read this poem!

our website from east to west (or east/west in a snappier nomenclature) updates seasonally and now, within a season, bi-weekly, more or less, with single poems we dig. these are found through the READ THIS POEM! link on the frontpage (homepage, cyberelly speaking).

just started this summer season

today's update is a mopoem (motion poem), Soapbox Derby, by Paul Adrian Mabelis.

link back through it also to read Ryan Laks and Jim Lineberger, our first two RTP!s.

cool stuff, i say.

around a gulf

before
you never read
never i you
read before red
bore be
read you i never
ef re: i
ever read
read fore you
never i yin be
you fore
never for
ever you
reveread
everread
bebeforfore
FORE

Hiya ERWAers

if you're here welcome.

john e

The Village Idiot OPA (old poem alert)

so much of my recent past is nipple-coated

fog trench buttoned

rain-proofed



a writhing coat of arms all chivalrous

unto Me Lady's chambers

for the nonce

the sputtering tempest

of these days when

and those that weren't

is water to walk upon



towards the first thigh-swell

and indigo gasp



suffer me to remove my coat

and arms O briefest of pleasure!

sliding up your body

in the peasant heat of royal rooms

crickets busy in the court



before spells twisted

atop new storms riding

before two sport and succumb

one through the other

one through the other



*



so much of my recent past is pussy-parted

so much digit-fingered

distraction wishing warm and wet



gutted revivals

riding off into the sunset

dry sheets flapping spiritual



O hurdy gurdy herky jerky chances!

There is one so far and fair

whose stars inhabit clear eyes

don angel skin -

Let me at her again!



(so much of my recent recentness

is she-wrapped)



(not as i might be in nipple fog,

or glaze-faced)



regardless of weather

my tea-potted climates

my home:

the tracks made by horses

when sky is shocked



think of this as a time

before photographs, before letters

made sense together,

when what you didn't even know as you

must needs be charged with

a capture of light



groin-popped, brain-tickled i am,

grinning in my rain-slopped

phantom village



~



7 12 03

little bothersome things, perhaps, perhaps not

although i have sorta participated in the hijinxx of poetry boards for about four years now, i can't get into the practice of revision as it is practiced by a buncha folks in a buncha places. i find nothing inherently wrong w/revising a piece, but i usually do it all when the poem is first-writ. so a quick poem might take a few hours to write and gawd bless wordpad. i pare and hone (ha, weren't they cartoon animals?), mask and reveal and then it's done. and i usually make no major change after i stick the date on the sucker.

i think some people are compelled to tinker with their work above and beyond the necessary because of the board environment. they don't believe in their own work! they have not the power of discrimination! they want that Best Revision gif! i'd rather abandon a poem than fuck with it - sometimes you're on, sometimes not. As if there wouldn't be another poem to write. as long as there is an opportunity (ie you don't DIE) you can write another - maybe a new take on that abandoned poem? crunch all you want...

the biggest killer i see is a search for a substitute word - like a synonym, like you were writing prose where the resonances don't matter as much. this is a bad word, why don't you use that? as if the poem remains the same! chuck the whole notion, the phrase, the weak step on the ladder. maybe the poem needs to be turned upside down; maybe the most revelatory stanza is, in the end, fluffing the identity of the poem.

maybe you're not sure what you are saying, or don't care if you're dishonest, and so word-substitution comes easily. this is a real disservice to people who read poetry. they expect pleasaure, revelation perhaps - an experience fer sure. constant tinkering with a poem to have it fit a small group's mindset's mold (ha, i said mold) does nothing for a reader who happens on a poem. the poetry-reader wants to believe the writer believes what is posted. the excuse of differences in style or approach to writing do not lessen the power of a poem. even the shield of i know what i like can't break the spell of a poem, to a reader.

when a poem starts out saying, for example, that poetry comes from a sickened heart, and is revised to say that poetry comes from a ghost's sigh i get the feeling that the writer is trying on shoes until a pair looks good and fit, and that there wasn't much need for the new shoes to begin with. this guy says he's a poet, but he's trying to have me believe that all of it comes from a sick place? that is almost offensive to me, and to other careful readers, i'll bet. and the change to the ghosty thing? i guess he didn't believe his sickened heart; easier to take (for some, not for me) to blame the ephemeral. perhaps the poet is lying to the poem. perhaps the poem to the poet. perhaps there is no poem.

also (as has been pointed out by a comic or two along the way): why can't we have a coffee maker that doesn't sound like it's coughing up phlegm near the end of its drip? a few months ago i bought a Black and Decker (!!!) coffee maker, and it scares the shit out of me sometimes. smart move, eh? buying a coffee maker made by a company that makes power tools and stuff.

very unorganized post, maybe i'll add to it later or something - add, not revise, heh.

listening to Death in Vegas live in Brixton, extra disc in their new Satan's Circus album. bought it at big bad Walmart - this act a poem in itself, perhaps. it kicks.

