The Very Winters

Your ocean’s broken at the sea side, at oxygen, at the club for dancing yourself into the floor. The downed flower was the way you knew the case was over. There was everything everywhere and you switched hats until you warmed the very winters within. Usually you’ll have the usual. It’s expected. Debt is the prick of reality’s vapor, makes you know that number’s real. And debt bums you down, too. You feel and age, an old whiskey feeling. You work so you don’t have to try so hard, but things—phenomena, the world that is the case (all of it)—get all the way in the way.

Take It All Off

Stash the ’bot in a major drawer. Stand alone in the rain cabin. Find a human in your mumble. This is to be shown, to be exploited in the first place you find. You shave your face free of your body, point at the moon, find a way to crow. Look at the signature across the cold hand, the knee that answers. It’s downright lyrical, this hallowed humane coat. Both of us nattered and palsied. Hey, you know how we used to go up on the roof and get down to our underwear and fancy ourselves important? Yeah, the fish tank has only gotten smaller.

Induction into the Society of Epic Wanderers: Cancelled due to non-attendance. We got high marks in vision, mysticism, high school. We fancied and felt admired. Something came down from a cave. A figurine and a bat had a message: Watch your tender head. Nobody talks like this, seriously. Except this freaking page. We have that, at least.

Textually, there are no seasons. Only Summer and Winter, Sandwich and Fall.

Description of Us

for A.M.

Taking it slow controls the weather.
Citizens are gathered up and bit by bit
Tossed into major and minor piles
Of gentleman road dust.

Some constructions are paper,
Some fancy sand.
Some ask a person to hold on
Way too long.

We both have haloes now
From all the brutality
And waiting.

But I must have you know,
In poems and in weather:
My ness is heavily you.

Going With Fortune

In broken fields of what stays open,
In standard hominess of over days,
We found you
Building a Wall of Signs.

Calculating people are lonely
In shadows, boards and potatoes,
Ranking Shoes in military highness.

Battlefields and handkerchiefs and battlefields
And Battlefields; something profound here
In the thoughty middle:
We saw Doing as a way to be sad and happy.

Stun-green seas wink to life
On Yearning’s floating carpet. After finding danger they
Dethrone Survival as Chance’s closest homie.

The Whale

Candles and sommeliers and pasta for my kindling pantlegs-pusher whispering the hype in someone’s frantic ear and you appreciate the cards the first time the whale takes the road and not the sea. The turnout was pretty intense and the last fight between the two parents and everyone up in their seats waiting to see the ending and the battle was sooo tragic and yet victorious and we have to be something more than what we expect of ourselves and so many damned mistakes winning ourselves back. Something like that, you know? Yeah. Something like that. You have to do different things, when you have all the beef you’ve been having. Like you have to be prepared not to come down all the way, you have to stay up, you don’t know what might happen mentally, you have to keep the engine running. You have to mimic someone who’s not tired or dejected at all.

I'm (I'm?)

I’m:
Breaking into jail
Breaking out of jail
Breaking my bones
Owning non sense
Putting up the sepulcher
Pasting old cuspids
With curious muck
Murking in the dark
Lovely
Pouncing in a noose museum
Able to sleep a rain
Cranking the top off bottom
Exhaling old frames
Nuancing charm-chatter
Reducing noise/ calamity boys
Diatribe/ omnibus
No mess/ no fuss
Fusion in elision
Harps in rhyme
Elastic decisions
Marked in plastic
A tease of sculpture
Ardent repose of conscious self
Tea-drink waterfall
Et al.

Coming Up: The Faster Pussycat Reading!

Yes, indeed. I'll be reading at The Happy Ending on May 19th, 302 Broome Street, in Manhattan, at 8pm (doors open at 7pm). That's a Wednesday Night! Don't miss it. It's going to be a strange evening and I'll be accompanied and "curated" by Ben Cramer, a crazed adventurer and journalist I've known for over 20 years! What does it mean to have your reading curated? Come find out!

I'll be reading as part of the Faster Pussycat Reading Series put on by The Feminist Press, in celebration of Upset Press's new book Halal Pork, by Cihan Kaan. The other reader's besides myself and Cihan Kaan, are the supercool Denise Galang and the hilarious and radical Nick Powell.

la forme

DOG

CAR

And Again You

And again You: face for a gathering. A YOU face, a-you-fAce (Italian accent), my doll, my Matt Doll (my mom’s accent). Oh you held me and I wanted to stay.

In the classrooms they are chanting vowels. Who’s chanting? A lesson. Chant now: “Where are you going, Big Pig? To dig. I’m going to Dig. And What will you dig, Big Pig? A bit white turnip.” This and the vowels as they unfold, or unfetter, or calcify in soup or a name for a place, or a shaming place.

Your face hears its name and brightens, collects, redraws old storybooks, maps to the treasure in the yard, the hidden coins, the snakeskin, cigar box with some of your baby teeth, a tonic against memory loss. But it goes, you watch it. Muhammad Ali, his hands shake now almost uncontrollably, says:

““I was twenty…twenty what? Twenty-two. Now I’m fifty-four. Fifty-four.” He said nothing for a minute or so. Then he said, “Time flies. Flies. Flies. It flies away.” Then, very slowly, Ali lifted his hand and fluttered his fingers like the wings of a bird.”

Smoking in Demonland

Recitation of a very old poem of mine, "Smoking in Demonland" in the snowy picnic gazebo at Oyster Bay's Theodore Roosevelt Park:

Snow Dancing on Oyster Bay's Theodore Roosevelt Beach

(In case you're interested, I was dancing to Madonna's "Ray of Light" in my headphones.)

