my 8000th unfinished poem about Roger's Park

-for Lorelei-

there's a fork in the road
at Touhy and Ridge
going East in Roger's Park
one way goes South, the other North
I haven't taken that one in years
since about the time the Latin Kings
were at war with the Gangster Disciples
of course the decision had less to do with that than the fact
that I was a sullen boy of 13
with little use for the playground at Pottawatamee Park

the neighborhood doesn't change a whole lot
there's a mall nearby and a couple townhouses
but the ground is still covered with shit
broken
spaceheaters, a toddler's bed
smshed to the ground
an afrikan drum
there's a community center acting as a store on ridge
it's full of filipinos and mexicans playing whatever card game
i'm too old and focused to understand

for years now i've seen roadside memorial
from the corner of my eye
today i finally took the time to cross it
full of baby shoes and old chairs
bodega votives eternally lit

I never knew who it was for
same thing with the piece of paper discarded
across the street from
Mr. Lee's
it had some cat's name
gang affiliation and phone number
like you'd get at a single's bar near a base in Norfolk
or a war crimes tribunal
in that bittersweet way that dictates the way i see my neighborhood
it was beautiful

Millie- she lives!!!

I must take this time to apologize to my roommates' dear felines Rudigger and Ipkus whom I had impugned and accused of one of the most heinous acts possible...murder. I must also apologize to my roommates who are deathly afraid of spiders.

Millie was found hiding in Nate's shoe where she knew she would get the most comic punch out of being found. One of her eight-to-ten legs appears broken but aside from that and a bruised ego, chances are she'll be good as new so long as she starts pouncing them crickets.

Huzzah

profile of a human

profile of a human

Nation or Liquid
or
Doug
is this short black guy
buff as all hell
a club kid
w/ hair greased up into fauxhawks and devilhorns, who's
moving through life in Cassady time
sold &
taken
too many
exes and gees
; he's older than he looks
and from the suburbs
New Trier in fact
but you won't know it
unless you were yourself

everywhere he goes
he takes an acoustic
guitar in the sidecar
in a case a girl left at my house
and once planted
plays nothing but
roots rock from when we were toddlers
Peter Himmelman, the Boss, that goddamn Phil Collins song

he hasn't slept in days and just left my house with another 200mg of amph
over the weekend he's traded 8 fo a couple fistfulls of ones
wherever he is they're wearing shiny shirts
and the table is a sand mandala of old pharms

i was always a shitty dealer
even when it was real drugs
eight years ago a girl I wanted to fuck OD'd off some prescription
I found out from her Mom when I called to
ask her out to an Acumen Nation show at the Metro
she was knocked out for about a week and we never talked again
through graduation
doug'll be fine though
he frosts his cereal with xanax and
if he makes it through the night
i can keep on with a free conscience

ann coulter has great tits and i'd totally give her a facial

ingrained racism:

walking by a mostly black school in a bad neighborhood shortly after the 3 o'clock bell, i'm thinking 'do all young black people have hearing problems cause they sure do seem to be yelling every goddamn thing they say'

portrait of an artist, mad and destitute

along with some furniture
stashed in an alley:

a painted nude with a hole punched through her pussy
a number of 78s of Shubert Symphonies smashed to bits and carefully put back into their sleeves

i kinda know how he feels

commercial skit

scene opens, everything is all cepia brown, a tag at the bottom of the screen informs us that it is 1975

a man and a woman are looking deep into one another's eyes in a cluttered studio apartment. He has a vest, an afro, large sunglasses that we can see his eyes through, a moustache, and flared pants. She looks like a slightly WASPy Janis Joplin with flowers in her hair. As the camera pans we see him drop to one knee.

MAN: Now, I don't really have enough to buy you a ring but [he is cut off]

WOMAN: That's okay I LOVE you

the screen fades and then opens, in color on a small room in an immense building. The camera is placed behind the woman looking over her shoulder, now she has grey hair and wears it up. She is decked out in pink and pearls. In front of her is her husband, with a salt-and-pepper CEO's haircut and suit. He looks deep into the camera, reaching into his pocket. Behind him is a doorway leading into a massive chandeliered dining room

MAN: I know this is long overdue, but I wanted you to know exactly how I feel

He pulls out a diamond-and-gold wedding ring

WOMAN: [incredulous, but sweet] I already know

MAN: No, you don't

She looks behind her and we see a spectre come through the wall, it is a skinny black man in rags and close-cropped hair. He is slightly transparent.

WOMAN: Who are you?

GHOST: My name is Iktembe, when the diamond mine collapsed in Angola, I was crushed along with seven good men. Some had families. [seven more ghosts come through the wall] Our blood is in that stone. He love you that much.

As the man and woman embrace, Iktembe and co. smile, nod, and cry as they fade away

VO: Diamonds are forever, because he loves you that much.

