Reasons For Living - November 2013

Movies
The Darjeeling Limited -Wes Anderson
Paris, Texas - Wim Wenders
Wings of Desire - Wim Wenders
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania - Jonas Mekas
Don DeLillo BBC Documentary
Vine Compilation Videos

Books
Try! Try! - Frank O'Hara
New York: A Serendipiter's Journey - Gay Talese
Return to A Native Country - Aime Cesaire
Reality Hunger - David Shields
Salinger - David Shields, Shane Salerno
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
Train Dreams - Denis Johnson
Impossible Vacation - Spalding Gray
Stories and Texts for Nothing - Samuel Beckett
Chekhov short stories
Guy de Maupassant short stories

Plays
Grasses of a Thousand Colors - Public Theater, Andre Gregory, Dir.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - Theatre for a New Audience, Julie Taymor, Dir.

I Was Ill-Prepared for the Effects of Not Being Famous

My younger self, culled from cartoon,
bulged his lip and bugged his eye like John Lennon.

There were cameras everywhere.
I was playing to them before they appeared.

There were cameras on John Lennon.
I was a star being shot into a cannon.

My dad was God throwing stars across the sky. 
I was a fiery twinkle searing his eye.

In a picture on top of our fridge, which I thought was him,
John Lennon gave the peace sign from the Statue of Liberty.

I have awoke but lie still in bed, listening
to my Dad sing "Hey Bulldog" in the living room.

Why am I telling you this? I am not
even interesting to myself.

Write what you know.
I am what I know. 

                                             I am not
even interesting to myself.

I am the star of all my poems.
There is no one between me and my camera.

Do not get in the way.

Words That Occurred to Me As I Was Writing Them

Florid Commandant Speaks      Raisins called to arms
Field-tested hand gesture        Cauldron horizon        Magnolias stab at wonderment
Overarching barbarous shingles     New hats off to creedo'd layman       Italian refrigeration
Squalid wheel, burn low        Take-mouth, you're a take mouth!
Feud of released cabbages          Table          Manure, a collaborative borax dispatch
Ruse dressed feedbags          Stench newborn          Chairs sanction horseback chat by
Slouched carbine of lewd psychology        Comptrolled afternoon sightseeing crests of charbroiled incest
Barndoors of light imply jetskis piss 3 cents          Lillehammer'd chickenmatter  
Fretboard speedbumps adjust waterfallen, braised hen         Deteriorates old Frambes of Dodge
Grandfather daubs oilslick stomach          Buckeye         Rediscovering surrealist tactics
Da Vincis summarized           Hoards of tempo powder wood floorboards            Lilt, gravestone flower
USA renews clawmarks on bedridden sheik           Macabre hooligan bouquet unshooed
Blizzard pasta floats        Vapor           Snot eyes look up      
Walking is incurred        Too many nods          Brick weavelines bob solely from alleyway mismatch
Key turns rave back and forth           The Folio Account         Sawtooth penguins slump coconut
Striding shoe-polish cobbled from Depression-era dreadlocks           Classic Rock pantry
Need well-heeled childewhore          Baretta schlock           Desert lack of foot lift and close
Plastic container suicide note: "Shut the door"         Moonrock nickel deposit
New currency with nosebridge and shadowed eyes         Strut mood carries singe touch
Unplanned therapist cosigns underwear lease         Broodmare casualty, sit down in the empty blue chair
Just kidding. Sit anywhere, staunch marble panther
My epitaph;
[                     ]
[      ] son
[                      ]


Quote me on this, after my death;
"It is what I is
I is what It is"

The Rain and Me, Me and the Rain

I'm sorry, rain, I can't hear you.
You trickled off at the end of your
Diatribe. What's gotten into you?
You wet everything like it's yours.
When I need you, you're never there for me.
Certain days, and I would never call them mine,
Certain days, the sun looks down so kindly at me,
These days, the sunny, I'd never call them mine.
I want to stay inside, to be away from them,
That's what you're there for, rain, so they
can't get at me. I'm not one of them;
I've spent my life insisting this. They
fend little rooms beneath their umbrellas. We
should stick together, rain and me. We.

What Nurse Ed Said.

"Well, we've taken a look at your chart.
As suspected, the problem lies in your heart,
but don't be afraid, surgery is a kind of art

and Dr. Hughes sculpts like Michaelangelo.
He'll be by shortly to say hello.
If, in the coming weeks you're feeling low,

there's no reason to be alarmed.
The pain may threaten, but it's rarely armed.
Just make sure you stay on top of your meds.

