For Willie T

Racoons in the alley
swatting knats in the
Nashville light pollution

and I'm moved to a creation
myth

it's about a boy turned tortoise
and when he rested; the cosmic

river swelled and Jones'd for
the easiest path,

a demiurgic TVA
drawn toward a three-star

moment
of triumph over a stagnation

so characteristic of the Devil -
the great agitator!
The great I Can't.

Behold, New Road

Timidity times ten:
tepid Tervis Tumblers
tear the trousers Tom tried
on
he hushed himself
how horrible has
this
been?

"I want to dig myself a hole
in the Scotts tough turf right about now.
I don't think I can make it past side dish X"
"Try this script on for size:
a man is dials the wrong number and its
his ex-lover's new number. They talk about
the old times.
Then, you hear a horrible cry and you find
out the woman has been hit by a motor vehicle
as she was filling up the generator for her ice cream
truck."
"Wait, this sucks; stop telling me this script."
"Man, this is the same shit I've been talking to my
shrink about. A sort of intellectual imminent domain;
like if the government bought all the Beatles songs
and chopped and screwed them for a Marines commercial
because by then the post-20th-century blackness
would have totally been imbued and thus transfigured
into the actual agglomerated consciousness of post-post
bullshit like "hey we heard that people used to love the
Beatles" like we do with Count Basie now. Every time
I try to pitch anything, it turns into a theft and bereavement."
"Man, will you lay OFF man!"

The End

The Inundation of Old Butler

progressive thinktank,
rolls on
sweeping the appalachian tail
"we're going to tame this river"

a slow inundation
a murky sumbersion
a drafty house
hidden

until 1983

"an electrified home for every man"
and we all know that Tate and Davidson
and the rest who transgressed and fled
the synchronicity of a new era
knew it would come to this

RELOCATION SERVICES
on the side of a flat bed truck

"we've got kin buried here."
"we're relocating them too."
and here's the line about
the permanence of the dead

now they'll have to float on top
where the bargemaster smokes his pipe
and the mates think they see something in the morning mist
those diesel babies shooting pulses
down to the diamond where the Watauga boys played

It's only land!

home is where the heart is
but if your heart's in the very soil?

in silt, it sinks

Things I Saw On My Walk

the sad origami of a crumpled receipt
a pile of rubble leaning agasint the shell of a payphone stand
rusted-out 100 spoke wheels
my empty bike basket; my book, stolen.

a fat sorority girl
a dogwood petal melee
a man replacing an intricate neon sign
I smelled my old house

a hawk circling 4th and Church
ICP chain on a neck
the delicate shoulders on many office ladies
perky half windsors on many young bucks

worming it to the yachtyard

two window washers cleansing the side of a building
so high

Things I Saw On My Lunch Break

A chubby pigeon
ubiquitous black Tahoes
"If it doesn't walk, we'll bring out the chalk." - Chicago Crime Lab t-shirt
the struts and sideways glances of several black men
white Nashvillian men on the brink of being Tony Blair's stylist
a man dancing and brushing his teeth simultaneously - the froth, a second beard
coal miners and kin marching in unison on a pedestrian path
a T3 Terminator Edition Toyota Tundra with vanity plate reading "PINCH"
a fat man in a red blazer
a prostitute shirking her duties, reclining in the park
my rusty bike looking useful and by its utility, beautiful
a million goatees
four high-toned children holding hands
FEMA backpacks slung on the shoulders of the indigent
a Dawn in poverty
a few dozen men who wouldn't mind punching another
a few dozen men with slob fathers
100 addicts
a Shriner's van
a schoolbus full of laughing children
Nathan delivering packages on his bicycle
a lovely day

Dork Lord II

My mother's voodoo
dwells, still, in my life narrative
"she really pissed in some Comet household cleaner
to see if you were a boy or a girl"
like what the fuck
I'm sick of vacant luck
balls on the bumper truck
whacked out kids on the halfshell
listening to Icky Thump
George Jones never had it this hard
and his was self-aggrandized
on a stage where the rose tattoo
meets the barbed wire baby boy
tears and fears and dreary days
Nerf gun boom boom
and I have a feeling my children
might get into noise music
and I have a feeling my children
will hate me

"she also did something with a spoon and her round young tummy."
"I think she rubbed it and then saw if it stuck on some onyx or something."

through the hollow door you
punched

through the glazed days you
worried
too much

a real man makes his own sleeves
the safari gentleman said to his wife (about the piled up African):
"He looks like tripod covered in dreadlocks."
African:
"He's going to wake up one day and find himself in a hollow near the river all covered in Patagonia."

"Yeah he ripped out the seats of his Lexus and made a rope and hung himself with it. I can't believe something like that would happen here."

in her pupils, a blue hurricane
The Spirit
furious interiors
she's hard up on clarification like
a bouncy ball in the booth at
McDonalds

O! Saddled Jewel

16th autonomous wonder!
your Memphian hilt
writhes along an aqueous narrative
the bluffs, a saintly calm

your limits,
a cradle to the self destruction
of a once grand place
conservation of motion
declares your Germans and Cordovans
the ultra usurpers
and the mem'ry of a limestone facade
crumbles with the alleyway liturgical
rites and the city exhales
and with every dying breath,
something new is brought,
and something spent is expelled
a delta distillation

next, we have the outliers:
a cottony kingdom
now in the hands of a few Jah Deerie.
Grandly, the earth crinkles
in a greaseless Ore-Ida fashion
and dips down as if it's being pinched by
the Devil himself down there in
the retirement swelter for all
humanoid ultimate deviants
who surround (with mirrors) those who
happen to find their slow road
ending

this lip pucks out
and pouts a little as if to say
boo hoo and hey what about me
and inside the pursed pinch
a trillion fauna dart in and out of dark woods
and driveway motion sensor floodlight
and the urban renewal really renewed
the faith of a dozen developers who were
trying a big boy way of life
copied from the back of double-breasted
limosines in Manhattan.
"I want to be like that."
But really the need for purification
and a real forgetting of the geo-social
and the swing low sweet chariotness
come forth to carry me quo
and set the Stage for a novelty
Central Business District,
a snarled ewy,
an abandoned baby
whah whah! lemme at em!
enough about Nashville

East, let's see: you damn near seceded
from us when we tickled the "great aggressor"
with a palm frond and a great Ankh'd machine.
Lay them down.
You can't walk over all those hills in one day.