Sporting Goods

A man is smoking in a suit
he looks disturbed about something
I'll avoid him.

Fudge Up

Fudge up the works and
sing a Brooklyn song, appropriately.
Divide a day into a pie graph,
just make sure each slice is large
enough to write your name on.
The gift of weather has come upon you.
Then what? A little sunlight dirge,
while the crystal ball gets kicked
around by an awkward, pigeon-toed kid.
Buildings tilt on their foundations
while the Holiday Inn stands ramrod
straight a block from the oily canal.
A ripped sweater makes you punk;
the Met tells us they mean business.
What has become of necessity? Or the quaint
vocabulary that gets us from here
to there and back again? In an effort
to be appear more beautiful and real,
I certainly hope so.

John Godfrey on Writing. A Film by Ted Roeder.

John Godfrey on writing from Ted Roeder on Vimeo.

Happiness Town

Walking on the outskirts of happiness town, illegible.
Every day I go to work and act like
I am one of them. Patterns of pressed white
shirts. Scan the dot matrix self portrait for
signs of imperfection. I could send you a list of
things to worry about today, but I doubt
you'd make it through even half of them. I think everyone
wants to know someone is interested in their life.
The gazes are vanishing, silt builds on the bottom,
cars drive by slowly and into the night. Just browsing.
I confused the white blossoms blowing from trees
with snow falling from the sky. My skin feels
tight around my body, hankering for a hunk of day,
all wilted and resplendent as a corn flake in cream.

Marianne, Michael, & Me. "Command Poetry" 1997, at Collective Unconscious, NYC.

Star Monkey

When I Lay My Burden Down

Ache exactly where something hurts,
not at the border, or the fringes.
You are made of coffee and sunlight,
among other things. Broadcast your ideas
on the radio into a microphone
that is a paper cup. You live in Brooklyn.
They have surprises here like light
on the water and so many giant church steeples
built by people from another time.
The canal has green water. People look sloppy
on a Sunday. On Bond Street there's toothpaste
on the corner of a dude's mouth. Later on,
you will lay on a table and pay someone to work the kinks out.
The early evening light will dim into
the most magnificent twilight for a moment or two,
and then it will be night.

The Smell of a Hollywood Movie Star

Pediatricians have a distinct smell,
as do Hollywood movie stars. People
that sell ice cream from trucks have a smell,
so do the clerks selling athletic shoes,
as does the young man serving coffee, and the
woman in the clothing store holding her
hair up in a bun. There is the smell
of a dentist and the smell of a priest.
Sometimes a person working in construction
will sit next to you on the subway and you
will be able to smell their smell. The train
conductor has a smell, as does the ticket puncher
on the Metro North Railroad. The cab driver
has a smell, and your boss has a smell. Cops
have a smell, as do firemen, and the guy in the deli.
Someone in the apartment next to yours has a smell.
The mailman has a smell that lingers after
he leaves the mailroom. The people in a warm
conference room all have smells, as does the woman
taking your ticket at The Brooklyn Academy of Music.
At the Poetry Project you are flooded with the smell
of poets. As you walk along the water's edge
in Brooklyn Bridge Park you can smell tourists
and the vague damp smell of tobacco and meat.
There are smells of the playground on Henry Street
and the smell of children coming from the strollers
in the lobby of your building. Your chair has a smell.
There is the smell of a scented trash bag held by your coworker.
There is the smell of a person jogging past you, the smell
of a lover's neck, the odor of a bird, the smell
of a puppy, the details of the smells of all things
barging in, weighing themselves against the days passing
from smell to smell into an oblivion of all smells.

The Poetry Project (Written with Drew Boston)

I can see myself crying in this room.
There are moments, real ones, that I see you.
Behind the act is the poised instrument.
Be kind to someone who is not in trouble.
The light and darkness, both broken into
Filaments, light houses, burnt limes
Dropped into cocktail glasses from
Precipitous judgment seats.
See, I’m not scared of you
Here in this vulgar sepulchre.
I am king of myself, mostly myself.
I’m changing Istanbul’s name back to Constantinople.
I’m building a room that I will fuck your mind in.
Polis is this.

At the Joseph Ceravolo Reading @ The Poetry Project

Dear Spring

Fact: The earth's surface is a series
of undulating lumps. Some lumps you can climb,
other lumps you just have to sit and admire
from a lawn chair in an easy park setting.
Another fact: It's not been a super awesome
spring, but it's been a pretty good spring,
according to a dude talking into his phone
on Smith Street, where the delicate invasion
of warm air has curled my toes into a sort
of salute. Taxis are interesting vehicles.
Trucks unload food that we'll eat later, or not.
Fact: I saw a little girl in a stroller with candy
striped boots and a silver star stuck
to her forehead, the kind the teacher would
put on a paper for doing a good job.
Dear spring, you are doing a good job.

