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
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Goose Necks, the NYC Mither
like a match scent
deciduous eggs of vagrant Canadian's
nurture the maws of patternless rats
recently,
I walked by you in a dream
Monday, February 23, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
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.
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
Friday, February 20, 2009
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
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.
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.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Andrew Taylor
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, February 16, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, February 13, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
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
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
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?
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?
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, February 9, 2009
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.
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.
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