Keep On, Keep On

A thousand apologies for not writing, its just that I've been so bussy lately; had an alligator up my ass, no - that's not how it goes. Wait. Yeah, it is.

Dreamer? Fuck you and that shit you're stressing. You will most definitely not be invited to the housewarming because you know what? Motherfuck a detractor -- can I get a what what (the fuck)? Worker is more like it; Mother, always; Heretic, sometimes; Sub NS, when he begs nicely; Botcher, Faker, Catastrophe-Maker, usually. Just the way with me. But thanks for reminding me that I was better off without getting any more "gifts" from you, like your natural virtuosity at kicking over a child's blocks when they've just barely got them stacked. Your child. I'll keep on kicking that shit 'till its gone and all the while secretly lamenting my conditioned disappointment over your arraignment of everything that describes my humanity. And I do mean secretly. You'll see that I don't really have a choice.

Same Old

"A Rant For All Seasons"

Nine crimes, rootless trees, coconut skins, accidental babies; a fugitive with two attempts. Self-reliance, avoiding the silent Judas train wreck that is the hypothetical parenthetical, and such a couple more, are the reasons I awe Ma. And while I don't think it was her, someone somewhere taught me that I didn't have to be that bitch blowing a baller in his drop-top Lex to hear words of undying love. But don't get me wrong: I love fucking and constancy and OMG I am sooooo hard over their new hybrid SUV!

And while you are right, I am not the king, I have faith in my competency so I still might buy me the saddest vacant commercial lot I can find and start up a car wash, wax, and detail shop. For real, G! Start up a realty! Not to be confused with it's hotly debated cousin, i after l, (reality, for all you slow studies, backsliders or neophytes, not that they are mutually exclusive terms.) I only speak to the things that I know because it is my most fervent belief that you have to be a valid person to be a valid artist; harping on hard knocks when you never even had a penitentiary chance at jail. And how can you be a valid person when you spend your days and nights staring off into the smoked out space of your rarefied saferoom while working on your unrealized film script, "Dusk at Cubist Castle" written in colored ink of the proprietary-est formula.

Speaking of, I don't have enough ink in my fucking pen to detail the ugly things you disguise. But I guess everybody is looking for something: validation, Daddy, encouragement, first place ribbons, etc., if you can think of it, someone somewhere didn't get enough of it; pendulum swings the other way, too -- now get out there and sublimate, kiddo! And if you're actually well-adjusted? Well, I'm sure you'll think of something.

Bravery? Oh, god, I'm too tired, okay? And I think we're out of Pepto, which would most def be a pre-wreck for this sour burp of a conversation.

Look, Kids:

stay in school
set the highest standards
maintain the lowest expectations
sow your own row
keep your tail between your legs
but stand as tall as your bone structure will allow
(tiptoeing through the hood, nigga, is no good, nigga)
(and this whole place is the hood)

Everything will be so disco superfly for you! Me? I'll be over here, with my proverbial ear to the colloquial ground, deciphering the low rumble mumbles of the marks' markets, toasting myself with a very pretentious Chateau Petrus, taking it any way I can get it, and enjoying the immortalizing feeling of my blood pushing deeper into my heart when, for the first time, I see the scion made of one criminal to one terrorist.

You did deserve the apple. Just not the cherry.

I, Burn (a presumption of innocence)

This is me after deregulation, before the rolling blackouts. This is the digital plow pulling my mechanized horse. This is my constant erection. Like yours, except when it isn't and where have you got yourself to now, my wayward artist? Because you aren't here. You're there: a voyeur watching a voyeur watching an exhibitionist in a hall of mirrors; a real house of fun. Into the depths of what for what? To make ze mortgage clear, Dear; to be responsible, to be good, to pretend that I am more than an able foil for my own blasphemous claim(s) to life, to make play that the zyklon b ain't better than the other piped-in things, like caviar dreams and federal nightmares, mascara tears and metholated air kisses, or the lonely rusted arm rocking chairs lingering on the broad, yellowed, broken, front porch teeth of turn-of-the-century farm houses, somewhere out west. But who am I trying to trick here? These are the best years, the folly of youth, the falling in love. And I was just absolutely positively fairly sure that sooner or later, you'd want my company.

You had better ask nicely.

Cue you: Ask what nicely?

It Reminds Me Of My Youth: Weed Smoke, Not The Window

How can any words ever be adequate?

They cannot. They are not qualified to speak to soft and forever.

I don't have any causes and I don't really have any interests. Here's what I'm into: having babies, being in love, thunderstorms, playing music, wikipedia, cooking, and reading. Are those the kind of things you could be into, too? Pensive? Not really. That would imply that I'm thinking. Tortured's more like it: my fingers are making that terrible raspy gasping air-in-the-lines sound because they are sucking at a dry well. But I'm an optimist and fucking perseverant (for serious!):

Understated understanding and a million miles away from the wtf looks and the uneasy silences. Epic fucking. Warm spoons held fast. Crooked smiles. A shared appreciation of particular chemical delivery systems. Constancy and creation; promised and delivered.

