29

29:

Bongos

Stop with your petulance
my well mannered egg sits half cracked
on my back lawn while they keep on
criticizing your objections to their
half hearted tarrying and blushing
at the thought somehow maybe we abandoned
what they were born to do.

Turn down the frequency of your visits
if your parents interfere, this type of
aliasing isn't new and you'll probably
enjoy the freedom of being lost in the throng
of wearing something ostentatious to their
sensibilities but insignificant to those
who have none.

Maybe when the shadows cast wane and
you watch them approach disappearance
then Neurath's boat will carry you
or some other traveller will let you
hitch a ride until you find your next
stopover

But while you backseat row and tell
your captain how you need to stop
and piss or that you can't stand the
waves and curves aboard and how the sun
is burning your skin maybe stop to think
how I can moralize you and rationally
convince you to shut up

Brass

#28 (last legs)

BONGOS:


Under

Consider the way a floodlit lawn (or, as it is better known, the morning mirror) assembles the night against its own variety. The cells of mulberry gun into companies, the vacuoles of dark are bamboozled into an order. The initial focus was inward, a city at the end of a long railroad within you, but the light outside amassed a feeling. The leaper confesses an urt of blood at the edge of the river. Elm will undo the desire in the park where seeds have napped. You are dying to know where the light stops. Close your eyes.



BRASS:

#27

Bongos:

everybody's guitar
would be a sunburst

our notes
stenciling out
filaments that
tangle strings
and trajectory

with beings
the progression
now of being
projected

until our chords
make worlds.

Brass:

Preprosition

Bongos:
I'm predisposed to prose. If they line up on the left, I feel my words are properly justified. I never enjamb myself, forever marginalized by that which is outside. I can't stand those cleverfolk.

Brass:

Bongos

A belly full of eels feels like a belly full of eels

#24

Bongos:

I'm finding I'm more like my father everyday in that I rarely place trust in the news from abroad. Perhaps we're too alike, finding it difficult enough, at most times, to micronavigate our own quotidian raptures and displacements, thrown aside by not the workaday chores but the simple things. I awake cold and find my window ajar, and I know not whether to crawl further under my blanket or get up toclose the damn thing. All I get is a rough draft, for the blanket is never comforter enough. In raising myself I erase the conflict I sought to solve. It is then time to read the newspaper, to see the news from abroad. At such moments, when I'm lucky, the print lades my person such that I stop taking for granite the walks outside, filled as I become with uncertainty, no phoresy between the hosts and the meanings in cargo. On better days the news from abroad tells me more about my personal imaginary than that outside, and keeps me going when I see that friend from God knows how long ago, when the conversation stalls after the hey how are yous. Brings my teeth back to that small chatter that I've missed since morning and adds a little guttural companion. That old did you hear the news from abroad.

Brass:

BONGOZ
#23

One Sleeping Cardigan

Somewhere between the day I stopped smoking cigarettes and the moment I
screamed out gravel, there was a sign. As far as signs go, this one was subtle,
damn near translucent. And I assumed that it had some sort of meaning, like
many of us do. Something divine, and honest, and mindblowing,
and earsplitting, and heart shattering, and eyebrow raising, and and and and...

My room is colder than any other in the house. I refuse, out of sheer masculinity
and stature as a native Minnesotan, to turn on a space heater. Instead I'll
swig whiskey and wear layers to sleep. The drawback here is that in my dreams
where I used to swim, I now drown smiling.

This reminds me of the time I told my mother about the dream where I was talking
and all my teeth fell out. She cried, and I asked her why, and she told me that
in her country this meant that I, or someone else, was going to die. I laughed,
because I sounded funny with no teeth. We agreed to disagree, but she still said a thousand Hail Marys and I smoked pot and fell asleep.

I didn't tell her about those dreams.

