another tiny note chiseled a voice of holy hebrew that always
sounded wrong swearing during sex, it was the same sound
that stayed quiet in the choking of children, who rubbed
their tired eyes with the sleeves of yellow rain jackets, chewing on
the invisible string that connects the past to the corner store, leaving
pretended views of shyness, late night keys dropping from our hands
like feathers, which still, in weathers like these, get out the cacophony

a coastal town leaks time from underneath a picnic bench,
in a dell.
no one notices.
one time I listened, but the leak was in finnish.
“leak” means something different, is spelled differently.
it wants to be left alone to catch up later.

the end of freedom

The slats here
will be the slats everywhere.
Why not an opera?
Instead of the symbol
for "asterix", you have drawn
the symbol for "at." And me,
I have given up
this life entirely. From
scrub brush to toothbrush to
sky. Neon festivity in place
of god. Rising levels of Ugg boots. Fashion,
and sheepskin, are weeping. Over cards
you told me you were leaving. And still so much
weeping to be done. You will leave me
adrift in pen caps. A scene by stagnant
suns. I will be
a bottle of blue water. I never
thought you'd wish that
on me.

for esme

"Fathers and teachers, I ponder 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

--Dostoevsky

mr. beeps

one tiny note

One philosophy thinks
happiness must be
birdstyle, built
one twig
at a time.

Another thinks:
there is no nest.

So much is possible
with so little.

David sang
his song to Goliath
with one tiny note.

The Same Dumb Run

1. The bathtub is grayed at the temples.
   
2. The pigeons asleep in their chair.
   
3. Twice hideous, once loved.
   
4. A raw feeling at dinner.
   
5. Red knuckles.
   
6. The faint strains of roadwork.
   
7. Pistol whip chorus.
   
8. You speak only in striations. Obligatory turbans and you don't have to see me.
   
9. The bearded croissant.
   
10. Cleanliness rarely equaling happiness.
    
11. Along the ________ edge of my knife.
    
12. Given up to perfect hair.
    
13. An unlikely confusion.
    
14. If you believe it's the same you'll never make it.
    
15. By radiant bus drivers.
    
16. Everywhere, everywhere a peach.
    
17. Grandstanding the pipe.
    
18. From many years ago a letter.
    
19. Oh, god.
    
20. The checks inadvertently in the checkbook.
    
21. The horrendous nature of ink. Of thinking.
    
22. Four orange flowers and nothing is better.
    
23. Volumes of Tolstoy and nothing is solved.
    
24. To argue at length the proper placement of the bookcase.
    
25. The love of you never rising above my hands.
    
26. The hue.
    
27. Dogs in the doorway; don't bother.
    
28. One day we'll walk an imaginary wheel.
    
29. An ever-increasing canto.
    
30. You might be less sad if you listened to Pavarotti.
    
31. You would like to pretend there was a first time.
    
32. Do you have a favorite bird.
    
33. Is your favorite bird the one you both loved and murdered at some frequency with BB guns.
    
34. Too much fabric at the ankle.
    
35. You imagine you whistle and they hear it.
    
36. You imagine they understand.
    
37. "Fashion Coat."
    
38. Every day write down the song you'll die to.
    
39. Math for the meter.
    
40. So much discussion.
    
41. We drove in one sitting to Pittsburgh.
    
42. Between gargantuan movements of light.
    
43. Who wins whose insanity.
    
44. A more complete recollection of scraps.
    
45. The collective holding of breath.
    
46. Legs crossed and waiting.
    
47. We came upon a clearing and within the clearing lay _______________.
    
48. Oh come on. What doesn't lie within a clearing, somewhere.
    
49. Some's and every's and an's and the's.
    
50. All the power to possess it.
    
51. Drive fast in white heels.
    
52. The one bass note that will win you.
    
53. It's impossible to predict what happens next.
    
54. To make the bed or pack a picnic lunch.
    
55. We walked out into the clearing on the tips of our half-ripped shoes.
    
56. There must be a scientific term for saying very little.
    
57. There is a term, like a shirt, for everyone.
    

jurgen, jurgen, rectify torpedoes
the lack of turtledoves in your thin little world
tears popping balloons as they float upwards
coming hard gloom to surface
and then not stopping, you rose
a different dive, like the kind you drink

captain captain, stroke your movie star beard
your imaginary charming sister
who finally falls apart when she hears of your demise
your own face as the thing you wanted most
sinking in shallow water

kitten, kitten, you went down as well
chronicled
damaged film in salt water
over you, and yours

prochnow, prochnow, did you ever milk a cow
in the large hum
boys in the road scrum of your listening eyes
until the words arrive
irrelevant
dead
migrained in barracks
these are my ears, and they have a nice house

over cocoa

The if I go becomes when. Do you want to spend the last ten years differently. Do you want to live in nickel slots, corrugated housing, bad manners. Dust bunnies and fingernail moons the color of old grease. The happy face of the parabola, but you've got that upside down. Well. Shit. The words bedded by pins to black velvet. Everything about you a fashion accessory. The retaught way to walk. It was neither the temperature nor the season for a scarf, but you went there anyway. The stupid places I would never have dreamed of stopping. Idiotsville. Fucktown. The shitfaced sidewalk. You awaken from a dream into another dream. You rise from a dream of water into a dream of walking. Madly populated by willows. Unsympathetic tigers. Seconds to live, seconds to live.

