Notes while Wasted in the Friday Night Subway after Finding a Pen in the Coalish Valley of Subway Tracks

the new york air had sickened
with the spring we'd been expecting
the thrushes of concrete branches
moved by urban adulation

this Black history month
was our personal longest and personal best
with cold weather recessing
and hipsters lipping secrets behind the blue girders of Jefferson
their pea coats flap like American flags
over the departed deserts of track work

this subway full of sleepers
their pocked redness, their face-puffs
the long inflation of the oldest freedom
the cool light-blueness of L-Train benches
what it symbolizes to the standers
and the voices pouring in at Montrose Avenue

Goose Necks, the NYC Mither

The promise of spring lingers
like a match scent

deciduous eggs of vagrant Canadian's
nurture the maws of patternless rats

recently,
I walked by you in a dream

The Fox Chase Response Couplets

Written after G. Emil Reutter's reading and book release (of Blue Collar Poet) at the Blue Ox Bistro in Fox Chase, Philadelphia.

I

What nobody ever thought about
simply single words to remember.

When everything is gone there
must be something left to fester.

Dark car cornering cop with pastry,
engine light on, zero wipers on high.

I wanted to do everything for you.
I wanted to take you to horror movies.

Just by begging we fascinate mirrors,
lips curving upwards spelling synonyms.

An explosion for the peacemaker
nothing more than a letter bomb.

The best words written on the salt
that exploded your pacemaker to act.

In security the X-ray machine ex’d out
and your eyes ex’d close like a child.

Boring rooms, with bald white lights,
the sheen a waxy glare fit for a palm.

Took upon flowers and watched them dry.
Married gaze to stems and curling commenced.

Each pain the foot is blood red to the mind,
but to the foot it is yellow like disease.

February in St. Croix did not happen;
but you and I quit Dunkin Donuts.

You and I quit BK ‘n’ McDonalds
and Wendys and I never started Checkers.

A checkerboarded face shows your good.
Evil is a drought hanging on with each sunrise.

Personably exquisite is what the security said,
voice drowning with the noise exhibit factory.

II

Wondrous droves of doves picked off corners;
salmon being cooked in grease, cracker-covered.

A glazed cinnamon raison bagel a treat
worth several hundred calories and tongue ties too.

The ice cream creams into liquid fat above
and there’s my tongue licking your thigh.

Too often do I think of the past these days.
Archetypes end up drying, gathering dust like us.

There was Colleen Olsen and her red tiara of hair,
her lips bubbling reality into fantasy, on time, in tune.

Though this evening’s beer was tall, it collapsed.
She stopped her conversation and stared back once.

Wurst cut in half and served in buttered bun;
anti-cheese sliding down throat like butter, jelly.

A scent of vague plums, bathroom plunged and sick,
I questioned the out of order sign’s threat, appeal.

It was the drive back and the discussion on bases,
it was our grim endeavors and angsty haste that won.

Remember that mall with its machines?
Remember that dove with its guns?

A chain gun sits silent churning 6000 rounds.
One minute ago we walked like deer to death.

Today a white flag means it must be dirtied.
Yesterday it meant “let us meet, truce, finish.”

Stolen between blood baths and microchips,
the youth tries to text but his phone is red, soaked.

Along the line dancers sit mimicking laughter.
Along the graves mourners stand to go.

Perhaps while we were drowning in wheat beer
a man was drowning in bullets, or the sea.

Big, Slow Ones

It's not that I don't mind
the fast spit of text or
the sniffling slithering
eons of prose battling
around lazer beam guitars
or choir's dirty glances--
styles, styles, styles.

Naw, man, shit.

I like 'em big. Big 'n' slow.

I like 'em in action.

Break chop kick cut up;
down left leap break slice;
hack pound jump pounce
trump pout spout lick--

the poems that crop shoot
dodge prop burp trip slip
tick pick point stoop dip
click ship trade drip fade--

paid. I like poems that pay.
The word chunks that grip
your throat by the throat
and give a grubby squeeze-in.

No Way These Are Local Boys

After Tremors

What the hell is goin' on--
I mean--what the hell
is goin' on?

Asking too much of life.
Blasting
the stink
back to town
where geography geology

Perfection

It's got you
good bye

to the war
good bye
to Bixby

It's time to defend
or exterminate

with the phone out
and the road out

Do something

What the hell are they?
Sons a bitches

(Graboids)

Predating the fossil record

It's a perfect conductor
That means we're stuck
That pisses me off

Aren't you supposed to have
a theory or something

Quantums

There were no buckshots
in the making
melting pot
of bad guys but realism
is back the finite number
has returned like crane
like
migration windstorms
even perhaps yes droughts

Females hard to come by
in light of dictatorship
healthy madness
the same system overlapped
rooted though in cash
bills cash money lights

cubic centimeters
fuel cells rupture
diamond rings and things

The real topic is murder
but everybody knows its
there the real topic is cry

Does he cry I don't know
I wasn't looking for that

Too busy jogging holding
up tomes of poetry as
fat expanded contracted
pregnancy of fat of lit

church tower broken glass
and the real question
how the hell was this thought of
but afterward nothing special
all made of broken glass
and spinning bells clicking

its time to eat your pecans
your mint chocolate chip
detriments prerogatives

A poem can't be finished
because it's time to work

A romance can't be started
because Bond's just busy

On Second Avenue

After the Babies, Tourists, Pigeons in the Courtyard of St. Mark's Church-In-The-Bowery

The pigeons land in their
Own slow motion
The old elegiac church-yard
Not wanting for any Irishness
Cement lions, shielded
Like the pigeons’ king

The benches of Second Avenue
Bromst, a great hair day in lower Manhattan
The computer loading like hope
And the feeling of being a writer, again
Surprise, Stephani.

The pink anarchy of
mutant pigeons
And the ladies faces painted redly
Bread on the bricks
The rejection of it
And the flag emptied of it’s wind

The front shifts, spelling mutiny
But who ever heard of that
Their finger-like hunting
The white one, a princess (a Gandalf?)
The baby, a duck on it’s head
Being filmed by a New York lover
and strangers kissing
while I trespass in a public moment

Landmark
Topiary
Designer strollers

The red-coats trilling
The trinity of the pigeons and two babies
The renegade happiness of their thin hair
And in the sleeping trees


A peerless jury
Sufficiently ruffled
their June-ish beaks
brace like the sun’s last lap

BGII

I used to know this guy named John who would play Baldur's Gate II with me via the Internet. He was three years older than I and we lived across the street from each other, but after we were sick of hanging out with each other in real life (snowball fights, snow forts, exploring the woodland near the neighborhood), we started playing computer games online together--BGII, Quake, Half Life, Myth, Heroes of Might and Magic. The funniest part about it was that often we would be on the phone while playing. It was a very special bonding experience. Granted, I wasn't on the phone with him as much as some of my other early "best friends," or even girlfriends, but it was enough to remember it.

