I am not Billy Collins

Billy Collins does not live on my street
nor do his poems come to mind
when I hum a line from an Art Tatum solo
when getting the mail under whatever
the color the sky happens to be,

I would think he fears bills
and invitations
as I do, prefers tenor saxophone
to reedy alto flights,
finds solace in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
when his computer breaks down
as I do when things fail
and I scramble for a passage I copied to a business card
from a description I read of someone else’s review,

There is no house with picket fences
nor apartments set off from the street
by grand trees and high hedges,
there are only parked cars blocking
the sidewalk as they impose their tires
on the curb, tattooed monsters drinking beer
and girls sobbing into cell phones
about what they wore on their worst night ever,
and me, dressed to leave as if forever to be gone
but staring at the computer trying to
fill this page with words,

Instead of a house mate singing,
there leaf blowers roaring
up and down the walk
scattering clipped grass from one
door way to another,
there is only ginger ale for
vodka martini fatalist,

Billy Collins would
find some clever things
to write in the absence or presence
of anything interesting
occurring in the place where
his feet are actually planted,
some planet or star or
an old Movie Poster
would rouse from his
seat and send on a mission
to get some inane thing
done because so much of
Western Culture hinged
on his having yet more
epiphanies and eurekas
as he sorts his bills, licks stamps,
contemplates dinner
and how large the portions,
Mozart and Wallace Stevens
ride in his backseat
as he drives to the market
where he meets Charlie Parker
and Thomas Carlyle
in the desert line, eating snack samples
made of cheese and crackers
from a lady in a tunic red as roses
on the slipperiest anniversary,
and then it’ll be home, a poem,
a cool round of music
and settled bills,
a world at rest after a hard day of being.

At this moment my dog
would bark if
I had a dog
but my feet hurt
all the same
walking for blocks past
Radio Shacks and taco stands
dragging a plastic bag of used paper backs
and canned food
for what is another night
of Law and Order reruns
and a final thought
in passing that

I wish I was Billy Collins
for a half hour just to see
what it’s like to live
in a world where
every thing I do ends up
perfectly measured and clever
in the form of a sentence
in a perfectly poised poem
that makes me laugh
or cry and leaves me
somewhere in between
as if dumped on an empty highway
from a fast car after being wooed
by the sleaziest bastard in my little town.

The death of small towns

Strange habits of brew overkill
studs the patter like
buttons on the coat sleeve
that cut the nostrils
in a full winter climes’
descending scale
of hot items.

All the things about
how needed surgery
destroyed her capacity
to get the words in the right order
without sounding as if she’d
been riding to another water shed
with another boy
named Jason or John or Jake
as it maybe who had
a hobby of spearing rats
with his buck knife and
skinning them for wallets
he’d sew together and sell
at the drug store on Sundays,
after Church.

Seeking some kind of refuge
with the regulars who been
irregular for many twisted years,
seeking an easy place to sit
and read the paper,

there I was,

Drinking ‘though not
thirsty at all
as the sun set and the
light in the bay window
dimmed until the room
was gold toned, then sepia?
and then a fine dark ash
that was perfect for
falling asleep in or
breathing your last
as a final memory crowds
out every deadline I might fail to meet,
or merely continue for hours
drinking in the dark
in the same old chair
listening to faint music
and the late hiss of tires
on the street roll by
until it seems that
there are no doors
or windows in the room
and things are exactly as they always will be,
alone and lost in themselves
in various suggestions of dark vapor.

i am not a crow on a power line

there are so many dimes
in the universe that want
to leave my palm and fall
into empty soda cups
held by grizzly men
in need of a shower and a steak.

there are so many grizzly women
leaving pennies on the sidewalk
because there is nothing
less to settle for, nothing more
to stoop to.

stoops full of scrubbed
and shaved men glistening
with soap, pink as rug burns,
cracking their knuckles
and rubbing their necks.

plastic cups with traces
of orange juice along the bottom
litter the street in front
of what was once a hotel
when rooms were rented
until check out time
the next morning.

stacks of Tiffany lamp shades
fill the back of the truck
and block the skyline
that tries to reach higher
that the loftiest power line
in the city where every lazy crow
comes to rest in the daylight
just to watch us cross streets,
go into buildings, write checks,
cry in the chair that faces
the street,
getting up again
and rubbing our grizzly chins
and the back of our necks
as if we knew what we were doing.

Shoes on a wire

Shoes on a wire
Originally uploaded by Ted Burke.

i am not Bob Dylan

nothing jangles except
keys in my pocket,

there are no
ghosts around
the light switches
in my kitchen,

they cannot read
my passport
at the border
as it drips with
Farmer Brown's paint,

i was under
the yellow sun
today dreading
avian flu,

why are my sheets
covered with
with chalk crop circles,

my friends from
medical school
won't tell me
what's in my mailbox,

even my girl friend
tells me what
my wife couldn't admit,
i am not bob dylan.

Four Scenes Set to Country Music

1.

Too long after the sun
has set do you dare me to tackle
something that sends
you running through the French doors
holding your nose,
there's something about the phone
bill
I wanted to ask you about, but
then I'm distracted by you on the patio,
back turned,
waving your hands, shaking your wrists,
an orchestra of flowers
below your feet
to do your bidding.

2.

You unfolded the newspaper
to where you
found me on page three,
under the obituaries
and next to the ad
for the Sunday specials.
My mouth was open,
I was shaking my fist,
the world around me
was leaning to one side,
yet only my hat was flying
off in that direction.

3.

You want to die
and I want to dance.

I want to sleep
and you want to
talk something through
until natural light
fills the room.

You want to
get real
and I'm always
in the mood
for amore
or at the mechanics
of it all.

Both of us feel like
Chinese tonight
and neither of us
have asked
why there's a grotesque
onion loaf in the middle
of our table,
next to the flowers,
which are dying.

4.

Chances are that some
of the things that I might say
will save someones life,
provided, of course,
that this is a cartoon
we are living in.

Nights are cold in the canyon

Cross your arms when hearing
your wife and her phone calls
in the night on the porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling,
whose arms caught you
and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O'Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your harmonica
until your lips start to bleed
at which time you'll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts.">Slate Magazine: "Nights are cold in the canyons

Cross your arms when hearing
your wife and her phone calls
in the night on the porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling,
whose arms caught you
and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O'Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your
harmonica
until your lips
start to bleed
at which time
you'll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts."

cafe_windows

cafe_windows
Originally uploaded by Ted Burke.

I am not Jack Kerouac

I am not Jack Kerouac
when my thumb lifts over the curb
and into on coming traffic,

Every tree I see is not
Big Sur with its endless groves
and shacks in the clearing,
smoke rising from chimneys
made of twigs and old tin cans,

Every abandoned car
reminds me of paradise
under harsh gleam of
bay side moon when
every spoon and pair of dice
glitters with impossible radiance
as the stars form a grin,
a full set of teeth
for the man in the moon,

I am not Jack Kerouac
and I won't have a drink
as I type,

I am as sober
as the judge
who laughs at hangings,
straight as managers
of franchise shoe stores,
square like new ice
when it hits the bottom of a glass,

Yet I dream
again of delerium and sin
and states of the union
where the grunion run on
the beaches under the clouds
covering the
acne scars of the man in the moon,

Don't let me speak too soon
nor too late,
Kerouac is dead and
in such a state
that he cannot spend
a dime of the money he made,

I am not Jack Kerouac
and this dollar is mine
to buy a Red Bull with
for those wings that keep
the city humming along,
singing a song
for pennies a day.

I Am Not Wallace Stevens

I told her to step back from the microphone
and speak slowly, to not tap the roof of
her mouth with the tip of her tongue that
need not click and pop in amplified echoes
while reading her poem by Wallace Stevens
about his crows, staring down on him from
wires stretched over new roads cutting
through the palm trees lining the edge of earth.

