Feel: Cop It
Red-Headed Corpse
"You pushed me, Deb, you pushed me," I say,
to the red-headed corpse who begs an answer-
then banned in Cheltenham, banned from plays
whose runs made you twirl, torque like a dancer-
dead, dry bone, ribs cracked, earth smudges,
grease, soot caked onto the derelict frame,
once could blinker me like freckles & roses-
"let me correct, recompense all your grudges,
all you astounded by changing your name,
all you inverted by striking your poses-"
No, I tell the fearful mirror, myself skin
& bone, brain smudged by understanding
the past I could never live in, get in,
fly through the air w/ out crashing for landing-
"I won't be corrected, cadaver'd by your Highness,
(as though I'd accept such vulgar mandates,
rivers run dry into spiders & dust),
won't lower my voice, to mirror your dryness,
then or now, applying no band-aids,
letting myself come up roughly, brown crust-"
"Then why don't you shut the fuck up," I spat,
splitting the Elkins Park air like an atom,
hitting the fifth you'd been taught to flat,
from clowns who amused you, to nuns, to your Madams-
why don't you shut the fuck up, it was,
spit out in venom, from someone in pain,
who you had been taught to subject to starvation-
forgotten the Eros, forgotten the lust,
just a mad prostitute cunt & a brain,
both fugue-stated out in unnerved enervation-
The Ballad of Robert Johnson on PennSound
The Ballad of Robert Johnson, recorded at Westminster Arch, Logan Square, Philly, 2011, on PennSound.
Winter Fragments
You start a would-be
become a should be
but you never could-be
because you don't
know what to be means
..................................................
Stopped for a funeral, stopped
stopping, waited for it to stop,
it was my funeral & I left, dead
...................................................
Never known me,
but I can guess the
number of times I've
turned blackly around
on a crowded street,
wind-whipped, and
seen myself in a store-
front window & then
known more than I
did before about
what might be worth buying.
....................................................
I am is
back to
basics,
a tent
put up,
taken
down,
heaved
into a
back
seat, as
if used,
never
having
been
slept in.
.........................................
I was raking leaves,
I found a volume of
Shakespeare, I raked
it, I found a volume
of Milton, ditto, &
just kept raking until
I hit Jonathan Swift,
who took my rake,
raked me over coals
too hot to be blackened,
told me to go back to
Chaucer, what a rake-
nothing was finished,
nothing was raked.
...........................................
become a should be
but you never could-be
because you don't
know what to be means
..................................................
Stopped for a funeral, stopped
stopping, waited for it to stop,
it was my funeral & I left, dead
...................................................
Never known me,
but I can guess the
number of times I've
turned blackly around
on a crowded street,
wind-whipped, and
seen myself in a store-
front window & then
known more than I
did before about
what might be worth buying.
....................................................
I am is
back to
basics,
a tent
put up,
taken
down,
heaved
into a
back
seat, as
if used,
never
having
been
slept in.
.........................................
I was raking leaves,
I found a volume of
Shakespeare, I raked
it, I found a volume
of Milton, ditto, &
just kept raking until
I hit Jonathan Swift,
who took my rake,
raked me over coals
too hot to be blackened,
told me to go back to
Chaucer, what a rake-
nothing was finished,
nothing was raked.
...........................................
Listen to the Devil: A Mini-Opera
I’ve never listened to the Devil…
he’s whispering in my ear now,
telling me about chance— play the cards,
don’t pretend you can deal the hand…
I never tried to deal the hand, I tell him,
because the deck has no card with a poet’s face.
The Devil laughs at me, dumps a load of press
clippings in a bag I marked Don’t touch—
………………………………………….
now, it’s so cloudy we can only perch on rigid,
bare ruined branches. We cannot fathom
what the surface should be, why the inelegant
is preponderant. Red flags whip our livers. Red
hot prods in crowded rings circle us. There can be no
twittering hope without notions of liberty, as means
of using flies, flying, flown over the protests on Market Street.
…………………………………………………
When you lift a Coca-Cola, you are pulling a lever
for entropy. The cloying tickle of high fructose corn syrup—
all dreams dried into anodyne. Goods may be America’s
heart, en masse; what in them beats? Sounds of horses
hooves, trampling down corporate dirt, all in a bone-piled
graveyard. Sounds of whinnies, conflagrations, blinker-viewed
social situational Waterloos, & you don’t know (they won’t
let you) who’s standing behind who, or you.
…………………………………………..
An old, mad, blind, despised, dying king,
says the country. We protect imagery, say others.
Belief is testament to goodness, rigidity
means faithfulness to a spiel we all know
like simple algebra, and that can be equated
to squares. We are bellwethers of chicken egg
home fries, I am a clucking and a shucking
and jiving, you’re alive to little red roosters
too lazy to crow for day. No facile Geist for
this Zeit. It’s a time for knickknacks picked up like cordite. Shoot.
