Red Motorcycle Orgy Kill

Shaking as if wet from a shower, Kevin James stumbled out into the cool mid-August night. Tuesday nights are the best, he thought, tapping his head 3 times and rolling his hips towards his midnight blue Kawasaki. It was a strangely monogamous orgy. Or so he had been told by Karen, the blond haired, bondage geared 30 something in a pink tutu:“It’s weird, but when it comes right down to it, tonight, I just want to be with Bob.”

The pipe had been passed for the fourth time by then and all Kev could manage was a dull, sympathetic nod, his eyes lingering for a second on the bright sheen off her patent leather half bra.

Kev was less than monogamous this night; discouraging considering the crowd of fine, half-dressed women mingling with wide eyes wondering whose veiled words and tentative touch would come next. But the weed was good and the stories were logged in that part of the brain drunken stories go and he looked forward to a late breakfast the next morning.

Flipping out the kickstand and sliding on his black helmet, Kevin thought of his journal, a fine ruled moleskin, nearly filled inside his nightstand. He thought of the slick thin ripples of concentration on Clarisa’s forehead and how they where so like the waves of fabric rising on his seat. He found words for the grip of a gender-ambiguous stranger sliding around a brass pole, neck full and round, back strong and perfectly arched. Revving the throttle and shifting into 2nd, he could almost taste the sticky sweet of Raja’s candy bra & for a second he thought he caught the salty cut of her sweat as well.

It was a pleasant diversion, to taste with all the vividness of sight, as the light turned red and a truck flashed white, and the bike went spinning through the air.

_________

This little story was an early entry in the “poet’s battle,” a tradition at the feature salon I co-hosted in san francisco. The tradition continues at the brainwash open mic which my sis and host Quinevere Newman hosts to this day.

Wordsworth: The Meaning of Peace

Anyone who knows me knows that I live in a world of words. I consider it both a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, language gives us the ability cut through the bullshit and build towards common understand. By finding agreeable common definitions and sticking to them as a baseline, common goals can be articulated, plans can be organized and understood, and progress can be charted and learned from for the future.

On the other hand, seizing on meaning can alienate you, beat you down and at times launch you into a world of contradictions. It’s hard to be consistent in meaning and even if you excel at it, by language’s own nature it will always slip out of your hands and on to floor the minute you think you have it pinned.

And then there is the matter of who’s definition we are talking about. As 1984 taught us, there is danger in focusing language to the exclusion of ideas that difficult to describe or disturb the order of things. I think we come up against this now as we look at catchall quality of the word “terrorist,” the white houses constant battle to avoid a firm definition for “torture,” and the fight for universal health care reduced to the empty threat of “socialized medicine.”

In the spirt of the fight for meaning, I bring you Wordsworth, a posts on words.

To start things off, how about something we all should agree with, the meaning of peace.

The following link is a story from NPR’s The World. As part of their Christmas show, reporter Alex Gallafent interviewed politicians, diplomats, religious thinkers and others from around the world to find how out they defined the word “Peace.” The results reach from the War on Terror to the fight for a federal “ministry of peace” to meditations on human nature itself. As often come up in deep discussions of meaning, everyone has common ideas about peace, but few seem to be willing to step up to it’s implications.

An interesting listen for the coming new year.

Pea….ummm…holla yall.

http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/14949

Marboro Man

The outfit called you babyface
mud caked like 3rd birthday devil’s food
splashed with candy apple iraqi juice
and a cowboy stick dangling on a piece of chapped lip.

you soot eyed charlie clamped in a too big helmet
plastic china-make chin straps clamped tight
on a square jaw
the imbed snapped you close up
close cropped

and you are a newsweek coffeetable happening
and posts on assorted blogs and recuitment posters

damn half dead-embed
matched twin shoots
you almost killed him.