If you need me, just ask for 'Nurse Ed.'
I'll see to it you're properly nursed."
There. That's what the nurse said.

Addendum To a Break-Up

She'll do.
She's a rough approximation of you
without the sense of humor.
She'll do
and she did.

Rough drafts come through
the window.
A woman like that will only let you
get away with her for so long.
Every time she left
I was paranoid she wasn't coming back.
I'm turning into John Cusack.
She's never coming back.

I write my fuckin heart out for you.

The Only Thing Separating Us From the Stars is the Ceiling.

I wake to two text messages,
O, all of them from you!
My new room's almost arranged.
This desk fits snugly under
the bed. I wonder if we'll both fit
in a loft so close to the ceiling.
Look, I've created
a new place to be lonely.
There's danger in not averting
these actual feelings
developing for you.
Why now? Why you? Why me?
And are they coordinated
with what is going on over there
inside your heart?
I fear I'm overshooting the mark...
Tomorrow pleasing French girls
will come along.  I try to dispense
my heart equally on everyone
but sometimes it seems like
only one person is worth it...

217 Hours, That's How Long I've Known Her

It's so early
I'm forgetting
what she looks like
when I haven't
seen her
for a couple
days.

I want to
see her all the time

to memorize
her quicker than
she is disappearing.

I catch
what moments
I can

like flaming snow
from a firework
shriveling to ash

in my fingers.



Boredom, with its
table of queer
instruments,
deals out its agony.

In a German accent it
urges me
to go outside,
to busy myself
to look away
so the hours
can slip
by unnoticed.

I refuse.

I want to be alone
with the pain,

the palpable absence,
the only feeling
equal
to her presence.

This pain
is the proper
debt for
what
she will bring.

Out of
the dark, her
face comes
in a flash.
She is beginning
to live in me already.

The memories
are slowly fusing
themselves to
my flesh.

Imagination is remembering
a future
that never comes true.

I can almost remember
the future

the future
where she hides,
waiting.

July 29, 2013

It takes approximately 30 years to get the message
that time is actually turning,
that this whirled world is headed somewhere,
that the mirror shows us a new face every time,
only it's nice enough to reveal us gradually
so we're not driven suicidal all at once.

We are creeping towards night
but only because it's day.
The dark clouds loom.
They move into the room.
The sun looms over them.
Do the flowers suffer in rain?
The Black-eyed Susans nod
with tears, Yes, yes, yes.

Yellow is plentiful in our meadow today.
The sun blowing its light all over the grass.
I am not comfortable unless surrounded
by green: grass, leaves, stems.
They place me. They hold me there.
The forest is a spa.

Today, summer, growth is winning
but the birds are not singing
about transcendence. In fact,
they are quite unhappy.
The sun barrels through the sky
burning away clouds.
The living flute of the beak forces
agonized notes into the indifferent face
of a sky so blue as to be totally mundane.

The earth is retracing its steps
like an insatiable nomad
or obsessive trying to find
something it lost it doesn't know
how many years back.

It finds the same handful of skies
it always has, a pearl necklace of stars
strung across it's murky night.
I've been dragged on almost 30 trips already.
It's the same shit every time.

White Fawn

white fawn shunned
finding family in snow
eyes pink
clairvoyant

a roost    hunter
puts eye
to arrow

white faun
closes eyes

growing her
crown

vanishes
into winter

The Art Room

Some kids found their rooms:
Math room pizza parties for those held in place by statistics,
four mirrored walls enclosing those given strong bodies pressing iron into muscle,
a tiny box for the Special broken off and hidden from the general population.
Those who went to the art room followed the music:
Stacks of scratched mix cds flourished with magic marker,
curated directly from fresh teenage hearts
made into sound flying over Doc's Art II class
as they sketch, carve, snack and chat.
The only room where students are allowed
to talk to each other all period
and pencils work to produce souls
instead of information.
There, the ineffable takes shape, in papier-mache, 
macaroni or glitter.

Here are the kids who knew how
to make mistakes. Perched on stools,
napping on the couch in the back,
the duds, the nerds, building things, hanging out,
shaving sculptures into their scalps. Their minds escaping
in paint-smear, light and earth, becoming amorphous blobs,
new species of globule bacteria squirming across a slide of canvas,
things under the microscope, not for interrogation,
but for companionship.
They reach no understanding with the world through movement
or the way the colors talk
to each other, they only reanimate the confusion into something
they can be friendly with.
Visions surface from the blank stare
of a white page.
They know how to get rid of that white;
just start getting it dirty.
Eventually it begins to look like something
clean.

