[An Experiment in Editing]: Ambassadors

[2003]:

Wrapped up in syntax and soap-bubble birth
vexed by spiders and sapphire blitzkrieg
in spirals
and some people drive through the
Midwest and get the fucked-up idea
that space is nothing more than
absence and lack
but voids attract activity with vacuous
velocity and i don't see too many
of you moving to Iowa.
So maybe the black hole is the coastal cityscape
skyscraper starships sucked
in and stuck
because the plains are so full
that mountains that try to reside there
are flattened and swallowed.
The Dakotas, Ojibwe, Oglala, Lakota
occupancy firecode
packed more than just passing through
can bite off and chew.
Their whole highway haunted
because celebrities are just
ghosts kept from leaving
the flesh by flashbulbs
and trapped motion
simulated by repetitive imagery
and the certainty of isolation may be
a murderous cretin
but what's more certain than steam under
streets and stories stacked statically above?
What's more bloodthirsty than that
concrete fact?
Displacement and misappropriation perhaps
but we spill and embezzle ourselves
like the guilty little fucks we are
and leave our homes empty
skeletons with only the memory of the
organs they held.
We hit those wormholes
and suffer whiplash at every attempt
to look back while leaving.
Maybe we are like the mountains and forests
that place doesn't need
or maybe we're all headed back there in
the end somehow anyway and just don't
notice
too concentrated on the step to be
concerned with the walk.
Expatriates, ambassadors, tourists, and



[2010]:

Some people drive through the Midwest
and get the fucked-up idea
that space is nothing more than
absence and lack
but voids attract activity with speed
and danger and
i don't see too many of you moving to Iowa.
So maybe the black hole is the coastal cityscape.
Skyscraper starships sucked in
and stuck.
Crashed in a vaccum inhaling
an infinite density and a collection of wreckage.
Maybe the plains are so full and thick
that mountains that try to reside there
are flattened and swallowed and
become the rich earth, become the wall
or get thrown out like there's a bottomless centrifuge.
Bounced like they violated the firecode of
the Ojibwe, the Dakotas, the Lakota, the Chippewa
the Oglala
and somebody had to go. We all had to go.
Maybe the occupancy is packed more than just-passing-through
can bite off and chew up and digest.
Those greedy jaws have eyes that dwarf their stomachs and
they don't get it. Don't eat healthy.
They gorge and choke - guts splitting at seams imagined
into place.
The Midwest knows when to say when
when to burp and excuse itself and catch a nap.
And the certainty of isolation may be
a murderous cretin, indeed
but what's more certain than steam under
streets and stories stacked statically atop
one after the other after another?
What's more inevitable than the fall?
What's more bloodthirsty than that
concrete fact?
Displacement and misappropriation perhaps
but we spill and embezzle ourselves
like the guilty fucks we are, like
somebody's gonna measure us by the markings
by the spaces we can fill elsewhere.
We leave our homes empty
skeletons with only the memory of the
organs they held.
We hit those wormholes
and suffer whiplash for every attempt
at backward glance, considering
our speed and our danger.
Maybe we are like the Mountains
who that place doesn't need.
Maybe we fucked around and got spit out
our wonderings too deadly and fast.
Too much to move around in a space already so full
of space itself. And we set to wandering
not because we wanted to.
But because the Midwest wanted to teach us a lesson
about sharing alike
and how to make room.
All piles lock arms with gravity.
All heaps struggle like all trajectories arc back
to the windless ground.
Maybe we're all headed back there in
the end anyway and just don't
notice
too concentrated on the step to be
concerned with the walk.
Expatriates, ambassadors, tourists, and


...
you may have noticed that i've been posting a lot of older pieces lately. in the process, as i type them in this little box here, i've been editing them - adding little fluorishes and cutting bits of fat. but i thought i'd try something a little different with this one. the seven-year-old version remains intact, exactly as one would find it in the notebook in which i originally scribbled it. for the remix, i just copied and pasted and then went through and fucked around with it. how does the comparison look? personally, i'm partial to the second version, but i still think it needs some work. it's a little chunky in some places, while a touch too frail in others. like popeye's arms, perhaps.