And then months later after
?

waking

forehead pressed on a community college desk
blood warm spit spread sticky
sitting in the back row
of an all expenses paid auto repair class.
Fellow fallujah redneck snaps a massless rifles
at backfiring cars and
you don’t know why

you wake up
occasionally gripping your wife’s neck
like the last ration
imagining
a cat gorging on the inside of a dead suspect.

you wake up
to lumpy brown oatmeal
and spokesmen duty.
Time’s man of the year
for a instant of war
and a shy kid
calls you
a hero.
__________

Inspired by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on James Blake Miller, the subject of a famous iraq war photo entitled “The Marboro Man.” James returned from iraq with post-tramatic stress disorder. His story can be found here.

Herds

On the bus nose an inch from a bust-line
we are stuffed dense as twinkle filling pushed
‘till the airholes squirt while going to work,
as kids bounce on to school on the cheese
skimming quick for a test on the panama channel,
or egypt trade routes,
or insects passing threads of leaf down an assembly line
like text messages hopping pole to pole across a country

movement in groups:

patterns fractal burst like flowers
when populations connect silently
burst through streets
so thick the cars are flooded
and disperse so quick the cops see nothing
but red ink sprayed in thick streams
“We where here and we left.”

Peeps peer into messages
bouncing on the baselines
passed on peer to peers
appearing without sanction
and ideas can’t be chained on a blank disc
how much does a shake of air cost?

and we sung in the streets once.
gathered in clusters round a hot light after meals
and mothers humming while scrubbing their young in the river.
To chant under breath to the man your left
flanking to strike your next meal
is a forward threaded a backdoor pass
at basketball game at the Y because we have lost nothing.
And processed meat don’t have to make you domestic
poor kids gallop in flocks to the free lunch lines every friday
descending on fruit cups gruesomely and we live in the wild times.
Divided into blocks
growths of culture breathe and shrink on the landscape
on the brink of colliding
in fear or fucking humpbacked on the floor
or lying in piles of flesh rotting
feed to masses in cute green cubes
marketed as all natural.

We are monkeytowns
murders of birds tilting tandem at the wing.
each a nation of stories no different
then packs of wolves running free
tacking the wind and tracking a meal
if you look hard.
Yet you wake on a monday
locked into schedules
blocked into cubes like oversized kennels
rocking in silence
on a bus ride
at 8:16
a.m.

________________

Made in early 2006 at the end of a depressing run working at electronic arts redwood city. I left the company shortly after. 

Court Vision

light bulb fro be bobbing off the baseline
they point be oil slick
be exacto on plexi. He graphs
kin with masterful strokes
massless his stroke
is matchless.
the rock
skips
light off
the backboard
the net folds like
peaches tossed in
burlap sacks
it’s your procession.
on point
detached ankles and asthmatic chests
your dj hands are orbital
Pivot toe drags and a scary AI half-carry
your range is infinite
locked eyes intimate
in isolation left hand hints a bounce pass
your right hand basekicks a studder
and you give head so hard
a forward falls to his knees
stiff.

To float
off a post traveling toe push
(with a slight weak side rotation)

and every
goes
ocean.

_________

Inspired by memories of roughhouse games at the countless ball courts around my home in North Philadelphia. I remember 3 within a 2 block radius of my house. 40 ounce was indeed a regular on one court off of lehigh and could easily break my asmastic ass down given his juice. Call this poem wishful thinking.

Bag Serials: Adam #1

In the beginning, there were thighs. Taut bundles of raw flesh standing almost horizontal. There was a division between outstretched fingers and toes gripping the earth underneath. And even this was not new. In the ongoing wonder of life, this change passed as unnoticed as wings sprung from hinged lizard arms and lungs formed from wounds that gills made back before. Little ever really changes. In this world we have inherited where moment to moment we strive to gain some perfect thought, a necessary intent that guides us towards the future, we forget the grace of patience. A flower days into it’s blooming. The months of stumbling before a child’s first steps.

In the beginning, there was a single stride. From the side, the pack’s limbs seemed as reeds in an osculating wind. They moved like liquid, pouring forward through the brush as one; sharpened sticks in hand and antelope ahead.

It was the same as any day. An unnamed leader lifted a hairy hand and all stood silent. They waited hunched in damp leaf and dangling between the trees. The prey’s head jerked in their direction. The air went still. Each side was aware of the other; it was just a matter of who moved first. The antelope gallops over a fallen log in a single movement. The pack springs to its feet.

