Mt. Jell-O

Ewb

2008-04-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

The confused spider
Spun a web so inane,
Flies died happily
Just to be inside her.

She never ate them.
An insect gallery
Webbed without purpose,
Aesthetically static.

The starving artist
Saw the web for its pain.
Dance of a criminal,
Gunmetal breakfast.

Crimson masterpiece
Caught in a crime scene.
It was ruled a suicide;
Never blamed the spider.

Untitled

2008-04-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

Blubbery cobbler
Moist fork

by Emily Leik

Radioscope

2008-04-21T20:25:00.000-07:00

On top of a bench
on top of a mountain
wishing I could fly.
Just like that bird of prey,
lofting with his time,
surveying, swooping
in for the kill.

I’d give up all the rest for that.

You talk about disembodied
spirits and flying dark and
white energy, polar light
stark, embattled - not
muddied as I
prefer to interpret.

Yonder, there is a radio-
tower man with a
scope of some sort.
I wonder if he is
aware that the condor
flies and vice versa
that the man radioscopes.

Tumbling down a hill these
days, I think about birds and
words much more
than I think about silly
afterlife theories.

Ponies

2008-04-07T16:16:00.001-07:00

Little girl duped out
with your pink doll
Loosen the ribbon
Unfold the napkin
Topple the glasses
I’ll croquet to you
In the Oklahoma
June and we’ll breathe
Together after all.

A Blackened Fall

2008-04-07T16:15:00.001-07:00

Motherfuckers that skip and slurp
On their merry way to land
And head pressure ping-pong
Reverberating whiskey dance

Cooler is the gust of wind griping
On a cheek as words begin
To echo in the skull

Innocent at first, a tumble of
Liquid inside body tank changes
Equilibrium :: The teacup tips
On a saucer and–

Razors upon
Awakening to freezing
Formaldehyde mask, Bonjour
“Tell Brenda I’m here,
I fell off a bridge.”

Back crack split pelvis
Keep it still and even
And then you inhale this.

Irish Ball Game

2008-04-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

Black shot &
McGillicutty Mistress

Floating

2008-03-24T15:47:00.002-07:00

You said I said
‘We’re floating on a cloud,’
I pinched but the numbness.
Somewhere, an Indian train.
Tears and raisins
scattered the bedsheets.
Nests of blank pages, no lines

Owl Sex

2008-03-24T15:47:00.001-07:00

Toothbrush
motion of the owl:
A ruffled fracas of
sepia and sage.

Guesestina or A Dream For M

2008-03-24T15:45:00.002-07:00

Fondly, our guests decide to stay,
their looming absence posing as a chore.
Cuddled outside, the itchy frost.
We strike up a flame for them,
beckoning door, hill weathervane away.
Lack of travel not seen as lack of spirit.

I kiss up her leg, that’s the spirit!
Beckoned silk forwent the pew to stay.
Bumbling in the bible hall, the way
after morn, un-preach the chor-
us, pitching at us staccato frost,
our sloppy music a snack for them.

Following, our guests still out in them-
selves, finding no more time for frost.
Hovering over our bodies, a pride of spirits.
Beckon them here, we do to stay.
Cornucopioltergeistic is the chore.
Sanctuary, the color gardenia away.

Not featherwine could pull mine eyes away.
Über tanned, her negative of frost
skin. Thighs in vice with legs to squeeze them.
Holiday not prescient of a chore,
or somnific leash, my own pet spirit.
Atop blue playground slides our daughter stays.

Guests, displaced, now writhing in the frost,
a flound-fish wretch expounds from them,
threatening to husk their lazy bones away.
Never in our kitchen shall they stay,
pessimistic micro-treated spirits,
waiting on our order for broken chores.

City visit dreams made of recycled chores.
She comes inside, to shake hands with them:
the angels, not the guests who went away.
Golden juice, they pour into her spirit.
While the water births from dying frost,
I pour into the place I am to stay.

Out of M’s chore, some shiny guests to stay.
Frosted sun hair, two three four of them,
dancing allgood spirits, we float away.

