Video of the Week: Black Dice -- "Kokomo"

Album of the Week

If you like guitars, pianos, and the human voice, check this out. Amazing. I also really love the album cover. Give it a listen at the band's myspace page.

My Man

OK all. Don't know what I was expecting to find in Pitchfork's Guest List Best Albums of 2007...I probably should have expected to find a few reasons why I hardly read this website anymore. Actually, the website's not all bad--they often do great interviews. I think that what I'm expressing is more along the lines of boredom and frustration with "indie" rock. Also, Pitchfork has a tendency to hype mediocrity and that kinda thing, so reader beware is what I'm saying. Anyway, I'd just like to say that there were three highlights, so check 'em out if you're innarested.

First, Marissa Nadler's picks. She's beautiful, she makes beautiful music. She's got good taste. What else can I say? Seriously, listen to this woman's music.

Second, John Darnielle, of Mountain Goats fame--motherfucker repreSENTS. His was the only list that contained CocoRosie's new album, The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. These two women make fucking incredible, beautiful music that alternates between shocking and hypnotic. The album didn't even get on Pitchfork's list, which featured Lil' Wayne's new album at #14 or something. Whatever, they can do what they want--but again, just so you know. John D: you're a soldier. For more on what John Darnielle thinks about CocoRosie, see his blog entry on the new album. And just generally read his blog.

Third, Noah Lennox, of Panda Bear/Animal Collective fame, only included three actual albums in his list. Otherwise, it was just a list of his ten favorite things that happened this year. What a goof!!

Other than that, Pitchfork is seriously slacking on modeling itself after my specific tastes. Is that so much to ask? In an act of open rebellion, I'm going to ignore every person who says the word "hipster" from now on.

In other news, I just finished a two-disc WINTRY MIX CD...if you want it, lemme know and it's yours. I'm listening to it now. It sounds like...oranges, melanomas, places, seconds, canaries, relativity, Africa, poodles, and, let's say, teenagers.

Amanda Hess - Rod Smith: The Interview

Here's the interview with Rod that Greg Campanielle and I boisterously interrupted (or preempted). Fortunately, the awkward social climate we immediately generated managed not to leak into the interview itself. Enjoy!

P.S. Greg--whose interview shall we disturb this week?

Check

His map was newly framed, he
was a puzzle full of means
from the pulmonary deep.
Home, or so he said. Thought I heard
a sudden sacrament from
the first note of my name, but no:
the clapping moon faced you,
just a screen door and instinct.
What's the weather like in Nashville?
The breeze a false glow
in the brain of your knees.
Then it gets me. The knot recurs
as its molecules part. Then is it less.
Outside, the landfill blooms
and I mistake it for my mind.

Round Two

Who's a winter, or whose canter
reflects my cold. In my head now,
move the bed there, and the couch
here, and now we've got lids,
now we're not losing. Right? The troll,
I don't mean a little scary thing, I mean
a pulling net in sea, the way the shrimp
swim still in the pull, the troll,
get it? Whose falter, who's caught
in a diamond shiver. The breath of
at odds, of ma cherie. Whose bar
could I leave at last, when it's nine
o'clock, my least favorite hour?
When you could work for a car,
or a press, or a sea, when you could
do that, what then? What happened back
in that winter? Whose
reflection gave my clock
a wallop in the wrong direction?

Function Creep

So what if I need to read something new
every twenty-four seconds? That means
by the time I die (kerplunk!)
I'll have read an unacceptable number
of books, incompletely. One thousand.
One thousand books. In my dead brain
one thousand books will strike their matches
all at the same time.

WOW!

Why am I so short? Gee, I don't know
It had everything to do with my face, I think,
but I can't answer.

Yes, here I am, under a lamp,
boiling my notebooks, waiting for someone to come and
photograph me.

And here comes my adolescence
in a huge steaming tureen,
a hairy shocking palm!
He pulls it back just in time.

Dreams bristling with ornaments, they splash
on my morning's doormat. "Sorry," they say,
"mandatory."

I'm stretching out all my parentheses.
They go to church unmussed and come
back with fogged glasses.

If it's true that my eyes
have a history, it's somewhere else,
staring out the window, or maybe
lying to the principal, wringing the red
from a Fruit Roll-Up.

Every day, no matter where I am, I go
back to his yard, the trading post we made there,
when I hit him accidentally with
my green plastic sword.

One reason I creep is because
people tell me not to.

And the reason I am not a reptile
is that my scales are too small.

PFC Poin

"From his position at D Company headquarters, Lt. Baglietto, the platoon leader, jumped into the cab of the first convenient truck. Privates Amos Grizzard and Bob Davis and PFC Lorenzo Poin leaped on board as he drove past the infantry officers and troops that were frantically getting themselves assembled into the proper units and digging in. Baglietto gunned the truck through artillery and machine gun fire for 500 yards until they reached the guns. With a few of the gun crew, they piled the 350-pound mortars into the truck bed and roared back. The guns were back in action before night fell."

