Thursday, October 22, 2009

What Then?

by W.B. Yeats


His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'

All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
`What then?' sang Plato's ghost. `What then?'

`The work is done,' grown old he thought,
`According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought';
But louder sang that ghost, `What then?'

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

My Friend,

I'm sick of everything spiritual,
everything elliptical,
everything fathomable.

Not enough bike rides.
Not enough air.
Not enough chewing.

Last night,
before bed,
I made a grilled cheese sandwich.
If you had been there,
I'd have given you half.

Shit. I would have made you a whole one.

I'd have shaken your hand for an hour,
showed you old pictures,
told you about my dream.
I'd have listened, too.

When you fall asleep tonight,
remember this game.

We Say Accident

Grand with a wish of cave men, grainy with kindling, crackfall of jar, uneven pavement stands alone, rain without sound. Some kindred hollow stun is gratified (drops in a bottle, too). Yellow dogs snarl once around the house and fall to sleep, dreaming upside down. Once I was upside down, saw shards, after superb velocity and drift.

Even rays of sound went thataway—or was it thisaway?—I came running, showed you my good ol’ messianic side. You (we, that is) or me makes a beat true: You? No. No: You.

Who owns a town of feeling? Take them up, your divining tools, et cetera. Time to tag a cleft in The Rock of Attention. A shepherd becomes a singer, becomes a salesman.

Muses busted through my engine block, left me handless, beaming. Dream, or you’ll go.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Beating Due Headfakes

A window or an asp will show you where you took your wrong turn. Neptune has certain objects that we possess, as fellows of the universe, but now is not the time to claim them. Nor is it the time to let Neptune know we are cohabitants. In time, in time. Hands agree to write as we get smarter, even as the fundaments of knowing fall away. This is the age of tessellated thought. Images bounce back at us for a grand undoing. Alone or along the window, our serpentine mental actions come back around. Time is the culprit, even as it is merely an invented thing. Yesterday, or the future, only exist in thought, and thinking only happens in the present --> the present is the only thing. Don’t think of it as a gift. It simply is. If something simply is, and you know it, don’t clap your hands.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Oh Yeah.

Read two of my newer poems in this summer's recent issue of Ekleksographia.
create animated gif

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Sort Of A _________ Craquelure

Magnetism by fire. Seams chewed free from the afternoon. Skyscrapers. Long nights with a great friend.

Light steams out my old window face, clears the crucible city and runs home in a rush. Some sonic landscape. A declination of magic makes its own magic. They (those ones with arms and loss) ripple an entire beach, redo spasms of new memory, travel further in. Glinting metal everywhere, surprise meat shudders away, plays the uncomfortable witness.

We made machines. Then machines made time for us. Substantial as knuckles or national will. But the city is a device of time, home to all the souls that ever were--catch them in photographs, a headstone, that mossy old tenement brick. All those nouns squirting reticules of memory.

Who is the sheriff of time: fundament or frangible thing? Pauses, expectation of an event. We got caught peering out of a loophole in luck's curtain. Something crenelated, something drawn. Stand next to words, fake or freak meaning, hamper every permanence.

Shin guard, chin guard. We look away, but always bend back around to original seeing.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

The Auroch And The E

Upon moving into my new apartment I discovered under the floorboards the remains of a perfectly preserved auroch, which had died suddenly but not violently, some forty thousand years ago. It still had its pair of piercing horns and a musky leather smell emanating from its impressive hide. I ran my hand across the body, marveling at what was once a great musculature, the kind that inspired earlier persons to paint its likeness upon the walls of their caves, in and out of trance. I found myself riveted by the large gaping holes where its eyes had been, and the hooves seemed as if they had just come from some magnificent thundering plain, bits of rock and ancient brown moss clung to the shaggy hair at the end of the forelegs.

I felt that the correct and most effective way to do this marvel justice would be to turn it into a piano-forte or harpsichord and invite all my old friends and lovers to come and appreciate this beast as well as my own appetite for curiosity and endless innovation. Besides, it is not every day that you have an auroch with which to theorize over a glass of soda with fresh lime.

I began my preparations in earnest, wringing my hands daily, deliberating over whether to have the creature embalmed straightaway and then install a keyboard over the top of the form of the great animal; or, to carefully cut into its hide, open its prehistoric innards and coat the ribs with several layers of a fine shellac, and then build my instrument within its dried guts. This seemed to me a grand question: Should I support an art that forces itself beyond the boundaries of occasion and setting, or should it complement and accompany the unfoldings of its immediate environs?

I was at an impasse.

To this end, I took particular note of the gorgeous “e” at the end of the perfectly plausible and temporarily comforting word “impasse.” The letter spun endlessly through mental space, now pulsing hugely and with crackling potential at the start of a word like “erogenous,” now playing a supportive role, yet not imposing its will or ineluctable identity too harshly beyond the boundaries of the scene, as in its second appearance in the word “cathected.”

