I’m having a bit of a crisis — just a dip after a bit of hypomania — my therapy appointment last night made me think about stuff I don’t like to consider.

I do not like to admit how much I miss certain things, certain people.

I am not complete. Not in that stupid ass Jerry McGuire way; more like there’s something missing that ought to be there — a hand hold for people to get a grip on. I’ve chipped them all off, I think.

I feel my age. I’m aging away from the people around me. I am afraid of looking ridiculous. I am afraid of that.

I snap too easily, say dumb things, can’t think, can’t concentrate. I haven’t written a poem longer than twenty lines or so in months — not because they aren’t there to be written, but because I can’t focus long enough to write them.

I’m afraid of not being a poet anymore.

I am failing at things I should do easily, and I don’t know how to get back to wwhere I was. I don’t even know if I should or can, but I know I don’t like it here.

Is this all I’ve got to look forward to? Because I’m scared of that, too.

I’m living scared. I’m never scared. I’m always scared.

This is not good.

(NOTE: please don’t call. I’m not going to talk about it after this. I needed to give it away because I needed to look at it on the screen and know I’d admitted it in public — I’m scared of where I am right now, not in a suicidal way, but in terms of how I’m changing.

Thank you for reading this.

Repeat: I’m not going to speak of it again. Please, do not call me.)

First change: the title.

WELCOME ABOARD

Continue reading

I’ll look at this again in the AM. Feedback?

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Career Advice

Welcome aboard.

First, orientation:
this place is big, a brick
house with no funk.

Next, code of conduct:
You would not believe how easy it is
to not speak to anyone here — just let them talk
and they’ll barely notice you.

Stay one step ahead of the boss in terms
of your computer savvy
and you can play God
indefinitely.

Lunchtime: try a salad and an antipsychotic
chased with pure spring water. Save a
Diet Coke for later, when you will need
the caffeine to help scrape together a little attention.

The bar across from this building is another world.
You will need a special suit to breathe in its atmosphere.
The creatures there use camouflage and mimicry to stay alive.

The grim men you see haunting the conference rooms
after marketing meetings and training classes
live on leftover brownies and stalled ambitions.
They own the sports cars at the fringes of the parking lot.
In other places, they would call them ghosts.
Do not let them touch you.
No one you work for will ever return your love,
even if they say that they do.
Do not allow yourself to pretend they will,
even for a second. They will only know you’re leaving
when you turn in your badge,
but if you work here long enough,
you won’t need the badge at all,
because everyone will know you.

Everyone already does know you, in fact;
we seem to remember you,
as if you’d worked here before,
so we already know everything we need to know
about you.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=585967

Fucking Wolfowitz.

it is not just your right to love
where love takes you, it is also your calling;
not only your right but your duty
to call yourself what you want to be called;

not just your right to sleep in a house
you built, but a blessing; not only your right
to speak your heart there, but the only way
the house can stand for more than a lifetime;

not just your right to move, to eat, to have
your body be your body and not a symbol;
to breathe and taste the mountains and the sea,
and not the tang of burning coal, wood, oil, or flesh.

and it is not only your right
to know these things
but to be able to hold them tight against you
when you are cold, hungry, and bleeding,

for they are not just speech.
they are warm as blankets.
they absorb. they wrap the naked,
cradle the dead.

one thing, though: they make terrible flags.

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.