Poem written with the help of the Curiosity Group

Traffic Jams of the Stars

F. Durst rose to morning in Budapest and found his smashed Prius.
Vulcanized, dipped in blue rubbers from intertubers on holiday ,
he scowled while Judith Light abandoned her Lexus in the Red Light district.
And there was this one time, in Lisbon, I saw Scarlett Johansson crying in an Audi—
her BFF Paris Hilton went to Las Vegas and caught a bug—it wasn't a Volkswagen.

While touring Sienna in my Fiat, I accidentally ran over Sofia Loren, it wasn't pretty. 
Unlike that guy who thought he was Bill Murray 
parked his Peugeot into an embankment outside of Leicester.
He narrowly missed Herve Villechaize—faked his death in '93—
swerving around a nest of Corncrakes on the median three kilometers outside of Krakow, 
rolling his Mini down a ravine where it smashed into a Polish dancer, 
proving that  all a tiny man needs to make Heaven, where he can frolick freely ,
is reckless wheeling in a cloud colored Fiat through Finland.

There he can spy on Sebastian and Lucia—not married, 
but sexually entwined— and then north along the Amalfi coast 
where Rick Astley in his American Police Interceptor  performs a perfect PIT maneuver
on the back bumper, jostling Sebastian and Lucia—still sexually entwined, 
nearing climax—to fly through the guardrail and over grazing sheep. 

The police dossier read, "They suffered an orgasmic Rickroll."
So it's appropriate  we ran into Johnny Depp—it was fabulous
and with Liberty Bells on woke up this morning to share the gospel 
with Wild Bill Hickock dumpster diving for fancy Belgium chocolates.
Looking for ale cans for his Mr. Fusion attachment,
desperately needing to get to work at 88 miles per hour.

His Sam Elliott spry locks shake as he sings: 
"Ima kick it like Judo, sing it like Menudo—
I make you fake & fraudulent  suckers fall apart like a Yugo. 
It's true though, from Juneau to Belluno,  from Fox to Telemundo, 
you're just numero Duo, I'm the Uno."

Later Cantos enumerate scrumptious dreams of Mr. Clooney,
naked except for his smile  driving awhile, the streets of colorful Madrid.
Catching slim glimpses of shocked faces, my heart races and breaks though
the steamed windows of our Audi. They see us being naughty and they like it.

Billy the Kid feeds his Gremlins after midnight in his lime Gremlin
watching a bootleg Deustch dubbed Wayne's World
and fucked up his car. So standing at the DMV counter, do I hear Europe's
The Final Countdown —again—playing through someone's headphones.
"What model is the car again?"  The clerk blurts as he scans my form. "An '84
Chevy Celebrity. It was my Grandmother's," I respond,  noticing how much he smells
like his lunch—never trust Yul Brenner with your Maseratti in Istanbul 
if Alec Baldwin's with you; he sold Yul a bad Yugo at the battle of Ypres, 
bonding over whoring in Luxemborg.

New July Poems from Portland

camera flash bouncing off raindrop momentary daytime

the last iceberg stewed for a kalpa with war & peace
a colophon for the veterans & the crocodile kids

alm a euro from a volvo for all I care
I’ll travel portland as the prophet of the exit poll
a wolf blitzer of the elements snazzy tie
twitter gandhi & jesus policekissing on the rocks
radio back take ears off throw them into a sea stop

spend a lugosi friday & lon chaney night
dressed as the stones with my paramour
the parasite eve raccoon with rotten apple cores
stumbled in my garage pilfed cat food pellets
gobstopper eyes peppercorn on camera
& naomi watts follows sucking on a parliament
from a vincent price splatterflick
atmospheric mellotron soundtrack

bumblebee screened american apparel tee in an alley
where she lived when she had that web money
watching distended smoke trails from a rocketship
disappear into a sheaf of papers
fanned out to play aboriginal dreamtime sonatas
to leopards their latest romance
cry out funny apologies I feel all inside

a fantastic sweetened employment of love

naomi teaches the sheets in video wonderfuls
like an astronaut in an elevator
a stranger in a 30 million dollar suit
holding the moon’s clockwork in a tube sock
with monstrous bipedal bob dylan songs
building behind us

