161
O intense specific hug-wish,
parameters imploding under the melt,
you are my outdoors itself, what does
Johnny Mathis do with his days these
bells-ringing in the fluorescence
maybe-strewn dollar-deriding daisy
days.
Friday, February 21, 2003
Sunday, February 16, 2003
160
WORDS ON THE RIVER
A helicopter hits the water, and the man who feeds the squirrels peanuts from the lawn chair where he sits sipping white wine, eavesdropping on the cell phone calls passing motorists make below --
Below is an anagram of elbow --
A cessna flies by along the river, must be beautiful up there. It's beautiful up here if you like a view of rock and tree shadow on snow and road in front of white-dotted green-gray river below a monestary, two highways, a gorgeous suspension bridge (I like math, but I don't love it, not like you, sweetheart) and then New Jersey's little palindromes --
The man doesn't even get up. The chopper didn't crash --
It just went to its Secret underground lair.
159
O CAMERA
When I think how nuts it drives
Nuts it drives nuts it drives me
To be here so far from you and lagging
For that matter a ways even from my
Feelings, without even a picture
Of you in my wallet I used to
Think I wish I had a camera or
I wish I had a digital camera and
A computer and a phone line and a printer
And plenty of ink and photo paper and
Then you give me the last camera
Your mother owned and I'm looking you
Looking you looking you in the eye
Picturing us at last and just
158
SPRING IN THIS UNDULY MOSHPIT COMPARISON CHART
In the west an ugliness hypnogically
Persuades ulterior no-farmers
The cliches must continue unmolested
It is an ugliness it's not too late
To get in on the ground floor
And once we're there, you and I,
And our thinking has adjusted
As our feet, freed from ice-soaked boots
Feel halfway alive again and therefore great
We praise the landlord and pass
The bowl of khat, cleaning our niceness
The first weapon they trained us in
157
THE RADIO WAVE
Talking to the book itself,
It's this we are reduced to is it.
In a room of a hundred people
I'd find the one ignoring me.
An unrequited love of absence.
The public journal. The stockade.
Lettering spoiled me for narrative.
Rebellion against the inhumane
Standards became itself unhealthiness.
A bit of sunlight on February's
Tab, even when it stays late
It skips out early. Uh oh, alive
Again. Good is undefined, on
The lam. The anthologist's
Safety goggles. Nobody here but us
Badasses. So far, still flying.
Who doesn't enjoy feeling tiny
Now and again. Waxed. In praise
Of a trance. Without a belief,
Under heavy manners. Red Means.
Go ahead, make us the real thing.
It dares you. Night platform
To declare opera fires name hoops.
The what-is-he-saying feeling,
As opposed to the what-did-he
Just-say. Close your eyes
To get away from the clue vendors.
Radio waves, the radio waves, do
The radio wave.
156
ONE-TWO ONE-TWO
When you go away
I know what you mean --
Singing and talking
You know they're the same.
Knowing you has been
For me as urgent
A calamity
As the turn of years --
Quantity problem,
I should think but don't.
Instead, it's "Testing,
Testing." I miss you.
Also, I'm happy.
Leave me a message.
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
154
How are you going
to be what
you say you are
when you think
there's so much
you have to do
before you begin?
This unrequited
feeling for yourself
puts you to
sleep on trains.
It makes you to
shake in the presence
of the broker,
and for that there
is only one thing
to do! The music
of what you notice
comes in loud over
the chatter of what
you see.
152
HOW TO ROCK
Use a lot of bow
Move your head
Quickly 'cross the page
Across the sea
Three hundred years go by they
Say what anybody knows
And repeat it 'till it's holy
The faces you see
In the movies all
Share the look of
Wanted-to-be-an-actor
The words they say
All come from
People-who-wanted-to-write
The musicians bring forth
Music-ambition sounds
Soldiers who train and train
So when the battle starts their limbic systems
Defer to the physical memory
It is not life
It may be better
150
MARY RING MARRIED YOUNG
Mary Ring married young
And soon she had four daughters.
