Friday, July 31, 2009

cmxci

I knew him in the biblical sense.

        Roses die upon a bed of roses
        With mirrors weeping at them.

                                      —Jack Spicer

This was in Tower Records with
a better quality of life.   Opening
on October 12th at the Galaxy
Theater.   Where we never were.

The

goutish ocean lapping at the eaves.

Rain is all elation today, with an
umbrella held by another’s
bronzish arm, loving and
smooth as the forgotten
sun.

Rain is where we go when all is
lost, or thought so, but look....:

     We had only begun to forget.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

cmxc

Shall I courier a carrot over to your place?

But first, where’s my bananas?

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

cmlxxxix

Rain drips down the venetian blinds/
Fourteen years we danced like this.


Things I wanna do tonight: read this
stack of books, etc.; go to End-Up;
finish listening to all the music I
downloaded this week; put the new
liners up in the shower; finish the
laundry (48 more minutes); watch
this 2-hour Japanese movie from
Netflix (watched all the rest the
last couple of days); dance; figure
out how to edit movies; drink a
liter of water; make the first journal
entry of the new year; finish this
list I’ve made here on my coffee table
(completely separate)...

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

cmlxxxviii

I can taste your make-up

and the laptop sounds like it’s going to explode
or take off to Mars or something.   The sun shines
amazingly and I’m inside making lists.   How to go
beyond the list?   Get something done before
the explosion or take-off?   Stop picking up signals
from 1991 radio waves, keep looking up songs on
YouTube, fantastic tunes I’d completely forgotten
for over a decade, like Aldo Nova’s Fantasy,
Red Rider’s Lunatic Fringe, Saga’s On the Loose,
and, wow, Van Stephenson’s Modern Day Delilah
from Righteous Anger, 1984, one of the first
albums I ever purchased with cash earned bagging
groceries, cassette tape (my first ever album was
Queen’s Greatest Hits, that one my one-and-only
8-track tape, but that’s one too many diversions)....

Monday, July 27, 2009

cmlxxxvii

Glenn Close’s Exit Makes Room for Dessert

Dear Cat Who Likes Dogs,

Your flying saucers are so gonna hug me.   Our
helicopter is way too low, but I appreciate its
NOIZE like Coco purring somewhere over the
Tenderloin.   So.   I download New Years and
break all my resolutions in less than a minute.

What have we to spare?   One lonely stack of
chaplets in front of a close-cropped TV set
(its tweaky echo of a recent episode of
Battlestar Gallactica – the one trying too hard
to be like 2001).   We’re still brilliant, and

always will be.   Which brings me to today’s
trivia tidbit: Which two states have official
donuts?   The answer, it turns out,
is Louisiana and Massachusetts.   The beignet
(of course) and the Boston cream donut.

Love,
January 10 (the day after Mom turns 66)

Friday, July 24, 2009

cmlxxxvi

Fie! Yer Breeder

You’d that camera
to capture goal of
readingwritingdom.

Ran 4 miles on top
of skies that scrape
the weight off buns.

Darren just called
and wants to bor
row two hundred

dodos.   And this
Japanese anthol
ogy, Yikes!   Ez

ra, Ezra, Orphan
Andy’s even af
ter lukewarm vis

age I am still
filled with love
& I am just

trying
to feel
it.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

cmlxxxv

When will it end when will it end when will it end.
10:30 or so wilting roses in front of me dark pink
lungs damaged from last night’s sleep. Upset most
of last week though haven’t eaten much at all
pieces of mac & cheese with Alex yesterday at
Rock Soup Cafe then to Mitchell’s for an orange
sherbet cone that’s it. You want to go to bed again?

E on Friday night said the sweetest things to me late
in the night “I don’t know what to say or what to do
but we will be the best” “I love you sooo much”
holding my hand sitting on couch next to dance
floor “next weekend we can go some place quiet”
and later “we need to get our picture taken together.”

Coffee seems weak my life of little substance I’ll just
read with my omelet. How to revamp erase start over
like I am somebody else. No longer good.



Wednesday, July 22, 2009

cmlxxxiv

I guess I just don’t want to be famous enough.

How do I feel?   Somewhat free.
I’m such a loser.   I’m such a loser.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

cmlxxxiii

Johansson puts snotty tissue on eBay

Collective unconscious.   Reading
Japanese poetry.   Darleen sends me a
message on Facebook but I can’t find
Darleen she’s invisible or unreachable.
Can’t reply.   Message from a ghost?
Not in Japanese, silly.   Cassie loaned me
this book with horrible introductions,
but now I’m down to the good stuff.
Unable to drink, spend the week
keeping the wobbly upright,
erect.   I am not a good poet.
But I just gave birth to
something.

Monday, July 20, 2009

cmlxxxii

Stop thinking?   Dance a tarantella
on the couch.   Turn two burners on high—
spike us each a tomato juice.

Now what?   Who am I

kidding; how could I ever finish this book?
Let’s never end, my pretending you’re
here—tis the season and I’ve an ingrown
whisker.   When shall we next

have sex?   Are you becoming the man your
mother divorced?


