here i am.

alive at that 4:50am cliche, but for once

i’m here.

i’m finally in the motherfucking moment.

I’m finally in that beautiful purgatory.

that magical place between drunk and sober.

the moments between the damned weariness of each day.

the moments between the horror of reality.

so i’ll keep this one short

because here i fucking go.

i finally have something to write

something at last

threatening to burst out of my very being

and god himself

could do this feeling no fucking justice.

I add insult to injury and bleed into the glass

Cut my lip upon the rim and my tongue upon the wine

Red mixing with the red, only told apart by farce

I've no ire; it's what happens when so sharpened is the vine

It becomes a heady mix, and I'll ask for yet another

A vintage with a copper note is too familiar to waste

Greedily embraced and savoured like a liquid lover

I'll drain it to the dregs to bet on changes to the taste

An insult I can handle, and my injury will heal

Uncork, and leave the bottle on the table by the door

But when one becomes the other all the splinters turn to steel

I'll pass the key with kisses, or just spit it to the floor

The night is joined in song, and I embrace it as a friend

For day's the enemy; illuminates where I have bled

If I pour myself one last, will I finally ascend?

Or will crimson be the colour of my resting place instead...

She said, “The water is still,

There isn’t any flow, no movement,

Not even the tiniest ripple,”

And I didn’t know how to reply –

I never know how to reply –

But it was such a pretty thing to say

And so I smiled anyway.

She was in a strange mood,

All fidgeting movements and wild eyes;

Her eyes looked off in the fluorescent light,

A little hollow and far too blue

And my heart broke for her

And my heart broke for me.

The conversation fell apart fast,

And she went off to ride her bike home

Saying something about how she needs to clean

And she only sweeps when she’s sad.

She drinks and cries

And sweeps her kitchen floor

And drinks

And cries.

Autena comes after eight-thirty

And tells me of Paris in July,

Its grace and its cool-dry beauty,

Not like here with the insufferable heat

And the awkward, rambling streets

Sprawling out in random beelines from nowhere in particular

To nowhere at all.

And I imagine myself on top

Of the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile,

Gazing out across the mad logical Champs-Elysées,

Screaming, wildly wailing at La Défense

Of my imagination, and I am afraid

That I will never be able to get out

And soon this will be everything, screaming

At imaginary cities in imaginary places that sit

Somewhere just to the left of my throbbing amygdalae

In the tangled mess of nervous knots,

My tangled cerebrum from which these tangled words spew.

I scream and I scream and my screams

Bounce and buffet around in the still air

Above the silent avenue, and die away into nothing.

And Autena leaves around nine,

When the clouds are ashen grey-black,

But still smoldering with passionate light

Around their edges of the stubborn bright

Burn of the selfish summer sun, clinging

Onto the end of day: It is that awkward time

Of late evening when all is certainly dying

But all is still bristling and frantic,

Like a child not yet wanting to go to bed.

Suddenly, I am bubbling and bursting

And so I light up another Sherman MCD –

Luxury, luxury!

I can’t afford such a headswim –

But it is not enough to stifle this electricity –

I need a greater object for my energy –

So I up and wander to East Main:

The low little buildings in a jumbled pile of brick and stone

Tell a century-old confused story of booms and busts,

Booms and busts, from the broken-down sidewalks on the west end

To the little birds singing in trees to homeless people on Legacy Trail

By the train station, to the self-conscious hip shops and restaurants

And bars that run the static length of the east end,

To the almost-but-not-quite abandoned garages on Porter,

Which will someday be gone and replaced by apartments,

Feigning culture, with their coffee shops and sushi shops

In their bottoms and their hipsters in their tops.

And I feel lost for a few clumsy minutes

On the corner of Crawford and Main

And Ali Harter’s whiskey-rough voice is rising up

From the patio in the alley behind Tres Cantina

To battle a bad band tumbling out of the cracks

Of The Opolis, and my cigarette burns the tip of my finger,

So I drop it and it scatters into a million glowing points

And I feel I am god for a minute,

Scattering life-light across the hot concrete world

Only to watch it burn itself out.

I smile.

I laugh wild in wonder, wild,

And then catch myself,

Because this is only Crawford and Main

And I am still nobody.

This is neither the time nor place.

So I set myself west,

To the grey ash-bitter west,

And walk myself,

The sidewalk descending from pristine glitter-grey

Into the inevitable rubble;

The dense ancient brick friend-faced facades

Grow sparser and fall away

And the city opens wide its teeth –

Everything becomes distant, dark, confused –

And swallows,

And I am consumed, acid-drenched, burning

And desperate. I am tiny, a speck of dust

Lost in an infinite plain

Of concrete, lost, ever-lost, and never heard

And never seen by anyone, a speck of dust

A nullity among nullities,

Swimming through the fiery stomach

Of this vacuous parking lot world.

