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