..

“All Lights a Green”

If finally
You
Should find
Or others
.
Should
Decide that your
Hating
.
Doesn’t matter well
Wouldn’t that be a celebration
For the processions full of
Bloody feasts in the
Well lit precincts of Gotham.

“Lunar Color”

How
Does it feel
To hurt someone?
.
I wouldn’t know…
The last time I did it I numbed myself so bad
That you could drive a Geo Tracker over me
And I wouldn’t feel it.
.
Just observe how the moon shifts in the silent night —
It will not show you,
It stays stalwart in fear
As the cats on porches lick themselves
In preparation for exactly nothing at all.

“The CVS Clerk Will Be Gone Soon”

Walking
Through downtown
Sometimes with the baldhead
On 52 degree nights
Getting off from my line cook job and
Going back home to my noisy apartment in the ghetto,
I stop into CVS for a pack of beers.
The girl working there I have a crush on.
She reminds me a little of the Progressive Insurance girl.
She’s there every night over night
And will brag about her little girly wallet.
Well now I learn that she’s moving.
She calls me “love” when I exit,
After she checks my ID and sells me beer…
One time I saw her walking down the street
In the sweltering heat
Dressed weird and
Blasting music from this little weird boom box thing…
I wonder if she’ll do that in her new place.
I guess it doesn’t matter.
I guess nothing matters.

“A Couple of Observations Regarding My Attempt to Learn German”

Just a couple of weeks or so, I had an experience that was possibly sort of meaningful: I fell in love with beer all over again, in a sense. I mean have you ever noticed how cool the German term for “brewery” looks on the Beck’s pack (“brauerei”)? It sounds like some sweet Jeff Spicoli type of surfer dude saying it. I was like, I gotta learn German. That’s all there is to it.
So I got the German for Dummies (I’ve had pretty good luck with this series up to this point) and the translator dictionary, each of which was quite easy and prevalent to find at the library. The first thing that struck me was that really early on they teach you the word “bear.” It’s like uh, I usually don’t go near bears… am I going to have to interact with bears in this strange place?
I am an aspiring chef, so I’ve been learning all of the food-related things (they crazily have like 10 different words for “restaurant,” which is pretty cool), but sometimes those bookend words at the top of the page of a dictionary in any language can be noxious. The first one, one that I find badly antiquated and unacceptable (which is ironic since I just read an article on “outlaw country” from the ‘70s) is “niggardly.” I mean it’s not even overstatement at all, or an idiom of any sort, to say that you’d get your a** beat where I come from for even saying that word. It’s like wow, I didn’t know I got the Dwight Yoakam edition of this thing.
The other one, and this one might be less obvious, is “heterosexual.” I mean, por que? What is the point? Why monitor other people to the extent that we categorize their sexual behavior?
Look, I’m not going to do what you think I’m going to do here, and go on one of those rants that’s like, “Down with Western civilization, we need to completely overhaul everything about society everywhere, down the colors we paint our flower vases.” But just to point out, the categorization of sexuality has been a mechanism for persecution over the years, namely in Christian societies like Britain and inquisition-era Spain. I DON’T think that’s something with which America or any modernized society wants to be associated, yet here we are with these spiny obstacles cluttering up our contemporary dictionaries, this particular one having just been updated in 2007. 2007 is like, the future. But then, I’m old, or so I thought I was.

“The Dream Somatic”

Sometimes in life
There’s a girl
In the low light
And she’s smiling
.
And you say something nonsensical to her
Once,
Only once,
As an affidavit to your own blood inside you
.
To set swirling mosaics up at the stars,
Within this interface disguised as repetition.

“A Randomness Missive”

The sky shoots your thoughts ahead of you —
Your little identity is there
In nativity set grey matter and
That is when they want to kill you,
When they are subservient to that.

“Hmm, I Never Knew That…”

Hmm, I never knew that,
That life is shingled,
That experiences
Are
Planted
In me
Just as
Hatched there
By self and that
People will
Notice
When I start
Flailing my arms
Around or walking around…
It’s the inner beat.

“Plans and Engagements”

We are living now in a time of ultimate truth
And the truth,
In turn,
Is just lies.
.
Don’t ever tell anybody the truth:
Keep them on clouds.
It’s the only way and it
Always has been.

“The NBA Commissioner and the ‘Gov Bug’”

We are living in a world that sometimes resembles a combustion engine or the motion of acid inside a stomach, it seems. It consists of constant, compulsive and essentially senseless shifts in rules of how things work. The power to initiate change is true power. This is exactly what we’re witnessing, in my opinion, with Adam Silver and the proposed alterations to the NBA’s playoff format. What is passed off as concern for “progress” is more like a nervous twitch, the result of insecurity of a man uncomfortable with a system that needs no tweaks.
According to a quote on Deadspin, Silver, the NBA’s commissioner, takes dissatisfaction toward the way recent playoff installments have transpired, saying that under the current protocol “‘you could have a situation where the top two teams in the league are meeting in the conference finals.’”
He offers this as a fearful encounter with a hypothetical, but one quick glance at recent history shows that in the last six years, three teams from the Eastern Conference have won the championship, as well as three teams from the West.
To Silver’s credit, he does do a pretty good job in his speech of denoting the overall genus of outlooks on the issue, which is basically “tradition” and “travel.” He insists that “‘the obstacle is travel, and it’s not tradition,’” going on then to sort of offer some pie-in-the-sky optimism that “‘Maybe air travel will get better.’” In fact, though, the “tradition” of the conference alignments is the only hope we have in the NBA of fostering any true rivalries, such as the Bulls-Pistons one in the late ’80s.
His statement on travel “getting better” obviously is just ridiculous and almost seems to dislodge his entire argument as conversation filler, the type of pulp meant to fill conference time and give the allusion of strong leadership, so to speak. In fact, what’s at work is the same epidemic as what we see in the government, the odd notion that running the country somehow entails “getting stuff done.” What is this esoteric “stuff” that people mention in these little diatribes? It remains completely immaterial, even worse, in fact, contributing to the atrocity Elizabeth Warren made public last year, things like the White House’s 500-page health care plan that was voted on before the congressmen even had a chance to read it.
It is in the hopes that Silver’s rhetoric on this unnecessary change is just conversation pulp and will dissipate in favor of true geographical integrity in the NBA. But his mucking up of the All-Star Game into “Team Lebron” and “Team Stephen” is likely resting sourly on the heads of many seasoned NBA fans.
Maybe the NBA’s commissioner is so opposed to geographical allocation because he’s regretful of the side of the country he grew up on. Whatever the case, he is definitely embodying to the utmost extent this all-too-common restiveness of the ruling class.

“2018 NBA All-Star Game First of the New-Age”

To witness ESPN’s Rob Parker stumble through an anti-Lebron rhetoric on First Take was to internalize a couple of things, none of which, unfortunately, bespoke too much good for either him or the network itself, or perhaps even the sport.
One, of course, is that ESPN has devolved into a sort of big-headed, entropic mess, trying to pass the buck for sports’ waning entertainment value on to undeserving parties, such as a Lebron James, an exciting player who’s almost undoubtedly good for basketball’s popularity level.
The other is that, sure, there is somewhat of a problem of “anti-parody” in the league, currently, and this All-Star Game is proof. The new schoolyard “pickup” format of choosing two “captains” to pick the teams marks a rigid entrance into a new era of the All Star Game, and of the NBA itself — one that rabidly feasts on individual star power as an antidote for the affective decline of the team game.