TXT MSGS

From: White Negro

Haha. yes work 7
days. it sucks but you
grow a wad quick.
and then contemplate
buying a handgun.
debates ensue.
between that and a
blackberry bold thru
ATT

Received: Nov 26, 08 10:06 p

* * *

To: White Negro

I want guns too much
I want them to shoot
at guys. I want to
shoot them at guys and
the nightmare rats. The
rats dying in the ceiling...
which we call gods.

Sent: Nov 26, 08 10:11 p

* * *

From: White Negro

O brave ocean!

Received: Nov 26, 08 10:21

Riding Bikes with Jack Spicer

I can never take the angels seriously

slumped in the drunk banana seat
wheeling toward a middle-distance finish
with a storm of chrome and peddling
your feet frenzy the light
as in mirrors, refracted, revealed

light is truly nothing
without the air in your mouth
your lips
and that which baffles beautifully behind you

I Told You To Walk

I told you to walk
over to the café.
“Ask them for free
cookies," I demanded.
You said you couldn’t.
I guessed at how it
would feel to ask that
question and agreed
with you; it would
probably be awkward.

The Others Stared

The others stared at me,
grease-soaked and dumb-
looking, and I watched
as they clutched their cups,
SBARRO red and green.

“They must feel so
insecure, so out
of reality in
this dead, stupid airport.”

Sylvia Brown was a Mysterious Woman

After Tony, Borders

The backstocks grinned
blood and neon
before succumbing

and turning you
into a unbalanced
guiding light, uniformed.

As you continued to
shelve away the books
you would never recall--

Atheist's Handbook,
the Shack, Nietzsche, the
Necronomicon--

even that narrow-spined
History of God,
with its shiny covers--

you talked softly to
me about punk rock and
crazed philosophers--

all these blank topics
that we would never
fill our red, fleeing

heads, my own flooding
up like a deep rice
paddy with no pickers.

Water becomes a
source of life and death
here, way down, packed-up.

You consider the
ghost-talker for just
a second before you

realize I'm laughing
a cold blue color,
pretending to rip

the covers off her
Biblettes, one at a
time, thinking loudly:

I have worked here for
over a month. Now
feels like the right time.

John Lee in Brooklyn

I.

The light moves slower...
Well, this is winter and
discontentment peels from
the tongues of consumptives
like bubbles popping in the chill

...something steely in the mist
led us both astray, doggedly
though our hands were hidden
from its wet wetness

then you told me the famous rumor
about Samuel Beckett
I didn't believe you
No, I didn't believe you
but then the mist cleared

II.

The adding machine is at it again
and the candle is a ghost of
it's once youthful figure
Madonna holding it
and then vanishing in France

clocks cheer the cheers of repubulics
their old battle hymns
their gentlemanly officers
their thirsty scholars
Samuel Beckett encharcoaled
on old brick
(his eyes are getting older)
his eyes are older than all of us put together

put together

put together, we would make
and amazing monster

put together

put together, we would make
a horrifying baby

III.

The worst possible outcome
would be a Bangor mushroom cloud
or a treaty traded for the animal war

...these equalizers make it easier...

While Bob will not be voted off
before the final three,
this tribe is beyond counseling

IV.

A bus blows by like it's the snow
in a cleanly lit city
with empty streets
thankful to their makers
catching yourself bearded in the sick glare
and the dingy glim
and the apricity
is impressive
on Myrtle Avenue

"Obama's already fucking up,
letting in Hillary...that's not
change."

This history of clammed voices.
This symphony of bland wreckage.
This antiquarian age.
This Toyotathon of Toyotathons.

Everything must go.
It is custom, yes.
Everything. Must. Go.

V.

Maybe one day
this mist will clear

And we will be screaming together.
The sound of stiffly quaking trees.

November Self-Slay Thought #5

For now the fantasy
rests in, behind, this
dome, cradled and all,
here's one more approach:

Rip every page out of
each book and tape all
pages to all walls
to all ceilings
of the dark bedroom--
even underneath the door
where the crack lets
shadows in, sometimes.

For now the fantasy
rests in, upon, these
pores, brandishing,
brandying, a dirty yellow.

My eyes, those of a child,
struggled to stay
open throughout each year.
Today I had more thoughts
concerning children, and
how so many people give
birth, and everyone grows
unhappy. These fears waned
in song to me, grew assertive.

More focus on absence.
Inject presence-filled needle.

More is less when less
is the vocabulary, a
short minimalistic style
yet begone (like hearth
to stone, like moon to
golden ray upon beach
or swirl of scent of bleach).

Shame quaked open today
like being a child lost
on the playground, searching
for someone to engage.

