TXT ISLAND

fly your butterfly

"A Monarch Butterfly which has died is trimmed for flight and flown as a walkalong glider. The butterfly was found with its wings in the folded position. The butterfly is put in a humid chamber to loosen up the muscles. Once unfolded, the butterfly wings are dried in a mold and fingernail polish is applied to the fuselage to add weight and strengthen the wings. The butterfly is then flown as a walkalong glider."



http://www.instructables.com/id/Monarch-Butterfly-Walkalong-Glider/

i am and i am

I am a cadillac and I am blind.

I am a dog and I am free.

I am an Arab and I am Lawrence.

I am a sock and I am thoughtful.

I am a bleach and I am forgiven.

I am a whale and I am sorrowful.

I am a claw-hammer and I am whole.

I am a bludgeon and I am directed.

I am a seed and I am growing.

I am a think-piece and I am grown.

I am a road-trip and I am my father.

I am an ascendant and I am flown.

[expanding]

drink it, goddammit

into the unknown

go blow

What caps the great well.
The hands are bound and
The little boy cannot hold it.
What does it mean?
The clouds bumble by
And the birds sing obliviousness.
The boy grows up into glass,
Joins his place in the case.
Shouldered beside the others.

admitted

one more before
the expiry there is
an uncountable
badness i jam my
hands into
pockets this world
is an ice cube beautiful
and cold no one
has ever told me
why perhaps only
because it doesn't i feel
affinity with sinking
lights a long time
ago i carried
knives i was sorry
for the both
of us the times i woke
up and couldn't
remember or the times
i did and it didn't
make sense to either
of us at
all.

upside down to clean it

i am trying to expire
desire a clean black
expanse confronts
me daily i
spilled orange
juice in it an honest
enough mistake
when you fist walked
home when you told her
nothing in fact was
wrong you are
the lights above the city you are
the left foot in front of
the next.

something off the brain

Somnolent wreck.
Flesh through the sweater.
The sexual complaints of abu anabi.
Could someone tell me why.
A truncated ring tone.
Who are you sleeping with now.
And then it all descends to ali.
A mix of brick and paint made to look as if brick.
Glottal. Glottal. Stop.

in the bag

kittens inspired by kittens

Forget the cities.
They never taught you
how to eat blueberries.
Walk over
the black hood face
down; instead kiss
the sidewalk a kiss
for your killer. I thank
you honestly,
truly,
from the still low empty,
mute gut emptied.
God that it would only be
what I squeezed into
my fist. My inky super
fist.

high praise

I am unmoved
unmanned
unhanded, hand
over hand to the top
of the ropes. From here
I can see almost
to the brink Four
counties Sissel
and the beanstalk
Hand over
hemoglobin Lovingly
scratched to the blank
bags of being Mother
embossment monogrammed
items unlikely to
be accepted upon intent
or acceptance
of return.

la la la la la la la la

You're up there
Took the stairs
To the stars all alone
You left all the lights burning
But nobody's home
I believe they deceived your tuneful heart too long
Now they sing along

--from Help Me by Alkaline Trio

small pome

blur and then blush and then
an ode to the cleaner, his long-handled
stick. stickiness. i stick to you
like glue. like the pungent wipe of disgrace
that would not leave my hand after eating. once
i took this same plane as the return
from adultery. i wondered what i would
tell you. that's not true. i knew
exactly the words i would employ, with what
hatchery and hatchetery i would bloodily
birth it, serve it
to you ugly and born
on a plate.
43 minutes.
we accelerate from space,
emptiness solid to something slightly
less so, a mist, half
tasted flavor, an old ring, or the cobble
crack cinder heel hair breast red
chest and tortured. ground.
i would like to call this love.
i would like it
very much.

White Mule

In a heat wave enter the rose gardens of Portland.
The victory of rose names over the heat, the victory of bees over all.
Sun, I do not speak your language
and yet you shout louder.

White mule climbs steps to a Greek villa
to be sent down again. Such is the heart.
The mule and the switch have their conversation.
It is okay to be a tourist in your life, but not an impostor.

