Ocean State Parallax

Grey homes and the sky
Also grey and greyly
Both pool in the wet
Rhode Island pavement
Pupil-black and slick
With slick rain
Streaming towards the water
Like rain on the grey paint
Of a grey home
Somewhere in Rhode Island

Maine

Tiring, these flashes.
The low summer thunder
Of suburban trains, pen-like (faster)
While a white and spacious
Country north awaits
A month of thaw

To bury.

Facebook Anarchist

It is the third day of February and one month and two days after I finished reading Crime and Punishment for the second time;

Cocytus is unfrozen (for now) although I don’t live nearly as close to it anymore and more earthworms appear everyday at 3 PM sharply.

I saunter with a heretic’s pride over the Bristol common, once a graveyard now a playground, to the store for batteries, my pre-amp has died and perhaps some Doritos for when I am more willing to be fat and alone and I think of a winter without amphetamine powders and a curriculum without Schopenhauer’s terrifying ghost and love’s existence in the post-structural world and Sebastian, the mead-hall landlord whose reign of terror is an Anglo-Saxon curse upon us all but whose Sicilian name gives him leverage in our neighborhood despite the fact that he won’t mix more than three types of liquor in his dirty glasses.

Ah, the flagpole is creaking incessantly but waning and the gazebo looks like new, just glazed with sky, and the birds are brown the majority of the time and we are not all guilty yet so there can be no democracy nor no despotism, merely a purgatory where we vote based on polling data mined from schools that reject more people than heaven and groom the ones who grow to rule our republican geldings delegating for the wind not to make the beach an ugly thing or the soul of the GDP and the NASDAQ index but I suppose no one is making a distinction anymore.

The foetid hydrogen of our teenage reveries flows boldly where no man has gone before into the old miasmas and ring-tone orgasms, the perfect bindings for an Allen’s night, which you are having whether or not you want to G. I. Joe…why are there not more WAL*Mart firebombings?

You shamelessly bit the apple, you snake, you fear monger, you blind bee queening your way through the winter doldrum. WAKE UP!

As a young and questioning courtesan covered in the dusts of valley summers and the smells of Providence Kennedy Plaza’s 60 bus, watching the best minds of anti-generations, these RISD Hipsters who don’t accept my French bread or my rosary beads (but they will always be there) much like their neon headbands and iPods as the sun fumbles beneath Mt. Hope with the ecstasy that we have come to expect from the cruel blurry madam of our starry harem.

Block 6100

Written on 10-29-08

I

As you picked apart my
eyes today dead birds
dropped from backyard
trees, and war torn cats
stumbled beneath each
fender and hood, too
hungry to beg, too dead
to listen to our calls.
I could not stop you
from claiming me as men
in rags down the street
begged mute for change and
change kept staying back.

II

Cold is a dust that goes
in through the pores,
locking the joints, making
it difficult to read
their letters. The leaflets
on the ground crisp away,
each edge slowly being
filed down toward the stem.

This stirring flora decay
will never know what it is
to be read; all those sneakers
smacking the pavement instead,
hands staying tucked in,
the heat of each pocket
like gold or wax, not like
holding a leaf up to the
white sunless sky, picking
at its grainy veins with
brittle fingers, brittle ideas.

III

Old boy dreaming. Saw and
named the White Devil last
night. No sign of the Road
Warrior. Maybe I saw its
child though. Too early to
say. It all happened while
smoking a cigarette with Todd.
After I heard his tales, we
moved inside, leaving the
starved to wait and starve.
I watched forgotten horror
films despite malfunctions,
viral plagues to my PC.
We set ourselves up for
them. We are smart but
ignorant, knowing but blind.
We are addictions. Blood but
only machine. Our bodies:
a pulley or two. Our souls:
invisible whispers without
steaming breaths. At night
this entire block slowly
drains us, 100 addresses
forming an ebony hole,
dead alley for the strays.

Animal War: The Battle of Cherryhill Ln.

