I Have Passed Along

A quiet desert as if

Robert Frost were my horse

You are my snowy woods

I mostly smile

Way to Pamela Anderson

Dare we not say you are gauche
gazing out from between the bars of the television screen
betwixt lip jobs Pamela Anderson pouts
the beach beneath her feet
all the world her magazine, she coos
trying to suddenly remember her line
as the sun licks the horizon a final time and descends
“Way to Pamela, Pamela Anderson!” someone
on the beach shouts. Pamela Anderson cannot
figure out if it’s condescension she’s
hearing or sarcasm. She raises an arm
and waves back yelling jubilantly,
“Thank you, anonymous beach person!”

Here's some other recent work up at the MiPOesias site. Thanks to the editor, Amy King. I think it's about 20 below outside right now, so I've been imagining that I'm dreaming all this. I really live in Southern California.

My poem A Heaven Beside Me is read on MiPO radio. Thank you to the host, Bob Marcacci.

It's the last piece read at the very end of the show.

Rghit

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.

Bird & Diz

Language Lariat

We must dance it
nude upon the Alps of meaning
we pirouette and tumble
upon beartraps stumble
for the air is spiny
clear and clean
if all goes well
life resembles a magazine’s
cover? But she soon
discovered it’s not
like that at all
(Summer devolves
into Fall and Winter
then comes slouching)
words can be graves
but also roses and
whenever life loses
its sheen polish
a question and let it
serve as a platter
beyond our fears.

Here's a few new poems up at Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks. No, they're not love poems.

There's a scene in 8 1/2 (that's La Dolce Vita) in which Marcello Mastroianni's character, Guido, listens to a critic's analysis and then he ends up throwing the results on the ground. When he scrambles over to pick it up after a second thought we are shown the visual representation of how most minds function. Going back and forth from feelings of independence to feelings of insecurity, ebb and flow, is a fact of life. Facing the mirror is no easy feat however. But being completely honest with oneself is the only path to freedom from our preconceptions.


Guido is a salad of confusion. He's torn between what he used to be and what he might become, and on all sides advice is offered from those who think they know what's best for him. Philosophical advice comes from critics, advice comes from his wife, advice comes from friends, advice comes from everyone with an opinion, but at the end of the day he forces his own subjectivity outward in an artistic gesture that seems futile. But in this act of creating he ultimately triumphs over futility and makes a lasting statement that outlives impermanance.

Icing the Shadows

Screen of dreams

exhale light

inhale night

supple as a lung.

It's only sunset

smoking a huge cigar.

Who

shouts

"cinema,

thief of exits!"

Carpet has a sound

is a dwarf

who needs some realism.

Orphan of speech,

said the waves, these

tears are all yours.

Major archeaological find at Stone Henge.

John Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all had something in common...Monterey, California.

Bruce Andrews : a user's guide.

Check out the innovative audiences Wiki.

Adam Fieled was here in Chicago recently for a reading at Myopic with Steve Halle. It was a great night of poetry and conversation. I'm much more familiar with the Philly poetry scene now thanks to Adam and he was kind enough to put a few poems of mine up at P.F.S. Post. Have a look, beautiful.

Big Bridge Vol. 3, No. 4

Here's my review of What's Your Idea of a Good Time? at Big Bridge.

Cate Blanchett is the most talented actress in existence (besides Meryl Streep). It doesn't hurt that she's so incredibly beautiful.

Jodie Foster is up there too. Diane Keaton is third or fourth and Scarlett Johansson would make the list. Angela Bassett would be on the list. Hmmm...can't think of anyone else right now. I've been thinking about all this because the Oscars are coming up.

Aren't very many male actors that are any good ... the best have left us. Brando, Robert Mitchum, Jack Nicholson is Mr. Hollywood but he's been laying low I guess. What has he done since "About Schmidt" ... I know he's in "The Departed," still haven't seen it. Benicio Del Toro is uberrr cool. John Malkovich (Malkovich Malkovich) ... the effervescent Mr. Depp.

