no balance

spitting shitfaced bullshit belligerently
with no sense of balance
berating with snapping sharp consonants
teetering and sneering insults, i
sling shit at everyone standing around

seething and snarling at foreign figures
only recently friends
tottering totems saying nothing now
dismembering these symbols, i
misremember their meanings unfound

shitting out an oversensitive screaming stream
of bellicose nonsense
spouting torrentially, smearing and staining my senses
straining no longer to stand, i
topple to the ground

JWR

Form with function, yet hardly functioning, too busy fathoming and fornicating.
It's more like floundering, really, even with the immense understanding belying that Fall.
Frivolous fledgling, fondling this freedom, pondering that forgiveness.
And yet still, frying the backs of your eyeballs for superficial thrills.

Who are you? Better question - you are who? Here is who you arent.
Your whole self. (Though I suppose through and through, this is physically you.)
An instantiation; proof that you exist. But more just a pointer we point to.

When you die, you're really gone. And there's no use asking.
But if you asked where? I'd point neither here nor there.
Because where you really are, we can't point to. Not in the air.

VLS

argentines want to drink my beer.

I am walking on clouds
high above where
argentines want to drink my beer
that i sip through a straw
& they confuse me with
my passport
& see me as a name they can't pronounce
consonant clusters which
are so natural become
unnatural
unnaturally broad & slender

But I confuse them too:
with friends & enemies
with words & ways of walking.
Why see difference
when you can see sameness
& similarity?
Why take when
you could receive?
& in giving a dollar or 4 pesos
what is returned?
what is the value of experience?
of jumpstarting braincells to
take in stimuli?
It is the returning which teaches
us to open.

But the argentine who wants
to drink my beer
still picks fights with me
from 5000 miles away.
I tell him "if you want to go
outside that's your problem"
& he says "do you wan' to go ou'side?"
I say "no, I want you to go outside-
I paid to be here"
& we walk away from trouble
but not from the problem.
Later in the bathroom after
5 handshakes
he tells me my presidents fuck
his country (with no specifics)
I'm holding my dick
& my tongue
& rolling my eyes.
He thinks he's educating me
But all he really wants
is the cigarette I don't have
& the beer I finished.
he doesn't want to fight
he wants to talk about it.
he wants to demonstrate
in the street
every Thursday & 2nd Sunday
of the month.
"When you go home you make change"
he gave me no specifics
but cardboard & a fence post
can't change much.

Now I'm riding much
closer to the ground
at home where
other people will want to drink my beer
& I will give it to them
If they will only ask.

PDM

9/18/10

reading old manifestos is like looking into lost, mad pasts,
and the future isn't anything like it seemed it'd be when
writing those lines in tiny black notebooks, tightly bound,
in tiny, ramshackle black print.

looking at old photographs is like looking into lies
and the future isn't anything like it seemed it'd be when
the flash went off, when our smiles told some impossibly small fraction of the story,
without any of the depth that makes reality real.

looking inside is like digging through your own mess,
and the future isn't anything like it seemed it'd be when
you left things muddied, half-forgotten, knowing you'd be back to dig,
unaware of how different your digger would be

JHS

I don't want to perceive infinity

I don't want to perceive infinity
to braid my mind infinitely
into unknowable patterns
of mind
from Socrates to Plato
unasking their own answers
in a writhing synergy
of mind
to me
unknowing nothing of my own mind
noting a few patterned infinities
in the singular synapse
that is my perception

JWR

A Sonnet Regarding Poetry's Inability to Fully Recreate an Experience Beside a Brook (That I May or May Not Have Had)

If I should stop to stand beside a brook
(if I should ever be so near to one)
and stoop to ground to get a better look
and gently graze its softly glittered run,
or should I brookside toss a stone to bed
to hear hardscrabbled rubble babble good,
or should I shout across the bank instead
to hear high hollow echoes in the wood-
If any of these actions I should take,
(if any of these sequences occur)
should I, in pauses there- which I should make-
should I attempt to play at raconteur
and write the wooded brook, it would be nice.
But one poor man's recounting won't suffice.

JWR

One a.m (a different work in progress)

hot dog wrapped in cheese
I am 1 a.m
Day 32
I am 1 a.m
cloudy I'm sure
I am at 1 a.m
recognizing some inadequacy
in television
I am 1 a.m (when I am
amazed by the planet)
[1 a.m] I am
in High definition
I am 1 a.m
Fade to blue
the new color of t.v.
i am 1 a.m
...no really…
I am 4:16 a.m and I am ready to fall asleep
but not quite ready
the tv beckons
it's quality cable, ya gatta admit
it don't quit
it's still kicken after
1 a.m I am
soon taken over by infomercials at 4:17 a.m

PDM

Beer the Band

                                      by Chris Svetlik

sunday

two men are quietly making love
in an empty bar
on a sunday
falling into their beers
leaning in
listening
saying something meaning
"i'm lonesome"
"me too"
But where are all the lonesome women?
As I'm worrying about where they're at
I turn the corner
& there she is
Beautiful & lonely
So I set the table for one
and she says
"it's actually for two..."
& I go off the lonely one.

PDM

here

here
here where we stand
on foreign land
here where we aren't us
where we're everything we've known
that we know that we don't
that we've grown
here we sit
or sleep or lay
or recover
on a couch
others stand
in other spots
in high hopes
in silly shrines
and let them
and envy them
if you must
if you're sad
if you're happy
if you wait
i'll arrive here
i'll be good
but i'd rather be here
but i'm here
for a sec
for now

NDW