The Gorgeous Black Vortex of Starbux

My views on this particular chain of coffee makers
are well known among my friends.
I've prattled a bit about what the logo means,
who the corporate owners are and what
their politics tend towards.

Their java is bitter and has the staid and
predictable taste one might associate with
the business model that produces
the cloned, reptile-brain-prodding flavor of Mack Donulds.

But i kept going back to see her,
pulled into that collapsing dark-colored beautiful space
in the nocturnal middle of campus.
I'd write a thousand poems about the girl
working there at night,
with the super sable glowing skin
and the colored eyes i only just
found out were marked with such a unique hue..
now that she doesn't wear glasses,
now that she looks at me a bit cross.

One thousand and fifty poems, fuck it.
I'm up to the task, you see.
Because I've not seen anything like her
and she can't possibly be faking that sweetness and those
intelligent exotic eyes whose color i
probably won't ever know,
now,
since i applied my cunning expertise
once again to the job
of fucking shit up
before it started.

Dystopia

i shake my head in disgust
at my kitten,
she is stupid,
and irritating, and irresponsible and mean.
her name is Sweet-pea and
she came about as an imposition,
like my other cat,
who is also dumb,
but vindictive, older,
and crazed, to boot,
and who lurks about with
dark erratic intent
that nobody who enters my apartment,
no matter how dull or disinterested,
will fail to observe as sort of unsettling.
Hers is a retarded stolid stupidity
mixed up with bitterness.
her name is Maga
and no amount of sweetness ever
bloomed in her big neurotic eyes or
influenced her naming.

They hate each other
because they are both female,
and confined,
and what more is there to say,
except that
my living space is dominated by these hissing,
fit-throwing little Empresses,
who demand to be fed continuously,
and piss for any number of reasons,
for pleasure or spite,
for need, for boredom.
They are piss factories.
I shall discover a vital human need
for catpiss
and become rich.
If they could shit as much as they piss,
they would,
but i do not feed them enough.

the way they inform me
that the shitbox is full
is by shitting outside of the box,
which is not as clever as it sounds.
the only intelligence they have
ever demonstrated is in
the artful positioning
of these renegade shitpiles
precisely in magical zones
where i can
neither see nor avoid
treading through them.

they excrete and execrate and loathe each other
and screech about all over the wooden floors
with their floppy dewlaps of flab
wabbling crazily from their domesticated bellies,
and mostly end up atop my
prized material possession,
an elegant folding table
of beauty
past human description
that is now ruined by
many hideous little scratches.
Sweet-pea lies in wait for Maga,
and attacks her
severally throughout the day,
while Maga waits for
Satan to repossess her old bones,
and occasionally lashes back
psionically with the
tentacles of the wounded octopus of her soul.
They are the best room-mates
I ever had or imagined.

Shutting up like pot-bellied mice-men

there comes a time when all of us must shut the fuck up,
and quiver quietly like mice
with no way out.

roll the dice
and hope for the slightest possible agony
and shame.

Do this: roll about and pray in
your helpless,
narcissist way.
sit in the pew and
freely breathe your stink
and the stink of things like
God and Government
and whatever produces
the horrors of television.
All the minor humiliations you
have suffered,
you must embrace and appreciate,
because they are as nothing to the
suffering of the children
of the Congo, or the Sudan, or Rwanda,
or Cambodia, or Vietnam,
or Guatemala, or Iraq,
or the poorer sections of
America and Europe.

We must all pray,
or else we should
all shit
upon ourselves,
quite seriously,
at some crucial point, my friend...
out of need, justice, or humility,
out of brotherhood with the,
well, the lesser.
in personal moments we must do it
because we are all family.
The key is to approach this
droning, mindless ritual
or this self-soiling
seraphic state with some degree
of humanity or humanness,
as if heated by the burn of our essential spark.
That is to say, we must
look forward to whatever
life brings us with a
cunning, secretive lust
for the profits that
can be won from the situation,
and a shrewd eye
for the weaknesses of
our companions.

morning is the best time of day, except for noon and night

morning is the best time of day.
idling in the fresh
goofy glow of the reborn beams,
slurping under Heaven's vault
one's galvanizing cup of drugs,
a breeze rifling through the skirted flirty trees,
now the lingering horrors of
the backbreaking cycle of yesterdays
are blown away,
and the sweetest things are imagined
with an air of conviction
and chanciness.
It is the spirit's
Get Back Up generator,
its magma core
of optimism,
and the clay body's
brief shot
at a hope
for daily renewal,
and that's why we say
morning is the best time of day.

