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Scott Nichols
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"large fingers pushing paint….
you're god and you got big hands….
--ed vedder
Matchsticks
We're borne to be all our friends.
I keep an erring soul. The tripe!
To see our venoms stand mutilated beyond the point!
To see our language runneth over by pigs!
Last night my grandmother slapped me and my father
cried buckets.
I held him. Something was, elsewhere,
Perhaps the remnants of a long-forgotten flight. I
limped inside.
My grandfather started a small red car
Raising his old red arms, his left fist then his right
fist,
Hiding a magick rock, or worse.
"This pity mobs your senses," he tries to tell me
or pities like it as the hands,
the rock and the car disappear.
It was then that I was the cocksucker.
The king of spades revolting the stock dream.
Turning his shoes inside out, cocking out past
The nonexistent dream, or the dream
Translated from English to English but missing the
cogs of its former beauty.
My father wants sleep. I roll over too,
Myself soon a father, mumbling incoherently that I'd
somehow
Detour into something different,
Get shot at in front of a million restaurants.
Fight back with a rusty sword. Receive no compliments.
I'll be sent diamonds and a black cat
With the black cat to eat the diamonds and my wife!
My pen as I write thank-you notes to my friends and
their lawyers!
The cops at the crime scene where I lost my car! Ha!
I'm not there!
I've been had!
I've been ill! At the dead letter office, redirecting
the traffic!
Accomplice to a girl who only wants to dance!
Laboring over my wishes! Cutting a cord!
Dancing incoherently myself,
Too miserable to come out. I stay in, medicated.
The pharmacy misses my calls.
Sick as a dog. Where does this get me?
I roll over into your fresh spittle, cologne
And magazines. A dream still fresh,
My ex-girlfriend sunning herself half-naked on the
front lawn,
The neighbors spraying her with the hose half-cocked.
I bark at you, at your feet,
You feed me thru a long slim tube.
I roll into the foggy coils of air above you,
Playing your father's best high-school chum
And missionary friend.
I teach him how to burn crosses to stop his own blood.
I melt into the Gulf of Mexico
One arm always carrying your blankets.
A cloud passes overhead, later,
And you balance a dam and a reservoir with equal time.
I jump with no resistance. I steal
Oranges and liquor from a long-defunct market.
Electricity from a television. The weather from a
storm.
A curtain rod and a small vase, localities,
Recorders, pilots, airspaces, benefits and rubrics.
Foulness repaid by a heron wearing a monkey's head.
He leads me to a pen full of the rigors of hell,
And I am to paint them all in the air above us.
I swim upon a broken reef,
Blue icicles pointing me into the mouths of a thousand
rivers.
A snake commandeering my conscience
And my bones jolting against his frame.
The snake opens a purse full of amber for his shaman,
My own son, a tall man with wet eyes,
Looking down from his perch on the reef at everything
I've
Stolen and saved. The air smells of wet rice and
cocoa.
Things that were never planted but somehow grew.
I look up at his tallest creation, a giant totem
Without a head.
My ripe fruit is quickly rotting.
The shaman is in no hurry to eat.
4.11-12.01
norwalk, CA
Cherries
You lost your papaya,
I lost my apple
In the same desert.
Many are the ways of our
Difference.
4.30.01
los angeles, CA
Pantomimes
your breasts
hang
so long in the window
a Chinese man paints over them
turning your nipples
an artful shade of blue
days later,
long after you've gone,
the paint chips away leaving
two
pink new breasts
surrounded by blue snowflakes.
3.23.01
los angeles, CA
This is not your choice
Green jackets
solicited in angry metaphor
tears. The coming of
low truths,
how we all fail to see
the traffic. How we merge
with the pinched jewelry
of freight.
How we wait in examining rooms.
Examining the prostate
of a pig. Examining a lutz.
The sleep of your pastor. The hub
of green robes.
The habitual bitch. The sonorous bull
of acid jazz. Reflux
spitting out
gay men and homophobes.
A godliness. A propensity to be
disgusted. How you waive
the prize
and hope to be bastard
of rings and magic tubes. It is this
vein the punchy one
waits out. And then descends trash
to pull up, gadflies
and all, knuckledents out of a ceiling.
Of high pacifists. A renter's
cough. Ending up St James' arse
for epic felonies. Sludge.
Out of mortar for real libido
and chocolate as a
lamb. Out of the lamb
and into the magnets, wherever they are.
This was never a test.
12.13.00
glendora, CA
The full bridge
Subdues. Nativities.
The father of the forked
tongue. Hornet teeth.
The first one to pick up dirt here,
staging a riot. Which
leaves only a bus, the mother hen
and the jaguar.
The wicks and pilots of
savagery. A nautical mile.
Joseph's blue and white robes
in transit. Feeding Jesus to baby pigs.