Convoy of mule days, convoy of mule heart—
low card brings it in, high takes half the pot.

umbrella today

umbrella today says: bring your umbrella
umbrella today says: don't
umbrella today says: high chance of showers
umbrella today says: are you retarded? bring your umbrella
umbrella today wonders why we bother
umbrella today says: at least for the moment
umbrella today says: i'm listless
umbrella today says: obviously
umbrella today thinks the hard thoughts
umbrella today says: why do we always have to have this conversation
umbrella today: the life you save may be your own
umbrella today says: it's raining. still.
umbrella today prepares for the flood
umbrella today: a new wet you
umbrella today says: yes, still raining
umbrella today wonders when next we'll see the sun
umbrella today is ambivalent
umbrella today is already inside, so by all means, go fuck yourself
umbrella today recommends galoshes
umbrella today says: learn to swim
umbrella today says: well duh
umbrella today: yes

don't call me at work
and aw no
the boss still hates me
i'm just tired
and i don't love you anymore

and there's a restaurant
we should check out
where the other nightmare people
like to go
i mean nice people
baby wait
i didn't mean to say nightmare

-- from They'll Need a Crane, TMBG

oh look it's a goose

broadcast from the high dry
hillocks. affixed with stitch
and strategy. primary
and angular, of stocky
stiffened cloth.

hands pushed the small shoulders forward.

there's no need to say it differently.

a small boy kneecaps capped in green grass
marched before them waving
fifty-two pinpoints on an ethereal
flag

i think we must simply
adjust

to the readout, of your Climate
Control Center which reminds me
of the clash
of the titans if the titans
were an intricasy of inscrutable
levers i mean that
lee-vers, say it with me and already
it's exploding
like some hot
tomato in the grasp
of some outright lonely
lobe.

cracking it open

Just think he said if
we cracked it open like
pancakes i said no
he said nothing
like that at all oh
i said well
then.

once again again

i am at
the still place where
the low voice bawls where
the clock indistinguishes
itself against
the dull
half murmuring
heart.

the night is
glass is
cold on the back
of my neck like
some bitter iced
remembrance i remember
when you saw it tears you
wiped from
your eyes.

what we held on that ugly
carpet our bony young
bodies one summer what
could possibly stand
against all this steady
dripping steady
happening steady
memory accumulated happening
like dust like rust like
the still the still i
want to. i want you. is
what i wanted to say and
never.

small song

my bed 2 A.M.
the silence my friend
is another dull tone on the line

and slowly the moon
sings another pale tune
and already already i am fine

in the dust far behind me
lies the salt of your tears

in the blue sea before me
lies the waste of my years

i thought once i'd make it
but now i know clear

that nothing will ever be mine

black ribbons

i left you walking half
to forever in all the barns
hands were turning mad
pulleys still upon
the doorknob i left
you even when i
looked i split
my lips.

i don't fit in much
of anywhere between
the thrall and the frame kid
socks and fingers worn
where i've used them my
intention no more than the
knobs of an old
electric.

blood tears and teeth
blood tears and teeth
blood tears and teeth
blood tears and teeth

morning on the train (on a bookmark, my bookmark)

what is wrong
with a dog in the grass. today
the sun is on my knees.
a smile is on the garage
door. and everywhere
the monochromatic joy
of the sky. five
thousand humans move
together. air blows
because of a process
involving freon. rings
mark the hands
of the taken. when
the ground cries out what
it's missing always is
the cadence of their
boots.

the questions of your life (phase 1)

• If you had to identify yourself as composed of three different authors, who would they be?
  
  
• If your house/apartment/cardboard-box was on fire and you could grab only one item before escaping, what would it be?
  
  
• Would you rather live by the mountains or by the sea?
  
  
• What song would you like to die to? What song should play at your funeral? Are they the same song?
  
  
• What animal are you? If you want to, explain.
  
  
• What would it take to make you give up everything?
  
  
• Describe your ideal breakfast. This means more than just the food. Where are you sitting? What's the light like? What are you wearing on your feet?
  
  
• What's the last thing that made you cry? If you refuse to cry, what's the last thing that made you feel oh so very bad?
  
