Radio Hat Chassis

Why That Fear Is Still Them Enemies

Without chaos with reciprocity for the horse, I bow down to a lonely dog. I’m still pounded by the iron fist of my me. Hey, you be a tequila. Mister wears a skirt. I am stronger by the way. Him doubt him right mind. How go forward in train, waiting to hear rags, or a rock? Them endings, endings of them. My muscles hurt, I meditate. I monk my life and me anyway making things wordsy: a choice, the addressee, this a poem. Slap a new date on it and find the way crumbles go down. Find some place in head to cavern out, westering, ever going. Yaws, a transport. Tonsils not victims. Them grow and make things, themselves, making life a complex raid on reason. On smacked-out liar heads. From these shifting wisps a life is made? Yes, and the risks are too grand to try and make a Bigger so best to shut it down. Too risked out most find it to make a Colossus, a Tangerine of Super Proportions. Mutts get it, even retrievers too. You make a life by working overtime. In tinted hollow moments nobody hardly anybody gets that.

Bye.

Where am I? I wish I knew. Good-Bye Giant Head. My heart is muerto? With world completely upside-down, goodbye to the bee. Goodbye to the knee. Goodbye to meeting in dreamworld, if there ever was one. Goodbye to poke poke. Goodbye to Mount Lemmon. Goodbye to burger-jaunts. Goodbye to chin hiccups. Goodbye to hairpulling. Goodbye fingerpulling and cracking knuckles. Goodbye Gitane. Goodbye shivery lake swims. Goodbye Bahia Kino. Goodbye blind-climbing. Goodbye tamales. Goodbye to monkey box liaisons. Goodbye broken-winged bird. Goodbye turd. Goodbye baby. Goodbye to pictures. Goodbye face. Goodbye hammock and hug. Goodbye egg cream. Goodbye mouse in the house. Goodbye the Santa Suit, arriving on Wednesday. Goodbye to the world that is too many people not enough in love. Goodbye to the bean. Goodbye to the many toe enamels. Goodbye bum thumb. Goodbye lega tibs. Goodbye avocado rolls. Goodbye Halloween. Goodbye Cannondale. Goodbye long fingers. Goodbye little snores. Goodbye chicken sausage. Goodbye Gogol. Goodbye Bordello. Goodbye bamboo bike. Goodbye Jimmy Santiago Baca. Goodbye português. Goodbye longboard. Goodbye black dirt and resolution, Rose Captain and song for the dead. Goodbye ringlets. Goodbye green dress. Goodbye Oscars. Goodbye kirtans. Goodbye 7 Falls. Goodbye Dustgarden. Goodbye cabin. Goodbye little t-shirts. Goodbye Evo. Goodbye green toothbrush. Goodbye running and riding. Goodbye Lights on Friday Night. Goodbye to spooning. Goodbye evening ice cream. Goodbye red dye in my sink. Goodbye cherry pancakes. Goodbye young one, who don' wanna go crazzy with me.

Norman Fischer is coming to Tucson

In preparation for his reading at CHAX Press on November 2,
follow the link below to read and hear poems from
Fischer's book I Was Blown Back:

The world's wealth is frozen memory
So many birds wheeling about in reaction to tides and breezes
A separate more perfect body pitched violently
Into a world it never acknowledged—

Elision Sonnet

ii.

I run the Superman equation.
It runs, like an apegirl on a drainpipe,
up a curve, then breaks off
into a period.
Or an exclamation punt.
********* reminds me of plastic bags,
dancing in the wind.
But crime is everywhere, Supe.
And I, too, have been trans*****ed against.
Now my days are filled with work
And occasionally cake.
To what dark galactic hollow could you hurl me,
Kal El?
What quiet place?

Elision Sonnet

i.

I was standing.
You came behind me and put a knee into my knee.
It was winter.
Someone saw us moving from inside a ****way.
We pulled each other fast and cannibal’d time.
You must guess that we are time.
The wrong moment for the right folks.
I guessed it long ago and something.
It holds water?
It was a story that told a poem.
It’s a double why.
I thought I could bend ****.
The wind pushed us together.
We huddled and huddled.

Where the hell is that underground passage?

Tando via Pennsound

Hear my May 31st (this year) reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC as part of the Segue Poetry Series, hosted by Tim Peterson and Erica Kaufman.

Just go HERE.

The guy howl-laughing in the background is my old high school pal, Richard Kim!

A L*****G Method

Go ahead and clack when walking. Make that umph sound when striking, using a superman punch, overpacked, energetically realizing all highness. Give someone a long tall drink. Drink them cool milling molecules, young outlaws in the surround. Someone shadowed her collective documents and gathered things with her deadpan wedgeface. Ninesense and reading teams, nickel and Cadillacs, shouldering the wait of ten years in a bag. Goliath down to your watering whole bag of feed and knuckles in two pockets, spilt tiller up in a ground. Range over acidic econo-dollops, fly fast away from a fickle folkster figgering ways to git free. Dumb heads touch faces, wonder about sleep, keep wallopy uppercuts coming out in springtime. Soul-bare idears get met with shut-up shit-blanked hater moves. Just flow, go, screen-dense yoga purgation, rut out dank corners of tomorrow and chase things on a bike.

bomomo

Beginning A Summer Summary

This spring and summer I did several readings, as my book, The Comeback's Exoskeleton, came off the presses in April. I've said this before in print and in public, but BIG thanks go to Zohra and Robert of Upset Press.

My first reading, which was a sort of homegoing, took place on April 7th, as part of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities lecture and reading series at Brooklyn College, where I did my MFA in poetry. It was great to see Julie Agoos, whose newest book is Property, and L. S. Asekoff, with whom I studied extensively.

Next, on May 3rd, I read in Tucson, for the Poets and Artists collective POG. I was the opening act for the illustrious and strange Leslie Scalapino. You can hear my reading here.

I then read on May 31st, in New York, for The Segue Series, with Simone White, curated by Tim Peterson and Erica Kaufman. This turned out to be both delightful and strange, as a dear old friend from high school, Richard Kim, showed up, along with another friend, Michael Ranson, from my undergraduate days. After the reading my parents and I dined with Tim and his family, Erica, Simone and other guests of the reading at a lovely Indian restaurant on the lower east side of Manhattan.

