Letter

Gimlet eyes soothes monster with
feather mechanism. Spreads butter on
collarbone to achieve desired sheen.
Old trick: foster flex and thrum.
All the animals are damp in this basement.
Pony smell where there is no pony.
Authentic letters in a bundle wrapped
with an old leather strap. Yellowed
paper between lips to orchestrate
a mailing motion. Minty envelope glue
from before the internet. Deposit through
rusted metal slot, like if there were water
the rust would turn blood red. Anyway,
a mobility issue, a stark contrast
to the surroundings, a hairless cat,
something else. So the letter never gets
sent but someone caves in and reads it.
Seriously befuddled entrance with fork
and knife kit for hikers. The method of year
endings mostly from estrangement and moss.
The vehicle of intent drives around waiting.

Three Photos Containing Paranormal Events

Break

I am on my best behavior when I am
moving through the night. In my heart
is a hand so you should find this soothing.
On earth you can travel through time
back and forth late in the night.
I'll hold you while you breathe in my room
where you are never here more than now.
You can lift your voice in song
in C in unison with the traffic and the people
that call and whisper things, that tone. With each
word another follows until you have a sentence
and that sentence tells you to do something
like kiss or eat or reveal strange new details
of your own solitude. It's fun and demanding.
In the night there are words
you never use in the light of day.
The curve of each vowel like a body you
can't remember how it feels to be curled up
against your own fear of heights. Your love of love
or your desire for desire which is asthmatic and wheezing all
the time now. You can join the circle
and celebrate your breath, now you are breathing.
Good luck to you, and away we go.

11:13 AM

I built a small boat out of tongue depressors
and let it lose in the bathtub while I watched
it just sit there in the water, tilted to one side.
So there's that.

Thursday Top 10

1) The Flavor Thesaurus by Niki Segnit

2) Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aime Cesare

3) Bach, Bach, & Bach

4) Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Lara Bar by Delicious Breakfast

5) Happy Birthday, Charles Olson

6) Nasty Cashier at Met Foods on Henry Street, #1!

7) Standard Key of Jubilation: D Major

8) New Year's Day at The Poetry Project

9) My body can't ignore the beat

10) Mellow Bliss

Rose, 2012

Efficient Holiday Travel

Efficient holiday travel is what I'm all about.
Make sure to stay hydrated and wear earphones
that leak sound during the Led Zeppelin section.
If the seat in front of you is too close
simply press your knees into it, like you
are in your own video with Led Zeppelin.
Then what you should do is open your supply bag
and get nail polish remover and use that
on your fingernails and maybe you have some
blood on your purse, it will remove that too
with a cotton ball and some rubbing. Then nail
polish, brushing from the base of nails to the tips.
Clean under the nails with a provided dinner knife
or tooth of a fork, yeah, that will work too.
Red looks good on your fingernails. I really
like it on you. Then if you take off your shoes
make sure to remove your socks and hang them
over the armrest. Do you have cell coverage?
Now is the time to use up those extra minutes as the month
draws to a close, speedily. Last thing: Onions
should be eaten like an apple if possible.
Napkins? Nasal spray? Personal lubricant?
Now might be a good time to pretend something horrible
has happened somewhere in the vehicle of transportation.
Get them to believe you, be convincing, not obnoxious
or too adamant about what you've just witnessed.
Allow the people around you to react in their own
way to the information you've just shared.
Make it believable! Have a safe trip.

Monday Top 10

1) A bag of clementines.

2) BACH on WKCR.ORG until New Year's Day.

3) Why Love Hurts by Eva Illouz

4) "Manhattan" by Cat Power

5) Tossing it from the balcony and watching it drift down to the street

6) Joanne Leah found her wallet!

7) Silence by John Cage

8) Captain Beefheart

9) Calm heart

10) Christmas Eve

Portrait by Joanne Leah

Click on photo to enlarge.

Sunday Morning with Charles Olson

"I have had to learn the simplest
things last. Which made for difficulties."

-C. Olson, from "Maximus, To Himself"

We Are Loyal Versions of Ourselves & Fun 4 All

10 Signs That I Am Full of Hope this Holiday Season

1) I bought 10 bananas that are only slightly green.

2) I bought a large bottle of face wash.

3) I bought 3 bars of soap.

4) I have enough cereal to last me at least a week and a half.

5) I have a half gallon of milk.

6) I have a full bottle of shampoo.

7) I bought a new stick of deodorant.

8) I just did my laundry.

9) I paid some bills this morning.

10) I have a brand new candle (Feu de Bois).

Paradis (Porte)

Portrait by Erin Albrecht

Captain Beefheart - When Big Joan Sets Up (1971)

Thursday Top 10

1) Amour a film by Michael Haneke at Film Forum, now.

