Mr. Tribe of Night

1.

tensile
secret filaments

anemone-like
radiating in quantum
around the head

astrally
fuck yes

elongated
is your
wavy bloom

winding
shifting
covert

you are yet
what
can't be seen

2.

Who hasn't gathered a few
regrets along the way?

Skulking uphill
in a gray driving rain.
Weary, lightheaded.

Mr. Tribe of Night.
With that hungry
feeling.

A thousand wasted nights.

Well,
you did it to yourself,
fool.

So better
let it count.

1998

1.

A victim of the insane. Myself, yeah,
but also this ruinous city of beasts.
I stood outside Grand Central
smoking a butt, staring in my lazy way
at the whirling traffic,
streaming crowds,
shiny demons;
the icy trickle in my gut
not of pilfered Stoli (yet), but of utter dearth.
Dead humans. In me, in them. Same.
Nothing good grows
in concrete, nothing pure is born
in stillness. Far away
and gone then rode
the last cries from my lightning glissando,
chased down from Eastern mountains
and beaten into slave songs.
Shattered guitars
mulled into corn cakes
for the prisoner, dumped penitent
from his hospital bed.

A broken shell
cracked now and forever,
cradled in a barman's
trembling
hands.

2.

Sucked down to sleep you go,
pickled,
sprawled
and battered on a peagreen
divan (yes divan)
handed down from some clan
of homoerotic madmen and striving
batshit artists,
a cursed couch and wrinkled,
rancid with sweat,
your sweat,
the tepid issuance of your blanched
midnight hours,

too few. Sweltering drops
of crude, look, it's
you streaking the curving
caked up back of sodden sleep.

Scholiosis, you drink
too much, is what
a friend once told me; your head's on fire,
is what the shrink said; and it was (and is)

My Strat is gray, no longer shiny;
her cherry lights is all but gone. Now she
just a subway minstrel, picked
up, beat down
and left for dead on the L train, nostrils
slashed, an ordinary slattern. Oh,

I am Midnight Dragon seed,
quite a tall boy, but with ashen feet.
Falling hard is sweet
and easy

your head don't feel it
when your heart gets
so wasted, lost and found
and lost

again.

go home

or Jane if it please ye

Crap runs downhill.
Dies on a barstool
with a bright lemon
rind grinning in its maw.

Work is walking John,
black blood in his face,
ice flecks in his mane --
he's going to make it.

Bright line of the noon
horizon
versus a bent knife
thrown spastic

at dusk,
in oily fog. Thud.
Swallowed up
in marsh muck.

Pick.
Go on,
do
it

I am an idiot

Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility…

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

3 days dry

Speck of an ego.
An abhorrent sense of self.

Feeling unfairly singled out
for being electric amplified wasted,

roughhoused past
one hundred hangovers,

the glory and the doom.
Running the elusive lingo,

treble lines amplified,
oscillating fast and wide

in wavelengths you'll never
understand. Me neither. So

depressingly common is it, and
nothing's more boring

no one ever really quits

his gin-soaked mouth a bleeding storm drain of cryptic fuckheadology

*

woke up, ejected from the edge of unconsciousness no less than four times, in a panic, his mind swirling with the colors of galaxies, crab nebulas, space dust, infinite terror. these visions no doubt a product of the silently flashing TV in the darkened bedroom; nonetheless, you can't see that shit and not fear that somehow maybe you're losing yourself

*

found in trance. in transparency

far too nothing

Killed my old blog dead, I did.
Awhile back now.
I was so compelled for reasons I'm loath to cite,
because I chose them.
That guy Craughmby was a drag anyway, but he is me
(and we are all together).

Candor is what counts.
File that away.

Fuck it,
I don't feel
like working; I feel like
straightening my head out.
Yeah. I

keep going around
with these broken lines,
the brute routine, day in and day out.
Everything you do and think,

I mean everything.
For instance,
beer is like water
and I yearn for feelings gone
that can never be again.
Who the fuck wants to hear
that?

Better to substitute disguises
made from words, magical
self-conceits leavened by crumbs
of strange being, devout desire.

Crippled guitar sounds
bleeding out, backward emotions
trapped in the bare air,
sounds of ore,
cauterized,
immune
to logic.

(OK, you have your anonymity back:
now what the fuck did you want it for?
For explaining
how crippled triangulate
methodologies of seeing, wanting,
but not doing can color an entire
human experience?)

show, don't tell.

delete

corporation t-shirt

Creeping miasma,
blob of human paste;

You are as plankton
lurking in green light,

Asphalt seas.
You're losing it down here.

Twirling flakes,
death in the parking lots.

The wind is wide white
and howling glory,

Breeding dread in certainty.
Fuck that shit

Basics

Mind imbroglio;
an everyday predilection
for smoke,
for impairment.

How easily I might have stepped off
in one ice-clad blue winter night,
away from your complex,
your hysterical chambers.

Always the refrain: keep
walking the path, all alternate
routes are
occluded.

Where you
would be
cannot be
known.

Tuscon, Arizona; California grass

A slack-faced apparition of pointless revelry
deflated. A bilious premonition of cross-eyed,
callow ambition. Torn up scraps from one of her paintings,
a raped and sullen Pleiades littering my tattered carpet.

Were all lines
I could have used
back in the day.
Were lines I did indeed use,

I did indeed,
I did indeed

*****

I feel a blessing here. Funny, I've been gone for years. But I'm turning on the radio and they're playing songs I used to know. So I'm happy all the way home. Thinking about the past. Yeah, I'm happy all the way home. Turning out my blues. I feel monotony. While the guy I used to be, he'd be drinking at the open feast, I've got my head bowed for the least of my brothers all the way home, thinking about my past. Yeah, I'm scrabbling all the way home, churning up my blues... The Lord carries all our hearts; we're created on the road. As for the burden on my back, I gladly bear the load

the mail

urgently written
sent
and received
it was

(and it was all about
me)

file 313

An arid, monochromatic winter, unleavened by any sense of crisp or clean

Is what I’m talking about

Be a good reader of books and of times;
have scansion; be honest.
And if you must misbehave,
don’t kid yourself

Is also
What I’m
talking about

The important thing to note about here
and other places like it elsewhere on this
goddamned fucking
Internet

Is that
it is for me and
it is for you,
whoever and wherever and

whenever
and (oh) whatever
you
or I

might
be.

salted wounds
salted wombs

salted earth
salted hearth

On its face, American culture has
been so mean
so base and
so violently idiotic
for so long

That catatonia,
ambivalence,
wanting to hide,
clam up and get wasted

Are all understandable
reactions

And I will tell you today
that I feel that I have
heretofore made out of failure

an art form, a paralytic-minimalist performance methodology
of kicking back into slack
perfected by rabid monks, sung by the decadent
foaming mouths of deaf-mute tone-poets

[I used to play guitar and sing. the day I stopped was the day
I discovered that what I was doing absolutely sucked
more than it
absolutely didn’t]

I'll tell you that a sad realization to have on a Friday afternoon is that you’ll pretty much have to
stop drinking if you’re ever going to accomplish much;
drinkin is a writer’s worst enemy, son. And best friend. And worst enemy. And also
a great friend.

[well, the Friday afternoon before an ice fishing trip is not
the time to take this particular horse of ambition by its reins
but I will be driving tomorrow

so that means I’ll be mainly straight]