1.

you know, i just watched Funny People and it made me think, i gotta be more honest while i'm up here. when i'm up here, i mean i'm alive. call me a sucker for unconventional friendship movies, but i don't want to lie anymore. this world is great.

2.

i think i don't have it in me anymore to be poetic. so i'll just play with form instead. and leave the text as unpoetic and as plain as possible. i don't think i'm trying too hard. i think i'm making sort of like an abstract painting. but for writing. and in reverse.

3.

so let me get back to the point. this world is great. i woke up this morning and saw my friends. and in the evening i ate quite a good meal. i played music. i watched a good movie. then it struck me to just write shit down. so i'm writing this shit down.

4.

i don't want to be fat anymore.

5.

god, i'm sleepy.

My Name in Reverse

I.

Nothing ceases to disappear. From the beginning where the child and the star

stain the void with brightness, to the language my teachers passed on to me

to understand these things. I dwell in what I do not fathom. Twin things:

the egg and the whole jungle I call life. Do not try to understand. The poem

is the poem, and this does not create between us a relationship. I speak

about rupture. The mouth opens. Just one. And many things speak. Don't be

like Adam who named every single thing. Be like the thousands of unforgiving

beasts that came after creation, dwelling in the absences where they prefer to dissent.

I prefer to relent.

II.

I am justified in killing my faith. I commanded it. I, who swore never again

to trust in Americans or Jews. I, who drew my own bastard Spanish blood,

who wrote beautiful verse by the sea until the insight was struck out of me.

I stayed in my room all day until possessed by a tongue so foreign

it could only be mine. And no human prayer would lift the curse from my being.

No benediction from my bodiless problem: I have no name, you see.

In my tongue, there is no need for a name.

III.

Take away madness from joy and all you're left with is useless laughter.

Remove struggle and you will not find anything. This is known as peace from where

I come from. That singular incident where you and I are lifted from our countries

and buried in the negative equivalent of a million tons of space. The heart

is the heart. Nothing more. Because it is more important to float away than

to remain inconsolable; the whole body should shudder out of love.

IV.

I propose that every cat must die. This way, there will be no cats. It is much better

than destroying a race of humans. This is the simplicity of math. Take a variable,

and destroy it.

V.

My forefathers insisted that they came from inside a man and a woman who came

from inside a giant cosmic bamboo tree. This tree was split by cosmic lightning.

This lighting was split from a single source of light. If you divide and divide these

mythical things, you will come to realize as much as I have that it is a terrible

waste of time to make up stories. I prefer to speculate on the terrible horrors

which will inadvertently destroy us. My favorite form of extinction is poetry.

VI.

A good preparation for death: one bright morning, when you wake up and see

that your consciousness still hanging from your bones, command yourself

not to rise. And by the time you lose track of yourself, it will feel like you are

slowly disappearing.

VII.

I once picked a fight with the universe, and it won. It was the only victory I have ever had.

Mondays are for Abandon

Mondays, my friend, are for abandon.
Mondays tell you to move outside your
bathroom, and call me crazy but I think
there's some heaven in leaving.
Mondays perch on your shoulder as the
suns grow heavy with lifegiving speed.
Mondays will whistle with you, or if not,
sit down beside you and weep
if they have to. Mondays break promises,
and dive. Mondays go to bars and thrive
on the people who live through them.
Mondays go as they please.

Tuesdays dine at parks and weave
through babies' hair, and sink into
televisions. Tuesdays forsake
mother time and leave strange notes
on their pillowcases. Tuesdays love
to eat grapefruit. Tuesdays are boring
but they swear they are trying to be
funny. Tuesdays slide away and avoid
swimming pools at all costs.
Tuesdays are ready to get married.

Wednesdays are not. Wednesdays
comb through everything that's ochre
and spit it out into a ball. One Wednesday
is enough in a week. Wednesdays
will save you from zombies. Wednesdays
will stay up at dawn and forget themselves
when they see that they are no longer
needed. Wednesdays light cigarettes and
take their coffee black. Wednesdays
always watch their backs.

Thursdays play in bands and volunteer
at shelters. Thursdays never forget to take
their meds or partake in all this dividedness,
or swindle their ways into another side of
the half-truth, on the rib cage of a science
thought lost beneath the bellies of Tuesdays.
Thursdays complain about the apex of the heart,
about the martyr who would stand still,
about the room in which a parcel of history
they so desire was created.

