I am ready _

dwelling on the wrong words
in other people’s poems.

I think she’s talking bones,
but she’s talking me.

–

tjq

I never much cared for her,
until cutty got lonely,
too much work:

peel, cut, dice,
simmer, skim, stir and

fuck I’m lazy.

Would you please, ice, yes,
and pass the canadian dry

–

tjq

Everything you said,
all night, foggy,
tinged blue.

In the rain,
under the bus stop
I tried to watch as you climbed
aboard, but the windows
were all white, foggy,
tinged blue.

but

your smile,
all night,

red red red.

–

tjq

complications and thick wet nights,
gowns of cold sweat,
the sticky walls of our low
rent apartments.

oh those long formative years,
oh these hot bothered nights

the wrong ending, again.
same start, same week,
desk, coffee, cereal.

waiting on nothing,
won’t someone write me a story,
good morals, strong characters
i’ll read it. soon.

–

tjq

She kicks me and scratches
my leg with her toe nails.

I finish the flick, clean up,
set the alarm, for her.

She was asleep and dreaming,
maybe. Now she has questions,

I don’t have the answers, or
she won’t take the ones I have,

Or whatever. She’s up now,
won’t sleep, can’t. Who knows.

–

tjq

Out the western window the sun thought
about setting and the whole thing,
the window, the plane, the airstrip,
my red face, glowed something romantic.
You could call it a peachy salmon,
but it probably had more to do with the fumes from our 777
refracting the low light, than any fruity fish.

In the dirt, off the tarmac,
thousands of prairie dogs gathered to welcome us.
Well that’s if you come from the middle west,
maybe you’d rather call them ground hogs, ferrets,
mongooses (geese). Whatever. Thousands of them.
Angelic too, in the gaseous fruity fish light;
little rodent Zorasters.

Maybe it was the Dolly Parton special I watched, twice.

Maybe it was the diet of scotch and scotch. ($5)
I’d thought about a snack pack ($5)
or a fresh Asian ($5)
chicken wrap
but no, for me just scotch,
scotch scotch.

–

tjq

Indolence’s whiplash cracks
like 16 gauge steel forced
through 20 gauge lips.

Which might not sound so bad,
but imagine putting a hole
in your lip
with a sewing needle,
even a big one.

Now try slipping,
all nice and easy,
a pencil through the same gash.

Oh how I suffer for fashion.

–

tjq

When I’m not there, you know, really
there.

The way we are
at new breakfast joints,
packing it all into our oracular crates.

Her squirming gets so abstract
mons a mons
and – you know, really -
no one in between,
the sheets tonight.

Our smile is weary,
no longer round.
My farming is no good
I need green new tractors
and bt corn.

In the end all i’ve got
are hoes, spades and manure.

–

tjq

The storm that left me drunk this morning,
last night flooded the sewers of my mind
slick and slow with the daily special,
again.

Today’s clean bright hours are a dry wind
blowing winsome platitudes through my cold fingers.

So I think about women, as baked clay,
how my hands won’t bring a plate from her bowl.

Nothing is organic with his, your, my
girl.

Breaking off her sins with ass pinching fingers,
gluing them on with face cupping palms.

She’s rounded out nicely now, mellow and easy
on the eyes, but half full, half dead.
I’m here to glaze her,
again.

Her past embraces chip off, poorly fired,
her memories flake down to me.

I can pick them up,
I can melt them
I can cover her,
again.

–

tjq

The sex, if poor, is gratuitous; she is
Texan blonde, or lesbian.

The band plays us loud
mournful numbers,
syncopation in seven
fourths. Dinner follows.

George works for the TSA with a duck,
a prick and a flower.

His Soviet realist hips and
allergic eyes tiredly beckon in
a whisper of vodka tears:

Yesterday the duck ate the flower and
the prick was arrested for fucking the duck.

The little prince and I have stars
to catch, you may come

to the blue black sky,
help us find

her red
red blossom.

–

tjq

Masturbation.

It’s like shopping, drunk,
at Wal-Mart,

at 2 a.m.

Once you’ve been a dozen times
you realize:

Hey!

it’s got everything I need,

and nothing I want.

–

tjq

Like file cabinets
tucked under overburdened
shelving units

beneath leaking drain pipes
that drip lives to be

ground and re-fed
(train train train)

accomplishments lie
like rust chips
ready to breed
tetanus or apathy.

Flabby red youths heave to,
wooden rubber dollies ease our
interventions
detoxifications
reorganizations
s-t-r-e-a-mlining,
and in the corner office
a wondrous filing derelict watches
old broken trains clatter
over old broken tracks.

