Monday, May 31, 2004

Avoiding a near collision at second, I fell awkwardly, thus my foot feels broken neatly across the top. Trying to throw out Bill Luoma at home from deep left, my right arm (having been dislocated and never properly healed) nearly comes out of the shoulder socket. Having spent most of the time hovering between shortstop and third, I rob Bill "Homer" (pronounced "Homah") Luoma of a line drive through the gap (though, by virtue of the aforementioned hovering between, the gap was filled), stopping the ball with my bare right hand positioned above my mitt and thus bruising the ball of my hand. Then after all was said and done, during our post-game yoga sessions, led by Diane, I tweaked my bad knee in some strange pose I didn't catch the name of. So it was a great season opener! Poets League Softball.

Awards are as follows:

The "We want a pitcher not a belly itcher" to Brandon "BIG LEFT" Brown.

The "Oatmeal Award for Good Effort" to Roger "Super" Snell for his outstanding fielding in Left.

The "Hey! Stephanie Don't Run!" to Stephanie "Pinch 'em" Young for her confusion while pinch running.

The "Jesus Christ Our Outfielders are Overworked and Tired" to Bill "Homer" Luoma for constantly making them hustle.

The "Wow Your Elbow Looks Like Hamburger Toughguy" to Taylor "Elbow" (aka. Bushman, Nipples & Baby Hustle) Brady for well, this one's self explanatory.

The "Keepin' it Cool Under Pressure" to David "Hard" Hadbawnik

The "Gee Thanks For Showing Up" to Alls Yous "Lazy Bums" Who Didn't.

The "I Can't Give Myself an Award Although I Rightfully Deserve One" to Me, James "Miracle" Meetze.

*There were others who deserve awards but because I don't know their last names, I can't then give them nicknames, thus making the whole award thing much less amusing. Next time, I promise.

Friday, May 28, 2004

Last night, Geoff and I playing guitar and Peter Gizzi singing back-up, doing the Gizzi dance, now that was fucking hilarious. His telling us of being 18 at a Pere Ubu show and having David Thomas sign his Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

FURNITURE GALLERY
for Peter Gizzi


Through it all, it was what they said that mattered when in the dingy apartment
or at the ballpark, or at the bar where the bartender looked away.
It was what they said that drove us to eek out our lives under this American
umbrella so full of soot.
What a treasure, this small belief in the possibility of greater things, these moments
made verbs: Sitting, playing, talking, making something bright in the dim
minute, a reading lamp illuminating a dusty page.
O so many waves beating against these full hearts, resting in these modern chairs
where it was what they said that mattered.
Getting there—aside the peach-bud maker, the earth-toned willow spears as props
—is less quixotic than say, bringing someone back from the dead.
How dark history and imagining its ghosts beneath the sun, ghosts in our homes
in the works of the dead at their wooden party merged with the present.
Outside there is a sideboard without a mirror, a davenport on the landing, here
an old mattress on the floor.
These things that matter less than what they said to us in our youthful nonchalance
that we are dressed in wrappers and dust-jackets, that we are cursed to sing
nimbly toward that which we’ve almost already sung.
April was just a reference to these preternatural blooms of May we consider so delicate
upon their stalks like waiting for an idea to organize itself and whatnot.

Thursday, May 27, 2004

Saw CAT POWER last night at the Great American Music Hall. And boy was she good.

Awww man

Phish is calling it quits.
Now what are all those fried-egg-brained kids going to do? They're going to be on the friggin street corners selling post-show munchies "veggie burritos man...ganja treats!" Ahh. Why doesn't Phish buy an island with all their money and put those kids on it with all their tapes of all their shows and all their stupid prep-school hats. Ok. I had a phase where I grew dreadlocks, followed the Dead and then Jerry died and then I followed Phish for a couple years. I am not proud of it, however "fun" it was riding around in a VW bus with a bunch of stinky kids on a lot of acid, but hey! you've got to try everything a few times. Needless to say, I'm now entirely against hippie idealism and drug use. Besides, Phish lost their edge after "Billy Breathes".

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Went to see Jim Jarmusch's new/old Coffee and Cigarettes last night with Peter Gizzi, Aaron Kunin and Dan Fisher but we were out of luck.

