props

say what you will
about working
on a comp, it is a boon
for enjambment. you can play
with line breaks all
day long
like
lincoln logs

Public Access

a few odes to a local hero, walt peterson  

 

The shot endures for a Warholesque duration, stretching barren seconds until it becomes philosophical
in its emptiness, the quake of room tone
tidal
on the audio track.
Every
edit
abrupt, knocks the viewer out
of the story

With the force of the stage punches that never
connect

In the saloon riots of his westerns. His framings oblong, zooms searching to a

sandstorm
of grain, lighting clerical
as a mugshot. Like porn without the sex, home
movies broadcast for the whole town
to see,

these are the loose
ends

never meant
to make it
to television.

I wanna make bad movies again

I wanna make em like Walt Peterson

I interviewed him for the high school newspaper,
asking questions from The Proust Questionnaire,

a survey I’d found in in the back of Vanity Fair

typically used by actors or writers to muse philosophically.

They were famous. It mattered what they thought about Life.

I’d often fantasized about answering the questions myself.

“What do you consider the most overrated virtue?”

“When and where were you happiest?”

”If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?”

It was like he’d never though about these things before.

Walt talked mostly about his faith. God was the answer.

He was a kind man, unpretentious, accountant by day, TV star on Sunday afternoon,

One week a secret agent, the next a cowboy,

Moses on Easter Sunday.

Hair the calm snowbank white and gray of television static,
Eyebrows thick and black as videotape,
Walt had the comforting vacuity of the old cowboy stars,

the ones you never hear about any more:
Roy Rogers, Chill Wills, Audie Murphy,
Eyes like rusty wells

maybe something in'em

maybe not.

As Ace Diamond he had all the swagger
of the best singer at a bowling alley karaoke,
more Barney than Andy,

timid, polyester, narcissistic without cause,
but with such good manners and earnestness
that he was
watchable.

I wanna make bad movies again

I wanna make em like Walt Peterson

How many mortals get to play Moses?

How many cast themselves in the part?

His Commandments left-overs from Halloween,

Two styrofoam graves carved with Sharpie,

His Red Sea parted of Play-doh and nail polish.

Walt Peterson affixing scripture to magnetic tape

In the back of a barn in Grove City, Ohio.

I wanna make bad movies again

I wanna make em like Walt Peterson

Let this accountant fire his Remington and ride his Trigger
across the muddy Re-enactment Villages of Central Ohio!

Let this man of Pataskala seduce and murder his way
through an entire Cold War of Supervillains!

Let this man who keeps a Superman costume in the trunk of his Buick
bring down the Word for all to hear!

On Channel 21! Local public access television!

scenes from a life - jan 16-18 - the narrow road to the deep north and other poems

ep 1 - the narrow road to the deep north and other poems



ep 2 - Now That I am Old and Mature I can Go Back to Myself



ep 3 - birds in a bus station
 

Reasons for Living - Dec 2014

Movies 
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Wes Anderson
Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu
Almost Famous - Cameron Crowe
Thief - Michael Mann

Novels
The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

Prose
Roxane Gay essays
The Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - Peter Biskind
Jonathan Lethem essays
The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
Do The Right Thing: The Book  - Spike Lee

Poetry
John Berryman
Ted Berrigan
Ted Hughes

TV Shows
True Detective - Ssn 1

City Limits

Great names painted on the mural

Of the Temple of Knowledge

In the café of the Barnes and Noble.
NIETZSCHE      KAFKA       DICKENS

Are they sitting among us right now?

Here in the shopping mall?

Eating Cinnabons in the wash of smooth jazz,

“music made by CIA agents” my dad used to call it?

A man down the bench has a stack

Of yellow books: “Currency Exhange For Dummies” 

“Crowdsource Funding For Dummies” 

“Hedgefunds For Dummies.” An amateur psychotherapist,

Using “Psychotherapy for Dummies,” performs

psychotherapy on himself. He tells me I’m suffering

from an Oedipal Dilemma caused by withdrawal

of maternal affection at a young age. I’m creating a great drama

Of failure, culling a subject out of my misery,

It’s the way a coward gives his life meaning

when he refuses his purpose.

That will be $400 for the hour he says

And his straw rattles as he sucks the last

Of my iced frappaccino.

I leave the café        (strange gulag)     my Toyota snarling

Smoke from a hood dented

Into a curled lip.

These two lanes will take us anywhere

Croons Bruce Springsteen

From the simultaneous dashboards

Of a city stuck in traffic.

I take refuge in the White Castle,

my alma mater turned to trash.

Eating sliders and working on a half-assed novel

I am exactly where I was

When I started

And it’s taken me ten years

To get here.