And it was a common thing.
Ripping at the carcass of conquest.
Sizing up a line of sight and moving without thought.
The leader’s spear stabbed their prey through the stomach. Five sets of sharp teeth tore ribbons across the beast’s fallen body. As was an unsaid custom, the youngest of the pack immerged, grabbed the spear at the hilt and pulled. A fountain of blood pooled at his feet. The pack roared at the sky.

The young warrior remained silent as they celebrated. Staring down at the dieing animal, he noticed the locks of intestines curling at his feet. It reminded him of dusk. As a child, he spent much time gazing into the hazy layers of red and orange and purple, his mind blank in-between swats and snarls at others playing by him. He noticed the glazed black eyes turning upwards and thought of the ocean. He saw the elders swim confidantly out towards the horizon as he slapped the cold wet surface and ran back toward his mother in fear. The voices died as he gazed at the deep purple tip of the spear, curled his toes in wet mess of flesh underneath him and bend his head to hear the antelope exhale its last breath.

Everything released. A thick stream of yellow vomit came tumbling onto the ground. The pack looked on in confused silence. There were scattered moans. One scratched his navel and a few brave soils gathered closer. No one touched him. He rose slowly, bend at the knees and hands on his thighs, stared deep into the ground. And then he ran.

rise.at.jawn: It’s about damn time.

Hey yall.

If you will allow an unpretentious moment: Welcome.

This site is the latest incarnation of a hundred spiralbound books abandoned under my bed, a false start at at religious concept blog I left languishing on the west side, 3 aborted chapbooks and stillborn album.

For a good 4 years now I have tried to have some consistent forum to present my work and most have fell by the wayside, save one. Facebook has somehow turned from a glorified picture posting to the center of college grads’ social history. And with it, I somehow managed, through the inspiration of my peers in the excelano project, to get a good amount of material up and out to world. I’ve gotten some fresh critiques, interesting responses, lots of encouragement out of the experience so far. So I figure, why not try my hand at taking things to the next level.

In addition to poetry, prose poems and whatever other writings I decide to put up, I want to try my hand at an old writing form that has falling out of favor…the serial. Magazines use to make use to serials all the time, with boxing stories and old west tales presented from week to week, month to month in bite sized pieces the reader could digest and wait hungrily for. Many of Dickin’s early work was created this way, as was Steven King’s “The Green Mile.” The web, as well as web users’ short attention spans, have made the form hot again, so I figure what better way to share my stories with friends without throwing a couple thousand words in their face. And, given time and interest, I would love to expand this site to allow serials from others, as well made site for this kind of thing seem to be far and in-between.

In the meantime, enjoy “Adam,” my first full length story. It will be put out weekly in addition to other content I am setup up before hand and will try to keep fresh. Holla at me with your thoughts. Peace.

_warren

Hello World.

The clash of asynchronous paths.

The catch and throw of simultaneous objects in the context of a pre-ordered ebb and flow.

And given time, the syntax matches the pattern matching of each synapse,
All feedback is feed through structures inherited from some parented one.
Some superclass through which the base is made more specialized.
Each function less virtual.
For each, a filtering pass through which an object’s true mission becomes a solid block of cognition.

In the clash of asynchronous paths
exceptions are the rule.

The hard and fast are parsed into weighted conditionals but somehow some events always seem to flag true and the past recurs and merges sometimes and with hope is split and solved and still some core is unresolved though, isn’t it?

Some leaf.

Some chance branch of truth, perhaps that base class through which all have evolved and yet just out of grasp, or perhaps nothing.

Perhaps null.

Maybe just the random flash of asynchronous collisions,

the crash of pseudo-randoms based on a unknown seed,

and an input
expanding breathe-first through a network
a million loops and levels deep: a google.

__________

The Googlism is a religon (used in the loose, satrical flying spegetti monster sense of the word) that believes that given its unseen, omnipresent, near-omniscient, allegedly benevolent status google must be accepted as a scientifically verifiable god. Seriously. This poem was the result of a trip to the site and a semester’s worth of constant programming.