formative years: the zeroes
recipe approx. 33% music videos
where'd you have ended up
without mopers on jangly guitars
probs a place without generation suicide jokes
who are these children
that never got a chance to murder their heroes
because the heroes had already killed themselves instead?

i'm not sure if this is the domino
the planet hardly ever shakes out like that
pues, john darnelle must own a french press by now
pues, he's on twitter
pues, has anyone heard from E this year?
pues, kurt cobain worship has moved to tumblr
pues, what are those stories about jeff mangum working in a bank?
oh "yeah, dude, i saw jeff mangum this week...at my bank"
pues, jeff mangum is back on tour too

post-"life is hard and so am i",
i suppose i'm asking,
is it any wonder at all that
being in on the joke is the joke

we've put our arms out car windows to this
teetering on the joints of salt box houses' roofing
hands flung out
were we dropping seed bombs of glib the whole time?
in the other room, a dead eliott smith still talks to me
and sure it shakes
but does stephen merritt really want to be taken seriously?

grass-stuffed stab wounds!
this subculture's bleeding out quick!
where does the drain go?
and how far to the community garden?

an the truth is i need tums
when i drink tacos and eat whiskey
these days
oh this crumbling wreck of a body

i mean this skin was imperfect as soon as i met it
christ, my wiggling thighs and stretched out stomach

i dunno
i dunno
if we're fighting, then i dunno
i say it because i never learned
i'm sorry that i was raised in deep silence that created me obsessed with outer space
the cold stars and cold cream of...........
oh whatever

you gotta finish what you started
even if what you started
is a cigarette


wish for something nice on your birthday
if you don't there's always next year

nighttime emissions and sublimated humiliation fantasies

i had a sickening dream, after i woke but before i rose. on dusty recliner with wooden arms and itchy hounds-tooth cushions, a frog slid tadpoles straight from a gash running from throat to tail. it had not been cut, it had only opened to birth them. it had always been there. on the chair a snake wriggled around with the frog. it wanted to eat them all. the frog fought and the blind babies squirmed away, but the snake ate them anyway. it was a slimy sight. i had descended from a tower, perched on a church's rust-streaked green dome, where i clutched to the surface on sticky octopus suckers with street-kids, where i had been safe. but, of course, the world ordains the things you must witness.

not to diminish the dreams i have had of you lately. no. you no longer chase me in soothing loops round escher staircases, our ability to move expanded to bounding many-storied leaps, the cartilage in our knees extra-strengthened pillows. now. oh now. you crack the bones in my wrists between your thumb and forefinger and i turn your skin to ribbons with a bowie knife. i cover you in hair, force it to grow everywhere, including the soles of your feet. you un-piece me by a pond full of sucking mud and throw my bits in to be watched over by the trees. in front of your elementary school, i walk behind you invisible, whispering the truths of your grown up self into your ear as you move to the double doors and you are so ashamed. you are hot-faced but you can't cry in social studies and language arts.

my daydreams are pure avoidance. "i am living my best life." audiences with princelings and me in a plexiglass box, lit under with LEDs, dancing to mint royale on repeat for eighteen hours, probably high, probably wearing knee socks, probably wearing a t-shirt dress with some lazy illuminati-based design (triangles no doubt, even though i've always felt better about squares), probably losing momentum, until i'm too exhausted to take home anyone who might have chanced a look. too tired to feel the hand on my face until after it's left a bright red palm print there.