She read quickly, clipped, skipping over
troubling icons and isolated flora, the man
scratches his head, rubs his chin, tilts his head
and is stunned as wing spans throw shadows
over his face and spoil his perfect profile
on the side walk he walks upon in a white suit and cane,
she breaths steadily, readily, swaying with the fronds
and her blue eyes, like ponds, grow calm as cut grass
as the sentences become longer and the words
veer into beautiful cities and magic forests
described in pages of secret novels
that is read aloud behind the backdrop
of each tailored turn we take in day of getting through.

She reads and comes to an end
where the music doesn’t stop
and even the silence is full of notes
that are scored and played in deferred crescendos,
applause fills the air, one hand, two hands,
four hands, five and more fill the air,
for the moment dulling the screams of cash registers
or the coffee grinders pulverizing beans
to fine, black essence of legal tweak and tattered,

I go to kiss her after dinner
and she withdraws
to her corner of the front seat,
opening the door,
standing over the window
while I rattle my car keys,

“You’re not Wallace Stevens”
she says before she turns
and walks up the stairs to her bungalow,
her eyes full of moonlight
the color of ice cream.

I am not Frank OHara

I am not Frank O’Hara
nor am I a blank slate or canvas
yearning for thick chunks of chalk
or coarse ugly brushes
to write and configure upon
all the materials that not like each other
and the friends they remind you of.

I am not Frank O’Hara
but that is me
on my knees in these old photos
I was going to throwing away,
you see me looking for a cassette tape
of our favorite Human League album
that flew my hand when you
tried to grab it in some lunge of love
or wrestling hold,
it went sailing behind a bookshelf
shoved against the wall,
tall and heavy, weighted with
art books and newspaper piles,
you snapped the photo
to use against me
in some future scenario when
my dignity would be an issue
and to prove, after all, that
I am not Frank O’Hara.

I am not Frank O’Hara
nor am I concert musician
nor an old Russian man playing chess
on a side street in Brooklyn,
I am in California
under the eye of an unforgiving sun
and the second hand smoke
of fires that burn closer to the beach
every day the weather remains dry as Algonquin wit,
I am waiting for you to come home
or for the avian flu to perch on my roof,
and yes, this long and wonderful day
is done and for all the phone calls,
emergencies, angry customers and
friends who will not take your advice
I am glad I am not Frank O’Hara
because I am breathing
and reading his poems that make
me want to pick up a pen
or stroke the keyboard
for words to fill the monitor
in wondrous rhymes about
the odd turns and twist of
every spoken word and gesture
of finger and hand to faces
that will not lie about how
the heart feels,

I am not Frank O’Hara
and dune buggies
are my greatest fear.

How Sad

Talking to myself
about the lines
crossing old railroad ties.

So many gloves
for one hand.

Seldom to the East,
nature never leans.

Factories
dot the matrix.

This sentence is about
itself complaining
about it's circular nature.

Well known map.

How much target practice
shall we demand
for our first date?

She swore it was all true.

I saw you last night
sitting next to
Charlie Weaver,
who was napping
when circle got the square.

She swore it was all
true , that our talent
were different
from the average bear
and that any attempt
to unite them

Would change the course of
mighty rivers,
unhinge doors,

Make us desire to
bend steel in our bear hands.

Cups rattle right off
the shelf.

False diction is all there is.

Moonlight on bath tub water.

ANIMAL RIGHTS

So the laughter takes us all
to another day that is after
the latest worse day to grace
the pages of diaries whose
ink runs and blots on the page
in the rain,
where you were writing,

So spins another day laughing
at the runs in the stockings of
pretty women for whom legs
are a religion of length and shape.

So laughter is not the cure for all that
ails the soul in the unnamed center of night,
but it is song that’s barked like the glee
of seals in a circus act performing
Bach on so many tricycle horns.

So the shoe horn one brings to the jam session
can only play sole music is enough to
make us laugh again by the rise of the sun
when it comes over the hills
and gutted mansions that
ruin the view of the coast line
loops along the curve of the continent
that grows redder than lobsters
in a hungry man’s trap,

So the leather that was wasted on the sidewalk
is gone but the feet survive all the blisters
sweet potato blues could provide in a stretch of
giving some one else a hand for merely showing up
in not just a nick of time, but the whole block of wood as well.

So there is no peace under the stars
when we laugh at the sins of the fathers
that visit us in any hometown that can be hidden in.

So there’s a sign up ahead.

So who’s laughing now?

A hat in the sofa cracks

A hat in the
Cracks of ugly sofas
Ain’t nothing to
Brag about on Sundays,
Pally boy.

marry me during the commercial

the hands of my watch have stopped
dead in their track, frozen on the dial

and the spoon full of steaming soup
is an inch from my mouth, arrested.

the cat looks to be posing for cute posters of
cats knocking things over, like it's done tonight with

that drink that is stuck in mid air , in front of the TV
with the beer ad on where no can even lick their suds

because time has stopped for the time being because
you're out of the room, on a cell phone , smoking

a Camel as you probably conspire with a girl friend
to stuff me in burlap bag and leave me

on a corner in a bad neighborhood, thinking gypsies
or blues musicians will find me and give me something

to do besides moon over your image, holding my breath
until you come back into the room,

just like your doing now, coming through the door
reeking of filter tips , cell phone in your grip,

looking at me askance when you see me exhale,
blowing out candles in the process, oh yeah,

I mean it's okay, really, I'm just glad you're back
from the break you took in the middle of my proposal

which means that all the breakable things left in the air
in your absence can now come crashing down to the

hard tile floor , all the bric-a-brac and my world particularly
getting bruised, bent and shattered and breaking wide, wide open,

my heart is broken again
when it's time to swim

and there's nothing funny about this at all,
I mean,

you're kind of cute, the way you
reduce me to rubble
even in my finest
courtin' clothes.

The Drive Home

The boy whistles half a song
he heard half on the car radio
when he was half listening
with the other ear to his Dad
who was half asleep already
after the long party where Mom
took his keys and pulled him the coat sleeve.

“Please please me” the boy finally sings
in the middle of Dad’s story about
the time when he was ten and he swung a bat
and hit the ball so hard that it sailed all
over the globe and came back  that
where the game was played and broke
an apartment window that made
the old women scream
and the young men cry,
“Please please me, oh yeah….”
the boy sings,
Dad smiles,
Mom drives,

“Oh yeah what? asks Dad,
rose cheeked and  slurring
as Mom fires up a cigarette,
with the electric lighter,
“Please you what oh yeah?”

The boy looks at Mom
who is looking  straight ahead
as they drive the country road
back to the city at night,
billboards  for A&P and Ford dealerships
passing by until the sky brightens with
street lights and neon that makes
the snow on the grown look grey,
full of suit.

“Oh yeah what?:” Dad asks again
and the boy coughs from the cigarette smoke,
thinking that the car no longer smells like new leather.

“ Please please me, oh yeah and I love you”
he sings, his voice cracking as he reaches
for a note that miles beyond  his grasp.

“…AND I LOVE YOU” Dad proclaims
and now looks out the window,
silent now and soon snoring
as the boy notices that
there are more houses passing by
and less wooded groves,

“Dad is snoring” he tells his Mom,
who was singing “Tennessee Waltz”
with Patti Page on the radio and
every violin player on the planet,

“Yes he is” she says, turning
into their drive way,
“he  loves even when he’s sleeping”.

Larry Rivers History

Larry Rivers History LessonIn spite of everythingthat's hard and coveredin cigarette burnsThere's not a ghostof a chance thatthis exact world hasbeen here beforeI entered the museumto stare at statuesand rooms full of soaked canvas,Washington crosses the Delawareas though posing fora glossy magazine ad for whiskey or fabulous airlines,Manhattan is nestled inthe forests aroundGreat Lakes country,Those who fire firelong riflessee only the bloodtheir red coatsincite in the eyesof those whose farmsthey burn on sketchy grounds,History and advertisingoverlay each otherand leave their tracesas rough drawings wrestling for control of the wrist that holds the pencil,The world in outline,fading reds and bluesdrifting out of the lines of what the eyesees in one viewing,the easiest dimensionThat shimmers, blurs,stutters on viewing,repeats itself endlesslyalong with so many deathsand births that crowd thecalendar days,Damn I wouldwalk a mile for many a Cameleven thoughI smoked my last oneten years agothis fall.

