How to Give Great High Fives

The trick? Look through
the elbows
inside, where muscles
are, the place amino acids
dissolve, how reflexes
happen, verbs of action
or something like sleeping.

Two children stare
at each other with their
eyes and their mouths
are showing rows of
connected white lights.

Not moving eyes or lids,
it happens, the clean
noise, a tree cracking,
or axes landing straight blows.
This was
a success
Although it usually ends
like a rubber chicken clapping
when their palms fail
to meet and then, strike

It moves without us

"Don't write about man, write about a man."

-E.B. White

They build, we build
out of straw, stone, and soon
plastic and space metals.
They thrive, we live on
the backs of women, then
of slaves, and now for
wage slavery. They fight,
we war for meager crops
and hollowed-out, crusted
loaves of hard bread. Still,
their pain is our pain, the
opposition, the others,
those with better grass
and short brick fences, those
with rifles and we with arrows
or knives, those with clean
water or those in drought,
the sun burning their faces
lined with years of squinting,
staring into the distance.

The fields are level, but saying this
to a man born on a mountain
and one born in those fields, well...

Can anyone say the man from
the lowlands can't feel the
earth beneath his bare feet, and
know that it moves without him?

White People!

Sometimes they shove
their elbows into each other’s
soft, trendy kidneys and bend
their knees in pointless, unnatural
ways. This is called dancing,
a constitutionally protected
form of ‘acting out’. This happens
on nights when the moon casts
identity aside and embraces the
orange of the sleeping sun.
Sometimes they can see
themselves-- in the bottom backwash
of cheap painted tin cans, or when
bouncing past clean store windows.
Willfully abusing their insides for the sake
of tradition, white people will
always die, and when they do
their remains are secured in a
plain ceramic tomb, always
to be turned on its side and
rapped on the base, forcing
the fog of ash to catch a
flurry of cool wind, lowering
them to the waves crashing into
crooked coasts of crystal sand.

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.