"something smells rotten on the carpeting" or "morning sickness"

Current mood: somber, silly

i am a bad pet owner and, very possibly, a bad person.
The other day, after a fair amount of whiskey, I saw my beloved tarantula, Milificent, scratching at the side of her cage like a sad puppy with two many arms and opted to let her crawl on me as she has done many times before. I thought nothing of it as she went across my back and went about my business of killing time, picking up a free weight. After about a minute Tania got out of the shower and, on her way from the bathroom to her room neglected to mention that I'd taken Millie out (as people tend to do when I have a nearly fist-sized arachnid on my back. Still, I thought little of it.
I went into the bathroom, wiping the steamed mirror with my sleeve to see where she had gotten and...she was gone.

I was drunk! I didn't know what to do! I had let one of my roommate's greatest fears loose in the house!

Tania, Matt and I shined flashlights under every conceivable surface, into every shadowed crevice, hoping to unearth it before Kyle and Nate returned from the liquor store. We failed and bedlam ensued. Raised voices and leaping onto furniture.

In what would ultimately ring of defeat, a death knell for Millie, we left to go to Dave's birthday party on 16th, where I would drink myself depressed, eat pork rinds and play punching games. I would never see her again.

I cannot say the same for Rudigger, our grey shorthair. Described by my father as 'too big for a cat, too small for a puma', he was previously thought to be afraid of large insects, but left many telltale clues the next morning.

First, he refused one of his two tricks: answering to Tania's beck and call. Instead of answering to his name he bit at our feet and looked up suspiciously at us all day long. Whenever we entered a room we'd been absent awhile, we'd find weird, softserve shit and vomit with strange lumps.

The whole day long, perhaps the length of the feline digestive tract, Rudigger seemed guilty and on edge.

It is with this in mind I lay judgment upon him. He is a murderer plain and simple and I am no better.

We are sad sick ilk but of course all we're guilty of is abetting the food chain.

I melodramaticize, the pet store is only a half hour away, if I can trust myself, but I still may never know what havoc i've wraught.

In fact today, licking his lips, our other cat Ipkus sat eyeing at the foot of th frog's cage

cocaine and cigarettes

two johns
older and smarter than i ever intend to be
gave it up
this last 6 years
after decades of routine genius
et al genius routine
fine tuned eyes and ears
caustic charming tongues
full of love and, softer, velvet vitrol
coming to me in bootleg
coveted wax and peer to peer
sneakt through my parents bedroom doorway as a 5 yr old me
fought my first bounds of insomnia
you will be missed
good night john peel, 65
johnny carson, 79
you will be missed

capillary

all the men in the family
have telltale topical abrasions
it was whiskey again
and we sat on the floor punching each other
autumn, she is bruised
(i don't mean that poetically)

i drank until i
became my problem
needing to be isolated
do me a favor and don't ask what happened to my arm
tell me i'm not an asshole
let it go
whatever i might've done

every now and then
i need to recalibrate my sense of tolerance
to know how much more or less i need to take
to find myself
tearful

your subculture will be defeated

for the first time ever
i saw a goth
shiver
as I 77ed it east on belmont
all color bleached from his hair
freckles blotted with pancake
at least three cows worth of buckles
boots up to his neck
and he couldn't take it

finally
they are doubly screwed

a few years ago
i found myself at the metro
it's been awhile

i was at a kill hannah show
-don't persecute me it was free!-
the type of August that drop old folks on sight
and
they
were
still
wearing
leather

i looked as much a dumbass as ever
in beige cargo shorts
a featherweightcotton shirt from an Isreili kibbutz/resort

but i felt
artificial air

and they didn't

they danced until mascara ran
all over the redleather balcony
and went home early

before the headliner went up earlier

on second thought
perhaps
they were the smartest
of all

the business of being a gentleman

i love this job

if a cop finds due cause to search me today I'm done for
right now i have the most antisocial backpack
to've ever graced my spine
amongst the clutter is
1. empty packaging for various types and sizes of dildoes
2. a bb gun 9mm pistol
3 a red yarmulke
all are props for the new Gentlemen Callers show
on Myspace
website

josh and i have a scene togethor where a guidance counselor (josh) is trying to convince a student (me) that a carreer in Nazism is right for him. At the end of the scene Jack comes out as a random celebrity that, as it turns out, is a Nazi, thus convincing me. To keep things interesting, this has become a game of obscure reference one-uppsmanship.
Here are a few chaps I've outed during rehearsals
1. Omnipresent 1980s wackyman Bronson Pinchot, you're a Nazi?!
2. Deceased character actor John Ritter, you're a Nazi?!
3. Sundance Film Channel darling Steve Buscemi, you're a Nazi?!
4. "90210" 2nd ringer and failed hiphop wigger Brian Austin Green, you're a Nazi?!
5. Early 90s locker pinup Mark Paul Gossalear, you're a Nazi?!
6. "Designing Women" diva Delta Burke, you're a Nazi?!
7. Deceased character actor Walter Mathau, you're a Nazi?!
8. 8-bit video icon, Q-bert you're a nazi?!
9. Former Chicago White Sox 1st baseman Steve Saks, you're a Nazi?!
10. Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg, you're a Nazi?!
11. Famous "Thundercat" hero, Panthro you're a Nazi?!

