Twenty-Fourth Entry

Hay problemas!

Anybody got a room for rent in Carroll Gardens/Park Slope? I'm not picky at this point. I'd take axe murderers.

In honor of a poet I like and admire (Steve Caratzas) and his poetic brevity, here's a short poem.

Or rather a normal poem with short lines.

Here's my poem:

UNDER VARIOUS HOLLOW LAMPS
I stutter
spineless
non-quixotic
weariness
furrowed
squinting
peeled
eyes
filterless
lucky
dangling
opposed
to timidity
paranoidedly
glancing
pel-mel
distantly
morbid
at
backlit
venetians
contrasting
flailing
silhouetted
torsos.
I blink my response and crawl up the stairs to you.

Twenty-Third Entry

I have no idea.

Here's my poem:

WHAT THE COWBOY MEANS TO ME

The spacesuit draped with sweat
appeared last night like the past whipping me in the lips.

I smelt the cigar smoke, felt
the shoulder cramp of huddling inside the heavy.

Did you hear the gunshot,
fading yellow across the street like John Wayne with Dutch Elm’s?

I donned my Stetson
and leapt from the roof into the arms of whispering stuntwomen.

When my skin was taken from me,
the desert felt of card game tables became my tuxedo.

My motorcycle twitches
with the Seminole fear I emailed you about.

Twenty-second Entry

I was just in an online magazine called Big Tex[t]. check it out here:http://www2-english.tamu.edu/pubs/bigtext/main.php

and as long as i'm at it, check out my poem in an old issue of Stirring magazine: http://www.sundress.net/stirring/archives/v7/e5/index.html i'm supposed to have something else coming out in there new issue. i think.

here's my poem:

NEW MEXICO AT NIGHT

Who mines the gold that paves the roads in heaven?
This miraculous highway with high billboards proclaiming ‘bend and toil.’
I stood quiet. I made precious love.
It was like crawling my body across a copy machine.
Each of these letters contains one of the results of that trial.
In a moment, a commercial will offer you majestic light.
But first the saint swings into your mouth with his sterling nine-iron.
This guitar is the guitar that coaxes open angel shells.
The person I’m describing laughs with a mirror-plate mustache attached with glue.
Like being high, I saw clouds and thought “don’t think about clouds.”
In the mine, blood leaks off faces and sinks into the intricate natural hollows.
Your dream where your fruit-like feet step across dainty wonders of your own creation.
That book about men.

Smoke exits the body and travels an unknown path.
The story begins with a character shaking his cape awake down the stairs.
IMPORTANT: due to the graphic nature of this program children are already traumatized.
You write your eternal nature on feathers and skin with an altogether original script.
When I began living in California the paint on the churches was faded piano blue.
This is the guitar we use to calculate light speed in our basement.
My brother Terry in the passenger seat, immobile, in agony, about to awake.
A vampire hawk swoops away when we had just finished rigging our net.
Each of these letters contains individual flecks of your body.
The castle of plastic that melts under the heat of an important supernova.
The unholy miasma cut down into the child’s crayon shape.
My body shrouded by the grim patagia of the barbershop awning.
But first this message.

From where does the cosmonaut pull the notes of his song?
Where is the hope of my wicked, fun-loving girl?
Who are you to explain the aura of my own sadnesses to me?
Did you hear the distant typewriter clack and ping?
How can I prevent the stranger from being the thief?
Where is your frightened calendar planning to go?
Who is the expose scumraker among my great-grandchildren?
Am I meant to let water slip from my palms to flatten on my feet?

Twenty-First Entry

So, my computer is dead, yes. But I ingeniously emailed myself all of this last year's work before it died! Go me! Sorry to the patrons of this computer lab, but I'll be doing a lot of printing.

P.S. i updated this on a mac and i don't know how to fix the size of it so sorry.


Here's my poem:

IN OUR ZOMBIE MOVIE

things happen in slo-mo
in our lavishly overgrown back lawn, medium to sunny.
The zombies sit cross-legged and slowly, patiently
teach us everything: pushing us to re-read Salinger,
to finally 'get' algebra as a perfect system.
It clicks.
We begin to see the applications in our everyday lives.

It's bearably cool outside, the zombies cook a good meal.
Sitting at a long table, we hear their elongated moans,
we feel this strange warmth of contentedness swell.
The zombies are strong believers in zen
even without its Buddhist context
to sit is to sit
to walk is to walk
we feel the sun in the afternoon

falling through the apple tree to mosaic on our shoulders.
With so much time to tend to ourselves, the zombies organize
all kinds of walking tours, filled with enlightened commentary
and good-natured dirty jokes.

We find all these old tapes in the neighbor's garage.
We all piss ourselves doing pompous David Bowie stage moves.
We all scream the chorus to 'Rio' but hum wordlessly to the verse.
We bump shoulders with the zombie with the sash in her hair.

Then sunning on the back porch
without a single thought in our heads
we suddenly become unhappy
we miss things we never had
and silently begin to wonder what might have been.

That night, resolved, we sneak away from home.
In black turtlenecks we sweat and silhouette against the moon,
scared, conspiring, we want only the strange quiet void of freedom,
not realizing we are leaving it behind,
we escape.

And in the windows of our childhood home the zombies moan.

Twentieth Entry

It's my bicentennial! Not really. But I still wish Gerald Ford was here.

Missed two good readings last night because I couldn't accurately figure out how to get to either of them. Oh poop.