This, according to one trigger-happy Chemical Weapons expert, is how my grandfather got his medals. (He didn't mention that the truck drove over a land mine on the way back to their encampment, killing and/or wounding everyone on it, including my Nonu.) He was too busy being impressed by the way that, "Carefully protected, [German soldiers] fell in thousands to 4.2 shells which dropped high explosive and searing white phosphorous nearly straight down into their midst with a suddenness that left survivors confused and demoralized." He also didn't mention, and probably didn't know, that my grandfather was saved and brought to a hospital by a German soldier.

My grandfather was demoted to PFC when his troop commander told him to drive a truck across an encampment with no lights (so as not to alert the Germans). There were men sleeping on the ground, so he said no. I guess they got someone else to do it.

If you'd asked my grandfather what he thought of the war, he'd say, "Patton was a butcher."

Zen Arcade

I first saw the words "Hüsker Dü" on my friend Pete Legrand's car bumper. He had affixed a black and white sticker of the band's name to his Toyota or Honda or whatever he drove in high school. The Hüsker Dü sticker had company: At the Drive-In was also part of Pete's bumper advertisement, and others that I can't remember--but I do remember that the back of his fucking car was, essentially, a syllabus of music that can and will rip open a high school punk's skull. Pete was, in a way, the coolest guy at our high school. He had a band, called Emily's Bat Mitzvah at the time, that had played at New York clubs we had heard of and been to. Me and my friends Ben and Chris had only ever played in Chris's basement (upsettingly loud and weird tho, which made it OK to us). Pete would sit in on drums when Ben and Chris and I struggled through our favorite songs--The Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog", Black Sabbath's "Paranoid", and Devo's "Be Stiff" among them. He drove us to JV Tennis practice, our joke of a sports requirement--we made up our own game called Tigerball MOTHERFUCKER and played it with the abandon and disregard for things like sanity and physical safety. Most of the time Pete just played us music on his car stereo in the parking lot. One band in particular, Necrophagist, still haunts me to this day. But that's another story.

One day I asked Pete, after walking to his car for practice, who "Huh-sker Duh" was (I didn't then know how to pronounce umlauts.) He said "You've never heard them? Fuck. Hang on a minute." He pulled out his wallet of burned CDs from the back seat (it was about a square foot, with more than 400 CDs in it) and flipped thru them, only to find that it was in his other wallet (another 400) at home. Needless to say, we were bummed. It didn't last long tho--on the short drive to the tennis courts, we all hung out of the windows screaming, "SLAYER!" and "METALLICAAAAA!" at the cross-country team. They liked running and Dave Matthews Band. In other words, they lived on a different planet.


Later--or it might have been earlier, now that I think of it (doesn't matter)--my dad got a new computer with a CD burner, which he (for some reason) gave me permission to use. At the time, the CD burner was, like, the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Immediately I invited Ben and Chris over for an all-day burning session.

Inspired in part by Pete's brain-melting music library, we all had a considerable amount of CDs. Each of us knew that the other one had awesome music, and we wanted it. I amassed quite a haul that day, and I still have some of those burned CDs: Can ("Tago Mago"), The Pretenders ("Pretenders"), Television ("Marquee Moon"), Magazine ("Real Life"), and The Stooges ("Fun House") were among them. As I paged through Ben's CDs, I came across a Hüsker Dü album: Zen Arcade. The combination of the name and the title struck me--I saw it in a kind of dulled gold calligraphy. Benjamin pointed to it and said, "This one. Do it."

I did it, and then didn't listen to it for quite a while. I had a lot of new CDs to absorb, and lots of homework to (pretend to) do, so it didn't even touch my CD player until one night when my mom pleaded with me to do the dishes. I always tried to be nice to her (she was basically the only one to ever do the dishes--me and my sister helped occasionally), so I said OK.

I went upstairs to pick out a CD and immediately chose Zen Arcade. It was now or never. No time like the present. Etc.

I had never heard anything so angry, and certainly nothing as fast, as this was. I couldn't even hear what the fuck was going on, I didn't know what instruments they were playing. I didn't know how many were being played. I didn't know what the guy was screaming--but what a scream! Whatever he was saying, he really meant it. It made washing the dishes go by really quickly.

As I continued to listen to Zen Arcade, I discovered that one has to listen to it at the highest possible volume one can stand. This is not only to hear the lyrics and the intricate layerings of distorted, lysergic guitar and some of the most precise basswork you'll ever hear--high volume also gives the songs the power they require to break open your head.

Kate Golcheski: In Memoriam (of her birth)

Some of you may be wondering: on what day was Kate Golcheski--famed used-book autocrat, drowsy poet, and 47-lb. rooster--born? Why, today, in fact! Not today, exactly, but on this day twenty-two years ago. Wowee-zowee!

As I write this, the Writing Center is burbling around me, and a blue piece of construction paper with a cooked scissored edge has fallen (miraculously) next to my hand. Can Kate "Crazy Legs" Golcheski expect a birthday message to be written on it? YES. She can.


But in addition, let's enumerate some of the things that we like about the birthday girl.

My Inner Psychic Congress, after much shield-thumping and consenting murmurs, has voted that the following is what we like about Kate Golcheski:

1.) KG writes things that make me go "EEP!" or "Snort!"

2.) KG was the abbreviation for the word "kindergarten" at Roger Sherman Elementary school and it's one of my favorite German words (Cultivate those kids!)

