Dirty Winter, a poem

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 30th 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 23rd 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.