I Can Be An Asshole Too

shitty rhymes for the sake of rhyming

timing imperfect

motions jerky

meter twerking

lurking in the annals of your mind

find me, lost in the grains between the wood-paneled walls,

or under Walt's boot soles.

Verses on the Jersey Shore

1. Jack Kerouac perched by the surf at Big Sur and lost his mind trying to understand the garbled language of the wide Pacific. I sit at the Atlantic, trying to looooose myself as Jack did and I can only come to a calm reason. The Atlantic is overlooked but here is where we all started on the grainy brown shores of the East where the water rolls in consistent and brackish and saltier than beards.

2. My lofty tones of natural wonderment are disturbed (welcomingly) by throaty calls down the beach:

Fuuuuudgie Wuuuuudgie!

Love your child, buy an ice cream!

A guy about my grandfather's age comes rolling an ice cream cart down the part where the sand is packed hard, between where it's wet and where it's dry, the cart's the kind with the oversized blue plastic wheels and the man wears high white socks with orthopedic tennis shoes.

3. Oh yeah, you know I bought a fudgie wudgie.

4. I remember sitting out here a few summers back, back in high school, reading the Cliff Notes version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (one of those awful Russian novels where everyone dies) and the man on the lifeguard stand turned out to be a teacher and knew immediately that this must be a summer assignment because what sixteen-year-old suburbanite would want to read Tolstoy in the summer time?

5. The fat kid next to us with a Philly accent is tossing potato chips to the seagulls and all I can think of (4 beers in) are the gulls in Finding Nemo

mine, mine, mine mine, mine

6. Okay, Kerouac, here we go again whoooosh, woooo, kerplash, sash, waaash, wishing, whistling on a limb a while whistle while you work, da do do do do dooo--

7. I tried to loooose myself like Jack again and all I can do is arrive at old Disney movies and so I end up passing out sitting up in my beach chair. Something about the Atlantic won't let me be lost, keeps me from wandering too far inward, keeps me looking outward, but not so far as the horizon, only far enough to point out dolphin fins arcing up and down just past the breakers; to laugh at the dad next to us who let his three sons bury him in the sand and give him a mermaid tail and pointy sand boobs; to grab another beer out of the cooler and arrange the sand with my feet just so; to the blue ink spreading across my page, methodically, logically, steadily as the choppy waves at Cape May.

tea time with coltrane

solemn muted brass

out on the cool summer night

winding like smoke between iron fire escapes

and mellow soft piano

black

keys

lower

lower

lower

softer, please

my head is heavy on my neck by 10p.m. it felt like midnight

purple black night

All Good 2010, II

A ray of sunshine through

the dust that laid un-

disturbed for a year,

a full year,

before the down home dancers,

the flowing barefooted wood

nymphs return

to their mountain,

the Mother mountain

of Masontown, West Virginia,

Marvin's Mountaintop,

a Mecca of Music and Remembrances of a tribal way of life,

dancing, spinning as little balls of swirling sunshine,

goldenrod and glimmering green goo upon our bodies

Bluegrass

I AM A BOOT HEEL STOMPING

A CRACKED WOODEN FLOOR,

WANTING WHISKEY POURED AS

AUGRED AMBER IN A PAIL,

A HEARTY DANCE TO APPALACHIAN

FIDDLES BACKED BY METAL

BUCKET BASS BUMPED BY

BARREL CHESTED WOMEN

IN BLUE LINEN

AND WHITE APRONS,

DIRT UNDER THIR NAILS,

COMPOST UNDER THEIR

TOENAILS, COMPOST MADE

OF EGG SHELLS, SWEET PEPPER

RHINDS, COW MANURE, COFFEE

GROUNDS--

All Good 2010

glowing speckled swamp boogie toads

gullets bubbling out, pulsing in

quivering, bouncing to the tribal drums

and animals calling, howling, awoooooing to their dozens of lovers

ow ow owwww into the night,

shouting out of primal delight in the rising stars like Chinese lanterns

hundreds of them glowing against the black backwoods night

we pound the ground, we glee at our feet stomping the hard packed dirt, kicking up dust for our limbs to bend and wander lithely through, blithely turning up our open bony necks to the sky--

the dust, the smoke lingers,

lingers

lingering on the fresh

mountain dew--

jubilance

awakening

clarity

ethereal

subliminal

MOTHER EARTH: consume us, possess us, move us:

