Mind Memorial

Let's lift our pants
Up over our heads and tell
The cabbie it is okay
To find a place on the street to run
From things that scare us.
In all likelihood, a small animal
Has become friendly with the people
You knew way back when you were
Throwing rugs off the roof of a building
On 9th street and 1st avenue.
1985. Think of a place you can remember
And then go there, or name it and then
You'll see, it's not happening there anymore.

They were vibrating in the dark. They knew we were there, watching for light.

Move Fast and Break Things

From the top of the table
shattered glass gets swept
into a pink mouth. What the hell?
Eating rabbit and head cheese,
sturgeon and baked Alaska. Making
small talk with the road crew. Spinning
into ecstatic melodrama. Pierced by
sunshine, stroked by anger,
lifted higher than high, so: a miniature
outer space module illustrating how sound
moves through space. Bullshit. Cuts near the elbow, ear,
and ring finger. Post a status update
announcing the end of the world, or
a bad headache, or the idea of closing
in on modernity. Oh my, and a, Boo-hoo.

Thursday Top 10

1) Lou Reed - Berlin (song playing now: The Kids). Such a goddamn sad and beautiful record.

2) Richard Hell and The Voidoids - Blank Generation.

3) Joy Division - Ceremony.

4) Antonin Artaud - Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period.

5) "Burned out from exhaustion, ravaged in the hail." Bob Dylan, "Shelter from the Storm."

6) Moving through time at an accelerated rate (daunting).

7) Want: Extra Special Day.

8) Reality: Gravity always works.

9) Dream: About Paris.

10) Spring, is that you?

Confused to Meet You

Dawn burps yellow light
it could be caustic
a pinhole
dim
the delights
are many
the relief
few
and far
between
dome head
bubble clomp
filter
the distance
in a mutable
glow star
function
out amid them
to delay
the onset
of dementia.

Dear Neighbor

Saturday Top 10

1) "Leviathan" at IFC in Manhattan. Swirly, abstract ethnography from Harvard. At points it was like watching close-up shots of Gerhard Richter making one of his squeegee paintings. Harvesting the fish of the sea in big machines driven by weathered men. Brutal conditions. Fish slaughtered en mass. The captain nodding off in a filthy kitchen while watching a reality show about fishing in the North Sea. Bulging nets squirming with life dumped into steel vats. Birds scavenging fish heads and entrails. The sea roiling behind it all like the back of a dark monster yielding dark nets stuffed with fucked life.

2) "Spring Breakers" at BAM. There's a discourse to be had in there somewhere. Perhaps reading it as a class conflict? Gender issues abound. I'm still unravelling the thick rope of this film. Harmony Korine had an opportunity to do something really radical. He almost did it. Certain repetitive images, phrases, and sounds drove the point home like a baseball bat. It was not a fun film to watch at all. James Franco is brilliant. "This is all my shit!"

3) I swear there is a man outside whistling to the same melody of a Bach sonata playing on my computer right now.

4) Talking about Jacques Lacan and Adam Phillips with Patrick in a sweltering and stinky music venue on Houston Street.

5) Gluten-free peanut butter cookie from Souen Soho. Okay, it tasted like peanuts mixed with sawdust.

6) More fantasies of escape.

7) Running with Jon in Prospect Park yesterday while talking about our experiences of Husker Du.

8) Vanishing for 20 minutes during a nap.

9) Smoothie obsession.

10) Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, & Samuel Beckett.

Robert Musil

"You load the space that surrounds you with a charge of increasing strength. The difference in intensity between imagining and actually being there becomes a joy that I feel."

-Robert Musil, from: Diaries: 1899-1942 p. 179

Thursday Top 10

1) I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp by Richard Hell.

2) Bach 360 on WNYC (Happy birthday, JS Bach).

3) The poetry of Jenny Zhang.

4) Green Vibrance. Thanks, Joshua Wolf Shenk.

5) Dream about Ben Stiller at a poetry reading I was hosting. Upsetting.

6) Imaginary walk with Fernando Pessoa under the Brooklyn Bridge.

7) A million worries reduced to 998,000 by a good night's sleep. 7 whole hours!

8) Grapefruit. Whenever I eat a grapefruit I remember Ron Padgett writing somewhere that he confuses the words "grapefruit" and "pineapple."

9) Seeing "Leviathan" and "Spring Breakers" this weekend.

10) Thursdays are my Fridays.

The Way In

Then, as in now,
amid them, with slow,
to snow motion, akin
to drips, or more likely,
the way, or the way in,
some light emitted, leading
the way in, that, yes, that.

Monday Top 10

1) Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors, Feb 1 - Mar 23, 2013 at Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th Street, Manhattan.

2) Windy & Carl, "Antarctica."

3) Cherry Juice from Trader Joe's.

4) My reading at 92Y with Tracie Morris, March 30th.

5) Butter Yellow.

6) Mister Freedom.

7) Introducing Larry Fagin at The Poetry Project, May 1.

8) The perfect banana.

