Bad Poems Written By Famous Poets (Issue #7)

The Devastating Fecundity Of Being by Heinrich Hiene (translated by Harry Hiney)

I squirted hand soap on my toothbrush this morning.

This cannot be a good sign of things to come.

The things I ask myself while getting dressed:

How many days in a row have I worn this shirt?

Do these pants stink in the rear end?

Are there too many holes in these socks?

My Fräulein has left me for an artificial lawn salesman,

and the snow is piss yellow in my dreams.

The prosaic and dull lock arms with Saint-Simonian hoodlums

while my temper steadies and dips, and my spirit wanes.

God, would you look at this sad sack of Spätzle and Sauerbraten?

My right to whine is uncontestable, though,

and I get around the more obvious mores with less pizzazz than a subterranean mole.

Shapes that shape me,

the rough-edged powder-haired ditz of my ways.

I am offered less than lower seeps of try to give cares their worn out where,

in the bundle of sheep-eyed morticians’ contoured glibness.   

Guess my weight.

Win a doorknob.

It is all I’ve got.

The Oiled Motions Of Avoidance by Pablo Neruda (translated by Howie “Boy” Dukes)

Lowly, in sweeps the hybrid breeze to coastal nests and

climbs ringing

in surety. I too

have similar rants to match less wits than

those

who take home supper

late.

Seaweed pie and crabby hunches

I’ll never see--

aquamarine tides of thought lingered to forever’s bask.

Got placenta marmalade?

I platonically smash igneous rock to splintered chips, with

or without

detrimental attached worship of myself.

I glue glitter to my boxing gloves to avoid

malfeasance fees.

I oversee the feeding of Australian spotted qoulls in dreary late-night outcrops

just like 24-hour cafeterias at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Nobody hassles me for the time of day.

Nobody snitches.

There are more colugos and nitwit eutharians in all the realms of

mystique and horror

than in any distant corner of the scrubbed and polished world

we partake in.

Guessing the difference,

our scrabbling overwhelms us with visitors; and

it is not

too early for some

atrocity of selfish love to wreck in the wrack

sailing ships come to honeymoon

with Spicebush Swallowtails in the sea-green clouds of destiny.

We are little, but

in touch. Forgive me,

mother, for I

have not

sinned enough.  

In The Peas by Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Grayson Silver)

I’ll tell you how it’s going,

Jerk.

It’s going shitty.

Fire me.

I’m not worth my weight in wine.

Dying is about all I’m good for,

deposed and shit on by sun and moon alike.

Deprive me of one fist and I will only

punch all the more with the other.

Bloody sheets. Bloody shoes. Bloody mouth. Bloody life.

I’m putting all my francs in the death trade,

in the jaws of wolves and hideous men.

I’m an upstart slacker,

a horseless carriage with no rider,

and on the shit-brown shores of uncompensated lust,

I get by on borrowed swagger,

swindled out of my last suit,

left for alive in the short burst of tedium’s dread.

Lonely?

Shit, I’ve staved off madness for this long.

Might as well not give up just yet,

I guess.

Gooby’s Lament by Federico García Lorca (translated by Henry “Shot Put” Cortez)

            I had a handle-with-care label affixed to my heart and a pack of temporary tattoos in my back pocket. There was everywhere to walk to, and we did. Just yesterday, presenting late company to be excluded, we lolled in tulips’ swiped daffodil-yellow. She had all the jokes, and all I knew were punch lines that didn’t go with them. A no-bell prize. A maybe knot. And in the sweeter tending of hapless jabs at jobless wonder, we had it and lost it at once. It wakened what wasn’t dangerous enough while the squirrel monkeys scrambled and fed, while the hats slept beneath the bed, while hours counted themselves out before we had time to be poor in days. A fold of up. An out of down. Brushed off-and-on with a tug at shabby skies, we held out for less and got bargained into more. For a ritzy shot at resisting rest, for a moss-and-string placard of dust-colored chagrin reading, “Just Be Klutz” in the shape of a ginger rhizome, for valueless valor, for creeps and jerks of old and doofus rage, we strained backwards to a perfect fault and found backwash tinged with love in the lees of our last together. Over lights. Covered under. Raining up with drunken kudzu. Splashed dry, we tumbled and forgave kumquats their slow float. We skimmed the nights with greedy eyes while the booze hummed my name below the music our mouths made out of neon and saffron and cephalopod dreams.   

        

        

Bad Poems Written By Famous Poets (Issue #6)

The Girls Down By The Striptease Shows by Charles Bukowski 

We are all worth less than what we owe

To all the worthless eyes around here

The saddest guy on the block

Tripping over his own dismal shoelaces

In the lightest dark you’ve ever seen

We are all tipsy in the afterglow

The sheen of buses going by

It’s less than windows breaking in the feints of dawn

But we keep tipping so it’s okay

In the musty clump of ourselves

To find ATM receipts and combs with broken teeth

We are drawn and floated over

We are packed up in a suitcase and smuggled overseas

We pay for our dalliances and then some

Nobody’s running green lights

Nobody’s stopping my mail

So get your goddamn hands off her

Sir

And let me pass

Waltzing by without a cent to my name

Just a bad haircut and a torn suit jacket

A battered brain and a patched-together life

We are well aware of the extenuating circumstances surrounding your demise

It’s just that the expiration date for your coupon for survival

Has passed

And we’ve got more indecencies per square foot than any place around

Baby

So

Get the paper

Sure

If that puts the pants on you mornings

And keeps them on all day

We expect less than most

And in the distance where the horses race the sad dogs of winter

For tomato juice disasters

And ground beef dealers

Who keep talking and talking no matter what and through all kinds of no matter what

