Another Draft

Perverse Cowgirl

Know what you’re saying before
you say it. Your partner of choice
may have an opinion. You must
efuckingnunciate carefully so

that when you hop on or your
partner hops on there needs
to be between spasms a careful
avoidance of cramp. That’s when

you’re talking about something
else. A perverse cowgirl, though
is someone you want to be next
to you in the firefights of life

and the enrapturing
of the erotic. They are evil
when you need them to be
and crushingly familiar

with your Eros and your Than-
atos. If you have kink in you
they’ll bring it out. Bells on,
and maybe a bit of feathers

and the bedroom door firmly
set against the eventual creep
of your children who will see
something that takes years

of therapy to unsee and never ever
gets forgotten. On your deathbed
they will remember and before they
cry will think of you in lingerie. O God.

Draft

Walking the line

I felt a stalwart black eye
of the hurricane blindside
me at midmorning. Tore
down the street 110 miles per

only to find my stop at
the end of the whine in
Gloucester where I dropped
off Olson’s now-fenced entry

to the Harbor.  A seagull
floated me down but
I rose like seltzer bubbles
all the way to the end,

where piers from three
centuries ago aggro’ed
me into submission. I
beat the oxygen

to the surface but flailed
in the face of the fish
company taken over the wharf
puked up my brunch

and decided to drive
up the Cape but lost my
way on Bearskin Neck where
all the protopoets go for ice

cream or to gig their hard
drives into submission.
Their poet hats are so quaint.
I’d like to bust them in the nose.

New Draft

Hi all. Did you miss me?

...

Liars. :-)

Here's a new draft in my new conversational style. Scatology and sexism optional, but you know, the fart joke always works.

One Last Crap

That’s ten pounds of weight I no
longer have to try to lose.

Do you know how long it takes?
To fill up? And I have diverticulisitis

or something which cuts divots,
fucking DIVOTS! into my colon.

I will forever be set upon by diseases
I can’t pronounce around my

spastic rolling tongue and the fine
root canals American dentistry

have provided lo these many years
but have not yet found a way to stop

psychosis. What kind of shit is that?
In the future dentists will cure their patients

of psychosis with drills and fine-breasted
attendants who intentionally brush you

as you turn your head to spit blood
and juices into the great gaping maw

of the American health system.

Reidel Interviews Rooney on Weldon Kees

Weldon Kees has been gone close to 60 years, but he continues to inspire. The Nebraska-born poet, who also wrote fiction, composed jazz, and produced experimental films, is the animating spirit behind Kathleen Rooney’s book Robinson Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012). In her new collection, Rooney pays homage to Kees’s best-known work, the four Robinson poems that he published before disappearing in July 1955. (His car was discovered in a parking lot near the Golden Gate Bridge, his body never found.) James Reidel, author of Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees(University of Nebraska Press, 2003), interviewed Rooney for the Poetry Foundation. They spoke about why Kees is an invitational writer, what Nickelodeon has to do with poetry, and the aesthetic elegance of disappearance.

Robinson was considered a doppelgänger of Kees, an urban and urbane Robinson Crusoe. Why write an entire book of post-Robinson poems?

The Robinson series is one of Kees’s projects that I would have liked to read more of, but there isn’t any more. Not to say that the four poems aren’t “enough” or that the series feels “unfinished”—if anything, I admire Kees’s economy—but I really love the poems and their mysterious, quasi-alter ego, and I wanted to see the story continue. One of the poems in Robinson Alone concludes with the couplet “Incompletion makes people / want to fill your blanks in.” The impulse to create, I think, often comes from this feeling, even if it’s not always as direct as it is in the case of my post-Robinson poems. Probably a lot of writers could tell you vivid and specific stories of the writers they read who struck or inspired them in such a way as to make them want to create their own work; I think of these writers as not just “inspirational” but “invitational”—like what they’re doing is an invitation to try to do it yourself. Kees is an invitational writer for me.

An example of this invitational phenomenon that sticks with me is from an episode of the Nickelodeon kids’ show The Adventures of Pete & Pete, which I watched all the time growing up. Little Pete is on his way to school, and he passes a garage band that happens to be rehearsing a song that he falls head over heels for. He can’t get it out of his mind, but when he comes back later, the band has disappeared. Ultimately, Pete realizes that the only solution (in the absence of ever finding the band again) is to start his own band and make his own songs. The Robinson poems are like that to me. More.