I remember he was a ranger throughout BGII. He loved using a bow and arrow. It fit his personality outside of the game perfectly. He also liked to set traps. I think his subclass was Bounty Hunter, which is a type of character that indeed specializes in traps. Well, anyway, I was always a fighter and always got impatient with him setting his damn traps but our personalities in reality generally coincided. He was the cold reason and I was the passionate emotive type. His emotions were usually in brute force, mine softer, passive. Strange how the roles both stayed the same and reversed at the same time via Baldur's Gate II.

What makes me think of that game? Well, I've been playing through it again on my mini-laptop, and it's great. It's definitely a lot easier than I ever remember it being, and the concepts are fresh but come much quicker to me, meaning I understand the game and the game isn't nearly as overwhelming (or, unfortunately, as vivid) as it was when I first got it in high school. I remember that the day the game shipped to me, it was one of the first games I ever pre-ordered, and it happened to arrive on a night that my family had a babysitter. I think my sister Katie was still too young and my little brother was probably born and young and very present at that point so me being the irresponsible little twit I was did not have the capacity to watch myself and two other people. Anyway, the babysitter watched me playing the damn game for a while. I was mesmerized. The improvement over the first game was, and still is, phenomenal, but it's much more subtle than, say, comparing BGII to one of the current Wii or 360 games that features stunning graphics.

I've been playing through BGII and I am on my way to beating it very shortly and I should be reading literature I haven't read, but there's a anti-social-though-still-social aspect to a computer role-playing game, much like a blog which is basically a community in itself and a way to feel okay being alone, because of the lightning-quick reflexes of the internet, and . . . well, anyway, BGII is straight-up fun. There are so many references I didn't get when I was younger, such as the Temple District being composed of every major spirituality that exists in our world today, including the strange grotesque cultist type worship that is absolutely irrational (in the game it's called the Unseeing Eye, and is a Beholder Cult that causes sacrificial patrons to gouge out their eyes in service to their lord).

When I finish the game, if I don't go through with the expansion pack, though I probably will end up doing just that, because in this maximist culture, is there any other way?, I hope that I don't choose to go play Oblivion. I recently discovered all of the graphics modification for the game that can be gotten, that would make the game run on my since-converted Linux computer (the behemoth laptop) quite well. I'm just worried about time, particularly because no one knows how long they're going to be on the earth, and to play a game, be in a virtual reality . . . these things shouldn't be strange to me but they are. I feel like I am the last generation of youth that will have this conflict. All kids younger than me will be born into technology of the computer and Internet age and will only know it. Though the relativity is comforting. Technology will still improve and they'll still have more to learn. But they won't know a time where they didn't have a computer, except when comparing blocks of time in their own, individual lives, when they had yet to learn this 21st century language from scratch, for the first time.

Andrew Taylor

Everyone should check out Andrew Taylor's poetic work in the new Otoliths.

His work feels like a meat grinder crushing bodies of matter together. I hate to say it but maybe that meat is soy?

Ditti Bop

We watched those birds
carry the fireman up and away.

The heavens are lofty
when you're in them.

Thunderbolts are figments
of the human condition.

Watch the figs get eaten,
the child thinking sugar.

Our bodies are more water
than hair or teeth or skin.

Atonement of the caterpillar
another giant leap for non.

Beside the carriage a name
the letters only gold when lit.

One rusted bullet dreams
it was just a nail or toe.

I calmed the ocean falling asleep
and woke up hearing Mozart.

Bromst will keep you awake
but fully functional actually.

Reading one line from Patrick White:
double adverb power: suddenly icily.

The only vivisector
is the one Lawnmower Man.

You better move over Red Rover--
we've sent the bird flu right over.

After a while crocodile
lost all of his teeth to caramel.

The Dichotomous Quarter Poems

I found a quarter that had its normal silvery color on one side and a magical signal color, slightly golden, on the other. I took it out of the register after giving the register one of my quarters. That quarter was happy to go. This quarter is happy to be part of my new bedroom family of purposeless novelty objects. I call those members of that family PNO Pals. That's a god damn lie and you know it.

Anyway the quarter's on my desk and I haven't done anything with it yet and the couplets I wrote a couple minutes ago, anti-couplets if you will, since they were composed in a lazy and clever fashion and that's about it, remind me of that quarter. If anyone cares the quarter had been in my sight, and still is in my sight, when I wrote those and as I write this. It's a magical coin that has earned its credit and that's why I'm giving it what it has due to it. Enjoy these couplets as they were primarily written for entertainment. If you find them unfunny or even miserable you can email me at gregbem@gmail.com, but make sure you have something constructive to say.

It's a great time to be destructive or unconstructive, but I won't have it, at least I will not promote it, despite my own modes of creativity. Also have you read a religious text lately?

This development
more plastic than soldier.

This development
the ground now liquid.

After three thousand years
the world is creaking shut.

The world is more than a door—
do not let me tell you otherwise.

Changes come forward
aromatic like shredded oranges.

This development
breathing without a cough.

This development
nothing but purpose.

Our goals were destroyed
blowing around; confetti, insects.

The elk cry out somewhere up there
but those who hear have full mouths.

I walked away on the ground
which was melting and important.

Shredded orange peels;
nothing served but purpose.

Doubt comes in cloak
to shadow strips of metal.

The full glass of water
needs little editing.

Running along paths
like the bunny slippers.

A shot to the heart
and you still are to blame.

Drum lines form the air
with every arm up and behind.

If I could do anything at all
says the girl to her doll.

Choice remonstrated
before we sniffled.

Purple lilacs sway,
are still pinchbecks.

This development
news from up north.

This development
little more than elk hooves.

I wanted to wish someone
but you wouldn’t focus back.

Four dolls hang from trees
and have rings around necks.

Under the boat a flamethrower
shooting blanks at ichthyologists.

Tell me the reasons
you were on crack cocaine.

This development
frogs as bad subject matter.

This development
nothing more than coke frogs.

The first man smiled
eyes like a frog when I said no.

The second man threw my pennies
and shouted what the fuck to me.

You were distributed
but the cut was too hard.

This development
is burn holes in the carpet.

Ten Minutes Later Update

I decided to submit this to the 13th Annual Poetry Ink Chapbook that the late Robin's Books puts out. The submission can only be one page in length, however, so I reformatted the original series into a condensed version, which I would normally post below but, in honor of the chapbook, will refrain from posting.

