Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Federico!

All morning/Toda la mañana

Early tragic morning
Nothing stands out like ruddy eyes
Told trees a quick dyed face
Fresh oranges for the crows
Ten days a space of road
Cars driven by dogs
No one alone
Everyone playing
Pills for waking
Pills for dying
Dust hand tooth wide
Hug tons of selves
Early early morning
Restrict everything not freedom

o

Mañana temprano trágica
Nada se destaca como ojos rubicundos
Árboles dichos una cara teñida rápida
Naranjas frescas para los cuervos
Diez días un espacio de camino
Coches conducidos por perros
Nadie solo
Cada uno jugando
Píldoras para despertar
Píldoras para morir
Diente de mano de polvo amplio
Abrace toneladas de identidades
Temprano temprano en mañana
Restrinjas todo no libertad

Just Let Go

And Let Jimi



Mark Leyner Interview



Mark Leyner is the author of the wild novel, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. Part cyberpunk, part automatic Dadaist explosion, part pomo stuffpile, there's never a dull moment. He's also written The Tetherballs of Bougainville, I Smell Esther Williams, and several other novels. They all have a crazed intensity to them, tossing language against the wall and cracking its skull. If it's sheer ribald panting you seek, the first chapter of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, "i was an infinitely hot and dense dot," will get you there. This link will take you to it, then you can "look inside the book" to read the first chapter.

Here's a good, early interview with Leyner. It should give y'all some good idears.

And here's a later interview, where you'll sense a deeper maturity, but the crazziness is still there.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

For Rain's Lee


I am up late.
This night
cannot sleep.
And I wish for rain
and to be with you;
it’s a kind of rain.
To wish for you
is to wish for rain.
And sudden things
and higher things
and all shelter
is rain.
I open my window
and listen for you.


Hear this poem.

Get Some Knowledge

>

Absorbed In The Park Of Joan Miró


One can see
Bird ladies landing coarsely over sand.
Puzzled worms extend
From the tips of their bayonets.
Each small worm carries an umbrella.
Each a tiny candy, dancing without music or sound.
The swiveling night, rudely angular,
Is a frieze of tangled lines,
Twisted into trees,
Gnawing at the earth.
The soil of our great planet is falling,
Cries fade into sepia daydreams.
Tears illuminate the night.

Night, Becoming Aware Of Itself

i.

Tangerine,
Sun,
Sweet and without clouds—
From crinkled star corners, a sense of place.

ii.

The floor remembers the feet.
Memories pose in dusty rooms.
At the hour of darkness,
They identify with candles.

iii.

Insect silence.
Outlines of trees.
Near the river, a ceremony.
Wind scattering.

iv.

Doors lead to hushed streams
Under veering stars,
Mud wends over stones.
Only the leaves make sounds.

v.

Not cold, not breathing.
Alone in black grass,
The waiting water.

Friday, March 23, 2007

A Recent Missive From Jamey

The following is a message I received back in November from my great pal, Jamey:

Just an hour ago, as I walked into my back yard to
throw cantaloupe scraps into the compost pile, I came
upon a small square of paper bearing a neatly written
note. It must have blown over the fence with the
maple leaves in last night’'s wind. By the way, I’m
not making this up.

At the end of my block is Walter Reed Army Medical
Center, which includes a best-of-class amputee center
and major medical facility. Many of the injured
soldiers from the current war wind up there. Just two
doors down from our house is a barracks for outpatient
soldiers who have mostly healed physically. I’'ve met
people staying there who, miraculously, though with
grave injuries, survived instances in which their
friends and fellows beside them were lost.

Of course, I can’t say for sure where the note came
from. And you can make your own sense of what it says.

For me, it is a reminder that there are people
suffering right now and struggling to make sense of
things – not only out there in the world somewhere,
but right next door. Though I'’m loathe to insert a
political tilt to this story, it is hard not to
remember what Ronald Reagan said in his 1980
presidential campaign: “Before you vote, ask yourself,
‘Am I better off today than I was 4 years ago?’”

And how about your neighbor? Here'’s the note, copied
as written:
“”
Wed Sept. 27, 2006 131pm
* Be Honorable, never lie to hurt someone, and only
under circumstances do you do so to protect feelings
* respect wishes of other
* Do not cheat myself
* Be more Discipline
* Seek Vast knowledge and wisdom
* accept the way of this world as is
* honor and remember those you knew know and love

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Generate A Random Dylan Thomas Poem!

By using the Dylan Thomas Random Poem Generator

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Just read 12377-12397 for a good yes.

Just A Reminder

Keep your hands UP when you're fighting!

Jane's Addiction performs "Jane Says"

Some wondrous hair in this vid. Plus, no one has saggy abs in it.

