Magnificant is a patchwork word,
           a lonely word, 
a tripping over my mattress-tongue word. 

Mag- is great,
 is grand, 
is a 500 piece band 
in pressed black suits
without a           care 
without a           wife
without a             life 
just the music 
wrapping around their hearts
like boa constrictors in the night

-cant is can’t without a ‘,
Chant without an h,
Canto without an o;
That last one is like a tree root,
It grows things that speak about singing, 
about a mouth being a doorway, about an evanescent taste of eternity 
brushing past our lips and into the cold air surrounding our 
fragility 

(-nifi- is just vacant letters inbetween)

Magnificant is a life lived well,
A perfect love,
A ringing bell,
Auburn hair wrapped up in a red bow
that falls around your shoulders,
Breakless porcelain crescendos,
Breathy fire songs carried in hand,
Bluefishes moving between the fusia ribboned rib-bones of death beauty, 
Chutes drifting drearily downwards,
Chai tea in white cups,
Chiaroscuro painted across your face when the rain hits the window,
Duermo y sueño intensamente,
Dormant nomadic thought stranded,
Dorian’s mordant expression eating like causticity through fingertips,
Elongated sickness creeping quietly,
Effacing out each bitter pill,
Erasers coated in pencil blood and aborted conceptual realizations,
Free love bound with needs and rope,
Fucking emptiness to get warm,
Finding out that love is a disease for a soul’s piece of eternity,
Grinding my headbones to dust,
Gimp legs holding up the rust,
Greenish beasts playing in my ear so I hear it all just slightly wrong,
Hell as my home without a hearth,
Havoc cavorting across my skin,
Holier-than-thou specters without eyes-to-hear and ears-to-see,
Irish eyes enraptured and shattered,
Immolating tendrils of empathy,
I finding screams without joy and balance without grief,
Jacob’s ladder flashing past,
Jumping up and down on my lungs,
Jesus kissing me beside my ear and whispering that life’s less than a day,
Kilns crumbling inward and out,
Killing the crying out for enough,
Keepsakes stuffed under the bed because they cut deeper than razors,
Luminescent dreaming ‘fore morning,
Leeches turgid and clammy,
Licking my lips because I’m dry and tired and I want a cigarette,
Moody dark blue shadows,
Morbid trees without any green,
Me breaking stride because I’m sick of this band it’s just for the kids now,
Nouveau expressions pour menteurs,
Necromancy just to get out of bed,
Never wanting to leave the covers because they cover up the decay,
Opaque daydreams shot in film,
Oevrus built and burnt,
Occidentally perceiving the sun arising and falling down,
Purple bruises deep and wide,
Peeking out from underneath skin,
Pleading for synthesis with my recompense for my offense,
Queer incidence forgotten,
Queens dropping crowns down,
Queasy lady leaning and making a spectacle of herself in that dress,
Rail fences painted black and blue,
Racking the courses for the answer,
Raconteurs telling you a story that I never wanted you to hear,
Snapping back with bullet speed, 
Sidling up here with scintillating ease,
Sighting where I’ve landed while my vagrant mind went adrift,
Tigers waiting for my back to turn,
Treating others like they treat me,
Truthful sincerity without a hinting shadow of false lies or redundancy,
Us without me or you,
Understanding one comes from two,
Usurping our thrones and making them stools to place our feet upon,
Veering to and fro and back to to,
Violent passion as gentle as you,
Vowing that I (that’s me, you see) will always love you (you poor lovely),
Wicker frames to house ourselves,
Woad to paint our hands together,
Water to wash away all the separate lies and pieces of the pain, 
Xenoliths where we are inside,
Xylophones playing better songs,
Xenon floating inside the dumb lamp that I loved and you hated,
Zeroes and ones exiled to bed,
Zeniths of perfection instead,
Zen inside the walls of our selves attached unmistakably to each other.

Magnificant is the Great Song,
It is life’s bewilderment at beholding the veil and it’s barbaric YAUP when it peeks behind and beneath the cloth. 

I am/you are/she is/he is/they are/we are All, Magificant. 

The singing, dancing dead are we,
But soon we won’t need eyes to see. 