The American MONKey

I fantasize about having no money and no debt, just roving the land like an American MONKey, sleeping under oak trees and at the edges of farms, wandering to doors with open hands, asking for a morning meal, then roaming the forests of Washington, California, Maine, sitting to meditate under trees, under the shelter of stones, meeting garrulous raccoons, eager chipmunks, kind snakes, Oh I'd be the American MONKey, with a short fuzzy haircut and fond memories of lightning storms that tested my nerves, tested my concentration, and I'd find myself improving, getting better at wanting what I've got, not questing for what I don't, Big I becoming little i, slowly, deliberately, with the changing of the seasons, fearlessly advancing in age and wisdom and my capacity to laugh at myself, I'd have to give up my bicycles, my music, computer, food in my fridge, close ties with lover and friends, leave for the forest, head shaved, feet trembling and willing to take me on the inner path to a silent sitting, a sweet quiet bower of the mind, plenty of green, no greenbacks, but an over-arching sense of lightness.

But, for now, I am the American debtor, full of loans and bikes, goofily complex idears, a monogamous relationship, a continuously re-managed cluster of sense-addictions.

Reading at the Bowery Poetry Bar

Had a wonderful time reading at the Bowery Poetry Bar with Simone White in NYC on May 31st. Read Tim Peterson's delightful introduction and see a photo from the gig at the Segue Series blog, here:

segueseries.blogspot.com

Thanks to Tim Peterson and Erica Kaufman for their wonderful work curating the series!

POGSOUND!

Recently (May 3rd) I gave a reading in Tucson with Leslie Scalapino for the Tucson poetry group POG. It was a great time, great crowd and I read for almost half an hour. You can hear the entirety of this reading by going to:

www.pogsound.org

Scroll down the page and you'll see my reading, under my name, among the other poets and their readings. Enjoy!

Good Words For All of Us

From H.E. Situ Rinpoche

The Comeback's Exoskeleton

My new book has just arrived in the world. It's full of all sorts of poems and mind-shards for you to fun around with. I wish I could give everyone cigars, but I don't have everyone's address. So, to share the joy, git yourself a copy!

You can get one by visiting upsetpress.org.

Enjoy!

Brooklyn College Exoskeleton Inauguration

Here are two mp3 links to my first reading from my new (and first!) book, The Comeback's Exoskeleton, given at Brooklyn College on Monday, April 7 at 2pm:

Introduction by L.S. Asekoff and Inaugural Reading

Q & A Session

Multiple #1

Your something this and your something that and did you get enough sleep this month, this week, this year is a strange one. You go to interviews you write and you think and you write until your hands come off or it feels like they do and you try to breathe and you ride your bike up and down hills and hills and something like the shortness of the day closes your eyes for a moment and you are up again and doing it again there is no next day only a sense of again again again. There is the disc, glowing the sky, our sky, a musical place with animals and yams to hang on. Some sort of glow comes from inside our hands, our writing hands are re-wiring and something goes, making sounds as it goes, making me (us) ((our multiplicity of selves)) into something more, something rich with sound and unconnected rhythms, something about loving makes loving easier, something about all of this regarding the frightful truth. And friends in strange hats make things easier to see, to understand the roil of sounds inside, axle grease, refusal to fight, switch and be progress, be all over sound, be fire trickster and range rider, steel tube rider, with wheels below and a shocking sense of hair getting thinner, urgency of poetry and urgency of torque, legs, et cetera. Something about memory and smell. This, then again, maybe this other.

Series Of Teams

What it means to be sad and unheard,
Why the door to the roof is locked,
Why children fear basements.

There is the ground,
Up where the sky begins.
The ground’s dissonance makes it beautiful.

Shining through soliloquies
Of lamps and translucent skin,
The voice of a lonely man roves towards town.

Thinks the voice: How to be a part of something that rings,
How to leave this old blandness behind?
I could be a bandit, stealing food for my family,

Or slip away unseen,
No one knowing I was here when the world was dying,
And become an inert chunk of time.

The voice trips over hills between fields,
Dissolving as lights from town approach.
No alarm sounds.

The plight of being made of thought, rats and voices alike:
One team must seek, the other must flee.

His Language Of Need

And he makes them, and makes them, and he makes animal sounds, he makes animal sounds and the day is, and the day he makes animals sounds the day runs into ruin, as the sounds run and he makes it, he makes them run, he rolls them, rubs the river, the day changes, he makes the day’s changes and it makes him, it names him, the animals name him, they go to him, he seeks them, they turn to him and he turns the day, the day runs with him, makes him something, goes toward rivers, makes changes, his sounds, make them changes, make them bread, make them with eyes and long uninterrupted swing sets with horns where eyes are, horns above lightning, feelings in the deep, in the war, he makes war with animals in his mind, the animals don’t befriend him if he makes war, and he makes it, he puts his face aside, he runs with the combinations, he retools things, makes everything run in the belly of animals, of scared people he knows, of walls, and he resigns, he goes to the basement, he keeps his tools there, he makes sound there, makes words and elephants, big elephant words that carry him in his war with words and animals and walls and the frayed ends of his liver that he wonders about in his medications, he sweeps aside things with his hands, his hands roll the grass up and take everyone to the river and to the train tracks and to the prison cell, he sneezes peels, he syrups snowstorm snowdrifts, he shadows his hearing under snakes, he envelopes crying, his tears tear his jaw down, he slumps, he feels horror, he goes to the people, they cry around him, they take his liver out, he looks at it, they are afraid, he is afraid, they feed him to animals and his liver regrows him, he is alive again, he is not angry with people, they took care of him, they did what was necessary, they eliminated the ardor, they followed through, they made him whole again, they fed him, they gave him a sense of when the time would be right for him to go on a journey, he went, he came back, they thanked him, everyone was having lunch, they sat him down, he told his story, they ate his story while they listened to him speak, there were bones making noises in the rooms inside their houses, the war was in their houses and the man told them of their war and they ate lunch, they had lunch next to the man, gave him sandwiches and salads and soups and they saw something of a feeling coming out of him and he was alone in that he could not feel them seeing that something was happening to him, he was alone and they were together and they felt him give way, he felt himself give way, there was something to say and he couldn’t say it, they listened and he said it but they could only hear their own hearing, them feelings, they thought, them feelings he’s having, it’s the war, they thought, it’s the war, and they asked if he wanted to leave them and he said no, and they stopped eating and asked him to sit down again and he took his arms and did something with his arms, used them in a way they could not understand, he made new words, made words without sounds or symbols of sounds, made unconnected wheelings of arm words and he left them thinking he might come back again, then the sky allowed for his passing, the light covered his shoulders in orange and he was washed clean of even his name and feelings and any other forms he used when was alone, now he was his own together with the dawn and the rich animal sounds coming from the river and his newly formed words that only he knew, his language of need