And soon she had a mother
Who would not follow orders --
Her father was an admiral
But I admired her.
Her husband was a builder
But what does the past do?
Wedding Ring, marry Young,
It goes and stays, it bills and pays,
It stops to admit you.
149
THE MUSE OF UMBRAGE
Rudimentary enthusiasms
squirrel to the
a) disco beat
b) middle of the queue
c) nth
d) exclusion of thought
e) edge of the dendrites, causing the top of the head to take "off"
The following analysis
was made reasonable
by a life-changing
mirror --
when the bell
can't imagine
getting on the train
and seeing a friend and
not expressing joy --
the surgical
supply store differs
from the Army-Navy
Deep fried what?
148
FINDING IN
The question is
Daddy on the speakerphone?
Carry your own damn
Impedimenta,
Baseball cap on a
Watermelon. Way in
The back with
The past-their-bedtime crowd.
The art of the headache
Is remembering to praise
The wounded animal.
Tension rising
But why, exactly?
Is all of epistemology.
Prayer to the notebook:
Keep me invisible.
Music we long
To provide for
The evening station
Rises up through
The primaries,
And singing, I'm
Compounding observation
In the bloom.
147
CABOTAGE
Pyramids of containers
Red and brown in the sun
Each of us does what we can
Shifting from one hip to the other
Brick and iron siding and wire
In with the wine grapes
The monorails and substairs
Consultants and dealers
Curiosity pulls you away
Straining to hold my neck up
The conversation nearby
As dead zones absorb the last
White mountain skyline
Bait foils leaving the sidewalk
The end of a process
Chlorophyll's acolytes
Superstation superstition
Placid and medical
The staying up for a nah
Auto pride day
Gives a grand trunk
The nervous break
Of town park
Private lackland
146
LIKE A SHEEP ON THE SIDE OF A HILL
It must be a different life
Being the one taking someone
Into the store where the bolt
Along the wall flutter as the bell
Is followed by Can I help you
These all must be different lives
Never at the point of sale
If never answering How's that going
With a sound more articulate
Than what a sheep says at the onset of rain
Mezuzot by the elevator
Throb and whipcrack
In the fluorescent bulb
That was the song
Of being there
Living not beside the point
But making light
And seeing fair
Shoveled joint
It won't belong
That was the time
Of quiet song
The jacket days
Inside of rhyme
That blast of leaf
The cost repays
Baa, baa, baa
The playbill gong
Compares its story
To the song
And has an essay
Nothing's wrong
Beggars belief
And won't belong
Stating in thick "I"s
Tobacco rock rest
Your face in the mirror
Hey excited feeling
Take off your shoes
And play with me a while
I doesn't understand
And never relies
The little list droning
Is packing its brief
Interruptions into a soft
Someone studying
Up against you
Soda can with gerber daisies
Take your process to the Alps
Mint is on the baby's mind
Chase the plane
Launch the more or less
Into the side of the sun
Give me the chan brain
Zen bran for a clam
Got a storing real
In a mojo pasha
Travel scribble
Affictionate complait
The tinsel removal
I sensed the affect
Gravitating toward
The soft feeling
Elbow to elbow in the salt
The please freak
Sees through the explosion
Of nice pinata disguise!
O insight you make me
Loot for walking
O vocative! whatcha
Got in the museum bag?
Briefcase on my lap
Are you my long lost desk?
Stereo in the store
Staring in the store
This quadrilateral attitude
Belittles all feng shui,
Predicates its classwork
On improv and AV
The drugs of the girl
Equal girls' drugs
Belated camerata
Stop asking me where
God puts faded things
Finding in
The glamor glommer glimmer,
What could be glummer
Mozart in the elevator
Nothing to be gained
By shouldering, shouldering
The pen goes
Where it feels like
Books pave the easement
I go where I feel
Something soft ignoring
And admiring
The percussion of bone
All the unyielding languages
Play with giving me truth
Navigable
Navigable
Navigable
Dad, quesadillas
Are experience and so are
Anklets -- the musical!