Awake

2008-02-26T10:12:00.000-08:00

Drawn shades in the new castle morn
Feeling ache of laureth sulfate -
Bruised inside.

Cover me you awkward freckle
Paint me yellow, stargaze me
A brainflower - Iris - falls right out.

I love your soil and the way you bend
Evokes smell of gasoline - I miss you
I am only Van Gogh's bad ear.

Rape

2008-02-08T09:15:00.000-08:00

Where do you call home,
pickle jar on the sidewalk?
Suck my fucking balls.

Average School Day

2008-01-30T19:31:00.000-08:00

John lumbered out the front door into a morning frost that made his bones ache from the inside out. He was eleven minutes late. This was no unusual occurrence. Some of the toasted maple leaves swung wildly on their stems in the September wind, hanging on with their few last fibers in protest of the inevitable liberation. The cold was well premature for Connecticut this time of year. John had neglected or forgotten (it was nearly impossible to distinguish which) to wear an overcoat, and clutched his torso with blue-white hands.

“Jeez it’s fuckin cold,” he muttered into a tuft of frosty breath, eyes half open.

The car door took some effort to budge from the ice, and in his struggles John observed the strange star-like patterns of frost littered across the hood of his Camry. He tried to connect this phenomenon with something he had learned in chemistry a year earlier, but failed to recall anything on the arrangement of water molecules in solid form.

“So then her cousin Ty shows up dude, out of the blue, just to check on the beach house. What are the chances this time of year? I had to jump out a goddamn window into a hedge without any pants on. Screwed up my knee.” Dodge was John’s best friend. He always told stories first period while they pretended to learn Post WWII American History with an unbelievable vivacity for eight o’clock in the morning. Usually they were about girls he almost laid or got to go down on him. The stories never seemed to cease, but John was a really good listener.

“That’s crazy man… crazy.”

At this point, John had become more familiar with the carpets at B. High than anything else. He was a chronic sloucher, the result of which was a downward perspective on the world. It was not an act of shyness or anything of the sort; rather a naturally awkward posture. Walking the halls, John would always trace the esoteric carpet patterns and let his mind run away with them. His stride would assume a rhythm so as not to step on the gaps, etc.

This hobby, of course, took a backseat when any of the girls on Dodge’s “Top 25” list happened to be walking in front of him. On such an occasion, John’s trademark slouch served a perfect cover to admire the finer points of the contours in Lauren Fitch’s jeans. He even had the stitch patterns on the back pockets memorized according to brand. By this indicator he was more apt to tell you what day of the week it was than by looking at a calendar.

Such was the trail John followed on this morning back to the locker bay when something caught his attention. A herd of students were gravitating to the corner of the dining commons near the main exit. Several of them were streaming through the middle with their coats and backpacks, apparently leaving the building at 11am.

“That’s peculiar.”

The remaining students were corralled on either side of the exit flow, their attention tuned to the giant news-ticker-apparatus situated awkwardly on the wall between two sound-absorbing panels and underneath the Bangladesh flag (every world flag hung around the dining commons as if it were the UN). The school had invested 11 grand in this clunky scoreboard the previous year, and John couldn’t even read it from across the common.

“What a god awful investment.” he thought aloud.

On the way to his locker, John passed a few of his friends playing poker or hearts in the adjacent bay, as was the norm.

“You guys know why everyone’s leaving?”

Simon Bohr, a Ritalin-gobbling pointdexter who ran a meth lab in his basement, as it were, looked up from his cards with a blank stare.

“Oh... a plane just collided with the Statue of Liberty or something,”

Brian Heinrich, a slightly more rational individual, interjected:

“‘Or something?’ It was the World Trade Center, you junky.”

“How could they make that mistake, there are a million flights into New York everyday?”

John cut across the commons, weaving the lunch tables and a few kids wearing wool hats, playing hacky-sack and giggling like assholes. The crowd watching the ticker had gotten much bigger. There were at least a hundred kids staring up at that damn thing like a UFO just landed. Dodge was there.