Blake's "The Tyger" (and film)

THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience)

By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

1794

Amando Tu Aparición

para la mujer que mora en su propia campiña

Amando tu aparición,
Tus manos de sombra,
Tu cuchicheo:
Respiración sin aliento.

Abrazando tu fantasma,
Olor de la tierra en su cabello,
Vórtice de su pupila…
Donde está el amor y donde está la muerte?

I, Too, Am A Fly, Chanting Recollections, Waiting To Be Shocked Into The Next World By The Strong Blue Light Above

So how can I get close to that rebellious creation force? If there be madness, may it go unswatted. Container of spoiled cottage cheese green and tough at the edges and I have my ambrosia. Riveting. Waste smell: a desperate inspiration. Cherish these pearlish wings, they bring travel freedom for mites and viral fevers. Artists move from illness to gloried striving: rare to find much food in their bins. They have no voice, but I thank myself for them. Racing over can continents and steaming dung islands, I lay eggs in everything, my posterior insuring I have left something to posterity.

Notebook

by Patti Smith

I keep trying to figure out what it means
to be american. When I look in myself
I see arabia, venus, nineteenth-century
french but I can't recognize what
makes me american. I think about
Robert Frank's photographs -- broke down
jukeboxes in gallup, new mexico...
swaying hips and spurs...ponytails and
syphilitic cowpokes. I think about a
red, white and blue rag I wrap around
my pillow. Maybe it's nothing material
maybe it's just being free.

Freedom is a waterfall, is pacing
linoleum till dawn, is the right to
write the wrong words, and I done
plenty of that...

april 1971

The Hungriest Day Is Devoured

I start myself with a question: Simplicity in me? Whoa, I don’t know. Bouncing bell horses smuggle what’s blue, playing like a room. Shh, I told myself, myths abound in forests, waiting to be counted, counting on weight, rolling under steam.

Only change can come from the gong, open the way all sound opens, ritmo under span of buses, bridges, tunnels and plains. Notions glimmer a moment, even some of all of them. Not afraid to be completely skull, skeleton and other masses rippling. In rubbings, ministers show winning numbers, a marina for twisted ships, tumbling in the grip of flanged abandon.

We hunker out in corpse of ocean and waist deep in my marrow find a meadow of cool place. There is swerving silence; bonjour swerving silence, brushing worthy building-tops, from whence have you come? Coarse walkers crash the planet, scene in time. Jellolujah, sing the kids, up-ended in angles of light.

Here is we, filling dense mystery with fuel from swollen mornings, faces cleansed by total eclipse. Haul down the skipper picture, our new captain ate the sea.

Anecdote Of The Bear

Breaking bread with a grizzly, a chronic allergy sufferer sneezed mucus onto the bear’s shoulder. The grizzly pulled off the fellow’s hands and wore them for a whole winter, keeping them on as he slept through the cold and snow. He kept the dismembered allergy sufferer in an insulated barrel at the back of his cave. In the spring, still wearing the hands, the bear went out and used them to pick berries and scoop honey into his mouth. He found them much more useful than his own awkward paws. Nevertheless, the compassionate bear hauled the emaciated allergy sufferer out of the barrel, reattached the hands, and taught him to forage for his meals. When he was plump and healthy again, the thankful fellow embraced the huge grizzly, shook his paw, and went on his way in the world, never to sneeze again. Lonely once more, and unable to keep a diary without opposable thumbs, the bear returned to the city of his birth. Eventually, he married a beautiful Spanish hedge fund manager. In the small but wealthy circles of society he and his wife frequented, he became rather well known for his soft fur, kind strength, and wise investment strategies.

All One And Alone

stunned
my voiceworld
will be my helmet
my protection
in sullen places
a dog makes his way
simply dissolves
a lonely pony
like a leader of granite men
I wantonly scramble
through infusions of tea
bearing ritual objects
through fire
down chameleon-eyed walls
with weird friends
I get out of the shower
with weird friends
down chameleon-eyed walls
through fire
bearing ritual objects
through infusions of tea
I wantonly scramble
like a leader of granite men
a lonely pony
simply dissolves
a dog makes his way
in sullen places
my protection
will be my helmet
my voiceworld
stunned

Exploding Heads

Men used to be able to make their heads explode. Some could do it by staring at the sun for a long time. Some could do it by snorting a few grains of rice up into one of their nostrils. Still others could do it just by watching another man’s head explode. Most of the men who used to be able to do it aren’t around anymore to teach the upcoming generations. If they were here, would they share their art with others, or would keeping it a secret be a matter of pride?

In a room, an oiled and shiny head spins on the end of a stick. Swiftly back and forth, the eyes maintain a crucial rhythm. Sounds are shut out, the mouth is opened wide but remains silent. Eager young men file into the room, laying their cash on the floor and trying to catch diamond engagement rings that fly from the spinning head’s ears, one to a customer. As each man exits the room, his head explodes.

Three skilled pilots flying three separate airplanes crash-land in the same mountain range. After wandering for a while, they happen upon each other. One has water, one has food, one has matches. They build a rainproof hut out of leafy green branches and diligently tend to a large signal fire. One day they see a plane flying overhead. They shout wildly and wave their arms at it. They watch it crash into a nearby mountain. Before the plane explodes, their heads explode.

An Inuit Song

And I thought over again
My small adventures
As with a shore-wind I drifted out
In my kayak
And thought I was in danger,

My fears,
Those small ones
That Ithought so big
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach.