Dad, quesadillas
Are experience and so are
Anklets -- the movie!
Waiter, there's an anklet
in my quesadila -- t-shirt
Standing on the crowd
And waiting for the morning
This complacent
Fifteen minute interval
The indoor logic of which
Is looking at the
Smoke of the wedding
From thirty miles off
While there
In the dictionary heart
All memory of hurrying
Along the sodium shadows
Up and down broken sidewalk
And the soft smell
Of beer flowers
Alarmed away
The speed and halt
Of the bow
Prop up
The pow
It can't linger in the
Demand to wait under
The shark light
When I was subsumed
Into the clavicle
This reeling -- was I aiming?
He gets the newspaper
A day after everyone else
Kenneth is gone
My marriage is over
Two babies lost
I am homeless
And on the edge of drinking too much
I am writing more than for years
Two books coming
Everybody wants work
Mosquito bites on my knuckles
And the soles of my feet
I have enough pants
To get through the week
At the job I will keep
Kenneth is gone
My marriage is over
Two babies lost
144
REMARKS ARE NOT LICE
How offshore is Delaware?
Life is the next best therapy.
Inside the moving terrarium, you could spread the sexual tension with a t-square.
At the democracy saloon I was asked to midriffize the house t-shirt.
Between takes I split a cruller with the key grip.
I lifted the wrong piece of duct tape and everything said 'ouch.'
I learned how to form plurals and woke from the bareback dream intact on the platform.
The passive relay subway word search project concluded all the new planets were only dust in the atmosphere.
The second best bookstore on campus has a sale on bottled water.
143
SKELETON KEY NECKLACE
The television's got me so woozy
The swollen faces of the anchovy
Look like art school to me,
Like business is a matter of making
Your will not only known but obvious
Making a storm drain for the energy
The competition taps into buckets
While worry waits in Rome
In the absence of the affect
One thing I miss is sex
Another one is raisin bread
The evening draws on my skin in green
141
QUALM
All this all or nothing,
It's enough to make a man
A gray lady, enough to make a tree
Feel scalding water on its back.
Events, my boy, events
Pass with us through the asteroid field
And without them we might go
For years inside a novel
In the pressure to be ourselves
As if a=a were a thug in clogs
140
ABANDONMENT AND INDEPENDENCE
Lighten up! intoned
The government boom box
Aimed at depleting my compound
Of its flickering demand for an encore.
The barge the pyrotechnics
Fouled with fuses and casings
Was cleared of suitcases
And is currently adrift
I am your captain.
These chairs I seem to drag around
Anchor and ballast me --
I scan the deck for the grand finale.
138
MUCK FIRE
Every word sings and is a siren,
Work, play, work, play. The lighthouse
Up above the beach bookends
With the turret of the honeymoon house,
Work, play, work, play,
Flashing is an illusion the spinning produces
It says in my heart's science section.
It says in my contract
I keep thinking I have something
To show you, like noticing
What I was thinking when I wasn't thinking
Which was partly what you were saying,
Something about happiness and sex and something
You wouldn't think I would think, noticing
How quickly once around the park was becoming
Sunrise flickering on the edge of your collar.
133
VICTORY LAP
When the independence budget
Is passed and all the psychic
Motherfuckers have left their messages
With their mess, bass guitar indicating
Classic rock's approval, the drunks
Will miraculously be parted, shawls
Of smoke and stains clean as June
Or June's parole sheet anyway
And then, to be a duke
And take stock
Like a championship picture
Like, Ghostbusters: preferable to Stripes?
In the daughtering dirt
Microscopes and randomness
Avail themselves of surprise
Hey-urge
British Telecom or before therapy?