Choice Quotes from Bellow's Herzog

Saul Bellow. The American Thomas Mann? A serious alternative to beatnicks? A Chicago anti-hero? Bellow's work, at least as I have come across in my first reading of him, the fantastically difficult novel Herzog (originally published in 1964), provides a chromatic blend of the drama of adulthood, the subliminal concentrations of the romantic, 20th-century travel and communication, and Dostoyevskian rage. This is a book of problems, as Philip Roth describes throughout his "introduction" to the Penguin Classics edition (of which I read, with the great photography on the cover by Martin Scott-Jupp, the edition being from 2003), though the problems are delightfully portrayed as manageable by Herzog throughout the verse: "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog." Thus the book starts off and at times it's very confusing. What is conflict? Does conflict have to be above the surface or behind the lines, or maybe it has to be both. The third person, the reader, gets the greatest conflict of all in this book, and that's trying to define.

Below I've tried to throw in as many crucial quotes from the first sections of the book, quotes which zero in on those problems, but also touch on the master descriptions, of character and environment, that Bellow so beautifully provides in a haphazard glance sidelong and penetrating.

"How paradoxical it is that a man who uses heroin may get a 20-year sentence for what he does to himself . . . ." (56)

"De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse." (57)

"'I don't agree with Nietzsche that Jesus made the whole world sick, infected it with his slave morality. But Nietzsche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from. I call that Christian.'" (61)

"Paranoia is perhaps the normal state of mind in savages. And if my soul, out of season, out of place, experienced these higher emotions, I could get no credit for them anyway." (64)

"Each man has his own batch of poems." (69)

"But Madeline was putting on lipstick, and fluffing out her blouse, and checking her hat. How lovely she could be! Her face was gay and round, pink, the blue of her eyes was clear. Very different from the terrifying menstrual ice of her rages, the look of the murderess. The doorman ran down from his rococo shelter in front of the Plaza. The wind was blowing hard. She swept into the lobby. Palms and pink-toned carpets, gliding, footman . . ." (71)

"Herzog, now barely looking through the tinted, immovable, sealed window felt his eager, flying spirit streaming out, speaking, piercing, making clear judgments, uttering final explanations, necessary words only. He was in a whirling ecstasy. He felt at the same time that his judgments exposed the boundless, baseless bossiness and willfulness, the nagging embedded in his mental constitution." (75)

"The lawn was on an elevation with a view of fields and woods. Formed like a large teardrop of green, it had a gray elm at its small point, and the bark of the huge tree, dying of dutch blight, was purplish gray. Scant leaves for such a vast growth. An oriole's nest, in the shape of a gray heart, hung from twigs. God's veil over things makes them all riddles. If they were not all so particular, detailed, and very rich I might have more rest from them. But I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness. They are too exciting. Meantime I dwell in yon house of dull boards. Herzog was worried about that elm. Must he cut it down He hated to do it. Meanwhile the cicadas all vibrated a coil in their bellies, a horny posterior band in a special chamber. Those billions of red eyes from the enclosing woods looked out, stared down, and the steep waves of sound drowned the summer afternoon. Herzog had seldom heard anything so beautiful as this massed continual harshness." (79-80)

"But we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler's "Prussian Socialism," the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness. I can't accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice--" (82)

"We are survivors, in this age, so theories of progress ill become us, because we are intimately acquainted with the costs. To realize that you are a survivor is a shock. At the realization of such election, you feel like bursting into tears." (83)

"perhaps we, modern humankind (can it be!), have done the nearly impossible, namely, learned something. You know that the decline and doom of civilization refuses to follow the model of antiquity. The old empires are shattered but those same one-time powers are richer than ever." (83)

"It was easy for the Wastelanders to be assimilated to totalitarianism. Here the responsibility of artists remains to be assessed. To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism." (84)

"The little demon was impregnated with modern ideas, and one in particular excited his terrible little heart: you must sacrifice your poor, squawking, niggardly individuality--which may be nothing anyway (from an analytic viewpoint) but a persistent infantile megalomania, or (from a Marxian point of view) a stinking little bourgeois property--to historical necessity. And to truth. And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth." (103)

"Not to be a fool might not be worth the difficult alternatives. Anyway, who was the non-fool? Was it the power-lover, who bent the public to his will--the scientific intellectual who administered a budget of billions? Clear eyes, a hard head, a penetrating political intelligence--the organizational realist?" . . . "The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with. This was where such as he came in. The progress of civilization--indeed, the survival of civilization--depended on the successes of Moses E. Herzog. And in tr4eating him as she did, Madeleine injured a great project. This was, in the eyes of Moses E. Herzog, what was so grotesque and deplorable about the experience of Moses E. Herzog." (137)

"Modern science, least bothered with the definition of human nature, knowing only the activity of investigation, achieves its profoundest results through anonymity, recognizing only the brilliant functioning of intellect. Such truth as it finds may be nothing to live by, and perhaps a moratorium on definitions of human nature is now best." (142)

"To haunt the past like this--to love the dead! Moses warned himself not to yield so greatly to this temptation, this peculiar weakness of his character. He was a depressive. Depressives cannot surrender childhood--not even the pains of childhood." (156)

Rexroth's Latest Poetry

The following poems by dear anarchist poet./lover of classic Chinese and Japanese poetry Kenneth Rexroth appeared in Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems (New Directions, 1991), a compilation of poems from his later books, including Love Is an Art of Time; Imitations of the Chinese; More Translations from the Chinese; Chinese Poems Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung; and The Morning Star (The Silver Swan; On Flower Wreath Hill; and The Love Poems of Marichiko). These poems in this orange book are much more difficult to get into than his earlier work. There is a sense of peace in these new poems, a sense of the still and ease, a sense of beauty through the stable, that comes perhaps with age. Perhaps it's most difficult because I am not old enough to be okay with them yet. Still, they ring true with that accessible aesthetic that drove me through Rexroth a couple years ago for the first time.

I Dream of Leslie

you entered my sleep,
Come with your immense,
Luminous eyes,
And light brown hair,
Across fifty years,
To sing for me again that song
of Campion's we loved so once.
I kissed your quivering throat./
There was no hint in the dream
That you were long, long since
A new arrived guest,
With blithe Helen, white Iope and the rest--
Only the peace
Of late afternoon
In a compassionate autumn
In youth.
And I forgot
That I was old and you a shade.

Your Birthday in the California Mountains

A broken moon on the cold water,
And wild geese crying high overhead,
The smoke of the campfire rises
Toward the geometry of heaven--
Points of light in the infinite blackness.
I watch across the narrow inlet
Your dark figure comes and goes before the fire.
A loon cries out on the night bound lake.
Then all the world is silent with the
Silence of autumn waiting for
The coming of winter. I enter
The ring of firelight, bringing to you
A string of trout for our dinner.
As we eat by the whispering lake,
I say, "Many years from now we will
Remember this night and talk of it."
Many years have gone by since then, and
Many years again. I remember
That night as though it was last night,
But you have been dead for thirty years.

