The Novel

You’ve got the moves like Jagger, but none of the swagger.
Sadly, your name is synonymous with braggart. 
Throw the deuce and paint-spray, rebel little tagger 
now get up off my dick before I call the body bagger.
As a matter of fact, you lack the respect, mack
got no game, and no one got your back 
This is some tricked out duck hunt shit, quack
Just shooting down the birdies and stuffing feathers in my pack.
calm coolies in the movies, silver-screen heartthrob
Making all the pretties want me close to tears, sob.
My face is like organic, fresh and expensive.
Yours is rotten lettuce, oh, you so defensive?
Why do you think you got so possessive?
Hanging on and holding out and only seeing asses. 
This is a tale for the masses
before you try and make some new passes
realize you’re not that hot, just full of hot gases. 

Prada

I sit in the fanciest bed, one knee propped
Prada shoes and Diesel jeans and Givenchy.
And a Burberry scarf and Vera Wang sheets.
Chanel for tomorrow, Salvatore for work
Put on my Yves Saint Laurent, now I look
Like some thousands of dollars
Because what I wear
Is more than I make in a year here or there
And it pains me to say this will last but a while
Because all the fancy is somebody’s pile
In their ritzy little closet
I only can dream
To own all they own
With my own meager means.
I may exude class and I may have fine taste
But I’m poor and it pains me to see all this waste.
Shirts worn just once when their price tags are staggered
But now I’ll pretend, sound a pretentious braggart.

Quark

You’re quarky. 
Your top, bottom, strange charms leave me breathless
feeling restless,
like I’m perked but somehow senseless.
Like the room won’t stop it’s spinning
Or missing Sundays sinning
or we don’t care who is winning
All I know is that it’s quarky. 

You’re subatomic like a string
Gave me a number for a ring
Somehow surpassed borderline fling
and how a way to share a time
We thought the world on fire
but sublimation transpired
too quick to pause and conspire
But not too quick for a rhyme.

I don’t know if leptons are allowed
but you give me a raging Hadron. 

It’s a problem

It’s a problem between the heart and mind
where last I search is first I find
And rough though smooth I find the grind
of day to day but left behind
the search of something long ago
I found the note and read it so
‘twixt the penultimate and end tone
I found, I found myself a show.

The curtains rise
The anchor drops
I sink or swim
A thousand knots.

The ticking watch on my wrist beats fast
My mouth, the face, the flag full mast
I count my beats, and hours last
the sound of dread, This too did pass.

Official the word, I deny the term
but find I lack the proper sternum
to protect my heart from germs
like prokaryotic myxobacteria. 

You infest my mind and brain
Though thousands of thoughts leap to complain
I realize my fears just will drain. 

And I wouldn’t have it another way. 

Cnidaria

Do you smile?
Not ever at all, just when you think?
Specifically of a certain someone
with some something
on a thin wing
di or monocot thing?

Do you travel past the world
orbital and past horizon
effervescent respiration
past the fears and trepidation?

 Do you acknowledge that you found
something amazing on the ground?
or do you find it hard to work
and so substandard is could fork
the roads you found substantiated
and the roads so blocked and caved in
but you’re past the rock and walls
and found amazingly you fall
right in the pit
where you might sit
and stop and think
or take a drink
of whiskey sour
past the hour 

and a soda
past the coda

Back to start where you may find
someone may question what you mind
and through the while
all the while
Do you smile
When you think of me? 

Jesse.

I am painting for you.
My brushstrokes severe with time long passed
and memories now raised half-mast
and critical strokes past the marching path
and beautiful treatment right through my own sad song.

I saw the blue and I thought of you
You gave me blue when you saw me, too
And my mind can know the painting of it all along.

And it hurts to know I did so wrong.
I flung it past, and I fled with songs
exploding from my lips, and it’s been so long.

So if you find it in your gracious heart
to see in my life you should be a part,
please accept my sorry where it should all belong.

 And I’m weak to resort with poems to say
What I should have said on that fateful day,
when I found the wrong and though it right, I was wrong. 

This is not to say that it all is there,
just I know the pain I caused wasn’t fair,
To fall off the planet, shouting hoarse, banging gongs.

The cymbals clashed and the Titans smashed,
And the keys went up by a major fifth,
and it didn’t resolve until the final evensong.

But we reached the end of the first ending
And came the coda and still we sang
We went right back and picked it up, I knew it.
We went right back and picked it up, I hoped it.
And I thought.
And I painted. 

Debt

Hurry.
Step on the gas and accelerate
to the indefinite finish line
where a degree in something
guarantees success at the cost of everything.
Eat your ramen noodles and avoid vegetables.
No community to sit ‘round the table
and enjoy a family dinner
paid for, not likely.
Four years of homework and heartache
and professors and finals to take
all the knowledge they offer.
Pull out the bottle stopper
and slam a shot down
and screw your liver.
You didn’t get in a hundred thousand dollars
debt like a cavern
with an endless bottom
just to wind up as a cleaner or something.
You’re better than that. 

