Teddy

my high school guidance counselor's husband won the lottery and she quit the next day

I took ceramics because nobody told me to take AP English

I hate the lottery

The Penguins (previewing)

Introduction

My penguins are hotter than yours.


Part One

My penguins are dicier, more clavicle, robotic-winged than yours. I don’t care if you’ve never seen the colony. I watch my penguins with interest. It is all about penguins, snow-white-fresh cocaine, and me. Believe me as sucker emcee. Goodnight, y’all, believe me and the ball that got rolling when I necked down on the floor, soaked in patio grime tracked in from outside under the slivered moon and purposed children were dancing for once in their God-forsaken lives.


Part Two

When my penguins get together they listen to up and coming orchestra. The flapping of wings and sucking of frozen feet, limbs appendaged upward, create snow dust on the coasts of Antarctica. The great mother looked at her children and screamed about politic's policies. I'm getting used to freezer burn. I'm getting used to being a loaf left in the back for months. My penguins rule the country while sucking their faces off in lust. My penguins are sexual deviants.

Part Three


Deicer, the word that the penguin king lives by, is like a cloak of ice words getting ready to melt for a few moments. You will be consumed by its chokehold. You will drown and the king will smile. Fresh bait baited.

Cameron Diaz

For The Fat Asshole I Almost Hit on My Bike

"Well for one thing you're going the wrong way"
"I know," I say, "I know I'm going the wrong way"

I feel like all the people who were just kicked out of the library for looking at porn
Who are they kidding when they claim a banana is a "solid food"

Hello, we're calling from the Suburban Station Lost and Found office
Mom thought you died or something, nope, still here

"Your session is over because this is certainly not research"
"I know," I say, "I know this is not research"

I find a watch on my floor and ask my friends if I should wear it
-Yeah, wear the watch, sure
-Do you like the watch? If you like it you should wear it, ya know?
-Watch?! I don't have time for this or did you forget what I'm going through!

An older friend believes his virus scanner is what's giving him viruses
"The fix is in" he says, smiling with pride
smiling because he's above the corruption
the corruption that's drowning us
that we're pretending we're swimming through

The way you set up your room now makes me think you're having sex with other people in it

This is me at my most spaceman
doing a whole new brand of moonwalk

This is about the time of night I start thinking
about the letters spelling Cameron Diaz

The time i think about "sweeping up"
in verb form

The time I think of Jodi Picoult
menstruating somewhere
somewhere woodsy where the heat's always on
because it always just snowed

Tourism

from Don DeLillo's The Names

"I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't clin to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expect to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dystenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event." (pgs 43-44)

Panomie

After Koestenbaum

Shedding the filth of adult urbanity,
you may have recognized them as necessary golem.

It is in true thought, in perfect form for the deranged,
that this is all hotel life. The transient stagecoach.
The backward doors and upside down Chinese in mirrors.

You would do this amazing thing with your hands.
Choke up on the buster of greening balls. It was made:
adamantium, human skin; oil degreaser concocted
by the wrinkle wizard wearing blue satin.

He was in his penthouse suite shining his shoes.
Too soon, you said! Grabbing your stickered bag
and letting go while spied upon by private eyes.

Snickering curses through the revolving portal.
You were the large gray whirlwind up front and in tune.

You were wondering in idealist conjecture.
Where there's will there's an answer. I could
have lost you like tennis balls flying by cameras.

But inside and then underneath your clay pockets
sat a recording device: vibraphone; instant finger
plucker response system. Your mind painted news.

It was you on the opposite veranda. All balsa.
This capture the flag game. This treaty of verdant sides
creeping along another king's kingdom garden path.
Where they hide the dead, where they hide your family,
is what sucks you up and makes the skin sticky.

You packed up bags and fled, thinking about robot
transfusion, neutrinos, and the red dots bouncing off
black holes during a mushroom trip your boyfriend had,
where the ceiling was molecular pancake mix frying up.

There is no blame to be spent when courtesy markets
are down: shareholders holding pens like pigged projects.
A giant glass dome made out of thousands of squares.
Rectangular thought provides intimacy and warm showers.

The Haunting of M. P.

