Top Ten Friday

1) Reason and Other Women by Alice Notley

2) Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler

3) Satellite Telephone #3 (featuring me) http://whof.blogspot.com/2010/03/satellite-telephone-vol-3.html

4) Lungfull Magazine #18 (featuring a collaboration between Joanna Penn Cooper and me) lungfull.org

5) Cousin Corrine's Reminder Issue #1 (featuring lots of poems by me) http://www.bookcourt.org/cousincorinne/

6) Noo Journal (featuring me, forthcoming) noojournal.com

7) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault

8) Prospect Park: One-Hundred Miles, Part 2

9) Solo Nyack Ride Saturday Morning

10) Seeing Lili Taylor buying herbs at Met Foods

Werner Herzog

Word Art

Brooklyn Flowers

How wonderful it is that there are people
who jump up and down when you enter the room
ready to work the kinks out of your muscles say
or entertain you with magic and technology
not so much as a distraction but as a reward
for the effort of simply putting one foot in front
of the other because the struggle is that huge
the weight of water is not that of air
and still we are skin bags of both
and can only dream of flight or a quiet
cabin in the woods lunching on birds
never flying with them above some particle
board the green below so vivid you have to
sort of walk away and weep joyfully
into your opened hands the tears gathering in the creases
of each palm rolling onto your wrists
you can go home again but you will be broken
open all salty and lived-in ready for some new flight
not away but into these Brooklyn flowers
where ease isn't magic it's just ease.

PS 22 Chorus - Covering "This Must Be The Place" by The Talking Heads

Love Poem

You must be accustomed to gentle hands
if you think everyone has slighted you
think about your costume: you're soaking in it!
You need to make sense of that because I can't.
We say hello gently or not at all and that's okay.
All of the details are really adding up like a good fucking
in warm light. My mountain has
a name (the idea that someone named a mountain
after me because I'm so hard to get over
and all that crap). I mean, if I wrote "I have a gun"
on a dollar and sent you to the bank
to get change for laundry, you might get arrested; so
I would never do that just to see what would
happen, I promise. What you can do is kick someone
when they're up and hug them when they're down
which makes no sense to me either-it's
something a boss would say.
Any day of the week there are
really good things to do in the city; stuff
that is amazing to me-stuff that gets me choked.
In a moment I'm going to get all up in your grill about goodness
and light and pro this or pro that. But first a message
from the sponsor of this poem.

Horse Feathers - Curs in the Weeds

My Modernity

I want a machine to dress me
so I can fly to work over the city.
A mechanical dog would be my companion.
No flakes off the mechanics, no ceramic chips
to burst in midair. My life would be one helium shot
of pure levity and bulbous desire. Sparkly and bubbly
like lollipops covered in rain. I call people
with a real good sense of themselves
"Early Adopters" they bring me gifts
from the future and instill in me a real
sense of how far we have to go before
the welts of modernity recede. When I walk
into my apartment I think: my god, what
a wonderful place to shoot a movie with
Madonna and Robin Williams and other people
like that who emote into the future. I think
the stars are aligning in such a way that
in the movie of my life the crew is remodeling my kitchen,
changing the blinds, discovering new rooms, installing
a conveyor belt that takes me from bed to desk
and a robot waiting for me with a martini when I get home.

Abilities

Lift something moderately heavy
like my body over your shoulder
carry me up the stairs in such a way
that I feel weightless, that my ribs
press into your shoulder making
you feel powerful because you are able
to carry me up six-flights of stairs
after I've had a pot coffee and some
almond butter and raw honey.
You have real abilities
and you put them to good use.
I like that about you.

Die Antwoord

Vacate the Premises

Ocean ocean ocean
with you
alone with you
alone.

Will You

Morning cracks
and the dark lid
of the sky gives way
over Prospect Park what
are your flowers doing
out there in deepest Brooklyn?
Dew on the furniture
maybe a car that sounds
like the ocean
maybe not.
The best coffee
in the world just
woke me up
enough to pulverize
doubt and mask
the pain of this body
long enough to dance
a bit I wish you'd been
here to see it
you would have been
impressed.

And Also With You

I like umber
spread on my nape
where my callous
sheds flakes
just a cause
for alarm
when you can't
tell when I'm being
a cardinal or a saint
lifting up my head
looking at you smile
not wanting to
wipe it away yet.

Gas Stations & Weirdos

Oh blue flower thigh you are silk and
matted with blood and fur.
The bus seats are lavish and primed
for your sweet flesh while jumpers
swoon over your eagle parts. Yes!
Think claw think gangrene
all misanthropic and molecular then
reach into the bed: red rim
around beet piss. From Brooklyn
a caller i.d. illuminates the welts
enough to spark principle
to sit and think or scoop chocolate
from a bin of thistles. I am moving
into the new cape with a tenderness
you know from way before you were born.
I was walking down Bergen Street
with a capsule comment: my lungs
want to breathe you in while my body
brays at the open sky in a calm
and reassuring way. An android full
of nut butters and quinine. Do you feel
calm and reassured? Is that my hand
you're holding? I want you to hold something
cool and silver and instructive.
Follow me home so I can call the police
and tell them you're finally here for me.

Go! Team!

I'm just lifting my heart out of bed
with muscles made of lemons, yeah: lemons.
I love the way morning turns grayer than dawn's pink
or the childlike way that the rhythm of the B.Q.E.
rocks me to sleep when you're not here.
You get prime space in my mind.
Are you sitting? Well when you stand
there are famous people right next
to you all akimbo with definite chillaxing
and super-ridiculous pulmonary effort.
I mean, I'm on to you and all the things
you stand for, on, and over and out. I can't
lift you higher than I did while kissing
that little love button that says "go go."
And then I do get up because maybe I've had
enough and I can do this in style
but I'd rather you found me dancing
all jazzed and joyful for simply being
awake at all in this rabid century.
Are you on my team? I would like to start
a team and I would like you on it.

Two for Monday

Additional Playground

In some triumphant dozer's
head a plastic toy is lodged
making an incredible leap
look easy from the cinema
of the cranium. Hollow and beefy,
lugged and mute, all I have
to do is do something in such
a way that you never forget
it and maybe even want to
roll in it. Peal the orange
over the radiator and watch
oils permeate the leather
headdress. I'm enchanted
by Spring, made misty-eyed
by the lurch of violets
on the patio near the highway.

Coming Soon

You might be thinking of me
riding a cruddy pony
or lifting up the filthy sky just enough
to slip into the morning
so I can find my way
back to bed or Baltic Street.
What's with all the older methods
of desire which have nothing
to do with retaining the rights
to reproduce even a rough-hewn
mugshot of a bore? I am causing
this cycle of woe to recede
just enough to see something
big and sweet and creamed and
perhaps even good for us-
like maybe an airplane
full of marshmallows
which is just total bullshit
and has nothing to do
with my life as you know it.

Days

There is time in these days
and we are living in them
products of flowers a bird
making sounds only we can hear
with our human ears the other
speaking into a cup
making space where there is none
it's just us in the light of morning
drinking in staying put
marking a spot with an X
that says stop
and sit a minute
there is nothing left to do
and we are doing it-
may I do it with you?