To be sure, I was caught in a pleasant conundrum. One sunny afternoon, after days of indoor contemplation of “e” while sitting over the carcass of my auroch, I came to an illuminating realization. I decided that I should, for inspiration, wedge the heel of my bare foot into the eye socket of the great auroch, and with my hands build a great “e” out of lucite and place within it a coiled string of blue Christmas lights. I did so, and upon entering homes of friends and old flames, I would plug my creation into the nearest wall socket and proclaim it a momentary bridge between thought and deed, object and action.

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Tangerines From Your Crow's Feet

He wallops a few flim-flammers on his way to the breakfast drizzle. Chlorine eyes and a shank of ice function as a makeshift pen. He knows about his target, trusts his team, and stirs ellipses into the mix. Frogmen gather at the corners of his mouth. Their assault on civilization and its hortative practices is imminent.

He brandishes a cutlass during an endgame morphology presentation. His cordage is wavy in a nautical light. He sees the microchip in your wobbly hand, notices you're fine, memory's fine, nostalgia's fine. Wearing a suit, he has every intention of showing you his cover i.d. He makes lemonade with tear gas and a battering ram. He figures out a way to keep force out of the equation. And this time, he knocks.

He ossifies your weedy arms, trundles off to probe symphonic destiny. Grins hang heavily from window trousers, beering around after the old dark. Negative ray, positive horn. An elbowful of mystery parties jangle on the docket. Music is grout in the space between you.

He rues time, bumbles lines before a Naga King, rearranges green curry molecules, feels the sting of an old sea tune, "as hit is breued in þe best boke of romaunce." And, amid an ear-y clangor, "bronze by gold," he "hear[s] the hoofirons steelyringing." Is he goatman, dogbeard, beewolf, stunned electric wire...something in between, perhaps? A turnpike of the feelings, trying and new. Some kind of field resonance.

He has been relegated to the "Obscure" pile. His hair and nails keep growing, though, while his nose hunts around corners, looking for a sandwich or a Karate-town.

He parties with one ear open, listening to your baby blue hair, running sideways down a sideways alley. His arms go down into the earth and his neck flops thisaway on the pavement. You see him spin, giddily, in a fly eye. His pants are made of cannoli and his shirt of broccoli di rappe.

He toils in sand with an old radio, bings out to roller-chango music, and stands reacting cagily to windpipe's gurgle. When you wake to clacking trains, think in a similar fashion. People get up every day and look down at the earth. Fields of muscles sweat out strength, and asphalt actually needs cars to stay viable, pliable. Holidays abound like so many founders of thought. Thus, record your celebration.

He pockmarked the sun today, used a stain instead of a hose, ate seeds of true rain. Can't wink to shave a few monies off your benign rumor? Toe the hammer, tundra down your knees. He'll meet you at the anti-freeze. Is there a dog you scatter windward, enough to make it back to burnt lands, hover and run in blues? Then go. Your field awaits. He's all sorts of there. Merely, merely, life is but a seem.

He chatters and sticks a new cat in your nunchucks for your Bruce Lee, blazing from your bike wheel. Limbs all akimbo, revenge in the torpid air, whiff this pong for your hangman game. Why go rambling when you have mind waves to walk on? And you do walk on, year after fall, down again in a storm of baying dogs. Roll to see if you survive a fight with a giant man, a ticklish grackle, or a world without chance.

He is in the middle chance and weeds or gloss with smooth stone and kids meander in a remembering place. Fire for a chill stove opens a stone gate without ancient purpose or an animal smattering. Living in vast thought asks how to wake the eating mind this day; forgiveness postures up the road and sheds light, guilt, and every sick, together with what you need to begin an old lizard séance collecting biting stillness.

He reads uncharted books, maps to your quest, robots get you all the way to a knowing country, maybe India. Horses in the clean streets, washing fish in handy rain, yellow carvings. All carpenters wander in search of inspiration, eventually end up in trees. You look to the end, your proximity makes him an origami man.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Embrace

Big books, big seasons, melting everything in bug sounds, no sleeping in that decayed secret. Beginning with slumber, you tear your drunken hair out. You fall down into text, stop breathing air, taste a version of death, know one star. We devour each other's messages, study meaning, make homes with strangers. Trying for growth, we find only the short mystery of a water dream. Smell the hot lavender of summer and embrace a ghost, exhausting your way of seeing the past.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

A Happy Quaddroid

Abscond

Holy grapes, hearty mouth, harrowing hearts and tinny sobs, sunny arterial ceremonies bounce new waves of winter off memory caves. Even tongues find a pictographic road to tarnish, make contact with forgotten love, and release. Words return to trees and die when the leaves fall.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Upside-Down Jabberwocky

Here's me reciting Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" while standing on my head at the University of Arizona's English Department Talent Show, on April 17th:

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Supe's Space Fortress



This image comes to us via comiccoverage.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Millenial Blooper

Here's an outtake from a first rehearsal for the poem "One Hour Happy Millenium." It cracks me up:

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Tuesday, March 03, 2009