turning on every bright light

yeah, that’s you on the overpass, walking past workers, looking like you. if you had a different name you’d still feel like this. two miles from your office motorway. motor away. reinvent the wheel until it rolls over everyone. the wheel waiting until sunday and then it goes around finding people to roll over. the newspapers make it a front page story and then it rolls over newspaper buildings. you can’t understand anything the wheel says. if you show it this or that it will say that’s a bridge. music to take you from one set of words to the next.

ashes ashes we all fall down

king tut and elvis both spent time there
there are other sad boys
hiding in bathrooms
crying in mirrors
they reinforce themselves
they know their own stories
they sleep with one eye open despite being the largest predators in the domain
waiting for the other shoe to drop
children of neglect
they still run home
and genuflect on the way back out of memphis

The Garment in which no one had Slept-Pam Rhem

from Thus I find my legs

IV.

The fact of sex under a microscope can be determined beforehand.

I have, on the other hand, an apprehension as to what exists outside of myself. As force. Thus, my waiting isn't spoiled.

There is no loss of speed. My decision to not know comes from my inability to affirm the prediction.

I remember the needle swinging above my mother's wrist read as one boy and four girls. However, he is absent.

I could never ask if he had existed because I was never told the story. Sometimes I thought that I only overheard myself.

everything's fine--part two

“That’s the thing,” said Principal Fontana. “I want to be involved in your lives. Or I think I do. But then, really, when I look into my heart, I’d rather be on the driving range, or getting drunk, or getting my wick dipped. Is this shocking you?”

“Some nights,” I said, “I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it’s not napalm. It’s apple butter. And it’s not a street. It’s my mother.”

“Right,” said Fontana. “I knew I could talk to you.”

---sam lipsyte

I was never your assassin

The more I think about it, the more I’d like to take a rain check on the subject of me. What I’d like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself. how important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it. That’s how I’d grasp a clearer sense of who I am.

from "sputnick sweetheart" by haruki murakami

Everything's fine.

"Everything's fine," I said. "You're here. I'm here. Everything's fine."

"Fuck here," said Gary. "We were from a town. A little town. Do you remember?"

"What a question," I said.

"There were people there," said Gary. "There were cars. Carports. You knew where to park."

"Dog hatches in the doors," I said. "Dog doors. Nearmont Avenue. The trestles on Main."

"Spartakill Road," said Gary. "Venus Drive. The Hobby Shop, the Pitch-n-Putt, Big Vin's Pizza, the Plaza."

"Behind the plaza," I said.

"Exactly," said Gary. "Behind it."

-- from Sam Lipsyte's "I'm Slavering"

more words about skin

we speak of space so space speak
holes in a waiting ground
split difference in an atom
or the distance at any time between our skins

pick a day soon and ask me what I want to do

pick a night when I’m myself and I’ll only bring the tips of my fingers




why were you out collecting rocks by the train tracks




when I woke up you asked me what I’d been saying
I acted like I didn’t know what you were talking about
I was saying don’t, please don’t. oh god, don’t.

my head squeezes into shape
vice grips
thongs for picking cotton
or removing babies from the womb
a tightening of the almost done with myself for now
my head will wonder what comes next

fourth dirty monday

Fourth dirty monday.
washed up and old
before the washbowl
the dull razor pulls,

catches,

at last aquiesces
and cuts.

You've always stuck by me,
my skin,
today as I again
abrade you,

let that not go unthought of.

let it not go unsaid

what

if we
were the only
three things
in the world.

you,
me
and the reflection of me
at 6 am,
the fourth dirty monday.

taping the lips-Tony Robinson

'taping the lips'
Anthony Robinson


all involve the idea of sweetness

the honey of elbow brown hair firefly

+

inside you

+

loping latitude. the loveliest I've seen
on that particular chair. bend back. over. again.

+

stars. douceur. the purloined love letter.
we burned everything left our clothes on her banks

+

the french have a word. it is not "freedom"
those men have a bomb


+

"you, my gazelle, really are the bomb."

—the man, you see, was drunk
he was trying to say the name
of a rhyming poem—

she fucked him. lucky error.