A PILLOW BETWEEN OUR WORLDS

A PILLOW BETWEEN OUR WORLDS

I am sleeping
while I make the
eggs the way an army likes them,
guys with guns
and armor
who came by last night,
looking for a party,
finding religion instead,
the only thing to
do when there are no women
in the house and no war to
fight except a yawn
and some obscure itch
at the scalp line,
an army of scared rabbits,
a  receding hare line,
a joke the eggs me on
snoring as I flip
the eggs, scrambled ,
like an alphabet soup,
onto plates, snoring
and sawing logs with nostrils
flared like pants on a ballroom dance floor,
an army praying for women, just some one to pick a fight with,
I find myself chewing my tongue, head against the pillow, awake in the light that comes from the bathroom , there is water running, the sheets are wet with sweat and drool,
I see your mouth glisten with  lipstick,
your dress hangs on you
so right and precise as it molds itself lovingly over your breasts and
hips that it hurts me to say goodbye again, I know what you will say
when  you see me watching,
“You’re still asleep, friend, go back to the
other dream,
an  army waits for you
that could  use your knowledge about
things to do
when everything is done”,
so I close my eyes, a tail of your dress
whipping around a corner, through a door ,
and  there are dirty dishes,
guns and armor all over the carpet, tired men
with out wives or girlfriends
to love them
mediating on uniforms and regulations  in an age
when war is only dreamed of
in philosophy,
this world
fades, the shadow
at the end of each street
I  think I can enter into passing by
in cars and buses,
doors and windows looking onto other dreams
of armies naked in their
lack of  dreams, a religion of standing around,
waiting for a whisper,
this dream before the next one,
a pillow between our worlds.

Poem during the eleven o'clock news

Poem during the eleven o’clock news

A car backfires around
the block and the news
that night still comes to
nothing but the same old scores
and the same teams swing clubs,
throwing tethered balls, not a word
of who ran out of gas on the tracks
as the train appeared in a movie

Maybe, yeah, a movie
we were watching
about someone's stalled car
coughing for gas in the tail pipe
as a locomotive approached
around a dark, bend of the mountain
and a basketball bounced and rolled
off the playing floor to the showers where
the   towel boy dropped the phone
he'd just answered,
dropped the soap in a shower you were taking,
female and foamy and curved like the lines
of cello pressed between legs
of a musician who watched a foot ball game
with pork rinds on his breath,
the tips of his fingers,
you ask for a towel,
a new cake of soap,

I slip train tickets under your pillow,
think of the moon in low, stirring tones
of rich wood purring sounds that are
nothing like cries for help,
the TV is on in all these worlds
that are passed through.

I dream sports on tracks a planet
thriving  on humidity and cigar smoke,
you say "give me your money
and make a wish, please,
make a wish and don't tell me..."

Recent Fiction Less Than Five Years Old

Meet Me in the Parking Lot
Stories by Alexandra Leggat
  
Flannery O'Connor, Russell Banks and Jersey Kozinzky meet for coffee, hash browns and small talk about psychic exile and the best sort of knife edge to hack through a bothersome bit of bone. Odd, disturbing, violent material here--violence either explicit or always at the edge of the crystallized situations here--all of which are made more jarring with Alexandra Leggat's taste for terse sentences and abrupt endings.

It works, for the most part, and the arc through the stories, life inside cars, on dark streets, side roads, parking lots behind anonymous bars, presents us with any number of dazed, abused and high strung women and rattled, crazed, raging men enacting any number of strange movements and quirks. At best, these stories are an adrenaline jolt, speaking truly to the sort of flash that gives one the urge to leap in front of traffic, to challenge immensity of grave and incalculable danger. Fans of Joyce Carole Oates take note , as Leggat seems a likely and artful heir to her position as chronicler of the Imperiled Woman.

 

Still Holding
A novel by Bruce Wagner
 
There's something refreshingly unforgiving in Bruce Wagner's lacerating Hollywood satire; those readers who've had a love/hate relationship with the movie business, an attraction-repulsion dynamic that loves movies themselves and yet is sickened by the business culture that makes it possible, will find the nasty laughs here telling, truthful, and an overdue joy to read.

Anyone else who desire something redeeming to emerge from all the bad faith, a kind act or sacrifice arising from some forgotten reservoir of decency would be better off seeking less severe wit. Wagner mines the old joke about Hollywood that "underneath the tinsel there's more tinsel", and obviously appreciates Jean Baudrillard's theories on simulacra, where the slavish and stylized impression has replaced the real; set this heady abstraction on to the business of celebrity lookalikes and the community that arises among them, we get a twisting , fun house mirror of Hollywood , a parallel existence that mimes the worst and most inane features of the stars they imitate. Wagner, in addition, writes like a wizard who knows where all the bodies are buried and the garbage is dumped.

Oblivion
Stories by David Foster Wallace
 
At his best, David Foster Wallace is an astute chronicler of the often needless (and fruitless) complications characters create for themselves. In these eight stories, he outlines the absurdity, sadness, and sheer comic reality of the outer-edge of consciousness. Fashion magazine editorial boards, consumer research companies, and paranoid office situations are among the areas fictionally explored where human activity fractures into dozens of frantic, nervous tangents. Oblivion is a dizzying, daring set of tales - a riveting virtuoso performance. Ironic, yes, that Wallace's exhausting "maximalist" style, which seems dedicated to fitting everything in sight into a sentence that contains everything else, works best in his shorter pieces: the humor hits harder, the stretches of associations don't have time to die on the vine.



The Body Artist
A novel by Don DeLillo
 
DeLillo is perhaps the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork  Underworld  made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age.
 
The Body Artist  has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritualized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event.
 
DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud.  A short, haunted masterwork.

Nights are cold in the canyons

Nights are cold in the canyons

Cross your arms when speaking
of your wives and their telephone calls
in the night, on the back porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on through
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling?
and whose arms caught
you and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind
night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O’Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your harmonica
until your lips start to bleed
at which time you’ll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts
that makes this life worth sticking around for.

Poetry as Stiff Drink

Somewhere in space, the tempest of intellection vs. emotion in contemporary poetry ensues, participants more passionate than habitual losers at downbeat racetracks. No one walks away happy from these discussions, of course. Although common sense, the proper place for one or the other of those qualities lies in the middle, with a dominant tone depending on what is being composed, matters get sidetracked to issues that leave aesthetics behind and land somewhere in the swamp of Deeply Held Personal Beliefs. The outcome from that kind of morass, in the extreme, are crusades, jihads, and obsession with celebrity murder trials. Barry Goldensohn's poem "Reading Faust When Young" hasn't calmed me down, in any case. Sometimes it's harder to stay in the center of a discussion than on other occasions:

  Reading Faust When Young for David Mamet I remembers only the leap from the bridge into the turbulent river after knowledge, but not what special knowledge or what power ever came his way in the old story. I was young when I read it. Immortality meant art, and Faustus was never an artist. And as for girls, you didn't need the devil when you offered everything. What did he really need to know? What did she feel and could never say about the girl because she had no words for it? He had little to say to the Greats. Helen was a peep-show. And the stuff about his soul— well, that was religious and historical. Overreaching for me was natural. I wanted to know everything, to stay forever in school taking courses. God and the devil never figured in. With his snaky tail, the devil was too fanciful to explain the lines waiting for gas or a bullet and ditch and firebombs and carpet bombs and the icy rapture of ideologues shouting about who to kill and who to save. My fellow humans were real: their evil was sufficient. The sacred was love and art and the political dream. The world-drunk heart was what I took for the soul, which dulled the edge of Faustus' sacrifice, and god was never real enough to love or lose. ©2003 Barry Goldensohn

 All told, this is not a bad bit of remembering, though it seems a fanciful evocation of some delayed connecting of points whose effect, I think, ought to have less earth-shaking patios. There's a lot of throat-clearing harrummmmmphing going on in the lines as I read them where a slighter, more minuscule rhetoric could have prevailed. There's something to be said for distanced irony, the now-I-get-it school, but since the instances were fleeting, minor, gradients of perception building to a larger, if not earth riving sharpness, a voiceless swaggering in its couched self-loathing would fit the material better. It would seem a better idea if Goldensohn hadn't mentioned Faust or Jung at all but in the title, and instead placed us smack dab in the action of his past thinking, the incidents as he vividly recalls doing them in his earnest, youthful practice of applying his hormone-fused enthusiasms upon his world. The mention of the big names and their ideas, though nicely arranged and phrased, are too precious for me to take this as anything more than an occasional poem that would normally find its way to the bottom of a drawer: it fairly gloats with its knowingness, and the author sounds too close to thinking that his eventual lesson learned is something to glory in. 

