Sick Clark's New Year's Rawkin' Eve!!!

Themb, naahin, eeeahifht, sssifffevplhegm, axe, ffligheve, floor, t-t-t-thee, oohnnt, un!!!!!

I'm Just Starstruck On You

A rocket age.
It's nobody's fault.
I hear them all
sing Katyusha whistle
and ring, ring the rage.
Ring the rage
dragging the martyrs
all over the set.
Slit by the heels,
my awareness
gets dragged
and dragged around
circles of autumn cannibalism.
Internecine ejaculations
of heated discourse
and
shell fragmented offal
dance around the radio,
flicker in the monitor,
scroll across the television
and
I just stare at it all.
I must be looking for
some kind of comfort
in all of it.
Something certain
beyond awareness
that never explains anything.
God.

Dial-a-Fight

When it gets like this

I like to pull my furry hat 

down over my eyes

and wait until I wake up 

in someone else's dream

maybe yours.

Perpetual Summer

The Principal of my middle school was a broad shouldered, rumbly voiced guy named Mr. Zurfluh.  He used to pace up and down the courtyard during lunch like a yard boss, breaking up groups of homogenous black or white boys in hopes of avoiding any race baiting and fights.  Looking back, it really was like prison. Pioneer Middle School was laid out like a penitentiary, with close-walled common spaces and red brick breezeways that connected the classrooms, gym, cafeteria and office.  The school was evenly divided between white and black students.  While instances of outright racism were few, there were eternal struggles about which was cooler; rock or soul, Prince or Journey, Members Only or San Francisco Riding Gear - sometimes coming to violence.  Mr. Z was really in his element there.  I believe he did indeed see himself as a warden. Year round, he wore these wool, three piece suits that felt like horsehair sandpaper whenever he got you in a headlock for a quick trip to the office.  For me, these trips were thankfully infrequent.

I got to know Mr. Zurfluh a bit during my middle school prison stay.  His intrusive strolls around the courtyard provided plenty of opportunities for conversation.  He had a sly sense of humor and could be pretty self deprecating at times.  Mr. Z didn't retaliate when I made cracks about snow in the forecast while pointing to his jacket collar.  This was quite a contrast from my initial impression.  I suppose the authoritarian Mr. Zurfluh was more his response to the immediate environment and the avuncular Mr. Zurfluh was probably closer to his civilian self.  His favorite movie was Patton.  I used to amuse him by doing George C. Scott imitations during lunch.  He'd chuckle and give me one of those knock-the-wind-out-of-you pats on the back with his giant, bear paw hands.

Mr. Z held down that Principal spot at Pioneer Middle School for a year after I went on to high school.  During the year that I left, his pregnant daughter was stabbed to death while closing up the Safeway near the community college.  Everybody in town knew about her murder within hours.  Steilacoom was a pretty small town and for some reason I never came to understand while my family lived there, very insular.  It seems odd that it was, considering it bordered the very large McChord Air Force base and the vast Fort Lewis Army Reservation.  Mike Loverick's sister broke the news about the Zurfluh death.  She got it straight from Mike, who worked at the Safeway with Mr. Zurfluh's daughter.  He drove a blue metal flake Trans Am and his family had a swimming pool tucked away behind their colonial revival styled home.  Mike's sister thought I was lame and gross so most of this information was stuff I gleaned from her constant loud babble during study hall. The stupid part of me was really jealous of the Lovericks.  How come the accident of birth stuck me with my hardscrabble lot instead of with these suburban Gatsbys?  Life for the Lovericks seemed to me like perpetual summer.

About a week after the murder, I came home from school to find the neighborhood filled with local news trucks and cops.  They were all massed down the street around the Loverick house.  Mike Loverick did it, I was told by my little sister, who walked right past their house on the way home from Pioneer.  They found the knife and the money in his room.  Mike worked as a shelf stocker at Safeway and was on the schedule the night of murder.  He later confessed to stabbing the soon to be mother to death when she caught him stealing money from a strongbox.  Needless to explain, this created quite a tempest in our town.  