regards

quick bits

current mood: seepy

1. I offended some woman at the Heartland (which is good cause it'd been awhile) yesterday when I said that all drag kings look like I did when i was in 8th grade: skinny, bad moustache, hair slicked back, they even tend to wear the same button downs and/or fatigues that I wore because I wanted to look like Bone Thugs N Harmony

2. Dream sequence .2
So in my dream yesterday, me Sarah and the roommates were watching a movie on the wall in my basement. The movie featured Ernest seducing a lesbian Kathleen Turner. The cinematography was pretty good, like the way they made Kathleen (former love of my life as Jessica Rabbit) look normal, even dumpy (a la Charlize Theron in Monster, but easier to pull off) except for in Ernest's fantasy sequences, where they must've globbed the glitter and mayo on the camera lens to achieve that out of focus sparkle but made her extremely hot, nonetheless. Jim Varney, a masterful character actor, eventually won her over when he was able to relay the fact that he was really a woman who had loved her but died in a car crash, reincarnated as Ernest P. Worrell. This is the kind of movie they used to show a lot on WGN Saturday Afternoons in the late 80s and early 90s

3 fuzzy eyes
Start your day off right with a big bowl of Cinammon Cluster Fucks

a romantic explanation for me being forgetful as shit

regardless of what i say
when i'm attention starved
and mapping out my forearms with blades and bone and
jagged pieces of plastic
i am
purposeful
and necessary
just most of the things i do aren't
like say
i have to hit a certain longitude and latitude within half an hour
to avoid getting hit by a certain .66 bus due east
so that it can splash mud on some old polack
who'll go home wet cold and angry enough
to beat his kids inspired
one of them will be the man who finds a cure for stupid
so I don't need to
, say,
remember to bring my final project to school
so long as my body makes it to the 11th floor of 600 S. Michigan
and I can spent a couple hundred dollars
to leave things at the store
after being distracted talking about early 90s west coast hiphop with a clerk
so long as i spent 12 minutes standing at Balbo and Wabash
so long as i keep hitting these points
my life
or someone else's
will somehowsomeday
be
rewarded/punished

destiny

oscar predictions 2005

my oscar predictions

jamie foxx will be treated like an ugly will smith and, barring any In Living Colour relapses, sop up the adoration of greyhaired whte people. I doubt such a relapse; jamie will most likely ignore the Wayans brothers' attempts to get a photo with him as he passes them on the red carpet

oh that wacky paris hilton! she's going home with a man tonight who is not her husband for the sex outside the means of procreation

though the jokes will be more scripted and soft-pedaling than ever, out of fear that an unscripted moment would result in FCC backlash that would dismantle the Academy leaving people unable to watch movies ever again, chris rock will manage to offend my Uncle Haishe and Aunt Rosalyn, as well as many people of their age and tax bracket. a winking joke will be made towards "j.Lo", a hinting joke will be made at michael jackson's expense, and more than one mention of "Governor Shwarzenegger" and "wardrobe malfunction". Mr. Rock will try his hardest not to use the word "tittie"

also, despite the extreme caution aforementioned the show will run ungodly long for the 77th year in a row

paul giamatti will be sitting in the back, near peter jackson (who will be inexplicably cut to a number of times) and michael moore (who will be booed)...in that beautiful place where the lights are all dimmer and the cameras never completely focus

oh that wacky courtney love! her carreer peeked about a decade ago, probably because she has had trouble weening herself off of drugs

out of rote, people will say that they miss billy crystal. no one will really remember why.

rumors will spread from seat filler to seat filler that steve buscemi haunts the halls many balconies, ctairwells and underground passages once the lights go out

can anyone say "this year's Lifetime Achievement Award Leni Riefenstahl"?

no less than 40 of Hollywood's prominent actresses (and at least 7 ineffectual starreyed models) will display no less than 94 of the worlds most prominent nipples. as they are framed by the shearest and most expensive of silks, midwesterners will be barred from complaining

dance number dance number dance number

johnny depp will continue to not get his due respect from the Academy, yet somehow manage to live a life greater than you and i can fathom. when i'm forty i won't look as good as the heel of his foot and will have been walked on tenfold more.

oh that wacky anna nicole smith! once a celebrated beauty and top model, a decade of scandal and lawsuit have left her emtionally ravaged with the rotective mentality of a rich orphan....a bungled mess of diet pills, pain killers, and most-likely dubiously prescribed anti depressants, she is incoherent and falls over. there she goes again. my, the oscars are fun !

movies will win awards. as will people. my money's on scorcese. people like scorcese.

glazing over

Current mood: streesed

My whole mental and physical state of being...my confidence, my place in the universe, my near-financial security. It all rests in the hands of...well me. Me and my skill in pressing buttons, turning lenses, and interpreting the uses of Adobe Photoshop Basic. I've all but been told that it is all for naught. I've been given a papercut of a sliver of a flimmer; bread crumbs that even the basset hound has gotten to first, gummed a bit, and returned to the floor. I'm less than 72 hours away from being a couple grand in the hole.

