Category Archives: uncategorized

the cracks

it is never perfect,
that first kiss, that first
touch, that first glance
when you walk into a room
and notice each other for the first time.
everything is flawed.

somewhere in your past the earth is shattered,
or a wind is playing hard devil
with human life.
every first moment
holds your broken places in it,
and if you convince yourself
that it is instead perfect, you are certain
to be crushed someday;
and the same is true of the one
you are looking to with such hope.

we are all filled with error. we all grope toward
some kind of correction, hoping
the next body erases
the feel of the last from our hands.
it cannot happen.

grow past it, knowing
the cracks will never disappear.
only you can live in your past,
but anyone could be your future.
if a glance, a touch, a kiss
pleases you, accept it
the way you want
to be accepted:

as if this moment
was all anyone needed
to know you;

as if, right now,
this moment was all you need
to know them.


Here’s what I’m thinking of for the next Tattoo:

I’d like it in the middle of my back between the shoulder blades. The leg seems appropriate, but I’m not a fan of leg tattoos (on me).

Also: want it straight horizontal and monochrome blue/black. I think I’m gonna keep my ink to one color, just for the sake of being contrary.


Attention, poets going to IWPS: information of great necessity

Tattoo parlors in Charlotte:

http://www.local.com/results.aspx?keyword=tattoo+parlors&location=charlotte&cid=40&gclid=CIqwxamI6YICFUGqLAod4jMv4A

Fu’s Custom Tattoos is a little over half a mile from the hotel and there are a couple of others within a couple of miles, based on my limited research.

Feel free to research others…


now, for no reason other than I like saying it:

(and I am saying it out loud as I type)

Godspeed! You Black Emperor

We return you now to your Silver Jews listening.


Protected: hello, deeply locked group

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It’s available.

Thanks to John Powers, we have an anthology! A hard copy representation of gotpoetry.com for your purchase and perusal.

http://johnpowers.livejournal.com/113968.html?style=mine#cutid1


SPEAK tonight

At the usual place…Alternatives Gallery, 5 So Main Street, Uxbridge MA.

7:30 – 9:30.

TONIGHT’S THEME: Possession. I will not be reading the dreadful poem on that theme I posted earlier, so it’s safe to come down.

see ya there.


not bad, not bad…

let the punishment fit the crime, eh?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/23/AR2006012301967.html


a dose of my own medicine

My father always called it dingo logic:
a ragged insistence on looking
for holes in the fence.
(As far as I know, he was never in Australia. He watched
a lot of nature shows; maybe that’s where it came from.)
I thought of it last night watching her:
redwrapped hips, blacklight lips
that made me shine when I moved toward them.
I moved toward them as often as I could knowing
I was getting nowhere, but I kept looking, and yipping,
because it’s what my dad taught me to do.

Afterward I sat up late, a tad drunk,
reading Maxim.
When it comes to love and conquest,
that magazine shelves doubt, scorns failure. Every woman
is available, it says, every woman waits for you
to fill that startling vacuum that opens when a man
is not in her life. All you have to do
is smile correctly and be sure of your cock,
and the fence will fall.
With my head full of that type of forced charm,
I have run the length of that fence for years at a time.
My dad, my books, my TV shows tell me
there’s a hole somewhere. I salivate
on cue, pretend to instincts I keep reading about,
tell myself I’m a lone wolf when I’m really a yellow stray
looking for a dry bone. If this is dingo logic,
I do not understand how the dingos have survived.


Publishing Opportunity

Hey, NYC:

My friend Skip (drgeorge) is having a book published by Heron Clan Press, and just got this in the mail.

Pass it on, repost at will. Let’s get some folks in print.