Mr. Zurfluh was destroyed by his daughter's death.  He resigned from his post at Pioneer and took a year off.  He took up a position under the Superintendent at the high school and I would run into him occasionally in the halls.  He was always quietly soused.  These encounters were awkward.  I would do little scenes from Patton and Mr. Z's eyes would get red rimmed and wet.  He was in perpetual darkness. 

When I was a senior, I wound up at a keg party in the house of Marion Manlove (yes, that's her real name), who was close friends with Mike Loverick's sister.  This was one of those parties you wind up at after a night of driving around bored with friends, looking for a joint.  On a medicine cabinet raiding mission to the bathroom I chanced to hear these two girls prank calling the Zurfluh house on a cordless phone, "Hello, is this Mr. Zurfluh?  Well, we got your daughter, you're next."  Some people live in perpetual darkness and some in perpetual summer.

Thanks Be For The Furry Hat

Thank you for this furry hat I set upon my head.  

I wearing all the more and some, quite even in my bed.  

This cheerful flap and buckle that 'tis fitting to a tee.  

Now I cannot imagine one as strapping grateful me!

Dream/Jimmy Silva

I just woke up

from this eerie dream.

There was a soccer pitch

upon which I tried 

to put together a game

of pick-up football.

The people milling about

were diffuse and mumbling.

It was hard 

to get a good look 

at any one of them.

I cussed about the fog

and realized it was clear,

they were clouded.

These people

seemed quite diverse,

not only in where they came from

but when they came from.

They spoke in rivers of babble.

After a few failed attempts 

to throw the football,

they all moved off the pitch

down a narrow road

towards an old hotel.

Okay, I'll follow.

The hotel was laid out 

in a quadrant of buildings

all overlooking 

a manicured lawn.

At one corner,

between the once stately

white columned structures

was a gaping mouth 

to a tree tunnnel.

Without anyone specifically

mentioning it

I knew we were there 

to look for a little girl.

I followed an inuit guy around

as he moved through the suites,

then a hippie woman wearing a sari

and finally went down to the lawn

behind a brush pilot type 

smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes.

On the lawn

I could see down the tree tunnel.

The oaks that composed it were 

hundreds of stories high.

Christ, how'd I not notice that?

Drawing up to the mouth

I looked down it's leafy throat

and got deep shivers 

of weird electricity.

Something primal inside me

was urging me away 

from this path.

Turning around

I noticed the lawn had filled up

with these faded folk

all milling about

like a garden party 

of somnambulists.

A great murmur 

came from the tree tunnel

and I began to see people 

trickling forth on to the lawn.

The little girl had been found

in one of the rooms.

How the hell do I know that

when nobody here talks to me?

Somehow I knew her name.

I'd heard it mentioned on television.

She lived in the southeast.

Not anymore.

At that point,

I had a very strong feeling

I was about to see an old friend

coming out of that tree tunnel.

He hasn't been around 

since that night,

December 23, 1994.

Jimmy's gonna show up here

among these flickering souls.

That's when I woke up

tingling from head to toe.

I just missed you Mr. Silva

but I sing your songs 

each passing day.

Burnt Kabob

We're pretty well snowed in here.
Getting a lot of reading done.
Here's a poem from the sufi sheikh Rumi
I like...

Burnt Kabob

Last year, I admired wines. This,
I'm wandering inside the red world.

Last year, I gazed at the fire.
This year, I'm burnt kabob.

Thirst drove me down to the water
where I drank the moon's reflection.

Now I am a lion staring up totally
lost in love with the thing itself

Don't ask questions about longing.
Look in my face.

Soul drunk, body ruined, these two
sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.
Neither knows how to fix it.

And my heart, I'd say it was more
like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,
struggling and miring deeper.

But listen to me: for one moment,
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you. God.

Priori Proof

The grandeur and awe

of the Virgin's Dormition and Assumption

in to the arms of the Son,

entering the house with great sound,

with Peter at the head 

and John at the foot

of the deathbed

is rendered in record as fantastic manifest.

Really?

I set it up in my mind's own canvas

knowing the ecclesiastic canon of the Gospels

calls for at least six pictorial representations.

It always comes out overly surreal

even campy

but I have faith

that the story has true power

because 

as the Canterbury Ontologicalists

like to say

the inspiration for it all 

is something than which nothing greater 

can be conceived.

