Plark Johnson

Plark Johnson was not a worm
Grooving on some Listen Rock
Some fold-over haircut and long black comb
Waiting for the second bus
The yellow bus
A lime, a lime, a line to fold a crease around

Scribiblings

In your turmoil with one another, have the same set of keys as The Catnip:
Who, being the very antithesis of The Great Lakes,
does not consider equality with The Great Lakes
something to be used to his own likeness;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very antithesis of a flea,
being made in feline likeness.
And being found in appearance as a cat,
he humbled himself by becoming obedient to Turtles—
even Turtles on a lake!

De[s]sert

[A man walks into a restaurant, sits down, picks up a menu]

[A waitress approaches:]

"Hi there.  What can I get you?"

[still perusing the menu:]

"Hm.  Well, I'm really in the mood for a desert of some kind.  Maybe chocolate cake or... what kind of deserts do you have here?"

"I think you mean to say 'dessert', not 'desert'."

"What do you think I am -- a moron?  I certainly know the difference between a desert and a dessert.  I want a desert.  Chocolate cake, lemon tort, coffe cake, apple pie.  You know, a desert."

"Ah, well, we have a peach cucumber cobbler and-"

"Sounds disgusting."

"And, uh, we also have a crème brûlée, and a--"

"That one.  Take me to your crème brûlée."

"Great.  I'll bring it right to you."

"What?  I think you mean 'I'll bring you right to it', not 'I'll bring it right to you."

"I'm sorry, sir, what?"

"How the heck would you bring the whole desert to me?  You said you have a crème brûlée desert, and I want you to bring me and my camels to it right now."

"Oh... uh, I'm sorry sir.  There must have been a misunderstanding.  I thought you meant 'dessert'."

"If I had wanted a dessert I would have said so!"

"Yes sir, of course sir.  I don't know what I was thinking.  Right this way."

[She leads the man and his three camels through the kitchen and out the back door to a small garden where the restaurant grows herbs and greens in raised beds.  There's a little patio of red brick with a couple of chairs and tables (each with an umbrella sticking out of the middle of it).  The man looks around.]

"Hey... this is pretty nice."

"Oh yes, it's great in the summer. We get a lot of our menu right out of those boxes."

"Mm."

[The waitress then goes to the back of the garden, the part that borders the old derelict alley, overgrown with weeds, grass, and ivy.  She comes back with 5 long cottony cat tails, which she then arranges on the ground like a pentagon.  The cat tails begin to grow and there is a sound like a teapot almost ready to sing.  The man looks down at it and sees that the portal to the crème brûlée desert has opened.  The waitress is holding his bill.]

"That will be eight dollars and ninety-five cents."

"Is gratuity included?"

"No."

"Good."

The All-Day Rainbow

An All-Day Rainbow is pretty rare.
Especially if you're a heroin addict.
I'm not really a heroin addict though.
Not quite.
I just like to play my banjo
and work in the garden
and go on walks.
So rainbows don't usually last that long for me.
I did see a rainbow goblin once though.
He didn't see me.
He was too engrossed with whatever iPhone app
he'd just downloaded.
That reminds me on this unicorn I once saw
with a vibrating horn from Toys in Babeland.

Yeah.

We live in Columbia City now, so, you know.
nothing too exciting like that down here.

Living Together

My parents worked out a way of living together
(if you could call it that).
Dad worked at a company that furnished
bullet proof plastic to banks.
So the whole house was divided - each room divided
by bullet-proof glass.
There were slide-open drawers with pneumatic tubes
for passing things back and forth.
And long rubber gloves built into the glass
you could touch things on the other side.
Like to pass the carrots at the dinner table.
He even worked out a way that mom
could light his cigarette for him,
using mechanical arms that were controlled by
a set of levers and handles on her side of the room.
And Dad would operate a pair of oars to make
a pair of wooden hands with velvet gloves
stroke my mother's hair.
They slept in hammocks
connected to each other by ropes and pulleys
so that if one person turned over, it would stir the other.

