Writing with Manners
These are some thoughts on etiquette.
Write something mean or write what you
mean; something that means something.
That you cannot believe and is terribly
difficult to convince. Don’t cut and
paste (for example, do you actually
purchase and send a card with
someone else’s words)?
For what it’s worth
say something also
specific. Which means
you can ramble as much as you want,
just specify. However, don’t be filmic,
that’s for cinema (instead, for example,
put your laptop in a drawer
and go to the movies). If you
make a living of words, don’t go on
NPR and poopoo the whole thing.
Take a look around. Pick one thing
that is impossible to say (to your lover).
Write it down, if need be, but remember,
there is music for almost any occasion.
Say aloud: “Am I philosopher or poet?”
One serves its purpose well while the other
is neither a recorder nor a vacuum cleaner.
Metafiction
I’m not sure if that’s exactly
like the bland resolve of
taking a shower in the
middle of a poem. But it
is like what I said yesterday
about there being no more
tomorrow.
How do I know
what you like?
I know it’s
not a triangle.
Nor humor
(which is all about me).
“What do you think?”
says the relationship of
good writing to bad ambition.
Sounds like I’m preaching
a la nonsense, right?
Stamp an “H” on it
(which, if it falls down,
becomes U).
Disinterested Missive
Like walking into the fog of hairspray. Walk
into another dimension (too many channels,
20 new posts).
You lie! I AM thinking of two things at once!
The pre-existing West Coastness of the poet
and the fog.
I am West Coast hairspray fog.
Baked salmon is not a metaphor.
Do you think I can handle that particular choice?
Cleanse (lather, rinse, repeat) only by choice.
I pick the coast of no coast
(this fiction).
Lastly, walk INTO the alarm. Grab
the bag and bake like a
dead metaphor.
Someone’s crying
on the fire escape.
With full knowledge
of I am, Friday, as
suggested with a glass
of persuasive leather.
I resemble a strangle.
After that, a suggestion
that I take “2 deep tokes”
as an answer perhaps.
Is an evolution like
the Castro evolves.
Far from I think so.
Intimacy
If I go to the moon
with you in my hand
after a 3.5 mile run
into an earthquake.
I mean try to find it,
the moon, in terms
of a simple vodka
tonic. Alone all
month, the cat
stares at the
wall. Can’t
this vague
memory,
perhaps
that of a fire
alarm, happen
when I only read
poems from women?
A Robust Wilderness
Walk hand-in-hand with the night.
Everything is niche-marketed,
just act like you’re going somewhere
(not because of the night). Don’t be too
lavish about the moon. Make a pan out of it.
Log the odd misty-eyed moment. This list,
your bridge to the witch’s cottage,
becomes instinct. So you’ve got a thing for the
hairy leg of night? Grab hold of it like a magician.
Filmic ogre, nomadic culture disappoints the rabbit
and dissolves uniformity. Turn down the oven
and wave the radar to wake the radar.
I am not dead. I am not dead.
Method Is Singular
Shake shit up
writing about fog
in fog. Be
destructiveness.
(Would
that this would flip a noodle.)
Pray instead
to the god of
career development
when the canary in
the ambulance
annoys the crap out of
breathing. Halt.
Modular. Penance.
(There’s
lots to remember
in New Zealand.)
Sweet thick
pea soup.
Resin. Resin.
Rainbow.
Summer.
A conservative
laxative. This,
the last bitch of hope.
Lie here on your ear.
Pause
halfway down
the stairwell
after work.
A whole minute
maybe.
It was never
interesting
in the first place.
Down the chute
I lie
in a tube
like a glass of water.
Palatable dope.
Untimely Premonition
The hackneyed use
of hunger as
motivation.
A flirty wave-
off. And barely having sex.
It works
and then it doesn’t.
The deadpan stapler.
My heart
is a pain in the neck
and does not have
signature authority.
The vendor is aware of this.
What a nancy
box. Fold it
into the bend of a body
(say an armpit) –
in such a way
as to....
Makes you
redundant. Which
is
completely unnecessary.
A broken face in a
fluted box. Barring
unforeseen circumstances.
Behold. I spent most of
my youth hailing
a cab
in Taiwan. Discuss.
Some
do not believe
in lube or tercets.
All hail _____
and _____....
This
makes me
permeable.
Every single written
or spoken word
is dishonest.
Outfox the cinema.
Make
believe.
That joke
is out of the loop. A
series of questions
about inevitability,
DSL and cable television
for Christmas.
“Stay away
from me, I’m an asshole.”
Like a knock knock....
Mind the dial tone
tornado.
It lost its
sprockets.
Seduced by a paradox,
someone
much younger. But
I’m trying
to get it all down. Oh, God,
my business card is all wrong.
Hoist it up
like an emergency pennant.
The wonders of modern technology.
Sorry I’m
so miserable.
How are you?
The gargoyles who protect our
economics
are stone. Stone.
This
dream
piped in
from....
Living through it
by
writing it all down.
Sorry if I’m miserable.
On the elevator door
someone wrote
“I am not dead.”
I am the most
depressed I can remember. Is this
a hint, your listening
to him read
a poem?
Why take the time
to figure it
out,
making no sense
with your heart on your sleeve?
The telephone refuses....
The ache of the mountain
on each page.
Twitch
and flail, yet
keep yourself broken
off. A cad
with
a party hat.
Hand swollen over
correction tape
ready
to
roll
the dice.