a note about the last line: whenever i read this one aloud, i would have a last noun after that "and"... i tried to improvise it, see how i was feeling that night, about that particular performance, etc. most often it was "corpses." i think once it was "insects" (which i rather like now) and only one time did i just leave it at the "and." some others i'm thinking of now include "attractions", "soulmates", "widows", and "carnivals."

oh, and about that beginning in the original version: i used to have this really annoying habit of just writing down random shit to get started on something. a lot of my poems from that era have these opening lines that have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the piece - subject or style. just verbal masturbation to get me warmed up, i guess.

-andy

An Ode to Chow Yun Fat

He's the Chinese Steve McQueen,
Pirouetting 'round bullets on my screen,
A concerned hitman,
A gun in each hand,
He washes his tortured soul clean.

He looks real cool in a suit and tie,
Maintaining panache as bullets fly,
He takes a deep breath,
As he's sized up by death,
And that badass spits right in its eye.


...
i wrote that when i was 17. for AP English. in High School. it's one of four or five poems i wrote for that class (including Haiku). the class that made me decide to start writing poetry. the class that made me want to be a poet. the other three that i can remember were about a break-up, with the death of blues legend Junior Wells as a backdrop, and my trombone - both sonnets (elizabethan and petrarchan), and a technopagnia about man's relationship with religion (in the shape of the Crucifixion).
one day, i will find and post the first poem i remember ever writing (i was 8-years-old and it was about Halloween).

thanks to Eneasz Brodski for randomly posting this thing on my facebook wall immediately after i updated with the "Under the Starzzzzz" piece. strange, indeed.

-andy

Under the Starzzzzz

I want to wake up to find myself
pissing off a helicopter who hovers
above Mt. Rushmore.
I want to fall asleep and
hit the forest floor running desperately
from the Huntress Ghosts of Long-Dead Loves
who try as they might, can't snort enough
antihistamines
or coke
to force my scent from their faces
I want a shitty U2 song blasting from a boombox
that I throw mercilessly against the
concrete knife-hand of a highway divider
surrounded by the burning rubber
twisted metal wreckage of a thousand brake pedals
pressed down just a fraction of a hesitated moment
too late to walk away from
while a mass choir candlelight vigil stands
in a semicircle, seventeen mouths deep
humming the elegiac chorus to
"Season of the Witch" by Donovan.

Fuck Dreams.
I want the waking world to be splashed
and peppered with hot sauce wrung from
the charred skeletons of burnt offerings
in sacrifice to a god too fat on tragedy
to fuck around with appetizers

But too often sunlight finds me taking
cold showers in the torrent of bad blood
gushing from the faucet-head slashed wrists and
throats of all the girls I've dated.
Or speaking about change, not proactively
not with confidence
but with all the hushed, remorseful dynamism
of eulogies for miscarriages
and abortions
to the arrhythmic din of a dozen hundred keyboards
clacking away without the slightest shred of consciousness
most notes in the symphony ghosted with
fluorescent sighs of defeat.

Bravo. Bravo. Author. Encore.
Encore.
White lie time sheets serving maximum sentences
on deathless stands.
Most mornings I'm a witness
heaving forged testimonies onto piles begging for the torch.
Most mornings I need to be swimming in whiskey & cola
just to gasp for air.
And if any of this seems pathetic, Congratulations.
You must not live with your parents.
You must not work a job that hates you.