Noon is the best time of day.
though the mass of toilers and office-pets
may only know it as the
half-hour slit or sliver
between underpaid misery
and cheap agonizing servitude,
when one may furtively gobble
a poisonous hamburger sandwich
or squat in the public park with
a genetically modified salad,
or recover bits of dignity over
one to three beers with one's fellow miners
or policemen,
really that may be enough.
But noon is also when the sun is highest,
and therefore provides the most light, truth and
biologic efficiency,
when it can power all flesh batteries,
all sun-drinking creatures
with the most vitality....
and at mid-day, we can
by the clock more reasonably look forward
to the redeeming comforts of home,
to pleasure and ease.
that, alone, could be enough to say
that noon is the best time of day.

but evening is the best time of day,
when the horizons are again painted
with garish inhuman colors,
and the wind might babble and heave
with added poetry and meaning,
and words like "gloaming" may be used,
and "twilight," and evening.
Even
the lowest plow-beast
gets to sleep,
eventually.

..and at this punctual darkening of day
we may safely remove our clothes in the company
of one another,
we may guzzle evil spirits without shame
or dire social consequence,
and we may plunge ourselves into the ten thousand things
that relieve us from
the grim plan of living...
into our wives and husbands and children,
into the orgy of hope and pleasure that is a New romance,
into our gardens and flagons and garages,
into ourselves where it is quiet and we
may comfortably fail to meet all expectations,
Ourselves where we are not like
shabby and disappointing strangers,
ourselves where we may always
find the gentle,
unhurried,
hypnotic embrace of nothing.
so evening is the best time of day,
and so,
everyday
must be the best time of life.

The Rent Collectors

she is at least 63 years old.
it is suspicious that
she still has
red hair.
florid marks of some
kind speckle her face,
enough to notice.
many people have probably
assumed or hoped they were
the result of some creeping disease
of a spiritual, moral origin.
her wide-opened,
powerful, business-like eyes
greet you with undeniable
southern and matronly cheer;
they are practically agog
with superficial southern cheer.
from behind the big silly glasses you would expect worn
by a woman
of her station
they gog at you
and expect a satisfying monetary exchange.
they oversee my district
of the Realty Trust,
a vast gang of cutthroats known to every land
throughout time and memory.

she tries to be nice
she is a Christian,
and, I Believe,
one of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
she has witnessed,
and every month religiously
she takes, my meager offering
of rent money,
and witnesses that
it is late without fail,
but within the bounds of christian charity
as well as
the terms of our contract,
and she takes it and is kind
and thinks quietly
of the times she nearly expelled
me for too-late-payment,
and of her patience and charity
beyond these two unpleasing events,
those two doughty smack-downs
i delivered to the Realty Trust's attempts to evict me.
they tried,
but were not equal to my sweet-tongued pleas,
and the promise of more bundled bills,
with interest.

but yes what power she possesses,
this glass-eyed woman
who twice abused my self-esteem
and peace of mind
by almost evicting me.
Twice i had to sweet-talk
the blotched and slack-faced buzzard
with sugary believable
lies that make the skin crawl
and the body shudder,
but we are talking about roofs over heads here,
and Jehovah's witnesses,
and the sordid fact that
i paid and
will continue to pay,
with my fealty
to the land-owners
and my guilt
for lying rather shamelessly to
a quite gentle woman.

hurry

i like her shadowy eyes.
while looking at me
they sometimes seem to sleep.
her mouth i like.
years ago they commonly
praised lips like those
as petals,
little half-parted,
moist, scarlet-pink buds,
maybe because they speak
so clearly
and musically
of the perfection of youth
and the beauty of
life, Spring and sex,
of the painful brute brevity
of every sweet thing.
lips like those don't give
long kisses.
she does not mind casually
letting them pout
suggestively.
It is an outrage to
modesty and to my senses,
the way she lets them hang open
as if
trying to catch
her breath
or invite me to bed

there is admirable pretense
in the grave, aloof,
exotic
loveliness of her face.
she knows the power of it,
she is attuned to the way men
leap like helpless chipmunks
into the spell of her
soft, sultry, dusky eyes.
i may have kissed something
a trace lovelier,
but nowhere near as wonderful
as her satiny cheek
or her elfish, dainty ears
whose fragile slenderness thrills me,
and that trace-lovelier thing
is hers,
and has a soft, feline name,
and purrs in my mind
right now.
we lay together and
i'm a bit sad for everyone else in the world
because they're not me.
i get the hunted,
zany feeling when
our faces are near.