So just for asking

For hire

For that long-shot hope that keeps ruin in your veins

Just for the courage to stalk the moon along streets long dead with lamplight

Because it’s just that the wise time has gone

Kid

And the blinding lights of taxis is enough to keep us from seeing

What it is

We’d rather not ever be

Loosed by Diane di Prima

the one-armed diabetic taxi driver

who swears twice in every sentence at least

karaokes The Only Living Boy In New York   

just about every night

after his shift

at Club Tango Tango on California

he wears a studded bracelet 

and a black ZZ Top tank top

and his voice trembles into a falsetto every time

and the audience roars

and the KJ claps and screams his name

Lewis! Lewis!

his name is Louie

the only living boy

or taxi driver

in New York

or San Francisco

or wherever the hell else

as if it matters

The Doorman Of Ewer Place by Robert Hass

I see this guy walk by all the time,

sometimes with a girl,

mostly alone;

and one time

cradling a bottle scotch.

He seemed happy that time--

more than the others.

I like his shoes;

they seem comfortable.

And he always,

always

wears a tie.

I respect that.

Sometimes I think that

maybe this guy,

he’s just a short-order cook,

or a busboy,

or a file clerk at a hospital,

but then,

hell,

who knows?

It could be he’s the manager of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club,

or the VP of some up and coming startup,

or perhaps just a barista at Peet’s. 

I don’t know.

All I do know

is that this guy,

he walks by this building all the time,

every night pretty much,

and sometimes a few times a day too.

I guess there are still some things

you can depend on in this world.

Well, at least he’s not embarrassed about himself,

like

I am,

quivering alone here by the door,

listening to the sound of all these cars swishing by and

making their futile noise in the street,

opening the door for these refined duds

who reek of sour sumac and high-end perfume,

and who walk dogs that eat better than most people.

I have thoughts of other lives

I could be leading

quite often.

But not this guy

whom I always see walking by,

face sort of smashed in and pocked like a war-scarred anteater,

fluffed hair like a chopped-up clown wig,

wizened chap-lipped mouth,

and eyes--

well, I’ve never seen eyes quite like that:

sort of dim, but playful and deadly,

moody and sublime.

No,

this guy?

This guy,

he’s probably got it all figured out,

and I bet there’s nowhere else he’d rather be

than right where he is,

wherever it is that he’s going

walking by this building all the time.

Oliver’s Stoning by Li-Young Lee

brash professionalism

out of keeping with who’s diving up

turns in

to not be heart worthy

hardly a heel

though

would take a knack to it

sweethearts of another era

and now it’s the sunshine barking of the damn dogs

go without it

try and forget

one moist towelette

no longer wet 

another life story never told

weep in the cottonwood shade

because like ai wieie says

there are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship

Bad Poems Written By Famous Poets (Issue #5)

A Banana In The Moon by Lawrence Ferlinghetti  

Walk these streets in a sour and confused state, tongue firmly planted inside cheek. Lonely gargoyles? Check. Had to tooth it between Jones and Taylor. Forget it. I’m made for spying on guys carrying gas cans into alleyways. I’m on a list of automobile deserters. I don’t make small talk with strangers. Checkerboard windows overlooking cityscape of drab off-whites and clay-baked roofs. I do not have time for troublemakers. Please, tip me over so I can swim before I fall uphill. Torment the jackhammers of the morning with silence. Toss potato peels to the pigeons. Take care of my debts with horseshoes and Barleywine. Just don’t let the ribbons of your past get tied together to trip you or bind your hands. The tenement buildings and scrubbed-clean Vicotrians line up across from each other along the narrow one-way, steeped in some stolid posture of repose. Lines forever drawn in cement and in stone. I am idling near their prospects. Brandishing a lightheaded nerve, a mordant glee like pain’s joy, I co-opt a few dreamy misgivings from the liquor store and make reluctant thoughts my give-and-take glory. “Hop to it,” scream the socialite worms. “It is high about time nigh that you wrap your head around some of this gunk. Just you hurry. Wait.” The real indiscretion here is one of lazy bumptious swagger. The real culprit is a sad Blue Jay named Robin. Well, there’s more clomp left in these shoes then you’d think. But how happy we used to be sitting in sun-filled windows drinking beer. And now, well, the windows have all gone dark and the bottle’s filled with gnats, and I sing of listless things that round corners in the dark. You too might meekly rankle the leeway of power from fading daylight. A shift in temperament might be nice. Think of it: a daring welt in the surface of being you for a moment. Trouble is, we don’t make music out of enough of it. Trouble is. We’re down and off key, swinging with simplicity, implicitly troubled, late-sleeping bastards that we are, walking past liquor stores a few times before going in. It’s lights out in Worry City. I am not ever ready, and I don’t ever make my bed. The go is all gone from my afternoon. The watchers of game shows take the rift from the spoils and eat cake for lunch. I get wished a nice day about a hundred times a day by people who talk into their collars, who sniff the wonder from their lives with phone calls, who make money and then die with it. We are all steamed with bored delusions of everything being locked and simple into the memory our portable devices. There are no contact lists in heaven; I’m pretty sure of it. But in hell? Who’s to say it’s any worse than this? Download my sentiments. Store them for a later date. No. Shit. Here it is: Take pleasure in noticing the smallest things, the things nobody else notices. Be the tangible and incoherent and abstract nothing that you are at all times. Scrape by, just barely. Eke out what you can from the corrupt and twisted dynamics of the thing. And at last, be alone. After all, you are nothing without it. Could the rest of our cares wash the streets free of who we’ve been up until now? It’s a tossup, and I’m up for none of it. Down, down, down, down. That is all that is left.   

