two new ones, revs, updates.

I somehow won my second Slam on sunday, this one at Revs. There was some amazing poetry and I am thankful to God to be a part of such an great family of artists, musicians, poets, and straight-up honest and good people in B/CS. My sister drove three hours to be there and watch me. Pretty sure she's the only reason I didn't mess up too bad. Thanks Missy, olive oil :)

More so than performance poetry, I have still been focusing my attention on the book I basically wrote in and around the time I spent studying in Japan. Sort of an amalgamation of prose, poetry, prose-poetry, inquiry and insight, little anecdotes, and whatever I want to write. Typing and editing now. Afterwards I'll jump back on the novel I started in January. 

Anyways, here's two new poems. I did the abridged versions at the Slam. If you want to see the shorter versions of those poems, just reply with your email address. Much love. (Again, sorry for the terrible formatting. This website doesn't exactly agree with Microsoft Word.)

---

it is the rainy season i am playing its song.

i sent Her a post card

taped it over my eyes and floated across the Pacific ocean on my back

it read 'ok...i give up. i am done with hide and seek. you can come out now. hello?'

and in the mornings i still wake early just to say hi and wait around.

i wake with my forehead hot and sweating out a rainyseason

i think it washed away the oil and the what holiness was left underneath put in its place a dumb fever that i can't think out and i can't think.

not with my skull soaked in sweat and dryin' up in the rising sun heat like bent sheets of plywood i don't know if i can bend it back or keep my thoughts straight anymore.

now i keep my eyelids drawn like curtains. they can't lift You up off this bed called Morning it is dawn and they are tired of trying. i am watching neon stars wash up on the back of the lids little suns rising red like blood through that maritime flag i use when i'm out of gauze

 

i am tired

of old bandages

on new wounds.

 

each red star does its best impression of you.

so i'm tired of seeing, seeing You here all over texas. so i went out got me a table top globe, used my palm, wet with the dew on your hair, to spin it slow and careful kept my eyes closed stopped it with a finger on the other side, there, i am going there, wherever that is, so long as its got good food cheap booze things to distract me from you and is nowhere near here.

tokyo.

so here i am. much love from japan.

i've shut myself inside its coasts and i'm not coming out not until you knock.

holdin' this pillow 'round my head over my ears cause i can't sleep with your deafening drowsy coughs, keepin' quiet 'cause i hear You when i sing, keepin' my hands holdin pens 'cause i feel you when i fold them to pray, keepin' my eyes down on this desk 'cause i think you've painted yourself into the sky and im too afraid to check, my mouth shut 'cause i know you'll find a way in, i know you will.

yea i've shut myself inside of it.

forty days i fasted on a diet of

white rice

raw egg

torn paper

origami cranes

soggy comics

subway cars

pond water

koi fish

shinto gods

dead emperors

buddhist bells

deer feed

green tea

japanese beer

chicken heart

hello kitty

and puddles of black ink.

on day four oh my heart was nice and ripe and fat with song.

i could hear it beating fast between two train tracks two wheels beating on the floorboards like lovers on top a shinkansen bullet train makin love at two hundred km/h sometimes people want to see things blur past and know that we are moving fast

forty days i let my nails grow long carved a circle in my chest and pulled my heart straight out,

cut down an ancient cherry blossom, the oldest i could find (i needed something that had seen things built up and torn down over and over and still blooms bright bright pink each year) stripped the sides and fashioned it into a wooden bowl, ya know, the kind you use for coffee in kyoto.

i cracked my heart open on its rim

poured the yolk inside

ate the shell

stretched out a broken English language across the top as a lid

(broken so you hear the sound and beat sing out through the holes)

dug upward into a mountain for about three nights until I had just enough dried-up dirt on my hands.

when my nails finally fell off i screwed them onto the top of my bowl with ballpoint pens already run out of ink.

i didn't have a spare.

so i spit on the jetty below, struck oil, mixed the two into the pacific, painted it on as a lacquer,

and here it is.

