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For Immediate Release guest-edited by Steven Hirsch |
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Volume II, Number
6 |
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Jack Foley: Two translations Eliot Katz: Five poems Janet Hamill: Six poems Kirpal Gordon: Raid Kills Bugs Dead Anne Gorrick: Three poems Steven Hirsch: Consultant Enemy Richard Rizzi: Three poems J. J. Blickstein: Three poems Sue McKechnie: Four poems Gary Gach: Six poems |
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two translations |
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| Spring Song
a translation of the anonymous Medieval poem, "Lenten is come with love to towne" Spring is come with love to town The red rose puts on her hue The moon sends forth her light "Lent" = "Spring," from Old English "lengten," when the days lengthen (lent/lengthen): "it is the period of 40 weekdays before Easter, a period of restraint (originally observed by fasting from dawn to dusk, as the Muslims still do in the month of Ramadan), its duration suggested by the 40-day fasts of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus"--Joseph Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. "Spring"
is named for the time the plants "spring
up," as "fall" is the time when
leaves and fruit fall down. There is, according to
Shipley, an etymological connection between the
words "spring" and "speak"--both
going back to the same Indo-European root. The idea
of beginnings. Cf. Chaucer. Sea Breeze The flesh is sad, alas! and I've read all the
books. Brise Marine La chair est triste, hélas! Et j'ai lu tous les
livres. Stéphane Mallarmé (1865) * Mallarmé’s commentators seem not to have noticed the extraordinary pun at the conclusion of “Brise Marine.” In the penultimate line, everything is lost (“Perdus”): there are no masts (“mâts”) and no isles (“îlots”). Yet, in a sense, the concluding word gives the poet back the very things he has lost: the sound of “matelots” (“sailors”) contains “mâts” + “îlots.” The “lost” masts and isles are not restored to the poet as entities, only as names, echoing words. But that is all they were to begin with. In a way, the proper translation of the concluding line is “But, oh my heart, listen to the song of ‘mâts’ + ‘îlots.’” One can sense in this early poem—written when the author was in his twenties—an extraordinary shift from a focus on “things” to a focus on “words.” If, from one point of view, the poet’s fear of action propels him towards language, from another point of view the poem enunciates a new mode of beauty. My translation attempts to include the pun. |
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five poems |
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| Ea
Everything starts with water—love, jealousy,
the high tide of rebellion, Y2K Glitches Weather-detecting programs on 5 nuclear reactors
shut down For Denise Levertov That was some principle attached to those bones When a Double Negative Isn't a Positive Overheard on West Broadway, Letter to Allen from North America's Skull July 2001 Allen, I'm sitting in straight-backed chair Allen, I think you'd be happy your younger
students & friends Did you ever think we'd elect a president dumb as
GW? Up here in mountain forests, there are no
newspapers, Up here I don't know who's winning at Wimbledon, So, I'm doing alright—better than most in our
nation, While I'm up here for two weeks breathing clean
mountain air Allen, we still need you, your ideas, your
imagination, your poetry, Allen, I miss our once-every-few-months political
discussions |
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six poems |
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| Out of the Blue
The horses that carry me
along have
brought me this far For my horses
flutes and drums have always urged them As I watch them turn out to
pasture a fresh
mount is needed Bursting with the muscle and wind of Al Borak
Black Beauty Body of Water Standing by a body of water. Moving or standing
still Lost in a mirror of infinite margins. Ever
sounding Baptized by a court of angels. In sympathetic
response Standing by a body of water. Moving or standing
still Blue Boy Weary of waiting, blue boy. Following the map Shaped by the charity of the firmament, blue boy The Green Harmonica The mouth begins a movement The mouth begins a movement Green wings beating against the ceiling Spellbound Spellbound. words escape me. Going out as if a
flame In this transport the temperature is dropping.
