Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife: 1 Page 12
Fine. Walk around all day like you just blew the Devil
and he didn’t warn you when he came Hot Tamales.
You are not the city of love. I undeclare you.
I am the city of love
and we executed the mayor years ago.
Eat a bag.
Paris,
I bring you a thousand ghettos in my knuckles.
I bring you capitalism in the beginning of my name.
I bring you everything wrong about America
which tonight is inherently right.
A brigade of light
charging through your pretense.
We will walk like the boss.
We will love like janitors.
We will drink like we were just laid off.
Tourist boats pass.
Bordeaux goes down.
We yell out
‘Bonjour you fuckin’ Frenchies,
Here’s to Scotland’…just to throw ‘em off.
Au revoir.
No si vous plait.
Voices in the night.
Three cans of graffiti.
You know the colors.
You know where the stars go.
A KICK IN THE CHEST
A KICK IN THE CHEST
When I do workshops for teens, I am always amazed at their perception and the freedoms they have over most adults. This is for them and every writer clawing into something scary. Struggle makes us fantastic. Remember that.
This page is a knife to the throat
of today’s poets trying to séance the ‘50s Beat poets
with craftless poetry,
lame snapping fingers,
bored tongues, eyes bleeding rust all over their new berets.
I cannot be that poster.
I cannot give you what you thought you might get.
I cannot give you stoner politics.
“Rasta is neither religion nor revolution
if practiced only while baked on a couch.”
I cannot be a revolution dealer
pushing for applause,
inflammatory phrases with no plan of action:
‘The system my friends is bringin’ us down…so we should fight together now.’
But how?
‘How.? Uh, that’s not my job.
Let me finish this bongload and then we’ll ask my third eye. Word eye. Society.’
Give their hearts action.
I will write until this mind becomes a roped-off crime scene
where failure was murdered.
How did the soap box turn into a broken polygraph?
This heart knows no yoga movement on the mountaintop of your chakras.
This heart is dredging gutters for other broken hearts.
This heart took an elevator to hell and brought you back text for souvenirs.
These shoulders are not to be cried upon for their blades cut through
tongues in cheeks.
The heart was once at peace but peace fit like a tuxedo on a red light whore.
And there are whores.
Show me a poet hungry for fame and money and I’ll show you a dead actor.
I’ll take a hot kiss in Hades over sex in a Mercedes.
Why?
So that if I curse the devil
my mouth can understand
the logic in the heart of the only angel denied mercy.
I want the action and the grit
and the blood inside your lips,
a knife to the throat of the poetry we knew.
It is:
A burglar breathing on your neck
stealing scenery while you sleep
and only the discarded beauty he keeps.
Like:
Hummingbirds with broken arms.
A police photo album of the suicidal breaking into heaven.
A superhero with cancer.
Boys street fighting for the feathers of dead doves.
A magazine where all the models advertise only things
that will kill you.
It’s time we gave them action.
The expected is the enemy.
The plan start in the writing of that which scares you,
that which kills you.
The thing that makes you weak is the thing that makes you real.
This is for the hearts that sweat for a different kind of
muddy, scarlet, Mother, I am broken but I am still fighting kind of beauty.
Honesty is never lost in translation.
Words were our wings…
now let them be rifles.
Aim for the heart.
MILLION DOLLAR BUM
MILLION DOLLAR BUM
Bums like to attack me. I think I have that ‘bum must attack’ look.
When bums walk toward you,
you are glad they aren’t carrying mirrors.
In a suit mauled by shovels and wind teeth.
The frittered heavy mouth of Miller’s salesman speaks
Hey brother, can you spare
a million dollars?
Your guard drops like porno clothes
A million dollars?
Yes, I am a high-class bum.
I ain’t got it today
Maybe tomorrow
What’s your name?
Oh, my name is long and everlasting.
If I started to tell you, I couldn’t stop.
But I can tell you yours for a dollar.
You nod.
He drapes the prune skin digits upon your head.
A bizarro phrenology begins.
You, son, are many sounds.
A violin played the hard way.
A heartbeat strapped to a landmine Congo.
You are the sound of walking sticks clicking in a Swiss cathedral.
When the congregation around you was blind and neutral
you ran a slide show of the Kama Sutra. Things are funny to only you.
Your name is the anthem for drunks converting
from verticalism to horizontalism
a worship song for gravity.
Your name is an elite circus
you often book with too many clowns
and not enough danger.
Your name is as understood as God.
He is not that awe sound.
You are not three words.
God does not speak English,
moves in feelings
among the water,
among catastrophes.
He is a feeling in your neck
that drops in your chest
and you feel like you’re dying
because you are.
