the highway of eden

by Atti?

the barrel spit a seed through the marrow
that grew into a leaf,
and bloomed on the backside
of his head-
his final thoughts were roses,
and the crown of thorns
that had circled round his door
before they plucked the buds from his skull

and buried him in the pricker bushes
-because the flowers are too dirty
to hold his contradiction
in the bosom of this rotten soil.

he died in the music of a soft suicide
where the razor gently kissed his lips
and his wrists
stared into the sky for prayer
-and under the headstone
his heart broke as he slipped
the silken silver
through the ill form of its dinner;

he swallowed the bumpers
and twisted steel
through a hollow dream sequence
that replayed on backside of the blade,
before it began to play-
he still chokes on sirens
before the headlights trickle down
his jagged face

-still remembering his first,
where the sunset on his forehead
and his fragile eyes
shattered on glass that proved to have
a thicker head then his.
his first,
where the scream ran
from the back of his head
to the swell of his lips
where the angel had forgot to kiss,
before it wrapped itself around his breath

.. it was his first death.

as his parents fell to their knees
he grew well on his feet,
in a coffin coughing on, support,
that threw the covers back over it’s lazy fucking head
to go back to sleep
after scribbling R.I.P. on the screens
that learned to double for a heart
with a bass line that could hardly
beat.

the airbags bloom
in a field of glass shards,
where twisted metal
grows from debris on the first day of spring,
and nature is mechanic tragedy
where jersey barriers
wear the blood stains like fresh fruit
as the bush in a massacre
that spilled it’s guts on Eden’s highway-

and prayers stumbled into the bone yard
sponsored by your local
internet provider-
along the cold steel
that doubles for a monorail
as the weekday starts.

the fiber optic cable
puke’s hopes and dreams at his feet,
as the news cast covers the story
with a funeral
live on TV.
his headstone is engraved
with his death date followed by “News Channel 8,”
and a microphone sent
to the homes of family and friends,
to catch their final words
of the dead.

.. and he dies again
-a suicide dive for the end,
where the eyes really tear
before the mourning has raised,
and the shoulders for a fallen family
aren’t connected to the back of an acronym!

so he tries to die;
enough to where he’s reached an afterlife
where touch isn’t lust,
and love isn’t digitally rebuffed
-rolling in his grave in disgust
to tighten the rope,
in hopes of finding a life where the feeling is
real.

swoon

SWOON is a street artist from New York City who specializes in life-size wheatpasteprints and paper cutouts of figures.

Swoon, real name Caledonia “Callie” Curry, studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999. Swoon is also a member of the Justseeds Artist Cooperative.

Swoon's worlds are often populated by realistically rendered cut-out street people, often her friends and family. Riding bikes, talking on a stoop, going grocery shopping - these people traverse a cityscape of her own unique invention. Bridges, fire escapes, water towers and street signs create crisscrossing shadows and spaces through which her figures move. Inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, Swoon uses cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of the experience of the streets.

the rat : the writer

by Atti?

i theologized reincarnation
between adolescent angst
and a mid-life crises thirty years in the making
of a twenty year old canyon dweller
in the state
of mind that has been said by many to be
"grand, er"

i've constructed monuments of my own failure
on each side of this exit way;
while i feed the city of garbage where i play,
i'll keep throwing sour love songs
tangled in last nights leftover-
dones'
and wish i could see the sun
just once,
as if i'd even know what to do with it
other than close my eyes until
it was done;

then write some ambiguously coherent poem
that doesn't even end about it,
on the backside of a napkin,
who's backside grins with jovial idiocy,
who's for-side is a notebook,
who's backside is a tragic epilogue
regeneratively:

i am the rat
who packed all his belongings in to a poem,
and bothered to recycle for the sake
of a more conducive environment-

but i'm beginning to see more saturdays
in these rotten heaps,
than fridays to be their predecessors:
TGIF - yes, Thursday Goes Infinitely Forever
between misplaced clocks
in a lot of rusted suffix where the pre-fix
apparently,
is not.

trace my own circumference
until i walk a circle around my own misdirection,
trying to justify the end
of every poem i've thrown
into the construction of this second-hand home
-with out the means
to remember what it is i wrote.

i'm the trophy wife of beautiful words,

who can't even count to the sum
of his own accomplishments
without a second hand
-who can scribe for the first.

i've subscribed to my own literary magazine
of half concluded exposays-
from the first issue in Novemeber of 1988
up until the presently future day
-where again i'm writing the past
because i've already forgotten of today.

i know
i'll throw this issue away too
-help build a solid foundation for my adobe hut.
my own bullshit makes for the best mortar;
even if its backside starts to grow flowers,
and its for-side can cup a coward,
and its backside can be picked for hours
by its for-side's half-fully empty coward;

i make two cent's of every message in a bottle
i recycle after sending it adrift to myself.
i've lost it all and earned it back with every poem,
and chanced it every time again
in hope that it will always come back to me

in the very end.
.Or the very beginning
depending on where it starts..
.. or it's ending?

???