……………………………………………
No Blogosphere back-draft,
only post ahead, into cacophony:
wire, networks, new wild west; ropes, holsters.
Age-old books; angst, anemic. It’s sexily red,
moral/ethical oblivion, hemmed in, quick as spurt,
across oceans: thermo-genic press coverage,
safe, free; corpses, numbers, brain lotions.
…………………………………………..
That notion, “that I’m suffering well,”
must be in Plato somewhere, or Nietzsche—
now, it’s in you too. You don’t succeed in laughing
at the shard-sharp world; it’s jammed too deep
in your throat, with suffocated senators,
black-robed judges, tentative press secretaries.
You only cough up butt-ends based on others’
words. Laughter is solely for surprise autopsies—
of an atrophied surface, what’s under incomprehensible
to most, who know, very precisely, just how most they are.
………………………………………….
A gift everyone gets is a Pat Boon(e).
Death & taxes are both Pat Boon(e)s.
Truth, as always, is less pat. Truth has
more to do with what I really glean
from you, which is not a political (exactly),
is (rakishly, richly) anti-politics, & is
conveyed by swift skin-kicks. There is no
place for this in the full frontal assault land
we’ve been Shanghai’d into, &
the dissemination of which is America’s ultimate Pat Boon(e).
………………………………………..
a soul's incision
into your cerebellum
which i can fill gingerly, not spill
onto a nail-bed you carefully made to ensure maximum viscosity
crank & creak the senator speaks
…………………………………………….
he’s whispering in my ear now,
telling me about chance— play the cards,
don’t pretend you can deal the hand…
I never tried to deal the hand, I tell him,
because the deck has no card with a poet’s face.
The Devil laughs at me, dumps a load of press
clippings in a bag I marked Don’t touch—
………………………………………….
now, it’s so cloudy we can only perch on rigid,
bare ruined branches. We cannot fathom
what the surface should be, why the inelegant
is preponderant. Red flags whip our livers. Red
hot prods in crowded rings circle us. There can be no
twittering hope without notions of liberty, as means
of using flies, flying, flown over the protests on Market Street.
…………………………………………………
When you lift a Coca-Cola, you are pulling a lever
for entropy. The cloying tickle of high fructose corn syrup—
all dreams dried into anodyne. Goods may be America’s
heart, en masse; what in them beats? Sounds of horses
hooves, trampling down corporate dirt, all in a bone-piled
graveyard. Sounds of whinnies, conflagrations, blinker-viewed
social situational Waterloos, & you don’t know (they won’t
let you) who’s standing behind who, or you.
…………………………………………..
An old, mad, blind, despised, dying king,
says the country. We protect imagery, say others.
Belief is testament to goodness, rigidity
means faithfulness to a spiel we all know
like simple algebra, and that can be equated
to squares. We are bellwethers of chicken egg
home fries, I am a clucking and a shucking
and jiving, you’re alive to little red roosters
too lazy to crow for day. No facile Geist for
this Zeit. It’s a time for knickknacks picked up like cordite. Shoot.
……………………………………………
No Blogosphere back-draft,
only post ahead, into cacophony:
wire, networks, new wild west; ropes, holsters.
Age-old books; angst, anemic. It’s sexily red,
moral/ethical oblivion, hemmed in, quick as spurt,
across oceans: thermo-genic press coverage,
safe, free; corpses, numbers, brain lotions.
…………………………………………..
That notion, “that I’m suffering well,”
must be in Plato somewhere, or Nietzsche—
now, it’s in you too. You don’t succeed in laughing
at the shard-sharp world; it’s jammed too deep
in your throat, with suffocated senators,
black-robed judges, tentative press secretaries.
You only cough up butt-ends based on others’
words. Laughter is solely for surprise autopsies—
of an atrophied surface, what’s under incomprehensible
to most, who know, very precisely, just how most they are.
………………………………………….
A gift everyone gets is a Pat Boon(e).
Death & taxes are both Pat Boon(e)s.
Truth, as always, is less pat. Truth has
more to do with what I really glean
from you, which is not a political (exactly),
is (rakishly, richly) anti-politics, & is
conveyed by swift skin-kicks. There is no
place for this in the full frontal assault land
we’ve been Shanghai’d into, &
the dissemination of which is America’s ultimate Pat Boon(e).
………………………………………..
a soul's incision
into your cerebellum
which i can fill gingerly, not spill
onto a nail-bed you carefully made to ensure maximum viscosity
crank & creak the senator speaks
…………………………………………….
Poems
- Feel: Cop It
- Stain Bar on CC Mixter
- Ry Mullen: A Collage
- Red-Headed Corpse
- The Ballad of Robert Johnson on PennSound
- Winter Fragments
- Listen to the Devil: A Mini-Opera
- The Four Quarters Magazine
- New Argotist Online E-Book: The Great Recession
- MInecraft: Solipsist: Beams (Emma Gambade, 2010)
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