+

all develop independently all make reference to the slippage.
sever sever sever. my love, i owe you several
missiles. i misspell my desire. drop it on the floor.

watch the cartoon flames dance dance &.

+

it is not like a womb it begins with "mother"

+

i need to be your skin.

look at those people. their flesh is on fire.

"i suppose that must have been some buildings
with people in them"

+
all involved.
all culpable.
all cuppable.
the idea of sweetness.

inside you, capably so.

from Movements of Sincere Banality

restless

like a swishing skirt
I should wear that dress
grey and black stripes

oranges rolling forth from a bin
they thud
softly
hitting the ground

seek and find but never hunt for it
hunting begets hiding
hiding doesn’t need your encouragement

black and grey stripes stick to
the backside of my thighs
when I bend I see you looking

but someone must right the oranges
before they roll off

on sunday poppy found faith, went
downtown looking to get in someone’s way
turned tall
turned black for you, a well-paid poppy tight as ever
purple flowers, dark seeds, opium shakes a drowsy syrup
when she moves on top of you, leaving
behind a looming scent
oakmoss resin
shed of night
the smart set

or mr. emerson, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise
she then, a sleep inducer who leaves a mark, the
inside of my arm has been thinking, it is
uncertain where this is the same word, although
all the forms are the same
a poppet
a six-string puppet comes down dangling elevated ornaments
she a generous flourish, much better
than this papaver
milky juice like pale skin narcotic
petals four like limbs

but this is reality so give me some room

It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline
But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline
Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying
Over luxury's disappointment
So he walks over and he's trying
To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her
That the Third World is just around the corner

In the Soviet Union a scientist is blinded
By the resumption of nuclear testing and he is reminded
That Dr Robert Oppenheimer's optimism fell
At the first hurdle
In the Cheese Pavilion and the only noise I hear
Is the sound of someone stacking chairs
And mopping up spilt beer
And someone asking questions and basking in the light
Of the fifteen fame filled minutes of the fanzine writer

Mixing Pop and Politics he asks me what the use is
I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses
While looking down the corridor
Out to where the van is waiting
I'm looking for the Great Leap Forwards

Jumble sales are organised and pamphlets have been posted
Even after closing time there's still parties to be hosted
You can be active with the activists
Or sleep in with the sleepers
While you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

---billy bragg

The To Sound

THERE APPEARS TO BE DIAGNOSTIC FRICTION IN YOUR AMBLYOPIA, YOUR
PATCHED OFF FLIGHT.

The corrected version begins: if a seed powders to husk in the bowel
of...not the x-rays came back blank, the coral hull is groaning...

Follow the pointer with all your moths closed.

Crack this grounded star like so: as a symbol of my capitalized wing
[better one?] as a dented speech of teeth [better two?]

Your vowels have been spreading since I notarizd the "ancient am"
under your arm, and your tilted diction suggests a torch of arid
bladder syndrome. The crunching in of hosts.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Anybody Speaking Words" (1982, acrylic and oil
painstick on canvas, 96 by 61.5 inches) is perhaps the best glottal
stop for your repealed gloss, your nitrogen highness. As I'm sure
this piece of clay demonstrates, the centrifugal swere in your third
opera is almost entirely crossed, an impossibly intoned operation.

i assuage you, this aphasia will swoon.

from The To Sound by Eric Baus

blow

two things to get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and have never joined a support group in my life. at seventy-three, I’m not about to change. the mental health establishment can go screw itself on a barren hilltop in the rain before I touch their snake oil or listen to the visionless chatter of me half my age. I have shot germans in the fields of normandy, filed twenty-six patents, married three women, survived them all, and am currently the subject of an investigation by the IRS, which has about as much chance of collecting from me as shylock did of getting his pound of flesh. bureaucracies have trouble thinking clearly. I, on the other hand, am perfectly lucid.
note, for instance, how I obtained the SAAB I’m presently driving into the los angeles basin: a niece in scottsdale lent it to me. do you think she’ll ever see it again? unlikely. of course when I borrowed it from her I had every intention of returning it and in a few days or weeks I may feel that way again, but for now forget her and her husband and three children who looked me over the kitchen table like I was a museum piece sent to bore them. I could run circles around those kids. they’re spoon-fed ritalin and private schools and have eyes that say give me things I don’t have. I wanted to read them a book on the history of the world, its migrations, plagues and wars, but the shelves of their outsized condominium were full of ceramics and biographies of the stars. the whole thing depressed the hell out of me and I’m glad I’m gone.

from "notes to my biographer" by adam haslett

i.9.

