I revise

The hardened hand is my
hardened hand.

Where did I put it?
I put it in the freezer
where it froze on the Stoli.

I put it in a hole
up on Naticook Lake

past a frozen scrim
which broke my skin

and drew blood
as I drew out
the perch.

Every road in this town is a
cooling board for dreams
that don't die.

Ghosts everywhere
remain, they live
and breathe and
walk
like men.

They sing like wires
in the winter
wind.

I can't stop
listening.

I will do
thier bidding.

The Chinese bartender
slips the info to me,
scrawled on a
small square napkin:

All your gone friends
are imaginary and
New York City
is forever hell.

I said, OK, sir.
Now another Fogcutter,
por favor,

I've many miles to go
and it's a far cry
till dark.

raw times is good times

driving through these towns:
scouring my hidden mind for raw material
listening to Axis: Bold As Love by Saint Jimi Hendrix
deciding that I'll treat 36 as an extension of 35
affirming that this late bloomer is in bloom
doing not trying
committing to playing even more
shedding all past defeats: they are not entities anymore
driving through these towns
these blogs was ever named Extemporaneo
you have no idea how much material is here that is raw
there is no audience here but me
and this is as it should be
I need a real domain
I am that real domain
this is my year
this is my year

The Band of the Pines

He said,
I'll never stop.
I'll never give up,
I'll never give in.
It's not a cliche
to want to win,
just human.
Enzyme of
the lion.
Band of the
Pines.

the magus

Jonny Greenwood is the man.

duel. sad

There was nothing in his physiognomy to indicate any unusual imaginative or intellectual power.

reprise

I turn off
the Internet
because
it is my box
of distraction
I turn off
my
listlessness
because it makes
me nobody
I am
turned off
by my own
lack
of
fire
discipline
in
close quarters

ukelele

the rude harlequin cries blood,
playing terrible ukulele
in the dumpster of
the night

revolutions

I turn off my TV
Because it is
Not my box of dreams

I turn down my mind
When it swallows
My vision of the road ahead

I turn up my guitar
When my soul feels
Muddled and unquiet

I turn my eyes to the winter stars
When my canine brother
Makes his bedtime ablutions

I turn to you
Asleep and warm
By me in our bed

I turn to you

Elmore James

Last fm has an astounding number of free tracks for the listening by this guy -- unquestionably one of the bona fide Mt. Rushmore figures of the music.

2

The 50 Essential Guitar DVDs

Wow.

Jake

marionette

Blank mouth
Blank eyes
Blank gesture
In the clear moonlight
Bright as day
A wretched creature gibbers
Somewhere just inside the pines
Blank refusal
Blank dismissal
The gears whir
The lights hum
The curse is cleared
Yet the old ways can't hold
So you wait for the transport
You wait for the edifice of the sky,
Slashing revelation
You wait for a song
To transform you
To make you real

You wait for it

Flying V

the medicine clown

He wants the raw deep
But is stuck up in the shallow creep
Cutting bait for the medicine clown
In its churchyard gown.

He wants the clear close
But is steered wrong by the host
Organism. In its jaunty cap,
It drives like crap.

He wants the ruby red
And the bonny blue
But the greasy seasick rain
Has no color.

Yellow is his drama,
and slow.
Where's he going?
Doesn't know.

2. Ronson's, have some

To be kicked, physically and brutally and nearly expertly, if the kicker hadn't been half-drunk on bourbon and lulled from having his dick freshly sucked on by her, but to be kicked by that big polished black shitstomping combat boot out onto the flimsy 2 by 4 by 2 by 6 side porch of her trailer which he'd by the way built himself this past summer gone; to be kicked by those boots and those feet, one, two, whump, fuck you, and punch. Fuck this, he said to himself as the sergeant's punch landed and and crashed over the crude stair's railing. Fuck this and you can have her if you want her so bad but not before this. What came to hand then was a cinderblock half buried in loose dirt and gravel at the side of the trailer. He picked it up with two hands and hurled himself back up the two rough steps threw himself through the screen door and smashed at the sergeant's crewcut head face and low creased forebrow, smashing right through the top half of the nylon screen, which crumpled like newsprint, hurling the big brick forward and himself with it. To his amazement, he hit his aim, hammering and tearing the sergeant's stubble face. The man fell backwards miraculously cracking the back of his head against the low heavy thick dark oak coffee table (also procured by Joe this past summer gone). And then lay stunned, the harsh red and blocklike hand dark and bloodsmeared from the welling face, the trained but fallen hand now kibbeying for the sidearm but nothing doing. The thought came to Joe later on sitting in the woods by the riverside that he might have at that moment gone for that cold black and brutal weapon, he could have used a gun, anyone could have, it was a cold country now where all consequences had been but long reversed, in many ways it was every brute for him or herself, it really was, it really really was, but instead he went for the Louisville bat, the poor man's enforcer, for the bat sat where'd he'd always kept it, which was just inside and behind the particleboard interior door, next to the futon's frame. And with the Louisville he hit the sergeant 3 times, hard but precise, lingering over the final one, across the top of the head, until the man moved no more and Joe thought, Oh fuck I've killed him. And then she was screaming and clawing at his, Joe's, face and he thought about hitting her, but no, he just shoved her down, and there she knelt sobbing over the fallen sergeant, Oh God, you've killed him, but Joe could see the man still stirred and breathed. Joe then lurched briefly off into the galley of the kitchen looking for anything, anything to take, and what he took was a pack of her cigarettes (Camel Lights) and a lighter and his folding knife and a yellow can of lighter fluid. And a half bottle of bourbon and a plastic sack to carry it all in. And his wallet with identification and his last few dollars. And she was screaming something about I'll kill you I hate you but to his ears it sounded merely like the refrain to the great song of the age, which was fuck this and fuck you, we are all fucked, nah nah nah nah. A deuce and a half towing a backhoe with a stump grinder attachment rumbled by on the gravel track of the road out front and Joe's senses finally came to him. Fuck this he thought, it's going to be a long cold winter. Maybe I'll just enlist and GTFO of here once and for all. Funny, now that he'd whupped the sergeant's ass he wasn't afraid of the man anymore; he realized he wasn't afraid of much at all, just then, short of who he knew he was becoming. Fuckin' 23 years old, he thought, am I a late bloomer or just a baby, man? Fuck, I ought to burn this fucker down with them in it, he thought, looking at her there screaming over her dazed and bruised lover, the county's sergeant, but then he thought, nah. I'm just tired. Not crazy and evil yet. He crashed off into the woods toward the river which he knew was just a few miles distant. I should've took that man's gun, he thought. Coulda shot me something for supper maybe. Harhar. But next time I gotta keep my cool. He felt sure just then that he would.