And yet, there is only
One great thing,
The only thing;
To live to see in huts and on journeys
The great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.

America Is One Dog

Happy Christmas (War Is Over)

So Many Damned War Pigs

For Your Listening Rage:

The Black Sabbath Version

The Cake Version

The Doormouse Version

The Freakwater Version

The Hayseed Dixie Version

The Government Mule Version

Back in college,

In 1991
when the Gulf War
had just started
it was close to exam time for me &
I remember
I had this sociology final
& the class
was dead boring

I could barely drag my ass into the room

where the professor would drone away
all the football goons staring at our T.A.
a tall blond grad student I was afraid to talk to
but I used to go to class anyway
’cause there was this gorgeous and feisty girl
I was dating who was MAJORING in sociology
& she was the only thing that kept me there

I couldn’t study a bit

not even when the final came
I stayed up for two (maybe three) nights in a row
thinking about I dunno what
staring into space thinking

shit

here’s spoiled notstudying me in college
& guys my age are gonna go DIE
in the desert & I’m gonna sit here
mooning myself & messing around with women

crap

& when I had to take the final
on 2 days with no sleep
I fell asleep during the test
& dreamed I was in tan fatigues
a soldier in the Gulf
so I finished my stupid multiple choice test
took a bus downtown to the

Marine Recruiting Office

& asked to speak with a hangdog-jowled officer
who sat me down & said

“The Marines will teach you about life
and how to be a man
and take care of yourself!”

& I, in my frenzy
of insomniac lucidity
asked a billion questions
about every detail

like

what do you do eat
what do you do talk about with the other MEN
when the shooting and bombing is over for the day
& what is the pay like
& other stuff

after a while

the guy looked at me
sadfaced, beaten
(& beaten) said

“Kid,

in the end,
The Marines is just like any other 9 to 5 job...”

but I finished the thought
in my head with

“except you have to kill
people
and maybe get killed.”

So I shook hands & walked out as 2 young kids
in heavy metal T-shirts were standing in front of another grayfaced
officer taking the Marine Oath

and I went back to college
to sleep.

Letter From An Angry Soldier

From the best of Craigslist, a letter from an angry soldier.

We Will Have Our Little Lives

May it be delightful my house,
From my head may it be delightful,
To my feet may it be delightful,
Where I lie may it be delightful,
All above me may it be delightful,
All around me may it be delightful.
--Navajo Chant

I wish you delight. When you wake up, when you sleep. When I am there or not there. Yes, we will live our little lives. I've got potatoes in the oven and a steak defrosting on the counter. You have your beer and chat in your little piso Boliviano. I watch TV on my computer, after the day of writing and teaching is done. You watch it in a room I can’t imagine, though I try...stocking it with random Germans whose faces and voices I do not know. We live our little lives. With clear eyes and full hearts, we can’t lose. Almost four full moons between us now. I’ve had one haircut and I’ll have another. I’ll grow a beard between now and when I see you again. And I feel so small and big in the in-between. In between seeing you. In between poems. In between the sound of your voice and the sound of your voice. And we each have our day’s little insanities. The company projects that you dropped down into from another continent and made your own. My lecture on Godzilla, his death and disintegration. Yeah, we live our little lives. Drink from the Lethe each night and begin again each day. Each morning I wake up without you, here in my little life. I told you to name your apartment. Though I have yet to name mine. I will name it in this poem. Right now it feels like it wants to be called the apartment that misses you. Are we a team? Do you know what it’s like to be a team? No, this is not the poem to talk about teams. That’s for a time when we have more than hope and waiting. We do our lines and have our days. With clear eyes and full hearts. And I feel a little empty inside, it’s an emptiness that fills me. I take it like a pill when I wake up and remember; it gets me through the day, this little empty feeling. And you are young. And I am young, too, in my way. And we don’t know yet just how we will love each other. Will we take our little lives and make them one big life? That’s what I’m calling this place, “The little apartment of big life.” It wants to hold you, with every arm I have. It wants to see what we can make together.

All My Pain I Ask How

Light gets in the way. Whatever me there is,
feels sensation, senses feeling.
Out at the edges, emptiness, gog and m’god...
Somewhere, the dark,,,

I love the dark.

The obscure side of love:
I run at it like voodoo.
People ride in cars,
my world is only dust.
An undead dog, eating the cities,
trying not to hate so much. Pain of sex.
togetherness a glimpse of the good life?
Chance to see what cleanliness might be? Not me.

A trapped rat, tooth and wings of hardship.
Rasping,
all the masses
colliding with earth
and magic death of earth.

Before the dirt I would do one right thing.

Human, human, human.
I seek the human.
God am I human.

masks
isolation

Beings unravel.

I see messiah hordes
rubbing their eyes.

Think:

Should we tie ourselves to...

the people...

we love...

?...

no more otherness...please...

In Stumbleville, A Pack Of Worldlings

A pack of infantile worldings runs across visionary lobster traps. Crucifying nothing, incandescence leaves their fingers. Feet barely touch. A bound fool runs behind, blunders a candle, goes out with ritual gesture.

Facts keep everyone’s heads cool when dead folks crowd the mayor’s house. Leaders emerge from the breakfast nook, colossal haircuts in waves of comic shots. Downtown is full of honchos.

Before elections, municipal leaders switched with men in the service industry. Now old janitors drink all day soda-pop, digging for clams at the mud flats.

A quick dog runs up and down every aspect of local life.

Men are steamrolled by area rug saleswomen. Your floors are too slippery, they say. Do you want your poor child, or worse, your poor wife, to break her delicate bones? A tramp, convinced he is king, keeps an eye on himself.

From the pudding factory comes the sound of loudly whirring blades. Not as sharp as we could hope, but some consolation after the abuse the town received in the radio exposé.

We feel alone in this world.

At the pub, an insect wing descends from the boring ceiling, cheered on by beer mugs. A poster of Yip Man, Bruce Lee’s teacher, hangs on the wall outside the high school. Students must bow low before entering. The county is endothermic.

Villagers could something if they weren’t at a loss. They’ve documented this shamanistic hodge-podge before, but it’s penned in the attic at the old movie house.