Below the roof Spellbound. Words escape me. Going out as if a
flame In this transport the temperature is dropping Seven Veils Rain, rain sweeps through the streets A castle keep Rain, rain shrouds the buildings A horde of sparrows Rain, rain makes the heavens clear A viper in hiding Rain, rain the wind is strong A mystery vessel Rain, rain heavier now The steadfast light of a hermit's lamp Rain, rain here to stay The evening dancer Rain, rain makes a soft asylum A map of the night in autumn |
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Raid Kills Bugs Dead |
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Take
me back on Hyndeford Street ---Van Morrison, "Hymns to the Silence" I She never expected her radio to talk back to her. "Go ride the music." What was that supposed to mean? Lying in her bed, she heard the clock tick and thought of him. She talked the words of the Cyndi Lauper tune her favorite station played, "Caught up in circles / confusion is nothing new." She had been addressing the radio. But that was nothing new, either. Her boyfriend was so long, her family so far away and the people she worked for so utterly stupid that she just needed to talk back at something. So a few weeks ago, she began bitching up at the radio, reprimanding it for playing the love songs that brought memories of her boyfriend back to her. But when she got over what a pathetic jerk he had been, the need to talk or sing or squawk didn’t go away. It only increased. She focused at first on the commercials that drove her nuts, especially those insipid jingles for insect repellant or soap suds. But soon she was commenting on everything. She found herself looking forward to these chats with her radio. After she put to bed the two spoiled brats she nannied, she would repair to her garret above the rest of the family’s second floor bedrooms. There she would turn on the most obnoxiously chatty station she could find, light up a reefer and go at it with inspired monologues embracing themes of love’s regret and thought control, the nature of time, the relationship between emotional repression and the pop hit. Then at half past eleven, she would ring a bell and like Van Morrison sitting in the silence that befell the city of Belfast, she would wait in her lonely London tower for her favorite radio program, "The San Francisco Sixties: Music Out of Time, Time Out of Mind." She would hum along for awhile. Then she would fall asleep. But now she was wide awake. She could not deny that the radio had spoken to her. Maybe she better change stations. Justina Sotheby was unprepared for ghosts whispering incomprehensible imperatives across invisible airwaves . Born in Little Compton in Cornwall, she was shy and tall, twenty-seven years old and never been to church. Though she thought London was a great town, her days were spent like this: she cooked, she cleaned, she walked the ingrates from Hyde Park to Portobello Road. She used to go to Ronnie Scott’s to listen to jazz with her boyfriend Shivji Lingam on week-ends. He was great fun to be out with, and she learned to love him. But that was before he had got deported for interpreting too freely the phrase "public domain." His video business went from boom to bust overnight. So come night time, she put the kids into their pajamas, persuaded them to give their unresponsive parents a peck on the cheek, tucked them into bed and read to them until they fell asleep. Then she would slip up to her solitude. There she would piss and moan to the radio until the Grateful Dead, Santana, Ali Akbar Khan, It’s a Beautiful Day, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Jefferson Airplane came up over the airwaves. She would fall asleep to their inspired, genre-defying anthems of the era. But tonight she remained awake. II "Pardon me, Justina," the man of the house said, shaking her gently. She had fallen asleep in his study. "I say," he said. He looked over the titles of the books that lay strewn all about the desk where her head lay as well and added, "Quite an interesting bit of research you’re doing. May I ask what for?" Among the cases of auditory hallucinations that she had read, an interview in the London Times with the American poet Allen Ginsberg was particularly fascinating. Not only had he claimed to have heard the voice of William Blake speaking to him out of time in his Harlem apartment! He further suggested that the late eighteenth century London poet and engraver, who also dealt in rare and obscure manuscripts, held the connection to secret mystical traditions that began in ancient Persia and spread everywhere over the centuries, flourishing in India and at least in the West until the Vatican’s Council of Nicea got hold of most of the books and had a bonfire. Chief among these officially discredited notions was that the unifying principle of all life could be transmitted from the mystic to the world through word and music. Later she