3.) KG has/wears cool shirts regularly

4.) KG is from Ol' Virginny, a lush and verdant state

5.) KG doesn't eschew my mystical beliefs

6.) KG is funny, and boy does she know how to talk!

7.) KG enjoys unicorns (see above picture)


Happy Birthday Kate!! You're born again today!

Wax Birthday

Born a couch, I'll take a finger for every
time you lit a candle. Quit. Beery,
I grip the circus sides, feed bears
fear. Badness, badness. The world board turns
for us: we don't, we dip. Really nice. Alone in his room
with Mr. Fox. I have never seen it. Grinning white,
flapping orange. Your greeting
graffitied on missiles. And hit my button.
Mountains furl, a frozen limn, too marred
for me. Hand gap is a multiply, where you can't weep.
So I see you. You're awake.

what has disappeared from my paintings

eyes
dirty fishbowls
the chair I don't sit on
your prim cup

My sixth burn-sense
dressed for night sobriety

in my lawn chair what do I feel?
they are the ways of my country
under livid pines
and a son's daft weave
my new physique:
my two birthdays

Finally, someone agrees with me.

Tom Green's directorial debut, Freddy Got Fingered, is a courageous masterpiece of surrealist art.

Will somebody please kill this guy?

Bike Shop David says: "Ima stur-fry his ass."

Let's forget we're brothers (revised)

Let's forget we're brothers
counting in the night
your morning mouth a
black apple burning.

Let's forget we're brothers
boxing at my wedding
women dust their yellow dance
on a gleaming new boat.

Let's forget we're brothers
and detonate in truckbeds,
before the dark cape
sends the wind against us
with its chalkboard suns
and its suicidal shrimp

Let's forget to ask
who dialed away those
concrete-doorstep Sundays
you took my hand on
hammocked dreams,
corrugated green,
through the bragging trees

Let's forget
the heirlooms
I've drowned:
the lime twig
Dad's nugget
your spine

Trellis

the clapping moon faced you,
where only the pajamas roll
I have a bed, broad up the road,
foaming tall
a puzzle full of means

You're only August.
the sun hurt my head,
or was it the work
the jump of a hare:
The point at which a waste
is not a waste

I said—some people
are calmed by fear—
a sudden sacrament
from the pulmonary deep

Spin

It is not how you are
like him; it is how
you are not. The globes
of prophecy drop
in a thimble of eyes
fretting. To trace
the symbol of
a rocket on my shoulder.
To win, to win.
To ask, where to place
your tattoo. Three
days of crouching,
straining into the heat
vent, to ask: where
is its world. To forget,
to say: you drain,
to get on a train speed-
ing under his likeness.
To not fret, to wind.
To frisk the skeleton,
to find new kin. To find:
it is not how
you are like him.

The Performance

by James Dickey

The last time I saw Donald Armstrong
He was staggering oddly off into the sun,
Going down, of the Philippine Islands.
I let my shovel fall, and put that hand
Above my eyes, and moved some way to one side
That his body might pass through the sun,

And I saw how well he was not
Standing there on his hands,
On his spindle-shanked forearms balanced,
Unbalanced, with his big feet looming and waving
In the great, untrustworthy air
He flew in each night, when it darkened.

Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth
Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,
To demonstrate its suppleness
Of veins, as he perfected his role.
Next day, he toppled his head off
On an island beach to the south,


And the enemy's two-handed sword
Did not fall from anyone's hands
At that miraculous sight,
As the head rolled over upon
Its wide-eyed face, and fell
Into the inadequate grave

He had dug for himself, under pressure.
Yet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows
Months later, to see him again
In the sun, when I learned how he died,
And imagined him, there,
Come, judged, before his small captors,

Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them--
The back somersault, the kip-up--
And at last, the stand on his hands,
Perfect, with his feet together,
His head down, evenly breathing,
As the sun poured up from the sea

And the headsman broke down
In a blaze of tears, in that light
Of the thin, long human frame
Upside down in its own strange joy,
And, if some other one had not told him,
Would have cut off the feet

Instead of the head,
And if Armstrong had not presently risen
In kingly, round-shouldered attendance,
And then knelt down in himself
Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done
All things in this life that he could.

BD

"...it seems to me to be the single most important issue on the table, as far as poetry is concerned: the carving out of a space for intellectual life in America that is independent of both the pharisaical uniformalisms of the academy and the lowest-common denominator thinking that dominates broadcast media." (Buck Downs)

http://www.dcpoetry.com/history/downs

Precisely

It is precisely a hot laundry power
The beads still hang on bottles we have bought
Where we sweep, but quiet cause we're not home
But your mouth is not quiet and wet and it is few

I am damp and a book shaky in the flame
You are new and then a piece of blood
Outside the street our genes are turned with orange

I am wondering if drinks were good to summon
I am a heavy color in the face and here
Strands of recent adventure, warming

Skin the warning of your upturned feet
Is a good trip to warm up to

Navajo

The air today is like that Navajo
cracking on the concrete.
His look from a fire's gut
His plush turbine sags
grey with chapels in the red-rhymed snow

Says:

paint me an orange pillow
sing me an eagle to sweat on
turn my head into a dash
fading like the fog

Let's forget we're brothers

Let's forget we're brothers
counting in the night
your morning mouth a
black apple burning.