Drink the broth as Ron delivers
one file after the next:
ding ding ding!

Friday, July 17, 2009

cmlxxxi

I’m not 100% sure
it would have been a
better way to spend
the evening, but
I offer you this:
would you will-
ingly read and
reread an ounce
or two of semen?

Thursday, July 16, 2009

cmlxxx

What a day
to be in love
with someone
who only wants
to sleep with you!

What a day to be
happily married
and madly in
love with someone
who only wants to
grind you
like a roasted
Colombian
bean!

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

cmlxxix

The conversation begins as a
happy accident, like a newly
burgeoning relationship that’ll
blissfully last for years to come
(except when one chases the
raw-eyed other from the
warmer end of a jointly
leased studio apartment
to the other, back and
also forth for a good
long time, all the while
beating his head with a
broomstick).   I finally got
the nerve to ask (yet and
again) if he thought we
could “move forward.”
And he said

yes.   Yes.
I was dumbfounded (and this
was back when dumbfounded
was cheap and easy, which
was either 1991 or
the day before yesterday).
So he came

to my place and we
spent a lovely night,
highlighted by a
long set of soft
slow kisses both
nearly but not quite
climaxing.   The
next day—

well, morning,
our beloved other’s
furtive fingernails
jostling around within
our very own unique
intermittent “can’t-make-up-
its-mind-what-to-hold-on-to”
grasps, we skitter dizzily,
each and as one,
to Jamba Juice for Orange Dream Machine.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

cmlxxviii

Let’s do the opposite.   Rushing
onto the dancefloor trying to
start something.   You, Mirac
ulous Stranger, you cum
obvious close—and
not only do I accept
and giddy appreciate,
but also reach out &
grab your dick.

Why’d it turn so
soft all of a sudden?

Monday, July 13, 2009

cmlxxvii

Del is striving for avuncular
                      (the apocalypse must be nigh).


Imagine that I am in love with this city.
Well, fantasize.
Too hard? Maybe, but I do love it.

Pick one line.
          “OK I was cut off.”
Right.   Pick another.
          “Long story short?”

Long story short my one and only ex-girlfriend
finds me via Facebook last night.   Same day I
get a sly note from my first college roommate
by way of yet another college friend.   He (the
roommate) was quite hotly and heavily engaged
when we shared our tiny campus domicile.
They got married soon thence and, inevitably,
divorced.   She (the other college friend) was
a classmate from India and a fellow chemistry
major (chew on that!) who arrived stateside
our freshman year via freshly arranged
marriage to the new physics professor; in
short measure she was lauding a newly-
found ‘liberation’—and soon thereafter was
happily divorced.   Next week, I have been
Facebookly informed, said He and She will
depart for the Caribbean, ensemble,where
they’re sure to whip up some riproaring mid-
dle-aged fun in (and no doubt out) of the sun.

One of my closest childhood friends’
kids is now at NYU on full scholarship.

Friday, July 10, 2009

cmlxxvi

Everything happens all the time, sometimes
simultaneously.   I’m just now reading a
poem by George Stanley about him
huddling outside of his apartment with
his neighbors (granted, at 5:30 in the
morning), just to get away from the
noise of the fire alarm in his apartment
building – “strangers and no structure” –
he seems to be writing with a hangover,
and then I misread “sleek & slender
selves” as “sleek & slender elves” –
well, it is almost Christmas.   I mean it’s
December.   Or at least May, when I am
back ON with You-Know-Who.   I wish I
could remember exactly how things went
at Mel’s after watching X Men (he was
45 minutes late!).   But as I was spilling
my very soul out to him over a grilled
cheese sandwich (and his Oreo milkshake?)
I do most clearly and gleefully recall
that I saw his eyes mist over.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

cmlxxv

I just dusted everything and it’s nearly
midnight.   All the blinds are closed and
I’m wondering if the moon is up.   Raise
the goddam blinds and see nothing but
blankly starlit rooftops.   MOON!   MOON!

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

cmlxxiv

I love it when you read.   I don’t know why.
I’m reading four books simultaneously (&
doing laundry & sipping a lukewarm Sprite).
Life, as they say, is good.

Facebook, however, is taking up too
much damn time!   My brother arrives
Wednesday, the place is a mess,
and I’m not going to get an ounce
of sleep tonight.   Plus I just
downloaded The Last Guy,

which is not what you’re thinking unless
you happen to be an avid videogamer
(which I’m not—
but zombies in San Francisco?
How can I resist?).

So.   That leaves room for a lot of
doubt, right?   Right.
That’s a lot of doubt.

By the way, nobody writes at perfect pitch
every single sitting.

Excuse me
while I go back
and adjust the margins.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

cmlxxiii

arabesques & bone spurs
                                —George Stanley

What’s real?   Martinis with Kim at
Martuni’s last night.   Talking the
talk.   They’ve moved the WellsFargo
ATM machines to 333 Market (that
used to be ‘indoors’ across Fremont).
That’s real (though
I’d heard a rumor....).

Our building’s fire alarm buzzer
just came on full force.   Real.
I walk out to see a neighbor
standing outside of his
smoking apartment.   I ask
if everything is okay and he
says yeah.   “Do you know how to
turn it off?”   “Nope, sorry.”