Look at me. I am wrong on a higher plane. The piece is overloaded with references and glancing mentions of religion and myth; the poet's voice aside, this poem reads like an abstract of a freshman's ill-crafted term paper. One may ask Isn't a lyric poem supposed to be about emotion? Yes, a lyric poem is the verbal equivalent of a musical evocation of intense feeling that defies the logic of words to express adequately. Thus, the looping chains of association, the constant comparisons of unlike things, including the sounds of the words creating euphony. Intense emotion colors the entire world, cast in all engrossing tints. The world to the perceiver makes a certain kind of sense, though the sense eludes them more often than not; there is even an element of paranoia that can come to play here, as in the notion that everything in the world, be it people, places, things, institutions, weather, are all somehow connected to the internal transformation. The irony alone isn't an emotion, but because it has something to do with an individual's perception, whether the poem's speaker or the reader, it can become a key determining factor in how hot emotion might boil or cool off, whatever the case may be. Irony concerns the incongruity between what is said and what actually is the case. Since a lyric poem operates on the transcendent level where emotion bypasses logical argument in pursuit of impossible language, capturing the inexpressible conflicts, disjunctions, distortions, and contradictions between myth and fact, action and deed are likely to happen as default conditions. They will ratchet up the energy a lyric swoon requires. I do think that my own work and explications regarding verse aim toward a Dionysian expansion. Still, unlike a host of others before me who pursued that expansion into sheer incomprehensibility --Kerouac, late John Ashbery, Pound, Language poets who never stopped being enamored of their ability to type non-sequiturs--I think the image, lines, and music need to be reined in, operate within strictures, Jazz is hardly a formless expulsion sans melodic infrastructure, since the quality of the best sets of spontaneous composition requires suitable composed materials to contextualize the extrapolation; the form of the melody being extrapolated upon gives shape to the musician's improvisations. There's a point in the kind of poetry I find appealing and the poets I think do interesting work where they have to acknowledge something a real subject set in the material world, the physical world, and that there is a need to link the most fanciful forays and high-flying linguistic maneuvering to real emotion, producing something at the end resembling whatever effect the writer thinks he's working for. It's a dialectical process, for want of another term, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Simply because something is transcendent about existence does not imply that it is illogical or incomprehensible. Exactly. I think there are many instances, occasions, events, emotions, all sorts of confounding affairs that are absolute without meaning as we understand based on the equation of binary oppositions, i.e., something that is not this must therefore be that. 

Still, I believe that there are ways of understanding that instances require an acute use of intuition and instinct.I am not opposed to intellection coming into works of emotional duration, but something needs to connect with the reader as a felt experience. Otherwise, it's a waste of time reading a work composed solely for the novelty of showing off what one remembers from undergraduate survey classes. don't mind, and even encourage a poet to intellectualize as they write their lines, but the issue is about proportions and ratio. Goldensohn's intellection is strained for the amount of memory he's actually working on; the epiphany is too slight for the evocation of top-heavy names like Faust. Faust, of course, could have been used effectively as a reference serving a satisfying conclusion, but the hand is heavy here when the name and its cache is played. Irony trumps everything, as the saying goes, but it can also kill everything that's going on in work, and the willingness to abstract compulsively here makes for a small work that is all over the map. It's an over-packed suitcase. 

 Stevens's strategies are better, in so far that his work is about the experience, at the moment, in the intelligence of a perceiver who is in witness to things that will not yield their essence in the metaphysical sense. Though not overtly emotional, Stevens crafts a supreme fiction he often spoke of to take the place of the secrets that are forever unknown, a dramatized system of perception that acknowledges the world as its own adequate symbol. Stevens was entering the world, and to have the world he experiences shape and forms his readings and writings; I think he wrote as a man who was in that legendary state of constant becoming. Goldensohn sounds lost at best, though I am sure he can write a decent poem. This isn't one of his better ones. Stevens believes in the adage that there ought to be "no ideas but in things..." (concisely phrased and explained by William Carlos Williams). Stevens, with compatriots Williams, Eliot, et al., were, in their varied ways, obsessed with making language a hard, malleable material no less than clay or steel, and they wanted to write and elaborate upon images that didn't obscure the fantastic qualities of the world their language was supposed to be writing about. Perception is a dominant concern for this generation of modernist poets. I believe Stevens followed the loose dictates brilliantly and developed a methodology of processing the world that could capture in it many of its amazing juxtapositions. What is amazing about Stevens' work is that he develops a philosophy of perceptual imagination from the world as it already is. 

 As for supreme fiction, well, it's Stevens' term, and it is a brilliant shorthand for his unique compositional practice. The work isn't about methodology and philosophy, it's about the world Stevens experiences as a human being and the ideas these experiences brought to him when he came to write about them.  Any good writer gets a set of ideas they work on throughout their careers as artists, and Stevens is no different. I don't call it blabbing, however, since I think his work grew deeper and more refined, and his voice became more refined and musical as he aged, all in the service of developing his subjects and the ideas they inspired. Eliot, Shakespeare, Whitman, Rilke, Goethe, O'Hara, Dickens; each developed a set of ideas they wrote about continuously, though hardly as a matter of adhering to some doctrine they were locked into. The result is work worth reading and digging into, though one makes allowances for individual preference.

Cooking pork chops yakking on the phone

There’s nothing for us here but
what the smoke leaves on the wallpaper
in the aftermath of the grease fire
that raged a minute too long,

All that remains of the fish tank
is broken glass and the pots
you through at it,

All I asked was whether you
borrowed a Penthouse
and lost it somewhere under
all that smelly laundry
that gets higher in the hallway,

You weren’t really hungry
is what you say now?
but I can already hear your stomach growling,

Remind me, please, to not
argue with you
about my porno and beer cans
when you’re cooking pork chops.
yakking on the phone,
tore up on speed.

Stellar Conditions

Stellar Conditions
Under west coast umbrellas
you rain on parades
that don't float your fleet
of boats whose hulls bulge
with your endlessly paired desires,
your presence lets the air of my tires
and calls my mother on the phone
to say that I've beena bad boy
with the lunch money
and the guest houseyonder back,
just beyond the golf course.

Why do I love you so much
that every day of
my fifty plus yearsis gone
like vapor escaping
a covered pot of boiling water,
my resume is shredded,
my works are undone,
every line in my faceand ache
in my bones means nothing
when I'm in the center of the street
or alone in the house
as you walk away,
a teen age boygassed
up on hormones
and jack rabbit guitar solos,
grinding my teethand yelling your name
from a hurt that
is deep and full
of colors turned inside out,

There are lines of menand womenup
and down each side of the main
street drenched from a constant rain,
ashen under lunar light
in the middle of the night when
all should be having dreams of their plans
for the next day's obligations,
but your negations change that,
fisher of men,
collector of women,seducer of secrets,
black scarab love,we glow under neon signs
for Budweiser and One Hour Photo,
muttering your nameas streetcars spark past on their rails,
we chant your nameas you open a magazinewhen the plane turns
over the ocean,we call your nameas
you order headphones for the in flight movie
that you'll watch under stellar conditionsas long as there is fuel
and credit cardsto cross the county line with.

