A full night of insomnia, coupled with and possibly caused by a severe headache, followed by a full eight hours of running a training session, followed by an evening event, followed by running another full day of training tomorrow.
I’m SO looking forward to this. See you tonight…wish me well.
Michael Brown did a great set to a packed house…as it should be, hint hint to those who didn’t make it.
Next week: Sam Teitel and Steve Subrizi. Be there.
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Since everyone else is mentioning theirs…got a Pushcart Prize nomination for "Where Do You Live?" from Sacred Fools Press; it appears in the new "Appleseeds" anthology. Two years running now…nice to be noticed.
Brutal headache — headed for bed. See you later, y’all.
OK. Election, Veterans’ Day, and the Thanksgiving holiday are over. You have no excuse about not being there tonight, none whatsoever.
GotPoetry Live welcomes back veteran poet, editor, and teacher Michael Brown from the wilds of Maine to our humble digs tonight, Tuesday, Dec. 2.
We’d love to see you there and hear your words…
GotPoetry Live
at Blue State Coffee
300 Thayer Street
Providence, RI
Sign up list goes up at 7:30; reading begins at 8 PM sharp. We end by 9:30 or so, so be there early and be heard…
— I rarely enjoy going to poetry readings any more, including my own. Someone astonish me, please. Make me recall why I cared so much about all this. I’m getting far more joy from reading poetry these days, and far more agita from hearing it. I am holding out some hope for enjoying the poetry at IWPS, but I’m not overly optimistic.
— The fact that a microblogging client is called "Twitter" is indicative of the essentially banal nature of the service. Why does everyone think they’re interesting enough to be telling everyone about themselves incessantly? A culture of narcissists gone wild…trust me, very few of us are that interesting. (By the way, I have a Twitter account. I haven’t used it since I first experimented with it…the best technology I’ve found to record my random thoughts is still a notebook and a pen, which I always have with me. Twitter makes it damn near impossible to delete an account…so yes, I still have one. But don’t bother following it.)
— Inaccessiblilty will be the next big trend. People turning off their cell phones, smartphones, etc., and becoming inaccessible will be trendy because everyone’s got them now. I am planning to lead the way. I’ve decided not to upgrade to any kind of smartphone as a result.
— The two things you need to do if you want to affect change in the world of your chosen art: Do good work and get it out there. If you want to get other good work out there for other people, that’s nice, but it defintiely is in third place behind the other two considerations.
— I’m considering pretty much abandoning plans for anything other than self-publication of manuscripts. We need to do for the publishing industry what digital downloading has done to the traditional music industry — destroy it and rebulid it from the ground up. Participating in it when this is coming seems counterproductive. If I see an opportunity to publish and feel good about it, I will take it (see "getting it out there" above), but I’m not going to lose my mind about looking for it.
— Poets: tour less, write more. Perform less, read more. Think less, do more. Do more good work first, learn how it’s done, and THEN get it out there.
— And please, please, please stop imitating Ani DiFranco. Most of you can’t sing worth a damn anyway.
I’m not interested in
the heartbreak
or despair of anyone
and I don’t care for happiness
or ecstasy either
because they are always the same:
the blues are the blues
and they pass, the joy of living
passes as well. We are made to bounce
from one extreme to the other
and we are certain to think
we are the first to discover
the territory,
wherever we land. Talk to me instead
of sitting
on your porch
waiting for the mail
because you’ve got the chores done
and the day is warmer
than it should be this time of year;
tell me how the neighbors are moving out
and you never knew their names;
tell me you’re not exactly happy
or unhappy, that you’re mostly just waiting
for the mail, for new neighbors,
for the day to day to finally feel comfortable
and for your own words to match at last
the truth of living: that there’s nothing much
going on in your life
that no one else has never heard of.
That everything
passes into the next thing
without much fanfare.
That the new neighbors
will be pretty much like the old ones,
and you’ll probably never learn
their names, either.
This is truth
I have known for years.
It’s something
I never think about
until someone else
mentions it. I need to think of it
more often.