would discover the East Indians called it "riding the laya" (Sanskrit, for the sound current) and the West Africans/Haitians called it "riding the loa" (Creole, for the god who lives in the rhythm of the drum). But that night all she knew was she had stumbled upon something important. When she read that Ginsberg thought "Howl" had found such success on the West Coast because in his estimation San Francisco was the only American city laid back enough to hear clearly what had broken through his long-lined rants and invocations, she knew this was somehow related to the secret message the radio had whispered. Now awakened from a dream of tribes of people gathering in a beautiful park as the sun burned off the fog, she asked her employer, "What does it mean if the radio says, ‘Go ride the music?’" "I’m afraid it means you better start looking for another job. You’re fired." At another age or in another life, Justina Sotheby might have been crushed. Or furious. Or full of self-pity. Or frightened that she were losing her mind. Or pleading with the moron for more time. But she took it all in stride. Packed her two bags and said to the kids, "Good-bye." And she didn’t start looking for another job either. She rented a flat near the library. Every day she pored over books by or about Ginsberg and Blake. Every night she told the radio what she made of it all. Every aspect of their lives---libertarian politics and religious experiences, bohemian lifestyles and wild sources of inspiration---seamed a conviction that the universe and herself in it was all-of-a-piece, what the Indian philosophers called non-dual, what the Chinese called tao. Before the first week was out, she stopped worrying about being nuts. Before the second week, she felt inextricably related to her field of cognition, not fragmented into the conveniences of language like perceiver/perceived. By then her readings had shifted from mediums and seances and apparitions and the occult to clairvoyance and extra sensory perception. The literature was confirming her suspicion. It turned out that many normal people in normal lives with normal jobs experienced para-normal events. It wasn’t that odd things happened; it was what people made of it. Most people were afraid. So they denied it. And then the odd things stopped happening. But not in her case. Although the radio gave no more messages, things in her life got more related, woven together, almost as if filling in a pattern or plan. Later she would wonder if this had more to do with pouring over Plotinus and Jacob Boehme, Shankara and Nagarjuna, Lao Tzu and Li Po. But now she felt that what she was looking for was also looking for her. Had she conversed with anyone on a regular basis besides her radio, it would have been clear that she was changing. For one thing she stopped complaining. Even at the radio’s insipid jingles and banal commercials. She had never thought of herself as a pout, but a generic woe-is-me used to spring up as if a reflex to accompany certain little things that didn’t go her way. Especially in matters of love and work. But now she wondered if this reflex were not the real problem. And as for things going her way, she was profoundly glad to have no idea what her way looked like any more. She thought such a phrase not just mere arrogance or ingratitude at being alive but a refusal to consider opportunities hidden within apparent adversity. The world was full of omens. She drifted within preparations she could not fully comprehend. It wasn’t that she had proof that things were turning out for the best. Or that God really loved her or that piety was the best policy. It was that the tyranny of "for the best" stopped having any validity. It all balanced out. As for God, the idea of a personal savior seemed like legs on a snake. And as for piety: sentimental and compensatory. Let pass but a few of the ego’s never-ending, nanny-spoiled demands, and the fear of death stopped running the bloody show. One could take a deep breath and everything fell in place! No, the only outward sign that anything were happening to her at all was that she grew less fastidious about her personal appearance. It wasn’t that she became a smelly, pimply misfit, only that she didn’t meet her smell or her pimples with horror. She had begun to take it all in stride. And to stop thinking about how others wanted her to look when she dressed for the day. "That’s a lovely sun dress you’re wearing," the librarian said to her one day. Was he flirting with her? "This old thing?" she said and smiled. "Pardon me, but we here at the library have taken notice of you. We have a proposition for you to consider. Would you care to join me for tea?" Later that afternoon, over a pot of Earl Gray , scones and clotted cream, the head librarian, a gaunt and quirky man whose name pin read Humphries, smirked. "May I be candid?" "Please." "You were weeping yesterday as I passed. Are you all right?" "Yes, of