So — there I was
at the Salvation Army store
with Sandra Bernhard.

She had “Pretty Lady” snarls
coming out of every pore.
I stepped over into

the red tag specials
while she let rip a snorting rant
about the lack of opportunity

for whores these days. What is the point
of being a professional, she said,
with all these amateurs cluttering up

the trade? Her wig fell off then
and I recognized the face anew: someone
the television had featured, briefly,

perhaps a lottery winner or a fugitive
with a face once blurred for legal reasons
that stayed blurred afterward.

Sandra Bernhard, wherever you are,
I have hidden a vintage jacket in your size
in a box near the aisle of broken toasters.

Come soon, your doppelganger is moving toward the door,
and if she gets loose,
there’s no telling what will happen to you:

you might end up in a place
where nearly familiar faces thrill at first glance,
and just as quickly disappear into the crowd.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

The Pope awakens in Nigeria
with a pen in his hand.

“I write to you, most esteemed
friend, in the hope of
succor in this hour of darkness.
I am Karol Wojytla, former Pope
of the Most Holy Roman and Apostolic
Catholic Church…”

He is aghast at
the foolishness of this. Is he not
a humble servant of God, the Holy Father
of millions, infallible in matters
of faith? Why should he need validation
in the Afterlife? Had he
had it wrong all along?

“…Due to recent uncertainties in
my life and times, I have been deprived
of my birthright and seek to protect what meager
resources I have left…”

Still trembling, he puts the pen down. He wants
to go to the window. All those people below him
in the street, waiting for a blessing…

Yes, that’s it. It’s all familiar now.
He shakes no longer, even as he begins to understand.
He looks out of the cinderblock frame
of the window, high over Lagos,
just another man
with a plan. Nothing’s changed, except this:
no one looks back at him.

“…I write to you now, as last hope
of deliverance, that I will transfer to your
account…”

What? What does he have now?
What will make them look?

i’m starting work on one, but am curious: are there any poems out there about “Nigerian Scams?”

The Furnace Review, Spring 2005

Terry Schiavo, Mitch Hedberg, Prince Rainier, Pope John Paul, Johnny Cochran, Robert Creeley…

Can’t anyone die anonymously anymore?

Oh, wait. Now I remember…

The Event: Sample at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, a monthly open mike/feature reading. Curated beautifully by Oscar Bermeo (geminipoet)

Feature readers:
Eliel Lucero (ambitious and well built poetry, plus a nice guy — great stuff)

Kyra Wolfe (wonderful delivery of really excellent work; her last poem was the poem of the night for me)

Tony B (ancient hack)

LJ folks in attendance: sancochao, ladyliberate, azureflame, aurorabell.

Random thoughts:

— BELGIANS!!! A school group from Bruges in Belgium showed up at the museum for the reading just before it started. There had to be 5,000 of them. It was like looking out over a blond sea.

— If you are a shit-hot, fire-spittin’ rapper, you should consider that not leaving your crew behind, including your manager, when you approach the mic really damages your credibility. Especially when none of them can beatbox. At all. When they don’t even try, even though you’re nonplussed by the fact that there’s no music.

— And when your manager blames the venue for not having music.

— Oh, and you should reconsider your career overall when you SUCK OUT LOUD.

— On the other hand, the guy who was “Blessin’ the Mic” was pretty tight.

— Cuban Sandwiches rule, even without pickles.

— And meals for six people, including a couple of beers, for 39 bucks in NYC is excellent in general.

— This is a great venue, a good time, and you all need to go. NOW.

Thanks and love to all who came out! We stopped the war with Belgium!

full update tomorrow but lemme say this:

i love Da Bronx.

I’m headed out the door for NYC! Come see me tonight at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 6:30!

I’ve been working on this for a while; was playing with it last night as the drugs took hold. Woke up this AM determined to finish it so I could have it to possibly read tonight. Finally fell into place. The new hotness reigns!

See ya…

No

Somewhere between the time
I walked with you to my car
and the time I climbed through your window
to open the door because (you said)
you’d locked your keys inside, I lost
my uncle’s hollow-ground, double-edged
Russell boot knife with the word
“Othello” engraved on the blade.

More precisely: I lost it, I suspect, sheath and all, somewhere
in the pile of laundry you’d heaped under the window,
knocking it off my belt when I scraped through the frame.
And once I realized that, even though
I was terrified that I’d be subjected to
another bad recitation of what you called
“Noir Erotique” to me while I hunted for it,
I had to come back.

You were, of course, nude when I returned.

If you’re wondering why I asked you to put a robe on
and then turned and left after
the briefest search, here’s why:
I would rather you have the knife
and not know the story
than for me to have the knife
after telling you the story
while lying in bed together
after fucking you just that one time
(even though I didn’t like you)
only because we were both lonely.

I wish I could explain this better to you.
I know you’ve got the damn knife, whatever you say.
It surely cost a hundred dollars over the counter
and that’s just a small part of the price of the loss.
My father gave it to me,
his dead brother’s blade, when I was thirteen
and told me no man in our family was ever without a knife,
and to never forget that my uncle
never turned down a fight or a woman
in his whole damn life.