 

i made this instrument for You.

it isn't hard to play my heart, not if ya know how to hold it right.

hold it now.

hold this out before your chest outloud and up high, You,

come to me.

make me into an instrument.

a porcelain bathtub.

put your hooks in the pacific winds

ride the current 'round to this here past.

come to my door and knock and I open up.

lay me out open up my ribs pour in freezing water and ice take off your clothes

(or bathe in them).

let your hair down.

step inside.

fold your legs.

use them to make me sing.

make music with me.

make sure you leave the old water inside.

('cause i want to know like you're still in here)

and show me how to hold it.

it's my first time.

so here i am. much love from japan.

---

sunday best.

we writers

we are vultures, ya know, birds of pray.

we go sing hymns in the sky and wear the wind like our sunday best.

i confess, the air is all i know.

in fact i am up there now speaking into and outta my human self through a wire too thin to see and two well hidden cups on either end. I apologize. This kid is young his skin is wood and cracked, his voice still cracks, when he cares the most when he tries to use his tongue and lift this love like a boulder out his throat, and I still don't know how to pull these strings to make him dance, or even how dress the poor guy.

they say 'business casual', you know, look laid-back but confident and presentable

then what do band shirts and bitten off fingernails tell about me?

well i don't know.

so i call upon the birds of pray, saints tailors and seamstresses, to sew shirts with verse and jeans with scripture that's died with the indigo stains of one-eighth Cherokee blood that build fires out of stories that burn quiet but burn to this day in my veins. i hear it brings out the green in my eyes.

they showed me my family tree

it is a treehouse in marksville lousiana.

they brought with them the boltcutters they blow notes through like flutes, cut through the locks of gray hair tangled on the gate and kicked down the back door.

in the back bedroom there is a closet where my great aunt Helen stays

spannin' underground across texas and louisiana

it is where, as little kids, my mother and her sisters played dress up with state lines and wore the gulf coast in their hair and shirts the size of my papa's guitar

it's something you gotta grow into

they put seeds in their pockets and bury their bedtime gowns in the backyard ground

it's something you gotta grow into

their sleeves dangle down trace tic tac toe and little clouds in the mound of dried up orange leaves

they sag like hand-me-down wings from my uncle stanley.

and i am trying on stanley's two wings.

his clothes forty-four stories too big but when i sing they somehow seem to fit.

(my uncle stanley,

he's a bird too

and can sketch the female form to a tee.)

in this closet i found an old jacket that my dad wore in college and thought was good as gone

there are holes on the elbows from pushing out hours on a desk 9 to 5 to 9 to 5 until the blue sleeves turned gold

so he sold the jacket and spent it all on my education so one day i'll call myself a writer and be poor but proud and chip my own words outta lead musketballs and say 'dad, no, i am more proud of you.'

and my dad raised me right so i'll say it.

i am scared.

i have seen ghosts in designer suits that wrap round little kids

call their veins up to the surface

and put an emptiness in their skin.

drivin' foreign cars fast burnin' gas gaspin' nightmare skidmarks on this here dirt path

but they cannot fly.

and my papa says

'will i am, i am i am,

you sure can.'

 

we writers,

we are vultures, ya know, birds of pray

we find prayers lying inside dead animals on the road

and pick at their matted fur out for poems

we dip our claws in their blood like inkwells and spell the words 'i love you so so much' across no name roads that run between two no name towns.

 

there are pages stuck inside these wings.

there is ink drippin' from these feathers.

 

when you hear the suits come at you bullhorns blaring out like bulls on parade

you

don't fly away.

no.

you stay.

stay in the middle of the street and stare them down.

...

keep staring.

...

stare till they slam on their brakes

stare them into a complete fucking stop and then stay and stare at them some more

make them go around you

when they ask what you make for a living, say

"i live

and i make

and i stare at people like you

i stare you scared till you run home.

i make you afraid motherfucker.

i dig up the grave you buried your old blankey in ya know the one you used to hide under at night and i keep my shovel right in here.

 

there are pages stuck inside these wings.

there is ink drippin' from these feathers."

