Heliocentric

It's a fact
that the same sun that shines
on you, shines on me. Throat laid
bare, so a beam warms the blood
leading to my brain. Yours too.
And in the woolen, late December
march of time to some vast oblivion,
I think of the year that just went by,
and I quiver a bit, not from the cold,
but from the way it all goes by
so delightfully fast.

Happy New Year!
XO
Todd

Lambchop

TC's T's

If you'd like one, pop me an email.

Three

Sample Questions

1) What did you have for breakfast?
2) When was the last time you really cried? Like all out super crying.
3) Did you ever go through a rebellious period with your parents?
4) Did you ever slap or punch someone?
5) Have you ever thought about shaving your head? And if so, why?
6) Would you - fill-in-the-blank - for a million dollars?
7) Were you a creative kid? How did it manifest itself?
8) Were you ever embarrassed about yourself as a kid? Why?
9) How many bones have you broken?
10) Have you ever had to get stitches?
11) Do your parents enjoy your creative work?
12) Have you ever eaten a whole pizza or box of doughnuts or box of cereal in one sitting?
Why do you think that happened?
13) Do you believe time is moving faster for all of us? What are the top three indicators?
14) What kind of shampoo do you use?
15) Do you believe in ghosts?
16) Share two observations, in two sentences, on Paris.
17) Do you keep a notebook?
18) What color hair does your ideal reader have?
19) What music made you flip your lid recently?

New Collages

Lambchop - Is a Woman

Love

Cat Power - Willie (Live)

Goosebumps.

John Ashbery

"What is it to mend
and be shattered, weep and not know what you're
laughing about?"

-John Ashbery

from "Opposition Memorial" in A Worldly Country.

Lorine Niedecker

"W.H. Hudson says that birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration and that nothing alleviates this feeling except flight (the rapid motion of wings)." Lorine Niedecker

Throw Pillow Patterns

Saturday Top 10

1) Beverly Kenney singing "The Things We Did Last Summer."

2) Le Labo: Iris 39.

3) Can: Anthology (Remastered).

4) The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell.

5) Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets

6) Black Point Mercantile Canvas Mats at John Derian on East 2nd St.

7) Excitability by Diane Williams.

8) Fats Waller.

9) Bix Beiderbecke.

10) Tara's new pillow. 

Slithering One

Had I known it was alive, I would never have poked it with my walking stick. The sound it made was a high pitched shrieking song that rose into the most beautiful melody I'd ever heard. Still, there was the slithering it did while emitting its lovely shriek song. That was not only upsetting to me, it upset the entire 5th grade class of Lilburn Elementary School. In the intervening years since chancing upon this beautiful, slithering creature, I'd hazard to guess, and I do mean guess. From the countless times I've done groceries, to the literally thousands of commercials I've seen for the very products that are in my home! I stood there, nonplussed, arched like a cat would be if it was under duress. Pushing a metal cart through the wide aisles always makes me think. When I get a new job, I'm going to make sure I talk about the benefits to me and what sort of joy it may bring into my life by asking pointblank, "What sort of joy will this job bring me?" I've always wanted to travel, so I did, a bit, here and there. Tuscaloosa was nice, and the Okefenokee Swamp had a peculiar, musky charm. I'm starting to get a grip on things. One thing in particular I'm getting a grip on is time passing; I get that now, totally. I also get that there might be someone else living in my apartment while I'm traveling. I can't say exactly how I know, but I've seen clues; uncovered traces. What I'm most interested in these days is the news, and how many sources there are to peruse almost nonstop. In fact, I'm so busy catching up with what's happening in the world that I almost have no time to eat! It's a musical I'd most like one day to star in, so I'm teaching myself how to sing. Later on, I'll take a stroll and reminisce about the old days before the hazards start multiplying, and leading me astray. "I'll always have you," I said to no one in particular. I need to stop biting my lips.