They came as the sun beat lowly
southward beating through
weak cloud structures and
leaves in transit

Twenty on the molding of
my childhood room
these Asian ladies with layered backs
one hard, uncompromising

the other a flecking
vein-matrix of stiff tissue
introduced by science
"My God, what have we done?"

So soon they forget the fields of their fathers
and the great aphid uprising
the silent, micro weevil, the living salt
praying nobly, like red-speckled raptors

one breeze from the north
and like the poor they scratch the walls
of this McMansion, like I am some
congenial matron of insected living things

No sir. Not me. Not with this big blue
can of RAID. And my mother's vacuum.
The niveous hemlock flowers. Plinking
through the reinforced tubes and gray roaring.

The Daymare's Daydream

a whole mess of chick-fil-a management
appears in the food court

their bluetooths give them
away

i hope they talk to me about
my purchase

god it's so lonely down here
sometimes

Another perfect poem we should've written

Proust's Madeline

by Kenneth Rexroth

Somebody has given my

Baby daughter a box of

Old poker chips to play with.

Today she hands me one while

I am sitting with my tired

Brain at my desk. It is red.

On it is a picture of

An elk’s head and the letters

B.P.O.E.—a chip from

A small town Elks’ Club. I flip

It idly in the air and

Catch it and do a coin trick

To amuse my little girl.

Suddenly everything slips aside.

I see my father

Doing the very same thing,

Whistling “Beautiful Dreamer,”

His breath smelling richly

Of whiskey and cigars. I can

Hear him coming home drunk

From the Elks’ Club in Elkhart

Indiana, bumping the

Chairs in the dark. I can see

Him dying of cirrhosis

Of the liver and stomach

Ulcers and pneumonia,

Or, as he said on his deathbed, of

Crooked cards and straight whiskey,

Slow horses and fast women.

Mt. Hope Bridge

This bus group is the meaning of bald
The younger riders cap themselves
In laundered reds
With small blue men playing
Traditional polo

We are all head-phoned
Or listening to the starved
Rhode Island pavement
Or staring (as windmills
Stare) through the thick
Windshield and the green
Blackness trapped inside it

Me, an Islander for one
More night while the Red
Sox are winning—
I am getting older—

Next to a man
Dressed in mold-tones
His stiff hair a canceled bonfire
Of oily flax

“Just a big bag full of blood”

Back home, the mice are getting braver
The kitchen smells like an abortion
And three months and the water bill
Are owed to men who own
And operate bars in the daytime
With infinite KENO slips
And lockless bathrooms

And we roll up Mt. Hope Bridge
The glistering jail of bolts and
Cables the size of Easter baskets

“We’re pretty much flying” I
Say, in passing, to Sebastian, his eyes
Like two swaying calves
In the ceiling of the abattoir.

Philadelphia's Black Babies

"Why are almost 50% of all
black babies in Philadelphia
being aborted?"

We surveyed the damage
to your happy, American home
the flamingos were fading

the neighbors lived in newspaper
like baby queens suckling
welfare from the failing hive

with notable quietness
the British soldiers rest where
"no dumping" is permitted

the subway: a casual miracle.
birth and treading afterbirth.
the aluminum storefronts rattle,

their merchandise buried with
the miscarriages and 50% of
Philadelphia's black babies

Another Approach to a Local Fire

originally written on 09-26-08 as part of “The Fire”
cut from original poem and edited into new poem on 10-26-08

When I walked over and talked with the third floor guy
who hadn’t even moved in yet but rushed down to that
room where all the flames started when he smelled smoke,
then trying to put out the mattress but it was all on fire, not
stopping for anything, he quietly said little and walked away.

Long after the old obese woman was given air and shoved off
into an ambulance, the image of the dog form first appeared.
It was passing by on a stretcher designed for humans, and it
was not moving, a plastic oxygen mask over its hair-lined mouth,
dangling somewhat around the edges of its contorted canine face.

