A lot of the stuff around ZW was written in the 4 or 5 years leading up to COVID, after I’d bailed out of undergrad at UT Austin in 2015: the more humorous fiction, Wyvern Fun, Invertebrate Musings, the digital photos and zine-inspired shit. I went back to school eventually though, and I took some poetry courses. I loved the poems I wrote in them and wanted to share the best ones here. Admittedly, a stanza or two from Wyvern Fun I ended up recycling and restitching scraps of into a couple things here.
“Biome of Lawns”
Every wheat stalk has its parking spot
and several hours’ commute
to arrive past the starved biome of lawns.
Can we digest sixty thousand square miles
of floral jawbreaker man dibbles?
Can we huff a Darvazan wind
or coast by a hurricane’s edge
or float zeppelins over volcanoes?
How inversely peninsular are the suburbs’
cul-de-sacs, the woolgathering p’lage?
How vlasic’d are Parisian mathematics
unprepared to xeriscape Buenaventura?
We cement the possible future for the pretense perfect.
We put projections aside for newsy b-sides,
the congressional discography of soundbites.
We see the wall’s writing like comic sans cuneiform:
f(I’m)og of a
a(te(gastro)st)l nature
like primordial soup that comes creeping back
up sewered streams like acid salmon.
Still I fix on the hours, the parking spots’ stutter,
the highway fjords: a Fordist legacy of vanished glaciers.
“Tin Cup”
I can taste the tin of the sky —- the real tin thing.
Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.
—Sylvia Plath, “Waking In Winter”
The tin cup solicits water without a jangle.
Oily oceans lap up curdled coasts, seep in scrap houses,
dye the coral poplars and pines—themselves unrequited.
The Cuyahoga: anti-primordial-soup.
The information highway: an acned tarmac turnpike.
Viral suburbia: nylon turf checkerboards.
The great shopping mall, the vast parking lot, destiny manifest.
The lawmakers’ mealy-mouthed pieties
offer prayer to our soles in cement jungles.
Their moneytheism,
their bleached Croesus Christ,
their tumbledown pyramid scheme,
their record jobs growth—three per person,
their cardiac arrested development.
Gaia’s perspiring befogged the Overton window.
The omens placed their onus on us.
“Recycle! Reuse! Head inland, north!”
But there the bourgeois Scylla ruled
with her industrial complexes feeding the maelstrom.
“Many Times Over, Many Years Later”
Sam’s fraternity mucking about his château,
fingers wagging, cocktails clacking.
A zoologic house
a show Manchin
a curséd Sinema
hullabaloo, theater.
The ceiling is thin air
so the roof cannot catch fire.
But here there a glance upward
dutifully
piously.
Sam “borrows” money with a pistol in-hand.
He has 800 offices in 70 countries
and 330 million orphaned children.
He is a firm, firm believer in democracy
one way or another.
He helped a buddy of his get a cushy government job in South America.
His buddy took out several loans and went on vacation
but the debt still must be paid.
Many times over
many years later.
Debt, numbers, zeroes
paperless trails sprawled like epochal genealogies
designs to make full payment a fiction.
Shoes of cement, compounded.
Pesticides beveraged to farmers in India.
Pensions clicked past barbed wired borders.
Windows of mom-pop stores shuttered.
The intercontinental breakfast buttered.
When Greek socialists came to power
the people called for Jubilee.
Euro judges gaveled with Mjölnir
and demanded the Parthenon.
“The Briefer and Briefer Tenancy of Cold”
A cold petrifies me.
A mothy hospital light covers all avenues’
urbanity. The billboards, blinking adverts, drive-thru’s,
the sidewalks dicing up sparse green patches we studiously avoid,
well-oiled concrete reflected up into the sky,
triply filtered plasticked water in vending machines
all have a bleached polish
and give me brain freeze.
So it is too cold to go out
although people do.
It is too cold to paint
without the craquelure like my hands have this season.
