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Apocrypha Now

Collected Poetry and Prose (2002-2012)

Manifesto

I shall throw my scrotum to the ocean,
turning steel into dreams,
making birthday wishes
out of religion
to give to children
on trick or treat

Anne Waldman workshop

The great mother had come
to rid the sick of the silence with which they were inflicted with
to free the frozen poet
and save a damaged planet

Her black hair flowed and billowed
like chthonian smoke signals,
earth’s black beams,
the light of the mind

Her words transmitted visions,
stranger gelled and melded with stranger
a great flood erupted
blurring the worlds of the seen and unseen

The poets composed many manifestos
and today their cries can still be heard
in the shells on the shore

Symposium for the devil

(RIP H.S.T)

Doctor, when does the pain of being a man become so great

one must fall on his own sword and deliver himself from evil?

And what hope is there for those of us with no masterpiece,

with no laurel wreath to splatter with complementary color

shooting from our skull?

I'm out here "getting the fear" in the city you defined for us,

yet mind expansion is a luxury we can't afford anymore.

And the floods have finally come to the desert,

but there is no Noah with a boat, it's every man for himself

and every woman has her hand out

and her legs crossed.

And then there's the bells, sounding everywhere

every second of everyday

it's all you hear

and we answer to them as if they are the chimes of freedom.

Doctor, you tried to tell us,

yet all these years later

our culture has just gotten sicker and vicious.

So thanks for the warning,

but as it turned out,

we wanted it this way.

The Classmate

A few weeks into my second grade, a new girl joined the class and she was assigned a seat next to mine.

We began playing a game together, just the two of us, we would try to imagine what the universe would

look like with nothing in it. We never talked about anything else together, we just played the game everyday,

every chance we had. We both smiled and closed our eyes, and then tried to explain to each other what we thought it would look like. The only times i've even approached such an experience of collective emptiness since has been during orgasm and for a brief period when I spent hours at a time in group meditation. Sex and stricture.

Then one day she was absent, and then the next, and the day after that, and she never came back. When our yearbooks arrived at the end of the school year, I couldn't wait to see her face again. But she wasn't in there and I remembered she probably arrived at our school after picture day. Since the only thing we ever spoke about together was the the game, I never even got her name, and now she was gone for good, somewhere out there in that very same universe we had both once seen extinguished of all objects and desires.

As I got older, I realized I may have dreamt her. After all I was seven that year, the age most of us stop confusing dreams for reality, and perhaps I was even a bit of a late bloomer. Maybe I was just experiencing the anima, my feminine side coming alive in a more mature form than it's initial appearances in my dreams where I would get my "hot dog" chopped off. And so just as the saying goes "the only zen you find on tops of mountains is the zen you bring up there", perhaps she just existed in my mind the whole time.

It's a bittersweet feeling to never be certain whether my true companion ever existed. Even thirty some years on, sometimes I will see a woman and wonder if she was that little girl, while other times I just have to look inside to find her.

Leaving for Las Vegas

I walked through a valley of fire
down a natural path with no outlet,
the ancients revealed their dreams to me
though their hopes, composed in stone, were soon buried
by sirens whose cries brought me back to the place
where fate overtakes nature
and our species walks around, watching itself,
and applauding it’s graceful decay.
Sucked into this city,
I’m diving towards the beast that cheats Jonah of rebirth.

Morning on Mt. Charleston

7am on Mt. Charleston
The first day of fall
I sat on a stump intending to meditate

and while trying to fix my mind on only my respiration,
I had to consciously block;
Unproductive worry over my fifth straight day of unexplained neck pain
Pleasure over several woodpeckers going about their business, unbothered by me
A mental check of the landmarks leading me back to camp
Wonder whether it would really disappoint Aubrey if she woke up early and found I left my signal whistle behind
The impulse to feel for my keys
The idea to write all this down
The thought that my body was satisfied, had no hunger or thirst, sought no sex, it was my mind that was seeking something to tether to
maybe 250 channels with all the premiums would pacify my mind for awhile , then I would need HD -free for life, and when that's no longer enough, I can get the
whole home DVR
or switch to Dish
so many choices for my mind to make, maybe I won't be able to focus on breathing today
Then I saw the face of a cro-magnon man (WTF?)