Let Me Know What's Real, Son: Threat/Promise

Two tears in a bucket and three under the bridge; god god god god god goddamn. I'm not going to cry and I am not going to shower; I'm going to weep and I'm going to bathe and then I'm going to the salon to get these stupid semantic hair-splits severed. Then, I am going to bounce like a nutsack and head out to the Big City to meet with important people in the design industry and have dialogues about Palo Pinto County, strategic outlet placement, and sophisticated water reclamation techniques. Next, I will retreat to the comfort of my home office and read the Texas Penal Code to educate myself regarding Class B Misdemeanors. So, you can see how busy my day will be and I don't really see myself having the energy to piss out your fires because it is so involved being me.

Any Old Chance I Get

IGMBWYAGMTYTTBOHM.

Read my mind, like the old days. And thinking about the even older days, I wish I woulda looked on the brighter side, because I'da saved my cheap tears for times like this, when they are for happy and for real. But every time has a place, and switched back, like mountain logistics, and am I really fooling anyone? Mostly, I'm just glad I don't have to carry an umbrella all the time to protect me and Baby from the squalls and now all I envy are the incredible jaws on the river horse and their ability to fit very very big things all the way inside them. You, Criminal, are a relative phenomenon and sometimes I am unsure why the entire world isn't in love with you because you are utterly lovable.

And now, to bed to sleepy sleep and then to schmacky schmack, my Onomatosweetpea.

Magnet Under The Table

I don't shine if you don't shine so get well now, not soon or later, because Momma hates when the babies feel bad and maybe out in the Palo Pinto mountains there aren't twenty-five hour pharmacies but even still I never gave up hope on breaking out of this two-star town nor on being a better writer. Po' one trick pony drop dead dreams, I'll curl you up in my arms and swallow you down like pills and you can go on and make homes in the knots in my heart. Soul? No such animal in no such animal, and humans? You're animals. A subtle stolen kiss to the temple and knowing eyes cut in a downcast direction and everything that should be; everything, everything. She? She's a treasure for sure and I? I have a criminal mind and you? You have reasons to pray.

Conspiratorial

When I die, I want to come back

as the shadows
in the hollows
of your collarbones

Or maybe as the sound of rain on a tin roof, something that I've never heard except in a grainy b&w home movie that plays loop-style in my, oh, god ... heart? Really, nigga? Heart? I've had it since I was 21 weeks old, including the nine months of cooking, and I'm just

one
among the hundreds
crying
for the millions

Did I say crying? I meant that to be performing. Did I say something funny? Everyone's laughing and East Timor, you're on your own (metaphorically, of course.) You'll hate me for two minutes but love me for ninety and that is something with which I can live, and you have to decide those things, I mean, if you're smart and don't like heartache you will,

decide
with what you can live
and with what you cannot

preferably before things get out of hand, on to paper, and into your, fucking shitty word choice redux, and maybe some deal-breakers you don't learn about a person until you've had two children with them, married them, and dusted off an old psychiatric eval but in most circumstances, its things like the unrinsed dishes or the bad accents or restless sleep, that undo the done and you know them, those things, those rubiconned wishbones, from the gunshot start.

you will say you don't regret it
but that is because
you are in love with regret

and I will smile
and kiss your bloody quicks
and tell you that I believe you

(are lying). In the meantime, I'll be over here on my knees, inhaling your exhalation, watching films about islands and wondering about the integrity of certain arguments of logic, namely what is real and what is not real, because I am plagued by things like this, and please save your neurological defenses for someone who knows less and cares more, because things like that hardly matter in a time like this, because the time is now, so said the propaganda, the work is seasonal and the dreams are pipe.

someday
when I am your wife
I will write you a song

Not instead of, but in addition to, stupid depressive digitized love letters.

Ain't It Funny

That "true love" rhymes with "murder suicide" and so on and so on, on and on, down the road, tunneled and velociticized, and driving like you just don't give a fuck or have an outstanding ticket, on the highway, interstate 20 and markum ranch road, if you're into that sort of thing, precision and whatnot, or clarity, whatever, articulation is overrated, or some word meaning that, most of the time, I can't really be positive about most things, read into the polarity whatever suits your particular negativist tendencies: learned, nurtured, neutered, enfuckingdemic. But we are both adults, consenting and lecherous, committing petty theft of sincerity and objectivity, in any way at all, in all of the ways that crush, swerve, wobble; teeter meet brink, sanity meet sleepy. Of that I am sure. I saw that little thing you wrote in the car and it melted me.

