Here’s an interesting link to two contrasting translations of the recent bin Laden tape.

I find the distance between these two fascinating. The difference between “If you do not attack us” and “If you do not play havoc with our security,” for instance. Subtle but telling.

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Tonight, I did what I always do: I dressed up as a normal person and sat outside with my guitar playing bonehead arrangements of John Prine and Townes Van Zandt and Joan Baez and Robbie Robertson for the neighbor kids while I handed them candy.

I also figured out an even more dumbass version of “Time Warp.” Lemme be clear, it’s not a great acoustic arrangement candidate. In case you were wondering.

The girl who figures prominently in my poem “Dispatch From the Home Front” came by and said she’d seen me reading the poem on TV.

I asked her if she liked it. She said yes, and then asked me to play the song for her again, the one I’d played back in 2001, the one I quote in the poem.

That was “Ripple,” by the Dead. So I did. She thanked me and left.

I suspect it’s her last year trick or treating with the young kids we get here; she was dressed as a “pirate lass” (I asked her) and the outfit was far more sexy than scary.

She was, in fact, the last trick or treater of the night. Seems about right.

Happy Samhain, all.

So.

There I was in the bunny suit again,
having an out of bunny experience,
seeing my own ears ruffled
by the breeze as I floated above me, lying
there on the tar all flat and freshly
killed.

How many incarnations
had it been — ten, twenty — since
I began this bunny cycle? All were short
and filled with babies and copulation —
and oh, the copulation:
it was a pleasure each time to be born
and see the bunny suit waiting and know
that puberty lay just weeks ahead.

So, there I was in the bunny suit again and
it had ended about the same as always and I
expected to end up back in a bunny suit again
as always when the Director of Lives stuck his head in
and said what I’d been dreading:

“Congratulations! You’ve been promoted.”

Well, how they think this is a promotion is beyond me:
no wiggling nose, no cute tail, at least eleven more years
before they’ll even let me think
about getting busy. No speed, can’t turn on a dime,
no ears to speak of and
if I even look like I want to burrow in the yard
they haul me in and wash me hard enough to scrape the fur off me —
if I did have it, that is.

So
I dream of the bunny suit
and talk to myself about the bunny suit because
I cannot explain the bunny suit to anyone, and
I know from past experience that it’s futile and
any day now, I will forget it ever happened —

except, maybe,
when
I run.

Thought you might find this enjoyable…nicked from Rich Villar.

http://www.stlconfluence.org/article.asp?articleID=205

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On what seems, somehow, to be a related note, the new Zero Point Zero is up…a gentle comparison of poetry and masturbation.

Trying to take the high road in my last few columns.

Please, dear readers, be good enough to lend a hand to my efforts here .

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And then there were seven…only seven more columns left.

Still thinking about how to end this. Thoughts?

grey reeds grow taller now
on a dune spilling across
an abandoned landing strip. a wrecked

hangar clanking in a late fall wind
sounds like a bell to
come home, though there’s no home here.

if there are traces of
any planes at all they’re invisible,
except maybe for those two long tire marks

that curve out into sand from a
cracked runway, and those might be from a car,
some locals dragging here after sundown years ago.

do I miss departures and arrivals? hardly; I would settle for
settling here: make myself a shelter out of these ruins
and hunker down. it’s a dark world

outside these gates. you can’t really fly anywhere
these days that doesn’t smell like abandonment. instead,
I’ll sit down, build a fire, get comfortable with discomfort.

maybe, though,
I might dare to hope
to be spotted by

some last adventurer who’ll touch down lightly and let me board
as if nothing had changed here, as if we could still
go up expecting to come down to something we could recognize.

Well, ok, I did.

But I’m back.

What happened while I was gone? Did the Sox win? (Yes, that’s a joke. I was in Provincetown, not Papua New Guinea.)

Is jbradley getting his pretty on? Is he a summer or a fall?

Didja miss me? I missed you. And I brought presents for everyone. Except I ate them all already.

Hit me, my people!

we’re here till morning, so time for another post.

The Sox win another. I find I’m keeping the running box score window from SI.com open, just to make sure I can speak defensively about the games to people as they happen.

Working on a really interesting project that popped up in the last two hours — a solicitation to read at the Mystic Arts Cafe in Mystic, CT — a prestigious (read: stuffy and fairly academic) series that has traditionally scorned slammers, with the exception of Taylor Mali. They want samples, so I’m scrambling to send them something before I hit the sack.

I’m beat, but have a lot to do. Drop me a line, I need the distraction.

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By the way, since I deleted the other post: I’m leaving in the morning for a week away. Won’t be back till next weekend. Have fun.