40 minutes in to the feature, a series of vignettes filmed over what must be 20 some odd years, the projector went on the fritz. The theater offered consolation tickets as they should. Then YaY! the film came back! For 15 or 20 minutes and then got a little shakey and SIZZLE! It burned up right there, metling film projected on the big screen. Bummer we missed the vignettes featuring Bill Murray, RZA & GZA, Jack and Meg White, ALbert Molina and all the other great actors featured. It was by no means GOOD Jarmusch. It was OK in a film student way. The Iggy Pop/Tom Waits vignette was funnily rife with tension, Iggy seeming somewhat starstruck at having coffee w/ Waits.

THE SOLID FIGURE

the pressure of not knowing but caring.

—Ann Lauterbach

Solid only as a photograph is the solidification of something mutable or movable
in time and the specificity of its form can be fleeting as we often shift.
She as a child outdoors and she with a child before a door and she wanting a child
for whom to make a bird in a landscape of statuary.
A child asleep and a man at his table by the sea, mere replicas of one another, she
would like to make a home for each in whatever available field.
If in a solid picture we would admire the light and shadow or the thing itself she
most desires—a place to rest and a body, warm beside her.
As it says, I am mutable and that’s true but a night that doesn’t change from violet
to black, solid as a photograph and migratory as a constellation of geese
is a knight not worth his rescue.
This symmetrical deal, its odd bird-forms of currency, a generous gift of urgency
that we will seal with an embrace at the door of the loneliest poet.
To say rendexvous means we’re playing at a gesture that would be our way of saying
a poet need not be alone to create a solid figure from the materials at hand.
Spread across the floor, her categorical images in beautiful disarray are not a sign of
being chaotic, no, they demonstrate a will to harness the chaos of the daily
milieu like rounding up children at nap-time.
Where we come together with paste, a starling among Romanesque colonnades
and a girl with her tiny girl-hand held aloft as if to say I am your perch.
We come together where the water seems to lengthen and a toy ship is but toy
on a roiling paper sea, where a boy atop a cliff sings the ship safely to
its harbor, the town borders it ablaze.
She is a solid thou, a siren without harmful intentions the way she softly calls
attention to this sad ambit, these western states uncrossable.

I AM AN IDIOT!

I have to completely re-typeset the Albuquerque and Central New Mexico chapter that I've been working on ALL day because somehow, a full page map disappeared. What a waste of time!!! Anyone want to pay me to complain about typesetting? I'm a professional.

THEM WHO ARE TOO CROWDED TO LISTEN

There is real pain in not having you
just as there is real pain in not having poetry.
—Spicer

Would they understand so simple a thing were it not born between two machines.
Or would they listen to your chest, hear the house that resides there, and be unable
to envision it furnished.
These wires connecting two distant voices are not the illness they might imagine.
I am writing this in lieu of a letter, to them who are too crowded to listen because
it is what I know to say.
If talk could afford to provide a cushion on which to sit, we could all be less
like narcissus and for a moment look away.
I sing the body acoustic so they may find what they will in these pockets of information
attached to a name, a face.
It’s ok. There is difficulty in what can’t be defined but when they arrive at a vision
the unstructured form that exists here could be made clear.
What should be silenced at the cost of language for fear of unknowing is the doubt
in language and its faculty.
Art is made of it, we listen to what the pictures say and we understand artifice
as a construct as this is a construct.
But what is said means everything for our words are not lightly thrown and when I say
I would do anything, I mean I would come to you as proof.
For now these machines are what keep us human. The grass we might walk on
is out front, the opal sky above, some magnolia trees providing shade.

Thursday, June 03, 2004

Again, I can't seem to get the form to come out right with these poems on the new Blogger interface, it just mangles the line. Basically, each line that carries over is supposed to be indented. But this is it. Amplifier in all it's finished glory.

AMPLIFIER


Is it too much to say, too brutal an obsession, to say that this is a system or love
under a persona, without shroud of rote obscurity.
It is something of impossible scale. An oblique penumbra I might call she who accepts
an arrow, someone else’s dream. O you look so impressive, through the hole
in the wall.
The empty space through which I see you, a lover in someone else’s hand, the space
of an hour or an hour within a life is more than you’ll ever know.
More than you can fill with the noise of excursion, the noise that inhabits our differences
and makes us weak with dancing.
I will work until the work is done, is electric, though the work is never really complete
not as long as life wades on into a sea of forms.
The easiest form in truth occupies the divine conundrum to be disproved
when all else is beleaguered by time.
One could say, no love in language better stated than muteness, everything in subtext
in what wasn’t said.


