Breakfast Thoughts

What came first the chicken or the egg? Speaking of eggs…how do you like your eggs?

 

Why do we

bother ourselves with such

trifles? GIVE

 

ME TRUTH. I’ve slammed the

switch on to expose

the cozy euphoric ignorance; the

Neanderthals that trotted about in

my skull evolved

into idea beasts. They are

mythical monsters that

 

lurk

in the woods. These

idea beasts scare you more than

anything that an ADT security home system

could detect. These eyes sans

blindfold drive you to

tuck in your child safely at

night and you hope that

he/she never discovers the idea beasts that dwell

under the bed and loiter in the closet

 

because they will set flames to your safety net.

 

But these idea monsters congregate

in the youths’ dreams and prowl in a manner more

clandestine than the CIA and more

dangerous than carbon monoxide.

 

Or is it the other way around? Dangerous – CIA?

They congregate in the

dim scream

 

of the violin

in the back of the song track that drowns

out the screams of all those

who suffer on the margins of society. You grasp tightly with manicured claws

to support the fence of the margins for fear of falling out of bounds or worse

letting the “others” cross over

the border. We rather

keep them on metal beds with

electric wires attached to their…

 

Yes there are lions and

tigers in my brain and

eels in my bloodstream that zap

me awake to realize the rippling/frizzing

cracks in “common sense.”

They mobilize the festering

ideas from my rib cage that should

be as valuable to you as bursting

oil wells.

 

Truth is my Colt .45 revolver

under the pillow. Give me truth;

it’ll never get weird

enough for me.

 

yes I’ll take truth over beauty; I’ll take knowledge of

Villa Grimaldi, the Kubark Manuel and Shock Therapy

over the spoon-fed idea of “spreading democracy;”

cause, ya know, they spread democracy like

the Bubonic Plague as they take over

the landscape of your country. They enter

with tanks and guns and leave your country

looking like a leper; destroyed by scattered

battlefields.

Some prefer their eggs poached.

 

Could we ask this question

to anyone other than the poachers

during the 70’s and 80’s in Chile?

With inflation at 375 % who thought

about style of eggs?

 

without the exhale of truth, these idea beasts

collide and beat one another and grasp

for the surface to breathe and take

life so much

that the inside of my skull is left like

 

scrambled eggs. so scrambled that

not even government surveillance can

wade through the piercing static. give me

 

ugly.

I lose my identity

within this monotonous beauty; I try to determine

reflection in the window of Falabella…but alas

I am transparent

as brand names have replaced

my yolk.

and don’t give me sunny-side up eggs

because I know they are only

“sunny” on the surface and the

inside is slimy and unstable so once the

safety net breaks with a pop, the whole

foundational yolk spills to the floor.

 

If you must

know.

I take my eggs

raw.

 Jester’s Requeim

Prelude :

 

You hold him at the foot of your walking stick

you tread on him and he drowns in your success

 

his thick glasses and deep eyes the color of bark

with its mahonany and amber

burn past your first layer of skin and penetrate you

too deeply so that you must

either look away or really confront

 

the pain that’s placed in the back of his

trunk like thighs sticking to leather seats in August.

 

He digs through the trash of your leftovers.

I watch him reach the dark bottom of the of

the trashcan’s retina and meander like a lost traveler

, desperately, he scrounges

 

his heartbeat tells him he’s human like everyone else

but the four crippled dogs and the make-shift tarp roof on

top of the four walls that he calls his house

tell him he’s just the guy who shines shoes.

 

 

 

[Part I]

He closes his eyes and clasps his palms over them until it was pitch

dark and the floating

Shapes are out of sight. He searches for a hopeful bit of hallucination.

Nicki spits out the pitch dark and opens his eyes.

 

Now the dark room eases and isn’t a

mystery. He can make out

the sileouttes of scats, tables, plastic spoons,

dog cage, cage, cage, nightmares of cages, cages

Around him.

 

He heaves his worn shoulders forward and

Swings his body out of the chair with some the last

Mc2 he has Left.

Empty pickle buckets that

He stole from the Salvadorean cook scatter and spot the floor.

 

Nicki secures the blue tarp. It

covers the room, cuddled by grey tape just as the Americans are is covered by the ICC.

All he makes out is grey – shapes and illusions – as the buckets

Fill — half empty, not half-full sort of bullshit.

He hears even the roof screaming insults to him

in every creak. He can’t tell if it’s the thunder, the

tarp-roof or just flashback to earlier

that day, at work.

 

His eyes clamp down again. He sees the inside of the locker room.

 

Nicki is shining golf cleats and muttering stories of horseraces and redheads

to himself.

 

Jimmy Arsenault strides into the room as if he just got his golfball into the second hole on the 1st try. His silouette precedes and succeeds him.

Jim lurches over. Nicki cowers and even the dirt underneath his fingernails

hide.

Jim smells weakness like a vulture. He belts out a cracking laugh.

Jim had Wheaties this morning.

 

Jim tosses his cleats on top of Nicki’s work table and

Tells him to replace the spikes and to unload his car but to

Taking a fucking shower first.

