Greg Bem

Merged from Dirty Winter and Treatment.

Part One

I’m driving through rose-tinted mountains, a range flipped on the head, arranged their ruffles in blue painted lead, like silkscreen waves, like oceanic current, like temporal parallax, like sweet simmering paralysis, crucified stately, narcissist martyr, pressure cooker, liminal lands took her, they all dodge the bullet

I’m coming home, a long blow through the tow’s line, 405 keeping bright, maniacal alive, arresting the guffaw ahh, lickety split at 5 and we’re back to the raw merging West a bit, to the central pit of awe, above the inch, along the rim, found the itch, strum the ridge, Mt. Baker, flick of the gas guzzle tongue punk, shaker up, it’s getting grim, light’s satin saturated and dim, come back in, image, flicker I once saw digging succulents on the run, it makes me bitter

I’m charging the rung, fingers over steel, taste of copper on the tongue, puppy muzzle owes me, fantasies sprung on me, psychopathic majesty, a bird in a garden flappingly, yours truly, shunned, owed, the debt, the galore, flung, the collector’s spent, kicking a bucket, empty to rust, empty to die, splinters on the wall, in my claws, in my eyes, I’m layered and sooted, wood fire tales foaming and moot from the ashen mouth muted, from a form with a claw as a foot you did, and I’m slumped, slung, done in and for what run, just a flicker?

And I’m swaying, swaying, heat, monger along the deep lagoon, Blue somewhere too soon, thrown inward, one doom in an Icelandic catch-all tune, the catch of the seat, no sun for days, not Reykjavik but Keflavik, nighttime sunshine nightmare, inverse to solstice, it only ever rains in the summer here, the situation in Germany, thoughts on lost bombs, and there’s no rabbit corpses in months in Totem Lake, so what’s going on? And they’re mobbed in Ottawa, mobbed on the Black Sea, retreating to Poland, hopeless in Lithuania, entrancing today aren’t ya, gone tomorrow, ya see, the slow burn daily, glow in the dark, like Chernobyl bullet holes they churn and spark

Along this same 405, this view, this eye, this stance, gray glass hue, what I wouldn’t do to be that fire, that fuzz, that shift, that spire, a lookout of behaviors when the dust of the violence comes to a settle, and the sticking point to just give in is all meddle and kettle, and we let those with ideas spin their spin, while the belly expands, polluted lungs heave and weakly rise with placed hands across the wheel, and the quiet and the shy exactitude accelerates into a dawning of certitudes and spiels, the same damn figures the highway multitudes captured in high beam sequences, turn on the bright lights, switch to a deep grayscale glitter, personhoods, mirrors shattered, dancing scattered, ruins and exiles flattered and casted into semi known patterns, the world a pinched cheek with a shadow on a knuckle, penumbra causing temporary blindness, it heckles, the finger skin’s wrinkles a kindness, blurry ridges moving and quaking seismographic to the arousal of the antagonist microcosmic certainty that can’t stop shaking claiming the world its fabulous plaything certainly, world receiving thinking, eyes in terror blinking, cheeks bloodied and slipping

Those succulent’s gotta suck out that sun, survivors, light to bathe, pleasure a privilege, make a minute, give a dime, hit the hat, run through the lime light, key, keys, sand, sour, sweet, roots entrenched and mud colored young, they go there to breed and be again, done, along the edge of that chromatic Miami seed, dangling in flow automatic hollow, holy, empty, blank, slate, wretched, open, beauty, that Biscayne bait, but here it’s all flame, wet, and memorized, sip sip bang goes the driest cider in the tamest mouth conceptualized, through which is which, Yonder, through snout is more snout, here they hear, they roll about, dirty winter and a blank stout, and the figure eights through Olympic flows, as far as nuclear curses go, environmental justice pinnings, thinking about Justice playing just as the cops come by again to complain again, age 20 and then again, believing in ghosts, cops, no nods just guns, no eyes just—guns, lingering, letting up, a trigger, a flicker