Brazz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8k4CspcDzA

#22

Bongos

I think I might like to slide right under the table and through the floor. The story being told is I’d like to take him out fishing. I suggest it. “Wouldn’t you like to go fishing with Gramps sometime?” He looks up at me from some game he’s playing. We might have the skatefish blues. I’m lost. I’ve missed my train. That’s how this always begins. He wants to take us fishing. I have to go to the courtroom, answer a few questions in front of the District Attorney. A close friend of the family. We get up early to feed the pigs and we zero in on their eyes. My grandfather turns into a fish. She calls to tell me she’s pregnant. She arrives in a rainstorm. I take a book of poems off the shelf in a foreign bookstore. This is overpriced, I say. He takes it out of my hands and puts it back on the shelf. Three hours later we are drunk in a sweaty café and he takes the book from his back pocket and hands it to me. I make him wait outside while I make the call. I am trying to note the spelling of the name of a train station while he is standing in the rain staring at me with the gloomiest look he can make on his face. When I call my father he says he needs a catscan on his stomach. They take the men elsewhere. Leo suggests that we smoke a joint. Her baby is much older now. The dog had cancer in its left kidney. She found a typewriter in the swap shop, which is next to the dump. They liked to throw old glass bottles to see if they could make it into the base of a broken refrigerator they found in those woods. He left the letter on my front porch. Just to say, I hope it’s okay if I date her. I didn’t care. I saved the letter anyhow. Sometimes when I’d help my father by cleaning out his cabinets I’d come across official documents I should not have read.

Brass

Post #20

Clean up this Mesopotamia


Do the dishes

#21

BONGOS:

Sexy Sexy Sex Gold

Led to a river and drowned
this was the ancient technique
which now is being undermined by the hose faucet and drain hole
the creation of water as an unnatural product brought to your homes
and inserted with such ease into your piping.
It's practically forced on ya!
And I am aware this newage alchemy may not surprise you
because it came slowly, but we're now faced with something wholly different
the components of course are basically the same I'll give you that!
Though it has been transformed into a commodity of the schottenfreud persuasion
striped bare of its organic mantle and handcuffed to the long limb of industry
these are the things that others must first desire.
Oh! there will be no lack in conviction or expense spared once it is bottled
and we will see it on the shelf realizing we had been unsatisfied since the beginning!
While the great King Midas rifles through our very own belongings
we will shout out in complete joy and utter disbelief
"See! This is the gold we found!"

BRASS:

A Lover's Flame

A Lover's Flame

Is thine flame so weak that it recedes with each whisper from a lover's breath?
Hast thou heard a knell in the winds of a lover's soft breeze?
Oh, the mistaken paths we tread.
These drafts intend new flames for your cooling embers
I confess, these intentions are not understood with ease.

Yet, I still wonder:
Such a gale as I now blow,
should, with a lover's flame,
yet a larger blaze bestow.

Perhaps it is thine own flame that doth not shine so bright.
Doth not true love shine with a fiercer light?

Ah, but as a lover, I must concede.
Perhaps this verse as kindling, be all it need.

# 19

BONGOS:




Sayer

the conversation rumbles into being: louis the fourteenth and louis the farrakhan walk into a bar. then into a woodchipper. it does not have the word for your blackness, but it is about your blackness. out you came. because you made the conversation about the word it does not have, lack became the word for your blackness. and halfness. deep in the hubbub of spew, the word. a tuft of question marks for hair. you know because you've heard its echo after someone knifed a drum with their lackness.








BRASS:

