This is where we keep wild things like writing and memories and loves and aces.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Switchblade
Sometimes at night I visit the squat house
remind myself I am lucky for what wage I get
in a country where this hold up is safer than
starving yourself on rent.
All the rights to them, but you don’t return
to the den your devil’s are made in.
Dirt driveway in winter, bumpy serenade
to the chaos of a ghost town.
Someone kicked in the front door.
Guilty consciences splintering
across the stairwell where boys my age
drank themselves father, snort home life
off the frame of abandoned bicycles abandoned
to rust on the front lawn.
A mattress in the corner-
where tension breaks like a needle.
Bits of paper and garbage litter the carpet.
A syringe is in the corner and nobody goes
to visit.
Something is breathing in the attic.
There are scratch marks on the bedroom door,
I think there was a dog here once.
Once they cut the electric
It probably didn’t make it either.
Turn the lights down.
This is the kind of story told in the dark.
Live from the furnace.
Wild in the blackouts
This hangs like a chandelier
in closets filled with bloody poetry
I AM THE VOICE OF THE SWITCHBLADE
WHEN YOU TURN YOUR HEAD, HOME WILL BE LOOMING
THE SWITCHBLADE DOES NOT SLEEP
IT WANDERS IN POCKETS ALONG AVENUES
AND SIDEWALKS YOU FORGED IN BAD BLOOD
FLICKER PACING LIKE AN EVICTION NOTICE
I LEFT THE PORCHLIGHT ON FOR YOU ALL NIGHT.
HOW ELSE WOULD YOU REMEMBER TO COME HOME TO ME?
There are so many memories in the ways we are handled
Traces of steel history you abandoned your spine for
I am no palm reader but goddamn
look at the poverty line.
See what they’ve drawn us in.
Electric Angel (Draft 3)
(Poem. Check me on this one. Thoughts? P.S. it’s been stormy in the 603)
The first time you
climb a streetlight,
stretch your spark
body skyward,
towards a glowing
neon heckle, and swear
to the ghosts of held-breath,
promise them your hands.
This is where
the atheists and astronauts go to pray.
Straddle that alter of rusted footholds
and scale.
Left foot.
Right hand.
Forget about the night
When she left.
Don’t look down.
It gets easier with altitude.
Memory viewing the crash sights your bodies made together.
Hypnotized by her lipring found meditating on passenger seat
illuminated by a magnitude of lamposts.
You caught them dreaming.
Right foot.
Left hand.
Sweet static voice
echoing in your eardrums
Echoing through the adrenaline.
Spark plug lungs
paused on the upward
When that gasp
Of a storm
Opens to greet you
You will think you see
the face of someone else’s god.
Parlor tricks of an angry sky.
The snap of lightning,
So quick
It is almost smooth.
Climbing over fences
Is an easier way
home tonight.
Avoid the lamp posts-
They laugh at you,
Firefly boy.
Shout mercy to that Electric angel,
soaring from a steel heaven.
You are a mosaic of lost causes.
Pray to the Patron saint of
sodium-lamp halos.
Trace your celestial scarlines like empty lips
in puddles on street corners at dawn.
Pray like a gaslight.
Know that static burst daughter
of lightning strikes has always been
too much storm for you.
You- just another lucky conductor for her electric whisper.
Know the morning she fades you for will be windows down in the rain.
The only holy
You will ever know
Is the gap between
Dead nerve fingertips and remembering
how her skin
used to feel
before a storm.
#OPERATION VanSwag
This is too much fun.
My parents probably wonder why Johnny Cash floats from the garage at all hours of night.
Lightning Storms
In southern NH the day before SFOD goes to Nationals.
So what I needed.
This weather, coupled with the full moon last night, makes me fucking wild.
I can’t wait for Charlotte, NC. The 2012 alleged apocalypse couldn’t stop these poets (And we may end up being the start of it..)
It’s humid out, thunder turns me on, and I’m working on a fun project in the garage with Johnny Cash floating out of the old boombox.
Oh, and did I mention the project?
~OPERATION VANSWAG~
They say his scally cap washed up on
the banks of the Merrimack.
That a fish punctured its lung on a 5 cent pin
from the hat.
This river is where the refuse of my generation
leave themselves for the drowning.
We are tied to the places our desperation leaves us for.
You were so new.
I imagine people will tell me I should have
done something different.
Built up a mocking
jury-rig of a home for you in concrete places.
How I rested you down easy
makeshift patriot of ups and downs.
By the time we had arrived,
you weren’t breathing.
When home uprooted itself from under you
left you fending for your own
like a free-fall
to be embraced in the spasm that
is life leaving.
My hands were as fragile to your existence
only as much as your broken nerves could
feel from the inside of of that doorstep.
You would have had a wingspan of survivor
in you.
And if we are so in our humanity made images of
a meaning
Nothing so quick should hurt.
Humanity is such a blink, a pinprick in time.
And we’re such imperfect little timebombs.
We are all the children of someone else’s survival.
In this, we are family.
I will fight for my family.
I will fight for all you.
- Untitled, Me
Lipring (draft 3)
Last lover last night I dreamed
I watched something being stitched whole
by the pits of torn pages littered around your dresser.
Gently they are feathered by ink and mascara and other
staining things we find at the crash sights our bodies make together.
As it drew up into itself, it formed
the underside of a tenement miracle;
grew wings the shade of coldwater flats and
filled belly-up by breadcrumbs – topping off on coffee
and wayward lovers left by mornings painted with sunlight.
