There are times when I tire of words
When these connections are just cobwebs
Made from the dust and decay of spirits long dead
And I feel I’m just a fool who clumps them into heaps
Thinking I’ll weave them into clothes to hide
My naked flesh from the world.
+++
Sometimes I’m overly brazen,
And I weave and weave and weave…
But the clothes are quickly ripped and worn.
So I patch them and patch them and patch them…
Until I look like a ragamuffin begging for change.
+++
But that’s how it is.
Don’t be fooled by what lies behind appearances,
Inside poets are paupers, too.
posted by ferret at 11:59 am

I want to know why it is that glitter replaced ink,
And all the artworks of a great nation
Were wrapped up in a smirking irony
Embracing the gaudy demands of materialism
But grasping its ideals with wrenched palms.
+++
But then I remember
An embrace never opens up the world.
It silently covets a corner
And creates another hiding place within it.
posted by ferret at 12:37 am
In that moment there with our bodies bare
You can’t deny we’re anything but this:
+++
We are bodies struggling, flopping, turning
Heaving against this river called life,
wound with these moments together
In the whirls and rapids, the eddies and falls.
+++
We’ll lash these moments together
As our raft, our rock, our treebranch.
We’ll use them to keep afloat in the torrent.
posted by ferret at 2:10 pm
I was walking down the street
With chocolate in one hand
And pride in the other.
I smacked my lips on both.
Feeling particularly animal,
I pointed my snout towards the sky.
The trees were waving at me
Singing couplets:
“Today’s the day your love has come along
So put your burdens down and hear our song.”
So I listened, and began humming with them.
+++
The people on the street glared at me -
Glared at me with sagging lips
Glared at me with pale cheeks
Glared at me with balding brows -
Not because they thought I was mad,
But because they knew all too well:
The trees no longer sang to them.
posted by ferret at 1:19 pm
I dreamed that Shanghai was a simpleton
Who ate glass bottles,
And picked the shards out
From his teeth with a rusty coathanger.
+++
Though many said he would die
From hemorrhaging or tetanus
Coughing his last breaths
In pools of blood and vomit,
He came into his own all too well.
+++
His breath full of fire,
He spat diamonds.
And when he spoke,
The people listened.
posted by ferret at 3:32 pm
You have sat at the edge of parties
Calling out the names of the various faces
That swaggered at you in their drunken haze
Fondling the passions of their hearts before you
Tossing them like dice carelessly
Letting them fall where they may
Taking chance for a blushing debutante
Ripe for the ramming
While you sat there with your passions
Held in your hands
Examining them like sacred saphires
Wanting to determine their every flow and crack
Before hewing them into preciousness
Wearing them upon your crown
As you went out upon the world
Praying that that moment
Would be your coronation.
posted by ferret at 10:51 am
A lot of people try to comment on my blog in an effort to inform the world about vicodin, viagra and naked women. There’s also a bunch of folks who continually leave comments in Russian. Their comments are always written something like this:
Wow! Interesting article! Viagra vicodin online pharmacy vicodin.
Or something like this:
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They usually have links attached as well. I’ve received thousands of these types of comments. I delete them all.
Yesterday I received one that sounded kind of like a poem, and I feel compelled to post it:
what is better cialis or viagra
took two viagra at once
viagra come in liquid form
will vicadin [sic] and viagra mix
I have the image of a drunken, wastrel playboy sitting on the edge of a hotel-room bed, uttering these words to himself. Three naked women are asleep on the bed behind him, locked together in a strange embrace from which he has just emerged - arms and legs and hands and feet all interlocked in a web of what was once lust and longing, but is now just an attempt to be comfortable and warm.
The playboy stands up suddenly, walks over to the mirror and inspects his naked body. He teases the hair on the slight paunch near his bellybutton. He recites his poem to himself again, as if it were some kind of incantation made to raise his spirit to new heights. He stumbles around the hotel-room looking for a pill box of vicodin. When he finds what he thinks is the pill box, he opens it and swallows a tablet quickly without water. He totters over to the thermostat by the bed and studies it for a minute trying to discern how it works through his stupor. When has succeeded in turning up the heat in the room several degrees, his eyes roll back in his head, and he falls to the floor. He passes out with a giant hard on after taking viagra which he thought was vicodin.
posted by ferret at 7:26 pm
Give yourself to warmer nights that drizzle on your tounge
Feel the pavement scuff the soles of your shoes
As the taxis fly by with lulling passengers
And the construction workers toil through the night
Tunneling around, beneath, between your feet
And Huaihai Road never ends
***
Give your mind to the flashing-light shoptowns
Let your judgment slide with the icicle lights
As the bottle of booze in your hand grows lighter
And you feel like the street could become a runway
And Huaihai Road never ends
***
Give yourself to those thoughts of home
Where you once uttered words that meant more
Than the friction of two strangers passing
Comparing the marks on their hides
And Huaihai Road never ends, Huaihai Road never ends.
posted by ferret at 11:25 pm
I hear there are no snakes in Ireland
Because St Paddy plowed them out.
+++
But where did they go? Into the sea?
Did they flit and swim happily through
Kelp as refugee eels, never trying
Never lying at God’s court of appeals
For displaced animals?
+++
Were their skins scattered in the sea,
Coating the coasts with an endless
Supply of translucent hides
Shuffled off in flight?
How were they used?
Did the weaver’s wind strange undergarments
For concubines and Catholic courtiers?
Did the skins sing in the lacquer of ornate lutes and fiddles?
Did they hang in the light of windows as kaleidoscopes?
posted by ferret at 2:56 am
This is the poem that filled a
coaster, but filled the world as
well. You know, the world -
that steaming, heaving mass of
shit and piss and blood and boiling
tempers and great unparalleled insights,
whispered on the lips of daydreamers
and bridge jumpers, pimps and
plagiarizing banshees, howling at
the moons of tragedy and unspoken
ecstasies, that sung from the
bowels of the universe, and imprinted
themselves upon this coaster, scrawled
in a backsliding hand, pleading forgiveness.
posted by ferret at 4:16 pm