M'leece angel....

Dear readers:

This is my artistic soulful snow-angel and botanical lyricist Mileece I'Anson...she channels the sound of the earth via all things organic and vernal..I've had the privilege of knowing this creature for the last five years (a la David Sereda's the Voice) and was honored to crash at her pad last autumn when I performed my poems at Dirty Laundry LIT...Today she is featured in (my favorite) publication the New York times....Mileece, I am so proud of you..here is me giving you a hug!!!! 

Once again, Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga showed up to one of my poetry readings and started taking their clothes off every time I read (Lady Gaga came dressed in an outfit made from an old TROLL book order form and Miley just pretty much got naked right away even though everyone thought she looked like Annie Lennox with that Robocop-tampon haircut) and once again, I ended the night reading excerpted hi-lighted junior high stanza's from THE BABYSITTERS CLUB and Miley and Gaga mistook it for Emily Dickinson and swore it was the most profound thing they simply had ever heard... after a great pain a formal feeling comes...sigh....

Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly and beyond....

...the writer en route to his sylvan writing desk....photo by Valena Jackson...

...sounds ike something my dear high school english teacher Larry Reents woud say....

..was cruising down past the seven figure mansions of antiquity dotting the cusp of Grandview drive last night with my dear high school English teacher when he turned to me and oh-so poetically posited, "Look David, Those are the houses where all the writers' who don't use run-on sentences live."

WHAT HE WANTS

WHAT HE WANTS

He wants not to be so bitter at the world all the time

He wants to know that he is clean

He wants to stop working such exorbitant hours every semester

Wants to read a book a week

He wants to get his shit together

He wants a pair of shoes that doesn’t have holes in them

Until he remembers the famed photograph of

Jonathan Larson holding up his pair of sodden

Converse sneakers limp by the top heel

As if the holy spirit

In ornithological dove form

Had just been shot dead with a pellet gun

 

He wants not to drink so much on the weekend

 

He wants to fuck her brains out

He wants the canvas of the screen to be the

Sunrise he looks into first thing in the afternoon

When he rises (because he works third shift

And sleeps on a futon he found near the dumpster)

He wants security

He wants to finish the book he started eight years ago

He wants to be able to pay off his debts

He wants to go down to his father’s grave

And tuck his chin into his neck

As his face falls into a

Triangle of wet prisms

 

He wants to really be there for his mother

 

 

But more than anything else

he wants to wake up one morning

In the hard frost of early February

And find her body asleep

Next to his body

Her chin and lips

Exhaling invisible ripples

Paddling across the dashboard of his chest

 

He wants to take a moment

And just look at the way

Her forehead and her cheekbones

Form a gentle meadow of peace

 

The warmth of her body

 The serene pasture of her eyelids

  

The amen of the prayer that is to come.

 

Thinks that the only apt punishment for Riley Cooper is that he should be coerced into playing the role of Jim in the Philadelphia community theatre's musical adaption of Samuel Clemens Huck Finn. Then should give a lecture on racism for inner city youth. The should give away his untoward million dollar a year salary to public schools. Then should be publically lynched, brain dead inane-inbred hick. Where is Chuck D when you need him...


                                      

Watergate Waterbeds

 

 

 

In the wake of the Zimmermann debacle I’ve decided to quit my ongoing pursuit of pending literary greatness, cash in my flaccid 401K and open a chain of civic-soporific oriented furniture stores called WATERGATE WATERBEDS, not only because I had sex on a waterbed last week for the first time and it felt like my entire anatomy was sloshing around like cosmic mitochondria sifting through the subtle... surf that is time, but because, here at WATERGATE WATERBEDS we avail the patriotic patron with the opportunity to fall asleep on the truth. Recent WATERGATE WATERBED owner Rebecca Hinder from Onan Prairie, Nebraska notes in a hand-written letter that ever since she invested in a WATERGATE WATERBED she doesn’t mind lying to her husband Herb Hinder about how bad the sex really is. “Our WATERGATE WATERBED really saved our marriage. Herb thinks he’s Casanova, and I don’t feel guilty thinking eensie-weensie thoughts about that store clerk from HOME DEPOT who handed me the caulk after it accidentally fell out of the shopping cart that one time.”

