I have the right
to breathe if I do it quietly.
Panting makes
the body less brilliant
and more brilliant bodies make
the nation brighter.

I have the right
not to be sad. There are sad
people elsewhere, but not here.
Sadness is a function of
being elsewhere. Sadness
is a face of foreign jealousy.

I have the right
to be a foreigner if I can forget how it looks
to be one. I have the right
to pray to God in my tongue
as long as I understand that God
speaks only one.

I have the right to a homeland,
to the colors of the flag
and the afterburners’ red glare;
to smell Tibetan incense in the mall, or to marvel
at a temporary ethnic frieze
draped on the town hall.
I have the right to patriotism,
to enjoy the parade
(if not the right to admit
silently, not out loud, that
I cannot explain
why I am still applauding).

I seem to recall other rights
but they are historic
and mostly decorative.

Late at night I boil them down
and make a poultice
against the pain of missing them.

Bourbon Congratulations! You’re 123 proof, with specific scores in beer (80) , wine (83), and liquor (104).

Screw all that namby-pamby chick stuff, you’re going straight for the bottle and a shot glass! It’ll take more than a few shots of Wild Turkey or 99 Bananas before you start seeing pink elephants. You know how to handle your alcohol, and yourself at parties.

Anyone who knows me is unsurprised by this result.

suck.

Alix Olson and Pamela Means are doing a show at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore the week AFTER I’m there.

AND the Sox are playing the Blue Jays on the Sunday I arrive, but earlier than I’ll get there.

While we’re on the subject of sucking: Why are vampires considered hot? I personally think the whole concept of combining “sucking” and “really sharp teeth” is not so sexy.

I’m going to be in Toronto from late on April 11 to the morning of April 15, leaving me Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night to get into a moderate amount of trouble and (more to the point) see some poetry. An open mike would be lovely, but not really important; hearing some stuff is.

I am there for work, so no mushrooms and/or visible tattoos allowed, and I need to be somewhat stable and up pretty early everyday.

Anyone got a clue as to what’s what? PSI site has nothing. I know Talaam Acey and Saul Williams hit the area pretty regularly, so there’s got to be some scene up there.

Also: I tried to get Wetspots info from Ms. King, but nothing ever came of it. Anyone got a new e-mail?

1.
David Bowie sang “Young Americans”
endlessly with his hair dyed pure black
and his skewed eyes fixed
on the vision he’d been after all his life,
knowing that trail of shine and substance
he’d left behind surely had led somewhere
but from this end, it was hard to describe what
this place was, the long hours and crowds
vanishing in the sodium lights, Ohio a memory,
Berlin a memory, New York a future memory
and ahead only the business of describing
buses of survivors rolling on broken roads,
his wonderful hands filled with cocaine,
bruised children, the keys to buildings
unbuilt; his voice spilling out between stretched fingers.

2.
I bought all your records.
Then, you showed up
in my mom’s collection.
I owned you, damnit.
No escapes allowed.
You have ceased to be the target
I aimed at for so many years.
I won’t wear you on my mask anymore,
since she’s already there.

3.
The lost chord, as the Moody Blues called it,
was played one day in 1994 by a Winger fan
who abandoned it in favor of another speedy run
at a pentatonic box. It had edges as long
as the Lake Michigan coast and stuck into the ground
where it fell. A fault opened around the point
of entry and we fell into it one day
wondering “what is this place?” When the guitar
I was holding broke a string on its own, unplayed,
we fled. After, we tried to describe it
and decided that you couldn’t really call what it sounded like
rock, or pop, or punk, or jazz; more like volcano, or meadow,
or the burn on your elbows after sex on the carpet.
It was less music than geometry. Physics perhaps, or biology;
the striations of the voluntary muscles drawn out to breaking.
It sounded fatal. This hasn’t stopped me
from trying to play it again.

It isn’t what you’re thinking —
or, maybe it is. I don’t know
what you know about it. All I know is
when I hear the words a finish line
appears, well-defined and solid,
at the distant end of a track.

At sunrise runners queue up behind the start line
and when the gun cracks they take off
as madly as they can, never noticing
that they never get any farther along —
not that it matters. The object here isn’t to win,
it’s to run; to be in the game.

If you’re watching
from the sidelines and you want in
someone just has to offer you a number,
a lane of your own that may or may not be crowded,
a stopwatch that may or may not be set to zero.
(The word is out that you should be grateful
no matter what you get.) All you need to win this one
is to be allowed on the track,

and then they call the race on account of darkness
and hand almost everyone a medal
except you — but tell you that you get to try again,
just wait for the next dawn to come up
bright and shiny as sweat on a pale brow.

“Be patient. The race is not always to the swift,”

you are told,
I am told,
we are told
again.

Fear, for me, always has far more to do with abandonment than physical danger. I’ll risk all sorts of bodily harm before taking the risk of losing a friendship, even to the point of absurdity. Even to the point of far greater emotional harm to myself.

Stupid. Self preservation is not one of my strong points. I can’t continue to let things hurt me in the name of false peace. There are times for things to end and I must get used to that sometime. Especially as my friends and I age.

I have noticed I’m getting better about it.

