiet stampede blues 7.82: on having never been alone.

imagine this on the back of a bank receipt, shaky and bus written:

where durable
hearts are surrounded by
deep moats– and where the busses still
kneel for the old folks– I’m building a city
of clichés tonight. a beaming castle at
its center. completely vulnerable and
completely tender. like being asked to heal for
someone else,
it’s not fair, to be combing
forgetmenots into your hair like that.
in other news it’s easy to make
beautiful things lately. all it takes is
two eyes, two ears, one tongue,
and a
sharp
hot
bleeding.

all my things are packed. I’m running away at midnight. I’ll never have writer’s block again. so long, miseries. so long, ground.

please don’t worry, mom. everything will be okay when the clock strikes midnight.

riotwalker blues 6.43:

And so let that be the end of it,
when a parade hits the front range like a sunset,
and the coyotes won’t shut up.
When the world
fountains drinks for us.
When the shitty floors creak and
the walls speak to us.

Everything will change now.
Let’s bathe in butter, gorgeous.
We’ll dye the sheets in saffron
to respect the sex.
We’ll make love to the candle light.
We’ll scream obscenities at the moonlight.
Let’s burn a dollar a day,
fuck it.
Let’s sew the constellations into our clothes.
I’ll bring you a bathtub made of gold.
The floors and other things will quiver.
Let’s make the deniable whither.
Let’s not make sense.
We can shout in libraries and dine and ditch.
We can kill each other with service.
Let’s kill neuroses without blame.
Let’s make Weatherfield our middle name.

We can eat like we are feating it,
We can dance like the world isn’t our shit.
We can walk.
We can fade and we can rhyme.

a writ to the dumbfound

Nothing ever has to do with anything. Everything is an ever after. Every after sucks, and he’s well acquainted with murderers of enchantment. His thoughts of them are stirred into a cup of coffee. The linoleum floors peel. The night is afire. There’s a tear in the lampshade from who knows what. He waits for the day to crack. He waits for the phone to ring.

The neighborhood parties creak of her. The windows are dirty with her prints. Tomorrow is something else, but the dumb kid is choking for her perfume tonight. Summer is coming, and reflects his heat for her. The costumes are all hung in his closet. There’s a grenade in his chest, a knife in his pants. A pointed longing for a good story. A soft makeup kit for his friendship.

The phone rings.

He says, “Y’know, it’s not my fault, and it definitely ain’t my shit. It’s my embarrassing lack of discretion. It’s my dumbfound. It’s the fact my projector is in full working order, and damn baby, you make a fine screen.”

This town will take you out, kid. And it’s only a matter of time now before calluses find you. Buckle up.

Tags: Fiction, Poems, Poetry

riotwalker blues: 6.07

Tear it up. Peel it open.
Pretend someone is giving you your heart back.
Pretend this is your home,
where the deer suck and the geese annoy you.
That you couldn’t care less.
Pretend you can never go back.
Pretend the strings are all being plucked for you.
Pretend your history’s being fucked for you.
That nothing has ever changed.
Nothing ever will.
Pretend that winter never knew you.
That love never blew you.
Get shitty all over again.
Be a wrecking ball.
Get lost.
Go home.
Be a monstrous bonfire on friday night.
Burn, sweetheart, burn.

Tags: personal, Poems, Poetry

riotwalker blues 5.94: on being psychotic and on honesty

And you will come home–too late–to a table fully set. You’ll know my plate. It’ll have the shortest serving. Lusty for loneliness, it will be nowhere to be found. I’ll never talk about my day, you’ll never ask how it was. I’ll sleep well knowing none of it was mine. This is my last attempt ever.

I will be a tragic walking joke to you. I will choke of you. I’ll eat in silence as you tell me the everything. This will be the most comfortable place I’ve been. We’ll leave three wine bottles for every next morning. I’ll die with every comma. Fuck, I’ll die with your breathing. Good night, I am dying.

You’ll let it make you too hot, and it will be regrettable tomorrow. You’ll quiver in the morning, you’ll squeal at night with my service. I will never write again.

Please: never let my grandchildren read this.

weatherfield loves us

Tags: Fiction, personal, Poems, Poetry

riotwalker blues 5.12: on ripples and things less symbolic

As ever-
As ever I ever was-
As ever I ever dropped into a world, unexpectedly,
more explosive than mine:
I’m being told by the ripples and waves to Stop.
And the face of this thing is too ugly
to cockle by.

And so exactly Eight-thousand-one-hundred-seventy-four days later, I still wonder.

There was a time when I swallowed sugar cubes whole, and never heard of minds like the ones I know now.

At some point someone gave us our world back.
Now we grope it and venerate it,
exploit and make love to it.
The feedback is always a sharp needle.
The result is always a hot bedroom.

Grooms would be made of us if we collapsed into that stupid needle, that fucking shivershake dance we never knew.

My greatest knowings now are the worst I’ve been through.

Tags: personal, Poems, Poetry, spiritual

riotwalker blues 4.07: on a broke heart, opening, and fruit.

Locked.
And we can live by a Houdini’s axiom:
When you are about to be constricted, make yourself as big as possible.

They were calling each other sweethearts and rolling in the grass long before we got there, so give yourself girth.