The first time Margerie was haunted it was the one year anniversary to her marriage. She was getting married to Benjamin Russle on her 23rd October 25th. It was a date I recommended to her on the eve of my honeymoon while we both cascaded significance through painkiller cocktail torpor. As I bit lazily the dead skin at the base of my cuticles, peeling off strands, pretending to get ready and spit them out of my mouth in haste, but primarily swallowing them down, I assured Margerie that as her father I was an authority on each October 25th in her short life's catalog. All save the last, her 21st, which occurred while she was, as she told me, studying diligently at school. Little did she know that I checked all the credit card bills that came into my addresses, including those which contained purchases on the card I had co-signed with her. The card was for emergencies. It was her first time away from New England, away from the town in New England she grew up in. And as a responsible and progressive parent I nodded off under the gulp of a pill for back pain the strange, minute charges for soda, trail mix, and condoms over in Flagstaff. How she made it all the way over to the other side of this country without using her plastic is a phenomenon even to me, her omniscience. It would be a lie if I told you I hadn't screamed WHORE to a beige living room wall at least once after the weekly, alcohol-soaked social. But this is not about me. This is about Margerie Pacingfield, and her haunted existence.

October 25, numbers one through twenty, were important dates for all of us. We always prepared for Halloween in our own ways, starting on the 25th of the month with a bang. Here is a brief composite of Margerie's explosive wind-up prep periods:

1) Ba-ba.
2) Da-da.
3) More cookie dough please!
4) I don't want that.
5) When are we going to the store? The doll!
6) I need more makeup!
7) I miss Kelly. (this was her school friend, a female)
8) I miss Bobby. (this was her school friend, a male)
9) The bad kids told me they'll egg me if I go out there.
10) But what if I just made a costume this year!
11) I'm gonna get more candy than anyone else out there!
12) Can I go trick or treating with Bruce this year? (her first boyfriend)
13) Mima's having a party and yes her parents will be there so can I please go? Please please pretty please?
14) I don't want to talk about it to any of you.
15) Halloween? Halloween is for losers!
16) Halloween is so fucking awesome! This year will be the best! (and I don't care WHO you are, I said, I told her, but watch your god damn mouth when you're under my roof)
17) Halloween is against my religion
18) I'm just gonna stick around here this year.
19) If God is dead, then Halloween is dead too.
20) (most recently) Josh and I will stay home and watch the candy. You guys go have some fun. (her first "steady" relationship)

Josh was the last one. With him came the haunting. He held the ladder when I fell from it and injured my spine all over. He was okay in my book otherwise. The association still paralyzes. The purple pills paralyze. Unfortunately despite Josh's good intentions he failed at severing the cord attached to the failed relationship with Margerie. Following the breakup, exactly two weeks after Margerie's 20th Halloween, Josh began his frenzy. There was reclusion. There was aggression. There was anger and pain. Like many hauntings, there was a lack of evidence, and a victim. There: Margerie smiling despite everything wrong inside the picture.

DUNE DUNE DUNE DUNE

1

oh my good GOD
---my understanding of you
(now that I know you've got
a calf clutch
on that T-Mobile
flip cam)

2

Listen up there
instead of down here
where my head sticks out
like an architect
on the verge
of collapsing
cell towers
disguised as birch
queens.

3

It was redemption at first.
At second (glance)
my QWERTY
caught fire and was more
dust for the fingertips

TESOL Free Write On Pedagogy

We start with the system
it's working parts
the consciousness that seeks to be assimilated
Frank O'Hara sounds that way because he thinks that way
I do this I do that
and schools are birthed
and entire industries from those schools
which is what Pete was talking about, passionately
which we are coming back to

the big picture and only mattering details
teaching as impressionism
only approaching, like cursors
for the occasional Icarus crater
or the tenebrism
or if you're Dan Brown the way St. Peter
sort of looks like a babe

the big picture and the system that produced it
which is the point of systems
and why we like pictures

Wishing You

Unlike the wavering reception of the traditional accordion, which derives its hulkish, centipedenal sound from some handsome 19th C Germanic roots (Dear Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, this one's for you, who never did dance with me, when I was traveling back in time, and couldn't get a grip on your skeleton's claw! You who sulk! You who unfolded your instrument for me and begged me to worship! Nevermore! Nay, I'll keep an eye on you as I pry each of those diatonic buttons out and pound them into your corpse dust!) and has long fallen decayed to the many tests of Father Time, the twin-lipped human whistle has proven its significance through a popularity never known before. Since its inception, and through until now, the whist, as it is called back home, a name generally accepted and often found adorable, has captivated audiences of all circles for a good twenty years now.