The onlookers moved by in a bubbly mass of shadows, slowly
and dance-like as this incapacitated Pagan figure, godlike perhaps,
flushed on through, the crowd parting like a ripple in a pool,
a balanced knife-like space down the middle of an open sea,
the stagnant streetlamps catching the waves of limbs and

starry-eyes overcome by the spliced emergency blues and reds, the
people not getting it enough, the crowd not opening wide enough.
A grizzly hero shouted “make a hole, make a hole.” And a hole
formed, the idol or puppet figure, symbol of hope and absurdity
moving people to tears, I’m sure, thousands of tears sitting on cheek.

Some of us were not part of that specific crowd, should not even
have been there to begin with, but that part of the story gets left
behind as I turn silent to my friends and sip Carlo Rossi, smoke
a Maverick, my voice’s echoing booms slowly becoming forgotten,
drunken evenings in Bristol becoming recycled less, forgotten more.

When glancing outside, a person such as any one of us could notice
that cop-car lights still remained, hours having passed, and the road
nothing more than closed, except to local traffic, naturally, and
upon leaving the comfort of one’s home, a person might walk over,
notice the firetape’s yellow sitting still, like neon laser beams,

tripwires, electronics. After watching a movie we all walked over
to the site, drunk and merry, completely unwelcome to the vacancies.
We saw the big gaping blackburnt porches, those two firemen losing
their minds in boredom, and a lone cop who talked about arson as a
possibility, always a possibility, if you could believe it under this moon.

Snow Crush Killing Song

This poem seeks to encapsulate the decline and fall of a previous relationship. I would like to thank Lee Upton for her poem Dyserotica which inspired me to memorialize my last great personal catastrophe.

The Red Sox have won another shutout
But we'll move on until the sitcoms
buzz around the women's dormitory
like gnats at the campgrounds

your car barely hits the rebar'd hurdle
outside WAL*MART, the burly wind
scatters shopping carts like
dim stars in new systems

spiraling like every coil of dead hair
left against the shower. You are staring
again. saying nothing as my words form
coldly on the windshield:

-"You know, I can't marry you if you keep drinking like this."
"I can't marry you either."

The Fire near Wood Street

Written on 09-18-08

Edited on 10-26-08

Two white plastic speakers uttered in flat
muffles a harrowingly metrosexual
Kanye chorus about flashes and lights,
a tune booming natural upon Jeff’s arrival.

Sitting the circle in the living room,
this haunted house’s groaning end deep
above us, we felt like we were little bards
brought in on tidal wrecks from Baltic seas.

We had arrived with the purpose of
transforming stories in our minds,
morphing tales into something elses,
new dimensions, syntheses and paralysis.
And it always seemed time to speak.

Inevitably the others peered at me. I had
not been following, my mind locked on the
situation, my voice muttering, aflame with
wine, ecstatic, hyperized, insecure at once.
What to do but play the fool’s vocal harp?

Like a shaggy pest in disguise, my small hulk
burying stature in the risk of social equality,
I announced a distinctly bland red death call:
“There was a huge fire earlier. Down the street.
Did you see it?” Their eyes turned to the street.

(Oh they hadn’t a clue about the fire. And so,
in the same thread as last time, my mouth boomed
the cop-lights scattered outside, preached the
dramatic stops and starts four blocks away, four
hours earlier. It was a bright and dull and faded
yarn, tattered oral weavework and mystery)

They looking on wide-eyed, mind’s eyes on the lasting
images, an emotionally imaginary crock-pot, American
sensations swirling around inside, flames licking the rims.

(The truth of the matter: the flames licked up a
building only two streets away from our house)

The orange beacon of smoke had been curling
through the black Bristolean sky like a myopic
funnel-cloud as people gathered, a procession sans
any musical dirge, replaced by all types of leeching
buffoonery, myself included, standing around like
dogs, a fealty sworn to a ghostly embrace with death.

