Spending $150 dollars fast

Hood comes up,
smoking engine like a bog at sunrise.
I dig the back of my head into the tire
and draw sighs into the air.
Cars rumble past.
Twenty minutes later,
a tow truck coasts around you
and cups the bumper like a sick child.
It grinds and pulls the car upright.
Both disappear beneath an overpass,
the car spilling its insides on the road.

Doin' jump kicks and parlor tricks while wearing spurs

So, updates happened sparingly, almost not at all. Lately, they've happened regularly. I needed perspective. I needed to miss the blogs I read, so I stopped blogging. It never occurred to me how that was supposed to grant me perspective or distance from anything. In fact, it alienated me.

Things have changed. Like cars and girlfriends. Both are new. Both made me reexamine what love is. At this point, I'm not entirely sure how to love either. I'm trying, though, which is probably the most important factor.

But yeah. New things, lots of them. I might be getting a promotion at work. New (better) schedule. New store. More money, maybe? Won't count on any of those.

My dad's not working as much. Thanks economy. He doesn't like to be bored, so he sits at home and stretches all day and makes faces at the TV. He just wants to work. He's a truck driver, and sometimes I thnk they're more important than doctors or politicians. I want to see what my dad looks like driving a semi through a mountain range. He probably looks furious and has the tip of a cigar hanging from between his lips. This image would be a great album cover.

Visual supplements of change:

78' Rabbit ABA Turbo. Fast. Green. Roll cage. Turbo. Wooshing. Backfire.

Gorgeous.

Also notice that I cut all of my hair off. It happens. I was well overdue. I don't think I'm ever going to let my hair get long again.

I think I said that at one point before. I'm a liar.

I'd like to go to Muncie soon. I need some sort of vacation again. This makes me a terrible long distance runner. I'd need to stop four times during a race to sit in a lawn chair and drink from a straw.

Oh well, I'm good at other things.

Everything gets laminated.

Some people call it old age.
When your legs tremble like splitting earth
and the only way you can get around
is from the assistance of something with an engine
or something with a battery hum.
You take sepia photographs of your parents
cuddling on stairs and laminate them.
You wear them on a laniard around your neck,
you choke tears when you glance down,
patting your chest with a sweaty palm.

I cracked open a beer and
nurse a small layer of foam.
My wife sits cross-legged on the floor
jockying the waistband of her pants.
She thumbs through pictures.
Water drips into a dirty pan in the kitchen
and every few seconds she looks up at me
with a bent four by six in her hand,
her eyes saying, "Please go shut off the faucet."

The head of my beer disappears
into long gulps of tan.
There's a stack of upside-down pictures at my wife's feet,
and the drips turn into a thin whisper of dishpan ping.
She hands me a small binder.
"Why not look through this for some pictures?"
I draw the bottle to my lips,
"I have nothing in my life worth laminating."
She lets out a fake yawn,
"Maybe you're right."

Watching the sunset hurts sometimes

You know?
It's like finding old celery in the crisper
but not knowing how old
until the stalk is lathered in peanut butter
then chomp.
Two weeks too old.

It hurts
because sometimes you're alone
in a park, picking at your flip flop.
The sky turns Easter.
Clouds burn and shrivel.
You just want the day to end,
then the Earth spins backwards
trying to milk forty-three more seconds
out of the day
and all you want to do is crawl into a mountain
of Ikea and breathe in down comforter
like it was the last six molecules of oxygen.

Other times, you're with the girl you love.
You aren't paying attention to clouds
or a sunset.
Imagine the sun whining, it feels neglected.
It wants your girl
or at the very least,
to be watched.
The sun wishes it had a lap
so the girl could fold her pigtails behind her ears
and cradle hands
and let out drawn sighs into your legs.
Enjoy this,
because somebody's jealous,
even if it's just the sun.

Project homes for birds.

I'm making a list of my favorite things.
At the top, I'll scribble crunching leaves,
not because it's semantically ambiguous
but because doing so burns my the bottoms
of my feet. My heels chap and smell like
campfire after a few minutes.

Crunching leaves is like gathering up clothes
that rest in a pile inside an open closet
and pulling on loose threads around the neck
until the shirt is a scarf that barely covers your neck.

And when that scarf turns into one long thread
I'm going to let it go and hope it blows across
yards and a bird can use it to make a nest. See,
the leaves are gone from the ground,
they're all part of nests. They're shelter to mothers
bading wings around a chick's shivering head.

Okay. Maybe I'm selfish that I destroy potential shelter
for birds. The leaves.

So, this is a conversation that's happened somewhere before.

Okay, so let's talk about some things that make us wonder.

Wonder about what?

I don't even know. I had this girlfriend a few years ago who would speak in a made up language when we had sex.

Did she know any other languages?

No, just English and that made up one. It wasn't the Charlie Brown grown-up speech, or a roll of pennies in a blender speech. You knew the words mattered to her and made sense.

Neither of us are smart enough to make our own language. Have you ever wanted to travel to the middle of the Earth?

Not really, I hate cars, and buses. And whatever mode of transportation might bring me to the middle of the Earth.

Just think about it for a second though: if like... theories and science are true, wouldn't you just get to the center of the Earth and flat there forever because of gravity and inertia?

Those are Scrabble words to me that're worth a lot of points. But yeah, it might be fun to be stuck somewhere for a while. You'd have a lot of time to write an apology if you needed to.

Yeah, I need to apologize to a few people. I tried to drown my mom's dog last week. It kept chewing through my shoelaces.

How'd you try to drown it? Did she stop you?

No, the toilet kept automatically flushing itself, so I gave up after a while. I did end up spending five minutes brushing my teeth. My gums felt like a rainsuit after I was done.