Exit Thief

“Like a thief in the night, Truffaut watched ‘his first two hundred films on the sly’ by slipping into the theatre without paying through the washroom window or the emergency exit.”



*






become a detective in
your own life
digest the sky

into darkness
and silence the world
waits for us

the curtains part
to reveal the most horrific
object: ourselves

we’ve never met
do I know you, I see, uh huh
well then, ok thanks

an only mystic sunset
orphan of speech,
boy on a beach

cinema is a dwarf
smoking a huge cigar who
shouts

lends just enough
knife-edge ambiguity,
who needs realism

thief of exits, my
tears are all yours
said the waves

inhale night
exhale light
supple as a lung

carpet has a sound
we approach the
screen of dreams

the animal flickers and
awakens, do we watch
it or vice versa.

Eye

There was a sun that was not a sun and inbetween there was a sun that resembled not a sun but an infinity of other suns of infinite light and the light cast from the infinite light of that sun that was not a sun cast a light of infinite brightness that seemed an incomparable darkness because the light from this particular sun resembled no sun ever before seen. It was orange and red and sometimes purple this sun that was not really a sun and inbetween that sun the infinity of infinite suns of infinite light cast a light of infinite brightness that seemed so blinding that the people looked up at the sun that was not a sun and in the blinding light of that briliance everyone burned with a bright understanding that was not like any understanding ever before experienced because it was not even an understanding but a feeling and a warmth.

But Still We Have to Pay Taxes

In the Old Norse
tale about the candle wax
and fragrent eyes
you may have
noticed that lemurs
stacked whales in
the cold shout of
Swedenic winters
and frozen sighs
limned the dingle starry
as if you were
paper and upon your
face a poem writ
such that goblets
filled with celestial
spit descended
angelically from
gypsy skies.

Of Foreign Coins

Twice in the final hour a French
horn will crow. Examine the bark
of trees. At a ceremony to celebrate
oblivion, a peal of thunder
was birthed into meaning.

Two eagles descended, lapping
the horse that won the race of existence.

A loud voice: On the final day
of snow, flutes and whistles slowly
circle weeping caballeros.

To sublet summer
there are twelve silences
and two lambs.

A hand claps the thirteenth
silence, as if a shell upon a liquescent beach.

Planted in a field against a shadow,
a priest spun webbed echoes the size of
Easter. A new constellation, itself backward,
now drips upon the pavement
electronic obsidian.

Contrabandista

Once inside the mist gathers
investigating the singular, its velvet passing

in this neck of sun some blossom mourns
I’ve known hopes crushed, still the depth of margins murmurs

what I cannot say thickens like approaching sleep
but a wall runs along my mind

the firm ring of memory
a wreath of saviors

If the present moment
has already happened, this excerpt tunnels

image of white saxophones playing taps
a blindfold caves in

some city, bleached and perfect
pause breathe think


My eyes fill with tears
I’m sensitive as an old typewriter
families bark in minivans
chopping down the shadows

I rooted for the ants I read about technology
the carnage just sits there from tomorrows news and

Columbus
deserves a massive parking ticket


when will someone notice me
for being so allusive

the source of this "wisdom"
The denouement was

pages of strange velocities


tell them that
maintaining leaves me
certain that words have claws.

Song of Breath

Blue, as wintry women swimming invisible

one ghostly curtain and a herd of thunder

degrees cooler than a nail in September

pause

quince backward into the light

the behavior of teeth is balsamic glittering

sprouts wings

the future waits unexpected, your eyes are

starlings kisses

anthologize for the sake of bells, among bees

tansy carrot, the absolute formula for

delirium gives a distant lust

at the end of a dark pier

not of stone, our tongues are on



form your hands into afternoons

gulp the liquid waiting

there and hear

me barely

breathing.