It Was Okay.

Your madness was something we couldn’t get around.
In the end, it was all light,
plus a few simmering stars and roadmaps.

Close To The Way The Freaks Lie Down

Moving generals of a minister land
Mild ponds cramp most fully with ore
Humble suits skin warbled skin
Most wasn’t waste
Moments for finding strain
What nights could break under slalom grooves
Earned sure to be away
Flight of mangled trains
Cover who’s to be
Verbs made vines grow
Nothing else for that

Advance To Primal

Me at 10 or 12,
forest roaming,
treehouse building,
salamanders, big beetles.

13 & 14, science fiction,
slingshots, BB guns, all sorts of targets:
cans, bottles, squirrels,
sadly, birds.

One day some moment
moved thoughts
to thinking
and made girls happen.

15, serious for girls,
to have them
and have them
have me.

Front seat of 1st girl’s car,
dashboard light so green,
clock going aroundaround,
my house across the street alldark...

Every minute a hundred-
year eyeblink and long.
Leaning over lost
in swimming head,

thinking—
Someone I love?
Leaves on trees. Wind.
Planes in air. Water. My face. Death—

Waiting
in moment before kiss,
I escape,
fleeing to girl...

And lips touch, conceive
the perfect firebrand
I sought, would seek
again and forever.

Godzilla, 1956

www.aristoi.net/video.php?id=1441

Young Kafka, A Dalai Lama

A painting done in 1995 by Mexican painter Arturo Elizondo (b. 1956). It is now housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
So I just watched this movie with Christopher Walken in it called Seven Psychopaths. It's not a great movie. It's not even a very good movie. But it's not terrible either. I'd say it's a notch or two above mediocre. And I'm watching this movie and there are several scenes that are good-not-great. And while I'm watching them, I'm kind of puzzled and scratching my head and thinking to myself: "This is a decent scene. But I BET if you had a crack at the screenplay before production started, you could have turned this scene into something really tremendous. Something that people would quote to each other late at night, while drunk." And then after the movie is over I listen to an old Led Zeppelin song, from a concert they did. It's "Going to California." Anyway, while I'm listening to it, again, I think of you, and I think about how some of my blood and a bunch of my words are, in fact, "going to California," to greet you...be with you. And THEN, for some strange-ass reason, I think of this painting that I love, that's hanging in the New York MOMA, called "Young Kafka, A Dalai Lama." And I'm imagining the picture, and looking at the picture, and imagining the picture... And then I'm imagining the two of us standing in front of the picture in the New York MOMA, and we're holding hands, and looking at the painting very intently, and very quietly. And all these people are walking by us, looking at the painting briefly, and then walking on. And time kind of slows down for us, and, in the same way that there seem to be either flower petals or large snowflakes hanging in the air in the painting, while young Kafka stands on the surface of a lake, so also are we suddenly aware that the motes of dust in the air around us, and the passersby, and their swishing scarves, are all frozen still in the air. And yet somehow we can turn our heads to look at each other, even in the midst of frozen time. And we are aware that the ground we stand on has properties very much like liquid, or even air. And it's only because we are there together, wondering about the crack of the universe, and stillness, and the yearning to express the depths of time and loneliness, that are all evoked by the painting, that we are not sinking through the floor into the stone, like sinking into liquid.

Puccini; I Ching

Both navigational rowboats.
Stealthily, an ice storm,
Javanese beam.
And who then?
Daggers of Empire.
Riddlin’ for your choir.
Sponges for tugging.
Mudpies on sunset bridges.
Wriggle away, paste to be made.
A rock good garden diffuses day.
The walking lathe walked in,
Fornicated under auspices.
Look all you want: the 3x cubed showtune.
Frozen lake upstream steaming.
Difficulty overmuch. Tusk tusk.
Chariot cars strode silver.
Calculations; festooned gibbons.
L’chaim inscription.
Needed: one line about needing,
Read by a veiny forehead man:
Stand with your legs apart, Boyscout;
Remember your training;
Stop dressing sissy.
(Shackwater Heyoka,
Tacky, too.)
Heroics unrecycled,
Five feet under.
Vacuum Wednesday,
Or do it today.

A Letter From James Joyce To His Wife Nora

If this letter entertains or enlightens, there are several more HERE.

To NORA

Dublin 16 December 1909

My sweet darling girl At last you write to me! You must have given that naughty little cunt of yours a most ferocious frigging to write me such a disjointed letter. As for me, darling, I am so played out that you would have to lick me for a good hour before I could get a horn stiff enough even to put into you, to say nothing of blocking you. I have done so much and so often that I am afraid to look to see how that thing I had is after all I have done to myself. Darling, please don't fuck me too much when I go back. Fuck all you can out of me for the first night or so but make me get myself cured. The fucking must all be done by you, darling as I am so small and soft now that no girl in Europe except yourself would waste her time trying the job. Fuck me, darling, in as many new ways as your lust will suggest. Fuck me dressed in your full outdoor costume with your hat and veil on, your face flushed with the cold and wind and rain and your boots muddy, either straddling across my legs when I am sitting in a chair and riding me up and down with the frills of your drawers showing and my cock sticking up stiff in your cunt or riding me over the back of the sofa. Fuck me naked with your hat and stockings on only flat on the floor with a crimson flower in your hole behind, riding me like a man with your thighs between mine and your rump very fat. Fuck me in your dressing gown (I hope you have that nice one) with nothing on under it, opening it suddenly and showing me your belly and thighs and back an pulling me on top of you on the kitchen table. Fuck me into you arseways, lying on your face on the bed, with your hair flying loose naked but with a lovely scented pair of pink drawers opened shamelessly behind and half sleeping down over your peeping bum. Fuck me on the stairs in the dark, like a nursery-maid fucking her soldier, unbuttoning his trousers gently and slipping her hand in his fly and fiddling with his shirt and feeling it getting wet and then pulling it gently up and fiddling with his two bursting balls and at last pulling out boldly the mickey she loves to handle and frigging it for him softly, murmuring into his ear dirty words and dirty stories that other girls told her and dirty things she said, and all the time pissing her drawers with pleasure and letting off soft warm quiet little farts behind until her own girlish cockey is as stiff as his and suddenly sticking him up in her and riding him.