Meanwhile I’m floating, outward into emails, murals defaced on 23^rd and Cherry, we all know it happened, they live among us, dripping boxes, white guilt, empty spaces, tear drops, canisters, proof to be worthier, the worth, the value, calculated, contributions, society, still floating, crawling up those god damn hills, moving outward, walking slowly to the peaks, peaking over the corner, memories, fleeing forever up to Teneriffe

Every urge a precipice sputtering longingly for one long untouched, final fall, pounding to the surface, echoed and echoed, and then, clearly, bounty of silence, and a sharpness long since sharpening, the land reformed, morbid, mourned, and still warm sputtering

We’re winding now, we’re back or not, but we’re whining, no we in I, no we in we, the utter space for which horns, drums, bass, for which they taste, like loon, go back home, go back to the jokes, alongside these eruptions, these spokes, upon a foggy fickle sight, amping up intake, the language of empty spaces hath spake, a page worth clutching, worth nudging, feeling, fixing, fully, fucking pure adrenaline posture pulling, pure posturing nulling, signaling, the patterns to the beat are beating, in this dirty winter breathing, driving through rose-tinted mountains believing

Not this here, this then was not 405 bent into shape so stately and the late night affluence ready to be basically driving by, with sties for eyes, forks for teeth, glittering and gallant with a heated seat, awash with loop and Boolean beats, bullshit boop beep boop and woe is me in this utopia spree, collapsed unto a bag of holding patterns soup, retribution of smatters and platters looped, fictionalized lifestyles, carried along by hers truly duped

Part Two

With Amiri Baraka and Auscultation

Say it ain’t so, beds made of coconut shreds, hanging solid, a beg for a pardon, the limitations of dread and a warden, cobblestone sordid, awarded, it’s a heartbeat and a forgetting, river, forded, a stamped out set of palms on the dash sweating, erasing, churning, calming, melting, blurring, Atlantic tide beat its breast, full of the rest, spit out the rehearsal at best, it’s the contest to be contested as we flexed nothing knowing, as we breathed and exhale then and say rest to the rest, tired, exhausted, upset, oppressors’ death a lullaby, nail boards to boards and cry, create weapons and enemies for warnings as childs, imagined and ahead of these stormings, the evil forests, young now, play pose positioned as rows of figures anywhere, which way, bullet time, never say never, revisited, it’s all revisited, nostalgia, all of ya

I’m sitting slumped on the flush of saving face, in Kirkland, guttural don’t look up or down, just the nervous twitching along a sunny springtime winter afternoon, the glacial peaks, crampons, man, those flattening arctic wastes grow on ya, collapse into pure, sweet methane

I’m sliding, effortlessly, hold shift, and then C, and then the big burst, adrenaline kings, and the education levy, and now I’m picking up trash along 30^th and Lane, where the poor don’t shine, and what are we gonna do, I got the hyflex edu blues, amping up the Chromebook intake, phasing out T-Mobile basics, deep abysses trace it, deep implants of slow going for our most needy learning, thoughts of defects, thoughts of waterfalls, Kamikaze trudge through it all, the neo Nazis unbudged, confederates in Canada undone

I’m tiptoeing through a block, a Seattle block, darkness and dog shit, careful now, easy step, alongside the quiet and quick, not too edgy, edging toward fluidity, climax toward ocean, how many times more plastic, the education isn’t a system it’s a rapture, the inundation of the information orgasm, what they don’t tell you in library school, ecstasy, flash mobs and the mundane, back to 2009, beckoning of a phone that flashes light, beckoning of the vibrato, entrancing, and the rings, auditory horror, pattern recognition, hunter and gatherer, hunted and gathered, and preyed, eat prey eat, this be it, the longing for gristle, etch toward warehouse, throb and haunt, mask and flank, saturation in a yellow sweat, the people’s vote, the voting’s body, wretched eruption, tongue in green, books in green, a greener pasture, Hillman City’s own, and they’re burning mice elsewhere, ghosts of the fireworks, and we’re preserving holes in glass, or buying macarons, or brioche donuts, or catching up, podcasts, albums, shows, rates, subscriptions, we’re catching up in the darkest corners, sets, releases, construction, playing, we’re catching up, viscera, the mood beyond the moon, the static that entices the list, the scribbling the flourishing, phalanx of doodles, polls, screens, alerts, subjects, bodies, signatures, alerts, a mess along the marginalia, escape to Ellensburg into the frosted fog that freezes my lashes

