Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Ripper Street Date


Talked to the girl, you want yourself dead.
you should have been brief, short and sweet,
it’s so hard to talk with a stomach full of lead.

A too gentle night where lamp light bled
into the streets, quick stop staring at your feet,
talk to the girl. She think’s your dead

or worse bored with a long night still ahead.
Getting the girl from bar stood to diner booth a great feat,
but it’s so hard to talk with a stomach full of bread.

You’re a bore now, she is blatantly fed
up with the lame stories, it was wrong for you to meet
her, just stop talking to the girl, she’d rather  be dead.

She’s going home to complaint to her girlfriends instead
of wasting her time with just some guy, a deadbeat.
“Your place or mine?” Is that what she just said?

You got the girl and she’s headed  to the bed.
A bad date now  shirts thrown around your cheap suite.
You kissed the girl and you’re a little dead,
still speechless, coming with a stomach full of lead. 

Aptostichus stephencolberti



The Rev. Sir Dr. Steven T. Mos Def Colbert D.F.A, Heavyweight Champion of
the WorldHe is America,and so can you.
The Greatest Gift of Allcame, not by stork,but by eagle to the capitol.
The last of 11Jimmy, Eddie ,Mary ,Billy, Margo, Tommy, Jay, Lulu, Paul, Peter,Steven.

He mourns two 9/11's,a patriots loss and a loss patriarchal.Loves Papa Bear O'Reilly,but hates every other bear.

The Favorite Son of South Carolina,Scarred by flight,Read Tolkien,in a new quiet,empty Charleston homewith fewer playmates, and less time to play.

The boy with one working earborn from a lovely lady
went on to be knighted by queens.

He keeps gold on his shelfin his Emmy and Peabody.In Air Colbert and treadmills.

The American Dream
in a cone.


The powdered history of the world
Lies beneath your feet.
The Pacific
Crashes before your eyes.
With two legs
You conquered land.
With two lungs
Water conquers you.
                                          
The growing ignorance of our smallness
Becomes evident to you.
The blatant oneness of the Earth
Is lost on mankind.
With two legs
We marched ahead.
With two lungs
We grew tired.
                                            
The soot filled air
Encroaches, surrounds the globe.
The particulates of our waste
Accumulates on broken promises.
With two legs
Man walked away.
With two lungs
Man coughed blood.
                                             
The warning, beacons of the end
Burned for blind eyes.
The Animals of the world
Fled from impending doom.
With two legs
Man conquered the world.
With two legs
Man himself itself. 

Sorry Angel


You, the Son of the Morning
Below the Sun
Who fell like Icarus
Who went against the forewarning
Below the Father
Who fell with a chorus
Without the Sun
Wings melted in fire and mourning 

46 - 50


46. Margret Michelle never sat down with pen,
Hell-bend on making southern witnesses.
Her father was always the better author,
But her tired in his old age,
A priest unable to raise an angry fist
To his congregation.
Given the chance to make his stupid daughter
Rich, and filthier, he took it with a death mask sigh.
The Mitchell family will never go hungry again,
But they will never see Margret as a heroin.
47. Just be silent,
Let vanilla tea, warm pasties,
And your stress waft over you.
Let the owls coo, and dragons slumber.
Let your mind be calm, under an asunder sky.


48. Letterman jackets creates tension in the bustling hallways of Dutchtown.
A Civil war battle field reclaimed by the farmers from the old country,
Stolen by state government to make room for paler more patriotic children.
The history of the school stays with its students, a huge chip is latched on bony shoulders
As the students walk through metal detectors. You never know who you can’t trust.
Children are the future, but America still fear what we don’t know.


49. I wish I had the stable addiction of my father,
Half a pack and a shot of moonshine helps the sould.
I wish I had the attitude of my mother,
Arguing with a legal dwarf ends up in a Middle Earth battle royale.
I wish I had my sister’s apathy,
The world could burn around her and she would use our searing childhood home to light a cigarette.
I wish I had my brother’s drive
20 hours to Connecticut, and the give-a-fuck to get out of Georgia.




50!!!
            Is God an Atheist?
            Yahweh takes no leap
Of faith to his work.
Allah doesn’t have
To wade through dirt to know the end.
Brahma fights in
No crusade,
Commands no army,
Splinters no wood for crosses.
Odin was never said to be infallible.
God doesn’t keep the Sabbath holy.
He grew fat on his throne
On the seventh day.
God didn’t kill himself so
Other would kill in his name.
God is arrogant, manipulative, petty.
He needs to re-read Jonah.
He should hate himself.
God should be an atheist.


