Alex Johnstone from Monster

I've pretty much been listening to Monster non-stop for a few weeks now. As part of a new interview series on gleefarm, I'll soon be interviewing Alex (who also happens to be a poet and artist) from Monster and posting it here. Meanwhile here's the link to her myspace page.

The Name of This Poem is: The Top 10 Books of 2009

& it goes a little something like this:
I rejected sweetness I'll accept it now
hello? My slowness makes me skinned alive
lately a view through carved blinds does
let drop speed into curse, what curse?
Evincing a mood of calm each month
I noticed you were wearing a shirt, why?
My sweetness abruptly or not at all.
It is sunny man, and like, I want the heat
of summer to make the sidewalks wavy again.

Josephine Foster

Here.

James Schuyler Reading "Freely Espousing"

Here.

Stuff onto it or in it

The minivan is parked outside again with people
packed in it. When I walk by it lists to one side
from the people inside making a serious effort to watch me walk by.
Us people are understanding stuff better than others.

In just a little bit some fantasy game like
Internet gambling on imaginary events or
the presence of social networking
as a possibility of getting prominence or recognition from peers.

Those channels like channels on a television
you can change with your good arm and not be worried
that the crimes are being committed that
the people are being frisked and manipulated.

It is more like having physical contact with people's ideas
about themselves at work or in social systems like at home
or with friends or at the hardware store with some people
there that can help you build stuff or improve your home.

The test is just looking at all of them in the stores
or the street and not feeling like everyone is squirming
in the subway wreathing together a slow motion
pollen exchange and then a delicate wandering about.

NYC Players/Richard Maxwell/Drummer Wanted

Richard Maxwell's People Without History

You should go see this. It's outstanding. Tickets etc. here.

Saturday Poem

The milky light of a not-so-sinister Saturday
is descending on my cup of green tea
I bought some blackberries and ate them
while reading The Times an expressway
over my shoulder men building things
in the courtyard and the faint sounds
of WNYC piercing the noise like a stickpin
sticking through my entire thumb
I walked to the grocery store earlier
the more indifferent the person ringing
me out the more I want to be kind and open
a conversation or at least exchange a pleasantry
nice weather we've been having lately, yes? A shrug.
Still, with my bananas, my blueberries, my avocados,
my sleepy tea, my canned salmon, I am still
always and only an animal living among animals
and pretending the ability to walk while
erect is something secret and vast
that we must keep from the rest of the country
if only the river had a boat waiting on it
just for me and a few friends if only
the air was thick enough to lift myself
above Baltic Street for just a few seconds
to get a glimpse of all I've been missing
in my thick moods my options are growing
my taxes are done I'm in my favorite chair
poems by James Schuyler on my lap
it's getting to the point where all I can
do is laugh at the despair of winter's
vast rage - curling in on itself now something
else is waiting in the wings let's see what it is.

Never

And

...then they were biting or scratching
they were tranquilized because they'd
given up on me and my words the house
was rotten with shit all over the place
the walls gouged from tantrums
the milk in the fridge was blue
bear bile was harvested in cold batches
for the wealthy children squeezing bears
with bags connected to machinery
to carry the bile in and the cars
to carry them home
say nothing about the golden handles
knobs with elegant etchings
the seats made of crushed animal
viper masks and the chalky wick
making it totally awesome
to bum them out.

Jesus, Rogan

Please Get Better at Being Good

If I were to say that all things like clothes cut off you with a knife were a way to be free then what knife would you use? If a sleeping pattern were interrupted for years or a loud hissing or cracking sound maybe jazz, maybe not. But it should be cold in the room, it should cause you to shiver a bit even with warm coffee in your hand in a mug or a determined look on your face sandalwood room spray or the vitamins you took moments ago that make your skin feel flushed or tingly. People should bring the paper to you with notes written in the paper inside a styles section in red pen they should put those messages there that are simple asking simple things when you read it you are not required to answer you should just mouth the answers as though reading and moving your lips or not at all but you should have a look that can be observed from say, binoculars. A sold out situation that really means closed for good or please be god or come to the neighborhood with useful products or something to save us. Call someone and ask permission to do X to another person or use the idea of that person to say hello or become friends with that person in a friendly way say by offering help around the house or loaning a small sum of money to purchase computer software or bread. And then all the rest of these ideas might be better articulated in books. Though when it comes to sleep or the contemplation of sleep it is better to sleep than to read or theorize about sleep. If sleep won't arrive on its own then please be good or please get better at being good even if you fail you will still have to live with yourself.