 

hello, its been awhile.

sorry for the lack of updates. but i've been here and here and all around japan.

not to worry - in the forty days i've been gone, i've been writing and writing and writing. sitting on about a novel's worth of stuff. going to edit all of it over the summer and hopefully have something at least presentable. or edible. or throw-able. or combustible. whatever you want to do with it. 

anyways, you need to know about this place in harajuku called 'design festa'. it's sort of an art gallery, that keeps changing. anyone at all can rent spaces, walls, or entire rooms and do whatever they want, just go to town. i can't really do it justice, so here's a link. I'm actually on the blog under 6/23.

I met an Aussie artist named Paul Summerfield there, and he was working on some incredible stuff. Check out his website at ageofwonder.org. And while your there, you may go ahead and purchase one or two or five of his art pieces. Mmk? Thanks.

That's it. I'll try to post some of my writings from J-town later on. But for now I'm taking it easy back here in Texas. I have serious readjusting to do.

Much love,

bill-san.

we met in the sky. revised.

this may be a shot in the dark...

 

dressed up in the beach of cali and down in this skin

old and coarse like sands of time

i step onto the tarmac

and we take off.

she says take off this skin, it stinks

stand bare

bear the inside out

and bore a hole in your chest

'cause only hollow men fly.

this boeing won't bear the daydreams of little boys.

it isn't big or fast enough.

 

J’ai un langue dans mes, mmm, un langue dans mes...

...no, no, so I point to fill in the blanks and say you know I keep language inside the tendons of my hands since sixth grade before literature class up a wooden ramp a long splinter came off the handrail and the blade stabbed in the loose skin between my thumb and forefinger and that’s when the words got in, it is a disease I have, there’s still no vaccine for writer’s block or what’s more fatal, writing.

Ah, je parle un peu de Francais.

I keep language in the tendons of my hands and toss them up for the rainclouds to hold until it storms and Sunday some words fell short she tied my hands behind my back with a thread called la francais that she pulled out from her eyes in that place she hides her tears and she speaks in the washed out ruby red of Paris or a place that isn’t here, (she says oui, Paris) or a city constituted by gray matter you know synapses and neurotransmitters passing through that light up skyscrapers all neon-like when the people doze off and go up in flames when the people read Titus Andronicus (ah, c’est tragique. oui) it is a city built on DMT day-emm-tay the stuff of dreaming.

Je ne comprends pas.           

Our tongues an axe words destroyed behind our teeth and in our throats we spit out the petite seeds and broken brown Adam's apple cores of English et Francais.

I don't understand.

There is a wordsmith inside wipes dusting his hands on his pants and says he’s done with this conversation and sets down his knife and measure, defeated. Il ne peux pas la finit. As a rule he does not take on small talk by god he kicks himself for agreeing to this job but she sweet talked him into it.

She says C’est ma premier fois en Etats-Unis ...and points up at premier saying one and first and showing to me the sky for the first time. We know the same clouds that cover us all and sometimes carry our voices like two cups on a string if we speak a silence into them and quiet  into this cup and pour my words and drink yours back.

Non, eh, wet air you sayeeng.

You heard right. I’m saying “wet air”. (‘Cause you dance on drops of rain one to another and never ever touch the ground, ne pas rien. Soaked hair in braids and wet glasses round rimmed c'est belle and I want to dance like you in the rain dance with you in the rain and we will rain dance like there's a drought.)

I see now and then she is

silhouetted

in the airplane window

and the San Andreas fault line flagging behind her like a tassle

hills rolling spanning off her skin.

I think she cries out coastlines red.

Her tears are mountain lions hiding in mountains

waiting to kill me.

Hills rolling like r's she still trills when she cries.

And I say habiller not habiter, I ask if she dresses in the heart of the Paris meaning to ask if she lives in the heart of the Paris no no I think she dresses up in the heart of Paris wears the Seine like a necklace. 