Ten years from now,
you’ll look the same,
You’ll look in the mirror
and say, "hey, I know you."
You’ll point at yourself and
you’ll point right back.
You’ll be pleased with that
and you’ll sail out of the house
convinced
of your uncommon nature.
"Haven’t I proven my fame
by being able to recognize myself, again and again?" you’ll say.
"All that self-destructive
feeding and drinking, all that
lax attention to the body —
good to know I am still myself."
In the second you die,
another ten years on, you’ll think of that
when the pang hits your heart, when your ass
refuses to lift from the couch no matter how hard
you will it to rise. You’ll recall
that there are stories of vampires
who look ruddy and fresh
for years after apparent death.
"Who was that liar
who looked back at me that day in the mirror
ten years ago?" you’ll ask yourself with a Gothic blink
right before you forget you ever existed. "Was that
some already undead notion, some spectre
that represented an unwitting corpse?"
You will die regretting
that you will not be buried with a mirror
on your chest
so you can accuse yourself endlessly
in the endless dark. You will die forgetting
that mirrors do not show vampires as they are;
at most, there is a mist in the glass. A mirage
of immortality looking back
at a dilapidated house which, if it notices you at all,
only does so to mock you.
When I was young, possibly as young as five or six, my parents were friends with some people who lived in Millville, the next town over.
I remembered this morning going to a community theater event there as a kid that ended with a minstrel show. Blackface, lots of banjos, Mr. Bones, the Interlocutor, the whole thing. I’m pretty sure my parents’ friends were in the show, and that’s why we went.
For some obscure reason, I woke up this morning with the tune "Heart of My Heart" running through my head and the memory came back to me. From 1965 or 1966. I’m assuming they did the song in the show. I know we sat through the whole show; I know this is all I remember of it.
That’s all I remember; the music, the banjos, the tambourines, the singing. Would I have felt that anything was wrong at the time? I doubt it. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it without thinking much about it. Did anyone feel outrage or even discomfort about such a thing in a New England mill town back then? I imagine the event made it into a local newspaper, maybe with photographs…
I wonder. I wonder if somewhere in Millville, people recall being in the show and regret it now…or do they simply recall what a great time they had at a community event, the camaraderie, the joy of performing?
And where are all those banjos now — gathering dust in attics, in closets, in basements; are they unstrung with busted heads and broken necks, or have they found new life playing other songs…or the same songs delivered in new contexts?
Maybe someone in Millville regrets only that times have changed and they couldn’t do that show today, and it’s a crying shame that that’s the case.
when the roofers
start climbing all over your home
on a saturday morning,
rousing you from what may be
the last sleep you’ll ever have,
you will fight to hang on
to the good dream you were having.
you will roll over
and cast a protective arm upon
the one beside you, believing
(in spite of all that evidence to the contrary)
that it’s worthwhile to make the roof sound again
for you and yours alone,
worth
taking the time
to hang on.
the noise of destruction,
of shingles slapping the driveway,
will be promise enough
that you’ll make it
through the winter;
that you’ll live
to enjoy
warmer rooms
and to appreciate
the trouble you’ve taken
to fix what is broken.
tony is thinking that green is the new black
tony is imagining a stem in his forehead
tony is sprouting starfruit
tony is dancing with an architect to the music of ionic columns
tony is capitalizing the second letter of a full sentence
tony is confusing the cat on the bed by standing on his hands
tony is fattening himself for snakes
tony is daddy to a bush baby’s mama
tony is sleek in the rain
tony is privately closing a library door
tony is cracking under pleasure
tony is singing "oh atlanta" to a snow globe
tony is your best friend
tony is your dangling participle
tony is a black male of indistinguishable height wielding a gun
tony is a blonde hottie with a mole on her right temple
tony is pastor of the right temple
tony is a right living cowboy
tony is the right wing of a left flying duck
tony is stringing together unrelated words
tony is throwing dice under a shower of scorn
tony is a social network anchor
tony is a reclusive ringleader
tony is a refusenik twenty years late for martyrdom
tony is naked
and running as fast as he can
toward you
in case you are blind to his own nude need
and hoping you’ll accept him anyway
tony is trying to think of what he could say
to redeem himself right now
Dog of my heart,
why won’t you hunt?