An Absolute Feast

Scared? I was never scared, not ever, I mean, I am never, and I know, its natural, what lies between you and me, what we've made and what we will, like things that bud and things that fall, oh, just listen to me; I'm gushing. Gushing would be apt, right? And you? You're sweating, or you will be, on me, from above and I don't mean palms nor bullets. Tastes like distilled carnality and feels like pinprick entry wounds; wet, happy, small scale splashes. Limitless, undying love described with a hydroelectric vernacular: not nearly good enough. Poor words always set up for spectacular failure, because no symbol like a letter or a glyph comes close to describing how it makes me feel when you come in closer. It was an absolute feast.

Backslider

Bruxing at the brake lights; the upcoming, on-coming, unforgiving, unstoppable stopping. But at least it gives people with nothing to say something to talk about and I know, I know, I get it a lot: yer so jaded fer so young! except they don't use jaded, they use some derogatory Crackerese equivalent, like bitch or democrat. It just seems like I'm always the kind that can't say no and they are always the kind that can't shut the fuck, you know the rest, how it goes, how it ends, with you dragging my polite ass out to the car while I'm talking over my shoulder and wishing them the best resolution to whatever epic fucking saga they thought it necessary to assault me with, not quite Cops and not quite Cheaters, usually, but somewhere in between, like abandoned canines and stomach flus and octogenarian junkies. Its not that I'm misanthropic, exactly, I just miss the clean air that I never got to breathe and I long for the waaaay out of the way privacy found only in points outside the interminable row crops of privacy fences; medium density housing, if euphemism helps you sleep better. But as I sat in the passenger seat with the Times folded neatly in my lap and my carmel macchiato warming my hands, I said that I wasn't sure that I could be happier, and I meant it. That said, I wouldn't complain about rooms with a view nor the sweet smell of a new baby and I would give you anything for which you asked, including, but not limited to, all of it, all night, tonight and any night. Yes, picture, to take the attention off. Sometimes, don't feel like communicating in complete. Lucky for me, for you. And vice verse, uh.

Come away with me.

Flashing Twelve O'Clock

"The only way they can hang is by their necks," and man! how trying to get over make a girl think crazy, where money is a function of competition and where competition is an exaptation of survival: eeking it out or raking it in, building it up so I can buy it down, for me and those who love me enough to allow me to call them mine. "Hustler" means different things to different people, depending on your particular socio-economic persuasion but no, I've never sucked no dick for no kind of money: not soft nor hard nor angel. Speaking of fellatio, oh, nevemind; we all have wildly unfair expectations (of ourselves.) I just want to get the fuck out sometimes and just drive until I run out of money for gasoline and nicotine and play it where it lies and would you go with me? Would you go anywhere with me? Even in public? P fucking S: jot me down on your "To Do" list under "Put Out Like A Fire".

You are the heart dotting the "i" in the word "apologize" scribbled drunk on a postcard sent from somewhere volcanoes are. I am the heart with no name, airbrushed on the license plate of a Subaru that was registered in Pennsylvania.

MightySatiety

Po' little babies. Tell me in great detail, what was it like growing up with a daddy that was a vampire and a momma that was a social klepto? Everyone should be so lucky and I am being completely sincere but sometimes I do think someone should just stitch my jaws together. Oh, wait. I do disclaim: the characters portrayed in this false advertisement are penniless actors. I think the worst part of being human is wanting conflicting things like: you to get your way and them to get theirs. Simian sex and anglerfish monogamy. Vaginal and anal and oral. And sometimes, you don't have to choose. Like, what if you're really hungry for yogurt but, unfortunately, you also have an equally strong desire to suck your food from a plastic tube? This Go-Gurt's on me. You should stick with me, Criminal, because some day I'm gonna have a real nice house and a real safe car and an enormous life insurance policy with you listed as the beneficiary. Or the co-insured. I haven't decided yet.

And I am not being hyperbolic when I say that the non-girlfriends of the world have the massively unfair advantage of being mostly anonymous. Luckily, he believes everyone is boring, after awhile.

An Artful Dodge

Heartsick solipsist for hire, for him. Nevermind the gap and disconnect the dots but be gentle with the brutal bruises from my coups of confidence; they're tinder. There is something that I need you to tell me:

Down what dark alley might one procure the necessary x-factor?

You know what I'm talking about. Now tell me the truth and tell me that you don't know. I'll tell you the truth: I've lost faith in the truth; it is just a measure of the facts. I am exactly that kind of coward; finding comfort, if not salvation, in the many skinny arms of premium class A's.

If you sleep alone, you sleep alone, and maybe I should just try to stay awake, or go outside and sleep in the rain and sink into the mud, or maybe I can wriggle open the latch and escape for a second and fly in frenetic circles around this room or I could re-arrange my days because I don't really have anywhere I need to be and I find life a little easier to take when it is a blur, a carousel of pictures sensually, purposefully, bouncing up and down; like I did that one time in that one memory that I have long since forgotten.