The boys in their suits for swimming forget to drown in romance before entering
the water; they can only splash around, never knowing the difficulty in
staying afloat.
The sky above them is everything they might one day understand, the boys sing
their songs as if it were necessary, as if they knew the sea.
I was watching them and I was them, bundled in masculine nonchalance, asking,
was there ever a boy that I wasn’t?
I remember being so many that the quality of the copy wasn’t worth listening to
and I had to go back to the beginning, relive myself from scratch.
The boys are still swimming, still playing in the field with rocks, getting all banged up
over what they don’t yet know.
They’ll keep to themselves or one of them might venture out to where the water
is above his head.


Do you still leave the ruin of morning on your shocked lips, the charge
eagerly rushing through them as you sing?
This preserved form of quiet, maybe nicer a second later than it was made, when
noise equals love so complete that it feels.
Empathetic slant light coming through the shade to make a pattern, a current, feeding
the hum in the cabinet, that glossy embroidery of action.
Do you ever play the same note again and again, longing for some explosion within
the body as if music would make sense louder and more raw than a wound
if in a state of decay?
It is waiting for you to allow it a final escape into silence for sound to rise like sound
can—sorry, not sorry, this is the volume.
This is the escapade that makes one sing the natural noise of the perimeter
that reaches you in sleep.
The tympani heartbeat, the feeling electrified and tight involuntary decibels, making
one larger or louder than it is light inside this dark box.
The unwieldy illusion of song is rising from the wooden floor so be careful not
to salute the war-torn heart amidst city hostilities or sing too sadly above
your formal balustrades.


You look so alone tonight, amplified beautiful landscapes and horizons empty
around you.
Did you have a time or did you feel it in your gut, the resonating chord, the thread
strung through your each move.
Your body never stops, its amperes lighting up the room, filling everything
with indescribable sound, waves in your hair, evening in your eyes
as night falls on Oakland and I imagine you asleep.
I imagine myself happy—notes expanding—coming through the tarnished facade
only to devolve into silence.
There is a you and there is a song for you, just another love song because this body
feels like dancing, like nodding its head.
Because in everything there is intention in the way I ask to touch your lips, it is
the american way.
And now there is a song for you called Tonight the Way You Look Dying, and you
are not dying, nor are you present and it is day.


We go in, we go to places, we are saying “these are the words I so love to sing”
a deepness in the pictured air I feel windy.
I am a mark upon the metal heartstrings and I am a departure ongoing, always
in health a dirge for the accidental gentry.
I guess I wear a somber halo, for am more sensible in lament than in whimsy
like I will not see her famous hands again.
We thought the city would close its garden, lose its nighttime varnish and unveil
its myriad dispositions.
Look, a note rising into the stars, a bird singly disappearing from view into all
the flashing bulbs and neon golden signs flirtatious in the night.
We go, and are not going alone into the question, a pledge to do what was undone:
tie a bow around the plastic visage.


Our momentary lapse in adhesion only enough to realize that we had seized
the day and were continuing to seize it.
I had not felt such a perfect kiss and such impermanence in unison, in sound
as everything eventually fades because reality, Americanism, tells us so.
I cry at everything, don’t feel anything lapping at my feet, no watery child
to strike an impromptu pose.
That little death in each instant newly surprising and faltering, a little death for
every occasion, silence at the end of each.
To not be dead and not be song is to be alone as I was alone when I should
have been with you so please don’t wake me, I plan on sleeping in.
I aim to avoid the sun as it rises, to abolish the aubade or make it duller
to mimic the mournful song of birds outside my morning shoulder.
My only beloved, walking notes and nature sound: wind, muffler, jackhammer
there is no moment without feedback in nature.
When currents are conflicting and man-made sound is natural, there are vibrations
in the strings, rustling in the leaves, no difference in origin of clamor or
ideas in nature.
It is natural to play guitar to see events in any reality, what nature is: voice
in imitation of sound in nature.


I want to see her come in and sit down like she did with little noise,
as it’s hard to talk about her at all; she looks away when she listens
and doesn’t cross her legs.
She is a song is sound is an occurrence of appeal, moves closer to sound
resonant of poetry, right?
So far seems artificial, not legs slightly open but song in simultaneous play
as nature with legs both disconnected because uncrossed or
impossible to summarize.
Experience is an interpretation, not representation related to nature, sound,
attraction or the impact of legs in an event.
I don’t blame you for every chance, for an autograph so sad, for my belief
in maudlin encores and apologism; because they’re honest.
I want to be a good one, be a friend to the lonely mountain dawn in cry and rest
so don’t say sorry because I love you and can’t give you the words.