Let's forget we're brothers
boxing at my wedding
women dust their yellow dance
on a gleaming new boat.

Let's forget we're brothers
and sing your tales of
ale and rust,
before the dark cape
sends the sky against us
with its chalkboard suns
and its suicidal shrimp

Let's forget to ask
who dialed away those
concrete doorstep Sundays,
you took my hand on
hammocked dreams
through the bragging trees,

left me reclining

in the corners of your eyes.

"TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES"

I am in a picture book
biting off the corners
yes, they taste like pulp

I was planted here by arrow-mothers
where the firm street deadens at the factory wall
they spoke to me
as if I were a learning game

I made a cardboard computer
and chickened out at show-and-tell
whispering mace a menace
while Ms. Dolan drank her Kool-Aid

Sometimes I feel like Trenton
but today I am on my way
green forest back
in a picture book with otters

Sisters

Laura's armor
falls
broils and cuts

Claire's ear
sells donuts in
special
crab oils

Nell's pets'
beaks
deal baubles that
wrench:

Ten beeps then mute.

Julie's tremors
smell
dots with rust

spots blear
glassed then
unlike
tinfoil

Nell gets
weeks
in her own
stench:

"Dial ten," says flute.

New English Army

Presently I defense here. After 2003 I get purrs a journey land pub. Before landing “Inside the Pentagon” in September 2005 I diary rights a Penguin (what a subrights does will!) and a news a news. Over half, over ion city sue. I find and develop. By talking to mitts the industry. I work the chief ideas three to five. I enjoy being there are ways and topics disc. One day I could find the need to save live whale soldiers in. Iraq the day how Afghans are Combs with rug mugs. Often poses issue I’ve never a face. At day, I most enjoy being in a job that allows my brain to chase new ideas.

Being an English major as my life reports. Owning language to clear my point were two skills. I icked up. More have strong art back help me eve anal situations and pick up trends. May the lives of readers. Somehow, being able to read has helped me!

Depart thus, fullness, quirks above the knowledge. Byron’s view on love with being! Continent amazed by Prof. Ganz!

Someone else's headstroke (now with 40% more strokes!)

Laura's armor
falls
broils and cuts

Claire's ear
sells donuts in
special
crab oils

Nell's pets'
beaks
deal baubles that
wrench:

Ten beeps then mute.

Kafka's house
is on loose

My spell is
mystic juice.




(more to come...)

Poems by Rebecca Alford, re-cut & trashed by me; a.k.a. "I STOLE YER DAMN POEMS!"

"Tennessee"

As you machine
hug an urn
with gears in your
twitch arms and legs.

I pin
cheek.
Sweat your body
you your eyes.

You row me
sit up straight and
the days are numbered
ever so.

I pull you
say your nose America.



"Urges in"

my big grey box,
tiny skin.
spine aligned with ten.
The speed wakes,
peakers a well-worn.
old wind rolled
my cheek.
The vibrations un-Velcro Sunday School lessons.
a little to, or to,
into or
into your house,
the green peas halfway.
It's nothing,
It's just sound.



"Vest me, Baby"

found snow, still plastic blue.
down, bed,
and squeezed. until my skull
shed straw spilled white
kick my four times until my heart.
pink in static straight,
my hand found veins galloping.
You inter flannel,
carried to
made geometry
between the pins.
I wound your,
she's in my hair.



"Mouse, Mouse"

The city bind the stars,
but if we were the country.
sure would.
So well we
in the under
flourescent shiver thumbs.

If we had field
how far would we
find its arm.
So well you
its cold suede
shaking feet.

Under and wires
is the only I could.
one cold made.

SMITH vs. GUTSTEIN

No home TV! No radio! Not even the new & shockingly marvelous Radiola Machine will be broadcasting this event! Come, on WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25th, to see the [poetry] Fight of the Century! Two lean, mean poetic forces will clash at the GW VISITOR'S CENTER, located across from Rome-Phillips and next to the Smith Center of Art! We at [blank] device guarantee it will be unlike anything you've ever seen before!

THRILL! at the airtight imagery & soundplay!

GASP! at the no-holds-barred trash talk!

BLANCH! at the butter-drenched prosody!

ONE! NIGHT! ONLY!

Come for the salad bar!* Stay for the bare-knuckle
POETRY!

*Salad and bar not provided.

K.V. (1922-2007)

So, Kurt Vonnegut is now dead. This feels important, like the ends of lives do. I have not read a word of Vonnegut--excluding three pages of Cat's Cradle I made time for two days ago--since reading Slaughterhouse Five in high school.


Naturally, I'm thinking of the whole deal in terms of its effect on me. I'm thinking that serious men with odd and mysterious intentions have cited Vonnegut as the writer who took a job in public relations to pay the bills. I'm thinking about critical things to say about K.V.'s friend, Joseph Heller, whose novel Catch-22 just received a good salting from my "Comedy in Literature" class. I'm thinking of his pessimism, the element that so many people seem to cherish in his novels, an element of the same stripe that can be found in Heller's Catch-22, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and so many other oddly embraceable works of the 1950's and '60's. I'm thinking of all the praise K.V. got/gets, while poor Robert Farina wrote only one iridescent, shattering novel before beefing it on a motorcycle. In short, I'm thinking that I kind of resent K.V., but that is only a fashion I am currently in the midst of shedding.

