manunkind

i’ve never eaten shit
i’ve never been curb stomped
i’ve never had needles shoved under my fingernails
i’ve never been fucked in the ass with a knife

but someone has

i asked my grandfather’s grandfather why i was born
with the negative of a noseless man’s two nostrils
burnt into my retinas
and a ring of bite marks from a set of baby teeth
tattooed around my penis

he licked his lips and said:

humans have been humans for 200,000 years
and we get bored easily
our thumbs grew twisted
to better beat off and rip the wings from flies

there is no god organ in our reptile brains
there is no moral compass buried in our chests
just shrapnel from botched surgeries
there is no logic, only rhetoric
there is no science, only dogma

he put his hand on my thigh and told me:

in the future, they’ll attribute our cruelty
to chemical imbalances and bad parenting
and they’ll forgive us with brand new hearts
pumping blood full of nanorobots and arrogance
and they’ll laugh in steely voices
at our crude self-portraits
fading in the corners of rotting history books

Note:

You will never be
famous No one
will ever peep your
shit No groupie will
ever touch you

r penis Any fleeting moment
of brilliance/relevance you
experience will only haunt you All
recognition you receive will vanish
like old show flyers No

one will ever know
you No one will care
which way
you chose to waste your life

You will die crazy and defeated
like Van Gogh but your
art will always be worthless

the flagellant

fuck you, breeder
your palms are glass
rubbed smooth from
fingering your lifeline and
jerking off to lesbians

tying a tourniquet
around your testicles
and burying your fist in your rectum
can’t hide the mark of the beast

fuck you, paleface
you huddle in a suburban bunker
listening to white rappers
with your ears packed full
of cotton and beeswax

you mouth the n word silently
like it was the name of god
but no number of Kill Whitey!s
can lift your original sin

stare at your slavemade shoes
when you speedwalk past panhandlers
lie through your straight white teeth
that you can’t help them

write your free verse, false poet
on bleached paper with an astronaut pen
but pray to the ghost of teddy roosevelt
that your pith helmet is bulletproof

drop acid and go on a vision quest in europe
tattoo it’s a free country inside your upper lip
flex your skinny muscles, mouthbreather
but know this:

when your dick finally goes limp
and you suck a bullet out of the barrel
i will write misspelled cliches
and trace poorly drawn skulls
on the back of your obituary
in black magic marker
so the ink bleeds through
and erases your name

steal this poem

cross out my name
and write your own above it
make one up
if you don’t like the one
your parents made up

you can change the words
or replace them
with identical copies of themselves
they all mean the same thing

put on your new shoes
and walk to the open mic
don’t talk to anyone
just stare through the floor
at the center of the planet
and wait your turn

if you forget to read it out loud
it doesn’t matter
no one is listening

loveshy not gunshy

this autistic manchild
socalled because he has a shriveled dick
sandwiched between his pale flabby thighs
is a balding death metal musician

this mathematician
with a metronome for a heart
was cut from the stomach of adam
and locked in a soundproof room

if he can play
the harmonic minor scales
and the blast beats
until there is no blood left in his hands and feet

if he can gasp
the caveman grunts
and the eunuch shrieks
until his vocals chords snap

the heavens will open up above him
like king arthur pulling a sword from an anvil
in a disney cartoon

and he will sleep well
wrapped in tattered sheets
printed with trains and stopwatches
stained by piss and semen

and he will sleep well
with one skinny arm hooked
around the neck of a prosthetic doll
his cum trickling out of its pink rubber anus

and he will dream
of valkyries
with lips painted red
eyes bruised black
and pubic hair dyed blonde

and he will dream
of valhalla

deus ex machina

i wish my life
was a wes anderson movie

i wish my every defect
was an endearing character flaw
intended to make me seem human

i wish my every failure
could appear significant
if played in slow motion
and accompanied by an elliott smith song

i wish my desperation
was just a plot device
and i could have faith that
it will be resolved
by act five

telephone poem #1

hey
it's me
jonah
jonah
last week we
you
yeah that was me
how are you
good good
oh i'm fine
i was just wondering if
sure i can wait

hi
i was just wondering if maybe you
wanted to hangout or something
sometime
hangout
like see a movie or
uh huh
i see
your boyfriend
but what about last
oh okay
no no i understand
it's alright really
okay
well i guess i'll see you around then or
oh right
nevermind
okay well
bye

bye

[Muskrat had taken to wearing a watch.]

Muskrat had taken to wearing a watch.
It didn’t tell time;
there were no hands or numbers on it.