The greatness is limitless.

Watching It Fall

I love it when it snows!

There's a fookin' igloo down the street.

We're going sledding

We're making snowballs and snowfolk.

We're staying out late and watching it fall.

Staying out late and watching it fall.

Passing by the Stars

I walk the dogs

with a 9 year old named Lili.

She sees walruses in autumn piles of leaves

and signals her conditions 

with a white leaf.

She has a song 

she would like me to share with you;

Passing by the stars

two in a row

on the way to the moon,

Passing by the stars

three in a row

on the way to the moon,

Passing by the stars

four in a row

on the way to the moon.

until you get to 10 in a row. 

-LKI 2008

It's very catchy, I think.

Diodes of Light

From this porch

atop the steam vent clouds

from a cup of whiskey tea;

everywhere, wintergray is made white

by this glorious sum of snow.

And later down hockey rink streets,

among plantation cotton-ball blossoms of ice

hammock-hung in the cradles of woodbrush,

we moon hop slowly to the store -

vested in heavy wool,

pinched by cold clear air,

and sung to by slipping bus tires

to get a cookie cutter 

and wax paper.

On the way home

the sun is a blinding yellow ice-cube

low in the south sound sky.

It looks like a pupil 

contracted between lid-fronts

of blue black arctic air.

Even at night 

the darkness pales 

in blankets of claustrophobic coldquiet.

My hands feel dry and old

under the floor lamp's heat

down here 

along the mopbucket sponge floorboards.

When December comes I stay inside,

with the heater constantly on,

clearing away the dust, 

and staring out the window

at frost never thawing 

bathed in Christmas colored 

diodes of light.

Watch The Footwork Baby

For Christ's sake, come on.

Watch the footwork, baby.

Watch it.

Come on.

If you want it you can get it.

Pick it up.

Pick it up, come on and get it.

It's free.

Watch the footwork, baby.

Come on.

Come on.

If you want it you can get it.

You can get it if you want it.

Dig it.

Dig it?

Oh,

Forget it.

Watch the footwork, baby.

I Make The Fog

Eleventeen years in a master tape box
Tracks of vocals
Tracks of drum
Tracks of feedback
Tracks of tears.
I’m pulling them out in splices
To build a picture.
A picture of a lake.
Every night
I come to the bank of the lake.
The bank of the lake
Is the bank of the fog.
The fog I am in.
There are no distances.
Space is all singular.
All of the round rocks
Under my bare feet
Are robin’s egg spotted blue
And woodgrain ribboned brown.
You can peel back the water edge
And turn the covers of the lake bed.
I lay down
I don’t need a melody here
To paint the lake edge in sound.
What is needed
Should be random
And appropriated
From the formerly meaningful.
I’ll run the sad falsetto backwards
Over epic soundtrack snaredrum
Struck dumb with tapespeed.
I make the fog
And the still lake bed
From these disembodied expressions
Of former feeling.
I make the fog
So that everything I do is clear
To me.

Ron Nasty: 10 09 1940 - 12 08 1980

We miss you, Ron.

The Evening Wear Migration

There's this thing 

you see down wet December streets

on cold saturday and sunday mornings.

A woman walking in heels like stilts,

shivering in a cocktail dress

all darting raccoon eyes and rum perfumed

making her way home 

from the holiday party

and the drinking 

and the dancing

and a pick up night 

in a strange bed.

Dana calls it The Walk Of Shame.

I don't see shame in that walk.

I see narcissism hung over.

They clack clack the sidewalk with bleary resignation 

cross-examined by daylight.

Channels of memory

replay last night's sophistication

lost in smears of lipstick 

and tequila.

The evening-wear migration ends

up the steps and through the door

in a hot shower and breakfast later with friends

dressing events in whole cloth 

of indiscretion and bravado.

Junior and Senior

Joel told me that Junior was the owner's youngest son. He was being groomed to take over the T-shirt wholesale operation when Senior retired. Senior was reluctant to turn over the reins of business to Junior. He was definitely your classic example of a wastrel cruising through life on his father's coattails. He bleached his balding hair that hung past the collars of his awful Hawaiian shirts. Junior even sported a gold razor blade on a chain which sat parked in a hedge of chest hair on his exposed torso. I often heard Senior shouting at his son to button up that fucking shirt because will call pick ups might mistake him for a pimp. Junior did a lot of illegal things but pimping wasn't one of them as far as I knew.

