Category: Penman Lounge

This is a hilltop story dedicated to you.
One height of myopic vision
While laying supine, you see

So much blue clearly
To be had. Drink it up. Lay
One on me. Tell me something

Any order of words sounding
Any vision imagined sublime
Like skyscrapers submerged

Any version of titanium sheaths asunder on thirty-fourth
Street under blue street trees. Snails scaling the empire eating
Supper super blue-green algae. Transit fish in suits swim to suburbs

To the 56th parallel. So much skyline in the way of a seaweed
Salad plate. Lay your eyes on the rooftop landscape
A simulation of tropical visions in manageable proportions

Laying claim to topical oceans
From the 78th floor sightless to the local
View. Tending fishbowl gardens

Brimming rims, the masterminds’ topiary hairpiece
Atop Kubla Khan’s stately dome, King Kong’s pleasure pool
Pet sharks and streetcars drop shadows on the

Sidewalk floor by degree
And the sun sets early
And the evening breezes…

Frequently. Wind tunnels kick. Pushing
Shoppers, non-stoppers, strollers, steamrollers
Downtown downstream.

So much view to be had
So many angles cut waves
So much to stain the heart

And scar the options:
Stares or elevate 34 seconds
50 six floors seventy eight scoreboards billboards

Lay up to sustain the game play one-handed,
One button, one shot, monochrome, monotone,
Open. Standing alone where floorboards leak through sealing so much gray.

They demand it be simple like the possible backstory
For the bobby pin on the floor and those benched around
Laboring relatively on the beat. Rich with tentative accounts,
The suggestions will simply be decorative. A patterned housing

A leg encased in netting, the wig from which it fell. The night
All shades and hue, the possibility of shady characters stupefied
And shirtless, the districts traveled in a bumpy flash on cobblestone
Continuously abrupt, smoothing out the strays she self-consciously

Sways, pushing back the strands, sealing leaky speech. Somehow
She can seem sophisticated through a facade of unmarked doors
She wears as lockets and rings, locks and rings of pointless entry.
She catches a strand with a wrinkling hand preoccupied by possibly

Now and what will follow and as it unravels the shrapnel fellows to the
Floor just an hour before the nameless, her men followed out the door.
As slung over the local telephone wire, dangling kicks like keys on a line,
Seldom walkers wonder by and even less the dealers don’t know why.

Only details left for private eyes who notice the pin a bobbing on the
Swelling of now buoyant floor. The evidence of demented reality,
Reveals dimensions of reconstructed criminality and deeper did they
Follow steps imagined. Shadowed by the present. Hidden in pieces

Left forensic. Dusting prints. Documented fragments. Somehow some
Stories down goes Bobby pinned to the ground.

Between the painted lines, fast food scraps
And headlines break down in the sidewalk cracks like grout of front-page, Arts and Culture, abbreviated World stacks
Stunting sprouting dandelions.

A song interrupts as a jingling advert:
”What’s It All About” from that album by the Grouch

Plastic and Paper Product
Restaurant and Catering Supplies
All flies attract circumnavigating patience as a virtue. Times is not meant to go again.

The “skidmarks” bumper sticker on the tagged-up fire hydrant with the kid in skid ripped off across the street from
Wash and Dry. Forgotten fame on the wrongfully chosen color for a brick hot wall, sits as dry and silver as urban scrawl.

The day-travelers cross the line and walk the signal down to suggest which way to look at the way you think of yourself right now.

Do you feel shameful enough that you draw a bath?
Wash that posthumous grin out of your mouth. It’s deflecting powerful kisses “as effective as halitosis” and your chosen word, “hate”, proves ineffectual in its pumping mass. It lies in the hands of image-makers and downtown movers and

Orville Redenbacher challenged Mr. Clean to a duel to win the heart of Mr. Peanut who Clean showered with the acid iodized rain that the little girl with the umbrella says she’s stuck in a perpetual rotisserie-style salt glass fit and she is a smoking vampire. She begs the Daily Mirror to kiss her reflection goodbye.
Make it a ritual of passage. Sketch it out like hopscotch on the dog-sh*t-ridden-piss-evaporating sidewalk in the antithetical coloration of Easter egg. Graffiti artificial gun-powdered shell chalk particles dissipate if you stroll in an offbeat right-winged gait asking cabbies about entropy in a clean city.