Nate starts new genres every class
though he plays no instrument: oy-punk, ska-core, pinhead blues.
Corban and Chip engineer robots
from their dad's junked wiper blades and orphaned gadgetry.
Quiet Jennifer looks
into the peeled aperture of her camera.
Golden Nick sketches always,
scoring every conversation with his etching.
Their eyes cast aloof
from what everyone else is trained to see,
staring into discouraged hallucinations.
Unable to convince themselves the visions aren't there,
they exorcise them through messes of paint, wavering clay,
kilns burning mud into permanent shape. Splotched
mistakes arch gracefully into unforeseen purposes, the erroneous made integral.
What is discarded or shamed in other rooms is here followed with curiosity,
rescued and incorporated into a perfectly rendered mess
of liquid. The rejected is what was, what became.
Here kids let their hearts out, casually, without having to explain them,
like red paint from a shiny new tube.
Can't everybody see it? It's up there on the wall, collaged out of glue-stick
and diced magazine scrap.
They don't have to clarify it in the desperate pomp
of a poem or the insipid glitz of jazz hands. Put on the run by the logical requests
of Spanish teachers, they can relax here,
and so they are real, and so they are different.

As adults, they still use what they learned there. I watch them. They are my friends;
bartenders or line cooks or nurses or clerks, their basements are cluttered
with bric-a-brac, creative purchases, bought not out of necessity,
but simply because they explode the room into life:
A creek painting amended with a rhinestone deer cutout,
the orange booth of a defunct bowling alley,
Happy Meal characters leftover from obsolete Saturday mornings.
Their dens are hung with 4th grade prize-winners, Governor's Show picks,
a woodcarving of an eagle so ugly only a Mom could keep it hung
on her bathroom wall for thirty years.
Exacto knives and staedtler erasers point
from Warhol coffee cups on drafting tables,
T-Squares and light boxes are dragged through a gamut of low-rent apartments.

Maybe in the cupboard, maybe out in the garage,
a box lies closed
but not empty,
filled with crinkled tubes
of hardened oil, a palette stained
with a multifarious rash of colors,
a forest of stiffened brushes growing
from a ceramic ashtray.
Every now and then they put a record on,
pull this box out, open it
and again, with a little insistence,
the colors come flowing.

Drinking the Wine

New lovers lie on a blanket
Inifinity lays six
feet of dirt against the fresh
pine lid beneath

I wonder what they see
when they look in each other's eyes

unperturbed earth
accustomed to a long diet
of deaths most
of its graves unmarked
forgotten

The grass is given
a close shave and a fresh drink

Four corks run
through with the sharp end of a pigtail screw
lightly stained in dark wine
the dark wine pouring
from fingertips into
little covered cask

Seeing in the Dark

A bird is singing all night
He thinks it’s still the daylight
Opened my mouth      and out it came
a litany of blame
not at myself
but at everyone else

I don’t consider it stark
That I can see in the dark
I know the place     where I belong
It’s dancing to this song
without you
It’s what I like to do

Did you find yourself talking to me
Only accidentally
Accept my apology
I am so sorry

A rose isn’t real enough
until it signifies love
This one’s dead     it was mine
I plucked it from a vine
just for you
Now it’s something new

Runyon Canyon is deep
The hills you carved are too steep
It is a well      made out of dark
full of people’s hearts
thrown in coins
They go boing boing boing

Did you find yourself talking to me
Only accidentally
Accept my apology
I am so sorry

I was never Chinese
I only know how to say please
Did you forget      that I was here?
Are you that soaked in beer
because of me?
It is flattering

Did you find yourself talking to me
Only accidentally
Accept my apology
I am so sorry

Walhalla

One of my first High School Friday nights,
we embarked from Staab's house, a caravan
headed for Walhalla in search of frights,
the girls especially eager. Slowly turning man,
I wanted to be wherever they were.
We wound through the bush down the holler,
wild between the parallel struts of High
and Neil, busy mother roads. She was shy
and so was I, but somehow more affected,
senses pumping her heart with excess legend.
Parked under the bridge, Charlie directed
us to imagine a boy swinging in the wind.
Giddy with fear, she grabbed my arm for security.
I could not wait for her to do what she did to me.