Soft Blabs
Speeding barfly across the shore.
Inhaling deep, self-portrait gulps.
The birds and bones atwitter. A
mocking sunrise interrupts. It
was there all along. Something,
anything, moves. Or keeps
drowning. But the point is.
The party coincides with
panic. Roils and quells.
And the roar of the fish on
the beach. But I am a goddam
bamboo, squawk-a-lot, and
think underneath thumbnails.
It’s a woodpecker’s lot. I got
the sense. It just froze at the
coffee store. The barque speeds
barfly across the. Surprise.
Sunset on Mt. Hula Hoop.
Sentimental
What of my lovely friends? Now
there’s a sentence! And who advocates
argument? “I do! I do!”
Nothing tastes right. Everything is
soggy and dull. But the iced tea
is pretty good. I’m trying to
drown myself in it. And then,
thirty-six pages into it, absolute
shivers. Up and down and all around!
We have a concept of justice
Despite the fact that assymetry is ubiquitous
And constantly throws things off-balance. But then
We are a tilted species.... (Lyn Hejinian)
I sit comfortably in a bed on the side of a mountain.
The bed is horizontal to what? Which lies in
a thicker reality: the mountain, the bed, or me?
Obviously, I’ve mis-stated everything.
Two people are giggling where
giggling isn’t allowed. With lips tersely pursed,
onlookers, those respecting The Golden Rule
of Silence, hone in on the gigglers.
No man is an island? I am the very template
of narcissist: I am suffering from the loss
of what it means to really know someone.
Meanwhile the fawns graze and the
turkeys gobble. And I recline
into the comfortability of
horizontal giving lectures to my
friends in my head. Imaginary friends.
Imaginary head. Imaginary horizontal.
The only immortality is absence.
—Lyn Hejinian
Pinch my kiss into a flame and let it
swell and sway under the oblong moon.
Find my woozy in your woozy, and be
deliberate about it. Then let’s just sort of
float along, lost halves looking for drama.
How did it happen? In your car, of course,
at 4:30am after dancing abrasively for about
two hours. On the deck of the Walnut after
soaking for about thirty minutes with the
naked hippies. It’s always happening.
It’s always. And we live only in homage.
We live only with one hope: I WILL
become that with which some other that
can collaborate. It’s a pie in the sky
kind of wish, and in the end are we
ever really anything except nothing?
Are we ever really something else?
So. Back to the woozy and to the
fellow I chatted with beforehand.
The one who pointed me in the
direction of the patina that is
this hallucinated night. Were
you pointing indirectly? Are
you satisfied now? Now that
I’m stone, can you carve me
out of this place, set me atop
the least imaginary bluff
on the coast and let me
bake upon it until you decide
what we do in the next chapter?
I thought the noise was squirrels
but it was birds. I shook the tree
(made of bamboo?) and they flew
away, perhaps all of them. Someone
walking up the stairs looked at me with
what seemed like disdain. Maybe she a-
dored the birds up there in the tree which
was perhaps bamboo. Or she was afraid
that one of the birds flying away from the
tree—and the foreign and meddling beast
who’d so unexpectedly disturbed the tree
and its otherwise contained, recognizable,
and noisy community—perhaps she was
afraid that one of the birds might shit
right on her. Or maybe, quite simply,
she had a little bit of indigestion. It
was just around dinnertime, after
all, and she was, undoubtedly,
returning from the dining hall.
Whatever the case, I looked
down at her with a quick
smile—and then—fixed
sight upon the birds (or
whatever they were)
as they flew gently
and (now) noise-
lessly down in-
to the beauti-
ful ravine.
Raw Trills
Toss a kid a champagne. Tiny
buds duel in our hearts. I find you
two hundred miles away, no longer
taken. Available? I suppose. At least
as the mind wanders. And S-L-O-W,
which is the opposite of oddly. For now,
drink it. Find me some urchin of truth
and bring a few napkins. I know. Miles
is miles. But we’re speaking franchise
here, something that might last decades
and forever come between us. That’s
really okay. It’s like
we’re being looked
after by the clouds
what stung us. Wait.
That’s not exactly right.
I’m reading a book of poetry
by a major prize winner. I’ve
never wanted to puke more than
I do at this very moment. It is
a very moment. How did I get
here? And shouldn’t I simply
(and humbly) switch books?
sinking be the ship
—Anselm Berrigan
Did I just do that? Overcompensating due to
undesirable location? Redundancy, they say,
is orgasmic (if handled appropriately). But
don’t handle me like that. I read this entire
book in ten minutes flat. Which is more than I
can say of your palatial underwear soundtrack.
It’s a spooky afternoon. I drive down the
hillside for reception and a hamburger that
seems to have gotten lost. Why are small
towns always brimming with despair?
“You’re projecting,” I hear someone say
over the whir of the fan. “Please,” I say, and
he hush-hushes me, afraid I’ll blab about his
new nose. Perhaps it’s just the heat but I’m
reading this all with the voice of Alan Shore,
shifting weight from one side of my jaw
to the other. At first I think it’s funny,
then poignant, but as time goes on, spooky
and creepy. It’s “nacho ordinary hot sauce.”
October’s fast approaching, though, and
while I’ll be happily single for something
like a month a half, true love is just around
the corner; untried estuaries into which
our Chronicles of Sardonica will sail.
Until then, my ripe and future fruits,
let’s tuck our tight lips into our fragile
asses. A hearty bon voyage to us all!