To ------

a modernist
reads between the lines
of a poem other
than the one she's reading
then reads a portion
of a bio of someone alluded to
there is a chant perhaps
in her head
as above so below
but the modernist eschews bifocals
articles continue to disappear
she is not happy
with her latest     she forgot
to mix it up
good stuff
on bottom
i like that
she thinks

like






a modernist
reads between the lines
she thinks of a poem other
than the one she's reading
in her head
as above so below
but the modernist eschews bifocals
articles cont to disappear
articles disappear
articles     once

she is not happy
then reads a portion
of a bio of someone alluded to
reads between the lines
of a poem other     then
there is a chant perhaps
to mix it up
good stuff
in her head
as above so below
but the modernist eschews bifocals
she thinks with her latest
articles continue to disappear
she is not happy
with her latest     she forgot
to mix it up
good stuff
on bottom
i like that
she thinks

likelike


like

like
like

myth of suburbia

once
there was a corner of the yard
well-groomed and swept
and the tree's acorns fell
in neat rows     at least
to the acorns
but it was a mess
and the acorns kept falling
here and there     ploop
ploop     what they fell into
already twice-removed
once
there was a scrubby patch of dirt
the tree plooping it up
maybe tomorrow concrete
tomatoes
in neat rows     neat at least
to those
who'll die here

Little Blue Rags

When my former wife dropped my younger son off to live with me and his brother, she gave me a large, clear plastic drawstring bag of little blue rags, washcloth-sized, institutional. She now works at a hospital, swing shift; her rheumatoid arthritis is acting up again. I guess she gets these rags easily. She said, you know, they're good to have around for cleaning. It was no big deal. I took about half a dozen out and stacked them on a knee-high counter shelf under the phone. When I need one to dry something or take care of a spill I reach down and get one from the neat stack, knowing it's clean. I toss the dirty ones into a soda case flat under the sink. After they're washed they go back on the shelf. Once in a while a really messy accident happens here, and I go to the clear bag for extras. My sons think these things are disposable. They wipe something up and throw the cloth away. They take a few and put them in a drawer somewhere and forget about them. Things like these shouldn't bother me, but they do. I don't know why I am so involved in the cycle of these rags. I swear my former wife said she uses and reuses them. Recently, when I spoke to her on the phone, I swear she laughed: No, throw them away! Before I started to write this I was thinking that the most important consideration must be for the boys to have easy unchaging access to a clean rag in the kitchen; they must be assured of things like this, always in their place, soft and loyal. What makes it the most important consideration is the humor one can find in one's obsessions as they unfold, and replacements ever-returning.

i am

the words under Caving In up there - the words there now, everything's subject to change - are from a short poem by Ted Roethke, Wish for a Young Wife. he had one; i had about five years on my ex-wife, but sometimes i felt ancient, and loved her, and understood Roethke. funny thing though: i'll bet she saw me childish, more than ancient. most times, whatever.


Wish for a Young Wife

---by Theodore Roethke

My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy's mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.

~

kinda sneaks up on you.....

dressing

i still wear the same clothes
i wore a few years ago
when i saw you
it was apparent again this morning
when i put on my brown suede shoes
and the thriftstore shirt
with the neat pattern     i don't do this
deliberately     these are my clothes
my favorites, and they don't wear down
easily even when the light around me
disappears or is torn apart
it's not a sentimental act
it's not an act at all
these are my favorites
though i'll admit     for some reason
remembering when i asked you
dark or light?
one night before we went out
(meaning clothes)
knowing you'd say light
probably anyway
i remembered this morning
as i slipped into a brown shoe
imagined spicy food and a slow grind
imagined you'd said dark
what i imagined
some twisted metaphor
for the light we always seemed
to be moving into

post-industrial poem

what i do over and over
from breath or fetish
at that very moment
no longer my habitat
must be that
other dimension i've
fallen through
these are not hands
they're orbits
tongue a machine
brain, wrecking ball
working on
worked by someone
suddenly there's no language
each thought hangs in air
slides through smoldering remnants
one cries i missed my train
steam release pollinates
then one is not one
night-blooming jasmine, ah
planted by the city
ah, i'm off again...
she has nothing at all
to do with this,
but she's here,
at the drill press being careful
the place closes at five that's
a mere technicality
love over gold
as they say in the trade

spirit is willing

now i
barely
remember
but middle
of the night
there were sparks
a poem
about a woman
sparks
of wordplay
settle into dust
i'd write her skin
not of it     and how?
i don't remember
dustdevil words
how tight i held her
where'd they go?
a poem about
losing the world
except for her
a poem pinned
with sparks
this morning
a lost poem
its way
lit by candles

dj synistar synapse

i'm caught caught
where the cold dark fingers trace

just another movie
another song and dance

i am lost lost
by the storm clouds am tossed

another poor sucker who never had a chance

now here come the snow deep

just another captain
going down with his ship

and i will take sleep sweet Margaret my dear
tell me
it was a long and a strong and a sweet year
indeed to get lost in

just another jerk taking pride in his work

no one to watch me when i die

just another movie

how will i live again?

*

MIKE HERON / PAT MACDONALD BARBARA K

*

This is a weird mash of some of the song lyrics to Explorer by The Incredible String Band, and Just Another Movie by Timbuck 3. *** Movie is a slight dark rocker, well put together. ** I used to listen to Timbuck 3. I liked how they could solidly rock in their best songs and still be able to goof or love or give you the lil willies. *** Explorer is a simply gorgeous rock song, raw and to the point, even with a few woodwinds and stuff. *** The attitude behind each song is so different. ***** The little thing above is the clash of these two outlooks: the grand and the offhand. * Sometimes a song runs through your head like say Rikki Don't Lose That Number, or some little bit of Mozart's 40th even. I get 'em two or three at a time, sometimes in tight rotation and sometimes like the piece above, jambled. * * * And like, the captain thing was the center, and now I just don't know: particle, wave, if a tree falls in the woods does it make the water sad?

Don't mind me, I'm listening to music.

monday feeling on tuesday

i have two newish poems up at Slow Trains: the lone prairie countdown (which is also at east/west) and Last Poem. Susannah Indigo has been very supportive for the past 4 years (!!) or so - check the back issues for me-j and pj.

i also received a rejection today of/for five of my poems from Malleable Jangle, out of Australia. i was hoping they'd have the noive to pub monster mo-poem (also now at east/west). no go, boho.

first rejection? i was advised by an otherwise sane teacher in high school to send some of my stuff to The New Yorker. little did i know she hadn't a clue re poetry. my first look at a form rejection letter. i subbed out to them again last year, and after months and months and months of waiting received a form e-mail rejection. what the fuck am i thinking?

home sweet web.

fun fact for today: i have fallen arches. okok: FLAT FEET

disappearing act

www . lostandfound


...small speck of blue sure can't be touched...

lost in the world wide web
is as easy as lost in the wide world

found is even easier
save for those lost

*

less-threatened
at my laptop
no tigers here

*

distracted by
the unknown zone

*

caving with coffee
found a big moment

*

it'll be
100 degrees today

*

outside

*

sunday afternoon flange

neil leach, who's an internet bud of mine posted something called black soil blues a while back. to me it was a fractured new blues, and i wanted to put it to music. well, i put it to something like music anyway. appropriately sloppy, but abridged enough to go by quickly. here's the audio link:


http://www.geocities.com/pj_nights/blacksoilblues.mp3


and here's the lyric:


black soil blues


--neil c. leach jr.


woke up in a hole
that was seven miles deep
heavy in my pocket
was a death's hand key

if you pass
be so kind
throw some dirt down on me
down on me

small speck of blue
sure can't be touched
struck a match for some heat
but it didn't help much

forgot your scent
forgot my name
makes no difference
where i lay

weather won't wet
sun came unstuck
shoulda known better
but i trusted to luck

heard a dog in the distance
my boy's howlin' for hunger
he could have my right hand
if i could roll up with the thunder

no need to wonder
no reason to think
no rhyme in my memory
eyes too dry to blink

crumb and coffee

this is R. Crumb's A Short History of America:


http://www.crumbmuseum.com/history2.html


this is one of my favorite pieces of cartooning. we who've lived a while have seen this: purity messed with by good intentions at first, then completely disregarded as more and more stuff is piled upon it. it's surely the american story, except that i'm not so sure we can connect that past time of purity to any of our ancestors. evil's been waiting in this old land, as burroughs knew, as he had been telepathically taught, and as we have been schooled and sliced by the cut-up bits and pieces of our own experiences and mindsets. crumb's short history of america is a mirror turned towards our own collective (and mostly personal) disintegration, entropy, rot. o but that's not me, right? chuck you farley, grab a gander, you silly goose. sometimes it's painful to look at things too clearly; we all like to blur, even if only once in a while.

that's one reason i like this strip. and because of however i'm wired, i've also found great beauty in his landscapes and backdrops. it might be a bare-bulb tenement room with a window open to a city's summer night (a junkie on the nod at a rickety table); or his lines in the sky telling us the sun is rising, or falling; or the other lines, strung across wooden poles, embellished by boxy transformer stuff: when i was young they were all images imprinting deep within me - feelings and ideas waiting to be explored. i had not yet the distance from these things in my own life; now i look at his panels and understand this. but first reads left me with stirrings only. this was the american landscape for me. anytime i got a chance to go to the country i didn't know how to act. it was hard to enjoy. i was beginning to go my own way, better or worse, like it or not.


i've been a fanboy of robert crumb from around '69, what a surprise. there were breaks, sure (as in most of my life's timelines), but i was drawn to him first time i saw a Zap comic, and recently purchased THE R. CRUMB HANDBOOK (which does have the america strip in it, full color) and find i am right back there. the handbook is a true story of a life that simultaneously feeds upon and is disgusted by popular culture. this has been a life simultaneously unfettered and obsessed. this is a (popular) art directly drawn out of the artist - at certain times of his life passed through sieves, collected in bowls, poured down.



most people around me at the time i discovered crumb were turned on by his outrageousness, rather than the sadness or the acceptance of what-is-strange in his cartooning. s.clay wilson was probably cooler to them than crumb at the time. you know: mutilation, weird sex (though crumb sure had both!) for me, a highpoint then was something like the narrative duck's ya yas, or even the panel where mr. natural simply yells at foont (in big letters) YOU'RE SO EXASPERATING or something. what a release, heh.

my last year at high school i took a few interesting courses, like video (called creative electography back then), creative (12th grade) writing and contemporary literature. i was already into stuff on my own (the padgett/shapiro anthology AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW YORK POETS was at the library and i fondly remember (am i getting creaky or what?) cutting school on rainy days to read stuff like that sitting at the back of the stacks near an open window. i found ginsberg, others. an extreme fascination with ted berrigan's THE SONNETS began back then; i still have that edition, over 30 years later, with the great back cover.), but my creative lit teach was inspiring, most of the course. her name was Anna M. and she was jolly and slightly irreverent most of the time. she was a regular person, not hip or anything, but she sparked me into people like stevens, eliot, joyce; she helped me tremendously, through a stevens poem, to have that AHA moment about poetry. back then i began to understand the relationship between how you write a poem, and what a poem really is. anyway, i shared some stuff with her like dylan lyrics and crumb. i gave her a ZAP to read. when she gave it back she was mostly noncommital (not outraged or anything, so she was heading in the right direction), but opened it to this one surreal strip and pointed: the ONE ENORMOUS TIT was the funniest thing in the book, she told me. this remark is one of those things i have thought about from time to time in my life, like that little scene with the parakeet a few posts down. why did she get off on that one panel? was there some darkness there i couldn't see that she appreciated? something jungian, or at least freudish? or was it just a goof? and did she think anything at all about the rest? did she know anything about crumb before i gave her the comic? into the big whatever now....


for an exam i had a choice of essay topics. i wrote a piece in first person, trying to be a modern day stevie d. from PORTRAIT. i was probably either stoned or on one of those experimental what-happens-when-you-go-for-days-without-sleep jags. those places open me, give me foolish bravery. the essay charted high.

an addendum re crumb: most times, the same people who got a kick out of the rougher stuff in crumb could also appreciate the sound of the name FLAKEY FOONT - many repetitions of FOONT later, we'd still be laughin'. in his cute little obsessive garden, crumb planted poetry. and old american music, but that's another story, at least partly, 'cause he wove it into his cartooning too, and gave it the sad beauty of things passing, and the dumb joys of being alive.

anyway (sooner or later THAT word creeps into my stuff, like stuff flitting about, all over the place), i guess the point of all this (if you'd feel more satisfied, more aristoteleanny-pleasured) has something to do with how certain things are put together, and also with how most things fall apart. both of these have to do with increasing complexity. our world is falling apart under the strain of having to maintain the connections among ever-increasing piles of junk; poetry builds upon itself from bottom up - what is the poem, then how do we bring it, then knowing how to bring it, just knowing, from best intentions through things passing, and the mystery of the enormous tit.

front desk

this is a picture i took at the Ben Bolt Hotel in Columbia, Missouri,

somewhere in the 70s.

i was the night desk clerk there a few nights a week.

mostly i did wake up calls

and mopped the floor around 5AM.

one time i was asleep in that chair with my feet up on the front counter

and a guy walked up

wanted a room

i fell forward couldn't stand grasped the counter.

i wanted this 1890s silver dollar this drunk had

and took it, was able to only because he was drunk, you see.

i listened to the men on saturday night who watched roller derby

on the tv set in the lobby. they were enthusiastic

about big women knocking the shit out of each other,

go figure.

i took pictures too of some of the people who lived there, long term.

the cleaver

was under the counter

from the first day i was there.

the owner said pay it no mind.

a single room cost

$4.16 a night then, tax included.

i staged this photo.

world of today (WOTtm): our cute little life "together"

i've never acknowledged it ('cause if i'm wrong, it's an ultimately painful presumption) but i've always felt that pj put up from east to west: bicoastal verse a few years ago as a present to me, she being east, of course. so now i fondly acknowledge this. it's been our little personal webspace for a while, and now it's also a place to show off some of the people we've met up with in one way or another in our journeys and e-journeys. peej does all the layouts and stuff - the, um real work and i try to keep up my side of the deal (being the "laziest man in california" this is difficult, painful at times) by setting up my own stuff and the stuff of people i've asked to join in. this started as a personal website; now it has grown to be something important in my life. i like to feel thrilled as we create a new "edition". i felt especially good earlier this year as i put together Coleen Shin's chap, Life's Home, until I flaked out and pj came to the rescue to finish the formatting and stuff. it's like getting drunk and not being able to finish the gig. i don't really drink anymore though; this was about drifting, i think, one might say. and yeah: i have gotten drunk once and booked before the sets were over, long time ago. once. anyway, i started calling the site east/west for short, partly 'cause i think it looks neat, and partly to emphasize distance - continental divide. i myself really think all these placenames ending in Journal and Review are funny, and maybe someday might name something rejour, or rejournalview, or something.
umm... oh yeah: but in the end, whatever it is today, i think east/west will always stay at a low-flying level, and i think that's good. and i luv pj's cheerful involvement, and stuff. it's hers, really, she and hers.

I weighed a bird

I weighed a bird when I was a little little kid, it was a pet parakeet
my father mother and I were living in a third (or fourth?) floor walkup
railroad apartment (hallway ran from the kitchen in back
through the bedroom out to the "front room")
the apartment house was not too far from the Hudson River
in a poor part of town most of which was torn down
to widen a main road and because it was old
and out of synch as things progressed (but
I went back there a few years ago to bury my dad
(he was pushing 91 years when it happened)
and our little street was still there
pretty much intact maybe because
there was a Catholic school there everywhere else
was either shambles or gone mostly I took the birdcage
out on the wooden back porch where my mom
would clothespin the laundry on a line
attached to who knows what at the other end
and wheel the line out I opened the cage there
cupped the bird in my little hand and put him down
on a bathroom scale that I guess was really a
back porch scale I don't think I brought it out there
they must have kept it out there for some reason,
hmm, one of the mysteries of life, and of course the bird flew right off
and the mechanical scale registered nothing
that night my dad tied the empty cage to the clothesline
and wheeled it out, little door swinging,
and here came the parakeet and it sat
for a few seconds on the line
I swear I remember him looking
at us and then at the cage
a few seconds, and then flew off
what chance did he have either way?


~~~~~

(impromptu, after coffee and such)