allow

Fundamentally a slacker in the low cycles, that'll never change. Wax and wane, bi-polar ambition.

Need to adhere to a certain sense of whimsy. Get whimsical about past failures, past shortcomings. Really, it seems like that's all that's left sometimes.

The germ, the insistent impulse to do the thing will never leave. No matter what you do; slack off or get down to work. So might as well work. And not worry. Serve the trance.

When the thing starts to take on a life of its own, then and only then can you really run with it. A certain workmanlike discipline however can be thought of as a learnable attribute. Perspiration. Anyone can do it. A matter of choice, nothing more.

Take action. Be hard-headed.

Practice.

intercalafragilistic

Again. Try it again. Just once more. You can do it.

Snow, the willing snow. Dream the willing dream. Transparently. Dream hard, walk gently. Say gently. Do gently.

Frozen mind. My mind. My mind is frozen solid. But my heart plays the blues all night long. Strike, reverse, switch back.

Don't think. Bear down. Do right. Do what you should do. Do it right. Observe a few rules. Have some fucking discipline.

Everyday. You need to do it everyday. Whether you want to or not. You know you want to. Plus, you can do it at work.

Cry the willing dream. Walk gently in the snow. Go gently where you have to go.

Roethke. Dylan Thomas. Don't want to be too much like those guys. Except in meter if I could. Never mind that.

Winehead. Could be the name of a guy in some book. A book that I write. Like that's going to happen. Why can't it happen? It hasn't yet. But so haven't lots of things, and they can still. If I want it to and I want it, too.

No one cares, no one knows. Except me. OK, quite a few people care, but they don't know. A couple of people know. One or two and me. This is ridiculous.

Lottery winner, already near the apex. People getting blown up, getting wasted daily -- all over the world. Smarten up. Being an artist is over-rated. It's a curse. I've always fancied myself an all or nothing type of guy. But who knows if I really am. I'm clever like the moon. I'm here half the time. It's all about percentages. It's all about the horses.

The million yard gaze, the drunkard's eye. I've seen you, boy. Never let me drink bourbon; Scotch I can do. Drink rum and rage like a sailor said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw I hate drinking diaries. I'm cutting down. I'm cutting down bodies from the trees. Laying hands. Sending them back out, long past the fields. Aint it something

It's always something -- and it's always some bullshit. Truer words never were spoken to me.

No, we don't have Diet Sprite. This is bar, not a fuckin candy store.

Transmit the narrative. Going to be 35 in about a week. Drive the speed limit. You better stop fucking around. Except fucking around is what I do. OK, but write it. You can write some of it here. At least to get you started on your way. Slap yourself around a little. You can take it. Pick those feet up motherfucker.

Why can't I just blog like a normal baseline college-educated North American slacker with pretensions to this and that. I woke up, my head felt OK, I dithered my way thru morning exercises and a shower, I shoveled the driveway and let the dog run out back, it was snowing like a bastard, our plumber was coming to thwart a toilet that no amount of plunging would help, I drove to work, I put down an enormous deuce that I'd been saving (see: toilet, plumber) in one of the far remote bathrooms because when it's a bad one you don't want to potentially get busted inflicting that on the guy who sits in the cube next to you or any of your bosses, I ate a Lean Cuisine [Chicken Mediterranean] for lunch and an apple and a minor fuckload of Hot and Spicy Cheezits, I should be cutting down on me drinking but it's Friday and I'm probably going to get lit tonight because chief among my favorite pastimes is getting lit and zoning out listening to me old iPod. Next week however I'll be back to my new thing which is no drinky Sun - Thurs or Mon - Wed or what have you, when you go for about 4 days in a row dry you start to get terribly lucid and anxious to write, by you of course I mean I, and since lucid and writing and not unhealthy is what I want to be I should probably start. Normal blogging, I say. That's what the fucking people want don't you know. No they fucking don't. Hey at least I aint

I'll say it again. This is ridiculous. I don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in me.

So, this is what this file is for. What an Internet, what a world, what a world. You can call me Mike. Mike R. Okozzum.

Good thing you don't have to be funny. Or I'd be livin in a box. Under a tarp.

I wish I was a German Shepherd

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