Your grandfather bit down too hard
on a mercury glass thermometer,
swallowed it all so the butterflies would die,
passed it into your silverquick chemistry
and you wonder why when bottles break
you are overwhelmed with a feeling of empathy.
Your name is the suppressed crisis in an anchorwoman’s voice.
Your name is a wardrobe
that a lion and witch enter at a party
and say ‘Don’t I know you?’
Your name is
a diving board on a skyscraper.
For a name like yours,
the night never seems to get black enough,
Shotguns never shoot far enough,
Lovers never fuck fierce enough,
The bar fights never last long enough for the song to finish.
Your name is a melody that might not last long,
but listen…
Some melodies get stuck in people’s heads.
MILLION DOLLAR BUM
BORDER STEALTH
The acclaimed California painter Jerome Gastaldi used this piece for his fantastic people of the boats campaign about immigration. Although it isn’t funny, something funny did happen when I read it at the Buddhist University known as the Soka University with George Clinton, the Godfather of Funk. There was f
ree strange cheese. George is a cool guy that has an entourage of people in white follow him around. After many glasses, we got our picture taken together by the paper and I finally got to say something to him. With a plate of cheese in my hand I said, “George, does this cheese smell funky to you?” No response. That will probably be the last time we talk. This poem is for all the students of Venice High who have turned to writing as a savior. Especially Jorge.
Son,
there is kerosene flowing over the steady drums inside me.
It was time to change our destiny.
My hands could beat that ground no further
Generations of our family turning soil reminded men like me
of what they are,
not what they can be.
My chin is lead with misery.
I would rather take it with me into the earth
than pass it down to you
Hope hones patterns in your eyes
It will not go to waste.
This is why I had to leave you.
Son,
So that your children may not live in a house of broken radials;
So that your children may not wear their skin out
in someone else’s fields;
So that your children’s dreams are not packed with skulls;
We die in the embarrassment of refrigerated lobster trucks.
We die in the January steam of booby-trapped tunnels.
We die in the trunk of a coyote’s abandoned Honda.
We die in the onyx blackness of cargo containers where fear waits
like a tongue on a cutting board.
We die in the barbed wire that surrounds us
like the thorns of Christ.
Son,
I am a hummingbird’s wing welded to your heart,
for you may never see me
but know that I am moving within you.
Our people are moving
the way the smoke surrenders to the sky
from village piles of burning tires.
Close your mother’s eyes.
See me when you bleed
in the slow crimson we share flowing
down down your soil-stained arms.
See me when you are tired of suffering
in the orange fields of summer.
See me when it is your time to run.
Son,
I have not forgotten you. I have not forgotten our home,
But someday you might stand upon the shores of a better place,
pieces of salt bleached ponchos, wicker hats,
suitcases with hope’s fingerprints embedded in the handles
will wash to you,
A museum bouncing in the tide,
laced in barnacles.
Brothers whose dreams were too heavy to float,
Sisters too serious to turn back,
too hungry to wait.
When you hear of some of us falling,
some of your friends will say they failed
but if our brothers and sisters fall
they have still found escape.
For in a greater way
they made it,
for exhaustion is a passport to God.
Glorious collapse is a passport to God.
A trained bullet in your back while running
is a passport to God.
CAPTAIN CREAMS
Strippers invariably hate my poetry and many of them have butt rashes. Did I get in an argument with a stripper in lovely Austin, Texas after I read this? Yes. Did I try to tell her the poem to me was about happiness and not mutilated stripping? Yes. Did she say I put an itch in her ass meaning I was a jerk? Yes. I hope it puts an itch in your ass too.
I am a stripper with no arms.
I had fake arms but as everyone knows
strippers are very against fake stuff.
I tried the pole thing and almost waxed myself.
They built me a handicap ramp. I am not sure why.
I can walk just fine.
Happiness is a dollar bill.
True happiness though
is a five-dollar bill
and they are waving it in my face.
I try to point at them to put their happiness in my underwear
but pointing is hard.
People pay a lot of happiness for these expensive drinks and dances.
Sometimes the dollar bills
have retractable strings attached to them.
Man, that’s funny.
Except for the paper cuts.
Sometimes the g-string is empty
and my sense of smell is gregariously acute.
You know how when you lose your sight you get better hearing,
same thing. I lost my arms and now
I can smell like a motherfucker.
I just sit around and smell the others girls’ happiness backstage.
The other strippers hug me goodnight and I just stand there
and lean in a little
doing my best.
I make a little ‘hmph’ sound.
I say ‘Can I have some of your happiness? You pretty girls were given a lot.’