On occasion, Junior would give me the keys to his Chevy Suburban and instruct me to take the behemoth to Brown Bear car wash for a thorough fucking cleaning. I could keep any of the thumb sized buds of smelly marijuana I found but any baggies of cocaine were to be rendered unto Junior. These thorough fucking cleanings occurred before his ski trips to Canada. I made extra cash selling the bud nuggets to Joel and Phil back at the warehouse. Senior did not like us because we were too buddy buddy with Junior. He used to sneer at us when he came through the warehouse and call us RollingBeatles. Once while sleeping off a hangover in the back of a semi container we were unloading, Joel revealed that there was a second son who was not senior or junior or major or minor. Apparently he was a successful dentist in town. When I asked why he wasn't being courted to take over the warehouse when Senior called it a day, I was told that he was queer. Senior could tolerate a lot of things; drunkenness, sloth, minor thievery, gambling addiction (it was Junior who first showed me how to read the Daily Racing Form), womanizing, even gross mismanagement, but he could not even for a moment of his life of simmering resentment and anger entertain the idea of turning over the company he built moldy cinder block by moldy cinder block to a faggot.

They Never Look You In The Eye

Hope,

The Great Leap Forward;

scene one revolutionary foco irregulars

immolate and collectivize the bystanding

standing in the center 

where your eyes never settle.

Hey you!

Powerman who sells me the same old story.

What vanguard is addressed in your vision,

ever navigating the general will

towards enlightened delusions

of virtue

constituted in blood tributaries

of those who must be sacrficed

to The Spirit of The Laws?

No Ambition For Dry Pivot

The white man says walk.

The red hand says stop.

We square step with a broom

and two dance with a mop.

I miss my friends; 

the stand up bass

and upright piano

but 

when they play 

I'll listen and follow.

Inside the basement wood joist ribs

of the old century leviathan 

sounding deep under waves of memory

I finally understand.

The headlights in the rain

are flashlights searching for meaning

in place and time.

I however have no destination.

I'm up here,

north of the oil tar skeleton

of the coal Gas Works,

west of the wayward girl-ghosts

of Good Shepherd Center,

yards from the fifty foot explosion

of big leaf maple

and the nicotine stained windows

of the doll-maker's house.

You can find me

with a needle and lodestone,

no ambition for dry pivot

staring at magnetic north.

An Urban Bestiary

Down the street
up in the buildings
under the avenues
in tunnels of transit
I am always surrounded
by the beasts of the city.
There are bears in the Capitol Hill bars,
snakes in the banks of Fifth Avenue,
dead foxes on old hens
browsing in the windows
of the West Edge.
Rats scurry in every shadow
from Aurora Avenue North
to White Center
(why do you think
they call it "Rat City?").
Cows block the doors
of busses in the Third Avenue transit corridor.
Chickens hide from tavern bulls
in tepid coffee shops
abutting slaughterhouse shopping malls
where the barnyard sleepwalks
single file
past the ringing tills
of the abattoir cash register.
Better watch out.
Young packs of wolves
roam far and wide
slashing at the old and infirm
with impunity
while pigs in penguin cars
sit safely parked
in suburban drive throughs.
This little worm
is gonna find a soft patch
of cold compost
and run silent
and deep,
like a dirt submarine.

Full Retreat

I fall back

from the front

in complete disarray

and teeth chattering confusion.

Shell fragments 

of general ledger flak bursts

lodge in the holes of my eyes

trailing white collar cordite smoke

behind me in the ambivalent wind.

I fall back

all the way to hopelessness

and infant panic

through high rise mausoleums

filled with filing cabinet tombs.

In the dark

I seek out the bright white mouth

of a florescent parking garage's

empty stomach.

Just a nothing place 

to hide in the bright dead light

and finish drinking

tiny bottles of white hot

black ink.

Just a place to go 

to be gone

and sit with failure.