The Heat Transfer Years

Warm tastes sweet
and sometimes bitter;
cold can seem salty
or sour. There are people
trying to sketch the wind,
talking like their mouths are
full of bread. The modern kids seem
vexed while they work on seizures
of sunlight. Everyone breaks
my face and I get hurt
by light blue. You can put the concave
part of a cool spoon against your lips
and practice kissing someone you miss
before eating your cereal. I come
to you in peace with the smell
of factory on my arms. To meld
with the world as only a martini
could once make you meld. Red and raised.
Aspirin tablets on brown dirt. To make
our hope real is to destroy it with red
and orange being warning colors.

Monday Top 10

1) Waking up to Fats Waller's song "Rosetta" on WKCR.ORG.

2) Soutache Embroidery. I googled it.

3) Black Ice. Warnings in the New York Times.

4) "When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy." from "Homeless Heart" from Quick Question by John Ashbery.

5) The idea of an "audience."

6) Morning: the radiant hiss of pipes.

7) Rimbaud the Son by Pierre Michon. "...it was all played out in three short acts: his immediate reputation as a very great poet, his keen awareness of the vanity of a reputation, and its devastation."

8) How long until we're there?

9) Walter Benjamin's section on idleness in The Arcades Project (p. 379). Baudelaire to his mother, Saturday, December 4, 1847: "Imagine a perpetual idleness with a profound hatred of that idleness."

10) Napping to Stars of the Lid.

Help

Hermann Broch

"That which had overcome him was something other than shame and more than shame: he who looks back on his life, sobered, and because of his sobriety perceives that every step of his erring path has been necessary and inevitable, yea, even natural, knows that this path of reversion was prescribed for him by the might of destiny and the might of the gods, that therefore he had been bound motionless to the spot, motionless despite all his aspirations to go forward, lost to the thicket of images, of language, of words, of sounds, commanded by fate to be entangled in the ramifications within and without." Hermann Broch from The Death of Virgil, p 142

What was the title of the poem I was supposed to write for Marianne?

If you put a tree in the middle of the room
and then decorate it with shiny objects, no one
will think you're berserk. The roundness of the
pies all have an affable glow; some are golden brown,
and another, a fruit pie, oozes deep purple. I would
like nothing more than to take a walk on a slushy sidewalk
with some good looking people. Then, perhaps a bottle
of something warm and sweet. This is Todd from Brooklyn
writing to you from a certain place amid the stacks
of objects. We're all in for it; I'll follow you there,
but if you get there first, follow me.

David Lantow & Todd Colby: Four Collaborations

Paris

The 10 Best Books of Poetry of 2013

1) Hurt in Table Accident (Corinthian Leather Press, 2013) Mike Stevens

2) Caffeinated Oxygen Tent (Sign Up Press, 2013) Daniel Kitchens

3) Great Aunt Pantone Guide (Funzalo Books, 2013) Jane Gross

4) Knitting While Eating Ribs (First Warning Press, 2013) David Clements

5) Indigo Bullshit (Book's Books, 2013) B.J. O'Doherty

6) Forest of Metal Objects (Los Angeles Taco Press, 2013) Pam Pope

7) Chicken Puddle (Conserve Paper Press, 2013) Jennifer West

8) Poets are Mostly Dorks (Blueberry Stain Press, 2013) Celine McDaniel

9) Sprinting on the Moon Would Look Like Slow Motion (Leaky Things Press, 2013) Tammy Timms

10) The Invisible Sign Language of the Streets (Tallboy Books, 2013) David Lantow

A Sustained Flapping Motion

Christmas Ball Poem

You loaf like a deer in a medicine cabinet.
You get groggy and wobble with the maximum thrills.
You are in a booming city made of metal and yarn.
Go get the box of flash and read it to me.
Blow sax machines into the bright new oblivion.
Skate in the woods on the frozen lake.
Eat gingerbread, and eagles; and pout.
You have big baby status among smaller babies.
The roof is collapsing from sugar and punks.
All I have to do is whistle and the wreath
starts shedding. Settle in for the duration
of claustrophobic winter chills and wind.
You can see sparkles where once stood a dull formation.
You may now lick lemon jelly from the tip
of santa's hat. Do justice to the mighty,
serve treats to the passengers,
and light up, and lighter.