That's always a good feeling. Do you ever want to just run until your joints freeze up and your feet swell from all the sweat that can't escape your body?

I actually don't like running. I don't own running shoes. In gym class, I always ran in sandals. My arches are terrible.

What's a good arch or bad?

A foot specialist could probably answer that.

You know what movie I hate more than anything?

Adventures in Babysitting?

No, Forrest Gump. I love how your face scrunched up when you said Babysitting.

It's probably illegal somewhere for you to not like Forrest Gump. What could you possibly not like about that movie? It was flawless.

You know the scene where Lieutenant Dan got his legs blown off?

Of course.

I didn't care at all about that scene. I was supposed to. Somebody was mutilated, and Bubba died and I didn't even care. I'm pretty sure the first time I saw that movie, I walked in front of the screen and went to the bathroom.

Poor manners.

I know, I'm probably the only person who didn't feel something. The ending sucked, too. I wish that feather would've been sucked up into a plane turbine or something.

But then the ending would've meant nothing.

It already meant nothing to me.

But not to everyone else.

What's your least favorite car that you've owned?

Back in high school I drove a Probe. Black... it was a stick shift. The hood had a hole in it and whenever it rained or snowed, the top of the engine would steam like a restaurant grill. It ran until I got rear-ended on my way home from the movie theatre a few years ago.

Well, how could you hate it? Sounds like a dependable car to me.

When I was leaving senior prom, my date had her period on the seat. She ruined it. I don't know why, but I loved those seats. When I just didn't feel like dealing with my family, I'd go sleep in that car. After that, I couldn't do it. It was like the car was haunted.

I would've just bought a seat cover.

That’s not the point. The point is a girl’s crotch exploded on my seat. The only part of the car I could tolerate. I wanted to burn the car.

And the girl?

Didn’t put out. Kinda’ ruined prom for us both.

I never went to prom. I just stayed at home and welded.

Welded?

Yeah, it’s the best feeling I’ve ever had. I soldered, too. Have you ever made something out of nothing?

I don’t think that’s possible.

It’s entirely possible. That’s what welding is. Turning waste into resources. Remember shop with Mr. Tosch?

I skipped twice a week.

That day he brought in all of those scraps for us to turn into furniture was the best day of my life.

All I remember about that class was making the electric bird feeders. Mine killed birds.

You’re such a masochist.

It was entirely on accident.

Doubt it. But seriously, I made my parents an entire patio set for the campfire. They still use that shit, it hasn’t rusted.

The man’s nails were piss yellow. That always freaked me out. I think he was Jaundiced.

Your attention to detail is nauseating. I always thought that his “worthless class” was the least “worthless class” we had to take in high school. Remember that business prep class?

The one where I drew dicks all over my resume?

Flip books. Every day in the corner of that text book. Every single day.

Nothing wrong with that. Although, I’m glad we had to take it. It was almost like having back to back study halls.

Thinking about that class is making me tired. Do we have any more chips?

Baked Lays or those lime tortilla things?

Either. At this point I’ll take anything with sodium. My insides are wilting.

I love running my finger around the base of this bean dip jar. I feel like that plastic diver in the aquarium.

Can you imagine how wonderful his life is? Like that scene in Life Aquatic over and over again.

I cried during that scene. It was so sad. He finally won.

I know. Angelic Huston is such a fox.

A fox?

A fox.

City next to a dam

I did not give up

this spot on a dam that acts

as a grey shoulder to a round-head city.

At dawn, the head tilts 

and empties its lungs of sighs.

I'm a non-migrating bird

preening wings, molting in a small pile.

I'm the overseer of a manmade slab

that chokes out electricity to two-room houses

in the bedroom community of machine metropolis.

The city is filled with naked trees

and people that move likes cells

that nourish something larger

than an organ. Maybe the lower half

of a body or the whole body,

keeping a sick body alive with slugging cars,

red cell cars that fight black illness

and the rub the sleep from your eyes.

I sit on the dam,

feet tucked and wings primed to fly,

feathers piled to my breast 

watching the streams of water

colored the same as dirty sky

flow away from each other.

One towards a sighing city,

the other to nourish a coughing,

vulnerable man.

This sounds way corny, but my life is a poem. Yours is, too.

Let's break our lives down
into the individual words we've said.
Then,
things might make more sense.

The first time I had sex would be
a six word sentence
filled with interjections and a whole
lot of prepositions.

Okay, it's yeahhh,
it's in. I told the girl
she was amazing at least fifteen times,
I hope she felt that way about me.
She never said it, though. She didn't say much.
She stared through, yes, not at,
but through my dick, like a telescope.
I wanted to know exactly what she
saw or how she felt about what we were doing.
Sex is a business,
but it'll never go under,
because you give somebody something
like virginity or an STD
and you'll never get it back.
It's a gift-giving party, it's
everyone's birthday when you have sex.
Everyone who's having sex
is having a birthday right now.

I chose to listen to the Doors. Movies
make it seem like sex and music go
hand in hand. This must suck for
noise bands. Nobody will ever
rip sheets and stain bedspreads
to their kackle.

So back to words.
My sex life is six words
and yours could be a novel
or a slightly longer sentence
and if this means nothing to you,
well I'm sorry. This poem will mean something
to somebody, regardless of how they feel
about sex or me or poems.
They're going to injest these words
like a dustpan skimming the floor
of a closed bar, scooping up bent bottle caps
and mushy gum
that fell out of lesbian-make-out-mouths.
Go ahead, trademark that last line,
it won't bother me any, just words right?

Some people are great with words,
their words turn into poems.
If an indivdual could own words,
James Wright would own plenty.
He knew what order to put them in,
seemingly at any time. I'm sure he wrote
bad poems, too,
but they were still filled with words
in the write order.
That's all poetry is.