whiskeyface, I saw you in the face of three-fucked up kids, in a softer amulet, softer than the bones we were born with. they trailed out lying about things they liked in phrases learned on the voyage to the new world. where did they learn those words. who taught them to say “I love that boy” as if someone else felt that love, as if the way we try to walk was a distance in itself, four walls for every room calling out incantations unlit, a small bladder, and the door to the café letting in the coming cold. are you like them whiskyface, or is that the command you hear in some voices, a repeated sample, a regurgitation, a liquid sacrifice that helps us from the lunch table to the cement to the car to the chant that says this is monday, an extraordinary best seller which is always ending just to come around again gone.

Cannanes - We Drink Bitter

The 30-minute train and the 30-year blow

Crosswalk boots. The lost collar. Excuse me
may I. He sits and shortly thereafter it's his twin.
At some point in the steady fill
you reconsider your decision.
If you were a roof what color
would be your shingles.
The words fly up the mountain.
I love you like copper.
Like rungs nailed into telephone poles.
Equal divisions of light.
In the bird's flight
a heavy reliance on feathers.
You told me you didn't believe in the distance.
I countered with window bars,
the compost box,
an interpretive charley horse in the sheets.
Three blocks to the wind and everyone a brown garage.
The old woman moaning in pain:
The __________, she explained.
Light sockets and eyes.
The world a retarded symphony.
The largest conceivable saxophone and no chance of reeds.
But! Plenty of step ladders and hats.
If you are the car, I am the yellow medallion.
And exactly what good is the yellow medallion, you ask.
Exactly no good whatsoever, I reply.

Shyness is nice

Plastic gray shoes.
Cinder block smiles.
I never asked to be cognizant.

All this wanting flutters around like a moth.
All this sleeping keeps
making me awake.
I never asked
to be the woman in the hat,
the dog in the bag,
the mouse on the cat on the dog.

I never asked to have bones.

I asked for two tickets, Eddie Money style.
I asked for two tickets and a wonderful life, although not necessarily
in that order.
I asked for a slight cessation in stupidity,
a better blender, or lacking that, a
better blended drink.
A woman to love me forever. Snap!

I never asked for wings, although if
given the opportunity I
would like to revise my list and
ask for wings.

Yearn upwards, yearn down.

I never asked for a good haircut, nor the hair
in pair to inform it, bigger muscles, a more dashing
line to my spine.
But we may safely take that as a given.
Much like: human
avarice, artifact worship, and termites.
AKA the overwhelming desire
to gnaw.

Against rising water we built the ark.
Against obliteration we capsule-pack seeds.

I never asked for double-edged tape,
fingerprintless glasses, life
without smudge.

Why is the idea of an apocalypse not
completely distasteful to me?

In another life you
are the samurai, the
inventor of the light bulb, the best
stone-skipper to come out of Derry in the
last 50 years. In another life I am the
housewife, a hang glider, the undisputed master
of the abacus.

I never asked for what wasn't.
I never asked you
to masturbate away hope.

Switzerland (Unmixed)

The door opens up
and in walks the
angel of death
looks just like a friend.

I took the pills
I took the pills
I took the pills
so why can't I sleep?

(Hope & Suicide, 2007)

we wore band-aids on our nipples for the pheromone tour because you’ve got to give some to want some. we went down below sliding on the banisters of shown skin. we sang with the unwashed clothes of the pips formerly of “and the pips” fame. we rediscovered the short life, the long night, the hourly bells, the way old watches used to move the air in overhead vent shafts where mice knew of cities done, of the light that blocks out the light as she fixes her hair with one last look in the bathroom mirror, the way our genes make the overhead fan turn and noise the wires to spark and chew mouths full of large organs, of less words in the thread, unraveled.

Thanks, Allen

Body I lose faith in you still.

Body the crestfallen have come back to you. Unlikely prodigals in the shape of a shoe.

Body I lay with you and overhead the satellites are wistful.

Why is it no one steps forth and announces us free?

Body we've been together a long time, and although the relationship has been fruitful, perhaps we should consider parting ways.

Body we've had a good run but the door is open.

In the night we waited under pillows and even then there was fear. The fear was black. The night was black. Black, black, black.

Body why the attitude.

Once when I was five I held my hand to the sun and I swear I could hear you through my bones.

Body don't look now but I think I've had a vision.

Bodies everywhere and why do they do it.

A massacre of thumbscrews. Televised canings and precision holographic nightmares. Three old crones still singing around the fire.

Body no one's forgotten oblivion but it's just not polite to say.

Cheat codes unlock the magnificent weapons.

Body up up left right down.

Body we shall recalibrate the soulless and toast victory with green tea.

Fifty-two years and what have we gained.

Body I don't think of my father. But when I do I think he was a good man. This is the softness of later life.

In purple fur we took to the streets to lay the new empire. Aloft the purple flags.