The Oldest Cowboy In The Bar by Randall Jarrell 

sail or search out

in for it

we’re 

rallying past a cry

to top or shove

glamour down

guess first

it’d test out

it’d drum for the lights

fashion taps at fingers

swell at last

to guess closer

still swimming

we’re

out of it

nowhere

keep shaving

keep in gear

we are not memories

the moon’s hung with violets

blunder better

we get mentioned

we get so tired of our own company

there’ll be a piano in the swimming pool

there’ll be ruins to explore

rattling traps

birch-sore

something leveled serious

through cahuengas of drift

no mottled cheer

no chancier weather than this

some dusky loft of complacency

grouped apart

there isn’t an ask left in us

so we cull a try

from a swarm of weddings

that’ll do no bad

that’ll pan fries and unplug the fridge

born right away from

vanished stereos translating love

into money

upped all the way down

only to swing with less sweep

bowling for neckties

a stick that squares

and doesn’t stay

eons gone since a last kiss

picked between strawberries

we’re hardly figured 

perpendicular to all parallels

in voice-activated gloom

as taxi lights

draw us asleep without windows

like lassoed clarinets whispering last call

all will be 

fine and magnificent

in the end

popular kids by Robert Frost (found scribbled on a napkin tucked away in a Band-Aid box in his old medicine chest)

you don’t like me as much as it’s true that one could like another one too we’ve had this hard-up time to spend in other lives and through other windows but you don’t like me and that’s for sure because my lawyer she tells me so before the money’s gone at least we’ve got each other but then again you can’t stand me and you’re on the way to other lives and you’re getting used to looking through other windows so that’s just something I can’t control so I guess I’ll run down to the shoreline and make some use of these sea legs at last at least until the money’s gone or my heart so I guess I can be free but who cares because you don’t like me because you can’t stand the sight of me because you want to erase me from your memory for all time and you you you you don’t like me at all no not at all and I am free and everything is never going to be okay again

Testament To A Goner by Patti Smith

A glob of yellow moon’s slopped on under night’s black eyes,

and Merle sits still on a curb

contemplating the sound that buses make going by,

and this while rummaging in copper-plated visions over another snack-less midnight.  

And this, too,

another “this too”

to add to the spreadsheet of her existence.

A bit of basil soaked in her thoughts,

it’s now that’s gone.

Comestible thoughts,

she thinks.

That sure does it.

She doesn’t think

it’ll be ever by noon again

in any hovering slowpoke of a way.

The greyhound clouds are escorting misbehaving stars on treasure hunts,

cruddy as Merle sees it.

And alone’s a disaster

she craves to be hers

alone.

A signpost she kicks at,

one that might as well read:

“Does not play well with others.”

But others play her like a Chopin nocturne.

But others…

It’s a swell that wanes to wax another day.

It’s the taffy stretch of care

swirled with smiled shadows,

with indifference and plunged compassion.

Merle stands up and does her best Harpo Marx,

balancing on her toes

on the curb edge,

off kilter and right in time

with the swayed shoulders of her past.

With what’s a battery-powered gumption

at least a sunstroke away

for her now

it is every girl for her

self,

which of course

in the gory streetlight’s sodium yellow

it is,

but just another

of course

hounding graver eyes than

any streetlights she’s ever thrown

a rock at

or stood beneath

just to be below something

that glowed

or suddenly broke

and then

just did not.

Bad Poems Written By Famous Poets (Issue #4)

All That Glitters Is Not Gary by Robert Pinsky 

They came for me, finally, by the dawn’s early light.

I’d been waiting for them,

hunkered away,

long in the curtains,

glaring in the rocket-colored haze

through a cheap nocturne’s fumes of dismissal. 

They came for me.

Knocked down the door of my home.

I had a switchblade comb in my shoe

and a tiny rubber leister in my back pocket.

I had floor crumbs and spills to contend with.

Dementia, or the early signs of it, are possible here.

I admit as little or a much as is allowed.

They broke the door down.

They sashayed through the window too.

They rose well past the occasion.

I am blessed to be a squatter,

a man who identifies with rats and marmalade stains on carpet.

Resounding speeches were not made.

They told me of resignation and hospital beds.

They wanted to liquidate water to add to their insurance assets.

They were told to erase the trail of my ways,

and leave business cards for heaven behind.

They did as they were told.

The radio was tuned to a religious station.

I had two slices of bread in the process of becoming

toast.

They told me that I wouldn’t be missed,

that I was obsolete and easily replaceable.

My closet was obliterated.

My phone was smashed.

My shoes and credit cards were torn to bits.

I am a lucky man

to live well on so much ill.

