BUT SUCH IS TIME and perfect timing, off time, under time, in time, time and time again, sloppy time, never time, Miller time, tea time too.
Neat time, time in a bottle, my time, the time of my life, in the life and times of Uncle Joe Stalin, time to shape up, time to get a job, time it all the way to the bank, tell me when it's time to get married the fifth time.
Shallow time. Shag time. Sane time. In the time it took to drive a bus off the cliff on a Seventies cop show, that's show time. For the third time today I needed time. Time to go to the bathroom. Time to shit or get off the pot. Time was when fun just cost a nickel.
Time this. Time that. Time warp. Time tunnel. Time is where the heart is. Time enough to think of a good response this time. Time to grow up. Time to eat and run. Time to suck the chrome off that bumper crop of party time. Time to beg the difference.
Time to cut the mustard. Time to pick out a receiver downfield. All the time in the world. Time to wipe my ass. Timex time. Time to cash a cheque. Time to win the battle but lose the war on drugs. Time it took six women to satisfy each other in a dark room on time. Time to kick the bucket.
Time to write a novel. Time to brush her hair the same way her sister used to brush hers, timing each stroke to the beat of time. Time to draw a conclusion at the bottom of the class. Time to mark a certain number of correct answers to the questions with a number two pencil.
Time to give up a lost cause.
Time to shut down the chicken farms along that river. Time to read the classics in their original language. Time to make lunch bags sing before the children race off to school.
The time it takes to build a universe only to have it collapse in your face is nothing like the time I helped Aunt Mardis rip through a chocolate cake in the olden days of French ascendency.
It takes time to learn to ride a bicycle. Time to reap what one sows. Or maybe not. Maybe that time is instantaneous time, time accurately remembered. Time to sing before she swallows for the last time that nasty pill. Time to harvest a generation. Time to swallow before you hang ten. Time to look before you cross.
By the time it took to dig up the Erie Canal times had changed. It's not about time, it's about attitude. By the time I get to Phoenix many husbands won't have time to take out the garbage. The driver swore to the witness that he didn't have time to stop. Time takes a holiday but time never vacates the premises.
Time laughs at odd moments but time never bargains with leftover sandwiches. Time is that which doesn't kill you. Time kills that child inside only to seemingly reappear later.
Time is a long, cool woman in a black dress. Time is kinky. Time paints by numbers. Time is a disease of the pancreas. Time is a pretty heart-shaped tattoo on Wendy's breast in some window in Times Square. Pi is a variable in a timeless equation.
Time understands all wounds. Time wounds all heels. Time is an asset. Time is a pain in the ass. Time is only as good as your next biological movement. Time is the needle in the haystack. Time is secondary but don't tell her that.
Nothing like a good time in the sack to make time fly. Time has no fear of flying, but Erica and Henry both knew what having a good time was about, and it was not about time, but the enjoyment of time. Grown-up time.
There is no such thing as time travel today, but recordings keep time in ways none of us truly understand past its fetish draw, but time was when a fine time was had by all, double time, life plus time. High time that boy got a job. Time the unfortunate child born without legs who beats a faster smile than you do.
Observe that same child pursue time into measuring itself with old technologies in a world that presumes time can't reverse itself while it can so readily repeat itself dipped in statistics. Time is a two-way mirror. Time is a dirty joke flooding the muddy Missisippi.
Time is nothing but what you or somebody else makes it, except when it's game time, and don't try to tell me about how much time it would take to make the timeless world safe for timelessness because everybody knows it's all in the timing, even though most of us are suffering a bad sense of timing.
There's never enough time to transcend one's station, especially when mobile. Time is far too formidable a friend on feverish afternoons to let stand in the cold rain without knowing that time sometimes stands still.
Without time on my side I perish with the daffodils. Time is a time-honored sport everyone must play in order to graduate. Time forgives. Breaking rules for time is not always a bad time, but does require timing it just right. Time scars. Grab the moment to make time while others bargain, losing time to others, until another time comes.
Time is a stiff upper lip in a compromising position. Time defers to gravity, but for one writer, time is nothing but a madcap schemer bought and sold on the installment plan, money paid back over time, but then two-timing Old Doc Celine didn't live long enough to get mixed up in time, time and time again.
Time is a nightmare to Klaw's girls who prefer time raw and risky than more often than their less time-tortured sisters. Time dresses up for special guests. Time is the major importer, exporter of stolen goods across state lines in situations where time is barely legal. That's time standing in the shadows, losing her shirt to timeless romance.
Time is nobody's business but the rates are skyrocketing. Time is colorless, odorless, tasteless. Time left is time right on time. Time left to itself is useless. Time blows tall buildings to the ground. Time grounds water tables and small asterisks into dust bowls older than TIME ITSELF because time is the wind in the sails of marginality until time itself stops.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Friday, May 08, 2009
MONEY FOR THE POETS
DECADES OF PUBLIC and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward.
Read it all.
Read it all.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
MY ONLY BOOK REVIEW
Yes, it's true, nearly two years after its publication, and despite the dissemination of forty or so copies among a few friends, family members, and strangers beating off the night, I have come to accept the fact that I write in such a powerfully dull way as to render this special class of improbable bibliophiliacs completely and utterly devastated to the point of unleashing their inner mute upon the very grains of sand upon which I stand. Now, I have not given this book away to just anybody with a cap size or a big gulp to spare, but only to those who pleaded, cajoled, and, if cool beans are a good source of protein, threatened my well-being for a personal copy of this collection of visceral sweat and tears, bloody for the twenty-five years it stewed in the making, usually a signed copy, and usually accompanied by some petty insolence that they loved poetry, or some such glad-handing gush as that.
The heartbreak of the silent rejection, notwithstanding, my book, The Silent Cull & Other Mechanical Ideas, Collected Poems 1980-2005 is not your usual book of poetry, but is four hundred pages of seething political arrest, and I use the word "political" and "arrest" in all their usual connotations plus a few more that I insist are both political and arrested within the pages themselves, banking on subtleties of style and insight that are only coming apparent to the ill-prepared general public in these, our own spectacular terror-driven chaotic times. Well-minced words are a swallower's delight, and this book rarely portrays paradise, or other romantic follies of the past or future tense of mankind, but in its own galloping way tackles the physics of time and thought itself.
But this blog entry is not about describing the book. It has been aptly described elsewhere.
Here I wish to fan myself with those few words of praise, or words of any kind that have wafted my way in the context of this inpenetrable book. The following paragraph was sent to me by a local artist, a young painter of some early renown, still in his late twenties, named James Coleman:
I really like the book man, I read it out loud to Christie at night when we go to bed, they say the baby can hear it and its good to read to him, but I dont know. I really love it man they say if you reach one person, blah blah blah, well thats me. I can sit on the roof and smoke a cigarette, lay in bed at night, damn i would even take it to the beach. It flows it pulsates, it moves me. Im not kissing your ass, I have no reason to. Just wanted to give you an honest opinion, and for whatever reason, it speaks to me. When I read it I feel like I did when I was in college smoking opium and reading boulbelaire or at the coffee shops reading dylan thomas, thinking I should start a fight. What I am trying to say is that at this point in my life your book works for me. Great job man, Im not a literary figure or even a good writer but just wanted to tell you. If I see you and I am drinking and tried to tell you all this, you would think I was full of shit.
What can I say? For all the silent pretenders haunting my crude ambitions, this single boast is just about the most stirring string of thoughts an old poet, fat on the failures of inertia, far past his gameface prime, could ever hope to absorb.
Thanks J...
The heartbreak of the silent rejection, notwithstanding, my book, The Silent Cull & Other Mechanical Ideas, Collected Poems 1980-2005 is not your usual book of poetry, but is four hundred pages of seething political arrest, and I use the word "political" and "arrest" in all their usual connotations plus a few more that I insist are both political and arrested within the pages themselves, banking on subtleties of style and insight that are only coming apparent to the ill-prepared general public in these, our own spectacular terror-driven chaotic times. Well-minced words are a swallower's delight, and this book rarely portrays paradise, or other romantic follies of the past or future tense of mankind, but in its own galloping way tackles the physics of time and thought itself.
But this blog entry is not about describing the book. It has been aptly described elsewhere.
