Castrato

Clipped roses float from the crowd and drop at his feet.

The ladies in velvet seats are weeping,
a lump between each lung from
a glass shattering high B-flat that
reaches them like a butcher would
claw for a sharpened blade.

He remembers the milk-bath; his mother's breath,
the last woman to clutch the nape of his neck;
blood bubbles from the empty wound
curdling in orange at his throat.

One thousand hands
collide and separate; applause.
A thousand crying eyes, in pairs.

Things I Will Never Get to Say to Kurt Russell

There's a way your hair falls on the back of your head, a way that fits the narrow space between too redneck and non enough rock&roll. It's the kind of haircut a man would find at the best point in his life; the kind of style that always seems to be positively reflected. An experienced actor such as yourself has surely seen the films of Ingmar Bergman. You haven't? Neither have I. There's something about storytelling for the sake of itself. Protesters will weave together in the streets just to brush picket signs against each other and yell in a glorious way that only large crowds can produce. These crowds are screaming for people like you and me, Mr. Russell. And we will shoot tear-gas from comically sized cannons and shout cowboy words into the air, the waves of angry young folks will dissolve and grow families to cope with a lack of passion. The hoopin' and hollerin' will be slowly silenced; We will laugh to crush our egos so we can fit in. But with a haircut like that, I could never compete.

Going Through The Proper Channels

"I thought about starting a blog, but I know I could never honest with something that so many people were seeing at once"

J. Haney

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The proper channels:

Channel seven will show death from enough perspectives that everyone who watches it will find something to relate to. And then they, also, will die.

Channel four will be reserved for my ex-girlfriends. Women will love this show. Men will not understand. I will watch it on Sunday's clean my dirty laundry.

Channel twenty-four will be neverending blackness. This represents all of television. No one will get it. That represents everyone except the self.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The thing I hate most about television is that it entirely dictates decorating procedures, forcing everyone in their room to have their backs facing the same wall that reflects the blue-white glow of the black box in front of them.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I love my friends.

Seven Things I Didn't Know When This Picture Was Taken

1. Putting acoustic guitars in photographs do not add any artistic credibility
2. Barack Obama will win?! No fucking way!
3. I am slowly falling into patters of abuse
4. There's better sex out there, just waiting for you to find it.
5. Somebody will really hate me, and yes, it will be my fault.
6. Women are not right 100% of the time; it hovers in the mid-eighties.
7. I will be seventeen years old for a very long time.

This is what we did, yeah. Sean is on the left, Kelson is holding the damn thing. It was not an everyday thing. You can tell by their faces that, yeah, this is pretty fucking cool.

This is just good advice, really. Pretty girls will sometime draw pictures of you that are great, and you will think the craziest thoughts about them. LoL.

Living together, young people will destroy each other.

There are creases in my bed that I have created with my body. They will form shapes like my body would seem without skin and gravity. The world will not carve me from onyx, it will wear me like granite. My body is not a rock, it is many smaller rocks that were forced together by natural causes. Earthquakes, tornadoes that prey on the illiterate, mudslides that are worse than the name suggests, whirlpools, half-assed rainbows in the spring. All of them are happening in extremely small doses to my nervous system. Is it obvious that I am thinking? That is why we are here: I am thinking too much. My mind is an army, and it loses more of itself by noon than most people lose in an entire day. We don't have a shot at making this work. My eyes are rolling beneath closed lids. Too much sensitivity to light can't be normal or good. The sun is near my body right now, as close as it will ever come. It pushes my shoulders down. It's hard to keep going. But, I will. I'm sorry. This is over.

This is not love and that's okay

The white haired dog
was snatched by the throat
for yelping at bigger dogs. This
dog was too much of a dog
to take any more of that shit.
The puppy corpse belonged
to me, a child. The dog of dogs
set it at my feet, paws moving
like a blade of grass above
barely breathing lips, which is
not enough movement to keep
any kind of hope for resucitation.
I never tried to replace it with
another little white dog, I didn't
do anything about it except
watch it happen, and then walk
inside for a glass of water. Such
is the nature of dogs, or so I figured.
The water was soothing, I was
thankful for such a warm day.

Existence

It's a pretty great thing, especially if
you're a book that I've written

birdhouse has ten poems and is
wonderfully put together thanks
to the help of my new-ish friend
Johanna Ofner. She's great! And
the book isn't half-bad. I've read
it cover to cover at least twice.

You should really consider buying
a copy at a poetry reading that
takes place tomorrow evening,
Wednesday, January 7th.
Place: MoTini's (Muncie)
Time: 9:15

It's only two dollars!! Wow!!