I'm 'fixing' things that cannot be fixed. A half dozen rolls of film and a whole camera have given their lives to this project and now I must make ghosts of wall hangings, dust the size of beasts and creeping things, my own negligence.

If all goes well, surprise. If not, we are blessed with a city free of clocktowers and full of stringent gun control laws.

I'm starting to understand why so many of my fuckup friends are in Iraq now.

never underestimate the beauty of easy

things that were wrong with me as a child

few people get how deep mynueroses lie. the big one, the one that affects all others is that I am retarded. People laugh when I tell them this, but that may just be to make me feel better. I believe that I am mentally deficient, by which i mean that i could be autistic, posess some mild degree of cerebal palsy, been born with a brain retardation, anything.)
I believe that I am retarded and that everyone else is humoring me.
It's hard to refute. I keep finding myself in jobs that are either
a) artistic and completely subjective, one day i'll have thought i've finally made it as a photographer and find all my prints hanging prominently in the outsider part of the gallery
or
b) manual labor, construction, set building, house painting, anything that requires me to move thing a to place b and get back

perhaps the first job i've had that, on the surface level, requires any brain activity would be tutoring math classes but to be honest, I'm sure a well-spoken, conservatively dressed monkey could explain a cryptarhythm as well as I can just the same as he can move a box or press a button on a camera or turntable

perhaps the depressed women of chicago have so run out of hope that they're willing to bed a mongoloid who's not completely obese and has good taste in music

hell, women sleep with Ace, the wheelchair bound standup comic wth mild palsy who Mancow lets on the air to abuse every now and then (and those women he meets as inexplicable club VIP may very well have better self esteem than anyone i'v ever dated) he has more notches in his left armrest than i will ever carve in any bed i'll ever own

this fear mostly goes back to grade school when i needed a lawyer. luckily, my father happens to be a lawyer so he was able to act as my attorney against the Chicago Public Schools and more specifically Stone Academy, who did not want to pay for my LD classes. LD used to stand for Learning Disabled but progressives far too left for their own (or anybody else's) good have changed it to mean Learning DIFFERENCE.

mine wasn't just ADHD. I was, of course, and a few years before it was in vogue and every boy who didn't excel in sports-or did far too well- got a bottle of Ritalin thrown his way but the meat of my problem was a sensory motor dysfunction.

what that means was that my HANDS and my EYES were BOTH fucked, within the confines of my brain
the kind i have, for some reason, usually dwells within smart artistic kids, which is why they didn't want to hire extra faculty to work with me. I didn't have a lisp or a stutter, I wasn't English as a Second Language, I was just weird, off. And i was the only one. Not to mention, I was "gifted". When I didn't have to read the board, the teachers couldn't keep up with me. Or the other students couldn't, forcing the teachers to teach down. I got loud and was often whaped on the arms. if it was just this, i would've been fine. i would've preserved to not leave the class and let the other kids all know full well where I was going. The problem is they did know. Kids can smell that type a shit for miles and i gave them a number of clues, most of which related back to hypersensitivity.

Hypersensitivity tends to come with really bad cases of Attention Deficit Disorder. Literally, you feel things too much. I could not sit still for a haircut. It was torturous, not just because of the sitting still but because each tug at my hair felt like it was all being yanked and ripped out of my head. I couldn't open my eyes under water (still can't). I couldn't take showers (and hated to lay still for baths). I couldn't stand the feel of itchy sweaters denim so I wore sweatpants. Because of the sensory motor disorder I couldn't tie my shoes and never learned to ride a bike.

Now forget about what you know about me. look back to the school you went to when you were 8. Picture a chubby (husky) jewish kid with a bowl cut, wearing sweat pants and velcro shoes. He hasn't bathed in a couple days and likes to spout random shit to amuse himself in class (i still do that last one). Now tell me that he's not retarded.

I felt retarded because I was treated like I was retarded. It wasn't just the boys who called me retard, but the teachers like Mrs. Weaver who scapegoated me whenever something went wrong; it was social workers who would ask me very slowly which one of the pictures was a "tri yayne gull". I'm retarded godammit, not an imbecile! "Can you bounce this ball?" Of course I can bounce the damn ball! I'm a little boy, that's all I want to do with my life.