There’s no entity in anything, light coming over the stage an entity under
emotive duress.
It’s an open season point of view, a gesture in opposition to phenomena
that comes so brightly.
She is internal shapes like healing radical possibilities on edge, identified
by presence instead of her features, she don’t blame you for seeing her
in the nude.
My experience has likewise been blinded with sight so keep the lights low, so
you will see as I see the kindness in imagined spaces, her soft framed face
her horizon then obscured by fog or is foggy the horizon?
The small amplifier on stage makes big sound like purple light—horizon—
without hooks but voices to bring you in.
I am enamored with the voice leaving her face.
I never dreamed of the sea again.
Everything has something to be said for it but what of the aether?
What of the names given us at birth, no-names and the above?


Don’t be in love with the autograph of heroism, Okay, your thoughts so tender
and being made alive in witness a border of liminal marigolds.
The beach, a real border around the sea the salty madrigals are singing over:
a shoulder to cry on, no one is willing to share it.
The transience in calling from the outside or coming back, wanting to be clean
to have emotions in the overtones that shake this land with no direction
but ample time to slip away.
How different the late-night wreckage, to see the lovers in place of our hands
the sound shattered a wine glass like language can transform a room
with power or intent.
Or how quiet sitting on the floor Indian-style with legs in quiet, a sweet understated
face, no sound coming from it, breathing maybe.
But a sweet face does, it can brighten the corner of a room with presence, how I am
reminded to be accepting of death because I died in sleep from such a sweet face breathing noiselessly in explicit rest.
This memory revealed by a girl in the corner, brightening, but what is memory,
a palace in which to go some day in sleep with birdsong out the window
or at night, to join sleep with birdsong.



The I in process, touching light to refer to as place or song from the heart
rising up to the sun which goes crazy instead of down.
I like to think the sun crazy in the sky, its two-dimensional exuberance having
evoked so many picnics.
Burning all night stars of sonic intervention, a small giggle, legs extended as if
to stretch what sound thumps along, aware of its own pace, its trust
in voices dispatched to ethereal heights?
We think of the world as endless if amplified, magnified birdsong a parenthetical
forest in which the wind is a testimony of endlessness.
Birdsong begins, becomes another bird’s reply, a bell, the virtue of time and final
engagement with time it takes her to extend and overlay her legs.
One barely across the other to project such meaning, on legs, of listening
to their friction, two specific legs like branches reaching for mobility.
What filler between birdsong and in the wind, slightly birdlike, a small falcon
attractive huntress whose legs are the means to an end.



This world in a wire attached to a magnet and a cone causing sound to expand
like one shaft of smoky sun coming into a forest, a ‘genesis’ of sensory
tradition arising from the soil seen from everywhere, here, at once.
Having been there and felt wind, I enact the arc, the pattern of its movement
but I don’t mean anything in particular.
Continually coming home to make noise in response to the loneliest season
when I am not paired off.
No legs to entwine in, no sound but breath what comes from the amplifier
and there are no songs about joy in spring, no bright tones other
than its color.
This until the breach of summer, the planets in whack and the feminine riddle
isn’t a riddle at all but a chance meeting.
The third time as plain as a charm in all its merriment, this metaphysical morning
when we woke, shafts of light or shafts of dark I cannot tell.
If trees were entering the apartment, the sound would be egregious, would be safely
distant or assuming egotism.
I forge ahead under a belief after many dreamed situations I find myself dreaming
in future tense as the present is perfect.
Here I am waving a sonic flag and singing our anthemic quickness, O fall in love
because it’s hazy and near.



With all these birds filling up such little space—if you listen—that’s how you sing
amazing grace or at least go on without character.
If she says it must be carefully unbound and folded into neat piles of notes, then it is
a symptom of anxiety.
I am talking about the color white, the lack of hue in your cheeks, actual color
where an expression once was.
That’s the light of truth shone on your face like the weather coming down all at once
with form and equilibrium dismantled by the opaque reflection in your eye
a cloud of dust.
The spectacle of the invisible world revealed in one ordinary blink, the world lacking
a substantial ideology other than urbanity.
You cascade beneath your dress a circle between bodies and pictures with no release
from this moment, this charm to which I am bound.