41 - 45


41. Being the son of a poor teacher,
Meant I had to teach math too many times.
I never want to sleep molten laminate,
Or experience  the sheer of a butcher paper cutter.
I don’t want to see anymore red pen ink,
No more bleeding pages, I have scribbled
On too many lines. 



42. Your body is a machine, imperfect. Your adrenal gland is too large. Your appendix too close to exploding for divine design. Your eyes to likely to erode. You carry around six molar hydrochloric acid in a mucus sac. You run on inefficient chemical processes, and your brain is too big for evolution to continue in good spirits. When you die, you run the risk of your rib-cage exploding from the pent up gasses, the noxious rage of your now late body. You will return to soil, you will return to your mother.


43.That damn bird.
Stuck in it melancholy
In the weeping willow.
Its wilted limps hang
Close to my window,
Unintentional up close look
At the sounds of nature. Its red
Is too bright, and its children barren,
Hungry.



44. Its late.
 The night young,
and the pack tired.
The caravan needs to
 leave before sunrise or
the Donner pass will swallow us.

We’re in late autumn.
The snow fresh,
And the storm continuing.
The horses need to rest,
But we need to get to Dakota before.
The Donner Party will have to eat again.

Frozen, splintered wheels of carts
Now fuel dying fires.
We need to cut our losses,
And the throat of a horse
To keep through the night.
Unless we want to eat
like the Donner party.



45. I was in Seattle,
Guiding my kindergarten muse
Into a bathroom to repent in slurs.
She only tried to find herself
In the ten story fall.
Adderall knows her better than I do now.
Little Any, such a prideful girl, so prudish.
I knew her in middle school.
That is a bond few admit to share,
But we know too much about each other
To want to ruin each other’s image.
She only wanted to be wonderful,
In a world so cruel.
She know I can’t live for the both of us.

36 - 40


36.  Chess is a hard game to master,
A misplaced bishop on plated wood
Ends in nothing less than a disaster.

Night air of failure, the morning after,
The knight cackles on steed, so misunderstood,
My faltering  under stress, blessed disaster.

37. Three years ago, in May Emilee (For the love of her God remember the two e’s) Ann Burroughs first kissed me, so unpracticed, on that cracked tennis court. She wept the night I ended the strife, September 28th will forever be a holiday of freedom and self-loathing.
She is now obsessive compulsive, trying to count how often the devil speaks to her in multiples of seven. I talk to her when I can relive myself of apathy, but her struggle makes me feel less tangible. She is a second hand author who can barely knit her way back into sanity, why couldn’t I love her?


38. [Published Before]


39. Oh brother,
How you have sent me
to the edge of insanity
on the John Deere boot strapped
West end of Georgia college life.
You sent me away to an academy to learn
How to be a better you.
I only learned to hate Italian major.
Such a foreign told for such a pasty boy.
Your judgment still hand in my head
To the rhyme of your potent
Tsk, tsk, tsk
A waltz of verdicts.



40. Thunderbolt had been dead for a few hours,
But our modest back yard told us nothing,
Until we pulled into its jagged drive.
I just a fence to greet the husky, but he greeted no one.

My eyes now shut to the image of my mutt,
Old, loud, and now in a trash bag.
I still have the callouses on my palms
From where I dug that grave.

I made you a sharpie plywood grave marker,
And asked in Donnie Darko’s voice,
Why did you want to be alone in the end?

31 - 35



31. In the back road of Hampton, Georgia,
Along the mana swamps and fog valleys,
Proud men cheer at screens in their locked homes,
Their wives hold pillows to their unsatisfied ears.
Sons and daughters of the south hold sweet home tears
Like fiery coals, and consider driving off the road into the barren trees.
Winter has come to Georgia.


32.  When I travel I feel my journal
Is a poor read and a worse waste of time.
At least cigarettes make the journey shorter.
When the roads wind into oblivion
on smoky mountain highways,
I watch the street lights fade, and
Gradients of asshole-ish high beams come towards me.
I still hesitate when I have to turn onto a street marked
With  a lamp, my femur still aches at the sight.
Swerving won’t help, neither will getting there on time.