"Angela was twenty-two then. She had been the real head of the family since she was sixteen, since Mother died, since I was born. She used to talk about how she had three children--me, Frank, and Father. She wasn't exaggerating, either. I can remember cold mornings when Frank, Father, and I would all be in a line in the front hall, and Angela would be bundling us up, treating us exactly the same. Only I was going to kindergarten; Frank was going to junior high; and Father was going to work on the atom bomb. I remember one morning like that when the oil burner had quit, the pipes were frozen, and the car wouldn't start. We all sat there in the car while Angela kept pushing the starter until the battery was dead. And then Father spoke up. You know what he said? He said, 'I wonder about turtles.' 'What do you wonder about turtles?' Angela asked him. 'When they pull in their heads,' he said, 'do their spines buckle or contract?'

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

get started, start a fire

You stop in the old cafe where you used to play pinball. And look for the air-raid shelter but it's gone and the cafe seems so small and all the gardens that had trees and stolen apples now have small businesses flourishing in cinder blocks. Then they will call your name and hand you a gold watch. Then they will call your name but it doesn't sound like much. And you'll never discover why it's like an old lover you can't touch anymore. It doesn't mean much anymore when you go back in time, back in time.

You head down to the local try to find a focal point. A scratch in the wallpaper but it's all been wallpapered over. Down at the newsagents it's all pornography and you try to get high again but it's like time-lapse photography. Then they will call your name and hand you a medal or something more practical like a whistling kettle and it'll test your metal just try to keep grinning knowing that this feeling is indulgence worse than sinning, trying to go back in time.

Photographs with a glossy finish, letters lovers never finished. And there in a dusty drawer a necktie you once wore. And a girl you tried to court made you feel about two feet short. Where is she now today? What would she have to say? Then they will call your name and hand you a pension. A bottle of pills that guarantee life extension and give you a mention in the local boy makes good section. But all the old news is like print stains across your mind when you go back in time.

from the song "back in time" by graham parker

the view from stalin's head

"you should steer clear of that guy," I said. "there are some who consider him an evolutionary cul-de-sac."

from "homeland" by sam lipsyte

metal school

their clothes; their rings as well, until
at last they wore nothing. all was visible:
flourish; humiliation; some things,
more than others, looking almost the same.
as if not only torn but lavish let be
the angle all tearing starts at,
as if this were the rule, each
splitting open around, unfolding
from -- so as, incidentally, to expose --
its wet center

by carl phillips

how to survive in this world and not even know it

[fragment]

When she touched me
I couldn't stand it,
as if missing layers of skin,
where had I put them,
I love you
she said, she kissed me, I said,
Ow.

Outside the mist lay over the city,
the mist always lay over the city,

Charles, she said
where are you going

In the park I saw a girl stand up
and her bottom held the imprint
of her seat,

In certain ways
even a picnic table
can want you,

Charles,
in certain ways
you are the only thing I know.

tea time

"Tut-tut, it looks like rain."

For my 2 Favorite Sad Bastards

Dean Young
He Said Turn Here

and then Tony showed us the lake
where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer
and it had dissolved like powder
so he thought maybe the lake could take
some of the radiant, aluminum kind
he had been making lately.
And it did.
It was a perfect lake,
none of the paint had chipped off,
no bolts showing, the arms that Dante
and Virgil would have to hack through
not even breaking the surface.
Mumbling Italian to itself,
it had climbed down two wooden stairs
back to the beach now that the rains were done.
How strange to be water so close to the ocean
yet the only other water you get to talk to
comes from the sky. Maybe this is why
it seems so willing to take on
Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes
his friends, which is really
many different sadnesses, smaller
and smaller, surrounded by more
and more space, each a world and
at its core an engine like a bee
inside a lily, like buzzing inside
the bee. It seems like nothing
could change its color although
we couldn’t tell what color it was,
it kept changing. In the summer,
Tony says he comes down early each day
and there’s no one around so the lake
barely says a thing when he dives in
and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine
and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand,
trying to drag him to safety
and some nights in New Mexico,
he can hear it howling,
searching for him in the desert
so we’re glad Tony has this lake
and we promise to come back in August
and swim with him across,
maybe even race.

