2013/09/07

When I Sell It I Intend to Buy a Debris Slide





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