  
• Bestow on yourself a nickname. Don't tell anyone what it is. You may have noticed that this is not a question. Do it anyway.
  
  
• Suppose you're stuck in a weird acid flashback, in which 5 minutes of your past keeps happening over and over, an endless loop. What happens in that 5 minutes?
  
  

too sleepy for thinking too tired
to sleep. i left my parents' house
along the slash of my father's
handwriting. the basket
of my mother's worry. i set off
to the world beholden
to my imminent disaster.

and only made it Here.

now cold in the hole of this
cliffsitting cabin.
the trailworn edge of the world.
being Here is like being anywhere:
too many feet and too little blanket.
more bullshit erected
at the side of the road.

simply put:
fuck fuck fuck
fuck fuck.
when morning

breaks i will step against
the sun. write my own
selfsame letters.
foot on stone my stone.
in the message i mail
to the present i'll tell them,
don't wait.
the future is certain.
all the songbirds
eloped.

Proverbs 8:1

 1 Does not wisdom call out?
       Does not understanding raise her voice?

 2 On the heights along the way,
       where the paths meet, she takes her stand;

 3 beside the gates leading into the city,
       at the entrances, she cries aloud:

 4 "To you, O men, I call out;
       I raise my voice to all mankind.

transition

Arrayed and dismayed. The lip of your metal cup. The edges of your memory. The smell of gasoline where 'Jasmine' would have been prettier. It could have all been prettier. Bent over the counter top while the unforgiving give of the vaseline. I am not saying I want it different. Would want it wearing heels. Sufficiently stilettoed through butterflies and bees. All ripped in the hitch. Then from beside the balustrade you find the smaller vital you. The you that might send you a message. With a half-perceptible pulsing it unfolds like the odor of grass. The comb at the throat. The small boat embarked upon the great waves. A mouse and a cat at the tiller. A raspy brace of sea salt. An azure dream of a deep and sighing jewel. When I snap my fingers you will awaken. When awakened inside your fingers you may snap. The last long call of a gull. That's it. You can open them. We've arrived.

tin prayer

oh lord
of fire and
lord of blight,
lord of the light
blue dressing.
lord of mysterious skies,
crying masses
of intestinal angst.
lord of vapid footed biology.
lord of mutter and worry.
lord of bitch-
tied 'bout the kneecaps.
lord born from the imprint,
lord copied from carbon.
lord still independent
of who voices. lord of
unbroken
breads. lord who by bison, by blue, by
wrecked and half-noble knuckles.
oh lord it is for you
that i bleed a bad tartan.
it is for you
i dance a slow jig.
lord whom to holier
nothings were nowhere
never whispered,
genuflectously intoned,
the breath of the great
patella oh magnanimous sweet
unfulsome oh bloody oh
lord.

Paranoia mix

celestial

the ridiculous arrangement of our bodies. books given on your birthday. how once in the backyard you dropped to your knees. took me there. a taffeta shift. spiderweb tights. that could have been us that rode to the stars. instead we never went anywhere. paved circuit from the bathroom to the bedroom. from the bathtub to the sink. we always want more of our powers. but someday we're done fighting evil. or good. love's fingers on the autoharp. the moon on the horizon. before the sadness of the stars. do i regret it? no. it's not a lie if you believe. what won me was the wisp. what held me i don't know.

the king of carrot flowers / once inside my head

black coffee

when only the fire glows
twin dots dotted from a host of ill centuries (.)
where space and wistful longing launch
themselves wheel idly around the same
round hole, whole star swung round

my hands and knees, 1 can
ajax 1 coarse green
scrubbie blow
me a kiss, red tile and wooden stairwell
50 pounds of onions too tough
to die. kid

what came for you later only came
cause it could smell you, that same
raw stink bits black trailing
tongues around your gums, your weakness, your initials
hot knifed to
the trunk of the tree.

it loved you
through rubberized fingers
crouched round the rubberized
handle,
held wetly half past
midnight.

once it was
you and the footsteps, you
were all just the whisper
of leaves, he liked
that. "Comfort,"
he said. "Don't
you see?" I
didn't. I don't.

you want i want

you want for maleness
while i just want
for peopleness. we're
neither. i want
for dogs' eyes,
third prize,
a fast mist at night
or the lonely light
laid down
from open windows.
thrown sleeping
to the street,
complete,
discursive and brainless,
highlit and neat.
(oh lover
hold thy tongue.)