———*———

She and I rehashed an old dialogue of Plato’s on illustration
like the cries of unexpected infant from a Parisian tart in a bazaar
crammed with the pungent stench of cigarette smoked carp heads
and citizens consumed with relish these icthyian innards
sopped with suicide drafts of a failed novelist
on his fifth mortgage, fourth smack, third junk on the hopeless sea,
and second pot of coffee—dirty ring finger belongs to Joe Dirt,
a stardust stitched tinseltown poet at a coffee shop with Jean Paul Sartre,
strumming a typewriter and fiddling with a conspicuous placard
fingering him with the invisible hand of fate.

So sick of wallowing in a Tom Collins in a sleepy hollow,
take the freeway on the weekend to date his lovely
and watch her make a coffee table from smashed pots and planters
in a neo-vorticist design. You’d never guess it but she’s a poet
with her Lolita glasses and honeydew crocs. He saw her on a slipcover
amongst the Fred Meyer cabbages, there was a Pettibon drawing
of a smoking hot nurse toking on San Franciscan seasoned herbs
and outsourced spices inspected by 47.

They’d sit together, legs a tetragrammaton of fairy tales
in which he is the Hasselhoff of princes and she his lovely paramour;
if only Ayn Rand’d stay outta the picture. When she fled the motherland
she was endowed with the novelist’s gift for fuckuppery.
The simplest gesture a chum like Chekov’d pen a few details,
she could paint a whole 30 page illustration and take the name of God,
seal it on the clay lips of her mudpie shadows and grow wings
to make any college student think collectively, “I too could be a poet.”

So a student collects the mead drenched spittle
from Kurt Cobain’s Sea Anemone of a face
and pays homage to the flannel calves
to this Northwest poet with a shotgun in his own House of Pain
while across town in the House of the Rising Sun
they read essays the length of World War Two cigarettes—
Picaynes, Galousies, Lucky Strikes and the boxes I saw in Europe
with fine engravings of pregger runaway xray Amsterdam lungs
designed with a triple X, but not what you think,
not for sex-positive denziens in jug band fetish videos,
their straw hats, checked long johns, and lovely ripped garters
running up bandaid scabbed trackmark legs in a color your own
vericose illustrations of Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment
and if I were worth my weight in salt, I’d make a damn find novelist,
but the X’s stand for all the hugs you get when you gave up kisses
for a dream gig as a novelist. How can I cut off a pound of flesh
to spite my face for poetry? Every opportunity I have to be with you
is a just another form of self laceration. If you look up emo online
you’ll find this illustration—little Buddy Ebsen in a Batman Costume
socking a three year old kid dressed in a Rolling Stones headband
and the spilled mallomars and charleston chews fan out
from his trick or treat bag prophetic goat knuckle style.

The two ice pirates, his parents, grasp hands over the table
and the theme from where everyone knows your name puckers the air
as he makes designs on her with line art in a gouache painting:
cheap colors, old paper in a language that everyone has forgotten.
What use is English to a novelist when the words of the future
are arrangements of farts in lovely candelabra like forms.
Your grammar should wave upwards on air currents,
breaks and genetically reform like the smoke
from a dark green cigarette sticking out your colophon, pregnant
with esoteric information and wonderful illustrations.

———*———

The “sweaty toothed” mechanic billed me in the face with a Secretly Canadian slap,
the economy laughed in the shape of a brown bear in a bellboy cap,
millions took countless jobs to pay off Caesar’s credit card,
and I think I priced myself out with graduate school.

I spent October in a Motel 6 laying the fragrant mint of regret on fluid stained pillows
while outside perennially eighties crustups rob my car.
They got the computer, breathing machine, paperwork, sketchbooks,
and the ex-girlfriend naked photographs.

Could the answer be in the scriptures? I consulted the National Review, Newsweek,
and U. S. News and World Reports for any divination from his Holiness,
Pontifex Maximus Barackus Obama,
anything for refuge in the folds of his uninvisible three-piece suit.

