scruta

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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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:

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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.

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.

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?

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.