Tendering My Resignation or My Last Poem

I woke this afternoon
and no longer wanted
to be a poet.
There was no fame in it.
There was no name in it
and certainly no money.
(That was my last rhyme)

I fell asleep
to words twinkling
in my head like stars.
When I woke
the windows were
clean with light.
I began to speak
in sentences with
no metaphors or similes.
(Those were my last metaphors and similes)

The questions I have been raising,
the ones with no answers:
I put them down and
pick up a tennis racket.
My friend is across the net.
One of us will win        one will lose.
I watch TV.         I ride my bike.
(No more caesuras only plain speech) 
I am not a poet.
I will not die for poetry.
I will live for life.

(One more
for old times sake.
There's something so
beautiful when
words are broken
apart
from each other,
when I
look at one
thing and see
another)

At last, I know
what I'm doing:
I'm giving it all up.
(My last stanza)

Goodbye

Why I Write These Things Down

I write things
down just in
case somebody
else might need them.

Their crisis might
intersect by chance
with my
words

their moment
searching through
a book with
this page.

They might be
looking
for someone
who's been
there before.

I hope
they find
me

and if
they don't I
can rest easy.

I tried.

I'll be
around
in case they
need me.

Excuse for Not Returning Your Text

The birds call from the vines clenching the church
next door but it’s the drums that clatter
me from sleep 8 o’clock Sunday morning
into that good prelude to the hangover
where you’re dopey and lucid as the young grey light
sneaks through the window without it’s  pants.

I have no girl with me, so I remember you
by your rambunctious smell, not at all like the perfumes
on the shelf of the Rite-Aid, your feral hair,
the wide wing-span of your eyes.
I click right past your text. Leave me alone again.
Alone is where we belong. We can give each other that.

She didn’t mean that much to me.
I’m not sure what does. I’m not sure anything can
in the delirious corral of this city.
You’re the last girl I’ve got to think of.
Maybe you regret that. Maybe you don’t know.

The D-train sleepwalks the bridge.
The Gowanus lays down and dies. The Hudson does not.
I am a Mummy in dirty brown sheets.
I turn up the volume on the birds and go back to sleep.

saints

the african marigold's melt in the sun
orange burning black like hot plastic
dad asks how they're doing from
3000 miles away. it is the last thing
he is permitted to nurture in his son's life
who unexpectedly and audaciously became
a man, marrying and moving across the country.

everything warns against attempting sainthood.
the saint's irrefutable soul is alien to
this world. many diseases rise to the skin.
persistently misunderstanding the logic of man
until no other conclusion can be drawn than
to be shot with arrows
he voluntarily strays into a fragmented wood
of renunciation and illuminating morbidity.
conclusions chime as bells of light
around the edges of his eyesight.
he climbs new sierras of pain
and he is on no journey but to climb higher

his head is a golden apple and his heart
belongs in a dog. later eras will pray to it
for now it's on loan and wrapped
in a fast-food sack on the dashboard
of a late-80s econoline.
most are saints.
none are beatified.
A seizure lifts him
and he is gently eviscerated
by the stars
halo melting to his scalp

Second Life

they packed the town into a big box
and shipped it to southeast ohio
they packed bryan adams into a box
and shipped it to southeast asia
they packed the baby into a box
and shipped it to madonna

drawn up with a silver pen
the EPZs jurisdiction
the cease fires declaration
and the stockyards reopen for business

the hundred thousand leaves shrouding
the white house roar
like a crowd, like a nation
a few man's hands
shake that sound
like snake's tails rattling
into a megaphone

the heavy metal band pleads self-defense
they just play music. that's all they do
they're not protesting
except in a vague way
against everything, they're not sure what
perhaps specifically the chaotic volume
of their early adolesence

a child bent around a pen
is told to count the lima beans again
he counted too fast
a snarling dragon pulled up
and he rode, logically concluding
in a sorcerer's castle's broad construct
of speedy fretwork and overbearing tablature

the card game made us
wizards, frankly, and we enjoyed it
more than being what we were
I throw the dice and the king's head
tumbles with them into a basket

a burmese girl sews the silhouette
of a man performing a feat
not meant for man
into the side of a shoe
that will wing you to heaven
if heaven is as high
as a slam dunk. boys
in a park joust styrofoam swords
and a hand is folded
behind the back to signify its heroic
loss in battle. it is regrown momentarily
to dunk a chicken mcnugget
boys in another park no longer
kill each other for the shoes
they stand and admire and compliment
I don't know what's going on in the ghetto
jay z is in a booth with warren buffett
and jerry seinfeld at daniel

they are saving the galaxy
the only one we have to save
which nobody lives in anymore
the forest is off in endor
the snow belongs to hoth

a boy fights a war
on his television set
in an afghan marketplace

in hd and widescreen
it's practically photorealisitic
the guns sound authentic
coming in 5.1 digital surround
from every direction

another boy fights a similar looking war
in an afghan marketplace
he wishes it did not look so real

the internet, our new planet

i shut the computer down
404: File Not Found

Two Friends Sit

Two friends sit on
the hood of a
Pontiac. A silence
comes over
them
unexpectedly.