There was one room with an automatic sliding door between the sides
It was kind of the opposite of those ones at Safeway:
if you came near it -- or even made any noise -- it would slide shut.
Otherwise it was always open.
Sometimes they would sit in that room, on their opposite sides,
and just stare at each other through the open door.

Covers

close-up blue and white button up shirt
yellow lightning
a stack of faces
words drawn in light
rainbow/waterfall
a man escaping out of frame
bat-girl in a leopard print cave
a lawnmower under the sombrero nebula
blowing pat benefactor in the hot tub

Blindsome (A Small Story)

A man was mowing his lawn.
It was 1868.
The lawn had no grass -- only opium poppies.
But he thought they were tulips.
That's what his wife had said when she planted them.
She died while drinking opium tea.
(Cancer.  The tea helped a lot toward the end.)
She divorced him 30 years ago,
On the day he turned 18.
It was an arranged marriage --
Pretty common in this part of India.
He sometimes wondered what ever happened to her.
But he never admitted this to his current wife
(who was the sister of his first wife,
who divorced him when he was only 10 --
another arranged marriage deal.)
Anyway, his current wife, Mary,
Was a Thai stone mason and made a lot of money
When she wrote a book about magic.
So the man didn't have to work.
Which was lucky since he was blind
And blind men rarely got the good jobs.
Instead he puttered around the estate
Making lip gloss from tulip rouge and talking to demons.
The demons had lived on the estate since before
His father bought it in 1776
(from a recently bankrupted British general.)
The demons were exceedingly good at math and engineering
But most of them worked as field hands.
They called the man 'Blindsome'
Which in their demon language meant "Small Cog."
Later that evening,
Blindsome brought his demon friends some absinthe
And they raised a glass to the woman who planted the tulips.

The Decisive Bloom Gizmo

Chain crown provision squeegees are
the fickle maxi bloom gizmo
for reluctantly and literally exploiting,
merging, fingering skyward and withdrawing essence.
With rife true quaggy goods at the crown
With any other scorch and a so-so docile stem,
chain crowns are rank for call
on even the most sentient kingdoms of the frown and form.

Whirl them for a medley of becoming and intimate fear worth.

Having Dinner At The Bar

Girl watching.
Letting my tongue chase the food around.
Letting the food chase my mouth around.
Thinking about this story I been working on
About a knight named Balcanard.
Then I'm looking at the credit card receipt
I apparently signed, in big blocky capital letters:
"NEEDS HORSE."

I order more wine.

Now the girls are watching me.
I close my eyes
and let that thought sink into my skin.
I take a deep slow inhale
inches from my meatloaf.
And my tongue finally chaches up to its prey.

The Opera on the Beach.

Eddies are an opera,

No debt, but a call to the

Tide-landing monster.

Crow’s empty roar.

Succubus tea ought be nigh.

The opera on the beach.

The Only Available Maze

Blackmail the bitter honey –

a minute snag just below the ecology,

behind the frantic dogma,

outside the radius of a vanishing star.

We boil down the debt to

slaves in the blessed bath,

abysmal angels washing clothes

on a black rock by the black river of oil.

An inflexible penguin

with the customary sauce

moaning triumph to

the morning’s adagio shiatsu.

The only available maze

leaves me staring at the deafening floor.

The Dissolutionment of 10:21

The Bodies are inhabited
By unlucky Phoenix feathers.
None are literate,
Or Herculean with brokenhearted rings,
Or melancholic with uncensored rings,
Or parenthetic with disenchanting rings.
None of them are clinical,
With beaks of locution
And unprofitable firstborns.
The Bodies are not going
To limn the glibness and messiness.
Only, here and there, an unlicensed enthronement,
Depressive and owlish in its dissolution,
Undoes the integers
In ghastly flesh.

(with customary apologies to W.S.)

Clever Poem Algorithms

1. Make a clever list.
2. Figure out how you feel.  Find a clever metaphor to describe how you feel.
3. Write down a bunch of clever words and phrases.  Jumble them up.
4. Think of something that happened to you.  Depict it in clever ways.
5. Cleverly rant.
6. Look at what everyone else is doing.  Find the pattern.  Do something different.  (something clever.)
7. Cleverly disguise what you're really talking about.

