i’m an artist
yesterday i
watched through
your window as
you made breakfast
i wanted you to
feel me
i wondered if you
could feel my
eyes like hands
running up your
sides touching
your thighs
like fingers
touching your lips
running through
your hair grabbing
your hips
pressing against
your ass
i wondered if
you knew that
i was watching or
if you knew
what I was thinking
baby,
i’m an artist
and the view
from the fence
is spectacular.
I’m seated at an outdoor cafe
sipping coffee, reading a novel,
when a thing in tattered clothes stumbles by
pursued by an angry mob
wielding tire irons and baseball bats.
It’s a hot, stifling day.
The beach is closed from contamination.
The blood-bars don’t open until three.
This is bound to happen.
Everything is as it should be,
everything is here, except
you and that changes
everything here,
Bessie the dog is sad-eyed,
the cats are sulking,
the radio is quiet,
t.v. off
your absence strolls
through the house, I
can feel you moving
by me; evening has
noticed, it’s autumn
presence falling like a
soldier weary of war,
putting down his
weapon and laying
down his head on the
earth to hear your
footsteps finally
coming home and
knowing everything
will be okay.
The Grande Ballroom in Detroit
dispensed music and sin seven days a week
for six years, until it ran out of money.
Even Ted Nugent sounded cogent
while describing his love for the place.
Alice Cooper, the MC5, Muddy Waters,
Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Who, BB King,
Frank Zappa, Iggy, the Grateful Dead
and countless other bands graced the stage.
The dressing room was open for groupies
and folks who wanted to tune Jeff Beck’s guitar.
Kids got down behind the stage.
Their parents couldn’t care less
what they were doing, or with whom.
A joyful, decadent time, before Detroit
collapsed into ruins, taking the Grande with it.
One frigid March afternoon in 2013,
I stood on the corner next to the Grande,
took cell phone photos of two friends
as they huddled beside the chain link fence.
They’d lived in Detroit their whole lives,
and had driven past the Grande
hundreds of times since its closure.
Still, they humored my need for documentation.
The two had been married
forty years, and were still in love,
but a little bored with each other.
He was an angry union guy on a vegan diet
who worked for the phone company,
and she had been fired ten years earlier
from her travel industry job.
They scowled as they leaned against
the crumbling bricks of the defunct ballroom,
the vivid pain of a Michigan winter
like angry red scratches across their faces.
Later, the woman showed me scars on her belly
from where her stomach had exploded
a few months beforehand. She almost died twice.
The scars were raw and purple, and
her skin bulged and sagged with their weight.
I stared, unable to comprehend.
Me: west coast girl, the one who escaped.
Seattle will collapse like Detroit, she said.
Everything on the west coast will one day
look exactly like the Grande Ballroom.
I laughed, said this was impossible.
A few months later, they stopped talking to me.
Of course, my friend was right, but I can’t
be blamed for my refusal to believe.
Like those kids behind the stage,
I needed my illusions to last forever.
Now, when I look at the mirror
and the street corner, all I see is wreckage.
Perhaps if I run fast enough,
I can twist the knob in reverse,
go backwards and restore everything:
the ballroom, Detroit, this damaged land
that somehow allowed me to survive,
my lost friendships, and more than anything else,
all the times I turned away instead of listening.
dim the lights
hit the music
and grab a
clean towel
it’s time to
release the
poison again
maybe, just
maybe
somehow
before i die
i’ll get to have
a partner in
this
i think we all
know why my
wrists are riddled
with arthritis
Everything is on fire and I want to sleep for at least two weeks!
(So drown me in Zquil and read to me from your Gideon’s Bible.
Read me something simple that tastes like reality.
Read me a story that is less Christian and more just inarguably true
because everything is on fire and I want to sleep for at least two weeks
maybe more
but I understand the shit green cloud of fiscal responsibility is hanging over my head
like a drunk woman pouring buckets of water out of her tenth story Brooklyn window.
When I say everything is on fire, I mean everything is on fire!
The couch cushions are on fire, the fruit stands on fire, and it never rains anymore.
All seven of the televisions inside of my skull are on fire.
The intravenous highways of the United States are on fire.
They IV drip down entitlement and god complexes, hero complexes.
My hero complex is on fire, my victim mentality is on fire, my love for strangers.
The cat is on fire and it’s still too afraid of the water to go in it.
(I am the cat in this scenario
and the water is a therapist
or any variety of activities that require coming to your senses)
but why would I go see a therapist
when I know the therapist is on fire?
Their fainting couch on fire, their perfectly framed doctorate on fire
and this is why I want to sleep.
The cross was set on fire by the pastors,
the oil slick ocean is still burning
The devil is on fire, he’s so fucking confused,
he’s just pacing and pacing in my head in your head
in most everyone’s heads which too are on fire
I find it hard to sleep to the sound of the eleven o clock news.
I find it close to impossible to rationalize an escape plan in a fun house.
I find myself easily a victim to sensory overload and I realize
that it’s maybe inescapable
we’ve built flashing lights into every dark alley,
always on camera, the flag is on fire, media on fire,
death is on fire, religion on fire,
the Buddhists are on Facebook again,
the streets are like a giant block party,
a giant pool party,
except with fire
and in the ocean of it all,
I feel something with you
and I worry that too is fleeting
or possibly completely imaginary
you tell me you’re allergic to dogs while I pant incessantly
while I shit on your carpet and you hit me with a rolled-up newspaper
but you let me lay beside you on the couch
and I dream
like that age we all once were where we were so good at it
where it was nothing much less than unlearned behavior
but now
the paintings are on fire.
I think about my childhood friend,
a Jackson Pollack painting, on fire,
I think about her alcoholic paint drizzle,
the way she’d just spontaneously combust
like a Kerouac star,
(none of this is aggrandizement.)
I remember the way she’d piece back together
I think about how part of why I left her
is she wore that t-shirt on the outside
that I kept swallowed.
I’m good at swallowing things
even when they’re on fire.
I swallow jazz records,
I swallow momentary relapses of judgement, insanity pleas.
I swallow the attention of strangers who don’t love me they love the poet
they love me in two dimensions, on fire,
in slick acrylic bursts of orange red and yellow
and I love them the same way sometimes but I worry
and sit by a fireplace while inside of a fireplace
and that fireplace is a brick city where tourists live
and somehow overnight I became the unfamiliar one
in the city that I love.
The newer transplants tell me the good spots to grab a coffee,
where the WiFi is tasty and well-seasoned,
they tell me how terrible the drivers are, they can’t see I’m on fire
and that’s okay because I can’t see them
I can’t see anything but this delicate egg shell heart
floating up to the sky
as I drift into two week sleep
as I drift into complacency
as I don’t save the world
as I don’t wait to pull my queen out
as I move my bishop erratically
across the black and white spaces
and maybe I ascend.
Maybe I am this and maybe that is okay.
Maybe it’s okay to be the one who feels,
no more significant than anyone else,
a prophet of emotion,
the canary who swallowed the coal mine.
Maybe it’s okay and maybe the fire is too.
get into bed alone
for the thousandth
night in a row
you only keep track
of the days to keep
yourself miserable
just a lazy dreamer
wondering why the
love of your life
has never knocked
on your door
long since failed to
ever learn the lesson
of going out to seek
the stubborn like
to believe it’s a
practice in patience
soon the voices
become mixed
and take you
down this bleak
path
where you never
have to blame
yourself
another lesson
missed
spare the pity
and turn your
hatred inward
shoot out the
mirrors
no one wants to
see what’s next
Horror Sleaze Trash 