Biography: 2005

I am twenty-nine. I live in a small apartment
in a small city in the northwestern corner of the country
currently considered the most powerful in the world.
I have no job. I spent the last two years of my life
drowning. I spent the last twenty years of my life hiding.
I am an empty tin can with the lid torn off.
I have everything I could possibly want.
I love my boyfriend. He loves me. With him I feel
possible. With everyone else I felt like a tourist attraction:
Most Miserable Girl This Side of the Mississippi.
I exaggerate. I have everything I could possibly want.
I have books and food and a bicycle. I have a small
animal that relies on me for its survival. I have a bed
and a pile of clothes I never pick up. Someday
I am going to die and the clothes will still be on the floor.
Someday I am going to die, and my boyfriend will die,
and my small animal will die. If you can read this,
you will die. In a way I find this comforting:
something is certain. I would like to be burnt
on a funeral pyre in the fashion of the Vikings,
or embalmed in the manner of the Egyptians.
I don’t know if we have a spirit, but if we do,
I’d like mine to float toward the sky.
I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but if there is,
I’d like to have my brain close by, and perhaps
some lip balm and a book. I believe in keeping
one’s options open. I am twenty-nine.
I’ll hold your hand if you’ll hold mine.

That building in Concrete

Andrew asked me about the castle/ asylum/ crazy building in Concrete.  So I got the story on it.  It was the old High School in Concrete and a guy bought it with plans to turn it into a castle.  He put the turrets on it, then he got old and his family moved him to Bellingham (where I live).  He refused to sell the building to someone unless they would turn it into a castle.  So it stayed vacant.  Then last weekend some boys were playing with matches in the building and lit a mattress on fire.  They thought they put it out with their spit and left, but the building burned and is pretty much gone.  I guess the old guy did not insure it.  

What I Would Say to God

Here's something I've been beating my head against a wall about for a few weeks.
~isaac

What I Would Say to God


In the minutes before I sleep, I pray and in this prayer I say:
Dear lord,
I’m tired. I’m sick of love and sick of being lovesick for individuals who are not lovesick over me. I’m closer to crying when I watch Gone with the Wind or Singing in the Rain. I don’t sing much anymore. I don’t pray enough, I know. I’m working on that. My job isn’t the best and I know you have better things planned for me, so I’m not upset. What makes me upset though is I lost my keys again. If you could, please give me a hint tomorrow when I’m looking around for them. Also tell Bev to get off my back about backing into her car. It was an accident and you know that. She should too. This may be too personal but I’ve been curious about this lately: did your bones click along the spikes when they were driven into your hands or was it a clean break? Sorry, probably not appropriate to ask that. Sorry, I’m not good at this type of thing. I just want to be there with you, you know. Not as in also crucified. I can’t honestly say I want or wanted that, but I think it helps to have a visual. Seems more real that way, more stunning. As if that bloody blossom of your palm cupping the inserted metal were a way of understanding why I bump into my neighbors’ cars when I’ve been drinking or why the kid at the corner house was found face down in his neighbor’s backyard without clothes on. I don’t mean to sound condemnatory or critical. Just need something to see. Need to witness your face wince while you most likely mutter a prayer to your Father to save you, to make it less painful, although you didn’t mean you weren’t willing to continue. I’m less of a man. You’re more. So when I say, I want to see your side spill out, blood folding around the guard’s spear, I mean my hands couldn’t hold onto each other tighter. I mean if I didn’t pray as if an ocean were tearing me away from the shoreline or I want to say butterflies do this when they fold their wings together or it would be a sin not to touch you, place my ear on your lips and listen for any ocean. Your skull must be made of music. Your tongue the indigo of my dreams. For every artery, ten small tractors pushing uphill. So I pray that you might need me the way I would press your mouth to my ear hoping for the miracle of sound.

Van Gogh Drinks PBR on the Paria Plateau at Sunset

Sunburned, leaning on the pickup’s hood, his eyes ripping up
the stone’s red surface, the sharp horizon line.

He searches his pockets, says he has something
to send to the night-black raven which just dove

into the canyon. Finding nothing, picks up a rock
and hurls it after the bird. Light never catches up to light,

he says, then tilts his head back, gets the last piss-drop
of gold onto his tongue, and stops and stares.

Navajo Mountain over there, beyond the lake’s open eye.
Grand Staircase to the north. This desolation

of stone and piñon trees, dead cows and sky.
He fingers his ear. Wants to call some woman.

I tell him it’s three hours to a phone. Tells me
to fuck off and stalks to the back of the truck

to get another beer. Remembering the way the sun
stripped everything from the land at noon but shadow

and how he stripped naked to be more like that lake,
collecting in the sky. The way he says that eyes work.

Later I find him staring over the canyon’s rim,
down to the stream’s distant tongue of stars. Says

That’s the texture of death. That’s what that hawk
sees in wind. Talks for hours about the way sand lifts off

the canyon’s walls, like a brush rising from a canvas,
and how he wants to just lie down here, among

these toadstool rocks, the sage and wind-black junipers,
though he’s afraid of being swallowed in at dawn,

says he knows that he’ll be washed, chased down
into this porous rock by the freakish rain of light and sky.

COUNTRY WESTERN

The old joke goes like this,
if you play the song backwards
you get the blind dog back, you get back the Chevy,
its grill hanging from its mouth like a set of bad teeth,
the gear shift bucking back into your scarred hand.
You get the bottle shattering silver inside the cab
and your shirt sleeve wet with love and anger.
The desert sun dripping, apocalyptic and red,
across the windshield. Even the neighbor's fence
of rotten saplings, which you drove through
maniacal and twisting, rises from the earth
whole again as you reverse through truth and redemption.
You get your wife back and you get her footsteps,
the way she drops her heels down hard
against the linoleum as she approaches you.
You don't even have to see her. You can close
your eyes and the let the book fall from your hands,
and let the music drift over your bald skull
as she removes her black blouse and bra,
swinging them like a set of circus knives,
tossing them aside, her tongue
climbing your neck, unbuckling every swollen
memory, the holiness of skin, the scent of collarbone,
her hips bruising yours one last time.

TO GET FOLKS TO WRITE POETRY DAMMIT

alright here's the shtick... dumb name i know...but hopefully this will inspire some of us to get active and write some decent poems

BANANA MAN