I am saying more than I will ever see,

flag or no flag,

spangled to death and seeing stars,

waving goodbye to those

who came for me

and then left by ways they’d never thought to enter,

leaving the land a tad less free and brave

as the home it had been

before they’d arrived.  

The Human Fund By Ezra Pound

Pl

ease, humb  --a --  ly (Lee!

Yes!)

for

give me

4   I

have eat

(en)  no more

th

a

n    “I”

should

‘ve …be

cause there are more hinds in sight

then

you

‘d

ever dare

2 imag-

-ine

,so

be blued to

blues

(All) (Ready)

someofthetime

sin (or con, too)

much urgency

;dot. dot. dash-dashing-dash;

listen: carpe -motherfucking- diem

A-

hole.

The Ayatollah Khomeini And A Houndstooth Coat by Anne Sexton  

i pinch open the drapes

it’s 3:37 a.m.

and the night’s burnt with orange lamplight

a caper-slow wringing of fallen leaves

a destitute shrug sings moody and empty-parking-lot sad

the wind’s loss

the sidewalk’s deadpan struggle

four less cops and the car alarms ring off with your head

i stab at typewriter keys

and rail at blank pages

plunging triscuits in egg-salad mush   

as the sweep and shush of scant traffic ponders by

there are no crickets for a hundred miles

and the city lights are dim at best

at 3:37 a.m.

but still

all finger-snapping aside

the ayatollah khomeini sings about his houndstooth coat 

and the reaches of squashed grapes

splatter bloody streaks on dull windows

i twitch matches alive

and sneak oil through odd customs

where sandpipers poke despair into muddy courage

maybe there’s a use for all of these delinquent things

all this clabbered joy slunk with wear 

but for now i’m spotting bruised blues and watercress

in predawn’s attenuated shuck

while i hold out

or on

still

as if waiting could matter

to anyone outside of this small dark room

whatever time it might be

wherever that is or isn’t

just 3:37 a.m.

or forever

droning static through what dreams don’t last

to a sound asleep arm

and a head jellied to shunt the rest

because

well

sometimes

through soft tawny hues of hate

you glance clockward

and

well

it’s only 3:38

Precluded Preview Of Never Coming Attractions by James Merrill

A movie showing in an empty theatre.

We are all riveted.

A silent academy haunched in nepotism and back-scratch favors.

Do the good luck girls all break so easily when auditions dry up?

Headshots come and go, and they catch you taking a sweater as your personal.

It is ochre corduroy smiles all around, and we dilute the poison with hay juice and mulled bathwater for good measure.

The utmost originality is trivial.

The importance of tearing up on cue is a diverse speculation only, for we’re just grommets and joists playing floor-tile bit parts.

Honk once if you mistake capsules for caplets sometimes.

Give the gaffer and the best boy the finger.

We move along in the magician black of it, spun in furcated eddies, bleached bright white and stinking of gold watches.

A casual glance caught in slowmo instant replay.

A cameo of true nonbelievers.

A day-for-night drive around and around the block until the black-and-white sun rears its weary head.

And then you find yourself lost in a cutaway, and that martini shot has come at last to the busted stale box you call your life.

Action screams itself to a cut’s fiver, and in the nope and curdle of lying low you seek restitution in what remembrance can only be called fairly fond.

McQueen never had to beg for a smoke break.

Paul Newman is dead.

A turbulent kid is whisked away parentless into the spotlight.

There is not time for well whisky now.

The benison-tongued are lunching with spies.

Growing down is all that is left to do.

And in a soon’s now we are trapped undulant with whispers and badly lit scenes.

The time for approaching is near and far.

All the HID lamps have gone out.

The stars are asleep, drunk and barefoot.

The set’s quiet as a tickle.

Move a muscle.

Go ahead.

See what it gets you.          

A Boy And His Gun (unfinished) by Gary Snyder

Left home

just before sunrise,

the holy smack of dawn shucking harvests of death

as I shook off the husk of wormwood dreams,           

and galloped towards Calico with revolver in tow.

Trees spotted with owl dust and Chinese-lantern light.

The human-devoid fields before me.

The heart of the world fresh and unspoiled.

Leaving.

And what’s left?

The behind is what creeps up,

and it shudders at my crepitant hesitation,

at the hushed lush wonder of sap-soaked boots on pine needles.

I am Ephrem The Syrian come for my spoils.

I wander and teach choruses of birds to sing my hymns.

I’ve got enough bullets to last until the end of the world.

Trust me,

there is no dawn lovelier than the last.

That there is never an all,

I believe

that we are all just waiting

biding this beautiful time we’re given--

too diffident to spend it.

And the real answer to it all is

Bad Poems Written By Famous Poets (Issue #3)

(A note from the author scrawled on the next page of the journal where the following heretofore unpublished poem was found) --

“Oh, dear lord! I wrote this deranged and careless thing last night. Shows what a bad job even I can make of things while under the influence of too much Schnapps. Is it of some worth, though? Lord, I do hope not. I write this under a hangover’s last dull nail hammered into the jagged and coarse walls of my skull, and perhaps I am too weary and etiolated to care for such things in this state. I think, though, that I will not burn it. I think that it may be of some use to somebody in the future: an ex-butler perhaps, a rodeo clown on vacation, the victim of a dune-buggy strike, or a scholar of the indecent minutiae of once famous scribblers. But for the moment, oh dear lord, what have I done? I do hope that nobody ever reads this.”