And…if you can read this, it’s not about you. In fact, it’s not even really about me. More about self-examination based on observations of others.

I’ve seen you pull the coins
off your own eyes
to feed the parking meter.

I’ve seen you and the hemlock vendor
chatting idly by the door
to the stadium.

I’ve smelled a hint of cyanide on your breath
just before you popped a mint
and smiled weakly back at this life.

Maybe in your mind you always skipped the denouement
to get to the wake where people
congratulated you on how great you looked

in your someday best and painted skin.
So now, when we pull you blue and white from the water
and see you bloated here and shriveled there,

now when it’s clear that this time
it’ll be a closed box we’ll sit around
to speak of you, now I have to ask:

did all that dress rehearsal make it easier
to go down to the lake this last time,
or were you as scared for yourself

as we always were for you? Did you wonder
what we’d be saying now, or did it all pale
to white light as you sank away?

This is not the way I thought you’d go.
I expected us to laugh bitterly together
at all those attempted escapes one day.

And I may yet laugh
at you, at us, at this —
but not now, and not soon;

not as long as I can still imagine
your body, a sack of empty gestures,
pulled out to dry under a waning moon.

Is growing on me.

I may have to dig out my King Crimson “Red” album to go along with it.

I’ve never been a prog-rock fan, but there are certain albums that defy an easy genre label and my accompanying bias, and I think this one (like the KC album) is going to become one of them.

Of course, I’ve been chasing this all with a generous helping of GYBE and Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation” so it may just be the total sonic wash aspect that’s getting me.

In other music news, my cube mate has absconded with my new Hem album. Damn her! (I did hear it before it vanished…oh, “Redwing”! What a great song.)

Switching to poetry — SPEAK was fun if a little disheveled last night. badgary read cool new poems from his forthcoming chapbook, Walt premiered a new poem about a 30-.30 rifle called “The Winchester Verses” (cough), and in general things were moony and fun. New themes were picked and will be headed to the Asylum website shortly…

Meanwhile, the shifting tempos and Zep-esque vocals of The Mars Volta continue to shred the office air…

is an eternity in poet time, so: a reminder for those in the NYC environs.

I (Tony Brown, AKA Harry Christner) will be reading from my revolting — um, revolutionary — oeuvre at the Bronx Museum of Art on March 30, 2005.

In the evening. In the Bronx. In the Museum. From my own stuff.

Come by or stay home and see who wins on American Idol, thus earning our snobbish scorn.

Mom always said,
“It would be a sin to waste food when kids are starving in Korea.”

By that logic, it would be a sin to not stroke each other for hours
when dance studios are crowded with lonely people
hoping a bossa nova brings them something closer than music.

It would be a sin to not kiss
when mouth to mouth dummies lie in their cases,
imagining near drownings, their saviors chosen from long lists.

It would be a sin to not get into each others’ pants
when there are used car salesmen out there
eyeing hip pockets as if they were the heirloom rosaries
they lost before First Communion.

It would be a sin for us to miss out on this chance
when there are mulletheads standing drunk and alone
as the DJ blasts Loverboy to herald last call.

It would be a sin to not discover the depth of the way we taste
when there are diners sniffing unpleasantly at their wine,
too afraid of ridicule to tell the server they don’t like it.

It would be a sin to not eat what’s in front of us
when there are club kids on X
starving in Chicago.

It would be a sin to not fall asleep together
when we can. It’s a sin that I even have to say this:
it’s a sin to look at each other this way
without immediately
closing our eyes.

One day I’m going to own these walls
and floor. Tear out the carpet
in favor of fur. Strip all the paint
in favor of bark. I want it sexy enough in here
to make no one want to work harder than I do.
Give me this boneyard and I’ll hand you back a farm.

One day I’m going to be a wheel
someday rolling across the plains
spinning past the desert’s hollow cheeks
all the way from this town to the far coast
and on into the waves.

One day I’m going to never have a bad day at work again
and it will not be my idea when I go, it’ll just be
the only idea anyone has for how to handle my impossible
beauty and lean tongue. Till then I don’t want to hear anything
that isn’t a come-on. I don’t want to do anything
that isn’t a faceplant. I don’t want to, bastard,
I don’t want to.

New/old purchases:

New:
Mars Volta, “Francis the Mute”

I may be giving this one away. It was only 7 bucks, though, so I may try to grow into it.

Hem, “Eveningland”

I loved “Rabbit Songs” so much I can’t wait to dig into this.

Repurchase:

Godspeed You Black Emperor! “lift yr. skinny fists like antennas to heaven”

Last year, I lent my entire GYBE! and A Silver Mt Zion collection to a work acquaintance who promptly moved to Portland, OR. I have mourned this ever since and never got around to rebuilding the collection. I have officially started.

In the guitarish meantime, I’ve been trying to work up arrangements of “Ballroom Blitz” on my ancient (1920s) black slide guitar and of “Dance Away” by Bryan Ferry on my usual instrument. The Ferry song’s pretty much done; the Sweet will take a bit more work but when it’s done it orta be…well, sweet. In a totally bizarre sort of way.

Some reasons added up. Careful; some nastiness therein.

bipolar