MBLS

I used to collect crucifixes. Birdwings. Postcards. Oatmeal cartons. Bunch of stuff like that. Now I make mobiles, essentially a way to make use of my useless collections. I noticed this many years ago: If you tie a string around something useless, then suspend it above your head, it becomes inherently interesting. I don't understand why, exactly, except for about a million psychological and aesthetic reasons.

Snowstorm Freedom Experiment

Beverly sez there's a big snow storm comin'. But the real news is that we did it: We upgraded on Pandora. For thirty bucks a year, we now get to listen to music commercial-free. Say what you will about the American plutocracy, this is freedom.

Bird Walk

It is important to know one's place in the order of things. Take last night, for example, when, on the walk home from work, I found myself under a vortex of blackbirds swarming & winging all turvy in the sky. There was maybe a million of them, maybe more, and all of them caw-ing and cheeping and finally filling two great big oaks on Jefferson Street, substituting for the leaves that fell a month ago. As I passed under their deafening bird harmonics and wingflap, I drank a few of the birds into my dumb heart & thought of auguries of yore, before hustling home so as not to indulge flight of fancy and risk of birdshit. I am man, after all, and belong not to the domain of the winged.

Kiki

A few days ago,
an old creative writing
student of mine,
"Kiki, from Chicago"
stopped me on the sidewalk.
"Hey, J.," she said,
safe inside her hood.
It was pissing rain
that day, brutally
cold & windy
along the pedestrian mall.
"Kiki, right?"
"Yeah."
She: young, brown, & radiant.
Me: distracted, on my lunch break,
head full of ideas that would later
turn into poem-stories.
"How are you? Still writing?"
"Nah. I'm a social worker now."
Her style, I later recalled,
was kind of a hip-hop thing.
Very Wu-Tang, very Nas,
except, you know, feminine.
Her subject matter?
Growing up broke
and fatherless
on the South Side calles
of the city.
Playing house with
baldheaded dolls.
The rape that had happened.
Seraphim on the stroll.
Room full of books.
And then - college, escape.
The years unfurl.
"Cool, Kiki. We need you."
I said. And we both
smiled the smile
of the tenacious -
and this was all on earth,
a million miles
from the angelic realm.

December Bone Bag

Sleeping in my pages.
A one-man walkabout
in minor chords
as the luck of a snowfall
caps picket & plinth.

Brumal

And so it begins.

buddy holly sez rock

was composed outta the landscape, our dirt daubed corner of time and space, followin its nose & skeetin the bleary-eyed five elements and the one four five sonic cuneiforms lifting their skirts the ten thousand things resultant flowerin that Chet Atkins style eatin white dirt an hoppin up like a shower of procaine to a big baby Texarkana welcome gettin grown into howlin turnaround murderin it electric pickup careenin axe-beat of Les Paul pull offs hammer-onin' the devil back down to the Hades in the crow's eye it sprang from like be-stripmined shanty songs from the domestics in the cracked arroyo before the banjo movement come rainin and hawkt it all down to the dupont certified ol man Mose the original negro Neptune's oleo show dragging its certifications through neon and corporate cantina where it's spitting blood back of the carcinogenic drum an these wings pierced to my back dont seem to ache as much in the nowadays cascade of burnt numerologies married to a greasy chemical compound lilting over your area with the pocket still burnin up my vein like a lost bulletproof gal in a lightnin storm