The blue
expanse of
night has knocked
them into
wonder.
Stars revolve
above a
dark brush of
pines.

Two
friends creating
silence
together.

Nothing
needs to be
said.

They hit
the road carrying
the silence
between them
a load
too heavy for
one.

Strange Mileage

Plenty of denim jackets in flight.
The day is dim and creamed of clouds.
The rain out-raced our morning light
And left us fast and cheap, nurtured loud.
New York City is a jump away.
Similar beards and throttling seats wait there.
The espresso shot and call it a day.
Someone blew a bomb in Boston and we started to care.
Our hearts went out, our eyes went in.
Twitters twatted, Facebooks faced down, booked.
Everybody reiterated the sin.
I'm here to look after the overlooked.
Los Angeles is nothing like my dreams.
Nothing ever looks the way it does in dreams.
Life is nothing like it seems.
You can have a great time if you stop picking at your own seams.
You are everything like you seem.

Love Song Love

The flowers: Where have they been?
I've excluded them. The rose is falling,
sogged with too much rain.
You did not need to cry that much.
I'm hiking up the ridge again
this time with a new flame,
a recovering alcoholic who sends me
an unusual amount of text messages.
When she talks she sounds like me.
Her eyes are owls.
They have wide, hooting pupils
constantly asking "Who?"
When I first saw her she was hidden
in her own arms and a rambling purple scarf.
I did love her then.

I don't love her now.

It's a peculiar feeling
not being a fool for a beautiful girl
who's agreed to go on a date with me.
It's not a feeling at all.
The old feelings were rotten.
Was love one of them?
Love was all of them.
Rotten, possessed love.
Downtrodden, obsessed love.
Forgotten, confessed love.
Love song love.
Luther Vandross love.
Bing Crosby love.
The real stuff. The stuff that turns
you into a desperate, hurtin' man.
I try not to feel it anymore.
I am successful and
am better off because of it.
The bud spills from the stalk
as blood tumbling from a bullethole.
The sun is high and it is breaking
the wild cucullia into crisp, dry weeds.
The sun is killing the grass.
It does not mean to.
It only wants to watch.
It watches too closely.
The grass dies.

feel it all the way

them california roads
where the steel river flows
they just don't reach far enough for me
each day it's increasingly clear
I gotta get the hell outta here
I just wasn't made to live in los feliz

the kiss you left behind
is branded on my mind
no ocean's worth of tide'll wash it away
the absence of your words
is all I've ever heard
there's a tape stuck in the deck that just won't play

and I feel it all the way
feel it all the way
through the long ride home

this redundant smiling sun
is not fooling anyone
it just ain't got a cloud to hide behind
I wish it'd go away
find another song to play
your tan's the only proof it ever shined

the same day repeats itself
in this air-conditioned hell
I think too much for anybody's good
I been waiting for your call
I waited much too long
longer than any normal person would

I feel it all the way
I feel it all the way
through the long ride home

the stars are trapped
in a blazing light
I'm racing back
to a midwest night

the same day repeats itself
in this air-conditioned hell
I think too much for anybody's good
I been waiting for your call
I waited much too long
longer than any normal person would


I feel it all the way
I feel it all the way
through the long ride home

Marfa Lights

West Texas Breakfast wakes us.
The road rides the land, its hills,
over the old dinosaur shells.
The universe was made
to become aware of itself
and then die. Dinos proved incapable
so God blew them to smithereens
and passed the tasks to us,
the gunbarrel He puts in His own mouth.

Out in Marfa, the ghost lights are burning.
Stars whisper secrets to the desert
that the city can't be trusted with.
This is something else though, something
we repeat only to ourselves,
light from Route 67 caught
in North America's darkest sky.
The compass finds its destiny.
The feet step. I read the road.

Van Gogh: giving bad artists an excuse to think they're neglected since 1898

It is an appropriate response
to a rejection slip
to tell them loudly
in your mind
"Fuck You People"
because you're a genius
and it's all politics
and you gotta know somebody
and you don't know anybody
and what the hell does anybody know anyway?

