Bather with Beach Ball

When you stand up to catch a ball, you leave
the print of your ass cheeks in the sand.
The ocean is salty, we taste it
when we lick the bright
cheese dust from our fingers.
The grit of sand between our teeth.
A beach towel from Bali. Suddenly all the
swimmers are screaming in the foam,
post wave. I put my hand
on your shoulder and let the cool water
dripping from your hair fall
onto my burnt knuckles. The suntan lotion
smeared on my sunglasses is making
everything appear like an old movie.
Soon this will be an old movie.

William Basinski

Two Figures in a Landscape

Red flowers on a loop
exploding in my skull. Rinky-dink
birds of insomnia float past
the great lights of 24-hour drug stores.
The glacial pull of time through midnight's sludge
is real to the people of my planet.
Shake a slow fist at the great pink now
or melt into the floor onto the neighbors below.
Honey and cream on blueberries in a coffee cup.
Flush with certitude, the mastication process
is gritty and vivid with crowns and caps.
On a roof at night is where the city looks
vast and ridiculous; a huge shrine
to sprawl like a punch in the face
is a reminder that I piss people off.

Beck - I Get Lonesome

In Any Case

Dangling time before you
as though the passage of time
were tangible evidence of decadence
appearing now on a soggy paper plate
in a display case. As if.
I'd rather time appear to convulse
elegantly in order to illustrate
the intoxicating effects of smog. Please note:
I am hereby absolved of any reductionism while
sincerely standing on the warm milky streets.
Think about it: all the panic in a day,
all the rotations of blood through
a thick body on a hot morning,
all the shedding
of hands onto other hands.
We're wearing each other. Vibrating
under the sun disc, breathing in the other,
the dust of the other, the cast-off parts,
the pure oblivion of sensations that we can't
do without. Anyway, I really like you,
your style, the affection
you show when things turn sour,
and all the other complexities of now.
Perhaps one day we can mistake the sun
for an opening and go there.

Thursday Top 10

1) "Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage." -William S. Burroughs.

2) In the Style Of by Mary Rinebold.

3) Cover Story: 14 Stories by Liz Colville.

4) A swimsuit that smells like chlorine.

5) In a few years, when we've all moved on, I'll have a difficult time remembering the names of the people I now work with everyday. It always goes that way. I have an understanding.

6) What the hell is going on?

7) Getting down with the little shit.

8) The realization every once in awhile that nothing is permanent. Duh.

9) You'll be amazed to see what happens to wood even in a podcast.

10) Hurling myself into the day like I'm jumping off a high dock into very cold water.

Epic Night

November 16 in Brooklyn @ 7:00 p.m.

The Stain of Poetry

Jennifer L. Knox, Sandra Simonds, Shanna Compton,
Todd Colby & Brenda Coultas

Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway in Bushwick

Refresh Tongue

To solve the view
I sprayed ammonia on the windows
to help dissolve black soot from the BQE, sort of.
I unplugged the refrigerator because electricity
has a sound I find distracting. A mistake, because cold
air keeps things from rotting too fast.
All day I want someone around me,
not these days. And the way the summer
sludge of icky sky is thumping
on my brow, ugh. Who will shatter
the glass sky in outer space? I have this bike.
The road to work goes over the canal,

green and plump with funk. I will ride over 

it, smack dab into the wild blue yonder.

Conducting in a Borsalino Straw Hat

Photo by Mary Margaret Rinebold

Fun City

I want you to make out with my mind.
Put it in your mouth and roll it around
from your cheeks to your gums,
let your tongue twist around my mind
in such a way that it touches
on parts of it that conjure up
sensations of grassy fields from long ago,
pine trees against a brilliant blue sky,
swimming in lake water so cold
I can only gasp and laugh, green apples
falling from buckets, melons oozing
sweet juice from their navels. I want
my mind to be swirled, lapped, totally
lifted and dropped until I'm spent
enough to sleep only with these memories
of you.

By the Time You Read This

By the time you read this
I'll be on my way to that quiet place.
I'll be milled with faint webbing,
held upright by the paltry glaze
of stubs and grains, bits and pieces
of some granular secretions; lending
urge to purpose, filtering rage with wonder.
It seems a decade or more since the days
of the low position of the sun, rain
in spoons, the mere phantom of the piles
of artifacts all yellow and dusty.
Many of the shells of that time are still
strewn on the floor. Ice Lizards,
we called them, as they melted
between the floorboards, swelled and made
the wood creak when the wind blew; we slept
through that. Shocking what time does
as it peals away some limbs and replaces
the rough edges with a smoothness
that slithers away until you wake up
and say "What the fuck? That really happened?"
My life has been such a fast vehicle for tumbling.

News

When things were groovy
there were places we could go
all the time and not be scared
of the tidal flux of the titular
glow of the cambered news cycle.
Methods of disdain were easily
grappled to the ground, overcome
and muted with a surgical, yet
human precision. The mathematics
of quaint exposition were tried
and so we could count on the disciples
to fathom the quads, rubbing any knots
or kinks into blissful oblivion
while still paying close attention
to the bigger picture, as squalid
as the outskirts appeared in newsreels
and tabloids. We had clarity, which
would make for spirited discussions
in automobiles, public plazas,
hotel rooms, conference centers
and malls. We stood at the screwy flank
and sputtered, frosted from air pucks and hard
finger flicks. Eventually, we cleared and relayed,
tantalized by the prospect of obliteration,
embraced by all that would come.