Post # 18

BONGOS

At night, on the banks of the St. Croix

there are few things which
distract from a picture
a thousand years old;
three lamps
shine orange across
the shore, illuminating
little more than themselves.
An airplane groans
deep and old from somewhere,
through the forest behind me.
This, and the sagging dock,
a few glass bottles tucked into the sand,
are all that separate me from the
long ago, a story no one can tell me.
My fingertips extinguish the lights across the river,
I stare at the insides of my eyelids until
the planes overhead filter into background
and hum like the world around-
same volume, different frequency.
Every second with my eyes closed
focuses the long ago, until the waves
weaving around the dock accept my advances
and soften;
It all folds into new sound.
But with my eyes shut I can’t see the river,
or the trees or sand or smooth rock
and I realize that the lights, the planes,
are all as natural as the currents of
air and water and mud that move here-
the only difference is newness.
So little difference exists between the soft
orange lights and the bird’s nests perched next to them
in the trees; the airplane flies somewhere between a robin
and a shooting star.
My foot ascends the curve of a glass bottle,
I stare again at the opposite bank,
try to make out the expanse in steady crescendo,
carving into rock and churning sand,
growing, slower than anything but growing.
Close your eyes long enough
and everything becomes a single
force in unison,
but that is only the beginning
of a story.
Watching the St. Croix eat rock 
and dirt makes me realize that only
a few degrees temperature
separate this bottle under my foot
from the sand in my shoes.

BRASS

#17

#17

BONGOS:

Everybody knows that I have a problem with the dissemination of facts and figures pertaining to the recriminations of the western automatons. What they forget to account for is the prostitution of the counterbalanced and underprivileged masonry class. Courage is not the issue—the weak will persevere against the certainty of failure in a vocabulary of obfuscation and ignorance. What is needed is a new knowledge, a recreational disembowelment of trivia that will reclaim sounds and symbols for a retributive recollection of beauty and song.

BRASS:

#16

BONGOS:

"We want to be English only, that should be the key, and that is imperative as a nation if we wish to survive." -Bay Buchanan

...then, for once, there was no confusion, only the confused.


BRASS:

Obama the Irish

#15

BONGOS

a battle rap on the subject of ET rappers

this kid's stock about to plummet like nasdac

Ima take each one of your lines

and shove it up your asscrack

when suckas trip on the mic

I'm known to give em flashbacks

beaten me is a big feat

hip hop sascwatch

I'm sick of these ET rappers...

BRASS

#13

BONGOS:

For a safer America.

BRASS:

#12

BONGOS:

your skin is a heresy, a lie
i do not believe what your cilia whisper
stretched thin over scapulae

fictive films on your celluloid thighs
i've watched us for hours, now
the images melt when i open my eyes

you're a mote in my vision
try as i might, i will never see
you, but you blur me

i will try not to scratch
though yours is such a delicious itch
sea salt and ginger and cayenne

stinging; then, caramel
what the hell; you're beautiful
but i don't mind being blind


BRASS:

#11

BONGOS:

And Google Loves Molly

her(e) is an answer to a celebration deserved:

I said it is the ender to the question that craved the ending to this last question
Of self-positioning, wayfaring, rather.

But im on the fence, white and picketing so it leaps in slivers of bitrate undoing, that engine uncoiled, rearing and wrapping, its tentacle arms tickle like so:

celery, cuddleday, define brain damage, digestion,
‘Did she say dream-analyzing?’

Glitter my space, like fotos and lake avenue tea party,

Morgendorfer and mechanical museum with a side of nipple tassles, hehe.



is the post in post-cathexis
the post in postage stamp collection?

BRASS:

#10

BONGOS:

Nangarhar

High times - you're seeing two couples off. Colorful smiles. Trees and hot smells of food spice, highland sun, smoke from mouths. Adolescence in twos. We will prosper, coupled futures in Nangarhar. Two families in a valley between the hills.

My son looks like a little man

Look at the bride, a flower in the scrub mountains

I will marry off two of my children today, he smiled through a huge beard. The progression. Coming together, families heading toward the center. A parade with nature as audience. Bushes and hills smiling, the sun winking potpourri overhead.

Time for a larger family

Climbing up the mountainside. A steep way up to the peak; soon we'll all be dancing.

Her figure is rounding out, look at those hips!

Brides in red and blue and green and orange and yellow and red.