A wordsmith asking for one kiss just one peck. To at last move past your lips lay tender on the inside scrape stones to make sparks set fire to your tongue weld the words himself reeassemble the shards of Anglais et Francais into a dialect you and I know by heart back in the hours before waking opened eyes and ears closed chests and know it by heart hearing a mother’s heart kick out its first four-to-the-floor rhythm and us kick back in the warm orangeblack. One kiss just one please. I will close my eyes purse my lips and wait. And wait. And I will press your chest to mine so our hearts will whisper what we can't translate in our heads much less say we will X out these accents sign X-O-X-O Tiphaine on my throat with your lips and I will taste your signature it is sweet like original sin I'll spit again those petite seeds like rhymes and hide Adam's apple cores and ask for more I need more than a one-course dinner like an original sinner you're my first i confess and I want seconds yea that writer's word-thirst you suppress send me to the Seine to drink and sin drunken and still, just one kiss please you see I read with my mouth. I am hungry.

And this is the fear of god you fear when dreams take on flesh and prophecies happen five minutes and two stanzas ago.  God, so scared and with this dry mouth words scraping along my tongue I try not to spit up sand into my hands. We are flying over the desert. My lips are chapped in the heat. I  stumble upon X-O-X-Oasis your skin the shape of the atlantic the color of sunrays skimming the waves it holds oceans inside I want swim down inside beside you into it all the way to the oceanbed. Yes. I checked and double checked my bags so as not to leave my heart in San Fran and instead I keep it six miles over Sante Fe where you said to step out the emergency exit so I did hitting the current of wind and hung my only heart on a clock-shaped cloud with that same thread from your eyes. Like a shot in the dark my broken arrow head heart speaks to the desert in broken kiowa-tanoan and tries on its accent but can’t recall the vernacular. It’s forgotten the language of its fathers. It wants to sound like the sand and wolves and look like a star hanging up there in twilight twirling. Yea, I say, my heart grew sick of staying inside my ribs feels more at home in a constellation longs to speak the earth’s slang spell out words with other stars. And i swapped out my heart in the emptiness filled my chest with your memory. It is heavy. And sharp.

flight fourteen forty four

‘lord send this plane

into the sonoran’

desert high-diving all divine

you take my hand afraid you kiss me afraid

scared tongue out

hand reaching out you fillin up with

life or what’s left so much

it spills out your arms

like the land

swallows

last drops of rain before a drought

we burn in

the desert dancin’ in

gasoline ignited in

tongues of fire in

wrecked steel skeleton in

the ribcage of a blue whale lost in the sand somehow in

the desert dancin’.

 

candlewicks last breaths of

a blue whale pressed out in

a blackened orange

misses the sea misses its home.

i miss my home.

Like the spur on a boot I want show you the heel of America Texas and the dirt I want to show you how I walk miles on a hot summer street at midday like a hindu monk on coals you ask how? ‘cause i did this as a kid and i prefers my sole to burn but not burn up. Yes I want to show you Texas and you will teach me back your home and your art.

A lesson in chemistry in my throat you weld the welt yourself and show me how to do alchemy how to push inside my chest a stone just stare smile walk away and allow ten minutes for it to cool swell push prod up under my skin  and I will chase each detail of your face lines in your cheek I will miss you so much that I‘m out of breath always.

A lesson in reading with my mouth watching hands wrapped round a barbed wire fence in between the barbs careful now dancing in between the barbs. Say you’ve never seen cattle up close before but you see them now look how big they are oui c’est vrai ils sont tres tres grands they are big and still stand still wait for a love to write back in blades of grass they read with their mouths they are hungry (like I said, I read with my mouth I am hungry for you to write back). You sit on my back like...um...I regret I know not the name of egrets perched on cattle-backs picking off the flies flying out and out for days but coming back let’s dance like that like they dance I regret this bull is ugly make me pretty, pretty please don’t fly away again like white herons do, there’s gray hair on my head from thinking of you heroine I need saving heroine I need a hit just one kiss please grace me gracely and I’ll keep grazing. I’ll stop asking. I swear.

A lesson in fashion I have a hat called Paris that I wear when I want to feel alone and she dresses in the heart of the city dresses herself in my thoughts pulls up into it in the night like a skintight dress that she will not take off.

(One kiss just one eyes closed lips out waiting hearing you walk away.)