Public school teacher Imogene Wilcox of Koinonos Falls, Michigan notes that she just used to “stay up freckled-tooth and frazzled all hours of the night,” worrying about her students’ who were roughly the same age of Trayvon Martin, but ever since she purchased her WATERGATE WATERBED. “It’s like I’m numb to everything. I know if any of my students do find themselves in a sort of pickle, I have faith in the legal system to do the right thing.”

And so the good book won’t slip out of the sheets in the middle of the night, if you order now, your WATERGATE WATERBED will come replete with a bible belt.

So make the political choice and choose WATERGATE WATERBEDS. After all, if you were born in the late-seventies you were probably conceived on one and, like your current mattress, the truth can sometimes be hard to sleep on.

After all, it’s the American Dream.

Went for a long tortuous drive through the vernal exclamatory-shaped corn husks dotting the dun haze country side that is Fulton county. Stopped at a Casey's gas station somewhere near Banner marsh and picked up two six packs, a cup of grainy coffee and some cheap cigars. Found a desolate dirt road and followed it for about 45-minutes into the cricket-oratorio oblivion that is rural Illinois at winking dusk in mid July, sweat aligning my brow like beads on an abacus. The moon was an ivory enhanced magnified toe-nail clipping boomeranging overhead and the West was an incendiary sip of left over birthday party Tang. In the middle of nowhere I stopped the car, got out, took off my shirt and just started screaming, howling, cursing, Sylvia Plathing-out-of-control, casting imprecations of eternal impotency on the people I love who have really hurt me, the lovers who have abandon me, the friends' who have fucked me over, the makeshift nest of mistakes I have made. I screamed for five minutes as loud as I could, a koan of sorrow and loss. I then had a beer and forgave those I had damned, those that I love. Forgave myself. Driving away, severing the rearview mirror above the dashboard because now, after all this time, after all this hurt, I don't want to look back.

Phuck yeah, that felt good. That felt really good.

..poem to commemorate the closing of CHAMPS WEST....

ENRAPTURED

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surely it would be like this:

 

The brazen herald from some celestial bugle

trumpeting punctuating decay

shrill of a junior high tardy bell

 

The dated Christmas tree bulb, the planet tilting

its cosmic neck as if to work out enervated kinks,

saddle of jigsaw cardboard  continents dripping sideways

 tectonic funeral tears

  cataclysmic zippers crackling

dotting the floorboard of the earth

in a fissure of fear

 

Oceans thrashing gargling  up

coastlines in bristled sweeps

volcano blowing their subterranean wad

mother earth menstruating fire and ash

Tornados skidding, Tsunami's roaring

 

Skyscrapers toppling like a game of drunken jenga

patches of the sky falling in heavy geometrical trapezoids

splattering thuds  anvils in cartoons

 

And this is how it would be

as reality unbuttons itself

 

A quadrant gospel of  devious

horsemen hackling in  neighing canters

across the Golgotha-gray horizon

 

graves rising like steeples caricatures in a children’s pop-up book

 

Overweight middle-aged naked Christians

elbowing each other to be first in line

making little “told-you-so” gestures with their fingers

at those who are left

 

ST. Peter holding an Ostrich quill

checking hotel room reservations

 

While below puppet sized incubuses

Prod pitch forks into the

Shoulders of  porn shop patrons

Marshalling them into a fire-laced

Subway staircase to suffer and to burn beneath

 

Cylinder Mayan Disc calendars

 Ricocheting satellite’s, asteroids plummeting

 failed comets hammering

like court-sentencing gavels as

albino buffalo stampede across great plains

 

cherubim and seraphim

playing soccer at Stonehenge

with black and tan Tao emblems

lotus plants plopping

crop circles rising like yeast as

 

marooned-coated Buddhists monks levitate 

towards enlightenment in pyramidic posture 

 Israel being removed  with a scalpel

boomeranging into outer space

concealed in a snow globe bubble

Mecca rising on all fours following

a MT. Arafat-sized silhouette of Muhammad, pointing

 

The entire continent of South America herds llamas into Alien spaceships headed for Andromeda

 

Thunder searing,  cities drowning, the mantle of the earth being riped from its skull

 

planets clanging together like abacus beads

 

the sunflower sun achingly

exhaling one final exclamatory wink

before giving birth to  nuclear miscarriage

blossoming into a butterfly supernova

 

yet still seven minutes away

 

 and how

 

in that moment

 

as this pocket of reality gradually snaps out of being

 

I want to find myself

seated on an overturned

cathedral doorway

hovering life raft

through the grainy dregs of

galactic nothingness

burrowed

in the earth of you arms

 

kiss the In the beginning  of your forehead

lose myself in the fleeting

cosmic eternity of your eyes

 

enraptured all this time.