Management style or plaster cast?
Itch that can't be scratched
By the woman who gets in front of me
And walks slower till I have no room
To breathe, are you the minimum of pain
Or just a golden retriever on strike
In a sunny patch of cobblestones?
I feel you continuously
Rehydrating doesn't take you away
Nor do sleep or cutting coffee out
Neither drinking nor keeping dry
Relieve this, neither leaving it alone
Nor licking at the tip make it heal
Condition stretching thirty years ahead
132
Here o red and blue
The life angers from
Tract batik to posture radio
I'm planted decalogue-
Style in the compote czar's
McMedicate me! chaperone
Land. The post office.
But am I planted, just
Because I'm upto my shins
In manure? And just because
I'm surrounded, am I cloven
Hoof guy, watched and impressive?
Fear of and, fear of the,
Bother of salutary golf,
Of navy, of clacking
Freight train on the
Hudson Line, 32 cars.
131
INDICATING FREQUENTLY
The flag in front of the Japan
Society (duomo
To Trump's campanile) moves
Not at all in the no-breeze
Post-thunderstorm, dahlias
In Mary's Garden beaten down
On wet marble. I am teaching
Myself not to stare
Smoker applause crossing
Hammarskjold Plaza. Judged
And loved, is that it?
My glare's up off the sidewalk
Often into brown eyes
The pigeon bulk on the curb
A no-fuckin-brainer
Sweet potato, a cardboard square
Bent in half tacks down Third
God bless irrelevant and random
Movement knocking the straw
Out of the messenger's shake-holding
Hand he circles back into traffic.
Ginkgos colluding brave
And tug both ways upright,
Captioning, editorial work
I'm velour jumpsuit, I'm convenient
To laser pointers, I'm refried
Crowd. (What'd Groucho mean??)
128
FOR THE LIBRARIES
The books if there were libraries
I'd still want my friends around
Incision in the vernacular
Vibrating pigeon cut grass
The pigeon walking from
The hexagon stones to the
Fresh-cut grass is vibrating
Make sure everybody gets enough to read
Blessings in the skies
Kewpie doll made of cowrie shells
A cupid made of puka
Nerve gas smells like fresh-cut grass
Motorized bicycle, glancing
Around as I cheer peaceful manoeuvres
126
UTTAR PRADESH
There comes a moment
In every man's life
When the urge to shoot cheap
Is more powerful than the urge
To pursue a life a dream
Interspersal with faceless
Dianthuses whispering
"Sleep with the background
"And glory is a cat
"Fever recipes I'm clipping
"Thanks." Uttar Pradesh,
Ya dig?
124
THE OBSERVANT SALESMAN
Back in the train
The chiropractors of California
Are questions unreal
As the feet of roosters
In civic gardens --
Real enough, and tough
As language in the mouths
Of poets, solid as objects
Of devotion in suitcases
Of white bakelite.
A spice rack gathers dust
Like an encyclopedia
In a home, and home is a target
To hit by letting go
To concentrate on how you hold yourself
After you've attended to
The sober icon, the valid menswear.
123
SOBER ICON, VALID MENSWEAR (2ND TAKE)
To show up in New York
And find out that we had
Environmental issues?
Two or three days to wrap it up,
Have it on their desktop June 19,
But if they receive my manual
Is the question for final approval
Putting the image up this afternoon
When we're ready to release those
Or was he waiting to tell everybody
About those changes, the universe
Or the larger group. I don't know
What it is with other training
Quote. So now let's talk reality,
They're waiting for direction
On the cases to enter for test.
It can go out now the way it is
With holes missing or
We can wait till the status meeting
To make them aware a document
Is in place. It's surprising
That it needs to be implemented.
120
HOMMAGE A JEAN PIERRE LEAUD
The present tense is neither sincere
Nor insincere; although it's occupied
By a window washer with eyes like
Cleaning fluid, the place called here
Is the last best proxy for home --
And as when you are eight or nine
The secrets that bring relaxation
Are feats of sleight of hand
Slipping out of chinese handcuffs.
