YSDP10: split and spread

folding grey laundry under rumpled skies
i spy with my flat little eye
another set of tumors autobahning the cortex
[another line lost to walking through fire and fog]
the american cage split and spread
less martyr than murder, squirming
intestines billhooked out the skull
as christ-arms dance and dangle
weightless for the supplicant camera

YDP07: soulja

beat cops swagger and sweat with their clients
black-ended strays break from under car to car
fresh peach paint slathers seventy-year walls
hunted and humid i slump through my doors

to share a bed again, a wish
but i don't have to show you the mistakenness
like pins set up for another winless frame
a rumbling throat under white-noise blades

YDP05: tinker

a codependent study
autovivisection as pastime
with mute unseeing science as my tool
i bend back the bone bars of the
cage containing what i've never noticed before
this too, a lie of the grown-up child

i spy another instrument
tailored to my velocity
but careful with that ex, eugene
it has set my controls for the sun of my heart

YDP09: coping with sumner

we rode the fictional plane from london
waylaid by the fratellis and
arrested by the police
burning naked under the giant sun
first down and ninety to go

torpedo tits and pretzel stench
behind glass
and only the drummer refused to fight

five dollar snapples and eight dollar beers
and i won't even quote the hand jobs
god bless 'em at least i got carded

YDP08: spy

My last words to her will be
like a New Yorker cartoon caption
"Our black cat has died."
Homeostasis.

YDP06: tailor

I am at least six months behind her curve
or would that I could be
and could fly namesake skies
to touch

YDP04: a swearengen weekend

I had almost fooled myself
that a life of solitude could be had
but then I held my blood in my hands
two or four weeks old, my bucket upended
coughing into my mitchum-stained shirt

I talk and talk and
understand myself ever less
Ain't that right, chief?

YDP03: silence

In the beginning, silence was agreement
synthetic and cautious
but I found it a child's strategy
soon abandoned in the sandbox

For a time, silence was home
speechless and comforted
but deception of that magnitude presupposes
levels of character that few can profess

Then, silence was necessary
spacious and compulsory
but energy cannot come from a void
and the jackhammer eventually wound its way through

Briefly, silence was punishment
servile and criminal
thought of as the cowards' way
but even easy outs will end the inning

Now, silence is a struggle
stilted and confounded
fought in the loser's bracket
by those unaware of its ending

Surely even this
will someday prove amiss

YDP02: Axis of evoL

There's a hole in my heart where the spindle went through
Now I've run off the rails
My gyroscope fails

'cause you were my axis of love
yes, you were my axis of love

You kept me spinning like a top
I hoped, I wished, I dreamed it would never stop

There's a hole in my heart where the spindle went through
The hand on the bowstring reminds me of you

YDP01: unhappy creatures

We are unhappy
creatures seeing ourselves in your desperation
laden with what we've lost
our shiny dreams fabricated
like our earliest memories, despite what we've been told
With spurned consumers' anger
snapping and pawing the ground
we are quarantined by our past reflections
shunned by the sunstroked and silent
those raw and burnt, flinching from touch
with the safety of range
With hipster irony, listless and dilute,
we level our surroundings despite
no blueprint worth mentioning
revision unnecessary
the past standing as it always has and apparently must
We are all unhappy creatures

coda
I should have stopped to write the lines
Now they are gone like passengers sick on trains
stained with the gore of stillborn poetry

E16St

Sweating of garlic the coke man stares through my nascar shades
He knows i said things meant for someone else or some other time