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When I grow up
I want to be a gun
big enough and loud enough
that my son can say
“I am a son of a gun”
with the straight face
he inherited from me

Want to blow things up daily
while smelling vaguely of hell
Want to bark like a colonial relic
and figure my worth
in trajectories

When I am not a man
I still like to think I could be a gun
deathless by myself and useful
to a cause or two or more
When I am not a lover
I like to imagine a harem of daggers
with me the gun glinting thickly among them

When I am sad
I am the thin .22
When I am angry
I am the hot .44
When I am most human
I am a scope and crosshairs so
nothing need be done dirty and close

I wish I was the gun I see
at my head when I awaken
in the night
I wish I owned my fate as he does

Thought you might want to get a look at the family.

Callie, the Evil one…AKA “Kali”, goddess of destruction

Icchus, the 20 pound wonder. AKA “Big Boy”

Josie, world’s greatest cat…mother to the other two.

These were taken on one of their rare, supervised forays to the backyard, where they immediately go hide under cars and hang out till I go get em and bring them in.

It’s about music and poetry, again; something of a personal nature that explores the relationship between my guitar playing and my poetry a little more deeply.

Filled, as well, with my usual cranky asides designed to piss off an open mike aficionado or two.

Go here for a look.

__________________________________________________________________________

And while we’re at it — the blurbs aren’t pouring in. Jeez, I even told you you could INSULT my work and I didn’t get many!

I’m hurt. Shocked, and hurt. And hungry, but I think that’s unrelated.

Just in case it was because I didn’t include my e-mail address in the post, here you go:

chrysler.poet@verizon.net

___________________________________________________________________________

Finally, because it’s so silly:

The Name Meme

I’ve been thinking about the Fenway riot.

I’ve never been in a riot, although I’ve been in two political demonstrations that turned ugly (both in the 70s, one an occupation of the administration building at Umass, the other a demo at Kent State against plans to build a gym on the site of the 1970 killings — got teargassed there).

What I remember is this: that in that atmosphere, I really became clear (not for the first time ) that anyone is capable of anything under the right circumstances.

Elias Canetti, an expert on crowd behavior, has done a lot of research on the way riots begin and end…and he says that while crowd frequently begin riots as a response to the actions of a few, in full bloom people in a mob will do things they would never do in a normal situation.

Which makes it so hard to truly assign blame, in my eyes…or perhaps, it needs to be equally distributed.

OK: a small change in plans.

Looking for people to respond who want to provide a two sentence blurb for the new chapbook.

E-mail the quote back channel to my e-mail.

Two requirements:

1. You actually have to know my work.
2. You actually have to be coherent.

Note well that I didn’t say anything about the level of complimentary prose you needed to provide. Well written contumely will be considered.

The winners (?) get a copy free, or something of equal value, like a quarter.

in the wake of the Red Sox celebration was the babysitter for one of my co-workers’ twins.

Fortunately for all concerned, the mayor has assured us she was killed by a “non-lethal weapon.”

Also important: the riot cops are getting counseling.

Good to know.

What’s in the new chapbook (not in this order):

Revisiting Roses and Violets
Chrysler
Why I Left Home
Mission Statement
Punk
Seafoam Green
In America
Political Art
DIY
Poem Was a Man
Cante Jondo For the Left Side
Radioactive Artist
The Kathy Bag
Conspiracy
Getting Ahead

I know I left a lot of stuff out that people had suggested, but decided to keep it relatively small, and go for more range by including stuff from all my various chapbooks instead. There will likely be a volume 2 (which technically will be a new chapbook, and I had planned this to be the last; but I will not do another collection of new stuff, so I think this is ok) later on.

With the exception of “Cante Jondo”, this pretty much covers the bulk of my basic slam repertoire, too — so that demon is exorcised.

“Revisiting…” is also a brand new, never released anywhere else poem. Although all the regulars know it.

Some of you may be receiving e-mails shortly about possibly contributing a blurb. Stay tuned, and thank you in advance…

Just sent the text of my next chapbook off to Sou for layout.

It’s a collection of “greatest hits” as it were — poems from the last twenty years of writing.

Not a huge collection — decided to stick with a handful of pieces versus a larger collection (there will have to be a volume 2, I think).

I’ll print the list tomorrow.

Now then: gonna choose a few folks to blurb me for the acknowledgement page…

absolutely nothing of interest to say today.

Sox win? Not interested…the only person in MA, I think, who doesn’t care about this stuff.

Election? Trying not to think about it.

Work? Sucks.
Poetry? Not much happening.

Not feeling particularly up and happy, not at all.

Anything else?

No.