I,

petulant by doleful disposition,
succumbing to catacombs of pity
unto this serrated image of self,
refusing to pardon or attest to
this innate aberration of the mind
malformed by relapse and grind,

testify to

the body as a boiled blood cauldron
of malarial composites and feces,
the body as a brattish burden cavity
of involuntary and derisory feats,

and revolt,

alternating as servant or concubine,
molested most by such indifference,
the barriers pillaged through trauma,
aware of anxiety’s almighty ubiquity,

as carrier to

obsessive-convulsive fits of irreality:
phantasmagorias fatuous yet freeing,
the only mutiny available to exercise,
faculties exploited confound trepidity,

despondency;

an imperishable mold cultivating
secret spores of profane insight
that garner along the roots of defeat,
unknown to host and foreign to many,
incorporeal from semblance to marrow,

urging catharsis.


–Cooper Callinan

Run a finger down the spine
of a much masticated book
and it will speak of milage,
life could be printed in braille.

Lineage reaching back through history.
You’ll find it painted on the walls
of caves that have been darkened
by centuries old cover-up.

Waiting to be discovered by beating
and breathing hearts, run rampant.
These are your brothers and sisters…
as flawed, and as perfectly imperfect as
you.

Fall in love with the marathon of hopes,
the symphonic transcendence
between the history, and the future,
where we fall in the in-between.

We too, are waiting to be discovered.

Our walls are painted, and our colors run
rampant. They bleed through, and are
unbound, and our unbound flight.
Learn to sing through the centuries old
cover-up.

Run a finger down the spine
of a much masticated book
and the milage it speaks is the story.
it’s yours written out in braille.

You have to feel your way.

stop

                                            there’s nowhere
                                            else to go,
                                            really,
                                            why keep running
                                            into the night?

drop

                                            the stars are
                                            crashing to the ground
                                            and the sky is cracking
                                            open and you have
                                            to remind yourself
                                            that you wouldn’t have
                                            gotten far, anyway

roll

                                            propel yourself
                                            the other way and
                                            don’t stop until
                                            you’ve reached better
                                            days

To the ding and the dong of the

Soapbox gong.

Feet a slip slapping

On the street a

Tip tapping to an old

Man to rapping, ‘bout Jesus and the end

How it’s just around the bend

Catching my eye as I walk on by

Repent now young sinner c’mon be a winner

Why’nt ya join me in the sky, I’ll teach ya to fly

Its heaven ya know

When ya looking down below

C’mon be a winner

I need me some dinner

Coins a flinging in a hat a ringing

Eye catches eye and the nodding on by

As my feet a slip slap

Down the street

And tip tap

All along to the dong

Of the soapbox gong

Safety pins are
only safe
if you remember
to keep them pinned,
and paper clips
don’t hold as tight
as staples, stuck
through papers’
tattered edges,
and glue sticks
can’t fix
broken hearts
or shattered windows,
just like 
duct tape
won’t save
a leaky pipe
or make you
forget
last night.  

I have made 365 poems to her 

idolizing her 

                    glorifying her 

                                          loving her 

but still she won’t acknowledge me 

she keeps staring down at me 

every night 

                  cold 

                         pale 

                                feelingless 

she’s the muse i always went for 

she’s the image of the evasive love

                                                      lover 

I wonder if I’ll ever understand 

that her heart is as stone cold 

as mine. 

before we were old enough for the 
bars
we’d hit the diner
2 AM
black coffee
cigarettes 
there was always time
for one more cup
always time to plan
for things that
never
happened 

then
we’d try the
motels
and
if they didn’t
take us
we’d sneak into
the park
and 

fuck
under-
neath
the
stars

You might think to quote oceans, vast
The clear of clean lakes

Or the pieces of seventies sky
Framing the jigsaw a Sunday makes

But if you’d never known these things
As more than words, you may as well talk

Of how blue -
        Is the smell of the street after rain
How blue -
        Is the strumming guitar in D minor
How blue -
        Is crickets scratching the quiet of night air
How blue -
        Is the sinking when the door slams behind her
How blue -
        Is the throb of a bruise when stubbing toes
How blue -
        Is the sore of the heart in your chest
        When you smell his breath on hers
        As she leans in to kiss

I do not welcome nostalgia tonight.

I do not laugh at what I should.

I do not like where I’ve been.

I do not want to think.

I do not see why.

I do not care.

I do not.

I do.