Memorandums of clubs in Providence and Philadelphia’s factories, incisors steeling as diamonds along the damp grass to hide in and the damper potholed streets take me back to fly in, pockmarked forehead, crushed grin of the passersby lacking in both twin and sin move ahead, neither thin nor spun this spin is thundering and bled in some distant land, some cathartic astronomic twitch, meant a delicate reference to an unhitch, a sentience, a telescope for us to reminisce, composure fuzz is the stuff and the buzz is the fluff, and the distance ugliness was flung, by the frantic fanatic’s beat of a heart on fire, and what I wouldn’t do to find those flames, jump up em

I’m running, wish to fly, wish to jump and fly, mountain breath, glasses discarded, language of the trails, desire to disappear, open mouth, open jaws, jawline, crack in chin, where the vowels go to hide and die, toward silence, impenetrable, it’s there, behind you, inside, foot over foot, the lingering, used it before, lines in repetition, the Burmese and the whiskey and the convos before convoys and mowing down of poets in front of children, staring into those dark eyes, you saw Charles Bernstein too, just as my dark eyes did do, you saw Baraka too, perched like the raven in the Free Library of Philadelphia, or on my end table, souls gazed as we hazily entered, retro, retro, cracks in the sidewalks, sweet stick of the cockroach click

We’re fluttering drunk we cockroaches, we wide eyed balloons, heaps of air in a blood red coat, bulbous, floating towards the throat of the city, we’re swallowed, the boys who were charged and we’re swallowed, the masses of the bored and we’re eaten, the men who walk and catch the neck, swallowed to belly, the bags mean everything, between pillars of tent, brick, wood, metal, sheaths, and the bags, like ecstasy, rupturing, every inconceivable idea made tactile, what it bring, entrance exam, retainment exam, you’ve lasted a long, long time, man, and you’re lasting, and breathing, fucking, waking pull and from that to the mirror, to the blemish, oil in the pores, mutant, a witcher, witcha, go back to Maine

We’re going back to the white wolves who tear us up, brothers of the pack, Creep and the axe to the head, an axe to chop wood, roast coffee, Congress Street, congressional beam, lighthouses, Bug Light, getting chased by shadow cops or Yankee ghosts, ransacked, early bloomer made late, law and lucidity, the drink, scores and settlements, cherry-flavored cigarettes, or were they chocolate, coffee-flavored brandy, where they found us, outside Hannaford on Main, the smoke thick and gorgeous, idles of conception, deceit in that Mercury, the way the mouth hangs open, teeth still fresh, young, bright, rearview mirror to nothing, no one cares, no one

The swing and the swung and the swill, remembering a mind so numb it honored a backwash fill, there we were, central pit of Gorham now, speckled and still a disgust as I swallowed and how and waited until the pestilence cleared the bill, results in a regurgitating gingerly spew quite festive I guess it’s questionable, and I wore that red hair, permed at the time, that red mountain dew, so permanent, 20 fluid ounces, those curls damn those curls sullen and slinking, Butterfinger candies nearby blinking, 3 for 1 baby the Butterfinger baby baby, that’s what I called myself lately, age 13 and happily digesting, happily employed and I loved to linger with that sweet sugar rotting the far edges so nearer, numbing calming claiming to seizure, deep cavities filled to measure, challenged opened exposed forever, crushed death wiping, the life morose, moreover, eating, biting, mouthing, consuming, hyper sober, negative space to positive flavor exploder, positive face to a negative pacing, run for cover, soon cornered, bottles clashing, labor forever, drunken zombie mother for a boss, recycled weapons aimed and thrown, thick smoke like decayed moss from a Virginia Slim long and lone, zombie mom’s gaze and the glass falling to a brittle muted boom, and it all stank, and the ash was a curtsy too often and too soon, but this was then, in that central pit of unholy zen

