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.