her laughter is a luxury
and a Pavlovian reward to my animal soul that
i don't want
to do without,
and have never had enough of.
Because i am so doped and delighted
by these peals of good humor
when they sound,
I have a suspicion...
I get so much pleasure
from her giggle and smile,
through the light shining on her silky black head,
in the slightest graze of
any part of her.
It's suspicious.
Amazingly,
all over she is covered
by the milkiest and smoothest,
pearliest skin, and
it makes me exult to be a man
with all ten fingers,
alive, in this
physical world with her,
panting and burrowing
in her fine musky spots.
whole worthy volumes
should be written about
her glorious ass
and Nefertiti tummy,
and I'll get around to them.
the worst scent she could ever produce
i would huff shamelessly
for days


she has a curved old-world nose
that demands
lifelong devotion.
it breathes character,
the Authentic, and
contract love sanctioned by the state.

My arc-nosed
vegetarian jewish socialist,
with your haunting taste
and smell and lines and curves,
I love you
and all your slinky skinny-panted
fey revolutionary ways,
except of course
for the way you can't
seem to love me back
as hard,
and the way you are like
the rest of your wayward
and sickeningly shallow
generation, with its
snarky manners and blasted smart phones,
with
its distractedness
and inability to feel
much for very long.
ugh but baby,
fuck it if I don't
long for you every day
just the same.
you see i have a fierce glad
drunk-souled
madness for being
anywhere near your
body and your heart
and i need to
sing it
while we still have time

a war poem

lately i really dislike war-fair.
as in, the vietnam war,
the Franco-Prussian war,
these fucking depraved war video games
being played every minute of the day by
millions and millions of
twitching zombie adolescents
who suspect not at all that they're being trained....
unpatriotically i dislike
each of the heralded
and consecrated World Wars,
and the current, endless, mainly Race-war being
waged against the Demon, Terrizm,
which warplan was cleverly authored
down in whitest Hell by a pale, obese, drunken Beelzebub
who snorts top-grade, Intelligence Agency cocaine all day with no ill effects,
and sucks the marrow of little catholic boys, for snacks.



it's just that i can sit in front of the tele-vision
and practically
smell the burning human skin,
and hear the howls
of hatred and pain of the mothers, brothers, and fathers
of the folks needlessly blown to
messes of torn tissue and split organs
and bones, and spines removed from the body partly,
and heads rolled into the gutters because
That is what heads do, being round.

you see, the neck is a soft, pliable region,
a weak point:
incidental beheadings
are common when NATO or Pol Pot or
Adolph Hitler or the satanic coke cartels arrive to
enforce Order, or support the faction of their choice
while amassing grotesque profits,
naturally, or otherwise.

war used to not bother me much.
nobody was bombing my city or poisoning my crops,
or using cancerous nuclear slag metals
in the bullets of the mounted machine guns
which come attached to the armored locusts
called Chinooks and Apaches,
and A-1O Warthogs,
when they paid me a tax-funded visit.



war for me used to be something to protest,
not get physically ill and weep over,
not to drive me into public like
an unwilling, cranky mule
because i look around and can't seem to find any
public disgust or outrage
at the homicidal folly
we're all engaged in,
every single one of us
that pays taxes and relaxes
and gives a slave's contribution
to the slaughter, while
working on our core.

We could do with fewer smart phones
built on the backs of smashed, diseased nations and starved people,
we could do with more curious consumers
who love themselves less.
we could do with a bit of romance that is not only sex.
and the avoidance of loneliness and boredom.
we can do much much better than this:



forgive me, for i have grinned
and borne it too long.
and i'm so tired of the hurricane Irene coverage,
the way we scurry to our own
fatbellied hysterias
when we can't catch a Gaddafi quick enough.

we couldn't catch bin Laden, we couldn't
catch the clap,
the war is waged by everyone, it's
sitting in your lap.