Meditation on a Romantic Obsession

My muse, my heart,

won't you lie with me now? 

Dreaming is better, anyhow.

 

My autistic brain?

My juvenile heart?

Only reality can tear us apart. 

 

To die, to sleep, perchance to dream.

The unfolding of time, 

the absence of meaning. 

 

Let's share a cigarette. 

Let's talk about love. 

The night that he raped you, 

you looked like a dove. 

 

Are you still fucking women? 

I'm sorry, but no, 

I would never kiss you, 

as you already know. 

 

Let's share a cup of coffee.

In a moment, I must go.

I won't tell you why I came here,

and I suppose you'll never know.

Long Hours

I remember long hours

shuttered in my room.

Allmusic.

Star Wars battlefront.

Limewire.

Indie rock bliss 

and loneliness.

India

Hot and humid roadways crammed with
tuks, trucks, scooters,
men, women, cows, bulls
smoke, exhaust, shit and trash.

Lord Siva sits aloft
hordes of Isreal's children
and Vasuki watches keenly
as they burn through Kashmere's finest.

Rich white yuppies scarred by divorce,
eating yogurt with strangers in Varanasi. 

What is life? 

Sun salutations, meditation and ecstatic dance. 
Singing around the fire in Dharamkot.
Forgetting the war...and fumbling for meaning. 

A Memory

In a bathtub,
in a bar, 
in Budapest

I sip a cold hefeweizen 
my legs across your lap
and your hand on my thigh.

Sunlight washes down
through a glass ceiling 
and your voice is music--
not Beethoven or Bach, 
but modern indie rock, 
and I'm in love

in Budapest,
in a bar,
in a bathtub. 

Chinese Elms

"They're poison" Gary said.

They spread out from the roots.

We cut the branches off

and ripped out all the shoots.

When I was a tiny child:
mom, the stroller and me.

Golden sunlight glimmered

through the tops of trees.

Thirty six years later

I found that copse of trees,

and saw they were Chinese Elms

as I examined the leaves.

The Loser Messiah

The Loser Messiah, I wasn't born.
My early years were not forlorn. 
There were no three wise men with gifts, 
of incense made from animal shits. 

But then I felt myself turn mean, 
perhaps it was something in my genes. 
I felt my self become unclean, 
with rotten karma ripening.

I grew progressively worse in luck.
I earned a black belt of fucking up
And every time I did some ill, 
I could only fall farther still. 

I ran into walls and stubbed my toes. 
I looked as if I steamed and smoked. 
I choked on fish and chicken bones. 
I read the modern ancient tomes. 

Who are Lear and Oedipus Rex?
My aura has the strangest effect.  
Everything around me gets fucked.
The shit on me is never unstuck.

I cannot help but fall down the stairs
and God is always waiting there. 
To kick the holy hell out of me 
then chortle at me while I bleed.

And oh, how could this happen to me? 
I'm ready to quit and I'm only sixteen. 
I just want a fork and a bite of the pie,
But maybe it's better to curl up and die. 

I imagine my future and it isn't nifty. 
I'm poor and sick and alone and I'm fifty. 
I'm up to my knees in the swamp and I'm thinking
of how to get out, but I'm rapidly sinking. 

 


 

Dietary Hipocracy

They insist we’re looking for attention
with our gastronomical appraisal.
And so assume a bizarre contention:
They know of all who trade their steak for kale.

What a triumph of circular reasoning, 

to assume all herbivores advertise
because they know our choice of seasoning
because we can’t help but to publicize.

They say that our untiring sedition
is always the source of their ammunition.
How terrible strange and ironic then
that they accuse us more than we do them.