“Where were you when it started?” they asked.
Parking, a road or parked cars and us penetrating
that row, relieved that Wood Street wasn’t on fire.
My eyes sunk as we joined the crowd of the meek,
the helpless, the curious, sorrowful, worried, girls

who showed up screaming, looking for their fathers,
looking for their fathers’ buildings, screaming more,
“that’s my house that’s my house” in strange, scary
tears and cacophony, I sitting stunned, Karen at my
side, though we were too shocked for tears and remorse.

(There was no death. Tones and tunes
really do play tricks sometimes)

Civilized Behavior

Written on Saturday, October 25.
Edited on Sunday, October 26.

Grandma used to be afraid of the cold trains
in Chicago, the Skokie Lokey line she calls it, way
back twenty-five years ago, in a world I hardly know,
with all of that horribly uncivilized behavior.
It’s a shocking discovery, bitters my tongue.

“I just don’t understand how it all happened,”
she says, and then later: “I’m sorry Greg, but all
the uncivilized people I ever encountered were black.”
A distinct 21st century hesitancy rests in both of us.
I think about her stories of these gamblers, these

businessmen, and what they mean today.
I wonder what she would think about the
train-ride home from Center City, about
the bootleggers and drug dealers, about
all the desperation. I wish I could tell her

if you do not mess with them they do not
mess with you. But if I told her, she would
not listen, she would only fear, but then again
fear is good. It is what grandmothers do.
It is what I should do too, more often, instead

of my constant glorification of the dirty train rides,
which some people will and some people will
not mind, get disturbed by, for years down the
road. After ending the call with Grandma,
I open a copy of the Revolution newspaper and

exchange greetings with the other train
riders, generally happy, completely devoid of
racial distinctions, devoid of any factors of danger,
and I think about all the past, and how maybe it was
kind of uncivilized, or maybe it was merely on fire.

Rexroth's Mosaics

The new moon has reached
The half. It is utterly
Incredible. One
Month ago we were strangers.

This beautiful hokku can be found in Rexroth's "Flower Wreath Hill" collection. According to the chapter notes the poem was written in Kyoto where Rexroth spent a fair amount of his later years studying and translating Japanese poetry. In many late sequences Rexroth went beyond the scope of many translators and infused his own work into longer renku fragments creating a subliminal medley as an homage to his subject culture.

Meditations In an Emergency Sales Surge After Mad Men Episode

Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency jumped to #3 on Amazon's list of most popular 20th Century American Poetry collections after being mentioned on the popular AMC show "Mad Men." My father watches Mad Men so I assume last night was his first taste of O'Hara's work (edit: Other than a few lines I read him while on a train outside Salzburg). We spoke about Mad Men one time. He told me it was "about [his] father's era" and "very depressing." The episode ended with a voice over reading the denouement of "Mayakovsky," the final poem in the collection.

"Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funy
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again."

Meditations in an Emergency is currently beating out The Rose that Grew from Concrete by Tupac Shakur and Frankenstein Takes the Cake by Adam Rex.

Link: Amazon Book Bestsellers: American 20th Century Poetry

W. B. Yeats, Gettin' Paid, Gettin' Paid

From: The Press Association

"A rare first edition of the renowned WB Yeats poem 'Easter 1916' could fetch up to 4,000 euro when it goes under the hammer this week.

It is one of just 25 copies privately published by an English journalist the year after the rising and distributed among only a select number of people for fear of its political impact. Written between May and September 1916, the poem sets out Yeats' mixed feelings on the tumultuous event.

Adam's auctioneers in Dublin is holding the sale on Tuesday evening. Director David Britton said the copy, which belongs to a private collector in the capital, will appeal to both Yeats enthusiasts and historians."

Sometimes I write spontaneous prose on the backs of my signed credit card slips. It's a lot like this.

Morning Renku

Red trees in the
picture foreground:
strangers kissing

***

Mist inbound.
The world is
getting shorter.

***

First frost
Tall oaks shower away
their makeup

An Abandoned Project that cost me a July

This poem was written during the down-time at my summer job: serving Coke Zero to people wearing Mom-jeans and NASCAR hats at the Ruby Tuesday in Middletown Rhode Island. The most popular item was the "New Orleans Seafood" paired with a trip to our "Fresh Garden Bar "(added on for 2.99$). I spent a lot of time staring through the stained-cedar blinds that provided our guests a view of West Main Blvd. as the sun set over military housing. There was also an open field and a Bus-stop.

