the vuvuzelas are coming!

i can hear them from the roof and down the street or swarming up the ventilation shaft.

leaves rustle and i pause to listen, to enjoy,
to reflect on some madeleineousness gone by--
but whatever, almost conjured, is resubmerged becuzza that
bbbfrrt bbbrrft bbbrrfffft-ing, damn you.

i turn off the shower, and hovering just above the fresh-wet silence: bbbfrrt.
i fling open the window to let some air in this sweat mine: bbbrrft.
i lift my fingers from the keys and, in among the empty staves ballooning near my ears:

a jerky vuvuzela slither:
bbbrrffft.

Something New?

the first breath of life, for this new little blog, was taken in conjunction with A Bulbous Gold Goblin Blog:

The Static Sound

may its breathing be as voracious as this beast....

Ween Concert Highlight

"And with just one faint glance back into the sea . . . it put's the lotion in the basket or it gets the hose again!"

--Gener, during "The Mollusk"

Traditional Irish Ballad #1

flip the intrepid

populate

scree

rough and ready

as Coltrane

reed

scr/

rupulous

lech

pre / late

offers confession from 9 to 5 (oh and its ALWAYS live)

&& the seed (of an idea

an inkling

of

an inkling

of an i-day

but if it's ramblin / rovin / football / courtin

drink black porter

fastas yill fill

Muskerry Sportsman

Bold Thady Quill

)

it could be otherwise

but, basically

were you at the Rock?

summer fucked

this corona is lukewarm
and the condensation's gone.
it's 90 degrees inside
my apartment, and the sun is down.


34 hours till i move out.
28 craigslist responses:
7 were legit, 4 want to meet.
there can be only one.


i told them all to come
at the same time tomorrow.
i might get drunk and propose
a highlander-style duel.







i'm all wet and melty and
my beer's got the sweats.
yesterday's hangover's
still goin' strong... ...

My Kitchen Smells of Rot

“Everything’s moving.”

her labored breathing,

“You’ve had one drink, sweetest pea.”

like a sigh, she starts to say something about tomorrow.

Is there any poetry

any atoms of poetry

to look at girls’ profiles

on OKCupid.com

it’s so hot

and the sky and that it’s all yellow

the yellow of some sick storm that’s passed

it was yellow when I looked

and yellow now cut with dark

and I’ve yet to find anyone

I look ‘til dark is cut with yellow

then out the stars

I’m looking by starlight

a search for riverbed baskets, subaqueous

weighted by smoothed breasts

licked by waves

or not by me, anyhow

I listen for the bubbles on the water’s surface

that’s how you know

cut my foot on the nipples

try to pry open the window,

it’s so hot

goddamn,

here:

I’ll put on our favorite record once more

and as it spins I’ll kiss you

I’ve never been to Humboldt Park

I’ll never stop looking

for it would be as a shark who stops swimming, dying,

no matter how few atoms of poetry are in it

we’ll taste them together, the record aspin, the taste of aspic.

Whomsoever Rides the Train

You’ll feel the train coming before you hear it. You’ll hear it before you see it. You’ll see the metal tracks beyond it illuminated by its headlamps before you see the train itself. Then you’ll see the train. It comes round the bend. Electric, it sends shocks of light up into the air underneath its skates, as it bears to stop, so eager to continue, to arrive at Southport, Fullerton, the others. The stops aren’t its many homes; they are its numbered haunts, and it patrols them like the night watchman. It makes the noises of motion and nothing else. Except once, below the cranks, my ear pressed to a wooden plank, I heard it let a simple gasp, and then a recovering cough.

desperately seeking subleaser

today my roommate
reached the edge,
balanced on two--on one
tricycle wheel,
slipped and fell.

roadrunner,
watch that whistling
speck until--
SMACK, poof.
then flee the scene.

now troll craigslist:
refresh page every 4 minutes,
rifle through inbox
while holding breath.
this time, this time.

this time i've got you.

Confessions

All girls all over the world
Original Mad Stuntman upon your case, man
I love how all girls move them body
And when you move your body
Gonna move it nice and sweet and sexy, alright?

