Washing My Face

When I'm alone I notice stuff
about myself, like how small
my head feels when I wash
my face. Cupping water
and bringing it up to my face
I think "my head is so small."
But my head is not small,
in fact, it is kind of big
and unwieldy. In tight spaces
it is prone to bumping into things.

Tuesday Top 10

1) Vigorous exercise to thunderous applause.

2) To miss everyone in the world I ever loved all at once.

3) Jumping up and down at a stop sign in order to prove something about flight.

4) Huge water bugs scare the fuck out of me.

5) 3:02 am: toast with extra virgin coconut oil & raw honey.

6) Terry Riley: In C. Again & again.

7) Apollinaire, Mayokovsky & me in the Adirondacks. That would be a good hang.

8) Nicholson Baker's comfortable tone in Room Temperature. Jealous.

9) What a list of the books in my bathroom would reveal about me. Or anyone for that matter.

10) "The Least of My Worries."

Dear Euphoria - That You Would

Radiohead - All I Need

Top 10 Things I'm Doing to Prepare for the Hurricane

1) Fuck shit up.

2) Wear a bandana in honor of Guillaume Apollinaire's birthday (1880-1918). Apollinaire's "bandana" was actually a bandage because he got shot in the head during WW I. I'm still covering my head in his honor.

3) Listen to Lester Young birthday broadcast on WKCR 89.9 (wkcr.org).

4) Bananas, avocados, spinach, tomatoes, kefir and coffee.

5) Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker.

6) Watch the rain from my balcony.

7) Listen to the neighbors downstairs move A LOT OF STUFF around downstairs.

8) Black Sphinx: On The Comedic in Modern Art, edited by John C. Welchman.

9) Buy an antique brown belt on ebay.

10) Restlessly get up and walk from room to room thinking I'll find something else to distract me.

Shipworms & Gribbles

Still within this gray gravity
of late summer pouting
a shot of green looms exquisitely
I can see the prow of a boat
slicing through the Buttermilk Channel
from the balcony a giggle
rattles your throat someone
has used peanut butter as bait
in a movie about starring in life
looming over a cascade of doubts
you are purposeful and gleeful
as a meadowlark winging lemons
you drop to the floor roll out the door
and exit in a fashionable way
an exit that says more is to come
if you'll only lift your dire fantasies
into the air and hustle them off
to the nearest chamber with
oxygen candles and blood stirrups
as befits a gang of personality.

Wood & Rubber

Bits & Bobs

Oh savage night
your phony eyelashes
barely bat the stars around
& that sad symphony of glitter
doesn't hide the smoke
billowing from trucks, it's futile.
Oh skinny sky, you beseech
me with your mild treble of space & time.
You are confined to physics
like a donkey in a shed.
You lap up the mystery
with your goofy tongue.
Oh goddamn you, night-
you'll get your dawn
and then things
will really change.

Are You Friendly?

You blow kisses
through windshields
hammer out miles
leaving shoe leather
on paths along the river
over the Brooklyn Bridge
under a lemon pie sun
it's getting darker sooner
and lighter later
I need something
I'm not sure what
here I am.

Three

N.F.L. Films

Chunks of time going by so fast.
Tumbling into oblivion.

Evening Him

Author show diligence
splatter self on floor
make haste with bloated charm
remember take nothing for granted
nothing is permitted
everything is tempting
arch into delight
address angels as friends
descend into midnight
hail the gladdening light
jump rope down six flights of stairs
then up again on helium
as though helium would suffice.

Mike Doughty - Dubious Luxury

Mike Doughty has a new record out and I'm on it. Here's Mike himself on the new recording:

"Let me say again: I don’t sing on Dubious Luxury. There’s sampled vocals from Joanne Kyger, Todd Colby, Erica Livingston, Young Jean Lee, Becky Yamamoto, and–perhaps most interestingly to people who listen to Soul Coughing–Rachel Benbow Murdy, aka the ghostly voice on “Janine”.

You can currently download the album for $10 or pick up the album and a t-shirt for $25 on Doughty’s website: HERE

Scoop

I hear you sometimes from a veil.
I swear on the heads of those all around me.
Link arms with a stranger on the subway:
hold on to me,
this is a scary ride, a scary place.
Morning is one scoop peanut butter
one scoop raw honey
two cups coffee.
The rays of light are sandwiched
between you and me
and miles and miles.
Forget the things you'll
do when you get back.
What are you up to now?