Here I wish to fan myself with those few words of praise, or words of any kind that have wafted my way in the context of this inpenetrable book. The following paragraph was sent to me by a local artist, a young painter of some early renown, still in his late twenties, named James Coleman:
I really like the book man, I read it out loud to Christie at night when we go to bed, they say the baby can hear it and its good to read to him, but I dont know. I really love it man they say if you reach one person, blah blah blah, well thats me. I can sit on the roof and smoke a cigarette, lay in bed at night, damn i would even take it to the beach. It flows it pulsates, it moves me. Im not kissing your ass, I have no reason to. Just wanted to give you an honest opinion, and for whatever reason, it speaks to me. When I read it I feel like I did when I was in college smoking opium and reading boulbelaire or at the coffee shops reading dylan thomas, thinking I should start a fight. What I am trying to say is that at this point in my life your book works for me. Great job man, Im not a literary figure or even a good writer but just wanted to tell you. If I see you and I am drinking and tried to tell you all this, you would think I was full of shit.
What can I say? For all the silent pretenders haunting my crude ambitions, this single boast is just about the most stirring string of thoughts an old poet, fat on the failures of inertia, far past his gameface prime, could ever hope to absorb.
Thanks J...
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
WORLD OF MOUTH
I. Avenue of the Americas
Who killed the hippie prep post-paranoia
preamble program where kitchen prophets
diddled themselves to famous quotes,
humpback quotas, and honorable prices sucked off
the mainstream poisoned ingluttonous, proud to be American
pubic? Was it Delilah Day strutting around in Great Plains
of economic theory gone sour like toadstools anonymous some mediocre
Prince of Peace was fed right before bedtime,
incensed, begging for more and more frequently with gutter regards
to her thousand and one Iranian tales leaning on the elocutionist’s
thug-tight polish sausages still unkempt but at least
Europe wails on about tiny hotdog explosions
and the absence of Mr. Monroe’s lost doctrine Cuba defies, Afghanistan
survives.....oh say can you see Beirut as revelation in the flesh,
endangered pigeons dancing in the eyebrow of Khomeini like sweat on
a burning Bush left to shake down the nations,
floods of panic warriors taking to the hills to defend
k-rations and dead ideals—
no new ones available.
II. Safety First
Did every new model doff Costello Elvis eyewear, uranium flags
sewn by prisoners of groundhog conservatives composing
fly-away pinstripes and swearing off fashion
for fifteen full and pepsident minutes until the xeroxed
Andy Warhol coughed and made it ‘real raisin’
enough for all turds of all race rats and cat classes from Cleveland
to Willacoochee, from DuPont to Berkeley, from La Crosse to Corpus
Christi, from Vincennes to Window Rock, from Boise to Times
Beach, from the Columbia Pipeline stealing from the rich to give to the rich,
from dead sunglasses and bricklayer entry level pocket positions
to call on the name of our holy hardware to save us
from the Law of Spic and Span Soup Flies? Incorrigible navy buoyancy
tests failed to shock the 80’s into an alternative issue,
so a new Neo-Manic emerges for the year 1991, for a blast,
whipping out scab groin vexation, irritated fort
albino annoy boy sandles forked exchanging kickoff boot fingers
and skinhead scissors that touch the spine of every real American band, braids
for starch to scorch brotherhood hypocrisy with gangslang goulash ‘stop
on a nickel nuke.’ The cities are purple
now ripe with renaissance resistance, cool cocks for kingdom’s cum,
AIDS an irony blanket, a bingo butcher passed around like
a snooky smile baby kangaroo. NYC has pissed one more
rat factory cursed infection, harDCore Washington—
the murder capital of America where bloody black as night and black power
have merged into one long filthy look into the confusion coersive
power drips sloppily into the sludge bucket decency secretes as remnants
of thy will be done, thy will be done.…
III. Buckhead and the Symbolic Mode
Why did the FDR lock up all the yellow bodies he could smell a scandal
hidden beneath five thousand years of eating raw fish and turning
out sensual art for the masses to mourn? Was Huey Long really
the enemy of the old cripple or could Ezra Pound spell
“encyclopedia” in forty-three languages and conjure up images
sick and disgusting to Mussolini’s headwaiter, St. Elizabeth’s no
prison but just a stopping place to feed the whales,
hunter agony curling the breasts every beauty bounces beneath
the best literacy test available in nightowl zones, corporate zions
offering zany dough illusions, nimrod solutions,
virginity restoring money back operations while
the punks go off to college to crucify
everyone but themselves…who
killed off purposes? Who authorized
this moron-anarchy, capital publishing,
stay-at-home-buy-’em-in-the-bleachers Ted Turner America’s
Cup Runneth Over sold by Soho into Egyptian slavery, walk
don’t talk or stare-at-my-supple-body nurf axioms
anyway? Jack London and his klondyke
pussy widowers and northern territory aristocratic devotion
to the weak and petrified? Why do the rich get richer
and the poor get more numerous? Is this really a poem
or can this page be classified as the answer to the eternal
quiz show dilemma, do commercials really sell soap?
IV. Creative Loafing And Other Tax Deductible Weather Patterns
Boho is dead! Poetry is dead! Ditto the poets!
…their mouths are full of boiled salted peanuts, ears of cob-roasted corn
stuffed in auto-eroticistic voices in from mainland factories,
broken excuses the sparing questions stiff, pockets in handle—
carry on Jack Nimble, piss
your unfettered mind away in cheap detective stories about man and god and war,
piss your unbuttered ambition away to rewrite the bible for MTV, piss
your Nielsen numbers away and tarry with the Ramones
in marchfest thimble standards, refusing to party hardy
with Il Dulce and Sicky Wifebeater where Mentorism
is rampant in the minds of the mindless, dark ages, and neon cages,
John Cage, John Cave, Nick Cave, and no cave, living
for the bookstore; Henry Miller! my old dusty friend! the stomach’s
losing out and I can’t seem to borrow, the new craving for passion pit
panache prize yarns and cystic fibrosis cushions my latest act
of imaginary sedition beggars not worth the cotton I’m wearing,
but then I read a fortune cookie yesterday that said I would never
think another thought without first counting the cost
orgasm brings to the homeless who steal a glance at the White House, but
then we all can’t be married to our work & know better than they (the safe),
the passive worth of strangers who serve
and will be served on a silver platter plateau
than those who steal zero from itself. First silence, then the flood of agents,
then postmarked bodyguards for the worthy famous filibuster sleeves
populating the risk of record vinyl, oy
Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, hip Corso
“where have all the visions gone
long time America?…”
slip it in dear—
part it here, don’t forget the mustard, erase words
ugly pimplexiproblematicist in heavenly heat quacking
candid fear of fornication offering complications by proxy
or pale comparison to last night’s doubt
and the cruisers
who snatch their talk boxes
and pump them half-full to fool talent
scouts from the Bronx, pretty
pink tourists carrying the card & earring vendorships
laughing in high bank notes left in grandfather’s will be done
and attaché unions of the newly post-Kerouac free,
the wise and sexless. Author’s Note: What I mean is—
that special creature who sees neither male nor female,
nor considers the game itself a matter of faith.
V. Aging Where Exposed to Temporary Eye
across the sober horny husk of Jersey night
sour rhythms snap a vulgar breath in two on orders from my feet
and I recant the last mile of hard nail poetries—
there is no breeze catacombs offer
to return the gesture & who is there
to remind me of social stares? Finally the fix of friendship
buries its own in the same hole seabreeze whores love a token chance
in the midst of a crowd of strangers petrified green too cold to bark
enema grips or nothingness sores plucking their lungs
from fairy tales great and grim
left in our daily bread paychecks and variety packs
of wolves and fanny plantations, oh Ginsberg go home!
eat a damn spicy onion from Georgia, not the sweet one all
have been waiting for, for those days are tucked away for now¬—
our feet hang on a line
a quote we commit as our own salvationary process
no new innovations can caress
no new insights into kaddish are made available
by the tiny presses
that liken us as to their own,
furnaces well-stoked with mindworker autojerk crowds
lip their motives
and I bow in recognition yet move circulatory
on past open doors closed to drafts, because!I refuse to confer, blood…
blood, blood, blood cells attacking
hair fashion pugalists
hung out on a dare
missing major poet tripping Denver says Rothschild, his mammon-saint,
this holy August. I hitchhiked all the fucking way
to Big Apple Momma Sucka My Explanation cos I am punk
just to chat seriously about coping
with this emerging generation of wild-haired cats
hung out on a bet, not yours but you know who…yep
who took all our Jobs and spoke to us in whale! Holy granoli
Americo-Russo whale!