I left you with the knife because
I am not my father, not my uncle.
I may not know what I am just yet,
but I am not a man who clings to things
that could smother him
just because they leave
an empty space
when they are gone.

That’s the final line from my poem “Geodes” about Sept. 11, or rather about one man’s reaction to losing a woman he loved that day.

I hate that poem, was glad I wrote it, hate it anyway. Hate that it exists. Love that it exists. Hate that I felt the need to write it. Hate that I needed to write it. Glad — glad? — that I did.

Everything is a metaphor, and nothing really hurts, or feels good, or is beautiful until it is interpreted. All the works of words and energy devoted to our perceptions exist only to damage our experience of things.

If poets put down their pens in order to live, would poetry not exist anyway?

That line I wrote is true, but are we better off if we speak the names? Or will we be better off if we let them exist and listen to a god that whispers without demanding that we shout and exalt any of the names?

From everything I’ve heard, the other two poets on this bill are kickass. And there’s an open soyou’ll get a chance to spit, or maybe even do a poem.

And maybe a drink after? Or something to eat?

Wednesday, March 30th (6:30 – 8:00pm)

OPEN MIC NIGHT featuring
TONY BROWN, KYRA WOLFE & ELIEL LUCERO
Hosted by OSCAR BERMEO
FREE!

Bronx Museum of the Arts (1040 Grand Concourse @ 165th St | Bronx, NY)

DIRECTIONS
Train- Take the D or B to 167th St/Grand Concourse or the 4 to 161st/Yankee Stadium.
Bus- Take the Bx1, Bx2, or BxM4 Express to 165th and Grand Concourse.
Car from Manhattan- Take the FDR Drive to Willis Avenue Bridge, stay to your left merge onto the Major Deegan North. Exit at 138th Street and Grand Concourse. Proceed to 165th Street and Grand
Concourse.

FOR MORE INFO
http://www.bronxmuseum.org

there are people who explain feelings so well
we no longer need to feel at all

so we imagine that feelings
are larger in us than if we felt them

they say they’re as strong as earthquake rumors
we feel ripples the size of mountains running through us

but nothing is truly felt except for the small trigger of the word
“tsunami” whispering inside us

it is not the same word as “dehydration”
or “vegetative state” but the same thing happens

we feel at a remove
as they make the words do what we want

yet another human becomes a news story
or a fat billboard for change

either way we do not see or feel
the stone wall of water smoothing the town like a still rumpled quilt

the people who stand and watch
and let the water come

or the warm dead hand becoming a cold dead hand
clutching the puzzle of morphine given to a woman who can’t feel

you’d never know we once were happy to be sentient
the way that now we render flesh to posterboard

I’ve got to figure out whether I’ve got time between work and school to get a proposal for the Ken Hunt Prize together by then.

I spent a lot of time today at the Cape, working on research for my paper on Anthony Braxton, one of my favorite saxophonists/composers (and someone I had the pleasure of playing with under bizarre circumstances about twelve years ago). Got my brain working on some poems, lemme tell you…

I’m going to have to post some of what I read regarding cultural biases toward reading music and not reading music, because I think it has some bearing on the poetry page/stage debate.

In a nutshell (and I’ll do a better job with this later) Braxton talks about a prejudice many jazz critics have against African American creative musicians who read music, write music with some degree of attention to European-derived musical theory, and yet maintain the spirit of jazz improv in their work; it’s complicated and I’m not doing it justice, but an example would someone saying that Braxton’s music is “too cerebral to be jazz.” Judging all jazz against a standard of it needing to come from some deep emotional core, spontaneously generated. primitively originated (yeah, that directly stated — there were plenty of examples given).

Interestingly, one of the critics most taken to task is Amiri Baraka, who has attacked Braxton’s music as not being “black enough” because Braxton identifies the composer Webern as an influence and has played with Warne Marsh and Paul Desmond.

Anyway, the poetry angle…

Braxton makes an interesting point about the idea that the score for a piece of music is, in Western tradition, seen as a text to be followed and reproduced; this is what leads people to believe that written music that represents intelligent, pre-planned creation of the work is the antithesis of jazz.

Braxton points out that his view and the view of many other creative musicians is that the notation provides the basic framework, the trellis upon which the music can grow — it offers ideas, suggestions, etc; but that it is written does not extinguish the necessity for spontaneous creation during the performance.

This seems obvious to me — my poem onstage is rarely an exact duplicate of the one on the page, certainly isn’t a duplicate of the last time I performed it. I’m assuming that’s true of others…

I wonder, though, how much of that spontaneous creation sometimes vanishes during the runup to a slam, as poems are honed to milliseconds of perfection?

Not really arguing anything here; just musing on a stimulating essay. Any thoughts?

I have been one lazy fucking lump today. I took a vacation day from work and did damn near nothing, which is exactly what I needed to do.

Now, I’m going to go to bed and do damn near nothing for several hours, and then I’m gonna get up and do damn near nothing for several more, except I’m gonna do it at a friend’s house on the Cape.

Sunday, of course, I’m gonna eat a bunch of stuff and then pass out and do nothing. Unless I decide to do some school stuff. Then again, doing nothing could be construed as a way of preparing for the strenuous thinking school requires. So maybe I’ll do nothing instead.