Weird Gravel

Vanity makes its own hole. I am the tip of an honorary spear. Then forgive me. Forgive me again for my thoughts. My homegrown cadence of betrayal and confession. All of imagination. Then the newness of a bruised love, recovering. Then tragedy of sex. Then octopus of orgasm and pleasure of you slapping my face. Togas at breakfast. Syrup and tears. Too many if only too many to think. Someone has to watch your back, even if it’s me.

The First Good Word Of The Tetherball Bastards

Heck!

You’ll go gladly, you’ll go. You’ll wake it all in some string. That one, that’s window. That Shake. That Make It To The Store before you get there. That One, bet you go. Then you get a flavor and A Rice, an even cold. Then you mix them up in a recipe, go The Desire Path, collaborate. You’re some kind of fun hominid, you show yourself, you chatter again, you go down in a cloud of this Darn Universe. Then saying things you intended are fine, then you do those things, then they do them, then everyone did them or some kind of Sitting Collects The Corners. Going round, going to come around in a car, a right vehicle for the time, more or less a vision of the believing that causes belief. It’s just an action, you know it, that Thought Stuff. Happens to happen in the every day, nothing special for Ten Days Straight.

2^nd Move

Stew gives you strength, you blow on the bottle, you re-gather with friends. Someone laughs, you move your arms. You raise them up, tell “em” to raise “em” up. Everyone feels real, or good, or neither, but still someone feels something, which makes it different from Last Night, when you all thought about someone you kiss. Yes, you make it so, you and your Little Happiness.

The Freaking

Him that go-gets a goiter, gets a pursuit in the belonging stance and for very announcements wish this was a horse. Tetherball Bastards, your fambly team on crutches. Your crotching past. That sifted dream of a red face huffing above you, taking your thought like aerosol fuel for Her Fire. Ting. Sounds to you like some kind of drink you drank, busted out of your scuttling coal pail, freedom in derangement, a chef. The thoughts you think you think all belong to me, you swimmer, Dinner.

Shambling Forward

Wearing your slipper running errands, bending your knees in a rhythmic way, tacky you don’t care. You loss, you shame, you Chiclet, you starling. Breath Hero. How you get that out of you for care, for a luck card, for a swing out to The Farm, where the inexperienced you (The Uninterpreted You) still rejoices in the loneliness of being alone. Do you now?

Leading Away

Stem in This Now Life. To regret is to choose time. To fracas! To carpentry! To hands themselves. Well, everyone you see, being well, being good to their cuckoo core, being glockenspiel, baloney. Shoe up, Shoe!

O Where Are You Going?

by W. H. Auden

"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,
"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."

"Out of this house" -- said rider to reader,
"Yours never will" -- said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you" -- said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

"The perverse allure of a damaged woman."

Long have I felt that the writings of Ayn Rand are pure shit. Every time I've cracked open one of her books, I have been repulsed at the sentence level by her ham-fisted and unbeautiful prose. Her ideas have always struck me as not much more than a precocious and angsty teenager's inner squawking at a world that just can't appreciate true greatness. I am perplexed at the adoration shown for her work by people whose ideas and opinions I have tried hard to respect. Thus, I am delighted to point you to an article on Rand in Slate Magazine about two new biographies of her. Perhaps, like me, you will find it both sad and enlightening. Click here or above for the article and enjoy.

In Homelike Need

In grungy cross-boats, everything changes and everyone ruts. The hills on the shoulders of men and ladies go daring their chasms collide in spoken inertial dampening buffers and boots. Like ten times ago you cleared your throat and shook a tree to see if people would grow away from their silks. Like switching to a new childhood that didn’t have a swingset or a pizzle or a shard of wild glass. Liver and runts go togethering in your window or pan, so wicker and shake to the sound of the old man has had his fun so whisper and shake to the day the old man can’t dance so wisdom and steak for your dinner or some such baloney, compadre. That washes away the hurting or the frame of mind that made the sting go feeble, shook the stench from your fingers.

In dream, he held a sharpened sword and showed his friends how to cut paper squares that floated in air. All was well, or at least possible, and the edge was sharp indeed. In homelike need I’ll find myself and your tan brain or your fishy upbringing will trigger a way to the smashing top of all this. Yes, someone said smashing, so that’s the verb of the day, accept it as adjective, too. She asks how the day goes, she says how the waves are full today, she is Lady Liberty and we’ve decided to bring her down this night, but instead we’ll get mints. The double cigarette technique produces the continuous expectation of non-recognition, so it could make you horny or something, if you have a sheer constitution. That was my somethingth declaration, I’m too terribly bored to go back and count. Plus, I was a graffiti smear on your highway bathroom.

Then the children we were came out to see the adults we became and a breadlike thing did an uncomfortable dance in the oven, once it got cold. The heat hardly ever worked poorly, we were always warm enough, and the floors were smooth enough to slide on in your socks. Even the dog slipped sometimes. You could play music and run circles around the living room and kitchen and the dog would slip and yip after you. So you did that. It created a message and story about dogs to tell the future. See? Them hands I’m wearing, warning my old caged bottom up from the basement. Shake it and run and feel the thrill of the approaching Boogeyman. Now I have only star stickers in my wallet and can feel the worth of them with my fingers, in the dark, if I’ll allow it.

Why so much discipline, why not think in terms of yes, and sure? These days have to be gotten into line, I guess, or else they’ll just go any which way and you’ll become a little bit of everything. That’s not delightful, by the way. This is a drafty something else. You understood that from the getgo, you in your corner and my watches on the tables of this young country. There will be a lot more shelves in my future, I can feel it.

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?'