I feel that way at college, perhaps because I go to shitty colleges. i've made it through 4 years at Columbia without ever really getting any real criticism on my work(and not very much praise, either). Today a teacher flunked me because I didn't really 'get it' and-mixed in with the depression- felt a swell of pride that she failed me because she figured I could get it if I took it again. I was lazy, not hopeless. I showed...ugh...potential (I always have and have always hated it)

People tend to ask how I grew out of it. I didn't. Maybe the hand-eye coordination stuff improved with Nintendo. That IS how I convinced my parents to buy the 8-bits that connected me to every other boy my age in America. The rest of the stuff, I had to make a jump, And that all happened in sixth grade. Around 92, 93 I had only a loose concept of what getting laid was (like what body parts went where...or sometimes there...but how?), but i knew enough to know that I never would in velcro and sweat pants. I want to go shopping! Teach me how to tie my shoes!
That was the one and only time I went to the Gap. I got some Cross Colours t-shirts and some flannel, because I really wasn't sure if I was black...or maybe 'grunge' or something. Jeans were weird and uncomfortable, and I wasn't able to get used to them as quickly as I had the imitation-Nike sneaks, but the next day both Katherine Rekkas (another depressed, soon-to-be extremely well developed young nerd I would 'date' in 8th grade) and Alfredo (whose older brother was, like, totally getting him into the Latin Kings and had, like, totally seen all this porno) told me i looked good, and I knew I was on the right track.

anotther reason to heate you

conservatively
-with 40 million American dollars-
i could fuck
four hundred thousand
high class
prostitutes
in any city on the globe
or better yet
feed a million
for years

i had resigned myself
to not get pissed
at
George Dubya
so soon

i am biased
already
loathing him
in my spare time

but on his first day
wasted
as leader of the free will
40 million was spent
to give a few thousand
a bitchin light show
and a full stomach
(though not much fuller than they're used to)

and
pachyderms
argue
that it was less than
the last one
much less than Clinton's
-adjusted for inflation of coorse-
but
why has inflation jumped so much

if your candidate won,
MY candidate who i'm sure did not run
you
meaning I
wouldn't be raising such a stink

but

he didn't
and kerry's not and
...
i probably would

more mortars went off in washington
than Asia and the whole African subcontinent
two days ago
the receipt has more zeros than i'll ever see on a bank statement
adjusted
of course
for inflation

my point is
the commander in chief
should not eat better than any of his men
when children
(and even strong men and women)
starve
nobody should

i've never flaunted my dinner to anyone that wasn't flaunting their diet
imagine what 40 million could do
in Sudan
imagine what it could do for Phuket
for soldiers scrapping metal
imagine how many windbags a 4 and eight zeroes could silence
imagine letting it loose on ebay, in vegas, in a video arcade
imagine what it could do for any school you've ever attempted

did you even see the rockets reign in red air
(a paraphrase)
on wednesday
did you taste the cognac

fat-browed pachyderms
argue
that it wasn't your money, my money, even bush's money
private donations
from companies

now ask
how much favor did they buy
to bedazzle a wealthy texan and his friends
and if it's not fuckin evil
that he didn't

just
say
no,

(thanks)

writing exercise 1: just another jewish cat's middleclass drudgery

the house is humming
hymning my songs so long as i feed it
when i run out of food
it will be the songs of the winds and street i listen to
the
ringing of bellbuckets and bodega doors
the
throbs
of thumbs
and
traffic
as
i watch
the colors
of the wheatpaste
meet
the season
under
live bands and lost dogs

i don't want to be what age has made me
time
casting
shadows

mine stretches all the way across chicago
both ways
as if took up by two suns
or zapruder footage

my parents are the size of ants
and their feeble wallets
cannot pay my
mortgage
this roof is my own

i am a teacher
because i can
i am a teacher because i
can't

i am

because global warming pro tects
insulates
there are fewer hearts giving out this winter
less shirts are
making their way to the
Village Discount Outlet

soon
the westside will be
gutted for hipsters
the suburbs, black people
the oldest generations
of my family
will make
their final American trek
to the panhandle

did you know that water costs money? that every step i take is worth something, so long as i acknowledge they're limited? if i want to. i can pay for thing I don't need and risk not having money?

all of a sudden
shoes
are
important
moreso than my face,
haircut, or resume
i bought my first jar of wax the other day
my father's is empty and
across town

time casts a shadow
across my face and motives
and
on the inside
where it is wet and far too dark for shadows
there is

resilience

rubber coiling
dragons
that fuck

in the pit of my stomach
in grocery stores and meat markets
both kinds
the ones with acid house and the ones with
cutletas and
either way
networking

they do not have corners to crouch in
they serve a purpose
not for
poetry, or dreadful things
they do not stand still
enough
for dreaming
in fact
overburdoned with sprinklers to wake you up

i don't even have a smoke detector
my roof is my own
perhaps, i get to make the rules

