ALL DISTORTION, ALL THE TIME
SAINT MARK'S
THE UNCAPTURED ORCHESTRA
SHOWER POWER

										

											
ALL DISTORTION, ALL THE TIME.


Someone plug my lungs back into the guitar amps!
More distortion ladies! 
Hear ye. Hear ye.
All distortion, all the time. 
More overdrive!
Thank you, Air Roadies.

Aren’t you sick of being appraised wholesale?
Aren’t you sick of sailing on listing ships?
Aren’t you weary from playing cellos with ex-lover’s bones?
I want the butterfly brigade to grant me a year with no stomach problems.
I want to affix the word un-blame in the dictionary 
so I can screw up your spell check 
and so I can call him without shaking.
I want a piano that will not warp outdoors 
when the rain demands slow dancing.
I want to know how to sashay on a Saturday 
with a mouth full of sa-tay… with Latter day Saints.
I want to skew the difference between Tai Chi and Chai tea,
and end up drinking a tall glass of graceful force.
I want to lick my hands after I touch someone that has just become 
razzle dazzled.
I want birds to come close enough to hear them speak Aviation Spanish.
I want your record collection in my throat,
and my thumb in the electric ass of the all night jukebox.
I want my shoulder blades mounted in the museum of knives.
I want church in a bar. I want to pass out and hear you say Amen.
I want a skeleton night light in the closet.
I want your wow in my now so we become NWOW.
I want the light in your attic to shine down to where the sidewalk ends.
I want free shit to not cost anything.
I want you to feel like a disco ball of fish hooks
so you can hang on my words and I can spin in your small miracles of light.
I want my kitchen to be a Brazilian dance floor 
with a pot of your sweat in the oven
and a fridge stocked with butt lust.
I want new sheets.
I want your silver muscles cut into a quilt. Let me sleep under your strength.
I want more pony lamps.
I want to sing this into all tail pipes until I’m exhausted.
I want to smell everything. 
I want to remember that the sky is so gorgeously large, 
I feel stranded beneath it.
When I gasp, 
I only want to gasp for more.


SAINT MARK’S


The telephone wires must be down.

You still haven’t called this winter.

I decide to go to the church,
the empty one 
that looks like it was struck by meteors.

I see it from Highway 31, off the road a little bit.

The roof has blown off of the Tennessee Assembly of God, 
formerly known as Saint Marks.

I go in with a camera.
I hope to replace some dated photographs in my home.
  
The backdoor is unlocked and the carpets are flooded. 
Grass is clawing through the floorboards.  
Red plastic flowers on their side. 

There is a sycamore in the parking lot 
whose leaves will not let go. 

Fake stained glass decals and pews broken by axes. 
Hymnals warped.

There is a dove design 
on the hymnal. I once saw it on a shotgun barrel.  
There is a song in here calling for that lightning bolt,
the one that is still trying to land on my fork. 
There is a field, with no one to run to on the other side 
and no reason to return to the start. Above me, through the rafters, a flock of vultures. 
Death is humming hymns from the air conditioner 
and the mantis’ in the walls pray for my soul. 

This church was great.

I return home to a room without.
My bedroom is a supermarket that is running out of food.
Aisles of non-unique orgasms and flailing spirits.
None of them want to check out.
All of them smelling shampoo bottles without realizing it’s all got the same stuff inside.
 
There’s a plastic orange skyline of pill bottles on the nightstand. 
There’s a photograph of someone forcing a smile. 
The sheets only warm my nightmares. 
I still sleep on my side of the bed
in case she ever comes back.
 
A chapel fills with snow.

Hallelujah.  


THE UNCAPTURED ORCHESTRA


The chubby girl is struggling speed on roller skates.

She is alone.
She is in that crazed eye.
She imagines the neighborhood friends.

Most the poets I know are fat girls on roller skates.

Few of them are in love,
but many know how to sing 
the notes of the uncaptured orchestra.

I think the composer Randy Newman is like that.
I don’t think he loves L.A. 
I don’t think he loves.
I don’t think I really have a friend in him.

The friends I know 
who are in love 
are doing something.

Love is busy magic.

Love must be magic
‘cause when my friends fall in it
they disappear.

I drove with a woman 
across the mosquito creeks of Arkansas
to figure out why that was.

Looking at each other like surgeons,
daring the other to go first
I finally asked how long 
she thought it would last.

She said she it didn’t matter how long,
it just mattered that it was.

I  changed the subject,
told her about the lone roller skater.
I asked if she thought she had ever been kissed.
She didn’t think so.

We held still, then

a sky flush with moon 
opened up like a ballroom
and her kiss broke the spine of the night
paralyzing the moment
into our skulls, 
forever.