 

 

 

                               

(performed C. West/ Bloomsday 2011/BLACKSTARSEA RADIO/ART SHOW/ Dirty Laundry LIT Hollywood)

...poem about sustained silent reading and communism for Brianne Ahmann (and poets Kyle Devalk and Megan Cannella)

USSR

 

Was the acronym they spoon fed us in third grade

Early afternoons chocolate-milk

Handle-bar cafeteria catered moustaches

Past the mulch burns and calluses of

 Autumnal recess

 

After the Lord’s prayer

 

 when we were required to look down

 

Into the open puddle of splayed ink

 alphabet inching across Russian tea

Gray plains of paper not knowing anything about

The cold war or the soviet republic

Or the Berlin wall

Not knowing a thing about the missile

Crisis two decades earlier, how our teachers

Would later describe to us the fashion in

Which they huddled fetus posture beneath the dessert

plateaus of their desks, the shrill of the siren

Heralding  an over head whistling screech of uncertainty

Waiting to find themselves incubating

In an ashy bulb of spontaneous silence

 

No more, or

 

The Russian grad student I was in love with

who told me that when she growing up

USA was the enemy and who wouldn’t sleep with me

  because  she was marrying a different man

Almost thirty years older

 who drove a firebird

And who came from a republic of money

 

How, on Bloomsday that same year

I did more

Shrooms than a Mario brother down at

The Red Foxx den

 Walking up  The balding cement arch of Main street Hill at 3am

Convinced with my long hair

And tattered jeans

 that I was an American slacker

Variation of Odysseus

And that the Russian girl

 was my Penelope

And how I had to kill the

Dual-Suitors of commerce and capitalism

Before our lips could possibly

Fold into each other’s breath

Licking the back of  Christmas envelopes

loose pocket  change fountain pebble

 

 widening of her eyes 

 

Like how we used to read

sustained passages of enduring silence,

 

Uninterrupted, painfully, pledging the pangs of our allegiance

To the scripted shells of language

Dripping off the cold sheet of a white page

One chilly icicle-shaped

Tear drop at a time.

 

 

 

... her body twisted in hard right angles/ her lips giving birth to the God bitten tissue of my name...

 

 

 

"Closets are for Gowns, Cinderella."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three days after Her Fairy Godmother's

Funeral, Prince Charming confessed

To Cinderella that he greatly enjoyed

Trying on her dresses while she was out

Sipping Cosmopolitans with Snow White.

It was the same night that Snow White

Admitted that she was actually quite a whore

Living with seven small men with

Very large feet. "Bashful wasn't so bashful

In the bedroom if you know what I mean,

And you'll never guess what Doc

Really was a Doctor of..."

The two of them crossed their legs at the bar,

Slamming shots of slippery nipples

Out of beakers. They giggled and teased

Far past midnight until the pumpkin

Flavored sun lumbered up in the East

Rella caught a cab back to her North

Shore Suburban apartment only to stumble

Inside and find Prince Charming wearing

One of her hot pink girdles around his

Head. Her Hollywood Naughty girl garter

'Mesh lynx coated corset Rella received

On her Bachelorette Party from Rupunzel pinned

To his hairless chest. A burgundy hyphen

Cover Girl's finest tinged his lips satin.

His visage was tilted like a White Trash

Christmas tree, dappled blotches of mascara

Reflecting dual ponds of azure Coated lids;

Elliptical planetary eyeliner gone awry.

"I think this could really save our marriage, honey”

The prince admitted stretching up one of his wife's

Inky-laced stockings far past his kneecap, clacking

His heels together, keeping his elbows angled

Into his waist as he effeminately

Gesticulated with both palms.