renewed faith in humanity

i just met my neighbor David
with red eyes and corduroy
breath to melt the snow
gave me a hug
on the corner of Iowa and Rockwell
found my phone in the snow
using it to have creepy conversations with all the girls on my recently calledlist
without your lonely
sunday drunk revelry
we never would've been reunited
before the batter wore out

pretty wrong, not funny

nonetheless the highlight of the day
heavy snow
same for traffic
running late to work
Chicago/Western bustop

a man
presumably
deaf
schizophrenic
dissociative maybe
is having a heated discussion with himself
in sign language

dream sequence

i've always had bad luck with
things that have more than four
or less than three wheels

so I probably shouldnt have attempted to man the chartered bus
down icy roads
in the middle of the night
even though the driver bailed
and i was feeling cocksure

the bus belonged to the photo department
or at least
was only occupied by photostudents
all seven were lost in the wreckage
the snow in the gutters
dyed brown from oil before
igniting
like some sign burning bush
hitting me over the head

nobody saw

i guess in my id

mama never raised me not to
rifle through dead men's pockets

i made it
to wherever we were heading
my jacket unmussed
sweat freezing in the night air
flicked to the ground shattering

it was a party
a gala even
for the end of the semester
no one noticed the cheap wine poured into nice glasses
sparkling

like every rippling
dreamy eye in the room
i had done it
leaps and bounds
what i'm trying to do
and they were celebrating me
money
employment
residence
my recent neuroses that i would be evicted by all future roommates would
no longer matter
people respected
my work

and then

there's alwayd
and then

as a guy was handing me my coat
a faceless brunette in a shiny blue dress
silk, or maybe
pleather
slinked across my arm
a pocket ripped
and a charred and torn
checkbook
i had not yet disposed of
dropped
slowmotion
to the floor
all eyes watching
and in
an instance
a 'thap'
it was gone

murderer
they called me

and it was all taken away

numerology

people say i move a lot
i have lived with more people than I've fucked

Roger's park
columbia town house
1982-1986
shayna
sherry
michael
jews
blood relatives
respective guilt and limitation
i
could not
shut up
sherwin home
1987-2000, summer 2001, summer 2004
depression
medication
occupational therapy
making out in the basement and on the roof
two cats,
rabbit
ferret
goldfish
a half dozen frogs i gave my name when i was 8

south loop
plymouth court dorms rm. 506
2000-2001
lon
john
chris
insincere filmmaker
stone roses n' dido dubliner
OCD douchebag
depression
abstinence
unrequited love
poetry
and
other people's couches

Wicker Park
Evergreen and Evergreen
2001-2002
nell
claire
cicely
the only yearlong lease i've ever completed
old friend,
fuzzy memories of IM hounds
sex
parties
drug
'experimentation'
nomad couch oaf
four more cats
need to get away
from Chicago and Erin
every
-thing
-one
i love
is suffocating

logan square
atrill, 2002-2003
shahbaz
cheryl
curran even more desperate than me on the couch
i can touch the ceiling but i can't leave the couch
new school
paves ways
new chances
subterranean truth or dare with Wizards
death threats vomit & mexican baked goods
four more cats
and another fat bitch who needs to watch American Idol
et tu brute
and i'm gone
pussy whipped
i give up digging
old terrain

Andersonville
Farragut
The Place
2003
it has a name
and it moves
flops and vice lords
deaf dealers and juggalo beasts
ken
jason
jackie
jessie
rachel
franklin
ramon on the floor
duo on the couch
until it's pissed away
then sosa's bed
when she moves in with me
first live in lady
fat smelly curran in the catpiss bed full of buffalo bones
runnin up bills and bitching
alcoholism
petty theft
insomnia
Triple Cs
concerted efforts towards bulimia
yield little
room painted with guns
15 pigs up the back way
k holes pissing off the roof
naked and sloppy fat at every party
everyday guests
getting fed by the church
Dragons demanding payment
blood om the walls
statuesque headless freakouts
DEA, roaches
and
it's time to quit pot
especially
mexican shit
from drugdealers
with ape's names
though Coco had his uses
everything else can stay
broken lease
broken friendship
people are dying around me
only one needs an ambulance

Edgewater
Berwyn Bordello
2003-2004
kenjason again
above us
cowboybeccachrisramondevon
below us
adamjhonbradleyjanet
Dante
my beloved crustacean
sicker than ui've ever been
and i'm not fat anymore
crazy bitches drawn
caffeine pills and firewater
black eyes and shit on the floor
blood in breanna's truck
I NEED TO GRADUATE
it's time to be discarded
again
(but at least i'm getting laid)

now
Ukranian Village
Rice and Rockwell
the Elks Lounge
2004 til they get the idea
kyletanianate
two more cats
ruddiggeripkus
millielatrobe
frogandspider
two floors
a projector
more flora
than i've ever seen
occasional bouts of jubilance and productivity
my life is a cartoon
but

it turns out i'm actually just the wacky neighbor
now
gent and junkman
all outta radio waves
and
completely smitten