VI. I Am—Pronoun City
no new purposes in this wertimer clan
the old issues not stale enough to use
as newspaper headlining spunk
fishwrapper glorified shipwiper stunt & punt quarters
no new intellectualisms
junkies or jeepsters, clunkers or keepsters
death rates by opulent characters
hung out to lie cockstill but hardly sure
to sacred students
crab telephone users
resisting another strike against him and her
mayhem in fashion-wave restaurants
bills toppling yet another pay t.v. eros
rights to America banned
episodes fragile famous poet busy
tired removed costly insiders only
need apply
necessary credentials shaved & groomable beards know
who I’m complaining about
with American
Express card you baffle me
now that you knocked off a few salaried
positions, gave speeches to the adoring zealots
now you don’t have to but you do, so don’t
tell me you’ve done it all when all you’ve done is
crack parking zones with Chrysler
imperialism.
[ 1983, Washington DC ]
Who killed the hippie prep post-paranoia
preamble program where kitchen prophets
diddled themselves to famous quotes,
humpback quotas, and honorable prices sucked off
the mainstream poisoned ingluttonous, proud to be American
pubic? Was it Delilah Day strutting around in Great Plains
of economic theory gone sour like toadstools anonymous some mediocre
Prince of Peace was fed right before bedtime,
incensed, begging for more and more frequently with gutter regards
to her thousand and one Iranian tales leaning on the elocutionist’s
thug-tight polish sausages still unkempt but at least
Europe wails on about tiny hotdog explosions
and the absence of Mr. Monroe’s lost doctrine Cuba defies, Afghanistan
survives.....oh say can you see Beirut as revelation in the flesh,
endangered pigeons dancing in the eyebrow of Khomeini like sweat on
a burning Bush left to shake down the nations,
floods of panic warriors taking to the hills to defend
k-rations and dead ideals—
no new ones available.
II. Safety First
Did every new model doff Costello Elvis eyewear, uranium flags
sewn by prisoners of groundhog conservatives composing
fly-away pinstripes and swearing off fashion
for fifteen full and pepsident minutes until the xeroxed
Andy Warhol coughed and made it ‘real raisin’
enough for all turds of all race rats and cat classes from Cleveland
to Willacoochee, from DuPont to Berkeley, from La Crosse to Corpus
Christi, from Vincennes to Window Rock, from Boise to Times
Beach, from the Columbia Pipeline stealing from the rich to give to the rich,
from dead sunglasses and bricklayer entry level pocket positions
to call on the name of our holy hardware to save us
from the Law of Spic and Span Soup Flies? Incorrigible navy buoyancy
tests failed to shock the 80’s into an alternative issue,
so a new Neo-Manic emerges for the year 1991, for a blast,
whipping out scab groin vexation, irritated fort
albino annoy boy sandles forked exchanging kickoff boot fingers
and skinhead scissors that touch the spine of every real American band, braids
for starch to scorch brotherhood hypocrisy with gangslang goulash ‘stop
on a nickel nuke.’ The cities are purple
now ripe with renaissance resistance, cool cocks for kingdom’s cum,
AIDS an irony blanket, a bingo butcher passed around like
a snooky smile baby kangaroo. NYC has pissed one more
rat factory cursed infection, harDCore Washington—
the murder capital of America where bloody black as night and black power
have merged into one long filthy look into the confusion coersive
power drips sloppily into the sludge bucket decency secretes as remnants
of thy will be done, thy will be done.…
III. Buckhead and the Symbolic Mode
Why did the FDR lock up all the yellow bodies he could smell a scandal
hidden beneath five thousand years of eating raw fish and turning
out sensual art for the masses to mourn? Was Huey Long really
the enemy of the old cripple or could Ezra Pound spell
“encyclopedia” in forty-three languages and conjure up images
sick and disgusting to Mussolini’s headwaiter, St. Elizabeth’s no
prison but just a stopping place to feed the whales,
hunter agony curling the breasts every beauty bounces beneath
the best literacy test available in nightowl zones, corporate zions
offering zany dough illusions, nimrod solutions,
virginity restoring money back operations while
the punks go off to college to crucify
everyone but themselves…who
killed off purposes? Who authorized
this moron-anarchy, capital publishing,
stay-at-home-buy-’em-in-the-bleachers Ted Turner America’s
Cup Runneth Over sold by Soho into Egyptian slavery, walk
don’t talk or stare-at-my-supple-body nurf axioms
anyway? Jack London and his klondyke
pussy widowers and northern territory aristocratic devotion
to the weak and petrified? Why do the rich get richer
and the poor get more numerous? Is this really a poem
or can this page be classified as the answer to the eternal
quiz show dilemma, do commercials really sell soap?
IV. Creative Loafing And Other Tax Deductible Weather Patterns
Boho is dead! Poetry is dead! Ditto the poets!
…their mouths are full of boiled salted peanuts, ears of cob-roasted corn
stuffed in auto-eroticistic voices in from mainland factories,
broken excuses the sparing questions stiff, pockets in handle—
carry on Jack Nimble, piss
your unfettered mind away in cheap detective stories about man and god and war,
piss your unbuttered ambition away to rewrite the bible for MTV, piss
your Nielsen numbers away and tarry with the Ramones
in marchfest thimble standards, refusing to party hardy
with Il Dulce and Sicky Wifebeater where Mentorism
is rampant in the minds of the mindless, dark ages, and neon cages,
John Cage, John Cave, Nick Cave, and no cave, living
for the bookstore; Henry Miller! my old dusty friend! the stomach’s
losing out and I can’t seem to borrow, the new craving for passion pit
panache prize yarns and cystic fibrosis cushions my latest act
of imaginary sedition beggars not worth the cotton I’m wearing,
but then I read a fortune cookie yesterday that said I would never
think another thought without first counting the cost
orgasm brings to the homeless who steal a glance at the White House, but
then we all can’t be married to our work & know better than they (the safe),
the passive worth of strangers who serve
and will be served on a silver platter plateau
than those who steal zero from itself. First silence, then the flood of agents,
then postmarked bodyguards for the worthy famous filibuster sleeves
populating the risk of record vinyl, oy
Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, hip Corso
“where have all the visions gone
long time America?…”
slip it in dear—
part it here, don’t forget the mustard, erase words
ugly pimplexiproblematicist in heavenly heat quacking
candid fear of fornication offering complications by proxy
or pale comparison to last night’s doubt
and the cruisers
who snatch their talk boxes
and pump them half-full to fool talent
scouts from the Bronx, pretty
pink tourists carrying the card & earring vendorships
laughing in high bank notes left in grandfather’s will be done
and attaché unions of the newly post-Kerouac free,
the wise and sexless. Author’s Note: What I mean is—
that special creature who sees neither male nor female,
nor considers the game itself a matter of faith.
V. Aging Where Exposed to Temporary Eye
across the sober horny husk of Jersey night
sour rhythms snap a vulgar breath in two on orders from my feet
and I recant the last mile of hard nail poetries—
there is no breeze catacombs offer
to return the gesture & who is there
to remind me of social stares? Finally the fix of friendship
buries its own in the same hole seabreeze whores love a token chance
in the midst of a crowd of strangers petrified green too cold to bark
enema grips or nothingness sores plucking their lungs
from fairy tales great and grim
left in our daily bread paychecks and variety packs
of wolves and fanny plantations, oh Ginsberg go home!
eat a damn spicy onion from Georgia, not the sweet one all
have been waiting for, for those days are tucked away for now¬—
our feet hang on a line
a quote we commit as our own salvationary process
no new innovations can caress
no new insights into kaddish are made available
by the tiny presses
that liken us as to their own,
furnaces well-stoked with mindworker autojerk crowds
lip their motives
and I bow in recognition yet move circulatory
on past open doors closed to drafts, because!I refuse to confer, blood…
blood, blood, blood cells attacking
hair fashion pugalists
hung out on a dare
missing major poet tripping Denver says Rothschild, his mammon-saint,
this holy August. I hitchhiked all the fucking way
to Big Apple Momma Sucka My Explanation cos I am punk
just to chat seriously about coping
with this emerging generation of wild-haired cats
hung out on a bet, not yours but you know who…yep
who took all our Jobs and spoke to us in whale! Holy granoli
Americo-Russo whale!
VI. I Am—Pronoun City
no new purposes in this wertimer clan
the old issues not stale enough to use
as newspaper headlining spunk
fishwrapper glorified shipwiper stunt & punt quarters
no new intellectualisms
junkies or jeepsters, clunkers or keepsters
death rates by opulent characters
hung out to lie cockstill but hardly sure
to sacred students
crab telephone users
resisting another strike against him and her
mayhem in fashion-wave restaurants
bills toppling yet another pay t.v. eros
rights to America banned
episodes fragile famous poet busy
tired removed costly insiders only
need apply
necessary credentials shaved & groomable beards know
who I’m complaining about
with American
Express card you baffle me
now that you knocked off a few salaried
positions, gave speeches to the adoring zealots
now you don’t have to but you do, so don’t
tell me you’ve done it all when all you’ve done is
crack parking zones with Chrysler
imperialism.