Body I don't believe in Rome or in anything.

Body where will it end.

oh my god my goodness

i will never be right again.

Sept.-Nov.07 Fiction/Non-Fiction Releases

NEW RELEASES FOR FALL 07

 

September fiction

Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (FSG); Sebastian Faulks' novel Engleby (Doubleday); Zakes Mda's novel Cion (Picador Original); Jesse Ball's novel Samedi the Deafness (Vintage Original); and Library of America's Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960 and On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking).

Percival Everett's novel The Water Cure (Graywolf); Valerie Martin's novel Trespass (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); Brock Clarke's novel An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (Algonquin Books); David Leavitt's novel The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury); Xiaolu Guo's novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); and Edmund White's novel Hotel de Dream (Ecco/HarperCollins).

Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift's novel Tomorrow (Knopf); Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead); Irene Nemirovsky's posthumous novel Fire in the Blood (Knopf); Paul Theroux's collection of novellas, The Elephant Suite (Houghton Mifflin); and Jim Shepard's story collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf).

Vincent Lam's novel Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Weinstein Books); Gina Nahai's novel Caspian Rain (MacAdam/Cage); Northern California writer Peg Kingman's first novel, Not Yet Drown'd (Norton); Ann Patchett's novel Run (Harper); and Bay Area author Gail Tsukiyama's novel The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (St. Martin's Press).

Berkeley resident and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass' Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco/HarperCollins); Michael White's Civil War novel, Soul Catcher (Morrow); David Peace's crime novel Tokyo Year Zero (Knopf); Oakland writer Erika Mailman's first novel, The Witch's Trinity (Crown); Adrian Tomine's graphic novel, Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly); Michel Faber's story collection, Vanilla Bright Like Eminem (Harcourt); Davis artist Spring Warren's first novel, Turpentine (Black Cat/Grove); Berkeley writer Don Waters' story collection, Desert Gothic (University of Iowa Press), Robert Alter's translation of The Book of Psalms (Norton); and Garrison Keillor's first Lake Wobegon novel in six years, Pontoon (Viking).

September nonfiction

Robert Reich's Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (Knopf), Michael Hoffman edits The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words - Stories, Poems, Drafts, Letters (New York Review of Books); Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (Grove); Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story (Norton); and Gordon Johnson's Fast Cars and Frybread: Reports From the Rez (Heyday/Baytree).

John Berger's Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches of Survival and Resistance (Pantheon); Edie Kerouac-Parker's You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac, edited by Timothy Moran and Bill Morgan (City Lights); George Saunder's essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead); and John Leland's Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of "On the Road" (They're Not What You Think) (Viking).

Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown); Edwidge Danticat's memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf); David Halberstam's final book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion); and philosopher Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Harvard University Press), winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize.

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's essay collection, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (Knopf); Janet Malcolm's book on Stein and Toklas, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press); James D. Watson's Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (Knopf); and Bliss Broyard's memoir, One Drop: A True Story of Family, Race and Secrets (Little, Brown).

John Bowe's Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (Random House); James R. Gaines' For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions (Norton); and Sports Illustrated senior writer and Northern California resident Austin Murphy's ode to college football, Saturday Rules: A Season With Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) (Harper).

Charles van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal (Walker), whom van Onselen contends was Jack the Ripper; Charles Fleming and San Jose's Howard Dully's book on Dully's troubled life, My Lobotomy (Crown); Hanna Rosin's God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Harcourt); San Francisco's very own Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions); and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (The Penguin Press).

October fiction

Wanda Colmeman's story collection, Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales (Black Sparrow Books/Godine); San Francisco writer Diane Vadino's first novel, Smart Girls Like Me (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's); Bay Area author Alice Sebold's novel The Almost Moon (Little, Brown); and Millard Kaufman's first novel, Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's).

Richard Russo's novel Bridge of Sighs (Knopf); Tom Perrotta's novel The Abstinence Teacher (St. Martin's); Philip Roth's final Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin); Fadia Faqir's novel The Cry of the Dove (Black Cat/Grove); Michal Govrin's novel Snapshots (Riverhead); and Bay Area poet Adrienne Rich's Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems: 2004-2006 (Norton).

Alan Lightman's novel, Ghost (Pantheon); Cees Nooteboom's novel Lost Paradise (Grove); Ursula Hegi's novel The Worst Thing I've Done (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster); Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Bad Girl (FSG); Joshua Henkin's novel Matrimony (Pantheon); Caryl Phillips' novel Foreigners (Knopf); and Iain Banks' novel The Steep Approach to Garbdale (MacAdam/Cage).

Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road (Del Rey), first serialized in the New York Times Magazine; William Trevor's story collection, Cheating at Canasta (Viking); W.G. Sebald's poems, accompanied by lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp, making up Unrecounted (New Directions); Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to the Practice - a Collection of Great Writing About the Law (The New Press), edited by Thane Rosenbaum; and Walter Mosley's new Easy Rawlins novel, Blonde Faith (Little, Brown).

October nonfiction

San Francisco author Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Jonathan Miles' The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century (Atlantic); Judith Jones' memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (Knopf); and University of Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein's revisiting of where the Internet has taken us thus far in Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press).

Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Henry Holt); Edmund Wilson's Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s (Library of America) and his Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s (Library of America); and Oakland's Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin).

Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont edit Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion (MacAdam/Cage); David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper); Shalom Auslander's memoir, Foreskin's Lament (Riverhead); and The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 (Ecco/HarperCollins).

Half Moon Bay author Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (Knopf); Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf); Marc Norman's What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (Harmony); former Chronicle religion reporter Don Lattin's Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge (HarperOne); and Julie Kavanagh's Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon).

Award-winning Russian historian Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin (Knopf); John Updike's Due Consideration: Essays and Criticism (Knopf); Joseph J. Ellis' American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic (Knopf); and Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark's Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (Walker).

Orland Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Bob Drogin's Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Man Behind Them: The Intelligence Nightmare That Led to America's War in Iraq (Random House); Imam Sayid Hassan Al-Qazwini's American Crescent: A Muslim Cleric's Struggle for Islam in America (Random House); and Berkeley author Fritjof Capra's The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Doubleday).

Amy Silverstein's medical memoir, Sick Girl (Grove Press); Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (Norton); Gary Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities (The Penguin Press); UC Davis history Professor Andres Resendez's A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books); John Lukacs' Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Winston Churchill and the Speech That Saved Civilization (Basic Books); and Dana Frank's Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California's Kitsch Monuments (City Lights).

Venture capitalist and Hewlett-Packard board of director member Tom Perkins' memoir, Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins (Gotham Books); The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W.G . Sebald (Seven Stories Press), edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz; Craig Unger's The Fall of the House of Bush: How a Group of True Believers Put America on the Road to Armageddon (Scribner); David Mas Masumoto's Heirlooms: Letters From a Peach Farmer (Heyday Books); and KQED "Forum" host and San Francisco State Professor Michael Krasny's Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford University Press).

November fiction

Michael Rothenberg edits The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press); John Ashbery's Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins); and Ha Jin's novel A Free Life (Pantheon).

Ronan Bennett's literary thriller Zugzwang (Bloomsbury); Peter Ackroyd's novel The Fall of Troy (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); Peter Hoeg's first novel in more than 10 years, The Quiet Girl (FSG); and Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Datebook: Vol. 2 1995-1999 and ACME Novelty Library No. 18 (Drawn & Quarterly).

The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta), edited by Richard Ford; The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Stories From the Pulps During Their Golden Age - the '20s, the '30s and the '40s (Vintage Original), edited by Otto Penzler; Andrea Barrett's novel, The Air We Breathe (Norton); and Steve Erickson's novel about Hollywood, Zeroville (Europa Editions).

Stewart O'Nan's novel, Last Night at the Lobster (Viking); the anthology The Book of Other People (Penguin Original), edited by Zadie Smith; and Yannick Murphy's novel Signed, Mata Hari (Little, Brown).

November nonfiction

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating (The Penguin Press); Silvana Paternostro's My Colombian War: A Journey Through a Country I Left Behind (Henry Holt); Peter Gay's Modernism: The Lure of Heresy - From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (Norton); Lachlan Whelan's Contemporary Irish Prison Writing: Writing and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan); John Richardson's third volume of his Picasso biography, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf); and novelist and story writer William Boyd's Bamboo: Essays and Criticism (Bloomsbury).

Ed Sikov's Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis (Henry Holt); San Francisco writer Alex Frankel's Punching In: My Unauthorized Adventure as a Front Line Employee (Collins); Thomas Hines' The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG); Umberto Eco's essay collection, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (Harcourt); Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris' The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (The Penguin Press); and Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon).

Alicia Castro and Ingrid Kummels' Queens of Havana: The Amazing Adventures of the Legendary Anacaona, Cuba's First All-Girl Dance Band (Grove Press); The Paris Review Interviews, II (Picador Original), edited by Philip Gourevitch; The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (Harper), edited by Charlotte Mosley; Ronald Brownstein's The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (The Penguin Press); and Conrad Black's (yes, that Conrad Black) Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs).

The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service 1967-1980 (Atria), selected and edited by David Hilliard; Bill Boyarsky's Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics (University of California Press); Steve Martin's memoir, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Scribner); Adam David Miller's memoir of growing up in the Jim Crow South, Ticket to Exile (Heyday Books); and a book not likely to be sold next to where you pick up your Frappuccino, Taylor Clark's Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture (Little, Brown) .

 

 

Louie's

To delineate
To encircle
To congratulate and
to weep.

Whenever anyone adverbalizes
uncontrollably
it always to my mind
brings the bowels,
the exploding wanton
love
of the bowels, of all the parts of you,
nether
or otherwise
even those alien and
antithetical, the hummingbird
or clockspring
that took you last Tuesday
to Louie's,

the bar I never
go to, on
the street I care always
not to see.

Louie's, where
you stood
two drinks too long, through
two too many
glasses
of wine.

I don't want you
to tell me
his name,
or at what drink it was
he paid
instead
of you,
or how
beyond
the basic
physiological
structure
his cock
worked differently
from mine.

I spend entire
evenings
considering
those differences.

