Confession.

All of this.

I just set this whole thing up
to try and sadly reach out to someone in a strange way.
I don't know why.

I was very bad to them.

I was just feeling lost and they used to admire me
I think.
It was stupid.
This whole thing was stupid.

We all do bad things to each other.
Sometimes you drive people to do things
and even though they shouldn't have done it,
or didn't have to, it doesn't matter anymore.
We all have blood on our hands.
I'm no angel.

Now I just feel bad for them.
The pain of life is hard enough
without someone taking (bad)poetically veiled shots at you
over the internet.
Buddha had it right, we are united by our suffering.

Artemis Kelleher...weird.

Anyway,
I'm done here.

I caught a bird

I caught a bird
with a peculiar beak.
She chortled and chirped
while she sat by my table
and as
she flitted around
with drunken abandon
I admired her until
I reached out,
caught her,
and took her home.

She slept in my bed
and we talked until sunrise
in a conversation I cannot recall.

The next morning I took her
back to where I found her
and popped it into drive and
pulled away.

A bittersweet morning
after a very long evening
with a very peculiar bird.

Do ya?

Do ya think we could ever make it happen?

You got a style on ya like a hurricane,
high pressure zones
up
and down
and
deep.

You dirty martini!

Smooth as vermouth
you permeate my
senses
and oh
how I feel like a king when
your body in plain view
appears.

Give me that bad one,
that one with the slick leather
lascivious
lip licking
ways.

Fox,
vixen,
villain,
these are the things that come
to mind
when my thoughts
glide
to you.

It was late so I thought I'd

Yeah.
There she is.
Beautiful.
Some women have it.
Some women have it
way down.
There's one in Tel-Aviv
who I haven't seen in
five years and
though she's miles
and oceans away she
still has it.
She has it
way down.

I always think -

that I am better than the ones they choose
over me at midnight on a Friday morning.

There he is with his clean shoes
pressed shirt
clean cut
and smoking his Camels
dripping with security and predictability.

I don't have a plan
or a clue.
My shirt is faintly stained
and I'm going on four years old
and long ago shaved off my hair
and quit smoking (mostly).

But.

I could give her love like she wouldn't believe

She would scream,
and cry -

her ruby eyes
rolling up in her skull like marbles
as she forgets where I begin
and she
ends.

So while they both pull away
in his shiny new car
with all the payments paid a few days in advance
just to be safe and responsible,
I'll be here
dreaming of gentle flesh
and angry love.

Marbles.

Every time that I see pictures of the Earth
I fall in love.

I wish we would stop ruining it.

We, as humans, are all very different and skilled
at many different things.

But ruining it is something that we all have

in common.

Hubris.

Sometimes I wonder:
Am I serious?
Do I really sit here and type this crap out?

I was feeling dismal at 12:36
and I was going to write about it.

Then I realized:
nobody cares.

Least of all me.

Emotions are temporary
and usually dependent upon some triviality.

It is 90 degrees in my apartment
and the other night I got too drunk
and I am getting older so the hangovers
come like unwanted guests who stay for a few days
too long.

I watch the cat try to keep cool
by laying in front of the fireplace
or front door.
Dying to find a cool linoleum
or stone slab.

I am too cheap to turn the air conditioning on
because I am tired of trading in my paycheck
for the "basic comforts" of life.

The sun used to nurture us
and now we all run from it,
hiding our heads and faces
in a ghostly white bliss.

My poems don't mean anything.
They are mostly moments
and lies.

Nights Like These

It's nights like these
that I"m in the mood to get high and
watch a certain film.

I'd done it once before.

It was the first time I saw
the thing.
She told me I HAD to see it!

Well she was right about its caliber.

But I wasn't right about hers.

She ran off with an actor
to Venice or the Amalfi Coast
or wherever it is that
actors abscond to.

I can't say that I blame her
I was as nice to her as I was
to the redhaired kid I used to punch out
at the bus stop everyday
after school.



...I never hit her or anything
don't go thinking that,
but I wasn't very nice all the same.

Still...

I mean she could have at least sent
a postcard from the coast
telling me it was over.

I am sure they make a greeting card for that nowadays.


You know what?

I think I will go ahead and watch that film.

After all she was right about its caliber.

I miss:

long talks
your porch.

Probably Just A Momentary Lapse Of Reason

I'm exhausted and
the lady downstairs is smoking on the porch again
and it blows its stink into my room
invading my breath.

If I wasn't so lazy
I would go out onto the balcony and
spit through the slats
washing her
and her butt
and stench
into oblivion.

I'm still worn from two days
of drinking and drugs
and real life seems like a distant memory
unbearable.

Three hours until work
or slavery
however you choose to view it
and I can't bear the thought
of their stupid faces
peering up from behind lists of food
not even worth a taste or a dump.

Happy Saturday.
Unhappy life.

6:00 am

It was about this time when I ran out of drugs
and the frightening onset of what would become
possibly my worst day ever began.

I writhed in agony and nausea
for a full twenty four until the sleeping pills stole
me away to a twelve hour sleep.

I have never hated myself more or what I could become.

And I realized that a lot of what I have written up until this point
is garbage.

We try to sound so eloquent
when in reality we are just
wasting ink.

I am done trying to impress you.

"No One...Just Someone I Used To Know"

I still think of her.

Not in a way that
form, or scent, or warmth are missed
but in a way that nostalgia consumes
the soul.

It and she float in and out like
a hummingbird, swing, or summer breeze.
There one moment
and the next
removed.

I hear a music and I picture us on
porches,
late at night speaking
of our deepest artfulness
and imagined eloquence.