:

Thunder barks. Fighting terror. Target sighted, enemy movement, prepare to fire And then lightning, and the brides were all in red. Red on the plants, red on the ground. Red like crushed berries in dry valley soil. Red painted on the leaves and the rush-boom of jets overhead. We've been attacked A crater for a pulpit. Bodies for guests. Scraps of rainbow fabric dyed black floating like buzzard feathers. Clouds of dust floating away off. Mountains sharp as broken bones. Running away. They headed down the hill and then they exploded Two weddings and forty-seven funerals. Bent metal and smoldering. The smell of spices and fruits replaced with the smell of burnt meat, too crisp for the reception. My son is only a boy A sonic boom shaking the valley. The dust too hot to breathe. Whimpers and cries in the dust. Drifting scraps of blue fabric. This is the only family you have left.

BRASS:

Afghan survivors tell of wedding bombing

#9

BONGOS:


Bursts

taut and stunk between the fiendish grassy know and the liquid find. yes, that was the about time that clustered up along the circling I scraped from loin but not from reason.

something seething in the sniffle. wrathful writhing in the wrists. laughter after a trip or people and other skyward things going horizontal in the bank of you.

here was the laugh about what we found in your fingernail. and the laugh about the time you said cllosstumes but meant costumes which would have made your brilliant point and everything relevant but 'twas slaughtered by the goons of too much too soon. mostly just the laughs about the time you slipped on public water but instead of pretending to dance or barrel roll back into stance you just boiled in the minutes until they morphed.

laudable laughable laughatable ponderous wander. humor in the squander body rotting all the fonder.


BRASS:

#8

BONGOS:


You ready for coffee, honey? 4 packs sugar, one afternoon. Gotta start somewhere. Which piece. German, Greek, Black, Polish, Irish, Dominican, Italian, Seneca, Poor, Riddled With Lead, Childless, Poetic, Cynical, What. Natives know it’s not the blizzard that gets ya, it’s the salt, asbestos. Breath of marinara. Factory box buildings. Behold, charade of holding our own(s). Fear in each knee, toetip. Don’t trust ‘em.

Dream of post-industrial meltdown, pairs of men in white shirts bobbing through old-wound empty lots, lonely West Side satellites. We live in the City of Good Neighbors. Beautiful day, say some. Hollywood, others. Hollywooood, the jersey gripped low to the groin. Disabled vets flick a butt to the curb and rub together tarred fingertips; Mmmmm baby. You look good today, baby! Very nice, very nice. Does a man feel an obligation to speak to a woman on the sidewalk. Does he learn this from the movies, his grandfather in the factory, the priest eyeing alter boys, in the Fruit Belt seeing his strong mama belt-smacked under the breasts in a ghost-ridden house. Does he feel it each time in his loins. This is not a multiple choice test.

Lift of detail in lung, shattering cornea. The city heaves its chest and out we dive. What could have been, a phantom limb. Tag ‘em high - Hert. Atak. Uphill all the way back? No ice cream? Closed at 5? Robbed at knife point?

My mother taught me to eat everything, in relative silence - pleasure in the quotidiana. Grease stained, no matter. Smell of bread, half-light under steel beams. Water on the street. Picking through garbage behind the hospital where you were born. Under the railroad bridge, over Niagara. Hope where.

BRASS:

#7

BONGOS:

 

They sold off my shoes to make pinstripes and news. “Thanks for your pulls pushes paychecks and punch.” In Xanadu did abreact your stately pleasure domes foreclosed. Our debt they shouldered now we shoulder theirs which is our own which is not theirs but they still chickenfight while our mortgaged-back(s) begin to brake.

[…]

Abandon a bandage a band of thieves a brand of real a state of panic a plan it seems to save our planet a plant but now I’m taken aback. This despotic dipsosis, the best taverns at the corner of That Street, liquidate your mortgage so we can sip That Sweet Something which we know is running thin but we can plummet, pillage the sea and shallow coastlines will supply That Salve that Saves, that spits and sputters, just give us That Second Shot. Whose we but you and them not me but if they fail then we do too but if we fail then they did too whose we not you; believe. Reap presentational democracy.