Too cold to eat a balanced diet.
But it is not too cold
to skim school reading and doomscroll.
To scroll
and keep scrolling.
To hibernate.
Dreams rebound on a cave’s walls.
Dreams of crisp and vegetative air
a zephyr unfurling like herds of bison, once.
There are no blocs of time or space.
We write our novels and slam our poems,
paint our murals and tend our gardens,
share our feasts and wade through wine.
We walk more steps than our ancestors did.
We are face-to-face more than interfaced.
But I wake whimpering
with a wish that does not equal the work.
Wishing borders vanished, dashed by free movement.
Wishing prisons and police stations torn down, forgotten.
I want to help channel Our love and rage into something
beyond the logic of capital and systems of states, and truly
C
that parabolic arc
that is our potential pulled down by politicks
and their hand-sitting and cash grabbing
and their fundraising and bootlicking
and their nice slogans dead in committee.
I want to scream at myself
that the problems are not too large
that because I can only do so little I can’t do more
anything!
that the wintry world can’t wait to thaw
to appreciate
the briefer and briefer tenancy of cold
as the sirens sound
before the heat evicts us.
“the mirror is rorrim”
the mirror is rorrim
and in so doing maintains decorum
it jointly tolls and extols youth
and never answers with the whole truth
how, it’s enlightened
averse to Y
because it knows you would prefer a lie
vainest is merest, oft ovoid
the self shattered or merely annoyed
demanding your portrayal’s polite
but your double is a parasite.
you notice Its slip above the sink
first you receive an unbidden wink
then suspect subtle delay in the zone
and realize your mirage makes you hardly alone
“In the haunted house”
behind the door colored fuschia
the arpeggiating minutiae
the loyalty surrounding betrayal
then confession — spiteful — in minute detail
when everyone was a little too steeped in the bizarre
where everyone — licentious — was never disbarred
the house always too given to refuge
the golden days too washed into ecru
the mind’s eye shoegazed the nadir
the Ōṁ too far away to hear
the haunting, the friendships’ encroaching dusk
the rust, you, me, eroding us
discourse: then apostrophe
counsel: opacity
concern: a paucity
trust: apostasy
paradise: retreat: then parody
but now remembrance, a psychic mélange
that ménage ever there for the writer’s séance
the curmudgeon’s pen — quagmired in drear
oft elides joys in Gothic veneer.
Because amidst all of the id unbound,
the earthly cloud nine and egos’ comedown,
the noontime porch front bacchanals,
the ensemble cast of the streets’ renown,
we also threw potlucks in secret springs,
teased sotto voce — eve’s kindling,
mattresses in the den for a movie shown —
Hayao Miyazaki, Alfonso Cuarón
— the house’s motley feng shui, a tableau
of our rapscallion selves, then nouveau,
in all small moments, little highs, repose,
joyrides, tagging trains in depots.
Some bridges are scarcely seen through smoke.
The lease expires and doors close,
but memory provides windows.
“The Sweetness, Saccharin”
If we’d debonair lycanthropy
If our time was kitschy gramarye
If we’d divined the moments that remained
If we’d quit drowning sorrows in champagne
But the sweetness, saccharin
Hearts’ desires vacuumed in
Painted plaster skies falling
Spiteful vict’ry laps crawling
Pledges of allegiance spat
Quaich of love, a tepid vat
Pantomime and placebos
Love language like runny nose
If ev’ry dénouement was ante bellum
If ev’ry fuss forked like a candelabrum
If we were pariahs we were paragons
If we were pedestals putting ourselves on
If we’d found Shangri-La we’d be zingare
If the horizon stole our sayonara
If we’d righted our ship inside a bottle
If the season of us weren’t autumnal
“In the Mind’s Bazaar”
In the mind’s bazaar I stall at stalls.
Through its catalogues I caterwaul
down winding roads and a mass of traffic
a claustrophobic, percussive racket.