Perhaps you can empty your pockets here. Take your clothes off on the corner because you initiate aesthetic aversion to your coated social scripting and it appears we chalk it up to illiteracy.
Read within the lines and color your facial enhancers, peel polish off your waxed curbside ailments next to the liquor store. Close for the holidays we’ve forgotten. Park free after six on weekdays.

We traffic, we jam down as we part ways.
Rolling up pedal pushers before getting caught in the chainrings. We’ll crank revolutions into revelations, or reverse the vice, or vice versa.
Steer clear of the potholes in the street and crackheads on the sidewalk and the hipsters snorting lines designating premature lines on their attempt at expression co-opted commercially implanted thought osmosis-like head dunking in the aquarium walls in the house of the Jones’.

It’s time to return your appliances and send a Thank You letter to the so-and-so handyman who sealed your waterlines and the cleaning lady who works a thin line between wrinkled hands and the dripping fate of the faucet, scraping between pierced tiles in the Albert Hall She’d love to turn you off.

I am more animal now than ever.
You are more vegetable.
Less human, more numeral breakdown
A cobalt dissolution

Purify my drinking water
With a sign of the cross
My heart pours in copper over the sink
So as not to drip a dipstick needle in your distilled horseradish
Peppering bloods.

One day I won’t have this full throw of hair
Nor hear the sines and waves traversing through the air.
Nor will I have the proof that I ever did.
Separate my toes and nod my head to the gift of beat no longer will I.
Going on eighty, I will release the process used in previous olfactory projects.

Hand over these boats and rays and pass on the polluted haze
Salute that sun along the bay
Squander for those fleets of flash cards and friendly folios
Overlapping knots per hour together.

On a nameless annual festival where on average there’s a shooting,
In autumn there are not shootings this year
But a bike ride means dodging doors and taxi hands on a busy street
To cap it all.

Our only desire is to die, but we just kill the time.
Executing a two-step shuffle.
“Why do they only dance ironically,” said the olive-skinned white biped of the white people dancing rhetorically
As though they argue, “There’s no such thing as too much fun.”

Can you layout the logistics of how to dance with soul
Could you hold your back along the wall, still
Now what will you belt about your wasted skill
Strap it with a nine mil’ kill?

I focus on moments of unconscious behavior
All races presume their given places in the

Basic emotional truth of ugliness the finest
Moments look awful like life with children
All brothers and sisters looking level

I level the lens preserving lies about earth
Bearing codes of ourselves taking snapshots
Of deniable circumstance

I use my device to embrace the predicament
The handicap television, the commodity sitters

As stirring up chest hair poses to be sexy
In a marriage to fashion and preoccupation in
The universal traditions of tailored hair

I autograph a portrait of the anniversary of poverty
And pawn it for a manual film camera

The objects of my visions obscure the finest
Moments of stylized embarrassment

Counterfeiting the equivalent of memory
I compile cakes and pets and obvious inhibitions
Of children engrossed in the composition of birthdays.

It’s a few minutes from a quarter to five and
You’re wondering how you got here in the first place.
You try to remember last Wednesday and
The Wednesday before the day you were thinking,
‘Next Wednesday, I will think to remember to think of
next Wednesday.’

It’s a quarter ‘til five and
You’re wondering if you would have chosen this if it were
Last Wednesday, many years ago, but of course
That moment, you chose to be
Who you were then as you are choosing, albeit passively, to be
Now.

