These Armies of Us

Wise Geysers

2011-09-01T05:06:00.000-03:00

bastards, the lot of us
loitering, losing pay-stubs.
harboring criminals and un-sane
unpublished inanities - pushing Peter away (well
fuck Peter, that wasn't the plan but)

Whispering would-be hate-crimes,
covering tracks with corrupt taxes,
biked drunk and restless, dosed or unwell,
took jokes too far, gave hippies second chances,
strangers wedgied Arbeau up the garage...

I wrote trite, unpatterned poetry that matters now that I do,
Cigarettes and Water - the great equalizer.
boiling both beneath the bucolic sunsets...
toasting n puking, smoking Colts knowing
these are the five-dollar days.

James Agee

2010-09-03T22:14:00.002-03:00

dilapidated afternoons, countrysides

all in the cracks of your palm’s precious wrinkles

filed nails painted with snake-bites and formaldehyde,

dripping wax like your candle-lit whiskey-eyes

Oh, Spring Will Sing

As No Living Thing

postlude to

the manic mornings, buzz-sawed dandylions

the naked whipmarks on your back drawn to tan

not dancing but swaying

blowing centuries of seeds undone

Let Us Now Praise Infamous Men,

their sunny solitude, dissolved,

is a disappointed diaspora

beyond calculated histrionics

the Manicured Self-Worth,

it bores me to think you’re thinking of me

you’ll be static before you find status

...and this is how we radiate

2010-05-06T03:34:00.001-03:00

In the Room, Waiting

2010-04-30T00:21:00.001-03:00

Back then I slept stubborn
and bare-assed, a six-drink-sucker.
It took a moment to shake the sleep,
like barnacles, from my eyes.
But her stomach was conscious and claustrophobic,
undone by naivety.

I took her somewhere safer, where
unbroken white shoes pace sterile floors.
Waiting on a destiny
in Life and Death’s waiting room,
surrounded by this White Noise –
waves and radiations.

She’s at home, but I’m intruder.
Still sick, my symptoms sunk deeper.
Surrounded by The Maladied,
breathing in-and-out, they’re seething in
those moments, those hours,
between registration and diagnosis.
Left to stew in simple paradox:
the longer we linger
the less likely it’s terminal.

And when she’s gone nothing keeps my mind from…
While the maître d’ walks in-and-out,
punctuating my curses.

Outside, the flags stand militant and rigid,
barely wrinkled under the fingernail moon.
Obscured by winter’s penultimate breath.

I can’t understand dawn’s majesty,
how it breaks and rips night off like a band-aid.
Left to bask in the sunrise’s sherbet glow,
but daylight feels ill-gotten.

I can’t see the horizon, but I know what’s next.

2010-04-29T03:30:00.000-03:00

Ben Burnett - Stuart Launch from Phil Angers on Vimeo.

apprehensively, i

2010-04-28T03:27:00.004-03:00

three-thirty AM has some mercurial authority...
Jenna, washing her hypothetical hands of me,
slurs towards her porcelain bathroom door
and dirties her literal mouth with stomach's gloop,
steaming, fine, carrot-littered,
then forgets us, as reckless as we abandoned her

certainly, three-thirty is an authority on these things,
and so, when he sticks his cup out
only to fill worse than raindrops
i can't help remember his flee-
ing like a thief,
get-away-ing down winter's liquored rivers

and yes, three-thirty knows what he does,
the days still falling
merciless, torn,
bruising an inadvertent purple
belied by faded gold chains
and the mist from her eyes
when it rains

when songs reject an end

2010-04-27T15:56:00.003-03:00

'I'm not done, only full-up,' he thought, full of some pseudo-self-beneficence. Packaged with a vain delicacy, the precise number of hairs to his chinstrap beard written in an obscure journal he kept between the bathroom mirror and the wall. Something telling written like tears,raindrops,both flowing down his cheeks.
He wanted to define her. Prove some divine efficacy through which the darker magics couldn't shine, just let the dust settle over themselves like a very fine lawn. He drank beer, good beer, the type of off-colour bottles people clutched/hugged to their chests - the bottles which, eventually, inevitably, would tuck him in, alone again - and laughed with him at the domestics, the cheap stuff, from dusky breweries on shitty cities busiest main-streets.
He felt celebrated, revered, when it rained. Full of some magnificence you only find in catalogs, or designer magazines. His smile like the lucky black ace that turns up only at the end of the deck, or when Mel Gibson needs it in Maverick.
'Yes,' he thought. 'This is the beginning of a good rain. A very lucky rain indeed.'

on and on and on

2010-04-26T23:40:00.001-03:00

“herald hard, oh! unheard angels”
rusty cornet curls like rings on fingers
blinking out another military afternoon

it’s curtains on her heart-breath’s
cerebral hum
somehow wills still fall
lost
on deaf ears

These Armies of Us

2010-04-26T23:31:00.002-03:00

"Things will be different now,"
but they weren't.