Use your degree, they tell us.
Find yourself a job, you lazy man.
The good Lord knows I’m trying,
and in this economy, I’m dying.

Debt. 

Mixed emotions.

This isn’t a poem. I just have mixed emotions.

A shadowed potential beleaguered with doubt drains my heart and soul devout left crumbling in the winds of change and time. And yet I find the phoenix flame I found right here has called my name and so I turn away and drench the drought. And I know it comes off romantically but really hear my changing speeds of speech and know I’m too damn pretentious for words, so don’t even bother with it.

Shit.

Anyway.

I know it’s fucking cryptic what I’m saying, it’s some sick shit, but deliberate won’t work in this kind of game.

I found a new and hard but true to say the things I must to you, so I hope you understand, but please forget.

I’m not worth the heartache.

Fast

Cerebral celerity like stalks of celery
growing expeditiously in swift stability.
Exponential mental centers settle
while we mettle in matters
of states transcontinental,
like a breakfast of bagels
we left at the hotel in Paris.

We walked on the rue
and were fashionably rude.
Attitude of lewd women,
shrewd claims ensued views.

You spoke once of a fast-track
of my heart, a sneak attack
from the start. Pull it back
to the part where I begin to pack
my things for the moving in.
Because you know I’m an SUV
in the HOV
flying free down the street
like in a movie.
And you warn me to slow
and pump my brakes
But I refuse the blow
and dump the shakes
and tremors I fear
for I find while I’m here
That I just don’t care if I hurt sometime near
Cause for now, while it’s out, this is what I’m about
I dive in so stern like stalks of green celery
and re-imagine this cerebral celerity.

Lips.

This one’s for you.
And your rhetoric
so slick, words thick they trick and lick
while you hug my hips
and back to lick
an envelope
return to sender
on a bender
bumped my fender
no accident
fishtailing freely
nonstop kisses got me reeling
I don’t know what to do with feeling
like I’m out on a boat never trained in sailing
limbs all flailing
and misbehaving,
little lithe frame heart palpitating
lips so juicy got me salivating.
New kid in the city with bodies gyrating
A tango or foxtrot
class like an ascot
wriggle in the sheets like a silkworm now not caught
Growing the wings
Vague like stuff and things
Tell your friends your boyfriend gonna be like a ring
circling hula-hoop
NBA, alley-oop.
Yo, Nicki, Hey, Nicki,
Check my flow, it’s singing
Jealous or zealous
my flavor’s never bested
I put my rhyming prowess to the tests.
While I decide to rest
with Lips, just for jest
we snuggle cuddle motha fuckers all these little bitches be yelling
like where are your manners
I can’t be telling
I said I don’t know, but the thirst I’m quelling
like Sprite on a hot day
I got a hot date
Four in a row and a row on the floor
Leaves me asking for Fate no more,
just calling me home.
to the zone
like a man left alone
but now just not
with the second l’Homme.
So safe crack the combo
and working the mambo
Just know I’m guns a blazing like RAMBO.

You Asked.

Strum my heartstrings in that chord
Only Palestrina knows, layered
And beveled in impressions of romance
Resolving in that layered dissonance.

You’re like music, my own lyre
You’re Hermes gift to my Apollo.
Painless pill I choose to swallow
Leaves me woozy but I follow.

So unfolding bed-sheets
Wrap my limbs like cocoons
And emotional monsoons
We’ll meet, I promise, soon.

So maybe it’s just me,
But wouldn’t it seem
That something in the night sky
Calls us over distant dreams?
And the figure of your frame
And the tremble in your name
The laugh and piercing pain
O Sanctus, it became this.

Dominae, I know not.
Father, I have sinned.
I opened my heart
And let a stranger in.
And jumped in deep
Without a glance
All fluids filling cavities
I never had a chance.

Cerulean spheres all swirling
Soaring spirits twirling
And that half-mast grin
A cheeky smirk unfurling
A day and hours separate us,
The feel of arms on arms.
Leave the land and find the sea
I won’t lead you to harm.

The golden, natural state
The tides, the cliffs, the breeze
I found it fate, I found it fate.
Now breathe, now breathe, now breathe.

I swear this stream won’t continue.
Give me a day and it’ll back to normal broadcasting, I promise.
This sulfur and lead, drank till the dregs
reeked with eggs and disdain and lost candycanes
will be forgotten from the doting author
who with his own money bought her
real estate in his mind
his own heroin heroine. 

Like a drug she played this Vileroy fantasy,
A Faustian gamble to play with me,
but I knew all the sets and limitations
and fears of the staunch moral denigration.  
And still I chose bargain instead of the gamble
so fault is Faust’s friend when in bed it comes back to
A boy who his heart might scream pure and intent
but wants and decisions are heaven’s hell-bent. 
So let me alone in this swift purgatory
I never have hated the boy I thought I’d be.

But now I see how and what, how, why I am,
and I think Mother raised you better, shit, damn.
but please don’t excuse my poetic misgiving,
I drank all my feelings and burned all my wicking.