You know Vincent Van Gogh.
He's a close personal friend.
He's you,
who will blow his unknown
genius brains out
in a dark blue garden
redecorating the sky
with a spatter of new stars
and brain tissue.
They'll scrape bits of skull
from the walls
of his pages
and smatter it into
a posthumous retrospective
but you're not so lucky

cause nobody pays
108 million dollars
for poetry
at Sothebys.

Pale Blue Dot

Isn't it funny
that from outer space
it is the earth
that looks like heaven?

Questions Are Remarks

Questions are sides you're afraid to take
Questions are statements you're unable to make
Questions are curiosities you're trying to fake
Questions are gambles with nothing at stake
So bend your sickle into a rake
Drive a point through your sentences for everyone's sake.

Your breath can't support a declarative thought
They die in your mind and what have you got
A body filled with nothing except what it bought
A net full of butterflies easily caught
A life gaining nothing which after it sought
A wine never matured but only did rot
Don't surrender your battles before they've been fought
Force your heart through and become what you're not
Let impulse fly before it's forgot
Send your words like an arrow definitively shot
Believe what you feel and forget what you're taught

The War On Kids

Why do the shootings happen in schools? because they are made by the same people who make the prisons and have the same chairs and tables. Because they have no windows and no wood. The children are amputated by the blank, textureless walls and subsequently their own eyes like nothing they see and their imaginations, schooled by darkness, can only articulate themselves through violence. They fire bullets into the dead walls to hear the only thing that has resonance: grim fame and death.

In a place where nothing grows, where no one listens, where the teachers are police, the loudest sound you can make is a well publicized murder. If these environments were more alive, if there were knotted wood and old brown books and trees imploring against the windows the kids could not understand murder because they would understand that the world around them is indeed a world and is alive. It's a problem of alienation and big guns are a symptom of that. These children are so powerful they never have to leave the throne of their armchairs and are fed genocidal images on command. Increasingly the schools are incorporated and so the minutes and the mentorships and the epiphanies are portioned out according to policy. Spontaneity and beauty is actively discouraged. At a time when people are already heinously self-conscious, that self-consciousness has been stoked and embellished to a point where by the time one makes it to the end of puberty (if), they have forgotten entirely who they were born to be and so can only relate to each other in terms of consumptions. What you buy is who you are. They can be whoever they want, as long as it will not ostracize them from the group and said identity can be sold to them.

Their inner world has been erased too. Words, which used to give them a way to share their hearts, have been withheld from them. Language is the way we detect an decipher what's encrypted inside of us. The whole language could fall in the space of one generation, one technological leap. When confronted with the forgotten, threatening traces of real language, the real texture of living things, they will learn to reply with guns, with seeming power and dominion over nature. We can't seem to locate our old hearts, the hearts perished by indoctrination, and so we drive the hearts of the innocent against the overhead projector screens and dry erase boards smeared with the afternoon's answers in an attempt to get them to speak to us, to know that there was blood in those veins after all. Our hearts will be written in a confusion of blood across the inoffensive walls.

The schools have been made into war zones, but not by the kids.

Poem About Our Politics

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Girls

An apartments the size of a grave
and just as expensive. It costs a life
to be buried on Avenue A.
Two girls reunite in their street corner booth

where many nights have been spent confiding 
about boys, the plausible deniability
of taxicab blowjobs, flights home over
one bridge or another.

She's just returned from a semester in Africa.
The unencumbered smiles beaming from
the children's faces linger like a sunburn.
Her friend is agonizing over a guy who believes in her

wholeheartedly. She commands him like a drone
with the send button on her phone.
She asks her friend if she saw the article in the Times 
about women in Afghanistan who die for their poetry?

Is it still warring over there? the friend says.
Her laugh is ambushed by a new feeling, something like
regret at having allowed herself to be wrapped
in the personality of her dresses for so many years.

First thing when she got home she pulled her grandmother’s old fur
out of storage and wrangled the antlers onto the cat
but the smile didn't come. Tonight, we're going dancing.
The boys are meeting us there. Does that work?

She nods. A button is pushed and a car carries them
to a warehouse in Bushwick which twenty years ago
was a wonderful crack house. Oh, it's so good to see you again!
She laughs and pretends she is living the night like it's her last

the whole time thinking about a young girl
across the world speaking her poem
into a telephone so someone else can hear it
before the line goes dead.