 33. The reading lamp isn’t on,
But these chapter of James Joyce won’t read
Themselves. I hope I’ll trip over the words
Enough to make sense of Norah love of James.
Such a fart slut,
A man of the girl’s dormitory,
Just read his letters.
Such a whore for words.
Such complicated ideals
Of sex sex sex. Yeah
Gender is androgynous along
With all the Darger boys.

34. Meatloaf again. I call back at the echoing images of Tim curry in drag, a great clown face man distorting the ideals of Old Spice men in bad acted musicals.
Transylvanians have nothing going for their country , aside from bad transsexual cunt puns, and twilight fanatics ruining the image of Vlad. 
At least hipsters try to keep the Pabst’s cultural shock intact, or at the very least hidden (I still hide the USS Lexington on my forearm under flannel).
 I nibble on my Chinatown General Tso’s chicken made by a Mexican.
I wish to hell the apocalypse would actually come.


35. I want to die
 so I can wade
through dirt
 to see the other side
I want the grave estate of
Reincarnation to
Bruise the face of god.
I want to be barefoot drunk on life
As I see the light of the next world.
I hope it doesn’t exist to prove my past selves wrong. 

26 - 30


26. The guitar is backwards,
The imperative inflection intrinsic
To villainous  vibratos is left to the left hand.
My entire hand-written expression is based
On my right, but my musical livelihood is placed
On the hand that can’t throw a football.


27. I wish them poison ivy,
 Frostbitten fingers,
And hot flashes.
I want their blood to clot,
And for their cokes to be flat.
I wish for them to be forced
To buy tampons for their sisters.


28. Jesus must have smoked weed. He hung out with twelve dudes in sandals and dirty robes  that had few possessions, and worked temp jobs. He overindulged in his last meal, so many rolls at the last supper. He didn’t feel the pain of whips and chains not because of God’s grace, but because THC numbs the senses and makes one more forgiving.
  

29. There’s smoke on your breath,
And I can’t drink after you
Because smoke makes Pepsi taste like piss.
There’s yellow between your index and middle finger,
A target so the doctor can know the source of your struggle.
You shadow box with me still, but my reach has over shadowed your
And your punches hold more weight,
A greater testament to your
Teeth pulling
Now archaic naval name
Stonehand Skinner.


30. “I didn’t know they let colors work here,”
Dear god Mawmaw not again.
A true southern woman through and through,
And she loved to prove it often,
Healthy tips can’t cover up racism.
That night still clots her blood,
The day her Velvet Elvis poster became a mausoleum.

21 - 25


21. I go inside my hollow gun dorm,
See the serfs dancing,
A simply wave is enough of a pleasantry.
I go up to my third floor room,
It smells of ramen and stress.
I pick up the guitar, I stop.
I can’t play because
I know she can’t, she won’t
And she will probably end up in tears.
A hospice bed, vestal to the sound of  a piano,
A minor chord of Iron and Wine Is too tragic.
 E Aᵇ A E  Gᵇ


22. I wish more people loved neutrinos.
Just an apathetic particle, no real attraction to the world,
Just a place holder to make Einstein right.  The sun
Pumps out neutrinos for human sustenance, but in that
Infernal engine, protons swim in the storm of electrometric
Waves, no Virgil as a guide, but protons will thank Newton for
Equal and opposite arcs, a path to destruction,
When those two protons collide the closest thing to a miracle occurs,
Two becomes three, from simple protons to quarks energy and a neutrino,
Shot from the world tangential from its birth.
A lash on the eye of god.


23. Mother Theresa should have done a strip tease to convert the masses.
Her church of suffer might had more devout listeners.
No one heard her sucker punch of condom-less births, but
Every loves a martyr. Property is robbery only  for those who steal
From African.  Dead Mother Theresa’s Twitter has more followers than the Pope.


24. You should know Poe’s telltale heart
Still beats to the drum of teen angst.
Galileo’s dilapidated middle finger still hangs in the air,
Mournful raging against the light of the church.
The rotting head of Golding still bears maggots
on its stake,
Warring away the ideals of Communism.
Milton still sees the downfall of man from Adams fire lit eyes.
The dead poets of the world make you glad to be alive.
C’est la vie.