 

"I never told you but long before I ever indented

My ankle and swooped down on one knee,

I doffed my Addidas and tried the glass slipper

On myself and, guess what? It fit perfectly!

I then realized that I should have proposed to me!

PC declared, much to Rella's dismay.

"I'm not quite sure how to take all of this PC,"

Rella said, gnawing on her tongue.

She remembered how once, three months

Into their marriage, she e-mailed her fairy godmother

Who also knew a thing or two about the flickerin’

Magic inside the bedroom.

 

"My Prince won't come or else he comes

Too soon!" She typed via Instant Messenger.

"He fucks me once and then roles over

Frisking his fingers across the

lamp stand fishing for the remote control.

Please help me!" She cried. "My darling

Dear," The Fairy Godmother replied.

"Your marriage is simply in that period

Between Happily Ever After and the

Neighborhood of Make Believe.

I remember when Never-Never Land

Banished Peter Pan because he traded in

His Pixie-dust for a PhD and pocket watch.

 

 

"My darling dear, you simply cannot

Remember How Once Upon A Time

You were quite content sweeping flecks

Of dust. I should have shoved that broom

Up your ass you whined so much about

How you never looked like anybody else.

You whined incessantly about finding a

Soul-mate in an age where no one has a

Soul nor do they mate for very long.

You groused and bitched until one night I took

A piss in the Pumpkin patch and forwarded

You online Directions to the Fairy Tale Gala.

 

"Here," said Fairy Godmother handing

The wand to Cinderella across the computer screen.

"Are you going to turn him into my Sex slave?"

Cinderella proclaimed, clasping her hands together

In lascivious prayer. "Oh Heavens, no!"

Replied her Fairy Godmother.

"There are other wands reserved for that, my dear.

Take this into the bedroom and watch what happens."

Cinderella logged off without thanking

Her mentor and later on that night while PC swigged

His Zima and popped three Zoloft, yawning in the opposite

Direction of his wife, Cinderella, intent on licking

Her nuptial twin with sin, brandished a V-tailed conductor's

Rhetoric, tapped the wand on Prince Charming's thick brawn

Shoulder blade three times. "Is that your Wand or are you just

Happy to see me?" He exclaimed. Then all was well until

Gradually the tip of the wand abraded, whittling into minute

particles of scattered fairy tale dust.

PC began to take more interest in the outfits

Cinderella unzipped on the far end of the futon

Before she buckled her limbs around him.

When PC began to yell out the names of different outfits

Cinderella owned, she intuited it to signify

A positive result of unabashed Male coitus,

Until the abscessed-tipped wand gave the Prince

A diaper rash. "This all must stop right Now," PC Declared

(he was sensitive down there).

 

 

That was two years ago and now Cinderella

Stands looking at PC, mouth aghast;

Her Fairy Godmother charred into cindery ashes.

In accordance to the will her remnants are to be scattered

Over the Pumpkin patch. "When did our marriage

Turn into the Ice Age?" Rella muses aloud, wondering

How Prince Charming managed to make his package

Look so small behind her translucent thong.

"We're supposed to be an indelible role model

For aspiring couples everywhere.

Everything was supposed to be perfect!"

 

 

"Maybe it still is, honey." PC says tapering an ash

From his Virginia Slim. "I'm having trouble

Double-knotting your corset, but maybe

If we both hold each other just long enough

With the lights out it will resemble the stars

That night when first we met and I danced with you

Because I noticed that eventually, if I stared down

Long enough into the reflective tips of your glass

Sling back slippers, I could make out the color

Of your underwear and eventually, if I gazed up just

A little bit longer, I would be able to make out the color of you.

"Eventually you made your way up to my eyes."

Rella said, sobbing a tear with a balled up Kleenex while

PC, who was now tall, dark, handsome and flaming,

Contorted two metal hangers into tiaras, placing them each

Like a laurel's nest atop their respected Foreheads.

"I don't plan on lowering my vision anytime soon."

Says the newly christened Princess, rubbing a lipstick

Smudge off his front tooth before dimming the lights

Reeling Rella into his ersatz bosom.

"I think everything is going to be alright."

DVB04