And my eyes closed still. tonight i sleep with my ceiling fan spinning fast as it can just to feel the wind ya know believe in something invisible overhead ya know and something that i breathe. i sleep with my fan spinning fast as it can to pretend im in the sky again and i am that plane flight fourteen-forty-four and hold you on the inside window seat in my mind staring out from my eyes. and if you’d like to fly back i’ll someday tell my daughter, ‘your mother and i? we met in the sky. cause that’s where you meet angels.’

Mais tu est en France maintenant. Je ne comprends pas.

I don't understand.

puroslam, san antonio.

i somehow won a slam on tuesday. it was PuroSlam in San Antonio (google it, its really cool). with this and then the gordone competition, im super super grateful to god. here's the video of the first one i did. its "calluses", but revised for a three minute time limit. sorry for the crazy hands and whiny voice and stuttering. i was nervous heh. (thanks goes out to Anastacio for filming/uploading this! this guy is an amazing poet, his stuff will give you the chills.)

off fm 359 between hempstead and monaville at dusk.

hi. sorry i’m short of breath

sorry for the dirt in my nails

see i just came up from the earth

had to dig around deep for this one

but i found it, thank god.

lord knows i can’t write this shit myself.

 

this one was

off fm 359 between hempstead and monaville at dusk.

 

i knelt on the grass head down toward a house called mecca

that i still see when i dream

that im a kid again

and didn’t stop there. no.

i pushed my hands into the land and planted

myself in the soil warm like wedding cake

up to my wrists

i felt the face of a raincloud. its skin was dry.

felt a dustdevil cry

a hurricane breathe in gasping afraid

an earthquake pounding out beats on the floor of california

and a boy called earth spinning the globe like a disney teacup ride laughing

while others waited in fault lines a mile long

he told me stories

lying like little kids lie like its his job

to fertilize the forests with the bullshit he spits

said

“those streets up there ain’t concrete mister

they are paved with years

from farm to market to death rattle

ringing on past towns

drawin county lines with regolith

 

and people dont know

down that road in corpus

lazarus was born and raised

age five dying over and over and coming back

laughin more everytime

scared the hell outta of his momma

and played freeze tag with michaelangelo

where mike made his first statues out of schoolmates

down the line he took the chisel to himself and chipped away.

he prefers to work with people.

wants a lover to shape with his hands

someone that would carve him back

and chip away his excess.

he too longs for home

and says we all hail from corpus

even if we dont.

 

and people don’t know

before helen of troy

there was helen of troy, texas

who sang the blues

hiding bluebonnets in her mouth

blowin out petals with every verse

and looked most beautiful

with dirt on her hands.

heroes vied for her love

jefferson johnson lipscomb hurt and house

not by fighting and dying but learning her music

and every battle in troy she played out back

riding a horse fast as she fucking can.

and every battle in troy           

pushed her out of that nowhere town

to university then graduate school then legend.

she invented penicillin

and goes by doctor helen of troy, texas. ph d.

thank you.

 

and people don’t know

i grew up with father time

his real name is tim

and father time’s father mance

fixes up grandfather clocks down in navasota

and when tim sleeps through his alarm

rolling back years in bed

mance put father time in time out

and starts settin all clocks back

its seven thirty now

wait

six thirty

wait

yesterday

last year

1492

in a post christian age

he prays it will help us think

counter-clock-wise again.”

 

like i said that kid earth is full of shit.

so i left but he came with.

 

and up to my neck i heard a mountain range sigh

it spoke the same language as blue whales in fact the two are cousins

and it pulled out empty pockets like hoover flags and cried

“we got no money for you, mister.

us fault lines are broke as a joke.

just leave us alone.”

and “no no no” i said “the air outside makes me cough and my head feel light.

they paved highways under the english channel

but still don’t build billboards pointing down, not yet.”

“ok,” they said, “come on in but take of them boots

this mud’s ages old

so don’t track nothing new

if you stain it with clean then you get down and muddy it up again

spotless spots of sterile don’t come out of dirt that easy.”