25. How can I be content
When that blue still haunts me.
The faded sky blue spotted with rust,
That marked my femur, my knee.
That folding steel fuselage that marked
One Steven T. Colbert.
That sky that turns that blue every clear afternoon
At 3:14. How can I be content when that blue still exists.

16 - 20


16. Off highway 75
There is bar where fun
Rarely goes.
Too many cars
Held together by prayers
And epoxy. Jesus take the wheel.

17. Middle School dances
Should be eternally wiped
From memory to make
Spotless minds.
I digress,
We must learn what
Rejection taste like.
Flat punch, sweat.

You must learn to hug the wall,
Before you can hug a woman.



18. The tattered ship finally moped into the Carolina harbor,
                Home, her name sake, her final resting place.
                                Her crew gone, their last lines lost in the final stage

     Of World War II. One man left. One simple mechanic, now
                Piecing the history of the USS Carolina for show,
                                The people want a show, a names on a plaque,

   A face to forget. The people want to hear the heroics of
                Senior Chief Petty Officer Clyde Jerome Skinner,
                                But they don’t want to see the horror in his eyes

   They only want to see the bored barrels attached to the stern,
                The people only want a show, not the stories,
                                They want to hear how he saved his ship.
                                Not how he watched his brother die.
                                Purple hearts, only cover stone ones.


19. Raw cinnamon rolls engross my formative years.
They always burn on the bottom or are flaccid and raw on the inside.
Those not so humble chemical bums taught me about reduction reaction
At the age of four, but I only remembered the chalky taste.
Don’t eat the raw dough was a challenge, how many faux eggs
Can you eat before someone quits.
Brands bordered my home and kept us fed, content.

20. Reliving Hamlet makes you feel a less
insane. The rouge peasant slave, a tenant of
the mind, an eye to rub, the length he goes
a mad man, needing a doctor, new hope
oh sweet Ophelia, Save this ass of ours.

11 - 15


11.  My god mother Jennifer
Chews on vodka, spits the butts of cheap
Cigars on the ground, chains too many words
With a single slur.
She is not deft at much,
 but she can argue anything.
 The weight of her wedding
Band was too great, and she
With heavy hands signed the divorce papers.
She now lives with her cat, Brutus,
The only man in her life that won’t betray her.
Little Five will be kind to her.

12. Don’t lock your knees
You’ll pass out before
your new life begins.
The bridesmaids are
years beyond you,
whispering practiced words
of encouragement.
They have been through it before.
You’ll learn to love him,
After you finally remember
What his sweat soaked
Convulsions feel like.


13.In your sister’s bedroom
Under the black lumpy futon
There is a box.
The box of her secrets,
Her fears, and her hope.
Sporadic scribbles that prove
Your relation.  
The carpet still shows
The signs of when you
 once lived with her.
A bookmark marks her latest tastes,
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
She always been more postmodern than you.
The head lights of her car flourish the window,
Time to disappear.



14. I want a cigarette.
Well packed and dry,
I want it to hurt, I want to smoke it
Until Darwin tears it from my dead hands.
I want to walk past my middle school,
And show them what happens when
They fail to do their job.
I want it to guide to someplace
Less worrisome.
I want the smoke to carve henna
Into my lungs.

15. I watched them from the lobby,
I wasn't going out of my way to watch them,
They didn't go out of their way to be hidden.
The power dynamic castrates him,
But he seems to be happy, complacent.
They are drunk, lacking the lucidity of a
Spiteful heart.  I can’t hear what she is whispering
But from his smug smile you can tell
She’s finally opening up.


Improve 6 - 10


6. After 6 I stay up,
 preparing for
early morning classes.
Tea stained teeth greet the mirror.
Smoke greets my lungs,
and I rub the sleep out of my eyes.
I saunter through civilized learning.
I hear again and again the Academy tradition
of manifest Go West, Go Early
Go Fuck yourself.
Blah blah blah blah blah.


7. The world becomes 
Call of Duty when your drunk.
The rain, a foreign stab.
The mud, an obstacle course.
When I drink the world
dissolves into Rex, Ga.
A dilapidated porch,
held together by chicken wire.
I’m putting fire crackers
in the old grill again.


