A Few of the Plants Still Grow
(Hop, skip, Little Cricket)
I saw the flicking embers
Soar like shooting stars
Looking in from outside the box
(Hop, skip, around my neck
Hold on tight
We’re going on a ghost hunt
We’re not scared)
It’s like standing atop a
Bed of nails
It’s standing on a thousand nails
To grow an inch
So twisted and contorted
(Hop, skip, Little Cricket
Wrap you up in blankets
Used to hold you in one hand)
All the pot handles rendered our hands numb
You’re in charge of your own suffering
One day, you turn thirty, and
It’s not your bully’s voice anymore
It’s just your own
Maybe it’s time to come home
I had all of these great expectations
Just a kite with no pilot
Maybe I need pinned to the ground
So, let’s run around. Let’s
Run the devil out
My friend, horror can be pain endured,
But it can be pain conquered!
Let it go, please
Let it go, as I smell
Burning flesh, premature death,
Putrid hate
(Hop, skip, paint the canvas)
Paint it finished
While I wash dishes
Surrounded by ghosts of the kitchen
No part of my life untouched by you
Worked into my DNA, worked into
The pattern of the walls and highway
My childhood into infinity, I
Showed my full hand, and you’re stitched in now
Someday, you’re thirty, and
What once was mysterious becomes
A predictable chain of events
(Hop, skip, mix it up)
A few of the plants still grow
I composted the rest, but a few live.
The tree, the aloe, your cactus and Cricket’s,
Eroding like desert sand in the wind
The universe hinges on the beat
The atomic weight hinges on the beat
See my life in iconograph
(Hop, skip,)
(Little Cricket)
No Chairs No Friends
See? It fits.
Throw a photo in the bucket
No colors tonight
The sound stopped echoing
I am finally writing my poem
The second you hit this shit
You have five seconds to change it
My arms stretched forever
This is where you go when you die
No living room
No chairs
No friends
The void.
Are you done now?
How it all looks brand new
How it all looks like Tupperware
“You’re my butterfly, sugar, baby”
Come, my Lahey
They’re $25 a piece
What the fuck we need a table for?
We have to fucking scream it
Sink, Florida, sink!
I will drag you to the front.
Ride, Sally, ride
Pints of Guinness
Pints of Guinness, half Jameson, half cream
How doubly foreign
It’s Joe
It’s a smoke and
A lot of fucking food
Quiet Little Town Psychosis
Please don’t
No thanks
“Okay, I’m not a racist or anything”
“It’s just the most racist joke I’ve ever heard”
Please don’t
Please don’t
Turn around
Heal pain
We’re going to Tulsa tomorrow
I’m trying to get laid
Please don’t, please don’t
Goddammit
“Get it?”
I turned around and everything
How silly to think she knew what I expected
How silly to think this place is any different
Alone in the car tonight
My brother, chest out like a bow
Breaking the water from your belly
Survive; take my Polaroid
I shook in my surprise
Survive, all meaning
Constructed like paper
I can dream, try and focus
Your outline on every face I meet
But for fuck’s sake
Why?
I just wanted to get laid
I swore my guitar grew from my chest
So maybe when I close my eyes
I’ll have an Etch-a-Sketch
Locked in a closet
Goodness, like an elevator
Stopping at every floor
Superbowl XXL III
Human Like Me
Seaweed on the ocean floor
Rolling like the road, like I-44
Oklahoma, pink rays piercing
Indigo skies like a
Whisper in the night
I will meet a human like me again
Someone to stand on tip toes
Between fence posts
Sneaking peeks over the top
While the rest of the kids play ball
I said:
“You know what fucks me up?”-
The truck squeezed back on his side-
“One day, one of these ‘oh shit’ moments”
“Is gonna be the last ‘oh shit’ moment”
“I’m gonna be so surprised”-
Over the hill, thicket of windbreakers bare phalanges-
“There better not be a fucking hell”
“I’ll be pissed”
I hid in the lamp room
You found me anyway
Told me a beautiful story or two
About Brooklyn and flying away
Here in Tulsa, we can be free
Scream it from Prague to Mississippi
It’s just the rhythm of the word
It’s just the light, a
Flower bloomed on the OR table
Rooting in my veins
How bad. Bad Hats. Our first date.
I questioned the table like Socrates
But for all the wounds I healed
I sure had the driver’s seat poorly adjusted
But how the hills rolled, almost like
Mechanical sets. I felt everything
Leave my body at the decrescendo
I said, “Be careful, Joe.”
“See you back at this end of the Mother Road.”
Run away, run away
Be someone else for a day.
Someday, I’ll meet a human like me
And it won’t be the barista in downtown Tulsa
She will be the light pouring in the window,
Warming me in the chair, brief inhales of
Heaven, brown crema gasp
Love you, forever
Life is short
Love you all the time
Little Dinosaur
Still out here looking, kid
Maybe she’s at the top of the
Rolling hill, the foot of the tree
Waiting for me. What novelty,
What novelty
Layer by Layer
Sometimes, all it takes is one
Photograph to lyse every scab
Bleed again
I saw it in your little face and
Pink rainboots
I saw the other side
The hope in my eyes
One good week, maybe just
One good week…
When does it leave?
You can drain sorrow enough to last a lifetime and
Never be emptied
This is how it happens
Layer by layer
Ripped to shreds, rebuilt better
I saw the future,
Or at least the concept, and
I saw it in her eyes
I see it in storybooks
I love you just the way you are, and
The everlasting question
“Why me? Why not her?”
This is how it happens
Gasping floors settling, balanced
Layer by layer
Build better
Gian's Art Dump 