Last Train To Oblivion by Frank O’Hara

Who speaks of rhinoceroses in silver weather?

Is there an adman free to sell me serviceable parts of modus operandi,

one to install megaphones in my rotary capability, ad nauseum?

Cease all questioning, madam.

Cease all moans and crane-operated smiles.

Cease dumbfounded coddling and fortunetellers who only tell of the present.

Oneirism is my weak suit.

I’d say more, baby,

but your drift is too light upstairs.

Capable of drafting squared circles for mediocrity’s role call,

I’m in the boom of crush, and liked by seagulls.

Serendipity’s moss has grown dead,

yet keeps spreading its fun-sucking tendrils.

Sandy Koufax might as well be a goner

as the days’ pitch count ups the ante’s fury for another winter,

for another off season of poorly executed distaste and warm beer.

I am intrepid and loved by pelicans.

I am as dull as fallen leaves crushed under the foot of a wayward child.

Nobody spills their goods like I do,

into the gutter and mealy with wine-dark dares.

Who sprints along with horses in cinnamon weather?

Who feigns hunger at the soup kitchen?

I am altered and adulterated to live in sumptuous poverty,

and I am willing to give out or in,

depending on the tact of situational living.

Call me Ishtar.

Call me Calvin Coolidge The Third.

Call me Early For Breakfast.

These self-service fads are just waves like chips of chocolate to pummel my radioed-in nature.

I cannot wait for patience to come on like an ulcer

or a slice of death.

There are buffalos in the basement treading the tepid floodwater of existence.

We do not have names for them,

yet.

Who runs crazy octagons in the geometry of night’s illicit chamber?

Who exercises?

Pause and peruse, I say.

And just in time too.

Because… 

Shit.

Line,

please.

my father was führer of mean by ee cummings

my father was führer of mean

in nice lands of try

through fat to had

plush with fail and lost

my father cussed from haves of not

and strutted away spring with dust

while i slipped on joy

and killed kind’s rule

with wingless nights

my sleep troubled none but flies

as cooled creeps tied old scores

in sunk weather’s ruin

clear-skied with closed doors

my father who chomped ice

and betrayed love for tits

made laughs scatter to bits

well beyond scraps of fun

grossly judged just

my only meter of right

courted ire through might

in coats of ill-done

wronged with scars and

slightly less care

than falling petals take

from up’s down-there

to be booted dreamy towards give

with razor-stained wrists

i was give-long and light

to pawn courage’s fists

and crash because

into another because

my father

you see

that emperor of scorn

made salt out of water

and never sailed sadly

beyond regret’s shallow tacking

or jibed brave in now’s past

and if a want gives way

to a grip’s iron brand

or is belted to halt

with a buckle’s last word

then to lesser worlds than a lash 

go all yeses to no

and pluck’s degraded

in a jackknife’s splash

that soaks all leaving

into one final go

    

The Bad Poems Of Famous Poets (Issue 2)

Make It Up by Carl Sandburg

involved in love

included in cloud cover

occluded over sound

chop chop

sing the news hounds

indeed

today is not tuesday at least

and the flesh wears itself out

under little

umbrellas stink of rain

I am rememberful

forged in forget-me’s too

your supper

is never served

for I am not bluto

carved crew cut while shaving

into being out

sided

plunk plunk

go the dailies

I am out of toothpaste and silverware

in the rain

in the rain

popeye is waning weak

and I misread my mail

in the deceit of being delivered

Radio Inactive by Edna St. Vincent Millay

i sew or

am seen

in the green smell of felt

tied today to a tuna melt

and breezing through gaps

in the gory alley

below is all the fall

that i am

canopy canopy sing canopy

swing canopy then

everthemore

newfoundlings strewn

reach for backwards

tied to iron

i sway

lacking the nerve to sense any better

and just explode

Stewardess by Gwendolyn Brooks 

Damn

it!

I forgot

to polish

my

purse.

Courtly Tennis In Arpeggio by Walt Whitman

I scream to thee incessantly, and if it were but for scour-hot landscapes and thrilled horses galloping to a clopped cadence of courage’s creed.

Oh,

But I mistake gruel for beauty and feed my soul’s suffering with hayseed, stocked with orderly chaotic whims.

You who do not wholly know leaves from branch from trunk from roots from soil,

We must chart higher offices of foraging for light.

Grassy chances gone-- lobbed and served and chalky with rough strokes--

I am wet and dull and gay in the backseat of carriages.

I am surcharged and grieving.

I am the apple picker’s pluck, the veiled lady’s stable flux, the moon lookers soiled prayers, the castle’s mote, the hurt’s waft of careened joy, the politician’s mucky lurking, the palm tree’s torn frond dangling shiny in the lamplight.

Nobody seek my herons; they are unused and stubborn; they are ruffians spent with terror and holiness.

It does not pay to be money-less in the moon-burnt streets, in the feces dropped, in the potholes flowed with muddy waters, in the coinage of a new frontier: a cut above lawless splendor, a retreat of homage to a never-told past.

I, who dream to thee effortlessly, like the baby’s last mumbles before language takes hold, am soured to drown in the space left after the flood while the rag pickers take their pick of my spoiled joy.

Laugh.

Go ahead.

I dare you.

Tiny Holdings by Robert Creeley

Somebody told us it was a good idea to flattop these hills.

We heard the different ways to mistake trying for goodwill. Not of us;

not in us;

not for or against us.