It’s eleven to five and you look around and
The trail of ants crawling along your desk,
Hauling pieces of particle board over tiny thoraces
Stale little morsels from Monday.
Amidst the constant flow, they bump intermittently,
Offering directions, instructions on how, where to go.
They’re all the same. They never asked for anything more or less.
Now a good seven square inch bite has seemed to erode from your desk and

It’s five to five. You offer the unfinished quarter of
Your almond butter sandwich from lunchtime.
It’s a worthy gesture in the spectrum of your capacity to give.
You won’t miss it next Wednesday.
You push your feet against the mutable partition
Supported by file cabinets tangled in wires bundled
Tangled strangling energy no interest in sorting itself out.
You glide across the hard
Plastic protecting the finely woven carpet that still smells like carpet.

You want out the glass, but pleasure is the gaze
It’s as though these buildings always were
Certainly, before any Wednesday you could recall.
It’s as though concrete sludge carved perfect blocks from stone and steel
Strategically sculpting almost perfect cubicles stacked, still standing.
Still glowing little squares shine.
The trail of cabs and buses, lights and wires, pushers and nannies hauling cargo
Some in bellies burning little memories of they
A flurried flow cracking everywhere.

From this distance, the trails have multiple arms and speeds
Abrupt and lingual. They’re all the same now.
They get angry. They say things. They want
Desperately to be beautiful. They want
To buy.

It’s five past five and there’s a generous chunk of sky missing.
It’s raining and hundreds of Carlas and Juniors and Sisters and Seniors have retired
Toward the vanishing point. Swallowing, swallowed
By sandwiching skyscrapers. You wave at them,
Making sure you remember this
Next Wednesday, when you will find yourself
With them.

Stay focused,
don’t follow the hocus pocus,
why can’t everything be peace,
and no need for toasters,
or watchin ya back,
wary of the vultures,
dodging strays in the corners,
hiding with crack smokers,
most of our problem is that we lack culture,
unaware of our roots,
overseas they try an scare em wit troops,
racism still exist,
whites fearing our youth,
this is the truth,
we swallowing lies without the proof,
son we gotta stand for ours,
we built this sh*t its like this land is ours,
did you forget?
slavery did exist,
calls for reparations dismissed,
this is sick,
if they don’t give it we gon take it,
tired of the snake sh*t,
struggle to be elevated,
pour liquor out for those who never made it,
real freedom celebrate it,
it ain’t a black or white thing…..

From under which rock did you crawl?
Inviting you over I do not recall
No flicker of interest was ever displayed
No eye contact ever made
Poly jacket and vinyl shoes
Over bleached teeth and too much booze
Mighty assuming and uncouth
Perhaps you should call Dr. Ruth
Dare we accept this just one dance
And then run for cover when we have the chance
Because this lower life form cant quite understand
The interaction ends along with the band
Our time is worth more than a $5 drink
I wonder why men are not extinct
The purse snaps shut. and then were out the door
Quothe the women Never More.

We all know a time share shmuck
Those presentations are so hard to duck
Buy a week in Detroit and with relative ease
Exchange for an exotic location with a tropical breeze
An alluring gift, sometimes money
You don’t qualify without your honey
If you have no credit card, you’re an ass
Through the hostess you will not pass
Perhaps you’re older than 67
You can’t bank your week if your already in heaven
If the fractional ownership concept you do not conceive
That free crock pot you may not receive
For 75 minutes they will trouble you
Make you feel like a P.O.W.
In that Dungeon you will stay
Until you figure out how to pay
For those two weeks of future fun
Snag that foreclosure There’s only One.

Time is something we should never waste
It’s intangible and impossible to replace
So why do we spend years with some dumb ass guy
And always try to justify
For the small fact he has no career
While your paychecks disappear
The unromantic thoughtless sort
While you need a years supply of St. John’ wart
He can’t remember how to spell your last name
But hell Never forget whose playing in the game
For all those times he was M. I. A.
And you actually believed what he had to say
But the important thing is that we learn
What Not to accept around the next turn
The assessment should not be a five year plan
You grade that paper as soon as you can
If he’s a C or below
He’s Got To Go
Less than average just can’t compete
He gets the ejector seat