Sonic Youth - Blink

again and again and again

Accidental Self-Portrait in the Rain

Thursday Top 10

1) Reading back over certain passages in my old journals is like watching a car wreck in slow motion right before impact. Unbearable to watch/read. I want to jump in and warn the person inside to eject or swerve or something. Helpless.

2) Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky, edited by Michael Almereyda

3) The pleasant feeling of being alone when I'm not at work.

4) Cioran, Kafka, Daumal. My companions last night.

5) The Death of Virgil by Herman Broch. An enormous, gorgeous & haunting poetic hallucination.

6) The impossibility of being gentle, loving, and compassionate all the time.

7) "The importance of reminiscence is its persistence." -Robert Ashley.

8) A room that is saturated with the scent of frankincense and myrrh.

9) Engineered Garments.

10) Thinking maybe I need to read more Balzac and Flaubert.

Dance with an angel is like being on a soft cloud

Thanks, Zack, for finding this on a wall near Court & Congress.

Patti Smith on Kids Are People Too

Taffy Days

It's morning now all night.
Aluminum skin pulls rays through
the park in the dirt, on trees, in my hair.
Not a bad day to jump up and down.
When people see how living spare is necessary
they get smaller, disappear. Sweet
morning, cold bones. Photos of people
doing things in places I've never
been. Does that mean the situations
are fake or have been staged somehow?
So the morning light and all this thinking
does is add delicious details to my story.
I grab the globe and think people have
thought of me from the following locations
while I've been here. Radiating sprays
across oceans, lines splayed out like
a hand. I enjoy getting lost in the tidal
flows of time without you, these taffy days.

This is Your Receipt and is Not a Ticket for Travel

The Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog

Setting Out

You are murdering the game right now
pale blue as mercury reflected in your eyes
getting ready for fall
creatives jauntily scrutinize the future
finding a new way to live
in the final stages of pure gravy
I'm going to leave a large empty space
on your bedroom wall
I'll stick my head through beams
naughty little heels
my skin is too tight
to walk out of the room
panic is a thing of wonder
traffic lights my books
someday you will
get it back again oh you will
I would like to suggest
that my name be at the top of your list.

Bit Lip

Okay, the gremlin's coming
and we're all ready to leap.
Taste the roast, it's dry.

Sonic Youth/John Cage/Merce Cunningham

I WOULD MAKE THE DANCES. JOHN WOULD WRITE THE MUSIC. from visitor design on Vimeo.

Sonic Youth, Tonight

They were brilliant tonight, as always.
I think I had the best seat in the house.
Click on photos to enlarge.

Friday Top 10

1) The furious beauty of Rene Ricard's poems.

2) Nicholson Baker: The Anthologist.

3) Sonic Youth tonight with Heidi.

4) My red RRL "GUIDE" t-shirt (eBay!).

5) Susana Baca: Seis Poemas.

6) Knowing certain people are on this earth, right now.

7) Reading my poems in London in October (xo Marianne Vitale).

8) Andy Kaufman: Bravest comedian, ever.

9) Coffee from Ethiopia from Jane.

10) The cool air over NYC right now.

The Ghost is Clear

Maybe someone will cough up
enough dough to make my walks
more delightfully absurd. I'd like a rose-lined
river to walk along, and if at all possible,
make the roses yellow and white. Here are the tools
I'd like the ghosts to use: computer,
mobile phone, digital watch, and coffee.
There's no more on the web than all the things
you dream about on this earth.
You ghosts like the internet.

Maybe Even Now

Maybe I'll forgive you
for what I'm becoming to you, now.
Once I thought people would come
to me for more than what I could sell them.
I can generate worth and harm. My days
blow by, I look at them sometimes
and think I won't regret this sensation.
I can lift my hands and wave them
above my head signifying surrender
or goodbye goodbye. We are not moving
across the landscape in a motorized anything.
We are the landscape and we are fading
into it. Look, what's so stunning is this morning
and you can't buy it. All lonesome and slow,
we're getting ready for something really
great so be sure to bring your Sunday best
secondhand stuff and burn it in a pile.
Flaming acrylic gives off the best light of all.
I'm your friend, all you need to do is worship me.
Anyway, people talk too much, so when those
areas of light shine in such a way, get there fast.

