To Die With You

I want to die with you
Ride like fire into burning clouds and
     crash with you
Strapped to an engine
Police cars screaming
We’ll hold each other and fade away
     into the night
Tops of old tress marked
     by the absence of stars
Into that black hole we’ll fly together
Always chasing the headlight
Shadows and gravel
A fresh cover of recently fallen rain
Your breath on my neck
Falling sideways into the forest
Leaping with you into the abyss
     of our insane future
Broken glass
Flashing lights
And the emptiness of love

2.2013

Bags of Ice

Behind the bar where the action is as hot as a summer night melting cold ice as quick as I can pour it over the beer...

Smoking wet cigarettes in the back
of a jon boat waiting on this mad rain to blow
its load across the lake
and skate off satiated to washboard  waltz with a pillow-faced
old timer in alligator boots
     and a caterpillar mustache
She pulls me aside her spit tastes like piss or
     beer her tits sweating
Tells me to run for ice
Slicker suit tuxedos scrambling through
the potted plants houseboat neighborhood like this is
the last deluge anyone will have a chance
     to drown in
Where’s that little girl?
Where’s that lonely woman’s child?
The dance floor can’t hold up under this much
     weight much longer
Mama Sue Xien smells like chicken talks like chicken
Wǒ hěn xiǎng cóng nǐ de yīnnáng xī huīchén
Close the shop for the afternoon to
pull pale ghost shrimp from the shallows in droves in the
blood-stained coveralls and broken fish
     nets of a starving family
A gallon of gasoline and a quart of oil should get us home
She leans into my ear and tells me
     to wait by the car after work
Her thick swollen lips crowded around a jade glass pipe
     packed tight with glowing buds
Mosquitoes skirting the edge of that silver smoke like wolves in
the darkness beyond the campfire thirsty for action violent
     instinct trespassers of our civility
I would curse her the she-witch arms of faded blue
tattoos but she is damn good
     with her hands
Three bags of ice and a glazed honey-bun
Hé jīngyè zài tā de liǎnjiá

01.2013

Patty

A poem about the people we meet, and the side of them we'll never know, unless, of course, we happen to be one of their targets designated for elimination to ensure a stable balance of some far flung future catastrophe. Keep up - this one jumps all over time and space... 

2012
She let’s her fingers dance so that her mind can sleep
So that she can quiet the screams
So that she can forget the child she left behind
The hour is late and she is numb
Smoking a cigarette
Gambling away the pennies of a foreign president
Thinking long on the promise she’ll never keep
Her fingers flutter
Tap dancing over a digital display of bare breasts on the screen

She checks her watch which tells her it’s October 17th
A sad smile at the secret she’s had to keep
For them it’s the birthday of a friend
Although it is certainly when life on Earth for her began
She shares our genes and is one of our race
But her truth actually started a very long time away
She was pushed from her mother’s womb in the depths of space
On a Hospital Ship orbiting the dead star Caul Dron 10
Though human her origins require a vaster leap

She sips the drink offered by a stranger because she’s cheap
Though she’d like to - she mustn't fall asleep
Smoke seeps from her nostrils and floats about her face
She scans the room
Those sharp eyes trained to see through haze
Her tightly wound muscles under a blanket of synthetic fat
A sleek modified blaster in the waistband of her jeans
She has not yet healed and feels no shame
This target tonight is number two hundred and sixteen

10002012
“Why must you go?” her son asked beneath the sheets
Outside the view hole the black star and the last remaining human fleet
She smiled at the boy but refused to cry
There was more to fear than the ship’s reinforced steel and concrete
Ten thousand years after the last man left Earth
There were no more cigarettes
There was no more whiskey
“But I’ve never heard of that planet”, said her boy
“You will”, she said,
“It’s just that our memory is incomplete”

2012
She chose her path just as she chose that bar seat
She chose her path because the sun was a dying source of heat
In a world where the air smelled heavily of nitrogen
Humans fucked for pleasure again and again
And cars did not fly but were stuck to the street
She inhaled the last of her cigarette
This insufferable city of Lafayette
Watched her target stumble through the exit
She paid for another drink and signed the receipt

10002012
They called to tell her that she had ten minutes before the jump hole would close
     and her chance to save humanity be obsolete
She kissed her son on the forehead and told him to go back to sleep
Memorized the smell of his hair
The touch of his skin on her lips
Though she was to leap across time and stars she knew that leaving that bedchamber would be her hardest feat
“Will you be back soon?” he asked
Confident as children are wont to be
“Of course,” she said with her saddest of smiles
“You’ll see”

2002
Ten years ago to the day she stepped into that bucket seat
Rebekah Octavius Rhendering 3.0 “Patty” Marquez fell from heaven in the bright glow of a comet streak
Landing on Earth in what was a one-way only leap
Behind her gray eyes a list of one thousand names
One thousand human males who carried in them a mutated gamete
They’re extinction would balance the sheets
Make history once again complete
If not for her
For a son born ten thousand millenniums later
Pulled from her loins by cold machines in the pediatric suite
She knew she could never return
But that one day in the future they would yet again get the chance to meet

2012
She crushes out her night’s last cigarette
Primes the blaster on her hip
Before she turns to go she lifts her bloated hand to her lips
Leans over the bar and speaks into a hidden cassette
“Target number two hundred and sixteen
Carl Robertson just left.”

12.2012