With Amiri Baraka and Auscultation

Coming home, a long blow through the tow’s line, 405 keeping bright, maniacal alive, lit up that magneto cape, what a slight shape, arresting the guffa a, lickety split and we’re back to the raw merging West a bit, to the central pit of awe, above the inch, along the rim, found the itch, strum the ridge, flick of the gas guzzle tongue punk, it’s getting grim, light’s satin saturated and dim, come back in, image, the flicker I once saw digging succulents to run, corpuscle map is what I’ve undone, it makes me charge the rung, fingers over steel, taste of copper on the tongue, gun muzzle owes me fun, fantasies sprung in this psychopathic majesty, yours, shunned, the owed, the debt, the galore, the collector’s spent, kicking a bucket past a credit union fuck it, empty to rust, empty to die, splinter splinter on the wall, in my claws, in my eye, I’m layered and sooted, wood fire tales foaming from the ashen mouth from a form with a claw as a foot, and I’m slumped, slung, done in and for what run? Flicker, Succulent’s gotta suck out that sun, light to bathe, pleasure a privilege, make a minute, give a dime, hit the high hat, run through the lime light, key, keys, sand, sour, sweet, roots entrenched and mud colored young, they go there to breed and be again done, along the edge of that chromatic Miami seed, dangling in flow automatic hollow, holy, empty, blank, slate, wretched, open, beauty, that Biscayne bait, but here it’s all flame, wet and memorized, sip sip bang goes the driest cider in the tamest mouth conceptualized, through which is which, through snout is snout, here they hear, they roll about, dirty winter referenced stout, streaming headlines and its pout pout flick the LCD lit, headlines in caverns is it, a stream of streams, a note for the notes, the brittle pages and the plastic coatings gloat, and the figure eights through Olympic shortcomings, environmental justice pinnings, thinking about Justice playing just as the cops come by again to complain again, age 20 and then, believing in ghosts, cops, no nods just guns, no eyes just—guns, lingering, letting up, a trigger is a snitch, a flicker is a flicked—no, flicker’s a destroyed garden remember say it ain’t so, beds made of coconut shreds, hanging solid, a beg for a pardon, the limitations of dread and a warden, cobblestone sordid, awarded, it’s a heartbeat and a forgetting, a stamped out set of palms on the dash sweating, erasing, churning, calming, melting, blurring, Atlantic tide beat its breast, full of the rest, spit out the rehearsal at best, it’s the contest to be contested as we flex nothing, as we breathe and exhale and say rest to the rest, tired, exhausted, oppressors’ death a lullaby, nail boards to boards and cry, create weapons and enemies for warnings imagined and ahead of these, storming the evil forests, young now, child play pose positioned as rows of figures anywhere, which way, bullet time, never say never, revisited, it’s all revisited, nostalgia, all of ya, the swing and the swung and the swill, remembering a mind so numb it honored a backwash fill, there we were, central pit of Gorham now, speckled and still a disgust as I swallowed and how and waited until the pestilence cleared the bill, results in a regurgitating gingerly spew quite festive I guess it’s questionable, and I wore that red hair, permed at the time, that red mountain dew, so permanent, 20 fluid