The Silver Swan XIX

The drowned moon plunges
Through a towering surf
Of storm clouds, and momently
The wet leaves glitter.
Moment by moment an owl cries.
Rodents scurry, building
Their winter nests, in the moments of dark.

The Silver Swan XXVI

Equation

Only truth can explain your eyes
That sow stars in the vault of heaven,
Where the clouds float through a field of tones

(The flowers which are born out of nothing,
When your eyes make fate so simple,
And the stars fly away from the hive
In the blue-green waiting room of heaven)

And explain your rapport with destiny.

Gunnar Ekelof

The Love Poems of Marichiko XIV

On the bridges
And along the banks
Of Kamo River, the crowds
Watch the character "Great"
Burst into red fire on the mountain
And at last die out.
Your arm about me,
I burn with passion.
Suddenly I realize--
It is life I am burning with.
These hands burn,
Your arm about me burns,
And look at the others,
All about us in the crowd, thousands,
They are all burning--
Into embers and then into darkness.
I am happy.
Nothing of mine is burning.

Hemingway's Shotgun, or Slashing Bonus +4

$4.99 is the Hemingway Shotgun.
Puts worlds in your stomach.
Worlds cities upon hills
my belly bulging like rockies.

Rockiest.

Anselm Berrigan's
"Have a Good One" poems
do the trick: have a good one
not said once during crime scene
at Olney Transportation Center
where a cop was gunned down.

See here.

Helicopter is God.
Text is God.
The flocks are god calling
man down man down.

The line of fire
is a rope course of police tape.

I even stepped on some
while I walked drunken Vietnamesed
up and down degraded sidewalks.

It's the Hemingway Shotgun.
It's the Florida keys, 90 something in length.

Call me trash whisperer, I told her.
I wait for the bats in the land of cats.

Apple juice from a silver-polished device
only purchasable at Mennonite thrift serum.

Goon look alike. Read Fables. Read Bone.
Read Sandman for chrissakes it's the 20th year
later. Or don't read. Or think about the midwest.

Think about Mammoth, TX, where you read Ed Abbey's
Desert Solitude and had a cheeseburger and still
want to go back; think about Terrance who
calls your father Vince McMahon after showing you
his Masons ring saying he was from CRI and just got out
and you are both on an island right outside of
City Hall and five separate occasions someone asked
the direction of Temple while standing outside the temple
and now you're think he was Jesus or some sagely thing
carrying on inside a homeless guy's body and you're happy.

Thank god somebody found it.

Read Nabokov's Laughing in the Darkness and
wonder about what's wrong with you for liking it
since it doesn't matter anymore.

Think about CAConrad talking about the coffin
factory that was up in PA and how it's become
the local old folks' home, all of them ex-coffin
factory employees, and the caskets they got
on discount will probably be used for them.

Think about Frank Sherlock talking about
the Situationalists and how Firefox thinks
that word is incorrect, even though
Sensationalists are on the correct list
but don't look the latter up please
because Google is working for the government.

Flu vaccines. Money. Big bills for big grills.

Got a quarter of a dollar the other day
and half of its bronze. Hanging onto it like
a charm though the magic is in the origami
Laura sent me; I put that orange figure, a frog
or anti-aircraft gun, in the corner on the
external hard drive that holds illegal

movies
pornography
music
games
documents

and makes me feel like the keeper of a universe.

Like banana shake off of a blender's penis-masher.
Feel awkward though project it outward.

How can a person forget Superbad, a film
that is so notorious for its characterizations?

I think about couplets and we think about darkness
and I think about silence and being alone and
work at 4:30am when I have to open these eyes
like a fry-cook taking up the tongs for the first
go, this game like the chess game that Anselm
described: anti, where we start in check.

Beer Castles

Another day drips away
while the robins eat the bricks
and the rust-scum clots

6-3-1, tried and tired
the old Motte-and-Bailey
like something to be bowled over

We stacked contagious air
on noxious film
and lived in our carnival

the bedding was the sod
of six-pack pack rings
and the fish within them

People Die All The Time

Reasonable Woman
"for child and home care"
your pinstripes are
surprisingly tasteful
like a Strand bag
stranded badly over
the Brooklyn-Queens
high-fenced expressway
with it's yellow visions,
speed limits, and
pedals on the metal.

Unabashed

that entirely unholy scuttling
down the basement of East Pyne
of eighty legs and God knows
how many thoraxes..thoraces?
[had I only listened more closely
in the grasshopper lab--
thank you, Cavanaugh]
shiftlessly dusting over
the linoleum, a health code violation
if I ever saw one
fishhooked the glance
and the neighbor's, our
peaceable kingdom of three
and two phylums, yet
this wasn't about to deteriorate
to another Wood Street
so with mouth utterly devoid of Blooming
and true musculature, and boots
scuttling got vanquished
a lone antenna masting there
for a redacted Kingdom's
halfgeneral disdain- what else
but a solo-cup scooper, a Switzerland
a gentle folder of paper for
disembarkation at windows?

Sonnet of the Wolf

Though this world was made for ending
I remember staring down the sidewalk
in front of us and thinking: hands, we
should be holding hands through this light,
but then I realized you weren't real and
it was a greater dream than I ever could know.
This could be the end of the world, in the
kingdoms, holding hands with a shadow or two,
beings I thought more human than "faceless
phantoms," problem childs of the faded grey
of the sky warping overhead like a giant
musty blanket, pulled up from beneath a sleeper,
or a dancing, clog-hopping, twisting knee,
falling down to your palms, scraping two palms.

Three Poems from Work Today

After Ringing Up Jena Swan

I

Her bright magenta pea coat
wraps tightly around her
frame like skin, skin whipping
around like raw flesh hanging
in flaps but youthful and fresh still
and being the best for everyone’s
eyes as a choice garment or cloth
blossom not matching her any
better than how it’s supposed to.

“I read the first book and it only
took me a day and a half but I
couldn’t find a bookstore around
the hotel and I was in Chinatown
too but I was working crazy hours
so I guess it’s okay and I’m really
happy that you’re here and you’ve
got this.”

I am carried by mystique, by the
absolute pairing of “crazy” with
“hours,” a match of dance-step antsy,
a greytoned zoning of the mind even.

II

Often when confronted with another’s job,
whether downtown or uptown, either
this neighborhood or that neighborhood,
it seems each position carries its own weight,
and it seems crazy enough but then time,
cartwheels onto the scene, not really a father
since it’s the 21st century but more like this
giant large ball with phalluces sticking out
and orifices hiding in every sweaty corner,
like a rolling sex bomb, ticking away, but down,
really, always down, down, down.

We never think about it as some
grand disclosure waiting to erupt.

Instead, here we are, thinking about
jobs and work, when we can’t even
wrap jobs around ourselves to protect
ourselves, from the cold or whatever that is.
We can’t think about our security, such
as that which I give to this Swan woman,
this girl who I think is more beauticul than
girl or woman or anything at all, but still
is purchasing that book right now, enough
to go completely mad or “batty” or stone cold.