Miranda July does Bruce Lee

Audio file of Miranda July which appears on The Diagram. It's called Bruce Lee.

Reading

from The Sofa Series
by Martha Ronk

For the sake of absolute balance, on one side
of the walkway a pink bush, on the other, a white.
Her socks match her shirt. On the mantel two candlesticks
push out six inches from either wall.
Everything's like pieces of desert paper
blowing in the wind. The motel disappears,
the road already comes undone, and beer cans litter
what's left of vacancy. On Saturdays there's no room
except the sky. Like a veneer of saranwrap the city
lies across a basin waiting to be rolled up,
taken to a new set of circumstances and spread out
for hoards of people with weapons or without.
Everyone prances like ponies, skitters like lizards.
No wonder her silver shoes, no matter her silver hair.

•

If the chair doesn't move across polished floors
and tables aren't burning with electric pulse,
if I can't glide in patent shoes over turquoise tile,
why have you brought me here?
What reason for such straight lines,
such an ill-drawn moon?
When the cactus glows at night I'll swim the length
and hold my breath until the edge of the sea.
Once, in between one belief and another, I thought
this town's at the end of all waters.
Nobody lives here who isn't already taking notes.
Across from her at the counter a cowboy reads a script
and she responds with coy laughter.
Nothing happens. We take walks. Suddenly the slide.

---------------------------------------------------

NEWS OF
by Carol Snow

another massacre; and the clean bright morning.
Keeping walking. 'Contradiction' is human -- I know that.
And 'knowing'... A stirring from the place the whirlwind -- something like
fear -- arises, and watching my breath

to still that. Suddenly thinking somewhere in the breath -- along
the breath, is an understood place. Somewhere -- but somewhere
in passing -- where the matter is reconciled.

Reading at City Lights
Thursday, July 21 @ 7:30pm
U.C. Press New California Poetry Series
with Laura Mullen, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Martha Ronk, Carol Snow, and Juliana Spahr

The New California Poetry Series presents works that help define the emerging generation of poets–books consistent with California's commitment to the Black Mountain tradition and reflective of California literary traditions–cosmopolitan, innovative, experimental, open, and broad-ranging in their intellectual makeup. Forthcoming for spring 2005 in the series are books by Sarah Gridley, Laura Mullen, and Juliana Spahr.

You know you want to go.

venus drive

you could touch for a couple of bucks. the window of the booth went up and you stuck out the bills. they might tell you not to pinch, but I was a stroke type anyway. some guys, I guess they want to leave a mark. me, I just like the feel.
I went over there on the way to see my sister. there was a lit-up eye with an eyebrow over the door, a guy in front with a change belt, an apron that said peep city. peeptown was up the block. they didn’t have an eyebrow over the eye over there.
why do they make these places so dark? I like to cop tit in the light. guess I have no shame. maybe I got through shame a long time ago. somebody said I had an old soul, which I took to mean I’m older than I am, or that I’ve been places I haven’t been.
you could hardly see in there, in peep city, and all that disco, that ammonia, it made me sick. I looked around for a girl with a good set, one who would maybe tell me I was sweet. sometimes they asked about handjobs, blowjobs, all the jobs, but I never wanted to go that far. I felt sorry for them. somebody told me they were exploited. me, I always paid in full.
this time, just to break habit, I went for what one of them had down below, just a few bucks more. she was a giant with plenty on the chest, but I put a fivespot out. she swiveled on the ledge, pushed an ass dusted with glitter out over the sill. I palmed her there, thumbed a pimple near the crack. what am I paying for his for? I thought, thumbing it.
the giant was talking to another girl pressed against her on the ledge. the other girl was a sway of hair that moved like a metronome. the sway took on the color of the strobes.
“what’s he doing down there?” said the other girl.
“jeez, nothing,” said the giant.
I dug a knuckle in.
“what the fuck,” the giant said. the blind was buzzing shut.
“prick,” she said.
there was a bucket near the door with soapy water in it. I got down like you do for a shoelace, dipped my knuckle in the bucket. the man in the apron came up.
“I got ass germs on it,” I said.
I figured it was peeptown from now on.