“What’s the deal, man?” John queried, feigning oblivion.

“They’re saying someone hijacked a plane and flew it into the twin towers, dude,” he returned, devoid of the spunk that fueled every first period story. “Bobby and Joey Mellon’s mom came in and pulled them out of class. She was jabbering about nukes within a 500 mile radius or some shit.”

“Jesus,” was all John could muster. He didn’t really know what this meant. No immediate reaction happened beside the verbal acknowledgment.

On the outskirts of the crowd stood Lauren Fitch. John spotted her; she was sobbing into her hands. He remembered from a conversation in economics that Lauren’s dad worked in the city's financial district. Now his eyes couldn’t stray from her face, which resembled a tiger’s on account of the tear streaks running down her artificially bronzed cheeks.

“Jesus,” he said to himself, and this time he really meant it.

None of John’s teachers said anything about the news in his remaining classes, but the lessons they gave were mostly empty ones. Nobody could concentrate. Mr. Freund was even more distant than usual, and Mrs. Elperina, one great big giant Russian heart of a physics teacher, spent the period telling a story about her escape from the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. John had always paid attention in physics since he liked Mrs. Elperina. Somehow he realized the look on her face now was the same one she must have had while watching Gorbachev on T.V. He doubted that he would ever fully understand thermodynamics.

The ride home was off-putting for John. The sun beamed high in a cloudless sky and it was at least 30 degrees warmer – practically t-shirt weather. John thought it all very plastic on this particular occasion. Neil Young’s Harvest, to which he’d normally be crooning along behind the luxurious privacy of the dashboard, seemed distracting, like white noise on a 3am television. The driver’s seat was itchy; everything was a little off. John wished he could be shivering and stuffing down a stale Nature Valley again, driving back toward the mind-numbing normalcy of an average school day.

For the first time in a long while, John was conscious in the act of opening the front door to his house. He knew what the bolt would sound like as the knob turned and it released. He knew the exact amount of force to use while leaning through, and the proper angle of the wrist for a discreet closure. All this made perfect sense to him, yet strangely it seemed like he was learning it all a second time. At the kitchen table was John’s father and neighbor Bud Dwight from across the street. They were drinking a glass of whiskey.

“Hey there pal,” said John’s father. He immediately turned his attention to the other room. Bud said nothing. His son worked on Wall Street.

He wandered into the family room, where Lisa, Bud’s wife, and John’s mother sat on the couch, ghost-faced and failing to hold back tears. A smoking tower featured on CNN with a pile of white ash beside where its twin used to be. The tickers and headlines blended into one useless globule of intersecting text to the point that John had no interest in reading them. He knew it was all early speculation anyway. Besides, the picture said a lot.

The quiet in the house became unbearably eerie. Even Molly, their yappy dog was sleeping on an armchair. He wanted to speak up but no one seemed ready to say anything. Before he could drive, John would often escape the confusion to the woods behind his house. He decided this course of action would do just as well now.

As he strolled, the crackle of leaves was all that ran through John’s mind. He wanted badly to be appropriately sad, but that seemed impossible. It felt like the world had stopped turning, and everything was a life-size porcelain model of itself and John was a bird flying low enough to see it all without anything blocking his path. At that moment, he wished it would all crumble.

John’s favorite tree was a big old oak rooted smack in the middle of the woods like the pole of a circus tent. It had a bunch of quirky branch stubs and obscure growths lacing the trunk. There were a few planks nailed rusty into one of the larger branches where a tree house that John’s father built him used to stand. John climbed up to the boards and watched a robin procure a meal from the birdfeeder in his mother’s garden. He hadn’t seen his yard from this angle in a long while.

Suddenly, a strong gust of wind came and a cluster of leaves snowed down upon the lawn. The birdfeeder leaned and finally toppled, sending the robin on his way. It was seriously cold again.

“Gonna be a long winter,” John sighed as he leapt from the weathered boards where his refuge used to stand and went to fix the disorder in the garden.

