Today's post brought to you by the letter W.

'W' Gets Its Own Place in Swedish Language

Winnie must be happy...






Which reminds me of the sign I made for the marches preceding the Iraq Invasion "War starts w/ W and must end now" that nobody seemed to be able to make that much sense of. Note to self: linguistic archness and policital outrage do not necessarily mix. I thought it was clever, though.




(A beardless and paunchless version of myself... That is Bill Corbett's mug in the interstice between the sign and my face.)

042206

No matter who you are
or what you do,

the big black pigeon
will come for you.




(Inspired by a badass pigeon that landed on my air conditioner today. Sort of a poor man's raven...)

Maybe I should just write doggerel for the rest of April...

041906

Blind on the boulevard that points
at the setting sun, barren

silhouettes appoach, noisy
vectors of rush hour. Bound

upstream, light ignites
the screaming rails.

Fatuous spring, running late
unconcerned.

Empty car's bombast, a thudding
door, a long tag along

the fence to Queensboro:
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSME

Brazen S: ride with me
all the way to Union Square.

041506

Note to self:

Next time take month of April off of work.

Trying to regain some semblance of a schedule for the Boog City reviews. If you have a chapbook (or book book for that matter) that you want reviewed in Boog City, send it my way. I am going to try and get the next few months or so planned out so I don't have to keep bugging my gracious reviewers for stuff at the last minute. If you want to write a review, also let me know!

041206

This is for when the last
face sprouts from the aurora
tree, you children out
of time who skate the white
line of the Dead Sea. There
christened by a magnet
in a lead bottle. Say fire
or water. Say broke or
broken. The sheet of time-
past blown far along the floodplain.
The weird children by whom
I'm led, far past the alluvial
forest, past the withered
foundation & the broken churn.
A dome rises from the middle
distance, a door in the rocks
I saw & still see. Never speak
of it; how I was alone.
How those spirits were mine.
I am a spelunker.
There are voices, I don't hear
them. There are figures
in the crux of sight, I cannot
see them. Little by little
the copse of pines is razed,
I will not walk there.
I am tired like a bird.
I eat the word never, walking
until walking becomes me.

041106

Nuttin'.

Sorry.

041006

ANHEDONIA

II.

In a net of antigens, or else
creaky nocturnal versimilitudes
The device had 2 heavy,
slanting wooden sides,
 that invent balmy catchphrases
as dawn stalks, a double-dealer
perhaps 4 by 3 feet each,
pleasantly upholstered
 advancing the docket so religiously
toward whatever peak or trough.
with a thick, soft padding.
They were joined
 It fleets & wavers, the weather
& the signs.  What nudges
by hinges to a long, narrow
bottom board to create
 through the periphery, the smoke-
shaped veils of foundering perception,
a V-shaped, body-sized trough.
There was a complex control box
 the chorus of preceptors & receptors,
mercurial transmitters that flutter the dumb birds
at one end, with heavy-duty tubes
leading off to another device, in a closet.
 of singularity.  If you did not sing
I would not breathe, or be as
An industrial compressor,
the kind they use for filling tires.
 a mummy of glad rags & beatific
compromise.  Still still still
It exerts a firm but comfortable pressure
on the body, from the shoulders to knees.
 like an anatomical model.  A crystal
scion of the heretofore unrectified
Either a steady pressure or a variable one
or a pulsating one as you wish.
 schism.  The lens & the abacus
& the coursing membranes
that inscribe & erase.  That wrap
around a lowing rod.
 

Finished up the prototype My Spaceship today, it should swing into full production soon!

Outside my Office, originally uploaded by mark_lamoureux.

This is the view outside of my office (or rather, the office I share with 9 other adjuncts) at Kingsborough Community College, where I sit nefariously denaturing language & ruining everything for the good, feeling people of the Earth. The office doesn't have a window, but this view is only a few paces away. Behind my office seems to be the only quiet place I have discovered in the metro-NYC area.

040706

Ladies and gentlemen
of the audience:
Scott Glassman
may make this
look easy, but
if you must try
it at home, please
bring scissors
& a BB gun.

It's all fun & games until
someone gains an eye.

Joe on the Grolier. Like all of Joe's prose, unflinching but full of compassion, like a nearly too-bright light.

It's hard to read too much Torra or Corbett these days (to name but a few) because it makes me miss Boston fiercely.

040606

These are the tiny hours
when the eye pains to roll


& the lung flutters to breathe
when perfectly vertical


pillars of light are searching
the unoccupied places


for those who go, shriven
into the stain of a crowd


when weary blades are cutting
strange shapes in the corners


of the air

01:02:03 04/05 '06

Make it the foretold
shimmer in the random numbers

Looping coriolis usurped
by the columns of belief

To not want it to be
a face out of static

The static is the blood
To at last listen to the trilling

words & their equations
To not be not raining when

it rains, the air in
the nesting codes the

winking cord of the pendulum
of sleep, the brazen lights

& the motion, the glyphs
of kelp & hairs & the splattering

Make it stalactites
of hindsight--such bliss

as is running
eyes closed

040406

Lightbulb reflection
on the window makes
a 2nd moon when this one
is new.

                                  Hekate's upturned breasts
                                  on the grubby page in the silence
                                  of Connecticut.

                                  Blue light pours
                                  from her eyes.  Her spine
                                  is a waterspout of words.

In hexagonal phalanxes
the drugs that still
the lunar speech.
The veils lift at intervals,
decades.  Yes OK
I will learn
to inhabit myself.

040306

We sleep even
as figures march
through snow
or dust to enact
violence.

                               The new grass
                               hammers at topsoil.
                               The world doubles
                               over in the pain
                               of its own birth,
                               long face beset
                               by everything
                               that tumbles from
                               metal-colored skies.

Anxiety forges
a crown of wrens
around the mind.
May my death
never come.
Still--I am
a plant like all the rest.

If you are in Philadelphia on the 18th, please come and see Leonard Gontarek, Julia Bloch and me at the Inverse Poetry Series at the Bubble House.

040206

Way to
begin,

dipshit

Rabbit Rabbit Studabaker

Well, here I am in Rome, so I guess I will give the old NaPoWriMo thing a shot. Which is likely to amount to my version of improvisation ad infinitum, anethema to in-class writing assignments everywhere. Though I don't think there's anything wrong with that, per se. It makes a certain amount of sense to have an automatic writing contingent float in our little parade, being dragged along by legless hippos.