(completely rambling)

still a failure
though a teacher

the last of my prescriptions is almost sold off and

hopefully
this time
it'll last

--approximates--
counting on hands
i have lived with 29 people
accepted eight names assigned by eight groups

fucked nine
eight schools
fourgrammaronehightwohigheronehebrew
seven neighborhood
one city
ten cats
seven medications
six specialists
fifteen people i've dearly loved
were institutionalized
some voluntarily
(i was spared
)
?

five pairs of boots four
bands
all fake
four improv troupes four
writing collectives three
radio shows
one
open mic
one
gallery show
and i've never written a goddamn zine

out of
twentytwo years
i've spent five in a relationship

maybe one day i'll know what all of this means

shorts: the new, the old

1. alright, cmon, it's 2005 already

by now there should be at least one astronaut's
(no pun) firsthand
account of zero g
masturbation
readily available

we've had over 3 decades
where are my theoretical tax dollars going anyway?

2. how to own 2004

hindsight is
20/20
so i guess this is a day
maybe nineteel
late

but if I was a zombie pirate robot
and
lived off the blue line
i wouldnt've had my fly zipped for more than an hour at a time

hand
over
fist

get a jump on the competition
prepare your viking costume for 05
don't let the stencil, photoshop kids get to it first

worst weekend ever?

Current mood: contagious?

no.
i still have the same number of appendages i had at week's end
nobody's pregnant
i'm not sitting shiva
not the worst weekend ever
no.
just a really shitty weekend.
last friday i hit up a gallery show, a punk show, and a party
king of the world
everywhere at once
renaissance man
this saturday, i missed...
a gallery show a punk show and a party
lesbian juveniles
jibberished above me
laughing
while i fell asleep to Cronenberg
and there were meetings
three of them
in a three and a half day weekend
stuck in a computer
photoshopping
capital
FINALS
the end
FINALS
full of cold
dripping mucous and hate
unable to eat anything but sweet tarts

i'm not in a bad mood
i've seen some good movies
and
slept through some more

i'm just recognizing
a shitty
shitty
weekend

worst weekend ever?

Current mood: contagious?
worst weekend ever?

no.
i still have the same number of appendages i had at week's end
nobody's pregnant
i'm not sitting shiva
not the worst weekend ever
no.
just a really shitty weekend.
last friday i hit up a gallery show, a punk show, and a party
king of the world
everywhere at once
renaissance man
this saturday, i missed...
a gallery show a punk show and a party
lesbian juveniles
jibberished above me
laughing
while i fell asleep to Cronenberg
and there were meetings
three of them
in a three and a half day weekend
stuck in a computer
photoshopping
capital
FINALS
the end
FINALS
full of cold
dripping mucous and hate
unable to eat anything but sweet tarts

i'm not in a bad mood
i've seen some good movies
and
slept through some more

i'm just recognizing
a shitty
shitty
weekend

the uninteresting things in my giant backpack as of last night

one sock, formerly white

phone charger

VHS copy of "Mtv's the State"

40 live crickets (jumbo) in tupperware

box containing all workprints and negatives of my final project (people on bikes for studio photography 1

copies of
Grant Schreiber's Judas Goat Quarterly Winter 05
Aaron Cynic's Diatribe 3.5
Jeff Dizzler's A Time All at Once vol. 1
handouts and syllabi from the last 6 semesters of Columbia and Northeastern
a mix cd from my father
noncurrent copies of the Onion, the Reader, and Chicago RedEye and this week's NewCity

a pencil and white out tape, both broken

a roll of Kodak 400 VC film

full bottle of Relacore (diet pills), half bottle of Stacker 2 (diet pills), sample bottle of Centrum A-Z (vitamins)
empty bottle of 'Siberian Cherry' energy drink

stack of flyers for the Gentlemen Callers' new show
smaller stack of flyers left over from first show
most of the scripts for both

4 bags of popcorn
(2 movie theater butter, 2 butter lover's)
1 bag of Top Ramen 'Oriental' flavor

small box of passionfruit hukkha shisha

a lighter, spare keys to my parent's house, jagged plastic

many blank and shreddedscraps of napkin that i can no longer tell which i'd scrawled poetry on and which was intended to wipe my ass with in emergency

Coming in Eight

my next week is not my own
it belongs to the Gentlemen Callers and Duende
it belongs to
Sarah
honorbound to Latrobe, Milificent and
the Elks Lounge

mostly

it belongs to the Advanced Color Darkroom at Columbia College


we all stand around
the processor
families
the way tribal peoples
gather about warming things
altars
fireplaces
televisions

we are all sick
coughing and sneezing
caligulan germ orgies
in a room with no lights
about
50 of us

the processor packs the germs like
so much dust
and we collect them
study them unwittingly
and
become
weak
break our backs with
oversize
boxes of paper

who breaks their backs with paper?