Considering
a yellow
car ride,
a purple
stairwell,
bedspreads,
Tuesdays,
Louie's,
the end.

ordinarily

Ordinarily
the empty.
Ordinarily
the blank.
The finger-smudged
convex, the perfect
eyebrow, and tell me
what is
older: the shotgun
or the mouth? the heart
seen only
as a bird's nest
of ink. the realization
of one forty three,
of thirty five zygote
and egg.

"for miles the city"

for miles the city
for inches the night
for centuries the ice
for five years the fingernails,
your face

for miles the night
for miles the knife
for miles the trees
for miles your belt
for miles the question
for miles an answer,
the right

for centuries the ice, the highball, the glass

for miles the wind
for miles the thinking
for miles the sent

for miles the insinuation
for miles the grief

for miles your fingers
for miles the ringing
of the telephone

for miles the photograph
for miles the gray

for miles the ending
for miles the end

for miles the ringtone
for miles the bend

featherbound

Featherbound
Oraga
Gypsum and moss
Clevinger post

Why did I
walk away from you

I wasn't happy then
and I'm not happy now

The daylight cuts into the water
The ocean swallows the sunset
The minnow swallows the whale

Why did I
walk away from you

In a thousand blank rooms
and your breasts I can barely
remember

Transfer slips
Drink rings
Fingerprints

There used to be breathing
in the blackness
The morning
you dropped your scooter
There will be
no more omelets
There will be no more
tea

All the people here wouldn't
fill a glass of you
If I could
be anyone I'd be
the man who told you different

Why did I
walk away from you

Twitter

1. A condition of twittering or tremulous excitement (from eager desire, fear, etc.); a state of agitation; a flutter, a tremble. Now chiefly dial.
1678 BUTLER Hud. III. I. 83 The ancient errant knights Won all their ladies' hearts in fights, And cut whole giants into fritters, To put them into amorous twitters. a1734 NORTH Exam. I. iii. §31 (1740) 141 The Attorney-General..was in a Twitter; for some of his Friends told him he would certainly be questioned for it in Parliament. 1802 G. COLMAN Poor Gentleman I. i, If I ben't all of a twitter to see my old John Harrowby again! 1825 J. NEAL Bro. Jonathan II. 151 A leap of the heart..and a sort of tingling twitter through all his blood. 1861 THACKERAY Four Georges iv. (1862) 198 In a twitter of indignation. 1869 TROLLOPE He knew, etc. xxxi, [She] was in a twitter, partly of expectation, and partly..of fear. 1869 L. M. ALCOTT Little Women vi, Beth hurried on in a twitter of suspense.
b. A suppressed laugh, a titter; a fit of laughter. dial.
1736 LEWIS Isle of Tenet Gloss. s.v. (E.D.S.), He is in a mighty twitter. 1847-78 HALLIWELL, Twitter,..(2) A fit of laughter. Kent.
2. An act or the action of twittering, as a bird; light tremulous chirping. Also transf. a sound resembling this.
1842 BROWNING Waring I. vi. 35 As pours some pigeon..her melodious cry Amid their [swallows'] barbarous twitter! 1849 W. S. MAYO Kaloolah v. (1850) 40 The hesitating twitter of the sleepy birds. 1871 BLACKIE Four Phases i. 43 A mere swallow-twitter of inarticulate jargon. 1902 J. C. SNAITH Wayfarers xvi, The ceaseless twitter of the rain on the road

TRS-80: Cliff Evans

march of the stanzas

It was exactly everything:
two brown arms and
the southward-pointing wheel.
The blackbird didn't
have time for your theories
and no one lived
in the concrete
but us.
Remarkably beautiful us!
And about now is the
time for a question.
Or is it?
You asked the blackbird
exactly why we bother
and the blackbird answered,
wings.

OK, for the part
about productivity,
I lied a bit. When
building the tower one
should usually strike
for up. And away! The joyous
lark and
hangover. Don't ask me
to stretch it in all directions,
to translate from the Russian
to your fears. My brain
is a puddle
of infinite depth.

I am a kitten eating cracker jacks.
a shoelace in the trees
a ruby-throated billboard
and a bite off Chekhov's inseam.

How many forevers
will I be able to see
the tree held in sunset light,
leaves bright and brushed
by the wind.
Already
it is gone.

We are out of the night.
We are arrived.

We're in
the dark days,
or so the advertisements
tell us.
Hopped up on facecream
is not the worst
way to die.
Screaming bombs! Screaming
babies!
Why can't we all scream
quietly!
Sometimes
the exclamation mark
is a wondrous
invention. I remember now
I had pledged to scream
Eureka! at least
once last night and at that
I have failed.

Last night I smashed
my lamp against the wall.
Time for a new lamp!
Time for therapy!

You pay for the privilege.
For the white flat front
of the bus.

And then into the folds of your apron
you tucked the knife.

In the yellow-cake colored paperback in the basement
was the story of the woman double-dipped in gold paint
who died when men covered up the small of her back,
the last breathing spot.

In the thick encyclopedias layering the shelves
was the story of the Temple of Kyoto, where elves
(well, monks) painted urushiol lacquer over all gold leaf
to preserve it from thieves.