A Video of Me Reading My Poem "CAPTCHA"

THIS VIDEO DOES NOT EXIST

Song of the Open Road: The American Machine

For the wanderer doesn't bring back from the mountainside
to the valley a handful of earth, unsayable to everyone, but
rather a word gained, a pure word.
-Rilke
The Ninth Elegy

10-20-98 Columbus OH: Much different than other shows I have done here. More people than usual and a much better venue.

Ohio is flat and the people are trapped on the flat plains. The endless small towns, full of American flags and bad food. All that time and television. You want the real America? It is here that you will find it. Ohio, Michigan, these are the places where the American slow death plays itself out over the seasons. Football and raking leaves. All that heritage. Depressed towns that are now shells of the boomtowns they once tried to be. No one told them it was a joke and the joke was on them; that the American Dream is only for a few, that the rest just serve their time in this tortured land of beautiful fugitives. Small towns are suppliers to the American Machine. Soldier boys, food, patriotic air, good sturdy racism and separatist spirit.
-Henry Rollins
Smile, You're Travelling

You said: "I'll go to another country, to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed
them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don't hope for things
elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

-C.P. Cavafy

The City

Young French would-be punk-rock stars

listening to American westerns on the juke

trying to figure out

how to get out of town

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous. Here it is the cocktail hour.

New York is the very opposite of Paris. People’s last concern is with intimacy. No attention is given to friendship and its development. Nothing is done to soften the harshness of life itself. There is much talk about the ‘world,’ about millions, groups, but no warmth between human beings. They persecute subjectivity, which is a sense of inner life; an individual’s concern with growth and self-development is frowned upon.

-Anais Nin

The Diary of Anais Nin 

I want the city

but I want the country too.

-Jonathan Richman

City Vs. Country

Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,

Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,

(But where is what I started for so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?)

-Walt Whitman

Facing West from California's Shores

"This shit's all fake. As long as you remember that when you come out here. It's all movies. Everybody's an actor. The money's real but everything else is fake."

-Dude on balcony in Hollywood on his cell phone

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a sainte-terrer", a saunterer — a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.

****

What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?

****

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road; and walking over the surface of God’s earth, shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities then before the evil days come.
-Henry David Thoreau

Walking

Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.

-Bruce Chatwin

The Songlines


Where you been is good and gone
All you keep's the getting there

The Peach blossom follows the water

-Li Po

REASONS FOR LIVING: The Best Shit I Read, Watched or Heard in 2012

Typically people do this in December, so people can read it during their downtime for the holidays, so they know what new shit to buy for X-mas, but I'm only getting around to it now. This is the best media I experienced during the year of our lord, 2012. The year the world didn't end.

Nebraska - Bruce Springsteen
The Branch Will Not Break, Shall We Gather at the River - James Wright

Travellers on the lost highway. Makes me think Springsteen should've never had a band. He should've made weird little tapes like this. The songs move slower, so they have more impact. They're not overwhelmed by the bravado of the band. The characters are alone, so the sound should be sparse. It reminded me of James Wright's poems. Poems of an abandoned landscape, an abandoned people, aimless, lost in a cold wind and a grey sky. Springsteen is an actor in every song. He's a serial killer, a highway patrolman, everybody's on the run. They don't know where they're headed. Probably nowhere. The glockenspiel makes it cosmic. It brings the stars, so high over our dirty, hard earth, and the delirious stupor of a living death. These characters have been pushed beyond hope, into the grace of helplessness, the same grace that one might experience as they fall after they've jumped from the ledge. They're almost like kids again in that they're not in control of their lives, at the mercy of some massive, unknown authority. They are beginning to enter the abyss. They've reverted to the cocoon of hypnotism. They've gone into a void, not heaven, but a few different kinds of hells. They will soon find out some answers to the mysteries. They are living in the night, the dark sky closing in, the same kind of dreaminess that one feels in the jaws of a leopard. The brain is releasing the dreamy narcotics to soften the bite of death.


Run With the Hunted - A Charles Bukowski Reader
This is an excellent retrospective of the man's work, culled from the span of his career and assembled into something of an autobiography. I'm not wild about the guy's poetry, but his prose is brave, and he's able to write about the darker impulses of man and granting us an understanding of them, rather than villifying or alienating us from them.

Adbusters - Issues 2009-Present
http://mentholmountains.blogspot.com/ - David Berman
I've always been a little bit reluctant/cheap to give an ear to anyone close to my age because of what I saw as a lack of sincerity or perhaps politcal conscience, but David Berman kind of eased me liking something resembling a more contemporary, "hipster" artist. He's something of an anomaly, an accessible and popular modern poet, and his music is clever and funny, although sonically it leaves a little bit to be desired. Now he's chosen blogging as a platform, collecting poems, articles, videos, songs all charged at renovating our modern mass consumer society and the cultural imperialism it wages on our consciousness, perhaps the rectify the sins of his father, who is a successful lobbyist in Washington for seemingly all of our worst habits and industries.