[ 1983, Washington DC ]
Monday, August 20, 2007
SAMPLEX
I was swinging flamelessly flawed
Crookedly along a line of shooting fame
Where bleeping patriots bang
Living bull winking after coming
All that distance for nothing
and knew it mattered something
as my lead,
felling numbers by the wayside.
Washington. ID’ed.
D’ever visit
Looking like what is it
The keeping of the holy sanctuary
Ringing in clocks and cells
Sent off spacely spiffed
And then gathered erroneously
Introducing numbers colored
What has been?
In the beginning there was no faith
Tremble forsook theirs
The lady barker bit as something silent
And something like slender pumped branches
Of guilt-ridden hitchhiker fire
Gave zero a sympatheticological smile
Charging the going rate of two dollars
And manslaughter
And acts half flag
Half rag
Gagging suspicious gangs
Some sing some hesitate to recall
Soil deep replacing
Me and you.
Deciding to return to space
Its only begotten
To do right by what’s left
Like sheep they would leap
In a twinkling of a cobra’s eye
Insufferably here to stay
Using maximum flair to cornbread level
Dressed above the Machiavellian hips
Calling themselves out as apostles of
Aesthetics of inactivity
Their seed.
I said that night
Bar stool on my tongue I am
The college of my choice
And you agreed
That mine is a subtle creed
Strangerhood breed
Speaking for myself as if I had no tongue
Some new testicles glorified
Kinetic Pierjudy Rapier
And his spicy bride
Who aspires to the moment I ask.
[ 1981, Corpus Christi, TX ]
Crookedly along a line of shooting fame
Where bleeping patriots bang
Living bull winking after coming
All that distance for nothing
and knew it mattered something
as my lead,
felling numbers by the wayside.
Washington. ID’ed.
D’ever visit
Looking like what is it
The keeping of the holy sanctuary
Ringing in clocks and cells
Sent off spacely spiffed
And then gathered erroneously
Introducing numbers colored
What has been?
In the beginning there was no faith
Tremble forsook theirs
The lady barker bit as something silent
And something like slender pumped branches
Of guilt-ridden hitchhiker fire
Gave zero a sympatheticological smile
Charging the going rate of two dollars
And manslaughter
And acts half flag
Half rag
Gagging suspicious gangs
Some sing some hesitate to recall
Soil deep replacing
Me and you.
Deciding to return to space
Its only begotten
To do right by what’s left
Like sheep they would leap
In a twinkling of a cobra’s eye
Insufferably here to stay
Using maximum flair to cornbread level
Dressed above the Machiavellian hips
Calling themselves out as apostles of
Aesthetics of inactivity
Their seed.
I said that night
Bar stool on my tongue I am
The college of my choice
And you agreed
That mine is a subtle creed
Strangerhood breed
Speaking for myself as if I had no tongue
Some new testicles glorified
Kinetic Pierjudy Rapier
And his spicy bride
Who aspires to the moment I ask.
[ 1981, Corpus Christi, TX ]
Friday, August 17, 2007
CHARLES BUKOWSKI WHERE IT COUNTS
[To the Editors of The L.A. Free Press]
November 15,1974
Hello editors:
Regarding the Lynne Bronstein letter of Nov. 15 about my story of Nov. one:
1. The story was about pretentiousness in art. The fact that the pretender had female organs had nothing to do with the story in total. That any female made to look unfavorable in a story must be construed as a denunciation of the female as female is just so much guava. The right of the creator to depict characters any way he must remains inviolate—whether those characters are female, black, brown, Indian, Chicano, white, male, Communist, homosexual, Republican, peg-legged, mongolian and/or ?
2. The story was a take-off on an interview with an established female poet in a recent issue of Poetry Now. Since I have been interviewed for a future issue of the same journal and for future editions of Creem and Rolling Stone, my detractors will get their chance to see how I hold or fail under similar conditions.
3. When the narrator lets us know that he has Janice Altrice's legs in mind might infer more that he is bored with the poetry game, and also might infer that he could have a poolhall, dirty joke mind, at times. That the narrator might be attacking himself instead of trying to relegate the lady back to a "sex object" evidently is beyond the belief of some so-called Liberated women. Whether we like it or not, sex and thoughts of sex do occur to many of us (male and female) at odd and unlikely times. I rather like it.
4. That "she is indeed speaking for Bukowski himself, who has expressed a similar contempt for unknown poets who give each other support." The lady spoke for herself. Her "contempt" was toward poets not academically trained. My dislike is toward all bad poetry and toward all bad poets who write it badly—which is most of them. I have always been disgusted with the falsity and dreariness not only of contemporary poetry but of the poetry of the centuries—and this feeling was with me before I got published, while I was attempting to get published, and it remains with me now even as I pay the rent with poesy. What kept me writing was not that I was so good but that that whole damned gang was so bad--when they had to be compared to the vitality and originality that was occurring in the other art forms. As to those who must gather together to give port, I am one with Ibsen: "the strongest me alone."
5. "Now that he's well-known and the only California poet published by Black Sparrow Press, he thinks that nobody else is entitled to be a poet—especially women, My dear lady: you are entitled to be whatever you can be; if you can leap twenty feet straight up into the air or sweep a 9 race card at Western harness meet, please go ahead and do so.
6. "A lot of us think there's more to write poetry about than beer, drunks, hemorrhoids, and how rotten the world is." I also think there's more to write poetry about than that and I do so.
7. "Female artists, on the other hand, try to be optimistic." The function of the artist is not to create optimism but to create art—which sometimes may be optimistic and sometimes can't be. The female is bred to be more optimistic than the male because of a function she has not entirely escaped as yet, the bearing of the child. After passing through pregancy and childbirth, to call life a lie is much more difficult.
8. "Could it be that the male is 'washed-up' as an artist, that he has no more to say except in his jealousy, to spit on the young idealists and the newly freed voices of women?" Are these the thought concepts you come up with in your "ego-boosting" sessions? Perhaps you'd better take a night off.
9. "Poetry is an art form. Like all art it is subjective and it does not have sex organs." I don't know about your poems, Lynne, but mine have cock and balls, eat chili peppers and walnuts, sing in the bathtub, cuss, fart, scream, stink, smell good, hate mosquitoes, ride taxicabs, have nightmares and love affairs, all that.
10. "... without being negative ..." I thought they'd ridden this horse to death; it's the oldest of the oldest hats. I first heard it around the English departments of LA highschool in 1937. The inference, when you call somebody "negative" is that you completely remove them from the sphere because he or she has no basic understanding of life forces and meanings. I wouldn't be caught using that term while drunk on a bus to Shreveport.
11. I don't care for Longfellow or McKuen either, although they both possess (possessed) male organs. One of the best writers I knew of was Carson McCullers and she had a female name. If my girlfriend's dog could write a good poem or a decent novel I'd be the first to congratulate the beast. That's LIBERATED!
12. Shit, I ought to get paid for this.
Charles Bukowski
November 15,1974
Hello editors:
Regarding the Lynne Bronstein letter of Nov. 15 about my story of Nov. one:
1. The story was about pretentiousness in art. The fact that the pretender had female organs had nothing to do with the story in total. That any female made to look unfavorable in a story must be construed as a denunciation of the female as female is just so much guava. The right of the creator to depict characters any way he must remains inviolate—whether those characters are female, black, brown, Indian, Chicano, white, male, Communist, homosexual, Republican, peg-legged, mongolian and/or ?
2. The story was a take-off on an interview with an established female poet in a recent issue of Poetry Now. Since I have been interviewed for a future issue of the same journal and for future editions of Creem and Rolling Stone, my detractors will get their chance to see how I hold or fail under similar conditions.
3. When the narrator lets us know that he has Janice Altrice's legs in mind might infer more that he is bored with the poetry game, and also might infer that he could have a poolhall, dirty joke mind, at times. That the narrator might be attacking himself instead of trying to relegate the lady back to a "sex object" evidently is beyond the belief of some so-called Liberated women. Whether we like it or not, sex and thoughts of sex do occur to many of us (male and female) at odd and unlikely times. I rather like it.
4. That "she is indeed speaking for Bukowski himself, who has expressed a similar contempt for unknown poets who give each other support." The lady spoke for herself. Her "contempt" was toward poets not academically trained. My dislike is toward all bad poetry and toward all bad poets who write it badly—which is most of them. I have always been disgusted with the falsity and dreariness not only of contemporary poetry but of the poetry of the centuries—and this feeling was with me before I got published, while I was attempting to get published, and it remains with me now even as I pay the rent with poesy. What kept me writing was not that I was so good but that that whole damned gang was so bad--when they had to be compared to the vitality and originality that was occurring in the other art forms. As to those who must gather together to give port, I am one with Ibsen: "the strongest me alone."