Laurie Anderson's "O Superman"

This is one of those ones that'll help us break through. Entirely. See.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Shall We Dance



Shall we dance? Shall Yul Brynner approach your town and sling his Winchester Model 94 over his shoulder and laugh a strongman’s laugh and erupt into gunfire and cat-calling while his hands rub against each other with precision? He always said that: “With precision.” And then he’d grin and shoot a cow in effigy. On his estate we used to watch him make papier mache animals for days, adjusting the horns of the water buffaloes to look startlingly authentic in the hot midday Texas sun. Then we would gather at the bay window

and watch him shoot those paper animal effigies to smithereens while he laughed and laughed

until he fell down, watching bits and shreds of animal paper falling away into the wind, swept along into the fields where real animals grazed. Goats. Yul always had goats so that he had something to eat up the paper that he would shoot all over his fields. It sort of made sense to all of us. All of us except Young Jesus, who never showed up. I can’t say where he was at those times. Perhaps moseying around the village square, bumping into people, saying, “Excuse me, if my mother is looking for me, would you please tell her that I’m in my father’s house?” But of course most of the people he bumped into were little children being led by their mothers and they would usually pull the children away and look back nervously at Young Jesus, wondering what kind of child would have such bloodshot eyes and why on earth he would be wearing a weird loincloth with tahini stains on the seat.

We Long For Regular Stuff

And it seems, but only seems, to come up out of doors and floors and in brine we fit ourselves with homing devices, shifting from one slippery foot to another, waiting to be taken away by pages and squires, also known as sharks.

The knights are cold, and called Ocean. Shimmying down into cranky cold bottom, sand whispers things like: Better not wait, I should be your priority, make me top of things to do. We wash our hands in the sea, which takes no time, since this is the long slow process of legally drowning.

Our airplane beeps down there, under my pants and the fishes under my pants. Floes of mentation imitate dollops of a hungry city. Idea-dirigibles swim around, but wait, no island. We wait. My comrades are here, just thoughts like a dozen or so effigies, dissolving.

Cranky thought of land runs up my leg and makes me laugh too hard. I survive once more and again. Even the sun has waited to hear something to give hope to the fishes.

This is a knot, a story of retribution, a scenario of the way I closed my eyes and felt around under a buoyant continent and came up shorthanded. Near to me is the fellow who marked me for dead, and he’s dead.

They find me departed and I find them the same. The captain of castaways said dine and we dined, although there was simply nothing.

Watching The Kid Make A Fool Of Himself Was Liberating, In A Way

There was nothing to do in the room, no food or drink. That strange face, pale with eyes too close together, hung in the window next to the sink. It swung slowly while the kid fumbled with his zipper.

To The Geckoes

You are the squadrons of youth. You, of the mighty darting limbs and the bug-bellied singing, I root for you. A country without you is a country without a president. You hunt even with your eyes. What foolish ambassador would fail to recognize your greatness? I once heard that the people of Mauritius sent a case of you to the planet Neptune and you took the place over.

Sexiest Knife In The Drawer

The bright dark shines in the dark,
a silent knoll tolls,
mellow witches pass the doobie.

The earth a lot of dirt,
most folks dig kids,
obvious heavy parrot tocks.

The weight on a scale of one to ten
harrows the labyrinths of hell,
looking for the Brontë sisters.

Landscape With Lorca

By mistake the evening
had dressed in cold.


And we ran as we glanced through sheets of rain, stumbled over brooks and wolf sounds. Walls around us filled with water, held us in with frogs and scared fauns. Streets bent and sank into city brine.

Through the mist on the panes
all the children
watch a yellow tree
change into birds.


Names exchange as stars beneath time burn day to cinders. Eyes blow on candles, sing their inceptions. Petals, out of space, split into here and not here.

Evening is stretched out
all down the river.
And the flush of an apple
shivers over tile roofs.


Bodies of birds swim in gardens, pebbles quivering under grass. Leaping with all their fishes, ponds leave holes in the past. Moments share swiftness with drifting blossoms.

In Perp

Braying of dove,
crumble of horse,
open bursting book
to knife the line:
Systems are a hell
of a thing
apart from stingrays.

Whiplash effects ring
ash in content, state:
Collapse into green
fur suit.

By bronze them
corn glide
village cities.

For Poem To Activate

Immersion in the break
(as in the break of a wave)
is what must:

eradicate rigid acres
(counties of thought
fouling out dead tribunal banter);

open more than jars of relish
(mere tensepoints banking at cozy poembottom
in wreck’d clammy tangles).

Then the act of making
has to put up its dukes
against the action of what’s made.

Charged into more than life’s pretty corpse,
(if we die in life, our dreams die, too)
the poem activates,
evicts the jealous why,
embraces the prodigal hOW.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

A Blessing:

May Srikanth Reddy Always Have People To Smile On Him And Help Him When He Needs It

Dapper Dutch Youngster, Handsome Dutch Bike (1905)

Friday, March 02, 2007

They Feed They Lion

by Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.