I loiter, if not wholly lost, half-lost

Around the high school, bloated and sprawling and empty

In the weary gasping summer night blackness,

That peculiar American machine, ever churning,

Replicating itself like a virus three-hundred-million times over

Into the soul-cells of unwanting kids, and then exploding

Them out into the hot, perpetual June afternoon,

Naked and frantic, with less than when they started,

Besides their infant livers and lungs already starting to rot

And the promise that their hungry heads and hearts

Will someday soon boil away into nothing.

No! No I will not be trapped again

In that ignorant web of disappointment and anger!

I got drunk off that shit for twenty years;

I was a junkie, prideful of my addiction,

Stubborn and self-righteous, a child,

But a child no more,

Because I have seen the crepe myrtles

Pushing up from under the concrete,

More powerful than the man-made mess

Of worry that sticks to us so pervasively,

That clings to our bones, perverting our morning reflections

Into floating black livers and brains,

That makes us see each other in constant twilight,

Broken down into our constituent shapes

And reflected light.

No! I will object no more to my humanity;

I will reject no more the quiet constant joy

Of knowing that I am a man and I am alive,

And I will revel in sweat and bake

Beneath the Oklahoma sun, and earn myself some blisters

And bleed, breaking up the concrete, and try to tell the soccer moms,

When they pitch their screaming fits, what I have seen

Beneath all of this, and hope that they listen.

But when they don’t (and I know that they won’t)

I will just continue my work, and sweat and bake and blister

And bleed, and hope someday soon they will

See the world as I have seen it, as flowers

Struggling against the concrete.

But perhaps I am Searle’s beer can

Popping up when all the switches are pulled just right

To exclaim excitedly, “I am thirsty!”

But never knowing exactly what that means.

I am thirsty.

I am thirsty,

Parched, famished, longing,

Starving for a grand x,

A variable in a function that refuses to be solved,

A thing that clamps down on my tongue-tip,

But which I can never name

And which is undeniably absent

But inexcusably present.

And so I spend my days

Building up my frustrated mess

And weakheartedly hammering away

At the perpetual concrete, while the philosophy kids

Worry themselves to death about the intentionality of machina,

And I am nothing more than a very thirsty beer can

Wading through signs and symbols trying to connect x

With anything meaningful,

A static cell in a cruel construct,

Waiting, always waiting to perform some function

I cannot fathom.

Relax. Just calm down.

You are no cell; you are a man,

And you are scared, and that’s alright.

Your heart speeds only to proclaim that you are alive.

But am I? My day is undone.

How I long to quit you –

To be burned by strange suns,

To breathe deep foreign grass –

But I am afraid:

I can imagine no hotter sun,

No softer grass on which to couch my soul.

You broke me and rebuilt me,

Piece by piece, a different man,

But how I long to quit you.

The steel of my spine gnags at me

On cold days, but on this summer night

I am titanic.

But I am still weighed down

By the broken streets,

By my unhistory – I do not know

My great-great-grandfather’s name

But I have his desk,

Built from strong lonely Thackerville timber,

Heavy with the petrified red mud

And with a century-old morning star

Which burned brighter then,

But is now faded, overburdened

By the anthropogenic light

Rising from some fucking casino,

Unable to proclaim its unasked-for but needed hope;

I bet he, like I, was a son of the dawn,

Fallen, ashamed, but never fully broken.

But I will be no twenty-first century Rimbaud,

Ever asleep on a hundred blank notebooks;

I will not burn what little beauty I build –

I refuse!

No, I will cast off my prairie shame

And shout naked from overpasses

To the low, infinite sprawl spread thin and disjointed

That no vultures will pick clean our iron limbs

That we will someday triumph!

…who are we?

In my exalted fervor, I carry myself

To Boyd Street, faintly glittering,

Bubbling and bursting with the impassioned apathy

Of Saturday night in a college town –

Classes have just resumed; the wolves are prowling

The bars lining the bright-dark street.

I find David, the old gardener,

With his bad knees and his bad back

And his sharp mind, smoking by the corner store.

He tells me of northern Washington,

Its colors and its quiet, and I am giddy,

And we are giddy together, dreaming of sweet elsewhere

In a gas station parking lot in between cigarette drags.

He wants to grow pot

And get just rich enough and breathe good air

And be happy.