But in a lost tale a daughter in the back seat
of a van with dozens of glittering, under a blanket,
bottles, lacquered, and boxes like jacquard, of liquor--
gifts for customers,

or a heist? -- is a mess of poison ivy under the blanket
with the spirits gilded and boxes elongate;
untouchable, though not dying. Spirited
away like a scratching anti-Juliet

-- Urushiol by Ange Mlinko

many times

many times in darkness
have i listened
to the last guitar chord
bequeath itself
to the still.
many times hand on
myself have i thought
this is it, the end, no more
root beer. many
times have i ground
the ax, many times
have i wished to be
more a man.
but what else is there?
many times in the darkness
have i wished
for more darkness,
the utter kind, the
soul-sealing
box, but
that's not the kind
they make. apparently.
many times
many times
many times.

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was as silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
or the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
or beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they've read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poety, with title like
"My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste
for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine."
They're not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me about trees,
that they're the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, they they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.

O my pa-pa by Bob Hicok

From one of the books I'm reading, Half Life, by Shelley Jackson. I'd like to think she and I are related, but we probably aren't.

(background: narrator is one half of a conjoined twin, and she's talking about when she and her sister read different books together)

This left a particular legacy. I cannot reread a certain energetic tale of derring-do without a feeling of melancholy bushwhacking me in the middle of a gunfight, at just the point her sob story made her bawl. Or read a particular love scene without bursting out laughing. Every book sems to me to have a second story under its skin, a narrative not of incident but of emotion, at odds with the one on the surface. Even when, for school, we had to read the same books, I reached the sad parts with a feeling of déjà vu when she had been there a page before me; she scooped every story, except the ones I scooped first. More often, it was a matter of chuckling or weeping over a grammar book. And when we found the battered Playboy by the highway, the day before a math test, √2 made my pulse gallop, and still does.

Also, I think this is an interesting short film. As one of my friends put it when we were talking about it, this is what dying of boredom looks like (it's 13 minutes, but worth it, and you probably won't be able to look away anyway)

joanne kyger @ city lights

Joanne Kyger Thursday, July 12th, 7pm Joanne Kyger celebrating the release of About Now: Collected Poems, published by the National Poetry Foundation

missing the 20th century

The Underdog

http://www.myspace.com/spoon

"You got no fear of the underdog.
That's why you will not survive."

Spoon, "The Underdog"

annie wilkinson

Art by Annie. More info on her site, and more pictures on flickr.

Re: Cheney

The Cheney Vice-Presidency

 

this monkey's gone to heaven

edwards drive-in

the conformist by bernardo bertolucci -- a lot, not a little bit, of genius going on here. it's about the weakness of the masses, but told through one individual, the way an individual can want so bad to be part of something. it's not just political, it's sexual and funny and maybe a little bit drunk. the movie is also beautiful just to look at. my favorite movie in months.

Let's Start Digging

I have long suspected
that when you got down to it
Gomorrah was a lot worse than Sodom.

You hear a bit about the Sodomites,
after all. They were the proud
purveyors of sodomy

But whatever they were doing in
Gomorrah was some bad shit.

God struck it down so bad
that even the bad behavior
didn’t survive in language.

Sodom got burnt &
Gomorrah got buried.

in response to "fake empire"

six minutes and counting

21 bus line—door jamb to curb

a panhandles puddled cement

orange juice banging against my thigh

I reached out all breathy and tired

your cool forehead, your hot cheeks

beneath a spiky Mohawk

all fawna and flora

you lie.

milk thistle tears

the glistening kind

full of pin-pricks

we waited and rocked

knees to a chest

I saved part of the infection in a small plastic bag. A grievance.
You didn’t want me. To turn down your covers, or generate
a low tone. You were wet with radiation sickness.
A pair of eyes came out of you. A pair of wisdom teeth,
a practice…

Eventually, I pinned your left hand behind your back. I sang you,
that boat, that heaven, the three-armed love. Whether there was
a blind wind on... When the sash blew we knew it was close.
The hoodlum tundra, the icicle full of pills. When the first
and perfect, and each one its own tome…

Even my breakage. In the closet, I shook the vehicle… In the
back of the closet, I examined my own fur.

-Danielle Pafunda, from Pretty Young Thing a.k.a. the next poetry book i plan to read if i can track the damn thing down.

forewarned is forearmed

I have a microchip
Implanted in my heart
So if I try to escape
The robots will blow me apart
And my limbs will go flying
And land before the ones that I love
Who would wail and would weep
But the robots would keep them at bay
While I shut my eyes
For the very last time.

--from Citizens of Tomorrow, Tokyo Police Club

oh!