They say ‘No one can give you happiness. You have to earn it, and that means
shakin’ yo naked little ass a whole bunch.’
Some wave goodbye and I always say,
‘Smartass.’
THE RISE AND FALL OF JULIUS WALKER
This prose poem was written right after I witnessed a terrible car accident. Outside of the Red Room in my hometown a man on many drugs rammed into a car of girls with his car, drove into oncoming traffic and nailed another car head on. His life was ruined right when I heard that explosion of steel. I felt no remorse for him. I grabbed my camera and ran to his car so he couldn’t run from the cops. Later, when writing, I put on his persona and things got weird.
Four drinks ago you were cute.
Now you’re a real Lauren Bacall, but blurry.
Congratulations on the promotion.
I’ll say it to your face.
You’re gorgeous. You’re still gorgeous.
If I wasn’t such a neat freak I’d shove one of my wrecked, warty hands up your boyfriend’s ass and make him say it. I’d make him say it like this:
You’re gorgeous and I am not just saying that because of the amazing puppetry currently engaged inside my ‘dumptruck.’ Gorgeous like it-hurts-to-pee
gorgeous. I see why Bert and Ernie smile so much.
You are gorgeous.
I’ll say it into this glass until myself and this bar are empty.
I’ll put my faith in the abilities of slow radio waves and know that somehow
the message will
travel to you.
You were beautiful when you were with me.
You are gorgeous without me.
I’ll hope the sound of my voice no longer reminds you of anything.
No more shall we perish. I’ll pass you on with grace to him.
The sloppy kind.
The room is full of noises.
I hear the clink of glasses.
I hear the sound of secrets
in everyone that passes.
That’s gonna be a song.
This bar is packed with real sport for I am drinking Jägermeister and that
means Master Hunter.
I am drinking too much in a dark bar in a dark part of Dark Angeles.
You could be right here, where I am standing, in this shitty lighting, in
this…everything is really red.
Now one last shot and…
The walls of this bar are melting into black. A theater.
A community theater.
We’re all here to see a short play about my life called The Rise and Fall of
Julius Walker.
Clap.
Go ahead.
Give it up, as they say in the hood’s local color.
The programs for tonight’s event are just blank bar napkins ‘cause some
of this stuff didn’t get the morphing memo. So patrons-I would like to begin tonight’s performance by sending out a sincere thank you for not going to the movies.
Look at this shit hole. How irritating is it that I couldn’t summon up anything more fitting than a 99-seat theater? How terrifying, that a play about my life is a short play… with bad actors.
There is a gay guy trying to pull off being me and he is excellent,
which raises many questions.
Backstage I have switched the candy glass bottle
for a real bottle and he busts it over his head in the
scene where he tries to erase the daylight
His Mom comes in impersonating a piñata.
That’s me not wanting to wake up ever again. A woman in the audience says:
“It seems so real.”
The bottle part is my favorite. After the contact, the actor is bleeding and collapses ‘cause he is weak! That’s obvious improvising, you Method bastard! The sound guy cues my heartbeat and it makes the lights go dim. Bad power, small theater and a lead that couldn’t act his way out of a douche bag, great.
Two-bit parts begin their scene. I was reluctant to hire Peter Falk but he promised to be less Columboey in this role by shortening his trench coat and no cigar. Christopher Walken is the hooker with a heart of darkness. He is supposed to represent my sense of manhood. He is holding a small TV and a picture of my mother. Peter Falk is fumbling with a dirt clod representing myfather.
Action.
COLUMBO: It seems here, da boy has a case of perplexnia, whereas when da first party witnesses da third party from da first part, he is pulled to da memory in a state of confusion on his knees like da girl was some sort of…
WALKEN: Mecca or you know…like a de-vice or a mag-net de-vice that attracts metal to the mag-net, as mag-nets do.
COLUMBO: Right. So when da boy enters da bar wit da heavy heart…
WALKEN: Can you say THE once in a-while ple-ase, old man. THE bar. THE boy. Thhh. You’re making me crazy-ish. You’re like bad hip hop.
COLUMBO: Hiccup? What? Just one more question. Ah. The bar is dark. You’re in da boy. Sometimes we become our surroundings, depending what we surround ourselves wit. So when da boy enters da bar, he finds the absence of light, till she brings her light in.
He sees what he missed. Now, the poor son of a bitch can never leave, because he is waiting. He becomes da bar and the bar becomes him.
WALKEN: Or vice versaaa. That son of a bitch was better off in darkness.
COLUMBO: Maybe he just drinks till it closes, ya know what I mean? To close something out of his mind. We all gots something to get out of our brains der.