I sit here and smile now
because our ideas
were so big and our abilities
small.

But we dreamed like children.
We loved like animals.
We gave like mothers
and we died like martyrs.

She lives on a farm now
with goats I believe.

With dreams only hers
there among the hills, goats, and grace
with love for someone new.


I still think of her at times

here among the ocean, gulls, and nostalgia.

It Has Certainly Been Some Time

Funny how the feet
walk miles of earth
in circles so tight.

I am giving up the water
for the mountain.

The sand and sun
for the hill.

I wonder what I'll find there.

If it be they, he, she, we,
or isolation dense and delicious.

Another episode.
Another chapter.

A different brush.
A familiar palette.

Last night I sat in similar surroundings
with warm hearts,
Glassware, silver,
and smiling eyes.

I was home.

I left one year ago
to find that place
and when I returned
it had been there all along.

It was here.
It was us.

The Lovely Songbird

The songbird sings
better than I can.
She paints
visual storybooks
and she sings
better than I can.

Long hair,
eyelashes,
fingers,
and legs.

She doesn't even know I still exist.
She doesn't know
and she sings.
Better than I can.

Late to rise.

Ultimately
we all mess it up.
Undoubtedly
we find ourselves wasted
and worn.

I would like to see the man
who never gets it wrong.
Who makes every decision
perfectly and accepts
every compliment
graciously.

Keeps his elbows off the table
and a starched press to his shirt.
Minds his cufflinks and stays
and never has spinach
caught between his teeth
when he smiles at
a pretty girl.

Sometimes I wonder if
I would want to be
him.

Sometimes.

Maybe sometimes.

But mostly
I just sleep in
and try not to let it all
get me down.

The Symphony of the Senses

I am so tired
of 0's and 1's.
I have been digitized,
my life,
my friends,
my world.

I got in the car
and felt the key
hard
in my hand.

Anatomical fireworks
exploded and
I,
real muscle and bone,
turned the key and
the engine turned over.

I drove to the bookstore.
I had to touch knowledge.
I needed a tactile reminder
that everything isn't all
0 and 1
and 0.

I needed to touch
the greats
and feel them
touch me back.

3 am

Shhhh
the rustling of the reeds
in the barren room
means depravity
has peaked.

Silent tiptoe toward the lav
to dispose of the days'
dally.
Do not disturb
the other -
asleep
like earth
and grave.

Smoke calms the nerves
and makes the dead
sleep sounder.

Clothed in vice
I wander the halls
at 3 am.

Post Traumatic Nostalgia

I just finished watching
a movie that used to move me to tears.
It almost still does.
Everything is so nice in the end,
so simple.
Beautiful wrapping and
a bright red bow.

But then you turn it off
and turn around
and see all the crap
you should pick up off the floor.
Still don't have a job
and the rent is due.
It is gray
and the movies lie.

Where did it all go?
When did we stop forsaking
all the doldrums
to focus on the possibility of
something.
Anything.

At one point or another
we died inside.
Dying:
The last real thing to look forward to.

When did we forget that we are dying?
Forget that in light of dying
a man should get living
and find the truth
that was once so unflinchingly
important.

Tomorrow
I have to go to the store.
We need groceries.
Something has to give
before there is nothing
left.

I'm ashamed to admit it but...

I am in love with a married, mother of two.
A caustic wit and a crystal eye
and skin that melts across ivory bone.
When she serves my drinks I would they tasted like her
and I think she knows or has been told.
I try not to covet but forgive me I falter
as her small frame and wrists and crystal eyes float above the
mahogany.
I don't usually put them up there,
up on the shelf where guests can admire
but this one, this one is an explosive.

I hope that they send me pardons for feeling
such a shameful thing.
But this married mother of two,
too late for me,
has a lover
should a divorce
go through.

Frigidaire rare

I am clinging to the cotton.
Sitting in a chair barely holding together.
I hate the cold air,
when you step outside you shrink into a twisted mess,
old beyond your years,
just trying to cling to the cotton.

What nonsense.

Somehow poetry is grander when
you hate someone or miss someone -
either way.
I don't miss anyone and hating people
just makes me look foolish because
no matter how much I hate
there will always be a greater number of
those who hate me more.

I am thinking of a woman.
A young woman.
She lives around the corner and
for whatever reason I
think of her.
She doesn't make any sense
and I think she might be insane.

On second thought
maybe she is just my type.
If it aint broke...

I bet she clings to cotton too.

Pretty Paragraphs

Pretend my words are paint by number.
I don't even want to say anything
I just want to paint it.

This is the closest I will ever get to
Robert Frost.
Nature is secondary.
The tranny who sells me smokes
and the puerto rican who buys me drinks
and the 6 foot 8 monster who works the door
these are my poems.

Besides,
nature seems to ruin
my words.
It is too cold these days to even leave
the house.
Then it is just me and you
and us looking at each other
and an uncomfortable silence
and a throatclearing and sigh.

I want to leave in the morning
and come back late at night.
I want to see the people.
I want someone to give me mead.

People are poems
and my drink of choice
is Ambrosia.

Here we go again.

I fall in love
many times a day.

I'm a multiple passenger car:
a caravan, a double decker,
can't have just one.

Last night, in the winelight,
I fell in love with a barmaid
of minute proportions.

She paints portraits,
nudes to be exact.
I would let her paint my flesh
as I paint hers in likewise fashion.

Same music, same tastes, same humor
stop me if I get too flowery.

I crave an artist these days.
A talented woman brings me down
like the Berlin Wall.

The first time is always
the best.