flip flip

flip flip… Continue reading...

1998 WAS A GOOD YEAR

From the spoils of hate—
into hate’s barn
unshackle a mouse of shame
Salt is one
mean keen blade,
my vision dries up on me tenfold
hate builds a reef, lips gleam like fine ice
yech, not a rusty crust
for the tongue in its cage, the air
the water, my eyes paint with
all things crystallized, salt is one thorough bug
It’s not as though every day is ice:
both before and after seem splendid—wild ice—
at the moment I’m a frenetic xylophone of fire
but as to… Continue reading...

Edouard Manet
He drew Baudelaire’s shoes
I found them beautiful
I found them in Clingancourt
He drew a clochard’s shoes

Like the king’s slippers
in Rabat
He climbs into the pumpkin patch

You can see Mexico
You can hear Quetzalcoatl
Chewing bread in the Zocolo

And the good people laughed at him
In fact they spit on him
For painting a bum… Continue reading...

All the signs here say

Watch It for Flying Eggs!

and the tent string turnip pawns pocket of a Queens
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bound clown, eating noodles w/a fluke

in a toothpaste tube
bodysock                                    deep in the pocket of the D
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MZ

blowing tin cans… Continue reading...

All things are flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our glaze.
—Ezra Poundcake

I plug into the wall and all my memories and the danger
light up my brain, get mixed up in one light
mess—like a fly by night carnival ride spinning so
fast it would kill you or at least make you sick to death.
Over the shoulder under the awning and into the churros

cleats, vomit in the brainwork, the single file of dream
extras with their clay thunder faces waiting on Fully
Sitting Duck to reel the last crew of kids halfway to… Continue reading...

I’m just sitting here thinking

trees have leaves, there are billions of people on Earth,
everyone’s perambulating and vibrating, everyone’s alive
at the same time, people die and are still alive in many ways
in thoughts and dreams. After shooting an episode of The
Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason had a bowl of Borscht then
got into a Bentley smeared with glassine lamplight, there
were specs of dust on his vest, the window on the sound
stage gave onto a wall, moonlit Inspiration for every sitcom
to be. Continue reading...

The incredibly glamorous lives of poets who are friends with poets
and artists lost for days on a trail which autopsy will never signpost

sitting around lofts or suites crazy-expensive while heat pipes clang
in blankets that belonged to their grandmas, underground trains

of state in their spit shining long limbs of eek wild onion
politico fasts—in love in long conversation regarding the destruction
of stupidity by impossible means at hand, art, since everything we say wakes
up to the skeleton and the snow we had no idea started… Continue reading...

The U.S. Economy is a thing that has no meaning to me.
It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t exist really.
Poverty exists.
The U.S. Economy isn’t a thing at all.
Why do we always talk about it?

“My wallet is raining on your purse…”

“The drops take so long to fall—”

Is the length of the trip really the point?
In this case, yes. Continue reading...

A HISTORY OF THE ROSE IN EXILE

(BY WAY OF BILL BERKSON)

“Jay DeFeo’s The Rose (1958-1965), a thickly incrusted
impasto painting featuring a sculptured starburst motif,
is the visual masterwork of the Beat era, a painting whose
spiritual aura and commanding physical presence make it
one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.” *

Ten years it hung
in an art college classroom. No one wanted it,
no one wanted to get rid of it
either. Continue reading...