demons i would like to exorcise

1. the flutter-stop of investment in the west wing, especially cj cregg and her beautiful sad long face as she shakes on the shoulder of secret serviceman and mutters president bartlett's cast-off latin, really-really-no-more-democracy-porn
2. "I guess I’m attached to long hair for the same milkmaid-mermaid-Rapunzel-potential reasons as any other chiquita who tends to hysterically cling to more literal expressions of femininity"
3. the creamy, getalin based candy of inertness as expressed by peers in the only-slightly-less public corners of the internet, failure is an all-expenses-paid vacation
4. a maximalist kind of literalism (as it pertains to tragedy, because literalism is the only comedy i can laugh at, though to give comedy it's due when it's good it is really a tragedy)
5. we don't say spirit animal
6. i sped along the race track, i burned my knees on gravel, i cut away my tights and i lifted the coagulant with tweezers thinking there was still rock buried there and when i was wrong, i bled even more
7. sure sure (unclear)
8. gangbangs i have known
9. years of linguistic tourism and to this day i still don't speak spanish (no more than si se puede or toque aqui para abrir las puertas and pinche cabron and eso si que si and adios ese) and i mean really what can we say when all i remember is chandra ke niche, sunder bagiche me, meri moonh betiye
10. to see your face is to drink a cup of coffee and all your ridiculous visage represents is a competitive advantage and one day the ugly will rise up to meet you and i will be there holding that knife that sings your flesh and whiskers
11. microwaveable bibimbap courtesy trader joe's, subcategory: takeout/away
12. this narcotic: i sleep, i would say, firmly on my right side, face seeking further depths of cotton batting, arm trapped or trapping, thighs vice on comfort, but when i wake up i flip away from the door to touch my left side to the softness, weighing my self down on the formerly curled over and hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngh
13. a wife and a kids and a dog, i'll fill you up with my dna, scatter me all inside you or at least torture you with the ever present possibility, the gun of your reproductive system
14. dic duc fac fer julius caesar had no hair and the guess what i remember the first five lines now not seven and given another six years i might remember only two, you're buried underneath the rubble of my dorm room and better teachers who plastered the walls in dynamite
15. i think i didn't take my own advice on the whole maximalist literalism thing
16. everything is important
17. oh honestly, i never actually read all that marx
18. um ah a very american cul-de-sac tragedy, you know the small sort, more a forgetting than an intentional slight, leaving off what's really important about geometry homework, lots of no, but not a lot of because and a little bit, i wouldn't change that for all the pearls in china, because what i felt for you, and this is the advantage of late first rumblings, was
19. no
20. i can't describe what happened to us
21. how many times will i have to try?
22. i want to write a poem about the love i bore for your split bodies and how i wished you were one person if only for ease and i want it to be beautiful even though it was not beautiful at the time, but i can never seem to correctly interpret any kind of moment of ours as anything more than kaleidoscope of strange power
23. my heart's not really in non-violence, but it's not in violence either and one day i'm going to be standing on the barricade, right at the top, and i'll have a bullet in me before i ever make the decision
24. bitch
25. i covet you
26. service pistol, service pistol, service pistol, marine corps, ptsd, and i fitted my knees in your elbows so you wouldn't thrash
27. the mountain weighs down on me in return and i finally feel small enough to warrant long hair
28. personal branding (particularly "this is my life now")
29. i said it just to have said it

"the perfect man, one crazy enough, the same dreams"

i never came to you in france 

in the night or day of france

i could not feed myself to you

your dream as it draped on a final calendar, 

threatening me with disappearance

until it lay on its deathbed.

your hunger groping around, 

claiming black and white

dismissing and blurring.

now you deliver me more words

you are full of quickness 

to claim you have found something to eat

but you cannot leave 

a world behind you do not feel, let alone see

you cannot leave what you have not tried to love.

i am not to be left behind.

i refuse to receive your rotting flowers 

of goodbye poetry i am not part of the world your turn around on

as you turn around you realize youre back

you never left.

you dont understand me?

your words have not extended your territory of possibility

they are closed windows

a view behind glass, a fantastic landscape within a frame

i see you performing an exhibit 

at a museum in your heart motioning out your freedom, 

believing in it so well

calling it india, calling it love, calling it

the perfect man, one crazy enough, with the same dream

tray key at oh me

yoga:
a fresh little giggle for the yogurt suckers
how many "you know what they say, 'if you can't do...'teach" before it sounds like noise
like spoon
    over and over
spoon spoon spoon
spoon spoon,
the old mcdonald song:
yo... ga.
a lot of things could be a lot worse
than a little giggle
which is more than they deserve.

risk:
a wacked out shiver for references to kimya dawson's appeals to memory
the end of an empire,

maurauding horses
kamchatka,
and all he can do is sit there
eating butter.

prince charming:
shut up about your farcical, amorphous
slo-mo snuffhouse cafe
of a railroad,
h-o scale my ass.
even peanut allergies couldn't save his majesty
so stop pretending to pretend.

also all the actors are yoga teachers
i'm not even sure why we're using the word "industry"
who in tarnation are you making your shit for?
boringboredasleepdead

i didn't shave my legs for this

am i speaking your language yet?

the promise begins at fashionably late
eases through with the clock pulsing
open window floating twitter-song
up stairs, down stairs
the floor is multi-culti lit lucite, the floor is hardwood
peter panning for gold

shout to be heard over shouting
not an issue of wrong making right
but more a slippery, gummy knee-jerk
we are not settled, not yet, not yet anyway

the joke begins at eighteen year old scotch
this is the oldest thing i've put in my mouth

it's not like when you're a child
and you say spoon
to make it lose meaning, just to see if you can
no
we pick up a phrase together
slip it in at the end of every sentence
and each time it gathers more meaning
until we can't say without losing it in laughter

ah what the cab drivers and rickshawallas of this spinning rock must think of us

a walk through the graveyard

now as the cold november wind

sweeps against the matted hills,

i walk where the crackling weathers shake

the many birds, the manifold leaves

and try to find a thing that grieves 

to hear the cloth of snow come on,

to hear the panting, boneless step

of death that waits to take the world--

and learn how nothing, nothing cares.