Why are you stifled
and panting?
Dog of my heart
with your long orange tongue
and your back-ruffled fur,
why are you hiding?
Dog of my heart,
leaper of turnstiles,
with your shadow-deep bark and
your tail on the go,
dog of my heart,
why are you sleeping?
Fetch me a notion
to worry and chew —
I’ll fill in for you
until you are well,
crawl through the mud
on my belly.
Dog of my heart,
rib-ridged and matted,
why won’t you come
when I call you?
Why are you silent
when danger comes round?
It’s not like I trust my own
instincts —
dog of my heart,
why won’t you hunt?
Why am I sitting here
weeping?
If the news of the moment
is curdled and sour,
if the prey that we seek
is retreating
before what we offer
to draw out their hunger,
why must I do this
alone?
Dog of my heart,
muse with a collar,
come back to me
and I promise
that we will go hunting,
we will catch fire,
we will bend all our breath
into baying
at the moon,
at the sun,
at the fox we can’t name,
at the quarry we’re sure is still out there.
O dog of my heart,
I sing of compression,
I need your senses
to expand me,
to keep us on point,
to keep me alive;
dog of my heart,
my ambition.
Yes,
I know,
the first official Thanksgiving Day
was ordered to celebrate
the massacre of
700 Pequots
in 1637;
yes,
I feel
accountable to the dead
for eating too much every November,
thus joining the rush to hide behind
the legend of the feast 16 years earlier
in Plymouth
that is used these days
to screen us from
an ocean of blood;
yes,
i must balance
gratitude and shame
when I sit with family and friends
and look at a bounty
built on theft and genocide;
if I say no
to every contradiction
I face every day,
I will sit alone in a hermit’s cave
barely breathing for fear of hurting another,
spend the rest of my life in mourning
for every cruel act done in my name
and never try to see the glad faces
of those I love
as anything more than a lie.
So yes,
yes
to making a temple anew
from sharing bread with others; and
yes, yes to holding tight to the memory
of death in the fields around villages
burning like candles on the shore
of Long Island Sound;
yes
to believing
that while the past is alive
in every bite of every dish,
all I have is the present
and the hope that the future will be born
in a revolution rising
from injustice I do not forget;
in the remaking of myths
through truth applied as lesson,
and not as bludgeon.
It’s 7 AM
and there’s frost on all the windshields,
thick enough to scrape for the first time all season.
Trash is all outside, the cat’s all balled up in his window,
all’s right with the immediate world —
so I shall consider having a shot of Jack Daniels
just because I want to sleep some more
and I’m too awake to do so,
just because I can…
People will think it alarming, and crazy.
It will cause concern among my closest friends.
Others will think I am more artistic for doing so
and others will think I am alcoholic simply for considering it
and I’m sure someone will suggest I try some tea I’ve never heard of
or some rare yogurt or perhaps some exercise or yoga
or quote me something about the drunkard’s soul
that they read in a fake shaman’s latest book
or maybe someone will say, "Right on!"
in a fake 60s libertine voice they don’t understand well enough to use
and someone will refrain from commenting but secretly agree with me
while reaching for the tumbler she didn’t empty before falling asleep
and another friend will send me a message asking, "Are you OK?"
I’m fine. I’m good.
In fact this morning
I can welcome the entire world
to my arms,
which is why I’m publicly considering
having a shot of Jack Daniels
on a Wednesday morning at 7 AM…
really, there’s no reason not to have one
beyond the reasons I choose to entertain —
no one’s waiting for me to be strong and corporate today,
and the thought of that
is enough to make me sleepy,
and laugh at myself,
and pet the cat,
and then head back to bed
to sleep like a drunk, like a baby,
only getting up when I’m damn good and ready,
in pure spite of all the judgment
in the freezing air.
Dark Matter 