After all, none of that is K.V.'s fault. Where is all this resentment coming from? What did Kurt Vonnegut ever do to me? Well, perhaps the thing with extra-super-extremely famous writers from around the "Beat Movement" era is that many of their readers believe they speak for them. That is a testament to the power of their writing, plain and simple--but what ferments in such a reader, again, perhaps, is the beautifully assailing notion that he or she has inherited the author's voice, the author's intuition, the author's rightness from the text itself. Anyway, I suppose I am feeling a little stand-offish towards Kurt because of trauma that cannot be attributed directly to him, but rather to many figures wearing gleaming plastic K.V. masks.

The thing is, I love books. I love literature. And I love Kurt Vonnegut. Despite all of the churlish, teenage, antinomian hoo-hah that has grown up around his work, he is one of the silliest, joyful-est, and most wildly creative writers in American literature--and that counts for quite a lot. His crazed fidelity to his unique sense of language is admirable, beautiful, and immensely important to me. This, I think, is what separates him from writers like Heller (who had the same itch in him, I think, but was a little more of a sourpuss about the whole thing), and George Orwell. Those dudes have written great, wide books about pettyness and corruption and greed, and have stated smoothly and beautifully and comically how awful it all is. But, really: every idiot in the world, including me, knows that. Vonnegut knew it, but he knew something else, too.

The other thing is, Vonnegut hated the reception of his book, too. After it was published he vowed never to write another novel and took up playwriting. He was severely depressed, and thought often of committing suicide. Some gut reaction, when I first learned this anecdote, had told me he'd redeemed himself through his shame, his self-destructive urge purifying him in the face of literature. And what a disgusting thought. But now...now what I have to say is: nothing, except that Slaughterhouse Five was one of those books that lets you know what is possible in human life--not the wars or the death or the cruelty, but the book, the possibility for human making. To paraphrase some words from Jerome McGann, it is one of those books that "distracts us to a greater awareness" of the world. Fucken "A."

The science fiction, the sex, the irreverence, the social commentary, the violence, the protest, the moral relevance, etc. etc., is all secondary in Vonnegut's writing to the human voice. And it is a hugely compelling voice. The tone and quality of it, the resonance, the poetic distance between the words and thoughts that came out of it--they are wonderful, wonderful. Vonnegut is featured on ads for the ACLU, and he has spoken at political rallies, anti-war rallies, etc. And really, I couldn't care less. He's got it all here, he doesn't need any more than this, and neither do we:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"


How perfect. How perfect is that? Michael Brownstein: "How many people have said-- could say that?" I mean, Kurt was a writer, and he wrote prose that does what all good prose does. His writing does what George Saunders said about Kevin Moffett's first book, Permanent Visitors: "The best...remind us of the real and only purpose of fiction: to recalibrate the heart." Why am I writing this? I'm defending Vonnegut from myself. And why's that? Something he wrote recalibrated my heart a few years ago, and I couldn't be more grateful.

"Is that what the old girls called karma?"

New York Times Style Section Says: "Dikes Play Sports!"

"Martina Navratilova in a 2001 ad for Subaru, known to some as 'Lesbaru.'" --NY Times Thursday Style

How they can get the point of how a world.

A Spam Poem: Two Episodes
Translated from Spam by Jared Meyer and edited by Loren Auda Poin


Franz Josef Land: The Oft-Amazing Drift of the Together.

Astonished that you have returned to go.
She stretches a hand
toward the toothy sleeper.
Is it almost honey, is it snow?
Wind, sleet. The branches sway.
Or else, like us, sunk into some long gaze.
Grateful, I know, for just such compensations,
Stars, the last day, endless and centerless,
The bees are buzzing,
The earth beneath his feet, in its dark cape.


The Mystery of the Missing Ships: The Franklin Search

Left and right, and far ahead in the dusk.
Jones Sound and Beaufort Sea.
In the sound of the snow. How countless.
Of meaning like these, the world created.
And melt the spirit; his mouth will distend.
Of a far barn, just where the road curves sharply,
The motionless farm couple trudging.

Lifted Wersching

From Drink & Walk redux.

"And I'm like, 'Tayari, Tayari! Tayari: I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees./ I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.'"

-Greg Wersching

Manilla Beatdown

One night Walter carried me to heaven.
His talons, unwasteful, cleaned me til I shone.
It was on a battleship,
up like kelp from meathook bunks
the rose cutlet of the moon
hot and jumping in Pacific knives.
One punch was my blank head forever.
Gut, then ear, and spinning
clipped the taper of my skull.
My hurt was specific, no bruises.
Just took the nozzle lolling
on the metal deck
and walloped me, walloped me.
My red sky everywhere.
I had no hunger. I danced the dance.
I let him go. We gladly had some beers
and he became the corner jukebox.
One night Walter carried me home:
held his thumbs to my head,
while squinting said Yep.
Cracked his starburst knuckles,
played my super-blue guitar.