to the tree, the river, the dreamless hill

that have spilled their seed and fruit away,

death is the brimming of the cup,

time's simple and most natural close.

though it is easier not to dream,

to bother as the hard years fall,

to take no friend or hope or brother,

how we will know that we have lived

in a world apart from leaves and wind?

the rich who give their days to toys,

the proud who cannot learn to break

the greedy with no hearts at all

will win the tinsels of the earth

and rot in tunnels soft as snow

those alone, who took the chance 

and practiced love, and dared despair,

will never fall from the shapes of grace;

those alone, who came to care 

the way it was with other lives,

have struggled above rock and beast,

have set their grain against the rst,

and, beautiful as trees still green,

argue the winter of this place

-a much younger mary oliver wrote this

analgesic anhedonia superman in appollonia
all the beliefs you got that no one told ya
and 30 thou in the form of an affirmative shoulder

this is it - $$$
pong pong clack pong pong clack
ching ching brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring
oh yeah, all that

the state'll never end in my lifetime
i'll just keep applying for grants







breathe thru yr nose and kill yr idols

french resort towns of my youth and other things i would like to forget

i'm suggesting, what if they just handed us a wad of cash at the beginning of the day? that's for today. he jokes, and it might not be there tomorrow, depending on how you do today. and that would make it real. and you might not spend it all on christmas sweaters and books about dystopic futures.

jon stewart makes you feel like you're doing something about how fucked up everything is. jon stewart is the court jester though. jon stewart is a fraud. jon stewart talks about gun control.

oh you like details, you must be if you're liking the the bolano, you must like realism. but what i'm saying is details do not help conjure reality. recording the varied depths of the red rings the hairband leaves on my wrist as it moves up and down my arm under my sweater only makes things less real. (2666, page 195, Amalfitano's section it just says: HELP [see also all of Transparent Things]) i wish the husband had been the one to chase the poet, while the wife, anguished, kept her post as a university professor.

what's-her-name, katy calls her crazy, that girl says "I know my parents passwords will all be my birthday so I can use their shit any time. I like that they love me that much." i don't like the nailpolish colors other people choose for me. don't trust another girl with your nails.

i'm worried we're tipping in to codependency again or would be were we living any closer or if you were next to me in a bar i would have to say, "you're a concert hall with no dead spots and there's no word for that, which makes me extremely antsy. it still does after all these years." i fantasize about getting famous with you and wearing flat shoes to awards shoes and swearing/sobbing on national tv. please don't send me anymore missives of resonance please.

is there anything to do but to record details? ipecac flirting groove wine gum sunset anxiety disorder chinese silk half-shaved head avi who was olivia low-rent two-bit just a step above community jaw structure advantage big island the beach is the thing oklahomo sucker punch drunk grounded gnit duct tape cut up skirt the last time a scrape went white over the top like this one on my knee was in Arcachon when i slid down the bank on a mountain bike my arm filled with wood chips and i went in the lake and it went white but also it was that time of month and i didn't care and i bled on my jean shorts trying to understand my uncle who knew my life with a look though he hadn't seen me in years and his father was maybe dying and everyone thought he was an addict anyway (this was later, I should point out, i did yoga while grandad got open heart surgery)

you do or you don't. are we liberated.....or not? what it is what is what what is up.

and was like "oh. of course you did. of course i did."

ii.
this is the most honest outfit you've ever worn, a borrowed romper over a full suit of pink long underwear, that old purple scarf, and mom's big ass waffle-weave sweater from the Gap during her fat period. if we were gonna get common law married it'd be like this, in our apartment, me in my undies and tee shirt, you pouring wine down the sink. mazel tov.

iii.
wish it were summer to pickle our magazine-rumpled cleanliness in an off-brand soda pop and sun. all my friends are available by satellite and pinging in my ears from outerspace. so i dream that the screen of my phone is a pool to dive into and when i reset the damn thing all our texts are lost and my veins turn vericose and oddly i remember high school. my hair stands on end with winter's static.

iv. wanna hear a good joke? (see below)

v. america

vi. this week alone: i like my pedestal, i like my cage, i love my phone, i like my time in the shower

we're going to chicago!!!

Who is on the land?

thankskilling at the buck house,
wilding land project, oregon 2012

i.
corn syrup daffy dewy creamsicle shell
a grass stained kind of denim
fuzz on the thighs backlit in an outdoor shower
pink and foldable

wouldn't it be nice to be beautiful
but i'll be the devil instead
yeah, i'll be the devil too

clarion call of spider bites

the socialite who killed a nazi with her bare hands
don't give me any of that feel good shit
lying on the floor is like
a number one
party girl activity
stoned on the divan, "my tears are in 3-D"

the fool indeed

every day

i.
Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseperable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior highschool playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.

from twenty-one love poems
by adrienne rich