You need to carry a bigger stick if you're going to talk to me about the blues. Everything in the backyard has a price tag on it, It's the way you grind your teeth when you sleep that makes the mornings a welcome advent of stalled traffic at the freeway entrance, loud radio blasting partisan blame, a coffee mug between my legs. Magic tricks with coins at the behest of fingers dancing between the back of the ear and the tip of her nose makes the child wonder who’s been placing quarters in her hair as she dreamed of her pretty ponies and afternoon teas with her network of dolls. She told me that you were coming over, and now here you are, and I still don't like you, so there. A mailman sneaks past the apartment building with the lightest steps he can manage. Cats come from the bushes to see who’s making all the noise. The clown at the party faints under the summer sun. Needless to say that there's no use telling the truth, so I'll shut up and allow you to sit there on the prosecution couch, arms crossed and tight lipped, filling in the stony silence with a vibe that's louder than any screaming you might have done. Hey, I just learned how to speak in tongues. A sandwich made from a recipe for alphabet soup. In the right disguise, I thought my voice might rise and ride on the wind with the leaves and smoke. For a quarter more I can give you enough fries to gag an off duty cop. All this gangsta rap is punchy, I mean, so honkin' in yer face, ace. Sentences cannot be jail terms when what you mean is a statement of justice meted out like finger treats and cold cuts. Let's go be with the others at the party, all of us gathered together like pearls around a long, rich neck. Sorry, but you are talking to someone who is smarter than the average bear, but an idiot with regards to taxes and dating tips. Be useful and go far, far away. Here's my entry in the bad Hemingway contest: rain. Close cover before striking. Call me Spider. Woke up this morning with those Phenomenology of Spirit Blues. Superman has moved into the Telephone Booth of Solitude. You think you can take me in a game of Groan? Yes, I never want you to leave in a bad mood, I prefer my relationships pure, like blank job applications.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
THE FUTURE OF POETRY (from "You Call This Lunch?!?")
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The Atlantic a month ago ran a pig-headed bit of snark-slamming prog rock as "The Whitest Music Ever, "a catchy bit of clickbait...
What I think you are getting here is the dry-fry tingle of a thought left on the back burner of the cerebellum on a day when your fingers do the walking through the back pages of U. S. News Reports’ rankest college reports, where Names Against Dad are embossed on felt pennants pinned on the mottled nutsacks of team mascots stuffed like a CIA file cabinet containing Bekken’s plans to re-enact the Russian Revolution in the midst of a Sir Lord Baltimore encore at Mom’s Saloon, resonant as a flatulent French horn of peristaltic self-assertion, the Barbaric Yow, sounding the tocsin of inertia through the Headquarters of Leisure, Pleasure past the bones of the Texas Monster into the steaming corridors of the eldritch donut shops of our wonderment, etched in adamantly banal false field-stone fronts of liquor stores and birdlime-bedizened palm trees, down past stucco rookeries the color of Al Coupee’s scalp, where half of what you buy was already unavailable before you were out of the womb, Bill Bailey shucking and jiving about “beef on a bun for people on the run” while your beef comes to grief and your bun is done to a turn, right?
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