Oh blackened pit of despair!
Let me take you by the handlebars.
Let me fluff for you the pillow. My guts
are fruit punch,
Hi-C fucked open
at two ends
by metal.
It is a good day, the sun
appallingly bright and the sky--
OK, the sky
is hazy. The hydrocarbons
are having a field day, even if
it's the white ribbon kind
that even the fat kid can win.
No prize
for you, blackened pit! Today the trees
are weeping black
lullabies and my sadness
shines like a far boat
on the bay.

there was red lighted door two doors down from the house
where she left a note for me in her underwear
that I found as I slipped them off
the note said “stay out super late”
it said I lived in a fake empire
that I was half-awake

I crutched the city
turned the bus-stop over with my hands
there was one minute and ten minutes
there was my friends scattered across any distances
people reaching into their pockets as if it would never mean anything again
there was a gay boy with a black eye who gave me the softest kiss I ever had
there were bell systems, gun shots, seven and nineteen minutes
a woman who looked younger than she is up in her room with her plants
an unknown musical organism pissing on public trash cans

her parents were lovely in how obvious they loved her

there was a woman with a big ass in a short skirt
and a tattoo on her thick left sky
mostly I was alone out there so I brought the big dictionary I bought at costco with me
pictures of people I used to know in a wicker basket
two and fifteen minutes
homemade camper shells and new friend love businesses
I went down with all the same things I always thought

tail fin

professional-like

i-pod wars

"Blood and Love Tonight!" was written
on our tombstones for us
In the silence of these graves
I was digging and up came the whispers
They said:
"The Right will switch sides"
We'll have our bride
And I will love my enemy tonight!

"We invite you all to join us here for this union."
The notes were all received by the vanguard
early this morning.
"Please come tonight, our allies.
This great divide
Has kissed us with a surprise bride."

I've got blood in the palms of my hands
It's only blood they'll understand

In the dead of night you better hold on tight to
your loved ones.
The rumor is the truth, the furies are here upon us.
Ask: "Who switched sides?"
My bride.
And this fight moves on
Outside the cemetery lawn.

"Who switched sides?!"
Our bride.
And this fight moves on
Outside the cemetery lawn.

cemetery lawn, by the rosebuds

OCD

recommendations for 30 yrs

live life
like a razorblade. become
beautiful
whenever possible.
encourage
light, spread and
take
sips, sometimes
gulps, sometimes
the whole damn
enchilada all
at once. yours. make
every effort to
surpass
the common verity. read
as much as
is humanly possible,
then ever
so slightly
more. and maybe most
importantly never
forget to
rock,
rock and love,
love and rock and
more of that,
onward, double-bass drums,
howling,
the night.

lupo rima

What we gave
to the wolf
can never be recovered. Even
the strongest
of similes will eventually
leave us, black
as a pocket or
bottled
like the sky. So
don't. I am here
to give you
the rafters. I am
the wolf
with the butterfly's heart.

not finished yet but still

How many more sad
poems than happy ones!
It's all right.
Why borrow another's
broken razor
when what's really wanted
is one's own private hospital
for lost birds.
We all want to be
Frank O'Hara but
it simply isn't practical.
For example,
the single size of pants.
There is so much
to suffer, ice cream
to spill and everywhere
we walk may be
the 101 in rush hour:
to the bathroom at night or
to the kitchen to say,
I need you.

new yorker article excerpt

In 1969, the Congressional Joint Comittee on Atomic Energy held a hearing at which Robert Wilson was called to testify. Wilson, who had served as the chief of experimental nuclear physics for the Manhatten Project, was at that point the head of CERN's main rival, Fermilab, and in charge of $250 million that Congress had recently allocated for the lab to build a new collider. Senator John Pastore, of Rhode Island, want to know the rationale behind a government expenditure of that size. Did the collider have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?

Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are partriotic about . . . It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

adjective as a noun

hard as an eskimo pie.
hard as as a sheep-shackle.
strong as a bathtub.
strong as a corkboard.
strong as a lipstick.
black as a shoelace.
black as a dollar.
black as a susan b. anthony dollar.
black as a plate.
black as a theory.
theoretical like a beer glass.
theoretical like iggy pop.
hard as crutches.
theoretical as birds' wings.
black as a pocket.
strong as a pocket.
strong as a tub.
bottled like the sky.

two from the iggster

"All I liked to do was walk around the streets with a heart full of napalm. I always though 'Heart Full of Soul' was a good song so I thought, What's my heart full of?
I decided it was basically full of napalm."

"What happened was by the time I finished Raw Power, my standards were different than other people's. That's the only way I can put it. I wanted the music to come out of the speakers and just grab you by the throat and just knock your head against the wall and just basically kill you."

The London Apartments - Streetlights Are Soldiers

what else are you taking with you? (old)

Kat grabbed a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table, lit one, and lay back upon the couch. She put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, savoring the acrid taste. She heard the crinkle of the tobacco burning, watched the thin ember ring work its way up the cigarette as it turned white paper to ash. She counted the rings on the stem of the cigarette, the tiny striated lines marking the paper that held the tobacco. How many rings per drag, per breath, she wondered. She inhaled and watched the rings disintegrate into ashes. The rings of a tree, she thought, rings of the cigarette that mark time’s passage, our life together. This ring for when I met you. This one for when we first slept together, and in gratitude you told me that you loved me. Here for your birthday, when we drank too much tequila and I broke all the plates.

