.

How does this song go? I keep listening to it, and listening to it — the skates stabbing against the ice, the sound of crushed bones walloping the boards, the collective, syncopated breathing.

Notre Dame, the college up here where I’m at, is perennially rated one of the top “jock” schools in America, and truly, I can find boys and girls in their gear going jogging on single-degree nights… but anyway, hockey is a big “ice”-berg tipper in favor of Notre Dame’s sporting prowess. What would Texas have to balance that out, like rodeo?
I just looked at a shot of Indianapolis yesterday during the Notre Dame – IU basketball game; that’s gotta be the ugliest city on the planet. It’s a place that from the looks of it would actually benefit from nuclear waste being rained across every square inch — at least that would provide some UNIFORMITY.
My town, eh, it sorta has uniformity — the entire thing’s a sh**-hole, and then there’s Notre Dame. I actually have a theory that the “townies,” as we’re called, became homosexually attracted to a lot of the Notre Dame men, and became ostracized for that reason, whereas towns like Bloomington offer a much more integrated resident/student experience, and that was actually something I liked about going to school there. I can still picture the soft eyes of the small town girls down there, and the aggressive ways of the do-no-wrong guys who’d be accompanying them as they’d flirt with me in Yogi’s.
One of my last trips to Indy involved a 3-D goggle feeding frenzy, and this overweight chick who wouldn’t shut up about how “hot” she thought Bruce Springsteen was during the Super Bowl halftime show. Man, what those people need is some hockey fan-dom, some deep freezes, and some humility.

Honky-tonkin’ up the tin hill,

You can slide down easily
And you make a sound easily
And there ain’t no point in doin’ it
Other than your brother wants to

Thank you

To whoever taught me to foster whole truths,
Everything that’s there,
And not just the pursuit of an activity.
.
As we stand firm
So sure that we’re separate,
Breezes are passing through us
Too
Bending our minds like ocean sails.

I sort of toggle between mindsets,

One mindset where I think things can be easy,
After I’ve tilled the field
Of life
And I’m still adrift in my time
Amidst computers that sit stone faced
To outlive the tao of Africa,
.
And when I’m battling in fisticuffs,
To end up low down
On the tiled floor of a jail cell
Only to bounce out to that gas station coffee
And that freedom that I know has no end
With in its own delusional intentions for me.

A young man of his adages

Cloaked in maxed fleetingness
Approached me on the bridge’s overpass
And inquired as to the dewey,
Prostrate tinge my irises displayed,
.
And with some reluctance
Before the torpid facets inherent to life,
I told him I’d just seen a 17 year old virgin girl
With wavy hair
.
But whose eyes shone out in an arc
That gripped by heart and tugged it to its shore,
A rhapsodic journey of space and
The conception of tactile flesh,
.
And it had told me everything,
Ridden by that inner dark truth
That only women know,
Which they may take to one day chain smoke over,
Calling out raspy entrances at low paying jobs
Under rafters phallic and steely.

The deep things that mesmerize men

Are a topic I think about a lot,
.
From taking in trees to
Rembrandt’s “The Rich Man in His Office,”
Who was rich,
As we know,
If only in spirit
A carbon bomb of that which he beholds.
.
But no matter what flies your kite,
What suits your fancy,
.
It will always be change,
Change, staying the membranes and
Piping out a tune
You can finally embrace,
That will get your hands opening up
And your saliva jaws nodded and dripping,
The moon’s knuckles shining on free will
And without it.

Take away all names, and rat-a-tat-tat, there go all the problems. Who could have a venture for gain, without a name? Where would the gain go? All he’d have is moments, just understanding, if I’ve got enough gas in my car, I’ll give some to you, hope the ice age doesn’t come like they say it’s supposed to. It’s one step closer to total lack of separation. We look, we make friends, and with love, there’s fear, love’s opposite. With us, there’s them, us’s opposite, and with green Earth, there’s orange pylons, names.

With the seeds of mice in mind

And feeling the hot gray sun
On my back, my neck like a strumpet,
.
I tune in, to
What is left of my life,
The dust between the cars
Forming an apex of my harm
That everybody must know,
So many to the north
With social security numbers
To knowingly watch me with sympathy
Knowing that I have tried and failed
.
Under these enclosed,
Seemingly accidental apparatuses
Of love’s lack, of tacky
Brandishings finding their way
And shining like the store fronts,
People
To devour the sands of time.

It is from the sky

That we learn abnormal truth,
The passion of the heart’s hate
To tell the utmost forthrightness
To the aging, the un-psychedelic,
.
And then we go angry
In bottomless quagmires
To measure up to that ever fleeing image
Which is only inside, anyway,
And which we will become again,
Subtracted,
Evanescent.

I wanted to take acid,

Once,
And just walk around my town
Wearing headphones
But not listening to the music,
Just feeling all those images
Crystalizing in time,
Immortalizing only to be vanquished,
Geese carving out their niches,
Squirrels hunting for bounties
So petty that it would blow your mind,
.
I wanted to hear the howling of wolves
And see the bounce in the step
Of the lady who just got her food stamps,
Her stereo playing a song that’s not quite perfect,
But she’ll pretend like it is,
And so will I,
Hailing a dream from the inner locus of the fight.