This Man Needs A Nickname. Won't You Help?

Birthday Poem

This is a wax. Born a couch, I’ll take a finger for every
time you light a match. Quit. Beery,
I grip the sides of the circus, feed bears
beer. Badness, badness. The world board turns
for us: we don’t, we dip. Really nice. Alone in his room
with Mr. Fox. I have never seen it. A grinning
white, a flapping orange. Your greeting
graffitied on missles. And hit my button.
Mountains sleep in frozen gin, too merry
for me. Hand gap is a multiply, where you can’t weep.
So I see you. You’re awake.

March and the Meadow.

The first week of March was very cold. The snowflakes were huge, they smiled as they fell like loving viruses. We all felt like something was about to happen, so we went to the Bust-O House, so called because it was busted, out on Pond Road, which was where things happened when they did.

Kirby was with us, but we called him Stump. I, for one, hated him, and I probably would now if he were still alive. Then I wouldn’t have gotten into the same swimming pool he was in. But his dad was all right, and they both lived in the woods far away from my basement on Ninth Street. One day we walked into his dad’s shed, strictly off-limits, and immediately saw why: machetes and axes were strung around the room like giant sulking Christmas lights. None had been practical for hundreds of years, and some were appropriate only for fighting polar bears on ice floes, and then only if you were a Viking.

We got to the Bust-O House and Stump picked up a rotting shutter and smelled it.

“Spring’s coming,” he said.

He was right. What the Indians called the Worm Moon hung in the blue air like a watermark. Stump put the shutter through his legs and rode it like he’d seen strippers do.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Oh, baby,” said Stump. “I’m just getting started.”

“You’re a pile of shit.” That was me, and I sort of yelled it.

“I forgot.” This was Ott, who was forgetful.

“What?”

“I have to go to the bank.”

“Yeah, hey. You owe me, like, twenty.” Stump was walking with the shutter still in place and now his pants were around his ankles.

Ott turned around and asked Stump what he’d just said.

Stump just kind of muttered and said something that sounded like “I don’t think.”

I didn’t feel like anything was about to happen anymore. Nothing had happened at the Bust-O House except Stump’s obscene shutter and I didn’t trust my shoes to know the ground I walked on.

We stood on the corner, but I wanted to go into the bank and gawk at the chasm between me and its people. I could do that well enough from the corner, but also I was restless. A small bird—a finch or a chickadee, one of the ones that look like a mouse you can take lovingly into your hand—sang in a tree. I will never understand what is beautiful about these bird songs. To me they share their sonic weave with telephones and vacuum cleaners.

A man came up to the large, empty windows—Squeaky Pink. Squeaky Pink pressed his radiant pink wiper to the broad window for a square foot and then stopped, looking at us. His jacket was big and heavy and glittered like a game show. It looked like he had a third ear hiding behind his jaw, but fantastically ruined: two swollen peapods stuffed with knucklebones. I felt like vomiting when I saw it. It was one of those days.

“Squeaky Pink,” Ott told him. “Do you have my money.”

“Money? I don’t know about your money.”

“Yes you do. The radio. You said you’d have money today.”

Squeaky Pink said, There are no radios in my life at this time. He said that exactly. But the radio hung from his shoulder on a strap, hustling behind him like a guilty child. At least he wasn’t playing it.

“Look, you see me? You see me at this window? You think I have any money in this building?”

I did, and Ott did, and I thought about the huge silver vault cringing needlessly in the rear of the bank. I imagined myself gripping the cold cylinders on its face, turning the giant dial ecstatically.

“OK. OK. Five dollars.”

Ott accepted it, and that was that. I wondered what my face had looked like during my fantasy, and if it had contributed to Squeaky Pink’s surrender.

Stump laughed in his irritating way and said, “Hah, he’s your bank.”

The snow had stopped and I was in bed. The street lamps reached for it on the ground and turned it from its bird-white to a salty color like bonemeal.

I dreamed a lynx or bobcat visited me and I ran away, ravaged by its speech. Its voice had a demented, side-to-side gait and, out of fear, I went into a public bathroom. Moans were coming from one of the stalls—not that, but real pain laughing, burning up the walls in scorched floral patterns. I could hear the slurred mutterings of the cat outside. I opened the stall.

Awake, I looked at my hands. Over the past few months they had turned hard and gotten bleached by the cold. My skin looked like layered tracing paper that had been scored with gentle X-es that tried to say the same thing, over and over, in a failed, ancient language. And the next symbol never came. I hadn’t touched my guitar in a year because after work it just felt like a big hammer. Then I remembered I was married.

Susan. During what people call a “lover’s quarrel” we reached the moment when I knew I would do it, and I did, and now I think about how easily I could have not hit her. I warned me but not her, me but not her—I’ll do it, I will, I swear, I will. I didn’t think to say it aloud. It should have been easy, and instead it was hard. What makes it that way? My parents had smoked dope and renounced their churches, but their sacrilege was not the noble kind. I was born to them with bright Catholic fists, a zoo-bred werewolf. I don’t know who, my mother or my father, was the wolf. But then what do I know.