At work, I woke up.
Shame then quaked shut,
like gaining knowledge
that there is no God
to watch over the people,
and then shouting out to all
this truth . . . blood-red
Morality glimmers under,
embarrassment, corridors
walked. Lie your face off,
then turn around and lie
off the face of that crab.

Resplendence Perpetuate

After the Mountain Goats

Houses and flames,
dead on the screaming
horizon, still
to sketch your yarns.
You flogged along paths of
makeup deep into those
lashes while I, commenting
on scum and deconstructs,
grinned a little.
This is empathy
and want of removal,
I told you. This is
where mind overs matter.

The Blasphemy of Exchange

As a certain standard of the equation,
these jingling mustard-colored coins
now set to the table, like gold or caps
from bottleheads, shuffle the dust up
among us, with our breaths, while our
hands, too young and too old to shake,
still succeed in catching this mess,
the slow and weighed-in anxiety--a bubble
waiting to be popped and evaporated.

We pass pressures between ourselves.
To comfort, we sneeze, we transfer our
other likenesses onto other bodies.
The teal euphoria becomes blank space
wanting nothing more than to behold serums
to certain poverties, before bowing to
our favored, well-time distractions--blue
funnels of the brain. A light "achoo" escapes.

Like the way of art, or the way an
unsuspector tiptoes atop an exploding
landbomb, its peasant limbs frayed and
shredded into rain and organic
fertilizer, we touch in sad, electric waves.
We touch in the method of fingertips,
feeling corners of molded paper. We touch
each other with eyes looking like soaked-parchment.

Soaking up residue in each ocular corner
is the easiest cover into looking beyond,
to pretend to look, to want to look into a
patron's smile or a manager's gray grimace,
to find another way of staring straight,
at those two stable, staring stones. Or
to reach the bridge of the nose, end of world,
and help fight soft blasphemies out of awareness.

To say "I do" is to listen but attentively.
To say "I don't" is to start jabbering on,
while the other pod in the same pea is prodding.
Both piddling idioms being dominant, first-person.

(0)

Diffuse by reaching back. Curl forward flaps, and gain
admission to the greeny pearl, so pretty, waiting
inside for fresh air, firm palms, forced scratches.

(1)

Stare at the rooftops begging for a monster to
find you and jump down, open claws made of grain,
ready to snatch your wallet or purse, your finance,
before letting go and scampering to find another.

(2)

Stamp off through leaves and scattered litter and
begin the repeat, this time with your house keys
in hand, or clenched between the teeth to taste,
bag hidden in a tree's hollow or a brick's splice.

(3)

Between the stormdrain they dropped, forgotten,
and your body too is pushed; like an acorn or
political leaflet it rolls or is carried away,
or is trodden upon like ink stamped to tops of hands.

(4)

The finality is to beg. Beg to know those dollars
you spent and you gained went into the black
of the stirred pool, like a cake or gunpowder,
or like a confectious spread made of cream cheese
and pineapple, ready to be nutted, ready
to be turned into a fruitful world with ups,
downs, and the wan wail to which hunger jumps,
before taken away with an instant chomp, goodbye.

(5)

The bohemian attractions tend to settle, to smooth.
Reality never was rent money due, gifts to purchase.

To realize letters require postage, to see time
reach out and grace with chewed nails again.

Dimes and nickles swirl the great air, creating
forms of this figure, a forge of the self, a mimic
dancing robotic and longingly. There are hints
of blood when smiling though these lips are not
like the rest of them. They are mangled and apart.

These lips--chapped through and through--will
bend those customers' eyes, clean the countertop.

I Saw This Poem #1

After the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Your life ain't so epic
with a gun holster to
put all that smokin' metal.

Life's gon' bring your family
wagonloads of stories, but
they'll hate 'em so you'll stop.

After quittin' the game to
watch His figure blast by, clouds
shootin' fast 'long sky-routes

may be some of the best catcalls
to the past this home ever saw,
and you still, you a blind bastard.

Poem for Want and Wish

It would be a lot
easier if the tool
to do it was in my
field of vision.

Bacon-smelling coffee.
Sweepstakes to Florida.
Unusable ink cartridges.
I am ready for a culture

bomb.

