Sommerfugl

Like, how did all of Atlantic Avenue suddenly become you?

Like, how did all of Atlantic Avenue suddenly become you?
Where do you clap your hands
when there are too many people around you?
The wood in this apartment is stressed. What I need is a recognizable
creak that I can oil or fill with wax. I see this zenith, see?
Everything is going to be alright or not.
I woud like nothing more than to supply my body
with sugars and fats. I'd like to connect with people
and form a bond of some sort. But still, I'm just
looking up all the avenues and you are those
streets I can still detect you on each one
I counted them and I am walking them home.

Styr

You Smell Really Good

You Will Feel Better When You Get Home

Dinner for 80 Years

The Biography of David Markson

Wednesday Top 13

1) Wednesday is brought to you by: Vitamin B-12.

2) Pretend Walkie Talkies are fun!

3) Jumping up and down like a weirdo.

4) Justin in Northern Georgia.

5) The King of Brooklyn.

6) Save Khaki Chambray Shirts.

7) Everybody Leaves.

8) Stylistically a mixture of Pollock, De Kooning, and Brando.

9) Everything erased.

10) Happy Birthday Aneurysm.

11) "Angels love you, we do too." - Howard Finster

12) "My grief is no longer the same; a memory which was still unbearable to me a year ago is now no longer so.
That is the result of observation."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 187

13) Everything feels calm yet pleasantly urgent.

The Best Blues Song Ever

The Audience at ACA Galleries Tonight in Chelsea

They were so sweet to me. Everyone in the room gave me a handcrafted gift after I recited my poems for them.

Top 5 Tuesday

1) A pleasant phone call at dawn.
2) Alone at work, early.
3) Toumani Diabate.
4) The rain falling so lightly that it tickles my skin.
5) Making my way sweetly through the day.

Kingston Ontario Tourism (what I saw before my battery ran out)

Reading!

Tuesday, September 28 · 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Readings by:
Todd Colby
Dorothea Lasky
Eileen Myles
Rebekah Rutkoff

ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr. (b/w 10th/11th Ave.)
New York, NY

Songs by:
Franklin Bruno

Hosted by Satellite Telephone editor Robert Dewhurst

There will be wine, cheese, and crackers, too!

C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.

Kingston Writer's Fest

See you here.

VK

"For about two years I had this idea that I was caving in on myself. That there was some sort of external weight or pressure like on those space programs where they show a can of Coke being tossed into outer space and how it would crush in on itself. I felt like that can, but more fluid and reinforced, as though it altered my shape just enough to make people forget about me so that I could make a quick exit."

Vincent Knopfler, from his novel How I Started Over and Met Your Dear Mother p. 67

Top Ten North American Flowers

1) Panic Sluice Flower

2) Volume Control Flower

3) The Chrysanthemum Flower

4) Paterfamilias Flower

5) Vine King Flower (or Kink, as it is known in Iowa)

6) Sandal Domingo Flower

7) Crazy Joy Flower

8) Lazy Afternoon Flower (with medicine)

9) Strange Meat Flower

10) Whippet Hound Flower

From the book North American Flowers and Their Meanings in the New World by Bradley Sykes and Martha Gold, 2002

Cedar Sigo and Jeni Olin in Jeni's Room at the Chelsea Hotel, May 2001

Polaroid by Todd Colby

Eau Duelle

If you changed one word
you'd be up all night
and I'd say: stop worrying,
I want your back and strong coffee,
I want them badly enough to cancel my paper
for a week while I'm still here. I'm feeling newsworthy
this morning. The ceramic coaster I put my cup on,
the cup itself; all the things on this table are spinning.
I spilled sugar water on my blue jeans.
I changed the room around with skin ease
and plum-tinted lights.
There's not a purer way out.
I'll convert to another product.
I'll invent a new math based on thrust and zest.
I'll jam out in order to become, and then, all I am-
which is pretty fabulous, when you really find it.
I'll show you love slowed down to a lifetime,
and then I'll bloom out over Brooklyn
with the storm clack of a sonic prince,
and I'm not kidding.

Bas Jan Ader

Bell! (Playing Littlefield on Wednesday in BK)

Sweet Chambray

Oh sweet chambray
your simple weave
mechanisms for lounging
all kinds of particles
can get in there in between
and all about you I steal thoughts
so you can retain what I say to you
still sweat stains a pale gray
and the smell
though pure
and pretty nice
is overpowering the borders
and I'm breathing
I can barely write this
without showers of sparks
over Manhattan tonight
trees uprooted
cars bent under me
the road dipped a bit where my bike tires
rolled west to the highway
sleeping next to it
an organ near an artery
I'm going to do groceries
and get all kinds of shit done
this weekend.

Love,
Todd

All the air got knocked out of the air

Rinsing Feeling — not so bad
what you knew would happen
has only happened later
than you expected
the delay: a blip.

Adam Phillips

"We are too much for ourselves - in our hungers and our desires, in our griefs and our commitments, in our loves and our hates - because we are unable to include so much of what we feel in the picture we have of ourselves."

