Amelia, Molly for Short
The world is yours
In the palm of your hand it lies
Your life
Once in mine
But, now
Only the story
Life’s greatest trophy
In this day in age one might
Upload it to YouTube
But, don’t
I warned you
Never mind
Amelia, Molly to mother
The every-other-weekend dad
Do what you want
Just don’t be a poet
Don’t know it
Don’t show it
Don’t rhyme
And remember
A daughter cannot glide
Off of my successes
Mostly because
They’re non-existent
Molly
It saddens me to say
But my only gift to you
Was rethinking abortion
Call it Christmas on the sixth of July
I was nineteen
Far from levelheaded
And if I’m an asshole
Fuck it
It’s genetic
And so are you
If you ever see me and think I look mad
You should see my father
Poppa, grandpa, I forget the name
You gave
I’m sorry, but
Amelia, Molly to broken condom
The lamps are on you now
I might be on this stage
But these lights aren’t burning me
They’re recognizing you
The imminent truth of your existence
The internal struggle
Man vs. man
In the literary sense
Laid out in front of these people
Holy shit these people
Eh...
Fool them with a funny haiku
Because Molly
When life dreams
The only loosely translated reoccurrence
Is you
Amelia, Molly for short
I can’t bear to call you by your full name
But
Amelia Elizabeth Gardner
Don’t take these words
In a punishing tone
You don’t walk slow you mosey
And medically my heart beats too slow
So it will take me time to love you
But, Molly
No
Amelia
Remember this
I can never be the exception
I can never be the dad, mom wants you to think
You know
You’ll always be my girl
Never my cliché
If you ever truly want to love something
You’ll have to find it
On your own.
Faux Rimbaud
Not spelled, but spoken in rhyme
He
Experiences all the impulses
To love
An infinitive
Love for an infinite amount of time
Usually
Attach a child to a life
Rather than attaching
He hurled himself against it
Yielding the mask of the rebel
Whose scatological ...
2b. the psychological study
Of an obsession
Images blasphemed
From the thoughts
Of an equally masked
Red woman
He said to me, “Do I look fucked up?”
No
You look like a nice guy
Your sound though
Is quite a bit fucked up.
“My sound?
My sound is hollow.”
He
Naturally
From years of memory
Times failure
Rejects the mother
A wet nurse to him.
One of the many
Masked red women
He
Regains the mask of the rebel
The road
Comes naturally to him
The exiled poet
Who speaks only in spoken word,
“You know?
You need souvenir
From being commando.”
He
In Afghanistan,
Baghdad
The eye of the desert maelstrom
No
The universal solider
In the ongoing war of the words
Moving like water
Two hydrogens
And the ever life-bringing O
Gone, gaseous, ghost less
He says to me,
“The three people talking
The hollow voices
The three voices
Commandos.
Want some vako?
You got a place to stay?”
No
Faux Rimbaud you baffle me
214 words so far
The only words
That have ever been in your honor
Where is the mask of the rebel?
Why are your boots not worn dry?
What the fuck is the souvenir...
The poem
He looks at me hollow
Back straight
Commando
I
Produced to be another solider
In the syntactical firefight
Now yielding a freshly carved mask
None other than that
Of the red woman
Leading him on
To find
The infinitive love
Of another
Loved
For an infinite
Amount
Of time.
Frisco, Sweet Frisco
Your veil hangs in the mist
Like a midsummer’s bride
The tourist’s bridge
Like lipstick
Glossed over
Twice a month
To cover what the bay couldn’t hide
The rivets in your back
Hold together
Your secretly rusted vertebrae
And when the sun decides to shine
You block the blinding light of god
With one of many clichéd pale faces
The father, the son, and the Holy Spirit
Religiously fire away
Leaving color-changing moles
Atop cancer-like traces
As your vagrants pick at the skin
Chinamen mingle amongst their heads
The drugged out dreamers
Dream of living in a culture
Of counters
That have done the math
And solved the city dead
But, Frisco, baby
If your streets were even and flat
Your hips wouldn’t be half as alive
The thrill of the game
The sweat of the climb
Trickles down through the glitter
Of your ecstasy-pumping
Castro gay eyes
If I could go back baby
I wouldn’t
A one-night stand is no way to leave
But if you’d take me
I’ll sit here
Inhale Parliaments
Not like Sinatra
But similar to Kerouac
Ginsberg and the boys
Frisco
Open the liquid of the gods
And put my heart in the bay
Where the bigs sit on thrones
Where a lump heart sinks
And fossilizes
Forever in the palm of your hand
Frisco, baby
Goodbye is too good a word
So I’ll settle for good morning
And as the sun rises
The spring brings rain
Bleak and beautiful
Five more suicides
The notes catch wind as you inhale
Flipping that midsummer veil
Back over your Frisco
Sweet Frisco eyes.
Ode to Firecreek
Even if I teach you
how to catch a falling knife
your chances are still
fifty-fifty.
Even if I teach you how to love
fuck it and rhyme
you would decide
that you are not meant to be with me.
I’m the first-rounder
who gets knocked out
for yelling
fuck Andrea Gibson.
Rest, rest.
Wait and see
if a blatant insult
gets taken as a joke.
Wait for the Hindu gods to congregate
because, I know your beef with Jesus.
The odds still
fifty-fifty.
The rebel yell cries out through me
she’s just an angry lesbian.
I agree with her stance on some things
but how can a voice be unique
when all her followers
cry, genetics
genetics
fake New York accents
and tight black homoerotic genes.
The hypocrite in me whispers
look down
my genes, as black as Malcolm X
faded, but up for interpretation.
Me on this stage crying out
you’ve won.
You’ve won.
Andrea.
How many cd’s have you sold?
Will you give me one
as consolation?
The odds fifty-fifty.
This poem isn’t funny
and it’s not about inner beauty.
The truth,
the truth is only the truth
when it’s dug up and resurrected
from a fairly decent lie.
For some reason
the eighth-grade Aryan me
thinks you should all be curb stomped with a
bible.
Lesbians, queers
and whatever is newly PC,
but even as their teeth
crack across Revelation
they would love each other.
They would be holding hands
in any way
that is so much more
than the cop out adverb
of passionately.
Who am I to say?
You people aren’t enthused.
I’m not yelling anymore.
Hate me.
Hate the martyr
that had to throw away
two beautiful lives
to find that his died long ago.
Hate me
the man who stands soiled
and lonely
save a shovel.
A man
who wanted to bury the bodies,
but ended up uncovering
the already found truth.
Love yourself.
Love each other.
Love your children.
Fucking love anything,
because this world
is made up of pieces of shit like me.
Love this poem.
Hopefully,
for humanity’s sake,
the odds still
fifty-fifty.