...
i think this one is about three years old. maybe more. yeah. more. i've tweaked it by a word or two here or there. it's one of approximately five poems i wrote in the almost-two-year period that i last lived in Denver. the notebook i pulled the piece from is mostly large chunks of blank white, and i don't think i'll ever fill it. i leave it empty to remind me that late-2005-to-mid-2007 was not a prolific nor particularly proud time for me. i'm glad to be gone from there, though there are plenty of things about that time-and/or-place that i love. i'm glad i no longer live with my parents (though i do miss them often). and i'm glad i no longer work in a cubicle in an office building that acts like it wants me dead.

-andy

Crazy Brain & Skin

It's Crazy how
my Brain can still remember her Skin
how soft it feels, like
right down to the dead dust mites
the micrometer
It's fucking crazy.

It flips through the files quicker
than anything
and brings up her name and
there it is, right in the folder.
The Soft, Crazy Skin.
It points and clicks and drags and double-clicks and maximizes.
And all this while the rest of me doesn't work
lies limp like it never did anything
or just did way too much.
Like death, maybe, but barely breathing
through congestion and a crumbling atmosphere.

It's crazy how
it just runs through those stacks like
a library long after closing.
At Midnight, even.
It runs through those stacks, racing time
playing Hide'n'Seek with Dewey Decimal.
My Brain, forever It
grabbing titles from shelves
shuffling index cards and
listening to hollering
"Olly Olly Oxen Free" and
opening little drawers and
there's her Skin.
It finds her like research.

And it's true.
It's Crazy how I reach
through sleep
and touch a shoulder - a specific shoulder
under the covers and it's warm
but not hot
and there's a coolness in one area like
it didn't get quite covered completely.
But i knead there, and massage there
and that Skin responds and the coolness fades
under my fingerprints.
And she says something, smiling.
I can hear her giggle, even with her face full of pillow.

Crazy how that tangled mess of wires
soaked in slime and spackled gray and
pinched into my skull like that.
Crazy how it got that right.
The things fired and the other things fired back
and there were maybe some lights flashing
or sparks
and then, while i snored with my right arm like a chicken wing
under my head and the rest of me wrapped like a burrito in blankets
and then there was her Skin.
And I woke up with a Hard-On.

A Trillion Stories

There are about a trillion stories
about the first date and the
weird thing that happened there
and they all open up their palms
in front of your face to show
you that little nugget they found
in themselves.

Or sometimes they pull a coin out
of your ear or a little bunny - by
its ridiculous ears - out of a formal
lid or they pinch your nose
and rip it right off your face and wave it
right there under where it used to be.

A trillion stories all thinking they
tricked a little kid
with flooded toilets and chipped
teeth and racist family members
or cab drivers
stalled cars or flat tires
allergic reactions
burning hair
things that pry our limbs apart
like bear traps, waiting.
Things that press us into each other
like we're looking for homes
looking for chores and a fireplace
a kitchen table
things that pull little collided remixes
of ourselves right out of us.
Reach right up in-between our thighs and yank them out.
Little versions of these stories
that are easily impressed
and who believe in Magic.
Little kids who want to sit in those
homes and listen to a trillion
stories about where they came from.


...
a pretty recent one. less of a downer.

-andy

All the Little Lights (Are for Kids)

All the little lights make
the trees look invisible
like you wouldn't see their shapes
at all, if it weren't for Electricity.
Like the bark isn't really there
just that spirit - vain and
dressing up in jewels - or maybe
just insecure and needing the adornment
like frightened knights need armor.
The Hero never needs it
at least not the helment. You can
always see his face when he slays
the beast and kisses the
helpless chick.
Always see his blond hair like
her blond hair and you
can tell he wishes they were frenching.
Wants her tongue in his mouth
wants her to make him hard
but he can't and she can't because
it's for kids.
It's not the videotape Matt found
in his Dad's desk.
It's something else.
It's for kids.
Anyway, the Hero doesn't need the armor
because he's The Hero and he's dumb
and the trees don't need those little lights
but they sure are pretty.




...
video by KC Robinson at the Atomic Open Mic (formerly "Wasted Afternoons") at the Silverlake Lounge on January 17th of this year.

thanks.

-andy