I’ve salvaged for those who fought annexed Parliaments with photograms—
Hitler’s secret throat skeleton inertia’ed on a throne of gold
by John Heartfield and Tristan Tzara janked the gears
and made molds of a young Obama instead.

Obama sits in a magical island high school reading essays by Thomas Paine
and Alexis de Tocqueville to prepare himself for the Antarctic of jobs.
He’s dressed as Captain Blood gnawing an adamantine scimitar
against hanging chad mummies spilling out of the endless trains of the foolish.

I got in my resurrected car and Violet’s reassured me I not alone
in this campaign for the lost crystal skulls of an alien ship and face
Minoan automatons coated in dark stockings of ash, priceless knicknacks
built for slicing the perfumed air with a decorative flourish for his Majesty Obama I.

And if you wish really hard, the clouds’ll part and the Lord will irritatedly pop out,
“This is my son, Obama. Serve him and when you die you’ll be set in a Prius in the sky
and promising leads for jobs in the New Jerusalem.” But I was at McMenamin’s
with a first year Cranbrook art kid, talking about his summer in India.

They get Coke and NBC while middle-aged Portland plunders buddhism—
gold Gautamas for gold Santos and replace the goofus for his gallant nemesis.
Obama picks up the phone at 3 AM on the first ring and jumps in his police Lamborghini,
makes the Bubblegum run from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.

And spoil a few friends with faux finish cabinet jobs along the way.
Of course! Slapped back jones’ll get you benefit laden jobs and the rest—barbarians at the gate,
low glucose listening to the Beach Boys for a million years hacking like the undead Hackula
behind the frozen donkey wheel making sure no more warnings light up my car.

Because we might be able to make a world in a cold water flat, but where from there?
There are a thousand worlds that came before us and we lose jobs to contemporary tourists
carnival cruising on the lido deck with the Pirates of the Caribbean.
I wonder if the hype around Obama is sustainable and won’t break like a heart in a car.

———*———

Setting aside the Frank O’Hara for a blog post positing my liferules from highschool.
I breathed fire in the Portland rain with the Real Player Kucinich slamming Bushie on the internet.
I’ve got some loans I’m trying not worry about.

If Obama’s proves, the market’ll better and I’ll stop eating frozen burritos.
They are so delicious and so warm and with crunchy iced beans that puck your mouth.

When the driveway’s wet, you can burn Rome but you can’t grill a burrito
like you were a quick stop cub scout then Kucinich gets on the air
getting his “the President is dead, long live the President” merit badges
when he kinda looks like Mouser from Super Mario Bros. 2. but without the glasses.

My student loans feel like original copies of the Magna Carta.
So I get in like Robin Hood to dropkick King John embiggened by Peter Ustinov
(accented with a scotch laden, redacted, Scott Joplin waggling brogue)
and get hosed, drenched, broken, and home to write in my blog:
“We didn’t land on Qdoba, Qdoba landed on us,” with a pump and a squeeze
with perfect, little Gattaca food babies.

It takes a dude like Frank O’Hara to swirl up on his Olivetti with an olive martini
to point out how miscast a Martin Luther is Kucinich. He’s our man in Oompa Loompa Land,
with an Alfred E. Newman grimace from a mad, cracked, grimoire on his puss doesn’t have a plan
for the loans or the groans and you know the news ain’t acknowledgin’ no fillibuster.

If I were O’Hara and I saw Dennis trying to Mr. Smith it in Washington, I’d change the channel too.
Printing moldy, national archive demerits and Kentucky fried clairvoyant writs
for a cowpoke Master Controller Program whose slit grin won’t get fooled “agin”
doesn’t make compelling television. I think we’d all rather eat burritos.
I eat it because is it delicious and because it is my heart.

We could make an interesting blog pasting up the newspapers and history books
you had since college and let Kucinich be the kitty cat hanging from a branch,
balancing a polished shoe on a blasted big buck in an editorial cartoon
where the shoe is a triumph and the buck, posterity and put down the paper
and toss out that Big Bomb—it’ll give you shits
and besides you can use your promissory note as a primo zig zag.

Even Frank O’Hara knew that, dude smoked up on a beach years ago.

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