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"