There is distaste in describing Jena Swan as
a swan, giving her that title, as a swan is
not regarding and often appears bitter,
queen-like, and antagonistic; no, Swan
was beautiful and full-bodied like a swan,
feathery and robust, turning my eyes like
a swan does, though this time in cowardice
and capricious tendencies not fear or hush.

White feathers bulging, pissed when too close.
Swans never let on but always seem to do.
Circumstances but why get too close to its bulk?

III

Hours upon hours, the craziest of them,
the damp hours, the torrent of hours, so
many hours yet it’s already only February.

It is the month of inching and premonitions.
Another dawn to another season of harvest,
creativity abounding through damp tracklettes.

It is winter, we know this. The hours in their
crazy, glazed glory cannot stop, won’t stop,
so people buy a pause, stop on in, have a chat,

and spend time. Let us pretend to contain
these hours, document those scouring crags,
fragments bundled together, watchface glass

ready to be cracked, broken, long been smashed,
large hammer bulk all rust and dust clouding,
the gravel’s movement a dualism of silent clatter.

The hours bunch ever around, accordioned,
siphons of blood, thousands of pumping threads,
vessels looking like a map of many snaking trails.

The typeface of our map is blue to shade unknowns,
topographic scales scanning distances like sets
of blinking, watching and measuring industry’s hours.

Because it’s just not for

In response to her mother,
who stood outside the bookstore,
looking at the palisade of red
romance novels and green mysteries,
who asked with a grave monotony
of the store next door to me
that I don’t like to think about,
because it’s just not for me,
“What’s in there?” the girl
all pinks and sweatpants,
wearing her smile like a saber,
lazily responded, destroying
both my moment and my ease:
“Beautiful diamonds and stuff.”

Brunswick is Wet Winter

Measuring time
in icicles, each
tear a drop
of melted water
landing, gathering
where we cannot see:

Grandmother
watches the
bathroom window’s
sequence of images
every day.

Every day she
exists alone
with her ice,
her daughter
away in Romania,
her son away
in California,
her grandson
in Pennsylvania,
her granddaughter
in Connecticut,
her other grandson
in school towns away,
her husband
away where
we cannot see.

Drops to the
bucket, hands
solemn but
clapping steadily;

every day she
is alone
with her ice
melting, one

extension
owned, another
severed for so
long, like ache
or throb.

She says the ice
falls swift, like
a waterfall.
One will melt
to make room
for the next,
an icicle horn
many feet long,
uncountable,
but always there,
and seen.

The reflections,
she admits, off
the frozen water
are blinding and
blind her, cease
the entire time;
the image of
blindness
sudden and breaking
up all the reflections,
the age through
the window’s
glass wiped-clean.

An Introduction

It was at the wit's end
Of a pinkribbon reckoning when
Other palates carried forth:
Sorry Daschle
Sorry Kafka
Notwithstanding indulgent drawling
In the blond wood times
Of the uninitiated
For whom footnoting is bloodsport
And hazing the sustenance
Sorry Ovid
Sorry Francie
Sorry Harold
And whosoever
Prefers the aspect, backlit
The everything, undifferentiated.

Choice Ins

From: Linda - Borders

Weirdo. What a sad and
lonely kingdom. I don't
want to work. Come play
with my client and I'll go
read since you know, I
don't ever read.

Jan 7, 5:18 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

The cats here would
terminate the Road
Warrior.

Jan 7, 7:57 pm

***

From: Rhonda - Borders

And this is homosexual
gay? Not weak gay? I
know weak gay poets
and shudder to think
they've been published.

Jan 7, 8:46 pm

***

From: Josef - RI

Catering brought a muffin
cookie sandwich surprise.
Deekle brought lemonade
and more cookies. To a
business meeting. But with
style.

Jan 8, 6:24 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

Tonight is the night of my
firing. Good thing I am
full of tricks, trials. I feel
like the bad luck coming in
from Tampa. Here in the
world's mouth. The
cavities we love to brag
about.

Jan 9, 1:30 pm

***

From: Josef - RI

Ah technology. Heard
Osaka is very Blade
Runneresque as well, but
in Tokyo I must find a film
oriented bar called La
Jetee, which is right near
the Red Light District.

Jan 9, 2:00 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

Tonight was great. I
want to chop down a
garden. The sweat pours
over like milk spilling into
the river: an Israel unto
itself.

Jan 9, 9:03 pm

***

From: Josef - RI

Thought. Bring Rabies
back. Like a jigsaw puzzle
of mono syllable
utterances. I was there
the whole time.

Jan 13, 9:53 am

***

From: Josef - RI

How say you rabies in
Japaense? Oh no? Just
KA. I wonder as that
panther mauls the
impromptu margasss dub
band.

Jan 13, 10:00 am

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

Dreamed it was the 4th
of July last night. I want
to know what the fuck is
wrong with me.

Jan 13, 1:34 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

No intellect there either.
Just papers and graders.
New York is the closest
thing to a salon. Lotsa
holes to fill too.

Jan 13, 6:49 pm

***

From: Chau - PA

Well, how 'bout the zoo
since you like animal noises
or Chester since you like
crime (you'll hear gun shots
all day long) and
poverty? Well, which
part did you do? The bread
loafs in the sky?

Jan 15, 11:02 am

***

From: Tim Hollan - RWU

So cold even the red
jacket can't keep me warm.

Jan 15, 6:40 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

This train is made of
meat. Super suicidal. I
will either die or eat my
way out and choke on
the bones. January is the
worst thing.

Jan 15, 8:55 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

Same dark red lights in
the drink like a drug full
of bolts and harnesses.
Didn't apply to work with
Lehman. His work is shit
like most people in power.

Jan 15, 11:20 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

Zakarai is a great Dunkin
Donuts employee. Doesn't
know what marshmallows
are but he predicts the
cold will stop in three
days. Also following that
plane crash.

Jan 16, 7:26 pm

***

From: Rhonda - Borders

No time or place in the
announcement? What a
vague blanket message!

Jan 16, 7:47 pm

***

From: Dave Prague - TX

They say radiation won't
give you super power but
technically cancer is super
human cell growth. Shitty
power but power none
the less.

Jan 16, 8:50 pm

***

From: Josef - RI

Forests at foot of a
mountain where sad folks
go to die. But only fools
would starve. Bring a
rope? Jump in from
mountain top? Or just
follow a drunken novelist
round town for a night,
waste all your money &
live again in the morn?

Jan 17, 9:41 pm

***

From: Campbell Andrew - PA

Get a coffee and
Gatorade. Walk the city till
it's gone then right up
Broad.

Jan 17, 11:11 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

Birds came back like
crazy birds.