At night, the light inside the Bust-O House was insane, illogical. It looked like bright plaid laughing out of a bug-eaten sweater. At this point Stump was dead. He had gone out onto the pond, which was thawing and thinning, refreezing only slightly at night, and, importantly for Stump, not enough. Ott was putting his uncle’s camping lantern in the Bust-O House and I was watching him. I just happened to look out over the pond. He was running, his back to us, when suddenly he jumped up and disappeared. He faltered only slightly as he went through. Ott called him an asshole through a frantic, walleyed stare. I saw him fall, as if a trap door had opened on the cold, white stage, and felt my heart whizz around like it was on a drill. My eyes twanged, but it was too cold and instead I sneezed loudly. He never came up. Stump, woundless and sloshing and under the ice, where his penguin ghost would never touch me.

The Bust-O House had, we felt, become incorrect, and we needed a new place to go when we felt like something was about to happen and nothing did. Ott and I walked through the fields towards town, very, very drunk. The moon fondled the evergreen tips and sang lullabies to the waking worms. Not yet, not yet.

“Coca-Cola,” said Ott, “is used to clean up blood on highways.”

He said this, I think, because we were walking on one, and we’d both spilled some blood on it. When I say “spilled some blood,” what I mean is, “spilled our blood.”

Ott burst out with a laughter that sounded like he was spitting out a huge spoon. He bumped my arm a few times with the back of his hand.

“Hey, hey: March Madness.”

We found a place, The Meadow, with a jukebox and curtains that concealed nothing. As I sat at the bar a man talked to the bartender and their talking oozed up around me expectantly. This is something that happens in bars. There was a folded-up newspaper on the bar next to the man, and this, I thought, must have been the source of their conversation, which now included me. I looked around for Ott—I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to shoot some pool—but he didn’t know me anymore. Maybe he had left by then, I don’t remember. If he was there, it didn’t matter. I was as visible and helpless as a birthday cake.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Young people seem to love sarcasm. Do you think that’s true? I think that’s true,” this man said to me.

The bartender nodded, nodded, nodded.

“I don’t get it,” said the man. “Why is sarcasm so wonderful? It’s boring. But then, I’m old, too. And he’s got all the women.”

He indicated a table in the opposite corner of the room, behind us, with his thumb. Yes, this man at the table did have all the women. It didn’t bother me so much. All the women in The Meadow looked like middle-aged men. They all had wet eyes overcast with a dumbness I wanted nothing to do with.

But this man at the table was a Marine. He was wearing his full dress uniform and gleamed like a tuba in the beer-soaked lights of the bar.

“I’m gonna go,” I said, and did. I walked over to the Marine and his harem.

“Hey,” I said. “I feel like pool. You wanna play pool?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

“You got a dollar? In quarters?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He put the quarters in the slots and pushed the lever in. The pool table thundered and gave us its balls.

I wasn’t sure how he’d be able to do it, but I wanted to see it. That’s probably mainly why I asked him to play, though it was true that I didn’t have any quarters. He still had his right arm, which was probably his dominant arm to begin with, and he steadied the cue with his knee, resting the meat of his thigh against the table. He shot from the hip, and wasn’t very good. No, I was much better than him, and I felt bad playing my best though I did anyway. I bought us beers afterwards with the five dollars I’d stolen from Ott.

“I ain’t been doing much,” said the Marine. “Went last night to see Palgrave Bridge get blowed up.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. That was a show. Those were fireworks. Smelled like gunpowder, it drifted all across the river to where we was.”

I liked him. He wasn’t the really cordial kind of military personnel that seemed to be everywhere. These were of the kind that my father appreciated, opening doors and being nice.

Why I went with the Marine: I wanted to be him and not me. I wanted his bitter streets, his plump nurses, his missing member. I wanted women to ask What happened, I wanted men to ask it. I wanted the wailing excuse of his sacrifice, to drag it down the beach, grandfather-clock sized, a charm around my neck. I asked him for it, but he had already lost it.

I fell asleep at the bar for a minute and had another dream. I am at a library and receive news of a strange heavenly event. The blue night sky is ripped lengthwise by hostile lights and we are scared. People run and camcord. Jupiter looms huge in the sky and turns slowly from bright white to black, as if in eclipse. Everyone has interrupted their lives for urgent global newscasts and the anticipation of immense physical change. Will they be affected? Yes: soon the atmosphere glows and the street is demolished by silent meteors. The buildings crumble, the Marine and I take refuge in a hotel basement. Later we emerge, it is safe for now. But Jupiter is still there and no one knows if it is finished.