ounces, those curls damn those curls sullen and slinking, Butterfinger candies nearby blinking, 3 for 1 baby the Butterfinger baby baby, that’s what I called myself lately, age 13 and happily digesting employed and, I loved to linger with that sweet sugar rotting the far edges so nearer, numbing calming claiming to seizure, deep cavities filled to measure, challenged opened exposed forever, crushed death wiping the life morose, moreover, eating, mouthing, consuming, hyper sober, negative space to positive, flavor exploder, positive face to a negative pacing, run for cover, soon cornered, bottles clashing, labor forever, drunken zombie mother for a boss, recycled weapons aimed and thrown, thick smoke like decayed moss from a Virginia Slim long and lone, zombie mother’s gaze and the glass falling to a brittle muted boom, and it all stank, and the ash was a curtsy too often and too soon, but this was then, in that central pit not this here, this then was not 405 bent into shape so stately and the late night affluence ready to be basically driving by, with sties for eyes, forks for teeth, glittering and gallant with a heated seat, awash with loop and Boolean beats, bullshit boop beep boop and woe is me in this utopia spree, collapsed unto a bag of goop, bag of holding patterns soup, retribution of smatters and platters looped, fictionalized lifestyles, carried along by hers truly duped, le fleur du mal du automobile du fleur, pon de floor, memorandums de memories of clubs in Providence and Philadelphia’s factories, incisors steeling as diamonds along the damp grass to hide in and the damper potholed streets take me back to fly in, pockmarked forehead, crushed grin of the passersby lacking in both twin and sin more ahead, neither thin nor spun this spin is thundering and bled in some distant land, some cathartic astronomic twitch, it meant a delicate reference to an unhitch, a sentience, a telescope for us to reminisce, composure fuzz is the stuff and the buzz, and the distance ugliness was flung, by the frantic fanatic’s beat of a heart on fire, and what I wouldn’t do to find those flames, along this same 405, this eye, this view, this stance, gray glass hue, what I wouldn’t do to be that fire, that fuzz, that shift, a lookout of behaviors when the dust of the violence comes to a settle, and the sticking point to just give in is all meddle and kettle, and we let those with ideas spin their spin, while the belly expands, the polluted lungs heave and weakly rise with placed hands, and the quiet and the shy exactitude accelerates into a dawning of certitudes, the same damn figures the multitudes, switching in a deep grayscale glitter, the personhoods, mirrors shattered, dancing scattered, ruins and exiles flattered and casted into semi known patterns, the world a pinched cheek with a shadow on a knuckle, the penumbra causing the viewer’s temporary blindness, the finger skin’s wrinkles blurry ridges moving and quaking seismographic to the arousal of the antagonist microcosmic who can’t stop shaking claiming the world its fabulous plaything, world receiving thinking, eyes in terror blinking, cheeks bloodied and slipping, every urge a precipice sputtering longingly for one long untouched, final fall, pounding into the surface, echoed and echoed, echoing, and then, clearly, a bounty of silence, and a sharpness long since sharpening, the land reformed, morbid, mourned, and still warm sputtering.