My Face is Not a Toy (Photos From This Evening)

Monster - Please Give Up

More MONSTER here.

Just Getting Along

I'm not sure what I fed you
but I think it rotted in your mouth
before you could swallow it.
There was some mistake we made
holding the pistol up to the teller
made us squirm in our gel.
The pontoon was docked and the feast
was wrapped in cellophane. It all
means so much once it's gone by
the tracery and the junction
little puppet light show mind fuck
in the middle of the room in the night
the blinds make shadows like an arm
across my chest a prism of gist
just getting along just getting along
the end cannot go any further.

Deerling

The Perfume of Accident

Jackie-O Motherfucker

Yo Thanks Guy on the Bike

Once We Were Saints

Before there were elves there were saints
and we saddled them with the architecture
of our memory of a lost perfection. We said
this does not feel like dying when we were
passing out our skin turned to flame
ash spilled from our mouths it was raining in circles
dark oil fell from our eyes so thick was our sadness
like a rope frayed at the beginning of the day
spent on the filthy grass, your body next to mine.
A little evil, a little insane, but forgetting
where the boundaries were was good when despairing
for the last time.

Hotel T.V. Landscape

Jerk Some Muscle Until It's Corn

All the moon does is sit in the sky and change shapes with tricks
of shadows while all we do is do and die.
These nightly escapades, lancing the sky
in order to drive a bargain, spit some shine
and jerk the muscle until it's corn.

In here, in a stall - a shower head sparking blue on my sugary self -
the beam of water feels good on the head of my class.
A buttery edge, a sweet gem and the goodness of triumph and fear.
I mean, what memory matters when there is no space for this?
It seems so real to be alive now days and so: things are sharp or break.

If what you do in your free time is sink into the organ of relief
then you should know what smothers the crane is the highly toxic
mechanism of fish fog and chum. Wave at them passing by
over a bed someone is waving goodbye goodbye.
There are no stormy lessons of the migrating beat.

I'll hook to the spoon and cringe in a metal film about all of you.
The savage comes clean to boot up a signal
in my strange machine: aloud. These broad moths
are what separates the pearls from the meat.
You remember the miracle now spit in your hand.

Tuesday Night with Cat Power

Tuesday Morning With John Lee Hooker

A Calm Cloud

"A calm cloud of humming gas lurks in this red pellet," he said, before tossing the red pellet at the cinderblock wall, causing the pellet to burst and release a raspberry scented gas that made me feel drowsy and content. "That's some lovely gas," I said before lying down on a straw mat that he'd placed on the floor. I worried he might stick his fingers in my mouth as I drifted off on the mat, sure that it would be a few hours before I woke up.

13 Most Beautiful

Please Be Good

The Person Sitting Next To Me Is Reading This

There might not be enough nakedness. Or there might be just enough nakedness. There might not ever be a better time than right now to take off your clothes. Like a knitter you organize ideas into a pattern and then you throw it over the bed and get naked on that. Sometimes when you enter the room water bugs scare the crap out of you. They're so big. In a catalogue of furniture you found a certain curve of a lamp that resembled her jaw so you bought that lamp and now it sits next to you on the desk and you shave the edge of the lamp instead of your face. It's raining all the time or it's always sunny. They are shutting things down or opening them up. We want coffee and democracy and somewhere quiet to write things down as people say them in garbled voices. Nakedness will always drive us into the next room and remind us why we came here in the first place. Buy some trail mix and a trashy magazine in the airport. Make a poem from that. Write large enough in your notebook so the person sitting next to you on the plane doesn't have to strain to read: the person sitting next to me is reading this.

Seattle Wet, Seattle Dry

This Morning

I like that sad way you make me sweet when I think of you I get scared my plane will go down that people will pick through my things and not know what I considered important or that the things on the wall or a volume of poetry with a ticket marking a page isn't marking a page but is an important ticket because it's connected to a memory that went away with me like that day in central park last summer when we slept on the hill by the boat pond and how the light was perfect and we both slept with the memory of buckminster fuller's domes still in our heads there was tragedy all around us but it felt like it ebbed a bit and allowed us to sleep in the world's big city on a patch of grass with cars swirling by just yards away we found somewhere to sleep because we felt so comfortable in the world for a moment so if something happens to me know that I thought of that this morning.

