opinari

Let me introduce for you Judas,

as he winds through the produce

aisle in Whole Foods: looking for yellow

pears and lettuce for a salad:

his bed hair at 8pm a consortium

of the woman he slept with last

night and the wild look he's

been going for since he read Chabon's

book on literary style and being

a man - he's got his eyes set on

being healthy wealthy and wise,

the prize to be the gold herring of cool.

Open your mouth to the beer can,

draw that water in, draw it back out.

He's opining to be an opossum:

awesome, ain't it?

judas, me, need smokes

On your way home, honey, would

it please to buy Judas and me

some smokes? We have yet

to arm ourselves with clothes

and seriously face the day, but

seriously, who swings that way?

We've talked about you, lunging

from the sofa to the

broken yellow chair,

Icarus sailing above us,

all that golden-iron hair

I swear love, would you please

pick me Judas up some smokes?

The sea outside my window

is a-turning. He's gone blurry.

Come home. He's at my throat

and needs be me to relax,

needs not to make me choke

but now we're soaked, honey,

oh no! Come home! Fucking

come home: the flood from the rag

is rung, is rung

lighthouse at sunset, lol what, judas

The news comes that Thomas Kinkade is a prick.
I'm not surprised, but why?
He's been making grandmas happy
and happier for years now.

Don't tell me
my grandma can't be happy.
Just don't. She's unhappy enough.

I'd buy that mustached
painter a drink. I talked with Judas,
he said he would, too.
But shit, man, those pictures
old T.K. paints are so bad
he'd probably sue. Sure, I said,
but it's hard to rip off a real fool.
Hard to sell out when your art is in
the homes of every geriatric Bible
collector that'd cry wolf
if your lighthouses didn't
glow so brightly, or didn't inspire
the comment: Sweet Lord,
that sunset is pretty.

(I was loved once, too.)

judas in the trenches

Judas sang a song of the gutter to me,
whispered line by whisper.
The grime, dirt, mud, and shit covered both of us
as the soil of the night was sundered;
Judas opened his mouth
and let me see him eat
the last tart he'd bought in Normandy.

We joked uneasily about the blood
between his teeth.
He seemed - almost -
as nervous as me.

And when the small echoing note
became a repeater
in that symphony in the unquiet dark,
when the quiet chorus
of water running in the trenches
between the starkness
of the stripped naked trees
sang in my ears, when what was once reloaded
became automatic: a pounding sore,
I began to know - as I quoted Homer and some of David's psalms,
that I would be
one of the dead ones
watched only by the salt-filled eyes of the night.

judas takes the women out boating

Judas, that working class (blue collar to the core) loose fisted man

who loves his selfhood and loves his fishing tackle,

what a man, smokes smokes his rolly's and drinks his brown liquor straight.

He slaps the mouths of the wicked children out of line, what a man,

takes the women out boating and gets the night-time spins,

bellows like Kerouac or maybe a more hellish Whitman, yawp-roar-yawp,

livid and alive, casting out line after line.

He's wasting your time, not his -

he's simply - no more - than Judas, watching the women grin.

judas, with a loaded gun

And I will say that Judas is a soldier

who stands all night in the rain guarding

a powder magazine -

he will begin . . . he will

think strange thoughts in the night,

soaked in the rain.

Who can blame him?

Not me.

judas becomes the beast

Endowed with wisdom,
Jenny is christened
in a little pool by an elder
fool with flowered robes.
Mmhmm, says her papa.
Her atheist mama
is quite skeptical.

They'll be held

to a silence elliptical this time

next year.

Watch out, you wee parental things.
Judas wants to eat that child.

judas shakes

What if the metaphysical became unequivocally solid? The philosophers would be terrified.

Suddenly nothing to do. Professors worldwide, irritated.

Peter and John seek weaponry.

Judas smokes more and more.

His sides shake with agitation.

The stars begin to fall from the sky.

judas smokes

Judas smokes on the front porch after playing cards.

He whistles because he won, he takes deep full drags and smiles. The moon smiles with him. The off-white light is perfect.

He’s already counted the coins everyone expects him to count because he likes to count.

Peter and John are jealous. They shit themselves with jealousy.

Judas keeps the money and they do the cooking.

They think Jesus looks at him funny, but playing cards requires their full attention.

Judas flicks off the ash and smiles at passersby, especially the women. He likes them.

He thinks about drinking beer at the Fisherman’s Terminal because this seems like an honorable task. And it is.

He’ll go to bed on a full belly tonight.