5. "Now that he's well-known and the only California poet published by Black Sparrow Press, he thinks that nobody else is entitled to be a poet—especially women, My dear lady: you are entitled to be whatever you can be; if you can leap twenty feet straight up into the air or sweep a 9 race card at Western harness meet, please go ahead and do so.
6. "A lot of us think there's more to write poetry about than beer, drunks, hemorrhoids, and how rotten the world is." I also think there's more to write poetry about than that and I do so.
7. "Female artists, on the other hand, try to be optimistic." The function of the artist is not to create optimism but to create art—which sometimes may be optimistic and sometimes can't be. The female is bred to be more optimistic than the male because of a function she has not entirely escaped as yet, the bearing of the child. After passing through pregancy and childbirth, to call life a lie is much more difficult.
8. "Could it be that the male is 'washed-up' as an artist, that he has no more to say except in his jealousy, to spit on the young idealists and the newly freed voices of women?" Are these the thought concepts you come up with in your "ego-boosting" sessions? Perhaps you'd better take a night off.
9. "Poetry is an art form. Like all art it is subjective and it does not have sex organs." I don't know about your poems, Lynne, but mine have cock and balls, eat chili peppers and walnuts, sing in the bathtub, cuss, fart, scream, stink, smell good, hate mosquitoes, ride taxicabs, have nightmares and love affairs, all that.
10. "... without being negative ..." I thought they'd ridden this horse to death; it's the oldest of the oldest hats. I first heard it around the English departments of LA highschool in 1937. The inference, when you call somebody "negative" is that you completely remove them from the sphere because he or she has no basic understanding of life forces and meanings. I wouldn't be caught using that term while drunk on a bus to Shreveport.
11. I don't care for Longfellow or McKuen either, although they both possess (possessed) male organs. One of the best writers I knew of was Carson McCullers and she had a female name. If my girlfriend's dog could write a good poem or a decent novel I'd be the first to congratulate the beast. That's LIBERATED!
12. Shit, I ought to get paid for this.
Charles Bukowski
Thursday, July 26, 2007
TRAFFIC GERUND
Good evening good peoples of Single Bibliophile Universe.
Good evening to you Guildrunners who aren’t.
(No Wittgenstein. You may not eat the gerund.)
Welcome.
Relax.
Take the kinks out.
Vibrate.
Dreamland asterisk marital status: comprehensive but vague.
Rest up for the holiday soon.
When you most expect it loosen your hair.
Burn off old habits.
Rock along the microwave with a New Waver.
Unfasten the refrigerator, Lux.
Throw punk rock at a dog whipping him into shapes only a cat loves.
Dust off your planted coffee-table books.
Pick them up.
Sniff them.
And demand a miracle.
Fish-pay the rent.
Let your memory bank stand in any hallway it chooses.
Consent to surpass the oracle of the Gaza Strip.
Open your monologue for staring strangers to see.
A very casual thing to do.
Dualist or donkey?
Inconveniences all queer statements must suffer.
Only if you wash me.
Designed to demolish warts and other unsightly buildings.
Please pardon this occasion of theology.
An aborted plot to dazzle you with distractions invariably most serious.
Boz is the real flaw.
The president smiling the greatest compliment allowed by law.
Given on the basis of one promise per chapter.
Brass doorknobs are selling where apples can’t get past the canal.
To look at you I would say your problems are not worth it.
Irkwink yourself if there is no other art of curvature in your corner.
They took us as fools and pried us free of our questions.
Where are you in that picture?
The living eternal end.
Now that those days have passed on to their reward,
cute daffy lions bralessly stop by, convincing
me I am suggesting myself. Despite Delilah’s
climax, poets are sometimes easy prey
to the desires of skin and savagery.
If you avoid the one, you catch the other.
Some of the people can be naked some of the time.
And all of the people can be naked all of the time.
But none of the people can be naked none of the time.
I see God’s face in my feet. I think Yeats said that.
Babes observe their impacts. True as glass.
Lines prepare their streets. Hit the books, son.
Samson loved Delilah and long-winded facts.
There is no time left to write poems,
only slogans which are wordsuck
resurrecting the legends we breathe our songs for…
[ 1983, Atlanta, GA ]
Good evening to you Guildrunners who aren’t.
(No Wittgenstein. You may not eat the gerund.)
Welcome.
Relax.
Take the kinks out.
Vibrate.
Dreamland asterisk marital status: comprehensive but vague.
Rest up for the holiday soon.
When you most expect it loosen your hair.
Burn off old habits.
Rock along the microwave with a New Waver.
Unfasten the refrigerator, Lux.
Throw punk rock at a dog whipping him into shapes only a cat loves.
Dust off your planted coffee-table books.
Pick them up.
Sniff them.
And demand a miracle.
Fish-pay the rent.
Let your memory bank stand in any hallway it chooses.
Consent to surpass the oracle of the Gaza Strip.
Open your monologue for staring strangers to see.
A very casual thing to do.
Dualist or donkey?
Inconveniences all queer statements must suffer.
Only if you wash me.
Designed to demolish warts and other unsightly buildings.
Please pardon this occasion of theology.
An aborted plot to dazzle you with distractions invariably most serious.
Boz is the real flaw.
The president smiling the greatest compliment allowed by law.
Given on the basis of one promise per chapter.
Brass doorknobs are selling where apples can’t get past the canal.
To look at you I would say your problems are not worth it.
Irkwink yourself if there is no other art of curvature in your corner.
They took us as fools and pried us free of our questions.
Where are you in that picture?
The living eternal end.
Now that those days have passed on to their reward,
cute daffy lions bralessly stop by, convincing
me I am suggesting myself. Despite Delilah’s
climax, poets are sometimes easy prey
to the desires of skin and savagery.
If you avoid the one, you catch the other.
Some of the people can be naked some of the time.
And all of the people can be naked all of the time.
But none of the people can be naked none of the time.
I see God’s face in my feet. I think Yeats said that.
Babes observe their impacts. True as glass.
Lines prepare their streets. Hit the books, son.
Samson loved Delilah and long-winded facts.
There is no time left to write poems,
only slogans which are wordsuck
resurrecting the legends we breathe our songs for…
[ 1983, Atlanta, GA ]
Monday, July 16, 2007
NICKEL
Nickel
I am in disgrace, imposed
Strictly between the lines hunger drew,
Composed of
I had it! I had it!
But a poor speaker gone near-public
With a whetted conscience of mayonnaise
And economic morality gone sour,
I jerk off into another memory, sifting
My self-rising hour, shifting on my feet
Like an entrepreneur trading promises,
Looking to the burning bush for better days.
I've been swallowed by that whale,
Caught in the drift of a dedicated urge.
I had it, I'll borrow to
Replace it in one revolution or two.
Yes indeed! I had it to give it
Its proper massage at face value,
To grease the palm tree with coconuts
Or oil spilt during an afternoon's taboo.
If'n you are polite, say
You are void of impulse, and
Let it go at that, say no thanks
But I have to go. (Periodically
Perjury is a motive known
To the best of legends.)
I had it, almost.
Language, your honor,
Is mere alphabet dirt. Abandonment is energy
Too sharp to touch without furor,
But say, haul it in,
Taste beyond contentment
The release
Doing its own work,
And other mad values captioned in crime.
Strapped to thyself against the deck, say
Blow, say blow bay blow, say
Grab up cane and tame the vicious dog.
Know that fear's elect echoes no chorus
But somehow somewhere sometimes forgets
To clothe itself with dignity befitting
Its call, say howl Allen Ginsberg
If you chance meeting him
In occupied territory
Where gods wrestle and speak, say
Speak to us in whale. And to the last word
Nymphomaniacs and their guessing captors,
Legging margins across the dispassionate land, say
Hey button those blouses open to angry remarks
Ruthless enough to Naomi, say
Juggle yesterday's summer
Until parenthetical dawn, say
Nothing to Walt Whitman,
Ezra say Pound, the captain of swans,
Willie Mays say hey Neil Young, say
My…my…my…nothing
To the brash Elvis, research impulsive,
Or Johnny Rotten in the heat
Of awkward citizenship.