And then somewhere between that last sentence and this one
My mind was finally calm and focused on my breath
And it too was satisfied and needed nothing else

Dem Bombs

I.
Obama's bomb's connected to
Kim Jong's bomb
Kim Jong's bomb's connected to
a center in Yongbyon
Yongbyon's connected to
uranium
the uranium goes into
Jong's big bomb
North Korea's got a beef with
the South Koreans
The North and South are connected
but the U.N. said they couldn't be one
So the North was connected to
the Soviet Union
And the South is still connected to
the pentagon
the pentagon says our bomb
is better than Jong's bomb
They say our bomb is connected to
altruism
and Jong's bomb's connected to
his egotism
so the U.S. uses food as a
weapon
while Jong threatens
Armageddon
and all the people are disconnected from
imperium

II.
Ezekial's in the valley with the live bombs
Ezekial's in the valley with the live bombs

Defuse, don't use dem live bombs
Defuse, don't use dem live bombs

Haiku #1

In contemplative
cultivation no soil should
stick to the shovel

Untitled

From what source, memory or imagination,

come these thoughts of a red river flowing?

A once limitless body where we bathe and play

before the ferries came, before the glass bottom boats of wealthy voyeurs.

Before the kings, I enshrined, demanded lifetime labor

and the dam began,

providing safe passage through barren caverns

where ladies would paint their walls

with the strange equations of gentlemen

who never allowed for distance,

leaving the river to ramble inside my mind,

lost without an ocean.

One side of five strangers' cell phone conversations

#1

Look, I was high fiven' the DJ

I didn't have to buy any drinks.

Shit, they want $8 a drink!

I paid two for mine

I had that all night

Shit, I still got it

#2

No hon, you'll have to find another chick for that

You know what Motherf-! Don't make me curse you!

I looove you, but don't make me curse you

It's weird

#3

A nigga just got in college

Yeah i'm goin' to school.

You need to stop wearing tennis shoes,

you need to wear heels

and wear your hair big,

that's what you need to worry about

hold on, I got a text.

Oh my God,

people are so stupid.

#4

Crazy

HA HA

I can't promise you nothin'

But i'll try,

No, i'm not even gonna try

SAY WHAT!?!

Oh, what she say?

Isn't it?

502-5304

Oh really? I have not been out since my birthday.

I don't see how people can drink beer

I can't hold a sip

I mean I tried Colt 45, Budweiser, Corona

I said what is that? Bacardi?

So I drank the shit like an idiot

and my chest was on fire

#5

And it wouldn't surprise me, it really wouldn't

I guess i'm still tryin'

I can't think of any calm, rational way to break it to her

without her freakin' out on me

I could do my own thing

but that's not really workin' out

Elephant in the room*

Only man can elevate and degrade you

Putting the prod in Ganesha's hand

to push us toward truth and good

And wield it in our own to beat you with

Training you to do what's not natural to you

A lifetime confined

for our instant gratification

while we graze on cotton candy

and then become distracted by something inflatable for sale

And while in the wild,

when you're visiting the bones of your dead loved ones,

you can't call it grief that you're feeling

or loss you are experiencing,

but man can be that abstract.

And yet man can also take you from the wild,

keep you captive, pack you on a train,

sell tickets, and use you for his amusement.

Only man can film your spirits being broken when you're young

with whips & bull hooks

and then take a brush and carefully illustrate

a smiling clown to be put on a poster to advertise it all

9/30/10 at 9:30pm

There is something,

it has no name

I don't even know if it's mortal,

but it doesn't feel gravity's pull

or the constraints of my body

and for just a moment tonight,

that's who I was.

Notes from an Ethiopian cafe

When we break bread together,

our hands pulling it apart
and using it to scoop and consume communal stews,
we are tearing apart the barriers of self.

When we rotate the plate
and take from the same lump of lentils,
we get confused
and we lose
the illusions of "you" and "me",
"yours" and "mine".

And just like this fermented teff,
which is baked
and becomes the bread we break and digest,
we too must build up and break down.

We are unbothered by that fact while we eat
and while this meal is all that sits between two people,
and we keep the injera turning together.
But once we pay the bill and walk away from the table,
we see ourselves separate once more
and the struggle to lose oneself begins again.

My Sustenance, My Sickness

My Sustenance, My Sickness
My Savior, My Slayer
Why must you demand of me mandatory OT?

My Sustenance, My Sickness

My Savior, My Slayer

You who give me

40+ hours at the mercy of the marketplace

which calls all day

which finds my mental anguish quite reasonable

which deems the homeless veteran a nuisance

as he asks for spare change for food or booze,

his sustenance, his sickness,

but they feel entitled to free Showtime!

My Sustenance, My Sickness,
I haven't watched, nor do I care to watch Charlie Sheen answer for his train wreck,
but somehow I still know all about 'tiger's blood' and 'winning'
Yet C.D. Wright never sits down with Diane Sawyer, never appears on our screens.
In fact with how little attention her poems receive,
she is telling unintentional secrets

My Sustenance, My Sickness
My Savior, My Slayer
I know there is no market for these words
it just seems natural to keep producing this contact call,
to try to establish the location of the flock,
maybe even until these are my last words

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