THIS IS MY BODY, IT SHALL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU

take of my shell and pour out the purple of my soul, dance and splash in me as I weave out a path through the weeds, the briars, the drums of the MOUNTAINSIDE

Lunchbox Prelude

We are all each of us drawn to a state, a state of mind along the warbling inconsistent warp of time that is our coexistence, white existential eggs waiting to be cracked open, or hard-boiled and then peeled back to the meaty yellow of your caveman mind, finding your element and at the same time feeling out of your element watching Jake kill the spider drunk outside his house with a garden hose and I've been waiting naked in the woods for you all night but you're forever on the beach so you said let's go to Oregon, where the forest runs right to the ocean. I'm feeling the motion of our collective brain waves arcing and pirouetting across the wood paneled sky and Lazy Lion Ryan just keeps right on lyin' on the couch in the corner, laughing inside at all us searching for the spot that does not exist. There is no spot, there is no bowl, and that's Zen Buddhism for silly little kids who aren't really about following what someone else came up with first but rather trying to find their own way through the crawling vines like ink expanding across your shirt, blue water colors that you flung up and around yourself, dancing in time to the twinkling of the stars hidden by beautiful polluted gradiated skies blue to purple to yellow and back again and the best people always are.

Kinetic Lollygagging

wilted with the wet

from the arcs of our spines

as we try to find

where the nerve endings

bend between the firing of synapses, the hot-wired threads

through our bodies to our heads, you said when was the last time your toes went numb?

Toes go numb, unstrung and shudder as a hot white light clings to an clears the clutter like green acid rain, brain waves are gone, and replaced with a radiant, third eye'd clarity as we bare our bodies like sunning reptiles,

dizzy and tired

from too much exhaling

but too much

is never too much

rather just enough to get things started between two souls grounded in two bodies inter-twined and open blooms of moon flower vines wrapped in the moon light streaming through the cracks in the burgundy blinds,

you sighed, and turned to face me, encased me once again and I want to fold into your skin, go back to your rib as I dig my fingertips into the skin on your back, leaving white lines through the red surface in the moments before we bend and contort to ever angle conceivable, limbs interlocking

and hips rocking in time to the palpitations of our synchronized blood vessels caressing me and we're bending, roving, up-ending over shoulders, and your clinging to me fast like petals on bees wings when the sun blurs the dew out the valley giving way to blue mountains rolling on and on and on and on

to the point of yellow element in the distant back beach, bleached on your brain matter splatter-painted blue water colors flurried up and around and around and around and back again, white linen

on tree trunks, hips sunk down to roots stretching out to each infinitesimal decimal point of synapse firing, firing out yellow caveman egg shell linings cracked open and peeled back like zippers opened, the metal button weighs down the flap of fabric waving in the breeze of the fan, your breath on the back of my neck and down my spine, a thin river of mist shaken off the mountain grasses rolled away the dew in the morning the moment when the moon sits below one horizon and the sun below the other so that

we are the only celestial bodies in the air opal cleavage flaked off the ore and refracting our reflection through bent mirrors, bulbs of water balanced on pink petals like your skin up against my skin, I can't tell where yours begins, I can't tell where mine is or where the ground is and what are branches

when put next to roots that shoot down to points past where they could have shot up where if we stretch too far we knock the stars out of alignment, but when we go down further and further and further and further we just flower out the other side of the globe like birds let loose,

sheets cling to curves walking through hanging laundry on wooden clothespins and the sun shines in, running our muddy hands through the clean linen as sound-waves caught between outer space and atmosphere,

we are still here, the widest of tree trunks with roots protruding up through the ground like tunnels are still clinging to the white shoots further down, and if you touch me again, I may just unfurl like redwood twine and start this whole thing winding again, and again, and again, and

we think about it,

in the brief moments before sleep,

your eyes

mist over, and we

collapse back in on ourselves

and let the sun do its job.