It was a cheap return we avoided like crepuscular gnats. And

if there is purpose in the picture taking of real estate agents, and

if there are poinsettias in our cereal, and if we behave like garfish in eel grass, then perhaps

there is no real “decision” to be made,

ever.

We will keep stuffing our pockets with ones.

We will walk faster than most joggers.

You see,

the deer here are lazy with Dear-John esteem,

and my holdings are merely gravel

and forced salutations.

Feel free to regret the boulevards their lights,

their pushpin dots of direction and swindled or swooped curve.

I know these things by smell alone.

We

and you

and I

and they cannot be stopped.

It is finished.    

the bad poetry of famous poem makers

Now Accepting Compliments by John Ashbery

I first noticed the ambush early one morning before the walking started.

It was puce;

and the color threw me;

and if there were a disassembly line--

something that could be monitored and controlled--

even in the worst of weeks

(as flying dazes lots of malicious mischief makers)

through and thorough with looped deliverances,

and still water.

Nobody’s getting any deeper.

Still,

put on your pants;

it is movie time.

Shaman Blues by Allen Ginsberg

an earworm for your thoughts bozo who seeks clown suits in higher places than overly stilted swampcabbage dearly paid for what’s the price you know it’s not me who crumbs to bums in the ticktock seatime of old nursing places and where’s home but for the heart’s when in the event of crucial bodhisattva histrionics it is an if’s eternal entity of being ad hoc and suited to whatever’s got your tongue, cat. get it?

Poor Man’s Jimmy Stewart by Sylvia Plath

i am awake

this little misstep of who

drenched caring whites away the core

of it

something that would have been blacker if not bold

first

in the heart’s charm

we who glisten less

we who swear to stop cussing

you don’t understand what the screen test shows

nobody would

not even me

i am awake

bite my arm a bit

i want teeth marks on my triceps

just for old time’s sake

please

and not just because

I want to stay

awake

It’s Not Time For Ovations, Just Ovaltine by Dorothy Parker

an extremely precise weather report

of the sort

that rings instead knocks

dashing as a head on rocks

would sound

round

not oval

in the ketchup-colored light

might

look harder to be lost

one less cookie tossed

after last night’s spell

binged it all to hell

it is raining if it is not

a lot

if up you hang

ps-- you rang?

Dictated And Substantially Inarticulate Too by William Carlos Williams

The mornings start later and later, and the nights get to happening sooner all the time.

The rain clouds have come to stay.

I do not invest my time in reaping or harvesting.

Most of my trembling is frayed nerves.

Doctor this.

Doctor that.

Do not call me anymore.

My depending is weak.

My wheelbarrow is out of service.

Johnny Don’t March Around Here No More by H.D.

Original limits of imagists like us

-- contrary

. And to think of me as (if no glasses, then with bob, and petty, and all)

We are

not

so dissimilar

after all.

And I am the honey to your lusts.

Guns drawn

this is not

ever

war. Not

just

yet…

Hope by Wallace Stevens

In the middle there was a dream.

It lay listless on the bed’s folded linen.

Towards the beginning we had streetcars.

We had this Eiffel-Tower dismay to contend with.

You, sir

Are not smog.

You are not the arms and legs of the thing.

We are built to not last,

You see.

And the dream,

Towards the end

Had to be reshaped, soldered, and imagined yet again.

Nothing hurt the shuddering gap between what there was

And what was never up or down

To what you’d always dreamed was gone

But never was.

At least what you suspected was here,

a thing that grew cold and mushy

as old French fries,

stayed put.

There are seraphim in your coca-cola.

Your day is lucky

that way.

caressing passes

(the picture taker)

“Why do people not like more of my things I post?” he said. She said, “Because the things you post are deranged. People like pictures of cats and babies and food, and links to more pictures of cats and babies and food, and snapshots of people they know showing off how much they don’t.” “But I post pictures of stupid things too,” he said. “Yes,” she said, “but your things are not for showing, not for others. Just for yourself. Nobody cares about the things you care about.” “But I don’t have a cat or a baby,” he said. “And my pictures are telling of something more than just pictures-- really, if you think about them.” “People don’t like to think,” she said. “People want to be entertained.” “I think I’m going to move to Mars,” he said. “Or maybe Istanbul, or down the street. Maybe I’ll find people there who are more decent to each other,” he said. “Or maybe not,” she said, “people are the same all over.

 

(the following of other events)

              The distributor is out to lunch, the fan belt needs a new owner, and there is no hood to speak of. Every level’s crooked. Wherever is lost. All the potholes are healing themselves with screamed Jehoshaphats three times a day. I don’t steal pencils from the blind. I do borrow a mannequin now and again, but never the stripped ones, only the at least partially clothed. Scanners react badly to good news, now, and my sheets are riddled with holes that stretch from dime-size to half-dollar overnight it seems. Being at large is for the birds. I’ve got my harpoon-machete. I’ve got my holy rabbit’s tail. I’ve got my cat’s foot and my brown-bag breath. Nobody bothers to check in on me. It’s nice.