How Tall is the Tallest Building in the World?

It's up there.
I mean, when you enter the city
you'll see it looming
over everything. As you get closer
to the tallest building in the world
you will notice that you'll have to lean
your head back all the way to see the top.
It's freaky because it's so tall.
Anyway, that's how tall it is:
Freaky tall.

Summer Poem

Midsummer soup
thick air
all the time
neck glistens
things happen
slower in summer
see that guy crossing
the street in slow motion?
See the kid jumping
up and down, lingering
in the air a fraction
of a second longer than
usual? Imagine
walking on the moon
when the moon is so
warm your pants are wet.
Now sit down in front
a fan and try to think.
Good luck with that.

Methods of Desire: A Clinical Approach

Open every session by asking
the client what they know about desire.
Tell clients that desire is an interesting "animal."
Give them the facts.
Desire uses feet just like clients use their hands.
Desire enjoys insects and eggs and other symptoms.
If you measured desire it would go on forever.

Desire doesn't sleep during the day
because it has a lot of work to do.
Have you ever seen desire with nothing to do?
Probably not recently.

Would you like to keep desire as a pet
in your Brooklyn apartment?
Would you feed it? Walk it? Clean it?

You'll need: markers, scissors, glue,
brown paper lunch bags, glitter, construction paper, ginger,
bus driver, yarn, wind chill, and cotton balls.

Using materials reproduce a decorative
desire fur pattern on paper for each new client.

Skill Pattern Test for clients:
Help each client glue a brown paper lunch bag
to the front of their body.
Fill the bag with random objects during the initial session
every time the client makes a point
that digresses from your empathy.
That will show them.

Encourage clients to create their own looks with the bus driver.
Did I mention the Bus Driver? Well, there should be one in the room
to set up a state of triangularity. Dig?

Place a piece of manilla construction paper
on the client's ribs and do a crayon
rubbing so the outline of the client's ribs appear on the paper.
Hold the paper up to the client's face and say "good desire."

Many clients like to talk about their life --
it will look and sound like this: "blah blah blah."
It is a form of distraction indicating an addiction
to the self. Break it in half.

Though desire cannot be photographed
tell the client that you have a special camera
that is able to capture desire on film.
Take a polaroid photograph of
each client's face and write the word "desire"
beneath it with a bold red marker.

At the end of each session tell the client:
"I have no other gift for you, the receiver.
Now go live your life out there but first
I'll need 100 dollars." This exchange is symbolic.

*******************************************************

Desire and that is just not confusing.

*******************************************************

Me Reading at Ear Inn: 9.27.91.

Here's a link over at PennSound
to a recording of a reading I did
nearly 21 years ago at Ear Inn here in NYC.
Poet Mitch Highfill curated the esteemed series.
You can listen to all 15 minutes of it here.
It's a good reading, I'm glad it's available for your ears.

Enjoy!

Merrily, Merrily

There must be something as merry as last night.
I'm on your radar, thick as all get out.
Sugarcane, some sort of plum in a zebra's
mouth, galloping. You can see a nipple in
someone's eye, maybe in between their teeth,
lipstick, lemons, lotion. You can almost get
on top of a lime if it were a planet, dance on it,
in high heels. Look at the juice that flows right out
into my mouth. Do you want anything green, and homespun,
and purple? Maybe something on my lips?
Would you kiss it right off my face?
Would you look right into my eyes, and stir
coffee into my face? I'm all yours.

Monday Top 10

1) Peaches. In season. Like the dream peaches of my youth in Atlanta, Georgia.

2) Cherries. In season. Eating a big bowl of them like Michael Stipe at age 13 watching Patti Smith for the first time on television while eating a big bowl of cherries. True.

3) The Feelies - The Good Earth. Every time I listen to this record I think of my old apartment at 236 E. 12th Street in Manhattan.

4) Brooklyn Bridge Park. I get a good feeling down there.

5) Cadel Evans.

6) The repaving of Alpine Road.

7) Doing what I can for the people.

8) Cultivating a sense of forgetfulness at night.

9) New fancy cycling shoes from Specialized. Thank you, Tara.

10) Riding over the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn.

Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy - King Tutta

Thanks, Michael Portnoy.

Tour de France Poems 2012

A complete list (so far)
of the Tour de France poems I'm writing
for Bicycling Magazine this month can be read by clicking here.
There will eventually be 22, or so, in all.
Whether you like cycling or not, I think you'll
like these poems. Oh, and there is audio
of me reading each one. Enjoy!

Love,
Todd

Heat Poem

The heat in Brooklyn
has made the air so dense
that children are outside
right now throwing chunks
of it at one another.

Physics

All you have to do is walk
around your neighborhood and it happens.
Sometimes it tastes like licorice when atoms
from outer space pass through your heart, which they
do, faster than the speed of light. Most
atomic particles taste like something;
a hint of grass, say, or the distinct
tang of lime blooming on the back
of your tongue. When you taste something
out of the blue, you know something
has just moved through you from the sky.
At any given moment as we traverse the earth
all sorts of things are passing through us
from outer space, things we know
nothing about, like right now
I'm tasting lasagna and wondering
what planet that came from.

The Feelies - When Company Comes

The Feelies - Slow Down

DUMBO Stroll

The Prologue (poem with audio) is now up on Bicycling Magazine

You can get there by clicking here.

Love,
Todd