8.  Three residential patterns
repeat.                
                                I see the new kids,
they must see me in a similarly
unfamiliar way. 
I am a vulture.                  
picking off a home from the failing
housing market.
                                The neighborhood
is tempered by the bod, rattling in the rain,
filtered by empty beer bottles.
                                The kids spray paint
the siding. They don’t know me well
enough to know what racial slur to put so they put them all.


9. The only excuse to go to Henry County Georgia
Is a faulty engine or your femur is broken.
The people here are fueled by antiquated ideals of
A once whiter picket fence. I once thought the jail
Was where they put people who knew too much.
I later learned that they just move away.
The population come in waves of babies,
Leaving in their late teens, hoping to never come back.
We all get stuck. Your boot just gets caught in the reeds,
And even though you get your foot free, you must go back
For the boot. You go to the same shitty restaurant,
Eat the same #7 combo, and regret it with every cigarette.


10. Deception and perfection are horrid traits.
One breeds trust, the other distain.
The foundation of relationships
Are built on the cement of hormones
And the want to be wanted.
You didn’t know me until you
Knew you hated me. I hope
You find sincere happiness, or
You remember your bones seared by sin.
Find another’s hand, trembling and sorrowed,
And calm them. 

Improv 1 - 5


1.  Go and tell your people
they can go fuck themselves.
You are an insult to your country,
your parents,
even your god.

Have you any context
of the Old Testament?
Have you ever read
Judges 19?
Do you know of the church
beyond communion wine?
You are the type of person
who doesn’t wipe their shoes
while passing  another’s threshold.
You are a hypocrite,
a hate mongering
daddy issue ridden
homunculus scum.
  

2.  I want to be singled out.
I want to be punched, feel a stone hand.
I want to hear a lonely steel pedal note and weep.
I want to smell fake cinnamon.
I want to feel love for her again.
I want to stop lying to myself.
Clear nights breed tragic thoughts,
and too many cigarettes breed gravity.


3.  He was the man always behind the camera, so
I never knew what my grandfather looked like
when my father was a child.
Did he have a beard, or a goatee when he leaned
to get a perfect shot?
Did he play guitar at home after work?
I doubt I will ever know.


4.  Music is becoming to drag on me. Bore me.
repeats itself a monotonous Gmaj, Amin, Emaj.
Even the plants sway to the memory of the once original
Pachelbel’s Cannon.   
Even I have no originality, the six strings
grate and bellow the same pentatonic chorus
of blue’s past.
My father taught me as a boy to play guitar, I still need to learn.


5. Strip down the rye,
to the fungus,
to the ergot.
Taste, color, odor
all nonessential,
easy to confuse.
Keep your sanity
on your coat rack,
less you want to forget it.
Pack only the basic laws of the universe,
and let C₂₀H₂₅N₃O recompose existence.
Lysergic acid diethylamide, Jude’s new play thing.

Shotgun Homes


I now envy those ugly bourgeois vomit curtains.
So flaccid and opaque, not forced
To be a witness.

My bladder woke me up. I had to leap over the front of my bed,
like every day to not wake up the golden child.
But the prodigal son was not in bed,
his Dell Inspiron was closed for once.

I take the usually 4 steps to the left,
But the light in the bathroom was already on.
The sink was running.
I knew Kyle was there I could hear his tell-tale mouth breathing.

The water was still running.
Kyle always hit me in the back if  the sink was on for too long in my presence.

The back door slams, I nearly match its volume from shock.
It must have been 5 am, my half deaf father was making his
Way to work, he can’t  hear the difference between the Pomp and Circumstance
Of quick-apathy shut doors, and a surreptitious exit.

I wade through the tepid air of that terrible hallway.
The knob turned without arguing.

The sink was not overfilled with water, I expected too many clichés
In my formative years.

But my brother was covered with brother.
His glasses only half on his bloodless face.
He could have been sleeping, if linoleum wasn't his bed.
Kyle was still wearing shoes, his clothes were the same shade of ugly from the day before.
I yelled at him.
I called him metal mouth, cello sissy, and whatever he used to insult me.
He didn't falter,
 I dared not touch him,
for fear he would reveal his bluff and retaliate.

I reverted back to infancy, and repeated my first word.
I kept saying it over and over, I crescendoed as I slapped
My mother’s door.                  
I was relieved to see another human.
Logan what could it be? Say!?
I reached up to her hand to guide her,
But she retracts and moves to the bathroom, reacting to the same faucet noise.

She complemented her god.