My Favorite Live Nude Poetry Book I Read in 2012

It's Thomas Patrick Levy's Please Don't Leave Me Scarlett Johannson. 

Give it a purchase and a nice review somewhere. Here's why:

O Scarlett I couldn’t look you in the eyes at the diner because you were wearing your apron like a too-small bath towel and I just knew you had a blue Chevy S-10 in the parking lot and my god you were certainly the sexiest person I’ve ever seen carrying a slice of pie to a booth in the back room and even then I knew that you were not real but I kept wiping these drops of coffee off my chin and kept looking around as if there were someone other than you to look at and finally when I left you came after me moving in a rush that smelled of purple candy and when I turned around you were already in your truck and the radio was already moaning MY HEART IS IN MY SHOES and your small fingers were holding a cigarette out the open window and you left me alone with the spatter of wetness your truck’s exhaust left on the cement and I swear the spatter was in the shape of Tom Waits’s face

And Scarlett never mind the run-down motels I’ll drive all night and you can hang your pretty toes out the window while the shadows swallow around us and the only light for miles is the candle my car holds out before us with one hand covering the flame and god you know how I love to hear you sing even when you’re singing THEY BROKE ALL THE WINDOWS so please sing yourself to sleep and let that cold wind come around you like a hush kept so frail and when you get too cold we’ll park in the shadow of an evergreen and you can rest your body against my car’s warm hood

And Scarlett once I watched a man on youtube photoshop your body in reverse and the dress he made you wear I swear was made of thin orange threads of my sweat and I swear to god I couldn’t open my eyes but each frame touched me like the wet of your tongue which makes shapes that can’t exist around my ear and I swear to god sometimes I sleep and dream you don’t exist and when I wake up in your bed there is a veil draped down like an arc of wedding light burst through the ceiling and on the radio I hear your voice and on the radio I see the way you crawl around and I see your knees bare as yellow fields by the freeways and I see your knees crushed carrot-raw on wet hairs of carpet and still each frame is so dark I have to light a candle when we kiss

Jack Gilbert Dead

I heard about this on a poetry listserv from one his close friends.  It doesn't seem to have hit the mainstream media yet. This is a fairly recent article by John Penner celebrating the collected poems. It's a sad damned day for me.

BERKELEY — In a spacious, humane skilled-nursing home, a man sits with his elderly neighbors arrayed in their wheelchairs as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald sing. Several guests arrive to see the man, and after the last note of "Cheek to Cheek," one of them takes up a microphone and reads a poem.

The reader, startled by a resident's pained moans of distress, stumbles over a word or two of "Looking at Pittsburgh From Paris." He finishes, and the man brightens in his chair and points at his heart, mouthing to a visitor holding his arm, "Me?"

Yes, Jack Gilbert. That's yours.

The poet is 87 and small in his wheelchair, mostly unable to talk, his brain diminished by disease. He is dying. But as for anyone with Alzheimer's or its variants, the end has not come quickly. It is a long receding. More.

Poem Draft

Eggs from Anywhere

The codicil to my third will (the official one) reads:

One, don't give nothing to anybody. Take the money

in cash and throw it under the mud-packed wheels

of your car in the bumfuckingest place you can find.

If you can find a place that was on reality TV, cool.

Two, don't eat the nachos from Chili's or the eggs

from anywhere; they are related in that ingestion

might kill a weak woman or a tweaker man. I wish

the birds would not twitter in my ear when I make

decisions. It's fucked up enough in here. I wish for

you, number three, the magic number, that all the days

of your life you will find roses in the tassels of your horse's

mane billowing out into better metaphor and a landslide

of clean fill that temblors down the back roads

of the choked creeks that yield orange rocks, no fish

but the pretty stones stained with runoff and the greasy

pizza pieces left over by a million students who sit on the banks

stoned thinking that they're feeding the fish; god knows

the fish don't eat that shit either. Back to number four,

I'm afraid. I'm afraid all the time. I sit in my closet floor

and caparison myself to no avail. The world wants my body,

I say, and slam the door. Monopoly and Risk fall on my

head, and the little man in the top hat runs into the other

room to fuck my wife. Is that all? the voices say. It simply

can't be all. But that's the thing itself. This IS ALL you get.