We are a blight. All of us.

w4m - 26 (Same Old Song and Dance, TX)

Jaded, tired, godless and semi-kinky, 26, seeks strings-attached darling to undermine my faith in love and dismantle my confidence over time.

I: am an exhausted quasi-professional with a keen eye for cheap metaphors and an over-develped sense of responsibility looking to chase the soles of your shoes for as long as you'll let me.

You: will make promises you have no intention of keeping and stay up late every night peering into the soft-core underbelly of the digitalia looking for something that doesn't exist to fill a hole you don't really have.

In return for your kindness, I will give you: everything you ever ask for.

Controlling The Risk

The property manager should consider ways to reduce the likelihood of the loss event occurring.

Like, how about not building on sickly wetlands? But I'm no property manager and I adore a devestating weather event now and again and oh, Baby, its about to be our Christmas: late nights in dark rooms, intimate breathless glory flash-frozen for forever, shutters tore open to the window that always stays slightly ajar. Its when I get Palo Pinto fever the worst. But some kinds of burning feel good. And if it isn't dirty dirty, then you're not doing it right.

Twenty-five years I waited for this.

There Are Many Things That I Admire In You

Like: roll over, roll over, roll over, roll over; said in the sugariest tones and genuine, too, because I love a man that loves a dog. That title and sentence were from last night and this one is from an hour ago: that was the hottest fifteen minutes of my entire life, so far. So for, a proposal? May I suggest the toast, to bred, like breeding, like this: Again with the ranking and again with the smoking. May there never be an end to our slack-jawed groping. And then something about the Catholics, but with more this and less that, for whatever part of forever is ours to call ours, tied up in a pretty raffia bow, but snakier, like the Brazos, and strong, too, so no scissors nor cat's claws could clip it because I think that staying tight Singer stitched and serged by future sutures is inestimably less painful than not.

Ninety Minutes of Pornography (like, like, like Dateless Date Night)

It is with you, my temporary saint, that I smoke my last cigarette. Does anyone really do favors anymore? Because it seems like nobody cares, including myself, as I train myself to not to. Am I more than my thousand names? Your hands are so used to holding things and I know that your back and your chest must be so very tired from carrying the pounds of pugnacious punctilo just like my mouth is tired of lying aching words through throbbing teeth. But you have slept it off and now it is time for me to go to bed, which means that it is time for you to get up and go out of this room and bust me into shards like glass like fractals like slow motion like the highest pointilistic art all around you as you punch through that two-way pad-locked missile-proof ceiling like that famous elevator did to that candy factory; so you can be free to go wherever it is that you go, in your mind. The sign says something wickeder this way comes and I have to admit, I am having difficulty believing that.

It is all actually so much less glamorous but I am under the influence.

If you love me, come show me.

I Am So Fucking Mad At You Right Now

But I just took another painkiller and I'm smoking a cigarette between my front teeth, so try to come home soon; before they both wear off again. Or don't come soon; and wait until I am asleep again. I mean, who the fuck ... nevermind. I get left alone at all of the wrong times. Space space. Now wash over me, my little white, scored, and capsule-shaped wave and carry me swiftly to your undercurrent. I have to work tomorrow but my appointment is right around your bedtime. I bought you some Dr Pepper and there is bacon in the vegetable crisper, for when you are hungry later. Please remember to plug the cell in.

love, mel

Second Try (Chemically-Altered Manifesto)

I guess I'll end it with God then, and I don't mean that colloquially. "Did you have to go to professional school to learn to talk that way?" Wheel/deal, away; with words. Of all the things I could've done and I'm just a sheep wearing sherpa and the only mountains I ascend are in my head, not including the habitual haptic happenstance that could make a mannequin melt. Yeah, that was about sex and yeah, he likes the mountain lion screams and the cadenced pants and the fuck-to-able backbeats of a drum machine and yeah, I like that he likes that.

Spellchecker was not 100% in love with "haptic".


God.

This Was The Year I Stopped Talking

I meant that to be "writing" at the end and I meant there to be an "I wish" at the beginning because this is actually the year I get my wisdom teeth pulled and etc. etc. who fucking cares, etc. et al. I'm dramatic about the small things, blase about the big: accent aigu at your leisure -- I'll just be over here: listening to electronica, hiccuping, running in circles and waiting to procreate again, again. Every child should have their picture taken whilst waving a sparkler - illuminated by the sparks, her profile was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. But she is too sacred to photograph and too subtle to sketch and too infinite to contextualize and too alive to dimensionalize. They are so tender and fragile and they only learn mean. And "we" are only the beaten, widowed, orphaned "them."

I resolve to make it better for her and for him.