It was specially designed
to give a tiny electric shock
every few minutes.
He found it prevented him from
dozing off or daydreaming,
as he was inclined to do.

To deal with his condition,
he had also begun shaving off
patches of his fur
in order to tattoo helpful phrases on his skin.

These include
(but are not limited to)
the following:

“You are me.”

“You wrote this.”

“This is now.”

“You are alive.”

“This is real.”

the meaning of gun is bang

afterwards i
pull my belt tight
like a junkie tying off
for the "last time
i promise"

kidney stone

i'm now convinced that
writing poetry is just
passing kidney stones

we squat in dark rooms
writhe in abandoned basements
chewing through our tongues

gasping as we squeeze
out! sharp pieces of ourselves
lest they poison us

we trade sweat and blood
for a pitiful pebble
made of piss and salt

radio for help

one grey monday
i walked the length
of the seashore with a
metal detector

i found a whale
the wretch beached itself
its atrophied limbs twitched feebly
as blue-black gnats drank its eyes

out of its blowhole
snaked a thin black wire
a radio antennae
perhaps jonah was still in its belly
frozen in a grotesque pose
like a fossil of a caveman
perhaps jonah was
composing his invisible s.o.s.
up until the moment when
asphyxiation overtook him

perhaps the ubiquitous hissing that you hear
after every other living thing has gone extinct
is not blood rushing through your ears

perhaps it is cosmic elevator music

perhaps it is the sound of
memoirs / living wills / death poems / suicide notes
recorded on an ancient 4-track
broadcasted in a constant loop
through tiny speakers
hidden in seashells

birthday poem

i wanted to make
you a present like
they do in the
movies and on
T.V. like a

funny card or
children's book or
birdhouse or
something but

i'm not very
good at those
things and
i'm not very
motivated, lazy
my parents say, so

here's a poem i
wrote i
hope you like
it O.K.

this dirty room

i look at the ceiling
so i don’t have to stare
at the dried spots of urine
speckling the ceramic tiles
sparkling in the tubercular fluorescent light
like the crystals in cat litter

i look at the ceiling
so i don’t have to risk
my eyes stealing a glance
at the ape next to me
milking his manhood

it’s like driving down a two-lane highway:
once you get the idea in your head
that you could turn the wheel
ever so slightly
and cleanly detach your brainstem in the collision

you can’t get it out

it’s like standing on top of a skyscraper:
you can so easily picture yourself
hurdling the short safety rail
and plummeting headfirst to the street below

it’s hard to keep yourself jumping

we are all slaves
to our inbred instincts
just like the lemmings

i fix my eyes on the ceiling
so i don’t have to imagine
the billions of dicks
nasty, brutish, and short
just like mine
relieving themselves
in this dirty room

the lonely road

sometimes
when i’m alone in a car
when i’m feverish and numb
from the humming engine
and the endless road
i talk to myself

i scream obscenities
because though i’m alone
they still make me blush

i listen to am radio
horns and drums
emerge from the static
at the crest of each hill
i pound the steering
wheel and howl

i am the last
living soul on earth

and i am finally alive

ex- highway beautification technician

i used to work for the city
i gave them half my life
patrolling the highway in an
off-white van
watching the road for the
kicking legs and flopping torsos of
paralyzed deer

when i found one i’d
park on the shoulder and
kneel beside it
i’d talk softly and
put my hand over its frantic heart
the manual says that a
deer with a severed spinal chord
can’t feel pain
but there’s something in those eyes
something that’s hard to watch
i’d put the barrel of my service pistol
on the temple just behind one of those
terrible eyes
then i’d close my own and
squeeze

i heard that on deathrow
there’s this thing called double jeopardy
if they execute an inmate and
somehow he survives
then he’s free to go

there’s no double jeopardy for halfdead deer

the city fired me
years back
for not meeting my quotas
but i still wake up some nights
to the bark of gunfire

now i work for the grocery store
putting egg cartons in paper bags
i smile at customers
like my boss tells me
but when they try to smile back they
never look me in the face

everyone says there’s something funny about my eyes

Fake Beard

America, the most loaded word in the history of pornography, assembly lines, and the repeating rifle. Welcome to the terrordome, a hyper-politicized, polarized, desensitized warzone. To the victor goes the talk show spots. The defeated commit the most abhorred sin: irrelevance. The Hitlers of history have infamy, the rockstars have celebrity, but the losers rot in the waiting room of most fatal mediocrity.