A Fearful Tale

A Fearful Tale

Strange as the rain they didn’t predict I was there staring across the when the phone rang.
The phone was black as arrest warrant ink, a quality that was more ominous by the sound of the bell, which was shrill like the cry of man bobbing on the line where the sky meets the lake.
Mary turned her head from the mirror where she was watching herself undo a ribbon around her neck as I stood in the middle of the room, counting the rings with the tap of ay big left toe.
“Silly” she said, walking to the phone, two strands of ribbon blowing over her shoulder in what seemed like a wind, “your games amuse me, but really, someone might be trying to get through to us.”
She stopped just short of the n1.ght table the phone rested on and picked up the receiver from the cradle with an arch of the back and a swoop of the arm that seemed professional, very profess
The phone seemed to leap into her hand through attractions unspoken of in the city. though by some natural attraction, L paper clips soaring to the north and south poles of a horse—shoe magnet.
Mary said a few words, nodding, cradling the phone between her Mar and shoulder as she finished untying the knot around her neck.
The ribbon floated to the floor as Mary took the phone from her ear and pointed it my direction,
“It’s for you” she said, “it’s Andy
The walk across the room took along time.
“Hi Ted, this is Andy. I wanted to see if you’d gotten those poems I dropped off?”
His breathing was a gurgling, grating rustle of congestion and worse. The black holes of the receiver appeared to vibrate, pulse in time to his rasping. The receiver felt clammy felt clammy, and the wallpaper, which I hadn’t noticed before, was suddenly bright and screaming with reds, yellows, pinks, and punishes blacks. This was all wrong. My scalp felt as though my hairline had been stapled into position as a guard against a long and blustering wind from the desert.

“Well?” asked Andy, “Whattaya think of the poems”.
“Yer poetry sucks and yer mama dresses you funny, Andy…”
“I see…”
“Kerouac was a weenie and you gotta leave that shit alone”.
“Gotcha. What else?”
“You spell like a muthafuckah!”
“Oh yeah? Well, you suck”.
“Fair enough” I said, “Lunch tomorrow?”
“I’m there” said Andy, “My treat this time…”
“You’re on…”
“Fuck off. Later.”

And the phone went dead. And then the sun exploded.
In heaven I was seated on a café on a cloud over looking planet debris. Monkeys were at every table, tossing silver ware and plates across an endless expanse.

Waking up is hard to do

The depth of sleep
digs its nails into the wall
that separates you from
a planet that is awake
from the tallest peak to the
smallest crack in the concrete,
slumber pulls you deeper
into the lake where
nothing moves.

Waking up is hard to do.

You’re forever confused
about the change to leave
on the table after coffee,
and who’s smiling and why any
of it should matter.

There are so many time
I wanted to say
I love you ‘though
I didn’t sleep at all last night.

Lets just say that
the art of evasion
is the occasion to rise to
when the drinks get honest
and nothing else seemed to matter.

We shall find our places
and assume our positions
of surrender and on waking
shower and dress and comment
on the drive to work that
there seem to be more and more
mattresses tossed out of homes,
leaning against dumpsters
like working girls reclining
against streetlights and payphones.





1•

Talking about the weather

Talking about the weather

So little time left
in a day that's already done with
by the time the sun
rises in the East
over the warm water oceans,

Microphones and men
with expensive hair
scream into camera lenses
to where the world is dark again
and ready for strong drinks
and toasts to sorry bastards everywhere
they don't happen to be,
unless, of course,
the water in their drink
is brown from the tap
and reeks of limitless amounts
of DNA recombined and
recycled in every form fit
for a natural disaster,
it's then time to drop the drinks
and microphones and head for
high ground, the tops of buildings
that no longer seem so tall,

Bad news travels fast
with the best seats
on the plane
as cities full of lost citizens
ask their politicians
what just happened
when the storm clouds gathered
and squeezed out the light
that shone over the land,

Politicians scratching their
heads until their
fingernails are encrusted with
dandruff and blood
as they look up to the sky
with their mouths awed and gaping,
waiting for God to answer their
demands about
what just happened
all while it rains,
and they drown where they stand,
dumb as turkeys
around a rain barrel.

spin cycle

she was hours ahead of schedule
so she sat down while the clothes
did their spin cycle thing and in an instant
was in the backseat of a limousine
that moved up a long black avenue
to where the skyline became a spire
like hands pressed together in prayer
under lights of the night that makes the
windows of the soul fall sad expressions
down to where the holes in the street
are deep with where the rain
gathers in songs about closing time
as drinks stick to coasters on bars
burned with matches and gouged with
penknives where names are carved over names
called from payphones one checks
for returned coins as they walk with baskets
full of socks which she collects and mends
and sells between shifts at the Woolworths
where she stands at a register under a cardboard
poster of orphans with wide eyes who look as cute
as they starve themselves
to becomecreatures so beautifully
taut on their boney frame
that they cease to breathe
but now her watch beeps
just as a buzzer sounds
and clothes stop rotating
and all the dreaming stops
suddenly, suddenly,
hard like brakes
screaming in the distance
just as you drift into a sleep
that is now stolen from you.

Half the world has ceased to be

A Map of the World

Every piece of the puzzle
hasn’t found a fitting contour
eventually falls to the floor
as we make room for cups of coffee
and places to rest our elbows,

This map of the world has
holes in the cardboard ozone,
lakes where there should be
mountain ranges across the
severest edges of Asia,
gaping oceans of nothingness
where neither land nor sea
define the tides or the shape of
the wind blowing over flatlands
and highest peaks,

Quite a world, you would think,
coming into being without
all its parts present in the roll call,
and even the curved and islet shaved
bits finding peace as they are pressed
into place, forced to make nice
with border cuttings that make no sense
nor which force the wrong populations
into the same small area,

And even now things get worse
with desert, which comes on a tray
that’s set on the table, we make remove
our cups and saucers,
take away our magazines and ashtrays,
the tray is moved onto the table top,
and the puzzle moves forward, to the edge,
and by the time the first slice of pie is
served on a dish with small forks
wrapped daintily in thin paper napkins
half the puzzle goes over the table’s edge,
off into the brief outer space between
surface and floor, half the map of the world
has ceased to be,

Irregular bits of the former world
resting in dissociated shards
on the worn wooden floor,
and it’s not over yet,

Dear brother drops his
desert dish
and now
what used to be the
half of the planet
I dreamed about in a romance of travel
is completely, thoroughly
devastated
and covered in cake
and sticky, runny icing.

FORMERLY CONCERNED WITH HUNGR IN AMERICA

An outbreak of law and order,
cont'd on A-4, col. 3,
threatens livestock and poultry in
the middle of California,
precious things
wilting, withering,
dropping
     like
          zippers
on the cracked and caked floor of a
dead lake,
all without warning
as farmers, dry as basket straw,
wish they could muster a decent spit
for their cracked lips,
caked with
dried dust
hungry for water,
thirsty beyond repair.
mindless for a drink,
mindless as I am in front of this glass
on this table where
I sit
                                              STONED, daddy-Oh,
thinking that Muzak is the death of art and the reason to breathe or to go on eating
because it leeches the life from the simple chords
that made life
seem a chorus worth sitting through.

I 'm staring at the paper, the photographs and captions,
this
window to the world,
worried about cops at the end of the lunch counter feeding their faces with coffee and
cherry pie, I know they know something is horribly wrong with me,
they see me fight back insane
tears
for

all that dead cattle
that never made to
the bun.

The hills wash away

All of us
lucky sons of bitches
live on the hill tops
high over the fatal diseased
stew that the village has become,

And one of these days
it will stop raining,
the water will stop rising
and we'll be able to use
the roads down the hills again,

But in the mean time
we will gather our pots and pans
and not mourn over our terraces
that have collapsed with the onslaught
of water and wind
that howls and whistles through
loose joints in the wood.