The first thing you have to learn here

is that you're already dead

and that there's no place like home

because there's no place like home.

Electric Laundryland

Last Sunday.

Walking south towards the bakery

on Wallingford

I saw this.

Old hippies 

had been living in the Apex Cleaners building.

They put up posters of Jimi Hendrix 

in the plate glass windows.

They put a Hendrix quote 

on the reader board,

"Blues is easy to play but hard to feel."

Somebody got up there 

and did a little bit of editing.

"Sleasy butts feel hard,

buy poo."

I am pleased.

six six six

All change comes

in modesto sun soaked wrinkles

pushed into 

wheat straw symphony folds

of highway foothills.

Nothing town 

on Salton Sea shore;

in cuts of long range focus

and letterbox quick close-up,

he steam engine idles 

through the pine board set

of the town.

Arriving fingered 

in the lux nova

of sun squint eyes,

he trails out kelp bed curls

of black dust wake disturbance.

Mistrust and awe

settle in greasy white pores

of parade route spectators

who had it so good

until their complexion went dim.

The shit's piled up in the breeze.

The lightning struck the pine.

We've all got a little disease.

All change is here.

It's nothing new.

Everybody's concubine 

is on the nod

and turning blue.

Lunar November

Up here
the snare drum
of the fishtank night
is the oil can bulletstrike
of the shipyard rivet gun
on hollow trawler hull.
The wind pounds its way north
up from the bay
through the re-grade
into the deciduous Sunnyside old growth.
Every sidewalk is a gyre
of dead leaves falling through
rot stains of concrete leaf memory.
I can't look down
or I'll forget how to fly
and fall through the maple root cracks
of the sidewalk.
Swaying curtains of rain
flamenco skirt in jaundiced beams
of cascade streetlight.
The edges of the day
that ooze out the tread marks
of the commuter bus tired
under my footsteps
and the gurgling asphalt
are stained with deep space
and howling darkness.
And now I've just heard
we might replace the moon.

The I Formation

It feels good 

to open the valves

on the AC-30 

in the stripper's basement

where four knives are mic-ed

and cut sheet metal circles

out of the ride cymbal ripple.

We've got twenty five years

of quarter inch Belden cable.

We have thousands of minutes

of meetings 

with Les Paul 

and his Celestion Greenback Speakers

logged in the books.

We've got Nixon nailing a split,

electroshock hospital jingles,

The Golden Age of Larry King,

Fender precision,

Herschel Walker's multiple personality disorder,

I-Formation,  fullback offset weak side

and sixteen tracks.

Down in the basement 

out of your earshot

playing loud rock and roll

and rock and roll and rock and roll

over

is a knockout baby.

It took years

to find the craft in our hands

and the ring in our heads

to know a good thing right.

Sorry people,

this next one is just for the band

and this next one,

and this next one,

and this next one. 

Rain Turning Into Showers

Listen I get up
in the morning's twilight.
The Sybil of Cumae
on channel 13
promises rain
turning into showers.
The Oracle of Delphi
on channel 4
forecasts a long commute.
Autumn's play of leaf fall
carpets the sidewalks
and storm drains
in slick sheets of rot.
No matter where I go
the sound of water,
running,
trickling,
splashing,
snaredrum rolling on metal,
follows me.
Away from the streets
and the tired expressions
of the city's worker bees,
the wildwood ground
soaks up the winter
in dark shades of green and brown.
I'll take you there.

Platform Rocker

When I was a kid

rockstars weren't politicians.

When I was a kid

rockstars came from space.

Everything they touched

peeled off petals of dull platitudes

and exposed glitter flashes of munificence

in struck fields of stage-lit faces.

The Tuba Man

Five kids

gang banging on Mercer Street

beat the living shit 

out of The Tuba Man

one October Saturday night.

He died a week later.

The Tuba Man 

played in the street,

usually in front of 

a ball game

or 

the opera.

I once asked 

if he could hit 

a low C

on my way into

a Mariners game.

He hit it.

The Tuba Man was like The Ramones;

you couldn't conceive a world without them.

But now, we have to.

Guts

I used to work on Capitol Hill,

fixing greasy tape decks

in a basement 

filled with solder smoke

and forklift exhaust.