And Mother Alibi, say the key to happiness
Won't open the door
Where implication and silence
Are only as good
As each word implies,
Say, how is it every time I pray
I feel like deodorized vomit, say
Souls grow on bones but die beneath
Banker's hours, say
Tell us your name whale, and
We'll make you a star, casting
Matches like chorus lines
Between government issues, say
Where do we hang our hammock, say
Hope a man will cut his hair
Simply to punctuate a sentence, or
Fix his neighbor a cheese sandwich, say
To Delilah Mae Jones,
Samson is dead. Say, but
There has come another greater than he, say
Welcome y'all, say crab canons are delicious
Ways of life, say whales of America
Are a sign to insurance agents.
If'n you are angrily plundered, say
Do not be tricked by men, say
But let them trick you, sampling
Their techniques
So that you are never sent to the orchards
To gather unbias pickles, say
Pairs of excuses are unexplainable
To a whale who is strictly vegetarian
For reasons only the father knows, say
Midnight cravings innocently coded
In hollow rhetoric
Are useless to the slayers of
Civil disobedience, say
Navel oranges tapered to grip expense
Sit down, roll around, gnaw bones, shape knees,
And remind us that chaos is culture, say
Practice what you preach, say
Silence. I am in disgrace, almost.
[ 1982, Atlanta, GA ]
I am in disgrace, imposed
Strictly between the lines hunger drew,
Composed of
I had it! I had it!
But a poor speaker gone near-public
With a whetted conscience of mayonnaise
And economic morality gone sour,
I jerk off into another memory, sifting
My self-rising hour, shifting on my feet
Like an entrepreneur trading promises,
Looking to the burning bush for better days.
I've been swallowed by that whale,
Caught in the drift of a dedicated urge.
I had it, I'll borrow to
Replace it in one revolution or two.
Yes indeed! I had it to give it
Its proper massage at face value,
To grease the palm tree with coconuts
Or oil spilt during an afternoon's taboo.
If'n you are polite, say
You are void of impulse, and
Let it go at that, say no thanks
But I have to go. (Periodically
Perjury is a motive known
To the best of legends.)
I had it, almost.
Language, your honor,
Is mere alphabet dirt. Abandonment is energy
Too sharp to touch without furor,
But say, haul it in,
Taste beyond contentment
The release
Doing its own work,
And other mad values captioned in crime.
Strapped to thyself against the deck, say
Blow, say blow bay blow, say
Grab up cane and tame the vicious dog.
Know that fear's elect echoes no chorus
But somehow somewhere sometimes forgets
To clothe itself with dignity befitting
Its call, say howl Allen Ginsberg
If you chance meeting him
In occupied territory
Where gods wrestle and speak, say
Speak to us in whale. And to the last word
Nymphomaniacs and their guessing captors,
Legging margins across the dispassionate land, say
Hey button those blouses open to angry remarks
Ruthless enough to Naomi, say
Juggle yesterday's summer
Until parenthetical dawn, say
Nothing to Walt Whitman,
Ezra say Pound, the captain of swans,
Willie Mays say hey Neil Young, say
My…my…my…nothing
To the brash Elvis, research impulsive,
Or Johnny Rotten in the heat
Of awkward citizenship.
And Mother Alibi, say the key to happiness
Won't open the door
Where implication and silence
Are only as good
As each word implies,
Say, how is it every time I pray
I feel like deodorized vomit, say
Souls grow on bones but die beneath
Banker's hours, say
Tell us your name whale, and
We'll make you a star, casting
Matches like chorus lines
Between government issues, say
Where do we hang our hammock, say
Hope a man will cut his hair
Simply to punctuate a sentence, or
Fix his neighbor a cheese sandwich, say
To Delilah Mae Jones,
Samson is dead. Say, but
There has come another greater than he, say
Welcome y'all, say crab canons are delicious
Ways of life, say whales of America
Are a sign to insurance agents.
If'n you are angrily plundered, say
Do not be tricked by men, say
But let them trick you, sampling
Their techniques
So that you are never sent to the orchards
To gather unbias pickles, say
Pairs of excuses are unexplainable
To a whale who is strictly vegetarian
For reasons only the father knows, say
Midnight cravings innocently coded
In hollow rhetoric
Are useless to the slayers of
Civil disobedience, say
Navel oranges tapered to grip expense
Sit down, roll around, gnaw bones, shape knees,
And remind us that chaos is culture, say
Practice what you preach, say
Silence. I am in disgrace, almost.
[ 1982, Atlanta, GA ]
LOST & FOUND ART
Allow me to explain my predicament. Up until March 29, 2003, I had carefully maintained, organized & archived my entire email history from 1993 when I first joined Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL all within a few weeks of each other, having been instantly smitten with this new world of messaging. I hail from a damned near illiterate background—from an alcohol-hardened household, from a band of brothers who somehow esteem reading and writing of little use above that required by law.
This is not an indictment of them, but a tiny spotlight onto the struggles for my own sense of clarity, given my own poetic nature, and desire for pursuing and comprehending the incomprehensible. I had been fortunate that during my ten years of archiving, I had never lost anything I had ever emailed, or had received from someone. Except for obvious and useless SPAM, and lower tier business correspondence, I cherished every bit of communication I had ever mustered.
And I'd been fortunate to have met and sustained along the way a steady string of writerly aspirants, so our email wasn't of the dull flat liner variety that would soon cloak the long silences of previous generations who had transitioned from sincere letter writing to the less literary and more immediate telephone call. Now we had access to a marvelous combination of the two, letter writing nearly extinct, and the telephone call, often as mundane and flawed for its archival challenges as the polaroid in the digital camera age.
But then came the shock and awe of that March 29 loss. Ten years of treasured exchanges gone in a keystroke! Ordinarily I kept a rather recent back-up of my work, but for reasons of brevity, let's just say I had little to rely upon that day. I lost my entire hard drive of personal information. After the week long stress, sweat and toil of data recovery magic, I found that I had recovered maybe two-thirds of my email data. I lost so much more other work, but it was my treasured email that mattered most to me at that point, and the process was too inadequate to worry about the rest of the loss. Now, of course, my email did not recover it former glory. Now, instead of each individual mail stored away in personal boxes and folders, where I had immediate access to them in plain text, I now had over 22,000 individual files each named, starting at number 1, increasing in value one file at a time, like this:
Email file (generic) 16784
And to make matters worse, each recovered file, no, did not include just a single piece of mail, but sometimes two, five, or three, point three emails. And these texts were not alone in their new miserable state. Of course, each file included huge chucks of header and other unexplainable strands of ASCII gibberish, cast off, decidedly boorish digital DNA that I would have to clear away like so many acres of undergrowth in order to isolate a long lost masterpiece from my friend Steve, or a stroll through Landryville with the wit and sarcasm of her spicy Cajun' upbringing, or merely a well-written communication from back in the day, those early days when so many people inside and outside the industry mocked the functionality, or inspirational value of email, while here we were composing masterpieces, detailing small everyday events of those days of our lives, marching to our exciting times with an eye on posterity.
Yes all this, BEFORE THE DELUGE OF SPAM. Before Internet porn. And for several years, before the WWW itself. Ah, yes, we were there, and we were writers, and yes, we could be bombastic or plain spoken. We could lie with dogs, or we could ride elephant ears. Those were the days where great plans ruled the great plains.
Nostalgic, but that's merely the background noise of my original purpose in posting today. Now here's one of those recovered files I just opened this morning, randomly. I did not write this, it seems to be unsigned, but I did save it. And since it seems as apropos as a summer shower given a rather new MS friend's recent smackdown of the Intellectual Predator, a series I highly recommend, here's yet another redux circa 1993-4 and my AOL years (when I signed on there I was among a mere 250,000 subscribers. When I left over 25 million. But I'll leave that story to later.)
----------------
First Light
He used to take advantage of me at first. You had to fight. He was dominating. You had to fight. He would push you to the edge. He respected me for fighting, for my philosophy and ideologies, and for my heart at the edge of reality.
Me and X developed a very special relationship where our friendship meant more than a job. It meant more than anything else I could think of, and I am good at thinking up things I just cannot touch. We used to hang out all night and we would just talk the paint off the walls. He'd tell me about his experiences and I'd tell him about mine. In a situation like this you meet a lot of good paragraphs.
When he saw me he was always real happy to see me like I was his next meal or the wedding of his fat daughter. I'll never forget this, one night we was walking and he said—it was almost like a movie, right—he said, "You know, a man meets a friend only once in a lifetime." That stays with me like the hiccups, even better. That quote is a great quote. It made me feel good that I had reached that height of wandering friendship and wondering humanity.
Mental States
Most of these guys just need somebody to really take the time with them. I think all these guys can be reached somewhere.
They throw all rejects from society into one pile and that's the ugly part of it. And only the strong survive. I've seen men lose their minds. Good men. Intelligent men. I've seen these men being ate up alive, men losing their minds before my face. After being in the condition over and over again these sane people eventually become insane because of the degradation.