Kurt Vile - In My Time

Kurt Vile - In My Time from LaundroMatinee on Vimeo.

Tuesday Top 5

1) Charlie Parker with strings on WKCR.

2) Joseph Beuys, 1983: "We have a finance system
that cannot fund human work."

3) Mizensir's "Cypres de Toscane" (a candle that smells like a church)

4) National Geographic documentary about the Appalachian Trail.
New term: "Trail Magic."

5) Vladimir Mayakovsky: "I'll raise the books of my poems
over the heads of the creeps!"

A Little Monday Joy

Ghosts of Summer

The great machine of night roars on
in my head. It is sweltering. Tonight
I watched Nirvana in 1991 on YouTube
and felt wretched and imprecise.
The walls around me were here
then, as now. A colossal frisk of my ways.
What did you do that summer? My essay
is rounded and steamy. This is my hymn to silence.
When the breathing stops we get attention
enough to walk home, get a vacation & fuck.
The whole world is on vacation. I have two
candles burning and a towel under my elbows
on my desk to catch the sweat. Summer, you have
warped all I thought I could remember.
The faint scent of cigarettes on an old sweater.
The life I had then before I had all these spirits
to exhume. I assume you made it out.
I hope you come to some final pardon,
bent over me like a ghost you read
about in a really serious book about ghosts.

Stuff

Those darling clouds
make my clothes dank. Bad weather
erodes sweet wisps of expensive scents.
Tuning into something redolent and wise
like a radio made of red candy. Blank
stares in the hood. My receiving mechanism
has gone all haywire, I'll have to bang it.
The reading lamp is coded with instructions
to concentrate on something solid and supreme
like a cold shower in the heat or that new jar
of peanut butter with the oil on top in the cupboard.
You've got a day to fill with all kinds of radical stuff.
Do you know what I mean about celebration?
And then remarkable things start to happen:
friends are kind, I find my old favorite pen, and
the people laughing in the courtyard finally go to bed.

Friday Night with Joseph Beuys

"One must make it palatable to people that it is interesting to totally abandon oneself with all of the mistakes that one has. I just want to encourage people not to wait for an ideal state of awareness. They must begin with the current means and with their mistakes."

Joselh Beuys, from Joseph Beuys: The Reader, Edited by Claudia Mesch & Viola Michely

Poem

When I think of what people do
in the summer they get away from me.
If you can sleep in a chair then
you are ready to drive across America.
Look at all the delightful things
that have silver in them. I would like
the sun to cast some light on me
that perfectly conforms to my body.
Just cascading beams of light all
over me. And then I would bump
into something real and know
I'm here. Everybody leaves.
I get the picture and the picture
is solid, will break in two.

Hello

It is late so I'm writing this
to no one in particular
just digital syllables rising
on the margins of this lid
over earth bouncing off satellites
holding off the dark with
styrofoam and wit.

Iggy Pop - Sixteen

Summer

Coppertone

In your best voice surrender.
I miss you in the zippy dawn
when all the math you do in your head
tumbles from your lips and we hibernate
in summer with swans & fishes.
You are on a startling mission
with a sense of blunt control
over time and space. Taffy.
I'll layer one bliss over another
mistake and see what happens.
Keep you near me
so you can see, oh can you?

Super Future

The saints are all my friends.
Beautiful colors, enjoy them
while you are here.
What breathing does
is keep me from turning blue
so I can hum a silver wind
from my lungs to my mouth.
Running through the city at night is magical.
Tonight, there is a pure love in Brooklyn.
People here are full of soft facts
they can't do without. When I think,
as I do now, I think of the possibilities
of the night when I'm alone with it.
Oh Friendship, you are reaching out
to a super future and then I
am more beautiful than the dust
I came from and shall return to
and all that.

Ted Berrigan

Guide

The last time I checked
there were books everywhere
I will explain later
but first let me address
this rapidly rising fever
people are moving
around the world
in airplanes made of glass
they get off and it is another
day in the month moving past
summer into oblivion.