The whist is one part synthetic-human lip-skin, and two parts conducted-air current. For every batch of tones created, only a select amount of joules are needed, and these are negligible when the measurement of beauty commences. Have you noticed the latest tools in aesthetic quantification? Look into the matter further, if you dare. Buschmanns need not apply.

It is no surprise that the whist is finding its way in every home. Professor Dunbar just purchased one two years ago and utilizes its preset tunes every night. He marvels at the Bach; he snaps to Eldridge; he bangs his head to Megadeath. He is quizzical and prays to God every night on the euphoric, almost sinful qualities of this curious musical instrument.

Little Annie down the street knows similar aural satisfaction and bewilderment as she listens to the mouthed -O- coo her to sleep. Ba Ba Black Sheep, Have You Any Wool? And when she wakes up in the morning to Miley Cyrus, the mimetic inclination rings her own lips as though one day, yes--oh, she is just a dreamer.

And yes, Marcus, oh Marcus--how his life was changed by the whist. Found on the streets by the WhistWonder 2XXL, a gigantotron of a whist, proudly displayed in the front window, bullet proof, down on the block, Marcus did not even know what was in store. But he stopped dealing, left the crowds he always considered friends, and family. Now he is off unemployment; off food stamps; and away from the government-issued housing projects. In the day M does cultural development and marketing processing downtown at WhistWonder's HQ; when he gets off, he sets up his two whists--one a prototype that only a select group of WW employees are allowed to know of, the other the original 2XXL--definitely inferior, though humorously, and touchingly nostalgic--on each side of the room, and creates mash-ups of popular folk songs. Big Rock Candy Ring of Fire actually found airplay at the local WURY station, famous for its innovative playlisting and advocation for experimental "sound artists."

Before I took the five minute drive to go and buy the whist, my life was hell. I had been a scholar in classical composition; my forte was piano sonatas. I could never "get it up," as they say in the office, to the string quartets or the symphonies or the nu-operatic. Even the dueling xylophones over on Ridge Street, during the student block parties, made me quiver more often than not. But none of that matters now. The plaguing life of family--wife, daughter, daughter, son--and the university position at the local League school--who really cares at all about 'consonant vocabulary' of late 20th-century composers?--and the weekend job doing research for a local comic book hero-artist, which sometimes provided me with the opportunity to write up some of the subplots--all went out the window, the attic window and the basement window, with the arrival of the fantastic machine.

As humans we spend years moving outward onto instruments. We strive for abandonment of our bodies. Security is fashionable. Always. From the dawn of time the goal has been to feel extremely comfortable with our own bodies by distancing ourselves from them. The painter picks up the brush and oils and canvas. The writer picks up the pen and notebook. The engineer builds models out of small wooden pieces. The doctor will only feel okay in life if he wields his scalpel. And the warmonger his tank. And the goddess her lightning bolts. And me, well, my whist.

With the whist comes a rationale that is grounding. It sobers. The whist will make us cry, will make us laugh, and make us love. The whist brings peace. At its current rate, it should end poverty and world hunger in no less than two years. In four I suspect the imperialist system throughout this globe will deteriorate and fall off like some old garment no longer desired, no longer sexually appealing. In eight years, the whist will come to be a language commonly accepted in all households. In ten, the whist will be a model of worship. Inevitably the whist will end and will be replaced by something else. The emulation of the human voice will be surpassed by the real human voice; but that state of enlightenment will not be immediate. There will be a crysis, then a dark age, and then, perhaps, the renaissance. Our mouths will quake and our moans will be deep and sound. I will be long dead, probably gathering dust right next to Buschmann. But that is okay. The whist, sitting next to me in my coffin, will provide my requiem, and my safe passage to the land of the silent.

Littering

He was prostrate on the blue rail bench trying to work the last of the coffee out of his body and commit the defining event of the day to memory. He imagined he was safe here, with his water, a lemon in it, at the Philadelphia International Airport, at the Terminal D R1 stop, the only sheltered railroad stop in like the entire airport rail-loop with benches large enough to lay prostrate on. It was so ordinary--a notable ordinariness considering what had happened. “How could everything feel so ordinary?” he thought, laying prostrate in the enclosure, waiting for the train to bounce back from its final stop: the E Terminal.

