Some Shit About Professional Wrestling

If I wasn't a poet, I think
I'd be a professional wrestler.
Trading in pens and pencils for
baby oil and hammerlocks.
Putting poetry in motion before
half-empty bingo halls.
Passion before self-preservation.
Some grow out of it,
some grow into their tights.

Becoming masked men, generic luchadors,
heroes, villains, moral in-betweeners.
At the make or break mercy of sleazy,
leisure suit wearing, comb over having,
cigar-smoking promoters glad-handing
and short-changing the card's who's who
before they take stage to portray the
night's brutish pageantry.
An inarticulate violence,
pre-determined and practiced.

Spilled blood, false finishes,
technical excellence.
The rush when people react
to these theatrics!
Subverting the expectations of
an attentive audience.
Masturbating their emotions,
making them believe what you feel is real.

Then someday when I'm broken
and old, long after my last look
up at the lights, glory days in
the rear-view traveling down that
sudden road to irrelevance,
I'll wonder...
How will I be remembered?
Will I be remembered at all?

If I wasn't a poet I'd be a
professional wrestler.
Though I'd forego questions
about legacy to chase the insatiable-
satisfaction...the one win I can't pin down.

The Bad Genes

I often wonder why you can't
bear to hear Cat's in the Cradle.
Is it in the way you relate?
You know, little boy blue,
the man on the moon?
When ya comin dad I -
Forget it.

I remember sounds of snapping
branches, the way an apple falls.
I remember the first bite of
bitter fruit, the taste of hate
searing my tongue, blistering my
lips, lighting a fire in my belly
that still burns. I'd rip you out
if you weren't so rooted.

I remember September 28th.
His birthday was the next day.
I remember feeling alone on mine.
I remember thinking strength was
not letting mom see me cry.
I remember wishing myself away
as we stood in silence, silence
that's since become so familiar.

I remember the last time you left.
Fractured frames littered the floor
of a half-empty home.
I remember blood blotting out the
faces of a father and son, my last
photographs of fatherhood
buried under broken glass.

Now I remember why you're
not welcome in my world.
13 years you've been asbsent
from these pages, strange parallels.
I suppose I should thank you for
reminding me why I write.
Though it took another look
at which way the apple rolls,
I now know,
you don't belong in my poems.

The Spin Cycle

Tropical passion fruit cynicism.
Feeding machines dingy dirt-caked coins
and watching it wash away two weeks
worth of sweat and stink-
the hamper has a life of its own by Sunday.

I reminisce about antiquated methods
of laundry. How housewives and maids
would wipe away filth and grime in the
rivers, basins, and tubs outside.
I can see chocolate stains on a mother's apron.
I can smell death being scrubbed
from an old settler's slacks.

Yet it's laundromats that take me back.
Maybe it's the Sunday funnies, bitter old
station clerks and rose-tinted Downy balls...
When did nostalgia become such a fucking chore?

Years later I'm going in circles trying to understand
why it takes so damn long for pants to dry.
Mom probably asked the same questions,
Questions about detergent,
Questions about dryer sheets,
Hell, the convenience of home appliances.

Questions about others as they navigate their lives
in the spin cycle. Empty eyed, sluggish, sipping
cold coffee, peering at timers over old magazines.

The strangeness of the mundane,
locked in their own temporal terrors.

An elderly smoker struggles to catch her breath.
A divorced man fumbles with socks
he can't seem to match.
A widow solemnly folds her husband's faded red and
black plaid flannel, only before sighing then pressing
a warm sleeve to her cheek...

In the tapestry of mid-American life,
laundromats have their own special patch.

I'm fluent in the language of the mundane,
the tongue of boredom my people
are too ashamed to admit they speak.
I think about this while viewing the
world through the holes in my underwear.

Spin Cycle (audio)

Live Reading: Sylvia Plath - Lesbos

For Kurdt

Blonde haired, blue eyed,
For you my pupils are dyed.
Sappy sifting, the Teen Spirit
gospel of generational endorsement.
My angst is the pedestal,
My savior the woman in white.
Clean up before she comes,
As you are, forever in debt.
I wish I was like blew,
Easily amused.

Personality Crisis

Soft screams
subtly subdued.
Short sighs,
trembling thighs.
Silence breaker,
sincerity faker,
violent mood changer,
fearless danger engager.

Lucky muckraker,
salacious soul sucker
stalking vacant city streets
still saturated in neon and
echoes of sultry sweet-talkers
whose acidic sentiments stain
sidewalks leading to the mouth
of a solipsistic serpent.

"The point is...
there is no point..."
hisses the snake.

Such are the laments
of those swallowing themselves.

Great walls,
heart engraved stalls.
Sleepless nights,
neurotic fights.
Anxious cries,
swarms of fruit flies.
Dead friends,
logical bends.
Loving trends,
it all depends on what
our lonely serpent intends.

The Wounded Chapel

Winter storm advisory:
Soft blizzard evokes stifling
feelings of cellar doors,
rotten cores, godless bores.

I and I sigh at sights of
shattered snowflakes melting
away already peeling paint
appearing like scabs on
an old chapel wall.

Christ's wounds have not
healed, holy blood pours
onto a pulpit made of
flesh and bone, bound by a
pastor bound by God.

We were to marry here,
The Wounded Chapel
that sits so delicately
atop the highest hill
overlooking a frozen valley.

I step outside to peer
at the empty gray sky,
as if the artist abandoned
this canvas, tossing away
oils, paints, and pastels.

Or maybe this emptiness
is deliberate. Deprivation,
withholding deep blue hues
that compliment the most
extravagant scenes at dusk.

These numbing nights are
longer without the pale glow
of starlight illuminating what
was once a dense forest.
Oh, how moonlight would leak
from the treetops and
spill to the floor below!

Memories and prayers clung to
like a scared child buried
in his mother's loving lap.
He turns to face father's
scorn, only to find in ashes
the burden he once adorned.

It was all too familiar,
waking up to blank realities.
Staring up at a dusty cross
from an even dustier pew
clutching my tattered bible.

To think it was all a dream,
to think we could be happy
hanging onto the gospels
of false prophets for we know 
salvation is Christ's concession.