            “That guy was driving a Cadillac flower car all over town back then. You know where that name comes from? Cadillac? Well, they took it from a French explorer who founded Detroit, and he borrowed the name from a commune in the south of France: Cadillac, Gironde. Henry Ford was kicked out of the company a year or so after it was founded, and the guys needed a new name, as they couldn’t go around calling themselves The Henry Ford Motor Company if Henry Ford was no longer with them, so, well, there you go. They even used the French guy’s coat of arms as their new company’s crest. But this guy, let’s call him Jasper, well, he’s got this flower car, but there aren’t any flowers in it, ever. Mostly he just keeps his belongings in the back there, all open to the elements, and cruises the hulking thing all over town, windows tinted, driving nice and slow and easy. Cruising. Now, Jasper’s got so much junk back there-- all sorts of crates and splintered furniture and used books and records and clothes, popcorn makers and door-less microwaves and what have you-- that he’s riding sort of back heavy, you know? You couldn’t miss him going by. We all got a real kick in the shins about it. Jasper going by. He was a sort of neighborhood hero to us.”          

            Just after I was done thinking that the platinum blondes around here all take the short way home and then run off with garden-hose salesmen, this girl named Lovely starts in on telling me about getting elbow drunk, and then she kicks me in the knee. Yep, just the endless numbing of the days growling by. So we sneak up above Clothesline Alley and drop some pennies on the miscreants below. The whites are out dripping in the high-noon sun.

            At some point I ask her, “Did you know that there are roughly three million lightning strikes each day on this planet?” She just nods softly and takes a nap on my shoulder. I go on: “All those nitrates, the clearing of dead trees and animals, those nutrients enriching the soil so as to make way for new growth, new life, another chance at breathing with the lungs of the earth: plankton bloom. We’re just passengers sightseeing for a bit, along for the ride for the fun of it. Protected from the destruction and/or complete annihilation of sun flares by our magnetism.” I might as well be talking to a red-throated bee-eater. The wind makes a pass at us, but I brush it away with a dangerous sweep of my hand. Nothing improves afterwards. All is brush fire smoke and bolide dust. We’re cozy in the crook of a fire escape, and nobody’s asking after our day jobs. Being prepared is for the sidewalk makers. Me? I look everywhere for nothing, and try not to let girls get the best, or worst of me. 

            How do the Valentine’s Day wishers get away with it? It must be the attack pigeons nesting in roosts of leisure above the pineapple stand. Even the moping raincoat merchants go for the cheats and pale harmonica players. We reach but never grab hold.

            Why do I keep falling love with girls named Claire? I don’t want to be in love. In love? Nope. Not no more. Not with some girl named Claire. Not for me.                            

              Maybe I’m not doing anything wrong, but I’m certainly not doing anything right. It’s ruined and left for alive, in a heart attack’s wake, and some guy named Hambone is whispering in the jukebox’s ear, and we’re drugged with compassion right along with the slowest bus lines in town, stuck behind a garbage truck of horrible music that’s blasting over construction noise and, well, everyone in this dead-end town needs the emptiness of their head examined. We’re all ready for all the bad things to come, just up ahead, where we’re all headed. A place in the dark with a bottle of decent scotch, that’s all I need, without the verse, without the harmony, without a woman telling me what it is I’m supposed to do. Don’t you go worrying about my time; I’ve wasted it all on away. There’s an ashtray in my vest pocket and a pool cue running down my spine. The doormen all forget my name. The girls all strangle themselves in the sodium yellow glow of lampposts. We are wishing what we remember to stay still and play mean for a bit. The bar top’s littered with torn, wet napkins and Ritz Cracker crumbs. Nobody gives a damn about your Joan Crawford smile and your Bogart teeth. People are mostly assholes who take pleasure in the misfortunes of others. And then there are those who are challenged to scream something like, “Fuck off gingerbread dick!” at any takers. I’m setting off the fire alarm and staying put. 

             One man’s robot is another’s fiancé. We all get what we don’t need. It’s a soused trombone player making amends with rowdy angels. It’s a hurricane of dirty clothes. It’s better off wrong. Diluted thunderclaps of courageous overtones in the meek of heart, and we’re left here-- god’s awful administrators-- with a go-to sense of entitled despair. Help comes from the strangest of corners, and the dust of us is all that’s left, for the most. 

            Some girl with violin hands is making the squares say their prayers. It’s never late enough in the morning for any of it. I am fit to be taken apart piece by cracked and ugly piece, rounded and curbed, lost in chants of racemation-- a bunched clubbing of the soul’s weakest sunken caisson. We who take nothing in stride and speak to televisions in our sleep. We who run the obstacle courses of oblivion just to pass the time. The armchair’s got a supporting role. There are no elements left to name. Music’s nothing but airport security officers whispering to drug-sniffing dogs on their break. It ain’t the Betty Ford Clinic, but it’ll do until we find classier crooks to check in with.

            I was feeling damn pleasant, sitting at a table by a large window with a glass of beer, watching the shadows crawl over old brick and wood and in the street. Nobody was around to bother my at the moment. Wes Montgomery was filtering in lightly over the sound of people at other tables clinking glasses and laughing and other sounds of general bereavement. A man in tight white pants was standing by the curb with both hands shoved into his back pockets, a good way to scratch one’s ass in public I guess. A cigarette was smoking away as it twitched up and down from his lips. He was ruining my peaceful landscape. I glanced over to the bar which ran along two sides of the room in a V shape. A well-lit plant was the showpiece of the joint. I’ve got to admit, it looked good up there behind the bar, like it was on a stage. I wanted it to be called May or Wilhelmina. It probably wasn’t though. It could have been just one of those things that goes through this world without ever having a name. Some guy sitting on a barstool had a most unfortunate case of accidental back-tucked-out shirt, with way too much of his bottom half showing for my taste. I told my eyes to mind some other business, and they went back to my beer. I drank it down fast. It was cold and strong and made my head feel full and clear again. I sat there and felt content for as long as possible. There was nothing else to do. 

