paperless statements

“A roadside stand / off I-78” — aha yes great first line

“Like little forges for which the heart too often / gets mistaken” — great opener, great comparison

“If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin / that moment shrapnel scythed” — yes yes this is good stuff

“I dropped the dying year behind me like a shawl” — aha yes been there, can’t wait to read the rest

“Colette’s heroine’s so sexually neglected she pushes her husband’s cat— / pussy, dear puss—off the balcony” — haha that’s clever, awesome, a bit clever but subtle

“The woman I love has gone / to bed early / so I can be alone in the living room” — all too recognizable experience esp. for the male poet, good work

“I stand, nude as a statue” — awesome simile here can’t wait to read more

“We checked the vents and hidden apertures of the house” — haha good for you, can’t be too careful, what else did you do

“A few days would pass, and, believing him / gone, we felt inexplicably better” — you were writing all this down I hope

“Relative of my father was a horse trainer, / had a horseshoe-nailing stand in the / principal street” — interesting, historically interesting, go on, go on

“You won’t come to bed because you’re / doing amphetamines again” — ohh yeah, boom everybody’s doing drugs now especially the over the counter stuff, world of pain

“The speaker was an actor, not hired to act / but to enliven topics” — oh seriously, hahaha i bet he/she was really wooden or out of place, go on

“They never looked like their snapshots, / the days when they were young and jaunty” — ooohh yes, true we all do age like this, btw love that ‘jaunty’

“Awake at 5:18, & happy / it’s possible / to touch your hair” — boom boom, hahaha can’t wait to read more of this one

“fog and snow childhood has forgotten its way / a fragment of wet sky blocks the window” — i’ve literally never read anything like this before, keep writing it please

I smooshed a little fruit fly
a-floating through the air
between my clapping hands, I did,
and saw his wee corpse there
no larger than a dot of ink
upon my right ring finger
and washed my hands a-thoroughly
in soap and warm tap water
and dried them to near dryness
on a dish towel hanging over
a chair nearby—

                  and then, thought I,
perhaps I shoun’ta killed him:
perhaps he was the happy type
that floats about a kitchen
to bring a grin, a visage bright
and ward off human sadness.

But killing bugs I sometimes do
to exorcise my badness,
or I’d kill dogs and maybe men
and maybe all mankind—
this little fly, he took one, then,
to save lives—yours and mine.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

This is the Hour of Lead—

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

[Emily Dickinson, c. 1862]

[Now @ McSweeney’s]

Great Lakes,

Special fondnesses,

With due aptitude,

Monetarily,

Cracker Barrelin’ down the road,

Fuzz,

Shamed a ya,

Lebanese dumbwaiter,

Actually I’d,

With handmade domestic products,

Floaty,

As Walter said to,

Anyway, sold the printing press,

Starbucks,

Scatterbrained today haha sorry,

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulpher-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through the office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

[Pablo Neruda, from Twenty Poems of Love and One Ode of Despair (1924); trans. Robert Bly]

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

[William Stafford, Stories that Could Be True (1977)]

Here are some poetry readings in which I will be participating during 2013.

• January 19, 7pm — Solar Anus Reading Series at Beep Beep Gallery, Atlanta, GA
• April 1, 8pm — Aaron Belz’s April Fool’s Showcase at Schlafly Bottleworks, St. Louis, MO
• April 10, 8pm — Reading w/ Michael Schiavo, Maggie Zurawski and others at The Carrack, Durham, NC
• October 12, 8pm — So and So Series at the Morning Times Cafe, Raleigh, NC

“But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

“Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

“This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

[From “This Is Water,” full text here, or listen to the audio part 1 and part 2]

Naming flowers might be a poet’s trick,
but the rose bushes across the street,
green now in the shade of a green ash
and surrounded by overgrown crossvine,
the rose bushes hanging partly out
over the gravelly roadside, flowerless,
don’t remind me of us, or you, or how
you once empowered me with your anger,
nor do they remind me of myself, now,
depleted in your absence, because
aside from the occasional full breeze
that ruffles them, and though their leaves
are spiderwebbed, beetle-eaten, they
seem at peace with who they are.

No, we were more like flame azaleas
growing wild in a highway ditch,
like gentian, blood root, foam flower,
we were solomon’s seal, blazing star
mown down by jumpsuited inmates,
stalks and bright petals scattered among
rain-mucky fescue, fallen among clumps
of sweetgrass that grow in marshier
places, and that is not to say our love
was ephemeral but that it was maybe too
bright and mistaken for weeds, viable only
among hippies and children who pick
and assemble them into bouquets,
place them on domestic coffee tables
as if they had value other than the value
that is immediately apparent, maybe
some brightness for a day, a poet’s trick.