here's some of my poetry... -andy...

they say the parents were away on business
Cold indigo air leaks in through window open to the midnight suburban skyline
caged compact by cummulus clouds
smoke clears the throat of the barrel and the chamber of the revolver and is minced
and the memo on the residue pasted over the fifteen-year-old's trigger fingerprint reads:

"This is no apology. And this is no confession. This is simply the companion piece byline footnote to a little concession. I realized something and must admit it. I came to the revelation that you were all right. You were right, sitcom mom. You were right, dateline's-deadlines-never-had-what-i-had dateline dad. You were right, teacher. You were right, doctor. You were right, boss. You were right, Mr. President. You were right, childhood composed of knuckles. I am a monster. I gnawed on too many dead leaves and too few umbilical chords. I jumped too many fences and too few hurdles. I hurt too many to be allowed to continue. I ate entire families out of house and future. I singed the earth's very crust with forests of fire. I put bullets in the eyes of those who opposed my father's will. But I was not without accomplice. Though I raped, another claimed the orgasm. Though I robbed, another claimed the loot. I murdered, but others placed the bounty. Yet this is no excuse. I am a monster and the very hole in my head is proof. That second mouth opened behind to breathe out what the first in front took in...hale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. You won't understand, but I had to let those knocking demons out somehow. I just gave them a back door. I just traded life for dream. And I want no forgiveness for my crime. I was a monster and must be remembered as such. I want to be listed in history with the Hitlers and Draculas. I want to be the worst-case example by which our world's wrongs are judged. I am the enemy of you all. Forgive me no trespass, for I know exactly what I have done. Absolve me no sin. Record me as wreckage and tragedy and fatal folly. I am the inadmissable evidence that NO GOD IS LOVE. And this is my closing argument. I will leave no ghost to teach you charity. Fuck you."

And the high school holds an unquiet moment of crackled static silence before lunch the next day.
A math teacher drops a graded quiz sheet into the wastebasket beside his desk, along with confiscated notes and sketches.

communique to the front line
this is not a "love poem"
though this heart-shaped shine shoots up my shapeless pump
with the stuff of storybook beginnings
(much more exciting than the endings that find the heroes winning)
and as if a grin were a sin
the smack-smooth high massages me to smile
i dose close to over under this spell
almost, but not quite
because this blister of blood built blockade on my fingertip
doesn't make this nearly as hard to communicate
as the disease it symptomizes
the lack of bleeding release
the absence of explosion inside
no popping colors or brilliant sonic hues can bloom
from a fuse unsparked
no crackling boom zooms forth
so i ask you,
"gotta match?"
emotions ever moving in tonic ascent
three chords by three chords
searching for a summit
to leap from
and i can keen constant kaleidoscope careening through kung-fu
but you
you lap past lamentation and elegy like Lazarus lusting for life
the stamp of Shango, seal of Thor
there are works of pyrotechnics in your eyes
and i wonder if you can shoot them into mine
could you see them reflected in mine?
in the way i've been flipping cigarettes around upside-down and placing them back in the pack?
they way i've been staring at four ones on digital clocks for eternal minutes
with one though echoing in mind?
how if i could swim the channels of your veins the way you glide through mine
we could reach an ocean
and be crowned Olympians
but no coronation comes with trumpeting jubilee
for you and i are not yet united, and knighted, as "we"
and i smoke this thought to invoke a curse
or two
or something else
perhaps to be felt by the stars themselves
because i can't stand or sit with my heart feeling like
a shaken can of carbonated desire that i'm too afraid of spilling to open
so now the top is popped luminescent
and as this movement may mean my life,
eyes puckered airtight,
i step forward off the sunbaked cliff
hoping to find forty feet of warm water welcoming me below
or maybe jumping just to jump
either way, here i am,
treading aquamarine
and i don't want to wake waves in your lake
but if i don't kick these legs
i could sink
and drown
after all i can't fall asleep listening the grumbling laughter of the deep
so can we bubble to the surface together
to fill our lungs?
to clack our tongues against our teeth
like dolphins singing psalms of the sea to each other?
cazas del sol me chutan
y hay una guerra civil en mi corazon
pero estoy buscando un bosque en el estomago de nosotros
the ghosts around me dance
and i can drink win without armor wrapped around my skin
and although i have left my spear laying silently in the sand
with no dreams of war to stain the hands that held it,
hands that fold in subtle prayer to hold you,
this is not a "love poem"
but i believe it possesses the proper potential...
...do you?