Oakend (C.P. Night)

2008-01-30T19:27:00.001-08:00

Old bus receipt, we boot the hills at dusk
A lonely photograph home on the desk
She waves slowly and marches in reverse
Her damage done; the pounding in my head

Intangible – record new document
When wined-up ghosts fly forth from head to foe
My eyes don’t meet their shifty cocaine gaze
They chase their trains and say “I am the King.”

Horn ornaments hang round a winding tree
His jazzy vinyl tablet is a birth
Trumping out the snows, yet wandering lust
This frosted over Charlie Parker night.

Around Fresno

2008-01-28T12:08:00.000-08:00

Numerical music
transposed into air, shell-
Spotting turtle hills.
Encyclouds:
a dragon,
Archaeopteryx,
et cetera.

Quiet Oaxaca dancer
(Tornado.)
Planks & iron, by and by
jimmied up to the great spin
Chimney soup.

Orange plains,
gas empty light,
Tomorrow's cumulus.
Joy is an
Apple-smile.
Ultimately the cow is to be hit.

Basquiat 11:57

2007-12-20T09:32:00.000-08:00

Sad chocolate
Philistine
Crumbcake
Crumbling
down in
Over my cheeks
Ramparts
& ear cavities.

How to Bake

2007-11-19T17:38:00.001-08:00

Strain the whole Earth
Thru a colander
Into a mind, mind you
Into a mind.
Funnel all the feathers,
Cram that shit
If you have to –
I had to.

Swim and pluck my
Ruffled feathers,
Fucks & coughs up weather
This loon can swim
But ducks instead, red eyed
Into a morphing pressure
Cooker, that’s her slit

Trim me fast, walking
Cut off my head
With a melty scissor
Before she swallows me whole
At least deny her that

Loon slick on a mountain slide
To get back to the lake
My neck, frozen,
Cuts off energy
Brain into a body,
Embody a brain
I don’t topple
Not topheavy
Not unlike the turtle
Smashed beneath a chevy

Shooter with your pellet gun –
That one that shoots.

I Dream You Out of Me in Noiseblocks

2007-09-18T23:10:00.000-07:00

Swan
On a Crouded Pond

Obelisk Ten or Viper
Broken Icicle Tremor
Shiver
Me Timbers

Ou Ou Ou Ou Destroy
Mushroom Observation
Arithmatician Crime Sauce
In Scientific Labs
Shrieking Ladies in Glass Jars

Nightwind Befuddle the Princess
Crafting Chasms

Train Whistle Out that Dead Swan

Whalesounds

2007-06-30T12:46:00.000-07:00

The bassoon frequency of
whale's call mumified
In to brine playfriend
schoolhall she neatly
Spikes my curiosity

The Dragontree

2007-06-16T04:25:00.000-07:00

Incandescent, insects
they hover beside me
harmony and the dragontree
tears

a wave between this page

music, the, it illuminates it
nothingness
picadilly songbirds linger

the return of their words
inconsequential --> it befalls
the semestral
equation.

i broke my wordstream
over the wristbranch
falling to december

a must chance
this hour
i forgot months' power
they stumble at the
spectrum before me
lights they adore me

John Smith the guns
bombardment we me
and the dragontree
find shelter

It breathes
not welters
Peculiar
sat in this

sound belle,
trees,
a dog cell,
book,
a vein,
huge down branches,
upside

Where is
the sick
morphing
noise - all
ambient
?

Bees

2007-04-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

The Kamikaze Venom Vainly
Queen vs. coiled pilots
Warring can-smoke
Dead thoraces

Peace over Honey and
they quiet the graze
they become our
Grids of milk.

Bees revolt! They sting
And sting and sting and
Die, triumphantly
Little diving trumpets

Escalator

2007-04-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve got an out-of-water suitcase
Packed with umbrellas
I promise, peddle:
Fling to people
Cling to the ankles of clouds

I am a blind dolphin
Riding an escalator
Writhing, a deflating balloon
The rain flows over us,
Black ink from a printing press

Your smile hops mountains
Of Jell-o, beside red
Happiness frogs scatter
Only for an afternoon

In truth, gelatin proof of rain.