Jan 18, 5:53 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

Millions witness a
profound moment in racial
history. Billions of worms
tunnel under in
insurrection.

Jan 20, 12:26 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

No got water over here.
Heat though. For now.
Now off to work in the
black slop of the five
frozen boroughs.

Jan 20, 12:57 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

The wall says "I'm sad. I'm
nervous." The beauties
near it agree with their
tight, erudite halters. The
way one remembers how
to swim halfway out the
plane. where gonna need
a lot more great
swimmers to move this
planet enough feet away
from the deep pacific
monsters of our fathers.
Swimmers and guns.

Jan 22, 10:10 pm

***

From: Jeff B - NYC

I'm at the vanishing point.
I smell so bad! No
showers. Skipped work
since Tuesday. Just
bought first whiskey
since the quiet times.
The times of silent
falcons and Cady library
smiles. I am rocking to
the bottom. My cock out
all the way.

Jan 22, 10:16 pm

Growth Spurt

She sits upon a golden fence
with the translucent skirt seeping
golden through lazy half-moons

while he rummages up a rusted key
like its meant for the garage corner,
spits slowly onto the dry ground,
muttering in slow whisper his queue.

Those masked bandits dining
on moonlight shied, harvesting their
alter egos while rabbits rub in bushes.

Bash In Heads

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/4/former_state_dept_official_hillary_mann

What does it feel
to put head to head
until hairs interlock?

Playful lambs butting
into broken facade
windows while we make
clocks with faces.

It's been thirty years
since the Iranian
revolutions (
rationality lightbulb)

Any place that sells
beer in bottles only
is only an only

There is no evidence
Ideologically driven

First suicide nation
This is nuclear weaponry

People with shaved heads
tapping each other

Their shoulders damp
with the currant sweat

Bestial vorticism
dancing along palace
walls, vestibules
covered in ink guts,
trembling like
Two Towers with wires
in between, all over
the entire sleeping
bag world

"It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies."

Quotes from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

From Part 1

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. (62)

I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and then she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling! The next instant I heard her—alive, unraped—clatter downstairs. The motion of fate was resumed. (63)

After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenly—Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and perfect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother’s husband would be able to lavish on his Lolita. (66)

So there was Charlotte swimming on with dutiful awkwardness (she was a very mediocre mermaid), but not without a certain solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?); and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know—trying to see things as you will remember having seen them), the glossy whiteness of her wet face so little tanned despite all her endeavors, and her pale lips, and her naked convex forehead, and the tight black cap, and the plump wet neck, I knew that all I had to do was to drop back, take a deep breath, then grab her by the ankle and rapidly dive with my captive corpse. I say corpse because surprise, panic and inexperience would cause her to inhale at once a lethal gallon of lake, while I would be able to hold on for at least a full minute, open-eyed under water. The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the contemplated crime. It was like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer holding the ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery twilight. (81)

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal heaven among an eternal alchemy of asphalt and rubber and metal and stone—but thank God, not water, not water! (82)

From Part 2

There was still a three-year-old bobby pin of hers in the depths of the glove compartment. There was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves up here and there by the roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-i8n. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in i8ts contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding world,--and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation. (267)

A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road, but when I reached Pavor Manor, the sun was visible again, burning like a man, and the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house seemed to stand in a kind of daze, reflecting as it were my own state, for I could not help realizing, as my feet touched the springy and insecure ground, that I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business. (267)

To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage . . . To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands . . . To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain . . . To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling—oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss! (269)

It was high time I destroyed him, but he must understand why he was being destroyed. His condition infected me, the weapon limp and clumsy in my hand. (271)

We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us. (272)

He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of the two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin. (272)

Project Verse

Found this on Silliman's Blog today. Def. going to enter: Project Verse.

Project Verse Seeks Applicants!

Can you write under pressure without breaking a sweat?
Always telling friends that writing a crown of heroic sonnets is a cinch?
Do you dream of perfect line breaks?
If you think you’ve got the write moves, I’ve got the poetry competition for you.

Project Verse


Dustin Brookshire, through I Was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin and Limp Wrist, is proud to announce Project Verse, the self-proclaimed “Project Runway” of the poetry world.

Project Verse is a free competition set to be a grueling but fun competition for poets. It’s a 10-week competition, and the winner will be announced week 11. Each Monday, an assignment will be posted in I Was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin. Poets will have to complete and submit the assignment by noon Friday of the same week. The judges will read and score the assignments over the weekend, and the judgment will be posted in I Was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin the following Monday.

Who are the judges? Dustin Brookshire, Beth Gylys, and Dana Guthrie Martin are your weekly judges; however, it wouldn't be fun without a little variety. Each week, except for the first week of the competition, there will be a guest judge. I would give you the list of guest judges, but that wouldn't be any fun either! We have a varied list of guest judges ranging from Pushcart Prize nominees and winners to a Lambda Literary Award recipient to National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipients.

And a competition wouldn't be complete without a prize! The winner of Project Verse receives the following prize package:
 a contract for a limited edition chapbook published by Limp Wrist
 a weeklong residency at Soul Mountain Retreat* (for the poet to revise and finish his/her chapbook)
 an interview with Joe Milford of “The Joe Milford Poetry Show”
 a review of the chapbook that will be published in ouroboros review and Limp Wrist

Open up ya, open up ya, open up ya throat

Question: "I've noticed, exclusively with black people, that they tend to pronounce the word "ask" as "axe". I've also noticed that it's common for them to substitute an "f" for a "th"; for example, they'll pronounce "ruthless" as "roofless" or "mouth" as "mouf".

I live and work in Chicago, and I've noticed this among both ghetto dwellers and professional types...I was really surprised to hear a female black executive use the word "axe" several times.

Note that I didn't say ALL black people do this, but a significant amount do."

The Best Answer: "It is African American Vernacular English and it IS a cultural thing.

AAVE shares several characteristics with Creole English language-forms spoken by people throughout much of the world. AAVE has pronunciation, grammatical structures, and vocabulary in common with various West African languages. Including sharing many features from regional dialects from the American South.

Many people from Boston or New York sound uneducated, some say, but they are not. It's just a dialect they have learned and share as a group as solidarity. I've noticed Latinos doing the same thing, now.

Also, American English was a direct snub against the British when America was founded. It was deliberate and was to separate from a nation they no longer wanted to be associated with, and created thier own dialect, spellings, and pronunciations.

Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Waldo from Monticello on August 16, 1813;
“The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed.”"