A Poem About Vaporization

The focus is revolutionary
when not focused on the storm -
or this glitzy plaza - but an actual place
full of details that seem certain
or almost clear, certain though, of a storm.
I'm up to us in parts, so this day is
good to you in a new way or you'll assume I'm bringing
you good news for once. I'll just be singing and dancing
with the most spectacular news ever.
I am reaching into the future of this day.
If I were vaporized, you could breathe me in,
but that would not be so great for me.
So I'll just keep getting my skin on your hand.
The efficiency is important to notice.
I cannot decline you.

Hazy Evening

If your dad was my mother,
I'd call him mother. I would,
because that’s what you call your mother.
If it looks like us, I keep it. It’s safe to walk around,
considering the benefits of being amused
now and again. For instance;
you go on a safari and tranquilize a rhino,
and then you go and hug it, and take a picture
of yourself with it, before it
wakes up and stumbles away awkwardly.
The world looks so familiar to you,
doesn't it? Like you've been here
all along, only you just now started
paying attention enough to know how
to see it like you’re an alien. These days
will devour you if you let them.

December

Behold that wilted splendor; the trees
are the same color as hamburger. I know the song
of the cardinal and it goes a little
something like this. Pangs twist
a belly, until it dawns, eat! The light in
early December hurts my eyes, and yours?
A chilled apple, a lit candle, and early
blues on WKCR. The smell of wormwood,
somewhere, is making me think of Long Island
City. What a person does on a Saturday is
purposefully radiant and productive. If
a stroll under the Manhattan Bridge brings
solace, go there. If a hat is needed, they
are sold all over Brooklyn.

My dear friend & collaborator David Lantow and I in his studio (featuring our recent collaborations)

Allen Ginsberg on Breath, Shelley & Punctuation

Allen Ginsberg: "The other precursor, to get ahead in time to the 19th Century is (Percy Bysshe) Shelley, who, I guess, is more or less familiar to most of you. How many of you have read any Shelley? [Students give a show of hands] - Okay - And how many have read Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" here? [Students show of hands less than the first time]. So I thought there are (at least) three pieces by Shelley that will illustrate the phrase.. (or, rather)... illustrate the word - "inspired" - "Inspiration" (that was one of the phrases, one of the words, that I was using). "Expansive" (by "expansive", I really mean "expansive breath", lterally, a breath, that is [Allen exhales deeply] large, with the spine straight, that can only be produced when the spine is straight, (and) when the body is relaxed, when the body is a hollow reed, a hollow tube, and in that state of unobstructed inspiration, unobstructed breathing (inspiration means breathing, remember, and exhalation), a kind of cosmic afflatus is reached. It's a literal state, a physiological state, as well as a mental state, as well as a poetic state. And it's accomplished by a great many poets, who have left behind formulae to reach that state - and the formulae to reach that state is the text, (like "A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"), which, if you pronounce it aloud, properly, following the(ir) punctuation to show you the(ir) breathing (where you stop and take another breath), using the(ir) punctuation as orators, hints for breathing, literally, taking it literally, not reading past a comma with the same breath, but, in other words, stopping at each comma and taking a new breath.. (assuming that you have a text which is from the hand of the poet himself, and not a text which has been stupidly corrected by a scholar to add more punctuation and commas, which might change the breathing."

Read the whole piece (& countless other treasures from the Ginsberg Archives) here: The Allen Ginsberg Project

Lift

Out here in the urban wilds
the wind goes "whoosh" through buildings,
while the sun plops down 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 our 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, and breathing
through rags dipped in vetiver
to disguise the smell of the dark.
In the morning, we'll eat the things
that are least covered with gray dust,
stopping between bites to blow dead skin
from the back of our hands.

Drawing: Hug Monkey

A monkey with extremely long arms.
The monkey can't walk.