course." "I must say, with the sunlight streaming through the window over your face, it left a singular impression." "Tears of joy then." "Inspired by something you read perhaps?" "Yes, actually. A remark the Buddha was alleged to have made." "Do you recall it?" "‘When I attained enlightenment, don’t think anything was attained!’" "Indeed. Puts the whole bloody bullocks to rest, that." "Sorry?" "All this frightful ambition to get something. Deadly business, really. Especially in matters of religion. Please, have another scone. When the only admission we can make with any certainty is that we don’t know a damned thing. Speaking of which, I don’t believe I know your name." "Justina Sotheby." Humphries paused, looked very grave and considered what to say next. "Odd." "My name?" "Yes. I’m the president of a meditation society known as Just So." "I thought you were with the library." "Yes, well, would you like to hear about Just So, Justina Sotheby? "All right." "We take our name from the state the Buddha dwelled in---tathagata---that is, a condition we might translate as suchness, or as we like to say, just so." "That is an odd coincidence, the first syllable of my names," she admitted. "Coincidence? Odder still, the remainder of the letters of your name." "How’s that?" "Well, after Just So, all you have left is the bay in. Cockney for the Be In." "Be In? What’s that?" "The first Human Be In took place in San Francisco, also known as the city by the bay. At Golden Gate Park, gateway to enlightenment." "I should like to go there then." "To San Francisco? The Just So Society would like you to represent us there." "And how ought one to represent you?" "We need someone of an agreeable and calm nature, you see, one who won’t take sides at this sure-to-be argumentative conference, one such as yourself who could greet regret as one would happiness, who might ‘cast a cold eye on life, on death.’" "As in, ‘Horseman, pass by?’" she quoted Yeats’s last line of his epitaph. "Yes, exactly, I should say. Is traveling tomorrow okay?" III The next day, given the address of the Drake Hotel, Justina kissed Humphries on the cheek and boarded the noon flight for San Francisco out of Heathrow Airport, compliments of the Just So Society. Travelling first class in a bold new mini skirt, sipping Scotch, she looked down on the Atlantic Ocean, all blue in green, from the height of 25,000 feet. Was this what an embryo feels, she wondered, floating in the womb? She felt serendipitous. She had never flown in a jet before. A voice came over the public address. "Cooperate and you won’t die. We are hijackers in the name of the Council of the Pure Ones!" Then she heard what sounded like a gun shot. A moment later the door separating first class from the cockpit opened. "You," a bearded man said to her at gunpoint, "get in here." He handed her a first aid kit and pointed to the bleeding leg of the captain. While Justina stopped the blood, cleaned and dressed the captain’s wound in the tiny compartment, the three hijackers argued among themselves. "You shouldn’t have shot him, asshole!" the tall one said to the beard. "Shut the fuck up!" the woman added, "Don’t let the passengers hear you." "Look," the beard said, "only in the face of catastrophe can we know if our devotion is sincere." It soon was discovered by everyone on the flight that the three were American Buddhists practicing a radical meditation technique called Contra-Tantra. Acts of terrorism were performed to help the practitioner confront the Madyamika doctrine that every proposition is ultimately unknowable. Only by an act of faith can one "swim across the ocean of fire, into the company of the holy." It also was discovered that the flight was full of Buddhists of all stripes. Unlike the quietistic Humphries, many of these people were boisterous, full of official and contradictory opinions as well as religious paraphernalia---mala beads, incense, holy pictures, little shrines that popped out of attache cases. "Council of the Pure Ones? What the hell is that?" "I’ve never heard of such a thing." "They’re performance artists, not Buddhists." "Artists? They’re bullies." "Who are we to judge?" "They don’t even meditate." "Maybe not the same way you do." "The path is easy for those without preferences." "Meditate, schmeditate! You can’t go having a jihad to prove you’re pure." "Who said anything about jihad?" "Don’t hak me chaynik, who do you think invented hijacking?" "So now the Arabs are to blame for this. Will wonders never cease!" "Listen to me. Condoning this in the name of any religion is nuts." Before long, the hijackers got involved in the discussion. Perhaps it was their automatic weapons or the fact that they had shot the captain in the leg or the eloquent logic of their predicament, but the hijackers were not interrupted, even by this kevitchy audience. They told their whole story. The passengers tended to sympathize most completely with