My favorite answers:

1. "It's just the way they know how to talk. My mom is from Manhattan and sometimes she say "der" instead of there, or Idear...instead of idea! My mom is not Black nor does she dwell from the ghetto! I was in Chicago at Taco Bell and some White guy asked his son " hey Bahby wan a Tack-o? But he meant Hey Bobby want a taco? I'm from California. No accent here!"
2. theyve always been too lazy to use correct grammer.
   they all also say "escape" as '"excape".
   if you notice , nearly all modern vernacular comes from them.
   ie; baby momma, my bad,wut up.etc.etc.
   the large lips may impeed correct speach of "ask" & some other words however.
   ( i dont want to hear any crap about me being racist either. these are facts and everyone knows it)
3. thats because the black man is the man
   man you have no knowledge.Let me give you some.
   all breeds of dogs on earth come from the wolf
   even though they might not look nothing like the wolf. that process is called genetic selection
   and it was done by man not god. so man made the dogs you see here today though a process of
   breeding(genetic selection). AND IT IS A 100% FACT THAT YOU CAN DO THE SAME PROCESS WITH MAN
   OR ANY OTHER LIVING ORGANISM ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH. AND I REPEAT THIS IS A 100% FACT. SO WHAT IM SAYING IS THAT YOU COULD ACTUALLY TAKE TWO BLACK AFRICAN PEOPLE AND PUT THEM IN A LAB
   AND CREAT ANY RACE ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH OR YOU COULD CREATE A NEW RACE NEVER SEEN BEFORE IF YOU WANTED TO . AND THIS IS A COMPLETE FACT.
   
   AND ANOTHER THING. THE THING ABOUT YOU COMPARING US WITH YOUR SELF AND CALLING US ANIMALS LET ME
   TELL YOU ABOUT THAT . THE BLACK MAN IS THE DEFINITION OF THE THE WORD MALE. HUMAN BEINGS
   HAVE A FEMALE HORMONE CALLED Estrogen AND A MALE HORMONE CALLED TESTOSTERONE. THE BLACK RACE HAS THE HIGHEST AMOUNT OF TESTOSTERONE WHEN COMPARED TO ANY OTHER RACE ON THE PLANET.
   I am black myself. the more you look like the apes we came from the more you look like man. white facial features are female features. black facial features are male facial features. the more
   you look like a gorilla the more you look like man and this is not a joke im 100% serious. the black race including male and female is on the male side of the chart. the white race and some
   other races are on the female side of the chart including male and female . do you not pay atension the white race in america is the king of homosexuals. even though the white female may possess the female features and the black female possesses the male features we can still make any kind shape and
   form of black people through gentic selection. so thoughs female features are stolen they belong to our black females.

From Yahoo Answers

Tell the Women We're Going

After Raymond Carver and Marshall Berman

The flatiron building's
searing city taupe
was brushed with peasant mortar,
its teeth crowning in the fascia.

The jail reading
was a cool sixty-two
and the little red guide
to good husbandry.

Frozen Immolation Quartet

One

It was not just a stranger.
The stranger with the coins
is no longer as strange to you.
It was the waiting, each day
a new forever, filled with
strangers, coins, last moments
shorter than the outstretched hands.

Two

A little boy crosses the street,
followed by a little girl in red.
The boy, in blue, makes it safely,
and so does the girl, but the
mother watches as they failed
(to look both ways, to hold hands)
and starts crying, right there,
in the middle of traffic, before
almost getting hit by a yellow cab.

Three

"I mean, if they
would just stop writing
about themselves and
start writing upwards,
to the sky, where new
findings await, air to
your water and earth
and fire, that special
flame casket, if they
would only look up there,
through the sky, heavens,
astral part, aerial part--
move forward, man, move on!"

Four

The cat escapes the mouth
of the doorway, a voice
releasing "get outta here,
ya ghost," and it watches
the voice (in waves) as
it lunges through the wind.
Survival through snow dust.
Cold cravings balancing
atop new-starred concrete steps.

The cat escaped and the voice
is gone off, talking to itself,
inside the house, over in
the kitchen, turning the stove
on high, then turning it down,
a second thought, voices do this
sometimes, not stutter but
think again and again and over,
the pan being rinsed, placed,
no thoughts about cats, no
thoughts about India or China
or Vietnam, but maybe, if
we could just burn our hands,
and think it through this time,
maybe oh, maybe, think about
fortune as a square instead
of a wheel lodged in the mud.

With Their Mangled Teeth

After Wendy and Lucy

I

With their mangled teeth
they were good enough friends,
shadows or demons, friends.
The campfire rabble wobbled
misty-eyed in booze and brooding.
Pretty good and pretty cheap,
the stories they told, of great
machinery in rolling landscapes
so much further north, up in
Alaska, king salmon all bloodied,
their goggles and shriveled eyes
loitering along like the officer’s
and his blanket of advice the
next morn after he tapped your
glass and how you wound up there.

Did you think about them again,
and will you, or have you been
completed by your automobile,
completed to us incomplete, to
sit back and capture what was before?

Lucy, as Dantean as any of us, knows,
guiding you silent, canine behavior
of the silent sighs and the opal teeth.

She stares up at you like we stare,
everyone in this world a statue, she
licking her lips while we bite ours,
ready to go in some other direction.

II

Police station;
the cash hungry
bureaucracy.

Where is the dog?
Where is the dog?

Time click shower
and boned legs
stamped to walls.

The blood has
quit its rushing.

The barrels of
regret stuck, jammed.

III

The search
exhausting.

“Come. Now.”
We shout.
We, Wendy,
fail like holes
in brown pockets.
To defer a hero.

To think, there is
no companion here.

We look for our
friends, our inner
energies, and
find the marrow
shivering with
heatflashes,
without boundaries.

IV

Each cell
barks its own call
and we cry a
single chance.

But each cradle
or parlor
or chamber
wails its sighs
in numbing tunes
while grey
whirlwinds arc
to dance as
knives do in
flights to walls.

Goodbye, dog
pound—good bye
like everything else.

V

“You a ‘blowin’
my mind, you—
you a messin’
my mind”

Shoos of air,
deals in the air,
car drummed fingers,
the tips all callous
and no fun, no game.

You’re mess of mind
is a new piece for
the old people to look at.

Nothing turns up in
a town that doesn’t let it.

Three prongs on the
system, the tier
aching for release,
but nowhere to give—

VI

The ghost in the bushes
is a smiling grip on reality.

As you take each garment
and attach it to the form,
the environment built once
and sturdy ever since,
the smile widens and erupts.

There is a ghost, of chance
or time we may not know,
but the operatic tones
sit pale on your skin, and
they are noticeable.

The ghost on the bushes
shrugs as what you do not see.

VII

Suttree revoked
to the steady dark.

They can smell
the weakness on you.

He can smell the
weakness on you.

Because you’re lost,
it is a dull weakness.

Not even a dreadful
strange can take it.

Not even a stranger
would want that.

VIII

With new cash
comes new debt,

but comes new love,
in an old place

with an old destiny
and a people
neither young nor
old nor pleasant.