Basta! Basta per Dio!

I have come now and the foolery is over. Now for your questions!

…………………………………………..

Get ready. Put some warm-brown-linoleum on the kitchen and hang a pair of red common curtains on the windows at night. Get some kind of a cheap common comfortable armchair for your lazy lover. Do this above all, darling, as I shall not quit that kitchen for a whole week after I arrive, reading, lolling, smoking, and watching you get ready the meals and talking, talking, talking, talking to you. O how supremely happy I shall be! God in heaven, I shall be happy there! I figlioli, il fuoco, una buona mangiata, un caffè nero, un Brasil (cigar), il Piccolo della Sera, e Nora, Nora mia, Norina, Noretta, Noruccia ecc ecc...

Eva and Eileen must sleep together. Get some place for Georgie. I wish Nora and I had two beds for night-work. I am keeping and shall keep my promise, love. Time fly on quickly! I want to go back to my love, my life, my star, my little strange-eyed Ireland!

A hundred thousand kisses, darling!

JIM

Separation, by Hafiz

by Khwajeh Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz-e Shirazi, translated by Paul Smith

May none be shattered like me by the woes of separation;
My life has passed by wasted by the throes of separation.

Exited stranger, lover, heartsick beggar, mind bewildered;
I've shouldered brunt of Fortune and blows of separation.

If ever separation should fall into my hand I will kill it;
With tears, in blood, I will pay all the dues of separation.

Where to go, what to do, who to tell my heart's state to?
Who gives justice, who pays out, for those of separation?

From the pain of separation not a moment's peace is mine;
For the sake of God, be just, give the dues of separation.

By separation from Your Presence I'll make separation sick,
Until the heart's blood flows from the eyes of separation.

From where am I and from where are separation and grief?
Seems my mother bore me for grief that grows of separation.

Therefore, at day and at night, branded by love, like Hafiz,
With nightingales of dawn, I cry songs, woes of separation.

where

where go and where come
oh mind of mind
you tick me so knot
i is rolling
over i goes
is busted up
heartarm cranked back
too far
too far

To A Headless Dead Snake:

Missing your head, oozing your goop into the road, where are you now? What does your new body feel like? Where is your head? Can I touch it? What is your life? Are you practiced in certain lost arts, unnamed since Malebolgia was formed? You missed the grass by just a few feet, you unlucky viper. Then it got ya, the car, or the shovel, or whatever. Now half of you is flat, and covered with a shiny film. They say it's myth that snakes are slimy. But in headless death, it's true.

What?

What is the mind then?
Just an emptiness that moves
Somewhere in the brain?

Rumor Confirmed: Five Immortal Cicadas Control The World.

We cannot know this, but it feels correct. Being terribly small, smaller than gnomes, we seriously consider erasing ourselves. Delirious cucumber harvesters fall, exhausted, into oblong nightmares. Demons rise from the soil, spraying our fears with a viscous, salty fluid. This fluid is the breath of life. Plants long dead come alive and draw themselves up out of a steaming broth. A cracked plate throws itself through a restaurant window. The family afraid to deny the convict in the bathroom is bound for disaster.

Even So Sad Gets My Moon Lady Breathing

You get yourself inside me and I'll show you what it takes to be. In this our final stand, hunkered copse of trees with washing-clean the mind bombs going all around, I want to tell you that I love and that now I owe you none. Didn't fantasies blow down from felling clouds of mist? Didn't second breaths reign for several seconds more? In this maelstrom, who will gather up my fingers and wait for boats that spring from far blown port? Sleeping on straw, faces drown in morning, stick in walls and mirrors, show the bottom of a world. Twilight checks our moorings. There come ways to get collected. Deep in night and time nerves let go when flow subsides. Deliberate the middle of the rite. Interrupt our inching selves to rant or wash the ceiling. It's exciting to be dead the way I am. More still to know that death is something more. Hungry ghosts write. Horizon and rubble. Brother wrecked if never my faith is clean. My moon lady can't come over for the mind bombs weary when I ache.

One Of My Favorite Scenes from HBO's "The Wire"

In which detectives Bunk and McNulty re-enact a murder in a woman's apartment, communicating almost exclusively using the word "fuck." Best show on TV?

#3 Mad Lipramble

avec Mark Follman and Jeanna Steele

Despite flies and the surfaces of flies,
and the eyes of brother-seeking eyes,
all trance-inducing trances
anger emerald doorjambs.

Lonely phosphorescent strumpets
croon songs of punkness,
pink tangelos careen up the Empire
State building.

Improper leers spring from deep jungle
stupas laced with charcoal,
burning in the cold night air.

A lonely puppy staggers three-footed
over ram horns and rubble,
dining on cow dung and other dainties,
effigies of Thor swing mightily
in the wind.

'Tis a high pleasure to be in the midst of all this
congestion, what with all the fireflies
crowded in our backpacks.

Damnation is, essentially, a thing of the past,
relegated to the likes of parachute pants
and the moonwalk.

We are the grand game,
mischievously cramming toothpicks in our mouths,
running windsprints down grassy knolls,
impersonating the mutts of Bora Bora;
8,000 Great Walls pound away at our earlobes.

Nothing Doesn't Sting

But it doesn't feel good, either.
It's more like a story than a person.
If you've traveled,
You may have felt a difference in your happinesses,
In a basement coolness.
Nothing plays a part in those transformations.
When you go from day to night there’s bound to be some suffering.
People talk about love songs and dislocation.
But the floor still pounds against feet,
Delivering not one answer.
A hair will singe when held against a match
That’s just gone out.
If you can get inside of that,
You might catch a glimpse of Nothing.
Lights and music.
Bums, mannequins, and cigarettes.
Who wouldn't clap for Nothing?
From ear to ear, from person to person,
Nothing treks like a stranger through every town.

I woke up with a gnome in my apartment.