Woman you cute and you don't need no make up
Original cute body, you make a man mud up

WOMAN! Physically fitter, physically fitter
Physically, physically, physically fitter
WOMAN! You're nice, sweet, fantastique
Big ship on the ocean is a big Titanic

I like to move it move it
I like to move it move it
I like to move it move it
You like to . . . MOVE IT

Canto I continues unabated

More from Canto I of Dante's Inferno


It was the first full hour of morning / the one when I don’t
want consciousness or green tea, rising bad as cream curdling
was the sun, hugging and kissing / grotesquely fondling the
lipid stars that filthily rose with him in ecstasy,
with the first shift and shake of heavenly hips: full of the hope of-
what filled me / queer yet beautiful skin
Of my prismic shifiting Panther, the dawn ripples the scavenger
and the season of the bitch. My joy was lost in view of fine, curling
locks, when the little lion man, big-hearted bastard, walked into my
flickering 8mm frame.

He was, like, ravenous & kept his head high,
even tho’ he licks the lichen from Formica streets.
A lupine lady, franc – o – phone / oh frank/ o’ hara and all frank spencer/
There was a want in her frame, disconsolate had she made many a barren, treeless hologram graphic. Small / formidable/ I was shitting myself eagerly in spite of her size.
I had, then lost, then wept and the floor was florid with my tears:
Sprinkling with sodium down a guttural utterance drain;
I was driven into night-time and made to wait there.

Somewhere / in a kind of hollow / a remorseless pit
I dropped and my head / sizeable but muddled /
caught, y’know, a shadow, with a crackling shellac’d voice, made
/ scratch/ from over-song and warping in the heat.
In the vastness I caught strains of his ballad
-Spirit or Living, whatever you be – I howled
– Take mercy on me –

Riposte: "Not now a man, man once I was,
And born of Lombard parents, Mantuana both
By country, when the power of Julius yet
Was scarcely firm. At Rome my life was past
Beneath the mild Augustus, in the time
Of fabled / false/ deities A bard
Was I, and made Anchises' upright son
The subject of my song, who came from Troy,
When the flames prey'd on Ilium's haughty towers.
But thou, say wherefore to such perils past
Return'st thou? wherefore not this pleasant mount
Ascendest, cause and source of all delight?"

"So are you that Blondell / minstrel man /
Flooding the static ether with your songs?"
Bashful and ranting, I spoke on –
"I always search out your records and my train has finally slept
and I can comb over you track for track - Legba and my Light!
I use your melodies and your chords / at court/ with fame and dexterity;
Look past my shoulder slung with song and see the Aquitaine who chases me
Sing a song / to revert other, I guess, siren-like and steam her howling away!

Everything that beets / beeps/ and flickers in my frame is rattled –
Soft salts began to liquid and drip my eyes, he answer'd, "Go another way
, if you want to be away from the trees/ the wild barren plains of my song /
Scream and this woman but you want pass the test / acid test/
To pass, whatever y’do, for fuck’s sake, don’t die:
Her evil will is never sated,
her gluttony is disgusting / untempted as she is by chains /
A sick and twisted marriage she manages with beasts of multiple feathers and fancys / disgusting and preying in her deprivations and captures
And will many more till the Greyhound bus will come and destroy her with a blunt and full pain. Great & gleaming His support will not be in the gravel /or the sand/
Or shiny steel glass of the new city on the hill
but by love,Wisdom, and virtue, and his land shall be
The land 'twixt either pelt.
Under his watch shall
safe Sherwood plains arise,
For whose fair realm, Camilla, virgin pure,
Nisus / athlete and stealer of drinks /
Euryalus / the pugilist / the peer of murderous Ares /
and Turnus / fierce King Rutuli / fell.
Ever chasing through every town
Shall worry, until he to hell at length
Restore her, when first envy loosed.