Seducing the new presidents
forever with piñatas.
Who feel that small things
do not ever grow.
Scandalously like being born,
feeling your mother
the very first time. Her gate
of guards. Iocaste feeding them
her feet
so she will run to you no more,
only to stay on a
treadmill. Subdued.
Bitten by the Red Sea.
Waiting for a new drink.
1.14.01
las vegas, NV
The mad greek
The perpetuity of life.
Love pours in
love pours out, or so
the blue hatter recalls, every time
his hand faces the Claddagh.
So the hang-ups are forced to
pursue the angles we've created,
the late Alexandria fading
into sparkles and dust.
Ismael, our friend, seeing
him and it every day,
leaning out the window to where
a man and a woman share
their first sandwich and soda
as husband and wife, on a bus.
He knows the mad Greek
won't be peeping thru the windows,
looking for victory.
1.14.01
baker, CA
A sofa
Ashtray, burn at night.
All bets are made
to the locusts who eat them,
the long-necked grubs sneaking out of
wine bottles, corks, and tastes.
You shouldn't call anyone's attention
to this. The long cell of midnight.
Standing on a pair of dice,
scratching my back.
The brassiere of music. And reflecting
thru a screeen built by
a dead man.
How the concierge builds suicide.
The ledge streaks away. Only left
is the final inhibition.
I guess my new wife's name.
1.16.01
las vegas, NV
Waiting for connection
your name means
"chosen one", doesn't it?
so
as I fly over west L.A.
and the fresh-scrubbed street
I imagine a tank in Viet Nam, 1971,
contemplating a little hill
and a rose garden,
and the turret-gunner is young;
he doesn't know whether to blink
or write a poem
among other things
and now the street gangs
and the cement
holding my red bricks together
and a journal I find
tucked in between the seats of a bus
prove
that mere "choice" is fine evidence
of other crimes.
ask me.
what other people have?
you'd want to crush it
and I wouldn't give a damn.
down the road,
red rails stop at a wall
still semi-new,
still unsure of a real topic.
by that itself,
I caution you unceasingly,
en ami.
12.18.98
west covina, CA
Canopy
The ships were always at the shore, waiting for
the launch; in the lazy air the seagulls learned to
fly. A whistle blows across the pier, sounding the
arrival of a visitor.
We walked along the water's edge as the sun rose
over the ocean.
******
Like an astronomer, the mendicant studied the
constellationsfrom beneath the canopy of clouds. Then
the sky fell open with rain, heavy rain: even
Cassiopaeia rose from her throne in the night and
fled. Weeping, the mendicant stargazer chased the ink
as it fled from his tables.
But we escape! I follow you closely, clutching
your arm. We hid behind the well until the well broke
with water; the shadows of friends until they ran
blindly into the deluge.
In the morning the ships set off.
******
O! how the moon rises like a pearl in wet
hands! The rushing of the silent air in flight! The
stealth of a vessel setting course at three o'clock in
the morning, her sweat still tingling over my skin!
4.22.98
los angeles, CA
Conduit
When the air is wet,
cigarettes
grow heavier.
The summary marches
to the organ grinder and the sauté,
Orpheus booking an imaginary
crusade of short films.
A mask of moping
at the helm, waxing discreet
metaphors, wishes
for the axe of Nilemud stammering,
the green coat of obstinate
length consuming the grass,
the rain,
the heavy tide of prophecy.
Supermarkets tangling in the round,
a spider and the consummate
salt God pours into Buddha,
shaking monks over a dimly lit
wit,
a cackle of pregnant
strips, with someone in the stable
to watch over the dowdy
Narcissus, the elegant plate
of the Red Cross, the trumpet's bleat
and a well-worked stone.
The pilot of a damaged oar. The party
of a wrench,
locking gears with
the clockwork, with the indigo
and an untempoed song.
With a stylist of infinity
and a broken pipe. A cooking
manual devoted to pigs,
the ugly clocktower reaching for
linguistics and Doctor Zhivago,
for the correct template of weather,
the unnatural clockwork of bears beating
honey all over each other, licking their
wounds with masking tape tongues
and glittering cameras,
the bears crowded into a freezer
and freezing,
and the illumination of cold.
A bookcase with two wine glasses
and a pen,
and a knife to cut the three of them out
of literature,
out of the museum,
out of the fifth tongue,
out of the league of poets,
out of meditation, out of the love of language,
the reach of an extension cord,
out of the Mason-Dixon line,
out of Canada and Leonard Cohen,
out of water crackers and innuendos,
basketballs, kitchens, and weights,
into the hole of a rapid pulse,
away from Aztec death and amulets
who stall in the rain,
confidential as a paper ghost,
no is the company of a fat
curator dying with nunchakus and a headdress,
and yes is everyone in love
saying goodbye.
2.26.01
norwalk, CA
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