Was digging through archives last night remembering the first days we adopted Stanley and Rose two early Septembers ago - easily one of the smartest ideas Earthgirl and I ever made, bar none - and found the above, which as always I post in full assurance that you get the metaphors I'm getting. The rest of the songs and poems? New feature! Lazy Ass Weekend Archival Blogging! All the blogwhoring and attention sluttery without the work, plus great songs and poems from a random month in archives that aren't songs and poems in the regular rotation, that make me happy to hear and read again, cause it's the fucking weekend in Stringtown, Blegsylvania and this is Fuck It v Fuck This, now, barring KABOOM!, weekends at BLCKDGRD. Maybe it lasts, at least until tomorrow. Songs tested last night on twaater, zero response. This is my favorite post ever since the last until the next.
HEAVEN FOR STANLEY
Mark Doty
For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean,
an annual, so he wouldn't have to wait for the flowers.
He said, Mark, I have just the place for it!
as if he'd spent ninety-eight years
anticipating the arrival of this particular vine.
I thought poetry a brace against time,
the hours held up for study in a voice's cool saline,
but his allegiance is not to permanent forms.
His garden's all furious change,
budding and rot and then the coming up again;
why prefer any single part of the round?
I don't know that he'd change a word of it;
I think he could be forever pleased
to participate in motion. Something opens.
He writes it down. Heaven steadies
and concentrates near the lavender. He's already there.
THE SIMULACRA
D. Nurkse
They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married,
sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a fingernail
gingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.
Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old,
the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it. Small towns flew past, Rodez, Albi,
limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racing
after hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered,
infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils—and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.
THE PROSE POEM
Campbell McGrath
On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row. To the right, a field of wheat, a field of hay, young grasses breaking the soil, filling their allotted land with the rich, slow-waving spectacle of their grain. As for the farmers, they are, for the most part, indistinguishable: here the tractor is red, there yellow; here a pair of dirty hands, there a pair of dirty hands. They are cultivators of the soil. They grow crops by pattern, by acre, by foresight, by habit. What corn is to one, wheat is to the other, and though to some eyes the similarities outweigh the differences it would be as unthinkable for the second to commence planting corn as for the first to switch over to wheat. What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs, they say, so long as the plough stays out, the weeds stay in the ditch where they belong, though anyone would notice the wind-sewn cornstalks poking up their shaggy ears like young lovers run off into the bushes, and the kinship of these wild grasses with those the farmer cultivates is too obvious to mention, sage and dun-colored stalks hanging their noble heads, hoarding exotic burrs and seeds, and yet it is neither corn nor wheat that truly flourishes there, nor some jackalopian hybrid of the two. What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected, even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more easily digested. Of those that travel the local road, few pay that fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk's descent from the lightning-struck tree. You've passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?
ZERO STAR HOTEL [AT THE SMITH AND JONES]
Anselm Berrigan
| At the Smith and Jones Factory I get my Gear, don't smoke Don't vote, dry off With Madonna towel It's a field night For the roachies Smoked too many Crumbs, too much Genre manipulation | looks like nothing ever happened except everything's wet, singed cork rubbeth face, pay concierge/owner in red-checked pjs for Ross' 8 nights decapitate writer head and sacrifice to gods of buried vocals |
| DugRoth says id Keats Was here in our burgers He'd slug him every time If he played the Welt- Meister? Double Slug. West Nile Virus Strikes Bill Five Times Tho' he's scared to enter Queens, despite status As honorary Met | Metro musician speaks: "If the global workforce continues to be decimated by disease & natural catas- trophe it will be necessary to clone a workforce. please give in advance to help create this force in exchange for these accordion songs. Merci." |
| It takes a dick To raise a pyramid Motorcycle crash On the tongue, small Business buried, this short But expansive demonological Expose is, in all probability My own diabolized & garbled Version of raising "the listener" To the rank of dualist "believer" | three nines, plus fifteen two fours king high, lose five two fives ace high, lose five nothing ace high, lose finger right index. Zilch, ace high, lose left thumb ten and seven pairs, get thumb back, doesn't fit. Two fives hand back thumb. Six high lose hand, split. |
| The moral right of the author Has been deserted And tearful words that rhyme You are not crumbling and You are tired of crumbling The moral continuum Of the gobot's heresy Has been dejected With feelings of paranoia Thank Augustine, for | like Leonard Nimoy you and I are made mostly of water. But when the assholes play ukeleles and gloat about cheap rent the sight of the world quarters me. Thus I regress shame and embarrassment fucking up the life |
| Many otters are also Making current loans Whilst unable To find the function Button next to the Pause button. While you were invisible I was privvy To the seamscape Brutish preconfiguring was there | end poem with gambling write out dreams another personal rule broken to quote face death unquote, with apologies to the just now stomped roachie. "they were all my friends and they died," an old thread and a new one |
| Coptic are, blue lady Bahrain coin, midnight Medoc, Eddie snickers Insects attack, denim guy Who robs drug stores Yearning to speak: Cocktail fugitive angst Ball refuses to be thrown Be not frozen in cigar Store scared to emote | basically we need a cultural tilting of the bowl or diseased markets. Interrogation chairs pile up outside guides. Primitives drool intelligence. I can't find the light. Two degrees outside. The city at odds. poetry is my strength clothes are my weakness |
| Nobody comes over And never leaves anymore Incidental back to a sill Calm, poignant and terrified Volunteer me a busride Chase middle fingers with bats Blooming by the pond I did not hug the tranquil Endowment after a wedding Drank everything I could | pigeon now weird big books everywhere jogging in hollywood t-shirts we raised this park and built a pond by which to shoot movies they shot us on the pond and it was the best I hate that dog I ever had feeding with a bottle |
| Now Eddie's bored People invented God To excuse their bad Habits this roach Says to me. There Isn't anyone it Even wants to imitate Eddie and I play anti- Chess, both begin In check | now Ross is gone bearer of sock herb impresser of exiled temps. Um is my comment, leaking uranium on the sea bed. Others tilt ever so slightly swoopward, blame the spiritual outsider |
| At the reading reaching For the bar food "Well We've got to put those Subs somewhere or else Sell them as staples Of a fast food fat Reducing diet. Find And replace he said I see a crabby Peering through a crag | passenger next to antagonist all my darkness is product I sell it your way as wisdom you lose blue, use red I see my feet sometimes artificial's the right word clinical joy unreported poke a hole in a blanket and with your head go through it |
| I've never met any Mysterious musicians Sorry. I wish They stopped saying Lord, and ended This Pope business My relative Clapp Died at the Alamo Let's give Texas Back to Mexico | the original of this poem is available for $5,000. When I sell it I plan to buy a debris slide. I'm broke but I make more money than my parents did when they were my age |
| Solid boundless freefall My connective tissue My fine citizen centering Circles this frame Upside down flying Back first into Woods, flipped Over handlebars Brake cord detached Leaf imprint on back | what is interesting about him is also what is wrong with him rendering him electable he's the guy who poses for trophies, biologically but he is turning into bio-seitan, to be eaten by a despicably healthy human extending a lifespan |
| I can get a sparrow With a bow and arrow I can buy anything Cheaper than you Who wasted the miracle On the dove? The subject is SAME NAME. There's nothing To cross out. $5,000! Have a happy warning | if you don't understand don't be ashamed to ask three times the answer is TIGHT-LIPPED you have won $30,300 can I have a glass of water? the Americans had Judy Garland & we had Edie Piaf he was set to do another season of Superman, then he was shot |