them. "We understand you don’t want to meditate in a cave." "The world is out there ready to test the limits of your practice." "But don’t be a luftmensch. Shouldn’t there be limits to testing the limits?" "Your teacher wants you to land the plane on his island in the Caribbean?" "So how did he get a private island in the first place?" "Don’t you think he may be trying to use you?" There was no end to their midrash on that old story of teacher/student. And their questions were breaking down the certainty of the Pure Ones. "All right," the beard said, noting the desperation of his partners, "we’ve heard from everyone but the nurse here. What do you think?" "Well," Justina smiled, "I recently heard a radio talk to me. You have every right to think I’m bloody bonkers, but I say it’s not the event that matters as much as what we make of it. We all have noted, in spite of our differences, your remarkable commitment to your practice. I would venture that we each have a personal gift to bestow to you to demonstrate how much we think of your bravery. Something given may mean more to your teacher than something taken. So rather than land the plane on his island, which could result in unforeseen problems with the airline officials, why not let us fly over your teacher’s island and then you can parachute out, proving at once your devotion to your teacher, your good will to us and---since you’re bringing no wealth but yourselves and the gifts we have freely given you---your skill in testing the very limits of your teacher’s sincerity as well?" And so it came to pass that all three hijackers jumped out of the sky. Needless to say, she never arrived in San Francisco. IV Cameras hunted Justina for a photo op. Having wished the Contra-Tantras Godspeed somewhere west of the Cayman Islands in the Greater Antilles, the passengers had de-planed in Vera Cruz to great fanfare. Hailed by the captain as a heroine, Justina was awarded a cash gift by the airline’s president. She made the evening news around the world. But the next day she did not board the flight. Her only explanation was that the limits of her own practice had been tested by the event. In response the Mexican government gave her a visa and a rented car and asked her, as a representative of the Just So Society, to tour their poor country and bless their Catholic shrines. She got as far as San Miguel de Allende, a charming colonial town in the mountains, whose chief industry seemed to be putting up with expatriate gringos. Preceded by her reputation and recognized immediately, she was invited to stay free of charge at the Hotel del San Francisco. "Hoo-stina," the owner said to her after she signed in and was given the presidential suite which overlooked the main cathedral and zocalo, "please join the Americanos in our jardin. In keeping with our festival de jazz which opens tonight at the teatro, they are having a service for one of their own." She walked in and sat down amidst bougainvillea and sweet-smelling jasmine that climbed the walls of the garden as a circle of Americans listened to a lively alto saxophone play a bit of Charlie Parker’s "Yardbird Suite." "That was one of Neal Cassady’s favorites, and why we here at the annual jazz festival like to say, ‘Bird Lives,’" a wizened ponytailed old man with a minister’s collar said to the crowd. He bid Justina welcome and added, "As some of you know, Neal died on the railroad tracks right outside this city in 1968. As for his cause in life or the cause of his death, let’s just say he rode the music as far as it could take him. I’d like to play one of the only recordings we have of him." Justina was glad to be sitting down. Hearing Cassady’s improvisational chatter in which he connected Sri Aurobindo, the power of a 1948 Packard engine, Jackson Pollack’s theory of action painting, the virtues of Denver school girls and Edgar Cayce’s theories on ghosts while the Grateful Dead riffed playfully in the background gave her pause. "What did you mean, ‘Go ride the music?’" she asked the minister when the service ended. "What did it mean to you?" he asked her back. "Who are you?" "Just an old conga player from North Beach." "Yes, but you’re a priest." "Well, you know, there are official authorities representing official points of view of official churches and then there are folks like me. Do you have a car?" "Yes." "I’ve got some unofficial church business to conduct just outside of town. For a ride, I’ll tell ya everything you want to know." But on the ride out to Aguas Calientes Justina did all the talking. This old timer seemed so utterly without pretense that her whole story just rolled off her tongue in one long ramble. He didn’t blink an eye at details that even Justina found hair-raising in retrospect. He was as "just so" as she! She followed him out of the car and down to the office of the hot springs so he could seal the deal that would allow jazz festival attendees a free pass