After the beers we got in his rental car, which had that smell like if flowers were made of vinyl. He drove us to a deserted fairgrounds where he had a malnourished dog chained up. I had a gun and used it. But no one died, it doesn’t matter who died, or that he tried to seduce me, or that the dog was just skin and bones. What matters is that we gave our stolen dollars freely at The Meadow.

bloosic, week 2, (2/26)

Albums:

Spoon, "Gimmie Fiction"
Iron & Wine, "Our Endless Numbered Days"
Peter Bjorn and John, "Writer's Block" and "Falling Out"
Easy Star All-Stars, "Radiodread" (reggae covers of Radiohead's "OK Computer"--word)
Guided By Voices, "Bee Thousand"
My Bloody Valentine, "Loveless"


Favorite Songs:

"I Turn My Camera On," "Sister Jack" - Spoon
"Somebody To Shove" - Soul Asylum
"Keep The Car Running" - Arcade Fire
"Young Folks," "Far Away By My Side," "Money," "Does It Matter Now" - Peter Bjorn and John
"Kicker of Elves," "I Am A Scientist," "Tractor Rape Chain," - Guided By Voices
"(ETI) Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence" - Blue Oyster Cult
"Crosstown Traffic" - Jimi Hendrix

City

City sweats his ass off
in two-hand touch
with a beehive that poolcues
straight for my groin
where his enemies live.

City get his hands red
as he builds wooden things
strong peony breath columns.
But who will use them?
the factory the school?
the holy spirit of life?

City grabs a beer,
his dimpled ashes
of rotting palms,

City has been snoozing
back at the landfill,

City is sifting
his sweat in the sun,

City's in the batting cage
rhyming his strokes.

Lobotomy Dream

This was at night, a lobotomy dream.

We made the darkness ribbon up,
one little globe
in a drawstring on a
scaffold, to convince Goldilocks, blonde
curls hanging down the ten stories
that we were only fairies, to be adored
and feared a little.

Then I stole a tiny pack of smokes from
the Army. Don't know why--they were there
to help!--but I just wanted to don
my medal. A friend, whose
face shook in the sun,
told me, "Get out!"

I woke from the dream and went to the street.

Down there was the Black Dude
fighting with his boss, the Ice Man. The Black Dude was
asleep on the job.

"I wish I had a camera!"
"Yeah, yeah."
"Yeah, yeah."
"I'll pull out yurr eyes, man!"

In the dream we were prisoners,
but out here we are free,
the Black Dude, the Ice Man and me.

Salt Shaker

On the stoop. You hear a deadbeat shake moan
and turn. She burns parallel to us.
It's here and I say Drop from a sky's there
and I will be your mouth. See how this critter
hush is a chain of chins that clatters
far far south towards the mural on my head.
My ladder can be your next house. I love our
mistakes, baldy, and I'm saying the parade
whooshes by, implies our house. There's nothing
I want to say in the way of "brutal honesty."
I'm rough on clothes, bright on skin, and it's
fine. Polish off the gristle. Flunk too soon.
Let me gift you your shining fists so
we can crash the party between them.

this week's bloosic picks

CDs:
"Worn Copy" - Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
"Versus The World" & "The Avenger" - Amon Amarth
"First Take" - Roberta Flack
"Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars" - Fatboy Slim
"Kicking Television: Live in Chicago" - Wilco
"Six Monk's Compositions" - Anthony Braxton
"The Science of Sleep" - Jean-Michel Bernard

Songs:
"Painter in Your Pocket" - Destroyer
"Won't Talk About It" - Beats International
"Don't Bring Me Down" - ELO
"Hold On Tight" - ELO
"Two Can Win" - J Dilla
"Family Gardener" - Jeff Tweedy
"If You Only Knew" - Jurassic 5
"Wolf Like Me" - TV On The Radio
"Stephanie quitte le cafe" - Jean-Michel Bernard

Your Hands Are Tiger Teeth

Hear a slow stair of doorbell
in an ugly place I like. And
when a lightning jumps it's
x-ray frogs again.
It makes me think my head, which
talks with your voice. I can
Say right now, I don't want your
Christmas cards with the children
that aren't mine. Have your hands
say "yes" or "no", but
quick and straight.

I've never liked church pageants
but I like the word pageant for its
ocean mystery. I went with my parents
to see her sing, sat on green velvet
under plastic pine. Then her mother
sucked the last pill, I heard, so
I flung back to the fake velvet,
the green plastic.
Left my shock on the couch.

A high pitch only means daisies
to me, a low something of cane sugar.
You couldn't hurt it if you tried, girl
it ain't a thing. Because even the bad
vibes I toss beyond the windowglass
draft up, blow right back,
balled-up paper bits in a six-story
upward hurtle, and
it's eerie:
the jarring dust just murmurs there,
crooned around underlit brick,
unsung bigtop, alleycat bedroom.

No Thistle, Green Beer

Sister, on St. Patty's day I stood
In our backyard and screamed
To dislodge our ruined
Whiffle balls from the smiling hedge.
The sky was yellow,
Hot and certain
Like it is tonight
Two hundred and twenty-seven
Miles south.

You are so gone. All that's left is
Your toothless picture on
The easel, this thistle,
The sense of driving away
That hangs behind my eyes.

Spiders still scare Judy, but I swat
Them no longer. My soup last night
Looked like your stain.
It rains silver drugs on me and I
Grab everyone that
Passes to cry on them
'Cause it's a fool who don't.

Small girl from a pinecone tweener
I wanted to kill you when you
Rode your bike faster than me and now
Your lips are heavy with sediment
And posture and grease and pistols and
Won't you take those earrings off
And be my sister again?

The Load

I lost the ability to sign in to my other blog. The Lesbian Test is no more, sadly. I don't know what I did wrong, except that I was born part retard.

Carry this Load.