2) Inner Experience by George Bataille

3) Dumb by Nirvana

4) Maximus Poems by Charles Olson

5) Daily Pictures of Paris by Mary Margaret Rinebold

6) Clean Apartment by Todd Colby

7) Lacan and Postfeminism by Elizabeth Wright

8) Columbus, Mississippi Blues by Bukka White

9) 3 days off

10) Hollow Log by Beck

View Out the Window

There's some rain that might
be mistaken for oil, the way it
looks over the street, a shiny
black coat. Then the cars
and how each one represents a human
going someplace other than here.
People walking. I see a woman
in bright yellow rain boots
up to her knees. A man with a red
scarf, probably wet, no umbrella.
The whoosh and thrust of a breathing
city. When I get out of town
and look at it from afar and think
here I am in all that. Well.

Monday Top 2

Let us not into compulsion

because
all the sublime metaphors
have been taken
the kernel
the thing itself
shall suffice
assaults days
with mad whacking
that membrane
going to rip it
into halting years.

Atone This Galaxy

Autobiography

1) Right on Schedule things got inchoate and shaky
2) In the birth room the air had to be stirred or it would Coagulate
3) and Disturb the gentle tubing of my heart
4) I was a Diligent boy, prone to fits of wildness well into manhood
5) savoring the delicate Parsnips and tossing one, as though a football.
6) My Dumpling is medicinal, and all that I stand for
7) far from Standard, these panting vats, syrups of confusion
8) I will stir anon and blister one Afoot as flooded with these breaths.

Thomas Bernhard

"In winter I think spring will be my salvation, and in summer I think autumn, and in autumn winter, it is always the same, I hope from one season to the next." -Thomas Bernhard, from: Old Masters: A Comedy, p.135

Wednesday Top 2

Really Great

I want a watch that can keep track
of my space. Bust walls so I don't have
to look through the puzzle. Meaning: If
I want to run, how far in front am I of that
goal? To think of desire as a root cause
cylinder comes to the exclusive notion
of brightly lit rooms all, like a map
before you went. Really great.

Tuesday Morning with Josephine Foster

Monday Top 10

1) Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems and Prose

2) Ted Berrigan The Sonnets

3) W.G. Sebald The Rings of Saturn

4) Esopus 18 (thanks, C-Pop)

5) False Translations

6) Opera on WKCR.ORG

7) Gray Monday

8) Louis Begley The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay

9) My body can't ignore the beat

10) Flushing Meadows

Did You Like the Day You Just Lived Through?

Let's focus on something more casual and steady, like a day just to receive. To wear slacks and feel flexible and free to do what I want. You know that steady progress on Enchanted, basic food chain of miracles! Praise Avenue Oh, oh powder blue shudders landscape. If the time attack police only mediators pushed oil and spinach. Camphor burned aluminum foil in the candlelight dinner in height. Let's get it going and it is a constant thing, these people live far people push. No peeling, no diving, no smoke, no spitting. I'll be here until then.

I love you so much

United & Raw

Needing or wanting something like an action figure
to wile away the hours with or to simply slide
on a ribbon of glass all the way into a vat
of warm wax. I want only simple things that don't pose
engineering problems or require long explanations
or psychoanalysis. I am dampening the sounds
in my head with a fluffy towel and coffee.
I still hear frantic harpsichords and loud neighbors
banging shit around like they were in their own video
about loud neighbors banging shit around. I stumble down
the stairs into the cold. My hands are chapped, they look
papery and flaked. On the street people look past me
into the eyes of their appropriate partners. Hi!
The damage has been contained by multitudes. All the private parts
are raw to the touch. Granules of salt infuriate
some of the people all of the time. As the year ends
we're all united and raw. Won't you tiptoe into oblivion with me?
And then I start getting this feeling of expectation.

Flushing Meadows!

You can order my new book here.
Scary Topiary Press is located in MacArthur Park,
the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles.

The Clothing of My Death

I'm not sure if the clothing I'll die in has been manufactured yet. Perhaps a bolt of cloth lies somewhere in some warehouse in New Jersey that will be the cloth of my clothing when I die. Or perhaps none of the cloth exists yet. Perhaps I'll get a shudder that will serve as a warning of some sort on the day the clothing I'll die in is being harvested or chemically mixed to create synthetic cloth. It could be years from the time of manufacturing of the clothing until the day I buy it. How many years would I do mundane things in the clothing of my death? Doing city stuff, like walking to the subway, sitting on a bench, eating in countless restaurants, riding in taxis, shopping in grocery stores, and strolling in parks. Perhaps the clothing I'll die in has already been purchased, perhaps a favorite shirt of mine will be on my body when I am taken to a morgue, the shirt will be half cut away, or there will be no signs of anything harmful to the shirt done at all, but I will be too oddly pale to be napping, too blue around the lips and eyes to suddenly wake up and say: "This is not the clothing of my death."