7th Avenue

Sunday Poem

A blitz of April light!
Trees burst buds
and people seem friendlier.
No one looks like they want to smack me
for acting like an ass clown.
This is a good thing
as I dance while walking up Union Street
doing an ecstatic tap routine
that might be confused with a seizure.

Love,
Todd

Saturday Top 10

1) Complete Fragments by Larry Fagin. Concise, absurd, inspiring, and funny as hell. P.S. I'll be introducing Larry before his reading at the Poetry Project (10th St & 2nd Ave, Manhattan) on May 1st at 8pm.

2) Punk: The Best of Punk Magazine Edited by John Holmstrom & Bridget Hurd. An amazing collection that's almost overwhelming.

3) "Loneliness is not living alone, loneliness is the inability to keep someone or something within us company, it is not a tree that stands alone in the middle of a plain but the distance between the deep sap and the bark, between the leaves and the roots." Jose Saramago from The Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis, p. 193

4) A history of my jean jackets. Where I bought them, why I bought them, how much I paid for them, who I was with when I bought them, how I felt when I wore them.

5) "To the Wonder" by Terrence Malick. I wanted to like this film, I really did. Ben Affleck bugs me, always has. Like a frat boy I want to throw a water balloon at. Too many shots of women spinning around. I mean, the whole movie is essentially women spinning around. In houses, in hallways, in fields, on the beach, in Paris, in a front yard, spinning, spinning, spinning. What's worse: it's coy spinning, the worst spinning of all.

6) "You know someone matters to you when they frustrate you." from Missing Out by Adam Philips

7) Blue, Black, Charcoal Grey.

8) HOWL Festival. Saturday, June 1st. Tompkins Square Park. 1-5 PM. I'm curating 4 hours of readings for The Poetry Project. Some amazing poets & musicians lined up. Stay tuned.

9) Writing about the friends I've had since being in NYC. One day I will publish it.

10) Going out for a run on a gorgeous morning. Bye!

Home

Sweet

Gifted loops gentle
as a lake rising to greet you.
Kiss your toes in the dark
so the medicinal lamp light
lowers softly on your crown.
Another word for that is "magic."
I could forget what comes after,
the stillness shattered by
movement, the painful aftereffects
littering the floor. A hat on the bed
is a real no-no. Hold your head
in a perch, so the trucks are muffled
with your ear against my chest.
I can think of so much I don't care
about anymore, but I won't.
Thick as a rope tugging the dawn
straight into chaos. But I won't
go there. I'll be here.

Tonight!

I'll be giving a reading tonight from my new chapbook Flushing Meadows at 61 Local (61 Bergen Street near Smith and Bergen St. F stop). It's all part of the lovely Atlas Reading Series. The night begins at 7 PM.



Love,
Todd

How to Escape a Cyclops

Get the cyclops drunk with wine.
Once he's drunk, find a ram
or three. Get underneath the largest
ram and reach up. Pull yourself
up close to the the thick fur,
chest to chest. Make a sound that will
startle the ram enough to make it run.
Hold on for dear life until
you and the ram get to the water's edge.
Dismount, get in boat, sail away.

You're welcome,
Todd

For My Next Trick

For my next trick
I'll swallow a spinning globe
and trot around under
the Manhattan Bridge
stately and demented
as a star in squalor.
Putrid as a day glow
painted lemon say, or
filtering out all
the sound except for
the breaths in between
the words. Impossible,
you say, spinning into
the warped boards
of my intentions
which have nothing
to do with you.

Cat Power - Manhattan

Interview

One of Daniel Nester's students interviewed me over at Stated Magazine.

Thanks, Daniel!

Poem

Whip the light into cream,
fill the red wagon with it,
and roll it all over Brooklyn.
Let the mad pigeons scrape
their gray wings on the edges
of my shoulders, bone pricking
their feathers into blue oblivion.
Tonight I'll pour milk into a cup
and shatter it with a hammer
just to see what happens.

Performing at the 92 St. Y in Tribeca with Daniel Carter & Max Johnson

March 30, 2013

Happy Birthday, Marlon Brando

He had an annoying self-assuredness that made us bristle when he spoke