With Auscultation

Dirty winter driving through rose-tinted mountains, flipped on head, the ruffles of the blue, silkscreen waves, oceanic current, temporal parallax paralysis, their mobbed in Ottawa, they’re mobbed on the Black Sea, crucified, stately, martyr, pressure cooker, liminal lands, Lithuania, dodge the bullet, retreat to Poland, trance today, gone tomorrow, the slow burn, glow in the dark warfare, Chernobyl bullet holes, I’m swaying, swaying, heat, monger along the deep lagoon, Blue too soon, thrown inward, one doom in Icelandic catch-all, the catch of the seat, not Reykjavik but Keflavik, nighttime sunshine nightmare, it only ever rains, the situation in Germany, utterly bouncing, no rabbit corpses in months, I’m sitting slumped on the flush of saving face, in Kirkland, guttural don’t look up or down, just the nervous twitching along a sunny springtime winter afternoon, the glacial peaks, those crampons, man, those flattening arctic wastes, collapse to methane, I’m pacing you know, pacing like Rauan who ran away to Spain, the long way around Taiwan all the same, the flatfooted bullet dodging Burmese poets who died and haunted me long after Twitter, I’m sliding, effortlessly, hold shift, and then C, and then the big burst, adrenaline kings, and the education levy, and now I’m picking up trash along 30^th and Lane, where the poor don’t shine, and what are we gonna do, I got the hyflex edu blues, amping up the Chromebook intake, phasing out T-Mobile lakes, deep abysses deep implants of slow going for our most needy learning, thoughts of defects, thoughts of waterfalls, Kamikaze trudge, the neo Nazis unbudged, confederates in Canada, the language of the Chicano marches and polarized geos, floating, I’m floating, outward into emails, Black History Month walls of text, the murals defaced, you know 23^rd and Cherry, we all know it happened, they live among us, dripping boxes, white guilt empty spaces, tear drops in canisters, proof to be worthier, the worth, the value, calculated, contribute to society, still floating, crawling up those god damn hills, walking slowly to the peaks, peaking over the corner, memories Teneriffe, running, wish to fly, wish to jump and fly, mountain breath, glasses discarded, language of the trails, desire to disappear, open mouth, open jaws, jawline, crack in chin, where the vowels go to hide and die, toward silence, impenetrable, it’s there, behind you, inside, foot over foot, the lingering, used it before, lines in repetition, the Burmese and the whiskey, staring into those dark eyes, you saw Charles Bernstein too, just as my dark eyes did do, you saw Baraka too, perched like an owl in the Free Library of Philadelphia, or on my end table, souls gazed as we hazily entered, retro, retro, cracks in the sidewalks, sweet stick of the cockroach, fluttering drunk we cockroaches, we wide eyed balloons, heaps of air in a blood red coat, bulbous, floating towards the throat of the city, we’re swallowed, the boys who were charged and we’re swallowed, the masses of the bored and we’re eaten, the men who walk and catch the neck, swallowed to belly, the bags mean everything, between pillars of tent, brick, wood, metal, sheaths, and the bags, like ecstasy, rupturing, every inconceivable idea made tactile, entrance exam, retainment exam, you’ve lasted a long, long time, and you’re lasting, and breathing, fucking, waking pull and from that to the mirror, to the blemish, oil in the pores, mutant, witcher, witcha, go back to Maine, go back to the white wolves who tore you up again, brothers of the pack, Creep and the axe to the head, an axe to chop wood, roast coffee, Congress Street, congressional beam, lighthouses, Bug, getting chased, ransacked, early bloomer made late, law and lucidity, the drink, scores and settlements, cherry-flavored cigarettes, or were they chocolate, where they found us, outside Hannaford on Main, the smoke thick and gorgeous, idles of conception, deceives in that Mercury, the way the mouth hangs open, teeth still fresh, young, bright, rearview mirror to nothing, no one cares, no one, and I’m tiptoeing through a block, a Seattle block, darkness and dog shit, careful now, easy step, alongside the quiet and quick, not too edgy, edging toward fluidity, climax toward ocean, how many times more plastic, the education is a rapture, the inundation information orgasm, it’s along the foggy night, it’s along that Waitsean flash, flash mobs and mundane notifications, 2009, the beckoning of a phone that flashes light, the beckoning of the vibrato, entrancing, and the rings, auditory horror, pattern recognition, hunter and gatherer, hunted and gathered, and preyed, eat prey eat, this be it, the longing for gristle, etch toward warehouse, throb and haunt, mask and flank, saturation in a yellow sweat, the people’s vote, the voting’s body, wretched eruption, tongue in green, books in green, a greener pasture, Hillman City’s own, and they’re burning mice elsewhere, and we’re preserving holes in glass, or buying macarons, or catching up, podcasts, albums, shows, rates, subscriptions, we’re catching up, sets, releases, construction, playing, we’re catching up, viscera, the mood beyond the moon, the static that entices the list, the scribbling the flourishing, phalanx of doodles, polls, screens, alerts, subjects, bodies, signatures, alerts, a mess along the marginalia, escape to Ellensburg, and we’re winding now, we’re back or not, but we’re whining, no we in I, no we in we, the utter space for which horns, drums, bass, for which they taste, like a loon, like an eagle, I caught it because I needed something to eat, go back home, go back to the jokes, alongside these eruptions, upon a foggy fickle sight, amping up the intake, the language of empty spaces, a page worth clutching, in Chernobyl, in Columbia City, a page worth nudging, feeling, fixing, fully, pure adrenaline posture pulling, pure posturing nulling, signaling, the patterns to the beat are beating, in this dirty winter breathing, driving through rose-tinted mountains believing.