from “old soul” by sam lipsyte

yolk

blurry grays shamble the halls
clothes hang the back of doors
a looming
a brush of fabric, framework
body pressed
the silence of the glass of water
by the bed
objects stack, pile lives
the choosing words in a mouth
the runny off
the no longer
they

jet plane variations (1)

Every Gerard I see
is Gerard Depardieu.
I tell you babe,
it's not a pretty thing.

At the Seaport Restaurant

by Andrea Baker

At the Seaport Restaurant

The birds kept twitching. All the snarling birds, snarling at the table. Say you are adorable just as you are; say I love to see you sitting below the ugly green umbrella. The texture of the plastic table was the texture of wood grain and it had a hole in the middle. Who ever was an empty one was sitting at the table. You were saying love love love.

Your hair was tight and curly black as always. It was looking like tight and early bird feathers curling in on themselves. It was looking like a whole set of unborns. Their hands inside their mouths. Them licking each one of their fingers.

The dinner came. It was linguini al fredo. It had a parsley garnish. The waiter was wishing me a happy birthday. None of these were the reason I couldn’t stop laughing.

There was a long piece of cellophane tied to a parking lot sign. I couldn’t believe the color. It was something that light itself had done. Illuminated crystal green, the inside of a saint left beside chicken bones and a broken toaster.

I wanted to hold you and hold you but the birds were all eating and crying at the table. The people had attached themselves to the sky. They had bird beaks but they also had hands at the tips of their feathers. That was both the birds and the bodies. Your face looked laced with tendons and puttered almost. I was deeply hurt; I said of course. The waiter came. You put your face in your hands. It looked half eaten.

I ate very little below the ugly green umbrella. I put the sparkling glass of water down on the table. More water, please waiter.

The to Sound

from The to Sound by Eric Baus

I was thinking birds with extremely long necks



And my sister sees I was using words I didn’t know she nods and we know

a voice

my mouth uses rain to say the body is a sequence



that counts

as it moves the body is a museum

where we apologize for our voices

where's a policeman when you need one

everyday gods with their everyday bodies and the everyday week
there’s a word, weak. you weak little gods. you absent fucks.
you non-revealing scene stealing extras to a life
suck in your stomachs and act like gods
take another long-legged huka hit
half-pipe, just another newspaper avoidance
smoke the smile she leans in with
don’t enjoy it too much
especially what you want most and only sometimes get
your fleeting center
your halfway across the room and forgetting why
yes, it leaves you unsure, which is not a coming attraction
not a builder
surrounding streets with people you like to look at and would rather not speak to

berrigan

               LXXXVIII


            A FINAL SONNET
                                       for Chris

How strange to be gone in a minute!    A man
Signs a shovel and so he digs   Everything
Turns into writing a name for a day
                                    Someone
is having a birthday and someone is getting 
married and someone is telling a joke   my dream
a white tree   I dream of the code of the west
But this rough magic I here adjure    and
When I have required some heavenly music     which even
    now 
I do   to work mine end upon their senses
That this aery char is for  I'll break
My staff    bury it certain fathoms in the earth
And deeper than did every plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
It is 5:15 a.m.            Dear Chris, hello.

                           (The Sonnets, 1964; 1982)

from South Dakota

v. Red tinted highways, bumpy mediums. Road construction can be so present. A turn off into a one gas station town. The bank has no ATM. The teller blinks. A fat child in a jumper is walking along the painted yellow lines. vi. The middles of everything are fat and dangerously round. It might be the heat. Drops of sweat are beading on my back. They fall in intervals. This feels no closer to the start or end of anything.