New Orleans

New Orleans


Waters are black with
what this city used to be
before the levee broke
in those places,

And yet no sins are washed away
and every streetlight goes dark
as the lights go out in
the eyes of every face
staring up from the bottom of the pool,

Three coins in a fountain
and God blesses no one
who hasn’t a car with the gas
to drive to the high ground,

There’s nothing spicy
on the Latin menu,
this is not Holy Water
coming up the avenues
and rising to the pitch
of the wooden roofs,

It’s a jazz funeral,
it’s the worse
of all opening sentences,

It’s a little man
in a pilot’s costume
staring at the screen
wondering why every station
have the same pictures
of bodies floating
where a city used to be,
angry that his lips
are chapped from kissing
those photos of John Wayne.

radio waves

song is always
the saddest
when it reaches the
high note
on a chord
that is torture to try for,
bones ache
and the voice breaks,
the world shatters again
on the half hour
just before some smoky,
faceless voice
reads off the call letters
that lead up
to news at the top
and half past the hour,

it's a headline that
everyone knows
yet no one reads aloud,

"hearts broken at midnight",

"another boyfriend screams
at passing cars"

"girlfriends sob into sweaters
that defies weather on weeknights"

all the news as the
drums gallop forward
guitar solo cuts
through a room of
subdued colors
and rattles its separate notes
like jar full of bees
who can't wait 'til
they break free,


it's a song with s name
that has a buzz
no amount of drink
or smoke can whisk away
as if it were a stain
that would fade away
as the song fades out
on the endless
lapping choruses
on the rocks of
all expectation,

number one with a bullet
that makes each heart
that bleed into
every river of tears.

CAREER JERK

there is no one left to jump
this fence with not enough
upper body strength to
haul the boxesafter
I cut through the pad lock,all
that good shit just going southt
to people who have money,

so I got a real
job to rob,

I showed up in
my paper hatand a piece
under my shirt,said gimmee all that cashand

I was goneup the street
and around a corner and up againsome
flight of stairs to
a door at the end
of the flightwhere some clown
busted my actionabout sorry mofos
and traction winders,shit,
he grabbed my piece and my money
and popped me three times like a tattoo,
telegraph and the next thingI remember
was thinking here I goto
some dark monkey palacewhere there's
no money either.

House of Talk

There are many voices I have
for every moon rising on a mood
which splinters into issues about
the weather and everything under
the atmosphere of that's tense
as white knuckles grabbing
the edge of the kitchen counter,

I am fine and you are so lovely
in your gloves as you new that axe,
your eyes are the softest gaze I've
ever had laid upon me as you scan
my neck, imagining brilliant pencil
dashes that come to resemble
perforation marks, wear every tears
in your outstanding order of dead things,

You piss me off royal and it's all I can do
to stop my fist from flying with an intent
of it's own to make your chin meet knuckles
or have your head meet a boot heel,
all that remains of the sunset is blood red
and the flushed rage of a setting sun that
sets screaming mutely as it sets off to scorch
another side of the planet, it's a car I want
to steal and drive into western towns where
motels rest at the edge of the desert, whiskey
and cigarettes on the bed stand, a revolver
on the pillow, a full box of bullets,


I hope you forgive me and let me
go somewhere to die, just to don't hate
me as much you might be inclined to,
I want only the best in the name of the Savior
and interest rates are good, it was all for you
and yours, but I fucked up, I fucked up bad,
I am worthless as candy wrappers, gum
stuck to the light pole, you are happier without me
calling you up at three or four in the AM and hanging up before you could take a breath, don't
hate me, let leave, I'll find some place to die,


My mouth is dry and tired from
all this talking, and the earth turns
on it's celestial wires all the same
despite protests, the choruses of
denial and rants, the rooms of
this house are full of talk with every
personality saying a line affixed
to the walls, the dry wall, the electrical
lines that go out into the world,
I practice each tone, each attack
and apology, there are no mirrors
in the hallway, no glass in the windows,
wind blows amid hisses and whistles
through the cracks in the brick,
I am silent again, I am voiceless.

Cop Poem

Cop Poem

Police men have a way of
dividing the world in half
with every hour they walk
the beat or grind it as they drive,

It’s about who they will
or will not put in jail,

Whose nose is arched
like bridges spanning
skylines over grievous waters
or flat and elegant as a small  pocket
on streamlined suit,

It’s about where they can park
when there’s nothing but
trouble on the radio,
or where they have to
drive away from when
the street comes up short on
bricks that were there the day before
and ugliness was an old house
junkies live in and not
the crowd that gathers on the corners
and will not stop glaring
until the glares become sharp sticks,
iron pipes, broken bits,

It’s knowing where your backup is
and where the shortcuts  come out to

and just how far
a dollar will go
on Saturday night.

Snaking under the ri

Snaking under the river to Canada

there were three moons in the sky
in the middle of the day
when darkness fell before
pants did the same,

the world just seemed to spin
like a bicycle tire, spokes
blending in motion against
the racket made by a baseball card,
and I remember something like a smile
on my face as uncut grass and
candy bar wrappers caressed and
pelted my face,

sounds of boots walking over
gravel, coming up the drive way,
the flower bed in front of the porch
where Dad stood with his tie loosened,
hands in his pocket, laughing out loud,
Mom smoking cigarette after cigarette
until it killed her thirty years later,

the officer says
it was a party they raided
that was full of high school kids
drinking beer around the pool,
I was wrestling with a lawn chair
before collapsing
into a giggling puddle of useless water,

Dad keeps laughing
and Mom has a scotch
with her cigarette,
fretting on the porch
about the future and
every bottle I might open
until the end of days,

“give me a kiss” says Dad,
and they argue until
I fall back asleep on the couch,
sawing logs loud as air horns
in traffic tunnels snaking under
the river to Canada.

A City Was Magic in Black and White Magazines

In a hurry and half dumbwith love, he walks through an alley,scratching his scalp,and whistles another country's anthem
in an age when TV headlines have itthat the sky never stops falling,He stops, sings a stanza in French, "My Cherie Amour", and skips mightily passed all the rear entrances and trash bins Simon and Garfunkel would have waxed and waned about in a language that made the obvious things in the city oppressive with meaning secreted among the rheumy lines of grime and gunk,
he laughs, thinks bunk, I need her armsand a good meal with amazing bread,
bottled water, baskets full of cheese, and thensomeone screams in the city,
a woman on a corner screams for life and more money
from whatever carpassed on a wet street, the night was filled
with screams and the hiss of tires slithering up back streets
and alleys that used to be short cuts in another decade
when a city was magic in black and white magazines,
there are many hours until the sun comes rises over the river,
light rays poking between the suspension cables
of sleeping bridges,days to go before something falls from the sky again
with all the heaviness assembled weight can bring on the length of the streets,
minutes away one of our own leaving the coil
that binds us as another joins the chorus,
too young in the first moments to hold sheet music
or know what we're attached to in these blurs that
come alive from their darkness and approach him in the dark,
he sings on,too late,he's asked"Where you from, "and he singstoo loudly to heara metallic clickand a bark of large dogs,he was expecting everyone to join in the chorusbecause love is all that matterswhen everyone knows the words,but instead the nightblackens all at once,a curtain drops,every line is unhingedas doors would bein a fast, devastatingheat coming acrossa flat Nevada desert,a city of jewelsburns high on amountain top,there is onlylight to follow,cordless , stringless musicat the end of corridor filled witha very white light.

Gatorade don't do it

Someone has to be the one
breaking the bad news over old bread,
catching us when there’s one arm in the coat
and chewing stale toast.
Seldom do you expect that
the length of the shadow
following you might possibly
be only one of many such shrouds,
all with names and families,
black or grey streaks falling across
sidewalks and brick fences,
each taking turns keeping you in line,
waiting your turn, motherfucker.
It’s getting so bad
that we’ll take a meeting
behind bars and resolve
that this is the year
we will throw away.