IX

Playing fetch
in a back yard
with a dog—
it is your yellowish-
brown dog,
wines and whistles,
the state of domain
and relations
upon you in
someone else’s
back yard, green
grass never
so bright; content
and ominous,
certainty ringing
like a rag or
not looking back.
Are there neighbors
looking from
windows, wondering
who this outsider
is bearing a gaze
to this glass land?

Sunset Stanza

Hey kid, don't let the
bomb slip out of your
fingers, covered in grease
and moving like spiders.

Flubber Ghast

The Flubber Ghast
1,274 Words

Later on during the sunset a quadrangle of shadow sat atop a giant urn. The shadow was angled westward toward the ocean, which lurked just beyond a single wall of trees, waiting at the end of the path like a giant monster of fortune. Looking out from the centered copse, the edge of trees looked like scattered blinds within a modest American home, dangling in their dance before a window of light, causing everything being struck by the rays to flicker after the wind, air, and other earthly vibrations. Beneath the angled amoeba of shadow, the urn sat wiggling slightly to one side and then another, being worked at from above, worked at by tools above the dark covering. From the bottom of the urn where through rough handling the metal edge wiggled most noticeably, the shadow’s form was beginning and was least noticeable.

The urn was made of a cheap metal, like aluminum, but was quite sturdy atop its hand-carved base. From below the cookpot where the wiggling commenced it was easy to see that the base was made of the densest hardwood of all the nearby forests. The forests had many varieties of trees and thus demonstrated how rich the other resources must be through and through the relative geographic location. A traveler might describe the place as a coastal paradise, or tropical wonderland. But to those that were of this place, nothing was too special, spectacular, bright, or colorful, even with the rainbowed light of the sunset bouncing off the ocean and prying its way into the grove, spattering each and every slice of the habitat with hallucinatory alteration.

Also it is to be noted that the malleable ground beneath the urn and beneath the structure below it did wonders to supplement this standing totality of art. The ground was a surface both hard and soft, both rough and easily punctured. It supplemented both the art and the vandals taking action from their vulturous perches above. These poetasters wore short boots of strong, hard leather. The boots looked like the inverted souls of dry, dead animals pinned to the walls of the afterlife. The boots were layered up and down with sand and dirt and muck and grit but had a very sadistic edge to them. The light brown shade served as a subtle reminder or light reminiscing of cattle, oxen, and perhaps the occasional boar whimpering about on a snuffish solo romp.

The slight but humanoid chirps could be heard sloshing around from above the art. These remarks could be traced slaying one another in and out of each breath of breeze. “Food really is quite necessary, no matter how you put it,” creaked one of the two vocalizations before a swift squish of saliva smacked from mouth to forest floor. A monotonous though echoing scrape along some corner of the urn escaped into the air in tow. This additional sound, just as sudden as the language being communicated immediately before, was more noisy and disturbed the air in many feet in all directions. It was the sound of hardwood on cheap metal.

The shadow at this point was more of murky pond or ambiguous bayou, pockets here and there extending with the quivering of the evening into the porous twilight. Something like a young girl’s voice appeared in the mess of sound waves blasting into one another above a pocket of the dark murk. The young girl’s voice quivered like a child in a pool of afterbirth. “Being American necessitates food.” It was let out in a long, subdued fashion, like a person jumping out of a ninth floor window about to finally hit the paved ground. The voice was not quite a squeak but could be considered similar to a baby mouse speaking to an additional, full-grown mouse in utter excitement. It was the first time this particular youthful vandal had said anything since the beginning of the evening, since the beginning of the urn, since the beginning of the monstrous ocean taking a nap down at the end of the trail just as the continued its own ways.

But the profound statement, its high-pitch essence wonderfully melodic, was absolutely snuffed out in unnatural haste, rubbed into the ambience by another chagrin of tapping and scraping noise. It was distinctly wood against metal. The urn ground deep into the structure by whatever force drove home, pounding like a phallus of meat into hole. This time the sound was a truck driving along a rocky shore, or the talons of hawks snapping onto the links of chain fences.

Into the ever-rising pool of black, which by now was gaining its own waves, as if from a tide, as if directed by an orchestrating moon, fell a wrist-watch with a plop that sounded like weight and frivolous spending. “I thought you might like to know that it is approximately four hours and one day after her E.T.D.”

“E.T.D.?” replied the companion, who was at this point definitely considered by everyone including the ocean a mere companion to the first, obviously dominant voice. The curdling growl of the ocean could be heard several thousand feet to the West, where at the same time ruby enchantresses danced so fast they only made streaks of illumined clouds through the sky.

“That’s right. E.T.D. Estimated time of death.”

“You mean we aren’t even sure?”

“Aren’t sure of what?”

“When she died—the exact time she moved on to the next place, I mean.”

“No. It’s just impossible to know. Hell, she might still be alive this very moment for all we know.” The voice stopped and after several beats of silence there was the sound of oars paddling through a swamp. The taste of gumbo filled the mouths of all the endless chasms of shadow gaping like hungry tents throughout the woods. “But don’t worry about it.” Crickets could be heard to the north, south, east, providing reassurance with their dirging symphonies. And after their mournful crinkles were to be left to memory, the west let loose a deafening explosion of splashes creating quite the effect of awe and acknowledgment.

“Well she certainly looks dead.” It was strange to hear a voice of such an acutely high pitch say such a thing after such a pronounced auditory event. The emotions evoked from such a statement were like those evoked after a baby’s ear-bending cry or a baby’s coddling laughter, both having been unleashed to an audience at the exact same time. The black bayou, as passive an audience as the trees ever manage to experience on a regular basis, had been slow to morph along its merry way, but in response to the words since spoken the preambling anti-creation of speed completed its cyclical change and found itself, startled like every other time it found itself in such a state, as an insidious sea filled with underground trees, rocks, stones, caves, bears, hawks, an urn, a wooden structure, some soft ground, and a couple of human beings with giant spoons in their hands. It was a new domain, a domain for life to slumber, a domain to symbolize the dead.

“What’s most important is that her soul definitely died a long time ago,” motioned the first voice with a hopeful, gurgling expulse of sound and bubble. “That we can be certain of. And that’s all that really matters.” The urn simmered. It had been simmering throughout the entire conversation of the forest. It simmered in such a way that signified a well-cooked meal.

“True, as long as we don’t have to eat her soul for dinner, I’ll be happy!”

People are so Retarded

2007 American Death Centers

Rubens - The Fall of the Damned (1620)

Detroit, Michigan
St. Louis, Missouri
Newark, New Jersey
Kansas City, Missouri
Baltimore, Maryland
Washington, District of Colombia
Oakland, California
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Atlanta, Georgia
Cleveland, Ohio

Based on Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports

What it do.

Santonio Holmes & Ted Ginn Jr.