I know shit is crazy.
You feel you could go insane in five minutes,
and that only someone’s arms for a few nights will pick you up.
But hearts never break closed,
so let the bundle of wheat fall, and open.

There was always a funny scent to our failures when we lost sight of Paris.
If she was the one to end’m all,
let her go in this beautiful Fall.

I don’t know how to make beautiful things anymore, only to narrate.
Bless me please, saints and Christians.

To be continued. I am a lost and broken thing.

Tags: loneliness, love, personal, Poetry

riotwalker blues 3.28

When there was endless entertainment,
When finely crafted loveseats and picture shows were our playground,
and we could break glasses over nothing.

The golden years are made up of pyrite and glitter
when we take scissors to the heartstrings.
And they’ve been plucked by cosmic perverts for too long
so let them come under the blade.

Throbbing and moaning underneath all this
is something worth dying for,
but I can’t explain how to get there,
never could.

I’ve only ever found it by the generosity of the weather.

Tags: personal, Poetry, series

riotwalker blues 3.14

The floral wallpaper made its way into my heart the same day I watched you give the fire breath. Someone dosed the wine that night and I became drunk of you.

Drunk of you I moved and I danced, without standing up. I left a shrine of that night on the mantel, lacking religion.

My first cigarette happened on a rooftop at dusk. I longed for airplanes overhead. I think of that sunset when I write stories, yesterday.

So let the preface happen. I don’t know how to make beautiful things anymore.

Tags: personal, Poetry

goodnight grass

I wished the wax
could have fallen under my seal on that one
but there was
too much hesitation
in the way that I walked and the movement I blocked
and
I have a bad habit of entrusting fragile things
to reckless people
light things to words like evil
and something’s gotta give.
and at some point our earplugs
weaken to the fat lady
singing.
and the clinging
undoes itself again
all
embarrassing and red
like
an unwelcomed practical joke.

Tags: Life, personal, Poems, Poetry

pouring libations for the life and death of the deerking

Friends of the Wood,

The walls rippled bloodshot and good when he walked in a room, unjustly. There’s no reason to shake a party like that. None I can think of at all if my mind’s right. But goodness gracious, God oh God, did he shake it. And he pulled all of us with him in that shivershake dance we never knew. And there were always strange wars on the tip of his tongue.

A twelve-pointed massacre to a heartshell, never welcomed but always leaving gratitude like a dust trail, let us remember the Deerking with a shot of whiskey to the earth, a shot of sake to the bind weeds. There’s nothing quite like a buck bent on the misery and fruition of his cohorts, and though thank God he’s gone, Jesus will we miss his spears. Jesus will his razor blades and hot flowers be missed. There never quite was a king like the One of Deer. And I smile and frown at the same time when I remember is scruff.

Ordinarily, I’d say such a venerated coward deserved a pipe organ on a Tuesday morning, but this buck’s different. He deserves a blast of salt on a pale afternoon, a shot of moonshine to the Kingdom of Raccoons. And so let this be a reminder of solemnity. The kind that evokes swingsets in a cold body, lhasangs in dark alleys. Like the crown of a Marlboro hat in a Tennessee liquor store, a black horse in a wood saloon, pour the ales, damn it, and pour them with heart. The Deerking kicks up your aimlessness like a steam engine that happened yesterday.

Barbed Wired and Yours,
The King of the Coop

Tags: Fiction, personal, Poems, Poetry

the ballad of militaries upon militaries and lollipops

Wind cracking whip shot to the bare breast, I used to think you were a picture show worth killing for, before the sky became too obvious. The dirty alleys and everything cock like a magnum at the history of what it means to be alone again, all of them alone again. And an environment has been birthed from a crack in the chest.

When all the steeds struck and boomed at the gate you were there for me. And you were sitting there next to me that day I decided to spit the water back at the wishing well, to give the slaughter back to the niche and swell. And though violent there are orchids in those offerings.

Allergic to the fringe I write love poems, to imaginary people. There will be a day when I no longer weaken to the command of militaries upon militaries who have forgotten to play the winds by ear. I never quite felt like it was home here. So the sounds of drunken play had me leaving.

And the smells of ridiculous laughter had me grieving, for every single moment, ever and always, that I forgot about gravity. That shit pulls hard, and so now I’m left here embarrassed at a lack of weight, which if existent would express something real. With open hands and a naked intention, let this be a supplication for a candy shop on a Sunday afternoon.

Tags: Poems, Poetry

excerpt from a note to India from Durango

(I hope you don’t mind, G. My only poetry is in letters these days.)

from the dirty floor of the southwest finally gracin’ my car tires,
from the gunholster in the back of a truck,
sittin’ in the jumpseat,
and the Wild Horse Saloon
(God is she wild)
where a Colt .45 rests beneath the bar,
from the mud on my car,
and the mechanic who’s fixin’ it
in his mountain back yard,
comes an enormous wreckin’ ball.
A heartshell wreckin’ ball.
And Jesus does she swing.

Swing, wreckin’ ball, swing.

Raw like you, though perhaps not so tender. There is a storm and I have no jacket. Raw by default.

You know I’m well,
I know you are.

Tags: durango, personal, Poetry, Travel

oh, and it’s true

my least favorite word