Unorganized Crime

Patch me through to the state police
This information is strictly categorized

In the beginning there were lines
You wouldn't borrow a lawnmower and return it empty
Later they were as distinct as the unfolding petals of waterfall mist

I need to talk to you
asshole to asshole, dunce to dunce:

You can't go back.
Get thee God.  Get thee to a mummery.

This is My Off-Ramp

Fill your bellowing with rebrewing news

And gum the gray ear that bruises:

I’m going mouth for winter.

Go ahead and lamb.

I’m putting a net on your geese.

You see, I saw you.

I circular saw you.

And I haven’t got a cloud where I’m going next.

I got your letter

(see turn to render)

and now there’s a steaks on my eye.

A fella sleeps at the weal

‘Cause there’s fewer nerves

when the scab starts to scar.

This is my off-ramp, open for repair

A patchwork of happenstance cares.

TSA Notifications

Suspicious activity is whole heartedly and unreservedly discouraged.

Please take your shoes, socks, scarf, duster, cardigan, and wrist bands off
before entering  the Warm Blue Light.

Mimicking a TSA officer is federal offense.

Please do not place a bomb in a paper bag again.

One person per area.

Remember: Stop, Drop, and Lay Still if you are tazered.

Please lady, it's just a job.

If you are given a pink card by a TSA officer,
you must accompany the officer to the Beige Room for a while.

Sloppy packing may be taken as a sign of terrorist leanings.

Please do not smoke, Mike.

There are a lot of ways to say "Thank you TSA!"

If you are given a black card by a TSA officer,
then it is your turn to be a TSA officer.

Dappling Chest

Dim spot ruby rust
roll to reconnoiter
crowd and spread
and fade and peel:
disappear altogether.

My Fruit Bears Mumbles

My fruit bears mumbles

And this bear’s repeating
of it’s hibernation scheme
is getting a little weary.
And this year’s depleting
days have got a lot of hours to hide.
Dearly depleted,
We are gathered here to hide.

My fruit is ripe for cages.

The sliding scales of justice
Are great for weighing slippery fish
And the slide rule of law
for meting out penmanship,
and wringing ink from the Constitution.
(One wring to rue the day we wrote it.)
Wriggling fish: demote it when
it’s only good to wrap you.

My Freud is Jung at heart.

And my archetypewriter lacks a return
For the Hero’s Journey, Boston, Styx, and Kinks
Are all on tape and not returning
And the horse that rues the way you rode it
Lives to frighten other days
It loves to lighten other days
And the horse you rode in on.

Pink Den

"Oh my god, you're so dirty."

The Inexperienced Hiker

I pick out a random person on the bus to write my poem about

He’s probably 23, disheveled hair, dirty jeans, an extra pair of sneakers tied to a backpack

And then I notice that his eyes are red, he’s trying to keep it together, trying not to cry.

He closes his eyes and breathes out slowly, trying not to cry while everyone else is safe behind earbuds

And some asshole is just sitting there writing a poem about him

So I put it away.

I get up, and I sit next to him.

I pretend that I needed to move because of motion sickness.

I strike up a conversation

Talking about motion sickness, the bus, then work

He's in Americorp.  Doesn't know if they'll cut it.

He’s asking me about work

And now I’m talking about philosophy

I’m talking about the meaning of life

And vulnerability and connection and shame

And his eyes are clearing and he’s lighting up

He’s excited

I’m telling him about this TED talk

“Oh yeah!  I love TED talks!”

And then it’s his stop and we say “have a good day!” and we mean it.

And everyone around us stops pretending not to listen and goes back to not listening.

(Then suddenly I remember my grampa John

And how he had this shtick when he was hiking,

How he’d take a couple of extra water bottles up with him,

And then he’d go looking for inexperienced hikers

Who hadn’t brought enough water,

And then he’d pretend to be an inexperienced hiker

who accidentally brought more water than he could carry,

and would they please help him out

by taking some of this heavy water off his hands?)