 

those rocky mountains seemed rough around the edges so i left

and let little earth tag along

 

down deeper there’s old bones

in the shape of music notes

where you hear america whisper

into the ground’s ear, which we call

the grand canyon.

earth says to watch what you say

it hears everything

and like all kids, he’s sensitive

he can tell the hardness of your heart by how hard you step.

so im through with shoes

from here on out its bare feet for me

‘cause the ground thinks we all have rubber souls

(I didn’t argue about it. Wasn’t sure I’d win that one.)

 

Just went further down

and cooked s’mores in the fires of the earth’s core

and swapped ghost stories with mayan gods

 

when they fell asleep

i went back up and out the same way i came in

except i was a child again

at that age when we all spoke to the earth and

dug holes in sandboxes to gossip.

i stood and that kid earth yelled up to me one last thing.

he said

 

texas is yours.

you are in her hands.

this land is the bare back of helen

stretching out.

she lets you walk across her skin

and laughs when you think you are lost

‘cause youre not.

never.

(she is all over you.)

 

a bride you call the south spanning acres

she sleeps away the day, her form impressed in bedsheetrock

and the night, a blanket she clings to.

 

you are married to this land and she to you and she loves you.

til death don’t you part and on and on after that.

little mary calls me boo-boo ‘cause she can’t say william.

i am 'boo-boo'.

christened by my younger sister when she was two.

you see saints speak through sisters in all that gibberish.

 

my sister says no, boo-boo, “heaven” is a hole-in-the-wall mexican diner

with burritos that make believers

tostadas that the new testament testifies to

and queso you’d swear was the blood of christ.

angels eat at rancho grande in rosenberg, texas

that, like all of rosenberg filed for chapter seven seven seven

something like seven years ago.

after hours god cooks over a hot stove called hell

mops the floor with lightning bolts

wipes the sweat from his head with a cloud

wrings it out on the ground

he sets a yellow sign outside on the flooding streets

that reads “cuidado, piso mojado.”

 

before doing janitor work for the earth he used to fix wristwatches but

nowadays times are tough

he can’t break off enough to do redeeming even part-time

so salvation takes another place in rancho grande,

on the backburner.

he sells grace online ‘cause we wouldn’t take it for free and

passes out truth like flyers

that we fold in 4’s and stick in our back pockets and forget its there.

he prints pages of scripture with sudoko on the other side

‘cause otherwise we might glance but won’t read

and every sheet says that

human beings are flyers

(that would rather walk than try on secondhand wings.)

human beings believe

(only if it doesn’t mean reading seeing and/or thinking about things.)

human beings have hours upon hours to turn back the clock

(and instead live by its hands and kill time on our time off

writing tic-tac-toe epitaphs,

little games played out on its grave.)

 

in a stairwell haven outside all that rain inside making small talk

i made a covenant with god who told me that

the sky is not falling, i promise.

 

in a stairwell haven inside outside of the flood and all that rain and making small talk

i met the lord. i introduced myself to my own maker, said

my name is billy.

and bill and william and sometimes i think i’m all three all mashed up into one

and god said “i know. me too,

i still can’t think like a trinity

its hard enough to be myself by myself to know my own self but i know you already.”

god graced me one of them flyers of his.

this one had a poem on the other side.

he told me to read it aloud and out loud

speak slow

sing like a proud father singing his child to sleep

another word another note.

here it goes.

 

i am boo-boo.

christened by my younger sister when she was two.

you see, saints speak through sisters in all that gibberish.

 

i am boo-boo a skyscraper scraping the skies for another self

‘cause i dont love this self.

ive tried and tried and

still sink into my sheets and down

i fall under the bedframe holdin my breath staying dead still

in a game of hide and seek with william and billy and bill

and pray like hell they don’t find me.

i don’t get along with them.

 

i am boo-boo boo-hooing hiding yet again under this bed.

yes, i found a good spot this time and im not coming out never ever

not in a million years

down here i made imaginary friends with my fears and family history.

both reek of booze.

 

i am boo-boo

and my soul is not for sale.

i divvied it up and each piece is for free

for whoever needs it more than me.

 

i am boo-boo.

only name I say

when i call what’s left of my soul

back home when i know

i am whole again.

one three all and none.

 

here comes the rain.

bring on the flood.

Cool. it works. heh.