Here's my poem:

BRIDE OF BRONTOSAURUS

I walk alone at no particular pace.
Walk or swim in the lakes rain has made from its tracks.
Or breathe in the pollen and sneeze it back out for fun.
Breathe, I tell myself, seeing the brontosaurus for the first time in weeks.
I look over my shoulder in case someone is watching me like I’m watching her.
Look at all the things I used to think were dinosaurs; mostly trees and buildings.
At the top of the building, the dinosaur’s body looks big and nervous.
The feeling I get when my hands shake from hunger or I don’t know why.
Feeling funny, the brontosaurus hunter has to regularly examine his motives.
Funny how little I know about dinosaurs I have hazily skulked after for years.
How could I possibly stop? Or lose her trail? Sometimes my choice is obvious.
Could I have been happier with someone else? Yes. But that someone never came.
I waited all month in the parking lot for her and now look at me.
Waited behind a wall like when the brontosaurus’s monolithic neck would turn my way.
Behind me are all the empty apartments and all the things my parents don’t know about.
Me with my useless binoculars and elephant gun just standing there.
With my quarry I shudder and stomp my enormous footprints about.
My heart is light, my eyes forward with no regrets.
Heart? That is an extinct species, they say, that used to roam the earth.
That booming sound is not feet in the distance but far within my own chest.

Nineteenth Entry

I should probably tell those concerned that I have an apt and have had it for several days. I do not however have an internet....or a working computer. Which is admittedly pretty craphound, as I never backed up all the poems and other things I was writing this past year. Fun stuff. Anyways, onwards and upwards.

P.S. everybody go out and buy Dana Levin's new book Wedding Day it's awesome.

Here's my poem:

FOR DANA (OR 2500 BASSISTS ARE AT THIS MOMENT STRUMMING AN E NOTE IN FOUR/FOUR)

When I'm comfortable enough to empty the basin of my friend's cynicisms
and find the empty old envelopes inside
and I won't have to wait for the R train
to pull into the R train stop
and not let anybody on
and the cigarette I flick will bounce back into my mouth
and I'll smoke the filter to make it appear casual
the 2500 bassists will drop their medium picks
and watch morbidly as they fall through the space in the boards
like the four of diamonds in my new deck of cards
that I play with anyway hoping to gain some cheater's edge.
And the amplifiers will hum

when the rain spills off of the window I forgot to close
and the union street bridge will erupt in momentary
and inexplicable fireworks, unprovoked,
because I'd like to think I keep track of every holiday
and I'll remember how much Angela liked the sparklers
and I'll remember how much I did as well
and reading is the only thing I can do at my new place and I don't wanna

and I'll think about all the fun little internet applications I'd have running right now and when Dana asked me whether or not the sound your computer makes when it 'logs on' is a recording or not and I didn't know and still don't know. If it was a recording why is it so dissonant and unpleasant? Why is everybody so worried they won't be considered ironic enough to get laid? Why am I wearing socks when it's so hot just because that's what is expected of me by my culture?

And by culture I mean the proverbial moldy person in my freezer telling me what to do
and by proverbial I mean he commands me around the place using verbs
and in four/four the e note doesn’t really move at all, it just sort of sits there
like an old man who grew up in this neighborhood
moved
and comes back every day. And by neighborhood I mean this carbon jacket
I flip over my head to pretend I have a bond with the people who inject themselves
into the buildings next to mine even though we have never and will never speak
that'll be when I'm comfortable enough
to mail all those envelopes back to the original owners
and tie myself to a roman candle and light the fucker
and paint myself an original unexpected color
and switch from E to a G blues progression which I know will sound weird
and hang myself from a shingle on the wall
and I will say 'open for business'

Eighteenth Entry

So, didn't get the apt. I thought I would, and in fact got no apt. at all, and I'm currently homeless.

Still, being back in the city has inspired something, so off i go again.

Here's my poem:

ONE YEAR OF CUTTING YOUR OWN HAIR

Heat bounced off buildings
reminiscent of last august’s swelter
the maniac rush to escape the street.
New York,
you have given me so many regretful reasons
and so much cement has worn down the summer
of my shoes, I look down past the bathroom mirror.

The small curls of hair grown haggardly
longer than all advisements, the itch and sting
of hair against the eye, rubbed out with water
and shampoo.

In small groups,
and without any communication between one another
my bits of hair(dark brown) have wandered off
my mortal coil and have coiled into pattern
forming eighteen separate german expressionistic images
which I will now name and categorize.

New York,
what was the name of the girl who once wrote me a letter
covered in crayon and smelling sweetly
of some unknown variable, the girl who I met
on the choir trip to Universal Studios
from Michigan
who I didn’t have a crush on
but was mesmerized by
and, after receiving the letter,
was frightened of? I have no right
to ask this of you but I expect you know the answer.

The school supply scissors I use
opened a small slit in my palm filled quickly
with an amazing amount of blood
which I then smudged on several surfaces:
denim, plastic, cardboard, metal, bandage, skin.
New York I am counting the folds and coils
of my three ten dollar bills instead of the bills themselves,
regarding the half-inch hole in my shirt
that I bought with Olivia last year
when I thought life was doing me right.

And I couldn’t tell you what I see in the bathroom sink
of the person whose couch I’m sleeping on.
And the cut on my (left) palm makes me wish it was my right,
it is thin and black with a pink curtain of a bruise.
This is my one year to look down and see something
and the something isn’t there
but I’m supposed to go and blindly run with it.