Their tombs are defiled by bulldozers in accordance with Eminent Domain. Their bodies are Fedexed via overnight mail to the doorsteps of their posterity. In the place of the graveyards, the Powers That Be will construct a theme park, featuring the giant robotic talking head of George Washington (Peace Be Unto Him). The investors will hire the best programmers money can buy from Korea so we can all hear the popular presidential catch phrases in Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and Modern English.

The people of America will line up for the grand opening six months in advance. They’ll stand there, bored, hungry, and soiling themselves. Occasionally, someone will be knifed for their spot and everyone will just pretend to not notice. Parents will gladly hand over their only child’s college fund in order to have their palms read by a minimum wage slave dressed in a polyester Abraham Lincoln costume, complete with fake beard and deep-seated depression.

…and at all of the clearly marked exits, a pimpled and handicapped adolescent will hand out complementary condoms, razor blades, and a fat stack of coupons.

Taxidermist

the business week is an ingenious invention
it must rank up there with free samples
and the fly on pants
it’s so brilliant and ballsy
i bet the guy who eureka’d it into existence was
fired immediately and issued a gag order within the hour

ideas like that are bad for business
you know

there must be an einstein quote that would
sum that up
something about
great minds &
adversity &
whatever
either him or ben franklin
they have a regular monopoly on aphorism

anyway
the only reason the unemployed are even aware
of the transition
from one week to the next is that
the sunday comics are in color

i was looking through the wanted section
one day
i’m sure of that much
the sun was out
i think it was morning but
there is a slim chance that it was actually
evening irregardless
i was looking through the wanted section and

there was my meal ticket
dead center of page B8
in times new roman

wanted: Taxidermist

My metronome is broken

i've had it for years.
i probably should have
used it more than i did.

i wonder how many times it
has made that noise
halfway between
a beep
and
a click.

thousands
at least.

i tried putting in
new batteries but it
still won't work.

there are probably many
profound ways
to end a poem about
a broken metronome;

something about
hearts or

i don't know.

oh
it just started
back up.

it must be in denial
still.

slow hand

imagine a room
walls filled with tv monitors
picture these monitors
show only the slow hand of a swollen brain
(from some 18 different angles in some 18 shades of grey)
shang-hai’d into a think tank
the index picks at the thumb nail
like snapping
only the ape digit is hooked
instead of hitchhiking

the cameras roll incessantly
spewing intangible chemical vapors
the film spills into small infinitude of square brown boxes
like cells in a honeycomb
they are meticulously groomed by unmanicured antennae
terraforming a warehouse into a monolithic cathedral
a monument to protocol

the focus groups preach a rigid dogma of
a. catalogue
b. evaluate
c. cache or d. dispose
[the burnpits resemble stripmines flooded with kerosene-soaked charcoal
ghostly campfires dot the primordial landscape]
the index has scraped a smooth rut into the thumb nail
the company analysts have determined that the ‘rut’
(technically, a ‘rift’ because the gradient tapers laterally)
deepens by three-eights of a centimeter every fiscal year
after a short eternity, a pyrrhic verdict was reached
by double blind tests spanning every significant* demographic
it was gravely established that
a watched lightbulb never quite burns out
it just smolders, patiently waiting to be left alone

(*the term ‘significant’ denotes demographics that contribute at least 3.125% of gross profits, not a value judgment on the constituents of said demographic’s hypothetical worth or unworth)

Moscow

i’ve been riding the coattails since ‘55
an aging crusty rasped
so i seen more than a hundred Vanishings

me and the other virgins sat in awe
around the trash blaze
watching them talk

once the usher gave me the wrong ticket
a greasy girl with dreadlocks began
i was up front rubbing elbows with
wrinkly women in fur coats and their nervous husbands
the slickhaired kid next to me got picked
i leaned in close my chin practically up on the stage and
her voice dropped to a whisper
i Heard

bullshit
the old one barked

well
she paused
i couldn’t make out all of it but
it sounded something like…

we all mouthed the words to ourselves like
they were a magic spell
that’s what they were supposed to be anyway
right before they go in the box He
cups their ear and moves his lips and sorta grins
then he taps the door twice with his wand and
they’re gone
and it isn’t just some trick
they’re not under the floorboards
they’re not behind a mirror
they’re just
gone

the old one nodded grimly
this punk i knew got picked
he continued
a real gutter kid
it took him ten years but
he got picked
you shouda seen his face when he
Heard
it flashed across him
like lightning dancing on a tin roof

hell
she added wistfully

i gulped a few times and
managed to stammer
where do
where do you think they go

they shared a knowing look
he nodded to her
she opened her mouth
carefully and said
we think
we think they go to

Moscow.