She said go deep

She said to “go deep”
as she handed me a football
which I dropped then
while I wondered out loud
how and why these goal posts
were erected in our store
to which she said
that she refused to
take her work home
but it was simply wonderful
to bring home life to the job.
As usual, I shrugged
and answered the
phone in my best
late night
broadcast
voice
and found myself
speaking to
a woman who had a book
with a yellow cover
that reminded
her of the dress she wore
seven decades ago
on her first communion,
in the spring,
when flowers bloomed
and relatives started sneezing.
She paused and
then hung up the phone,
and as I put my end down
a kid from the neighborhood
was at the counter
asking me the price
of every book and
pencil in sight
in between segments from
his gasping saga
of buying a tombstone for an
uncle who once got funny with him
in a closet
two holidays ago.
the kid laughed nervously, fast,
breathless, as I said,
and ran out the door
onto the cracked, pricey sidewalk.
My coworker
was doing drum solos
with number 2 pencils
along the glass shelves
that displayed the
heaviest books in the store,
she smiled and riffed,
pinged, rim shot her
way out of a tight
rhythmic problem,
the phone rang again,
she tells me to
get that,
but I get nothing at all
except a headache,
looking up from the counter
after I pick up the receiver,
some middle aged guy
in an MC 5 t-shirt
holding a mounted moose head
over the cash register,
a long stretch of Bullwinkle
waiting to be kissed,
it’s all I can do
not to look up
from the small holes
in the receiver,
it’s still three hours till lunch.

At noon all the cats

At noon all the cats
behind the bushes
and yowl for their rights
to milk and stiff fingers
scratching their heads.

Such faces they make
when there is one can left,
squinting under the sun
that’s not even blinding
the visiting team’s outfield staff.

She learned how to
read when the cuffs came off,
signs in hard English explaining
basic hygiene as it doesn’t get
mentioned in stacks of Elizabethan smut.

One bullet was all he needed,
one clear shot,
a gun would help, he joked,
and then a car pulled out
from a parking spot and
he stepped on the gas,
turning hard with a squeal,
gravel flying.

It’s just another
rumor of fires
behind the hills
where there are still trees
to clear for our houses
and meals with families
from other states.

Cats leave the pool alone
but sing to the moon instead
as jets make their way in
formations ready for desert blitz,

These are nights when
no calls get through,
cell phones go out of range
in the back of your pocket,

Emergency operators are
standing by as you stand there
staring at the phone and trying
to watch the ball game at the same time,

Did you say you’re from Detroit?
Great. That’s where Jimmy Hoffa
was sliced into a dozen Sicilian pizzas,
y’know?

Karl Marx wrote his wife
love poems for each daughter
who died waiting for him to
change the world.

San Diego is a home
that makes sleeping
seem a crime against
drugs and their use.

Goddamnit, I say
move the mountain
to Arizona, to hell with the Cross.

Every Floor Gives Way

You are a card carrying
waste of time
and I am
a prince and a punk
whose words make
noise like coins
falling on marble floors,
a rattle and a snap,
and then silence
like a big room after a wake.

One of us
talks too much
on right-turn radio
where opinions
are all you have
when the facts
are no where
in the vicinity.
The other of us
packs a lunch
every morning,
and by 4pm
notices the
long shadows of
buildings draping
over the park bench
where they
nap until quitting time.
The paper bag
clinks with
the rustle of
broken glass,
a police radio
repeats the name
of another child gone
missing from the
playground,
a child reads the names
of those who died
somewhere at work,
over a city that was
getting ready for lunch,
afternoon naps,
both of us
stare at each other
when the bad news
reaches our table
at the bar,
news stations
offering their best
screaming headlines,

All we ever do is scream
at each
other
I say,
And you
add.
That's the only time
we hear each other

I scratch
where it itches
before asking
you for a kiss
like you gave me
in the days
we were younger
and full of the future.

We'll meet for dinner
at eight you say,
we'll line our pockets
with knowledge
and bread,
dance
together to the news, weather, sports.
all notes
about forms of battle,
we'll raise our
voices
and yell the worth of
our lives and anxieties
into the mix
we'll pass between ourselves
while the
earth turns, cracks, splits apart
and the cries of the night
merge with the sunlight
and becomes a part our day
of yelling and screaming
and every floor
collapsing from under our feet.

No Birds

So much depends on sunlight,
a head turning the other way to
avoid a crash of sight lines,
long sails on the bay during
still water days,
hotel keys dropped in the sand.

God is dead asleep
in the hills
along paths the coastline,
the philosophy of dust
contravenes conventional wisdom
those beautiful things
last forever in the shapes we gave them
because the roads to the beach
are lined with abandoned houses
and farm equipment left
from another decade in arid fields
that turn into mire and mud
every time it rains.

Nothing grows here.

Catholic to the bone, look,
there are no holes in my hand,
Jesus must have dirty fingers
after he arose from his ales,
I baptize myself with layers
of deodorant soap, water circles the drain
in a funnel, and then is gone.

The tornado pulls itself
over the land and reconfigures the
towns and farms it ploughs through,
this land is matchsticks and glass
blowing over the hills,
windows blow out buildings,
everyone ducks into cellars
and door frames,

The shoreline boils and churn,
waves are white,
there are no birds in the sky.

A Wild Rotary Blade in his Pants

"I am tired of drying the goddamned cat by hand."

That was what he said. Drying the cat by hand and all he could do
was rant and spew about how much he hated being alive in a city
where no one knew the meaning of the fine phrase "get down." It was enough
to make a man wish that none of the riots of sixties had taken place
if only because it was time for a man to be a man and cram a wild
rotary blade in his pants.

"Why don't we go into the other room where we can can
figures some shit out and shit like that?"

"Fuck you, I want a copy of Commie Grelb Pants magazine
on my coffee table right now..."

I picked up a copy of Gravity's Rainbow and hit him over the head with it,
and kept hitting him until there was nothing to swing at.

Change for a dollar

Most of the change from the dollar
For the newspaper falls to the floor,
It’s all you can do not swear and smile instead
As the cashier with the greased fingertips
Widens her eyes, eyebrows pitching in
An A frame of worry,

A tiny smile on her face trembling as
She fights back the fear, her mouth
Shrinking to an ‘o’ of ‘oh my”, she giggles, she sobs,
Everyone stares past the candy bars and magazines
To see who made their angel cry,

Oh my back creaks like
A door on a corroded hinge,
My knees crack when I bend,
Snapping twigs are what
People remember for

Every penny is flat at your feet
And red faced as you stare hard
At several Lincoln copper tone beard
Tarnishing under the fluorescent light,
Round taunts lying on two tone tile,

You smile at her, you bend over,
Knees make the sound of snapping twigs,

Oh my goddamned back

Every dime, quarter and nickel
Has rolled under the counter,
Out of sight, having scurried
To some dusty corner
The janitor’s mop couldn’t reach,

I’m making the sounds my father made

And you swear you see him as you stoop
Walking out of an elevator and out the street,
Wearing a nice suit and fine hat from fifty years ago,

Around the time you were born
When all this wear and tear began.

Florida hat band

when speaking of fronts,
the back must follow
as would a shadow after
a figure in the full brunt
of noon day glare,
pressed together and
poetically obvious to
an eye that registers
each straight line
and ordered fold of evey
woven thing in the vacinity,

in between
only bloodlines
and tissue wrapped
around a matrix of bone,
a unity of
all things happening at once
for the good reasons
writ on chalk boards
in lecture halls,
phenomena not
stopping for slide shows,

a society of immense, overlayed functions
that sustain the apparatus
of the gesture that attempts to
soften the gaze that freezes ambition,
makes desire a dead, cracking flower,
the mouth a riot of
twitches that might
be words had
not so much depended
on the red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
by chickens gone
platinum in the
depths of the Big City,

large traffic
stops the two sides
of street from meeting
in combat,
and Democracy
sweats like a Florida hat band.

Zip

By eight in the morning
all you had to do was sing
and think of ways to keep the neighbors
distracted with your long legs
and rumor of a shirt.