on Sunday. Even when she stripped off her clothes and invited him to join her, he got naked as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do. The waters were built labyrinth-style. Hand in hand, they followed a canal until it twisted and turned. As the water got deeper, the elevation changed. Soon the ground was twenty feet above them and mesquite trees shaded the brutal afternoon sun. They lingered there awhile in a large pool and then he said, "Let’s explore the cave." He swam ahead, entering a long, narrow tunnel that had light at the end of it. Halfway in, when she could no longer see either end, she knew he was just ahead, but she couldn’t see him. She got nervous and thought about turning around. This was more chilling than any radio talking to her! She felt herself in her mother’s birth canal. She wanted to scream. She wanted to go back to being a nanny. She wanted her little bedroom in Cornwall. "Justina," a voice whispered, "just a little more." She didn’t know why she was weeping. She lay next to him on a rock in the center of the back end of the cave which was a perfect circle. Light filtered down from a turreted window forty feet above. "You know that famous advertising phrase, Raid kills bugs dead?" "No," she said and sniffled, "I grew up in England." "Well, only in America would an exterminator name his product Raid. Anyway, the poet Lew Welch wrote that line on his last day of work as a copy writer for Montgomery Ward. From that day on Welch, like Cassady, just rolled the dice. No more straight-job-sit-stand-security-ennui-pension-plan, and his life tumbled through every kind of breakdown. Then every kind of breakthrough." "How do you know that?" she asked him suspiciously. "Because I helped him build his shack in the Sierra Nevadas." "And you?" "I was a young pastor for a progressive Sunnyvale congregation, but once I heard Ginsberg read at the Gallery Six, everything opened. I began playing with the poets and the congueros in Golden Gate Park. The Be In had gathered these tribes of people, so I moved my ministry to the street." "To go ride the music?" she asked. "That’s just a phrase Marty Balin liked to sing at the end of ‘Wooden Ships,’ a Crosby-Stills song that expresses the lost-at-sea sense we shared. Ironically, that song came out when Miles Davis opened for Crosby, Still and Nash. All those rock guys knew they were just the red headed stepchild of jazz, and Cassady was a reminder there’d been Bird and Diz and Trane and Monk, a bridge to that other America the Forties and Fifties tried to stamp out. You know, Raid kills bugs dead! Prophetic, if ya think about it. To kill what bugs you, like a napalm raid over Vietnam, which in the Oriental sense is a form of suicide as all life is connected so to kill a bug is to also kill oneself. But also in the old jazz sense: hip music kills bugs, folks who are bugged out. Nuts to rhythm. Gone to wigged. Crushed with joy! And in the Christian sense: died like Mahalia Jackson sings, to be reborn in glory, Lord, I’m goin’ home one day to tell my story." Later that evening in the Teatro de Musica she would hear the San Francisco Sixties music she loved giving birth to a new sound the padre called acid jazz played by a band named Raid composed of Bay Area musicians her own age. Later she would get lost enough inside the waves of that sound to see the ancestors of unknown spiritual traditions dancing in the air above the band’s heads. Later she would accept the padre’s invite to become the new unofficial minister at Padre Rama’s Lost and Found Church. But right now she saw the garret of light above and her crying stopped. She realized why she had ventured this far out of her way. In her naked skin she had finally come home. ---for Blake Standish |
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three poems |
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| The Cancer
Variations
A: Cut into the
abdomen of night B: Pale cell water C: An automatic
memory D: Transversal
sectioning of night E: Imperceptible F: We are
discussing things in G. The grey asphalt Montauk A: became wisteria from Stammer "Would my eyes be tired, if you were the color of starlight?" Moon sown with licorice, tremor, bourbon The Nile: a bone or watermark or wafer powered The failed pinks of the world carried out The sewing press of aground Roses. World runs