He was frittering around in my kitchen, jangling pots and pans and pissing off my pet bird. I usually consider it wise to leave a gnome alone, but this little bastard was making so much noise that I picked up my heavy desk lamp and...O, let’s come off it! Does anyone feel like weeping? What do we care if the gnome had both his legs broken by my lamp or if he barely managed to crawl through the slats of the heating vent? We have to use hard facts and experience results. Some cicadas spend seventeen years gestating in the dirt. One day the maddening dark forces them to emerge. Try and refute that. Because of biological processes and weather conditions, cicadas come out and die after a few weeks of singing and mating. Right now, using phrases like "breath of life" really gets us off track. Five hundred people control half the world’s wealth. Cyanide smells like almonds. I am a survivor. I had to cover myself in filth, but I’ve avoided detection.

Tournament Of Nakedness

a collaborative poem with Alicia Marie Howard

On tops of buildings,
our beautiful stones of teeth
between cold scrambled walls

after sullen rain,
muses in their spin,
in endless engines of light,

one loneliness roves.
One of loneliness roves.
A smile needs to tell

the story of the body
even a hand
cannot commit to its fever, but still

can have its way:
the timing is right.
The laws are see-through and

all movement is a ride
on top of head, on palm tree
down the night.

The slide of death
through trick skulls.
We fall into the arms of great sweetness—

Nobody alone.
No body
alone.

Not Just Nipples

Bravery?

Tom Waits puts a fish in his pants whilst fishing with John Lurie.

Ride!

Not Going To Dinner With The Poets, Coming Home And Writing Instead

The woman up at the front of the room was giving me diamonds, I swear I could taste them like drops of white lemon in my mouth. Dinner! Everyone said “Dinner! Let’s all go out for Dinner!” And I thought, “Huh, Dinner, I like it, like Dinner, as much as the next mouth.” But there was no way I could not go home to write after that. There were 'possums on the roadway in my head and I imagined squirrels and songs I could write. I wished for to be something other than I am for a long time, long and long, waiting for the way the eaves open upward and windows everywhere, nothing not-alive and nothing to be ashamed of and just me and opening up my worldhead, the mother up in front of the room, reading poems about her son the Pisces and I am a Pisces and I was her son for a moment, though she might have been even younger than me, but she was all mother love in the world and I felt good about it, remembered reading and getting kissed on the forehead and the cheek, wishing to be alive forever in that love, and also remembered breaking up hard with a woman I loved like a mother and even called her that accidentally a few times...But it was no accident, I was looking for a mother, for someone’s sustenance, direction, piles of warm and wonder to hold me in my lonely post-traumatic, even-now-traumatic life, and found myself lost when we broke, when she left for another fellow, another bloke, who needed no nurturing the way I needed. So she said goodbye I’m kissing another guy, starting a life with another gent, and I dropped the phone, put on my running shoes and ran out into the rain, went running in the cold winter rain for hours, didn’t care about ninjistic ice brain that kept forming and re-forming, didn’t care about lungburn, legs getting wobbly and wanting to cry. (But I ask you, how the hell do you let your fuckin' legs cry when they need to? You just freaking can’t.) And I came home from that run and was alive to the moment of insane cinderblocks packed into my chest (a wonder of hurt), a bullet traveling slowly through me, barbed and empty, made of desire, bursting out my back, leaving a great canyon behind. And I sat down simply on the floor to get contact with basic breath, kernel of non-pain. No good, no good, no good, still sad me in realm of thought, expiring alone, alone in the world, lonely forever. Sitting for hours, untalking. And then my mom, my heavenly Ma, small-framed and thin, Laurie, with love stronger than thought, drove over, walked in my room, knelt down, my Mother Saint of Grace, held me in her long little arms while I followed my breath. Me crying, shoulders shaking in her hands. She simply held me, protected, man in her arms. Now, thinking back on that moment, full decade ago, more dreamlike than anything else, I remember dimly the pain, but remember the love like fire, live fire all around me, strong hearth emanations coming up from generations of blood and mothers. And tonight, as I write this, the desert is outside, alive. And as that poet read to me from her poems, another saintly woman, I could tell, I simply knew, I could feel my heart go slippy and make contact with inner world of motherlove again again again. Good, and I was drinking Coke. It was good, it was sweet, it had a mystic tinge, nothing about me felt wounded, nothing was behind me, sinister or full of fear, I was aware of the wicker basket at the back of the room, aware of the painting on the wall to the left, with an athlete, face fixed in severe gaze of striving and yearning. A feeling of mercy filled the room, a feeling of holy mixing with whatever hells the listeners were in and it was okay, no plague of desire, no writhing frustration, even though poems of longing and poems that hinted at the way the world could be if we could lead with our hands instead of our balled fists. Nobody was sad, nobody’s body rebelled against her, the future there was promise and the air was easy to breathe. I could feel my legs talking to the hair on my legs. They were happy together. Which was strange, since they never had a conflict or a problem before. But tonight they were appreciative of their relations. O, I suppose there was some yearning, some sense that people everywhere had tears and busted up lives to keep living out. But up there was a mother, Hoa Nguyen, pouring out her mere everything for us, and she knew and we knew and even in the midst of a city (collection of lost souls living close to feel like the fire’s not far) we were connected, we felt, or at least I felt, like I inhabited a connected body. Body of work and body of light. Body of feeling. And if I were to die today (I almost died last night—ah, Christ, I’m always almost dying, so much so that to hell with the whole concept. Who needs it? Who needs it? Not me, no death. Like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, famous death guru, says, after you spend enough time next to the dying, you know. Know it’s all bunk, all mirror-myth. No Death. No End. Reepicheep knows it, has gone beyond fear. Just moving onward. Who knows where? No worries, just a way, una selva oscura, a path into the woods, no trubba, trubba not, zanting in the minced moonlight, all eyes peering out from some teary cold head-world, and even though I almost went under a car last night, tonight I am willing, open up my arms. Right now, no shit. As I write this, no joke. I’m really doing it, really opening my arms, it’s good. No helmet on as I write this, no need, even though the night is full of things, full of ways to respire my last. I hope the next time I die I’ll die with wide open inner eyes, unworrying, inward-smiling, poems reeling forth quietly from my ears...Poem of the quiet night beyond whatever nutty way my body rings the gong.) it’d be okay. And I promise to write letters to the people of the world, this language we have, this love, this expression of the lost world that lies within us, we make it and frame it in such wacked-out ways. (Hey, that’s good. That’s okay.) And I’m no longer fearful of that part of myself that seeks something motherly in a mate, soft hands and compassion, it’s cool. But what of the dance, the extra-dance that utters softly in the night? That is not mother/son. Something else entirely, hey? Yes, though it’s soft it has a different kind of heart, a feeling of making close connections, good for everyone’s inner self, good for the body, good for the connection force, good for principalities of pleasure and the bright soft living inside illumination of holy connection between bodies, lover and lover, ah, you sense its quiet raucous power, ‘tis good, ‘tis mighty good. Green things grow green because of that pushing. Bodies? Hell, bodies are just containers. Something to hold our feelings for us. Something for letting them go, too.