It read:
“If you went looking for our early years
you would find them scratched and sprayed on the lawns
dives, and pavement we frequently ruined.”
This consistency is lost somewhere between drunk nights
and my disbelief in hopeful romantics. There was hypnosis
in the finding of your lip ring meditating on my passenger
side seat and a magnitude of streetlights illuminating a walkway not far
from where you reside.
And I’ve got the kind of personality that needs a fix to sleep so
don’t tempt me like you like to do.
Just walk with me. Let our feet
etch a path through the mortars of this city.
This is how we echo ‘goodnight’ to lantern ghosts.
What a pretty mockery we were.
We made such beautiful sins together.
As you left like they like to do you carved
your woodwork fingerprints into my neck
choked me out on broken codes, left me dancing
in chains for the mobs.
Sometimes, you still call.
A rebel yell for renegade media operating on pirated wavelengths.
Sing ‘missing’, sing ‘lonesome’-
You tell me all your stories of secret skeletons,
but I cannot afford to be the collector of bones anymore.
Springtime has brought lightning storms blooming
on the horizon and in them I will wash you
from the cracks in my knuckles
the haunts of my veins.
In the rain I will lose you.
This time I will not go looking.
Lipring
Last lover last night I dreamed
I watched something being stitched whole
by the bits of torn pages littered
around your dresser.
Gently they are feathered by ink and mascara and other
staining things we find at the crash sights our bodies make together.
As it drew up into itself it formed
the underside of a tenement miracle
grew wings the shade of coldwater flats
and filled belly up by breadcrumbs – topping off on coffee
and wayward lovers left by mornings painted with sunlight.
It read:
‘If you go looking for our early years
you will find them scratched into the lawns
dives and pavement we frequently ruin.’
My home has been lost somewhere between drunk nights
and a disbelief in hopeful romantics. There was hypnosis
in the finding of your lip ring meditating on my passenger
side seat and a magnitude of streetlights illuminating walkways not far
from where you reside.
And I got the kind of personality that needs a fix to sleep so
don’t tempt me like you like to do.
Just walk with me. Let our feet
etch a path through the mortars of this city.
This is how we echo ‘goodnight’ to lantern ghosts.
- Derek Avila “Lipring” 2012
For the Girl with Patterned Skin
1. Its morning. We sit in a half-sunlit kitchen. Her bare feet curl in front of smooth-drawn legs, and we sip black-brewed mirrors to a criss-cross mantra.
And her sunrise, which has always been so much less then what it could be, can’t remember how to stand.
Try to recall the first time a fist curled in your throat, choked up on the names that belonged to every face that ever broke you.
This morning is the first morning after a hard winter.
I came down to the kitchen and found a fly contemplating
loss atop fruit bowl parapets. It looked curious as to what forfeit tastes like when leaving the tongue.
Here, we have always been one gleaming canine short of grimace. Half an inch from hitting the bottom, always been just one knuckle short of albatross.
And she stands there, radiating this vacant strip of concrete, impressing the few passerbies’ with the smoothness of her rhythm. Raised by the wolves her fathers pretended not to be. Presses the damage end of her lucky strike to bow-shaped world spinners and
open lips exhale smoke atmosphere into my broken codes. I want to ask about her beautiful belief in the answers of hands.
2. So to boys with Saturn-ring eyelids: This kitchen is filling with smoke. It’s not the first time. Your lungs are trying to remember their first time. Before they started moaning sirens.
There are carbon faces drifting restless here in the white-washed dorms housing over-sweet fragrances of collapsing willpower. I can hear your slate-faced lover, all hips and illusion colliding with other doorframes then your own. Cradle them in sand paper hands, the playful guardians of missing things. Through the 5 a.m. light, crisp fog shows fireflies running late for beds they thought they owned, lamp-bodies losing their shimmer. Unshaven and barefoot kneeling naked uncradled. Nobody here ever wants to be where they are.
To the girl with patterned skin: Count your piercings like I don’t count my blessings. Exhale a lullaby through pinstripe lips.
Ask the boy with Saturn-ring eyelids if he’s learned to dance yet. Two-step a vendetta in the rose garden.
These are the motives I use to establish
distance from evolving into someone else’s comfort.
When he flirts you, pretend I stopped looking. Pretend we aren’t all falling right-side up for the predators.
Pretend that this smoke-mirror, bust-lip generation wasn’t born with the American heartbeat our ancestors would asked each other to dance over.
- Derek Avila, “ For the Girl with Patterned Skin “(2012 edit)
Last lover last night I dreamed
I watched something being stitched whole
by the bits of paper littered
around your dresser.
Gently they are feathered by ink and mascara and other
staining things we find at crash sights.
As it drew up into itself it formed
the underside of a tenement miracle
grew wings the shade of cold-water flats
and filled belly up by breadcrumbs – topping off on coffee
and wayward lovers left by mornings painted with sunlight.
It read:
‘If you go looking for our early years
you will find them scratched into the lawns
dives and pavement we frequently ruin.’
My home has been lost somewhere between drunk nights
and a disbelief in hopeful romantics. There was hypnosis
in the finding of your lip ring meditating on my passenger
side seat and a magnitude of streetlights illuminating a walkway not far
from where you reside.
And I got the kind of personality that needs a fix to sleep so
don’t tempt me like you like to do.
- excerpt from ‘Lipring’, Derek Avila 2012