Many times I have cried, I'm not going to lie to you or to anyone else who thinks about why I am here and they are where they are. I have swung at the air. I have felt sorry for myself. It's not easy to be independent.
As far as snapping, I've leamed too much to snap. I can't really diagnose my own case, but I'm angry now and again. I've got a temper that's really bad, enough to scare the crows away. That's new. Anger. That's the only thing that shivers me. I'm angry at the world. I might be sitting here talking cool and collected but....
I'm scared of myself at this point. Some of the things I had to do. I have beat people up. I have begged, borrowed, and stole. And the anger that I have. I dance and stuff and I just snapped at one of the girls at a dance class because at this point I'm angry at the world. Nobody cares for me. And yeah, I'm climbing up and I'm looking good. It's all of that need to say that I am somebody. You're not going to walk over me. I'm going to survive. I'm fighting. But I'm fighting 'cause I'm angry. I'm scared of myself 'cause I wonder if I get up there one day will I be vindictive? Hitler was once in a homeless joint. This is the stuff that makes Hitlers, I hate to say it.
Poetry
I want to feel better
So l write a poem
I don't care if it rhymes
If it's offbeat
Onbeat
Unpunctuated
Or misspelled
I just want to write a poem
So l can feel better
A poem is supposed to have moving images
Which stirs the senses
Well, the only images I see
Is blackness
Sadness
Unfairness
Martin
Malcom
Garvey
Kennedy
Nuisance
Revenge
Choking hands
Neck and mind braces
Starkness. Images that required reaction. That's what photographer Morton Hundley and I were looking for in October 1986. I had recently started a job as a social worker for the Homeless Services Unit of D.C.'s Downtown Cluster of Congregations, an ecurnenical association of 24 downtown churches. He introduced himself to me, and offered to buy me a cup of coffee. I said okay and the next thing I knew we were looking at these pictures he'd brought, nicely tucked into a satchel that was worn and tattered around the edges. His pictures were black. I had to cry.
This is not an indictment of them, but a tiny spotlight onto the struggles for my own sense of clarity, given my own poetic nature, and desire for pursuing and comprehending the incomprehensible. I had been fortunate that during my ten years of archiving, I had never lost anything I had ever emailed, or had received from someone. Except for obvious and useless SPAM, and lower tier business correspondence, I cherished every bit of communication I had ever mustered.
And I'd been fortunate to have met and sustained along the way a steady string of writerly aspirants, so our email wasn't of the dull flat liner variety that would soon cloak the long silences of previous generations who had transitioned from sincere letter writing to the less literary and more immediate telephone call. Now we had access to a marvelous combination of the two, letter writing nearly extinct, and the telephone call, often as mundane and flawed for its archival challenges as the polaroid in the digital camera age.
But then came the shock and awe of that March 29 loss. Ten years of treasured exchanges gone in a keystroke! Ordinarily I kept a rather recent back-up of my work, but for reasons of brevity, let's just say I had little to rely upon that day. I lost my entire hard drive of personal information. After the week long stress, sweat and toil of data recovery magic, I found that I had recovered maybe two-thirds of my email data. I lost so much more other work, but it was my treasured email that mattered most to me at that point, and the process was too inadequate to worry about the rest of the loss. Now, of course, my email did not recover it former glory. Now, instead of each individual mail stored away in personal boxes and folders, where I had immediate access to them in plain text, I now had over 22,000 individual files each named, starting at number 1, increasing in value one file at a time, like this:
Email file (generic) 16784
And to make matters worse, each recovered file, no, did not include just a single piece of mail, but sometimes two, five, or three, point three emails. And these texts were not alone in their new miserable state. Of course, each file included huge chucks of header and other unexplainable strands of ASCII gibberish, cast off, decidedly boorish digital DNA that I would have to clear away like so many acres of undergrowth in order to isolate a long lost masterpiece from my friend Steve, or a stroll through Landryville with the wit and sarcasm of her spicy Cajun' upbringing, or merely a well-written communication from back in the day, those early days when so many people inside and outside the industry mocked the functionality, or inspirational value of email, while here we were composing masterpieces, detailing small everyday events of those days of our lives, marching to our exciting times with an eye on posterity.
Yes all this, BEFORE THE DELUGE OF SPAM. Before Internet porn. And for several years, before the WWW itself. Ah, yes, we were there, and we were writers, and yes, we could be bombastic or plain spoken. We could lie with dogs, or we could ride elephant ears. Those were the days where great plans ruled the great plains.
Nostalgic, but that's merely the background noise of my original purpose in posting today. Now here's one of those recovered files I just opened this morning, randomly. I did not write this, it seems to be unsigned, but I did save it. And since it seems as apropos as a summer shower given a rather new MS friend's recent smackdown of the Intellectual Predator, a series I highly recommend, here's yet another redux circa 1993-4 and my AOL years (when I signed on there I was among a mere 250,000 subscribers. When I left over 25 million. But I'll leave that story to later.)
----------------
First Light
He used to take advantage of me at first. You had to fight. He was dominating. You had to fight. He would push you to the edge. He respected me for fighting, for my philosophy and ideologies, and for my heart at the edge of reality.
Me and X developed a very special relationship where our friendship meant more than a job. It meant more than anything else I could think of, and I am good at thinking up things I just cannot touch. We used to hang out all night and we would just talk the paint off the walls. He'd tell me about his experiences and I'd tell him about mine. In a situation like this you meet a lot of good paragraphs.
When he saw me he was always real happy to see me like I was his next meal or the wedding of his fat daughter. I'll never forget this, one night we was walking and he said—it was almost like a movie, right—he said, "You know, a man meets a friend only once in a lifetime." That stays with me like the hiccups, even better. That quote is a great quote. It made me feel good that I had reached that height of wandering friendship and wondering humanity.
Mental States
Most of these guys just need somebody to really take the time with them. I think all these guys can be reached somewhere.
They throw all rejects from society into one pile and that's the ugly part of it. And only the strong survive. I've seen men lose their minds. Good men. Intelligent men. I've seen these men being ate up alive, men losing their minds before my face. After being in the condition over and over again these sane people eventually become insane because of the degradation.
Many times I have cried, I'm not going to lie to you or to anyone else who thinks about why I am here and they are where they are. I have swung at the air. I have felt sorry for myself. It's not easy to be independent.
As far as snapping, I've leamed too much to snap. I can't really diagnose my own case, but I'm angry now and again. I've got a temper that's really bad, enough to scare the crows away. That's new. Anger. That's the only thing that shivers me. I'm angry at the world. I might be sitting here talking cool and collected but....
I'm scared of myself at this point. Some of the things I had to do. I have beat people up. I have begged, borrowed, and stole. And the anger that I have. I dance and stuff and I just snapped at one of the girls at a dance class because at this point I'm angry at the world. Nobody cares for me. And yeah, I'm climbing up and I'm looking good. It's all of that need to say that I am somebody. You're not going to walk over me. I'm going to survive. I'm fighting. But I'm fighting 'cause I'm angry. I'm scared of myself 'cause I wonder if I get up there one day will I be vindictive? Hitler was once in a homeless joint. This is the stuff that makes Hitlers, I hate to say it.
Poetry
I want to feel better
So l write a poem
I don't care if it rhymes
If it's offbeat
Onbeat
Unpunctuated
Or misspelled
I just want to write a poem
So l can feel better
A poem is supposed to have moving images
Which stirs the senses
Well, the only images I see
Is blackness
Sadness
Unfairness
Martin
Malcom
Garvey
Kennedy
Nuisance
Revenge
Choking hands
Neck and mind braces
Starkness. Images that required reaction. That's what photographer Morton Hundley and I were looking for in October 1986. I had recently started a job as a social worker for the Homeless Services Unit of D.C.'s Downtown Cluster of Congregations, an ecurnenical association of 24 downtown churches. He introduced himself to me, and offered to buy me a cup of coffee. I said okay and the next thing I knew we were looking at these pictures he'd brought, nicely tucked into a satchel that was worn and tattered around the edges. His pictures were black. I had to cry.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
OSCAR WILDE
Originally published on September 11, 1999
Well Bracken (you still wish to be known as Bracken, eh?), as I said today, I was rather touched by that flick I saw last night, WILDE, and so have been reading up on Oscar via the web. Talk about the penultimate master of negation. Every utterance is an inverted of the common, a negation of the mundane, a transcendence of the obvious.