--

you want for maleness
i want for peopleness

we're neither
yeah we're neither

i want for dogs' eyes
third prize

oh brother don't believe her
yeah don't believe her

a fast mist
at night
a lonely light
laid down
from open windows

thrown sleeping
to the street,
complete,

where ever you will find me
brother you will find me

the small hours

A joyrider rip up Lockland.
It takes barely five minutes
for a precinct helicopter
to dip and swivel over lawns
and two opposing lines of cars
parked innocently snug to the sidewalk.
They haven't found him yet.
Every couple of minutes or so,
my blind soaks in outrageous light
and the helicopter hauls its drone
and feud all over my backyard.
There's a fan over my bed
that says similar things in summer:
adages, reproach and rhetoric.
I talk too much, give far too much away.
In mumbling my company, I reckon on
a twofold payoff: some echo;
being found out, consequence.
I lie low. Minutes swell.
He must be out there somewhere,
lights switched off, crouched and bundled,
foot within an inch of the get-go.
I pull the comforter up over my ears,
count to forty-two, then start over.
I'm trying, trying hard, to hold my breath.

by vona groarke

You can't feel it with your hands.
In your tooth tips,
lips,
wrenching the complaints like jagpipes
to your glasses, a broken tune.
And only across the room.
Amok we go to the morning bakery.
Amok I feel you below the blanket.
A teddy bear beneath your elbow
is no way to live.
The slug's slimy purpose, now compare:
favorable in singularity, but grand totaled
it's hardly worth the metrics.
My god, all that time punching the pillow.
Frumping and rosecheeks.
All that anger mistaken
for health.
A saran-wrap crumpled nose.
Who knows?
I sometimes have those thoughts.
A remarkable, unerring diligence.
But then we have sex and shortly thereafter,
I am free.

grayday grayday

cheap symbol i'm here
talking nobility
while you wait with
a half-handled boning
knife, serape, cigars yes
it's taken me, is not well
belted cloaked hidden you
shouldn't look up the halo
of the moon. in other
worlds the saw
is the law, she will
wear a veil, she may
never see you. a hot
blooded holy, lent back
in strong wind mother
fucker i've seen you
i know you
three times alien
babies in the
plastic pitted
capsule.
artificial
life. ill-fitting
zipper. pathos
particularly mcglincy
you gherkin
i am. i am under
black kerchief mainsail,
the jar,
the man who played with
muddy waters plays how muddy
comes apart. this poem
has no idea
what it is.
this poem is still trying
to wake up.

it's a flower.

reply in the sky

Your pictures are
very cool but they
are also so very very tiny
on the web page.

Awful, hideous, and old
is what we all become,
someday, just
like someday we will all
become babylike and pink,
also sweet and soft
as powder.

St. Paul is a twin
to Minneapolis, and Minneapolis
gave birth to the Replacements,
and I love the Replacements
from the top of my Westerberg
to the bottom of my Stinson.

Good luck
on the redeye
and on the mid west.

Three cheers
to the almost-rendered heart.

an evening in mongolia

Dean Young was sad and Russell
wasn't much better. It's true

we had little
to go on: a few
shaggy ponies, spears. When pressed,
which would you abandon? Usually
you toss them both
to the latest thundering

herd. If we all
walk an endless desert, why
so many poems
about flowers yet
so few about
hot feet? I guess
what I'm saying is

so what. I don't

care what you ordered
for dinner, even
when I get philosophical
about bicycle seats or
the seats that sit idly
upon them. Mostly

when I wander I
do it in the company
of monsters, carrying
the names of by-gone
women: Henrietta, Missie, napkins
folded in our monstrous

pockets. None
of us make comments on
the sand.
What a waste.