And I find Jesus strung out on speed

And three-point beers

On the corner of Asp and Boyd

And he gives me American Spirits

And he sings me a song

And he tells me of how his brothers and sisters

Had beaten him down, nearly killed him,

And he spent three days in Norman Regional,

Comatose on morphine and despair,

But he made his way back to this world,

A half-man, proclaiming that we are gods,

That we are all gods,

And he follows me back to the corner store

Like a hungry dog beaten down,

Bruised and whimpering,

To buy cigarettes and beers

With money he doesn’t have,

Proclaiming all the while

That we are all gods,

Every one of us.

…who are we?

Are we gods?

We are skinks cowering in corners

From the possums’ sharp teeth,

But no injury can truly kill us.

We are tree-planters; I know it’s sad,

But we cannot stop to watch them grow –

There are tireless axmen always at our heels,

And so we must continue our work

Until they are finally overwhelmed, and turn,

Red-faced, sweating, panting, away,

And we will rest in the shade, and admire

What a forest we have built to shelter our eggshell souls

From the august-hot world.

And that day will come, I promise, but until then,

We must break our backs, we must blister our hands,

We must let the Oklahoma sun burn and crack our necks,

We must sing the glory of our malaise and moonlight

And we must love, always love, and be patient;

On the local nightly new, they like to call that

“The Oklahoma Standard,” and I must confess

A cringe for every time I hear the phrase,

But there does seem to be some peculiar overactive

Philosophy beat in to us from birth which contends

That we cannot rest until we can all rest.

And I can vouch for the existence of the Oklahoma Standard:

I’ve seen it shining through the bigoted black

Perpetuated by Mary Fallin, that vulture,

That horny and holier-than-thou whore,

And her prostitute crowd,

Who turned the crumbling Capitol Building

Into a grand and wretched whorehouse

Where they suck the throbbing red cocks

Of highway patrolmen and oilmen and lobbyists

Until they explode, cumming blood and money and fear

Into the wide, lusty mouths of the lawmakers

Who swallow down those sweet sacraments of the modern age.

Yes, I’ve seen it!

It’s sometimes dim,

Like a distant star under city lights,

But often bright white

And all-encompassing,

Clothed in work gloves and work shoes and denim,

Two-thousand strong, marching,

Getting burned beneath the June sun,

But never stopping, righting

Overturned headstones tossed by wind,

Picking up trash and tree branches,

Until, finally, the work is done

And we can rest together

In the shade of a wide tree

And talk and smile and laugh

Over a well-earned simple meal

And cool water, calming the day’s desperate thirst.

It is not some strange and unique gift

Of people around these parts, though.

It is an exaltation, a celebration

Of the often forgotten but immutable grandeur

Of basic human goodness and decency –

Nothing more and nothing less.

I am awoken, this time by the yellow lights

Of the university, softly glowing

Like the face of a very old friend,

Like the face of my mother holding me,

Six years old, after I came home from school

To a shoebox, a casket

For the soft thing that kept me safe at night

And I realized my mortality –

Daydreamer like me,

Lost and forgotten soul like me,

Clothed in red clay, longing

For switchgrass and romance, gunfights,

Long nights filled with poetry

And gas station beer.

There is some ugly beauty in this place,

This hot, wet incubator of everything good or evil,

Peopled by thoughts, by hovering minds, roving

In their sputtering, sweating, panting, crawling, gasping work,

Endless hours spent on the innervation of the viscera

Of this brainless body

In which we pump our dark, thick blood

Out in wild veins going nowhere until it all bursts,

And stains ten-thousand desks still dripping

Onto the floor the undried mess of another futile organ.

But we pump and we pump,

Spewing our constant chaotic nothing,

Leaving a tiny gorgeous stain,

And crying, joyful and pure,

When it finally finds oxygen

And for a second glows radiant red.

Automatically, I think of her:

Her breath, overburdened

With the tacit rambling whispering

Of seasons: I long for that breath

On my cheek, warm and wet, ancient,

Made holy by the australopithecine grunts,

By the sweet not-magic singing

Of striving, fighting, loving, living, ever-living

Humanity.

And when she constricts that eternal air

Through her steady shifting glottis

And lets it fly across the rolling plain of her tongue

And through the snowy peaks of her teeth,

She speaks

With the power of sacred everything.

Her voice is that of songbirds,

Of animal roars,

Of sweating hunters,

Of a spectral deified existence,

The eternal spirit of life.

She says, “Fuck you.”

And I swear it’s the most beautiful thing

I have ever heard – I deserve it, need it.

She is gone now. She was never here.