And I mean it is LOUD.

Here comes the fire truck some
fifteen minutes later as I go down
(holding my ears) to check the
dryers.   One.   Real.   Empty.
Rah!   Plug her in!

Monday, July 06, 2009

cmlxxii

how I’d love to dream let alone sleep it’s night
                                                        —Frank O’Hara

The laundry is only begun.   Joe just signed on.
Doldrums since Saturday, no real reason.   It’s
Sunday.   Then fondue.   I made a rather long
list I haven’t started on.

People are dancing right now and I’m here
on the couch writing a ‘poem’ – where’s the
sense in that?   The bells of reason
will surely ring any
moment now.

Til then, I’ll not name any more names.
Except last night we couldn’t wait for
Cyndi Lauper.   Just couldn’t wait.   Or
I was in pain from standing four (five?)
solid hours.   Otto sweetly patient,

gimps home with the old fart at 12:30am
after Lady Gaga and one of the chicks from
Destiny’s Child.   What’s a pop concert for?

What’re my memories of dancing in my bedroom
to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

and never to see her live except this place,
me 41, her who knows how old, kids of 20
and 21 scrambling by with a bump and a shove, etc...?

Sure, she’s got a lovely new ‘hit’ now –
one that even grows on you, doesn’t quite exude
the vapors of nostalgia, one I’ll be most happy
to dance at alongside a few assorted eye candy
on my own present-day turf, which is which
ever stomped- and slobbered-upon San Francisco
dancefloor of the moment that pulses with
the rhythms of a vapid-ethereal-electronical
rehash of all things past and pop by way of
a decently-escapist semi-world-renowned
DJ until the cows come home, no drunken
bumps, no live performance, except just this
bash & bash & bash & bash &...

Thursday, July 02, 2009

cmlxxi

(Like the Muffled Roar of a Corporate Giant)

Welcome to my series of utterly honest
sarcasms, bitter to the core, each with its
own violently clever and overwraught (one
and all!) twist that makes one wonder if I’m
possibly this stupendous or if I’m merely
lucky to bend a few attenuated ears with a
garden variety of half-baked jokes, ha ha,
which are quite possibly aimed at countless
dull replicas of your very own self, Dear
Degreed Purveyor of the Enlightened (known
colloquially as Illusioned) Guess.   A rather
lavishly fluid volume of, let’s just go ahead
and call them postmodern aggregations of
memoria, each one built, if you will, upon
its own wondrously appropriate paper head-
stone; each grave (or any assemblage of
graves) to be interpreted as nothing less than
a mockery of all poetic traditions, espoused
or otherwise; and yet, each blithe construct
is a scientifically sound disputation of the
very poignant, earnest, brilliantly straight-
forward argument or narrative – that is,
the very carcass – ensconced within each
brilliant contraption; individual ‘disputation
vs. narrative’ duets can by gosh downrightly
be summed up as disposable ‘get on over
yourself’ sermonettes craftily parlayed
tongue-in-cheekly as chorus to an endless
knell, and always a sly misreprentation
of the deviant, My Own True Self, sung
just as deservedly to all kith and kin who
spend their days, their nights, their final
breaths languishing in the company of
words, wordettes, and wordy wordisms.
In toto, I might add, because it should be
iterated, these incomparable casements
encompass a fabulously excruciating
excess of divinely harmonic redundancies,
deliciously rabble-rousing bon mots, and
just plain inimitable sentences, which to a
T are gloriously impossible to repeat
unscriptedly, and naturally inconceivable
to utter in completion without the loving
assistance of at least one strong arm
slipped deep and ever so slowly
up the utterer’s wazoo.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

cmlxx

Is this our way to be alone?

I daresay a day or so of
silence from you is an
unmitigated joy; it’s several
sheer pages of unmottled clarity,

a remedy for this year and next.
“Life is a Jumble Shop,” and
I’m too busy wedging Frank O’
Hara’s timelessly snappy coigns

into each well-intentioned day; I’ll
drum nary a knackered word of my own
into this chest, nor beat one, pithy or not,
into our veritable daily dough.

Why worry a jot over
kleptomaniacal tendencies?
I am perfectly satisfied just to
seek out that one clear frequency,

to pick up a clown-sized megaphone,
aim it in any general direction.
And transmit!
I do reckon there are occasional

incidental problems around which
to maneuver, but there’s clearly no
need to reinvent the all-glorious antenna.
I did have my mind on this

one thing, though,
that really needs to get fixed, but while
said slipshod mind cozily drifts off into
something like eloquence, watch closely

as the rest of me resoundingly remains
a fully functional and beneficent instrument of
conveyance.   Meantime, how’d you careen so
magnificently, so sublimely out of control?

Hm.   I do seem to recall some vague gesture
for direction, an ever-softening motion toward
relevance.   But I’ve had a few kooky dreams since
that I could have just mixed it all in with,

not to mention I’m as down with love as
either of us can ever hope to be.   So cut out
that racket!   I’ll be damned if you’ll catch me
screwing with my pitch-perfect reception!