In the mind’s fissures I’m a rogue ushered
through echo chambers of gauche mutters.
I’m all the grains against grains in a silo.
…no I know I know I know I know I know I know I
i
i
i always do(ub)t the letter.
If I were anyone else I’d know better.
If my season’s depression seemed less autumnal
If I could right any ship inside of a bottle
of a drink’s heady stuff—the mind’s bezoar
much mythologized and causing ulcers.
I’m no antidote but coagulate chaos
rutting castle moats ‘round a yawned séance.
I summon punny, kitschy gramarye
out of chaff inside a granary.
I’m the periphery, I’m circumstellar
the rainwater to the rathskeller.
I’m crumpled paper and the saboteur’s pen
a will-o’-the-wisp and backwater wherein.
I’m a shoegazing trapeze act.
I’m the potbellied and the kettled black.
I smile a smile that’s overly bleak.
I just have perique mystique.
I’ll follow a train as through Babel’s Library.
The song to myself is a flat miserere.
“A Spoonful of Neutron Star”
I fell into orbit midnight at a bodega like Giza
and found her Galaxy waiting to spark
in his fruitful rind’s orange-horned shades and lime scarf
and his gravity’s source creeped up,
a sleepwalking dwarf quark.
Her eponymous refrain went “mâché like paper.”
She sung from a musical, multiply lived-in terrace.
Her gems, homemade soaps, the revolving door: cherished.
We hula-hooped to Kiesza, through myriad vapors,
toking mouth-to-mouth, our only kisses.
All the beloved, her ensemble cast I crashed into:
Vibez, the world’s sonic Sharpie.
Scardust, the world’s psychic sponge.
Miranda, queen of silent ache.
Gabby, saint of Ōṃ.
Cat, Pollux, Mouse, Gandalf, Nic.
But the first couple years we were the inseparable trio—
her, our Galaxy, and me.
A year in her ten-by-ten room at the Woo
where every floor everyone lived next door to their dealer
where the landlord waived her rent for ten months
where Indian cuisine from below bathed her garden in gold scent
where we watched the students sprawl across campus each day
while day-drunk I mused about the classes I’d missed.
The year next, when it was me in whose orbit
we swamped my flooded apartment to wine down
without any sense of weekends or endgame.
I laughed thirty days at La Ha ha ha
but as though years had passed in the cosmic void.
Because I met Leland as I shoved between him and Galaxy
but too late to repair spatial rift.
I watched them cyclically: puke, jab, puke, fight
turning “voulez-vous” into “en garde.”
Barred indoors by the natural light
and a spoonful of neutron star.
And boxed in by suboxone
he went out in noctem.
His street corners spoke in a substantial jargon
the go-betweens to his mirage in the margins.
He navved the van through hyperspace
the choppy surf to the dragon chase
and hiss into canvas with a mouthful of sonar
to harpoon his feet in a frontier of tarp.
Once more at the bus-stop
in prob’ly a school zone
self-destructive, sighing, the bulldoze
with his head in a pretzel bowed in his lap.
I doused him with water, punched, slapped
got us on a bus with some awkward maneuver
(the van had crapped and I couldn’t afford Uber).
Get home somehow, the foxhole, the pigsty
refuse dump, refuge, a safe place to get high.
Someday they split like nuclear fission.
She went Christian, and he went missin’.
She’s amazing now, sober and sublime
and it’s best he left their son behind.
“Still Starburst Echoing”
It is still starburst echoing
beneath a honeyed dusky evening eking
like light’s relentless fingers
that paint the complete picture
in its complexity
not clarity.
The jovian storm lingers around 22’s
thick fog, centrifugal force,
(diving in but inevitably circling)
the mind’s isthmi and its madrigal choir.
The color of incomprehension,
red blue yellow ratioed such
that not the supermassive darkness
but the event horizon’s violence siphons
all the information youth comprises
dreams schemes loves lusts trusts logic illogic
especially the minutiae exoskeletal
both of time and the void,
you, maybe.