Ruby Tuesday

Everyone and June, the month
is ill and a gassy-happiness
bubbles from the bay shallows
like two young people
deciding they no longer loved each other
and that it was final
with the certainty that green worms
floating into your car
signify spring, and the reissue
of your various transcripts,
their own youth ghosting
like bags from K-Mart
billowing variously in middle aged trees.

In chain restaurants
guests distrust the salad bar
like a grandmother's rotten ladder
and their dyed-wild hair
angles sun-light like
fishermen wanted for tax evasion
"We will not be going back to Florida
until after the Fireworks."

Rhode Island's haze clots thickly
the strange glaucoma of the sinking states
a drugless mess
"everyone is so dry."
A blaring hive of undifferentiated nothingness
and nothing-masters.

Irrevrent pelicans would
have better luck lapping
off the docks of Gloucester
but there is too much green
and wind between them

the heat breaks with another rain
the fireworks are canceled

this once was an island

full of pink visions
these nine year olds in denim
dress legs pass over new weeds
in skinny ring
ashes, ashes, and everyone crashing
in front of a concert
that isn't going to write itself

A column of plague
dedicated to the roses
Pocked with youngness
the high flank of wintering thighs

this once was Massachusetts

when the skies were different
and 10 O'Clock fries inspire the first poem
in three weeks. Salt, pepper,
Barack Obama.

confederated stars in the
tall grass midnight
dreamy, salted fences
pace around the setting moon

And the breathing of dying worms
will spread beauty in catholic gene pools
tiding in summer's ice heaves

"I haven't left the Island in Four Years!"
"They don't give out blue ribbons for nothing."

The walls turn a sick ballet of mirrors
the feverish infinity of Wal*MART
and their low, low prices

the slim inches of beer rot in 6's
last night's nadir
a Pennsylvanian Dreamcatcher

"I forgot my umbrella!
I'm the only one who brought one from Wisconsin!"
She says, in a purple shirt
with a chipped dog on the front

Zebra'd light through blinds
on half a ruby tiffany
sun over west main, the bay
Providence plantation
Dormant street lamps grimly reaps
over pre-fab military housing
black shutters, doors

wild grass fruits
in the highway wind.

Poems from Vienna, June 2008

Gemäldegalerie

Still-life in other centuries
the watered wood smells similar
to public speaking
the clock hands cast mute shadows
swirling the cobble streets
like low-fat ice cream
in the stomaches of mothers

Tour guide voices vaulting
off the cloister
tongued, old Pentecostal saints
their flaming crowns recalls
drivers education
and airplanes failing
in alpine cross winds
the babies louden

The old lies spill through matte labels
the security has once again succeeded
dogs on fences dream of city lakes
the white square overflows with hoses
and denim

Stephansplatz

City readers
nesting in shady metal
a coughing loudness
(street repair)

and all their places lost

...as if tight leopard print returned
from the dead
with a vendetta against
the solid legging

"Although, could he
have loved her?"

rushed hair on old ladies
serpentine rims
rimmed with flowers
like famous fountains
made of lead

St. Stephen's clad in scaffold
The Russians fall to Spain
we all have broken legs
all of us in the Ringstrasse

But this is flying weather
clear, the faces of old friends
and their vacuumed homes.

A fine cellist on her laptop.
It is like a new Venus being born.

Pestsäule

The city wrapped slowly
and the rocks chipped in the coil
and then nails rusted over
as if to acquiesce
their squareness becoming distant
to the drifting darkness settling in
Turkish suburbs lit by new
crescents, whitely fixed.

The city yellows around
a column to the plague
which looks like a golden horn of bodies,
kings, baroque disease
Flanked by tourists in their shorts

The city yellows even though we hate it.