9) Fantasies of escape.

10) Looking at the city from the roof and wondering.

Drawn and Quartered

Lift

Out here in the urban wilds
the wind goes "whoop" through buildings
while the sun plops down all over everything
at severe angles. The vacant lot of brown grass sways
a syrupy dance, undulating like hips
during a fuck. Heavy with rust, all the cars
creak over the dusty highway.
We drink snow coffee and pace
around the aluminum shed,
glancing at our reflections in
oily puddles to determine the effects
of the environment on our rush
through time. Gravity plays no
small part when we drop things.
In fact, it is because of gravity
that a baby can rest
on a knee without floating away.
By nightfall, the city is dark,
people stumble over curbs and cuss,
brushing themselves off, breathing
through rags dipped in lavender oil
to disguise the smell of the dark.
In the morning, we'll eat the things
that are least covered with gray carbon dust,
stopping between bites to blow dead skin
from the back of our hands. I am learning
to love the products of this environment.

Sucked Into Jet Engine

Top 10 Rainy Day Delightful Things

1) Smiling as I walked down 7th Avenue and watching people either smile back or avert their glances.

2) The F train arrival at Bergen Street and the wind it brought which blew the debris on the tracks around.

3) The drip of water from a store awning onto a little boy's face as he sat in a stroller giggling with his mother
while they waited for a bus.

4) Buying gluten free muffin tops for my coworkers and the joy they expressed while eating them.

5) Jason dropping a glass water bottle over and over again while I videotaped him.

6) Horizon Organic Milk.

7) Speaking fake French as I walked down Union Street while pretending to talk on the phone.

8) 8.5 hours of sleep for the first time in months.

9) My brown felt fedora rolled up in my bag.

10) The idea of reading all day in bed with the windows open a bit letting the sounds of rain and distant cars seep into the room.

Saturday Top 10

1) Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala. Devastating. Beautiful. Brave.

2) 27 Gnosis by Michael Portnoy with Ieva Miseviciute at The Kitchen through Monday.

3) Engineered Garments, Spring/Summer 2013. Ticklish. Classic. Twisted. Perfect.

4) Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke.

5) Petites Betises. I make a daily visit. She always has something posted that stirs me.

6) The Tremendous World I have Inside My Head - Franza Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley (rereading).

7) Notebooks 1914-1916 by Ludwig Wittgenstein. "Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy." Page 74.

8) "Crystal" by Husker Du. "sucked out of the 1st class window."

9) Headless Multi vs Perpetual Interface by Billy Cancel. If you get a chance to see him read, do.

10) Spring? Is that you?

Morning Results

The feeling that I might
have gotten something right.
That the fingers and toes
on my body seem to be gripping
and poking just fine. I realize
that I can't use the word "impunity"
in a sentence even though I know what it means.
I know the way the wind is blowing from the angle
of the snow outside right now.
I feel a certain restless yet relaxed
feeling when I think of today
and what it may bring. A certain distance
from the way we make a living
is good on a day off and often
encouraged by people who know about
distance and relaxation. The delightful way I felt
while doing a little jig on Union Street
last night as I approached a friend out of the blue.
Some of the best days have very little
to do with productivity or compulsion
to be productive. In fact, the very best days
have nothing to do with productivity or compulsion.
I lift my blue mug up to my lips
and taste the last of the luke warm
coffee. There are only so many days.

Eaten by a Pack of Wolves

Snow Burn

Cheeks so bright red
I could write a check on them.
Use the bone in my nose for the pen
and tag the surface of a denim jacket
with the words "NO MAS."
In the event of an aftermath,
acquire a sponge bath
and low dial the doubt mechanism.
Plant ass on sofa or flat on back
and get down to it. Sleep
will give you a thorough drubbing.
By morning you'll be ready
to do it all again in a tuxedo
while some envelope glue
will pass as a meal. In case
you were wondering: Yes.

Toes Twisted Off with Pliers

Shins Struck with Hammer

Tuesday Poem

Tuesday morning's faint kiss
is resinating tongue action.
Maybe I'll go down by the water
and spray the word KISS
in blue paint under the BQE.
The clanging residue of sloppy
memory functions like a cascade
of i-photos in a trance at dawn.
How do you spell relief?
The sun is switching the sky
from pewter to blue
while the bulldozer
of my heart pushes blood
into my skull, making my thoughts
feel tight and spastic. Or maybe
it's the coffee. I love the underdog
status of Tuesday, among the week of days
it lacks the the glamour of Friday
or the melancholy solace of Sunday
but it seems more relevant than
all the days and then
I start to think here I am.

Monday Top 10

1) Canticles of Ecstasy.

2) My new blender (smoothies, frealz).

3) Abstract blueberries.

4) The wind of a new week.

5) Santalum + Cedrus.

6) Formally shaven.

7) "Something I Learned Today" by Husker Du.

8) Quality Beast.

9) Leaping Lizards.

10) Disinfect all relevant surfaces.

Hideous Dreams