Red powdered iron feeds the carpet,
spores fill my lungs,
despair stares back in flaking paint;

education is surely a wonder.

–

tjq

Lives worth reading are novels
dictated by seismographs
their passages all cliffs
and waterfalls,
the characters
snow leopards and bahral
encompassing a singular
purpose more cleanly
than diamond slaves, or
the diseases of their whores.

When Bazarov said
destruction too is a creative force,
he meant these rare beasts.
No ninety pounds bags,
just six foot tails
flying, smashing, being.

The rest of us float through
our nothingness
sustained by nothingness
over nothingness
the nothingness of these keys and words,
lucky few that throw up a rope
to be drug like a flea
through the falling shale
on the back of a true life.

Our days instead are soft grains
of pine and cherry
smoothed in lacquer further still
not even forward, just
sloping
       sloping
bendingback maybe
petering out,
our too young candles snuffed,
or, in comfort sailing back down
back into the grain
back in line
back flapping gums
stuffing ears
back on a barstool
in a pew
in a wheelchair
whittled only into dust.

If you must pray
ask to be the
dust feather of a fault.

–

tjq

Close lives lived before our camera
gets around to clicking
record are hidden like understudies
in the wings of the stars, always
with the spotlight, oh long
responsible nights, long
responsible years, son.

Bible study, rafting,
trophy skins and skulls,
these proofs hang on walls,
in sheds,
but

of trophied women
there are none to tell.

Until the understudies’ toe peeks
under the curtain, reflected in his boot

A black mustang
nineteen sixty five
stick shift and burning frozen tar.
Still too new to be real
yet imprisoned,
in the garage of a minor
urban windswept western dame, Montana…

She, ha, wanted to trade
wink
ha, dames. Sigh.

So me and Howard, you remember
Howard, beards, guns and horses,
that’s Howard, a real Grizzly Adams,
all three hundred pounds,

Well we Jacked, and Jilled her
brought Sally home
to old Uncle Sam
in missile land.
“Here she be, dame.”

A thumb glides over an index
over a middle
and back
and forth.

Simulating, simulating, simulating
what?

–

tjq

Warped and worn thin
the liquefied carbon
of old bones, long molted feathers,
beaks and bills sink
into deserts and swamps.

We dig and pump these lives
fueling vanities we can tie to.

We bury our selves
in failures perceived,
We disappear in choices lost to time
crushing and compressing us
into pixelated cartoon characters.

Our women, buxom long blond
damsels. Vessels for
Our men, deep thick captain
Americas. Ragged dry skeletons

reaching out together we grasp
with barbed harpoons
attaching

emptiness
hate
despair

to our souls
like rocks and detritus
we become bipedal
Xenophora

and we slow
and we crawl
and the chains we lock
and the keys that won’t go
and the torch has no gas
the bolt cutters today are so dull
the cry slips and stutters out
see meeeee
seeeeee me

If you give me your key
I’ll give you mine,

and we will try it,
try it again.
–

tjq

When you are some years their
whisky, their friends,
them.

When you are their
women
had,

Be there. Put your head down
so it creases, dog ears
on your forehead
to remind you
that gainful
is not you,
that your doors refuse
to unfold in pulp
fiction masterpieces.
You are not a thrust,
a squiggle,
an hour on a night,
a language,
a ganfaloon,
lest you see cats in their cradles.

–

tjq

She’ll bite
If the meat is,
ok,
bouncing alive.

If you can’t, well.

She’ll dig her own tunnel
five tunnelers, mice and machines
scurrying out ovals.

If pens are meant for ink,
what ink is spilled
that stains,
stains skirts, sheets, siblings.

Stamped like wax
on cotton
in sweat.

She’ll climb
if there is a cable
car.

Marking territory
with sharp shallow epidermal paths
cuticley carved
from upper blades through lower
-brates.

You are death,
She will swaddle;
You are disease,
She will swallow.

–

tjq

Rock dove!
Modern gargoyles always
planning, then
attack!

It’ll be on your shoe, or shoulder
and better likened to se
men than
blood.

If karma’s pockets
were lined with sooted paisley feathers,
lifted from the neck
ties of pink post crises men,

then I’d be in for it, (pestilence,)
a thousand reincarnations
as bird seed, at least! (winged)
which i might fly through,
in mumbai or new york. (rats!)

Eternity as bird seed,
but our souls are becoming part
smithsonian,
long sold out,

like beautiful rail cars, Replaced
by four wheeled demons and
flashing
     flashing
           flashing

four cornered boxes.

–

tjq