If you can't
remember whether you
brushed your teeth, what
are the chances you
actually did?
This is at least a
measure.
Of you,
as a person,
good night.

saturday wordle

saturday saturday saturday

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The far majestic (bly poem)

Your cigarette down-poised, un-lit.
Welcome to the often-tunneled
earth.

Your course is mapped
like a constellation
in the stars.
But the shapes
- the bear the belt
the crab the stupid-
handled pot -
you don't buy it.
Are you so desperate
against the dark?

Maybe it's a trick
for memory. But is that wisdom
or excuse?

Luckily age
has taught you to doubt.
Often, yourself.

These days you're happy
making love slowly. You wish
the coffee stayed hotter
in the cup.
What if
the world could give up wanting.
You ask that to the ass
of every young girl.

Friend,
what map could possibly lead you?
What starshine
will sing you
through the night?

Obvious Poem

Part of me is very sad.

It's not the part
that is given a latte
by the beautiful woman.
Or that eats a blueberry
muffin still melting
from the oven.

But it's there.

It's not the part that sits
with my friends on Saturday.
That hears "good job" at
the office. The rustle
of paper. That's not
the job
but I hear it.

There is the danger
of too much obviousness.

Why?

As if the worst
that would happen
is that life becomes
too still.
Too simple.
Like a cucumber
sandwich
on a plate.

Just fucking eat it.

Oh, heart.
We still wander
a black ocean.
Tell me when it is
we'll go home.

Warhammer 40K quotes

• Beat your thoughts to the mold of your your will.
  
  -- Attributed to Leman Russ
  
  
• Pain is an illusion of the senses, despair an illusion of the mind.
  
  -- Assassin Proverb
  
  
• Though my guards may sleep and ships may lay at anchor, our foes know full well that big guns never tire.
  
  -- The Tyrant of Badab
  
  
• Here I am and here I shall die.
  
  -- Attributed to Leman Russ at the battle of Rising Fell
  
  
• Do not waste your tears. I was not born to watch the world grow dim. Life is not measured in years, but by the deeds of men.
  
  -- Unknown
  
  

writing a poem on wednesday night

I thought I would as
there was little
else: sitting
in this chair,
dying. From
somewhere
a violin
sawed like
the happiness
hissing out of
a beachball, epic
deflation and then:
again. Why am I
lost in the memory
of vinyl. Why am I
dying of wide ties
and glasses. Why do I
sit in this chair smelling
orange.

My mother was the first to go and I can remember a fat man with a red face and a black suit telling my father that there was no doubt where she was, that he could be as sure of that as he could of anything else in this vale of tears. But he did not mention where and as I thought the whole thing was private and she might be back on Wednesday, I did not ask him where. Later, when my father went, I thought he had gone to fetch her with an outside car but when neither of them came back on the next Wednesday, I felt sorry and disappointed. The man in the black suit was back again. He stayed in the house for two nights and was continually washing his hands in the bedroom and reading books. There were two other men, one a small pale man and one a tall black man in leggings. They had pockets full of pennies and they gave me one every time I asked them questions. I can remember the tall man in the leggings saying to the other man:

'The poor misfortunate little bastard.'

I did not understand this at the time and thought that they were talking about the other man in the black clothes who was always working at the wash-stand in the bedroom. But I understood it all clearly afterwards.

-- from "The Third Policeman," by Flann O'Brien

today i feel like this

"No there's no sun shining on Robson street
You've tipped your hat and escaped defeat
So intent speaks louder than ink or pen
No, I'm not your fellow Canadian, John
Thanks anyway"

--from "The Sharpest Pain" LOTL

One Night Stand, and other titles

It didn't mean anything.
Anyone but you.
Yes, I was drunk.
Yes, I _was_ drunk.
Bus smell.
Coffee angst.
Oh good, tomorrow.
You never loved me.
Oh, it's my _additional_ leg.
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.
When the flood happened.
No roses.
F you, Jean-Paul Sartre.
Soapy.
Die alone.
There was a reason.
Liza Minelli.
One Night Stand.
Ephemeral online contact.
Generation gap.
Two years too young.
It won't work.
No, you don't.
It's me.
And, you.

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.