Dwelling in the House of Days

Lemon Yellow, Powder Blue, Pale Green & White

A
Warm
Happy
In these
Hard
Times
Is
Rare

Soothe
The
Sad
Year
Away
There is
Joy
Too.

Getting Close To The Unlivable

Getting closer.

WG Sebald

"The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling."

-W.G. Sebald from Vertigo p 212

Nina Simone - Save Me

Pandatone

A Person or Two

I'd like to find a person or two to delve into my new sounds
creating a piercing caca-booty and dirty hair -- a principle like blue wind.

I go to bed thinking about waving, I get up thinking about waving. In fact all I do is wave goodbye.

Nina Simone -- Suzanne

I want this song played at my fucking funeral. Leonard Cohen is a genius but Nina brought his song to life.

Sunday Poem

So the apartment was wobbling
from floor to floor each room tilted
from one end to the other with a stick
holding it against my thighs landing
in the hallway blood on the knob
the shadow is purple there are people
in the room no there are not
it is late eating two oranges and two
scoops of peanut butter a jar
it is like that sadness getting a stick
to the head pounded out of the blue
landing on savage memory an island
in the middle of the bed adrift now
wake up waving a pillow a white flag
if someone were looking in the window
seeing me do that like a rescue committee
in uniforms with brass buttons officials
with credentials not stacks of books
everywhere but like a light license some
clout in the industry of saving people with light
reaching through the window and pulling me out
but my hand is porcelain now it broke off.

Alice Notley

Weekend Top 10

1) Seeing Julianna Barwick
2) Seeing Miho Hatori
3) Seeing Shoko Nagai
4) Connie Converse
5) The Bell House (see all 4 above)
6) A truly lovely email from J.S.
7) Chris Martin saying something beautiful and sweet to me.
8) Riding up to Nyack on a bicycle with friends on a gorgeous day.
9) The narcotic-like nap after the ride.
10) Reading my poems at Bowery Poetry Club Friday night.

Nina Simone!

Cold Operator

COLD OPERATOR from Carson Mell on Vimeo.

Before You Left

Lemons grew as flowers
on the balcony
to humble trees to shake
hair glistened that was gold
in the terry cloth towel
forest green bath mat
footprints scaled the walls
hands in garlic slices
the fur consumed cat
cries oblivion rapture hello
the ceiling felt too low
the table was wood
that is now metal
I heard the BQE
it was the ocean late
at night we were
dreaming this panging
head on an orange
pillow getting dirtier
time passing soon years
and fog taking it away
from memory tricks
laps milk slips away
goodbye goodbye.

Pandatone -- I forgot if we dreamed

Larkin Grimm

The Harpeth Trace

The Harpeth Trace from BlipMobile on Vimeo.

Bowery Poetry Club/Happy Hour Poetry Reading: This Friday, 3.6.09. at 5PM!

Bowery Poetry Club/Happy Hour Poetry Reading w/Amy King, Todd Colby, Buck Downs, and Gary Parrish -$5

The reading starts promptly at 5pm and ends at 6pm.

The Bowery Poetry Club in collaboration with Farfalla Press (Brooklyn) invites you to NEWS: North East West and South Poetry Series. A poetry Happy Hour featuring poets and publishers from Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Washington DC area. March reading featuring Amy King, Todd Colby, Gary Parrish, and Buck Downs.

The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
(Between Houston and Bleecker)
F train to 2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker
212-614-050

www.farfallapress.blogspot.com

Thanks FUXSAKE

Monster: Sincere Blues

Monster - Sincere Blues from Carson Mell on Vimeo.

More of Carson Mell's work can be found here

Art Show

Snow Day

Snow makes it quiet
hides where I stood in the rain
and stared at your feet it makes
things look clean
a padded city
silent BQE
last night snow filled the bottom
of the window where I
left it open a crack
to keep it cool in here
I'll just look at it out there
until it gets dirty
until people try to walk in it
only a few footprints
no one is up
it's good
no really
it is.

Connie Converse

HERE

Dissociative Fugue (11)

1) The author is elsewhere.
2) Continuous time, not units.
3) A bank shot off a lily simply turns it to pulp.
4) Touch a grieving person's head.
5) That is not the same as wanting to be ravaged.
6) That is awkward you can't say that.
7) Was that a smile or a grimace? Really.
8) I am suspending my use of the earth.
9) I used to be so smooth.
10) There is nothing rather than something.
11) I'm going to work now.