But, walking through the woods, he swigged on the bourbon, and as the brown sweet liquor burned into his veins and the sound and the smell and finally the view of the shining, half-dead river came upon him, brown birds whirling over it beneath the dead brown sky, he thought he might yet feel warranted to reverse his earlier precepts.

1. Ronson's, get some

the blank hard stare meets the trash fire in a bashed rusting whitepaint peeling oil drum down near the river
the old bridge abutment gnarled in dead sumac and frosted ice

this one kid Lucian who'd said fuck class again so early in the year
set it with book matches grabbed in a handful
from the convenience mart up the hill

an old man owns that store
and it seems to Lucian that that
old man lets him steal beer and sundries
and sunlight and time by the magazines

no adequate winter coat for this kid, just a drab beige bubble parka
bleeding white nylon fluff at its hem
and seams
and it too came from a dumpster

as the kid himself came from a load
blown that should've fallen
into a rubber prophylactic
to be crushed and left
upon the dirt track riverside

like the child now 13, oldest in his grade,
has been left
to his own devices
but no: the child lived, had to wait to be birthed

before receiving his gift of abandonment
yes, the gift of it
finally? when all is occluded
and future seems lost

thinking you're living
your whole life
at the end of the road
isn't such a bad concept
or deal

esp. to this kid who burns like trashfire and sets them
while the frozen river creaks and strains.
and the blue wind howls up from the South,
like a song of eternal night

the cop out

Denying nothing
Admitting everything

for years drifting along
another
late blooming fiend twirling
along his seam of Earth

shuffling
back and forth,
doing petty crimes
for petty times

just another
lurking stalking creeper,
another hunting
hapless chump

but then: he
was allowed to go back
they let him do that.
the extraterrestrials who came

said he was their game
and what would he do?
would he do the same?
if they sopped up his pain

and his insane chain of existence
and let him start forth again?

so
then there in the rain
there back in the long ago
outside her dark window

there in the streaming rain

beneath a sky not indigo,
but the color of ash
always the color of ash

his eyes were black blood
when the lightning flashed

and he did exactly the same
things

all over again

on the road and hungover in conferences is when I do my best writing

1.

went nuts
smoked 8 butts
was in self-destruct
mode

fear crept in
of all them dreadful Whens
of times I've wasted
suspect times I've tasted

force myself to be calm
force myself to be fertile
eschew lack
of engagment

the frittering frivolous slave to his own impulses
is now a late blooming hard worker

I am so fucking
lazy
but I am trying
to be

better

thinkin' 'bout my blues

down on Main Street

The shoe salesman looked like Lee Harvey Oswald
The crossing guard looked like Geronimo

The social work case manager looked like Koresh at Waco
The florist looked like Orson Welles

The dentist looked like Rainer Maria Rilke
The podiatrist looked like Abraham Lincoln

The brickmason looked like Johnny Cash 
The unemployed software engineer looked like William Faulkner

The homeless man looked like Gary Gilmore
The married father of five also looked like Gary Gilmore

And I looked like my same damn stupid self,
Not at all like Jimi Hendrix.

What bullshit.

jimmy danderlion

the code

The code. The code. The code.
The code is no mere minor excrescence.

(Look up excrescence: 1. outgrowth -- a growth that sticks out from the body of a human, animal, or plant; 2. unsightly addition -- an ugly addition or extension to something such as a building)

 The code is/is no mere minor excrescence.

[The gift of hangover. Not many mornings, but some. Like this one.]

[We lead lives apart right next to each other]

The code captures the truth

The ugly truth
The plain truth
The dullest truths
The shining truth
The wanton truth
The hidden truth
The covert truth

The fleeting truth

The truth as alluded to by a man hidden in plain view
A man who blends in on the stage
Who is there but not seen

Who knows who are his real friends
and who his imaginary
(Which one am I to myself?)

No one wants to think of themselves as a selfish thievish covert animal
(In other words: a dick)

can you see me?

we'll always have Paris

dreamt of her elaborate lips
as an elastic dromedary signal

you kissed them
and her wiry neck

your swollen hive
your mead to mix

you jumped down to the ballroom floor
of  a huge blue granite hall

there was a theatrical production up there
and you mocked it

you said it's a tradition for me to be
half schlocked at Christmastime

organic prospectus

You hold it
You carry it

Like a map of your veins and nerves
Like a map of your veins and nerves

I asked her,
Do you think I have a lot?

She said, No more than anyone else
So far as I can tell

squanderlust

do your chores first
then you can play

fill up a page here
every day