Matthew Bass, 29 october 2012
took the 56 bus downtown
to a place once real,
or at least in imagination.
The flat windows and cold steel
that scraped against the winter sky
felt like human parking lots
hanging over the abandoned shoulders
of people running back and forth,
while the homeless sold newspapers
no one cared enough to read.
A city lived only in imaginations
by people without imaginations.
I talked to old friends along a dirty river
about nothing about a reoccurring past,
their names slowly forgotten, names whitewashed
into a tapestry of post-industrial bliss.
I followed an address to my childhood:
an empty void with escaping memories
blowing in the lake effect wind.
And when I awoke
I walked forward... because
there was no where else to go;
tears were not worth the trouble.
Matthew Bass, 15 october 2012
Am I insane?
Blessed with trials
of unclean angels
perfected with imperfection,
mirrors of experience
reflected in a cracked iris.
The holy face that follows
comforts and watches over
with a holy smile radiating
in stark starry sleepless
pre-dawn mornings intertwined
in long walks to nowhere
from Yuma to the Middle East
with notebooks of noble philosophy
holding hard against supernova
storm clouds that sway blindly
into unknown fiery revelations.
Murdered with angry shotguns
on the brink of failed hope
as thousands and thousands of
trumpeted bugles scream down hills
in complete darkness one can only
discover in slippery black sand.
Slipping away on credit
in imagined Spanish avenues
that continue on until irrelevance
is no longer a petty comfort
to watch pretty girls
dance on giddy toes
refraining "This is how I am"
thinking about strategy, conquest
the science of sex, and
the next fix.
This is for you Priya Shah
This is for you John Caltagirone
This is for you John Bouse
because this life is not for
petty meaningless us, we
pointless chroniclers of
what we strive to be with
words destined to fade slowly
in the utter blankness
of pre-dawn mornings cursed
with the comfort of self-important
tarnished abstraction obssesed
with structure, form, and
stark raving expression.
Without you we are nothing.
Matthew Bass, 6 october 2012
Tornados form in the distance,
products of wild imaginations
on rolling highways. Wisps
of nipples barely swirling
from green clouds turning above
God´s country in opposite directions
with unspoken understanding that
the plains are there only in preparation
for gloomy sunlit Kansas desert doldrums,
and the people on this tapestry blanket
only do his bidding here.
Screaming yelling kicking
in the absolute silence of corn fields
connected by straight lines dashed arbitrarily
in the great empty vastness.
Interstates, highways, country roads
marked with letters numbers
and towns unmoved with the strings
of quaint dignified sleep
with something lost in the madness
of cities who have failed
in their search for the authentic.
Symbols, important things.
Eagles in the sky encompassing everything,
sometimes lifeless on the asphalt.
Vultures salivating above rotted corpses,
floating over South Dakota waterfalls
that have always been there.
The moons burning in infinite space
guiding us in the darkness
from Des Moines to Eldon.
Harvest moons eating the stars
like red giants,
high blue ones atop
the otherwise unknown
in search of the spontaneous
betrayed by great horizons.
Small wood houses standing upright
against dismissive winds running away east
past the decay of another time eyeballing
underneath shallow skin with gothic dignity.
Deep into the night the world turns slowly,
change is just euphemism for how quickly
tommmorrow chooses to forget and ignore.
Matthew Bass, 6 october 2012
Oh world! (blah). Poets! What have you become?
Directionless without Bréton´s authority
Obscure like early Rimbaud
museum pieces in the attic
trapped on this plane, marking revolutions
from bored jaded middle-classes.
Alone on a stage with Kevin McCameron
with no one to listen or
pass us by.
Western destruction imminent and passé.
It is only best to speak in love poems
sonnets, and prose of sweet rememberance.
The sun sears asphalt on stop-and-go traffic.
The heat smells not all different from colors
in crowds of faces too unhealthy and beaten
to see all the beautiful things just outside
their frames of mind; characters only spoken to
in old books and ideologies.
The Meaning of life:
To catch a glimpse of the waitress pretending not to notice
the table full of torn notebook pages during happy hour,
but you notice her
and she held your hand in meditations
that very morning.
To teeter on the edge of obscurity because not all hope
has yet been lost. The universe exists in infinite space.
The Bodhisvatta has a pleasant smile, straddling the body
like a dripping wet sweatty naked woman in a blanket,
the fourth dimension hidden by the other three
length height volume.
Poetry has done nothing for me.
War made me fast and violent,
bloodied my knuckes with blistering cigarette burns.