I tell that I cannot find the
part in my hair
as the poker playing dogs in
that ugly poster all look
as though they've broken their pose
and look at me from the side
of their eyes,
pupils full of need and confusion
following the stroked of my comb
while I forge a route, a clean, thin
line of scalp so my hair matches the
way your face flairs red
when I mention that you're singing
makes me drunk with memories with all
the sex I've ever had,

I say this and see you
go up like a match,

You sing in a voice that could
make Heaven confess
to sins that would embarrass Lucifer,
turn deserts green with envy,
make fish grow arms and legs
and new lungs so they
can climb from the brine
and walk a mile for
whatever it is you're serving,
all this makes me weak in the knees,
my bones rattle and I shake
with sensations of oceans
leaving me and making me feel spent
and falling into some
idea of subterranean afterlife

When my cell phone rings
a digital chill of a melody
long in the cruel face of
public domain,

Help me find my part, I ask,
no, you answer,
I have fish to feed and children to teach,
but come here and zip me up
I will be there in a zip I say
you will never see the hand that
makes you late for work.

Cloudless Black Tablature

There is nothing that drink won't fix
but the bars are closed on Sundays
so it's holy water instead of vodka
we'll soak our cam shafts in,

Yes, the library looks like a spinning top,

Regular posse mode gives broken disc
half chance to shred party dress with
flower vase shard and splatter guitar vexing
because every nerve is a note plucked with
a pick foregrounding power lines crossing
the white moon alone in cloudless black tablature,

Where there was language commerce has ploughed under,

Peculiar pajama party pizza slice Romeo
melts like cheese, runny and gooey at the
ends of centuries he had to chew on for tests
he was late for and gazed into rooms watching
friends at desks drum number 2 pencils against
top lips moaning grieving over
the Battle of Gettysburg all over again,

Meet the author and kiss him until
his wife writes her own book and
you may in turn change your taste
in scents and spices.

Tennis shoes on power lines,

Vacant room overlooking train yard
the way you were going 'til something
nameless crawled into your suitcase
and made it weigh more than your mortgage,
dollar signs made of brass and iron,

A bent 'h',

Let's leave the cross where it is
and move the mountain instead
one spoon at time, several times a day,
seven days a week,
we have too much shore line as it is,

Shelves full of empty aerosol cans,

Bird cages are left open
and there are feathers
spinning down from the rafters,
we cover our sandwiches
with duck billed hats,
there is a line drive to center field,
vacant skyscrapers in the background,
proud as men facing a firing squad,
A hand job going both ways,

A box of pencils,
a jar of paint thinner,
a gum eraser,

Lips around a straw,
Sammy Davis Jr. felt painting,
white men fishing before the black perspective of the news,
morning comes to the last dark crevice behind the dumpster,

Modified rolling pin sawdust splayer grinds off
another batch of odes and codes and stanzas that corrode
in the places they are positioned like pistons proud and
erect like men who are thoroughly fucked
with what this life has in store for them,

An apple on a plate, sliced into four parts.

Slate Magazine

Slate Magazine

His Love for The World

Slate Magazine: "His Love for The World

After we bow
our heads
under the railroad cross
and crawl across
the stone mason's floor
and boundless black sand,


He will love
me just a little bit more
as I hold my breath,
lift my last sword
and thunder stick,
stab my palms with
quills to write home with,
He will love us all
as he would love a storm
that breaks every limb of tree
that smites the eye
that sees only lands
pure and white with sterility,

He will love us
then love us
all the more until

There is no more
skin to bruise cut
or otherwise rent
with the talking points
of our crusade,
no more flesh to humble
in piles of limbs
and heads saying
prayers that return
to the lips of
the doomed which say them,

Not until
the last flag
is laid over
the last box
and are no more hands
with fingers enough
to grip
and squeeze the trigger.


"

Cloudless black tablature

(A cubist musing)

There is nothing that drink won’t fix
but the bars are closed on Sundays
so it’s holy water instead of vodka
we’ll soak our cam shafts in,

Yes, the library looks like a spinning top,

Regular posse mode gives broken disc
half chance to shred party dress with
flower vase shard and splatter guitar vexing
because every nerve is a note plucked with
a pick foregrounding power lines crossing
the white moon alone in cloudless black tablature,

Where there was language commerce has ploughed under,

Peculiar pajama party pizza slice Romeo
melts like cheese, runny and gooey at the
ends of centuries he had to chew on for tests
he was late for and gazed into rooms watching
friends at desks drum number 2 pencils against
top lips moaning grieving over
the Battle of Gettysburg all over again,

Meet the author and kiss him until
his wife writes her own book and
you may in turn change your taste
in scents and spices.

Tennis shoes on power lines,

Vacant room overlooking train yard
the way you were going ‘til something
nameless crawled into your suitcase
and made it weigh more than your mortgage,
dollar signs made of brass and iron,

A bent “h”,

Let’s leave the cross where it is
and move the mountain instead
one spoon at time, several times a day,
seven days a week,
we have too much shore line as it is,

Shelves full of empty aerosol cans,

Bird cages are left open
and there are feathers
spinning down from the rafters,
we cover our sandwiches
with duck billed hats,
there is a line drive to centerfield,
vacant skyscrapers in the background,
proud as men facing a firing squad,

A hand job going both ways,

A box of pencils,
a jar of paint thinner,
a gum eraser,

Lips around a straw,
Sammy Davis Jr. felt painting,
white men fishing before the black perspective of the news,
morning comes to the last dark crevice behind the dumpster,

Modified rolling pin sawdust splayer grinds off
another batch of odes and codes and stanzas that corrode
in the places they are positioned like pistons proud and
erect like men who are thoroughly fucked
with what this life has in store for them,

An apple on a plate, sliced into four parts.

LEAD PIPE CINCY

Five steps
down but
who is smoking three
on a match songbook
waxy buildup
and navy blue.

This is no way
to mop the floor
or wipe that smile
from your face
as we dig for
the penny caught
in the snuggest bug palace.

The trains
don't go
to Del Mar
in July
in the heat
of the races
doggedly horsing half smiles
and cigar strands
of moonless romance.

Days from now
it's all the same
snow you've been
plowing back into the street.

Contemplate other facts
and areas of growth
like pants too tight
this time of night.

Money doesn't
grow on trees
nor does freedom come
from a barrel
of monkeys
but banana pants bosses down
run it all down,
for keeps.

You see
all the sins
of the saints
in the mold
in the bread laid
before the dead priest's body,
now eat.

Five steps up chopping wood
front style like biker skronk melon
shredded on skunk bud, mac,
my cloistered quiver requires a point.

The rocket's red glare

The rocket's red glarehow drunk could be getbefore we began to look attractive to the flies that buzz around our heads ,against the broad strokesof red and henna coded cloudsthat set the horizon on fireas the sun sinksjust a tip under the blurred line of the planetwhere earth and skyare a duo that play one masterful rondoafter anotherone of us stands upto God and his whispering minionsthat he is tired ofsuffering the resultsof a good ideagone postal.i raise my head from my palms,stop studying the waymy shoe laces arecoming untied,i gather a sense thatthere is more to lifethan gas , food and lodgingbut would settlefor any thing because i hadnone of the aboveand no love for curbsand the drainage dreamsthey inspire, i ask "IS THERE AN ARE ART SHOWCLOSING SOMEWHERE TONIGHT??"the other one of uswas still drinking as he careened up the street,one side to the other,all the billboards should read "tilt","LOVE STRAYSAND STAYS ARID"he yells at a passing bus,i laugh, Jesus what a jerk,i will take the busand play music in my skulluntil it comes,i will be serene and leanon the vernacularthat's so spectacularwhen I'm in the bagand full of mean remarks,i will behave,i will be silent,nothing will upset me,i am invisible on the bus line,but even as my mantrais uttered and foldedinto a vest pocket of the soulover where the heart still beatswith what remains ofmy sense of my self andvirtues beyond the bulge of my wallet,a car approachesthrough the intersection,it veers closer,i sing to the streetlights,the fixtures on the power lines,the car slows down,i'm on the twelfth chorus of "Cherokee",something breaks in my lapand then I am wetwith waterneither painful nor holy,the car speeds awayinto the slim v perspectivethat runs right to the water's edge,i am wetyet am i blessedin such a state,i hum another chorus, my lap drenchedwith tap water andbits of burst balloon,and now it's darkafter eight pm in Julywhen the fireworks go offfrom the end of the pier,where i wanted to beto make a phone callunder the rocket's red glare.