Tell yourself to listen to what you know,
Show up, stand where they tell you,
Move your face as little as necessary --
Smile and pout and time and space'll
Make you miss your train!
119
The subway has a cow-
Catcher and you and I go
To bed alone -- we know
These aberrant uncertainties
Must have reasons but
What? the air's on in the car
Tho it's 40 degrees out
I want to get on a train, now,
Tho I'm on one, a different one
Going a lot closer to you.
I know I'm using up a wish
Senselessly, come bring me
To my wits again!
117
ONE-SEVENTY-FIVE
So much is available to those
Who mock their own hostility.
For example, at this station
All the mist of sumptuous feminity
Boards the express each morning
And to this station it returns,
Although to be sure that is
A man in those small shoes holding
That satchel with the perfume name.
116
ONE-SIXTY-EIGHT
The footsteps of the passengers
Coming down from the iron footbridge
Sound like pigeons taking flight
And in fact there are often birds
Flying in this tunnel, at this
Deepest station in the system.
They come in from the cave entrance
That opens onto the breezeless night
Between the hills that look like fake ID
At rivers clobbered now and then by
Police boats, the Circle Line,
And the occasional speedboat, a
Cartoon in a bikini on the bow,
Or maybe a dog, paws up on
The windscreen, thinking,
I chose well, didn't I, Rex.
115
NOT A POETRY
In the tube
The noise is trains
Not ground support
The world cup
Goes on as planned
Assimilation waits
For no man,
AKA the wondering hero
What do bananas
And the hidden vice president
Have in common?
Clocks everywhere
But not a second to think
The preliminaries
Not a nickel to spare
Done on the wall
Every twenty yards
And every now and then
A nope
If they could look at the news
The way they critique
Celebrities in evening dress
What color smoke
Do the ballots make?
What being original
Meant throughout history
Penny for your song
114
SIROP NUAGE
Transfer here to Transylvania
express, a person
with syntax
putting the solenoids
into absolute nightfall
a humming, a cold
series of applets
PLONKA, LIZ
TEXTS?
the squeal
of patent leather
as it comes off
the roll at the
fabric store
sends me shivering
the same way
strangers roll their
cigarettes on the pool
table at International
Hose. Tonight
the fire is
in a dream of
a battle at sea
and I feel mean to
the right to pull
the summit out from
under a force
other than me
112
BEFORE THEY GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN
The breeze on the
Corner of 41st and Park
Ah when redheads wear
Dingy green tops
I used to think that's
What they meant by "lawn"
Is blocked by a satellite
Truck and I'm carrying
The Ticklish Subject
Back to my office
Kids sitting on the curb
Is this where you pick up
The Jitney? It's Tuesday
One of those promissory
Workdays under investigation
For leading everything
To think "just ask"
At 43rd and Lex
Ooh means a woman
Fell in the street
"Are you okay" gets
A yes an unlit cigarette
Saint Agnes open till ten
111
BEST KEPT SECRET
Is a currency trader
Hold a pen, it's kryptonite
It grows trees across your
Line of sight
Do not in response
Become a dendrochronologist
I'll follow you anywhere
Except across state lines
Speaker in a crowd
Wearing horn-rims
Mirrors on the storefront walls
Change the format
And everybody falls in love again
Change three and
They'll call it a
Productivity miracle
If you haven't lived until you've seen
A psychedelic fur
Load his ink-jet into a u-haul
Then I've lived
Dilligrout in aggregate
Equals gravel in your gruel
All these occasions
Open in the sun
It's simply too nice a day
For a legitimation crisis
110
We were picking up electrical interference from every appliance in the building. As I went around checking all the connections, she put down her ice water and continued.