KungFu vs. Yoga

Okay, friends, if you haven't seen this before, then you have never seen ANYTHING like it. Holy Smokes! KungFu vs. Yoga. No matter who wins, your sense of what's possible loses!

One Take New York

In his 1921 review of Poesies, by Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound writes: "The life of a village is narrative; you have not been there three weeks before you know that in the revolution et cetera, and when M le Comte et cetera, and so forth. In a city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap, overcross, they are “cinematographic,” but they are not a simple linear sequence. They are often a flood of nouns without verbal relations."

One Take New York, the hatchling filmmaking crew, understands this, and, as visual poets themselves, are doing something wonderful.

Visit them at www.onetakenewyork.com and watch one of their first films right here:

The Last Chase

Track Midnight

Track the midnight changes, all powder burning tea, et cetera. My head, my hand, every day a distance. Cringing floor, tourniquet-essence extracted from this gone globe...I’m living off dust of broken civilizations. I go to bed, get up, again/again, bed a place of Random Image Hunger. All claims to the contrary, all walls up around me, mockumentaries for my making...in making I am made something less than whole, something more than the null set. And if I go running (or thinking of her running) via cities, thinking of mirrored selves, endlessly expressing, I can go precisely where? Tension in the gone world. Ten tons in the gone whorl. Then run in a gun whirl. Wing Chun and a fun gurl. Feel something? I ask myself and detect a wishing spot, as of a new organ growing inside me.

I Vote

that we spontaneously make Beth Orton the President of the United States of America.

Few Are Chosen...

Put away all the mystical shit and just get into this. Open up with it, you rebel soul, you delinquent messianic anti-hero.

Ah, Plavalaguna!

The "mad scene" aria "Il dolce suono" from the 3rd Act of the opera "Lucia di Lammermoor," by Gaetano Donizetti (Italian libretto by Salvatore Cammarano after Sir Walter Scott's historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor) as featured in the film The Fifth Element in a performance by the alien diva, Plavalaguna (voiced by Albanian soprano Inva Mula-Tchako and played onscreen by French actress Maïwenn Le Besco). You'll also see Milla Jovovich go into radical, alien-smashing, Bruce Lee mode.

Mouse And J Story, With The Inherency 0

What it does to be quicker possible me it is necessary! The DJ and person present time morning demanded in the method map book which takes out the method mouse which dies in the San Francisco of the house of the silver mine. Short history age... The thing and from here in the house my woman demanded yet in you, (that I in goopy, inside distance where walking these people does not put I, increase it gives charge of a hazard heart but). To our mouse you 2 divination sign grudge where operation area is necessary - the cube which the root it writes (operation area duration of visit of weekend of mine) butter which is identical ground discovers in poisonous peanut which will stagger the small adoptee that is, guaranteed, it decides my spouse and a standstill room living there to be a money expense which is experienced. It grips and to empty support of the fireman engineer the license the J person explains dined again in the hazard house which it will cut. After the sourish mine my woman dies and hazard house them embolism poison, the question of the attention mouse and the mouse and two possibilities to be complete goes, it leaves there! Truly was contracted assuredly it grips! Denouement? The e feels it gets married in the ground of the tecto. The mouse it will snap off! The urination talked the mine woman with medical service. The general who is insufficient inside brevity in this method J combination expensively looks away, and the day when it is insufficient to be expensive in disco method and expense is complete discovery inside the specialist. The subject is only the indemnity bonanza which is, when compared does not relate to me must threaten, 0 packs of 5 through the disk mornings my accumulation, my woman, and it fires. Him that 5 flesh is, when this it controls connecting, canceling and packs through the disks at day, immediately its inherency being special inside the kingdom demands recording depository institutional of 0 the voices and tie will go to it!

Best Of Craigslist

Holy Crap!

Do you want to read some hilarious and totally wacked out stuff that people (just like you) are doing/selling/dating/buying?

If so, just click!

I LOVE CAKE

God, do I love cake?! HELL YES I love cake, God!

One Thing Inspires Another

One idea about one thing inspires another idea about another thing in a non-sequential manner. I can tell the listener about a record cover... thus you can find a useful channel for just about anything. If it’s good, one thing inspires another. One thing inspires another and that inspires something else. So I’m hoping to actually get out there and do some photography. This way the interaction between lyrics and music is the best possible, because one thing inspires another. One thing inspires another, in fact the dream or the nightmare never ends...Saying one thing inspires another thing is not the same as saying one thing equals the other thing. So it's pretty obvious that there are similarities between riffs and that one thing inspires another. It was a throw away comment really, but one thing inspires another - and isn't it nice to know that people are reading our collective inane ramblings? Isn't it funny how one thing inspires another....You bring that out so poetically but discernable too. Hence the so on, and so on in the title -- one thing inspires another, and in turn another and so on and so on... Live without regret, because one thing inspires another! Inspiration comes from everywhere and it's circular...one thing inspires another which inspires yet another which influences the first, etc. Japanese filmmaking has had a major influence, but so have Italian and British and French and German...and even American filmmakers. Do you find that one thing inspires another? Creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum, one thing inspires another and it keeps going. It was a throw away comment really, but one thing inspires another - and isn't it ...

nothing haiku

haiku for nothing,
and nothing for this haiku--
haiku ain't nothing.

Solvang Double Century

www.planetultra.com/solvang/

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.

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.

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

Aldo Perez is Alive!

Hear Aldo's hilarious song "The Man I Am" here.

and

Visit his website here.

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.

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.