This is what he always did after work although using a word like always seemed more than a little ridiculous in light of the circumstances. Henceforth, he thought, there would always be the way things had been before the event and the way things were after. His life-line now sundered by some pre/post duality. It had been one of those days where history becomes binary.

He noted how ordinary everyone else was being.

“This is ridiculous,” he said to no one in that nothing-voice we use when addressing ourselves.

“But-,“ he almost replied before being rebutted by some other cerebral pundit. In times like these self-talking is often shaken down to breath-heavy prepositions or whichever expletives we’re most invested in at the moment. Plausible narratives, causality, other words that basically mean “meaning” weave slip-shod quilts in the frontal lobe and, due largely to latency issues, these paltry push-pins of language are all that escape. It’s as if what we conceive as our “lips” were trying to remember the dreams of what we conceive as our “self” had had last night.

He sat up. He was sitting up now, no longer prostrate, although we know that the rail bench was long enough to accommodate his 5’10” 160 frame. He thought about what he must’ve looked like there on the blue rail bench, under the sign that said “Terminal D: all Gates, Ticketing, Baggage Claim,” at once the Airport’s anatomy and its religion, mouth-speaking things to the ether. He thought about memory and experience and perception and eventually cinematic perspective. According to the sorts of authors he always cursed because they were always right: “I’m in your movie; you’re in mine.” Ergo, he wondered: where would they place the camera in this scene of the bio-pic? What would the other scenes be? Surely today’s event would be incorporated. How could it be skirted? Anything with this many breath-heavy mouthed words behind it must hold some belly of biographical significance. Surely, some theater-goer or reader (because, at some point, he probably would write some memoirs or letters or something if that’s still the trend for “the greats” when he’s had enough life experiences to be called a “life” and the desire to feel young again—a desire to return to days like today: the day of the event…the day that changed everything forever ago.) Surely someone could cull some meaning from things like this, things this traumatic, things this memorable, things that inspire this much fucking introspection and meta-fiction and poetry that will surely be anthologized as his post-“whatever-the-media-and-internet-are-calling-the-event” period, which represents a major departure from his juvenilia.

The train slid in exactly when the paint-chipped sign said it would and he left the enclosure, leaving behind the empty cup, a depleted lemon inside.

“What an asshole” everything who boarded previously at the E Terminal and sitting in the seats with windows that could see into the enclosure thought as this indignant, self-absorbed litterer walked through the requisite series of automatic doors and joined them as passengers.

Sixty years later he still feels guilty about littering because it’s the only thing anyone else remembered.

"Minor Things" or "Nantucket"

Let's start with a nod to the irrational numbers
followed briefly by what we consider imaginary
and who could forget the fractals
by which Star Wars is possible
that teenage ship-launcher
like mine, Times Square, eighteen
at B. B. King's
the guy who bought me the first bar shot
meeting Magner in the crowd like a smoke monster
that one guy with the backpack with the acid
the myth he was until you found him
and train-ride home through the laughing gas of youth
how youth ends at drug use
how drugs make Plato credible
and Boltzmann, Morrison (who I hate), Coyne, and the current anorexic music slump
and Timothy Leary
who JFK Jr. summered with
great plane crasher, great Payne Stewart figure
great vicarious sadnesses
a depressed father driving through Massachusetts
the lesson on the "Texas Wedge"
how small and awful this island really is
how these are the poems your father would like if you shared yourself
but if you shared yourself
but if you shared yourself
but if you shared yourself

The Middle of the Atlantic

For Future Breakups

It became clear earlier
that this was no time to be happy

I know you think the stage extends everywhere
but this is Fishtown
and we're in a parking lot
and the sky just went on strike
it's been without a contract since March

you recognize the horizon from the broken churches
where only the locks work
and we keep swearing at each other in our graffiti
about it being over, about it being too un-tragic

You text:
"Even if it is Jeff Koons
a wax penis in a beer cozy
won't win me back"
Which I immediately forward
to all my fake lesbians

rather than photography
let's bank this instance
for the next time we're in a long line
or staving off ejaculation
or on the El dodging H__ N__'s
or trying to forget about you
forgetting about me