I think it would better, yeoman,
that my tracks you trace, when I bring you over the vastness
of the space, hearing as you go shrieks and shrivels of desperation
&& see old spirits tormented / tangled / invoking miserable states
Of Revelation;

Next peel eyelids to them who dwell
Contented in fire, bruning hopefully / hapless beggars forgotten/ to come
when the time gets to be that chime, among the lucky,
And if you want to tunnel further / bring a better Davy lamp /
Ascend with someone who has more &&
in whose charge, when I spin off,
you’ll be left: for that Almighty King, with the lion-locks
Who reigns above all and every, a rebel to his law, like you to yours
Has made the undelegated decision that
That to his city none through me should come.
In all the provinces sky or dust he holds sway;
Rules there hold / gripping / often grasping
His citadel and the City / the land of twisted April bankers/
Happy and lucky if he is your friend in his City – Robin spoke few words: -
Bard && Minstrel Man by that Lion, whose songs you’ve not sung ,
I beg you / penny for the ferry please / to lead me, where you say,
That I Saint Peter's gate may view, and these poor who I need to see –

He moved on / I pursued /

overheard at Navy Pier

"Water's like my favorite thing in the world! Do you know that Brad Paisley song, 'Water'?"


(Actually, it's a pretty cool video and a decent song)

got that cloblock

i've got the bloc

What are Bill Cosby's favorite deadly sins?

Jello-sea and Glutin-y!

droid quote of the "week" # 4 (with a demonstration of Droid's search algorithm)

"Answer the question, 'What's going on?' with the utmost certainty of what actually is."

Answer the question, "Who's your daddy?" with the utmost certainty of "who actually is your daddy" with the utmost certainty of "who actually is incontrovertibly your daddy" with the utmost certainty of "who actually converted to Diddy" with the utmost certainty of "who used to be P Diddy" with the utmost certainty of "who was once Puff Daddy" with the utmost certainty of "who was born Sean Combs" with the utmost certainty of what actually is.

A Night In Israel, Chapter 1

It’s an insufferably sweltering night in Jerusalem, the broken air unit in our share of the Hotel Leonardo a real contributor (that narrow, balding building with permanently fogged windowpanes and exotically graffitied epistyles, the one erected next door to the faded landmark hotel, like an ugly younger sister who stands always to the side of the beautiful girl, a hand on the shoulder and grey, crossed eyes askance at the floor . . . the landmark hotel’s name I registered once, briefly, a name I’d picked up in a short story, I think of Camus, and set aside, now scurried soricine across my tongue, while we, the fifty postgraduate, Chicago-homed Americans lazing aboard Bus Tour Group 747, crossed the suspension bridge and sighted the grand opulence of a place we would not repose this night nor ever, then forgot the pretty image entirely once the autobus moved along, beyond the vestiges of splendor [speaking of Jerusalem] - upon seeing where we would be staying - the Hotel Leonardo erases one’s mind like that).

In the lobby we received roommates, three to a plot, preordained from a folded up list taken from the taskmaster’s pocket, room keys, and instruction. “There is to be none of this, all of that.” A schoolchild again at twenty-three. No bother. The tour guides left to consider the Torah in their flannel pajamas and gauzy bed sheets while the group of tired half-Jews, still strangers despite the transatlantic flight and the endless layover in Frankfurt (of all places), the oily clothes and the bloodshot eyes, descended upon the unsuspecting lobby bartender en masse, where the Israeli man, in the nick of time, began at once to overcharge everybody. Israeli beer – there is nothing to say. We drank and spoke and I didn’t like many of the people. I’ve known them all my life without knowing anyone presently gathered and I didn’t like them then, either. It occurred to me thusly that this would be too long of a trip, that ten days would leave me in shambles, cracks in the frame that guards my tissue paper organs, that I should have talked a friend into coming along, if only for an echo of commiseration. If only, if only. The words spoken were formulaic. I feel like I don’t even have to expand upon what that means. I’ll say this: if I’m ever forced to discuss once again the television shows we watched as children, or the linguistic derivations of soft drink appellations betwixt neighboring cultures, I might start a fire.

Around one in the morning, Jews began to retire for their first night’s rest in The White City, one of the holiest municipalities in all the world. How would we sleep? I think if you’d asked me then, I would answer correctly, “Without grace.”

