wake up, rod

I took it in a different direction. Swan Song {To Kensington} To the popsicles: I’m calling it quits. My ice drips limp in the Serpentine – exhaust – smother. {nothing left but the ruling} An eyrar of cygnets take turns biting and cutting a crying child’s fingers. Their beaks drip blood. Mute, orange bills shine in the night. They’re owned by the Queen, their feathers to God’s ears. Ultraviolet, they hunt through the muggy night, ghost wings haunting the ring roads, masks peering from rotary brush. A whiteness stealing over the grass to you. Shake, man – they come to rend you in the dark. {burn me once} rage for forgetting, rage at the blankness the despair of forgetting, the tortuous loop. lasso me to your moon, see how you neglect to leave me hogtied. pitch a bucket of pitch, I’ll baseball my eyes and snake the grass under foot, chant a song of self-devouring. here’s the thing: I’m sick to death of you and everything you are, the tower of heuristics crashing down at th...

In honor of our 100th Post on Wake Up, Rod. I present: The Menu for Tonight's Four-Course Assignment (with drink pairings): APERITIFS  An apéritif (also spelled aperitif) is usually served before a meal to stimulate the appetite. (wikipedia)   In order to truly awaken the palette, I expect a brief (eight lines or less) imagisitic  creation with a regional terroir . You choose the region (the word itself is intentionally open-ended). Remember that the ultimate goal is subtle flavors expressed masterfully.  HORS D'ŒUVRE  ...food items served before the main course of a meal. (wikipedia )  In the tradition of molecular gastronomy   we will approach this appetizer with an eye for remaking, re-representing, and reforming. Cut a chunk out of a beloved piece and examine its structure (once again, intentionally open-ended) in order to invert it. Idea(s): take a subtle flavor and make it bold, recreate a familiar technique using a contrary method, etc. ...

Moonlighting as a Skyscraper: $10/hr Let’s start with the last: blow back breeze, sway in the bitch wind, squeeze my girders you rotten tangerine. Let’s drape ourselves like Hitchcock stars over the parapet, radio rod, ledge, rooftop-park-bench, cry tears into each other’s mouths, pre-grease our hands. Let’s emote like Antonioni: below me only ground, surrounding me only sky. Let’s start with me screaming, that last guttural accident clanking out my mouth as the asphalt sucks me down, your mouth mouthing prayers like pennies at my face. Or let’s get rid of you, I've already replaced you with a mustache and a squeegee waxing my 51 st advancement. Let’s decorate me with tower-cranes like yellow birds, any yellow birds, doesn't matter, but mustard yellow fuckers for sure swinging like beanie flyers in the breeze, get me all fancy for my little perching man. Let’s imagine you for a change, but you never look up, never stop to pat the limestone like an acceptable child. So let’s im...

allegro musics I’ll stack up melodies for you, build a twisting gold chain of song coiling nimble on your collarbone, though nothing like the cuffs that manacle our middle fingers together. Mix CDs trailing into pre-time, stacking like creation myths collapsing into each other, cassettes like decks of playing cards like meat cleaver throwing knives like wood shingles lunged by a tornado that’s the embodiment of every embarrassing moment in a rail shooter. Fixed perspective doesn’t give hold on this, doesn’t codify a rock grip, but I’ll dino up your face until my quads diffuse black acid, till my clavicles be the conch shells in the Javanese mermaid gamelan of your otitis media . Heartworm in the earbulb: shrill silence, trombone fanfare, egg shaker. Then when the CD’s rice-based metronome goes black, I’ll tell you with Skinner crooning back in the mix, just what it’s like after all this time to sing sweetly to another man.

I was going for a little departure from my usual. Not sure, but it mostly feels unwieldy. Let's talk about your face as a lamp I've lost the bulb to. Let's talk about dirt, or stacks of magazines or any number of small dominoes we deliberately set up, the tumble comes much later, of course, & it's never something we count down, it's more a rock paper scissor moment. Suddenly I'm holding your hand Suddenly I'm holding the toilet. I once escaped to the basement for hours trying to find an album to prove you my childhood. You asked where I'd been & I said "sweeping." These are incidents to etch into skin: your hand, still, unmemorizable.

Lost in a cannon of curve mirrors, he cannot perch or sling, rather sings every space song ever but only the chorus about Major Tom comes like a repetition that has fresh written all over it. He misses lettuce, putting on shoes, sharpening pencils. To catalog is to mark and there is no time here, just categories of awake-- stop, pause, breathe: the stars a shimmy machine.