Directions to Nowhere (fast):

1. forget how to tell time
2. paint with thick brushes, you’ll cover the canvas faster
3. remind yourself that poems are just the warning label at the bottom of the bottle
4. buy stock in bullets
5. stay up late, insomniacs make the best art
6. talk slowly but forcibly at strangers, lest they try to pretend you’re crazy
7. keep running
8. if attacked by vultures, pretend to be alive
9. sell your lightbulbs, money burns brighter

Backwards

Antone leaped from bed and gave a reverse striptease,
Dropped loose change in a jar and kept the receipt.
Underdressed in plainclothes, he slid through the streets
Like an otter coated in crude oil.

The wise guys all called him names like gumshoe and flatfoot.
Everyone laughed like it was a joke but shot him bad looks.
He played dice like a cop, but paid bills like a crook,
Plus he lined his cap with tinfoil.

Antone sat on a bridge and stared into the sun until he couldn’t think.
He wrote his stories on the back of chinese fortunes in bloodred ink,
Stuffed them in empty beer bottles filled with rocks and let them sink,
Saying how strange it is that rain makes the sea boil.

Most folks don’t understand him because his voice comes out backwards.
The silence at the beginning of the record is him waiting for answers.

on mortality and causality

january 12 1988: i was born
january 13 1988: tatev abrahamyan was born
january 15 1988: sonny moore was born

sonny moore is the singer for the band from first to last. they were signed to epitaph records in 2004. they are now signed to capitol records.

tatev abrahamyan is is the youngest top rated us woman's chess player. she holds the woman international master title and is rated 2220 by fide.

i am 5:09 PM 11/5/2006 and it was nice knowing you all.

man overboard

jonah was a whaler.
jonah was a poacher.
jonah was a sleepercell.
jonah was a double agent.
jonah was a guerrilla.
jonah was a commodity fetishist.
jonah was a hipster.
jonah was a cutter.
jonah was a smoke signal.
jonah was a karma con artist.
jonah was a door to door salesman,

peddling dragon bones and horse teeth to pay his way through
medical school.

jonah was a amateur radio operator.
jonah was a man overboard.

[Asex Manifesto]

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Bogart an Apartheid

Faces like noble wolves, held to granite altars by oxblood boot straps, fangs snubbed short by guillotine-style cigar cutters, cowlick Mohawks scalped off, eyes died blue.
Dazed zombies emerge from the dungeons and caves to work the fields...
A coxcomb Cyclops sun eats through cotton-filled ears, apocalypse blizzards cut muscles clean from bones. Primordial forests still haunted by the ghosts of druids and dryads hold hordes of renegade trolls, muskets in their claws, bandannas over nose-holes, black blood in iron pots over cinders and coals. Ironwood crosses and hangmen stockades line the road to new Roma,infidels stung-up on telephone poles, ribcages exposed.

In a nearby culvert, the sewer rat grips a water-logged dictionary in his Darwined fingers. The nicotine black hole in his starving arm is nearly as large as his heavy eyes, so the pen must still be wet. Gas masks always fit better when you’re starving.

Crushed turtles shells dust the Oysterman’s fingers. Frog’s blood runs through those hard plastic tubes in his thighs and neck. The fish slime doesn’t ever really come off; it just dries in crystals that hug the skin. Eggs come in strings and sacs and shells, but they all slide down your throat like a warm, yolky, pre-Cambrian afterbirth. They all settle in your stomach, a lubricated membrane in rich, tepid quicksand.

Amateur Auteur #untitled

A ghostfaced boy, silent like a good movie,
floating on spider-silk tripwires through a wax minefield:

Smile :: pig knuckles
Grimace :: milk-teeth
Smile :: surreptitious self
Grimace :: karma kills a beetle.

Feedback loops replace pacifiers until we're no better than the may-flies choking the faux-tel pool.

I hot-box my skull until my drunkmath brain bleeds serotonin.

I chase tired whodunits through 50 years of 50's cinema just to hide under my tongue the same pills that were illegal last year.

The blackened factories will take commissions for any snuff film just to keep the coffers full of monopoly money:

"Don't listen; all peasants want is to build huts and wait for them to be burnt down."

A ghostfaced boy, silent like a good movie,
dog-paddling through the lagoon of human sewage with both Van Goghs intact and a cosmetics mirror clenched in his teeth.

Diving for the x-rayed bones of ex-presidents and cavemen.