The boys who’d slumber beside me were all right enough on first glance - dark everywhere but in their pale skin, their curly hairs tangled from the strain of travel, clouded by the shadows of beards that would pursue their faces like kudzu for the rest of their lives. They were tired, like me, and reasonably unsure about the warm hotel room and the startling proximity of our beds. We, like men, set out to move them (the beds) as far apart from the others as we could, but this wasn’t far at all. We showered, separately, under a detachable showerhead that was too small for its sheath, such that it rattled and slipped onto our heads from its own whimsical exertions. So I stood with one arm raised above me, holding up the showerhead, while the other arm roamed for packets of liquid soap and shampoo that I tore open with my teeth and ably dispatched onto my face and eyes and mouth. The showerhead bounced along the bathtub floor, retching, while I clawed at my face. Scraping is a most hygienic sound.

In bed, in the swelter, I’d manage a light doze with the abetment of the pills young Americans stuff into their carry-ons like candies into pillowcases on Halloween; these are brim-stuffed carry-ons, the pills bursting forth into the world upon unzipping, piñata-like. Pillowcases stuffed so tight that they’re piñatas. On the airplane, as a first icebreaker, before names are traded, they barter with each other: Quaaludes for bennies, all that old hat. My family-sized Tylenol p.m. smokestack went unnoticed; it is the candy corn of barbiturates. But in icebreakers, the lonely go out on limbs and are received there, trembling in the wind, and I scored three Ambien and earplugs to boot. That night I would take half of a pill. They are so small, those Ambien are, and I wanted to eat the very bag they came in, but I had already in my mind the notion of ten days and the nights that would follow them.

At four a.m. on the sixth floor of the Hotel Leonrado, I was roused.

Terrestrial

All poetry is

doosh-wafting at

various frequencies.

Some can

waft so well they

catch a blister

of air and

shimmy up

to the nimbus,

like some

vaguely disoriented

turkey.

But most just flutter their

little doosh pockets and

keen some

terrestrial dirge.

I bet Nietsche

took a dump

with dignity.

let's talk cellulite and varicose veins

A First Foray into The Inferno

Segment of Canto I of The Inferno


Shove off, shove off me midway stream that I am,
I found myself amongst the horrible holographic trees,
Astray / Askance / And with no direction home:
build a ballad of the grand bois, how savage wild
That forest, robust / rough/ its growth,
Death before a melody like that again and other “thoughts”
Uncovered / unclothed/ uncouth/ restlessly relayed

The first steel door I can’t remember
Hazelight eyes plumbed my scope
when I left the high street
Kicking up against the mountain toe
The spread that pierced my heart needling /dread/
Burly brawd shoulders / brimming / I saw
dressed in the light of earthly colour / trees/
Bus driver who doesn’t steer you wrong

Something to get me over / a drug for e.g. /
the flickering agony in the pit
that came out of that nightime-like / pissed/ fully passed
Like a panting sailor running quick the other way,
Shanty && Sherry to his lips
I gazed out into the empty lots and Unreal City
Now empty of Spirits and Wine
Struggling with terrors / went looking for the straits,
seeing more life than what I’ve left behind.
Worn my frame / fraying at the edges /but complacent again /
I turn back to sleep and twitter in the peaks.

I’d rather run the fuck away. The climb up the charts had barely begun
When I saw a panther, nimble and made of light / prismic/
speckles of the sun in its skin making itself Houdini,
Determined to find my feet and chew them
With paranoid perception I re-traced and re-traced my
Thrashing steps.

see salty sea, man, see

tonight at the pool halls,

circling sharks eyeball

hooks that dangle--

sharp, waiting to rust.

shut up about age, oil spills, weather and logging.

just murmur at the soft spot

on my neck and yes and yes and

another switchback lager, please.

someday i'll be a shark:

deadly, unblinking. steady...aim...

for now i spend my time near land.

caught in the breakwater, his bed, his favorite bar.

someday i'll win back my money,

stop fishing and swim.

but for now, i'll chum the wake

and look back, hoping to see...

we could make a day of it

your hair smells of shells

like your tongue is an slippery oyster pulled over mine

breasts are mounded salt deposits-

-I could go on, how the sea tastes

but you’ve never been to the ocean

I have

how I have