"We do not study Greek to reinstate Apollo. We do not hunt to watch the pain move across the kill." There were two or three kinds of cable and socket, I don't remember how many; none was loose. But the hum kept high.
I was stumped; she kept talking; the twenty of us there kept moving around -- this was, then, the resistance.
Monday, February 10, 2003
109
TRYING THE MIRROR
What we do you mean, ring pop environment
chambre de bonne
space out and those tense trees take five
minutes to check their messages, file their train cases
in the cubbies, involuntary revelation
what have I put on a magnet today?
asking questions again
go through with it
going through with it
Don't go through the mirror!
when I think of Ted Berrigan
going through the mirror
confusion is all right with me
"steer into the cones" the pusher truck
sends me along to the Amoco, two quarts please
108
SUMMER LIGHT
You are not the smell of dog
or the detachment that made New England famous
behind enemy behinds
smell of the clean laundry
when you're jonesing for the hannukah decorations
of the 'normal' setting on the cell phone
the sniper having taken the weekend off
to catch up on Tintin
or order some haggis maybe
looking into the arbitrary
ass-intention of novelists
I seem to be anally fixated tonight
Manhattan air-raid drill
quickly turn out all the lights
was what Kurt Cobain meant by it's less dangerous
I feel idealized and ten days away
from being out on my ass again
ass again
I think the last time I saw an ass in summer light
wait are we talking sun or moon light
107
GETTING DOWN TO THE REAL WORK
Funny, I don't feel like a gust of wind
knocking down the state house
I feel like a dirty t-shirt
"If it isn't STIFF
It Isn't Worth a Fuck"
Is this the feeling
That came over Jeff as he did Faucheuse 4?
I want to be California
Famous for lying in the sun
I am a terrible liar
Listen to the clock the car alarm
I am worth
The red light
That warns the self-preserving pilots
Off the Empire State Building
The ancient jazzy look of it just so happens
The people home in that compound
Make a diagonal zig
And all the love I feel looks like it's gonna growl
106
We've got to get that bird singing out there
interested in politics
immense unused corrugated sheet
it's a fantasy!
I haven't bought a car yet
I want to but I haven't
and his girlfriend staring ahead
with such a look
a view of trees when I wake up
and maybe the river
two rooms for the books and a desk
and a seat belt to get me settled down
105
Here is my lifework
Sunrise
in the green studio
I draw my stacks of books
I was at the battle of Salamis
I sent salamis to my girls in the ami
"by airmail"
It was good to be dirty, and political
And aware that anxiety wasn't my deal
Here is my deal
flash of light
Not Erica Jong and the flashlight
Not Ezra Pound and the book sd be
as light as your balls in your hand
should
should
like a missile launcher
For example it's eight-thirty and I
am expected in my little cubicle soon
However I feel I am doing the earth more good
trying out this pen
in the sudden absence of
my complacency
And you who read this
are doing me good
are throwing confetti over me
whether you experience anything or not
although I expect you will
It may not be as good as a circus
or the movies for that matter
it may on the other hand
compete with Christophe Fischer-Dieskau
singing Dichterliebe
It's gray out and I like that
It feels familiar
104
WORKSHOP
Play -
- go boat
noises in your house
the workshop for 3e graders
to "really feel" freezing issues
what you see when you look where you're going
the tea years
uncanny diagnosis mistakes
now lonely in starlift
now covered with chainstore clothes
the skittish vernacular go and write
white light
all night
what would I teach
I listen for -- what?
attention deleting my bass
playing out at large
in the snowdrop
the transparency stares into the
next thing to look
in the direction
of the sun!
and not walk into a tree
to be at home in the
Internal Revenue Code
Swagger of a
HIGHWAY SIGN
"beat poetry"
do I have a sense of when
I'm galumphing through the security checkpoints
System in shock the first class
we meet at a table
I am nervous but excited I talk a lot
and hand out some stapled photocopies
start with the main thing what is the main thing
the main thing is feeling
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