She was only ever a myth I made

From a face picked out arbitrarily

From the popcorn ceiling on a Sunday afternoon,

Too sad to get out of bed.

I like making myths.

I’m good at it.

I was born without myths,

And so I build them –

Ginsberg and Pound and Faulkner and Rimbaud and WHATEVER,

Anything better to cling to,

Anything to keep me complacent

And hoping –

And I stack them high:

Bottles of gin, filled to the brim

With cigarette butts, like milk bottles

In some carnival game, with the big bear

Of pseudointellectualism peering down

From the highest shelf:

“I want it, I want it.”

I’ll get it for you.

I’ll do anything.

The ball flies hard and swift.

Proud, beaming, I am certain.

A clink, echoey and hollow,

And not a one falls,

And I am ashamed, burning red,

Embarrassed by my weakness

`And my empty pockets –

I have nothing, and now you know it,

And now I know it.

And somewhere a tall man with a mustache

Is saying, “Cowboy up, son!

Quit your crying: There’s work to be done

And you won’t get anywhere with a face that long,”

And I hate him.

Everyone’s so practical –

I wish I was practical;

I wish I could shake this

Daydream-tit-sucking-infant mind of mine

A while and just live

And quit chasing ghosts and myths

And quit hating tall men with mustaches

Who never existed.

Crockett comes after work;

Beers with Brad by Plaid,

Cigarettes and the forgiving wind:

We talk of acid trips

And how we drink too much.

We talk of Camus and Heidegger

And astrophysics

And compare the case system of Old English

With that of modern German.

We talk of dreams –

I dream sober, eyes open,

The way I always do.

I lie and say that

I can never remember my dreams

Upon waking.

We talk of lost loves –

“No! Loves unfound!”

Crockett retorts, knowing,

And we agree that it’s more poetic

Than we deserve;

I can’t help but think

Of Sal, his head exploding

In Denver monastery darkness

Beneath mountains crumbling before their time.

I can’t help but think

Of the low Arbuckles, tiny

Now, but once grander

Than Himalayan highs,

And lights burst before me,

Sober. How wonderful

To be born in such a shadow.

A little dazed, and very tired,

I make my way back across town

To my car, thinking how there is no truth

Nor falsehood nor good nor evil,

Only beauty and boredom

And those too tired to know the difference.

But no! No!

There is truth!

There is truth!

There are people who love you

And there is truth in that

And there is beauty in that!

I smile.

I breathe deep the cool late summer night air;

Switchgrass whispers in my over-full thorax.

I am content.

And so, for what it’s worth,

Some advice from an idiot:

Smoke life to the butt,

Suck greedily down the last sweet dribbles

Clinging stubbornly to the core

And be unashamed of the sticky juices

That run slow and precious down your chin.

Be prideful of all the messes you make

Because you are but a flurry of messes,

Yourself, coagulated and floating

Downstream unimaginably fast,

If you are anything.

Because the water is still now,

But one glitter-gold morning

Someday soon, a warm sun will rise

And heat all the stilly world

And love and joy and all the beautiful hope

Will burst forth from our silver ventricles

And flow, at first a trickle,

But then a roaring cascade,

Across the rocky racket that worried us so, for so long,

And make it all smooth,

And make it all shine again;

One glitter-gold morning,

The flowers will break through the concrete,

And the cruel-faced vultures and axmen

Will learn to love again.

Understand that you are a speck of dust

In an infinite field of cold concrete

Pushed around by the fickle wind,

But know that you’re a giant.

Walk and talk and breathe and laugh and love and

Live like a giant.

Be vain of your quirks –

The way your mouth goes crooked when you smile,

Or that laugh that escapes when you get nervous.

Be vain of your quirks

Because somebody loves them,

Because somebody loves you.

Smile at the busted-up concrete

And be thankful that you are breathing,

Be thankful for the busted-up world

And set yourself upon the work to mend it.

Fall in love a little bit with every beautiful thing

You come across, because it matters.

It matters more than anything, more

Than the trendy insecurities we wear,

More than the used-up social fuel

We piss out and then replenish.

And silence is ugly – be loud.

Be loud though it is terrifying.

Be loud because you know

You have something to say.

And so take that thing beating out

From the sweet depths of your chest,

And write it. I’ll lend you my good pen

And a few blank pages

And I’ll wait and smoke my cigarettes

And drink my tea before it gets too cold,

And when you’re finished,

Read it back to me,

Slow and gentle, and we will sigh

And swoon like lovers

Over what wonders we build.

If you have a magnificent monster

Clawing from inside your soul,

Whisper it in my ear,

Let it be free,

Let it be known,

And the water will flow again.