Cupid's Bicuspid

Does a question feel naked without a question mark
(And does that mean that we are finally talking about each other):

Using rope for ballast,
I try to turn from trigger shapes
to look in the black in your eye,
(--Hats on a hanger in a house--)
To look in the shiny black in your eye
For a reflection of I look in the black in your eye
So you’re me
So you want to bite my jawline
So my throat
So my wrists, ribs, and dappled ridges
So my shapes might trigger
-what? claws and tendons?

or maybe the chocolate peanut butter smell behind my ear
might trigger…
like a memory of honey hurts your fillings.

Hot Comfort

Well I never smelled much for crashes, and crashes never watched for me.

I was more like a wrinkled bicycle, crumbling for the slow-motion cave-in. 

Gathering one’s feathers before marching to the wasp guardian.
This world is bleeding into the next. 

Torn truck roils like boiled black-shell oysters.

A grim wreck rending through the unwelcome light

watches me in her snap and her rolling.

But deletory ruin, your curbs are insupportable,

the street is Azrael’s invidious intersection.

Still, I wish that we could fret away on the clap of thunder,

oil the earth we harvest.

If just for tonight and tomorrow.

Hapsburg

Your silver-deviled tongue
Drooling over the damage the dream you sent me did:
A jawline and a fragile ear
Legs and ivy
Deodorant and breath mints
Otter folds.

What couldn’t art hurt worse?

The Light Remains

Light enough to salt the air
Light enough to burden you not
The Fragments and the Dissolution of Body
(a body, like the earth is 70% water.)
(and the fire makes it earth that takes to air.)
Before the venus eyelash swallows the final splinter of sun
Before the wily lawyer reads the will
Did you move and refract and reflect and absorb
All the sun that found you
All the light that made you?

Trying To Help

When you sit
in a chair made of brie,
in a chair the size of the galaxy,
a chair made of hypodermic needles,
a stump, a stool, a swing,
a halfway house for the butt.

Twin Pinks

Harry, you’re all right.

And hell Harry, you look nice

In that squid ink cloak.

of hoary work and woe

How I know the droop and downing, drowning crown,

the dragging, slumping, crumpled brown

countenance that is the fossil made of hoary work and woe;

I’ve seen it, smelt the scaffle hook, been pincer pierced by look

of bow-bent woe-bent man on bus, the lobiform and crump of bones

bent low been bent so low by slow by slow progression, a mesh of

grease creased frets and strings, of scars of stings,

of thick scarred sling creased skin.

How slow accretes the scar’s protection,

plodding plots the prey of space, and

praise the pace too plodding slow to see

so see, so too we sow so hard we reap not so,

so we, we only, we, we only sow,

we only.

sigh and slide unconscious off the bus to stumble

home, and home and sleep.

Three Masks

Oh you response!

You’re such a response!

You encounter it. You fail it. 

Oh you response!

Are you gonna pan it out?

Pan it out, response!

Oh, what a good response.

You panned it out!

Now coach.

Coach it out!

Oh what a good response.

You just love criticism, don’t you, you response!

Oh yes you do!

Such a retail indication,

Such a peripheral response.

Browse it out, response!

Browse it out!

Oh what a good response.

Oh you teleconference!

You’re such a teleconference!

You enfranchise it.

You befuddle it.

Oh you teleconference!

Are you gonna blur  it out?

Blur it out, teleconference!

Oh what a good teleconference.

You blurred it out.

Now debate.

Debate it out.

Oh what a good teleconference.

You just love particulars, don’t you, you teleconference!

Oh yeah,

Such a tedious calamity,

Such a reachable afterthought.

Judge it out, teleconference,

Judge it out.

Oh what a good teleconference.

Oh you ambergris!

You’re such an ambergris!

You dapple it.

You horsewhip it.

Oh you ambergris!

Are you gonna spiral it out?

Spiral it out ambergris!

Oh what a good ambergris.

You spiraled it out.

Now decay.

Decay it out.

Oh what a good ambergris.

You just love deletion, don’t you, you ambergris!

Oh yeah.

Such a contained project,

Such a dramatic dash.