As for Adbusters, I was visiting my cousin a few weeks ago in Evergreen Park, Illinois, a suburb on the South Side of Chicago where the Unibomber's from, and noticed a copy of Adbusters in his bathroom. I'd never read it before, but heard a little about it at OWS. He saw me looking through it and came in with a whole stack of them, every issue from the last three years. It being Chicago in January, we had a lot of time downtime indoors, which I spent reading every issue he had, cover to cover. He came in a few days later and said, "You doing okay in here, Kazcinski?"

Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes
I was sitting
Youth away in an office near Slough,
Morning and evening between Slough and Holborn,
Hoarding wage to fund a leap to freedom
And the other side of the earth -- a free-fall
To strip my chrysalis off me in the slipstream.

The Cruise - Bennett Miller, starring Timothy "Speed" Levitch



David Attenborough Documentaries -
These should be our biology classes in high school. I don't know how this guy gets his footage, but he's one of the greatest filmmakers in the world. Netflix has helped me discover a new love for documentaries. These movies show that the world outside of man, the world of nature, is beautiful and imaginative far behind any artistic capability we have. Watching these movies is a good way to gain a new consideration for the natural world, which is now being fatally overlooked, occupying little space in anyone's consciousness.



Shakespeare Behind Bars -
The greatest film adaptation of Shakespeare. Watch it on Netflix. An Othello monologue performed by a man doing life for killing his wife is as authentic emotionally as it gets. It's hard to picture, but Shakespeare writes about real people. These murders, rapes, betrayals, maneuvers, amputations, androgenies, these are real events, not fictions.

"Walking" - Henry David Thoreau
The Songlines, In Patagonia, On the Black Hill - Bruce Chatwin


"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking". These guys are one or two. Werner Herzog is another.

Diaries of Anais Nin, Vol. 3 1939-1944

Wandering - Herman Hesse

"By Blue Ontario's Shores", "When Lilac's Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" - Walt Whitman
The Civil War - Ken Burns
I was taken by the eloquence and strength of even the young soldiers during this war. In this movie, we see the beginnings of modern warfare, and the horror evoked by it in those who were the first to witness what was being unleashed. You can feel the dignity of the whole world unraveling, and death taking over.


Black Coffee Blues - Henry Rollins
The funniest shit I've read in a long time. Rollins is the greatest. Here's an interesting website that argues that Bob Dylan's more recent albums have borrowed heavily from Rollins' books.

Residencia a la Tierra - Pablo Neruda

The Stepfathers set at the Del Close Marathon at the UCB Theatre, NYC.
Hello Lazer at the Magnet Theatre, NYC.
One of the advantages and beauties of improv is that it's theatre stripped to its most essential, and Hello Lazer performs with the logic of the dream. Probably my favorite improv group. The Stepfathers one word suggestion was "Rewind", and about 2/3s of the way through a funny set about a gang of saxophone players, Bailiff school, Chris Gethard steps out and says "and now we're going to rewind to the beginning of our set" and they proceed to perform the whole thing exactly as it happened IN REVERSE. We were all lucky to be there that night.

Truth in Comedy, Art by Committee - Del Close, Charna Halpern, Kim "Howard Johnson
Impro - Keith Johnstone
Mastery - George Burr Leonard
The War of Art - Steven Pressfield
Buck - Cindy Meehl
These books helped me a lot this year. The principles of Improv aren't just helpful to would-be improvisers, they're a pretty solid foundation for living well. Steven Pressfield's audio books are pretty hilarious, as he sounds like a grizzled survivor of "The War of Art". Impro by Keith Johnstone is a spooky, magic assessment of modern society and how to re-animate our spontanaiety and humanity.

The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry - Edited by Paul Auster
It's all there. Auster's introduction is stellar. I discovered Apollinaire, Artaud, Francis Ponge through this book.


"What People Say About Paris" - Kenneth Koch
People also say these things about NYC.

"The Exstacie" - John Donne

Duino Elegies - Rilke
Maybe my favorite poems.

They Live - John Carpenter starring "Rowdy" Roddy Piper
The prophets Carpenter and Piper. The scene where they bulldoze the encampment is exactly what happened in Zuccotti Park.



Encounters at the End of the World - Werner Herzog