Alipio

certainly he
can take it,
man the beseiged,
alipio americanus,
chicagoan he who
takes it every night on
3am sidewalks.
the mechanism
is one handed,
american industriousness,
with one movement
the blade, but
the sentiment to use it seems
a most unamerican undertaking,
by this i mean one
must act unencumbered
by forethought, repercussion, as
if one were already
dead. no one
ever stops at 3am, and
thus it is
a wash, a thousand
knives into the eyes
of a thousand draining
shadows,
bootheels and
bootheels' echoes soon
will all just sink
away.

whiskeyface!

his dreams brightened. the vanished world returned. kin long dead washed up and cast fey sidewise looks upon him. none spoke. he thought of his life. so long ago. a gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned. on the table books and papers. it had begun to rain and a cat at the corner turned and crossed the sidewalk and sat beneath the cafe awning. there was a woman at a table there with her head in her hands. years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. shelves tipped over. some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. he picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. he'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. it surprised him. that the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. he let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.

from the road by cormac mccarthy

friday

here
my heart
is nothing, her
forehead, tears, her
handkerchief, if
only i had
loved you, streetlights, why
all i see are things
that lie
behind us, baby, i
would have
been brighter, better,
another man
entirely.

not quite weller

hello i am a nothing salesman
i sit alone and wait for endings
once a year i suffer the old folk
it's always good to know where you're heading

that's entertainment
that's entertainment

at age twelve i was a brilliant young lightbulb
by eighteen a pock-faced nightmare
thirty-five and now i know nothing
it's just the wattage that's what i'm saying

that's entertainment
that's entertainment

art store

this is by john pylypchuk.

see more of him here

i-pod wars

when our mouths are filled with uninvited tongues of others
and the strays are pining for their unrequited mothers
milk that sours is promptly spat
light will fill our eyes like cats

and they shall enter from the back
with spears and scepters and squirming sacks
scribs and tangles between their ears
faceless scrumbled charcoal smears

through the coppice and the chaparral
the thickets thick with mold
the bracken and the brier
catchweed into the fold

when our mouths are filled with uninvited tongues of others
and the strays are pining for their unrequited mothers
milk that sours is promptly spat
light will fill our eyes like cats
light will fill our eyes like cats
cataracts

---andrew bird, from the album armchair apocrypha

Pagan Kennedy

Pagan Kennedy
Makeout Room
Writer's w/Drinks
Saturday, April 14 @ 7pm

gulliver's travels (for john)

So

So the promise of happiness?
he asked a frog

then swallowed the frog
And the buzz of memory?

he asked the page
before lighting the page

And by night the sliding stars
beyond the night itself

-- Michael Palmer

cymbal chimp, you're okay

at the rack

frankenstein took the three-pound hammer from the wall, found the hand-sized area on the anvil that rang the clearest and gave the most bounce to the hammer’s head—the anvil’s “sweet spot”. everything has two meanings, he thought, our simplest, smallest words branching off into the storms and whirlpools of sex, warfare, worship. therefore the words do not work. he breathed shallow while the wet coal at the fire’s edges coked up, the sulfur cooking out of it and filling the shop with lung-stinging fumes. “coked up”—the verbal thing there made him wonder if he wasn’t just doing this to be doing coke, if the part of him that literalized all words, the undeciphering, dreaming part of him, believed he was here getting high. several nights of sick dreaming had preceded his relapse. various dreams but they all happened in the same place, a city he must have visited once and couldn’t remember anymore, depopulated now, vast and silent stadiums, motionless streets. the man in the dream was no longer himself; it was some other fool, some other drugged maniac, and he, frankenstein, watched the rest of it from a place beyond, like a moviegoer—a dreamgoer. he’d never before had a dream and failed to be in it.

from already dead, by denis johnson

Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. President,

You should be careful
how you handle
civil wars.

Word
on the street is:

they're highly
contagious.

Yours truly,
Democracy

treatment

The camera begins on a pane of glass, looking from the inside out, and a wet hail weakly taps the window. Outside can be seen a dour winter, snow on the ground, a northern mountain town. Cars move slowly down the streets, early day, everything gray in the pale gray light. In fact it is Christmas.

As the camera pulls back into the room, turns, we can see we are in a bedroom, a man's room, nothing on walls, wooden floor, the kind that echoes too loudly beneath one's heels in the still of night. A pile of clothes in the corner, work boots, a bed and a cluttered bureau. Upon it change, scraps of paper, receipts pulled crumpled out of pockets, a lamp and several mostly-empty beer bottles.

A man sits in the bed fully clothed. Jacket and boots on, waiting. He holds his ski cap in his hands, looks out the window. Lucas Raley.

spit

sister spit reading, mon apr 9 @ edinburgh, i don't know if men are allowed

start a war

you could have it all

millstone

I used to be such a burning example
I used to be so original
I used to care I was being cared for
And made sure I showed it to those that I love
I used to sleep without a single stir
Cause I was about my father's work

[drum kicks in]

-- Brand New

edwards drive-in

when did ryan gosling become edward norton jr.? just watched the believer and half nelson back to back and I'd do it again. cause I'm an internet using motherfucker, or with hyphens: an internet-using-motherfucker.

"john, the internet using motherfucker"

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