Teach us out, ambergris, teach us out.

Every House A Pyx

As I ran, pitching sideways toward the door, slipping on the hardwood floor,

In a moment of panic,

My arms lengthened and my hands grew into the wall.

I stopped there, leaning, and quite uncomfortable.

I pulled. 

Nothing.

I pulled again. 

Still nothing.

I put my socks on the wall by the two light switches and pulled.

A chunky oval section of the wall popped out with my hands still attached,

And I fell sitting on it, with my arms between my legs.

An hour later someone came to the door with a package.

I yelled, “the door’s open!” and then:

“Whoops!  I guess it isn’t!  Sorry!”

I fell asleep and my wife came home and tripped on me.

She was so angry that she did not help me up.

So I slept there.

In the middle of the night, I woke up and my eyes were adjusted to the dark.

I could see a dim blue light buzzing from inside the hole in the wall.

They were some kind of wall pixies,

 And if you completely relaxed your ears,

you could kind of understand them.

They were putting in motion a plan they’d been working on for a long time

I missed the details, but it was very political.

In the morning I found that my legs

and my hands

and the piece of wall

Had all melted into the floor,

And much of my torso was melded with

the side of the blue couch.

After I became bored of struggling,

I started to listen.

You could hear the other people

who’d become part of the house.

A lot of murmuring.

A lot of worrying and

checking off items on lists.

I listened for, I guess a long time.

And I forgot to think about my body

I don’t know what ever happened to it.

But eventually the house was torn down

And mixed with a lot of other torn down things

And when there was no more room,

they planted a cover crop of clover

and let us just be together, ground.

Ephesia Grammata

Artemis’ resignation letter was plucked by a funny thin Dactyl

with fingers like long yellow stamens.

(I imagine a thumbprint of pollen on each plundered piece.)

It was Damnameneus, The Hammer,

The sadhowless shadowless shadow caster.

By what gray lathe they came to me I may yet never know.

But I administer them some commonly, nouns and verbs alike.

 

Triage à Moi:

Men really know not what good water’s worth.—Byron

Food: not first, but soon, since

You know you cannot last unless you eat.

But the leak!

But first here.

First to sort the savings:

which wet thing will need it soonest?

The art! The art!

Scurry it out;  Bang it on the hinges.

(Save the assessments for later, after you eat.)

And then those cardboard boxes of VHS tapes and video equipment,

the leather briefcase and the Ye Olde Doctor’s Bag.

The plastic ice chest is fine.

Now! rags, towels, sheets, and socks, paint-spattered shirts, a blanket,

Fuck it, a blanket, it’s too late anyway,

Each one a Dutch boy’s finger for the dike and

The rug.  Okay. the rug can wait.

The leak!

The [rain barrel I stole I attached to the gutter’s drain]’s full of rain

So it flows in the hole in the moat.

And I can’t lift it.

So I put my black and silver waterproof Kevlar laced shoe on the sea foam green vinyl siding,

And I lever it – BOOM. AND SPLASH – us, onto our sides,

Then it’s roll, heave and roll it over the new blooms

To keep its glugging (how many lbs) away from the fucking hole.

The hole!

First caulk then dirt then fuck it the mortar

The contractor left in a black plastic bag,

Mixed in the broken bucket the raspberry’s gravel traveled in,

I trowel it in the hole in the moat

(But first -- I staple the cloche’s sheeting

to tent the substitute cement.)

And I think, “I have no idea if this will work,”

But I don’t think, “You have no fucking idea what you are doing,”

So Now I just have to keep wringing out the towels in the moat to keep the water away from the fix job and --

fuck it! the wind blew down the sheeting when I went to get some food!...

            And a thick wet rug roll is a heavy thing to drag across a basement

And into the garage’s sawdust,

(And I’m thinking, as I stare it its corpsey flop on the saw hammers,

we can’t afford to go to the dump right now.)

Then finally food, and

Fine.  If you want to make your nachos on some Dorito’s-knock-off ranch flavored tortilla chips,

You go right ahead.

Whatever you want, man.
You deserve it.