The Night Life.

this city is eaten away
but my door is unlocked

My Life Reassessed at Twenty-two

Pull me into this morning's holocaust.
Listen to my own skin taking light.

a bonfire re-erupts

and I think to myself:
I want endless fuel.

I want nothing but joy.

Impossible First Born

the muscle of a bicep
that arm around my mother

like a collar of stars

some things about a father's body
will always be found in his son.

To whom it may concern:

New short story finished titled: "An Attempt at Forgiveness Rewritten as a Spider on a Wall."

If you would like to help out by reading this story please leave your email as a comment.

And thank you. 

Saying nothing again
the moon hangs without nails.

 
Count headstones as a national pastime
until our consciousness is redefined.
No paper trail of words can make sense of
the loss, the wonder, the endless lack of
answers. My own bones an architecture
built as a collapsible model of
the universe with zippers and scaffolds.
I am disassembled by my Midwestern
doubts when I try to name the place where I
will exist after my name is forgot.

die of natural causes.

talk yourself to death.

Some nights I felt like apologizing for
not being better, for not knowing how
to make the most of a moment. But
inspiration doesn't walk back in
through the door. There is no breakfast
or morning after discussion. This is
my life and everyone, including myself
will draw the same conclusion.

 Rewritten, Insane

I kept trying to write about the people I knew.
Patiently
like a spider draining fluid.

I was certain there was something alive in us.

Not a heart, a badly mixed color red
but maybe a dictionary of words.

The same 26 letters rearranging
themselves into new, beautiful things.

I can't write the story any better.

Every time I change it
I feel less like myself.

The Experienced Think About Concrete

A guilt as crooked as a bird's wing
held by the teeth of a cat was what worried me;
was that the past wouldn't leave.

That the worst parts wouldn't change.

The towels with which I wash
my face

would keep their colors.

What looked like a nest of eggs
in a tall, safe tree was a painting of a dream I had.

A breeze filled with feathers
went across an orange setting sky. 

 Underskin

the way a building is disguised
as a series of ascending stairs

I disguised my dreams
by my habit of standing near windows
of never standing close enough.

 No one should be called crazy

just because living in a created world
makes everyone too eager to feel guilty.

A Brief Example of Symmetry

remember the sand, the
cotton? removed and
 the water moving like marbles
inside of a glass.

our skin matched

and your hairs stood up
in the blue, sheet wind 

 New poetry project with Fred started today.

First three poems from the efforts are below.

Please follow, as this project promises more poems in the future.



Read more poems by Fred here:
http://massacre-change.livejournal.com/

Especially read one of his newer poems titled "The Pear and the Shade"
http://massacre-change.livejournal.com/79626.html

 Precursor to a Painted Nude

Stuck poring over the
space of a naked closet

my feet make a beautiful picture
with the carpet and my hands
with the dark air.

A bed behind me, with no one
laying in it, is a subtraction of

the years that have already
been divided without my knowing.




The bees twisted in groups above our heads

What we were then was ethereal -
summaries of twenty years of journal writing
stapled to the nimbus of our Great Innocence.

Every page licked.
Each muscle unwound

until there was nothing feral to locate.
Until there was no bone left.




Monotheism of Movement

The beach broke casually on the shore.
Sandpipers flickered across the horizon.
Salt lapped over buried toes and the night

came like a challenge
to stay silent. Lights switched on in the

distance fell inward, burdened
with the years they carried.

Down the coast, a crowded beach
house, a rational piece of land.

I didn't know if he or she or I
was anywhere nearby. 



- All Poems by Fred Bauters and Vince Bauters

 Two poems written with Josh Zoerner can be found here:

"necklaces"
http://joshzoerner.blogspot.com/2009/07/necklaces.html

"fireplace"
http://joshzoerner.blogspot.com/2009/07/fireplace.html


Josh has another incredible poem worth looking at titled "bedford, pennsylvania"
http://joshzoerner.blogspot.com/2009/07/bedford-pennsylvania.html

 I'll hold your stare from across the room
in the old green chair, with two arm sleeves

and a view

of the white wall behind you.

And if these are our best portraits,
our best completions of ourselves;
or just the most
convenient way to be remembered,

then I'm thinking of your brown hair
against white, still.

 Moonlight falls into every moving car.
The way an American painter considered
expressing the night. And then there is
the way it looks from a backseat,
the way it looks when not driving,
when watching the dada of streetlight shadows:
the culture lit up like a craving
orange animal.
Here the children fall asleep on each others' bodies,
their eyes closed in the rear view mirror.

 Blame Your Life on Someone Else

This present will be projected.

This life extended and

recast into the future like a cycled sky
until every cloud combines to a blanket

stain.

And this could happen while I'm in my car
which is not the car I had in my twenties, or
my destination is no longer the person I was heading
towards. There was a curve. There was black

ice. Or maybe I slashed my own tires.

It's a type of fear. Just a kind
dressed in its own clothes which
it can take off as easily as the lover
who has lost his insight

into the situation

or has simply walked into a room
with the wrong person waiting.

 On a Bed Spread

Be aware and watch the hands
grow wider

like a field with birds constantly
flying out and out, not poured

but thrown up.

And then lightly fall;
sink like untied strings.

Odd that parts of the body

keep growing after
others stop.