            

inscrutable trivialities

                                             

             I want a never-ending supply of toilet paper, dollar bills to throw around like spaghetti, and a fleece sweater with pelicans on the sleeves.

            Whistling Sweet Georgia Brown all the way to the poorhouse. And everything smells like wet dog. It’s just that…well, don’t go putting your business on the street like that. Besides, she’s a pretty snappy dish to take it out on. Just be completely yourself, at all times and costs, even in the wolfed-down state of affairs that you’re jostling around in. Me? I wish I had 365 pairs of underwear. And I wouldn’t wash any of them. I’d just wear a different pair every day of the year, depending on how I feel.

            Alleviate some misunderstandings with being misunderstood. Better glad rags to go with the shrubbery. In plumose attire, at least in theory, to match that whole feather-in-the-hat genuine article over by the cigarette machine. A relict of weepers, running the banks and the bowling alleys with the same touch, whatever takes the place of the heart’s gone. Like a wild rye ear with awns, scraping by. It pouts. It moons. It is not always yours to keep.

            I only need the music of eructation, the swamp song of morose frogs, the blue that breaks day’s jar and crumbles to sand. If I need and only want, then want’s need is overcome by torched joy and in springs the bed for the just needy, or perhaps not.

            It’s not a test. It’s an emergency waiting to happen. Sipping louched absinthe, dripping with the faucet, bowled under, thinner around the middle, enduring and erring, most of the ripped-off loonies in this here villa depend upon the meanest of neighbors to get over being less than substantial in the swing of things. Too many rounds had gone to the sufferers of lightness, and it was tread or be trod before the lack caught up with you. The yard was nothing but graves. Trip-toed, and never a tad heavy on the good news at all. We tapped happier, after all, when the moon wasn’t so droopy.

                       

            “He’s got his collar half-cocked like Jim Stark in a suit at the police station, drunk. And The Pickle Boys are nursing their gin rickeys as time sludges on and the bored fountain angels get their fix. Last night he went out and bought himself a homemade spatula. The moon’s pants are halfway down. There’s no sleep left in his early, and he’s jogging Etruscan around the park. Don’t go begging Mars for candy. Don’t be less than half-full twice around. Around this place the blocks number themselves while the streetlights jab and jaw. So don’t get caught with your foot in the grease jar.

            “He’s taking the bread out of canceled reservations. He’s showing off his socks by law. A cricket hounds him for his story through the broken heart of thin-skinned walls. Sure, tomorrow’s either on deck or in the hole, but he’s laughing all in Spanish, with his knees bandaged to hide yesterday’s scars. You’ve got to listen or you’ll miss almost everything he sees. There’ll be holy water in his brandy when he finally makes his pleas. He eats scarecrows for breakfast with a side of steamed dandelion stems and boiled lima beans. He’s dedicating songs to himself. He’s got Top Ramen in his hair. Don’t tell him what’s his hurry. He’ll be gone before you even care.”

            A Marabou Stork for your nightmares.

            Today’s special: a slice of baked eagle with saltwater hash. It goes with all you’re never saying. It takes the pie and chucks it at a yield sign. Ornery robots spill their dimes and sleep to the noise of their internal fans. The scientists stay up late counting all the blessings around. The buttons are all pushed. The ceiling’s falling. The sky’s limit is nothing the robots can’t handle. Buffered and holding all the rest of everybody’s ground, they nod to battery-powered life, charged and plucky, and the scientists can’t tell for whom this all’s getting murky and stained. One of them mumbles, “We’ve had monkeys before…we’ve had coin-operated lives, too.” The cooperation of numbskulls gets their mechanical goats, and the robots emit a collective eye-rolling sigh. The room sparks to life with electric lice. The circuitry of loss is rewired with chrome tinsel. It comes down to this-- in hoc signo vinces-- for a robot in hock:

            “They seem to like me, over there, like in a tell-them-I-went-to-Alaska sort of way. The place would fall apart if I weren’t around to spectate. Always a crisis with those boys. Great sense they make, you know. Lie around and slop around all day-- maybe a chance to relax in there too, high foreheads and all. Still, it gets greener still.

            “I grow anxious. It’s about now that it’s about time. My pictures get blurrier. The lights go down for the count. But hell, over there? Over there they seem to like me. And that’s where we have to draw that proverbial line in the moss. Dead leaves conceal what the cement don’t know. Well, drop forge me in China and call graver diggers. I’m out of ideas. 

            “Moments come around. Christ. And here I go taking one.

            “Poorly moneyed, and just a nick above scratched. I stay on. I sit. They seem to like me. Over there. Roll up my sleeves and pass the job on to nobody else.

            “Whiskey and dead flowers are my companions through pastures of missed phone calls. I half try almost all the time. I am beginning to wonder. It’s not just a start anymore. It’s trouble in the lowercase. It’s just a hat to toss from a tomb. And if it’s swanky enough for me, hell, let’s make a date of it, or let the wind come around and try to blow it all away. Just let it try.”