Piles of cleats and spikes engulf Nicki; they will not cease. Piles of spikes

And cages and cages, cages, spikes, cages.

[Part II]

He flings open his eyes and hopes to release the torment.

 

He hears; the thunder cracks

his thoughts. The tarp scrapes and whines.

No wait, it’s the dogs scratching at the “front” door. He

Pushes forward and skates through the pickle buckets

Michelle Yamaguchi.

 

He unhinges, thrusts and

Shoves the door out. Three wildabeast dogs glide by. The fourth one,

A cripple, drags itself through the mud collectings and engulfing the house.

Nicki grabs the cripple. He looks up

And catches the trees jeering and mocking him + his cripple.

“Some men,” they sneer.

He glares back with all the threatening grandeur of a bill in lading.

 

The other dogs are running over Nicki’s mattress on the floor,

Making all the mahogany stains new again; a touch up of sorts.

Two lay on the mattress and snarl at Nicki. The third

Takes up position in Nicki’s only chair.

Just like the tarp, Muloch, the thunder, Jim, and the trees, it dares him to

Prove that he’s not scum. The only spot

Left for him is over by the cages. They, too, dare—

Cages, on cages, behind cages.

 

Nicki grabs the cripple and throws it on thet

table and masterfully turns it on it’s belly. He holds down

the only good leg with his palm until it stops floating.

His hands, stained amber as the Salvador, grab for lone knife among his box of spikes.

The oil and dirt hide more deeply, retracting to his cuticles.

He narrows his eyes and penetrates a slit,

A straight line down its stomach and

He clasps

 

the heart. Blood pours down his fingers to the beat of the rain, blood

hunts down the cowering dirt, with a sharpened pitchfork.

It pumps and pulses between

his nails and palm. it keeps pumping, pumping, pulsing, pumping, pulsing, pumping______________

 

Until then white sprouts at every beat. It forms an

incomprehensible prison of ribs that form a cage and another cage.

Then more muscle engulf the bones and then skin, eyes peer out

Through the suspended spaces between his fingers. A baby

Girl wrestles in his hands.

 

7 minutes pass.

 

Rain roars from the mouth of the sky like Muloch’s revenge.

Water spills with screams out of the pickle buckets.

The dogs howl and moan.

The boards of the walls clammor and shake violently.

The tarp roars then falls in – caging them. Only

Nicki and the girl escape. He runs

 

Out and glares into the mouth of the sky that

is still spitting down on him.

He raises her up and howls “Am i big enough now”

Thunder claps and the sky

belts out a cackling laugh.

Wanderlust in a Sinking Ditch

I set my home on fire because I don’t want it anymore.

There were so many warning towers, bright and blinking, but your ominous gaze fixated my dimmed headlights. You stopped my tracks, brought me out to make me feel luminous. Instead it became obvious I was a cog in your wheel; a serf for your feudal plan. Made different feel bland.

That drive home from your spotlight, I switched off my headlights in a solitary highway, only companied by the raccoons and vermin, all of us in flight. I turned them off and accelerated through the darkness. Hoping I would fall as far down the gravel caves as the other roadkill because my low-ness needed to be felt externally, too. In my invisibility my creaky engine gasped for oil. I figured the fault would be detected when it was “too late,” but listen, that seems better than not being detected at all.

You can burn down my home because I don’t need it anymore; chairs left to entertain fleas as their conversing guests. Stained from thighs sweating the August we met, from when you introduced me around, when I felt proud, when you kept me stalled to make your exit strategy.

But you kept me entertained

But you kept me people-ed

But you kept me, eyes glazed over with rose.

I just wish you would keep me.

Every morning I plaster your name to my lips but swallow hard knowing I’m around to stave off your nagging old obligation to smoky rooms of drink and degraded desperation.

I still go in ebbs and flows when I find safety in us. Even an ounce of wind in our hair will justify a milestone of catastrophe. Fleeting: Our laughter and time hugged by your sheets becomes more expensive. We bicker and bite to feel something in us.

My knees could collapse in a holy praise to this table that separates diverted glances and murmurs of “I’m miserable.” The table that already carries the burden of plates and amber-stained napkins, I thank for also keeping you from walking out in this moment, make sure we’ll walk out of here together. Even if we’ll walk with a yardstick between us and with our eyes fixated on our own foreheads.

That night, an hour into driving home from your spotlight, I imagined hitting the blown tire that was spared by an 17-wanderlustwheeler. A shutter ran electric through me when I saw myself laying ripped on the road.

 

 

 

 

I hit that spared blown out tire because I was tired of us feeling torn away from that which propels and gives us purpose. I wanted us to feel something else, even if it was a collision less durable than I intended.

Truth is: I love you but can’t stand the thought of you. Truth is: I need my space but “mine” doesn’t feel good when mine is the only footsteps coming up the hallway to a room of stale linen and speckled wood where our shoes had danced hieroglyphics of a time that was ours, from a time, when I thought, I needed “mine”.