Of course he was a bugger, and thus he shall remain, shall we say, utterly worthless to you as a commanding spirit? But I am indeed awed, particularly since I now know he was such a sad, physical giant of a man, as personified in the movie and reiterated in the additional photographs and extensive commentary I've found this evening in a welcomed break from the stress of today's 14 hour DNS outage. Toad says they hope they've fixed it as of 10:30 this evening, but are aware that their upgrade is probably still buggy, speaking of the laws of buggery.
Fascination with Oscar? What that says about me, is yours to ponder, for I surely boast no pat answers, but I do host a belated sympathy for that gentlest of giants.
Might you have preferred Oscar the Hun? This reminds me, I am overdue in torquing Kubhlai's remarks on sexuality.
Penned Oscar: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless...real beauty ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."
Well Bracken (you still wish to be known as Bracken, eh?), as I said today, I was rather touched by that flick I saw last night, WILDE, and so have been reading up on Oscar via the web. Talk about the penultimate master of negation. Every utterance is an inverted of the common, a negation of the mundane, a transcendence of the obvious.
Of course he was a bugger, and thus he shall remain, shall we say, utterly worthless to you as a commanding spirit? But I am indeed awed, particularly since I now know he was such a sad, physical giant of a man, as personified in the movie and reiterated in the additional photographs and extensive commentary I've found this evening in a welcomed break from the stress of today's 14 hour DNS outage. Toad says they hope they've fixed it as of 10:30 this evening, but are aware that their upgrade is probably still buggy, speaking of the laws of buggery.
Fascination with Oscar? What that says about me, is yours to ponder, for I surely boast no pat answers, but I do host a belated sympathy for that gentlest of giants.
Might you have preferred Oscar the Hun? This reminds me, I am overdue in torquing Kubhlai's remarks on sexuality.
Penned Oscar: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless...real beauty ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."
WIPE THOSE FEET
Each American city evaporating
into the clean cool dusk
experience sends tapping nervous patients
on suspicious knees, devoid of grassy knolls,
brokering unabridged entropy, fixated
on last hope expense checks electronically mailed,
and yet without fair warning.
We laugh out of sheer geometry,
absorbed in a crackling worth, our capacity
for sweet shock stilled for camera shots
and misfitted shoes of fortune gaping a t the naked
grizzled flesh, shoving it across in public
bodies of water and wine and mud...
We drop our coin
into each inverting slot,
pulling a bag behind the bushes,
a bag actively malevolent, still cruising
our crusted minds like a decade
we forgot to peel.
into the clean cool dusk
experience sends tapping nervous patients
on suspicious knees, devoid of grassy knolls,
brokering unabridged entropy, fixated
on last hope expense checks electronically mailed,
and yet without fair warning.
We laugh out of sheer geometry,
absorbed in a crackling worth, our capacity
for sweet shock stilled for camera shots
and misfitted shoes of fortune gaping a t the naked
grizzled flesh, shoving it across in public
bodies of water and wine and mud...
We drop our coin
into each inverting slot,
pulling a bag behind the bushes,
a bag actively malevolent, still cruising
our crusted minds like a decade
we forgot to peel.
WHY I AM LOUD
Daily I sing camp songs to a cast of thousands
Boldly I recline in the pit of this orchestra
A spring peach in a night gown grown
Justly proud of my fleshy fevered cleavage
Jumping up and down until
They look at me,
And I become the scene.
Once in the spotlight I cannot relinquish
Long after I quicken empty of words
I am she might and muscle as I he conjures noises
Public displays of bodily function
Aiming to keep an audience captured
To watch
To listen
To me
Once I was pinched to the cold lost wall
An ugly frazzled flower always tripping
In gold glossed high school halls
Over long legs of boys, over long legs of boys
The grip of the cold lost wall was fierce
But refusing to take root or suffer this load
I made my escape in a green gray Chevy
Up an unshouldered bayou road.
That's why I am loud.
The more books I open the more I read
The less shy I pretend I am
I ask the world to touch me with delicate fingers
Desiring open spaces of mountain and sky
No walls but canyons and oceans for me
Where I cannot be held by
Walls that grope
Or am forced to hang out
In dingy coops
with the chickens.
______________________________________
This poem, written in 1997, is a collaboration with a SF poet named Landry. Although I only offered a few changes which she said she liked, she didn't think it was her poem anymore. Well, I liked her root images immensely, and despite the tightening chances I offer it here...
Boldly I recline in the pit of this orchestra
A spring peach in a night gown grown
Justly proud of my fleshy fevered cleavage
Jumping up and down until
They look at me,
And I become the scene.
Once in the spotlight I cannot relinquish
Long after I quicken empty of words
I am she might and muscle as I he conjures noises
Public displays of bodily function
Aiming to keep an audience captured
To watch
To listen
To me
Once I was pinched to the cold lost wall
An ugly frazzled flower always tripping
In gold glossed high school halls
Over long legs of boys, over long legs of boys
The grip of the cold lost wall was fierce
But refusing to take root or suffer this load
I made my escape in a green gray Chevy
Up an unshouldered bayou road.
That's why I am loud.
The more books I open the more I read
The less shy I pretend I am
I ask the world to touch me with delicate fingers
Desiring open spaces of mountain and sky
No walls but canyons and oceans for me
Where I cannot be held by
Walls that grope
Or am forced to hang out
In dingy coops
with the chickens.
______________________________________
This poem, written in 1997, is a collaboration with a SF poet named Landry. Although I only offered a few changes which she said she liked, she didn't think it was her poem anymore. Well, I liked her root images immensely, and despite the tightening chances I offer it here...
LAMPSHADES MADE OF FLESH
Long and white pickings
of the litter slid past
this old television set
where filthy & famous
gorge themselves silly
fool's camera, off topic,
in some gorgeous idea
their own well-greased
bravado and beauty
will set Smith free from
the mules of mockery
of misery and toil
of danger, democratically.
Society of the spectacle
ain't without its icecapades
or pumpkins carved up for fright
until writing clay poems for raids
scattered along the glittering class
loving then shooting on first sight
sane pigeons walking the awful plank
hands in nobody's pockets nobody's
like some bayou country on the run,
we believe ourselves dutifully astonished
swooning at the slow taint of suicide songs
entering nations now as the thief moons
simple courtesy to some frenzied
God of the Dead licking steroids.
Hatred and phobias in the news
no time for sergeants or dirty Jews
no cross-bearers, no Zen, no holy cow
to rot this new perspective, only
the icy pool of blood to plow
words in a book of terror
left as Joe Mohammed's
calling card
to each of us who doubt
we're on the invitation list
engraved by fourteen centuries
of lust wandering the sands of time's
last stand. Time is the detonator.
Time is the fire, the flame, the scream.
Time in due time will prove itself the liar.
[ 2002, Washington, DC ]
of the litter slid past
this old television set
where filthy & famous
gorge themselves silly
fool's camera, off topic,
in some gorgeous idea
their own well-greased
bravado and beauty
will set Smith free from
the mules of mockery
of misery and toil
of danger, democratically.
Society of the spectacle
ain't without its icecapades
or pumpkins carved up for fright
until writing clay poems for raids
scattered along the glittering class
loving then shooting on first sight
sane pigeons walking the awful plank
hands in nobody's pockets nobody's
like some bayou country on the run,
we believe ourselves dutifully astonished
swooning at the slow taint of suicide songs
entering nations now as the thief moons
simple courtesy to some frenzied
God of the Dead licking steroids.
Hatred and phobias in the news
no time for sergeants or dirty Jews
no cross-bearers, no Zen, no holy cow
to rot this new perspective, only
the icy pool of blood to plow
words in a book of terror
left as Joe Mohammed's
calling card
to each of us who doubt
we're on the invitation list
engraved by fourteen centuries
of lust wandering the sands of time's
last stand. Time is the detonator.
Time is the fire, the flame, the scream.
Time in due time will prove itself the liar.
[ 2002, Washington, DC ]
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
ENTROPY
Some men are pansies and some women are painters. The lion's roar
can be dressed up in colors neither'd recognize.
The paint can in time is exploded by a handsome bullet
with my name on it and a typewriter's glint.
Fame's not a fruit but the lady bug's as beautiful as the core
a nuclear reactionary must in faith never hypothesize.
Nobody hears and nobody's nose, to unquestionably spool it
I'd need to check the past reconfiguring absolutely every hint.
GT - September 1, 1996 - Washington DC
can be dressed up in colors neither'd recognize.
The paint can in time is exploded by a handsome bullet
with my name on it and a typewriter's glint.
Fame's not a fruit but the lady bug's as beautiful as the core
a nuclear reactionary must in faith never hypothesize.
Nobody hears and nobody's nose, to unquestionably spool it
I'd need to check the past reconfiguring absolutely every hint.
GT - September 1, 1996 - Washington DC
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