Catherine Wagner

A Poem for Guideposts

I made a pie of light
Sat me down in front
The glaze sucked all the blue out of the air
I was a pilot search
Went intrinsically backward
The moss of my feet booked me in
Moss and wet cold
I held my spine up natural head natural like a top spins
Will God deny me anything
God will I eat a piece of the world
Piece of gone
There was a steaming wedge but it was not a piece it was
The whole boat
It was carried
Our shoulders dirt our shoulders smell like come
Swerve round this round that balancedly
The one plate and the other at varying levels till the table comes

The Hole (Robert Creeley)

There is
a silence
to fill. A
foot, a fit,

fall,
filled. If
you are
not careful all

the water spills.
One day
at the lake I took
off my bathing
suit

in the water,
peed
with pleasure, all
out, all

the water. Wipe
yourself, into
the tight
ass paper is pushed. Fatty

Arbuckle, the one
hero of the school,
took a coke bottle,
pushed it up his girl.

But I
wouldn't dare,
later,
felt there,

opened
myself.
Broken glass,
broken silence,

filled with screaming,
on the bed
she didn't want
it, but said, after,

the only time
it felt right. Was
I to force
her. Mother,

sister, once
seen, had breasts.
My father
I can't remember
but a man
in some building,
we were all swimming,
took out his

to piss, it
was large. He was
the teacher.
Everywhere

there is pleasure,
deep,
with hands
and feet.

I want
to, now I
can't wait any
longer. Talk

to me, fill
emptiness with
you, empty
hole.

(Words, 1967)

am I on the train today?

that was the year that every new shirt I put on felt novel, amiss against my skin, with
buttons that never looked reasonable.

that was the year I wore headphones everywhere I went, not because I was listening to
music, it just made it easier when people talked to me to point at my ears and
keep walking.

that was the year that things never looked so good.

that was the year I stayed up all night most nights, scouring the city for women with
really bad skin. the streets I found them on seemed like they should have meant
something but they were just streets and every time I turned around there was
another one in the offing.

that was the year the woman with the worst skin I’d ever gone out with told me her name
was team. she had a friend with her who called herself summer. they seemed too
young for the plunge because it’s not as effortless as some make it look. you know what I mean, the way you become fascinated by someone in an
underground station and then the train happens some magic, a disappearing act, flowers in your hair. or the way you tell a lie in a bar, like giving a false name, and you’re stuck with it.

that was the year I fell for a woman with the worst skin ever and breathed her in. there
was no way to get close enough. I’d point to my ears and try to keep walking
but most of the people who seem missing turn up sooner or later.

that was the year I woke up at four in the morning and found her sleeping so I watched.
it creeped me out. sometimes you’ve given all you can give.

that was the year her father sold newspapers above the stairs of a muni train stop. he had
a picture of himself on one side of his booth with a caption underneath that said
once there was spring. he had the same picture on the other side and underneath
that one it said you’ve seen this face somewhere before. he was a grizzled old
bastard with gray curly hair that he never washed, or hardly ever. he wouldn’t
talk to you or ever look up from his book when you bought a paper. he’d just point to this five gallon plastic paint bucket and you’d hand over the fifty cents. every morning I’d throw the change in violently and say to him take that you fucker. one morning I took a paper out from under the brick he used to hold them down. the red brick dust got on my hands and on the paper like it did every morning, but I just stood there this time reading. he pointed at the bucket and I kept reading. he pointed again and I said you smell old man. he reached into his pocket and dropped fifty cents into the bucket without looking up.
I slept with your daughter last night, most nights actually.
team or summer.
team. I never knew they were sisters.
that one, he said, that one has always been hungry for blood.

am I waking up at all today?

Not sure it fits on a postcard i'm not sure sentiment is worth one fucking stamp, when a younger man i was no more happy though once i watched the pink broad sky, alone in a far-off sand and surrounded by the shadows of coyotes, one gets weak with linebreak, one doesn't have the heart to end it, as if believing perhaps one line might finally solve it, as if there might ever be one final line.