Goodbye Ms. Hartigan

1922-2008

YouTube Medley

Building a House with Robert Creely

We dropped
wood in thick
stacks made
of the same winter
we hated

Glasses tipping
a steady grade
down the
ridge of your
red nose, always

The house built
kept us decent
as beavers
in both spring
and summer

Your Maine-coat
looks stolen
from the cave of
a small bear
or mountain

Your hair mats
like the leaves
in the mud
in the thick mud
in the thickening mud

Let's Discuss Things, Drunkenly

Behold the Jeroboam
wrapped in dim bristol
the day's ocean had rose highly
stone walls crushed ozone

the bridge light's blue casts
shadows in the gathered dark
your letters are showing
(I am cheating, as always)

Let's Get Drunk and Discuss Things

For Rabia

I walked through abysmal rain
enjoying nether lips and their
sweetest wet spots, to be shaken
by a single message over satellite
perplexities. You must love the
one you dream to be chained to,
A person bigger than yourself.

For the End of All Days Person

For Kat

A.

The woman of the deep-
textured clothing,
who wears nails painted
with the images of
verisimilitude,
and an ironically
taciturn facial
grimace, has yet
to show her whittled
mug under these pall and
apprehensive skies.

This sordid weather's
howl compliments
the bashed-in,
torn-up streets
that stretch slick
with dicey rainspew,
a liquid drawl to
encourage the
ugly foundations
waiting beneath.

The lanes splice
the problems of this
human vision,
retroactive with
uncertainty,
giving attention
to the sidewalk padding.

The streets are hollow
middles, vacuous spaces
to be filled and
to be anti-filled.
Even the orange sky
moves off to the
landscape's corner
on this night of pretense,
barbarism, and poverty.
It moves like a blade,
quick, accurate, downward.

Several cat's meows,
normalizations of
which I have learned to
expect when returning
home from work, remain
muffled tonight, and each
window through which
we hear the streetworld
just outside are right now
slammed shut and strange.

Even the soft and
plentiful keys played
into the piano and
accordion on the
computer are muted,
low-level noise hushed
to hold silence's safety
back just far enough.

"No utopia here,
boy. You are a
sinner, a done one."

B.

Last night my eyes
closed and I thought
before entering
the blind dreams
about the package I
must mail to my
friend in Bar Harbor,
and how brilliant
I would be when finished,
having created something
so complex and unusual in
nature. Today, with the
package completed, drying,
I start to write this
and stumble across a
a vision, a spectacle.

Up in one of the trees
that hug the splitting streets
like follicles of hair,
a flawless older
man sways from a
street light, catching
wind on his arm,
and the thick
moisture of rain
gives him weight
a la a reflexive
Louis Vuitton tie
and magazine-quality
button-up, azure blue.

The vision ends and
I wonder if the
woman of wet clothes
and jagged teeth,
wrinkled skin
and imperfection,
the woman of the local
storm, woman of cool
chaos, has wound up
on this street tonight,
and if she has left me
this startling gift
in which I must search
and concoct an artful
response as well.

A List Because You're Looking For Someone Who

It's time for something
confessional, we
agreed, then took up
two bricks and threw
them as hard as we could.

A.

Chapped lips
suckled beehive balm
to rub in deep
and pretend.

Only one zit

now (a
bazillion baby-
booming more to
come forward
this week, sure;
I said "here
comes the cavalry"
once today)

Indentations in
wrist now (no
watch or watch-
band), indentations
on waste from capri
pants (still on
but I know the
marks linger with
the more
permanent scars)

Small chunks of
almond and essence
of chocolaty
residue swirl
around with tongue's
charge, it hooks
on the teeth like
a ceiling fan,
memory of
trail mix lasting
longer, hungrier

B.

Glass of water
with mineral scent,
two letters sit
patiently,
remain unread,
dirty wallet
falling apart,

headphones encrusted
with guilty uses
known only to me
and this plastic
table where I sit
(and this computer
has seen too much
as well, so kind),

a set of keys
too many to know,
to replace accurately,
an empty glass,
clear and dust,
an empty mug,
black and hidden,
my nostrils
needing Kleenex,
loot abound like
a dense jungle slash,

my glasses fogged,
fingers torn up,
in-grown hairs
on both my arms,
gut extensive
(the poetic
object at last),
two teats filled
with milk of soy,
years of drinking
all substances
non-nourishments,
a splatter of coins
trying to sit still

Objects everywhere
yet nothing of value.

Look at this smile
though, look at this
laugh as I, deranged,
stare into your eyes
one fleeting moment,
convince you to turn
away the very next.

Waiting for Cloud Cult: A Mashup

For Maria Winters, Greg Gillis

now, walk it out
all across the warping floor creep the old stains
through the innumerable pine-solings and sweep-ups
the residual souls from new Bowery cakes
the dance floor like a food-fight

Hey, you. I don't like your girlfriend
or the way she addresses you (in the diminutive)
as if you're a thing capable of reduction or
reductionist summary as in Boethius, Anslem, and most Greeks
(the only others readable are Godwin, Nietzsche)

Throw some D's on that bitch
and then talk to me using both hands, loudly
as if its raining and you and everyone else scramble
for newspaper whose dying mirrors the ice in Michigan
in the cruel, cruel April

The ascot lives on on Eskimos only
sippin' that Amsterdam
I don't want to wait
for this life
to be over

nor this youth which slips daily with
every Subway swipe and gray hair found,
plucked, the terror of the heating ducts, their
squatters, scavenging in the painted wall paper
while the sirens go "whee-a-whee-a-whee"

Two Revisions

Note: Formatting does not carry over to Blogger.