 

BRASS:

Edit:

 

#6

BONGOS:

Give me thirty eyelashes

and a crown

for your troubles

I am timeless

dull-eyed and alone

I and naked

purple pinstripes

and soda cracker bones

I am master of excess

a ferocious lover

I peel and tear and stretch

and wear you on my breath

BRASS:

blog.grimpuppy.com/uploaded_images/hottest_wedding_dress_ever-739272.jpg

#5

BONGOS:


Protected Under Several U.S. Patents

I.
Voice of the body won’t leave me alone asks for things to be fed to be led fertilized mud erodes the roots of reptilian bones and corn don’t hold back back what were you thinking. All day day going on coffee coffee and dirty thoughts licentious refrigerator caught caught in the dead wanton knuckles of tree present participle of leak to become known runs rivers run where are you going where have you a million mornings and back body still gurgling enormity toxic vein on poisoned land is it consensual or affordable or organic or engineered?

Eat eating yielding leafy green iron content make the most I imagine my lover as a fish slick catch of scales rubbed the wrong way accumulation of fins for five years a nurturing a refrigeration a peeling

Mercury is interplant. Digestive. Complimentary. Seedlings take root in love production irrigate that proposition progress flows downstream profit margin will make four thinner hips whose body their body whose self my whose land hungry mother Monsanto please pick up why you didn’t call Shirley says

there always is a reason trust

II.
in us reason trust reason us treason us reason trust us eason rust ust treas on us



BRASS:

nature's little helpers:
http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/

#4

BONGOS:

I think I finally understand Luis' $200 sneakers.

Why would prey wear their worth on a placard? Who paints a target gold and fastens it to their chest? Loud neon thumbs pointing down at the root of lowered expectations.

I tell her my order and make sure that I pronounce every syllable correctly. I shudder at the improper use of salad forks while melting gray faces make ambiguous eyes. I'm the only one wearing a tie. I'm the only one whose skin is crawling across the table and into the corner. I start to move again when my father recognizes the hole I've dug and decides to throw money into it.

The men sitting next to me are crumbling into dust while I crack crab, yet they stare at the horns I'm starting to sweat from my forehead. There's no more money to be thrown, so I start feverishly gnashing on the shells and inherit an exoskeleton.


BRASS:

# 3

BONGOS:

A fragment, worth revising:

Rabbit in the electrical box. Found another in the fridge. Under coffee rings over love letters now post-its. Everywhere Rabbitlife. The moon is a Rabbit, and my belly is Rabbitful, and even my Rabbits are Rabbits.


BRASS:

and the winner is...

#2

BONGOS:

The average prehistoric hunter gatherer worked an estimated four hours a day. My dad always told me if you want something done ask the busiest guy you know. Everyone wants a washing machine, and the dirt didn't use to make us sick when we slept in it.

BRASS

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/washington/19cnd-cong.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1221924011-9fKzHiXjOqO062KslRBJ/A

#1

BONGOS:


The Hawthorne Effect

Workers were divided into test and control groups so the memory is panicked and closure-free. A thong for christmas, day planner, an abdominal crunching ball. A slurred romp through the kitchen, groping after the fringe. we know they was watching but still stomp freely. We, the burrito concoctee. The intent was to find the level of illumination that made the work of female coil winders, relay assemblers and small parts inspectors more efficient. We knew they was watchin' so we hovered too. We didn't say we wanted to mean, or that we wanted new means, we just meant the regret has its clatter and bonk.

To the mall, check the mail, check them all. It was during the first phase of study that we discovered our Dura Mater: that most cadence was hitched to the wind. more precisely, a balloon in the wind. Lighting for the test group was increased from 24 to 46 to 70 foot-candles because it is 1924 and there are no dimmers for dim ideas. In that town, stimulus lobbed from a cloaca landed in our mouths so we gathered to talk about it: work about it.


BRASS:

in the beginning there was Hugo Montenegro: