Caving In

some of july

2008-07-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

a couple of things:

one thing:

when you think continuously about a fearful possibility
you are only half-there in your car, your job, the tidbits
that usually make you happy. sorry i was distracted, you say
as if there were a small rock in your shoe, that's all.

but you know most of you is being pushed by a gale towards a cliff.
good thing you're only half-there too.

and when it's not continuous, when the feeling of being
a shadow on an old brick wall, trash in the mud of the alley
is brought into you by a few words or a person seen
from the corner of your eye, the switch is turned on,
the night now is bright, too bright, it's overwhelming.

so your fears make you a failure in your own half-opened eyes.
and your world -- all around you, in you -- consumes you,
the first time it happens we begin to figure how spineless
ennui is, yet how total its jellyfish devour. until we are frightened enough
by our own undramatics, our scene blocking -- the quiet frightened --
we'll never know how badly everything was botched.

the other thing:

when someone, like some guy i know,
has two strikes in the prison game,
and has been rumored to say
that if he knew he was going to be taken in
for being involved with guns
or fighting once more, he'd finish
the guy(s) off, whatthehell. the thing about rumors
is that sometimes they're not true,
but once in a while they understate
the possibilities. i imagine red splashes
and dismemberment, and try not to
tick the guy off. if you think about it,
he's the guy who's half-there,
always uncomfortable in his shoes
is what we think, but
what's really going on is a whole lot worse.

post-thing:

myself, i'd rather be a shadow than worry about
a rock in my shoe.

~

7 26 08

THE PROSE POEM

The prose poem is not my forte. Sometimes I believe the poem is not my forte. I read an old copy of Sentence while in my bathroom. I read it over and over and sometimes I'm almost late for work. Work is certainly not my forte. I don't think I understand the prose poem. Does writing one have to do with wild connections? Maybe it goes the other way: like an old radio show it speaks almost enough, and this creates the story for someone who reads it, who listens to it with his mind's ear. Some prose poems sit on the page easily, a few words. When they get up to greet us, they aren't that easy, after all. They bully us. Some tell a story, but we suspect they don't tell the whole story, and so we go back to them, over and over, as I do in my bathroom. Maybe this isn't a prose poem. Maybe it's a poem, and I've decided to trade the lines for a block, Tate the other way around. If he can call them poems, maybe I can get away with calling this a prose poem. But, as I've found, over and over through car wrecks, love and illumination, my last thin dime: getting away with it isn't my forte either.

~

7 13 08

A BAG OF FROZEN PEAS

I went to the store for, among other things, a bag of frozen peas, and the repetition. I admit I see things as objects, then eat them. Except for poems, they eat me, when they're too cute, like this right here.

At the store, the meat was bloodier than usual. I'm not sure if this is a good thing. A lady with a nametag watches me with concern. I see some of my poems in the bread department. A few have cents-off stickers. This is so cute, and so like retribution. And now I have my bag of peas, which I pay for, and some other things. It's icy outside on the walk and I slip and fall unceremoniously. The bag of peas goes sliding, but luckily the peas are safe, contained.

~

7 20 08

linkee things

2008-07-05T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have a new page at Unlikely Stories:

http://www.unlikelystories.org/e0708.shtml

also, forgot to mention I had a new page at Slow Trains from the Spring:

http://www.slowtrains.com/vol7issue4/eivazvol7issue4.html

also, re Unlikely Stories, check out this "multimedia" work by Donna Kuhn,
I think it's the knees of bees, tasty like ice cream and exciting as fireworks with an old soul:

http://www.unlikelystories.org/kuhn0107.shtml

(I have been spotty about posting stuff here.
I received an e-mail a while back
from someone who wanted to buy my blog
for fifty bucks. Is this some new scam
or what is it? I wrote the fucker back
and told him to never write me again, but
i was probably just talking to
a machine.... )

and of course, right around indi pen dance day, this one:

Paris, Britney, Nicole & Lindsay Just Wanna Have Lesbian Fun

the page itself for the video has a buncha interesting comments on it. check out the guy's other vids also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lio6imaRR68

some recent stuff

2008-07-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Western

where are the warriors? there are no warriors
although there are the reckless, and not in that
cartoon sort of way, even though the one
who might be called the warrior strikes clean
with nary a grapple, but strikes clean over and over
meaning the other is not at war, or perhaps is fighting
under duress, not being paid in any way, money
or otherwise.

there is no lint either, nothing small
like that, only mud and snakebite and the blood of others
splattered across the plains. then there's that guy in the saloon
who elbows his buddy, or a stranger, or a mad whore
when he tells how he gunned down that indian warrior,
then picks a cloud of lint from that elbow, the one
he jabbed the drunk with.

damn what a world, no cobalt, no lilac,
only pissing in the streets, drunkfucking and murder.
everything has a little sand in it, scrubby brush - nothing synthetic
and the calico came later, when the dust settled with whomever was left
and the smoke cleared away these memories of warriors.

then suddenly (as these things go) Norman Rockwell, and trollies and boom!
split-levels, Hollywood and the dry martini, finally a place to be properly carnal,
to bait-and-switch, supersize and layaway,
a place where the coup wasn't even recognized
by the warrior or the one warriored upon.

~

7 4 ~ 7 5 06

The Fade

Every color is gathered and then flown ...
~~Lyn Hejinian

pockmark closeup crevice delightful in a fancied splendor
of bounce short dress where the sun is seen between her legs
no desire for night yet this lasts only seconds and the red glare

ruptures the faberge spoils the mark we make upon
a bed i do me over and over as i slip from room to room
fresh lipstick wild fragrance damp panties

torn stockings tawdry words tight clothes
there is sunrise unseen sunset revealed
since decades mean nothing tiny night is null

day is full of color crash a bleed of yellow into green
is for you different from me i am so much less
Dove, blackhole reversed, adamant she never lose flight

a purple waver under lost sheets scented us
my brown shoes split, more holes now in my socks
than those wings that stab the sky

insistance is a harm yet it isn't like memory at all
not pliable, no remainder - that is part of its nature:
the on-and-on of it, unlike milkgloss of pearl

turned and gone, not the pink inside, hidden in time
from time, the blue bed of heart, all waves of heat
in summer, or pockmarked winter sky

swirled till all is white, then dark once more

~

6 29 08

Travel Journal

I had been walking for hours and hadn't gotten there yet. Eugene
was worried that the growls and blips and rumbles around us
would preoccupy us so far into the night we would never get there,
instead we would simply keep on walking. If only we were hungry
it would simplify all of it and there'd be no chance of missing our appointment
in the town square, witnesses we would be to the hanging,
lest we lose our moral code. Speaking of codes as night slammed down
it wrapped us in warbling shivers and not the moral ones,
the ones of alone, of dark, of the walking we now were unaware of.
Well, what of it? Most go through their codes tightly wrapped
and never work up the gumption to even hear those blips. And what
of Tess, that sylvan vision waiting, barely moving, stomach silent?
What of the past most taken, central heat and air, La-Z-Boys
and the princess, ovens not only hot, but full to bursting,
smoke detectors detecting, mittens, slippers, I give you my all
in the neon and the appointments, the wandering executions,
Tess and Eugene with their dark wavy hair over there
watching, slowboating emotions so vibrant and a ho and a hum
and a fee fie foe fum bull when the neck snaps in the code
code night, some former one shits his pants and we kiss
as the smoke wisps away. Dinnertime, been walking, almost jogging
for what seems like years. Feed Eugene first, then Tess,
then let me slip the spoon in your mouth, and let's leave
the oven on. Could it be the moral code we feel, the wind
from the racing obscurity that began as a walk towards death,
names of bodies we know not, night knows no light. When he was a boy
my father watched them hang a thief, or a criminal of some sort,
the former body now in the town square. Even though he forgot names
he would have fed Tess first, then Eugene, or Eugene then Tess.
The snap now silent, cold code blips into the night of full-bellied wandering,
least-resistant, road-forked, dear we're alone now, I can't stand
that I want to love everyone everywhere and can't because
this town of intentions wanders so, and is so square.

~

6 7 08

Taking A Stand Against The Past

When did I learn the new language?
The less I say, the more I mean, only
at times I can't help railing against myself
over there, loving, right, near-perfect.

So I take it out like trash,
take it out on you, on
myself, on the tears
only gibberish,
the wail of the moon.

~

6 28 08

2008-06-04T17:12:00.000-07:00

in-between kiss

now some in trying to figure the title above
might imagine a kiss to hold onto between
one glorious struggle in the sheets
and the next but that's another poem
another angle, one of a mix of a vanishing fragrance
slightly citrus i dunno spicy too
another poem yes this one is more
of an aftertaste of cheap coldcuts
a kiss necessary like lunch too much
salt no idea of the animal eaten
sometimes our lips wet when brushed against
or moisten pressed together like an
overflow, sweet water from the rock
soaring broken down all the way to
half-conscious pout into her face
soured further by a voice inside
lazy heart motion block so easy
to disappear even as our fingers touch
each others' arms there is no
leaning in these are the ends
of the roads the rarified, the dead ends
in-between there is the longing to kiss
whether we are together or not
each time i imagine the taste of your lips
the pressures of bodies the disappearing
it's a kiss lonely ones i must believe
in something like magic for these
in-between kisses are like food
i'm alive, safe

~

4 20 08

a few new ones

2008-03-15T21:39:00.000-07:00

how to give this world the slip

there are types of touch essential
like the sneaky hot squeeze
a breath in a tipped neck
can regulate her untouched legs

these are spells
there is no science to it
there is no leg regulation really
there is only a random shaking

just when i think i've lost her
and the air is a sleepy lie and i drip
sweat as the natives turn back
another spell is remembered

but not by me she of her own squeeze
doesn't give a damn and animates
my uniform is soiled my vestment
wrinkles in laughter shakes in a heap

on the floor when the sun sets
she makes sure we do not stop
before we get there indigents
uncontrolled save by our want

once settled in we grind
and slide and wipe skin
on each other essential
too, for our vanishing

~

3 9 08

midday

i went dark from inside
dark for i funnel, i burrow,
for i close my eyes and soon
dark whether they're closed or not
the dark where i hope to meet you
slicing your own dark

meet me in a humid season
wear out this sense of skin
my lips anywhere on you
skin a border a border
describes a state

we love skin but
sometimes to disappear
all these states this light
revealing our hunger
this dark becoming it

~

3 15 08

katauta

blow the ice capades?
life would be warm if only.
search for exits. stop dancing.

~

Would you please sit still?
Tumbleweeds suburbia
Frightening nexus echoes

~

is this heaven yet?
through the clouds, laughter - no, screams
right before the fiery crash

~

Ain't the Wild West done?
I saw a pig curtsey swell,
Always leave my door unlocked.

~

3 9 08

A Dream of Overused Questionmarks

My sleek agile takes preference in twisted reference.
The beginning never seems the beginning except once
in a while it does when it isn't. Don't look away
and you'll see how it's done. That isn't to say we don't have
a decent size cage to peer out of. Out of the last comes this
one. Two winstons and a shrew. Albert where is my brine?
Has it spun enough, is it
twisted? He was running into steam and this
caused him to slow down too. Remember that you wish
to be remembered; don't when we all fall down. You can see this
whenever you want to, but tomorrow is Sunday that fated bagel
both nervous and creamy. Here are a few footnotes in this waterfall's bridge
though they never hold still to read. And isn't that what we all
cringe against, or maybe some of us take off its coat and make it coffee:
we'll simply never know and even that an absentminded conjecture
as we're dropped off miles away and kicked by the mule.

~

3 15 08

valentine

2008-02-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

these old times

all those stores all those rollup gates
under red green and white slapped-on signage
we took so much for granted all those years!
we were nothing special nothing was
it was every second of it special
the time empty of second looks of considerations
no looking back yet either
as it should be as it should be now
trust the crowded heart the metaphor muscle
the never-beginning kiss longing leaves behind the never-
ending smile and wish for a right now
meaning more than anything before either in absence
or presence can't do anything else but
love nothing special the pediments remain
the wrinkles and rankles and runckles just words
the edifice suffices these adjoining doors
open to joy our home is where we are
can't see it climb those hills will chills
and kiss me again in the ghetto of Getty
the Hill of Park the
Yo of So

~

2 13 08

a poem and three on poems

2008-01-17T21:33:00.000-08:00

bark the silence

it's okay
having three green legs and
having to crawl.
that guy over there
has it worser.
kneel on the side of the bed
and i'll enter you.
i close my eyes to see the cave
grey cotton cloud
why does it hang between us
when my ears are open?
i read he got 75 years
and she goodbye to them.
now i have four legs
red red red
doggy style, Augustine
in my early period
chantnfuckchantnfuck
kiss me
i'm way over
here

~

our poets fail us

with their distance, their intimacy,
landscapes of letters and space,
nickels and dimes shiny,
vomit in the streets,
sweat in the sheets

the pockmarked nobility
traded for nobilities of farewell
and imperfections, crafting a world
they call our own,
nobility of alone
instead of
the poem

~

there is a fussiness

we need, and we are, one by one
the only ones who know whether
this fussiness is necessary or not

sometimes, if we are not fussy enough
our knives fly, slicing through
the remainder of the world,
the parts of it we don't care for
while we talk of creation

~

The wildmen here

hate you and your little doilies
and your dusty tomes
and buggly aphorisms.

try wearing that doily on your head
eat that book
and squish the proverb to nothing
until it looks like a smear on the back page
of the Star

we will love you then
like midnight

~

1 10 08 - 1 17 08

eleven eleven

2007-11-11T12:46:00.000-08:00

A) WHAT TO CONNECT

journalistic spiel not in terms of the style sheets

     (god knows it's treacherous to express that way
     if you're spilling the poetry)

same that
it's boring
to poem
of poem

and that's a shade of the old journalism too     all those

words

those imaginary tags supposed to say more than a tree, or meat
and potatoes     so much

to connect!     as usual,

this someone here   ("writer")   tries to say
to you

HOW TO READ

not even asking, not even asking
if you care, why you don't this or that, sing or not sing, dance or --
why not even forgetting the people places things i've
truly forgotten but have left scents and shadows and laughing for no reason
when i'm alone     you don't seem
to forget anything, anyone - but are they/is it still felt? THAT'S

the thing you can always find in the writer, especially the
poet
(or his shadow):

blood you can feel move inside, blind to things,
penetration to twinkling eyes within
with no regard

for facts
     for curly journalism, even sometimes

for intent
(or its          lack
     thereof and a strong suspicious slant-eyed sizing-up
of vocabulary, i mean     even LOVE
all fucked up in the letters and memories, i mean

     another connection is in order, harrumph

toe the line? or tow it,
drag that sucker out of harm's way, away from
metaphor, the poem about the poem, haul it into
a cloud     of love, how did we
get UP here? oops,

don't fall

B) THE SLOW MOVEMENT

time-lapse photography retains the mystery
of moments unfilmed, unshot (might
as well be) a mystery growth, film brilliante

gumshoe walks by night within
each turned corner a new shot
in the fog a new returning all shots
of there remembered sort   houses
- faces - between no longer there not even
in memory laughs it off
check's in the mail

we will be stuck, filmed,
in the end, no shots, no growth
mail, faces - nada we will hear
and a D will sound like an T
our houses will grow time-lapsed:

all those skies thrilled us, even the grey,
even the fog thrilled me every corner i turned
every quiet snap of a shutter

time-lapse growth brilliante of moments unfilled
no, only unremembered sort
in sequence remembered retains faces
slowly trails off
quiet   simple

end always whole

C) BUT THE WHITE ALBUM WAS DIANNE

wasn't it? i always think of NYC impending winter
teen years mixed with the Beatles, a browse in a bookstore
but that was me heading toward or being with or heading away
from Dianne   you and i were such friends
at the time, or around that time, around November one year
later we shared a locker but it wasn't the same   later
i remember - don't remember if i talked to you or someone else
told you goodbye or told someone else
i had told you goodbye there had been a maxi skirt and a pocketwatch
and Odessa through wheels of fire later i had the staten island ferry alone
for a nickel, and another, and another i had been many people, and it continued
your skirt shorter than your peacoat   we in winter walking
and now no need to sing pete seeger at moratoriums instead i need
you i am too worn to fight a war - you know: fight a war itself, not in one
o bla di o bla da can you take me back maybe it was Dianne that time,
a connection skewed but i kissed you in her basement
we were such good friends at that time and your kiss lasts this long
and will be with me tomorrow were we kids out grocery shopping with our mothers
when we first saw each other, touched an arm, or maybe you laughed
at me when i made a silly face for you, a stranger -
or were you, even then? Dianne's basement, o bla di o bla da
you felt it in the Circle, downtown, later on, a day off from all the things
left in our way, things hold us, can you take me back
where i came from, a little snow on the streets later, a kiss
that never ends, i will always feel the same

D) STATES OF MATTER

Did we walk in the rain?
We walked into the snow,
uphill always, and I didn't mind.

We walk toward the cold,
the cold I've forgotten, the cold
you've felt in your eyes and your bones.
I miss it. Now simply cold. We know
there is warmth somewhere,

not far, I can feel it. opens like
a refrain toward resolution,
raindrops pooling, ice melts
immediately, yes let's leave it,
let's continue as we have
walked in the rain.

     here is
   a vocabulary of
         photos,
how     light   takes
              over

we are     distracted, seems what is
     important has turned
  into     harsh light

we need new
         pictures, not ex-
planations, wars i'm tired of          can these
          sounds

be replaced by rain, let's walk

when it's heavy, pool away singing
a refrain toward resolution

not unlike ice         smooth
         see-through pristine
something to slide upon
         when days are cold

~

11 10 ~ 11 11 07

photopoem

2007-11-11T12:45:00.000-08:00

how still the trees

digitized to death they are bleeding
into each other as moments and memories bleed
together, dry up and fall apart, no matter
family friend uniforms and matching outfits, the leaves still bleed
look, we have interrupted your party, look
as we look, neither here, yet i remember one had moustache,
i think, and the trees were bleeding, not blood
but something from their preservation, no longer trees

i steal your soul! they are all dead by now
barely

remembered most smiled
i'm thinking right at that moment
none even knew why

or went about trying to decide if it had been
for a picture, or for -

something more personal, not immortal
maybe each is tied to the other

could be it all simply bleeds
together like the trees
in an old photo

~

11 10 07

sittin' on a fence

2007-06-24T09:36:00.000-07:00

Act of Remembering

Funny isn't it?
Sad? The place
we remember really
only exists inside each of us;
it will vanish when we do.

Nick

~

the most difficult times, and they don't come often
something like
an old rolling stones song not heard for 40 years
and then when i do that line i've sung to myself for years
i find is wrong all these years
i've remembered it wrong

difficult times once in a while in the sense that
for a little while i'm liable to totter against the grain
of my life, my life barely stitched together
the more i wear it the more it slips apart

all those nights we sat on the hill and watched the river, the palisades
i remember a few only, remember like i do old songs i love, songs
i can't get out of my head, my nights, my songs
will vanish when i do.

~

6 21 07

WALL OF JASMINE

2007-05-15T20:38:00.001-07:00

built through the twisted blades of someone's lunch

light we say we want but leave when the colors flash
alternately when the trees are too bright

it's not a wall, but a fork in the stop sign
we are eating we purse lips then wipe them
as we go on

you are the one who admits
it's me who really is the one who writes you
and who scents the jasmine?
i think of you
of me
of lunch

you never admit it is me
who is talking like now
you are talking to me
and i talk to myself
in these words
of concern for you

every night i walk past the wall of jasmine
updating my attractions
sometimes the air is sick with beauty
the wall is markers on mounded graves
vertical crypts of beauty
we i you dare not leave tears
misunderstood like theorums
used for their use
my tears are scents unto themselves
ourselves yourself

well of jasmine my life thrown in
harsh light yesterday candle tonight
neon future scent on the wind

scabgravesmell not avoided
but absorbed when sentence fails
ping pang pong

i stuff a bunch in my pocket as noonday workers laugh
and walk on to you

me
us

~

5 1 07

standstill windowsill

2007-05-15T20:37:00.001-07:00

minty green tablecloth
spotted by sun

it is always spring
in the moving light

in the freshest water
the sleeping kitty

now
what to do
with spring?

~

5 14 07

preaching to poets

2007-05-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

blah blahblah blah blahblah
blahblah breasts blah brook shattered by sun blahblah
kiss blahblah cobblestones blah blahblahblah
fingers blahblah entwined blah blah
blahblah warm legs pressed blah together
blahdidiblahblah laughter
in the blah hollow blippityblah night

Sigourney Weaver Undressed

2007-05-15T20:33:00.000-07:00

i downloaded movie clips of her
completely naked front and back
she excites me clothed    naked,
surprised how she looked like a girl

from my past some link, some attraction
even through clothes how she saddened me,
her hips, her bush, hers and hers all hers
all so far    i googled her (my old g/f)

watched a video of her
(both of us fully clothed)
she looked the same
as before    as Sigourney

(sort of)    as all so far, and me so Hollywood-surprised,
so sad    now you, so real, your bush, your touch, your eyes

i watched the morning moon...

2007-05-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

i watched the morning moon go down through wires
its speed was shown as was that of the earth...
remain so still and calm that breath's retired
and moving turns itself upon your worth

then you will see how quickly it all turns
at once you'll also feel the wrap of time
and too you might find love in sunlight's burn
apart together love makes daylight climb

we are a day away from little graves
we each are one abandoned and forlorn
together though we dance the nights and days
the music makes each day the day we're born

i wished you true; you are, i needn't cease
my love my movement under time's release

~

5 4 07

old muzik

2007-05-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.myspace.com/ejohne

Sense of Direction in the Dark

2007-05-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

The space between is never dark, but still
is where I lose myself when I'm with you.
Am I you? I'm not sure, but know I will
be more myself to lose this dark for you.

This dark is soot, is cloud complaint, a day
that leaves itself for night, and thinks it's won;
mud of rude argument or silent way
of unthought speech, an old war never won

will not invade this space, this safety dark
our hearts have tidied, hands smoothed over.
Transparent plains between not dark at all:
we see within, across, without -- not over.

Let us be fools to let the world's dark be:
Come love, kiss dark which once was you and me.

~~

12 19 06

recent pastimes

2007-04-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Browsin' an' diggin' at Salty's Record Attic

April 22, 2007

2007-04-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

mark me

the corner turned me into another black world
you lived in i loved you
as a breeze blowing pitch
unremarkable yet undeniable
full of small words and big ideas
or was it big words and small -
it was both at times
when the worst rain we ever saw
or felt or made pocked our future
and it came again and once more
and i loved you like a man who sees the bus blocks away
the bus to take him to the right place right time
and that bus disappears
and only then the love comes
and that's how i loved you then
and now the corner
so sharp and surprising
i can see none of it from before
i'm on that street no longer pacing or pouncing
cradled rather or rocked
undeniably kissed whether you are here or there
present or absent
the mark of today always there
whether the rain came yesterday
or is expected tomorrow

~~

woodypoem

the dead had expressed themselves when alive
filled us with what we called dreams, whether we wished
to be above or below them as they breathed, whether
it was enough to walk up the hill, nearing the watertower
but stopping before, drunk and hungry shuffling into the small
Italian restaurant for pizza just before close, its owner waiting tables,
knowing how we wanted what we wanted, and now i can't remember
his name, but remember the name of a friend
waiting there for me, already ordered for us including more beer
i remember sitting in the dark surrounded by wood
yet the place not as dark or woody as outside
and with just enough cheese, its owner waiting on us,
always humoring us, his expression when alive
and i'm sure he is dead by now and here i am expressing
and wondering and wanting to travel uphill further
to that watertower and the little house of an aunt of a friend
and the dull light of party with people probably fucking upstairs
while i sat with strangers telling enormous lies, all of us,
whether we knew it or not (i knew, and continued still
in my impish innocence), or sitting with headphones on
while all were finally asleep, listening to rock and roll
and seeing firesigns burn the sharp corners of thought
until in a flash i was no longer innocent but full of cynicism
as befits the outsider, surely looked upon as such --
as these things will happen, even in our longing,
even as we fight them through the streets of our cities and hearts --
looked upon as such even if inside there is the struggle to recover
days lost, loves abandoned, ideas spat upon in haste
not as the guy who likes a quiet pizza with a friend
a little further down the hill further up though from the bodega
in front of his apartment, street slanting toward pizza and a watertower
a house not his own a friend lived in further down than all
of this, the clink of bottles, music like accordians cutting through riffs
of deep purple and the buzz of a martin's strings
Cubans, Dominicans, quiet people from Pakistan and Iran,
their stores and restaurants waiting in what i still call my dreams
and how they are still
expressing themselves through doubts and over hills,
into the wooded dark of their eateries
unknown yet richly imagined from thousands of miles away
into and unto my cheesy dying day

~~

oui

2007-03-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

petite chouchou

berrigan had his pepsi
old westerns and chris,
hello

he wrote for other poets
he wrote for himself
and maybe even the pimply kid
scribbling in a diner
at 3AM
grace to be born...
and
don't tread on me

*

as i age i trust myself more and more
and this trust replaces certainty
toward both myself others
and suddenly there is no me
and no others
only the poem i fly
the poem i trust

*

being sparked by the idiom is necessary
before a dismissal

each poem is an idiom
each poet's opus an idiom
each image - idiom

(sounds better than metaphor, eh?
believe me: i know what i like)

*

a pilot
let's say a stuntpilot
gives his show
and even though those on the ground
haven't a clue as to what he is doing
they are moved in some way
whether the movement comes by surprise
(something new)
or is expected
(as a perfect recreation of the spirit of manoeuvers
of those who flew before)
and what of those passengers
who expect only to debark
what would they think
if caught in a loop-de-loop?

*

beginning high school french
i was the wiseguy who figured
Vous donnez moi un mal a la fesse
was funny
but to a frenchman it probably speaks more
of an impossible transfer of haemorrhoids
than it does of disdain

and who would call their best girl
a vegetable?
a frenchman?

oui

*

berrigan was a stunt pilot
sparked by his own idioms
and others'
and others
Eliot flew intercontinental
speaking his own language
(the clouds of ours)
Poe sat in the dark
and then there was Blakeshine
Larkin beautifully morose
Ginsberg gayly cherubific
who else? who else?
and all of our others...
hurting inside to knock down our doors
our chipboard doors...
inside
some never fly

*

speaking of eliot and those guys
i've heard it said that the 20th century
was the time of allusion
and i wonder how it got that way
and grew and grew
finally birthing academics who scorned academics
criticism growing like fractals
whose slow mutation you can't see at once
whose journeys veer into sideroads rutted and brown
whose spires grow baroque and gargoyled
and are imploded to make way for superstores of minimalism
(look! is that Brautigan there, hiding behind the endcap?
is that a haiku or a mastercard that fell behind the checkout?)
and all the growth got old and ended
and we are now new
are stuntpilots tricking foreigners into a ride
and hope for a sigh

*

at times it's like
we are all foreigners
some enjoy playing jokes on foreigners
but i can't
i can't
rewrite this trust
in my garden
my little flowers
my veggie pepsis
my idioms looping those loops
listening for the ooohs and ahhhs
as under my breath i quietly aside
don't tread on me

~~

3 23 07

Z

2007-03-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

don't look for the zeitgeist here

within this second's transport to a night long ago
scent of the air shared through a window to all that
happened and happens
cloud highlights help
me find the full moon

then i remember the scent of the air
through the window of my car
slicing fields nearly there    nearly green
'twas the same the same      both scents hung

on the same memory had both times    of what, of what?
dear reader i have had enough of this day
that's the zeitgeist here
it's personal, this second's transport

like a no-pants dream, a joke stuttered, no double takes
from either side, yet such obvious superimposition, of what? the same?

~~

3 10 07

2007-01-27T12:48:00.000-08:00

you open all small things

the shine
of short

glows
in a vestibule

to leave
not a church
vespers
or song

more a road
you can see

sunlight touches
each pebble
still it's only
a road

1 19 06

~

a city reveals itself on sunday morning

2007-01-27T09:01:00.000-08:00

a city reveals itself on sunday morning

how empty the streets are
only a few walk like me
everyone else knows it's sunday
early on sunday
only a few
catch the wind whip through what is built up
and how useless and littered it is
when no one but me is around
others dream or wish a god
others prone and sleepless
or on arthritic knees
or lost in snores
away from the emptiness
of the built up world

~~

1 26 07

Untermeyer Park

i love the way
trees open for me
and i see downhill
to the river beyond
and after that, granite
wall of higher ground
i will one day visit
again

~

1 9 07

do you remember the milk deliveries?

i sorta remember the milk deliveries, but,
like most things, it's vague...
like i remember a milk truck in front of my house,
a shadowy image, and perhaps it's only imagination
these years later

but i do remember the milk machines
we had one a few steps away from our house
Dellwood, i think...

milk was a quarter a quart
but, like all things
it went up, two cents i think

can't remember how long the machine was operational there,
but it was there when i was in St. Denis grammer school

we used to climb up the fence next to it
to get to its roof,
just to stand up there

when i was in fourth grade,
and was in a school play - Nutcracker, i think -
my brother climbed up there, but
fell and got his arm caught
in the sharp fencing and it got ripped open
like a red mouth, and i didn't go to the play
and he went to the hospital

we used to have an old Assyrian lady renting
the back apartment who didn't speak english
and used to go out on the street on sunday mornings
in her old cotton nightgown, asking people
to set her fat gold watch for her
in a language they didn't understand
or shuffling out there to buy
a quart of Dellwood milk
with only a quarter

~

1 22 06

slightly belated birthday wishes

2007-01-20T16:29:00.000-08:00

to Don Van Vliet, our Captain Beefheart,
who "turned" 66 on January 15th.

in the earth all fall down on their knees
lookin' for a little ease...

Cruel Imagination (demo)

2006-12-27T04:05:00.000-08:00

CRUEL IMAGINATION

a smoke and a burger some caffeine
we'll string all the tyrants up
it's raining again like in childhood
this government's so corrupt
a wonder is quickly perverted
the grease slides into the drain
your memories gather like stormclouds
like thunder you follow the same

no more cruel than imagination
and the way it might haunt or tease
the world will still be with us tomorrow
on our knees thank you please

one day away from the vagrants
the ceremony's under the bridge
the locks have all been smashed open
the flies are dyin' inside the fridge
your good news drains of its color
as anchormen all babble the blues
blame tight shoes for sensible journeys
the large print version of news

unloading the night makes me weary
there's danger in knowing your job
in cities where growth into nothing
makes worthless the things which we rob
i say it's my world and believe it
we do as we please if we can
believe that the sky lasts forever
and kill like the night when we can

some smile small like a pimple
some grin till their face disappears
but i know some who are cautious
step through gates like erasing their fears
waters define all our coastlines
grain puts the farmers to sleep
concrete simmers in sunlight
frost holds us tight as we creep

all in all it's a good life
every boy and girl knows the tune
readin' and writ and the other
documenting all of our ruin
signing off till tomorrow
what can i say but goodbye
cows coming home in a heartbeat
signs stop in the wink of an eye

~~

12 27 06

Rather Be Nowhere

2006-12-15T22:27:00.000-08:00

Rather Be Nowhere

I wanna make it with you I wanna break it with you
Fly off to Morocco or Jamaica will do
Or we can sit down on the floor and have the sand stay on the shore
Cock an eye at roadmaps still to come and those before

There's a bunch of busy colors on those maps
Okay moving around long as we get our naps
Immature or sage, but time won't get its due
Yeah, I'd rather not be there, rather be nowhere
Rather be nowhere with you

If it means we gotta sometimes squint our eyes
As long as we're together it'll be no surprise
When the stars all blur and stumble away
When our hands are our touch
And our touch starts to sway

'Cause the running and the talking aren't real
Yeah we need 'em sometimes, but they ain't no big deal
I think the stars are in your head, o yes it's true
And I'd rather not be there, rather be nowhere
Rather be nowhere with you

There's a pretty place, a picture on my wall
Sign off my thought, to destiny I crawl
When I'm floating will you be there with me?
When I'm sinking slow will you be my sea?

On the corner 'cross the street I'm afraid
All the people we were turn their backs just to fade
And so the old has turned into the new
But I don't care to be there, not to be anywhere,
Rather be nowhere with you

~~

12 15 06

in winter

2006-12-09T19:30:00.000-08:00

path curves
snow covers
cold brush

red light
prisms dance in
warm eyes

white sheets
fold away from
bodies

RKO Proctors

2006-12-06T00:32:00.000-08:00

What Saves It

to remember
the musty air
more than the
red velvet and
the lodges and
how this changed
at the snack stand

remember these scents
more than my
tired eyes now more
than the sameness
of dark turning it to
just shadows softness
of velvet stained
and sticky floors

to remember it fondly
to make in me this way
of remembering

this saves it
night's anxious squalor
dark's routine rehearsal
suddenly filmless
all must gone

~

12 06 06

fishobaby

2006-12-03T22:25:00.000-08:00

Lewis C. and john e somewhere in the 70's
Pisacano's Fish Market, Yonkers, NY

RIP Lewis, 1978

whoop

2006-12-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

dodder

kilt lifter ale    light
on every corner
as it should be

the poor have a right too
to be eccentric

walter sylvia dance
dance dance

dance to absorb me
larry and sue
dance to absorb me

it's a sleep problem
i have anyway   'swat
makes my speech simple
my barren bare barren bared

here i am saying saying saying

saying to you   lift that ale
all you white russians

dance to absorb me

~

11 29 06

(an aside)

the poor who act with grace
transfigure sour face
and leap and hobble still
but ne'er against the will

a tongue of gold it coughs
and wails the mis'ry off
in song we wheel these carts
to gild these plastic arts

so curse the day is long
our ending won't be strong
by roadside scrub we sleep
the night the poem we keep

unemployed, written 1975 sung 2006

2006-12-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

advice to myself, quoting myself

2006-11-14T15:24:00.000-08:00

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

~~from old poem "The Village Idiot"

for audioscape

2006-11-03T22:21:00.000-08:00

beat

someone the young one gone down the fizzle
work a cat too long and he ends with the middle
love a little thing little and the funk of the sizzle
put your eye at risk so's a drizzle's just a riddle

shovelin' the jive these pretty things too
heap a pile waldo, schoolday at the zoo
go forth nekkid not knowing it's true
covered in glue lemme stick it to you

10 13 06

beatscape

fini mess

2006-11-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

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Author	Comment
e'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=ejohne">e john e unModerator Posts: 2330 (10/30/06 1:14 am)	i'm outta here i abdicate the world doesn't need SPIT anymore even if poetry blogs aren't as enticing as they once were thought to be (as i had mentioned a while back, and was summarily thrown off of one for my comments, and now, even those in power there admit to the truth of my words) there are enough forums around the world can get by without SPIT me? i'm off to rape minors and plagiarize poems happy trails john e, asshole, ret.
Tasha1 '>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=tasha1">Tasha1 ; little suzy sunshine Posts: 28260 (10/30/06 1:35 am)	Re: i'm outta here me too
drolziaushy Registered User Posts: 118 (10/30/06 9:57 am)	Re: i'm outta here source friend, good luck trying to find a place to hide. behold, enduring glenn beck's lies w/o opportunity to re in a comparable forum is torture. glenn beck told katherine harris that he hated politicians, but now he's calling rick santorum, "churchill." what gives? evil gw bush is a satanic treasonous piece of garbage. he should be tried in the world court for grievous high crimes against humanity and treason against his country and religion. how many have already received the mark of the beast? demand an account. homeland security cannot respond to me directly. they have to usurp. bush is a satanic abomination. he probably took his twins down to mexico when they were 12 to get ph`,`kked in their li'l anuses by dirty legals and have shyt smeared on their faces while the laura "the horrible whore" licked the shyt off vincente fox's balls. 12 is the age of sexual consent in mexico, 13 in s korea, 14 in iowa and sixteen in most other us states. condi rice likes the way of life of the consentual rapist. how nice. bush is an evil gay terrorist pedophile. save our troops. comments@whitehouse.gov we are, in fact, placing homeland security and all media ownership under citizens' arrest for obstruction of justice, aiding, abetting and facilitaing all degrees of sexual misconduct. the abridgement of free speech, suspected conspiracy to commit murder and establish the bilbical mark of the beast into law via the economic and intellectual deprivation of millions. turn yourselves in, bush admin. and give us our reward money and oval office. we arrest us presidents, gw bush, clinton, ghw bush, carter and ford for grievous crimes against humanity and facilitating the rape of the world's children. mr bush, get the ph`,`qqq out of my whitehouse, bytch!!!!!!!!! say my name jesus is qing www.clubdada.com/ john allan tate 111 the only way you can win is to usurp and deceive the masses into accepting the mark of the beast or kill me. give us back our freedom. does citizens' arrest mean anything to you? answer the charges. turn yourselves in and appoint me and coleen shin president and vice president. p198.ezboard.com/fsaltydreamsb... john a tate, iii rro comments@whitehouse.org redrodrowen@yahoo.com coleenshin1@yahoo.com saltyfeline@yahoo.com dschlussel@yahoo.com ravenfreebyrd@yahoo.com rubyslippers525@yahoo.com waroc69@hotmail.com rush@eibnet.com news@glennbeck.com mamabelladonna@gmail.com senator@shelby.senate.gov rick.renzi@mail.house.gov www.congress.org
Don'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=donschaeffer">Don Schaeffer Don Posts: 1586 (10/30/06 10:05 am)	Re: i'm outta here Good byyyyyeeeee and god speed.
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1036 (10/30/06 10:09 am)	Re: i'm outta here quid est veritas?... quod me nutrit me destruit.
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1037 (10/30/06 1:09 pm)	Re: i'm outta here P.S. Well, I for one think you for having set the thing up in the first place... you might not think so, but you created something rather unusual here, outside of the poetry itself. thanks.
LetaJo Mod Posts: 1372 (10/30/06 1:46 pm)	Re: i'm outta here best to you, John..Spit was the best there for awhile. Circle of life, blah, blah, blah... What do you mean, "me too," Tasha?
Dorothy'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=dorothydmienko">Dorothy D Mienko Starry Mod Posts: 1053 (10/30/06 3:14 pm)	Re: i'm outta here tossing a few things out do you really believe that thread about ryan laks, poetry thief brought your forum down? or could it have been the way ray was treated- he was a huge part of spit and his many good friends posted here Edited by: Dorothy'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=dorothydmienko">Dorothy D Mienko at: 10/30/06 3:18 pm
Paul'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=pauladrianm">Paul Adrian M Registered User Posts: 58 (10/30/06 3:16 pm)	this forum isn't down however, that bullshit political banter is uneccessary here, and it makes me not want to post or read here either, having to navigate through hoppa's spam. (drolz) so, delete his shit and let's get on with it. cmon
PatrickCarr Registered User Posts: 69 (10/30/06 3:26 pm)	Re: this forum isn't down as i said before -- he's the kinda guy who will clear out a room, right quick. happy trails, cowboy John.
pjsnights '>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=pjsnights">pjsnights ; Mod Posts: 1368 (10/30/06 3:47 pm)	Re: i'm outta here some great, brilliant, amazing & quirky things went on in here. thanks for giving us a place for that to happen, john when you started, you thought it would only last a few months and it went way beyond that.
e'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=ejohne">e john e unModerator Posts: 2333 (10/30/06 3:48 pm)	editorial i have resentment like a bitter taste for some of the petty dimensionless concerns voiced here from time to time soul-sucking they are i tried to build something here passively at times when it was lively but was disappointed in the end then lethargic with that silly old school musical hope in my heart that requiem for a dream "it'll be nice" that sudden windfall of dreams so high that when you fal.... you know? and then i lost that feeling yeah and fuck the pilfering poet thing and all the things we all lost faith in each other 'cause we're so fuckin' dumb and i gave up on dumbness and no one had my back thanks and sorry brought your forum down wow, like greek tragedy or something paul, you're right shit does shine for too long a time and then it's just clutter mea culpa mea culpa yeah nay my same whudda fuggin joke hay nick see ya 'round, we'll get into something new thanks, christine - climb, peak and descend that's how it usually goes (not exactly a circle) unless it gets the proper kick-in-the-pants guess i didn't hit the mark Don! well, blow me down! so nice of you to come visit now scram and so, come, simian king shit upon us all nay my same
Paul'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=pauladrianm">Paul Adrian M Registered User Posts: 59 (10/30/06 4:55 pm)	if you want a real laugh john go listen to mr. schaeffer read his poetry on youtube, lol. he actually says "flippity-flop" in one of his poems, and he's not even talking about his dick! p.s. don't run away from this thing because someone called you elitist, or because someone is dumb enough to a. hate on george bush where nobody cares ie. are apathetic, or b. post an email address to make comments to the whitehouse, with the domain name .gov...if we are in any type of "beastly" danger from the current administration, i sure as hell am not owning up to any dissent or dissatisfaction with their fascist/neo-nazi ways by way of a government sponsore petition, lol, that sounds like a trap to me if i ever saw one! p.s. POETRY!!! go read rilke or something letters to a young poet, i might write letters to an old poet if you drive me that far, or in actuality abandon this as pj has stated, sometimes brilliant and beautifully original haven for the mind, my mind, your mind, anyone's mind really, insomuch as the mind isn't just babbling idiocies and trite already heard stale political banter such as drolzhubris here has done. p.p.s. if i can keep posting here, you cn kp pstng hr rght?
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1038 (10/30/06 6:23 pm)	Re: if you want a real laugh john Hmmm, is that what its about... Some aged Rod McKuen clones bumping you from your board... well comes the revolution...
Oneafterone Registered User Posts: 53 (10/30/06 8:36 pm) ezSupporter	Bump from Page 11 (This message was left blank) Edited by: Oneafterone at: 11/1/06 5:05 pm
fdostoev '>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=fdostoev">fdostoev ; Justin Posts: 1027 (10/31/06 12:28 am)	posturing and announcement of egress? You’re gonna keep on diddling your little inverse pecker till your light goes dim, here or elsewhere, and then nobody’s gonna remember you – yea, maybe your son and ex wife every now and again, but then only fleetingly… Take your two contrived, note needing hands and wrap them tightly around your joke of a dick while you’re still here: give em little skeets of hell you bloated joke. Don’t turn tail like some chemically castrated sex offender. If you were half the fucking poet you think you are, you wouldn’t pick on Don. Who picks on the retarded kid? That’s a rhetorical question you hackneyed twat.
Don'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=donschaeffer">Don Schaeffer Don Posts: 1588 (10/31/06 1:06 am)	Re: i'm outta here I get it. This is a nihilistic forum where nothing makes sense and nothing is sacred, or even has meaning or points to the future. This is the home of plotters and mad bombers. Oh I get it. Targets are everywhere.
Paul'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=pauladrianm">Paul Adrian M Registered User Posts: 60 (10/31/06 1:11 am)	you gotsss it spot on.
drolziaushy Registered User Posts: 122 (10/31/06 8:43 am)	Re: you gotsss it targets are everywhere...duck. xgwxgwxgwxgwxgw xgwxgwxgwxgwxgw xgwxgwxgwxgwxgw wgxwgxwgxwgxwgx wgxwgxwgxwgxwgx
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1040 (10/31/06 12:12 pm)	Re: you gotsss it Justin and Don, you are talking to yourself, he's gone and you are simply taking to yourselves, which is not all that unusual for self styled artists...masturbation doesnt lead to procreation...it doesnt work that way... Y'all doing stuff here to be remembered? By who? This isnt a scrap book,an anthology of poetry or even a telephone book... Its a columbarium that even the nearest and dearest eventually forget to visit on sundays, because a football game is on tv. Its dead, let it rest. Edited by: Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J at: 10/31/06 12:34 pm
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1045 (10/31/06 12:53 pm)	Re: you gotsss it P.S. John... This place was great for a while... Sort of like TBS before it went public and the board of directors took over. Once full of Stooge-a-thons, cheezy horror movies and the Marx Brothers... now nothing but syndications of Sex in the City...

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Author	Comment
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1046 (10/31/06 12:55 pm)	Re: you gotsss it P.S. John again thanks. this place was once like TBS before Turner went public and the board of directors took over.... Once filled with stooge-a-thons, cheezy old black and white monster flicks with bad hungarian accents... now nothing but reruns of Sex and the City...
pjsnights '>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=pjsnights">pjsnights ; Mod Posts: 1369 (10/31/06 3:43 pm)	Re: i'm outta here i certainly didn't abandon this forum because of that plagiarizing stuff. i stayed even though i seemed to be talking to myself most of the time.
drolziaushy Registered User Posts: 131 (10/31/06 3:47 pm)	Re: i'm outta here plagiarism should be legalized. and child molestation criminalized. permissive laws should be criminalized.
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1057 (10/31/06 3:51 pm)	Re: i'm outta here Wrong again as usual.... criminalizing progressive laws makes for more crime... Denmark has massively liberal laws on pornography, and the Danes have stopped consuming it decades ago because it has become boring. The only people who do so are tourists from repressive countries.
drolziaushy Registered User Posts: 132 (10/31/06 4:01 pm)	Re: i'm outta here permissive laws, not progressive. age of consent laws aren't necessary. sex with 17-yos need only be forbidden. permissive laws just confuse legal processes. ..and what do you mean again? i was never wrong in the first place. Edited by: drolziaushy at: 10/31/06 4:02 pm
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1058 (10/31/06 4:05 pm)	Re: i'm outta here Define permissive.
drolziaushy Registered User Posts: 133 (10/31/06 4:17 pm)	Re: i'm outta here allowing. accepting or tolerant of something.
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1061 (10/31/06 8:29 pm)	Re: i'm outta here Define something.
drolziaushy Registered User Posts: 134 (11/1/06 7:49 am)	Re: i'm outta here you define something.
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1063 (11/1/06 11:36 am)	Re: i'm outta here why.. I am not interested in changing something.
drolziaushy Registered User Posts: 137 (11/1/06 12:07 pm)	Re: i'm outta here then you must be a nambla aspirant.
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1064 (11/1/06 1:04 pm)	Re: i'm outta here No, I am just not an idiot.
drolziaushy Registered User Posts: 141 (11/1/06 5:11 pm)	here's some nambla queers...maybe they'll let u join. this is it. here's one of nambla's myspace accts. profile.myspace.com/index...60c3d33e77http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=27291495&MyToken=15170242-9ce8-4242-8b01-5b60c3d33e77">profile.myspace.com/index...60c3d33e77 come terrorize them. where' s START--> source friends and enemies, act now before another soldier dies or another american receives the national id card/mark of the beast. sieze the white house or cut and run and good luck trying to find a place to hide. behold, enduring glenn beck's lies w/o opportunity to re in a comparable forum is torture. glenn beck told katherine harris that he hated politicians, but now he's calling rick asshole santorum, "churchill." what gives? evil gw bush is a dead-satan worshipping, treasonous piece of garbage. he should be tried in the world court for grievous high crimes against humanity and treason against his country and religion. www.happynature.com/ use%20 %20sufi%20islam%20to%20diffuse%20sectarian%20violence. how%20many%20have%20already%20 %20received%20the%20mark%20of%20the%20beast? demand an account. and full disclosure of the plan to establish it into law. homeland security cannot respond to me directly. they have to usurp, hide and deny that i' s START--> john allan tate 111 the only way you can win is to usurp and deceive the masses into accepting the mark of the beast or kill me. does citizens' arrest mean anything to you? answer the charges. turn yourselves in and appoint me and coleen shin president and vice president. or vice versa. www.p198.ezboard.com/fsaltydreams... john%20 %20a%20tate,%20iii rro%20 %20 isanun@happynature.com comments@whitehouse.org redrodrowen@yahoo.com coleenshin1@yahoo.com saltyfeline@yahoo.com dschlussel@yahoo.com ravenfreebyrd@yahoo.com rubyslippers525@yahoo.com waroc69@hotmail.com rush@eibnet.com news@glennbeck.com%20 %20 mamabelladonna@gmail.com%20 %20 senator@shelby.senate.gov rick.renzi@mail.house.gov www.dorothydmienko.com/http://www.dorothydmienko.com/">www.dorothydmienko.com/%20 %20 %20
Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J Junkheer Posts: 1065 (11/1/06 5:26 pm)	Re: here's some nambla queers...maybe they'll let u join. Too busy raising alimony for my five ex wives ptitsa, I am sure you would be happy to go in my place.. after all, "thou dost protest too much" all of those Republican closet cases screamed the loudest against pedophiles and homosexuals were closet cases. you are yelling a lot louder than they did... you are making a very loud echo in your closet. Edited by: Nicholas'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nicholasj@saltydreamsbook2">Nicholas J at: 11/1/06 5:30 pm
Edward'>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=edwardgrim@saltydreamsbook2">Edward Grim Ed Posts: 306 (11/1/06 9:41 pm)	I said GOOD DAY!!! Damn it! This is not the forum for discussing this shit! This is probably why John is leaving. I just think it's disrespectful to do this here! I agree with John and Paul Adrian, this place has turned into a watering hole for political bullshit and nothing but nonesense. I haven't been here long, but I miss the good ol' days with Reid, Zero, bernie and now E John and maybe even Tasha! Fuck it, man. I just miss good poetry; the stuff that defined this place. When I came here, I was fucking writing about daisies for shit's sake. Now I like to think my writing has improved; it's still nothing like their stuff, but at least it's in the same realm. It's just sad this place has gone down the crapper. I'm gone too. adios
Tasha1 '>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=tasha1">Tasha1 ; little suzy sunshine Posts: 28281 (11/1/06 10:09 pm)	Re: I said GOOD DAY!!! daisies.. how cute well i kinda really can't leave. as for hoppa and his political stuff... you would have to know the whole story which involves a mental breakdown and someone not taking his meds. all my so called friends here know what the deal is with hoppa but are on some sorta high and mighty horse. so fuck them and as far as i am concerned this forum is now a free for all. which i will probably end up deleting. no disrespect to onelass, if anyone could whip this place back into some sorta shape she can but i doubt she has the motivation or energy.
Tasha1 '>http://p198.ezboard.com/bsaltydreamsbook2.showUserPublicProfile?gid=tasha1">Tasha1 ; little suzy sunshine Posts: 28283 (11/1/06 10:15 pm)	Re: i'm outta here fuck i don't even have the motivation or energy. thanks pj for all you did here while john was usually gone on one of his pouting fits. you really did 90% of the moderating in here and kept it clean. the women on this site are amazing, the men.. are fucking babies. well i better shut up now. and will probably just delete this whole mess tonite when i get home from work. what do i care, huh?

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shortie

2006-10-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

we love to qualify

it is our ode
aria to sure

but i understand
better when it's
the sun, the tree, the

beauty mark
under your skin

~

10 12 06

early october

2006-10-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

Sonnet

the wonder of the braiding, the set-on
separation of strands, the weave of blue
and sun, the silliest of conceptions
that lives in our blood, arranges our hair,

a braid of wonders, columbus fall kiss
a noisy life two made twisted and brave
one of days uncounted, moments matter
and spirit, spun around new heavens'

head, head out to braid's end, a flourish
will melt, adornment of a party kiss
in each drop of blood alive with breath
adventures of art live with no object

the hearts of hair wave in your calendars
throwaway, throw away all but desire

~

10 02 06

some august poems

2006-08-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

cold start, then warm, title added on

some of us are in the business of creation
chip sculpt and hone and on

but not all of us

but me? a flawed piece lit upon by flecks of trash
intones more in its song than strict adherence to a lone scope of beauty
sings more of what happens in hearts and why we like to remember

this wordfull chipped smear is more me
than stagnant water, lit upon by what one later remembers as
golden rays of the sun

but this is not the point here, though indeed
it may be all there is

the point is
instead of making
i'd rather be made
and forget it

i'm thinking of an old chinese poem in a thick book
of many old chinese poems it closes,
more or less, by letting me know the best thing to do
is to get drunk in the flowers, in so many words, and it's
a pleasing translation i don't drink much

but i drink in her skin even when she's away, i sip her warmth
either by mouth or mind, and there are those flowers

but maybe the point is
no way
am i flipping
through that book

and damn it
i ended up writing this
all flaky chips and smudges
we lose ourselves in echoes
of our own time, our heartbeats,
the way our fingers trace the same lines

instead of lips and softly the curve of an ear
and suddenly somewhere warm
like i was taken there
like i was made
like in flowers

~

8 2 06

blow up dolly

i blow up your photos
and stare

so that you're all a smile
or an eye sees just me
a curve the world's timeline

stopped

save for memory and desire

~

8 6 06

the tango inside

begins a waltz, formal and restrictive,
very described

but soon she swoons in my arms
still holds her own

like she did in
three quarter time

bodies on a brink
the infancy of passion, clothed

and later, nude in faint moonlight,
a childhood lived

in the music made inside,
the tango, the waltz

losing my senses, a child thinks
this ain't for sissies

our flesh ethereal as memory
dances light and dark

in parlor air, sea air,
people, clouds, we drift, now rest

~

8 8 06

like her

i've never been able to picture you
in fog. any good sense in a broadway musical
shines in your eyes, convinces me.
you are not morocco,
but still.

museums of stars compel and delight.
you're on my arm on the
promenade, throaty and spicy.
look. people are wiping the dust away.

when i engage myself, there's usually
a black eye, or blue balls. not engage as in
weaponry, interrogate maybe. humor as vapor:
it rises and sets in your eyes.

a pile of lace like you, there in the corner.
so many miss the little things
the sprouting hearts and weeded passions
(each so precious)

~

8 14 06

The Writing I Had an Idea About

There were pillowcases and thermals and bras
convulsing with wind in varied grey afternoons.

I got earshot and tried to explain,
omitting words every so often in a regular pattern,
and didn't begin to explain until I randomized

the words then the ideas then the writing.
Would that syntax would sometimes have been
as waterbeads on skin or wind on water

I would no longer wish to write. I could point,
or simply listen and there I would be
in this water, in these winds.

~

8 17 06

2006-07-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

too poem in curious style

2006-07-28T14:36:00.000-07:00

suddenly i'm a straightman

hamstrings singled out in the frozen closet
accelerate the flow why do you breathe me
dobbin dobby why do you seethe me gnarl
at the hoop's agenda there is somewhat a prize
isn't there isn't always a prize like last year
i meditated on this year and thought there were
fifty years but honestly dobbin dobby breathe me
there's certainly nothing for lack of a better
time i'll take this, with nuts, kiss me you
gnarl pop the locked closet seethe into rivers
taste the spoon upon your back
the wheel under the spoon
tasty switch left on

~

did i mention i bought a watch?

a blinking thing after swell envelopes
violin wonderboys don't smoke it better
jumped into the fray skid
well yes i was scared roquefort robin
i however like dissipation
the white noise boys so the lithium
keeps it up for three years
time sexpot yes like that
tantric endurance like that
slammin on greasy brakes
i forgot we were fucking
forgot is not the right word
threshold of the gate
set low
does that mean
we come through
or don't come through?
i wore a beanie
on a violin
all smiles
also hard
still
late.

~

4 4 04

*

2006-07-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

artist's rendering

roughht night on crevice road

tittering vexed cornflower

when we stop     hot radio

when we

shoot     floor the heap

     we immortal?

but enought oft

      onions     minuet

postcards

here's rough stuff

voiced     bedridden

orange peppper

thouggh     toniggght

         toniggght

       tonighht for the fable

no orange     red

red fire outside the

sleeeper     olds up

in flames     one

never knows

how it happenspenspenspenspensputerpunsterpenuteruterpenspenspenspenspensputerpunsterpenuteruter

~

7 16 05

thread re-sponse poems

2006-07-22T17:24:00.000-07:00

old pornography

after Napaulm, really...

old pornography taunts me now
but a job's no longer a job
there is light in picking a piece of fruit
with affection i look back
to when i was jobless
but O that magic feeling / Nowhere to go, nowhere to go!

with nostalgia i'm stirring the cream into the coffee
and my fucking legs ache from the work i have
you are nude, in my thoughts,
and we are together

~!~!~

7 22 06

beautypoem

after Dervii and love...

i'm bumped into beauty,
beauty is all there is,
in itself contains
all of the other abstractions,

and the leaves,
tiny leaves that shimmer in their dew
wings as the sun comes up

which doesn't come anywhere
a physical abstraction --

why do we do these things to ourselves
when skin is fragrant
touch remembers other times
our longings create

beauty instead of
my heart of grey sky i love better
something i love
like your breath, leg slung over
and eyes say a kiss is perfect
a kiss like the last, nothing original,
so unlike beauty
so unlike a stinking hole of words

~

7 22 06

at the winery

2006-07-17T22:11:00.000-07:00

implied mantis foma

last night at work
a praying mantis
stood still on the
concrete. i bent
down and placed
my gloved hand
next to it. it hopped
on. i carried it
away to a safe place
a few feet higher
and it hopped off
and stood still.
maybe there's a
scientific reason
for this odd and
solitary thing
jumping on and off
my hand, a sort
of compulsion
of temperature
or vibration or
something i could
never think of.
but now i write
to you, compelled
also by unknown laws
of grace, in bliss
i think of green
sticks, how we talk,
not caring to know
why we write.

~

7 17 06

foma: "harmless untruths" - Kurt Vonnegut

suchacutup

2006-07-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

(raysweat's pressing, remix)

skin hair and everywhere

the thing about Romantics:
we children never had a chance.
it’s just one of those days where
they will probe until they find
the movie many times

look at these hands,
they always think it will end differently,
how they have a mind of their own
the skin of the matching fingernails
pressing the morning
it’s just another snake that hisses

it’s a lock of hair in the bible
long yellow hair
and skin
the skin of an official inquiry
the skin of a faithless grandmother the skin of
a trick of the bible a prayer
sliding into the overhead bin as useless as

the orange cantaloupe moon.
unappreciated coffee.
the ripest grapefruit sun

faith is any book
when you get it on your lips

could be
where the word was open for pressing
you and me against the page

soon there will be your flesh
to sink into (my only interjection! this! right here!)

watch as they try to think
without water
doesn't matter

soon the machine, the parents' unsuspecting backs
will suck us all in

is outside, though,
her duty?
they've seen
behind doing

~

7 15 06

tonight's poem

2006-07-15T02:34:00.000-07:00

recovery

stone galoshes in the corner,
why don't they pick up
after themselves? alright, the acrid
air of the tunnel. okay,
the shiny new train and pressure,
letting off steam. i'm sure i know,
even if i don't remember, and i don't
only mean that in a sexual or scientific way.
i walk days around a broken toy.
i walk and disperse. there are
poems written about this, but this
isn't one. i don't have the time for
the story of my life, you understand:
i don't have time. the unsculpted stones
taken from the cold water of the river.
children finally lift me, no longer children.
my head gone from the blast,
check myself in. i don't have the time for
more than one miracle. by god
she made it good.

~

7 15 06

duover

2006-07-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

johneee/soniii sf july 2006
starting ovah in the middle

look what i found!

2006-06-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

trapped in a moving vehicle (petite tashee remix)

like dead pine needles
and i ain't gonna lie

I only want
the one with waltz hair glowing
drinking Dos Equis
out of a papercup

he touches the root of summer
sleepy face on my nest
red points a fat ghost a white relief

the ship without light
the yellow lights in the peachy glass
the groceries never brought in

sucked off
spun in dirty water

our last
small party
singing that silly song
collecting trolley stops
in this small box

orange lipstick &
nylons

6 16 06

materialized from
bits and pieces of
Tasha Klein poems

blog profile poem

2006-06-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

Backy

I'm 53 years old.
Been living at the same location
for 46 years.

The pictures that you see here, are mostly from the area behind the yard,
called 'The Trail', and beyound that 'The Woods'.

That woods has been severely
over-run with wysteria,
but for as much as I knock it,

it's made for some interesting pictures.

This area was once a huge illegal
dump. I've been chopping up the wysteria

and digging for buried treasure.

8 16 06

~~~

yesterday's poem

2006-06-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

for some reason

i think it true, this saying i've read
or aphorism approximated, maybe just
guessed at

like it was some foreign affair, black tie you know?
this half-remembered sentence
its ghostly grips

something defining poetry
as the way that the silence
before the abyss gets filled

imagine that:
soon strain for any single sound
swear there's a breeze, hiss....
known to be so close
to that dull black soup
swallowing you there may or may not be
clear consomme on the other side

something simic said ...
ack

administered pragmatically
poem abortion makes sense for
some reason
there is still silence

~

6 10 06

bunch of poems

2006-05-29T13:09:00.000-07:00

i decided to post a bunch of poems here today, from the most current ("There You Were") to stuff a few years old ("why you write" for example). just got a bug up my, umm mouse, i guess.

i am a very private person, that's why my poetry is so obscure at times, hawhawhaw. or is it that i am a very confused person, and that's why my poems are so private at times? or am i a person at all? i know i'm people, but am i a person? ya know?

babbleblurblebleep

so long, modesto, you've joined the ranks of the painful...

john e, private first ass

title poem of my first imaginary book

2006-05-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

remainder of thursday afternoon

hue the
stone
window

dirty gold, sun
dust rocktop
after all what

it is hard
stone you
pretty we

want pretty
shop display
pretty window

you are sad
sleepy paper
parasols

relevant hair
sad stone
pretty window

your blue
robe tries
color inside

hair flies some
blue reason blue
soon goes white

~

2004

'nother old un

2006-05-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

mood swing, for PJ

yesterday you were a ROCKET SCIENTIST
today a bridge of sand

someone who doesn't completely understand
told me about this i wasn't there

you mean yesterday when wood rot bloomed
and aphids danced i asked yes he said

yes i exclaimed and the moon the lisps
of peasants the marginal scream

you were there he questioned
are you a ROCKET SCIENTIST

no i admitted but i used to know
a beauty good with figures heart be still

yesterday matter of fact but days are different
all the time hard to understand to fight

hourglasses dripping sand
so different all the time

2001

old poem

2006-05-29T13:01:00.000-07:00

why you write

creating instead of knowing
is a dangerous indulgence. so much
is vicarious, so much self
deceit. create the proper pink

being filled by appropriate size
and everyone's happy staying
down on the farm. but the city
of lust, the world of self, the cosmos of

how a leg swings
is really where it's at; and that
crack in the plaster you saw, until
seeing wasn't enough?

it's still chipped the same way now, long after.
her climax booked your memory
solid for years. there was nothing
more to know, done is done. so you created.

~

2001

old IM cutup

2006-05-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

when i emailed you, you hadn't told me you were a lump, lol

there are cowgirls, sports nuts, lonely old ladies
computers are easy to run, any one can do it
yeah

So, is this like a Jonestown thing

look for women with snazzy webpages and send an email

appear with your name on it, untitled,
walking around and absorbing the world

it said that i had no interest in sports and outdoor activities, that i did nothing most of the time, and that i wrote poetry

But fuck geez,
fuck geez,
fuck geez,

stare at my toe,
stare at my toe,
stare at my toe,
oops

i wrote a letter to adrianna the other day (she had sent me one)

...and some spots in the poem seemed to be the writer peeking out from her work -
not meaning to, the thing just happening. sort of like a private moment, partially
broken from the poem itself. like being able to say to myself: uh huh,
this is this person intruding on her own poem, and not even knowing it.

whopper of pretentious spoiled bratness
with brief flashes of you.

: too fuckin caeful
: careful

yes there are millions of writers out there but honestly,

the whole idea of DATING is alien to me

there are cowgirls, sports nuts, lonely old ladies
computers are easy to run, any one can do it
yeah

:i was wrong, for the life of that ad anyway
:i dunno i dunno...

~

9 12 03

some poem

2006-05-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

Stingray

we aren't words
we aren't animals
pity we're grasping,
needing, ing-ing things

maybe we're not even
things
a tree is a pile of ash
a pretty rock
sooner or later

we cruise the bottom
of each thesis
bump against argument
sometimes heal

i see what has become
i am hearing a word
and it can become anything

paint the sky
bubble water
die in my arms

die in my arms

be silent

~

4 1 06

for paul

2006-05-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

stroboscopic, for Napaulm

also like blood on the sheets in the streets
daybleak no light no heat blackout
sidewalk sweet and cool tap the empty
music's the rule the bottle chimes
she a kaboolanichtinsstoolha wa wa wa wee word
in scent he make the bottle chime the lady climb
she sent to hell a love divine as easy as blood    night    booze
just the topper slack on that a while full throttle
the on the off we got'll blind the joy spasms
now on the street and blotto and the fools    shed    tears
whoever gets 'em or has 'em
takes red beer and pills just to freak the dance
piss pants by chance not ill, yeah    by chance
all the sorrow the minutes of piss and how
there's no sacred fight from the will
poetize sacred prize cow the now's the all
motionless through motion, this
       until we hit the wall

~

1 13 06

posepoem

2006-05-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

Two Heads or What Have You

Most of my friends have two heads, or only one arm, and some of them aren't really my friends, but close enough. More than a few of them have told me things that made my eyebrows curl and smoke rise from my toes. They're my friends because they are like mirrors, and I can see myself: twelve-toed, earless, butt so fat I can't get through the door. It's helpful revelation, visiting friends. Last Tuesday, for a change of pace, I went to see this enemy of mine, and boy were my eyes opened. I'd stutter describing how peculiar he was!

~

3 3 06

don-type poem, john e style

2006-05-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

Most of our assessments are capricious

That may be a good thing in rewarding us
with light lives, a flutter, turn and stare down,
giggle and sweat, forge ahead ahem see the wave
before those on shore, shape it with our ride
our ride, our, our, ou...

I buff my stone. I love this stone,
beyond my understanding,
love it like light, its is
like light's penetrations, its silence
unspoken vows on a deathbed.

~

5 18 06

poem again

2006-05-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

I want

to turn a circle into a square,
a square I think is easier to understand
than a circle and if you stop and make the leap
from square to circle it is easier to understand
the grandeur of a curve complete in itself

even though no start end or stopping,
perfectly balanced, drawn out to its own
inscrutable conclusion. How did he
yank out that rabbit, remain in water, bury
himself alive and remain? Cheap tricks;

wouldn't we rather smooth logic to truth, send it way up
tied to balloons, draw it down to bury in damp dirt,
to know wounds and stars for instance
are also something else

and are more truthful for it.
Look again, and the corners
have disappeared; I want to make corners
disappear, a lovely belief
one might find in a poem.

for simic and neruda maybe

~

5 23 06

some etc. stuff

2006-05-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

Goldie's Paper Appeal

~~~~after Mary Desti's Ass, by Frank O' Hara

In Philly once
we knew the young Andy Warhol
and during my exhibition
of painted tin
he broke down and sighed
that's the way it was in Philly

the way it was in Tijuana
was about the same
except no one saw anyone
(unless they were family or cops)
especially in the tittie bar
you always wondered

in the woods of Westchester
we gave chase through the Tudors
the relentlessness of over-endowment
was gaining on us

no one felt relieved
living in Lauderdale
you are calling it a different run
for me a vacation, light different
from Westchester, vapidly friendly

I was motoring down the campus
in Missouri
when I met Ronnie's brother
and we pretended together
and maybe that's why I liked him

then in Turlock the weight of furniture
broke my neck and my back was worked and crippled
the worst part was the heavy drama
of the train whistle
at night, rolling through my eyes with its blue tartness,
a comforting thing, so debilitating

from Taipei it's a few hours drive
to see the man who can tell you
when you're gonna die. this was all too spooky
and i walked to Cave's Books and on the way back
found a Taiwanese fashion magazine with pictures of hot looking chicks

and Frisco where I saw Rent
and La Boheme both some composers
are so well-liked and some come after
and their afters become well-liked
and some don't and it's all history

i've never had the desire to go
to Paris
what with all the lights and love eternal, maybe the fog
of a hilly English countryside,
driving at night, peaceful and unsettling both, is not knowing enough
to know

~

11 25 04

Mary Desti's Ass

~~~by Frank O' Hara

In Beyreuth once
we were very good friends of the Wagners
and I stepped in once
for Isadora so perfectly
she would never allow me to dance again
that's the way it was in Beyreuth

the way it was in Hackensack
was different
there one never did anything
and everyone hated you anyway
it was fun, it was clear
you knew where you stood

in Boston you were never really standing
I was usually lying
it was amusing to be lying all
the time for everybody
it was like exercise

it means something to exercise
in Norfolk Virginia
it means you've been to bed with a Nigra
well it is exercise
the only difference is it's better than Boston

I was walking along the street
of Cincinnati
and I met Kenneth Koch's mother
fresh from the Istanbul Hilton
she liked me and I liked her
we both liked Istanbul

then in Waukegan I met a furniture manufacturer
and it wiped out all dreams of pleasantness from my mind
it was like being pushed down hard
on a chair
it was like something horrible you hadn't expected
which is the most horrible thing

and in Singapore I got a dreadful
disease it was amusing to have bumps
except they went into my veins
and rose to the surface like Vesuvius
getting cured was like learning to smoke

yet I always loved Baltimore
the porches which hurt your ass
no, they were the steps
well you have a wet ass anyway
if they'd only stop scrubbing

and Frisco where I saw
Toumanova "the baby ballerina" except
she looked like a cow
I didn't know the history of the ballet yet
not that that taught me much

now if you feel like you want to deal with
Tokyo
you've really got something to handle
it's like Times Square at midnight
you don't know where you're going
but you know

~~

a slight aftershock, nostalgia towards small revealed beauties already

2006-05-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

There You Were

a period of morning

Then all
the other sentences

down home country and western miseries
with no truck

I hated the dense metal skies
I had loved before

hated the way
they went dark

There you were
a period of morning
small and round
overtaken by
the sunlight soon due
though my eyes lingered

still upon you

~

5 28 06

month or so

2006-05-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

squeaky transcendance

is all i get. why is nostalgia
easier to take than anticipation?
things i think of have to do with
a calliope and a test signal
mittens winter skies and spring breeze.
there's no looking forward
from the tasks at hand to their completion,
whether your favorite building
will still be there next year,
when your best friends will turn up lost lost,
or pass away, whether you'll ever get it.
ah, but backwards or forwards either
and the dance goes on, i'm wobbling
from americana to nirvana,
grabbing onto all these words
to fill my pipes.

~

4 9 06

Big Business

Anyone can talk themselves into success,
or maybe I should say: everyone does,
no matter aptitude, talent, perseverence -
any of the incidental graces we say we are
blessed with. Talk is the pipeline,
the cargo carrier tough enough to do the job,
if the specs are right. I know I did.

What comes from a pitch, an equation,
a list of rules? I'm not sure. But speech,
yes, speech can bring you face to face
with a monkey, bring you to birdspit soup,
an expense account, a free lunch. Sure,
there is such a thing as a free lunch,
only sometimes it's on the other side
of our world. But forget about all of that,

I know I did. Tired of talking opposing language,
tired of watching people dance steps that rock
from harpsichords to harmonicas, Bach to blues;
this is not talk, this is not success. Success comes

when we finally shut up, stop flying, just breathe,
only look into green eyes, strain for the whisper
which makes us foreign, yet for that straining, and
for the listening, remembered perhaps, sold without
a sale, dare I say loved.

~

4 20 06

I Want to See You Naked

And it's this imagination that's interesting --
even more so at this moment
when I haven't yet seen you naked --
more so than what you look like
at this moment, possibly naked.

But I'm not seeing you, right now,
even if you're naked. And I want
to see you naked, and I have to be there,

no imagination. Though now I imagine
what it's like, seeing you naked:
you stand, you sit, and oh yes
you turn slowly.

My whole imagination is in slow motion:
your hand moves slowly to me,
you press your body to mine,
I smell you as we kiss and your scent
comes to me in bright wisps,
foreign, slowly overtaking.

Even if you tripped out of your undies
and lost your balance and steadied yourself
in front of me, quick quick quick --

I want that more than imagination, I want to see
you fall upon me naked, my body wants to see.

~

4 28 06

Sky

I'm the grey smudge band
between green treetops
and sky, something doomed
to always be, something
of my own making, sky-drunk,
life-bloomed. A hand reaches
up past life, into nothingness,
tells me Enjoy. Some
whispers: Unbutton her
here, under my tree, in my air.
Dip your grey tongue in my dirt,
kiss her everywhere I tell you,

make her disappear,
disappear each other.

I'm hearing my voice
it's me speaking now
to myself cultivate
irrigate sun-touch
us,
sky.

~

4 28 06

quiet bedroom

contrapuntal
folds of curtains

sheets gliss
tickle the hot ivories mama

everywhere
breeze touches
on fire

moments
we are absent:

trills in melody

tongue the final chord

~

4 28 06

to myself, at 52

there are times when you tell yourself
you're not old, you still struggle to prove this
but somewhere a voice mimics your own
and the sounds it makes hope for a speedy end,
hope that it all ends soon - the struggles, you mean,
all you meant were the struggles. there are times
you look in the mirror and, except for the wrinkles
and sag and missing hair, you can still see the guy
ready to rock downtown, surprise a girl, drink all night.
but don't pull out the old pictures, that really was
another guy. not too long at that mirror, either,
by yourself, in your bathroom. there is no one else,
and so no passion or conflicts or joy. dangerous ground, this
longing come by unexpectedly. age is one thing, look around,
it's everywhere this decline of light but this is the opposite,
isn't it, this true image, this reflection you can't make sense of
for it's always changing, and never for good. too long here
and you'll be nothing which is sometimes what you want,
isn't it? 52 means nothing, you mean nothing.
you mean this nothing to no one, not even as one nothing
might comfort another, your pleas for senselessness
echo and disappear. instead you get numb, don't you,
when what you want is to disappear within another,
at least, if not disappear into the clouds over the water
near the trees. disappear anywhere, then, anywhere
but into yourself. you don't know cold, you don't know green,
yet you can move as though there were a destination,
warm soft arms around you, haunted by a body's fragrance,
numbed by the wait for the next joy, the next conflict,
numbed when you get there too. you don't have a hard time
convincing yourself it's all temporary, do you, except when
in dim light dreams of flesh turn any way you want them to
and you usually want them to turn to embraces,
and you still won't disappear, will you, you'll keep
your eyes open against her skin and detail will disappear
all the frustration and fear and bits of nothingness
taken away by an impulsive lick of a shoulder
thought circling tomorrow's specifics
mirrors at 52 a woman can
give you the world see?
it's over there.

~

5 1 06

What is Music

Examine ice crystals. No, don't. They won't be there, their symmetries brought down, like what grime on the windshield does to sense of purpose. They're now dead words, these patterns. They might be meditations if you're lucky. But mostly not what they are, by the time you're true with them. Only if you're apt to see angels who scare you or a moon hiding behind a moon will you survive to understand the patterns and how every circle is different, how they're spinning wheels chattering with basball cards, rolling away. Windless harmonicas settle for second best, no choice in the matter. Blow your harmonica, son.

I've written my first symphony, alone by an icy window. I'll admit there are some rough measures and questionable melodies. I hardly disturbed the ice crystals though, hardly aware of spiky echoes and their godly roundnesses. I think I'll get rid of the second movement, I think that's where I touched the glass. Across the street a little boy in a red cowboy shirt stuffs his hands in his pockets. It's cold and he has no jacket. He's saying something. I'm hearing What you think are questions are not questions over and over. Mother arrives, singing showtunes. Why is tombstone a word, what are we saying? Is song brought down to this? I love the ambivalence that fuels my art. I get it from half-looking at ice. Sometimes being sneaky is appropriate. Beethoven loved big fat notes, big stupid chords, and look how many of us went along with it. This windowglass, frosted with trill upon trill mathematical, white prison of soul heat, melts when I touch. It's the just the way it gets sometimes, here in this trad kazoo, limegreen scherzo, icy conundrum.

~

5 2 06

Critique, like love, is constructed of apparent contradictions

I read some of his stuff, this poet.
I enjoyed him before I knew who he was.
I'd tear it all apart now, even having to check
some books on poetics for new ways to prove
how he has failed in his work. Once perhaps he
failed you, even if this has somehow
brought you to me. One type of critic or poet
would use irony to turn and unlock
this situation. Another tears through the work
like fangs through the dark,
don't see blood, but you bleed.
I have the silly grin.

O those poets, I'd smirk,
or jovially concur, or slip someone
a tickle, some sharp abstraction everyone
knows they should turn away from,
look for postmodern glittering rainbows,
some drug hallucination    they know
they're being tampered with
and so on. But, you know,
I have the silly grin.
See you Saturday?
Though we don't dance, well,
you know.

~

5 3 06

What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

Look me up, Loch Ness, spotted a yeti
New as I am to the world of the chuckle
Things get you through, like rice and spaghetti
If they ask what I do, I swashbuckle

I don't have the nuts to be a Svengali
My lurid romance steams one hot tamale
Want two, or three, and to be obscure
Zen moments bloom from each nonsequitur

My need, my need, is to have a spoon feed
In red-bubbled hot soup de jour
A rollicking bald tumbleweed

~

5 4 06

quick poem

i
was
thinking
about you

when the sky
went dark
but lit by
moon

how
angels sing!
another
matter

lit by spring
i nearly didn't
notice until
some po
et wrote
some t
hing

that triggered me i read it
on an internet poetry board
actually this whole thing is a lie

the
fancy
dancing
softly
soft

inside i'm
roaring i'm
thinking
of you

~

5 5 06

then there's this

time in my life when nothing works
and it lasts for years all those years
i find without looking    people passing
stores where the signs are all crooked
churches locked and fenced    i have no
notion to carry me further along in these
discoveries    who sent me and where do i go
schools have different names and my fingers
not properly calloused to play the guitar
in those years when nothing works i can't
sing    i like to walk at night all night
this time in my life when there are no incidents
only weeks or more at a time    this sort of time
imbeds itself in every moment now
not days or hours
but moments    a little piece of a missed funeral
all of this time

~

5 5 06

Of minds that would be entranced

We're in the middle of it,
and pretend it's over there.
We can see it over there,
but I can't see it in you
nor you in me, except for
its action which we see
over there. We buy supplies
at Walmart. Nothing so
Americana to me than black
lung and rolling hills with
that smoke and fog that
really does shroud. Even though
life was tough before wouldn't
you like to stroll down a gaslight street
garter on your arm, suspenders,
gal gettin' saucy and that new
perfume. Even the drugstore
was poetry, written not for poets
but for the fun of coming thirsty
to its fountain, downing new elixirs,
taking home notions. Did this all happen,
the parades and barbershop quartets,
talkies, ads folks really listened to
no matter if they're myths? I buy
supplies at Walmart, which we
see over there, not in here.

~

5 7 06

one moon's

phases pull
me to you

and when
you're not
around i

dance inside
and under
not even
moving

moonlight
in your eyes
a few miles
away

your colors
are perfect
pastel against
the real

the chill is
in the air

all is metaphor
spanish
in the park
cold coffee
and cream

embrace me
once more
by share of night
i touch you
soft fingertips
bright

~

5 8 06

dare i sign off with love

there's a grey-green balloon that popped
and all the monkeys that came out
weren't monkeys yet, they were still
children, blonde-haired, green-eyed,
chipped tooth and such. destined for monkeydom
these childbeasts boarded a train
and from its windows they saw golden light
curve in on itself, shapes left their feelings
behind, abstracted themselves, sent themselves off
to some other Smithsonian, an American symptom,
this growth towards monkeydom. at some point however
nearly every childbeast has a spot of recognition
as to who they were, what they were becoming and
how to stop it. and this spot is usually over their shoulder
and to the right, maybe not, who cares. because
this is like a book of monkeys already, full of the feelings
left behind. now who's going to clean up all this balloon mess?

~

5 12 06

The Legend of Starbucks

Twice or more upon a city
An apparition appears
We partook of its potions
White cocolate and strawberries
Forsooth! The dragon
Singes us with scrutiny
CDs at the counter
Drags its tail into the night
Ever after winds blow hot
Shrill with the change we hold
The fool's hymn just a ditty
Muffled in the crowd's noise
Of this second's century
Respite on the way
Busy and chatty

~

5 12 06

for a while

there's a spot under the moon
god misses small fishes still
in its light otherwise in a splash
heat drips from echoes
now how does it do that?
drips to sear my skin
and my eyes and every
word i will write

~

5 13 06

empty basket through frozen foods

you can keep
the movie, i'll mail you the book
after i finish it, is that okay?
or i'll bring it to you somewhere,
meet for lunch maybe,
or a long walk through the dark,
maybe catch a movie,
maybe talk.

~

5 14 06

Lost My Footing for a Moment

Last night at the winery I had to listen to the guys talk
about guns, cars and racists. I couldn't tell you anything
about gauges, rims and why the government is in a rush
to work the southern border, and not say jackshit
about the north. Pussy and reverse discrimination don't usually
engage me in themselves. But I'm thankful
a woman comes along once in a while whom I can adore,
and if all that black/white/brown stuff is for real
at least I can ignore it, and sometimes it even makes it easier
to see more of what some people really are,

just like pussy will teach you things you won't learn
anywhere else. I can overlay this with all sorts of curliques
and Viagra and what all else, but let's touch its beating heart:
before and within skin there is love, always. Take it as a given,
love for friends, family, love for beloved, all sorts of love.
How could you not feel it?

There's routine begatting other routines, and the routine of
falling into a routine begats another you. Word association is a cruelty too,
and suddenly we realize it's going on deep in our muscles,
even our eyes blink consistant with where we might be
who we might be with, and our larger shadows are even easier to spot.
Spics and porch monkeys, ragheads, fags, wetbacks, whiteboys and Gramps too.
How an arm goes up if there's too much disagreement,
decibels displace grace. Put a newspaper in front of my face

and try to remember her scent, buoyancy in her eyes
right down to her belly, remember, then it's gone,
and a high level alarm starts to ring, break is over,
fucking only an adjective, all the compressors are running
still there's silence upon silence, scent and its memory have no sound.
We all submerge again, swim in what we don't even know we love,
or what we love and cannot have, silence and the work gets done.

~

5 17 06

a return to the cave

2006-04-03T14:09:00.000-07:00

first grow a soul

plant a smooth seed
in jujubees Please
moju jujo     tear
the hair out     weave
the sweep second hand
tapestry dance     nothing
as heavy as fleabite, stubbed toe, no one arrived
at your party     and who
are you jomo juju
waving fingers make my impressions leaden
never so small as full
or full as empty

a windup chatter on chipped flaked table
and its ingenuity     words
suggesting taffy cottoncandy caviar and SUVs
pre- and sub- text hot mojo bad juju
you were watching the watch
you watch it in your dream
where your job is to stamp
an origin into each plastic toy
what comes down the line
before it cools
driver, spook the horse
enough poetry, into
the seen of dark

~

4 3 06

feet drug

2005-11-02T10:45:00.000-08:00

feet drug

in my world surreal has three "r"s and stones still shift in the mountains but O joy nothing ever upsets the junkman's cart as it moves, light as falling birds.

clang clang summoned ashore clop clop by a rusty bell a cowbell a long line of cowbells strung on an old piece of twine, wind picking up pregnant with rain.

dream stones fearless of mixing in the rain in the wind the horse tore choruses refrains junk the only autumn i know.

old men plan walks sit to soup etc. and something not understood takes them over, trilling tunes sour from venus roads to voided walls.

three "r"s and all i miss you, i miss myself, i miss

when it was like a cartoon, something to sweeten the blend

~

11 2 05

*

2005-10-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

weatherbow years

tell me you don't love sound and how it turns
into royal blue or
                               a slur you suffered
many years ago      weatherluck weather
bourbon weatherbow years      i've changed so

ghosts careen aged and blended      and brittle
so brittle when i knock against myself
it's pick up sticks sharp snapped pick up sticks
dry riverbed betty summoned ashore

her bimbo waits as koko waits      and me
weatherborne years     as if weather brought time
one day the next is enough      after that
you're finished you want those fleischer houses

and streets      those comical curves      those mutters
under breath that black and white that faded

~

10 4 05

*

2005-09-30T11:21:00.000-07:00

all american

there's always the recipe on the box
involving cream sauce soup in casserole
you should be meditating on betty
boop, where our culture came from, where it went

you've never been the modern wife, though tipsy
at times, rusty can of soup, walk so fast
you say should i? when it's full speed to dream
i find this attractive in a woman

what i mean is: spines slip through venus walls.
on voided road we meet them, who are we?
junkman always had a hanson cab heart
on the street where you lived your delight

a flash of leg and garter for good luck
coffee good any time, calm the tempest

~

9 30 05

explosion on the freeway

2005-08-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

i was afraid it was a gunshot
right through the rear window maybe it missed
me by a few inches but there wasn't
any projectile and no blood and i passed
two exits doing 70 before i was able to turn off
to check i kept going a while i don't know why
little pieces of glass kept falling even with the car stopped
the thing just exploded i found no trace
of anything like a decision made
without concern but based perhaps
on most important concerns of
engineering and stress and maybe somehow
there was something tossed at the car
something that shattered the glass and so
based perhaps on doing damage then
running away i stood in the 7-11 lot
thinking of when i tied my brother to a tree
my dad drinking buttermilk with his lunch sandwich
and his ulcer my mother that time she left
with the suitcase she always had ready
for those hospital trips but this time she left
because her own words argued against her
because the laundry needed to be hung out the window
because my father said this and that
and i said this and that
and the house was quiet your mother,
my father said softly, your mother
and our hands were folded for two days
as she hid out upstairs with the old italian lady
the guys who replaced the glass found nothing inside either
it just exploded everything fractured
then new glass installed so we could see

read this poem! 8/27/05

2005-08-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

Shane Allison's Poem for Lee Ann Brown

east/west

*

2005-08-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

In You That's Not Me

Unquenched by fog this is

the manner in which it is said.

My eyebrow droop does tricks,

want to watch? I've made such sad

the willow a medal returned to the widow.

Damp passage to rub your shoulders up on.

In a moment there's light,

a symptom of less-concerned, less conscious.

It turns over.

I mistake the fog, think it you. My fog, so familiar.

I want fog as god,

teach myself the gradations of the sublime

to know every tremor. Only one who loves

knows you are microtonal.

My fog is not you.

But still in the still

ness of fog there pass cloud echoes,

void drifting in light, assurance:

these are like you. You were not made

to be sweet, nor dark. A twitch of your leg

should be enough, my eyes are closed, you draw me in.

The mess I've made on your leg glows,

do you remember me not saying it,

or what you said before your face?

Well, the fog is not cryptic,

not at least as a wading pool, or the wooden pews.

So we substitute one word for another, one thing.

We're no smarter for it,

and then we waltz it away,

contest it's alive. I've thought of you

as frail,

wet seeds without sun,

possessed as another,

kneeling before me.

Picture one day your heart giving out,

you sit at a seaside window and sigh.

You then have no clothes,

you're touching yourself.

I tell you Go On.

Fog over the water, feel it?

It's not my fog, in you

that's not me, me, you.

But yes you me me you.

*

2005-08-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

tiny cityscape

i imagine a day in the city
rain, rushing to catch a bus

and see this kid standing alone
small and his arms held straight

and he cries and cries as people
skirt glances down at him (and as

i watch), and the rain is louder,
i can't hear the bus

or the cars or anything, he cries
and looks around him slowly,

grey and black raincoats, dungarees,
and i'm still running for the bus

but slowly now, maybe that's why
the rain hits me harder now

and none of this happened, i only imagine it
and see then myself hop on that bus

if i thought about why i rode off
this would read differently

from the start. just remember
how he looks, this boy you see.

~

SPIT TOON at Salty Dreams

2005-08-06T06:16:00.000-07:00

INCEPT DATE 8 5 05

Post poetry, crit poetry, ignore poetry.
Practice tolerance until it hurts, but be assured
we wish no pain. Hip us to your faves,
discuss closure, explain again why verse
isn't necessarily poetry, why old words
or unique words or cliches
or the annotated arcane masterful mishmash
long poem haiku bouts-rimes
this-is-my-life-and-i'm-sticking-to-it
minimalist maximus dream poem
poem is/is not valid. What would
an Ashbery/Collins collaboration
read like? We'll never know,
but we might wanna post on it,
for fun. This is getting hokey;
I hope you get the picture by now.
The ubiquitous challenge, judged,
unjudged, begrudged, desludged,
sized-up, prized and forgotten too.

http://p198.ezboard.com/fsaltydreamsbook2frm37

Further Back

2005-08-06T06:14:00.000-07:00

I have a picture of my dad
looking very small, standing
in snow on a mountaintop
in Iceland,
and it has always been surprising to me
that he looked so happy
bundled up in the cold

later he drove officers around
through Europe, the
Netherlands, he'd say,
Brussels, the Netherlands,

and he liked telling me about
some three day pass and I imagined him
in grey rain, eating hot soup
maybe trying to forget that
what the fuck am I doing here?
feeling, cold sense of alone in the snow
maybe more tremble than smile
I kept this little black and white picture
in many old wallets, along with one

of my mom young and standing in a ray of light
in front of a wooden wall on the back porch
of the top floor apartment i was born into,
her dress a sadder sense of gingham now seen,

secure for the moment both parents immigrants
these two pictures always together in old wallets
snow and sad sunray before I was born this is
how they were before I was born

~

8 5 05

read this poem!

2005-07-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

if you're here welcome.

john e

The Village Idiot OPA (old poem alert)

2005-07-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

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 ------

2005-07-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-17T06:04:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-10T07:39:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-05T10:02:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-04T07:02:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-03T12:47:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-02T09:56:00.000-07:00

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"

2005-07-02T09:36:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-02T07:42:00.000-07:00

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)