Last Poem

I'm trying in vain 

to erase you from

these pages, but to

my chagrin you've

etched yourself in. 

Invest in my flesh.

You've left your mark

again and again, 

scarring me in the same

way as if I never wanted

to heal in the first place.  

I hope you're satisfied

with the mess I've made.

When I sleep you're 

hanging over bad dreams,

begging to be followed

to the gallows.

I can't forget.

I can't forget. 

I can't forget,

no matter how little I've tried. 

I told you I loved you,

this is how I show it. 

It's been raining since you left.

She said, finally, it's over,

devouring me whole. 

I'm still reeling from digestion. 

Association

Lampshade inspiration
Cigarette ashes
Makeshift ashtrays

For the camels I shepherd

Swirling smoke

Awkward glances

Underage drinking

Vices

Self-deprication

The walk-off-come-find-me gag

Isolation

All habits I support

Hatred

Lamentation

Depression

Saturday Night

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.