Fridays let the tongue in through the back.
Fridays are supposed to be quiet, but they have
no plans and are hence, inquiring. Fridays get
no sleep nor want for food, nor need love
at its bare minimum. Fridays lick the stale air
they were born from and feast on art. Fridays
last for millenia without decomposing. Fridays
cannot argue, thought with the fact
that they are going to end. Fridays betray
themselves over and over again, until, at last.

Saturdays burn so easily that they are used
often as a drink. Saturdays recognize the harmonies
in any song on the radio. Saturday's favorite word
is a myth that had forgotten how to be properly
told. Saturdays secrete the listless, the pardoned,
the survivors of a madman's memoirs, droplets
that coalesce into the funniest jokes, many other
selves. Saturdays rust. Saturdays must. Saturdays
get dizzy inside bookstores but stayfor the smell.
Saturdays rhyme with nitroglicerine at the back
of a basketball court and spin on the floor like there
ain't no tomorrow.

But Sundays insist that there is. Sundays will steal
your sadness and turn it into a crisp consonant at
the edge of every child's new voice. Sundays are
made to know that the best thing to do when you have
lost is to accept this, that you, dear friend have lost.
Sundays will walk with you down the stairs. Sundays
are doting on thier many unused coffins. Sundays
bleed enamel and have the gift of telepathy. Sundays
are arranging the dinner table. Sundays will break
bread with you and call you home.

Windows 7 is the shiznit!

So fast, so clean, so cool!

Phenomenon

sometimes what happens is instant.
the wave becomes a long white hush.
imagination crystallizes into machine.

sometimes tears turn into trees
when the moon is too pretty and
it is difficult to be sad. this happens

when the lover and the loved, love.
this happens when a light turns on.
as one intuits his way through sleep

or when an eagle is befriended, when
a tribe marries another tribe, when man
and city meet, when the pen i hold

suddenly becomes a reason. discover
what must be discovered. a fountain
of all the things that make us wake.

An Apology to Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Assuming That It Exists

I mean you no harm, I will say, as I blast on a record
of a celtic folk song from the fifteenth century. I will

step into the neon ether and be absorbed by the doorway.
They may or may not take my brain and fuse it with

their machines. I will allow them everything I know.
I will show them why I sit sometimes by the lawn

and watch the sky turn orange. I will make them
understand why it is so important for me to marry

the girl I love. I will show them old photographs I keep
in my memory. Ones from my trip to the mountains

where I stood by a great old pine, looked on, and smiled
for the camera. I will make them understand what dew

smells like here on earth. It smells like rain that didn't fall,
but just floated down, sat on a leaf, and waited for morning.

If they find my sins looping at the back of my head,
then I will say this. Forgive me, if you could fathom

what forgiveness is. Look even farther into what i cannot
recall. Waking up a baby and crying. That terror I must have faced

coming up for air. Then tell me what it is you desire, great ones.
Tell me how I should make you stare at all my little joys

and outweigh them to all my people's failures. I am sorry for my
kind, I will humbly say. I mean you no harm. And if they did come

to destroy us, then I will show them what they face. I will
bother them with thoughts of me destroying a little animal.

Stepping on a grasshopper and burning dead leaves. I will
submit my saddest memory for neuro-scan. One gray Sunday

killing my feelings as I shot a dog an sat there until it smelled like fire.

this poem has a name.
i lose it while listening to the rain.
this poem gives itself time
to walk across my life as though
i were a lake, dark and warm
with the reflections of stars.
i believe in hope. i believe it is
the origin of sin. and this poem
listens sadly as it holds my face.
come rise with me, it says,
to the places you've forgotten:
the carousel and its lifeless horses,
grandfather's afternoons spinning
music on his turntable, music
coming from nowhere. and i lose
my face. or the idea of my face.
i lose my terrifying body and turn
in stead into water. ready to be
walked upon by things more faithful
than the human heart. this lie. this
poem and its name. telling me
what it is like to turn into the dark
river of words, into a spinning wheel
of memory. and loss. this poem
has a name. a name like any other.
a word. a sound. music.