communique to the rear guard
i cannot measure my concern in cups of cabernet or cancer consumed
but that doesn't mean i won't try
and why does this place placed in the past behind persist
to pull at you with the same power it pushed me away?
you are back among churches in cornfields
and do you know where the fuck you are?
in the same state that almost swallowed you whole
with a stream that didn't know her own strength
while lice looked on like Lords of limp lungs
my brother, do you remember when the both of us
were terrorist gangster kings of gridlocked blocks
when we pressed the gums of lambs with our thumbs
to pump out the sum of absent teeth
in luxurious-lawned slums where the
streetsigns were tombstones for trees?
let this cry blast plaster to fractions with the velocity
of vulcanized sighs
for i am reminded of our reign with every earnest glance
at my name etched as if in epitaph on
certain squares of sidewalk cement
our walks warranted war with every wayward whistle
our exploits spied only by the stars
your stomach once burned mud like gasoline
you were a diesel engine roaring with unprecedented injection
are your fingers too scarred to turn the ignition painlessly?
hermanito, te amo
hermanito, te extrano
hermanito, ten cuidado
hermanito mio, con un luche en tu boca,
dame un grito con el viento abajo del mais
siga derecho, hermanito
con los tiempos de sangre y llueve
de leche y armas
y el fin de la semana
brother, we trespassed zones laid out for brat-packed tract homes
frightening the light away from construction sites
claiming twilight as our comrade in battle against
the static night
side by side
pride and prejudice projected with pregnancy
prey prevailing over predators
tiptoed around talons
hiding in the wingspan of raptors and stabbing them to death
with their own neatly plucked feathers
our knuckles and cheekbones monitored progress
with gathered moisture
be it clear or be it deep red
our laughter and sighs were heard ringing above
bugle calls and shrieks and televisions and homework
we had a fortress with fireflies flamboyantly flagged on fingers
when the thesis of push met the anthithesis of shove
we found our synthesized definition of love
checked "none of the above" and were on our merry way with standards raised
beaming with sharkskin sheen
we had the lean,
know what i mean?
as we caressed cecada casings clasped to a concrete county line compass marker
and shotgun shells among husks and hewn stalks
gone dry
we stood against a sea of staticity and charged
brandishing baseball bats on bike-back with black belts
and rage that
brought ash from grass and broke spines and splintered bad splices
the mantra was creed
was motto
was bond
"if we burn this field, if we cry ourselves to sleep
if we tear these wings, shed this skin, and slay the Lord
our souls to keep,
then who the FUCK could call us lost?"
have you forgotten that oath?
hermanito mio
hermanito perdido
hermanito, te amo
was it i who abandoned you?
who left you behind to be taken prisoner of war?
brother, i am sorry
and i am coming back for you
you will be freed
or we will die together.

counting backwards from "fuck you"
my thumbnail
can scrape that sarcasm
off the roof of your mouth
if it pleases you
if not
then just bite off my fingers
and i'll paint your eyes that passionate red you like so much
with leaking stumps
a six month old computer sits restlessly in a dumpster
i can file knives in the base of a spine
unhinge the drawers
and save on the power bill
i'd like to bake your skin dry
and peel it all off with cosmetic precision
and pack you in rich dirt
right under the sun
and water you weekly
until you blossom again
and then do it again
i am fire
i breathe in the gas
expanding, exploding
exhaling
i've made oceans vanish
but now you drown me with tears
extinguish my heartbeat
and live...
... only in pantomimed fears
well-rehearsed like licked earlobes
a television down an elevator shaft
a little yellow pill down a throat
vomit it up
choke it back down
swallowing, spitting
and stopping to contemplate the way
my lungs hug my heart without my brain's permission
the way a windshield hugs the space where a bullet passed through
the way a mountainside hugs parts of a car but not the whole
the way a shell casing attempts to embrace its divorce-seeking heat
a lawnmower lead over an exposed sprinkler head
a child in a kindergarten classroom
counts down
5
4
3
2
1
ka-boom
there's pulp on the walls
wounded in the halls
and papers and pencils
and passed-notes of proposed matrimony
unpardoned
like guards at the Tsar's Winter Palace

hollywood premise
there's a story i'd like to tell you
about hell, penniless wishing wells, familiar smells
and refunded, threefold, miscast spells
'cause that's what sells
this tale was told to me through unbleached seashells
broken like bottles against a
rapidly receding coastline
bald spots like pressure points
betraying weak joints
in this story
someone may or may not die
two people may or may not make love
the world may or may not end
and humankind may or may not ascend
like one sprouting wings while walking through a revolving door
feathers frayed upon entrance
or glass and metal breaking to release flight
turnstiles tweaked like turntables to unleash the beats
cut against clouds and air
and
you may or may not believe every word
i may or may not say
this story may or may not change your very dreams
the last five men who read this story aloud
are dead
and disappeared
and cleared like pimples under chemical wash
surrendering instead of exploding
with no last words of brave defiance
but you'd better press me pop between your fingers
or i'll never go away
i'm the sixth sun to create these same words under me
this story is like nothing that's ever broken the lock on your ears and snuck in
to settle and stir southward before
this story is its own vocabulary
this story spans cornfields and mountains and deserts and suburban blocks between two oceans
this story blasts cultural boundaries like a butcher knife
on membrane
plains catch fire
and planes crash like prairies
tempting Mao's spark
when this story is whispered or whistled
like rumor or whimsy
by careless tale-tellers and yarnless spinsters
this story's author claims destruction for adventure
like a high school actor sitting in the backrow of a movie theater
making out with a mako shark
he's an Arawak greeting columbus with a necklace of sharpened fishbones
like a noose of razorwire
he's an electrocuted Italian shoemaker
he's an elephant trampling caretakers
who hold tranquilizer guns
he's the man who shot mckinley
and made mail bombs
he's been murdered for stealing bread a milliion times
but never believes his act to be crime
he wrote this story to rid himself
of his fear of ruins
he died in Barcelona with characterizations still dripping from his lips
and plot points from a bullet wound
this yarn spun around tree branches
like a blade between the bars of a ribcage
like smoke between teeth
one prisoner slips out in the confusion of the cafeteria riot
claiming the badges of guards
in this escape,
two people will fuck,
the world will collapse,
humankind will fall back,
and some fool will get wasted
for tasting the paste of the binding

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