The Originals:

THREE: ROUTINE PRESENCE

(i.)

It happens every evening, or so

I think: I go out for a cigarette and

I watch.

The fountains are still there

and they are something I depend on,

as many poems I have written remind me.

The wind might be noisy or calm,

but my voice is always drawn to the fountains’.

Out there, I end with stubbing out the smoke,

but I don’t remember if I ousted the embers.

I do remember the doors opening with ease

because they are usually propped with stone.

And there is the curl of the fingers off the

smooth painted railings.

And the seat cushions me, sitting

down and admiring my fingers pressed

down against the keyboard, or my lips pressed

into the shallow-cut groove of the water bottle filled

with deep, blood-red (or sunset-red) wine—many

sips worth.

Everything revolves around before.

Before, when outside there was no warmth, only shivers;

before, when there was only a grimace to the stars.

Cars are not driving by out there. Not even one.

Pedestrians on the footpaths of this school are gone.

It’s too late for them, for my routine.

(ii.)

The racing rhythms are heartbeats, questions formed as

I become some exception: what do I except?

what do I accept?

I except and accept knowing the difference or

the importance

between the stillness outdoors and

the stillness indoors and

how the rift, the boundary between the two

is an intoxication.

is life right now as maybe meant to be passed off.

FOUR: WEEK LONG

Every day I sat for hours staring

at a table with the same objects on it.

There was a Polish vocabulary book.

And two ashtrays—one a dome hollowed out

and one a trinity that anyone can place their

smoke into, and watch it burn to the core.

Packets of matches—matchbooks scattered,

the cat gnawed on them when all else is slept.

Glasses and cups used and forgotten were needed to be cleaned out;

they created a stench, but I could handle the next to my bed—

the couch.

There was a remote control for the television,

and a giant lighter with a modified flame, saying:

I am giant, so flick my device and show me to the world!

We smoked bowlpacks and drank forties of malt liquor

because those things were cheap and didn’t require civility.

We looked at the same videos, the same vinyl records,

and the vision showed that the apartment revolved around

how boring it was.

Throw a random Providence hoodlum in there and

he or she might scream. But we never screamed.

Each morning,

the routine suddenly dawned on us in its divine curtain:

Here, we thought,

the abstract is as simple as the concrete;

the smoke rings we blow are still little boxes

controlling the air flow into the cat’s nostrils,

and it’s the same air we inhale daily.

The Revisions:

Routine Presence

(i.)

Every evening I go out for a cigarette and

I watch.

The fountains are always still there,

still something I depend on.

Whether wind is noisy or calm,

my voice is drawn by the water sounds.

Embers are stubbed, doors

opened with ease, stone-propped from earlier.

The curl of fingers paints the

the stairwell’s smooth railings.

Seat cushions, fingers pressed

down against the keyboard,

lips pressed to shallow-cut grooves.

The water bottle: filled

deep with wine, I take many sips

from it.

Everything revolves memory.

Outside without, only shivers:

Before, a grimace to the stars,

footpath pedestrians, the entire school, gone.

It’s too late for them, for my routine.

(ii.)

the racing rhythms are heartbeats,

I become exception: what to except?

to accept?

the stillness outdoors

the stillness indoors and

rifts maybe meant to be passed off—

Week Long

Spring Break 2008

Providence, Rhode Island

(i.)

A table with the same objects on it.

Polish vocabulary book.

Two ashtrays.

Hollowed dome

to forget.

Trinity to wait for

and to watch the smoke.

Packets of cat-gnawed

matchbooks. All else slept.

Creations of stenches. Bed handles.

The couch.

Remote control, television, giant lighter,

giant flame, flicks of skin on metal,

flame shown the world, meet this tobacco.

(ii.)

Smoked bowlpacks,

drank forties.

Looked at video cassettes,

same vinyl records over and over.

Vision showed the apartment,

sometimes: “How boring.”

We cheapened things

and didn’t require much civility.

(iii.)

Yesterday Dawn came onto

us through the divine curtain.

Then simple abstractions.

The concrete;

the rings blown;

little boxes controlling air;

the cat’s twin nostrils.

We inhaled daily

but never screamed.