This guy named Corey

used to come into the shop

with rare bootleg vinyl 

to sell for crack

when he came up short

between paydays.

I picked up a lot of good stuff

and fed his habit

with currency

he turned into

little off-white rocks

he liked to burn

deep into his 

stained glass lungs.

Urban alchemy.

They called him 

the Warehouse Rodent.

Jibb and Fish 

said he looked like a yeti

with his coarse beard

and missing teeth.

His smile 

looked like a 6-7-10 split.

I thought he looked like

Ben Gunn 

from Treasure Island.

Cory used to call me Hitler

over warm swill beers

in the back of the Comet Tavern,

the blackened pancreas of the city.

I never knew why.

Cory used to come to Model Rocket gigs

and request Back to the Beanstalk.

He knew it was about him

and his addiction.

He loved it,

the song and his addiction.

Cory finally got shit-canned

for throwing a pry bar 

at the warehouse manager.

He disappeared 

into the dark, wet guts of the city.

We're all 

slowly getting digested here.

I saw him 

one early summer morning

after a long summer evening.

I was coming up for air

from the Sunset basement speakeasy.

He was with some faded transients

gathered for a parley

behind a rancid dumpster.

I boozily called out his name

and gave him a surprised hug.

He smelled like shit and ammonia.

"You better get out of here.

This ain't any kind of place for you."

That's all he said.

I don't think he recognized me

in the small dead hours of the morning.

For some reason,

he came into my thoughts 

while riding on a bus 

going up the Battery Street Tunnel

into the city.  

The exhaust stained tile

of the tunnel's interior

reminded me of villi

in a small intestine.

Cory's been consumed,

digested and expelled as waste,

passed through the Battery Street Intestine,

right out the Alaskan Way Colon,

through the Harbor Island Anus

into to the rainbow slick of Elliot Bay.

We're all slowly being digested here.

Seizure of Montezuma

A little bit from something I’ve been reading that Gee-Flipps loaned me. I can’t stop thinking about the Aztec Empire’s ride on Fortuna’s Wheel. Empires all seem to go in this direction sometime, don’t they? Monarch to organ grinder monkey in a fortnight. Sometimes it ain't good to be the king...

The events recorded in this chapter are certainly some of the most extraordinary on the page of history. That a small body of men, like the Spaniards, should have entered the palace of a mighty prince, have seized his person in the midst of his vassals, have borne him off a captive to their quarters,- that they should have put to an ignominious death before his face his high officers, for executing, probably, his own commands, and have crowned the whole by putting the monarch in irons like a common malefactor, -that this should have been done, not to a driveling dotard in the decay of his fortunes, but to a proud monarch in the plenitude of his power, in the very heart of his capital, surrounded by thousands and tens of thousands, who trembled at his nod, and would have poured out their blood like water in his defense,-that all this should have been done by a mere handfull of adventurers, is a thing too extravagant, altogether too improbable, for the pages of romance! It is, nevertheless, literally true. Yet we shall not be prepared to acquiesce in the judgments of contemporaries who regard these acts with admiration. We may well distrust any grounds on which it is attempted to justify the kidnapping of a friendly sovereign, -by those very persons, too, who were reaping the full benefit of his favors.

William Prescott; The History of the Conquest of Mexico, 1843

My First Guitar Lesson

Pat Reilly gave me his copy of Tommy, by The Who. His mom, a practicing Catholic, forbade him from playing it in the house. He let me keep it on the condition that he could come by and listen to it whenever he felt the urge. Pat didn’t just want to listen to it though, he wanted to play air-drums to the entire four sides of vinyl. In addition and as part of the album lending arrangement, I was to accompany him on tennis racket during his furious drum work outs. Pat Reilly was bigger than me and most of my runty middle school chums. He pretty much got his way but I didn’t mind because he was riotously funny. He once got up in front of our advanced placement literature class in sixth grade and gave a spontaneous alternate ending to The Hobbit, hoping to pass it off as his book project. It had something to do with the dragon Smaug eating all of the gold under the mountain and then drowning in the lake because he was too heavy to fly. Bilbo and the dwarves had to go up his ass in a magic submarine to retrieve the gold. He didn’t get credit but he did get a passing grade when he did a presentation on acne and used me as his model. Just as in the Tommy lend-lease agreement, my issues and concerns about the project were not addressed. During our air band performances, Pat would sit on the headboard of my bed, chopsticks in hand and lead me through the the rapid fire progressions of stuttering drums and power chords. When I began windmilling slashing at my Wilson tennis racket, he corrected my technique, advising me to stum upwards instead of coming down at the ‘strings’. He told me that’s how Pete Townshend did it so he didn’t lose the pick or mess up his hands (he was right. It sounds better that way too). The one thing I felt bad about concerning Pat and our air band rock opera performances was that I never told him I had a cheap Gibson Les Paul Jr. copy and a Peavy Backstage 30 amplifier in the closet. I was afraid of what he might make me do if he found out.