and
count backwards
two tuesday
when we will be free and forget each other's names

restraintecdote

when the
heavy metal
little person
told me that
she feels claustrophobic
in her
studio
apartment

i decided to bite my lip
and not
tell her
she got it better than the rest of us by
a few good yards

row row row

i'm starting to believe that it's all over
in that
quantum
eternity in a moment
consciousness experiencing cosciousness
w/in
by its own rules
pothead
way

the days are becoming less sitcom
less real
more
ir

yesterday was more than inclimate
more than greenhouse

every surface began to melt in front of me
the facades still
drap
today

there were men with heads of birds sitting on park benches

today
in ukranian village
i saw some demon
some nano
a lilliput
convulsing
on a porch
(it was just balloons but)
why were balloons bobbing on a porch

reassurance:

down state street
dejected
the red staircase
singing to myself
in my head
the tune
of my hopeful, coming
death
i was grabbed by some longhair
"you better read this"
black bound
gold trim

he looked like a native american
the kind
you see in arthouse cinema
greyscale
"you better read the bible
cause we'll all find our coffin

itchums

i've developed this new habit
:
fondling the
contours
of my
scarred and semedhic
nose
when i'm lying
when i'm uncomfortable
when i'm thinking
when i space out
and my hand goes off on its own in search of
tactile sensation

there's a ridge
and
dip
a bump that rides up
big
jew hill
down
240
rounding
350
degrees
back

i don't like
having
a
tell
being
'in'
theater
i'm not supposed
to
have
my hands
in front of my face
and truly
i don't want you to know
how awkward
i truly feel

buddha

my favorite loony
just got busted
odd and black
like a grown up buckwheat
or
some broken bird

he would yell shit
as he
jay-
stumbled
across the boulevard
slapping cars on they backs
.
shit
like

You can't do that, motherferfucker's dea, man!
He's in the ground!

and
always
look right into me
and
disappear

he's in the papers
apparently
this cat
was walkin down
along
the magnificent mile
and
did what i've considered only a couple dozen times,
just
strarted clocking random
uppercrusts
and trafficops
until he had his full
and
walked off
free
in his
epileptic saunter

i'll miss him
the most
because of all the

smelly people i've sat with on the bus
through accusations
and pleas

he was the only one i ever thought might have actually been talking to me
and not himself

it was a failure on my part though

that i just didn't get it

revelations in a hardcore basement

1. the deaths of 2004

memory jogged by a bomber jacket patch:

back when i was in high school
i had a grey-and-black
urban camo
baseball cap
with three
patches
my mom helped me iron on

on the left
the Wu Tang Clan

on the right
Pantera

in front
a white
scratchy
'A'
emblazoned across
a
white
circle

is anybody

missing

a revolutionary

today
?

2. there is nothing
cuter
than a skinhead
who hugs you goodbye
at the end of the show

3. sometimes
you politicized yerself into a danged corner
and you're completely lost:

"Thanks for comin out, I hope you all realize that the world is not limited to your scene, your area. You gotta write a letter to one of these kids in Indonesia whose neighborhood's been wrecked by a tsunami and let him know that, like, 'it's okay, like i'm just a hardcore kid too and, like, i feel you; "

i object
indeed

pomdermint

I held _____
on her couch
as the news talked
about
rape
after
rape
after
rape
after
rape
on
the
blue line

I miss the Guardian Angels

the groups
of
ex-
gangbangers
and
skinheads

that used to prowl
the subway
in red berets
primping
and
absorbing respect

they were the only thugs
my mom could smile at
those rare times
she saw em on the street

in memoriam

Current mood: chilled

my mohawk
february 2002-january 2003
may 2003-august 2003
october 2003-january 2005

strangers have no reason to talk to me on the bus anymore

cocytus

hell is a
twin size bed
a beautiful woman
and
a hot december

(aparently, it's january now
i wish it wasn't)

we writhed in all the wrong ways
trying to
eke
out a few inches of freedom

our skin
met
poorly
and
smoked

when we attempted to take each other in
we gagged
on
togethor

this is not usually the case
not on my end

watching cartoons that were familiar
but couldn't make us laugh
hid
stared

the twin thoughts of exercise and suicide
were mutually
unappealing
but i half assed a set of pushups
and a couple of slices to the leg

downed some sleeping pills
and garlic tablets
let a little salt spill
so my eyelids would have room
to breath

it's seasonal
i tell tania
but it's not
it's one of those massive
axis tilting
young person

i'm
looking
for one of those books
that tells you how to deal with failure
being one
that tells you
how not to try and do something special
but just pay the bills
and enjoy life
i know i can
but i don't know how
to start

i was always a shining star and a lost cause at school
apparently they aren't mutually exclusive
and
i
conversely
received
too little and too much
encouragement

and i never learned how to not know

the ninth level is
the home of Satan, Brutus
and other wayward Democrats
where you wait and hurt

this
is
incomplete