weld B: The Nile: a filagree or a bone powered Sewing press of welts run aground: Roses Pressed seam, a city: Bridgehampton Braille of direction, survived nonsense They believed in the enchantment of the characters that formed their names When a basin held in the arms felt like staring C: In colic, safflower and jade Mica in the ice of its wonder When Name = Bracelet Circus of a Chinese transubstantiation The wood is wrapped and the embodying cable Bracket of grasses for the wrist Basin of its jaw bleached out is embedded D: The color of noon became only wisteria to stammer The exponential sun on Montauk became starlight he The moon seeded with worlds, halon The failed colors of the rose makes weld Braille of direction survived The enchantment of their name Referring faith locally with dice E: Echo of mica, the ice, a miracle, colic The exterior of the wood is wrapped in cable A false gram for impulse A crow crowned in rice and wind The door: parenthesis and crocosmia F: The color of midday became only stammering Only wisteria from stutter The exponential sun came down in slats over Montauk A line of water or bone Moon sewn with welts of wafers powered Roses run aground, weld When a basin in the arms to look at, fixed 14 raw character spell his name Sleeping in Skin Across babel in her acetylene belly over a slow fire cobra echo and jackal
abracadabra: easter Abaca: bark alloy to lyric joke Cuttlebone Amaryllis: out Pieces of ark float or Job's tears Tell the year it is cobalt Lottery for the ruins obey trace orbits, your oat robe |
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Consultant Enemy |
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| #1
Anonymous email from Petty tyrant triggers Page me at 11:30 at night If my revenge distresses me #2 A face lift #3 The "end state" you prescribe
If #4 Dry cough tic #5 Placed clearly beneath #6 Acrid coffeeground slurry in the cup #7 Everyone's a lawyer or knows one #8 You are the Great Pretender, swagger of unearned
bravado |
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three poems |
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| Cheap Hotel Rooms
danger at the border of her cunt Peninsula To Her Mouth I entered the jewel surrounded with skulls 10-11-01 The Blind Hero Laughs Goodbye the stone snow without question gave the enemy
wings |
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three poems |
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| Vision of Salt
& Water
The Photographer He found the dead crow covered with a marquee of
bees. He laid on the hardwood floor & photographed The sounds of the bees were a horn of labor, The man that understood the doorway conjured The room had no telephone, but in his memory it
was the bruise He missed her. He made his way through the world with dark
humor, heartbreak & film, He saw no angel in the river, only her face. He
cut He saw himself in the river. The sunlight pissed through the window &
drooled a spotlight He picked up the crow with his hand crushing He began to whittle away his toes, he wanted to
witness the bones. He laid down on the bed with the hammer. He found
in its weight, Each dream caused him to recognize himself in the
material,
Each time he awoke there was a stain in the river He did not want to sleep but wanted her with him.
Sketch Red butcher at the spleen of the family table, Out of his mouth falls a season with the tattoo
of a swimmer. Practice
Monk put an apple on his head High noon in the orchard. He paced the floor like a small general Things burned without smoke The words circled the room like small airplanes He muttered something about depth He pulled some stones out of his pocket like a wounded bird. The apple rolled across |
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four poems |
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Articles
( my face in parts ) what
the small piece of sun
what custom your tears they
proud leg of your shriek in the flag tether
ask
settle what it is with sea mechanics in the downfall of the heart. under the thing you play with signature in cipher. not becoming a language. collection. light. details. Vitals drop a bomb between your fingers drop your fingers between your ribs as you evaporate your links grow stronger shadow box shatter Compression
shivering I read the book of the bomb shift each page the crimes set in the dampening of my face against Budapest Trinity with its nuclear face book of x-ray, book of wood |
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six poems |
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Elegy
o stairs or pillow famous last words: the sun is up. epitaph to a life: will the rivals arrive at the funeral? at the
wake in the light of death one last time, visiting the nude beach loving life more roads only end cardboard box of ashes, marked o Seek the company of people who look for Kosa VIGIL Candles lit MISSING all terror & grief -=/=- heaven sheds tears -=/=- pelicans gliding ... Vanishing Trails As was last heard wind atop mountain, moss along rock chimney smoke, stops AH! HO! OH! ----- vanishes mid-air. steps consonant, the feet the pots Tseng Jui (Mongol dynasty) L a m e n t i n g t h e T i m e s to the tune of "Sheep on the Mountainside" The rooster sings & the scheming How to awaken - - mind for t h i s To be rich & famous - money: - men: Tr. by Gary Gach Thanksgiving My buddy stopped after which the battered guy looked at me all week! I was like to practice compassion." Haiku roots of tradition ... |