The Heron Clan III anthology will be almost ALL NYC poets, so if you have nominees, have them send 15=20 pages of poetry to:

Doug Stuber
4404 Cedar Pass
Chapel Hill NC 27514
919.271.0727
dougstuber@aol.com


it’s snowing

i have nowhere to go, just a bunch of phone calls to make, work on the next column and maybe get some cleaning done.

oh, and make this humble request:

if any of my hot rockstar poet friends on here can either help me score a few college gigs or give me some idea about how to go about soliciting them, i’d be much obliged. you can respond backchannel if the circumstances demand that such esoteric knowledge be only shared in private.

regards, the latest full time poet (code word for unemployed)


Feeling dictatorial

I’m too tired to write a poem…

But you aren’t. Write a poem using one or more of the following word pairs:

dingo logic
blacklight lips
magazine shelves
startling vacuum
forced charm

No fair splitting them up. Gotta use the pair as is, in that order.

Put ’em in your own LJ and let me know if you aren’t on my friends’ list.


AAAAAAAAAArgh

I am listening (in a moment, I’m going to change it) to a show about how Native American spirituality can save the planet.

Without going into a lot of my conflicted logic as to why I hate programs like this, may i just say that once — just once — i would like someone to put together a soundtrack for one of these shows THAT DOES NOT FEATURE THE PLAINS FLUTE PLAYED IN A DEEPLY REVERENT MANNER WITH A TOUCH OF REVERB.

I play the Plains flute, I love playing the Plains flute, but I don’t wanna hear it every time someone gets on the horn and says “All my relations…”

Shit dudes…let us hear some Rez hiphop — Robbie B, whynot? — or some John Trudell. How about Joanie Shenandoah? Robbie Robertson, even? I’d even go for some Buffy St. Marie once in a while.

I hate this whole “there is a spiritual connection to the Earth that only these simple natives can teach us” thing. Not because the philosophies and cosmology are invalid — far from it — I just feel like it’s another co-optation at heart; I feel like it gives people an excuse to forget that indigenous knowledge the world over, from the Celts to the !Kung to Hawaii to the Hmong to the outback, has told the same story.

You don’t have to go exotic to find wisdom. Go ask your own ancestors to save you. It’s not rocket science, and you’re no closer to a solution just because you smudged the hybrid SUV before driving to the sweat lodge.

And God, you guys, learn to play the harmonica. You can hang a dreamcatcher off of it if you must.


disposable poem: LJ phone home

Sister Wendy, the venerable bucktoothed nun who was PBS’ poster child for art appreciation a few years ago (this is totally affectionate, by the way — I enjoyed that series), used to speak of a concept she called “newspaper art” — work that was possibly good, even significantly meritorious, but because of its specific topical nature had no shelf life beyond the immediate moment. You know, like most slam poetry.

Didn’t mean she didn’t like it or think it was not worth doing; just that it was work of the moment and no more.

This is a newspaper poem — with the exception of the whole “possibly good” thing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hey,

are there any left-handed
dead people on my friends’ list?
I have a question about barley
only you can answer.

If anyone out there
knows of an equivalent
for honey in making
Javanese sauce, let me know.

Regrets? I’ve had a few.
Here are five of them, I tag
anyone regretful to tell me their own.
I’ll wait.

And does anybody know
the names and faces of all the guys
who were in the band The Crank Case Children?
I know I was one of them, but the rest…

O, you who are without names,
there are reasons I can’t sleep
and you know the reasons as well as I do.
Is this why you never respond?

Eh, pressing the flesh
is overrated anyway;
any one of you who might touch me
could be anyone else.

I made this entry public
so you can try to prove me wrong
in your comments. I’ll wait.
I’ll be waiting. I’ll be right here.


final post of the night…

For you real, hardcore, diehard policy wonks out there…

This is a link from my favorite online political site, Cryptome (http://www.cryptome.org). Cryptome is a site that provides access to public but little seen documents regarding privacy issues, the War on Terra, and other fun stuff. They also have a running calendar and names list of all the military dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, lots of photos of the war and press and family photos of the deceased…aerial photos of various key facilities and things, just to show how easy it is to find this stuff…you get the picture.

Anyway…here are the COMPLETE plans for the protection of American infrastructure. Good to have, eh?

http://cryptome.org/nipp-v2.htm