The storm raged namelessly.
I could have borrowed the poem I’d written in my phase before when
“in the Texan Levantine”
the supernova enchanted me.
But maybe chocolate stouts and little love notes
scenic drives and toking in treetops
had too faded beneath summer’s solar eclipse.
Plastered spitfire on laminate flooring
in a sterile apartment that wasn’t mine
because mine was junkyard Ganymede.
You shored up a pebbly beach of dust and catshit
venomous and with nowhere to go
and vomiting your spite for the world from your core.
Lacking any surface
I was a satellite.
“Missed”
you whose name rhymes with
“jumpstarting hearts” and
“they’re hardly stars to what you are”
being the only person I ever wrote proper, corny songs about—
now that I think about it.
Way too many songs, actually, for a one-sided crush.
Luckily I wasn’t too big a weirdo for us not to be best friends eventually
I guess if only a really cool few months.
And maybe this one I let fade, I think
once I’d dropped out and didn’t know how to talk school
and talked more about drugs and the Woo and a haunted house
and that grizzled fucker Gary the Undertaker who broke my nose
however that beat jargon sounded to you.
Me wanting to be Kerouac and Burroughs
failing spectacularly, but you being the best friend
as much as you could, more appreciated than could ever be versed.
Breezy you I met before anyone else in Austin
touring the school of journalism. Then two liminal months of summer
corresponding as fictional characters, as strictly intragalactic travelers.
Then in autumn: poetry slams Tuesdays, costume parties
drinking lattes in hookah lounges—and I’d never tried coffee before
but I drink ten cups a day now—
at Dr. Dog and Ghostland Observatory’s concerts (these I can’t listen to anymore)
your high-rise (relatively) overlooking a marmalade campus some nights
singing “Day Man” from Sunny (an episode I skip now).
Though I recall how your favorite book was Atlas Shrugged
which held no significance to me then but
now I wonder if you would be insufferable but
am I imagining you crystallized into some rabid reactionary
so that it oughtn’t hurt me anymore that you just suddenl—
Vibez you, with your amazing mania and volume
like a hyperactive child
(but you were like thirty! I was shocked)
painting the world, tatting yourself entirely
your fucking neck, your forehead, idiot.
Immediately I loved you, your absolute and sincere thrill for life.
You tagged every piece of furniture I owned.
Once, you crashed on my floor
and when the place flooded you thought you’d pissed yourself.
You cooked jailhouse spread for my roommate’s birthday party.
You had your own place briefly, an attic
reeking of paint fumes and burnt shards of bulbs
where your housemate waved his gun around the kitchen
because I’d ashed a cig in his cat’s bowl on the porch.
I fucking love cats, I just really thought it was an ashtray.
We could only laugh after getting the fuck out.
Only I went with you to all your court dates
since you’d robbed an apartment and couldn’t remember.
I couldn’t blame you for running off to Cali.
Cosmia/Scardust/Winter you I wrote my brightest, best poem for
the original starburst echoing in me
but whose lines have curdled and wormed
their way into many petty laments.
There were good moments, yeah, spanning years
the drives, trees, sneaking you in through windows
because roommates had banned your very presence.
And you’re the best cook I know
although you wouldn’t let people eat in front of you.
You rarely wore shoes. You drove over my foot
and maybe you apologized.
Sometimes I think nothing’s your fault, really
with a sociopath mom—I met her several times, I know—
with your chronic agony and diabetes
which had you seizing up in bed and me calling EMTs
thrice, and I have no idea who calls them for you
in Manitou, Carolina, Cali, the hundred other places
you’ve trekked barefoot, hitchhiked, driven through all your life
which of the friends you make so charismatically
for the few days they can tolerate you.
Your birthday went by last week
and I ignored you again, going on a couple years
and you Facebooked how all human beings
are worthless pieces of shit
for the thousandth time.
zoologic Woo 