Princeton Hosts Jasper Johns Exhibit

Today Liz and I took a trip to the Princeton Art Museum with the specific goal of seeing the current Jasper Johns exhibit. It was going great until I had to check my man-purse at the door (I feel naked without my books and technology dangling on my back like some useful tumor). Anyway the lockers were pretty big and the deposit was only 1$ (I got it back). The exhibit itself was excellent, featuring a number of examples from Johns' "Light Bulb" period. Lithographs, sculptures, and what I thought were "fuzzy x-rays" were arrayed in a small, off-shoot room, near some classic American art (cowboys, guns, saddles, no black-people). If you're in the area I highly suggest you check it out. It's free; just check your man purse. I highly recommend locker 4.

Princeton's Page about the event

Edward Mendelson's Review of Ford's O'Hara's "Selected Poems"

Excerpt:

"...W.H. Auden famously warned O'Hara against the arbitrary, surrealistic shifts of tone and subject in the poems that he and his friend John Ashbery were writing in the 1950s:

I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any "surrealistic" style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.

Auden had not detected the almost opposite motivations behind the "non-logical relations" in O'Hara's and Ashbery's poetry. Ashbery's work, O'Hara said, "is full of dreams and a kind of moral excellence and kind sentiments," while his own "is full of objects for their own sake" that he treats with "ironically intimate observation." But Ashbery's dreamlike sentiments link together whatever happens to be in his mind while he is writing a poem, while O'Hara's "objects for their own sake" are linked together by his sense that, as in Dante's Paradise, everything that has profound value in itself is obscurely but profoundly connected to everything that has similar value.

In fact, in O'Hara's best poems, the relations that Auden called non-logical had a logic of their own. O'Hara was a lapsed Roman Catholic who detached himself cleanly and almost guiltlessly from his religious past. He lost all interest in Catholic theology and morals, but retained an aesthetic sensibility in which saints, shrines, relics, and rituals from wildly different centuries and cultures exist in a single harmonious texture of mutual adoration and love. The abrupt leaps from one object or person to another may look like the arbitrary leaps in Ashbery's poetry, but they have a logic founded in a Catholic sensibility that persisted after O'Hara discarded Catholicism...."

Source: Powell's Books - Review a Day

Recent Work

"I am not a mailman, yet"

A coolness creeps through the
dorm-style morning “I have
enough hair for both of us”
The window meets at
The corners. Two planes
Land in Newark. Rain delays.
My clean feet fiddle for
Jeans which stain the walls
With a wiggling blue
A triptych carpet (for
washing) where the floor is
covered in a sandy poison
The small mouse clicks like
A small mouse eating new stucco
Waking her up in the naked dark.

Bonanza: I-95

Bridgeport in September
Blue street signs to the sky
On Iranistan avenue
Mercury slips into retrograde
Quiet and collected
Like a bank-robber
The day they proclaimed the last
French Republic and tore down
Our father’s stadium
Was the day that Pharaoh ate
Grecian olives from an urn
Like a bachelor of the arts
With the grass of our old
Backyards fresh on the
Entropic, falling wind
This bus can’t musket fast enough
Through Connecticut, it’s wires
Sleeping giants, and broadcast nodes.

St. V's

The cement steps of the hospital
Sealed with black gum
And the gravel of eight million human beings
And did you know: hope is a robin’s nest
In an open sewer of the village
Raided by cats with ironic hair-cuts
And men with paper skin
Who smell like trash-water
Selling earrings
And unpackaged beepers

Everywhere there are dogs shitting
And constructors, constructing
People regretting life
Blowing down Broadway
Eddying the gusts of boxy trucks
The most beautiful girl
Takes my picture “Are you
This man?”: her eyes, smile,
Holds up an image. “No,
He looks like Jacques Derrida”

A pawn is pushed,
“The trap is set” an old man says
to his younger self, blue-eyed,
forced to castle

There are robins nesting in the rafters
They make me think of silos
And returning home
Instead, I sit near the bottom
Of a tall and heavy island
Wanting for nothing but
hope and some gum.