Adam Phillips from On Balance, p 35

Memory

I used to enjoy remembering you
when I could remember you I would
use my memory in such a way
as to conjure you into my living room
the dust on the bookshelves
is really our skin mingling amid those
stacks of things so you were here
so we're sort of hanging out
with the dust from us
this is Thursday
my bills are due
Brooklyn is waking up
somewhere you are walking across
town or uptown or simply cradling
a cup in your lap
you could be doing anything
and I'd still be thinking of you
trying to remember something
if only I could.

Love Poem

My regal name is Fast Learner.
I can use a computer, send links,
I've used a remote, a microwave,
a chamoise and a Swiffer.
I can identify fennel, rhododendrons and wisteria.
I know that a Shirley Temple is a real treat or prize.
Any drink that red is for special people.
I would like to get to know you better.

Tuesday Top 9 Books

1) Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems by Jeni Olin (buy this now!)

2) On Balance by Adam Phillips

3) Manhood by Michel Leiris

4) Basic Philosophical Writings by Emmanuel Levinas

5) Treatise on Elegant Living by Honore de Balzac (thanks Jane!)

6) Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams by Mark Ford

7) The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry

8) Waste by Eugene Marten

9) Reason and Other Women by Alice Notley

Action Town

Someday soon I shall sip a Mango Lassie
in Action Town. Not bereft at all, but pleasantly
aware of winter coming in on all fours.
All voice messages and text messages will
be erased in no time. You can visit a place
away from the city and they will call you Spark Plug
and things will get wavy from their harsh medicines.
It's gonna be okay. I mean, you're a good habit.
I'm not sure where you like my body seemingly
poised or just walking down the street
with the people. It's funny to think who I would
call if something really awful happened.
I'd be jumping up and down knowing who to call.
I can cut paper with my hands. I've painted faces
inside of you and you will get to know them and
crack up. My way of doing things is scary to me.
Remember the toothbrush and the honey bear
and the meal that would never end? I'm counting on
you to come through high water, come through chaos,
come to Action Town and lift my aces to skyward aviation.

The Biography of Michel Leiris

Eye Water

Even what I'm doing now is doing it better
for you than what I was supposed to be doing. Good
and worth doing, like moistening the sponge
for the hermit crab you found--that was good!
Those things are nightmares in a shell. Fact:
a hermit crab could crawl inside your ear while you're asleep.
Follow a guy in Rome with a dog and eye water because
a stranger is a cure for aching on the train.
You have all night to reason with yourself by
putting big hands where there were none or
small feet making a statement with how small they are.
Every mistake is only a mistake
in perspective (the dudes were even wearing masks).
I'm doing research and I would like you to have enough manners
to provide me with the funding to do so.
The situation is enlivened because you're in it.

You Get the Picture

Aching for the riff but really
all I want is a pair of arms
all funked and breathable.
Nothing is confusing really beacause
my needs are simple and refined
as mayaonaise on corn beside a truck
in Red Hook on a sunny Sunday, or something.
I can barely see you through the night.
A silver bike is my agent of velocity.
Zipping through the city is all I can do for you.
Hey! I am so well-rounded
that you can't even make your way to me
all gray and bulbous. You may now enter
the museum of my face. You are going fast.

The Biography of Emmanuel Levinas

Sleep at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn 9.8.10.

On the Beach (Me)

Top 13 Monday

1) I'm getting good at not filling the empty space.

2) Press my face into your throat until I feel your pulse on my lips.

3) Blue Vaseline.

4) Remembering: "voluptuous sadness."

5) Ovid, Homer, Lacan, Rimbaud.

6) Fine & Raw.

7) You've got to think: zenith or crest?

8) Going over the deepest part alone (you don't need that shit).

9) Whenever people are not green i.e. yellow or gray - it means they're not there.

10) Finding someone to play catch with the indestructible part of yourself.

11) I am comfortable in your skin.

12) Books all over the place.

13) You know what?

There is something I would like you to know about

Tuesday, September 28 · 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Satellite Telephone Presents:

Readings by:
Todd Colby
Dorothea Lasky
Eileen Myles
Rebekah Rutkoff

ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr. (b/w 10th/11th Ave.)
New York, NY

Friend

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson

Too Soon

It snowed on my backyard in Brooklyn today.

Sunburned Lungs

Opening my lungs and thrilling out
to the new possibilities of a boat on the water
a sail unfurled on a river the language
of vegetables I hear it like a radio
buried in a compost heap
the delicate thread around my neck
is snagged in your incisor
I can come for you all golden and broad
linking wings with birds stung with sap
I get chills from the damp ground I freak
your friends out with my intensity
I glow in the dark I'm so proud of my outfit
it's not me hugging the lead sinkers
I float so as to say "Love, Todd" like I can say that
and mean it and get away with the murder
of my doubt with love anyone can
it's in the cards a hurricane is moving
up the spine of the coast we call you inside
and you are all like "what now?"
and I am all like "better than never!"

Glass, Bird, Plaque and Todd