A Good Thing Right

Dear nobody...

The first time 

I realized that I 

play the guitar

and it 

does not play me

was this morning.

I awoke 

fingering an E chord

pulling 

an index finger hammer-on

while my hand cradled

her sleeping wrist.

That's a good thing right. 

Value Free

That old house on 11th where my friends and I lived in the confused past had a few names. The two that stand out to me were “The Boy Scout House” and “Bedlam.” “Bedlam” was the name that stuck. H-ward painted it backwards right below the address numbers on the front porch of the off-white barn. At times, up to seven of us lived in the maze of inexpertly remodeled rooms thrown up inside its early 19th century frame. To the outsider, it truly was a bunch of boy scouts living in bedlam. To the insider it truly was a bunch of bad scouts living in bedlam. Something was always going on. There always is when you have that many people trying to exist in the same space. Unfortunately, the elephant’s share of what happened there rarely involved cleaning or general upkeep. At that age, nobody can be concerned with picking up after themselves let alone preserving the roof over their heads. Bedlam even had its own boat! That’s right, the Bedlam Intruder. I was house sitting for my parents one summer when the UPS man mistakenly dropped off a large bulky package on their doorstep. The address on the package had an SE when my ‘rents resided on an SW. Being a little more “value-free” and “rational choice” driven back then, I loaded the box into Truck Truck #1 and drove it back into the city. Once at Bedlam, we opened the package and discovered a three person, inflatable raft. The Bedlam Intruder was christened, inflated, filled with beer and taken ten blocks north to Greenlake where we embarked on our maiden voyage. The only wrinkle in our plan of the day was that there were five of us and the raft could only hold three. It was a hot summer day so we took turns splashing around outside the raft in the water. Everybody took turns in the drink except for G-flipps. He kept delaying until he was practically shoved in. As he went over the edge into the lake, he stuttered something about not being a strong swimmer. He went in right over the top of me as I tread water next to the raft. Subsequently, I went under the green, soupy waves like a plastic bobber struck by an angry lake trout as G-flipps death clutched my feet and legs. It was like he was trying to use me as some kind of ladder so he could hurtle himself out of the lake and into the sky like a human Polaris missile. My roommates always seemed to put themselves into harm's way at Greenlake. Peat-Rich nearly severed his toe trying to jump off a dock one moonlit summer night. I think that was the same night Johnno and I were walking home cutting through some condos and I fed a lawn sprinkler through an open window by an attached garden hose. Sure enough, the light came on about four or five seconds after I turned on the water. Bulls-eye, we hit the master bedroom. Like I said, things were a little more “value-free” in my late teens.

The Whiteness of The Whale

On the way home tonight

I chanced to see

the ghosts of barefoot girls

dancin' in the moonlight

in between the Green River rocks

smug with slime,

lust and helplessness,

desire and control.

Something up here

drains the truth 

out of the sun

and fills our pale bodies

with the coldest aspect.

Mark my words

because each one of them

is a grave.

In Aurora Avenue gray

the highway skirts

the ridge ways of

cheap trick nihilism.

Something in the moss 

that prom dress blankets

the rotting ground 

river running along the black bed

burns the cold air

and everything it breathes 

white hot.

Up here,

the dead, the living, and I,

ascend numbly into the brutal opaque,

knowing full well he wrote,

"It was the whiteness of the whale 

that above all things appalled me."