Death made me a man without dreams of
towering cities over lakes and rivers.
Spain made me human, fascinated by
unscripted lives that moved still with time
lacking purpose. Priya taught me love
risk and heartbreak. To love is always best,
To love unconditionally is always better.
God taught me to never give in to astonishment,
to understand what is directly in front, but
can never be seen.
Everything that has been written
or will be written has already been written.
Fear is control, Fearlessness is freedom
We are only theater, extras trying to remember
what it is that we´ve already heard.
Matthew Bass, 6 october 2012
(You)
Sublime and calm,
pecking and cooing
at the unseen side of my brain.
A breathless hug pinning my body to the floor
asking me to come hard and let go this time;
sometimes it´s on the floor
sometimes it´s on the bed
sometimes it´s in a book of poetry.
I hope and dread but secretly wait
for you to tickle me with your soft syllables
to pull down my arms
and massage my lungs
until they fall on top
of my broken heart.
But
you
do
nothing
When you finish,
you just dance around in the air
hanging from a thread
with your damascus sword.
Blow me kisses on your tip toes
and say:
"It´s not time for that yet"
I almost walked away yesterday,
couldn´t quite cross the bridge!
Maybe I will today,
I hope.
Matthew Bass, 6 october 2012
Is it to much to ask for something more than
dopamine and ((pulsating)) cromatics
beating and shaking
against the walls
counting time
until
your middle-aged 2 A.M. destiny...
that never seems quite as good as it could be,
and you´re left singing karaoke to a wall
once your best years have passed you by
while everyone else gets drunk
fantasizing about
the fear of yielding to other´s desires
and you´re ass.
Is it too much to ask for a little true love?
Romance isn´t dead, but your bleached hair
and fake tan are; standing helpless in the cross-rhythm
of your insecure shoulders, just so you can complain
about something else. A rook in the relentless assault
to commodify one of the last few things
not ripped from our chests without anstesia just yet.
I will not forget how to dance on thin membranes of air
lifted by the scent of chivalry
because not all is sucked out by:
text speak and faux-paux dispositions stuck to listas
and empty stares batting themselves to death
looking for open doors to E-Classes and X5´s
with drinks full of secret ingredients.
Is it too much to ask for something beautiful
that goes a little deeper than damaged flesh
hung out to dry on glossy meat hooks?
To care about something more tangible you obviously
could never care enough to try an understand?
Matthew Bass, 6 october 2012
I am alone today,
Alone in a cobweb
with friends clamoring
from the kitchen to the porch.
Alone in the jokes bouncing off antique windows,
alone in my own smiles and laughs, and an ominous feeling
I share with no one. I am anonymous;
as a face in a dark pub
comforting itself
with feigned ignorance,
much like the night before.
Did I fall asleep? Does it matter? Do I care?
It's said:
Time heals, everything arrives at a rightful place.
I know that already, it's hell.
Yet I hope
I want to hope
I need to hope,
if only day to day.
I could write you, express my love in abstractions
though you would not answer back, even if you want to.
I feel your graceful movements
as real as they always are,
then you kiss me in the awkward moment, and kiss me again.
I say stop, shutdown,
clean off the beer cans
stacked on the glass table
and you put your arms around me
just before I fall into you
on a white leather couch
because,
I can only hold on from afar,
Matthew Bass, 7 june 2012
I will sit here.
Drink another beer
smoke another cigarette,
alone. And contemplate
nothing.
Meanwhile,
Drunk Punk Mike stands on his corner
with his white witch wife
talking about 1977
when
people were alive.
Larribe the hippie
drinks mint tea in the Jewish Quarter of Tangier
talking about Katherine Hepburn and The Rolling Stones.
The whore in Singapore I got drunk with
who admonished me for feeling so so sorry for myself
still sits there with her teenage face
talking of beautiful things.
and
I will become this bench
punctured with splinter wounds,
watch man descend into chaos
hoping for the rise of woman
with a Teak smile.
Then decompose like stagnant driftwood.
Matthew Bass, 7 june 2012
I promise I will
smash unplane mirrors,
let the stars align
like all the times before
with riddles cased in midieval stone
and shared cups of tea
as we fall into Saturn´s embrace
without ever saying a word.
Matthew Bass, 6 june 2012
The color of your eyes
is as lost as your name.
I refuse
to look.
The warmth of your arms
does not make the bedroom
feel any less cold.
Before you spoon me
just know...
I´d rather not hurt you
tommorrow.
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